Rebel Women
BY
EVELYN SHARP
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMX
Copyright, 1910
BY JOHN LANE COMPANY
Some of these sketches have appeared in the _Manchester Guardian_, the
_Daily Chronicle_, and _Votes for Women_.
Contents
Page
I. The Women at the Gate 7
II. To Prison while the Sun Shines 20
III. Shaking Hands with the Middle Ages 27
IV. Filling the War Chest 41
V. The Conversion of Penelope's Mother 51
VI. At a Street Corner 59
VII. The Crank of all the Ages 68
VIII. Patrolling the Gutter 75
IX. The Black Spot of the Constituency 83
X. "Votes for Women--Forward!" 92
XI. The Person who cannot Escape 101
XII. The Daughter who Stays at Home 110
XIII. The Game that wasn't Cricket 118
XIV. Dissension in the Home 123
Rebel Women
I
The Women at the Gate
"Funny, isn't it?" said the young man on the top of the omnibus.
"No," said the young woman from whom he appeared to expect an answer, "I
don't think it is funny."
"Take care," said the young man's friend, nudging him, "perhaps she's
one of them!"
Everybody within hearing laughed, except the woman, who did not seem to
be aware that they were talking about her. She was on her feet,
steadying herself by grasping the back of the seat in front of her, and
her eyes, non-committal in their lack of expression, were bent on the
roaring, restless crowd that surged backwards and forwards in the Square
below, where progress was gradually becoming an impossibility due to the
stream of traffic struggling towards Whitehall. The thing she wanted to
find was not down there, among the slipping horses, the swaying men and
women, the moving lines of policemen; nor did it lurk in those denser
blocks of humanity that marked a spot, here and there, where some
resolute, battered woman was setting her face towards the gate of St.
Stephen's; nor was the thing she sought to be found behind that locked
gate of liberty where those in possession, stronger far in the
convention of centuries than locks or bars could make them, stood in
their well-bred security, immeasurably shocked at the scene before them
and most regrettably shaken, as some of them were heard to murmur, in a
lifelong devotion to the women's cause.
The searching gaze of the woman on the omnibus wandered for an instant
from all this, away to Westminster Bridge and the blue distance of
Lambeth, where darting lamps, like will-o'-the-wisps come to town, added
a touch of magic relief to the dinginess of night. Then she came back
again to the sharp realism of the foreground and found no
will-o'-the-wisps there, only the lights of London shining on a picture
she should remember to the end of her life. It did not matter, for the
thing beyond it all that she wanted to be sure of, shone through rain
and mud alike.
"Lookin' for a friend of yours, p'raps?" said a not unfriendly woman
with a baby, who was also standing up to obtain a more comprehensive
view of what was going on below.
"No," was the answer again, "I am looking at something that isn't
exactly there; at least----"
"If I was you, miss," interrupted the facetious youth, with a wink at
his companion, "I should chuck looking for what ain't there, and----"
She turned and smiled at him unexpectedly. "Perhaps you are right," she
said. "And yet, if I didn't hope to find what isn't there, I couldn't go
through with what I have to do to-night."
The amazed stare of the young man covered her, as she went swiftly down
the steps of the omnibus and disappeared in the crowd.
"Balmy, the whole lot of 'em!" commented the conductor briefly.
The woman with the passionless eyes was threading her way through the
straggling clusters of people that fringed the great crowd where it
thinned out towards Broad Sanctuary. A girl wearing the militant
tricolour in her hat, brushed against her, whispered, "Ten been taken,
they say; they're knocking them about terribly to-night!" and passed
noiselessly away. The first woman went on, as though she had not heard.
A roar of voices and a sudden sway of the throng that pinned her against
some railings at the bottom of Victoria Street, announced the eleventh
arrest. A friendly artisan in working clothes swung her up till she
stood beside him on the stone coping, and told her to "ketch on." She
caught on, and recovered her breath laboriously.
The woman, who had been arrested after being turned back from the doors
of the House repeatedly for two successive hours, was swept past in the
custody of an inspector, who had at last put a period to the mental and
physical torment that a pickpocket would have been spared. A swirling
mass of people, at once interested and puzzled, sympathetic and
uncomprehending, was swept along with her and round her. In her eyes was
the same unemotional, detached look that filled the gaze of the woman
clinging to the railings. It was the only remarkable thing about her;
otherwise, she was just an ordinary workaday woman, rather drab-looking,
undistinguished by charm or attraction, as these things are generally
understood.
"Now then, please, every one who wants a vote must keep clear of the
traffic. Pass along the footway, ladies, if you please; there's no votes
to be had in the middle of the roadway," said the jocular voice of the
mounted constable, who was backing his horse gently and insistently into
the pushing, struggling throng.
The jesting tone was an added humiliation; and women in the crowd,
trying to see the last of their comrade and to let her know that they
were near her then, were beaten back, hot with helpless anger. The
mounted officer came relentlessly on, successfully sweeping the pavement
clear of the people whom he was exhorting with so much official
reasonableness not to invade the roadway. He paused once to salute and
to avoid two men, who, having piloted a lady through the backwash of the
torrent set in motion by the plunging horse, were now hoisting her into
a place of safety just beyond the spot where the artisan and the other
woman held on to the railings.
