The two men were soon on the top of the Mile End Road tramcar, on their way eastward. It was a hot, dull evening. The setting sun behind them was already swallowed up in mist, and the heavy air held down and made palpable all the unsavoury odours of street and shop. Before them stretched the wide, interminable road which was once the highway from the great city to Colchester and East Anglia. A broad and comely thoroughfare on the whole, save that from end to end it has now the dyed and patched look that an old village street inevitably puts on when it has been swallowed up by the bricks and mortar of an overtaking town.
Tressady looked round him in a reverie, interested in the place and the streets because she cared for them, and had struck one of her roots here. Strange medley everywhere—in this main street, at all events—of old and new! Here were the Trinity almshouses, with their Jacobean gables and their low, spreading quadrangle behind the fine ironwork that shelters them from the street—a poetic fragment from the days of Wren and Dryden, sore threatened now by an ever-advancing London, hungry for ground and space. Here was a vast mission-hall, there a still vaster brewery; on the right, the quiet entrance to the oldworld quiet of Stepney-Green; and to the left a huge flame-ringed gin-palace, with shops on either side, hung to the roof with carpets, or brooms, or umbrellas, plastered with advertisements, and blazing with gas. While in the street between streamed the ever-moving crowd of East London folk, jostling, chattering, loafing, doing their business or their pleasure, and made perpetually interesting, partly by their frank preoccupation with the simplest realities of life: with eating, drinking, earning, marrying, child-rearing; still more, perhaps, by the constant presence among them of that "leisured class" which, alike at the bottom and the top of things, has time to be gay, curious, and witty.
As he rolled along, watching the scene, Tressady thought to himself, as he had often thought before, that the East End, in many of its aspects, is a very decentish sort of place, about which many people talk much nonsense. He made the remark, carelessly, to Watton.
Watton shrugged his shoulders, and pointed silently to the entrances, right and left, of two side-streets, the typical streets of the East End: long lines of low houses,—two storeys always, or two storeys and a basement,—all of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner "public" on either side, flaming in the hazy distance.
Watton hardly put his comment into words; but Tressady, who knew him well, understood, and nodded over his cigarette. Watton meant, of course, to suggest the old commonplace of the mean and dull monotony that weighs like a nightmare upon this vast East London and its human hive, which hums and toils, drones and feeds, by night and day, in these numberless featureless boxes of wood and stone, on this flat, interminable earth that stretches eastward to Essex marshes and southward to the river, and bears yellow brick and cemeteries for corn. Well! Tressady knew that the thought of this monotony, and of the thousands under its yoke, was to Watton a constant sting and oppression; he knew, too, or guessed, the religious effects it produced in him. For Watton was a religious man, and the action of the dream within showed itself in him and all he did. But why should everyone make a grief of East London? He was in the mood again to-night to feel it a kind of impertinence, this endless, peering anxiety about a world you never planned and cannot mend. Whose duty is it to cry for the moon?
"Better get down here, I think," said Watton, signalling to the tram-conductor, "and find out whether they have really gone, or not."
They stopped, half-way down the Mile End Road, before a piece of wall with a door in it. A trim maiden of fifteen in a spotless cotton frock and white apron opened to them.
Inside was a small flagged courtyard and the old-fashioned house that Marcella Maxwell, a year before,—some time after their first lodging had been given up,—had rescued from demolition and the builder, to make an East End home out of it. Somewhere about 1750 some City tradesman had built it among fields, and taken his rest there; while somewhat later, in a time of Evangelical revival, a pious widow had thrown out a low room to one side for class-meetings. In this room Marietta now held her gatherings, and both Tressady and Watton knew it well.
The little handmaid bubbled over with willing talk. Oh, yes, there was a meeting up Manx Road, and her Ladyship had gone with Lord Naseby, and Lady Madeleine, and Mr. Everard, the inspector, and, she thought, one or two besides. She expected the ladies back about ten, and they were to stay the night.
"An they do say, sir," she said eagerly, looking up at Watton, whom she knew, "as there'll be a lot o' rough people at the meetin."
"Oh! I daresay," said Watton. "Well, we're going up, too, to look after her."
As they walked on they talked over the general situation in the district, and Watton explained what he knew of this particular meeting. In the first place, he repeated, he could not see that Lady Maxwell understood as yet the sort of opposition that the Bill was rousing, especially in these East End districts. The middle-class and parliamentary resistance she had always appreciated; but the sort of rage that might be awakened among a degraded class of workers by proposals that seemed to threaten their immediate means of living, he believed she had not yet realised, in anything like its full measure and degree. And he feared that this meeting might be a disagreeable experience.
For it was the direct fruit of an agitation that, as Tressady knew, was in particular Fontenoy's agitation. The Free Workers' League, which had called upon the trade-unionist of Mile End to summon the meeting, and to hear therein what both sides had to say, was, in fact, Fontenoy's creation. It had succeeded especially in organising the women home-workers of Mile End and Poplar. Two or three lady-speakers employed by the League had been active to the point of frenzy in denouncing the Bill and shrieking "Liberty!" in the frightened ear of Mile End. Watton could not find a good word for any of them—was sure that what mostly attracted them was the notoriety of the position, involving, as it did, a sort of personal antagonism to Lady Maxwell, who had, so to speak, made Mile End her own. And to be Lady Maxwell's enemy was, Watton opined, the next best thing, from the point of view of advertisement, to being her friend.
"Excellent women, I daresay," said Tressady, laughing—"talking excellent sense. But, tell me, what is this about Naseby—why Naseby?—on all these occasions?"
"Why not, indeed?" said Watton. "Ah! you don't know? It seems to be Naseby that's going to get the egg out of the hat for us."
