A Second Coming Part 9

'Daughter!' He said.

And, behold, the woman sat up and looked about her.

'Where am I?' she asked, as one who wakes from sleep.

'Is all well with you?'

'Oh, yes, all's well with me, thank G.o.d!'

'That is good hearing.'

Then there was a tumult in the theatre. The students stood up in their places, speaking all together.

'How's he done it?'

'She must have been only shamming.'

'It's a trick!'

'It's a plant!'

'It's a got-up thing between them.'

Insults were hurled at the Stranger by a hundred different voices. In the heat of their excitement the students came streaming down from their seats on to the operating floor. They looked for the man who had done this thing.

'Where is he?' they cried. 'We'll make him confess how the trick was done.'

But He whom they sought was not there. He had already gone. When they discovered that this was so, and that He whom they sought was not to be found, but had vanished from before their eyes, their bewilderment grew still more. With one accord they turned to look at the woman.

As if alarmed by the noise of their threatening voices, and the confusion caused by their tumultuous movements, she had raised herself upon the operating table, so that she stood upright before them all, naked as she was born. And they saw that the bandages had fallen from off her, and that her body was without scratch and blemish, round and whole.

'It's a miracle!' they exclaimed.

A great silence fell over them all, until, presently, the surgeons and the students, looking each into the other's faces, began to ask, each of his neighbour:

'Who is the man that has done this thing?'

But the woman gave thanks unto G.o.d, weeping tears of joy.

CHAPTER VI

THE BLACKLEG

The foreman shrugged his shoulders. He avoided looking at the applicant, an undersized man, with straggling black beard and dull eyes. Even now, while pressing his appeal, he wore an air of being but slightly interested.

'You know, Jones, what the conditions of employ were--keep on the works.'

'But my little girl's ill!'

'Sorry to hear it; but you don't want to have any trouble. You heard how they treated your wife when she came in; they'd be much worse to you if I was to let you out. They're pretty near beat, and they know it, and they don't like it, and before they quite knock under they'd like to make a mark of someone. If it was you, they might make a mark too many; they're not overfond of you just now, as you know very well. And then where will you be, eh? How would your little girl be any better for their laying you out?'

Jones turned to his wife, a sort of feminine replica of himself. She had her shawl drawn over her head.

'You hear, Jane, what Mr. Mason says?'

Mrs. Jones sighed; even in her sigh there was a curious reproduction of her husband's lack of interest.

'All I know is that the doctor don't seem to have no great 'opes about Matilda, and that she keeps a-calling for you, Tom.'

'Does she? Then I go! Mr. Mason, I'm a-goin'.'

'All right, Jones, go! Don't think that I don't feel for yer, 'cause I do, but as to coming back again, that's another matter. Mind, we can do without yer, and we don't want no fuss, that's all. Things have been bad enough up to now, and we don't want 'em to be no worse.'

Outside the gates there was a considerable crowd. Among the crowd were the pickets and a fair leaven of the men on strike; but a large majority of the people might have been described as sympathisers.

Unwise sympathisers they for the most part were; more bent on striking than the strikers; more resolute to fight the battle to the bitter end. The knowledge that already surrender was in the air angered them. They were in an ugly temper, disposed to 'take it out of' the first most convenient object.

As Mrs. Jones had made her way through them towards the gates she had been subjected to gibes and jeers, and worse. She had been pushed and hustled. More than one hand had been laid rudely on her. Someone had thrown a shovelful of dirt with such adroitness that it had burst in a shower on her head. While she was still nearly blinded she had been pushed hither and thither with half good-humoured horse-play, which was near akin to something else.

Tom Jones was an unpopular figure. He was one of the most notorious of the blacklegs, in a sense their leader. He had persisted in being master of his own volition; a.s.serted his right to labour for whom he pleased, at whatever terms he chose. Such men are the greatest enemies of trades unions. Allow a man his freedom, and unionism, in its modern sense, is at an end. It is one of the questions of the moment whether the good of the greatest number does not imperatively demand special legislation which shall hold such men in bonds; which shall make it a penal offence for them to consider themselves free.

Word had gone round that Jones's little girl was ill; that the doctor had decided she was dying; that Mrs. Jones had come to fetch him home to bid the child good-bye. By most of those there it was unhesitatingly agreed that this was as it should be; that Jones was being served just right; that he was only getting a bit of what he ought to have, which, it was quite within the range of possibility, they would supplement with something else.

It was because of Jones and his like that the strike was failing, had failed; that they were beaten and broken, brought to their knees, in spite of all their organisation, of what they had endured. Jones! It was currently reported that the idea of giving the blacklegs food and lodging on the premises, and so rendering the wiles of the pickets of no avail, was Jones's. At any rate, he had been among the first to fall in with the proposition, and for many days he had not been outside the gates. Jones! Let him put his face outside those gates now and he would see what they would show him.

When the gates were opened, and Mrs. Jones had entered, they waited, murmuring and muttering, with twitching fingers and lowering brows, wondering if the prospect of being able to bid his dying child good-bye would be sufficient inducement to him to trust himself outside there in the open. And while they wondered he came.

Again the gate was opened. Out came Jones; close behind him was his wife. Then the gate was shut to with a bang.

He was known by sight to many in the crowd. By them the knowledge of who he was was instantly communicated to all the rest. He was not greeted with any tumult; they were too much in earnest to be noisy.

But, with one accord, they cursed him, and their curses, though not loudly uttered, reached him, every one. He stood fronting the array of angry faces, all inclined in his direction.

The three policemen, who kept a clear s.p.a.ce in front of the works, and saw that ingress and egress was gained with some sort of ease, hardly seemed to know what to make of him, or of the situation. They glanced at Jones, then at the crowd, then at each other. All the morning the people had been gathering round the gate, the number increasing as the minutes pa.s.sed. Except that they could not be induced to move away, there had been little to object to in their demeanour until now. As Jones appeared with his wife they formed together into a more compact ma.s.s. Another shovelful of dust was thrown by someone at the back with the same dexterity as before, so that it lighted on the man and the woman, partially obscuring them beneath a cloud of dust. That same instant perhaps a dozen stones were thrown, some of which struck both Mr. and Mrs. Jones, the rest rattling against the gate.

It was done so quickly that the police had not a chance to offer interference. They had been instructed to make as little show of authority as possible, to bear as much as could be borne, and, until the last extremity, to do nothing to rouse the rancour of the strikers. In the face of this sudden a.s.sault the trio hesitated. Then the one nearest to the gate held his hand up to the crowd, shouting:

'Now, you chaps, none of that! Don't you go making fools of yourselves, or you'll be sorry!' He turned to the Joneses. 'You'd better go back and try to get out some other way. There'll be trouble if you stop here.'

Tom Jones asked him stolidly, gazing with his lack-l.u.s.tre eyes intently at the crowd:

'Which other way?'

'I don't know--any other way. You can't get this way, that's plain-- they mean mischief. Back you go, before you're sorry.'

The constable endeavoured to hustle the pair back within the gate.