The outburst against feminine treachery had an effect upon Jenny's state
of mind beyond the mere evoking of tears. These were followed by a
general agitation of her point of view necessitating an outlet for her
revived susceptibleness to emotion. A less sincere heart would have been
caught on the rebound; but she and men were still mutually unattractive.
The consequence of this renewed activity of spirit, in the aspect of its
immediate cause, was paradoxical enough; for when Jenny thought she
would try the pretensions of suffragism, no clear process of reasoning
helped her to such a resolve, no formulated hostility to man. Whatever
logic existed in the decision was fortuitous; nor did she at all
perceive any absence of logic in throwing in her lot with treacherous
woman.
Lilli Vergoe was proud of such a catechumen, and made haste to introduce
her to the tall house in Mecklenburg Square, whose elm-shadowed rooms
displayed the sober glories of the Women's Political, Social and
Economic League. Something about the house reminded Jenny of her first
visit to Madame Aldavini's School; but she found Miss Bailey less
alarming than the dancing mistress as, rising from masses of letters and
scarlet gladioli, she welcomed the candidate. Miss Bailey, the president
of the League, was a tall, handsome woman, very unlike Jenny's
conception of a suffragette. She had a regular profile, a thin,
high-bridged nose, and clearly cut, determined lips. Her complexion was
pale, her hair very brown and rich. Best of all Jenny liked her slim
hands and the voice which, though marred by a slight huskiness due to
public speaking, was full of quality and resonance. She was one of those
women who, carrying in their presence a fine tranquillity at once kindly
and ascetic, imbue the onlooker with their long and perceptive
experience of humanity. She was in no sense homely or motherly; indeed,
she wore about her the remoteness of the great. Yet whatever in her
general appearance seemed of marble was vivified by clear hazel eyes
into the reality of womanhood.
"And so you're going to join our club?" inquired Miss Bailey.
Jenny, although she had intended this first visit to be merely
empirical, felt bound to commit herself to the affirmative.
"You'll soon know all about our objects."
"Oh, I've told her a lot already, Miss Bailey," declared Lilli with the
eagerness of the trusted school-girl.
"That's right," said Miss Bailey, smiling. "Come along then, and I will
enroll you, Miss----"
"Pearl," murmured Jenny, feeling as if her name had somehow slipped down
and escaped sideways through her neck. Then with an effort clearing her
throat, she added, "Jenny Pearl," blushing furiously at the confession
of identity.
"Your address?"
"Better say 17 Hagworth Street, Islington. Only I'm not living there
just now. Now I'm living 43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town."
"Have you a profession?"
"I'm on the stage."
"What a splendid profession, too--for a woman. Don't you think so?"
Jenny stared at this commendation of a state of life she had always
imagined was distasteful to people like Miss Bailey.
"I don't know much about splendid, but I suppose it's all right," she
agreed at last.
"Indeed it is. Are you at the Orient also?"
"Yes, you know, in the ballet," said Jenny very quickly, so that the
president might not think she was trying to push herself unduly.
"I don't believe there's anything that gives more pleasure than good
dancing. Dancing ought to be the expression of life's joy," said the
older woman, gazing at the pigeon-holes full of docketed files, at the
bookshelves stuffed with dry volumes of Ethics and Politics and
Economics, as if half regretting she, too, was not in the Orient Ballet.
"Dancing is the oldest art," she continued. "I like to think they danced
the spring in long before calendars were made. Your subscription is half
a crown a year."
Jenny produced the coin from her bag; and it said much for Miss Bailey's
personality that the new member to adorn the action did not wink over
her shoulder at Lilli.
"Thank you. Here's the badge. It's copied from an old Athenian medal.
This is Pallas Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom."
"She isn't much to look at, is she?" commented Jenny.
"My dear child, that's the owl."
Jenny turned the medal over and contemplated the armed head. Then she
put it carefully away in her purse, wondering if the badge would bring
her luck.
"Now, I shall let Lilli show you round the club rooms, for I'm very busy
this afternoon," said Miss Bailey in gentle dismissal.
The two girls left the study and set out to explore the rest of the
house. Over the mantlepiece of the principal room Jenny saw Mona Lisa
and drew back so quickly that she trod on Lilli's foot.
"I'm not going in there," she said.
