_ CHAPTER VIII
Devoutly thankful at having escaped from her compromising position unrecognized, Mrs. Fox-Moore firmly declined to go 'awskin' fur the vote' again! When Vida gave up her laughing remonstrance, Mrs. Fox-Moore thought her sister had also given up the idea. But as Vida afterwards confessed, she told herself that she would go 'just once more.' It could not be but what she was under some illusion about that queer spectacle. From one impression each admitted it was difficult to shake herself free. Whatever those women were or were not, they weren't fools. What did the leaders (in prison and out), what did they think they were accomplishing, besides making themselves hideously uncomfortable? The English Parliament, having flung them out, had gone on with its routine, precisely as though nothing had happened.
Had anything happened? That was the question. The papers couldn't answer. They were given over to lies. The bare idea of women pretending to concern themselves with public affairs--from the point of view of the Press, it was enough to make the soberest sides shake with Homeric laughter.
So, then, one last time to see for one's self. And on this occasion no pettiness of disguise, Miss Levering's aspect seemed to say--no recurrence of any undignified flight. She had been frightened away from her first meeting, but she would not be frightened from the second, which was also to be the last.
An instinct unanalyzed, but significant of what was to follow, kept her from seeking companionship outside. Had Wark not gone over to the market-gardener, her former mistress would have had no misgiving about taking the woman into her confidence. But Wark, with lightning rapidity, had become Mrs. Anderson Slynes, and was beyond recall. So the new maid was told the following Sunday, that she might walk with her mistress across Hyde Park (where the papers said the meetings in future were to be), carrying some music which had to be returned to the Tunbridges.
Pursuing this programme, what more natural than that those two chance pedestrians should be arrested by an apparition on their way, of a flaming banner bearing, along with a demand for the vote, an outrageous charge against a distinguished public servant--'a pity the misguided creatures didn't know him, just a little!'
Yes. There it was! a rectangle of red screaming across the vivid green of the park not a hundred yards from the Marble Arch, the denunciatory banner stretched above the side of an uncovered van. A little crowd of perhaps a hundred collected on one side of the cart--the loafers on the outermost fringe, lying on the grass. Never a sign of a Suffragette, and nearly three o'clock! Impossible for any passer-by to carry out the programme of pausing to ask idly, 'What are those women screeching about?'
Seeming to search in vain for some excuse to linger, Miss Levering's wandering eye fell upon a young mother wheeling a perambulator. She had glanced with mild curiosity at the flaunting ensign, and then turned from it to lean forward and straighten her baby's cap.
'I wonder what
she thinks of the Woman Question,' Miss Levering observed, in a careless aside to her maid.
Before Gorringe could reply: 'Doddy's a bootiful angel, isn't Doddy?' said the young mother, with subdued rapture.
'Ah, she's found the solution,' said the lady, looking back.
Other pedestrians glanced at the little crowd about the cart, read demand and denunciation on the banner, laughed, and they, too, for the most part, went on.
An Eton boy, who looked as if he might be her grandson, came by with a white-haired lady of distinguished aspect, who held up her voluminous silken skirts and stared silently at the legend.
'Do you see what it says?' the Eton boy laughed as he looked back. '"
We demand the vote." Fancy! They "demand" it. What awful cheek!' and he laughed again at the fatuity of the female creature.
Vida glanced at the dignified old dame as though with an uneasy new sense of the incongruity in the attitude of those two quite commonplace, everyday members of a world that was her world, and that yet could for a moment look quite strange.
She turned and glanced back at the ridiculous cart as if summoning the invisible presence of Mrs. Chisholm to moderate the insolence of the budding male. Still there was no sign either of Mrs. Chisholm or any of her fellow-conspirators against the old order of the world. Miss Levering stood a moment hesitating.
'I believe I'm a little tired,' she said to the discreet maid. 'We'll rest here a moment,' and she sat down with her back to the crowd.
