THE SUFFRAGETTE
The night spent on the Embankment seat was less tragic than squalidly
uncomfortable. Wedged in there between those hopeless other figures, Eve
had to resist a nauseating sense of their physical uncleanness, and to
overcome instincts that were in wholesome revolt. Her ears and nostrils
did not spare her. There was a smell of stale alcohol, a smell of fish,
a smell of sour and dirty clothes. Moreover, the man who sat on her
right kept rolling his head on to her shoulder, his dirty felt hat
rubbing her ear and cheek. She edged him off rather roughly, and he woke
up and swore.
“What the —— are you shovin’ for?”
After that she did not attempt to wake him again, turning her face as
far away as possible when his slobbery, stertorous mouth puffed against
her shoulders.
As for the seat—well, it was her first experience of sitting all night
in one position, on a sort of unpadded reality. Her back ached, her neck
ached, her legs ached. She was afraid of waking the man beside her, and
the very fact that she dared not move was a horror in itself. She felt
intolerably stiff, and her feet and hands were cold. She found herself
wondering what would happen if she were to develop a desire to sneeze.
Etiquette forbade one to sneeze in such crowded quarters. She would wake
her neighbour and get sworn at.
Then the tragic absurdity of the whole thing struck her. It was absurd,
but it was horrible. She felt an utter loathing of the creatures on each
side of her, and her loathing raised in her an accusing anger. Who was
responsible? She asked the question irritably, only to discover that in
answering it she was attacked by a disturbing suspicion that she
herself, every thinking creature, was responsible for such an absurdity
as this. Physical disgust proved stronger than pity. She reminded
herself that animals were better cared for. There were stables,
cowsheds, clean fields, where beasts could shelter under trees and
hedges. Worn-out horses and diseased cattle were put out of the way. Why
were not debauched human cattle got rid of cleanly upon the same
scientific plan, for they were lower and far more horrible than the
beasts of the field.
She was surprised that this should be what one such night seemed
destined to teach her. These people were better dead. She could feel no
pity at all for the beast who snored on her shoulder. She could not
consent to justify his becoming what he was. Ill luck, fate, a bad
heritage, these were mere empty phrases. She only knew that she felt
contaminated, that she loathed these wretched, greasy creatures with an
almost vindictive loathing. Her skin felt all of a creep, shrinking from
their uncleanness.
As to her visions of a regenerated civilisation, her theoretical
compassions, what had become of them? Was she not discovering that even
her ideals were personal, selective, prejudiced? These people were
beyond pity. That was her impression. She found herself driven to utter
the cry, “For God’s sake let us clean up the world before we begin to
build up fresh ideas. This rubbish ought to be put out of the way,
burnt, or buried. What is the use of being sentimental about it?” Pity
held aloof. She had a new understanding of Death, and saw him as the
great Cleanser, the Furnaceman who threw all the unclean things into his
destructor. What fools men were to try and cheat Death of his wholesome
due. The children ought to be saved, the really valuable lives fought
for; but this gutter stuff ought to be cleaned up and got rid of in grim
and decent silence.
Eve never expected to sleep, but she slept for two hours, and woke up
just before dawn.
It was not a comfortable awakening. She felt cold and stiff, and her
body ached, and with the return of consciousness came that wholesome
horror of her neighbours, a horror that had taught her more than all the
sociological essays she could have read in a lifetime. The man’s head
was on her shoulder. He still spluttered and blew in his sleep.
Eve decided to sit it out; to go through to the bitter end. Moreover,
she was curious to see the faces of these people by daylight. A strange
stillness prevailed; there was no wind, and the river was running
noiselessly. Once or twice the sound of regular footsteps approached,
and the figure of a policeman loomed up and passed.
A thin light began to spread, and the whole scene about her became a
study in grey. The sky was overcast, canopied with ashen clouds that
were ribbed here and there with lines of amethyst and white. The city
seemed to rise out of a gloomy and mysterious haze, dim, sad, and
unreal. The massive buildings looked like vague grey cliffs. The spires
were blurred lines, leaden coloured and unglittering. There had been a
sprinkling of rain while she had slept, for the pavements were wet and
her clothes damp to the touch. She shivered. It was so cold, and still,
and dreary.
The stillness had been only a relative stillness, for there were plenty
of sounds to be distinguished. A line of vans rumbled over one of the
bridges, a train steamed into Charing Cross. She heard motor horns
hooting in the scattered distance, and she was struck by the conceit
that this was the dawn song of the birds of the city.
The light became hard and cold, and she wondered when her neighbours
would wake. A passing policeman looked at her curiously, seemed inclined
to stop, but walked on.