And he plunged eagerly into the description of certain schemes wherewith Naseby had lately astonished the Maxwell circle. Tressady listened, languidly at first, then with a kind of jealous annoyance that scandalised himself. How well he could understand the attraction of such things for her quick mind! Life was made too easy for these "golden lads." People attributed too much importance to their fancies.
Naseby, in fact,—but so much George already knew,—had been for some months now the comrade and helper of both the Maxwells. His friends still supposed him to be merely the agreeable and fashionable idler. In reality, Naseby for some years past had been spending all the varied leisure that his commission in the Life Guards allowed him upon the work of a social and economic student. He had joined the staff of a well-known sociologist, who was at the time engaged in an inquiry into certain typical East London trades. The inquiry had made a noise, and the evidence collected under it had already been largely used in the debates on the Maxwell Bill. Tressady, for instance, had much of it by heart, although he never knew, until he became a haunter of Lady Maxwell's circle, that Naseby had played any part in the gathering of it.
At the same time, as George had soon observed, Naseby was no blind follower of the Maxwells. In truth, under his young gaiety and coolness he had the temper of the student, who was more in love with his problem itself than with any suggested solution of it. As he had told Lady Betty, he had "no opinions"—would himself rather leave the sweated trades alone, and trust to much slower and less violent things than law-making. All this the Maxwells knew perfectly, and liked and trusted him none the less.
Now, however, it seemed there was a new development. If the Bill passed, Naseby had a plan. He was already a rich man, independently of the marquisate to come. His grandmother had left him a large preliminary fortune, and through his friends and connections besides he seemed to command as much money as he desired. And of this money, supposing the Bill passed, he proposed to make original and startling use. He had worked out the idea of a syndicate furnished with, say, a quarter of a million of money, which should come down upon a given district of the East End, map it out, buy up all the existing businesses in its typical trade, and start a system of new workshops proportioned to the population, supplying it with work just as the Board schools supply it with education. The new scheme was to have a profit-sharing element: the workers were to be represented on the syndicate, and every nerve was to be strained to secure the best business management. The existing middlemen would be either liberally bought out, or absorbed into the new machine. It was by no means certain that they would show it any strong resistance.
Tressady made a number of unfriendly comments on the scheme as Watton detailed it. A bit of amateur economics, which would only help the Bill to ruin a few more people than would otherwise have gone down!
"Ah! well," said Watton, "if this thing passes there are bound to be experiments, and Naseby means to be in 'em. So do I, only I haven't got a quarter of a million. Here's our road! We're late, of course—the meeting's begun. I say, just look at this!"
For Manx Road, as they turned into it, was already held by another big meeting of its own. The room in the Board school which crossed the end of the street must be full, and this crowd represented, apparently, those who had been turned away.
As the two friends pushed their way through, Tressady's quick eye recognised in the throng a number of familiar types. Well-to-do "pressers" and machinists, factory-girls of different sorts, hundreds of sallow women, representing the home-workers of Mile End, Bow, and Stepney—poor souls bowed by toil and maternity, whose marred fingers labour day and night to clothe the Colonies and the army; their husbands and brothers, too, English slop-tailors for the most part, of the humbler sort—the short side-street was packed with them. It was an anxious, sensitive crowd, Tressady thought, as he elbowed his passage through it. A small thing might inflame it; and he saw a number of rough lads on the skirts of it.
Jews, too, there were in plenty. For the stress of this Bill had brought Jew and Gentile together in a new comradeship that amazed the East End. Here were groups representing the thrifty, hard-working London Jew of the second generation,—small masters for the most part, pale with the confinement and "drive" of the workshop,—men who are expelling and conquering the Gentile East Ender, because their inherited passion for business is not neutralised by any of the common English passions for spending—above all by the passion for drink. Here, too, were men of a far lower type and grade—the waste and refuse of the vast industrial mill. Tressady knew a good many of them by sight—sullen, quick-eyed folk, who buy their "greeners" at the docks, and work them day and night at any time of pressure; whose workshops are still flaring at two o'clock in the morning, and alive again by the winter dawn; who fight and flout the law by a hundred arts, and yet, brutal and shifty as many of them are, have a curious way of winning the Gentile inspector's sympathy, even while he fines and harasses them, so clearly are they and their "hands" alike the victims of a huge world-struggle that does but toss them on its surge.
These gentry, however, were hard hit by more than one clause of the Maxwell Bill, and they were here to-night to protest, as they had been already protesting at many meetings, large and small, all over the East End. And they had their slaves with them,—ragged, hollow-eyed creatures, newly arrived from Russian Poland, Austria, or Romania, and ready to shout or howl in Yiddish as they were told,—men whose strange faces and eyes under their matted shocks of black or reddish hair suggested every here and there the typical history and tragic destiny of the race which, in other parts of the crowd, was seen under its softer and more cosmopolitan aspects.
As the two men neared the door of the school, where the press was densest, they were recognised as probably belonging to the Maxwell party, and found themselves a good deal jeered and hustled, and could hardly make any way at all. However, a friendly policeman came to their aid. They were passed into a lobby, and at last, with much elbowing and pushing, found themselves inside the schoolroom.
So crowded was the place and so steaming the atmosphere, that it was some minutes before Tressady could make out what was going on. Then he saw that Naseby was speaking—Naseby, looking remarkably handsome and well curled, and much at his ease, besides, in the production of a string of Laodicean comments on the Bill, his own workshop scheme, and the general prospects of East End labour. He described the scheme, but in such a way as rather to damn it than praise it; and as for the Bill itself, which he had undertaken to compare with former Factory Bills, when he sat down he left it, indeed, in a parlous case—a poor, limping, doubtful thing, quite as likely to ruin the East End as to do it a hand's turn of good.
Just as the speaker was coming to his peroration Tressady suddenly caught sight of a delicate upraised profile on the platform, behind Naseby. The repressed smile on it set him smiling, too.