A woman, apparently of the small shopkeeping class, was already established at one end of the only bench anywhere near the cart. Her child who was playing about, was neatly dressed, and to Vida's surprise wore sandals on her stockingless feet. This fashion for children, which had been growing for years among the upper classes, had found little imitation among tradesmen or working people. They presumably were still too near the difficulty of keeping their children in shoes and stockings, to be able to see anything but a confession of failure in going without. In the same way, the 'Simple Life,' when led by the rich, wears to the poverty-struck an aspect of masked meanness--a matter far less tolerable in the eyes of the pauper than the traditional splendour of extravagance in the upper class, an extravagance that feeds more than the famished stomach with the crumbs that it lets fall.
As Miss Levering sat watching the child, and wondering a little at the sandals, the woman caught her eye.
'Could you please tell me the time?' she asked.
Miss Levering took out her watch, and then spoke of the wisdom of that plan of sandals.
The woman answered with such self-possession and good sense, that the lady sent a half-amused glance over her shoulder as if relishing in advance the sturdy disapproval of this highly respectable young mother when she should come to realize how near she and the precious daughter were to the rostrum of the Shrieking Sisterhood. It might be worth prolonging the discussion upon health and education for the amusement there would be in seeing what form condemnation of the Suffragettes took among people of this kind. By turning her head to one side, out of the tail of her eye the lady could see that an excitement of some sort was agitating the crowd. The voices rose more shrill. People craned and pushed. A derisive cheer went up as a woman appeared on the cart. The wearer of the tam-o'-shanter! Three others followed--all women. Miss Levering saw without seeming to look, still listening while the practical-minded mother talked on about her child, and what 'was good for it.' All life had resolved itself into pursuit of that.
An air of semi-abstraction came over the lady. It was as if in the presence of this excellent bourgeoise she felt an absurd constraint in showing an interest in the proceedings of these unsexed creatures behind them.
To her obvious astonishment the mother of the child was the first to jump up.
'Now they're going to begin!' she said briskly.
'Who?' asked Miss Levering.
'Why, the Suffrage people.'
'Oh! Are
you going to listen to them?'
'Yes; that's what I've come all this way for.' And she and her bare-legged offspring melted into the growing crowd.
Vida turned to the maid and met her superior smile. 'That woman says she has come a long way to hear these people advocating Woman's Suffrage,' and slowly with an air of complete detachment she approached the edge of the crowd, followed by the supercilious maid. They were quickly hemmed in by people who seemed to spring up out of the ground. It was curious to look back over the vivid green expanse and see the dotted humanity running like ants from all directions to listen to this handful of dowdy women in a cart!
In finding her way through the crowd it would appear that the lady was not much sustained by the presence of a servant, however well-meaning. Much out of place in such a gathering as Mrs. Fox-Moore or any ultra-oldfashioned woman was, still more incongruous showed there the relation of mistress and maid. The punctilious Gorringe was plainly horrified at the proximity to her mistress of these canaille, and the mistress was not so absorbed it would seem but what she felt the affront to seemliness in a servant's seeing her pushed and shoved aside--treated with slight regard or none. Necessary either to leave the scene with lofty disapproval, or else make light of the discomfort.
'It doesn't matter!' she assured the girl, who was trying to protect her mistress's dainty wrap from contact with a grimy tramp. And, again, when half a dozen boys forced their way past, 'It's all right!' she nodded to the maid, 'it's no worse than the crowd at Charing Cross coming over from Paris.'
But it was much worse, and Gorringe knew it. 'The old man is standing on your gown, miss.'
'Oh, would you mind----' Miss Levering politely suggested another place for his feet.
But the old man had no mind left for a mere bystander--it was all absorbed in Suffragettes.
''is feet are filthy muddy, 'm,' whispered Gorringe.
It may have been in part the maid's genteel horror of such proximities that steeled Miss Levering to endure them. Under circumstances like these the observant are reminded that no section of the modern community is so scornfully aristocratic as our servants. Their horror of the meanly-apparelled and the humble is beyond the scorn of kings. The fine lady shares her shrinking with those inveterate enemies of democracy, the lackey who shuts the door in the shabby stranger's face, and the dog who barks a beggar from the gate.