"Why not? It's a nice room."
"I'm not going in. I don't want to," she repeated, without any
explanation of her whim.
"All right. Let's go downstairs. We can have tea."
It was a fine afternoon towards the end of July, so the tea-room was
empty. Jenny looked cautiously at all the pictures but none of them
conjured up the past. There was a large photograph of the beautiful sad
head of Jeanne d'Arc, but Jenny did not bother to read that it came
originally from the church of St. Maurice in Orleans. There was a number
of somewhat dreary engravings of famous pioneers of feminism like Mary
Wolstonecraft, whose faces, she thought, would look better turned round
to the wall. Below these hung several statistical maps showing the
density of population in various London slums, with black splodges for
criminal districts. Most of the furniture was of green fumed oak fretted
with hearts, and the crockery that lived dustily on a shelf following
the line of the frieze came from Hanley disguised in Flemish or Breton
patterns, whose studied irregularity of design and roughness of
workmanship was symbolic of much. In order, apparently, to accentuate
the flimsiness of the green fumed oak, there were several mid-Victorian
settees that, having faded in back rooms of Wimpole Street and Portman
Square, were now exposed round the sides of their new abode in a
succession of hillocks. On the wall by the door hung a framed tariff, on
which poached eggs in every permutation of number and combination of
additional delicacies figured most prominently. Here and there on tables
not occupied with green teacups were scattered pamphlets, journals, and
the literary propaganda of the feminine movement. The general atmosphere
of the room was permeated by an odor of damp toast and the stale fumes
of asthma cigarettes.
"What an unnatural smell," murmured Jenny.
"It's those asthma cigarettes," Lilli explained. "One of the members has
got it very bad."
Jenny was glad to escape very soon after tea, and told her friend a
second visit to Mecklenburg Square was not to be done.
"I used to think they was nice houses when I passed by the other side in
that green 'bus going to Covent Garden, but I think they're _very_ stuffy,
and what wall-paper! More like blotting-paper."
However, one Saturday evening in August, as Jenny was leaving the
theater, Lilli begged her to come and hear Miss Ragstead speak on the
general aims of the movement, with particular attention to a proposed
demonstration on the occasion of the re-opening of Parliament.
"When's the old crow going to speak?" Jenny inquired.
"To-morrow evening."
"On a Sunday?"
"Yes."
So, because there was nothing else to do and because nowadays Sunday was
a long grim moping, a procession of pretty hours irrevocable, Jenny
promised to accompany her friend.
It was a wet evening, and Bloomsbury seemed the wettest place in London
as the two girls turned into the sparse lamplight of Mecklenburg Square
and hurried along under the dank, fast-fading planes and elms. Inside
the house, however, there was an air of energetic jollity owing to the
arrival of several girl students from Oxford and Cambridge, who stumped
in and out of the rooms, greeting each other with tales of Swiss
mountains and comparisons of industry. In their strong, low-heeled boots
they stumped about consumed by holiday sunshine and the acquisition of
facts. With friendly smiles and fresh complexions, they talked
enthusiastically to several young men, whose Adam's apples raced up and
down their long necks, giving them the appearance of chickens swallowing
maize very quickly.
"Talk about funny turns," whispered Jenny.
"They're all very clever," Miss Vergoe apologized, as she steered her
intolerant friend past the group.
"Yes, I should say they ought to be clever, too. They _look_ as though
they were pecking each other's brains out."
Miss Bailey encountered them here.
"Why, this is capital," she said. "Miss Ragstead won't be long now. Let
me introduce a dear young friend of mine, Miss Worrill."
"How are you?" Miss Worrill asked heartily.
She was a pleasant girl dressed in Harris tweed strongly odorous from
the rain. Her hair might have been arranged to set off her features to
greater advantage, and it was a pity her complexion was spoilt by a
network of tiny purple veins which always attracted the concentration of
those who talked to her. Jenny began to count them at once.
"Come to hear Connie Ragstead?" asked Miss Worrill. "Jolly good crowd
for August," she went on, throwing a satisfied glance round the room.
"Have you ever heard her?"
"No," Jenny replied, wondering why something in this girl's way of
speaking reminded her of Maurice.
"You'll like her most awfully. I met her once at the Lady Maggie
'Gaudy.'"
