Carnival Part 57

Miss Bailey encountered them here.

"Why, this is capital," she said. "Miss Ragstead won't be long now. Let me introduce a dear young friend of mine, Miss Worrill."

"How are you?" Miss Worrill asked heartily.

She was a pleasant girl dressed in Harris tweed strongly odorous from the rain. Her hair might have been arranged to set off her features to greater advantage, and it was a pity her complexion was spoilt by a network of tiny purple veins which always attracted the concentration of those who talked to her. Jenny began to count them at once.

"Come to hear Connie Ragstead?" asked Miss Worrill. "Jolly good crowd for August," she went on, throwing a satisfied glance round the room.

"Have you ever heard her?"

"No," Jenny replied, wondering why something in this girl's way of speaking reminded her of Maurice.

"You'll like her most awfully. I met her once at the Lady Maggie 'Gaudy.'"

"At the what?"

"Our Gaude at Lady Margaret's. Festive occasion and all that. I say, do you play hockey? I'm getting up a team to play at Wembley this winter."

"My friend and I are too busy," Miss Vergoe explained, looking nervously round at Jenny to see how she took the suggestion.

"But one can always find time for 'ecker.'"

"I _could_ find time to fly kites. Only I don't want to," said Jenny dangerously. "You see, I'm on the stage."

"I'm frightfully keen on the stage," Miss Worrill volunteered. "I believe it could be such a force. I thought of acting myself once--you know, in real plays, not musical comedy, of course. A friend of mine was in the 'Ecclesiasuzae' at the Afternoon Theater. She wore a _rather_ jolly vermilion tunic and had bare legs. Absolutely realistic."

Jenny now began to giggle, and whispered "Cocoanut knees" to Lilli, who, notwithstanding the importance of the occasion, also began to giggle. So Miss Worrill, presumably shy of their want of sensibility, retired.

Soon, when the rumor of the speaker's arrival ran round the a.s.semblage, a general move was made in the direction of the large room on the first floor. Jenny, as she entered with the stream, saw Leonardo's sinister portrait and tried to retreat; but there were too many eager listeners in the way, and she had to sit down and prepare to endure the d.a.m.nable smile of La Gioconda that seemed directed to the very corner where she was sitting.

During the earlier part of Miss Ragstead's address, Jenny's attention was chiefly occupied by her neighbors. She thought that never before was such a collection of freaks gathered together. Close beside her, dressed in a green djibbeh embroidered with daisies of terra-cotta silk, was a tallowy woman who from time to time let several books slide from her lap on to the floor--a piece of carelessness which always provoked the audience to a lullaby of protest. In front of this lady were two Hindu students with flowing orange ties; and just beyond her, in black velvet, was a tall woman with a flat, pallid face, who gnawed alternately her nails and the extinguished end of a cigarette. Then came a group of girl students, all very much alike, all full of cocoa and the binomial theorem; while the rest of the audience was made up of typists, clerks, civil servants, copper-workers, palmists, nurses, Americans and poets, all lending their ears to the speaker's words as in the Zoological Gardens elephants, swaying gently, offer their trunks for buns.

Gradually, however, from this hotchpotch of types, the personality of the speaker detached itself and was able to impress Jenny's attention.

Gradually, as she grew tired of watching the audience, she began to watch Miss Ragstead and, after a critical appreciation of her countenance, to make an attempt to comprehend the intention of the discourse.

Miss Constance Ragstead was a woman of about forty, possessing much of the remote and chastened beauty that was evident in Miss Bailey. She, too, was pale, not unhealthily, but with the impression of having lived long in a rarefied atmosphere. Virginity has its fires, and Miss Ragstead was an inheritor of the spirit which animated Saint Theresa and Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. Her social schemes were crowned with aureoles, her plans were lapped by tenuous gold flames. She was a mystic of humanity, one who from the contemplation of mortality in its individual aspirations, had arrived at the acknowledgment of man as a perfect idea and was able from his virtues to create her theogony. This woman's presence implied the purification of ceaseless effort. Activity as expressed by her was a sacrament. It conveyed the isolated solemnity of a force that does not depend for its reality on human conceptions or practical altruism. Her activity was a moral radium never consumed by the expenditure of its energy; it was dynamic whether it effected little or much. When she recalled the factory in which for a year she had worked as a hand, the enterprise was hallowed with the romance of a saint's pilgrimage. When she spoke of her green garden, where June had healed the hearts of many young women, she seemed like an eremite in whose consolation was absolute peace. Her voice was modulated with those half-tones that thrushes ring upon the evening air; and since they were produced suddenly with no hint of premeditation, the feeblest listener was at some time inevitably waylaid.

It was not astonishing Jenny should find herself caught in the melodious twilight of the oration, should find that the craning audience was less important than the speaker. She came to believe that Mona Lisa's smile was kindlier. She began to take in some of the rhetoric of the peroration:

"I wish I could persuade you that, if our cause is a worthy cause, it must exist and endure through the sanity of its adherents. It must never depend upon the trivial eccentricities of a few. I want to see the average woman fired with zeal to make the best of herself. I do not want us to be contemptuously put aside as exceptions. Nor am I anxious to recruit our strength from the discontented, the disappointed and the disillusioned. Let us do away with the reproach that we voice a minority's opinion. Let us preserve the grace and magic of womanhood, so that with the spiritual power of virginity, the physical grandeur of motherhood, in a devoted phalanx huge as the army of Darius, we may achieve our purpose."