And so while the maid drew her own skirts aside and held her nose high in the air, the gentlewoman stood faintly smiling at the queer scene.
Alas! no Mrs. Chisholm. It looked as if they must have been hard up for speakers to-day, for two of them were younger even than Miss Claxton of the tam-o'-shanter. One of them couldn't be more than nineteen.
'How dreadful to put such very young girls up there to be stared at by all these louts!'
'Oh, yes, 'm, quite 'orrid,' agreed the maid, but with the air of 'What can you expect of persons so low?'
'However, the young girls seem to have as much self-possession as the older ones!' pursued Miss Levering, as she looked in vain for any sign of flinching from the sallies of cockney impudence directed at the occupants of the cart.
They exhibited, too, what was perhaps even stranger--an utter absence of any flaunting of courage or the smallest show of defiance. What was this armour that looked like mere indifference? It couldn't be that those quiet-looking young girls
were indifferent to the ordeal of standing up there before a crowd of jeering rowdies whose less objectionable utterances were: 'Where did you get that 'at?' 'The one in green is my girl!' 'Got yer dog-whip, miss?' and such-like utterances.
The person thus pointedly alluded to left her companions ranged along the side of the cart against the background of banner, while she, the famous Miss Claxton, took the meeting in charge. She wasted no time, this lady. Her opening remarks, which, in the face of a fire of interruption, took the form of an attack upon the Government, showed her an alert, competent, cut-and-thrust, imperturbably self-possessed politician, who knew every aspect of the history of the movement, as able to answer any intelligent question off-hand as to snub an impudent irrelevance, able to take up a point and drive it well in--to shrug and smile or frown and point her finger, all with most telling effect, and keep the majority of her audience with her every minute of the time.
As a mere exhibition of nerve it was a thing to make you open your eyes. Only a moment was she arrested by either booing or applause. When a knot of young men, who had pushed their way near the front, kept on shouting argument and abuse, she interrupted her harangue an instant. Pointing out the ring-leader--
'Now you be quiet, if you please,' she said. 'These people are here to listen to
me.'
'No, they ain't. They come to see wot you look like.'
'That can't be so,' she said calmly, 'because after they've seen us they stay.' Then, as the interrupter began again, 'No, it's no use, my man'--she shook her head gently as if almost sorry for him--'you can't talk
me down!'
'Now, ain't that just
like a woman!' he complained to the crowd.
Just in front of where Miss Levering and her satellite first came to a standstill, was a cheerful, big, sandy man with long flowing moustachios, a polo cap, and a very dirty collar. At intervals he inquired of the men around him, in a great jovial voice, 'Are we down-'earted?' as though the meeting had been called, not for the purpose of rousing interest in the question of woman's share in the work of the world, but as though its object were to humiliate and disfranchise the men. But his exclamation, repeated at intervals, came in as a sort of refrain to the rest of the proceedings.
'The Conservatives,' said the speaker, 'had never pretended they favoured broadening the basis of the franchise. But here were these Liberals, for thirty years they'd been saying that the demand on the part of women for political recognition commanded their respect, and would have their support, and yet there were four hundred and odd members who had got into the House of Commons very largely through the efforts of women--oh, yes, we know all about that! We've been helping the men at elections for years.'
'What party?'
Adroitly she replied, 'We have members of every party in our ranks.'
'Are you a Conservative?'
'No, I myself am not a Conservative----'
'You work for the Labour men--I know!'
'It's child's play belonging to any party till we get the vote,' she dismissed it. 'In future we are neither for Liberal nor Conservative nor Labour. We are for Women. When we get the sex bar removed, it will be time for us to sort ourselves into parties. At present we are united against any Government that continues to ignore its duty to the women of the country. In the past we were so confiding that when a candidate said he was in favour of Woman's Suffrage (he was usually a Liberal), we worked like slaves to get that man elected, so that a voice might be raised for women's interests in the next Parliament. Again and again the man we worked for got in. But the voice that was to speak for us--that voice was mute. We had served his purpose in helping him to win his seat, and we found ourselves invariably forgotten or ignored. The Conservatives have never shown the abysmal hypocrisy of the Liberals. We can get on with our open enemies; it's these
cowards' ('Boo!' and groans)--'these cowards, I say--who, in order to sneak into a place in the House, pretend to sympathize with this reform--who use us, and then betray us; it's these who are women's enemies!'