"Isn't it terrible to see women going on like this?" lamented the lady
breathlessly. "And they say some of them are quite nice--like us, I
mean."
The artisan, who, with his neighbour, had managed to evade the
devastating advance of the mounted policeman, suddenly put his hand to
his mouth and emitted a hoarse cheer.
"Bravo, little 'un!" he roared. "Stick to it! Votes for women, I say!
Votes for women!"
The crowd, friendly to the point of admiring a struggle against fearful
odds which they yet allowed to proceed without their help, took up the
words with enthusiasm; and the mud-bespattered woman went away to the
haven of the police station with her war-cry ringing in her ears.
The man who had led the cheer turned to the woman beside him, as though
to justify his impulse. "It's their pluck," he said. "If the unemployed
had half as much, they'd have knocked sense into this Government long
ago!"
A couple of yards away, the lady was still lamenting what she saw in a
plaintive and disturbed tone. Unconsciously, she was putting herself on
the defensive.
"I shouldn't blame them," she maintained, "if they did something really
violent, like--like throwing bombs and things. I could understand that.
But all this--all this silly business of trying to get into the House of
Commons, when they know beforehand that they can't possibly do it--oh,
it's so sordid and loathsome! Did you see that woman's hair, and the way
her hat was bashed in, and the mud on her nose? Ugh!"
"You can't have all the honour and glory of war, and expect to keep your
hair tidy too," observed one of the men, slightly amused.
"War!" scoffed his wife. "There's none of the glory of war in this."
Her glance ranged, as the other woman's had done, over the dull black
stream of humanity rolling by at her feet, over the wet and shining
pavements, casting back their myriad distorted reflections in which
street lamps looked like grinning figures of mockery--over the whole
drear picture of London at its worst. She saw only what she saw, and she
shuddered with distaste as another mounted officer came sidling through
the crowd, pursuing another hunted rebel woman, who gave way only inch
by inch, watching her opportunity to face once more towards the locked
gate of liberty. Evidently, she had not yet given sufficient proof of
her unalterable purpose to have earned the mercy of arrest; and a ring
of compassionate men formed round her as a body-guard, to allow her a
chance of collecting her forces. A reinforcement of mounted police at
once bore down upon the danger spot, and by the time these had worked
slowly through the throng, the woman and her supporters had gone, and a
new crowd had taken the place of the former one.
"Oh, there's none of the glory of war in that!" cried the woman again, a
tremble in her voice.
"There is never any glory in war--at least, not where the war is," said
her second companion, speaking for the first time. His voice travelled
to the ear of the other woman, still clinging to the railings with the
artisan. She glanced round at him swiftly, and as swiftly let him see
that she did not mean to be recognized; and he went on talking as if he
had not seen her turn round.
"This is the kind of thing you get on a bigger scale in war," he said,
in a half-jesting tone, as if ashamed of seeming serious. "Same mud and
slush, same grit, same cowardice, same stupidity and beastliness all
round. The women here are fighting for something big; that's the only
difference. Oh, there's another, of course; they're taking all the kicks
themselves and giving none of 'em back. I suppose it has to be that way
round when you're fighting for your souls and not for your bodies."
"I didn't know you felt like that about it," said the woman, staring at
him curiously. "Oh, but of course you can't mean that real war is
anything like this wretched scuffle of women and police!"
"Oh, yes," returned the other, in the same tone of gentle raillery.
"Don't you remember Monsieur Bergeret? He was perfectly right. There is
no separate art of war, because in war you merely practise the arts of
peace rather badly, such as baking and washing, and cooking and digging,
and travelling about. On the spot it is a wretched scuffle; and the side
that wins is the side that succeeds in making the other side believe it
to be invincible. When the women can do that, they've won."
"They don't look like doing it to-night, do they?" said the woman's
husband breezily. "Thirteen women and six thousand police, you know!"
"Exactly. That proves it," retorted the man, who had fought in real
wars. "They wouldn't bring out six thousand police to arrest thirteen
men, even if they all threw bombs, as your wife here would like to see."
"The police are not there only to arrest the women----"
"That's the whole point," was the prompt reply. "You've got to smash an
idea as well as an army in every war, still more in every revolution,
which is always fought exclusively round an idea. If thirteen women
batter at the gates of the House of Commons, you don't smash the idea by
arresting the thirteen women, which could be done in five minutes. So
you bring out six thousand police to see if that will do it. That is
what lies behind the mud and the slush--the idea you can't smash."
A man reeled along the pavement and lurched up against them.
"Women in trousers! What's the country coming to?" he babbled; and
bystanders laughed hysterically.
"Come along; let's get out of this," said the woman's husband hurriedly;
and the trio went off in the direction of the hotel.
