addressed the audience in a loud and overpowering voice.
"Look at 'er!" he adjured them, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
"History, she says! Believin' what she's towld in a book. Ain't that
jest like a woman?"
Having thus disposed of the facts of history, he went on to deal more
largely with the question as a whole. "Pack o' women!" he snorted. "Why
don't they stay at 'ome and mind the baby? Why don't they cook the old
man's dinner? Why don't they----?"
"This gentleman evidently thinks it is question time," struck in the
real speaker with undisturbed composure. "Perhaps, when he reaches the
age that will entitle him to use a vote, he will know more about the
procedure of a political meeting----"
"Well, you ain't got a vote yourself, anyhow!" said the incensed youth,
turning round amid the laughter of the crowd to face the woman on the
sugar-box, which, of course, was exactly what she wanted him to do.
"Ah, I was wrong," she smiled back at him. "I see you do know something
about the present political situation. If you will kindly keep your
questions till I have finished speaking, I shall be very happy to----"
"Yuss!" agreed a supporter. "Stow it, Jim, till the lidy's had 'er say."
"But I don't want to hear no bloomin' Suffragette," grumbled the youth,
angrily conscious that the crowd was no longer with him.
"Then git out!" advised the crowd; and the speaker's voice was drowned
for a minute or so in the altercation that followed.
"What's it all about?" asked one woman of another, at the edge of the
crowd.
The other, encircling a large bundle with her arms, shook her head.
"I dunno," she said; "but I loves to 'ear 'em talk."
The woman on the sugar-box was just giving the obvious reply to another
interrupter, who wanted to know how a woman could find time to vote if
she had a husband and six children to look after.
"How does a man find time to vote, if he has a wife and six children to
support?" she demanded; and the woman with the bundle nodded
approvingly.
"Now she's talkin' sense, and I likes sense," she remarked to her
companion. "I don't 'old with women bein' Prime Ministers, but I likes
sense."
The hostile youth, growing tired of being made the sport of the crowd,
moved off with the remark that he would like "to see 'em all drowned";
and the speaker profited by a temporary lull and began to talk of
economics. She held her audience now without difficulty, telling them
things about the labour market that they knew to be true; and a kind of
tense hush was over the crowd round the sugar-box, when a well-dressed
woman came strolling along the pavement on her way home from the Park.
"Why, I do believe that is a real live Suffragette! How chic!" she
exclaimed with an amused smile.
The Suffragette caught the remark, and determined to catch the woman who
made it. In a minute or two the amused smile was gone, and another
comment floated up to the sugar-box.
"Jack, are you there? You must come and listen to this--you positively
must! I--I had no idea they were like that!"
The woman in the French hat was won, but the crowd was again temporarily
lost, and wild din reigned for the next few moments while supporters
yelled for silence and opponents sang songs. At the first semblance of a
pause, the Suffragette broke in again, the smile still predominating.
"I can see how anxious you are to help the Suffragettes," she said
sweetly; and once more she carried the joking, irresponsible crowd along
with her. "You women who are here, come to our demonstration in Hyde
Park next Sunday----"
"Hold on, young woman, who's going to cook the Sunday dinner for the
kids?" interposed a voice.
"Your wife will cook it before she starts," was the ready rejoinder.
"Or, better still, she can cook it overnight, and you can bring it with
you and eat it in the Park----"
"What price roast pork and greens in Hyde Park?" demanded a
sporting-looking gentleman in a terrific waistcoat.
"It won't hurt you to have cold pork and salad just for once," said the
resourceful speaker. "Only think how the children will love a picnic,
and a picnic like ours, too, with eighty women-speakers at the end of
it! You know how dull picnics generally are when there is nothing more
to eat----"
"Eighty of 'em! How about Holloway?" jeered the man in the waistcoat.
She turned on him swiftly. "If you had your vote taken from you
to-morrow, wouldn't you have the pluck to go to prison to get it back?"
she asked, suddenly in deadly earnest.
Any crowd loves a fighter, and this one howled with delight. The lady in
the French hat noticed that listening women, who had hitherto shown no
open approval of what was said, nodded furtively and caught their breath
when the speaker fired up in defence of women.