"What on earth do they make Naseby speak for!" said Watton, indignantly. "Idiocy! He spoils everything he touches. Let him give the money, and other people do the talking. You can see the people here don't know what to make of him in the least. Look at their faces.—Who's he talking to?"
"Lady Madeleine, I think," said Tressady. "What amazing red hair that girl has! and what queer, scared eyes! It is like an animal—one wants to stroke her."
"Well, Naseby strokes her," said Watton, laughing. "Look at her; she brightens up directly he comes near."
Tressady thought of the tale Fontenoy had just told him, and wondered. Consolation seemed to come easy to maidens of quality.
Meanwhile various trade-unionists—sturdy, capable men, in black coats—were moving and seconding resolutions; flinging resentful comments, too, at Naseby whenever occasion offered. Tressady heard very little of what they had to say. His eyes and thoughts were busy with the beautiful figure to the left of the chair. Its dignity and charm worked upon him like a spell—infused a kind of restless happiness.
When he woke from his trance of watching, it was to turn upon Watton with impatience. How long was this thing going on? The British workman spoke with deplorable fluency. Couldn't they push their way through to the platform?
Watton looked at the crowd, and shrugged his shoulders.
"Not yet—I say! who's this they've put up. Come, my dear fellow, that looks like the real thing!"
Tressady turned, and saw an old man, a Jew, with a long greyish beard, coming slowly to the front of the platform. His eyes were black and deep, sunk under white brows; he was decently but poorly dressed; and he began to speak with a slight German accent, in an even, melancholy voice, rather under-pitched, which soon provoked the meeting. He was vociferously invited to speak up or sit down; and at the first interruption he stopped timorously, and looked towards the Chair.
An elderly, grey-haired woman was presiding—no doubt to mark the immense importance of the Bill for the women of the East End. She came forward at the man's appeal.
"My friends," she said quietly, "you let this man speak, and don't you be hard on him. He's got a sad story to tell you, and he won't be long about it. You give him his chance. Some of you shall have yours soon."
Up. The speaker was the paid secretary of one of the women's unions; but she had been a tailoress for years, and had known a tragic life. Once, at a meeting where some flippant speaker had compared the reality and frequency of "starvation" in London to the reality and frequency of the sea serpent, Tressady had seen her get up and, with a sudden passion, describe the death of her own daughter from hardship and want, with the tears running down her cheeks. Her appeal to the justice of the meeting succeeded, and the old man was allowed to go on. It soon appeared that he had been put up by one of the tailoring unions to denounce the long hours worked in some of the Whitechapel and Spitalfields workshops. His H facts were appalling. But he put them badly, with a dull, stumbling voice, and he got no hold on the meeting at all till suddenly he stepped forward, paused,—his miserable face working, his head turning from if side to side,—and finally said, with a sharp change of note:
"And now, if you please, I will tell you how it was about Isaac—my brother Isaac. It was Mr. Jacobs "—he looked round, and pointed to the tradeunion secretary who had been speaking before him—"Mr. Jacobs it was that put it in my mind to come here and tell you about Isaac. For the way Isaac died was like this. He and I were born in Spitalfields; he wasn't one of your greeners—he was a reg'lar good worker, first-rate general coat-hand, same as me. But he got with a hard master. And last winter season but one there came a rush. And Isaac must be working six days a week—and he must be working fourteen hours a day—and, more'n that, he must be doing his bastes overtime, two hours one time, and an hour or so, perhaps, another; anyway, they made it up to half a day—eight hours and more in the week. You know how they reckon it."
He stopped, grinning feebly. The trade-unionists about the platform shouted or groaned in response. The masters round the door, with their "greeners," stood silent.
"And about Wednesday in the third week," he went on, "he come to the master, and he says—Isaac was older than me, and his chest it would be beginning to trouble him pretty bad, so he says: 'I'm done,' he says; 'I must go home. You can get another chap to do my bastes to-night—will you?' And the master says to Isaac: 'If you don't do your bastes overtime, if you're too high and mighty,' he says, 'why, there's plenty as will, and you don't need to come to-morrow neither.' And Isaac had his wife Judith at home, and four little uns; and he stopped and done his bastes, of course. And next night he couldn't well see, and he'd been dreadful sick all day, and he says to the master again, he says as he must go home. And the master, he says the same to him—and Isaac stops. And on Friday afternoon he come home. And the shop had been steamin hot, but outside it was a wind to cut yer through. And his wife Judith says to him, 'Isaac, you look starved!' and she set him by the fire. And he sat by the fire, and he didn't say nothing. Then his hands fell down sudden like that—"
The old man let his hands drop heavily by his side with a simple dramatic gesture. By this time there was not a sound in the crowded room. Even the wildest and most wolfish of the greeners were staring silently, craning brown necks forward.
"And his wife ran to him, and he falls against her; and he says, 'Lay me down, Judith, and don't you let em wake me—not the young uns,' he says 'not for nothing and nobody. For if it was the trump of the Most High,' he says—and Isaac was a religious man, and careful in his speech—'I must have my sleep.' And she laid him down, and the children and she watched—and by midnight Isaac turned himself over. He just opened his eyes once, and groaned. And he never spoke no more—he was gone before mornin.—And his master gave Judith five shillings towards the coffin, and the men in the shop, they raised the rest."
The old man paused. He stood considering a moment, his face and ragged beard thrown out—a spot of greyish white—against the figures behind, his eyes blinking painfully under the gas.
"Well, we've tried many things," he said at last. "We've tried strikes and unions, and it isn't no good. There's always one treading on another, and if you don't do it, someone else will. It's the law as'll have to do it. You may take that and smoke it!—you won't get nothing else. Why!"—his hoarse voice trembled—"why, they use us up cruel in the sort of shop I work for. Ten or twelve years, and a man's all to pieces. It's the irons, and the heat, and the sitting—you know what it is. I've lasted fifteen year, but I'm breaking up now. If my master give me the sack for speaking here I'll have nothing but the Jewish Board of Guardians to look to. All the same, I made up my mind as I'd come and say how they served Isaac."
