She might take up a movement. She was a rather exceptionally good public
speaker. Only her elopement and marriage had prevented her being
president of her college Debating Society. If she devoted herself to
some movement she would be free to devise an ostentatiously simple dress
for herself and stick to it, and she would be able to give her little
house a significance of her own, and present herself publicly against
what is perhaps quite the best of all backgrounds for a good-looking,
clear-voiced, self-possessed woman, a platform. Yes; she had to go in
for a Movement.
She reviewed the chief contemporary Movements much as she might have
turned over dress fabrics in a draper's shop, weighing the advantages
and disadvantages of each....
London, of course, is always full of Movements. Essentially they are
absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. They have a common flavour of
progress and revolutionary purpose, and common features in abundant
meetings, officials, and organization generally. Few are expensive, and
still fewer produce any tangible results in the world. They direct
themselves at the most various ends; the Poor, that favourite butt,
either as a whole or in such typical sections as the indigent invalid or
the indigent aged, the young, public health, the woman's cause, the
prevention of animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous
advertisement of Shakespear (that neglected poet), novel but genteel
modifications of medical or religious practice, dress reform, the
politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement of aeronautics, universal
military service, garden suburbs, domestic arts, proportional
representation, duodecimal arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama.
They range in size and importance from campaigns on a Plessingtonian
scale to sober little intellectual Beckingham things that arrange to
meet half-yearly, and die quietly before the second assembly. If Heaven
by some miracle suddenly gave every Movement in London all it professed
to want, our world would be standing on its head and everything would be
extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. But, as Mr. Roosevelt once
remarked, the justifying thing about life is the effort and not the
goal, and few Movements involve any real and impassioned struggle to get
to the ostensible object. They exist as an occupation; they exercise the
intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance of the
normal routines of life. In the days when everybody was bicycling an
ingenious mechanism called Hacker's Home Bicycle used to be advertised.
Hacker's Home Bicycle was a stand bearing small rubber wheels upon which
one placed one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in such a
way that it could be mounted and ridden without any sensible forward
movement whatever. In bad weather, or when the state of the roads made
cycling abroad disagreeable Hacker's Home Bicycle could be placed in
front of an open window and ridden furiously for any length of time.
Whenever the rider tired, he could descend--comfortably at home
again--and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had been. In exactly
the same way the ordinary London Movement gives scope for the restless
and progressive impulse in human nature without the risk of personal
entanglements or any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.
Marjorie considered the Movements about her. She surveyed the accessible
aspects of socialism, but that old treasure-house of constructive
suggestion had an effect like a rich chateau which had been stormed and
looted by a mob. For a time the proposition that "we are all Socialists
nowadays" had prevailed. The blackened and discredited frame remained,
the contents were scattered; Aunt Plessington had a few pieces, the Tory
Democrats had taken freely, the Liberals were in possession of a hastily
compiled collection. There wasn't, she perceived, and there never had
been a Socialist Movement; the socialist idea which had now become part
of the general consciousness, had always been too big for polite
domestication. She weighed Aunt Plessington, too, in the balance, and
found her not so much wanting indeed as excessive. She felt that a
Movement with Aunt Plessington in it couldn't possibly offer even
elbow-room for anybody else. Philanthropy generally she shunned. The
movements that aim at getting poor people into rooms and shouting at
them in an improving, authoritative way, aroused an instinctive dislike
in her. Her sense of humour, again, would not let her patronize
Shakespear or the stage, or raise the artistic level of the country by
means of green-dyed deal, and the influence of Trafford on her mind
debarred her from attempting the physical and moral regeneration of
humanity by means of beans and nut butter. It was indeed rather by the
elimination of competing movements than by any positive preference that
she found herself declining at last towards Agatha Alimony's section of
the suffrage movement.... It was one of the less militant sections, but
it held more meetings and passed more resolutions than any two others.
One day Trafford, returning from an afternoon of forced and
disappointing work in his laboratory,--his mind had been steadfastly
sluggish and inelastic,--discovered Marjorie's dining room crowded with
hats and all the rustle and colour which plays so large a part in
constituting contemporary feminine personality. Buzard, the feminist
writer, and a young man just down from Cambridge who had written a
decadent poem, were the only men present. The chairs were arranged
meeting-fashion, but a little irregularly to suggest informality; the
post-impressionist picture was a rosy benediction on the gathering, and
at a table in the window sat Mrs. Pope in the chair, looking quietly
tactful in an unusually becoming bonnet, supported by her daughter and
Agatha Alimony. Marjorie was in a simple gown of blueish-grey, hatless
amidst a froth of foolish bows and feathers, and she looked not only
beautiful and dignified but deliberately and conscientiously patient
until she perceived the new arrival. Then he noted she was a little
concerned for him, and made some futile sign he did not comprehend. The
meeting was debating the behaviour of women at the approaching census,
and a small, earnest, pale-faced lady with glasses was standing against
the fireplace with a crumpled envelope covered with pencil notes in her
hand, and making a speech. Trafford wanted his tea badly, but he had not
the wit to realize that his study had been converted into a refreshment
room for the occasion; he hesitated, and seated himself near the
doorway, and so he was caught; he couldn't, he felt, get away and seem
to slight a woman who was giving herself the pains of addressing him.
