"Have I been honest?" Patrine asked herself over and over, kneeling by the open window, staring into the darkness. "Have I been just towards the man who never was a friend even when he played the lover? Did not my own attitude of cynical curiosity towards secret, hidden things, bias his line of conduct towards me? Might not even von Herrnung have respected a girl who showed no inclination to flutter moth-like, about the flaming torch of Sin? No! he would not. But I could have saved myself even from scorching—I, who approached the flame too closely, and shall carry the scars of my burning to the grave."
Drip, drip, drip! Water, oozing from the box that stood upon the table, was dropping on the carpet with the small, insistent sound.... At the west end of the Catholic Church where Patrine had told her story to a priest in the Confessional there was a great black Crucifix, bearing a white thorn-crowned Figure gashed with gory-seeming wounds. She had fancied that the blood from them dripped down upon the pavement as she had sat staring at the High Altar, and wondering whether it were true that wilful sin committed by men and women for whose salvation Christ had bled and died might not cause Him suffering even now?
She had been willing to sin for Sherbrand, and said so in her hour of madness. Yet the renunciation of her lover as a husband had been an act of the purest love. Perhaps God would overlook the one thing for the sake of the other? Perhaps He had really spoken by the mouth of that old priest whose tears had dropped upon his withered hands....
Drip, drip, drip! Patrine began to suspect the source whence the sound proceeded. The people who had packed the roses—they must be roses—had wetted the cotton-wool too heavily, the fools! The inlaid table and the carpet would suffer if the wet were not mopped up. One ought to ring for Mrs. Keyse or Janey, or better still, see to it oneself.
She half-rose with this intention, then sank down again nervelessly. It was half-past ten. The October night leaned close over London, Harley Street was muffled in velvet darkness. The veiled gleam of electric lights showed at its junction with Cavendish Square. The rumble of the tube train came from Portland Place, the faint shriek of the Northern Express sounded from Euston. A Brocken Hunt of motor-buses screeched and clanked up the Marylebone Road and faded into distance. The rumble and roar of Oxford Street showed signs of diminution. It was possible to hear stray sentences spoken by people passing upon the pavement below.
"I don't care!" This from the shorter of two female figures that had halted before the house. The edge of light-coloured skirt showing below her cloak, and the gleam of white cuffs framing the gloved hands with which she gestured, suggested a Hospital nurse to Patrine. "Taxation without Representation is a crying injustice—and the men will wake up to it one of these days.... And Mrs. Clash may be a noisy person—and Fanny Leaven may drop her haiches—I do myself when I get stirred up. But they're in earnest—and they've suffered—cruel!—for their convictions. Look at this Petrell—that one that always takes the Chair. She's a physical wreck—with the treatment she's had—and I know what I'm talking about! Haven't we had Suffragettes brought to the Hospital for treatment over and over—after they'd been pitched out of Political Meetings by Stewards and half-throttled by Police. What I say is—Moses! how late! ... We shall get locked out of the Home if we don't run for it!"
And their light hurrying footsteps and the unmistakable frou-frou of starched print accompanying, passed away up Harley Street. They must have come from the Mass Meeting of Suffragists that had taken place at the Royal Hall.
It had been a memorable evening. The atmosphere of the Royal Hall, thronged not only with the members of the W.S.S.S. but with representatives of many other Women's Unions and Associations and Societies and Leagues, was highly charged with electricity. Mrs. Petrell, resolute-lipped, quiet-eyed, clear of diction and composed of manner, knew, as she sat in her chair beside the little table in the middle of the crowded platform, and better even than the plain-clothes police among the audience—that at any moment the storm might break.
She had advocated with all her much-tried strength an armistice for the War-period, involving a temporary abandonment of militant methods and inflammatory addresses, in favour of a policy of active help and practical sympathy, alike honourable to her head and heart.
Other Societies, Unions, Leagues, and Associations might have followed the lead of their Presidents. But would the W.S.S.S. accept her programme? Militancy had been its motto and the breath of its nostrils through all these troubled years. Since the outbreak of War, Flaming Fanny had busily sown the whirlwind, advocating fresh Demonstrations in conjunction with a system of Unlimited Strikes. Woman must hold her hand, now that her help was needed. Man, the Oppressor of all time, must be coerced by Woman's flat refusal to take part in Relief Work, or War Work, or Work of any kind whatever, into yielding the withheld right. And Mrs. Clash sided with Fanny—and others, nearer home.