The woman with the passionless eyes looked after them. "He sees what we
see," she murmured.
"Seems he's been in the army, active service, too," remarked the artisan
in a sociable manner. "I like the way he conversed, myself."
"He understands, that is all," explained his companion. "He sees what it
all means--all this, I mean, that the ordinary person calls a failure
because we don't succeed in getting into the House. Do you remember, in
'Agamemnon'--have you read 'Agamemnon'?"
It did not strike her as strange that she should be clasping iron
railings in Westminster, late on a wet evening, talking to a working-man
about Greek tragedy. The new world she was treading to-night, in which
things that mattered were given their true proportions, and important
scruples of a lifetime dwindled to nothingness, gave her a fresh and a
whimsical insight into everything that happened; and the odd companion
that chance had flung her, half an hour ago, became quite easily the
friend she wanted at the most friendless moment she had ever known.
The man, without sharing her reasons for a display of unusual
perception, seemed equally unaware of any strangeness in the situation.
"No, miss, I haven't read it," he answered. "That's Greek mythology,
isn't it? I never learnt to speak Greek."
"Nor I," she told him; "but you can get it translated into English
prose. It reminds me always of our demonstrations in Parliament Square,
because there is a chorus in it of stupid old men, councillors, they
are, I think, who never understand what is going on, however plainly it
is put to them. When Cassandra prophesies that Agamemnon is going to be
murdered--as we warn the Prime Minister when we are coming to see
him--they pretend not to see what she is driving at, because if they
did, they would have to do something. And then, when her prophecy comes
true and he is murdered--of course, the analogy ends here, because we
are not out to murder anybody, only to make the Prime Minister hear our
demands--they run about wringing their hands and complaining; but nobody
does anything to stop it. It really is rather like the evasions of the
Home Office when people ask questions in Parliament about the prison
treatment of the Suffragettes, isn't it?"
"Seems so," agreed her new friend, affably.
"And then," continued the woman, scorn rising in her voice, "when
Clytaemnestra comes out of the house and explains why she has murdered
her husband, they find plenty to say because there is a woman to be
blamed, though they never blamed Agamemnon for doing far worse things to
her. That is the way the magistrate and the daily papers will talk
to-morrow, when our women are brought up in the police court."
"That's it! Always put all the blame on the women," said the artisan,
grasping what he could of her strange discourse.
Big Ben tolled out ten strokes, and his companion, catching her breath,
looked with sudden apprehension at the moving, throbbing block of
people, now grown so immense that the police, giving up the attempt to
keep the road clear, were merely concerned in driving back the throng on
four sides and preserving an open space round the cluster of buildings
known to a liberty-loving nation as the People's House. The gentlemen,
who still stood in interested groups behind the barred gates of it,
found the prospect less entertaining now that the action had been
removed beyond the range of easy vision; and some of the bolder ones
ventured out into the hollow square, formed by an unbroken line of
constables, who were standing shoulder to shoulder, backed by mounted
men who made little raids from time to time on the crowd behind, now
fast becoming a very ugly one. Every possible precaution was being taken
to avoid the chance of annoyance to any one who might still wish to
preserve a decorous faith in the principle of women's liberty.
Meanwhile, somewhere in that shouting, hustling, surging mass of
humanity, as the woman onlooker knew full well, was the twelfth member
of the women's deputation that had been broken up by the police, two
hours ago, before it could reach the doors of the House; and knowing
that her turn had come now, she pictured that twelfth woman beating
against a barrier that had been set up against them both ever since the
world grew civilized. There was not a friend near, when she nodded to
the artisan and slipped down from her temporary resting-place. The
respectable and sympathetic portion of the crowd was cut off from her,
away up towards Whitehall, whither it had followed the twelfth woman. On
this side of Parliament Square all the idlers, all the coarse-tongued
reprobates of the slums of Westminster, never far distant from any
London crowd, were herded together in a stupid, pitiless, ignorant mob.
The slough of mud underfoot added the last sickening touch to a scene
that for the flash of an instant made her heart fail.
"St. James's Park is the nearest station, miss," said the man, giving
her a helping hand. "Don't advise you to try the Bridge; might find it a
bit rough getting across."
She smiled back at him from the kerbstone, where she stood hovering a
second or two on the fringe of the tumult and confusion. Her moment's
hesitation was gone, and the sure look had come back to her eyes.
"I am not going home," she told him. "I am the thirteenth woman, you
see."
She left the artisan staring at the spot near the edge of the pavement
where the crowd had opened and swallowed her up.
"And she so well-informed too!" he murmured. "I don't like to think of
it--I don't like to think of it!"
* * * * *
Shortly after midnight two men paused, talking, under the shadow of
Westminster Abbey, and watched a patrol of mounted police that ambled at
a leisurely pace across the deserted Square. The light in the Clock
Tower was out. Thirteen women, granted a few hours' freedom in return
for a word of honour, had gone to their homes, proudly conscious of
having once more vindicated the invincibility of their cause; and some
five or six hundred gentlemen had been able to issue in safety from the
stronghold of liberty, which they had once more proved to themselves to
be impregnable. And on the morrow the prisoners of war would again pay
the price of the victory that both sides thought they had won.
