The Judge Part 4

He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it was his desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said to himself, "That little girl is pretty well done up. She's nearly crying.

Someone must have been rude to her." (He did not know his Ellen yet.) "I must give her a moment to get her poor little face straight." So until he drew level with her his dark eyes were fixed on the Castle Rock.

And Ellen thought, "Why, here is the big man who has been in Spain and South America and has the queer stains on his hands! How big he is, and dark! He looks like a king among these other people. And how wonderful his eyes are! He is miles away from here, seeing some distant beautiful thing. Perhaps that mountainside he told us about where the reflection of the sky is like a purple shadow on the snow. A poet must look like that when he is thinking of a poem. But--but--if he keeps on staring up there he won't see me and buy a paper. I should like to interest him in the Cause. And I daren't speak to him." She flushed. Though Mr. Philip's claw had not done all the hurt it hoped, it had yet mauled its victim cruelly. "That would look bold."

But in the nick of time his eyes fell on her. He gave a start of surprise and said in his kind, insolent voice:

"Good morning. So you're a Suffragette."

She was pleased to be publicly recognised by such a splendid person, and answered shyly; but caught a glint in his eyes which reminded her that she wasn't perfectly sure that he really had thought she was thinking of the Argentine when she had proposed writing to Brazil in Spanish. Was it possible that he was not being entirely respectful to her? She would not have that, for she was splendid herself too, though the idiot world had given her no chance to show it. She pulled herself together, knitted her brows, and looked as much like Mr. Gladstone as could be managed with such a pliable profile.

"Sell me one of your papers," he said. "No, don't bother about the change. The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence. Well, I think you're wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all these blighters going by."

"When one is wrapped up in a great Cause," replied Ellen superbly, "one hardly notices these minor discomforts. Will you not take a ticket for the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall? Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark Lyle are speaking. The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling. But you'll find the shilling ones quite good, for they're both exceptionally clear and audible speakers. Women are."

"Next Friday? Yes, I can come up that night. Are you taking the chair, or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?"

"Me? Mercy, no!" gasped Ellen. Had he really been taken in by her bluff that she was grown-up? For she had a feeling, which she would never admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the cla.s.s-room.

But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up. She was seventeen past and earning. "No. I'll be stewarding and selling literature."

"Good." He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly: "I say, hadn't you better write your name on this? I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow and they wouldn't let me in because they thought I looked the sort of person who would interrupt. But if you wrote your name on my ticket they'll know I'm all right." He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she wrote reflected: "How do I come to be such a fluent liar? I didn't get it from my mother. No, not from my mother. I suppose my father had that vice as well as the others. But why am I taking so much trouble to find out about this little girl--I who don't care a d.a.m.n about anything or anybody?"

He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her signature. Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most beautiful people who have ever lived. It was like climbing to a towered castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called "Seaview." She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female creature would have worn. But she had looked even younger then; he remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a party. It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had been having in that dreary office could possibly be. And into the pretty print of the scene on his mind, like a humped marine beast rising through a summer sea, there obtruded the recollection of the little solicitor, the graceless embarra.s.sment that he had shown at the beginning of the interview by purposeless rubbings of his hands and twisting of the ankles, the revelation of ugly s.e.xual quality which he had given by his shame at the story of the bed that was made an altar.

He looked at her sharply and said to himself: "I wonder...."

Oh, surely not! The note of her face was pure expectancy. As yet she had come upon nothing fundamental of any kind. He had no prepossessions in favour of innocence, and he put people who did not make love in the same cla.s.s as vegetarians, but he was immensely relieved. He would have hated this fine thing to have fallen into clumsy hands.

There was, he realised, not the smallest excuse for staying with her any longer. "Good-bye; I hope I'll see you at the meeting," he said; and then, since he remembered how keen she was on being businesslike, "and look after my villa for me."

"Yes, we'll do that," she said competently, and looked after him with smiling eyes. "Oh, he looks most adventurous!" she thought. "I wonder, now, if he's ever killed a man?"

