A Knight on Wheels Part 33

"Well, it has," affirmed Tim. "Citizen Brand is consumed by a hopeless pa.s.sion for the haughty Jennings."

"Rot!" said Philip, interested at last. "How do you know?"

"I was having a brief chat with Miss Jennings the other day--"

"What about?"

"We were discussing the affections, and so on," was the airy explanation; "and when in the course of conversation I happened to mention Brand's name, the poor young creature turned quite puce in the face."

"That rather sounds," commented the unsophisticated Philip, "as if the hopeless pa.s.sion were on Miss Jennings's side."

Tim wagged his head sagely.

"Oh, dear, no," he said. "Not at all. In a woman, that is a most misleading symptom. She told me all about it. I notice," he added modestly, "that people confide in me a good deal."

"My son Timothy," said Philip, "you are a gossiping old wife."

"The difficulty, I gather," continued Timothy, quite unmoved by this stricture, "lies in the fact that they seem to have nothing in common whatsoever. Otherwise they are admirably matched. Socially, Miss Jennings is a young lady, while the Citizen is only a mechanic, like ourselves. In politics, Miss Jennings is a Conservative, while Brand is an Anarchist. In religion, Miss Jennings is Church of England, with a leaning to vestments, whereas Brand thinks that heaven and earth were created by the County Council, under the supervision of the Fabian Society."

"I should have thought that it would have been a most suitable match,"

said Philip. "They would be able to bring each other such fresh ideas."

"That is just what I told her," said Tim; "but it was no use. She said he was only a common person, and did nothing but fill his head with stuff that would put him above his station--night schools, and debating societies, and Ruskin, and Eugenics, and--and Grape Nuts."

"It seems to me rather a laudable ambition on the part of a common person."

"So I said, but I soon gathered that I had said the wrong thing. It appears that the Citizen has been trying to elevate Miss Jennings's mental outlook, too. He took her to the theatre, and that seems to have put the lid on everything."

"Why? I thought she liked the theatre."

"Yes; but the situation was mishandled. They met by appointment outside a Lyons' tea-shop--Miss Jennings in a dressy blouse and the Citizen in the suit which he only wears as a rule on the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille--and proceeded to a hearty meal of b.u.t.tered buns. Then, instead of being taken to see Lewis Waller, as she had secretly hoped, Miss Jennings found herself at the Court, listening to a brainy rendering of 'Coriola.n.u.s' played by an earnest young repertory company without scenery or orchestra. I gather that they parted outside the emergency exit, and went home in different 'buses."

Philip listened to this highly circ.u.mstantial narrative in silence.

Finally he said:--

"I'm sorry for Brand. He may not be up to Miss Jennings's standard of gentility, but he is the best man we have, and I intend to make him foreman next week. I bet you he finishes high up in the Company's service."

Tim shook his head.

"We shall see," he said. "Meanwhile, let us go and study the Suffragette in her natural state. I hear the Cause received a tremendous fillip last Sunday. Two policemen were jabbed in the eye with hatpins."

But the Suffragettes were not so conspicuous as they had expected. They did discover a group of intensely respectable and consciously virtuous females haranguing a small and apathetic audience from a lorry, but these had wrecked their chances of patronage from the start by labelling themselves (per banner) "Law-Abiding Suffragists."

"We want Ettes, not Ists," said Tim.

At length their attention was attracted by what looked like a gigantic but listless football scrimmage, some four or five hundred strong, slowly and aimlessly circling about upon a wide gra.s.sy s.p.a.ce. It was composed mainly of anaemic youths smoking cigarettes. But there was no sign of the ball. All that indicated the centre of activity of this peculiar game was the sound of some twenty or thirty male voices uplifted in song--Timothy explained that the melody was "Let's All Go Down the Strand and Have a Banana"--somewhere about the middle. A couple of impa.s.sive policemen appeared to be acting as referees.

Timothy addressed a citizen of London who was standing by.

"What is going on inside here?" he asked.