"If that is like real war too," said one of the men to the other, who
had just made these observations aloud, "how does anybody ever know
which side has won?"
"By looking to see which side pays the price of victory," answered the
man who had fought in real wars.
II
To Prison while the Sun Shines
Once, when I went to Holloway Gaol to visit a friend who had been sent
there by a puzzled Government, the wardress who led me across the
echoing stone yard was inspired to make a little pleasant conversation.
"It's pretty here in summer," she remarked sombrely.
At the time it was natural, perhaps, to credit her with a grim sense of
humour; but a morning spent not long afterwards in a London police court
suggested another explanation. You cannot sit in a police court and
watch while men and women pass out into captivity, without realizing how
many there are of us who go through the world snatching desperately at
the air for some of the colour of life. I think my wardress-guide would
scarcely have burst out with her involuntary remark had not some one
come in from the outside to remind her that she lived in a grey
semblance of a world, full of people who had tried to take a short cut
to happiness and managed to get lost on the way. It was her instinctive
human defence of a system that thinks to cure a desire for sunshine by
shutting it out.
All the people I saw convicted in the police court that morning went to
prison while the sun shone; for it was one of those irrepressible summer
days that even London smoke cannot succeed in dimming. The brilliance of
it had touched the official soul of the constable who guarded the door;
and the little crowd on the pavement, clamouring with or without
justification for admittance, was at least being handled with wit and
good humour.
"Only those under remand, if you please!" remonstrated the doorkeeper
politely, placing on one side the little woman who was waving a
visiting-card at him. "Press, did you say, madam? Pressing to get in, I
should call it, wouldn't you? Well, well, I can't say what might happen
presently if you care to wait on the chance. Those under remand only.
Yes, yes, to be sure! If you were let out on bail the previous evening,
you're under remand; but you're not a prisoner yet, or you wouldn't be
out here, would you now? Pass inside, please. The other lady is your
mother? Some of you ladies can show a lot of mothers to-day, it seems to
me. Right along the footway, ladies, if you please. Those under remand
only!"
A man with a blue paper in his hand made a path with some difficulty
through the crowd of waiting women who continued to throng the pavement
with courageous patience. He was admitted without question, but wore the
air of a man who felt that his natural prerogative as a frequenter of
police courts was being infringed. Certainly the constable who guarded
the door took far less interest in him than in the ladies on remand; and
he was received without any wit at all. After him came the gentlemen of
the press, who were also passed in without comment; and seeing this, the
lady with the visiting-card resumed her plea.
"Oh, come along," said the indulgent constable; and she found herself at
last inside, confronted by more constables and an inspector. They were
all smiling. She dived in her bag for credentials, but was instantly
waved aside with fresh humour.
"We don't ask any questions, and it's best to give no answers," she was
told pleasantly, as they took her across an empty ante-room that seemed
unnecessarily large, into a crowded court that was certainly
unnecessarily small. It was all very still; the wit and the clamour and
the sunshine outside seemed suddenly very far away.
Admitting freely that tradition and fact are at variance in most
countries, one felt that the little judgment hall, with its want of
space, of sunlight, of air and sound and all the things that matter, was
strangely at war with the accepted notion of the publicity of British
justice. The British public was there, it is true--a dozen strong,
perhaps, very self-conscious, and eaten up with pride at having
succeeded in getting past the constable at the door. But it was a
distinctly exclusive, not to say private, sort of public.
One forgot all this, however, when the magistrate came in and began to
hear the cases. There were a good many, and they were heard with
extraordinary rapidity. I suppose the offenders knew beforehand what
they were charged with--an advantage they sometimes had over the
magistrate when he mixed up the charge sheets. But the British public,
jammed together on the one bench reserved for it, could only gather
occasionally why this or that person was fined or sent to prison or
remanded. One thing could be clearly deduced from the progress of that
heart-breaking procession of human failures, as they passed, generally
in hopeless silence, from the greyness of the police court to the more
complete greyness beyond. They were all people who had snatched
desperately at the air for some of the colour of life, and had succumbed
helplessly before they found it.
No court of justice could help them. You could not expect a magistrate,
faced with something like forty cases, to stop and consider the terrible
monotony of existence that had driven the little scullery-maid to be
"drunk and disorderly," or the poor clerk to steal his employer's money,
thinking to steal his happiness with it; or the lad with the jolly
fearless face to beg in the streets because he was "out of work"--at
fifteen!--or the boy, whose eyes were swollen with crying, to be so
unmanageable that his father had to bring him to a place where no child
should be, at an age when, in happier circumstances, he would be just
starting for Eton with a prospect before him of unlimited opportunities
for "ragging."[A] The magistrate was not unkind; nobody was unkind. All
the prisoners were scrupulously asked if they had anything to say, if
they would like to call a witness. Anything to say! You might as well
try to discharge a mountain torrent through a bath tap. As for
witnesses, a bewildered woman, convicted of drunkenness because she had
been found lying unconscious on the pavement, could not be expected
under the circumstances to have secured a witness to prove her
contention that she was merely faint. One by one, they all shook their
heads mutely, and went away to prison while the sun shone.