He stopped abruptly, and stood quite still a moment, fronting the meeting, as though appealing to them, through the mere squalid physical weakness he could find no more words to express. Then, with a sort of shambling bow, he turned away, and the main body of the meeting clapped excitedly, while at the back some of the "sweaters" grinned, and chatted sarcastic things in Yiddish with their neighbours. Tressady saw Lady Maxwell rise eagerly as the old man passed her, take his hand, and find him a seat.
"That, I suppose, was an emotion," said Tressady, looking down upon his companion.
"Or an argument," said Watton—"as you like!"
One other "emotion" of the same kind—the human reality at its simplest and cruellest—Tressady afterwards remembered.
A "working-woman" was put up to second an amendment condemning the workshops clause, which had been moved in an angry speech by one of "Fontenoy's ladies," a shrill-voiced, fashionable person, the secretary to the local branch of the Free Workers' League. Tressady had yawned impatiently through the speech, which had seemed to him a violent and impertinent performance. But as the speaker sat down he was roused by an exclamation from a man beside him.
"That woman!" cried a tall curate, straining on tiptoe to see. "No! They ought to be ashamed of themselves!"
Tressady wondered who and why; but all that he saw was that a thin, tall woman was being handed along the bench in front of him, while her neighbours and friends clapped her on the back as she passed, laughing and urging her on. Then, presently, there she stood on the platform, a thin, wand-like creature, with her battered bonnet sideways on her head, a woollen crossover on her shoulders, in spite of July, her hands clasped across her chest, her queer light eyes wandering and smiling hither and thither. In her emaciation, her weird cheerfulness, she was like a figure from a Dance of Death. But what was amazing was her self-possession.
"Now yer laffin' at me," she began in a conversational tone, nodding towards the group of women she had just left. "You go 'long! I told the lidy I'd speak, an I will. Well, they comes to me, an they ses, Mrs. Dickson, yer not to work at 'ome no longer—they'll put yer in prison if yer do't, they ses; yer to go out ter work, same as the shop 'ands, they ses; and what's more, if they cotch Mr. Butterford—that's my landlord; p'raps yer dunno 'im—"
She looked down at the meeting with a whimsical grin, her eyes screwed up and her crooked brows lifted, so that the room roared merely to look at her. The trim lady-secretary, however, bent forward with an air of annoyance. She had not, perhaps, realised that Mrs. Dickson was so much of a character.
"If they cotch Mr. Butterford, they'll make 'im pay up smart for lettin yer do such a thing as make knickers in 'is 'ouse. So I asks the lidy, Wot's ter become o' me an the little uns? An she says she done know, but yer mus come and speak Tuesday night, she says—Manx Road Schools, she says—if yer want to perwent em making a law ov it. Which I'm a doin of—aint I?"
Fresh laughter and response from the room. She went on satisfied.
"An, yer know, if I can't make the knickers at 'ome, I can't make 'em awy from 'ome. For ther aint no shops as want kids squallin round, as fer as I can make out. An Jimmy's a limb, as boys mos'ly are in my egsperience. Larst week 'e give the biby a 'alfpenny and two o' my biggest buttons to swaller, an I ony jest smacked 'em out of 'er in time. Ther'd be murder done if I was to leave 'em. An 'ow 'ud I be able to pay anyone fer lookin' after em? I can't git much, yer know, shop or no shop. I aint wot I was."
She stopped, and pointed significantly to her chest. Tressady shuddered as the curate whispered to him.
"I've been in orspital—cut about fearful. I can't go at the pace them shops works at. They'd give me the sack, double-quick, if I was to go try in 'em. No, it's settin as does it—settin an settin. I'm at it by seven, an my 'usband—yer can see im there—e'll tell yer."
She stopped, and pointed to a burly ruffian standing amid a group of "pals" round the door. This gentleman had his arms folded, and was alternately frowning and grinning at this novel spectacle of his wife as a public performer. Bribes had probably been necessary to bring him to consent to the spectacle at all. But he was not happy, and when his wife pointed at him, and the meeting turned to look, he suddenly took a dive head-foremost into the crowd about him; so that when the laughter and horse-play that followed had subsided, it was seen that Mr. Tom Dickson's place knew him no more.
Meanwhile Mrs. Dickson stood grinning—grinning wide and visibly. It was the strangest mirth, as though hollow pain and laughter strove with each other for the one poor indomitable face.
"Well, ee could 'a told yer, if e'd ad the mind," she said, nodding, "for ee knows. Ee's been out o' work this twelve an a arf year—well, come, I'll bet yer, anyway, as ee 'asn't done a 'and's turn this three year—an I don't blime im. Fust, there isn't the work to be got, and then yer git out of the way o' wantin it. An beside, I'm used to im. When Janey—no, it were Sue!—were seven month old, he come in one night from the public, an after ee'd broke up most o' the things, he says to me, 'Clear out, will yer!' An I cleared out, and Sue and me set on the doorstep till mornin. And when mornin come, Tom opened the door, an ee says, 'What are you doin there, mother? Why aint yer got my breakfast?' An I went in an got it. But, bless yer, nowadays—the women won't do it!—"
Another roar went up from the meeting. Mrs. Dickson still grinned.
