It is all very well to say that there have been movements towards
the enfranchisement of women since before the Roman era; it is all
very well to point out that these movements are periodical, almost
as inevitable as the volcanic eruptions that belch out their volumes
of running fire and die down again into peaceful submission: but when
the whole vital cause is altered, when the intrinsic motive in the
entrails of that vast crater is changed, it is no wise policy to say,
"It will pass over--another two or three years and women will find,
as they have always found before, that it is better to sit still and
let others do the work."
It is the problem of population that is being worked out now, not
the mere spontaneous and ephemeral struggle of a few dominating
personalities.
It is well-nigh ludicrous to think that Sally Bishop--quiet,
virtuous, chaste Sally Bishop, the very opposite of a revolutionary--is
one in the ranks of a great army who are marching, they scarcely know
whither, to a command they have scarcely heard, strained to a mighty
endurance in a cause they scarcely understand. She seems too young to
be of service, too frail to bear the hardships of the way. How can she
stand out against the forced marches, the weary, sleepless camping at
night?
There are going to be many in this great campaign who will drop
exhausted from the ranks--many who, under cover of night, when the
sentinel is drowsy at his post, will slip out into the darkness, weary
of the fatigue, regardless of the consequences--a deserter from the
cause that is so ill-understood. There are going to be many who,
through a passing village where all is peace and contentment, will
hear the tempting whisper of mutiny. What is the good of it all--to
what does it lead, this endless forced march towards a vague
encounter with the enemy who are never to be seen? If only they might
pitch tents there and then--there and then dig trenches, make
positions, occupy heights--put the rifle to the shoulder and
fire--into hell if need be. But no--this endless, toilsome marching,
marching--always onward, yet never at the journey's end.
Who blames them if they fall by the way? Even the sergeant of the
division, passing their crumpled bodies by the roadside, becomes a
hypocrite if he kicks them into an obedience of their orders. In his
heart he might well wish to drop out as they have done. Who blames
them, too, if they slink off, hiding behind any cover that will
conceal their trembling bodies until the whole army has gone by?--who
blames them if they sham illness, lameness, anything that may be put
forward as an excuse to set them free?--who blames them if a wayside
cottage offers them shelter and, taking it, they leave the other poor
wretches to go on? Who blames them then? No one--no one with a heart
could do so. The great tragedy lies in the fact that they are left
to blame themselves.
And this--this is the way that Nature wages war--a civil war, that
is the worst, the most harrowing of all. She fights her own kith and
kin; she gives battle to the very conditions which she herself has
made. There is very seldom a hand-to-hand encounter. Only your French
Revolutions and your Russian Massacres mark the spots where the two
armies have met, where blood has flowed like wine from the broken
goblets of some thousands of lives. But usually it is the forced
marches, with the enemy ever retreating over its own ground. And in
this position of women, it is the army of Nature that has begun to
move. Not the mere rising of a rebellious faction, but the entire
unconquerable force of humanity whose whole existence is threatened
by the invading power of population.
And Sally Bishop--frail, tender-hearted, sensitive Sally
Bishop--has donned the bandolier and the haversack and is off with
the rest, just one unit in the rank and file, one slender individual
in Nature's army that is out on a campaign to effect the inevitable
change in the social conditions of the sex. It makes no matter that
she will never reap the benefit; it counts not at all that she will
never touch the spoil. The lines must be filled up. When she falls,
there must be others to take her place. The bugle has sounded in the
hearts of thousands of women of her type, and they have had to obey
its shrilling call.
Stand for half an hour in the morning at any of the main termini of
London's traffic-ways, and you will see them in their thousands. They
little know the law they are obeying; they little realize the cause
for which they are working, or the effect it will produce. In another
book from this pen it has been declared that the words of
Maeterlinck--"the spirit of the hive"--are an inspired phrase. Here,
in these conditions, with no need to don the protecting gauze, you
may see its vivid illustration, as only the great draughtsmanship
of life can illustrate the wondrous schemes of Nature.
For two years Sally Bishop had been one amongst them. For two years
she had caught her tram at Kew Bridge in the morning and her tram
again at Hammersmith at night. Only her Sundays and her Saturday
afternoons were free, except for those two wonderful weeks in the
summer and the yawning gaps in the side of the year which are known
as National holidays.
When--where did the bugle sound that called Sally to her
conscription? What press-gang of circumstances waylaid her, in what
peaceful wandering of life, and bore her off to the service of her
sex?
There is a little story attached to it--one of those slight, slender
threads of incident that go to form a shadow here or a light there
in the broad tapestry of the whole.
The Rev. Samuel Bishop was rector of the parish church in the little
town of Cailsham, in Kent. This was Sally's father. There never was
a meeker man; there never was a man more truly fitted with those
characteristics of piety which are essentially and only Christian.
With charity he was filled, though he had but little to bestow--his
whole intellect was subordinated to his faith--and with the light
of hope his little eyes glittered so long as one straw lay floating
on the tide.
