'Alas, too many!' everybody told him. 'Our people are such individualists.'
'But where are these individualists?' cried David desperately.
As if in answer, the bovine proprietor, encouraged by the laughter, crept in again.
'You still here!' he murmured to David, taken aback.
'Yes, but if you'll give me a subscription for Jewish Self-Defence----'
'Jewish Emancipation!' cried the fur-dealer. 'Why didn't you say so at first?' He put his hand in his pocket. 'That's _my_ Party--or rather the National Group in it, the Anti-Zionist faction.'
The stern Bundist laughed. 'No, he doesn't mean he's a J.E. even of the other faction.'
His father-in-law took his hand out of his pocket.
David cast a rebuking glance at the Bundist. 'Why did you interfere? Perhaps my way may prove the shortest to Jewish Emancipation.'
His hearers smiled a superior smile, and the fur-dealer shook his head. 'I belong also to the Promotion of Education Party--I am for peaceful methods,' he announced.
To be rid of him, the Bundist gave him the address of a man who kept aloof from Polish politics--a bourgeois cousin of his, Belchevski by name, who might just as well be killed off in the _Samooborona_.
But even Belchevski turned out to be a Territorialist. David imprudently told him he had seen his fellow-Territorialist Grodsky, who had half promised----
'Associate with a brainless, bumptious platform-screamer!' he screamed. 'He's worse than the hysterical Zionists. It is a territory we need, not Socialism.'
'I agree. But even more do we need Self-Defence.'
'The only Self-Defence is to leave Russia for a land of our own.'
'Five and a quarter million of us? Why, if two ships--one from Libau for the north, and one from Odessa for the south--sailed away every week, each bearing two thousand passengers, it would take over a quarter of a century. And by that time a new generation of us would have grown up.'
'Besides,' David continued, 'what new country could receive us at the rate of two hundred thousand a year? It would be a cemetery, not a country.'
The Territorialist smiled disdainfully. 'Why didn't you say at first you were a bourgeois? The unconditional historic necessity which has created the I.T.O. may drive at what pace it will; enough that as soon as our autonomous land is ready to receive us, I intend to be in the first shipload.'