Mutimer had been pressing on his scheme for five months.  Every night he addressed a meeting somewhere or other in the East End; every Sunday he lectured morning and evening at his head-quarters in Clerkenwell.  Ostensibly he was working on behalf of the Union, but in reality he was forming a party of his own, and would have started a paper could he have commanded the means.  The ‘Tocsin’ was savagely hostile, the ‘Fiery Gross.’ grew more and more academical, till it was practically an organ of what is called in Germany Katheder-Sozialismus.  Those who wrote for it were quite distinct from the agitators of the street and of the Socialist halls; men—­and women—­with a turn for ‘advanced’ speculation, with anxiety for style.  At length the name of the paper was changed, and it appeared as the ‘Beacon,’ adorned with a headpiece by the well-known artist, Mr. Boscobel.  Mutimer glanced through the pages and flung it aside in scornful disgust.

‘I knew what this was coming to,’ he said to Adela ’A deal of good they’ll do!  You don’t find Socialism in drawing rooms.  I wonder that fellow Westlake has the impudence to call himself a Socialist at all, living in the way he does.  Perhaps he thinks he’ll be on the safe side when the Revolution comes.  Ha, ha!  We shall see.’

The Revolution. . . .  In the meantime the cry was ’Democratic Capitalism.’  That was the name Mutimer gave to his scheme!  The ‘Fiery Gross’ had only noticed his work in a brief paragraph, a few words of faint and vague praise.  ’Our comrade’s noteworthy exertions in the East End. . . .  The gain to temperance and self-respecting habits which must surely result. . . .’  The ‘Beacon,’ however, dealt with the movement more fully, and on the whole in a friendly spirit.

‘Damn their patronage!’ cried Mutimer.

You should have seen him addressing a crowd collected by chance in Hackney or Poplar.  The slightest encouragement, even one name to inscribe in the book which he carried about with him, was enough to fire his eloquence; nay, it was enough to find himself standing on his chair above the heads of the gathering.  His voice had gained in timbre; he grew more and more perfect in his delivery, like a conscientious actor who plays night after night in a part that he enjoys.  And it was well that he had this inner support, this brio of the born demagogue, for often enough he spoke under circumstances which would have damped the zeal of any other man.  The listeners stood with their hands in their pockets, doubting whether to hear him to the end or to take their wonted way to the public-house.  One moment their eyes would be fixed upon him, filmy, unintelligent, then they would look at one another with a leer of cunning, or at best a doubtful grin.  Socialism, forsooth!  They were as ready for translation to supernal spheres.  Yet some of them were attracted:  ‘percentage,’ ‘interest,’ ‘compound interest,’ after all, there might be something in this!  And perhaps they gave their names and their threepenny bits, engaging to make the deposit regularly on the day and at the place arranged for in Mutimer’s elaborate scheme.  What is there a man cannot get if he asks for it boldly and persistently enough?