This is the man whom Christianity demands, and this the very man whom
Christianity crushes like a slug under the heel. He is bound to be
a failure--bound to hope too much, be blind with faith, and give,
out of charity, with the witless hand that knows not where to bestow.
For ten years he had held the parish of Cailsham, fulfilling all his
duties by that rule of thumb which is the refuge to all those lacking
in initiative. Not one of the parishioners could find any fault with
him, yet none bore him respect. They blinked through his services.
During his deliberate intoning of the lessons, they thought of all
their worldly affairs, and while he preached, they slept.
Hundreds of parishes are served with men like the Rev. Samuel Bishop.
It is half the decay of Christianity that the prospect of a fat living
will induce men to adopt the profession of the Church. This is the
irony of life in all religions, that to be kept going, to increase
and multiply, they must be financially sound; yet as soon as that
financial security is reached, you have men pouring into their
offices who seek no more than a comfortable living.
There is only one true religion, the ministry of the head to the
devotion of the heart. You need no priesthood here, but the
priesthood of conscience; you need no costly erection of churches,
but the open world of God's house of worship. There is no necessity
for the training of voices, when the choir of Nature can sing in
harmony as no voice ever sang. There is no call now for the two or
three to gather together. The group system has had its day, has done
its work. The two or three who gather together now, do so, not in
a communion of mind, but in criticism and fear. Each knows quite well
what the other is thinking of. Where is the necessity for one common
prayer to bring their souls together? Their souls are already tearing
at each other's throats.
You would not have found the Rev. Samuel Bishop agreeing to this.
How could any man consent to give up his livelihood, even for the
truth? This gentleman would have stayed on in his parish, happy in
his hopeless incompetence, until his parishioners might have sent
in a third request for his retirement, had not the irony of
circumstance broken him upon its unyielding anvil.
For ten years, as has been said, he had held the rectorship of the
parish of Cailsham. Sally was then fourteen years of age. Her mother,
one of those hard yet well-featured women upon whom the struggle of
life wears with but little ill-effect, had endeavoured to bring her
up in the first belief of social importance consistent, to an
illogical mind, with the teachings of her husband's calling. But she
had failed. It was grained in the nature of Sally to let the morrow
take thought for the things of itself. The other three children, the
boy up at Oxford, the two girls, one older, the other younger than
Sally, were different. With them she succeeded. Into their minds she
instilled the knowledge that, of all professions, the Church takes
the highest rank in the social scale, and though in the world itself
they might have found that hard to believe, yet in the little town
of Cailsham Mrs. Bishop had discovered her capacity for draining from
her husband's parishioners a certain social deference and respect.
By persuading the Rev. Samuel to utilize his priestly influence upon
the declining years of an old lady of title in the neighbourhood,
Mrs. Bishop had stolen her way into the very best society which
Cailsham had to offer. And Sally was the only one of her children
who did not thoroughly appreciate it.
With what deftness she had induced her husband to make his spiritual
ministrations indispensable to the tottering vitality of Lady Bray;
with what cunning she herself had persuaded the old woman to be
present at her garden parties over the last five years, though the
poor creature was nothing but the head of death and the bones of decay,
barely kept together by the common support of her clothes, it would
be almost impossible to imagine. But to entertain Lady Bray; to be
even a friend of her ladyship was, in Cailsham in those days, a key
to the secret chamber of social success. And Mrs. Bishop held it.
The Rev. Samuel himself gave her ladyship a copy of the Holy Bible,
bound in the best Russian leather, with various texts marked, which
had never failed to bring her comfort when intoned in the meek
monotony of his gentle voice. On the fly-leaf he had inscribed her
name--Lady Bray, from her devoted friend and rector, Samuel Bishop.
On Sundays it was quite a feature of the Communion Service to see
the state and ceremony with which the Holy Eucharist was carried down
the aisle to the Bray's family pew, where the old lady sat, huddled
and alone in one of the corners, like a dead body covered clumsily
with a black pall. One of the parishioners, who had not that good
fortune of being personally acquainted with Lady Bray declared that
she really almost objected to this invariable interruption of the
service.
"I assure you," she said, "it--it practically amounts to a procession
like they have in the Roman Catholic Church."
It was this lady who--whenever the occasion demanded, which was not
often--bracketed in a breath Roman Catholics and unfortunate women
of the street, and alluded to them jointly as--poor creatures.
To be able to say this, and feel that one is daring convention by
one's breadth of mind, is no uncommon standard of Christian
intelligence.
But all this dutiful attention to Lady Bray availed the Rev. Samuel
nothing. On the anvil of circumstances he was broken, as in the smithy
the red-hot metal is bent and severed as though it were but clay.
After ten years' faithful, if somewhat incompetent service, in the
parish of Cailsham, the Rev. Samuel Bishop was requested to accept
the chaplaincy at some distant Union. It was in this manner that his
downfall came about.