Turning her head she found she could see the face of the man next to
her. His old black bowler hat had fallen off and lay on the pavement.
Eve studied him, fascinated by her own disgust, and by his sottish
ugliness. His skin was red, blotched, and pitted like an orange, black
hair a quarter of an inch long bristled over his jowl and upper lip. His
eyelids and nose were unmentionable. He wore no collar, and as he
lounged there she could see a great red flabby lower lip jutting out
like the lip of a jug. His black hair was greasy. He was wearing an old
frock coat, whose lapels were all frayed and smeary, as though he were
in the habit of holding himself up by them.
Eve turned away with qualms of disgust, and glanced at the old woman.
Her face, as she slept, had an expression of absurd astonishment, the
eyebrows raised, the mouth open. Her face looked like tallow in a dirty,
wrinkled bladder. She had two moles on one cheek, out of which grey
hairs grew. Her bonnet had fallen back, and her open mouth showed a few
rotten black teeth.
A man at the end of the seat was the first to wake. He sat up, yawned,
and blew his nose on his fingers. Then the sot next to Eve stirred. He
stretched his legs, rolled his head to one side, and, being still half
asleep, began to swear filthily in a thick, grumbling voice. Suddenly he
sat up, turned, and stared into Eve’s face. His red brown eyes were
angry and injected, the sullen, lascivious eyes of a sot.
“Good mornin’!”
She caught the twinge of insolent raillery in his voice. Even his
brutishness was surprised by the appearance of his neighbour, and he had
a reputation for humour. Eve looked away.
He made facetious remarks, half directed to her, half to the world at
large.
“Didn’t know I was in such —— genteel company. Never had no luck.
Suppose I’ve had m’ head on your shoulder all night and didn’t know it.
Didn’t kiss me, did you, while I was sleeping like an innocent babe?”
Another face peered round at her, grinning. Then the old woman woke up,
snuffled, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
“Bin rainin’, of course?”
Eve said that she thought it had. The old woman’s eyes seemed to be
purblind, and without curiosity. A sudden anxiety stole over her face.
She felt behind her, drew out the bit of newspaper, opened it, and
disclosed the fish.
She smelt it, and then began to eat, picking it to pieces with her
fingers.
The red-faced man reached for his hat and put it on with a sullen
rakishness. He was looking at Eve out of the corners of his eyes. Being
a drunkard, he was ugly-tempered in the morning, and the young woman had
given him the cold shoulder.
“Stuck up bit of goods. Looks like the lady. Been up to it, have yer? I
know all about that. Governess, eh? Some old josser of a husband and a
screechin’ wife, and out yer go into the street!”
She was more struck by the vindictive, threatening way he spoke than by
the vile things he said. Her impressions of the night grew more vivid
and more pitiless. Something hardened in her. She felt cold and
contemptuous, and quite capable of facing this human animal.
“Be quiet, please!”
She turned and looked at him steadily, and his dirty eyelids flickered.
“Mayn’t I speak, blast yer?”
“If you speak to me as you are speaking, I will stop the next constable
and give you in charge.”
“Goo’ lord! What the hell are you doin’ here, may I ask?”
She kept her eyes on him.
“I came here just for an experience, because I felt sorry for people,
and wanted to see what a night here was like. I have learnt a good
deal.”
“Ah!”
Something fell out of his face. It relaxed, his lower lip drooping.
“You’ve learnt somethin’.”
She felt pitiless, nauseated.
“I have. I hope before long that we shall have the sense to put people
like you in a lethal chamber. You would be better dead, you know.”
Eve got up and walked away, knowing that in the future there would be
certain creatures whom she could not pity—creatures whom she would look
at with the eyes of Nature, eyes that condemn without pity. She wondered
whether the amateurs who indulged in sentimental eugenics had ever spent
a night sitting on a seat next to a degenerate sot. She doubted it. The
reality would upset the digestion of the strongest sentimentalist.
She felt so stiff and cold that she started to walk briskly in the
direction of Westminster. A light, drizzling rain began to fall, making
the city and the river look even dirtier and uglier, though there is a
fascination about London’s courtesan ugliness that makes soft Arcadian
prettiness seem inane and unprovocative. Nor does bad weather matter so
much in a city, which is a consideration in this wet little island.
Eve had not walked far before she discovered that she was hungry. No
shops would be open yet, but in allowing some whim to take her across
Westminster Bridge she happened on an itinerant coffee-stall at the
corner of a side street. Her last two pennies went in a cup of coffee
and two massive slabs of bread and butter. The keeper of the stall, a
man with a very shiny and freshly shaved chin and cynical blue eyes,
studied her rather doubtfully, as did a tram-driver and two workmen who
came up for breakfast. Eve noticed that the men were watching her,
behind their silence. Her presence there at such an hour was an abnormal
phenomenon that caused them furiously to think.