II

"Is my frock hooked up all the way down?" wondered Ellen, as she stood with her back to a pillar in the Synod Hall. "Not that I care a b.u.t.ton about it myself, but for the sake of the Cause...." But that small worry was just one dark leaf floating on the quick sunlit river of her mind, for she was very happy and excited at these Suffrage meetings. She had taken seven shillings and sixpence for pamphlets, the hall was filling up nicely, and Miss Traquair and Dr. Katherine Kennedy and Miss Mackenzie and several members of the local militant suffrage society had spoken to her as they went to their places just as if they counted her grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering antic.i.p.ant people, and up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic women came on the platform, and would sanctify the emotion as sane by sharing it; and by their willingness to co-operate in rebellion were making her individual rebellious will seem less like a schoolgirl's penknife and more like a soldier's sword. "I'm being a politikon Zoon!"

she boasted to herself. She had always liked the expression when she read it in _The Scotsman_ Leaders.

And here they were! The audience made a tumult that was half applause and half exclamation at a prodigy, and the three women who made their way on the platform seemed to be moving through the noise as through a viscid element. The woman doctor, who was to be the chairman, lowered her curly grey head against it b.u.t.tingly; Mrs. Ormiston, the mother of the famous rebels Brynhild, Melissa, and Guendolen, and herself a heroine, lifted a pale face where defiance dwelt among the remains of dark loveliness like a beacon lit on a grey castle keep; and Mrs. Mark Lyle, a white and golden wonder in a beautiful bright dress, moved swimmingly about and placed herself on a chair like a fastidious lily choosing its vase. Oh! it was going to be lovely! Wasn't it ridiculous of that man Yaverland to have stayed away and missed all this glory, to say nothing of wasting a good half-crown and a ticket which someone might have been glad of? It just showed that men were hopeless and there was no doing anything for them.

But then suddenly she saw him. He was standing at one of the entrances on the other side of the hall, looking tremendous and strange in a peaked cap and raindashed oilskins, as though he had recently stood on a heeling deck and shouted orders to cutla.s.sed seamen, and he was staring at the tumult as if he regarded noise as a mutiny of inferiors against his preference for calm. By his side a short-sighted steward bent interminably over his ticket. "The silly gowk!" fumed Ellen. "Can the woman not read? It looks so inefficient, and I want him to think well of the movement." Presently, with a suave and unimpatient gesture, he took his ticket away from the peering woman and read her the number. "I like him!" said Ellen. "There's many would have snapped at her for that."

She liked, too, the way he got to his seat without disturbing his neighbours, and the neathandedness with which he took off his cap and oilskins and fell to wiping a pair of motor-goggles while his eyes maintained a dark glance, too intense to flash, on the women on the platform. "How long he is looking at them!" she said to herself presently. "No doubt he is taken up by Mrs. Mark Lyle. I believe such men are very susceptible to beautiful women. I hope," she continued with sudden bitterness, "he is as susceptible to spiritual beauty and will take heed of Mrs. Ormiston!" With that, she tried herself to look at Mrs. Ormiston, but found she could not help watching the clever way he went on cleaning the goggles while his eyes and attention were fixed otherwhere. There was something ill-tempered about his movements which made her want to go dancingly across and say teasing things to him. Yet when a smile at some private thought suggested by the speech broke his attention, and he began to look round the hall, she was filled with panic at the prospect of meeting his eyes. She did not permit herself irrational emotions, so she pretended that what she was feeling was not terror of this man, but the anger of a feminist against all men, and stared fiercely at the platform, crying out silently: "What have I to do with this man? I will have nothing to do with any man until I am great.

Then I suppose I will have to use them as p.a.w.ns in my political and financial intrigues."

Through this gaping at the client from Rio she had missed the chairman's speech. Dr. Munro had just sat down. Her sensible square face looked red and stern, as though she had just been obliged to smack someone, and from the tart brevity of the applause it was evident that that was what she had been doing. This rupture of the bright occasion struck Ellen, who found herself suddenly given over to irritations, as characteristic of the harshness of Edinburgh life. Here was a cause so beautiful in its affirmation of freedom that it should have been served only by the bravery of dignified women and speeches lucent with reason and untremulously spoken, by things that would require no change of quality but only rearrangements to be instantly commemorable by art; and yet this Scotch woman, moving with that stiffness of the mental joints which nations which suffer from it call conscientiousness, had managed to turn a sacramental gathering of the faithful into a steamy short-tempered activity, like washing-day. "Think shame on yourself, Ellen Melville!"

she rebuked herself. "She's a better woman than ever you'll be, with the grand work she's done at the Miller's Wynd Dispensary." But that the doctor was a really fine woman made the horsehair texture of her manner all the more unpleasing, for it showed her sinisterly ill.u.s.trative of a community which had reached an intellectual standard that could hardly be bettered and which possessed certain moral energy, and yet was content to be rude. Amongst these people Ellen felt herself, with her perpetual tearful desire that everybody should be nice, to be a tenuous and transparent thing. She doubted if she would ever be able to contend with such as they. "Maybe I shall not get on after all!" she thought, and her heart turned over with fear.

