The Convert Part 44

'Well, she's found a thick-and-thin advocate in you apparently,' said Borrodaile.

'Ah! if only you could _see_ her! trudging along, apparently quite oblivious of her quaint following, dinner bell in one hand, leather case piled high with "tracts" on the other arm, some of the leaflets sliding off, tumbling on to the pavement.' Vida laughed as she recalled the scene. 'Then dozens of hands darting out to help her to recover her precious property! After the chair had been returned the crowd thinned, and I crossed over to her.'

'You in that _melee_!' Borrodaile e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. 'Well, Ernestine hadn't the quaintness all to herself.'

'No. Oh, no,' Vida agreed. 'I thought of you, and how you'd look if you had come on us suddenly. After the crowd had melted and the helpers had vanished into the night, we went on together--all the way, from the Battersea Fire Station to Sloane Square, did Ernestine and I walk, talking reform last night. You laugh? So do I; but not at Ernestine.

She's a most wonderful person. I sometimes ask myself if the world will ever know half how wonderful. You, for instance, you haven't, after all I've said, you haven't _an idea_!'

'Oh, I don't doubt--I don't think I ever doubted that women have a facility in speech--no, no, I'm not gibing! I don't even doubt they can, as you say, sway and control crowds. But I maintain it is very bad for the women.'

'How is it bad?'

'How can it fail to be! All that horrible publicity. All that concentrating of crude popular interest on themselves! Believe me, n.o.body who watches a public career carefully but sees the demoralizing effect the limelight has even on men's characters. And I suppose you'll admit that men are less delicately organized than women.'

'I can only say I've seen the sort of thing you mean in our world, where a good many women have only themselves to think about. I've looked in vain for those evil effects among the Suffrage women. It almost seems, on the contrary, as if there were something enn.o.bling in working for a public cause.'

'Personally, I can't say I've observed it--not among the political women of my acquaintance!'

'But you only know the old kind. Yes, the kind whose idea of influence is to make men fall in love with them, whose idea of working is to put on a smart gown and smile their prettiest. No, I agree that _isn't_ necessarily enn.o.bling!'

'I see, it's the new taste in manners and the new arts of persuasion that make the ideal women and'--with an ironic little bow--'the impa.s.sioned convert.'

'I'm bound to admit,' she said stoutly, 'that I think the Suffrage movement in England has the advantage of being engineered by a very remarkable set of women. Not in ability alone, but in dignity of character. People will never know, I sometimes think, how much the movement has owed to being taken in hand by just these particular women.

I don't pretend they're the average. They're very far above the average.

And what the world will owe to them I very much doubt if even the future will know. But I seem to be the only one who minds.' She laughed. 'I could take my oath _they_ never give the matter a thought. One thing----' She leaned forward and then checked herself. 'No, I've talked about them enough!'

She opened her fan and looked about the crowded room.

'Say what you were going to. I'm reconciled. I see what's coming.'

'What's coming?'

'Yes. Go on.'

She looked at him a little perplexed over the top of her fan.

'I was only going to say that what struck me particularly in that girl, for instance, is her inaccessibility to flattery. I've watched her with men.'

'Of course! She knew you were watching her. She no doubt thinks the eyes of the world are upon her.'

'On the contrary, it's her unselfconsciousness that's the most surprising thing about her. Or, no! It's something more interesting even than that. She is conscious, in a way, of the hold she has on the public. But it hasn't any of the deteriorating effect you were deprecating. I've been moved once or twice to congratulate her.

She takes it as unmoved as a child. It's just as if you said to a little thing of three, "What a clever baby you are!" or, "You've got the most beautiful eyes in the world." The child would realize that you meant well, that you were being pleasant, but it wouldn't think about either its cleverness or its eyes. It's like that with Ernestine. When I said to her, "You made an astoundingly good speech to-night. The best I've heard even you make," she looked at me with a sort of half-absent-minded, half-wondering expression, without a glimmer of personal vanity. When I was so ill-advised as not to drop the subject, when I ventured to say something more about that great gift of hers, she interrupted me with a little laugh, "It's a sign of grace in you not to get tired of our speeches," she said. "I suppose we repeat ourselves a good deal. You see that's just what we've got to do. We've got to _hammer it in_." But the fact is that she doesn't repeat herself, that she's always fresh and stimulating, because--I suppose it's because she's always thinking of the Great Impersonal Object, and talking about it out of her own eager heart. Ernestine? She's as unhackneyed as a spring morning!'

'Oh, very well. I'll go.'

'Go? Where?' for he still sat there.

'Why, to hear your paragon. I've seen that was what you were leading up to.'

'N--no. I don't think I want you to go.'

'Oh, yes, you do. I knew you'd make me sooner or later.'

'No, don't be afraid.' She stood up.

'I'm not afraid. I'm eager,' he laughed.

She shook her head. 'No, I'll never take you.'

'Why not?'

'Because--it isn't all Ernestine and skittles. And because you'd make me keenly alive again to all sorts of things that I see now don't matter--things that have lost some of their power to trouble me, but that I should feel for you.'