"An so there's nothink but settin', as I said before—settin' till yer can't set no more. If I begin o' seven, I gets Mr. Dickson to put the teathings an the loaf andy, so as I don't 'ave to get up more'n jes to fetch the kettle; and the chillen gets the same as me—tea an bread, and a red 'erring Sundays; an Mr. Dickson, 'e gets 'is meals out. I gives 'im the needful, and 'e don't make no trouble; an the children is dreadful frackshus sometimes, and gets in my way fearful. But there, if I can set—set till I 'ear Stepney Church goin twelve—I can earn my ten shillin a week, an keep the lot of 'em. Wot does any lidy or genelman want, a comin' meddlin down 'ere? Now, that's the middle an both ends on it. Done? Well, I dessay I is done. Lor, I ses to em in the orspital it do seem rummy to me to be layin abed like that. If Tom was 'ere, why, 'e'd—"
She made a queer, significant grimace. But the audience laughed no longer. They stared silently at the gaunt creature, and with their silence her own mood changed.
Suddenly she whipped up her apron. She drew it across her eyes, and flung it away again passionately.
"I dessay we shall be lyin abed in Kingdom Come," she said defiantly, yet piteously. "But we've got to git there fust. An I don't want no shops, thank yer!"
She rambled on a little longer, then, at a sign from the lady-secretary, made a grinning curtsy to the audience and departed.
"What do they get out of that?" said Watton, in Tressady's ear—"Poor galley-slave in praise of servitude!"
"Her slavery keeps her alive, please."
"Yes—and drags down the standard of a whole class!"
"You'll admit she seemed content?"
"It's that content we want to kill.—Ah! at last!" and Watton clapped loudly, followed by about half the meeting, while the rest sat silent. Then Tressady perceived that the chair-woman had called upon Lady Maxwell to move the next resolution, and that the tall figure had risen.
She came forward slowly, glancing from side to side, as though doubtful where to look for her friends. She was in black, and her head was covered with a little black lace bonnet, in the strings of which, at her throat, shone a small diamond brooch. The delicate whiteness of her face and hands, and this sparkle of light on her breast, that moved as she moved, struck a thrill of pleasure through Tressady's senses. The squalid monotony and physical defect of the crowd about him passed from his mind. Her beauty redressed the balance. "'Loveliness, magic, and grace—they are here; they are set in the world!'—and ugliness and pain have not conquered while this face still looks and breathes." This, and nothing less, was the cry of the young man's heart and imagination as he strained forward, waiting for her voice.
Then he settled himself to listen—only to pass gradually from expectation to nervousness, from nervousness to dismay.
What was happening? She had once told him that she was not a speaker, and he had not believed her. She had begun well, he thought, though with a hesitation he had not expected. But now—had she lost her thread—or what? Incredible! when one remembered her in private life, in conversation. Yet these stumbling sentences, this evident distress!
Tressady found himself fidgeting in sympathetic misery. He and Watton looked at each other.
A little more, and she would have lost her audience. She had lost it. At first there had been eager listening, for she had plunged straightway into a set explanation and defence of the Bill point by point, and half the room knew that she was Lord Maxwell's wife. But by the end of ten minutes their attention was gone. They were only staring at her because she was handsome and a great lady. Otherwise, they seemed not to know what to make of her. She grew white; she wavered. Tressady saw that she was making great efforts, and all in vain. The division between her and her audience widened with every sentence, and Fontenoy's lady-organiser, in the background, sat smilingly erect. Tressady, who had been at first inclined to hate the thought of her success in this Inferno, grew hot with wrath and irritation. His own vanity suffered in her lack of triumph.
Amazing! How could her personal magic—so famous on so many fields—have deserted her like this in an East End schoolroom, before people whose lives she knew, whose griefs she carried in her heart?
Then an idea struck him. The thought was an illumination—he understood. He shut his eyes and listened. Maxwell's sentences, Maxwell's manner—even, at times, Maxwell's voice! He had been rehearsing to her his coming speech in the House of Lords, and she was painfully repeating it! To his disgust, Tressady saw the reporters scribbling away—no doubt they knew their business! Aye, there was the secret. The wife's adoration showed through her very failure—through this strange conversion of all that was manly, solid, and effective in Maxwell, into a confused mass of facts and figures, pedantic, colourless, and cold!
Edward Watton began to look desperately unhappy. "Too long," he said, whispering in Tressady's ear, "and too technical. They can't follow."
And he looked at a group of rough factory-girls beginning to scuffle with the young men near them, at the restless crowd of "greeners," at the women in the centre of the hall lifting puzzled faces to the speaker, as though in a pain of listening.
Tressady nodded. In the struggle of devotion with a half-laughing annoyance he could only crave that the thing should be over.
But the next instant his face altered. He pushed forward instinctively, turning his back on Watton, hating the noisy room, that would hardly let him hear.
Ah!—those few last sentences, that voice, that quiver of passion—they were her own—herself, not Maxwell. The words were very simple, and a little tremulous—words of personal reminiscence and experience. But for one listener there they changed everything. The room, the crowd, the speaker—he saw them for a moment under another aspect: that poetic, eternal aspect, which is always there, behind the veil of common things, ready to flash out on mortal eyes. He felt the woman's heart, oppressed with a pity too great for it; the delicate, trembling consciousness, like a point in space, weighed on by the burden of the world; he stood, as it were, beside her, hearing with her ears, seeing the earth-spectacle as she saw it, with that terrible second sight of hers: the all-environing woe and tragedy of human things—the creeping hunger and pain—the struggle that leads no whither—the life that hates to live and yet dreads to die—the death that cuts all short, and does but add one more hideous question to the great pile that hems the path of man.
A hard, reluctant tear rose in his eyes. Is it starved tailoresses and shirtmakers alone who suffer? Is there no hunger of the heart, that matches and overweighs the physical? Is it not as easy for the rich as the poor to miss the one thing needful, the one thing that matters and saves? Angrily, and in a kind of protest, he put out his hand, as it were, to claim his own share of the common pain.
"Make way there! make way!" cried a police-sergeant, holding back the crowd, "and let the lady pass."
Tressady did his best to push through with Lady Maxwell on his arm. But there was an angry hum of voices in front of him, an angry pressure round the doors.
"We shall soon get a cab," he said, bending over her. "You are very tired, I fear. Please lean upon me."