But Mrs. Ormiston was speaking now. Oh, it was treason to complain against the world when it held anything so fine as this! She stood very far forward on the platform, and it seemed as though she had no friends in the world but did not care. Beauty was hers, and her white face, with its delicate square jaw and rounded temples, recalled the pansy by its shape. She wore a dress of deep purple, that colour which is almost a sound, an emotion, which is seen by the mind's eye when one hears great music. Her hoa.r.s.e, sweet North-country voice rushed forth like a wind bearing the sounds of a battlefield, the clash of arms, the curses hurled at an implacable and brutish enemy, the sights of the dying--for already some had died; and with a pa.s.sion that preserved her words from the common swift mortality of spoken things she told stories of her followers' brave deeds which seemed to remain in the air and deck the hall like war-tattered standards. She spoke of the women who were imprisoned at Birmingham for interrupting Mr. Asquith's meeting, and how they lay now day and night in the black subterranean prison cells, huddled on the tree-stumps that were the only seats, clad in nothing but coa.r.s.e vests because they would not wear the convict clothes, breathing the foul sewage-tainted air for all but that hour when they were carried up to the cell where the doctor and the wardresses waited to bind and gag them and ram the long feeding-tube down into their bodies. This they had endured for six weeks, and would for six weeks more. She spoke with a proud reticence as to her sufferings, about her recent sojourn in Holloway, from which she had gained release by hunger-striking a fortnight before.

"Ah, I could die for her!" cried Ellen to herself, wet-eyed with loyalty. "If only it weren't for mother I'd go to prison to-morrow." Her love could hardly bear it when Mrs. Ormiston went on, restrained rage freezing her words, to indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views confirmed by the woman she thought the wisest in the world, for she felt an exaltation that she was afraid must make her eyes look wild. It had always appeared to her that certain things which in the main were sombre, such as deep symphonies of an orchestra, the black range and white scaurs of the Pentland Hills against the south horizon, the idea that at death one dies utterly and is buried in the earth, were patterns cut from the stuff of reality. They were relevant to fate, typical of life, in a way that gayer things, like the song of girls or the field-checked pleasantness of plains or the dream of a soul's holiday in eternity, were not; And in the bitter eloquence of this pale woman she rapturously recognised that same authentic quality.

But what good was it if one woman had something of the dignity of nature and art? Everybody knew that the world was beautiful. She sent her mind out from the hall to walk in the night, which was not wet, yet had a bloom of rain in the air, so that the lights shone with a plumy beam and all roads seemed to run to a soft white cliff. Above, the Castle Rock was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that would now be close-curled b.a.l.l.s curiously trimmed with dew, and gra.s.s that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's pictures--the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coa.r.s.e and wholesome as a home-made loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of b.u.t.terflies. And at the Music Hall Frederick Lamond was playing Beethoven. How his strong hands would beat out the music! Oh, as to the beauty of the world there was no question!

But people weren't as nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience.

Ellen knew her very well, for every Sat.u.r.day morning she used to stride up in an emerald green sports skirt, holding out a penny in a hand that shook with rage, and saying something indistinct about women biting policemen. On these occasions Ellen was physically afraid, for she could not overcome a fancy that the anklebones which projected in geological-looking k.n.o.bs on each side of Miss Coates's large flat brogues were a natural offensive weapon like the spurs of a c.o.c.k; and she was afraid also in her soul. Miss Coates was plainly, from her yellow but animated pallor, from her habit of wearing her blouse open at the neck to show a triangle of chest over which the horizontal bones lay like the bars of a gridiron, a mature specimen of a type that Ellen had met in her school-days. There had been several girls at John Thompson's, usually bleached and ill-favoured victims of anaemia or spinal curvature, who had seemed to be compelled by something within themselves to spend their whole energies in trying, by extravagances of hair-ribbon and sidecombs and patent leather belts, the collection of actresses' postcards, and the completest abstention from study, to a.s.sert the femininity which their ill-health had obscured. Their efforts were never rewarded by the companionship of any but the most shambling kind of man or boy; but they proceeded through life with a greater earnestness than other children of their age, intent on the business of establishing their s.e.x. Miss Coates was plainly the adult of the type, who had found in Anti-Suffragism, that extreme gesture of political abas.e.m.e.nt before the male, a new way of calling attention to what otherwise only the person who was naturally noticing about clothes would detect. It was a fact of immense and dangerous significance that the Government and the majority of respectable citizens were on the side of this pale, sickly, mad young woman against the brave, beautiful Mrs.

