The Convert Part 24

But it was much worse, and Gorringe knew it. 'The old man is standing on your gown, miss.'

'Oh, would you mind----' Miss Levering politely suggested another place for his feet.

But the old man had no mind left for a mere bystander--it was all absorbed in Suffragettes.

''is feet are filthy muddy, 'm,' whispered Gorringe.

It may have been in part the maid's genteel horror of such proximities that steeled Miss Levering to endure them. Under circ.u.mstances like these the observant are reminded that no section of the modern community is so scornfully aristocratic as our servants. Their horror of the meanly-apparelled and the humble is beyond the scorn of kings. The fine lady shares her shrinking with those inveterate enemies of democracy, the lackey who shuts the door in the shabby stranger's face, and the dog who barks a beggar from the gate.

And so while the maid drew her own skirts aside and held her nose high in the air, the gentlewoman stood faintly smiling at the queer scene.

Alas! no Mrs. Chisholm. It looked as if they must have been hard up for speakers to-day, for two of them were younger even than Miss Claxton of the tam-o'-shanter. One of them couldn't be more than nineteen.

'How dreadful to put such very young girls up there to be stared at by all these louts!'

'Oh, yes, 'm, quite 'orrid,' agreed the maid, but with the air of 'What can you expect of persons so low?'

'However, the young girls seem to have as much self-possession as the older ones!' pursued Miss Levering, as she looked in vain for any sign of flinching from the sallies of c.o.c.kney impudence directed at the occupants of the cart.

They exhibited, too, what was perhaps even stranger--an utter absence of any flaunting of courage or the smallest show of defiance. What was this armour that looked like mere indifference? It couldn't be that those quiet-looking young girls _were_ indifferent to the ordeal of standing up there before a crowd of jeering rowdies whose less objectionable utterances were: 'Where did you get that 'at?' 'The one in green is my girl!' 'Got yer dog-whip, miss?' and such-like utterances.

The person thus pointedly alluded to left her companions ranged along the side of the cart against the background of banner, while she, the famous Miss Claxton, took the meeting in charge. She wasted no time, this lady. Her opening remarks, which, in the face of a fire of interruption, took the form of an attack upon the Government, showed her an alert, competent, cut-and-thrust, imperturbably self-possessed politician, who knew every aspect of the history of the movement, as able to answer any intelligent question off-hand as to snub an impudent irrelevance, able to take up a point and drive it well in--to shrug and smile or frown and point her finger, all with most telling effect, and keep the majority of her audience with her every minute of the time.

As a mere exhibition of nerve it was a thing to make you open your eyes.

Only a moment was she arrested by either booing or applause. When a knot of young men, who had pushed their way near the front, kept on shouting argument and abuse, she interrupted her harangue an instant. Pointing out the ring-leader--

'Now you be quiet, if you please,' she said. 'These people are here to listen to _me_.'

'No, they ain't. They come to see wot you look like.'

'That can't be so,' she said calmly, 'because after they've seen us they stay.' Then, as the interrupter began again, 'No, it's no use, my man'--she shook her head gently as if almost sorry for him--'you can't talk _me_ down!'

'Now, ain't that just _like_ a woman!' he complained to the crowd.

Just in front of where Miss Levering and her satellite first came to a standstill, was a cheerful, big, sandy man with long flowing moustachios, a polo cap, and a very dirty collar. At intervals he inquired of the men around him, in a great jovial voice, 'Are we down-'earted?' as though the meeting had been called, not for the purpose of rousing interest in the question of woman's share in the work of the world, but as though its object were to humiliate and disfranchise the men. But his exclamation, repeated at intervals, came in as a sort of refrain to the rest of the proceedings.

'The Conservatives,' said the speaker, 'had never pretended they favoured broadening the basis of the franchise. But here were these Liberals, for thirty years they'd been saying that the demand on the part of women for political recognition commanded their respect, and would have their support, and yet there were four hundred and odd members who had got into the House of Commons very largely through the efforts of women--oh, yes, we know all about that! We've been helping the men at elections for years.'

'What party?'

Adroitly she replied, 'We have members of every party in our ranks.'

'Are you a Conservative?'

'No, I myself am not a Conservative----'

'You work for the Labour men--I know!'