Yet he could but feel grateful to the crowd. It gave him this joy of protecting and supporting her. Nevertheless, as he looked ahead, he wished that they were safely off, and that there were more police!
For this meeting, which had been only mildly disorderly and inattentive while Marcella was speaking, had suddenly flamed, after she sat down, into a fierce confusion and tumult—why, Tressady hardly now understood. A man had sprung up to speak as she sat down who was apparently in bad repute with most of the unions of the district. At any rate, there had been immediate uproar and protest. The trade-unionists would not hear him—hurled names at him—"thief," "blackleg"—as he attempted to speak. Then the Free Workers, for whom this dubious person had been lately acting, rose in a mass and booed at the unionists; and finally some of the dark-eyed, black-bearded "greeners" near the door, urged on, probably, by the masters, whose slaves they were, had leaped the benches near them, shouting strange tongues, and making for the hostile throng around the platform.
Then it had been time for Naseby and the police to clear the platform and open a passage for the Maxwell party. Unfortunately, there was no outlet to the back, no chance of escaping the shouting crowd in Manx Road. Tressady, joining his friends at last by dint of his height and a free play of elbows, found himself suddenly alone with Lady Maxwell, Naseby and Lady Madeleine borne along far behind, and no chance but to follow the current, with such occasional help as the police stationed along the banks of it might be able to give.
Outside, Tressady strained his eyes for a cab.
"Here, sir!" cried the sergeant in front, carving a passage by dint of using his own stalwart frame as a ram.
They hurried on, for some rough lads on the edges of the crowd had already begun stone-throwing. The faces about them seemed to be partly indifferent, partly hostile. "Look at the bloomin bloats!" cried a wild factory-girl with a touzled head as Lady Maxwell passed. "Let 'em stop at 'ome and mind their own 'usbands—yah!"
"Garn! who paid for your bonnet?" shouted another, until a third girl pulled her back, panting, "If you say that any more I'll scrag yer!" For this third girl had spent a fortnight in the Mile End Road house, getting fed and strengthened before an operation.
But here was the cab! Lady Maxwell's foot was already on the step, when Tressady felt something fly past him.
There was a slight cry. The form in front of him seemed to waver a moment. Then Tressady himself mounted, caught her, and in another moment, after a few plunges from the excited horse, they were off down Manx Road, followed by a shouting crowd that gradually thinned.
"You are hurt!" he said.
"Yes," she said faintly, "but not much. Will you tell him to drive first to Mile End Road?"
"I have told him. Can I do anything to stop the bleeding?"
He looked at her in despair. The handkerchief, and the delicate hand itself that she was holding to her brow, were dabbled in blood.
"Have you a silk handkerchief to spare?" she asked him, smiling slightly and suddenly through her pallor, as though at their common predicament.
By good fortune he had one. She took off her hat, and gave him a few business-like directions. His fingers trembled as he tried to obey her; but he had the practical sense that the small vicissitudes and hardships of travel often develop in a man, and between them they adjusted a rough but tolerable bandage.
Then she leant against the side of the cab, and he thought she would have swooned. There was a pause, during which he watched the quivering lines of the lips and nostrils and the pallor of the cheeks with a feeling of dismay.
But she did not mean to faint, and little by little her will answered to her call upon it. Presently she said, with eyes shut and brow contracted:
"I trust the others are safe. Oh! what a failure—what a failure! I am afraid I have done Aldous harm!"
The tone of the last words touched Tressady deeply. Evidently she could hardly restrain her tears.
"They were not worthy you should go and speak to them," he said quickly. "Besides, it was only a noisy minority."
She did not speak again till they drew up before the house in the Mile End Road. Then she turned to him.
"I was to have stayed here for the night, but I think I must go home. Aldous might hear that there had been a disturbance. I will leave a message here, and drive home."
"I trust you will let me go with you. We should none of us be happy to think of you as alone just yet. And I am due at the House by eleven."
She smiled, assenting, then descended, leaning heavily upon him in her weakness.
When she reappeared, attended by her two little servants, all frightened and round-eyed at their mistress's mishap, she had thrown a thick lace scarf round her head, which hid the bandage and gave to her pale beauty a singularly touching, appealing air.
"I wish I could see Madeleine," she said anxiously, standing beside the cab and looking up the road. "Ah!"
For she had suddenly caught sight of a cab in the distance driving smartly up. As it approached, Naseby and Lady Madeleine were plainly to be seen inside it. The latter jumped out almost at Marcella's feet, looking more scared than ever as she saw the bandage and the black scarf twisted round the white face. But in a few moments Marcella had soothed her, and given her over, apparently, to the care of another lady staying in the house. Then she waved her hand to Naseby, who, with his usual coolness, asked no questions and made no remarks, and she and Tressady drove off.
"Madeleine will stay the night," Marcella explained as they sped towards Aldgate. "That was our plan. My secretary will look after her. She has been often here with me lately, and has things of her own to do. But I ought not to have taken her to-night. Lady Kent would never have forgiven me if she had been hurt. Oh! it was all a mistake—all a great mistake! I suppose I imagined—that is one's folly—that I could really do some good—make an effect."
She bit her lip, and the furrow reappeared in the white brow.
Tressady felt by sympathy that her heart was all sore, her moral being shaken and vibrating. After these long months of labour and sympathy and emotion, the sudden touch of personal brutality had unnerved her.
Mere longing to comfort, to "make-up," overcame him.
"You wouldn't talk of mistake—of failing—if you knew how to be near you, to listen to you, to see you, touches and illuminates some of us!"
His cheek burnt, but he turned a manly, eager look upon her.
Her cheek, too, flushed, and he thought he saw her bosom heave.