Ormiston. People were horrible.

And there was Mr. Philip.

Oh, why had she thought of him? All the time that she had been in the hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers sent by mad kings to make what history books, to mark the unusual horror of the event, called ma.s.sacres. She had begun to know better late last Monday afternoon. She had returned to her little room after taking down some shorthand notes from dictation, and, because there was a thick, ugly twilight and she had come dazzled by the crude light on Mr.

Mactavish James's desk, had moved about for some seconds, with a freedom that seemed foolishness as soon as she knew she was observed, before she saw that Mr. Philip was standing at the hearth.

"Have you come straight off the train?" it was in her mind to say. "Will I ask Mrs. Powell to get you some tea?" But he looked strange. The driving flame of the fire cast flickering shadows and red lights on the shoulders and skirt of his greatcoat, so he looked as though he was performing some evil incantatory dance of the body, while his face and hands and feet remained black and still. There was no sound of his breath. "Good mercy on us!" she said to herself. "Is it his wraith, and has he come to harm in London?" But the dark patch of his face moved, and he began his long demonstration to her that a man need not be dead to be dreadful. "Is there anything you want of me, Miss Melville?" the clipped voice had asked. It was, so plainly the cold answer to an ogle that she gazed about her for some person who deserved this reproach and whom he had called by her name in error. But of course there was no one, and she realised that he had come back from London her enemy, that this accusation of her boldness was to be the favourite weapon of his enmity, and that he found it the more serviceable way to accuse her of making advances to him as well as to the client from Rio.

"I want nothing," she said, and left him. Since there was nowhere else for her to go, she was obliged to wait in the lobby beside the umbrella-stand till he came out, quirked his head at her suspiciously, and went into his father's room. She perceived that there had been no need for him to go into her room save his desire to make this gesture of hate towards her. It came to her then that, although an accusation could not hurt one if it was false, the accuser could hurt by the evil spirit he discharged. If a man emptied a jug of water over you from a top window in the belief that you were a cat, the fact that you were not a cat would not prevent you from getting wet through. In the midst of her alarm she smiled at finding an apt image. There were still intellectual refuges. But very few. Every day Mr. Philip convinced her how few and ineffectual. He never now, when he had finished dictating, said, "That's all for the present, thank you," but let an awkward s.p.a.ce of silence fall, and then enquired with an affectation of patience, "And what are you waiting on, Miss Melville?" He treated her infrequent errors in typing as if she was a simpering girl who was trying to buy idleness with her charm. And he was speaking ill of her. That she knew from Mr.

Mactavish James's kindnesses, which brightened the moment but always made the estimate of her plight more dreary, since just so might a gaoler in a brigand's cave bring a prisoner sc.r.a.ps of sweeter food and drink when the talk of her death and the thought of her youth had made him feel tenderly. Only that morning he had padded up behind Ellen and set a white parcel by her typewriter. "Here's some taiblet for you, la.s.sie," he had said, and had laid a loving, clumsy hand on her shoulder. What had Mr. Philip been saying now? And she did so want to be well spoken of. But there was worse than that--something so bad that she would not allow her mind to harbour any visual image of it, but thought of it in a harsh, short sentence. _"When Mr. Morrison went out of the room and we were left alone he got up and set the door ajar...."_ Something weak and little in her cried out, "Oh, G.o.d, stop Mr. Philip being so cruel to me or I shall die!" and something fiercer said, "I will kill him...."

There was a roar of applause, and she found that Mrs. Ormiston had finished her speech. This was another iniquity to be charged against Mr.