'Why are you always worrying the Liberals? Why don't you ask the Conservatives to give you the vote?'
'You don't go to a person for something he hasn't got unless you're a fool. The Liberals are in power; the Liberals were readiest with fair promises; and so we go to the Liberals. And we shall continue to go to them. We shall never leave off' (boos and groans) 'till they leave office. Then we'll begin on the Conservatives.' She ended in a chorus of laughter and cheers, 'I will now call upon Miss Cynthia Chisholm to propose the resolution.'
Wherewith the chairman gave way to the younger of the two girls. This one of the Gracchi--a gentle-seeming creature, carelessly dressed, grave and simple--faced the mob with evident trepidation, a few notes, to which she never referred, in her shaking hand. What brought a girl like that here?--was the question on the few thoughtful faces in the crowd confronting her. She answered the query by introducing the resolution in an earnest little speech which, if it didn't show that much of the failure and suffering that darken the face of the world is due to women's false position, showed, at all events, that this young creature held a burning conviction that the subjection of her sex was the world's Root-Evil. With no apparent apprehension of the colossal audacity of her position, the girl moved gravely that 'this meeting demands of the Government the insertion of an enfranchisement clause in the Plural Voting Bill, and demands that it shall become law during the present session.' Her ignorance of Parliamentary procedure was freely pointed out to her.
'No,' she said, 'it is you who are ignorant--of how pressing the need is. You say it is "out of order." If treating the women of the country fairly is out of order, it is only because men have made a poor sort of order. It is the
order that should be changed.'
Of course that dictum received its due amount of hooting.
'The vote is the reward for defending the country,' said a voice.
'No,' said the girl promptly, 'for soldiers and sailors don't vote.'
'It implies fitness for military service,' somebody amended.
'It
shouldn't,' said Nineteen, calmly; 'it ought to imply merely
a stake in the country. No one denies we have that.'
The crowd kept on about soldiering, till the speaker was goaded into saying--
'I don't say women like fighting, but women
can fight! In these days warfare isn't any more a matter of great physical strength, and a woman can pull a trigger as well as a man. The Boer women found that out--and so has the Russian. I don't like thinking about it myself--for I seem to realize too clearly what horrors those women endured before they could carry bombs or shoulder rifles.'
'Rifles? Why a woman can't never hit
nothing.'
'It is quite true we can't most of us even throw a stone straight--the great mass of women never in all their lives wanted to hit anybody or anything. And that'--she came nearer, and leaned over the side of the cart with scared face--'it's that that makes it so dreadful to realize how at last when women's eyes are opened--when they see their homes and the holiest things in life threatened and despised, how quickly after all
they can learn the art of war.'
'With hatpins!' some one called out.
'Yes, scratching and spitting,' another added.
That sort of interruption did not so much embarrass her, but once or twice she was nearly thrown off her beam-ends by men and boys shouting, 'Wot's the matter with yer anyway? Can't yer get a husband?' and such-like brilliant relevancies. Although she flushed at some of these sallies, she stuck to her guns with a pluck that won her friends. In one of the pauses a choleric old man gesticulated with his umbrella.
'If what the world needed was Woman's Suffrage, it wouldn't have been left for a minx like you to discover it.' At which volleys of approval.
'That gentleman seems to think it's a new madness that we've recently invented.' The child seemed in her loneliness to reach out for companioning. She spoke of 'our friend John Stuart Mill.'
'Oo's Mill?'
'That great Liberal wrote in 1867----' But Mill and she were drowned together. She waited a moment for the flood of derision to subside.
''E wouldn't 'ad nothin' to do with yer if 'e'd thought you'd go on like you done.'
