They reached the platform. "Jump up, Arthur, and help me," she commanded. He did so. But his discomfiture only grew apace with the increased heat—the dingy ceiling crushed him—and the rows in front, the entire floor seemed transformed to eyes, malicious eyes. She told him to sit down at the piano and play the Marseillaise. Then standing before the table she drew from her bosom a scarlet flag, and accompanied by the enthusiastic shoutings she led the singing. Arthur at the keyboard felt exalted. Forgotten the pains of a moment before. He hammered the keys vigorously, extorting from the battered instrument a series of curious croakings. Some of the keys did not "speak," some gave forth a brazen clangour from the rusty wires. No one cared. The singing stopped with the last verse.
"Now La Ravachole for our French brethren." This combination of revolutionary lyrics—Ça Ira and Carmagnole—was chanted fervidly. Then came for the benefit of the German the stirring measures from the Scotch-German John Henry Mackay's Sturm:—
Das ist der Kampf, den allnächtlich
Bevor das Dunkel zerrinnt,
Einsam und gramvoll auskämpt
Des Jahrhunderts verlorenes Kind.
Yetta waved her long and beautifully shaped hands—they were her solitary vanity. The audience became still. She addressed them at first in deliberate tones, and Arthur noted that the interest was genuine—he wondered how long his fat-witted club friends could endure or appreciate the easy manner in which Yetta Silverman quoted from great thinkers, and sprinkled these quotations with her own biting observations.
"Richard Wagner—who loved humanity when he wrote Siegfried and regretted that love in Parsifal!
"Richard Wagner—who loved ice-cream more than Dresden's freedom—Wagner: the Swiss family bell-ringer of '48!
"To Max Stirner, Ibsen, and Richard Strauss belongs the twentieth century!
"Nietzsche—the anarch of aristocrats!
"Karl Marx—or the selfish Jew socialist!
"Lassalle—the Jew comedian of liberty!