Philip. The thought of him had robbed her of heaven knows how much of the wisdom of her idol, and it might be a year or more before Mrs.

Ormiston came to Edinburgh again. She could have cried as she clapped, but fortunately there was Mrs. Mark Lyle yet to speak. She watched the advance to the edge of the platform of that tall, beautiful figure in the shining dress which it would have been an understatement to call sky-blue, unless one predicated that the sky was Italian, and rejoiced that nature had so appropriately given such a saint a halo of gold hair.

Then came the slow, clear voice building a crystal bridge of argument between the platform and the audience, and formulating with an indignation that was fierce, yet left her marmoreal, an indictment against the double standard of morality and the treatment of unmarried mothers.

Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too, that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.

Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she would not know.

Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and gra.s.s and daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was wondering. She had laid her fingers between its leaves, but a shivering had come upon her, and she ran downstairs very quickly and washed her hands. These memories made her feel restless and unhappy, and she drove her attention back to the platform and beautiful Mrs. Mark Lyle. But there came upon her a fantasy that she was standing again in the garret with that book in her hands, and that Mr. Philip was leaning against the wall in that dark place beyond the window laughing at her, partly because she was such a wee ninny not to know, and partly because when she did know the truth there would be something about it which would humiliate her. She cast down her eyes and stared at the floor so that none might see how close she was to tears. She was a silly weak thing that would always feel like a bairn on its first day at school; she was being tormented by Mr. Philip. Even the very facts of life had been planned to hurt her.

Oh, to be like that man from Rio! It was his splendid fate to be made tall and royal, to be the natural commander of all men from the moment that he ceased to be a child. He could captain his ship through the steepest seas and fight the pirate frigate till there was nothing between him and the sunset but a few men clinging to planks and a shot-torn black flag floating on the waves like a rag of seaweed. For rest he would steer to small islands, where singing birds would fly out of woods and perch on the rigging, and brown men would come and run aloft and wreathe the masts with flowers, and shy women with long, loose, black hair would steal out and offer palm-wine in conches, while he smiled aloofly and was gracious. It would not matter where he sailed; at no port in the world would sorrow wait for him, and everywhere there would be pride and honour and stars pinned to his rough coat by grateful kings. And if he fell in love with a beautiful woman he would go away from her at once and do splendid things for her sake. And when he died there would be a lying-in-state in a great cathedral, where emperors and princes would file past and shiver as they looked on the white, stern face and the stiff hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, because now they had lost their chief defender. Oh, he was too grand to be known, of course, but it was a joy to think of him.

She looked across the hall at him. Their eyes met.

III

There had mounted in him, as he rode through the damp night on his motor-cycle, such an inexplicable and intense exhilaration, that this ugly hall which was at the end of his journey, with its stone corridors in which a stream of people wearing mackintoshes and carrying umbrellas made sad, noises with their feet, seemed an anti-climax. It was absurd; that he should feel like that, for he had known quite well why he was coming into Edinburgh and what a Suffrage meeting would be like. But he was angry and discontented, and impatient that no deflecting adventure had crossed his path, until he arrived at the door which led to the half-crown seats and saw across the hall that girl called Ellen Melville. The coa.r.s.e light deadened the brilliance of her hair, so that it might have been but a brightly coloured tam-o'-shanter she was wearing; and now that that obvious beauty was not there to hypnotise the eye the subtler beauty of her face and body got its chance. "I had remembered her all wrong," he said to himself. "I was thinking of her as a little girl, but she's a beautiful and dignified woman." And yet her profile, which showed against the dark pillar at which she stood, was very round and young and surprised, and altogether much more infantile than the proud full face which she turned on the world. There was something about her, too, which he could not identify, which made him feel the sharp yet almost anguished delight that is caused by the spectacle of a sunset or a foam-patterned breaking wave, or any other beauty that is intense but on the point of dissolution.

The defile of some women on to the platform and a clamour of clapping reminded him that he had better be getting to his seat, and he found that the steward to whom he had given his ticket, a sallow young woman with projecting teeth, was holding it close to her eyes with one hand and using the other to fumble in a leather bag for some gla.s.ses which manifestly were not there. He felt sorry for her because she was not beautiful like Ellen Melville. Did she grieve at it, he wondered; or had she, like most plain women, some sc.r.a.p of comeliness, slender ankles or small hands, which she pathetically invested with a magic quality and believed to be more subtly and authentically beautiful than the specious pictorial quality of other women? In any case she must often have been stung by the exasperation of those at whom she gawked. He took the ticket back from her and told her the number of his seat. It was far forward, and as he sat down and looked up at the platform he saw how vulgarly mistaken he had been in thinking--as just for the moment that the sallow woman with the teeth had stooped and fumbled beside him he certainly had thought--that the Suffrage movement was a fusion of the discontents of the unfit. These people on the platform were real women.

