n card; it wasn't in his proper name, but,
as he explained, one name is as good as another and he has had so many
from time to time that now he cannot rightly say which is his own. I
asked him to elaborate the Young Socialists' programme of murder and
sudden death, a subject which, as a proposed victim, had a morbid
fascination for me. He said he knew nothing about that; their
everlasting talk bored him and he never attended the public meetings. It
was the committee work which interested him.

He told me about the first committee meeting he attended. He wasn't a
member of the committee at the time, a fact which put difficulties in
the way of his attending the meeting, as it was held behind closed
doors. All the doors were closed and locked, including the cupboard
door. He was in the cupboard. I wondered what they would have done to
him if they had found him there. He told me he had had plenty of time to
wonder that himself when he had once got himself locked in.

"Begin at the beginning," said I.

It was a question, first, of getting round the door-keeper. He made
friends with that door-keeper, took him out to supper, gave him a kirsch
with his coffee and a cigar with his kirsch. He told the door-keeper
that he was the most distinguished door-keeper he had ever met. He
encouraged him to go through his ailments and his grievances and was
visibly distressed by the recital. He got in the habit of sitting with
the door-keeper while he was keeping the door for the committee
assembled inside. And, when he thought the friendship was sufficiently
advanced, he poured forth his inmost heart to that door-keeper. He said
that Young Socialism was to him the breath of life, and the tragedy was
that he was always kept on the outskirts of it. He said he would give
anything to take part in a committee meeting, or anyhow to hear the
great ones at it; and, to make this sound plausible, he expounded a
scheme of Young Socialism of his own, which was far more drastic and
bloodthirsty than anything that had yet occurred to any committee.

The door-keeper didn't believe there could be anybody who really cared
all that much for communism; for his part he kept the door because there
was money to be made easily that way. At the next committee meeting he
made more money and made it more easily, and my friend was safely locked
up in the cupboard before the committee arrived. What with the heat
inside, the thought that the door-keeper might be mo