had known her in the past, too--the past that seemed so long ago and yet
dated back only to last week--had sometimes bought flowers of her
because she looked cold, and had generally found her unprepossessing and
much inclined to grumble. I thought I knew now, as I stamped my feet to
keep warm, and shook my box invitingly in front of cold and distant
people who refused to be invited, how very much she might have had to
grumble at. The queer part of it was that she was not grumbling now; she
had ceased to grumble, in fact, for the very reason that made me
understand for the first time why she should grumble. Standing there
beside her, in God's rain that knew no respect of persons, I was no
longer a client out of whom another penny might with tact be wheedled; I
was just a boon companion, bent like herself on wheedling that penny
from a miserly public that eternally hurried by. So she gave me her
pity, though I wore a fur coat and she only a threadbare shawl, and the
same biting wind bit at us both.
The newspaper sellers at first held aloof; so did the girl who sold
air-balls.
"I haven't took a bloomin' copper all the afternoon," she complained,
looking pointedly after the lady who had just dropped a shilling in my
box. I considered the wisdom of explaining that what I was doing was
going to help her in the long run, but decided that under similar
circumstances I should prefer a more practical and immediate evidence of
good-will from any one who offered me such an explanation. For the worst
of the long run, mean this what it may, is that it never, never runs.
Luckily for our future relations, a gust of wind carried off a blue
air-ball, and in the chase that followed I came off victorious, and was
able to hand it to the owner with a disarming smile. She unbent slightly
in return.
"Dessay you find it chilly out here, not bein' used to it," she
suggested, pulling the knot in the string tighter with her teeth.
"What are they doin' it for? That's what I arst! What are they doin' it
for?" said the lame newsboy in a slightly peevish tone.
My agility in capturing the air-ball had made him sore, I think, though
he had no reason to feel any envy on that score. Seeing the alertness
and speed with which he dragged his useless limb after him when he came
to show me anything uncomplimentary about the Suffragettes that happened
to appear in his pink newspaper, I could but marvel at the thought of
what he might have accomplished on two legs. One could only suppose that
his agility, like the flower-lady's sympathy, was the result of a
lifelong evasion of difficulties.
The elderly gentleman who sold the penny Conservative paper knew why we
were doing it. He never failed to wink joyously to his friends if a male
elector stopped to argue across my money-box about the cause for which I
was shaking it.
"Doin' it to git theirselves 'usbands, that's what they're doin' it
for," he would say conclusively, in denial of the usual contention of
the anti-suffragist, that we are doing it because of our distaste for
husbands.
When the enemy attacked, my fellow-hawkers waited with grim anticipation
for my replies.
"Is not this a terrible condescension on your part?" asked one
disapproving lady, putting up her lorgnette to read the inscription on
the box. "Oh, I quite believe in your cause, but why do this sort of
thing? How much better to get round the men another way!"
She looked gently pained when I explained rather obviously that I should
consider that a condescension, and so would the right sort of man; and
my companions looked with puzzled eyes after the retreating lady who
seemed to belong to a strange world out of their ken, in which
helplessness had a market value. It was pleasantly illuminating to
find, however, as the week wore on, that they had come to accept me as
an equal, not because I could hold my own against the passer-by, but
because they saw me, like themselves, exposed to all the discomforts of
being passed by. That, I am sure, is why the elderly paper-seller gave
me so much friendly information about goloshes, and why the lame boy
observed so sympathetically, one wet evening, that I had had a quiet
day.
"Yes; nice and quiet, wasn't it?" I answered gladly, being a militant
suffragist of many and strenuous experiences that would not generally be
called either nice or quiet. It was only when I caught his astonished
expression that I understood him to be referring, not to political
passions, but to trade.