"Sufferingettes, sir," responded the citizen affably. "The police won't let 'em 'old no meetings now,--not off no waggin, that is,--so they 'as to just _talk_ to people, standin' about, friendly like, same as me and you. There's a couple of them in there just now"--indicating the scrimmage with his pipe. "You'll 'ear 'em arguin', now and then."

He was right. Presently there was a lull among the choristers. A high-pitched girlish voice became audible, trickling through the press.

"And I ask all of you, if _that_ isn't woman's work, what is?"

The speaker paused defiantly for a reply. It came, at once:--

"Washin', ducky!"

The crowd dissolved into happy laughter, and the choir struck up "Meet Me in Dreamland Tonight."

Philip and Tim moved on. Philip felt hot and angry that women--apparently young women--should be subjected to such treatment as this. At the same time he remembered Miss Jennings's dictum upon the subject of asking for trouble, and wondered what on earth the parents of the youthful orators were thinking about.

Presently they came to a group near the Marble Arch. It was being addressed by two speakers simultaneously. The first was an angry-looking old gentleman with a long white beard. He was engaged in expounding some peculiar and (to judge from his apparent temperature) highly contentious point of doctrine to a facetious audience; but it was impossible to ascertain from his discourse whether he was a superheated heresy-hunter, an evangelical revivalist, or an out-and-out atheist. This is a peculiarity of the Hyde Park orator. Set him on his legs, and in ten minutes he has wandered so far from the point--usually through chasing an interrupter down some irrelevant byway--that it is difficult to tell what his subject is and quite impossible to discover which side he is on. As Philip and Timothy strolled up, the bearded one parted company with the last shreds of his temper, chiefly owing to the remorseless hecklings of a muscular Christian (or atheist) who was discharging a steady stream of criticism and obloquy into his left ear at a range of about eighteen inches; and partly by reason of the distraction caused by the voice of the other speaker, a pock-marked gentleman in a frock-coat and bowler hat, who, with gla.s.sy eyes fixed upon some invisible textbook suspended in mid-air before him, was thundering forth a philippic in favour of (or against) Tariff Reform.

With gleaming spectacles and waving arms, the old gentleman turned suddenly upon the heckler.

"Out upon you!" he shrieked. "I despise you; I scorn you; I spit upon you! Plague-spot!"

"What abaht the Erpostle Paul?" enquired the Plague-Spot steadily, evidently for the hundredth time.

This naturally induced a fresh paroxysm.

"Miserable creature!" stormed the old gentleman. "Having eyes, you see not! Having ears, you hear not! What did Charles Darwin say in eighteen-seventy-six?"

The crowd turned to the heckler, anxious to see how this thrust would be parried. The heckler pondered a moment, and then enquired in his turn: "What did the Erpostle Paul say in one-oh-one?"

The crowd, evidently regarding this as a good point, laughed approvingly.

"I'll _read_ you what Charles Darwin said," spluttered the old gentleman, producing quite a library from his coat-tail. He selected a volume, and turned over the leaves with trembling fingers.

"And now, gentlemen, as regards this question of Exports and Imports,"

chaunted the Tariff Reform expert. "I will give you a few facts--"

"Fictions!" amended a humorous opponent.

At this moment the old gentleman began to read, in a hurried gabble, what Charles Darwin had said in eighteen-seventy-six. The heckler allowed him two minutes, and then suggested cheerfully:--

"And _now_ let's git back to the Erpostle Paul."

And so on. Our friends moved away, for not far off Philip's eye had discerned a familiar figure gesticulating upon a rostrum. It was Brand.

He was addressing a considerable crowd, upon the edge of which Philip and Timothy now took their stand. Philip had never seen his colleague out of his overalls before, and was struck with the man's commanding presence and impa.s.sioned delivery.

"Life?" shouted Brand. His face was dead white, but his eyes blazed.

"Life? What does life mean to you?" He surveyed his audience with profound contempt. "_Beer!_"

The crowd accepted this bludgeoning in excellent part.