She heard them recover their voices directly she had moved away.
“Bet you she’s been up to something. ’Eard of any fires down your way,
Jack?”
“No. Think she’s one of them dirty militant sneaks?”
“I wouldn’t mind bettin’ you that’s what she is. Dirty, low-down game
they’re playing. I’ve a good mind to follow her up, and tip a copper the
wink.”
But the speaker remained to talk and to drink another cup of
mahogany-coloured tea.
“That’s just it. These suffragette women ain’t got no notion of sport.
Suppose they belong to the sort as scratches and throws lamps.”
The coffee-stall keeper interjected a question.
“What about the chaps who burnt ricks and haystacks before the Reform
Bill, and the chaps who smashed machines when they first put ’em into
factories?”
“Well, they burnt and broke, but they did it like men.”
“Women ain’t in the same situation.”
“Ain’t they? They can make ’emselves ’eard. Do yer think my ol’ woman
goes about the ’ouse like a bleatin’ lamb? Garn, these militants are
made all wrong inside. Fine sort of cause you’ve got when yer go
sneakin’ about at three in the mornin’, settin’ empty ’ouses alight.
That’s ’eroic, ain’t it?”
These men had set Eve down as a militant, and they had come precious
near the truth.
She was on the edge of militancy, impelled towards strenuous rebellion
by an exasperated sense of the injustice meted out to women, and by
brooding upon the things she herself had experienced. It was a generous
impulse in the main, mingling some bitterness with much enthusiasm, and
moving with such impetuosity that it smothered any sound thinking. For
the moment she was abnormal. She had half starved herself, and during
weeks of loneliness she had encouraged herself to quarrel with society.
She did not see the pathetic absurdity of all this spiritual kicking and
screaming, being more than inclined to regard it as splendid protest
than as an outburst of hysteria, a fit of tantrums more suited to an
ill-balanced and uneducated servant girl.
A shrill voice carries. The frenzied few have delayed so often the very
reforms that they have advocated. And there is a sort of hysterical
enthusiasm that tricks the younger and more generous spirits, and acting
like crude alcoholic drink, stirs up a so-called religious revival or
some such orgy of purblind egoism as this phenomenon of militancy. The
emotions make the brain drunk, and the power of sound reasoning is lost.
The fools, the fanatics, the self-advertisers, the notoriety hunters,
and the genuine idealists get huddled into one exclamatory, pitiable
mob. And it is one of the tragic facts of life that the soul of a mob is
the soul of its lowest and basest members. All the finer, subtler
sensitive restraints are lost. A man of mind may find himself shouting
demagogic cries next to some half drunken coal-heaver.
Now Eve Carfax was on the edge of militancy, and it was a debatable
point with her whether she should begin her campaign that day. Necessity
advised something of the kind, seeing that her purse was empty. Yet she
could not quite convince a sensitive and individualistic pride that the
breaking of a shop window or a scuffle with the police would be an
adequate and suitable protest.
She walked about for an hour in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square,
trying to escape from a treacherous self-consciousness that refused to
suffer the adventure to be treated as an impersonal affair. The few
people whom she passed stared rather hard, and so persistently, that she
stopped to examine herself in a shop window. A dark green blind and the
plate glass made an admirable mirror. It showed her her hair straggling
most disgracefully, and the feminine part of her was shocked.
Her appearance mattered. She did not realise the significance of the
little thrill of shame that had flashed through her when she had looked
at herself in the shop window; and even when she made her way to St.
James’s Park and found an empty seat she deceived herself into believing
that she had come there to think things out, and not to tidy her hair,
with the help of the little mirror and the comb she carried in her
vanity bag. Moreover she felt that she had been chilled on that
Embankment seat, and a cold in the head is not heroic. She had her
protest to make. The whole day loomed over her, big with possibilities.
It made her feel very small and lonely, and cold and insecure.
Hazily, and with a vague audacity that had now deserted her, she had
assured herself that she would strike her blow when the hour came; but
now that she was face to face with the necessity she found that she was
afraid. Even her scorn of her own fear could not whip her into action.
Her more sensitive and spiritual self shrank from the crude publicity of
the ordeal. If she did the thing she had contemplated doing, she knew
that she would be hustled and roughly handled. She saw herself with torn
clothes and tumbled hair. The police would rescue and arrest her. She
would be charged, convicted, and sent to prison.
