Part 2 (1/2)
The large steward observed with an indulgent smile that one must make allowances. He did not say for what or for whom, but his meaning seemed to be clear to the other steward.
”The eternal feminine, eh?” he remarked with a knowing nod; and all the men standing round laughed immoderately. Under cover of this exhibition of humour, a girl in grey, with a fur cap and m.u.f.f, was allowed to pa.s.s in without any special scrutiny. She moved very deliberately along the front chairs, which were now filled, stood for an instant facing the audience while she selected her seat, then made her way to one in the middle of a row.
”Votes for women!” piped a wit in the gallery, reproducing the popular impression of the feminine voice; and the audience, strung up to the point of s.n.a.t.c.hing at any outlet for emotion, rocked with mirth.
The girl in grey joined in the laughter. ”Every one seems very jumpy to-night,” she observed to her neighbour, a lady in tight black satin who wore the badge of some Women's Federation. ”I was actually taken for a Suffragette in the market-place just now.”
”Were you, now?” returned the lady, sociably. ”No wonder they're a trifle apprehensive after the way those dreadful creatures went on at the Corn Exchange, last week. You were there, perhaps?”
The girl in grey said she was there, and the Federation woman proceeded to converse genially. ”Thought I'd seen your face somewhere,” she said.
”A splendid gathering, that would have been a glorious triumph for the Party, if it hadn't been for those----” She paused for a word, and found it with satisfaction--”females. Females,” she repeated distinctly. ”You really can't call them anything else.”
”I suppose you can't,” said the girl demurely. The sparkle lit up her eyes again. ”Our minister called them bipeds, in the pulpit, last Sunday,” she added.
”And so they are!” cried the lady in tight black satin. ”So they are.”
”They are,” agreed the girl in grey.
In the front row of chairs, speculation was rife as to the possible presence of Suffragettes. The wife of the man at the door, a homely little woman with a pleasant face, was a.s.suring everybody who cared to know that the thing was impossible.
”They've drafted five hundred police into the town, I'm told; and my husband arranged for thirty extra stewards at the last minute, because the detectives wired that two of them had travelled down in the London train,” she informed a circle of interested listeners.
”Is that why there are so many men wearing little b.u.t.tons?” asked the woman on her left. ”I wondered if that was usual at political meetings.”
”I think I heard you say you'd never been to a meeting before, didn't I?” said her neighbour pleasantly. ”Neither have I, and I wouldn't be wasting my time here to-night if it wasn't to please my husband. He likes to see women take an interest in politics; it was him that got our member a hundred and twenty-eight canva.s.sers, last election. Oh, he thinks a lot of women, does my husband; says he hasn't any objection to their having a vote, either, only they ought to be ashamed of themselves for going on so about it. I don't hold with votes myself. It's only men that's got all that idle time on their hands, and if they're respectable married men, there's nothing else to occupy them but politics. But for a woman it's work, work, work, from her wedding-day till her funeral, and how can she find time for such nonsense? 'You've got to be made to think, Martha,' he says to me, coming here to-night. Think? If a woman stops to think, she don't stop with her husband, chances are. Of course, he don't believe me when I say that. He's too sure of me, that's where it is.”
”That is always where it is,” said the woman in black, quietly.
Her neighbour took out some knitting. ”They laugh at me for bringing my knitting everywhere,” she said. ”I can't listen if I sit idle. Not that I want to listen,” she concluded, as she settled down comfortably to the counting of st.i.tches.
The organ boomed out a jerky tune with elephantine lightness, and the audience vented its impatience in a l.u.s.ty rendering of some song about England and liberty. The music was uninspiring, the words were clap-trap, and seemed to convey the singular idea that freedom had been invented and patented within recent years by a particular political party; but the indifferent expression of the woman in black changed and softened as the chorus rose and fell, and a tall man with a lean, humorous face, who stood looking at her, gave her a smile of understanding as the echoing sounds died away. He too was wearing a steward's b.u.t.ton, she noticed.
”There's a sort of barbaric splendour about that, isn't there?” he remarked.
She felt none of the irritation that had been roused by the conversational advances of the other steward. It was a relief, indeed, to talk about something ordinary with a man who, she felt instinctively, knew how to give even ordinary things their true values.
”It's the whole effect,” she answered impulsively. ”The cathedral outside, and this thirteenth-century interior, and then--this!” She looked round the magnificent old County Hall, and along the densely packed rows of restless modern men and women, and then back again, half whimsically, at the man who had spoken to her. ”It is like reaching back to shake hands with the Middle Ages,” she said.
”To fight with the Middle Ages,” he amended, and they both laughed. ”You will find,” he added, narrowing his eyes a little to look at her, ”that the Middle Ages generally win, when we hold political meetings here in the provinces.”
There was a distant sound of cheering, and every one stiffened into attention. A stir ran round the hall; doors were closed with a good deal of noise, and the stewards, looking apprehensively at the little block of seats in the front, gradually closed round them until the gangways were entirely blocked at that end of the hall. One lady, who complained that she could not see the platform for stewards, instantly found herself placed under observation, and was only freed from suspicion when one of the gentlemen identified her as his aunt and pledged his word that she did not want a Parliamentary vote. Her neighbours congratulated her, but in accents that betrayed disappointment.
The stir was followed by an expectant hush. The tall man looked steadily at the fingers of the woman in black, which locked and unlocked ceaselessly, though she leaned back in her chair with a vast a.s.sumption of unconcern. Those tireless, nervous hands told him what he wanted to know.
The little officious steward was back at his side, whispering in his ear. He shook his head impatiently in reply.
”I'm not going to stay,” he said shortly. ”You've got enough without me, even to deal with two Suffragettes who may not be here; and--well, it's a sickening business, and I'd sooner be out of it.”
He went, and all that was of her world seemed to the woman in black to go with him, as she looked after him, half disappointed, half contemptuous. Up to this point, the Middle Ages were certainly winning, she decided.
The next quarter of an hour was the longest she had ever lived through.
Afterwards, looking back, she remembered every detail of what took place, all the impressiveness of it, all the ironic absurdity. At the time, it felt like holding one's breath for interminable minutes while unfamiliar things went on somewhere in the thick of a mist, as things happen in a bad dream that just escapes the final incoherence of a nightmare.