The Convert Part 49

'Sophia!' he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed softly, 'and Stonor!--by the beard of the prophet!' He half rose, whether more annoyed or amazed it would be hard to tell. 'We're discovered!' he said, in a laughing whisper. As he turned to add 'The murder's out,' he saw that Vida had quietly averted her face. She was leaning her head on her hand, so that it masked her features. Even if the woman who was speaking had not been the object of such interest as the people in the hansom had to bestow, even had either of them looked towards Vida's corner, only a hat and a gauze ruffle would have been seen.

Borrodaile took the hint. His waning sense of the humour of the situation revived.

'Perhaps, after all, if we lay low,' he said, smiling more broadly. 'It would be nuts for Stonor to catch us sitting at the feet of Mrs.

Thomas.' He positively chuckled at the absurdity of the situation. He had slipped back into his corner, but he couldn't help craning his neck to watch those two leaning over the door of the hansom, while they discussed some point with animation. Several times the man raised his hand as if to give an order through the trap door. Each time Sophia laughingly arrested him. 'He wants to go on,' reported Borrodaile, sympathetically. 'She wants him to wait a minute. Now he's jumped out.

What's he--looking for another hansom? No--now _she's_ out. Bless me, she's shaking hands with him. He's back in the hansom!--driving away.

Sophia's actually---- 'Pon my soul, I don't know what's come over the women! I'm rather relieved on the whole.' He turned round and spoke into Vida's ear. 'I've been a little sorry for Sophia. She's never had the smallest interest in any man but that cousin of hers--and, of course, it's quite hopeless.'

Vida sat perfectly motionless, back to the speaker, back to the disappearing hansom, staring at the parapet.

'You can turn round now--quite safe. Sophia's out of range. Poor Sophia!' After a little pause, 'Of course you know Stonor?'

'Why, of course.'

'Oh, well, my distinguished cousin used not to be so hard to get hold of--not in the old days when we were seeing so much of your father.'

'That must have been when I was in the schoolroom--wasn't it?'

He turned suddenly and looked at her. 'I'd forgotten. You know Geoffrey, and you don't like him. I saw that once before.'

'Once before?' she echoed.

He reminded her of the time she hurried away from Ulland House to Bishopsmead.

'_I_ wasn't deceived,' he said, with his look of smiling malice. 'You didn't care two pins about your Cousin Mary and her influenza.'

Vida moved her expressionless face a little to the right. 'I can see Sophia. But she's listening to the speech;' and Vida herself, with something of an effort, seemed now to be following the sordid experiences of a girl that the speaker had befriended some years before.

It was through this girl, the mauve matron said, that she herself had come into touch with the abject poor. She took a big barrack of a house in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and it became known that there she received and helped both men and women. 'I sympathized with the men, but it was the things the women told me that appalled me. They were too bad to be entirely believed, but I wrote them down. They haunted me. I investigated. I found I had no excuse for doubting those stories.'

'This woman's a find,' Vida whispered to the chairman.

Ernestine shook her head.

'Why, she's making a first-rate speech!' said Vida, astonished.

'There's n.o.body here who will care about it.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Oh, all she's saying is a commonplace to these people. Lead-poisoning was new, to _them_--something they could take hold of.'

'Well, I stick to it, you've got a good ally in this woman. Let her stand up in Somerset Hall, and tell the people----'

'It wouldn't do,' said the young Daniel, firmly.

'You don't believe her story?'

'Oh, I don't say the things aren't true. But'--she moved uneasily--'the subject's too p.r.i.c.kly.'

'Too p.r.i.c.kly for you!'

The girl nodded with an anxious eye on the speaker. 'We sometimes make a pa.s.sing reference--just to set men thinking, and there leave it. But it always makes them furious, of course. It does no good. Either people know and just accept it, or else they won't believe, and it only gets them on the raw. I'll have to stop her if----' She leaned forward.

'It's odd your taking it like this. I suppose it's because you're so young,' said Vida, wondering. 'It must be because for you it isn't real.'

'No, it's because I see no decent woman can think much about it and keep sane. That's why I say this one won't be any good to us. She'll never be able to see anything clearly but that one thing. She'll always be forgetting the main issue.'

'What do you call the main issue?'

'Why, political power, of course.'

'Oh, wise young Daniel!' she murmured, as Miss Blunt touched the speaker's sleeve and interjected a word into the middle of a piece of depressing narrative.