'Benjamin Disraeli was on our side. Mazzini--Charles Kingsley. As long ago as 1870, a Woman's Suffrage Bill that was drafted by Dr. Pankhurst and Mr. Jacob Bright passed a second reading.'
'The best sort of women
never wanted it.'
'The kind of women in the past who cared to be associated with this reform--they were women like Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Martineau, and Josephine Butler, and the two thousand other women of influence who memorialized Mr. Gladstone.'
Something was called out that Vida could not hear, but that brought the painful scarlet into the young face.
'Shame! shame!' Some of the men were denouncing the interjection.
After a little pause the girl found her voice. 'You make it difficult for me to tell you what I think you ought to know. I don't believe I could go on if I didn't see over there the Reformer's Tree. It makes me think of how much had to be borne before other changes could be brought about.' She reminded the people of what had been said and suffered on that very spot in the past, before the men standing before her had got the liberties they enjoyed to-day.
'They were
men!'
'Yes, and so perhaps it wasn't so hard for them. I don't know, and I'm sure it was hard enough. When we women remember what
they suffered--though you think meanly of us because we can't be soldiers, you may as well know we are ready to do whatever has to be done--we are ready to bear whatever has to be borne. There seem to be things harder to face than bullets, but it doesn't matter, they'll be faced.'
The lady standing with her maid in the incongruous crowd, looked round once or twice with eyes that seemed to say, 'How much stranger life is than we are half the time aware, and how much stranger it bids fair to be!' The rude platform with the scarlet backing flaming in the face of the glorious summer afternoon, near the very spot upon which the great battles for Reform had been fought out in the past, and in place of England's sturdy freeman making his historic appeal for justice, and admission to the Commons--a girl pouring out this stream of vigorous English, upholding the cause her family had stood for. Her voice failed her a little towards the close, or rather it did not so much fail as betray to any sensitive listener the degree of strain she put upon it to make it carry above laughter and interjection. As she raised the note she bent over the crowd, leaning forward, with her neck outstretched, the cords in it swelling, and the heat of the sun bringing a flush and a moisture to her face, steadying her voice as the thought of the struggle to come, shook and clouded it, and calling on the people to judge of this matter without prejudice. It was a thing to live in the memory--the vision of that earnest child trying to fire the London louts with the great names of the past, and failing to see her bite her lip to keep back tears, and, bending over the rabble, find a choked voice to say--
'If your forefathers and foremothers who suffered for the freedom you young men enjoy--if they could come out of their graves to-day and see how their descendants use the great privileges they won--I believe they would go back into their graves and pull the shrouds over their eyes to hide them from your shame!'
'Hear! Hear!' 'Right you are.'
But she was done. She turned away, and found friendly hands stretched out to draw her to a seat.
The next speaker was an alert little woman with a provincial accent and the briskness of a cock-sparrow, whose prettiness, combined with pertness, rather demoralized the mob.
'Men and women,' she began, pitching her rather thin voice several notes too high.
'Men and women!' some one piped in mimicry; and the crowd dissolved in laughter.
It was curious to note again how that occasional exaggerated shrillness of the feminine voice when raised in the open air--how it amused the mob. They imitated the falsetto with squeals of delight. Each time she began afresh she was met by the shrill echo of her own voice. The contest went on for several minutes. The spectacle of the agitated little figure, bobbing and gesticulating and nothing heard but shrill squeaks, raised a very pandemonium of merriment. It didn't mend matters for her to say when she did get a hearing--
'I've come all the way from----' (place indistinguishable in the confusion) 'to talk to you this afternoon----'
''ow kind!'
'Do you reely think they could spare you?'
'And I'm going to convert every man within reach of my voice.'
Groans, and 'Hear! Hear!'
'Let's see you try!'
She talked on quite inaudibly for the most part. A phrase here and there came out, and the rest lost. So much hilarity in the crowd attracted to it a bibulous gentleman, who kept calling out, 'Oh, the pretty dear!' to the rapture of the bystanders. He became so elevated that the police were obliged to remove him. When the excitement attending this passage had calmed down, the reformer was perceived to be still piping away.
''ow long are you goin' on like this?'