Even when you are filling the war chest at the edge of the pavement it
is not impossible, I find, to spare a little pity for those who pass as
well as for those who are passed by. "_L'homme oisif tue le temps; le
temps tue l'homme oisif_," as it is expressed by the nation that knows
better than any other, possibly, how to kill time gracefully. Time
seemed to be killing a good many idle people, I thought, during the week
of days that I stood outside that Tube station. The habitual hawker, of
course, was a loiterer by profession; so was the friendly constable who
remarked, "Well, you ladies do have to face somethink, you do!"
referring, I imagine, to the snow, which was soft and soothing compared
to some of the street witticisms I had to face in the course of
business. The real waster was rather the person who stood at the
entrance of the station, sometimes for hours, waiting, not for something
to happen, or even in most cases for somebody to come, but just waiting.
Sometimes the idler was a man. For one whole afternoon it was a man with
a pale and purposeless blue eye that stamped him at once as being one of
those who, in killing time, are being gradually killed by it. He said
something about the weather to the policeman, something about the
winners to the boy who sold pink information about winners; but he did
not spend a halfpenny on the information, nor did he look as though he
had spent a halfpenny on information in the whole of his life. Even when
a motor-car broke down opposite, he did not cross the road to look at
it. You have to be really interested in life, I suppose, to form one of
a street crowd.
Most of the women loiterers seemed to be the victims, either of their
small unearned incomes, or of somebody else's unpunctuality. One of
these, after stamping her feet in unison with mine for more than half an
hour, asked me if I had seen a lady in a green hat. I think I had seen
hundreds, which was not very helpful; but the enquiry made an opening,
and I shook my box gently and seductively in her direction. She was
quite affable, told me she had believed in woman suffrage all her life,
and thought it an excellent idea for other people to stand out in the
rain collecting money for it.
"It gives you a pinched look, and then people throw you something
before they see what it is for," she added genially.
Evidently my complexion had not taken her unawares in this way, for she
made no effort to support the cause in which she had believed all her
life. She had so many claims, she said. I understood what she meant when
one of the claims, wearing a mountainous hat in emerald-green straw,
bore down upon her with torrential apologies for being late, and carried
her off to the shops.
"It's for something to do up my every-evening black, and you have such a
good eye for colour," was the cryptic remark I overheard, as they went.
In about half an hour they were back again, and the girl in the green
mountain was dropping two-pence in my box. She smiled rather nicely, and
on a sudden impulse I asked her what she had bought for the
every-evening black.
She stared, laughed a little, and ended on a sigh. "Nothing," she
confessed. "Isn't it tragic?"
"It must be," I tried to agree. I suppose I succeeded in sounding a
human note, for she still lingered.
"I hope you'll get your vote soon, and not have to go on wasting your
time like this," she said.
"It isn't my vote particularly, or my waste of time," I called after
her. But she was gone, her ridiculous hat bobbing up and down in the
crowd like a Chinese lantern on a stick; and I wondered if she would
some day make a truce with time and save her soul alive.
Time, though a deadly murderer, does not succeed in killing all the
people who are trying so hard to kill him; and hope, even for a serious
cause, lurked sometimes in that stream of bored and idle passers-by, who
seemed so bent on cheating their nature out of everything it demanded of
them. It was always a pleasant shock when women and girls, wearing the
most preposterous hats and the most fearsome of purple-spotted veils,
slid something into my hand and hurried on, trying to look as if they
had done nothing of the kind. And my knowledge of things human played me
entirely false over the expensive dowager in sable and velvet.
She had stood in front of the nearest shop window for some minutes,
discussing with a patient companion the rival qualities of jet trimming
and gold braid. "Jet lasts," she observed ponderously.
"It does last," agreed the companion.
"Perhaps that gold edging would look handsomer," proceeded the old lady,
assailed by sudden doubts.
"Oh, yes, it might," said the companion hastily, adapting her tone.
"You are looking at the wrong one," said the old lady bluntly. "It isn't
likely I should put a four-three edging on my best satin between-wrap."
Then she veered round and saw me.
Naturally I expected something very cutting, the more so that a kindly
supporter threw me a shilling just then from the top of an omnibus, and
a money-box not being so handy as a tambourine, I spent the next few
seconds grovelling in the snow at the lady's feet. When I came up again,
successful but apprehensive, I found her smiling blandly.
"If I were ten years younger I should be out in the street fighting with
you," was the astonishing remark that accompanied a handsome donation to
the war chest.
