“Venenum in auro bibitur,” the other quoted, which shows that he was an extraordinary detective, “and so far as I am concerned it matters little to me whether an irresponsible homicide is a beautiful woman or a misshapen negro.”
They dismissed the taxi at Aldgate Station and turned into Middlesex Street.
The meeting-place of the great congress was a hall which was originally erected by an enthusiastic Christian gentleman with a weakness for the conversion of Jews to the New Presbyterian Church. With this laudable object it had been opened with great pomp and the singing of anthems and the enthusiastic proselytizer had spoken on that occasion two hours and forty minutes by the clock.
After twelve months’ labour the Christian gentleman discovered that the advantages of Christianity only appeal to very rich Jews indeed, to the Cohens who become Cowans, to the Isaacs who become Grahames, and to the curious low-down Jews who stand in the same relation to their brethren as White Kaffirs to a European community.
So the hall passed from hand to hand, and, failing to obtain a music and dancing licence, went back to the mission-hall stage.
Successive generations of small boys had destroyed its windows and beplastered its walls. Successive fly-posters had touched its blank face with colour. Tonight there was nothing to suggest that there was any business of extraordinary importance being transacted within its walls. A Russian or a Yiddish or any kind of reunion does not greatly excite Middlesex Street, and had little Peter boldly announced that the congress of the Red Hundred were to meet in full session there would have been no local excitement and—if the truth be told—he might still have secured the services of his three policemen and commissionaire.
To this worthy, a neat, cleanly gentleman in uniform, wearing on his breast the medals for the relief of Chitral and the Sudan Campaigns, the two men delivered the perforated halves of their tickets and passed through the outer lobby into a small room. By a door at the other end stood a thin man with a straggling beard. His eyes were red-rimmed and weak, he wore long narrow buttoned boots, and he had a trick of pecking his head forward and sideways like an inquisitive hen.
“You have the word, brothers?” he asked, speaking German like one unaccustomed to the language.
The taller of the two strangers shot a swift glance at the sentinel that absorbed the questioner from his cracked patent leather boots to his flamboyant watch-chain. Then he answered in Italian:
“Nothing!”
The face of the guardian flushed with pleasure at the familiar tongue.
“Pass, brother; it is very good to hear that language.”
The air of the crowded hall struck the two men in the face like the blast from a destructor. It was unclean; unhealthy—the scent of an early-morning dosshouse.
The hall was packed, the windows were closed and curtained, and as a precautionary measure, little Peter had placed thick blankets before the ventilators.
At one end of the hall was a platform on which stood a semicircle of chairs and in the centre was a table draped with red. On the wall behind the chairs—every one of which was occupied—was a huge red flag bearing in the centre a great white C. It had been tacked to the wall, but one corner had broken away revealing a part of the painted scroll of the mission workers: “… are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
The two intruders pushed their way through a group that were gathered at the door. Three aisles ran the length of the building, and they made their way along the central gangway and found seats near the platform.
A brother was speaking. He was a good and zealous worker but a bad orator. He spoke in German and enunciated commonplace with hoarse emphasis. He said all the things that other men had said and forgotten. “This is the time to strike” was his most notable sentence, and notable only because it evoked a faint buzz of applause.
The audience stirred impatiently. The good Bentvitch had spoken beyond his allotted time; and there were other people to speak—and prosy at that. And it would be ten o’clock before the Woman of Gratz would rise.
The babble was greatest in the corner of the hall, where little Peter, all eyes and startled eyebrows, was talking to an audience of his own.
“It is impossible, it is absurd, it is most foolish!” his thin voice rose almost to a scream. “I should laugh at it—we should all laugh, but the Woman of Gratz has taken the matter seriously, and she is afraid!”
“Afraid!”
“Nonsense!”
“Oh, Peter, the fool!”
There were other things said because everybody in the vicinity expressed an opinion. Peter was distressed, but not by the epithets. He was crushed, humiliated, beaten by his tremendous tidings. He was nearly crying at the horrible thought. The Woman of Gratz was afraid! The Woman of Gratz who. … It was unthinkable.
He turned his eyes toward the platform, but she was not there.
“Tell us about it, Peter,” pleaded a dozen voices; but the little man with the tears twinkling on his fair eyelashes waved them off.
So far from his incoherent outburst they had learnt only this—that the Woman of Gratz was afraid.
And that was bad enough.
For this woman—she was a girl really, a slip of a child who should have been finishing her education somewhere in Germany—this same woman had once risen and electrified the world.
There had been a meeting in a small Hungarian town to discuss ways and means. And when the men had finished their denunciation of Austria, she rose and talked. A short-skirted little girl with two long flaxen braids of hair, thin-legged, flat-chested, angular, hipless—that is what the men of Gratz noticed as they smiled behind their hands and wondered why her father had brought her to the meeting.
But her