[A] Since the above was written children's courts have been established.
Then the remand prisoners, the women who had thronged the doorstep in
the early morning, who were there to answer for their rebellious manner
of demanding a human and a political right, were brought into the dock
by ones and twos; and there crept a change, a subtle change, into the
musty atmosphere of ages. The court was still bathed in its queer half
light. There was the same feeling in it of spectral unreality. You knew
even more certainly than before that the machinery of the little
judgment hall was entirely inadequate to deal with the prisoners in the
dock. But the hopelessness of the whole thing was gone. These were not
people whose spirit had been driven out of them by monotony and bad
luck, as it had been driven out of the derelicts who stood in the dock
before them. These were not people who were going to give in before
they had won from life what they demanded from it. It may be a perilous
business to hunt down the colour of life for other people; but it is a
less hopeless kind of job than hunting it down for yourself.
The great British public, represented by the handful of spectators who
had evaded the censorship of the constable at the door, might, without
cudgelling its brains unduly, have found some connection between the
dreary convictions it had just witnessed, between the clumsy if kindly
handling of habitual offenders, and this passage through the dock of
imperturbably serene young women who, by the grace of God and the aid of
a good cause, did not belong to the criminal classes. It might even have
discovered that the one set of offenders had brought the other after it,
into a police court on a summer morning.
There was the same rapidity in hearing the cases, the same courteous
farce of asking for questions that could only be answered outside the
police court, and then, perhaps, only once in a hundred years or so. And
there was the same unimaginative treatment of those who thought it worth
while to accept the invitation to speak.
"Have you anything to say?" came the regulation enquiry, hallowed by
centuries of official belief in the innocence of unconvicted prisoners
who yet felt their cases to be prejudged. Then, as the woman in the dock
showed every indication of having a great deal to say, this would be
followed up with a hasty "Yes, yes; but I have nothing to do with that.
I am here to administer the law as it stands."
So the law was administered as it stood; and the colour of life still
flickered elusive beyond the grasp of all of us, as thirteen more
offenders, a rebel woman every one of them, went away to prison while
the sun shone.
III
Shaking Hands with the Middle Ages
"Going to be a good meeting, don't you think?" chatted one of the men
wearing a steward's button to a woman dressed in black, who sat in the
front row of the little block of seats reserved for ladies, just below
the platform.
She gave an indifferent glance round the hall.
"Yes," she acquiesced; "I suppose it is. I've never been to a political
meeting before."
"Really?" said the steward blandly. "Quite an experience for you, then,
with a Cabinet Minister coming!"
He hurried away, unaware of the touch of condescension that had jarred
indescribably, and spoke in an eager undertone to a large stout
gentleman who was inspecting tickets at the ladies' entrance.
"It's all right," he said officiously. "I've just been talking to her.
She isn't one of them."
The stout gentleman looked over his shoulder. "Who? That one next my
wife? Oh, no! She's not their sort. Besides, they all wear green or
purple, or both. I'm up to their dodges by this time--just had to turn
away quite a nice little girl in a green hat----"
"My sister!" observed the other. "Oh, it don't matter; I let her in by
the side door, and it won't do her any harm. They've got so out of hand,
some of these canvassers, since the general election."
The large steward observed with an indulgent smile that one must make
allowances. He did not say for what or for whom, but his meaning seemed
to be clear to the other steward.
"The eternal feminine, eh?" he remarked with a knowing nod; and all the
men standing round laughed immoderately. Under cover of this exhibition
of humour, a girl in grey, with a fur cap and muff, was allowed to pass
in without any special scrutiny. She moved very deliberately along the
front chairs, which were now filled, stood for an instant facing the
audience while she selected her seat, then made her way to one in the
middle of a row.
"Votes for women!" piped a wit in the gallery, reproducing the popular
impression of the feminine voice; and the audience, strung up to the
point of snatching at any outlet for emotion, rocked with mirth.
The girl in grey joined in the laughter. "Every one seems very jumpy
to-night," she observed to her neighbour, a lady in tight black satin
who wore the badge of some Women's Federation. "I was actually taken for
a Suffragette in the market-place just now."
"Were you, now?" returned the lady, sociably. "No wonder they're a
trifle apprehensive after the way those dreadful creatures went on at
the Corn Exchange, last week. You were there, perhaps?"
The girl in grey said she was there, and the Federation woman proceeded
to converse genially. "Thought I'd seen your face somewhere," she said.
"A splendid gathering, that would have been a glorious triumph for the
Party, if it hadn't been for those----" She paused for a word, and found
it with satisfaction--"females. Females," she repeated distinctly. "You
really can't call them anything else."