"Do come, all the same," I urged, caught by the lightning gleam in her
little grey eye. But she shook her head and returned to the jet and the
gold edging--a wicked waste of a warlike grey eye!
So the week drew to an end, and I was no longer to be numbered among
those who are passed by at the edge of the pavement. In my foolishness I
thought it would be easy to remain on friendly terms with my
fellow-hawkers of yesterday; and with that idea in my mind I took an
early opportunity of returning to the spot and buying a halfpenny pink
paper and a penny white paper and a blue air-ball and a bunch of
daffodils.
I met with a chilly civility from them all, with the exception of the
flower lady, who shamelessly overcharged me for the daffodils.
"Yes, lady, they are dear this morning; cost me that in the market, they
did--thank you, lady, much obliged, I'm sure. Yes, it is cold for a
body, sitting out here all day."
That was all--from the friend and sister who had almost offered me her
shawl, a week ago, because she saw me shivering.
The sun was shining, and the snow had gone, and I suppose the patch of
sky at the western end of the street was all right. But I had been put
back in my place as a passer-by; and neither sun nor sky belonged to me
any longer.
V
The Conversion of Penelope's Mother
"In converting the heathen," I told Penelope, "never make the mistake of
converting your friends. There is nothing so unconquerable as the
immortal grudge that your friend owes you for having had the
impertinence to interfere with his opinions. You see, friendship, being
a rare and elusive and provoking condition of the soul, has nothing to
do with opinions. It matters what your casual acquaintance thinks about
the subject of the hour, because you have to talk with him. It doesn't
matter in the least what your friend thinks, because there is no
conversation among friends, there is only intercourse, which has nothing
to do with opinions. Naturally, I am not talking of eternal truths,
because if your friend does not see eye to eye with you about those, no
friendship is possible. One never converts people to eternal truths,
only to the particular manifestation of these that is being revealed to
the age through which we are passing."
"According to that," objected Penelope, "there is no possibility of
converting people to anything, unless they are already converted
without knowing it."
"Exactly," I said. "That is why it is waste of time as well as
impertinence to convert the person who is your friend. And as your
mother is one of the few mothers I know who is also a friend to her
children, I strongly advise you not to----"
"That is all very well," again objected Penelope; "but mother has not
yet discovered that she is converted to the particular manifestation of
eternal truth known as Votes for Women; and, to put it plainly, you
can't go on living with some one who thinks all suffragists are
hooligans, when you are one of the hooligans."
"Theoretically," I argued, "you could, if----"
"But I don't live with mother theoretically," interrupted Penelope; "and
if you seriously mean that you cannot convert her because of the
immortal grudge she would owe you for doing it, I suppose I shall have
to take that risk myself. It is not at all easy to convert an old lady
to eternal truth at the mouth of an ear-trumpet," she added
insinuatingly.
In the end I was persuaded to undertake the conversion, being no wiser
than other apostles of great movements who have bartered friendships for
causes since the world began; and Sarah's greeting, when she opened the
door to me the day I called upon Penelope's mother by appointment, was
therefore disconcerting.
"Miss Penelope said, would you please wait in the back drawing-room till
she's finished converting the mistress," said Sarah in the impassive
tone of one whom no message, however strange, could disconcert. "It's
the Suffragettics, I think," she added for my enlightenment. To Sarah
all manifestations of the eternal truths rest on the level of rheumatics
and other mortal infirmities.
I suggested that, folding-doors not being soundproof, I had better wait
downstairs. Sarah led the way up to the back drawing-room without giving
this proposal a moment's serious consideration.
"You can hear anything that's said to the mistress from the top of the
house to the bottom--that is, if the mistress can hear it," she
explained unemotionally.
The controversy had reached the acute stage when I arrived in the back
drawing-room, an unwilling eavesdropper. This I gathered from the
significant circumstance that both speakers were talking at once.
Presently there came a calm, in the course of which Penelope seemed to
be getting on rather well. She was keeping her temper wonderfully, I
thought, and was apparently convincing the enemy beyond the power of
retort. The absence of retort became, indeed, astonishing, until it was
explained by a sudden interruption from Penelope's mother, just as her
daughter reached a fine pitch of persuasive eloquence.