'What sort of----'

'Oh, oddities, uglinesses--things that abound, I'm told, at all men's meetings, and that yet, somehow, we'd like to eliminate from women's quite on the old angel theory. No, I won't take you!'

CHAPTER XIII

The following afternoon, at half-past five, the carelessly dressed, rather slouching figure of Lord Borrodaile might have been seen walking along the Thames Embankment in the neighbourhood of Pimlico Pier. He pa.s.sed without seeing the only other person visible at that quiet hour--one of the 'unemployed,' like himself, but save in that respect sufficiently unlike the Earl of Borrodaile was the grimy, unshaven tramp collapsed in one corner of the double-seated munic.i.p.al bench. Lord Borrodaile's fellow-citizen leaned heavily on one of the stout scrolls of ironwork which, repeated at regular intervals on each side, divided the seat into six compartments. No call for any one to notice such a man--there are so many of them in these piping times of peace and prosperity. Then, too, they go crawling about our world protected from notice, as the creatures are who take their colouring from bark or leaf or arctic snows. So these other forms of life, weather-beaten, smoke-begrimed, subdued to the hues of the dusty roads they travel, and the unswept s.p.a.ces where they sleep--over these the eye glides unseeing.

As little interested in the gentleman as the gentleman was in him, the wastrel contemplated the river with grimly speculative eye. But when suddenly Borrodaile's sauntering figure came to a standstill near the lower end of the bench, the tramp turned his head and watched dully the gloveless hands cross one over the other on the k.n.o.b of the planted umbrella; the bent head; one hand raised now, groping about the waistcoat, lighting upon what it sought and raising a pince-nez, through which he read the legend scrawled in chalk upon the pavement. With a faint saturnine smile Lord Borrodaile dropped the gla.s.s, and took his bearings. He consulted his watch, and walked on.

Upon his return a quarter of an hour later, he viewed the same little-alluring prospect from the opposite side of the street. The tramp still stared at the river, but on his side of the bench, at the other end, sat a lady reading a book. Between the two motionless figures and the parapet, a group of dirty children were wrangling. Lord Borrodaile crossed the wide street and paused a moment just behind the lady. He leaned forward as if to speak to her across the middle division of the bench. But he reconsidered, and turning his back to her, sat down and drew an evening paper out of his pocket. He was so little like that glittering figment, the peer of popular imagination, that the careless sobriety of dress and air in the person of this third occupant of the capacious double bench struck an even less arresting note than the frank wretchedness of the other man.

Presently one of the children burst out crying, and continued to howl l.u.s.tily till the lady looked up from her page and inquired what was the matter. The unwashed infant stared open-mouthed at this intruder upon her grief. Instead of answering, she regarded the lady with a bored astonishment, as who should say: What are you interrupting me for, just in the middle of a good yell? She then took up the strain as nearly as possible where she had left off. She was getting on very well with this second attempt at a demonstration until Miss Levering made some mention of a penny, whereupon the infant again suspended her more violent manifestations, though the tears kept rolling down.

After various attempts on the lady's part, the little girl was induced to come and occupy the middle place on the river side of the bench, between Vida and the tramp. While the lady held the penny in her hand, and cross-examined the still weeping child, Borrodaile sat quietly listening behind his paper. When the child couldn't answer those questions that were of a general nature, the tramp did, and the three were presently quite a pleasant family party. The only person 'out of it' was the petrified gentleman on the other side.

A few minutes before the arrival of the Suffragettes, two nondescript young men, in a larky mood, appeared with the announcement that they'd seen 'one of them' at the top of Ranelagh Street.

'That'll be the little 'un,' said the tramp to n.o.body. 'You don't ketch 'er bein' late!'

'Blunt! No--cheeky little devil,' remarked one of the young men, offering a new light upon the royal virtue of punctuality; but from the enthusiasm with which they availed themselves of the rest of Lord Borrodaile's side of the bench, it was obvious they had hurried to the spot with the intention of securing front seats at the show.

'Of course it ain't goin' to be as much fun as the 'Yde Park Sunday aufternoons. Jim Wrightson goes to them. Keeps things lively--'e does.'

'Kicks up a reg'lar shindy, don't 'e?'

'Yes. We can't do nothin' 'ere--ain't enough'--whether of s.p.a.ce or of spirited young men he did not specify.

As they lit their cigarettes the company received further additions--one obviously otherwise employed than with politics. Her progress--was it symbolic?--was necessarily slow, for a small child clung to her skirt, and she trundled a sickly boy in a go-cart. The still sniffling person in possession of the middle seat on the other side (her anxious and watery eye fixed on the penny) was told by Miss Levering to make room for the new-comers. The child's way of doing so was to crowd closer to the neighbourhood of the fascinating coin. But that mandate to 'make room' had proved a conversational opening through which poured--or trickled rather--the mother's sorry little history. Her husband was employed in the clothing department of the Army and Navy Stores--yes, nine years now. He was considered very lucky to keep his place when the staff was reduced. But the costliness of raising the children! It was well that three were dead. If she had it all to do over again--no! no!

The seeming heartlessness with which she envisaged the non-existence of her babies contrasted strangely with her patient tenderness to the querulous boy in the go-cart.