The Convert Part 47

'Gettin' up rows and goin' to 'Olloway's no good.'

While she justified the course that led to Holloway--

'Rot! Piffle!' they interjected. One man called out: 'I'd have some respect for you if you'd carried a bomb into the House of Commons, but a miserable little scuffle with the police!'

'Here's a gentleman who is inciting us to carry bombs. Now, that shocks me.'

The crowd recovered its spirits at the notion of the champion-shocker shocked.

'We've been dreadfully browbeaten about our tactics, but that gentleman with his bad advice makes our tactics sound as innocent and reasonable as they actually are. When you talk in that wild way about bombs--you--I may be a hooligan'--she held up the delicate pink-and-white face with excellent effect--'but you do shock me.'

It wore well this exquisitely humorous jest about shocking a Suffragette. The whole crowd was one grin.

'I'm specially shocked when I hear a _man_ advocating such a thing! You men have other and more civilized ways of getting the Government to pay attention to abuses. Now listen to what I'm saying: for it's the justification of everything we are going to do in the future, _unless_ we get what we're asking for! It's this. Our justification is that men, even poor men, have that powerful leverage of the vote. You men have no right to resort to violence; you have a better way. We have _no_ way but agitation. A _Liberal_ Government that refuses----'

'Three cheers for the Liberals! Hip, hip----'

'My friend, I see you are young,' says Ernestine.

'Lord, wot are you?' the young man hurled back.

'Before I got my political education, when _I_ was young and innocent, like this gentleman, who still pins his faith to the Liberals, I, too, hoped great things from them. My friends, it's a frame of mind we outlive!'--and her friends shrieked with delight.

'Well, it's one way for a girl to amuse herself till she gets married,'

said Borrodaile.

'Why, that's just what the hooligans all say!' laughed Vida. 'And, like you, they think that if a woman wants justice for other women she must have a grievance of her own. I've heard them ask Ernestine in Battersea--she has valiant friends there--"Oo's 'urt _your_ feelin's?"

they say. "Tell me, and I'll punch 'is 'ead." But you aren't here to listen to _me_!' Vida caught herself up. 'This is about the deputation of women that waited on the Prime Minister.'

'Didn't get nothin' out of him!' somebody shouted.

'Oh, yes, we did! We got the best speech in favour of Woman's Suffrage that any of us ever heard.'

'Haw! Haw! Clever ol' fox!'

''E just b.u.t.tered 'em up! But 'e don't do nothin'.'

'Oh, yes, he did something!'

'What?'

'He gave us advice!' They all laughed together at that in the most friendly spirit in the world. 'Two nice pieces,' Ernestine held up each hand very much like a school child rejoicing over slices of cake. 'One we are taking'--she drew in a hand--'the other we aren't'--she let it fall. 'He said we must win people to our way of thinking. We're doing it; at a rate that must astonish, if it doesn't even embarra.s.s him. The other piece of distinguished advice he gave us was of a more doubtful character.' Her small hands took it up gingerly. Again she seemed to weigh it there in the face of the mult.i.tude. 'The Prime Minister said we "must have patience." She threw the worthless counsel into the air and tossed contempt after it. 'It is man's oldest advice to woman!'

'All our trouble fur nothin'!' groaned an impish boy.

'We see now that patience has been our bane. If it hadn't been for this same numbing slavish patience we wouldn't be standing before the world to-day, political outcasts--catalogued with felons and lunatics----'

'And peers!' called a voice.

'We are _done_ with patience!' said Ernestine, hotly; 'and for that reason there is at last some hope for the women's cause. Now Miss Scammell will speak to you.'

A strange thing happened when Miss Scammell got up. She seemed to leave her attractiveness, such as it was, behind when she climbed up on the bench. Standing mute, on a level with the rest, her head deprecatingly on one side, she had pleased. Up there on the bench, presuming to teach, she woke a latent cruelty in the mob. They saw she couldn't take care of herself, and so they 'went for her'--the very same young men who had got up and given her a choice of the seats they had been at the pains to come early to secure. To be sure, when, with a smile, she had sat down only a quarter of an hour before, in the vacated place of one of them, the other boy promptly withdrew with his pal. It would have been too compromising to remain alongside the charmer. But when Miss Scammell stood up on that same bench, she was a.s.sumed to have left the realm of smiles and meaning looks where she was mistress and at home. She had ventured out into the open, not only without the sword of pointed speech--that falls to few--but this young lady had not even the armour of absolute earnestness. When she found that smiling piteously wouldn't do, she proceeded, looking more and more like a scared white rabbit, to tell about the horrible cases of lead-poisoning among the girls in certain china and earthenware works. All that she had to say was true and significant enough. But it was no use. They jeered and howled her down for pure pleasure in her misery. She trembled and lost her thread.

She very nearly cried. Vida wondered that the little chairwoman didn't fly to the rescue. But Ernestine sat quite unmoved looking in her lap.

'Lamentable exhibition!' said Borrodaile, moving about uneasily.

The odd thing was that Miss Scammell kept on with her p.r.i.c.kly task.

'Why don't you make her sit down?' Vida whispered to Miss Blunt.

'Because I've got to see what she's made of.'

'But surely you see! She's awful!'

'Not half so bad as lots of men when they first try. If she weathers this, she'll be a speaker some day.'

At last, having told her story through the interruptions--told it badly, brokenly, but to the end--having given proofs that lead-poisoning among women was on the increase and read out from her poor crumpled, shaking notes, the statistics of infant and still-birth mortality, the unhappy new helper sat down.

Miss Blunt leaned over, and whispered, 'That's all right! I was wrong.

This is nearly as bad as Hyde Park,' and with that jumped up to give the crowd a piece of her mind.

They sn.i.g.g.e.red, but they quieted down, all but one.

'Yes, you are the gentleman, you there with the polo cap, who doesn't believe in giving a fair hearing. I would like to ask that man who thinks himself so superior, _that_ one in the grey cap, whether he is capable of standing up here on this bench and addressing the crowd.'

'Hear, hear.'

'Yes! Get on the bench. Up with him.'

A slight scrimmage, and an agitated man was observed to be seeking refuge on the outskirts.

'Bad as Miss Scammell was, she made me rather ashamed of myself,' Vida confided to Borrodaile.

'Yes,' he said sympathetically, 'it always makes one rather ashamed--even if it's a man making public failure.'

'Oh, that wasn't what I meant. _She_ at least tried. But I--I feel I'm a type of all the idle women the world over. Leaving it to the poor and the ill-equipped to----'

'To keep the world from slipping into chaos?' he inquired genially.

She hadn't heard. Her eyes were fastened on the chairwoman.

'After all, they've got Ernestine,' Vida exulted under her breath.

Borrodaile fell to studying this aspect of the face whose every change he had thought he knew so well. What was the new thing in it? Not admiration merely, not affection alone--something almost fierce behind the half-protecting tenderness with which she watched the chairman's duel with the mob. Borrodaile lifted a hand--people were far too engrossed, he knew, to notice--and he laid it on Vida's, which had tightened on the back of the bench.

'My dear!' he said wondering and low as one would to wake a sleepwalker.

She answered without looking at him, 'What is it?'