The speaker who had risen to open the meeting was a jolly woman like a cook, with short grey curly hair; and her red face was like the Scotch face--the face that he had looked on many a time in all parts of the world and had always been glad to see, since where it was there was sense and courage. She was the image of old Captain Guthrie of the _Gondomar_, and Dr. Macalister at the Port Said hospital, and that medical missionary who had come home on the Celebes on sick leave from Mukden. Harsh things she was saying--harsh things about the decent Scotch folks who were shocked by the arrest of Suffragettes in London for brawling, harsh suggestions that they would be better employed being shocked at the number of women who were arrested in Edinburgh for solicitation.

He chuckled to think that the Presbyterian woman had found out the Presbyterian man, for he did not believe, from his knowledge of the world, that any man was ever really as respectable as the Presbyterian man pretended to be. The woman who sat beside her, who was evidently the celebrated Mrs. Ormiston, was also a personage. She had not the same stamp of personal worth, but she had the indefinable historic quality.

For no reason to be formulated by the mind, her face might become a flag to many thousands, a thing to die for, and, like a flag, she would be at their death a mere martial mark of the occasion, with no meaning of pity.

The third woman he detested. Presumably she was at this meeting because she was a loyal Suffragist and wanted to bring an end to the subjection of woman, yet all the time that the other woman was speaking her beautiful body practised fluid poses as if she were trying to draw the audience's attention to herself and give them facile romantic dreams in which the traditional relations of the s.e.xes were rejoiced in rather than disturbed. And she wore a preposterous dress. There were two ways that women could dress. If they had work to do they could dress curtly and sensibly like men and let their looks stand or fall on their intrinsic merits; or if they were among the women who are kept to fortify the will to live in men who are spent or exasperated by conflict with the world, the wives and daughters and courtesans of the rich, then they should wear soft l.u.s.trous dresses that were good to look at and touch and as carefully beautiful as pictures. But this blue thing was neither st.u.r.dy covering nor the brilliant fantasy it meant to be. It had the spurious glitter of an imitation jewel. He knew he felt this irritation about her partly because there was something base in him, half innate and half the abrasion his present circ.u.mstances had rubbed on his soul, which was willing to go on this stupid s.e.xual journey suggested by such vain, pa.s.sive women, and the saner part of him was vexed at this compliance; he thought he had a real case against her. She was one of those beautiful women who are not only conscious of their beauty but have accepted it as their vocation. She was ensphered from the world of creative effort in the establishment of her own perfection.

She was an end in herself as no human, save some old saint who has made a garden of his soul, had any right to be.

That little girl Ellen Melville was lovelier stuff because she was at grips with the world. This woman had magnificent smooth wolds of shoulders and a large blonde dignity; but life was striking sparks of the flint of Ellen's being. There came before him the picture of her as she had been that day in Princes Street, with the hairs straggling under her hat and her fierce eyes holding back the tears, telling him haughtily that a great cause made one indifferent to discomfort; and he nearly laughed aloud. He looked across the hall at her and just caught her switching her gaze from him to the platform. He felt a curious swaggering triumph at the flight of her eyes.

But Mrs. Ormiston had begun to speak, and he, too, turned his attention to the platform. He liked this old woman's invincible quality, the way she had turned to and made a battering-ram of her own meagre middle-aged body to level the walls of authority; and she reminded him of his mother. There was no physical likeness, but plainly this woman also was one of those tragically serious mothers in whose souls perpetual concern for their children dwelt like a cloud. He thought of her as he had often thought of his mother, that it was impossible to imagine her visited by those morally blank moods of purely sensuous perception which were the chief joy he had found in life. Such women never stood upright, lifting their faces to the sunlight, smiling at the way of the wind in the tree-tops; they seemed to be crouched down with ear to earth, listening to the footsteps of the events which were marching upon their beloved.