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!"