A shrill burst of applause relieved the painful situation. Turning his head, David found all the childish eyes converged upon a single figure, a bulging-headed lad who had sprung into a sudden position of eminence--upon an egg-box. He was clothed in the blue blouse of Radicalism and irreligion, and the faint down upon his upper lip suggested that he must be nearing fifteen. 'Comrades!' he was crying. 'In my youth I myself was head boy at this school of yours, but even in those old days there was the same brutal autocracy. Your only remedy is a general strike. You must join the Syndical Anarchists.' More shrill cheers greeted this fiery counsel. The members of the Junior Bund waved their satchels frenziedly. Only the landlord's son stood mute and frowning. 'You don't agree with him,' said David. 'No,' answered the little Bundist gravely. 'I follow Comrade Berl. But this fellow is popular because he was expelled from the Warsaw gymnasium as a suspect.' 'You must strike!' repeated the juvenile agitator. 'A strike is the only way of impressing the proletarian psychology. You must all swear to attend school no more till your demands are granted.' 'We swear!' came from all sides in a childish treble. But the frown on the brow of the landlord's son grew darker. 'It is well, comrades,' said the orator. 'Your success will be a lesson to your elders, too. Only by applying the Marxian philosophy of history can we upset the bourgeois _Weltanschauung_.' The landlord's son reached the roof of the egg-box with one angry bound and stood beside the agitator. 'Marx is an old fogey!' he shouted. 'What's the good of a passive strike? Let us make a demonstration against the director; let us----' 'Who told you that?' sneered the orator. 'Comrade Berl or Comrade Schmerl?' The boy missed the sarcasm of the rhyme. 'You know Schmerl's a mere milk-blooded "Attainer,"' he said angrily. 'Believe me,' was the soothing reply, 'even beyond the Five Freedoms the boycott is a better "Attainer" than the bomb.' 'Traitor! Bourgeois!' And a third boy jumped upon the egg-box. He had red hair and flaming eyes. 'If Russia is to be saved,' he shrieked, 'it will be neither by the Fivefold Formula of Freedom nor by the Fourfold Suffrage, but by the Integralists, who alone maintain the purity of the Social Revolutionary programme, as it was before the party degenerated into Maximalists and Mini----' Here the egg-box collapsed under the weight of the three orators, and they sprawled in equal ignominy. But the storm was now launched. A score of the schoolboys burst into passionate abstract discussion. The unity necessary to the school strike was shattered into fragments.