The small lady in glasses was giving a fancy picture of the mind of Mr.
Asquith and its attitude to the suffrage movement, and telling with a
sort of inspired intimacy just how Mr. Asquith had hoped to "bully women
down," and just how their various attempts to bring home to him the
eminent reasonableness of their sex by breaking his windows,
interrupting his meetings, booing at him in the streets and threatening
his life, had time after time baffled this arrogant hope. There had been
many signs lately that Mr. Asquith's heart was failing him. Now here was
a new thing to fill him with despair. When Mr. Asquith learnt that women
refused to be counted in the census, then at least she was convinced he
must give in. When he gave in it would not be long--she had her
information upon good authority--before they got the Vote. So what they
had to do was not to be counted in the census. That was their paramount
duty at the present time. The women of England had to say quietly but
firmly to the census man when he came round: "No, we don't count in an
election, and we won't count now. Thank you." No one could force a woman
to fill in a census paper she didn't want to, and for her own part, said
the little woman with the glasses, she'd starve first. (Applause.) For
her own part she was a householder with a census paper of her own, and
across that she was going to write quite plainly and simply what she
thought of Mr. Asquith. Some of those present wouldn't have census
papers to fill up; they would be sent to the man, the so-called Head of
the House. But the W.S.P.U. had foreseen that. Each householder had to
write down the particulars of the people who slept in his house on
Sunday night, or who arrived home before mid-day on Monday; the reply of
the women of England must be not to sleep in a house that night where
census papers were properly filled, and not to go home until the
following afternoon. All through that night the women of England must be
abroad. She herself was prepared, and her house would be ready. There
would be coffee and refreshments enough for an unlimited number of
refugees, there would be twenty or thirty sofas and mattresses and piles
of blankets for those who chose to sleep safe from all counting. In
every quarter of London there would be houses of refuge like hers. And
so they would make Mr. Asquith's census fail, as it deserved to fail, as
every census would fail until women managed these affairs in a sensible
way. For she supposed they were all agreed that only women could manage
these things in a sensible way. That was _her_ contribution to this
great and important question. (Applause, amidst which the small lady
with the glasses resumed her seat.)
Trafford glanced doorward, but before he could move another speaker was
in possession of the room. This was a very young, tall, fair,
round-shouldered girl who held herself with an unnatural rigidity, fixed
her eyes on the floor just in front of the chairwoman, and spoke with
knitted brows and an effect of extreme strain. She remarked that some
people did not approve of this proposed boycott of the census. She hung
silent for a moment, as if ransacking her mind for something mislaid,
and then proceeded to remark that she proposed to occupy a few moments
in answering that objection--if it could be called an objection. They
said that spoiling the census was an illegitimate extension of the woman
movement. Well, she objected--she objected fiercely--to every word of
that phrase. Nothing was an illegitimate extension of the woman
movement. Nothing could be. (Applause.) That was the very principle
they had been fighting for all along. So that, examined in this way,
this so-called objection resolved itself into a mere question begging
phrase. Nothing more. And her reply therefore to those who made it was
that they were begging the question, and however well that might do for
men, it would certainly not do, they would find, for women. (Applause.)
For the freshly awakened consciousness of women. (Further applause.)
This was a war in which quarter was neither asked nor given; if it were
not so things might be different. She remained silent after that for the
space of twenty seconds perhaps, and then remarked that that seemed to
be all she had to say, and sat down amidst loud encouragement.
Then with a certain dismay Trafford saw his wife upon her feet. He was
afraid of the effect upon himself of what she was going to say, but he
need have had no reason for his fear. Marjorie was a seasoned debater,
self-possessed, with a voice very well controlled and a complete mastery
of that elaborate appearance of reasonableness which is so essential to
good public speaking. She could speak far better than she could talk.
And she startled the meeting in her opening sentence by declaring that
she meant to stay at home on the census night, and supply her husband
with every scrap of information he hadn't got already that might be
needed to make the return an entirely perfect return. (Marked absence of
applause.)