"I suppose you can't," said the girl demurely. The sparkle lit up her
eyes again. "Our minister called them bipeds, in the pulpit, last
Sunday," she added.
"And so they are!" cried the lady in tight black satin. "So they are."
"They are," agreed the girl in grey.
In the front row of chairs, speculation was rife as to the possible
presence of Suffragettes. The wife of the man at the door, a homely
little woman with a pleasant face, was assuring everybody who cared to
know that the thing was impossible.
"They've drafted five hundred police into the town, I'm told; and my
husband arranged for thirty extra stewards at the last minute, because
the detectives wired that two of them had travelled down in the London
train," she informed a circle of interested listeners.
"Is that why there are so many men wearing little buttons?" asked the
woman on her left. "I wondered if that was usual at political
meetings."
"I think I heard you say you'd never been to a meeting before, didn't
I?" said her neighbour pleasantly. "Neither have I, and I wouldn't be
wasting my time here to-night if it wasn't to please my husband. He
likes to see women take an interest in politics; it was him that got our
member a hundred and twenty-eight canvassers, last election. Oh, he
thinks a lot of women, does my husband; says he hasn't any objection to
their having a vote, either, only they ought to be ashamed of themselves
for going on so about it. I don't hold with votes myself. It's only men
that's got all that idle time on their hands, and if they're respectable
married men, there's nothing else to occupy them but politics. But for a
woman it's work, work, work, from her wedding-day till her funeral, and
how can she find time for such nonsense? 'You've got to be made to
think, Martha,' he says to me, coming here to-night. Think? If a woman
stops to think, she don't stop with her husband, chances are. Of course,
he don't believe me when I say that. He's too sure of me, that's where
it is."
"That is always where it is," said the woman in black, quietly.
Her neighbour took out some knitting. "They laugh at me for bringing my
knitting everywhere," she said. "I can't listen if I sit idle. Not that
I want to listen," she concluded, as she settled down comfortably to the
counting of stitches.
The organ boomed out a jerky tune with elephantine lightness, and the
audience vented its impatience in a lusty rendering of some song about
England and liberty. The music was uninspiring, the words were
clap-trap, and seemed to convey the singular idea that freedom had been
invented and patented within recent years by a particular political
party; but the indifferent expression of the woman in black changed and
softened as the chorus rose and fell, and a tall man with a lean,
humorous face, who stood looking at her, gave her a smile of
understanding as the echoing sounds died away. He too was wearing a
steward's button, she noticed.
"There's a sort of barbaric splendour about that, isn't there?" he
remarked.
She felt none of the irritation that had been roused by the
conversational advances of the other steward. It was a relief, indeed,
to talk about something ordinary with a man who, she felt instinctively,
knew how to give even ordinary things their true values.
"It's the whole effect," she answered impulsively. "The cathedral
outside, and this thirteenth-century interior, and then--this!" She
looked round the magnificent old County Hall, and along the densely
packed rows of restless modern men and women, and then back again, half
whimsically, at the man who had spoken to her. "It is like reaching back
to shake hands with the Middle Ages," she said.
"To fight with the Middle Ages," he amended, and they both laughed. "You
will find," he added, narrowing his eyes a little to look at her, "that
the Middle Ages generally win, when we hold political meetings here in
the provinces."
There was a distant sound of cheering, and every one stiffened into
attention. A stir ran round the hall; doors were closed with a good deal
of noise, and the stewards, looking apprehensively at the little block
of seats in the front, gradually closed round them until the gangways
were entirely blocked at that end of the hall. One lady, who complained
that she could not see the platform for stewards, instantly found
herself placed under observation, and was only freed from suspicion when
one of the gentlemen identified her as his aunt and pledged his word
that she did not want a Parliamentary vote. Her neighbours congratulated
her, but in accents that betrayed disappointment.
The stir was followed by an expectant hush. The tall man looked steadily
at the fingers of the woman in black, which locked and unlocked
ceaselessly, though she leaned back in her chair with a vast assumption
of unconcern. Those tireless, nervous hands told him what he wanted to
know.
The little officious steward was back at his side, whispering in his
ear. He shook his head impatiently in reply.
"I'm not going to stay," he said shortly. "You've got enough without me,
even to deal with two Suffragettes who may not be here; and--well, it's
a sickening business, and I'd sooner be out of it."
He went, and all that was of her world seemed to the woman in black to
go with him, as she looked after him, half disappointed, half
contemptuous. Up to this point, the Middle Ages were certainly winning,
she decided.
The next quarter of an hour was the longest she had ever lived through.
Afterwards, looking back, she remembered every detail of what took
place, all the impressiveness of it, all the ironic absurdity. At the
time, it felt like holding one's breath for interminable minutes while
unfamiliar things went on somewhere in the thick of a mist, as things
happen in a bad dream that just escapes the final incoherence of a
nightmare.
