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.

There was the roar that broke through the mist in a huge wave of sound, when the speakers walked on to the platform. Looking round at that swaying, white-faced mult.i.tude, mad with a hero-worship that lost not a jot of its attraction in her eyes because for her there was no hero, the woman in the front row, who had never been to a political meeting before, felt a moment's amazement at her own temerity in coming there, alone with one other, to defy an enthusiasm that had all the appearance of invincibility. Then the mist began to roll away, as somebody started the usual popular chorus. Translated in terms of jolly good-fellowship, hero-worship no longer appeared unconquerable.

To the woman in black it seemed as though a thousand chairs sc.r.a.ped, a thousand throats grated, while the audience settled down, and the chairman delivered carefully prepared compliments, and the great man sorted slips of paper. Then two women, out of the hundred or so who had been admitted because they did not appear to want the historic liberties they came to applaud, clenched lips and hands as the roar burst out once more.

The great man was on his feet, facing it with a gratified smile. To one at least of his audience that smile restored a courage that was in full flight the minute before. That he should strike so egregiously the wrong note, that a fine situation should be met with affability, argued something wrong with the situation or something wrong with the man.

There was a false note, too, in that second roar, and it stopped so unexpectedly that one man was left cheering alone in a high, falsetto voice, provocative of instant derision. The fineness had gone out of the situation, and the immediate future of the woman in black, full as it was of unfamiliar fears, came back into some sort of a line with the present.

The absolute silence that greeted the opening period of the ministerial oration had something abnormal in it. It was a silence that almost hurt.

The smallest movement put stewards on the alert, made heads go round.

The speaker felt the strain, shuffled his notes, stumbled once or twice.

Yet, as the tension tightened to breaking-point, the woman in the front row knew the grip over her own nerves to be strengthening by minutes. In the mental commotion around her, she felt the battle already half won that she had come to fight.

A man's voice, challenging a fact, caused a sensation of relief out of all proportion to the slightness of the interruption. Some wag said amiably, "Turn him out!" and there was laughter. The man, a well-known local Socialist, repeated his objection, and was supported this time by several other voices. There was quite a little stir, and the great man put out his hand benevolently.

"No, no, gentlemen, let him stay!" he adjured the stewards, none of whom had shown one sign of wishing to do otherwise. "I stand here as the champion of free speech----"

The rest of his sentence was drowned in a spontaneous outburst of applause, during which it was to be supposed that he dealt with the objection that had been raised, for when his words again became audible he had gone on to another point. His next interrupter was a Tariff Reformer, at whose expense he was courteously humorous. The emotional audience rewarded him with appreciative laughter, in which the Tariff Reformer joined good-humouredly. Speaker and listeners were rapidly coming into touch with one another.

The great man, growing sure of his ground, made an eloquent appeal to the records of the past. The woman, who had never heard a politician speak before, leaned forward, hanging on every word. She felt strangely elated, strangely sure of herself, now. This man, believing all that about liberty, seeing all that behind the commonplace of democracy, should surely understand where others had failed even to tolerate. She felt disproportionately irritated by the click of knitting-needles, wondering how any woman could occupy mind and fingers with wool while eternal principles of justice were being thundered over her head. Then there came a pause in the thunder; and sight and sound were blotted out as she took the opportunity, rose to her feet, and stared up blindly at the spot where she knew the speaker to be standing.

"Then give all that to the women," she said, in a voice she never seemed to have heard before. "If you think so much of justice and freedom for men, don't keep it any longer from the women."

For a little s.p.a.ce of time, a couple of seconds, probably, her eyes went on seeing nothing, and her ears drummed. She thought she had never known what it really meant to be alone until that moment. She was a woman who had known loneliness very early, when it came to her in an uncongenial nursery; she knew it still, in some houses, where everything was wrong, from the wall-papers to the people. But the meaning of utter isolation she had never learnt until that moment when clamour and confusion reigned around her and she saw and heard none of it.

Then her senses were invaded by the sound and the look of it all; and to her own perplexity she found herself on the point of smiling.

She thought of a hundred things, many of them irrelevant, as she tried in vain to walk to the door, and was obstructed at every step by stewards, who fought to get hold of some part of her in their curious method of restoring order and decorum. She wondered why the meeting was interrupting itself with such complete success, because one woman had made the mistake of thinking that the hero they had welcomed with bad music was a man who meant what he said. She thought of plays she had seen, dealing with the French Revolution, very bad plays most of them, she reminded herself as she was dragged this way and that by excited gentlemen, divided in opinion as to the door by which she was to be ejected. The sea of distorted faces past which they took her, the memory of the knitting-needles, even the intolerable smile of the great man as he made little jokes about her for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the platform--all this was very suggestive of the French Revolution, as portrayed in a badly written play. In all the plays she had seen, however, she did not remember that there had ever been women who cried a little, or men who sat silent and ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed to put a stop to what was going on. These two things appeared to be really happening, here and there among the audience; and she supposed this was why they hurt the most.

She thought of the fastidiousness that made her a jest to her friends, as she felt her hat knocked sideways, looked down and saw the lace at her wrists dangling in rags. The blow that some one aimed at her, as she was dragged unresisting by, seemed a little thing in comparison with those torn strips of lace. Apparently, she was not alone in this eccentric adjustment of proportions; for the little fussy steward who, unbalanced to the point of irresponsibility, had struck the blow, was apologizing clumsily the next minute for treading on her skirt. He did not seem to understand when she told him gently that he was the man who had boasted of protecting women since the world began.

Sky and stars looked very remote when at last by circuitous ways they brought her to a door and thrust her out into the night. A final push from the gentleman who liked to see women take an interest in politics, sent her stumbling down stone steps into a moonlit market-place.

Everything looked very big, very still, out there, after the ba.n.a.lity and the bad staging of the play from which she had just made her unrehea.r.s.ed exit. In the clearness of thought that came to her, freed at last of hands that dragged at her and voices that coa.r.s.ened to say things to her that she only now dimly began to comprehend, she knew what it was that had made women, ordinary quiet women like herself, into rebels who were out to fight for the right to protect themselves even against their protectors.

A cheer greeted her from the farther side of the market-place, where the police kept back a crowd that had waited all the evening to see the two Suffragettes from London, and not, as the local paper afterwards somewhat flamboyantly put it, to "worship from afar the apostle of progress and democracy, almost as the servants of the G.o.ds might wait at Olympic banquets for crumbs to fall from the rich man's table." It was a friendly cheer, she noticed, though this did not matter much. Nothing seemed to matter much, just then, except that the black ma.s.s of the cathedral towered overhead and looked unshakable.

A little altercation floated down to her from the top of the steps, as she leaned motionless against the worn stones of the old bal.u.s.trade.

"Martha! You of all people! Disgracing me like that! However did you come to be mistaken for one of those screaming----?"

"Well, I couldn't stand the humbug of it, there! Talking about free speech and all that fal-lal nonsense, and then----! I wouldn't let my cat be treated as they treated her, all for nothing----"

"Nothing, do you call it? Coming here on purpose to interrupt----"

"So did that ranting Socialist you think so much of! So did Mr.

What's-his-name with the husky voice. Why didn't they tear _them_ to pieces? Now, you listen to me, James. You brought me here to-night because you said I'd got to be made to think. Very well. I've been made.