Here the speaker paused and, as if afraid she might be deemed to offer counsels of pusillanimity, broke forth more pa.s.sionately:

"But because I wish to see our ambition succeed through the aggregate of dignified opinion, I do not want to discredit or seek to dishearten the advance-guard. Let us who represent the van of an army so mighty as to be mute and inexpressive, let us, not thinking ourselves martyrs nor displaying like Amazons our severed b.r.e.a.s.t.s, let us resolve to endure ignominy and contempt, slander, disgrace and imprisonment. Some day men will speak well of us; some day the shrieking sisterhood will be forgotten, and those leaders of women whom to-day we alone venerate, will be venerated by all. Pay no heed to that subtle propaganda of pa.s.sivity. Reject the lily-white counsels of moderation. Remember that without visible audible agitation this phlegmatic people cannot be roused. Therefore I call on you who murmur your agreement to join the great march on Westminster. I implore you to be brave, to despise calumny, to be careless of abuse and, because you believe you are in the right, to alarm once more this blind and stolid ma.s.s of public opinion with the contingency of your ultimate triumph."

The speaker sat down, lost in the haze which shrouds a room full of people deeply wrought by eloquence and emotion. There was a moment's silence and then, after prolonged applause, the audience began to babble.

Jenny sat still. She had not listened to the reasoned arguments and statistical ill.u.s.trations of the main portion of the speech, nor had she properly comprehended the peroration. Yet she was charged with resolves, primed with determination and surgingly impelled to some sort of action.

She was the microcosm of a mob's awakening to the clarion of an orator.

A cataract of formless actions was thundering through her mind; the dam of indifference had been burst by mere weight of rhetoric, that powerful dam proof against the tampering of logic. Perhaps she was pa.s.sing through the psychical crisis of conversion. Perhaps, in her dead emotional state, anything that aroused her slightly would have aroused her violently. No doubt a deep-voiced bishop could have secured a similar result, had she been leaning against the cold stone of a cathedral rather than the gray flock wall-paper of Mecklenburg Square.

"I'd like to talk to her," she told Lilli.

"She doesn't half stir you up, eh?"

"I don't know so much about stirring up, Mrs. Pudding," said Jenny, unwilling to admit any renascence of sensibility. "But I think she's nice. I'd like to see what sort she'd be to talk to quiet."

No opportunity for a conversation with Miss Ragstead presented itself that evening; but Lilli, somewhat elated by the capture of Jenny, told Miss Bailey of her admiration; and the president, who had been attracted to the neophyte, promised to arrange a meeting. Lilli knew better than to breathe a word to Jenny of any plan, and merely threw out a casual suggestion to take tea at the club.

So without any premonitory shyness Jenny found herself talking quite easily in a corner of the tea-room to Miss Ragstead, who was not merely persuasive with a.s.semblages, but also acutely sympathetic with individuals.

"But I don't want a vote," Jenny was saying. "I shouldn't know what to do with it. I don't see any use in it. My father's got one and it's a regular nuisance. It keeps him out late every night."

"My dear, you may not want a vote," said Miss Ragstead, "but I do, and I want the help of girls like you to get it. I want to represent you. As things are now, you have no say in the government of yourself. Tell me, now, Jenny--I'm going to call you Jenny straight away--you wouldn't like to be at the mercy of one man, would you?"

"But I wouldn't. Not me," said Jenny. Yet somehow she spoke not quite so bravely as once, and even as the a.s.sertion was made, her heart throbbed to a memory of Maurice. After all, she had been at the mercy of one man.

"Of course you wouldn't," Miss Ragstead went on. "Well, we women who want the vote have the same feeling. We don't like to be at the mercy of men. I suppose you'd be horrified if I asked you to join our demonstration in October?"

"What, walk in procession?" Jenny gasped.

"Yes, it's not so very dreadful. Who would object? Your mother?"

"She'd make fun of it, but that wouldn't matter. She'd make everyone laugh to hear her telling about me in a procession."

Jenny remembered how her mother had teased her father when she saw him supporting a banner of the Order of Foresters on the occasion of a beanfeast at Clacton.

"Well, your lover?"

Jenny looked sharply at Miss Ragstead to ascertain if she were laughing.

The word sent such a pang through her. It was a favorite word of Maurice.

"I haven't got one," she coldly answered.

"No?" said Miss Ragstead, gently skeptical. "I can hardly believe that, you know, for you surely must be a most attractive girl."

"I did have one," said Jenny, surprised out of her reserve. "Only we just ended it all of a sudden."

"My dear," said Miss Ragstead softly, "I don't think you're a very happy little girl. I'm sure you're not. Won't you tell me about it?"

"There's nothing to tell. Men are rotters, that's all. If I thought I could pay them out by being a suffragette, I'd be a suffragette."

Jenny spoke with decision, pointing the avowal by flinging her cigarette into the grate.

"Yes, I know that's a reason with some. But I don't think that revenge is the best of reasons, somehow. I would rather you were convinced that the movement is right."

"If it annoys men, it must be right," Jenny argued. "Only I don't think it does. I think they just laugh."

"I see you're in a turbulent state of mind," Miss Ragstead observed.

"And I'm glad in a way, because it proves that you have temperament and character. You ought to resent a wrong. Of course, I know you'll disagree with me when I tell you that you're too young to be permanently injured by any man--and, I think I might add, too proud."