There was the roar that broke through the mist in a huge wave of sound,
when the speakers walked on to the platform. Looking round at that
swaying, white-faced multitude, mad with a hero-worship that lost not a
jot of its attraction in her eyes because for her there was no hero, the
woman in the front row, who had never been to a political meeting
before, felt a moment's amazement at her own temerity in coming there,
alone with one other, to defy an enthusiasm that had all the appearance
of invincibility. Then the mist began to roll away, as somebody started
the usual popular chorus. Translated in terms of jolly good-fellowship,
hero-worship no longer appeared unconquerable.
To the woman in black it seemed as though a thousand chairs scraped, a
thousand throats grated, while the audience settled down, and the
chairman delivered carefully prepared compliments, and the great man
sorted slips of paper. Then two women, out of the hundred or so who had
been admitted because they did not appear to want the historic liberties
they came to applaud, clenched lips and hands as the roar burst out once
more.
The great man was on his feet, facing it with a gratified smile. To one
at least of his audience that smile restored a courage that was in full
flight the minute before. That he should strike so egregiously the wrong
note, that a fine situation should be met with affability, argued
something wrong with the situation or something wrong with the man.
There was a false note, too, in that second roar, and it stopped so
unexpectedly that one man was left cheering alone in a high, falsetto
voice, provocative of instant derision. The fineness had gone out of the
situation, and the immediate future of the woman in black, full as it
was of unfamiliar fears, came back into some sort of a line with the
present.
The absolute silence that greeted the opening period of the ministerial
oration had something abnormal in it. It was a silence that almost hurt.
The smallest movement put stewards on the alert, made heads go round.
The speaker felt the strain, shuffled his notes, stumbled once or twice.
Yet, as the tension tightened to breaking-point, the woman in the front
row knew the grip over her own nerves to be strengthening by minutes. In
the mental commotion around her, she felt the battle already half won
that she had come to fight.
A man's voice, challenging a fact, caused a sensation of relief out of
all proportion to the slightness of the interruption. Some wag said
amiably, "Turn him out!" and there was laughter. The man, a well-known
local Socialist, repeated his objection, and was supported this time by
several other voices. There was quite a little stir, and the great man
put out his hand benevolently.
"No, no, gentlemen, let him stay!" he adjured the stewards, none of whom
had shown one sign of wishing to do otherwise. "I stand here as the
champion of free speech----"
The rest of his sentence was drowned in a spontaneous outburst of
applause, during which it was to be supposed that he dealt with the
objection that had been raised, for when his words again became audible
he had gone on to another point. His next interrupter was a Tariff
Reformer, at whose expense he was courteously humorous. The emotional
audience rewarded him with appreciative laughter, in which the Tariff
Reformer joined good-humouredly. Speaker and listeners were rapidly
coming into touch with one another.
The great man, growing sure of his ground, made an eloquent appeal to
the records of the past. The woman, who had never heard a politician
speak before, leaned forward, hanging on every word. She felt strangely
elated, strangely sure of herself, now. This man, believing all that
about liberty, seeing all that behind the commonplace of democracy,
should surely understand where others had failed even to tolerate. She
felt disproportionately irritated by the click of knitting-needles,
wondering how any woman could occupy mind and fingers with wool while
eternal principles of justice were being thundered over her head. Then
there came a pause in the thunder; and sight and sound were blotted out
as she took the opportunity, rose to her feet, and stared up blindly at
the spot where she knew the speaker to be standing.
"Then give all that to the women," she said, in a voice she never seemed
to have heard before. "If you think so much of justice and freedom for
men, don't keep it any longer from the women."
For a little space of time, a couple of seconds, probably, her eyes went
on seeing nothing, and her ears drummed. She thought she had never known
what it really meant to be alone until that moment. She was a woman who
had known loneliness very early, when it came to her in an uncongenial
nursery; she knew it still, in some houses, where everything was wrong,
from the wall-papers to the people. But the meaning of utter isolation
she had never learnt until that moment when clamour and confusion
reigned around her and she saw and heard none of it.
Then her senses were invaded by the sound and the look of it all; and to
her own perplexity she found herself on the point of smiling.
She thought of a hundred things, many of them irrelevant, as she tried
in vain to walk to the door, and was obstructed at every step by
stewards, who fought to get hold of some part of her in their curious
method of restoring order and decorum. She wondered why the meeting was
interrupting itself with such complete success, because one woman had
made the mistake of thinking that the hero they had welcomed with bad
music was a man who meant what he said. She thought of plays she had
seen, dealing with the French Revolution, very bad plays most of them,
she reminded herself as she was dragged this way and that by excited
gentlemen, divided in opinion as to the door by which she was to be
ejected. The sea of distorted faces past which they took her, the memory
of the knitting-needles, even the intolerable smile of the great man as
he made little jokes about her for the amusement of the platform--all
this was very suggestive of the French Revolution, as portrayed in a
badly written play. In all the plays she had seen, however, she did not
remember that there had ever been women who cried a little, or men who
sat silent and ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed to put a stop to
what was going on. These two things appeared to be really happening,
here and there among the audience; and she supposed this was why they
hurt the most.