Little wonder then that Pressmen, sensing the imminence of riot, had turned out in their shabbiest tweeds and left their watches and tie-pins at home. Little wonder that Medical Students, who had not already joined the Service, with betting-men and patrons of the pugilistic Prize Ring, found themselves baulked of anticipated entertainment, or that loafers and crooks, pickpockets and rowdies, disappointed of a pleasurable evening, expressed themselves in unmeasured terms regarding that Mass Meeting at the Royal Hall.
A melodious speaking-voice can be a magical wand, wielded by the mouth of a plain woman. But when the woman is beautiful and intellectual, when soul breathes through her words, and strength and tenderness, then she becomes a Force to reckon with, a Power to move mountains and bring water of tears from the living rock of the hardest human heart.
The officially-checked lights of the Hall shone down upon a sea of threatening faces. The electric battens over the speaker's head showed her to be a tall, fair, slender woman, dressed in filmy grey, veiling soft clinging silk of the same shade. The simplicity of her dress was unrelieved by ornaments other than a chain of pearls about her long throat. The red-brown hair seemed heavy for the little Greek head, the lovely pale face with the sensitive lips, wore a look of patient sorrow, the eyes she turned upon the audience—a seething mixture of irreconcilable elements—had in them courage, sympathy and understanding, and knowledge too. Before she spoke she had created an impression. Strangers were ingratiated by her beauty and evident refinement. Those who best knew her were among the wildest and most reckless there. They had quieted, when she had risen up in her unnoticed corner of the platform, and moved forwards to the speaker's place opposite the Chair, as though oil had been cast upon the waters of a stormy sea.
"When God Willed this War that we call Armageddon," she had said to them—"for without the permission of the Most High the earthly Powers that planned and prepared it could not have plucked the fruit of their desire—it came in time to prevent the declaration of a War even more terrible. War, to the Death, between Woman and Man."
In a few trenchant words she painted the dire results of such hostility.
"That unnatural horror has been mercifully averted," she said to them. "The old sore is healed, there is no hatred nor rancour left. We women have learned what a price has to be paid for the Franchise of Manhood. It is the brave blood that is drenching the soil of Belgium and France and Poland—that will flow in rivers as wide as the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge before Peace is proclaimed again. They have answered the Call. They are pouring into the recruiting offices—in thousands of thousands—those who have given up their loved ones, their homes, their hopes of success in Arts or Sciences, professions or businesses or trades. Will women be as unselfish and as generous when their Call comes? For it will come. It is coming while I stand here!"
They were strangely quiet, under the spell of the beautiful voice, and the eyes that were luminous and deep with tenderness:
"There are faithful Christians among you; brave earnest souls who have prayed to GOD for guidance among the difficulties that beset the way for working-women, and weaker souls have been maddened to frenzy and plunged into unbelief by the intolerance and the injustice, the shrieking wrongs and the unpurged evils that Man, who enters upon his heritage the world, by the Gate of Motherhood, has ignorantly accumulated upon the shoulders of the sex he professes to respect."
There was a murmur of approval at this. She lifted a hand, and they were silent.
"I say to those who have despaired, 'Despair no longer!' I say to those who have prayed—'Your prayer is answered!' Take up the work that has dropped from the hands that are busy with the rifle. Prove your right to the Parliamentary Franchise. Take your place amongst the World's Workers, for good and for all. The Vote will be granted: it cannot be denied! But if you had it now, passionately as you desire it, and the choice were offered you—Oh! my sisters!—would you not yield it up with gladness to bring those dead men back to life again?"
And after a pause of unbroken silence she added:
"For they have fought even better than they knew. They have re-conquered Woman. Freely and willingly as comrade and helper she takes her place and her share of the burden. Peace is proclaimed. The War between the sexes is at an end!"
We know how truly the speaker prophesied. Quietly as the vast Atlantic flows into and fills a labyrinth of empty, echoing, rock-caverns, the vast body of unemployed women took the places of the male workers called away to the Front. They had clicked into the slots before the world was well aware of it, or they themselves understood that a miracle had been wrought.
Said the breeched and gaitered lady-conductor of a North-West tram the other day:
"Now the ones that was brought up active has got their chance to do a bit, and the ones that was brought up idle 'ave found out that they like work, will they ever be content to sit and twiddle their thumbs again? I don't think!" She clipped pink tickets with zeal, and when a red-nosed, watery-eyed elderly man who had offered her a pewter shilling cursed her venomously as she thrust the coin back on him: "'Ere you! ... 'Op it!" she said to the offender, and caught him neatly by the scruff, hauled him down the cork-screw stairway, and deposited him in the Camden Road without turning a hair.