"At the what?"
"Our Gaude at Lady Margaret's. Festive occasion and all that. I say, do
you play hockey? I'm getting up a team to play at Wembley this winter."
"My friend and I are too busy," Miss Vergoe explained, looking nervously
round at Jenny to see how she took the suggestion.
"But one can always find time for 'ecker.'"
"I _could_ find time to fly kites. Only I don't want to," said Jenny
dangerously. "You see, I'm on the stage."
"I'm frightfully keen on the stage," Miss Worrill volunteered. "I
believe it could be such a force. I thought of acting myself once--you
know, in real plays, not musical comedy, of course. A friend of mine was
in the 'Ecclesiasuzae' at the Afternoon Theater. She wore a _rather_
jolly vermilion tunic and had bare legs. Absolutely realistic."
Jenny now began to giggle, and whispered "Cocoanut knees" to Lilli, who,
notwithstanding the importance of the occasion, also began to giggle. So
Miss Worrill, presumably shy of their want of sensibility, retired.
Soon, when the rumor of the speaker's arrival ran round the assemblage,
a general move was made in the direction of the large room on the first
floor. Jenny, as she entered with the stream, saw Leonardo's sinister
portrait and tried to retreat; but there were too many eager listeners
in the way, and she had to sit down and prepare to endure the damnable
smile of La Gioconda that seemed directed to the very corner where she
was sitting.
During the earlier part of Miss Ragstead's address, Jenny's attention
was chiefly occupied by her neighbors. She thought that never before was
such a collection of freaks gathered together. Close beside her, dressed
in a green djibbeh embroidered with daisies of terra-cotta silk, was a
tallowy woman who from time to time let several books slide from her lap
on to the floor--a piece of carelessness which always provoked the
audience to a lullaby of protest. In front of this lady were two Hindu
students with flowing orange ties; and just beyond her, in black velvet,
was a tall woman with a flat, pallid face, who gnawed alternately her
nails and the extinguished end of a cigarette. Then came a group of girl
students, all very much alike, all full of cocoa and the binomial
theorem; while the rest of the audience was made up of typists, clerks,
civil servants, copper-workers, palmists, nurses, Americans and poets,
all lending their ears to the speaker's words as in the Zoological
Gardens elephants, swaying gently, offer their trunks for buns.
Gradually, however, from this hotchpotch of types, the personality of
the speaker detached itself and was able to impress Jenny's attention.
Gradually, as she grew tired of watching the audience, she began to
watch Miss Ragstead and, after a critical appreciation of her
countenance, to make an attempt to comprehend the intention of the
discourse.
Miss Constance Ragstead was a woman of about forty, possessing much of
the remote and chastened beauty that was evident in Miss Bailey. She,
too, was pale, not unhealthily, but with the impression of having lived
long in a rarefied atmosphere. Virginity has its fires, and Miss
Ragstead was an inheritor of the spirit which animated Saint Theresa and
Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. Her social schemes were crowned with aureoles,
her plans were lapped by tenuous gold flames. She was a mystic of
humanity, one who from the contemplation of mortality in its individual
aspirations, had arrived at the acknowledgment of man as a perfect idea
and was able from his virtues to create her theogony. This woman's
presence implied the purification of ceaseless effort. Activity as
expressed by her was a sacrament. It conveyed the isolated solemnity of
a force that does not depend for its reality on human conceptions or
practical altruism. Her activity was a moral radium never consumed by
the expenditure of its energy; it was dynamic whether it effected little
or much. When she recalled the factory in which for a year she had
worked as a hand, the enterprise was hallowed with the romance of a
saint's pilgrimage. When she spoke of her green garden, where June had
healed the hearts of many young women, she seemed like an eremite in
whose consolation was absolute peace. Her voice was modulated with those
half-tones that thrushes ring upon the evening air; and since they were
produced suddenly with no hint of premeditation, the feeblest listener
was at some time inevitably waylaid.