"I can't hear a word you are saying, my dear. I wish you would pick up
my ear-trumpet," said Penelope's mother, breaking unconsciously into the
middle of a sentence.
Evidently the ear-trumpet was found and adjusted, for retorts came thick
and fast as soon as Penelope began patiently to say it all over again.
"What rubbish, child!" was an early interruption. "I have never done
anything to hinder your development, as you call it. I drew the line at
ju-jitsu, I admit, because I didn't like the appearance of the
unpleasant little yellow person with the pigtail--he had no pigtail?
Well, he was the style of person to whom one expects to find a pigtail
attached. That is neither here nor there--"
"No, mother darling, it isn't," interposed Penelope firmly; "and I never
said you hindered my development. We are not Suffragettes because we
have personal grievances, but because of the general attitude towards
women----"
"You will never persuade me, my dear, that you can cure anybody's
attitude towards women by knocking off policemen's helmets----"
"We don't knock off----"
"I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a picture, in the _Daily
Illustrated_, I think it was, of a woman knocking off a policeman's
helmet. Her mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an
umbrella--a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature she looked! I
remember it distinctly. The _Daily Illustrated_ is a most respectable
paper; it would never----"
"Darling, you know you have told me over and over again how all the
respectable papers of the day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful,
unwomanly creature for wanting to go out to the war to nurse grown-up
men without a chaperon, instead of staying at home to nurse the baby
she hadn't got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet.
"And so they did," cried her mother, as though her veracity were being
called in question. "All sorts of wicked and untrue things were said
about that noble woman, for whom I have the utmost veneration, because
she taught me to air a room by opening the window a few minutes at the
bottom instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking the things they
said about her! But now----"
"Now," said the wily Penelope, "no woman in England is more honoured.
That shows, doesn't it, that we should not believe everything the
papers----"
"Penelope," said her mother abruptly, "I have dropped my ear-trumpet
again, so you had better ring the bell for tea."
Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah admitted me to the front
drawing-room. The ear-trumpet was sticking out of the coal-box, always a
sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home; and both she and her
mother were looking for the spectacles which had been swept momentarily
out of existence.
"I cannot think what I did with them," complained Penelope's mother, as
though her loss were not an hourly occurrence. "If you had not upset me
so dreadfully, Penelope----"
Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's lusty announcement of my name
having passed over her unheeded through the temporary disablement of the
ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her hand she banished eternal
truths and their tiresome topical manifestations to oblivion, and
received me in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years ago, to
hide from visitors and servants alike that the head of the house ever
had any private emotions or any public interests. Now, as then, it
deceived nobody; but it bridged the gulf between eternal truths and
afternoon tea very pleasantly.
"How charming of you to look in just as Penelope and I were going to
have tea! Come and sit near me," was the gracious greeting I received.
She turned a serene countenance towards Penelope, who was showing no
inherited instinct for bridging impassable gulfs. "My dear, can you find
my ear-trumpet? I am sure I had it a moment ago."
"You had," murmured the rebellious Penelope. "It might just as well have
stayed in the coal-box the whole time, for all the good it was to either
of us!"
It was only when, at the conclusion of a blameless discourse on ribbon
embroidery, Penelope had been sent upstairs to look for a piece of
needle-work, that Penelope's mother stopped being my Early Victorian
hostess and became the mother of all the ages.
"I suppose," she said, with the true motherly mixture of appeal and
disapproval in her tone, "it is you who have converted Penelope to all
this nonsense."
"No," I said. "The age has converted her. Penelope is the child of the
age."
"She has no business to be anybody's child but her mother's," was the
indignant reply. "When I was a girl daughters were their mother's own
children----"
I interrupted to ask if she really thought that this had ever been true.
The ear-trumpet described furious circles in the air--another danger
signal, as I knew from experience.
"When I was a girl," said Penelope's mother once more, "we had the good
manners not to let our mothers guess that we knew more than they
did--even if we did."