She proceeded to avow her passionate interest in the feminist movement
of which this agitation for the vote was merely the symbol. (A voice:
"No!") No one could be more aware of the falsity of woman's position at
the present time than she was--she seemed to be speaking right across
the room to Trafford--they were neither pets nor partners, but
something between the two; now indulged like spoilt children, now
blamed like defaulting partners; constantly provoked to use the arts of
their sex, constantly mischievous because of that provocation. She
caught her breath and stopped for a moment, as if she had suddenly
remembered the meeting intervening between herself and Trafford. No, she
said, there was no more ardent feminist and suffragist than herself in
the room. She wanted the vote and everything it implied with all her
heart. With all her heart. But every way to get a thing wasn't the right
way, and she felt with every fibre of her being that this petulant
hostility to the census was a wrong way and an inconsistent way, and
likely to be an unsuccessful way--one that would lose them the sympathy
and help of just that class of men they should look to for support, the
cultivated and scientific men. (A voice: "_Do_ we want them?") What was
the commonest charge made by the man in the street against women?--that
they were unreasonable and unmanageable, that it was their way to get
things by crying and making an irrelevant fuss. And here they were, as a
body, doing that very thing! Let them think what the census and all that
modern organization of vital statistics of which it was the central
feature stood for. It stood for order, for the replacement of guesses
and emotional generalization by a clear knowledge of facts, for the
replacement of instinctive and violent methods, by which women had
everything to lose (a voice: "No!") by reason and knowledge and
self-restraint, by which women had everything to gain. To her the
advancement of science, the progress of civilization, and the
emancipation of womanhood were nearly synonymous terms. At any rate,
they were different phases of one thing. They were different aspects of
one wider purpose. When they struck at the census, she felt, they
struck at themselves. She glanced at Trafford as if she would convince
him that this was the real voice of the suffrage movement, and sat down
amidst a brief, polite applause, that warmed to rapture as Agatha
Alimony, the deep-voiced, stirring Agatha, rose to reply.
Miss Alimony, who was wearing an enormous hat with three nodding ostrich
feathers, a purple bow, a gold buckle and numerous minor ornaments of
various origin and substance, said they had all of them listened with
the greatest appreciation and sympathy to the speech of their hostess.
Their hostess was a newcomer to the movement, she knew she might say
this without offence, and was passing through a phase, an early phase,
through which many of them had passed. This was the phase of trying to
take a reasonable view of an unreasonable situation. (Applause.) Their
hostess had spoken of science, and no doubt science was a great thing;
but there was something greater than science, and that was the ideal. It
was woman's place to idealize. Sooner or later their hostess would
discover, as they had all discovered, that it was not to science but the
ideal that women must look for freedom. Consider, she said, the
scientific men of to-day. Consider, for example, Sir James
Crichton-Browne, the physiologist. Was he on their side? On the
contrary, he said the most unpleasant things about them on every
occasion. He went out of his way to say them. Or consider Sir Almroth
Wright, did he speak well of women? Or Sir Ray Lankester, the biologist,
who was the chief ornament of the Anti-Suffrage Society. Or Sir Roderick
Dover, the physicist, who--forgetting Madame Curie, a far more
celebrated physicist than himself, she ventured to say (Applause.) had
recently gone outside his province altogether to abuse feminine
research. There were your scientific men. Mrs. Trafford had said their
anti-census campaign would annoy scientific men; well, under the
circumstances, she wanted to annoy scientific men. (Applause.) She
wanted to annoy everybody. Until women got the vote (loud applause) the
more annoying they were the better. When the whole world was impressed
by the idea that voteless women were an intolerable nuisance, then there
would cease to be voteless women. (Enthusiasm.) Mr. Asquith had said--
And so on for quite a long time....
Buzard rose out of waves of subsiding emotion. Buzard was a slender,
long-necked, stalk-shaped man with gilt glasses, uneasy movements and a
hypersensitive manner. He didn't so much speak as thrill with thought
vibrations; he spoke like an entranced but still quite gentlemanly
sibyl. After Agatha's deep trumpet calls, he sounded like a solo on the
piccolo. He picked out all his more important words with a little stress
as though he gave them capitals. He said their hostess's remarks had set
him thinking. He thought it was possible to stew the Scientific Argument
in its own Juice. There was something he might call the Factuarial
Estimate of Values. Well, it was a High Factuarial Value on their side,
in his opinion at any rate, when Anthropologists came and told him that
the Primitive Human Society was a Matriarchate. ("But it wasn't!" said
Trafford to himself.) It had a High Factuarial Value when they assured
him that Every One of the Great Primitive Inventions was made by a
Woman, and that it was to Women they owed Fire and the early Epics and
Sagas. ("Good Lord!" said Trafford.) It had a High Factuarial Value when
they not only asserted but proved that for Thousands of Years, and
perhaps for Hundreds of Thousands of Years, Women had been in possession
of Articulate Speech before men rose to that Level of Intelligence....
It occurred suddenly to Trafford that he could go now; that it would be
better to go; that indeed he _must_ go; it was no doubt necessary that
his mind should have to work in the same world as Buzard's mental
processes, but at any rate those two sets of unsympathetic functions
need not go on in the same room. Something might give way. He got up,
and with those elaborate efforts to be silent that lead to the violent
upsetting of chairs, got himself out of the room and into the passage,
and was at once rescued by the sympathetic cook-general, in her most
generalized form, and given fresh tea in his study--which impressed him
as being catastrophically disarranged....