'I'm going to. If you don't be good you won't be asked to the wedding.'
Before the temptation of a retort she had dropped her argument and encouraged personalities. In vain she tried to recover that thread of attention which, not her interrupter, but herself had snapped. She retired in the midst of uproar.
The chairman came forward and berated the crowd for its un-English behaviour in not giving a speaker a fair hearing.
A man held up a walking-stick. 'Will you just tell me one thing, miss——'
'Not now. When the last speaker has finished there will be ten minutes for questions. And I may say that it is a great and rare pleasure to have any that are intelligent. Don't waste anything so precious. Just save it up till you're asked for it. I want you now to give a fair hearing to Mrs. Bewley.'
This was a wizened creature of about fifty, in rusty black, widow of a stonemason and mother of four children—'four livin',' she said with some significance. She added her mite of testimony to that of the 96,000 organized women of the mills, that the workers in her way of life realized how their condition and that of the children would be improved 'if the women 'ad some say in things.'
'It's quite certain,' she assured the people, 'there ought to be women relief-officers and matrons in the prisons. And it's very 'ard on women that there isn't the same cheap lodgin'-'ouse accommodation fur single women as there is fur single men. It's very 'ard on poor girls. It's worse than 'ard. But men won't never change that. We women 'as got to do it.'
'Go 'ome and get your 'usban's tea!' said a new-comer, squeezing her way into the tight-packed throng, a queer little woman about the same age as the speaker, but dressed in purple silk and velvet, and wearing a wonderful purple plush hat on a wig of sandy curls. She might have been a prosperous milliner from the Commercial Road, and she had a meek man along who wore the husband's air of depressed responsibility. She was spared the humiliating knowledge, but she was taken at first for a sympathizer with the Cause. In manners she was precisely like what the Suffragette was at that time expected to be, pushing her way through the crowd, and vociferating 'Shyme!' to all and sundry. The men who had been pleasantly occupied in boo-ing the speaker turned and glared at her. The hang-dog husband had an air of not observing. Some of the boys pushed and harried her, but, to their obvious surprise, they heard her advising the rusty widow: 'Go 'ome and get your 'usban's tea!' She varied that advice by repeating her favourite 'Shyme!' varied by 'Wot beayviour!—old enough to know better. Every good wife oughter stay at 'ome and darn 'er 'usban's socks and make 'im comftubble.'
After delivering which womanly sentiment she would nod her purple plumes and smile at the men. It was the sorriest travesty of similar scenes in a politer world. To the credit of the loafers about her, they did not greatly encourage her. She was perhaps overmature for her rôle. But they ceased to jostle her. They even allowed her to get in front of them. The tall, rusty woman in the cart was meanwhile telling a story of personal experience of the operation of some law which shut out from any share in the benefits of the new Act which regulates the feeding of school children, the very people most in need of it. For it appeared that orphans and the children of widows were excluded. The Bill provided only for children living under their father's roof. If the roof was kept over them by the shackled hands of the mother, according to the speaker, they might go hungry.