I asked a depressed Penelope, on the way downstairs, why she had not
taken my advice and left me to risk my friendship with her mother,
instead of imperilling her own?
"It was idiotic of me," confessed Penelope; "she said something unfair
about 'those dreadful women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and
after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I haven't converted mother
in the drawing-room, I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting
cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a few more Antis
concealed about the house while I was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?"
"Listen!" I interrupted.
Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the open drawing-room door came
scraps of conversation.
"It is only right to study both sides of a question, Sarah."
"Yes'm."
"Florence Nightingale, the noblest Englishwoman who ever lived--I hope
you open the window and not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom,
Sarah?--Florence Nightingale was misrepresented just in the same way."
"Yes'm."
"I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and order a suffrage
periodical for the kitchen instead."
"Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's already. Thank you, ma'am."
Penelope and I fled downstairs to escape detection.
"She was converted all the time; I told you she would be," I remarked on
the doorstep.
"Now for the immortal grudge!" sighed Penelope.
VI
At a Street Corner
"People of London!" faltered the lady who had just stepped upon the
sugar-box at the edge of the pavement.
The people of London, who happened just then to be a very little girl
carrying a very large baby, stared in some astonishment. Another lady,
who had been distributing handbills farther along the street, came back
and prompted the speaker encouragingly.
"Go on; that's splendid!" she said with friendly warmth.
The woman on the sugar-box, who had never stood on a sugar-box before,
smiled wanly. "Why do they never have earthquakes except in countries
where people don't want them?" she sighed. Her friend being engaged at
the moment in pressing a handbill upon the little girl, who obligingly
gripped the baby with one hand and her chin in order to take it, there
came no response to the appeal of the orator in the gutter; and she
pulled herself together and made a fresh start.
"People of London!" she repeated amiably. "We have come here to tell
you about 'Votes for----'"
"Why, it's these 'ere Suffra_gites_!" suddenly yelled the people of
London, shifting the baby on to the other arm; and the debutante on the
sugar-box broke down and laughed deprecatingly.
"I really must wait for some more people," she protested.
"You needn't," said her more experienced companion. "They always come
along fast enough as soon as they see some one like you standing on a
sugar-box."
"That doesn't surprise me," remarked the inexperienced one, thinking
regretfully of a happy past in which the chief aim of a well-ordered
life had been to avoid doing anything that would attract attention.
"Here they come," continued the lady with the handbills. "Just keep them
going while I get rid of these, there's a dear! It doesn't matter what
you say," she added consolingly, as she went towards two approaching
women with outstretched hand and an ingratiating smile.
"_Ah! ce sont les suffragettes!_" exclaimed one of these unexpectedly.
"_Nous sommes des suffragistes françaises, nous aussi! Vive le
féminisme!_"
"Oh, how perfectly delightful!" said the English suffragist, beaming on
them. "Do stop and listen. _Nous allons avoir un_--oh, bother! What is
'meeting'?--_un rendez-vous, mesdames!_"
"_Tiens!_" gasped the French suffragists, as well they might.
At this moment the speaker, her mind a blank concerning all the
carefully prepared sentences she had been learning by heart for days,
could be heard announcing that she would now call upon the other lady to
address the meeting; and the crowd, increasing every minute, cheered
inconsequently.
"Well, there ain't much of her, but give 'er a chaunce!" remarked a wit,
as the second speaker mounted the sugar-box.
A small boy hitched up his trousers and moved off. "I shall turn into a
woman if I stay here," he observed.
"No such luck for you, my boy!" came the quick retort from the rickety
platform, and the impressionable crowd grinned with appreciation.
The speaker pounced upon her opportunity and began to sketch the history
of Reform. She used long words purposely, so they made an instant show
of listening, it being out of the question, of course, to allow that any
woman, least of all a Suffragette, could talk over their heads. The
astonishing statement that women in the past had enjoyed a certain
measure of political power, was, however, too much for one youth.
"Where did you git that from?" he shouted.
"My friend has forgotten his history," said the speaker indulgently. "It
is an historical fact----"