'It's child's play belonging to any party till we get the vote,' she dismissed it. 'In future we are neither for Liberal nor Conservative nor Labour. We are for Women. When we get the s.e.x bar removed, it will be time for us to sort ourselves into parties. At present we are united against any Government that continues to ignore its duty to the women of the country. In the past we were so confiding that when a candidate said he was in favour of Woman's Suffrage (he was usually a Liberal), we worked like slaves to get that man elected, so that a voice might be raised for women's interests in the next Parliament. Again and again the man we worked for got in. But the voice that was to speak for us--that voice was mute. We had served his purpose in helping him to win his seat, and we found ourselves invariably forgotten or ignored. The Conservatives have never shown the abysmal hypocrisy of the Liberals. We can get on with our open enemies; it's these _cowards_' ('Boo!' and groans)--'these cowards, I say--who, in order to sneak into a place in the House, pretend to sympathize with this reform--who use us, and then betray us; it's these who are women's enemies!'

'Why are you always worrying the Liberals? Why don't you ask the Conservatives to give you the vote?'

'You don't go to a person for something he hasn't got unless you're a fool. The Liberals are in power; the Liberals were readiest with fair promises; and so we go to the Liberals. And we shall continue to go to them. We shall never leave off' (boos and groans) 'till they leave office. Then we'll begin on the Conservatives.' She ended in a chorus of laughter and cheers, 'I will now call upon Miss Cynthia Chisholm to propose the resolution.'

Wherewith the chairman gave way to the younger of the two girls. This one of the Gracchi--a gentle-seeming creature, carelessly dressed, grave and simple--faced the mob with evident trepidation, a few notes, to which she never referred, in her shaking hand. What brought a girl like that here?--was the question on the few thoughtful faces in the crowd confronting her. She answered the query by introducing the resolution in an earnest little speech which, if it didn't show that much of the failure and suffering that darken the face of the world is due to women's false position, showed, at all events, that this young creature held a burning conviction that the subjection of her s.e.x was the world's Root-Evil. With no apparent apprehension of the colossal audacity of her position, the girl moved gravely that 'this meeting demands of the Government the insertion of an enfranchis.e.m.e.nt clause in the Plural Voting Bill, and demands that it shall become law during the present session.' Her ignorance of Parliamentary procedure was freely pointed out to her.

'No,' she said, 'it is you who are ignorant--of how pressing the need is. You say it is "out of order." If treating the women of the country fairly is out of order, it is only because men have made a poor sort of order. It is the _order_ that should be changed.'

Of course that dictum received its due amount of hooting.

'The vote is the reward for defending the country,' said a voice.

'No,' said the girl promptly, 'for soldiers and sailors don't vote.'

'It implies fitness for military service,' somebody amended.

'It _shouldn't_,' said Nineteen, calmly; 'it ought to imply merely _a stake_ in the country. No one denies we have that.'

The crowd kept on about soldiering, till the speaker was goaded into saying--

'I don't say women like fighting, but women _can_ fight! In these days warfare isn't any more a matter of great physical strength, and a woman can pull a trigger as well as a man. The Boer women found that out--and so has the Russian. I don't like thinking about it myself--for I seem to realize too clearly what horrors those women endured before they could carry bombs or shoulder rifles.'

'Rifles? Why a woman can't never hit _nothing_.'

'It is quite true we can't most of us even throw a stone straight--the great ma.s.s of women never in all their lives wanted to hit anybody or anything. And that'--she came nearer, and leaned over the side of the cart with scared face--'it's that that makes it so dreadful to realize how at last when women's eyes are opened--when they see their homes and the holiest things in life threatened and despised, how quickly after all _they can learn the art of war_.'

'With hatpins!' some one called out.

'Yes, scratching and spitting,' another added.

That sort of interruption did not so much embarra.s.s her, but once or twice she was nearly thrown off her beam-ends by men and boys shouting, 'Wot's the matter with yer anyway? Can't yer get a husband?' and such-like brilliant relevancies. Although she flushed at some of these sallies, she stuck to her guns with a pluck that won her friends. In one of the pauses a choleric old man gesticulated with his umbrella.

'If what the world needed was Woman's Suffrage, it wouldn't have been left for a minx like you to discover it.' At which volleys of approval.

'That gentleman seems to think it's a new madness that we've recently invented.' The child seemed in her loneliness to reach out for companioning. She spoke of 'our friend John Stuart Mill.'

'Oo's Mill?'

'That great Liberal wrote in 1867----' But Mill and she were drowned together. She waited a moment for the flood of derision to subside.

''E wouldn't 'ad nothin' to do with yer if 'e'd thought you'd go on like you done.'

'Benjamin Disraeli was on our side. Mazzini--Charles Kingsley. As long ago as 1870, a Woman's Suffrage Bill that was drafted by Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright pa.s.sed a second reading.'

'The best sort of women _never_ wanted it.'

'The kind of women in the past who cared to be a.s.sociated with this reform--they were women like Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Martineau, and Josephine Butler, and the two thousand other women of influence who memorialized Mr. Gladstone.'