She did not fear pain, but she did fear the inevitable and vulgar
scuffle, the rough male hands, the humiliation of being at the mercy of
a crowd. Something prouder than her pride of purpose rose up and refused
to prostitute itself in such a scrimmage. She knew how some of these
women had been handled, and as she sat there in the hush of the early
morning she puzzled over the psychological state of those who had dared
to outrage public opinion. Either they were supreme enthusiasts or women
with the souls of fishwives, or drunk with zeal, like those most
offensive of zealots, the early Christians, who scolded, spat, and raved
until they had exasperated some Roman magistrate into presenting them
with martyrdom. She discovered that she had not that sort of courage or
effrontery. The hot, physical smell of the ordeal disgusted her.
Yet Nature was to decide the question for her, and the first
interposition of that beneficent tyrant began to manifest itself as soon
as the stimulating effect of the hot coffee had worn off. Eve felt
chilly, an indefinable restlessness and a feeling of malaise stole over
her. She left the seat in the park, and walking briskly to warm herself,
came into Pall Mall by way of Buckingham Gate. The rush of the day was
beginning. She had been conscious of the deepening roar of the traffic
while she had been sitting over yonder, and now it perplexed her,
pressed upon her with a savage challenge.
She had thought to throw the straw of herself into this torrent of
strenuous materialism. For the moment she was very near to laughter,
near twitting herself with an accusation of egregious egoism. Yet it was
the ego—the intimate, inward I—that was in the ascendant. The hurrying
figures that passed her on the pavement made her recoil into her
impressionable individualism. She felt like a hyper-sensitive child, shy
of being stared at or of being spoken to. The hurry and the noise
bothered her. Her head began to ache. Her will power flagged. She was
feverish.
Eve walked and walked. There seemed nothing for her to do in this
feverish city, but to walk and to go on walking. A significant languor
took possession of her. She was conscious of feeling very tired, not
merely with physical tiredness, but with an utter weariness of spirit.
Her mind refused to go on working. It refused to face any
responsibility, to consider any enterprise.
It surprised her that she did not grow hungry. On the contrary, the
sight of food in a window nauseated her. Her head ached more, and her
lips felt dry. Flushes of heat went over her, alternating with tremors
of cold. Her body felt limp. Her legs did not seem to be there, even
though she went on walking aimlessly along the pavements. The faces of
the people whom she passed began to appear grotesque and sinister.
Nothing seemed very real. Even the sound of the traffic came from a long
way off. By twelve o’clock she was just an underfed young woman with a
temperature, a young woman who should have been in bed.
Eve never quite knew how the idea came to her. She just found it there
quite suddenly, filling the whole lumen of her consciousness. She would
go and speak to the rosy-faced suffragette who sold papers at the corner
of Southampton Row. She did not realise that she had surrendered, or
that Nature might be playing with her as a wise mother plays with a
child.
Eve was quite innocently confident that the young woman would be there.
The neatly dressed, compact figure seemed to enlarge itself, and to
dominate the very city. Eve went up Shaftesbury Avenue, and along New
Oxford Street. She was nearly run over at one crossing. A taxi driver
had to jam on his brakes. She did not notice his angry, expostulatory
glare.
“Now then, miss, wake up!”
It was the male voice, the voice of organised society. “Wake up; move
along in the proper groove, or stand and be run over!” The words passed
over and beyond her. It was a feverish dream walk to the corner of
Southampton Row. Then she found herself talking to the young woman who
sold papers.
“I meant to do something. I’m not strong enough. I have been out all
night on the Embankment.”
She was conscious of a strong presence near her; of a pleasant practical
voice speaking.
“Why, you’re ill! Have you had anything to eat?”
“Some coffee and bread and butter at half-past five. I have been walking
about.”
“Good gracious! You’re feverish! Let me feel.”
She gripped a hot hand.
“Thought so. Have you any money?”
To Eve money presented itself as something that was yellow and
detestable. It was part of the heat in her brain.
“No. I spent the last of it this morning. I want to explain——”
The paper-seller put a hand under Eve’s arm.
“Look here, you’ll faint if you stay out here much longer. I’ll take you
to friends. Of course, you are one of us?”
“I have been trying to earn a living, and to keep my pride.”
“A thing that men generally manage to make impossible!”
They had to wait for some traffic to pass, and to Eve the street seemed
full of vague glare and confusion. She was aware of a firm grip on her
arm, and of the nearness of something that was comforting and
protective. She wanted to sink down into some soft, soothing substance,
to drink unlimited cold water, and not to be bothered.
The body had decided it. There was to be no spasm of physical protest.
Nature had determined that Eve should go to bed.
* * * * *