"Oh no!—no!" she cried. "How impossible!—when one feels oneself so helpless, so clumsy, so useless. Why couldn't I do better? But perhaps it is as well. It all prepares one—braces one—against—"
She paused and leaned forward, looking out at the maze of figures and carriages on the Mansion House crossing, her tight-pressed lips trembling against her will.
"Against the last inevitable disappointment." That, no doubt, was what she meant.
"If you only understood how loth some of us are to differ from you," he cried,—"how hard it seems to have to press another view,—to be already pledged."
"Oh yes!—please—I know that you are pledged," she said, in hasty distress, her delicacy shrinking as before from the direct personal argument.
They were silent a little. Tressady looked out at the houses in Queen Victoria Street, at the lamplit summer night, grudging the progress of the cab, the approach of the river, of the Embankment, where there would be less traffic to bar their way—clinging to the minutes as they passed.
"Oh! how could they put up that woman?" she said presently, her eyes still shut, her hand shaking, as it rested on the door. "How could they? It is the thought of women like that—the hundreds and thousands of them—that goads one on. A clergyman who knows the East End well said to me the other day, 'The difference between now and twenty years ago is that the women work much more, the men less.' I can never get away from the thought of the women! Their lives come to seem to me the mere refuse, the rags and shreds, that are thrown every day into the mill and ground to nothing—without a thought—without a word of pity, an hour of happiness! Cancer—three children left out of nine—and barely forty, though she looked sixty! They tell me she may live eighteen months. Then, when the parish has buried her, the man has only to hold up his finger to find someone else to use up in the same way. And she is just one of thousands."
"I can only reply by the old, stale question," said Tressady, sturdily. "Did we make the mill? Can we stop its grinding? And if not, is it fair even to the race that has something to gain from courage and gaiety—is it reasonable to take all our own poor little joy and drench it in this horrible pain of sympathy, as you do! But we have said all these things before."
He bent over to her, smiling. But she did not look up. And he saw a tear which her weakness, born of shock and fatigue, could not restrain, steal from the lashes on the cheek. Then he added, still leaning towards her:
"Only, what I never have said—I think—is what is true to-night. At last you have made one person feel—if that matters anything!—the things you feel. I don't know that I am particularly grateful to you! And, practically, we may be as far apart as ever. But I was without a sense when I went into this game of politics; and now—"
His heart beat. What would he not have said, mad youth!—within the limits imposed by her nature and his own dread—to make her look at him, to soften this preposterous sadness!
But it needed no more. She opened her eyes, and looked at him with a wild sweetness and gratitude which dazzled him, and struck his memory with the thought of the Southern, romantic strain in her.
"You are very kind and comforting!" she said; "but then, from the first—somehow—I knew you were a friend to us. One felt it—through all difference."
The little sentences were steeped in emotion—emotion springing from many sources, fed by a score of collateral thoughts and memories—with which Tressady had, in truth, nothing to do. Yet the young man gulped inwardly. She had been a tremulous woman till the words were said. Now—strange!—through her very gentleness and gratefulness, a barrier had risen between them. Something stern and quick told him this was the very utmost of what she could ever say to him—the farthest limit of it all.
They passed under Charing Cross railway bridge. Beside them, as they emerged, the moon shone out above the darks and silvers of the river, and in front, the towers of Westminster rose purplish grey against a west still golden.
"How were things going in the House this afternoon?" she asked, looking at the towers. "Oh! I forgot. You see, the clock says close on eleven. Please let me drop you here. I can manage by myself quite well."
He protested, and she yielded, with a patient kindness that made him sore. Then he gave his account, and they talked a little of Monday's division and of the next critical votes in Committee—each of them, so he felt in his exaltation, a blow dealt to her—that he must help to deal. Yet there was a fascination in the topic. Neither could get away from it.
Presently, Pall Mall being very full of traffic, they had to wait a moment at the corner of the street that turns into St. James's Square. In the pause Tressady caught sight of a man on the pavement. The man smiled, looked astonished, and took off his hat. Lady Maxwell bowed coldly, and immediately looked away. Tressady recognised Harding Watton. But neither he nor she mentioned his name.
In another minute he had seen her vanish within the doors of her own house. Her hand had rested gently, willingly, in his.
"I am so grateful!" she had said; "so will Maxwell be. We shall meet soon, and laugh over our troubles!"
And then she was gone, and he was left standing a moment, bewildered.
Eleven? What had he to do?
Then he remembered his pair, and that he had promised to call for Letty at a certain house, and take her on to a late ball. The evening, in fact, instead of ending, was just beginning. He could have laughed, as he got back into his cab.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Marcella had sped through the outer hall into the inner, where one solitary light, still burning, made a rather desolate dark-in-light through the broad, pillared space. A door opened at the farther side.
"Aldous!"
"You!"
He came out, and she flew to him. He felt her trembling as she touched him. In ten words she told him something of what had happened. Then he saw the bandage round her temple. His countenance fell. She knew that he turned white, and loved him for it. How few things had power to move him so!
He wanted to lead her back into his library, where he was at work. But she resisted.
"Let me go up to Annette," she said. "The little wound—oh! it is not much, I know it is not much—ought to be properly seen to. We will do it between us in a moment. Then come—I will send her down for you. I want to tell you."
But in her heart of hearts she was just a little afraid of telling him. What if an exaggerated version should get into the papers—if it should really do him harm—at this critical moment! She was always tormented by this dread, a dread born of long-past indiscretions and mistakes.
He acquiesced, but first he insisted on half leading, half carrying her upstairs; and she permitted it, delighting in his strong arm.
Half an hour later she sent for him. The maid found him pacing up and down the hall, waiting.
When he entered her room she was lying on her sofa in a white wrapper of some silky stuff. The black lace had been drawn again round her head, and he saw nothing but a very pale face and her eager, timid eyes—timid for no one in the world but him. As he caught sight of her, she produced in him that exquisite mingled impression of grace, passion, self-yielding, which in all its infinite variations and repetitions made up for him the constant poem of her beauty. But though she knew it, she glanced at him anxiously as he approached her. It had been to her a kind of luxury of feeling, in the few moments that she had been waiting for him, to cherish a little fear of him—of his displeasure.