'Ain't you
never goin' to stop?'
'Oh, not for a long time,' she shrilled cheerfully. 'I've got the accumulations of
centuries on me, and I'm only just beginning to unload! Although we haven't got the vote--
not yet--never mind, we've got our tongues!'
'Lord, don't we know it!' said a sad-faced gentleman, in a rusty topper.
'This one's too intolerable,' said a man to his companion.
'Yes; she ought to be smacked.'
They melted out of the crowd.
'We've got our tongues, and I've been going round among all the women I know getting them to promise to
use their tongues----'
'You stand up there and tell us they needed
urgin'?'
'To use their tongues to such purpose that it won't be women, but
men, who get up the next monster petition to Parliament asking for Woman's Suffrage.'
She went down under a flood of jeers, and rose to the surface again to say--
'A man's petition, praying Parliament for goodness' sake give those women the vote! Yes, you'd better be seeing about that petition, my friends, for I tell you there isn't going to be any peace till we get the franchise.'
'Aw now, they'd give
you anything!'
When the jeering had died a little, and she came to the top once more, she was discovered to be shouting--
'You men 'ad just better keep an eye on us----'
'Can't take our eyes off yer!'
'We Suffragettes
never have a Day of Rest! Every day in the week, while you men are at work or sitting in the public-house, we are visiting the women in their homes, explaining and stirring them up to a sense of their wrongs.'
'This I should call an example of what
not to say!' remarked a shrewd-looking man with a grin.
The crowd were ragging the speaker again, while she shouted--
'We are going to effect such a revolution as the world has never seen!'
'I'd like to bash her head for her!'
'We let them know that so long as women have no citizenship they are outside the pale of the law. If we are outside the law, we can't
break the law. It is not our fault that we're outlaws. It is you men's fault.'
'Don't say that,' said a voice in mock agony. 'I love you so.'
'I know you can't help it,' she retorted.
'If we gave you the vote, what would you do with it? Put it in a pie?'
'Well, I wouldn't make the
hash of it you men do!' and she turned the laugh. 'Look at you!
Look at you!' she said, when quiet was restored.
The young revellers gave a rather blank snigger, as though they had all along supposed looking at them to be an exhilarating occupation for any young woman.
'What do you do with your power? You throw it away. You submit to being taxed and to
our being taxed to the tune of a hundred and twenty-seven millions, that a war may be carried on in South Africa--a war that most of you know nothing about and care nothing about--a war that some of us knew only too much about, and wanted only to see abandoned. We see constantly how you men either misuse the power you have or you don't use it at all. Don't appreciate it. Don't know what to do with it. Haven't a notion you ought to be turning it into good for the world. Hundreds of men don't care anything about political influence, except that women shouldn't have it.'
She was getting on better till some one called out, 'You ought to get married.'
'I'm going to. If you don't be good you won't be asked to the wedding.'
Before the temptation of a retort she had dropped her argument and encouraged personalities. In vain she tried to recover that thread of attention which, not her interrupter, but herself had snapped. She retired in the midst of uproar.
The chairman came forward and berated the crowd for its un-English behaviour in not giving a speaker a fair hearing.
A man held up a walking-stick. 'Will you just tell me one thing, miss----'
'Not now. When the last speaker has finished there will be ten minutes for questions. And I may say that it is a great and rare pleasure to have any that are intelligent. Don't waste anything so precious. Just save it up till you're asked for it. I want you now to give a fair hearing to Mrs. Bewley.'
This was a wizened creature of about fifty, in rusty black, widow of a stonemason and mother of four children--'four
livin',' she said with some significance. She added her mite of testimony to that of the 96,000 organized women of the mills, that the workers in her way of life realized how their condition and that of the children would be improved 'if the women 'ad some say in things.'
'It's quite certain,' she assured the people, 'there ought to be women relief-officers and matrons in the prisons. And it's very 'ard on women that there isn't the same cheap lodgin'-'ouse accommodation fur single women as there is fur single men. It's very 'ard on poor girls. It's worse than 'ard. But men won't never change that. We women 'as got to do it.'
