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—"