It was not astonishing Jenny should find herself caught in the melodious
twilight of the oration, should find that the craning audience was less
important than the speaker. She came to believe that Mona Lisa's smile
was kindlier. She began to take in some of the rhetoric of the
peroration:
"I wish I could persuade you that, if our cause is a worthy cause, it
must exist and endure through the sanity of its adherents. It must never
depend upon the trivial eccentricities of a few. I want to see the
average woman fired with zeal to make the best of herself. I do not want
us to be contemptuously put aside as exceptions. Nor am I anxious to
recruit our strength from the discontented, the disappointed and the
disillusioned. Let us do away with the reproach that we voice a
minority's opinion. Let us preserve the grace and magic of womanhood, so
that with the spiritual power of virginity, the physical grandeur of
motherhood, in a devoted phalanx huge as the army of Darius, we may
achieve our purpose."
Here the speaker paused and, as if afraid she might be deemed to offer
counsels of pusillanimity, broke forth more passionately:
"But because I wish to see our ambition succeed through the aggregate of
dignified opinion, I do not want to discredit or seek to dishearten the
advance-guard. Let us who represent the van of an army so mighty as to
be mute and inexpressive, let us, not thinking ourselves martyrs nor
displaying like Amazons our severed breasts, let us resolve to endure
ignominy and contempt, slander, disgrace and imprisonment. Some day men
will speak well of us; some day the shrieking sisterhood will be
forgotten, and those leaders of women whom to-day we alone venerate,
will be venerated by all. Pay no heed to that subtle propaganda of
passivity. Reject the lily-white counsels of moderation. Remember that
without visible audible agitation this phlegmatic people cannot be
roused. Therefore I call on you who murmur your agreement to join the
great march on Westminster. I implore you to be brave, to despise
calumny, to be careless of abuse and, because you believe you are in the
right, to alarm once more this blind and stolid mass of public opinion
with the contingency of your ultimate triumph."
The speaker sat down, lost in the haze which shrouds a room full of
people deeply wrought by eloquence and emotion. There was a moment's
silence and then, after prolonged applause, the audience began to
babble.
Jenny sat still. She had not listened to the reasoned arguments and
statistical illustrations of the main portion of the speech, nor had she
properly comprehended the peroration. Yet she was charged with resolves,
primed with determination and surgingly impelled to some sort of action.
She was the microcosm of a mob's awakening to the clarion of an orator.
A cataract of formless actions was thundering through her mind; the dam
of indifference had been burst by mere weight of rhetoric, that
powerful dam proof against the tampering of logic. Perhaps she was
passing through the psychical crisis of conversion. Perhaps, in her dead
emotional state, anything that aroused her slightly would have aroused
her violently. No doubt a deep-voiced bishop could have secured a
similar result, had she been leaning against the cold stone of a
cathedral rather than the gray flock wall-paper of Mecklenburg Square.
"I'd like to talk to her," she told Lilli.
"She doesn't half stir you up, eh?"
"I don't know so much about stirring up, Mrs. Pudding," said Jenny,
unwilling to admit any renascence of sensibility. "But I think she's
nice. I'd like to see what sort she'd be to talk to quiet."
No opportunity for a conversation with Miss Ragstead presented itself
that evening; but Lilli, somewhat elated by the capture of Jenny, told
Miss Bailey of her admiration; and the president, who had been attracted
to the neophyte, promised to arrange a meeting. Lilli knew better than
to breathe a word to Jenny of any plan, and merely threw out a casual
suggestion to take tea at the club.
So without any premonitory shyness Jenny found herself talking quite
easily in a corner of the tea-room to Miss Ragstead, who was not merely
persuasive with assemblages, but also acutely sympathetic with
individuals.
"But I don't want a vote," Jenny was saying. "I shouldn't know what to
do with it. I don't see any use in it. My father's got one and it's a
regular nuisance. It keeps him out late every night."
"My dear, you may not want a vote," said Miss Ragstead, "but I do, and I
want the help of girls like you to get it. I want to represent you. As
things are now, you have no say in the government of yourself. Tell me,
now, Jenny--I'm going to call you Jenny straight away--you wouldn't like
to be at the mercy of one man, would you?"
"But I wouldn't. Not me," said Jenny. Yet somehow she spoke not quite so
bravely as once, and even as the assertion was made, her heart throbbed
to a memory of Maurice. After all, she had been at the mercy of one man.
"Of course you wouldn't," Miss Ragstead went on. "Well, we women who
want the vote have the same feeling. We don't like to be at the mercy of
men. I suppose you'd be horrified if I asked you to join our
demonstration in October?"