"Now describe exactly what you have been doing," he said, sitting down by her with a troubled face and taking her hand, as soon as he had assured himself that the cut was slight and would leave no scar.
She told her tale, and was thrilled to see that he frowned. She laid her hand on his shoulder.
"It is the first public thing I have done without consulting you. I meant to have asked you yesterday, but we were both so busy. The meeting was got up rather hurriedly, and they pressed me to speak, after all the arrangements were made."
"We are both of us too busy," he said, rather sadly; "we glance, and nod, and bustle by—"
He did not finish the quotation, but she could. Her eyes scanned his face. "Do you think I ought to have avoided such a thing at such a time? Will it do harm?"
His brow cleared. He considered the matter.
"I think you may expect some of the newspapers to make a good deal of it," he said, smiling.
And, in fact, his own inherited tastes and instincts were all chafed by her story. His wife—the wife of a Cabinet Minister—pleading for her husband's Bill, or, as the enemy might say, for his political existence, with an East End meeting, and incidentally with the whole public—exposing herself, in a time of agitation, to the rowdyism and the stone-throwing that wait on such things! The notion set the fastidious old-world temper of the man all on edge. But he would never have dreamed of arguing the matter so with her. A sort of high chivalry forbade it. In marrying her he had not made a single condition—would have suffered tortures rather than lay the smallest fetter upon her. In consequence, he had been often thought a weak, uxorious person. Maxwell knew that he was merely consistent. No sane man lays his heart at the feet of a Marcella without counting the cost.
She did not answer his last remark. But he saw that she was wistful and uneasy, and presently she laid her fingers lightly on his.
"Tell me if I am too much away from you—too much occupied with other people."
He sighed,—the slightest sigh,—but she winced. "I had just an hour before dinner," he said; "you were not here, and the house seemed very empty. I would have come down to fetch you, but there were some important papers to read before to-morrow." A Cabinet meeting was fixed, as she knew, for the following day. "Then, I have been making Saunders draw up a statement for the newspapers in answer to Watton's last attack, and it would have been a help to talk to you before we sent it off. Above all, if I had known of the meeting I should have begged you not to go. I ought to have warned you yesterday, for I knew that there was some ugly agitation developing down there. But I never thought of you as likely to face a mob. Will you please reflect"—he pressed her hand almost roughly against his lips—"that if that stone had been a little heavier, and flung a little straighter—"
He paused. A dew came to her eyes, a happy glow to her cheek. As for her, she was grateful to the stone that had raised such heart-beats.
Perhaps some instinct told him not to please her in this way too much, for he rose and walked away a moment.
"There! don't let's think of it, or I shall turn tyrant after all, and plunge into 'shalls' and 'sha'n'ts'! You know you carry two lives, and all the plans that either of us care about, in your hand. You say that Tressady brought you home?"
He turned and looked at her.
"Yes. Edward Watton brought him to the meeting."
"But he has been down to see you there several times before, as well as coming here?"
"Oh yes! almost every week since we met at Castle Luton."
"It is curious," said Maxwell, thoughtfully; "for he will certainly vote steadily with Fontenoy all through. His election speeches pledged him head over ears."
"Oh! of course he will vote," said Marcella, moving a little uneasily; "but one cannot help trying to modify his way of looking at things. And his tone is changed."
Maxwell stood at the foot of her sofa, considering, a host of perplexed and unwelcome notions flitting across his mind. In spite of his idealist absorption in his work, his political aims, and the one love of his life, he had the training of a man of the world, and could summon the shrewdness of one when he pleased. He had liked this young Tressady, for the first time, at Castle Luton, and had seen him fall under Marcella's charm with some amusement. But this haunting of their camp in the East End, at such a marked and critical moment, was strange, to say the least of it. It must point, one would think, to some sudden and remarkable strength of personal influence.
Had she any real consciousness of the power she wielded? Once or twice, in the years since they had been married, Maxwell had watched this spell of his wife's at work, and had known a moment of trouble. "If I were the fellow she had talked and walked with so," he had once said to himself, "I must have fallen in love with her had she been twenty times another man's wife!" Yet no harm had happened; he had only reproached himself for a gross mind without daring to breathe a word to her.
And he dared not now. Besides, how absurd! The young man was just married, and, to Maxwell's absent, incurious eyes, the bride had seemed a lively, pretty little person enough. No doubt it was the nervous strain of his political life that made such fancies possible to him. Let him not cumber her ears with them!
Then gradually, as he stood at her feet, the sight of her, breathing weakness, submission, loveliness, her eyes raised to his, banished every other thought from his happy heart, and drew him like a magnet.
Meanwhile she began to smile. He knelt down beside her, and she put both hands on his shoulders.
"Dear!" she said, half laughing and half crying, "I did speak so badly; you would have been ashamed of me. I couldn't hold the meeting. I didn't persuade a soul. Lord Fontenoy's ladies had it all their own way. And first I was dreadfully sorry I couldn't do such a thing decently—sorry because of one's vanity, and sorry because I couldn't help you. And now I think I'm rather glad."
"Are you?" said Maxwell, drily; "as for me, I'm enchanted! There!—so much penalty you shall have."
She pressed his lips with her hand.
"Don't spoil my pretty speech. I am only glad because—because public life and public success make one stand separate—alone. I have gone far enough to know how it might be. A new passion would come in, and creep through one like a poison. I should win you votes—and our hearts would burn dry! There! take me—scold me—despise me. I am a poor thing—but yours!"
With such a humbleness might Diana have wooed her shepherd, stooping her goddess head to him on the Latmian steep.