She thought of the fastidiousness that made her a jest to her friends,
as she felt her hat knocked sideways, looked down and saw the lace at
her wrists dangling in rags. The blow that some one aimed at her, as she
was dragged unresisting by, seemed a little thing in comparison with
those torn strips of lace. Apparently, she was not alone in this
eccentric adjustment of proportions; for the little fussy steward who,
unbalanced to the point of irresponsibility, had struck the blow, was
apologizing clumsily the next minute for treading on her skirt. He did
not seem to understand when she told him gently that he was the man who
had boasted of protecting women since the world began.
Sky and stars looked very remote when at last by circuitous ways they
brought her to a door and thrust her out into the night. A final push
from the gentleman who liked to see women take an interest in politics,
sent her stumbling down stone steps into a moonlit market-place.
Everything looked very big, very still, out there, after the banality
and the bad staging of the play from which she had just made her
unrehearsed exit. In the clearness of thought that came to her, freed at
last of hands that dragged at her and voices that coarsened to say
things to her that she only now dimly began to comprehend, she knew what
it was that had made women, ordinary quiet women like herself, into
rebels who were out to fight for the right to protect themselves even
against their protectors.
A cheer greeted her from the farther side of the market-place, where the
police kept back a crowd that had waited all the evening to see the two
Suffragettes from London, and not, as the local paper afterwards
somewhat flamboyantly put it, to "worship from afar the apostle of
progress and democracy, almost as the servants of the gods might wait at
Olympic banquets for crumbs to fall from the rich man's table." It was a
friendly cheer, she noticed, though this did not matter much. Nothing
seemed to matter much, just then, except that the black mass of the
cathedral towered overhead and looked unshakable.
A little altercation floated down to her from the top of the steps, as
she leaned motionless against the worn stones of the old balustrade.
"Martha! You of all people! Disgracing me like that! However did you
come to be mistaken for one of those screaming----?"
"Well, I couldn't stand the humbug of it, there! Talking about free
speech and all that fal-lal nonsense, and then----! I wouldn't let my
cat be treated as they treated her, all for nothing----"
"Nothing, do you call it? Coming here on purpose to interrupt----"
"So did that ranting Socialist you think so much of! So did Mr.
What's-his-name with the husky voice. Why didn't they tear _them_ to
pieces? Now, you listen to me, James. You brought me here to-night
because you said I'd got to be made to think. Very well. I've been made.
If you don't like it, you should ha' let me stay at home, as I wanted
to."
She stuffed a mass of dropped stitches into a torn work-bag, and went
down the steps, her chin in the air. "If that's politics," she called
back to him from the pavement, "then it's time women got the vote, if
it's only to put a stop to them!"
The girl in grey came round the corner of the building and joined her
comrade, who still waited in the shadow cast by the cathedral. Her muff
was gone, her cap lopped over one eye, and she held her hand to her
throat where the collar had been wrenched at; but her eyes shone with
their unalterable courage and spirit. She knew better than any one that
every skirmish in the battle they were out to fight was always won
before a single blow was struck.
"All right, are you? You did splendidly, for a first shot! Come along
to the Martyrs' Cross; the police say we may hold a meeting there. Oh, I
know you never have, but you can come and try. Any _idiot_ can speak
after being chucked out of a Cabinet Minister's meeting!"
Encouraged by this quaint process of exhaustion to regard herself as an
orator, the woman who had never been to a political meeting till she
went to be thrown out of one, walked across the market-place to shake
hands with the Middle Ages on a spot where men and women were made to
die, centuries ago, for having been born too soon.
She found the girl in grey cheerfully assuring an interested crowd that
she stood there as the champion of free speech.
IV
Filling the War Chest
As a passer-by, I had known that spot in a busy street all my life; or
rather, I thought I knew it. It was only when I took my courage in both
hands and a money-box in one of them, and went to stand there every day
for a week, that I discovered how wide a gulf it is that separates the
passer-by from those who are passed by.
It was all right as long as the sun shone and sent charming side-lights
across the bunches of colour in the flower-lady's basket, and put gay
and human feelings into the heart of the public so that it lingered and
bought daffodils and pink newspapers and ephemeral air-balls from my
companions of the gutter, and even sometimes gave me a coin as well as
an amused smile. One liked it almost as well when the wind blew up
unimportant showers, so hurriedly and unexpectedly that the rain seemed
almost out of breath when it came; for this turned the bit of western
sky that blocked the end of the street into a fine country sky, that
ought to have swept across a moor instead of scudding past a London Tube
station. But when it snowed, or rained long and uncompromisingly, and
when the wind blew swift and cold without blowing up anything
interesting with it, there were no street effects and no smiles, and the
public shut its impressionable heart against colour and pink news and
polemics, and everything else we were hawking; and one learned suddenly
the meaning of being passed by. Perhaps it was worth learning--one of
those odd, disagreeable experiences that are worth gathering up by the
way when you stand on the edge of a London pavement, helping to fill a
war chest for rebel women. Certainly I might not otherwise have reached
the heart of my fellows in the gutter.