"What, walk in procession?" Jenny gasped.
"Yes, it's not so very dreadful. Who would object? Your mother?"
"She'd make fun of it, but that wouldn't matter. She'd make everyone
laugh to hear her telling about me in a procession."
Jenny remembered how her mother had teased her father when she saw him
supporting a banner of the Order of Foresters on the occasion of a
beanfeast at Clacton.
"Well, your lover?"
Jenny looked sharply at Miss Ragstead to ascertain if she were laughing.
The word sent such a pang through her. It was a favorite word of
Maurice.
"I haven't got one," she coldly answered.
"No?" said Miss Ragstead, gently skeptical. "I can hardly believe that,
you know, for you surely must be a most attractive girl."
"I did have one," said Jenny, surprised out of her reserve. "Only we
just ended it all of a sudden."
"My dear," said Miss Ragstead softly, "I don't think you're a very happy
little girl. I'm sure you're not. Won't you tell me about it?"
"There's nothing to tell. Men are rotters, that's all. If I thought I
could pay them out by being a suffragette, I'd be a suffragette."
Jenny spoke with decision, pointing the avowal by flinging her cigarette
into the grate.
"Yes, I know that's a reason with some. But I don't think that revenge
is the best of reasons, somehow. I would rather you were convinced that
the movement is right."
"If it annoys men, it must be right," Jenny argued. "Only I don't think
it does. I think they just laugh."
"I see you're in a turbulent state of mind," Miss Ragstead observed.
"And I'm glad in a way, because it proves that you have temperament and
character. You ought to resent a wrong. Of course, I know you'll
disagree with me when I tell you that you're too young to be permanently
injured by any man--and, I think I might add, too proud."
"Yes, I am most shocking proud," Jenny admitted, looking down on the
floor and, as it were, regarding her character incarnate before her.
"But it's just these problems of behavior under difficulties that our
club wants to solve. I'd like to put you on the road to express yourself
and your ambitions without the necessity of--say marriage for
convenience. You're a dancer, aren't you?"
"Um, a ballet girl," said Jenny as usual, careful not to presume the
false grandeur of an isolated stellar existence.
"Are you keen on your dancing?"
"I was once. When I began. Only they crush you at the Orient. Girls
there hate to see you get on. I'm sick of it."
"I wonder," said Miss Ragstead half to herself; "I wonder if active work
for the cause would give you a new zest for life. It might. You feel all
upside down just now, don't you?"
"I feel as if nothing didn't matter. Not _any_thing," replied Jenny
decidedly.
"That's terrible for a girl of your age. You can't be more than eighteen
or nineteen."
"Twenty-one in October."
"So much as that? Yes"--the older woman continued after a reflective
pause--"yes, I believe you want some spur, some excitement quite outside
your ordinary experience. You know I am a doctor, so without
impertinence I can fairly prescribe for you."
"Well, what have I got to do?" Jenny asked. She was almost fascinated
by this lady with her cool hands and deep-set, passionate eyes.
"I wish I could invite you to spend some time with me in Somerset, but
I'm too busy now for a holiday. I feel rather uncertain whether, after
all, to advise you to plunge into the excitement of this demonstration.
And yet I'm sure it would be good for you. Dear child, I hope I'm not
giving bad advice," said Miss Ragstead earnestly as she leaned forward
and took hold of Jenny's hand.
So it came about that Jenny was enrolled in the ranks of the great
demonstration that was to impress the autumnal session of Parliament.
She kept very quiet about her intention and no one, except Lilli, knew
anything about it. The worst preliminary was the purple, green and white
sash which contained her unlucky color. Indeed, at first she could
hardly be persuaded to put it across her shoulders. But when the booming
of the big drum marked the beat, she felt aflame with nervous
expectation and never bothered about the sash or the chance of casual
recognition.
The rhythm of the march, the crashing of the band, the lilting motion,
the unreality of the crowds gaping on the pavements intoxicated her, and
she went swinging on to the tune in a dream of excitement. In the
narrower streets the music blazed with sound and fury of determination,
urging them on, inspiring them with indomitable energy, inexorable
progress. The tops of the houses here seemed to converge, blotting out
the sky; and Jenny felt that she was stationary, while they moved on
like the landscape of a cinematograph. As the procession swept into
Trafalgar Square with its great open space of London sky, the music
unconfined achieved a more poignant appeal and infected the mass of
arduous women with sentiment, making their temper the more dangerous.