Mrs. Thomas stopped, faltered, and pulled herself up with, 'Well, as I say, with my own verifications these experiences form a body of testimony that should stir the conscience of the community. I _myself_ felt'--she glanced at Ernestine--'I felt it was too ghastly to publish, but it ought to be used. Those who doubted the evidence should examine it. I went to a lady who is well known to be concerned about public questions; her husband is a member of Parliament, and a person of influence. You don't know, perhaps, but she did, that there's a Parliamentary Commission going to sit here in London in a few weeks for the purpose of inquiring into certain police regulations which greatly concern women. Who do you think are invited to serve on that Commission? Men. All men. Not a woman in England is being consulted. The husband of the lady I went to see--he was one of the Commissioners. I said to her, "_You_ ought to be serving on that board." She said, "Oh, no," but that women like her could influence the men who sat on the Commission.'

'This is better!' whispered the ever-watchful Ernestine, with a smile.

'So I told her about my ten years' work. I showed her some of my records--not the worst, the average, sifted and verified. She could hardly be persuaded to glance at what I had been at so much pains to collect. You see'--she spoke as though in apology for the lady--'you see I had no official or recognized position.'

'Hear, hear,' said Ernestine.

'I was simply a woman whose standing in the community was all right, but I had nothing to recommend me to serious attention. I had nothing but the courage to look wrong in the face, and the conscience to report it honestly. When I told her certain things--things that are so stinging a disgrace that no decent person can hear them unmoved--when I told her of the degrading discomforts, the cruelties, that are practised against homeless women even in some of the rate-supported casual wards and the mixed lodging-houses, that lady said--sitting there in her pleasant drawing-room--she said it could not be true! My reports were exaggerated--women were sentimental--the authorities managed these places with great wisdom. They are so horrible, I said, they drive women to the streets. She a.s.sured me I was mistaken. I asked her if she had ever been inside a mixed lodging-house. She never had. But the casual wards she knew about. They were so well managed she herself wouldn't mind at all spending a night in one of these munic.i.p.al provisions for the homeless. Then I said, "You are the woman I am looking for! Come with me one night and try it. What night shall it be?" She said she was engaged in writing a book. She could not interrupt her work. But I said, if those rate-supported places are so comfortable, it won't interfere with your work. She _turned the conversation_. She talked about the Commission. The Commission was going to make a thorough scientific investigation. Nothing amateur about the Commission. The lady was sincere'--Mrs. Thomas vouched for it--'she had a comfortable faith in the Commission. But, I say'--the woman leaned forward in her earnestness--'I say that Commission will waste its time! I don't deny it will investigate and discuss the position of the outcast women of this country. Their plight, which is the work of men, will once more be inquired into by men. I say there should be women on that Commission. If the middle and upper cla.s.s women have the dignity and influence men pretend they have, why aren't they represented there? n.o.body pretends the matter doesn't concern the mothers of the nation. It concerns them horribly. n.o.body can think so ill of them as to suppose they don't care.

It's monstrous that men should sit upon that committee alone. Women have had to think about these things. We believe this evil can be met--if men will let us try. It may be that only women comprehend it, since men through the ages have been helpless before it. Why, then, once again, this Commission of _men_? The mockery of it! Setting men to make their report upon this matter to men! I am not a public speaker, but I am a wife and a mother. Do you wonder that hearing about that Commission gave me courage to take the first opportunity to join these brave sisters of mine who are fighting for political liberty?'

She seemed for the first time to notice that a little group of sn.i.g.g.e.rers were becoming more obstreperous.

'We knew, of course, that whatever we say some of you will laugh and jeer; but, speaking for myself, no mockery that you are able to fling at us, can sting _me_ like the thought of the hypocrisy of that Commission!

Do you wonder that when we think of it--you men who have power and don't use it!--do you wonder that women come out of their homes--young, and old, and middle-aged--that we stand up here in the public places and give you scorn for scorn?'

As the unheroic figure trembling stepped off the bench, she found Vida Levering's hand held out to steady her.

'Take my seat,' said the younger woman.

She stood beside her, for once oblivious of Ernestine, who was calling for new members, and giving out notices.

Vida bent over the shapeless mauve bundle. 'You asked that woman to go with you. I wish you'd take me.'

'Ah, my dear, _I_ don't need to go again. I thought to have that lady see it would do good. Her husband has influence, you see.'

'But you've just said the men are useless in this matter.'

She had no answer.

'But, I believe,' Vida went on, 'if more women were like you--if they looked into the thing----'

'Very few could stand it.'

'But don't hundreds of poor women "stand" much worse?'