'Go 'ome and get your 'usban's tea!' said a new-comer, squeezing her way into the tight-packed throng, a queer little woman about the same age as the speaker, but dressed in purple silk and velvet, and wearing a wonderful purple plush hat on a wig of sandy curls. She might have been a prosperous milliner from the Commercial Road, and she had a meek man along who wore the husband's air of depressed responsibility. She was spared the humiliating knowledge, but she was taken at first for a sympathizer with the Cause. In manners she was precisely like what the Suffragette was at that time expected to be, pushing her way through the crowd, and vociferating 'Shyme!' to all and sundry. The men who had been pleasantly occupied in boo-ing the speaker turned and glared at her. The hang-dog husband had an air of not observing. Some of the boys pushed and harried her, but, to their obvious surprise, they heard her advising the rusty widow: 'Go 'ome and get your 'usban's tea!' She varied that advice by repeating her favourite 'Shyme!' varied by 'Wot beayviour!--old enough to know better. Every good wife oughter stay at 'ome and darn 'er 'usban's socks and make 'im comftubble.'
After delivering which womanly sentiment she would nod her purple plumes and smile at the men. It was the sorriest travesty of similar scenes in a politer world. To the credit of the loafers about her, they did not greatly encourage her. She was perhaps overmature for her
role. But they ceased to jostle her. They even allowed her to get in front of them. The tall, rusty woman in the cart was meanwhile telling a story of personal experience of the operation of some law which shut out from any share in the benefits of the new Act which regulates the feeding of school children, the very people most in need of it. For it appeared that orphans and the children of widows were excluded. The Bill provided only for children living under their father's roof. If the roof was kept over them by the shackled hands of the mother, according to the speaker, they might go hungry.
'No, no,' Miss Levering shook her head, explaining to her maid. 'I don't doubt the poor soul has had some difficulty, some hard experience, but she can't be quoting the law correctly.'
Nevertheless, in the halting words of the woman who had suffered, if only from misapprehension upon so grave a point, there was a rude eloquence that overbore the lady's incredulity. The crowd hissed such gross unfairness.
'If women 'ad 'ave made the laws, do you think we'd 'ave 'ad one like that disgracin' the statue-book? No! And in all sorts o' ways it looks like the law seems to think a child's got only one parent. I'd like to tell them gentlemen that makes the laws that (it may be different in their world, I only speak for my little corner of it)--but in 'Ackney it looks like when a child's got only one parent, that one is the mother.'
'Sy, let up, old gal! there's some o' them young ones ain't 'ad a show yet.'
'About time you had a rest, mother!'
'If the mother dies,' she was saying, 'wot 'appens?'
'Let's 'ope she goes to heaven.'
'Wot 'appens to the pore little 'ome w'en the mother dies? Why, the pore little home is sold up, and the children's scattered among relations, or sent out so young to work it makes yer 'art ache. But if a man dies--you see it on every side,
in 'Ackney--the widow takes in sewin', or goes out charin', or does other people's washin' as well as 'er own, or she mykes boxes--
something er ruther, any'ow, that makes it possible fur 'er to keep 'er 'ome together. You don't see the mother scatterin' the little family w'en the only parent the law seems to reconize is dead and gone. I say----'
'You've a been sayin' it for a good while. You must be needin' a cup o' tea yerself.'
'In India I'm told they burn the widows. In England they do worse than that. They keep them
half alive.'
The crowd rose to that, with the pinched proof before their eyes.
'Just enough alive to suffer through their children. And so the workin' women round about where I live--that's 'Ackney--they say if we ain't 'eathins in this country let's give up 'eathin ways. Let the mothers o' this country 'ave their 'ands untied. We're willin' to work for our children, but it breaks our 'earts to work without tools. The tool we're needin' is the tool that mends the laws. I 'ave pleasure in secondin' the resolution.'
With nervously twitching lips the woman sat down. They cheered her lustily--a little out of sympathy, a good deal from relief that she had finished, and a very different sort of person was being introduced by the chairman. _