The procession became a pilgrimage to some abstract nobility, to no set
place. Jenny was now bewitched by the steady motion into an almost
complete unconsciousness of the gaping sightseers, thought of them, if
she thought of them at all, as figures in a fair-booth to be knocked
carelessly backwards as she passed, more vital than they were with their
painted grins.
In Whitehall the air was again charged with anger. The tall banners far
ahead floated on airs of victory. The mounted women rode like
conquerors. Then for an instant as Jenny heard from one of the
pavement-watchers a coarse and mocking comment on the demonstration, she
thought the whole business mere matter for ridicule and recalled the
circus processions that flaunted through towns on sunny seaside holiday
mornings long ago. Soon, however, the tune reestablished itself in her
brain, and once more she swept on to the noble achievement. The houses
grew taller than ever; faded into remote mists; quaked and shimmered as
if to a fall. Far down the line above the brass and drums was a sound of
screaming, a dull mutter of revolution, a wave of execration and
encouragement. The procession stopped dead: the music ceased in
discords. Two or three of the women fainted. The crowd on either side
suddenly came to life and pressed forward with hot, inquisitive breath.
Somewhere, a long way off, a leader shrieked, "Forward." Policemen were
conjured from the quivering throng. Somebody tore off Jenny's sash.
Somebody trod on her foot. The confusion increased. Nothing was left of
any procession: everyone was pushing, yelling, groaning, scratching,
struggling in a wreck of passions. Jenny was cut off from the
disorganized main body, was helpless in a mob of men. The police were
behaving with that magnificent want of discrimination which
characterizes their behavior in a crisis of disorder. Their tactics were
justified by success, and as they would rely on mutual support in the
official account of the riot, individual idiocy would escape censure.
In so far as Jenny was pushing her way out of the mob, was seeking
desperately to gain the sanctuary of a side street and forever escape
from feminine demonstrations, she was acting in a way likely to cause a
breach of the peace. So it was not surprising that a young plough-boy
lately invested with an uniform should feel impelled to arrest her.
"Now then, you come along of me," commanded the yokel as a blush ebbed
and flowed upon his cheeks glistening with down and perspiration.
"Who are you pushing, you?" cried Jenny, enraged to find her arm in the
tight grasp of a podgy, freckled hand.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he declared.
"Don't you speak to me, you. Why, what _are_ you? Invisible blue when
you're wanted. Let go of me. I won't be held. I wasn't doing anything. I
was going home. Let go."
The young policeman, disinclined to risk the adventure single-handed,
looked around for a fellow-constable to assist at the conveyance of
Jenny to the station. All his companions, however, seemed busily engaged
tugging at recalcitrant women; and instead of being congratulated on his
first arrest, a well-groomed man, white with rage, shouted: "Look here,
you blackguard, I've got your number and I'll have your coat off for
this. This lady was doing absolutely nothing but trying to escape from
the crowd."
The young policeman looked about him once more with watery,
unintelligent eyes. He was hoping that someone would arrest the
well-groomed man; but as nobody did, and as the latter was not unlike
the Captain of the Volunteer Company from whose ranks he had climbed
into the force, the novice released his grip of Jenny and said:
"Now, you be off. You won't get another chance."
"No, you turnip-headed bumpkin," shouted the well-groomed man, "nor will
you, when I've had five minutes at Scotland Yard. I'm going to watch
you, my friend. You're not fit for a position of responsibility."
Jenny, free of the crowd, walked through the peace of Whitehall Court
and promised herself that never again would she have anything to do with
suffragettes.
"Soppy fools," she thought, "they can't do nothing. They can only
jabber, jabber." She reproached herself for imagining it was possible to
consummate a revenge on man by such means. She had effected nothing but
the exposure of her person to the freckled paws of a policeman.
"Not again," said Jenny to herself, "not ever again will I be such a
silly, soppy idiot."
In the distance she could still hear the shouting of the riot; but as
she drew nearer to Charing Cross railway station, the noise of trains
took its place.