"Why, they go to prison because they like it, don't they?" observed the
amused man who answered to the name of Jack. He had not intended this
for an audible interruption, but nothing escaped the ear of the woman on
the sugar-box.
"If you think a woman's ordinary life outside prison is as dreary as all
that, don't you think it's time you gave her the power to improve her
conditions, so that she needn't go to Holloway for a pleasant change?"
she shot back at him, hot with scorn; and again listening women flushed
with nervous pleasure. "Some of our comrades are coming out of prison
next Saturday," the speaker went on rapidly; "and if you want to give
them a welcome, as I know you do"--here she paused to allow time for
yells of derision and references to skilly--"come and walk in our
procession from Holloway gates."
"What! And be taken for gaol-birds too? Not much!" roared the man of
sporting appearance.
"We'll come, miss; we'll be there!" suddenly called the woman with the
bundle; and curiously enough, the crowd respected that and stopped
jeering. But the speaker of a hundred open-air meetings, knowing her
crowd better than it knew itself, saw that it had had enough, and called
for questions. These were swiftly disposed of, being principally of the
wash-tub order, already answered in her speech; and observing serenely
that she concluded everybody was now converted, the Suffragette came
down from her perch.
She and her companion were instantly swallowed up in the jostling,
chattering crowd, and the well-dressed woman appealed to Jack.
"Do help them to get out of this," she said, clutching anxiously at his
arm. "They'll be crushed to death, I know they will!"
"Eh, what? My dear girl, they're much better able to take care of
themselves than I am," observed Jack tranquilly. "Besides, they're not
being crushed to death. You couldn't crush a Suffragette if you tried."
A sudden swirl of the stream swept them face to face with the two
suffragists, who, still distributing handbills to right and left of them
as they came, were composedly wedging a way for themselves through the
dispersing people.
"I--I think you're splendid; and so does Jack!" cried their new
supporter, flinging mere accuracy to the winds. "And I'm coming to
Holloway Gates on Saturday and to Hyde Park on Sunday--and so is Jack!"
"Eh what?" said Jack mildly.
VII
The Crank of all the Ages
VOTES FOR WOMEN, price one penny!
Articles by Annie Kenney,
Mrs. Lawrence, Christabel,
Other Suffragettes as well.
Men and women, come and buy--
As you pass and hear the cry--
VOTES FOR WOMEN! here we sell
Articles by Christabel,
Mrs. Lawrence, Annie Kenney--
VOTES FOR WOMEN, price one penny!
(New Street Cries, 1909.)
I never knew until I became a regular newspaper seller, one day in every
week, how many people there are in the world bent on reforming it. You
do not discover this so long as you merely sell papers in a spasmodic
fashion, appearing on fine days at the edge of the pavement with a
bundle of _Votes for Women_ under your arm, and going off to tea as soon
as these are sold out. Any element of amateurishness at once adds an air
of detachment to the paper seller and keeps the world from really making
friends with her. But as soon as the public grasps that she is a
fixture, just as much so as the seller of pink football news or of green
politics, except that her stock is renewed by a purple, white and green
pony trap instead of by a panting boy on a bicycle, then every kind of
crank who is out for an airing thinks she is there to listen to his
views on every conceivable subject, from food reform up to
simplicitarianism.
You divide the world into three kinds of people, roughly speaking, when
you sell papers as a professional and not as an amateur. There is the
person who wants to buy a paper. There is the person who wants to know
where the nearest tea-shop is, or which omnibus goes to the Circus, or
whether you have seen any one with pink wings--the last being a
reference to millinery and not to aviation. This person really makes one
feel like a professional newsboy at a street corner. Lastly, there is
the crank. The crank does not want to buy a paper, or to seek
information; he merely wants to talk. He leaves the ordinary newsvendor
in peace, recognizing that he is there merely for the purpose of selling
news, whereas the seller of suffrage papers represents an attempt to
reform the world as well. So her pitch becomes a common meeting-ground
for cranks.
If it be true that the character of an age is to be found in the
character of its cranks, the period we are passing through will present
extraordinary difficulties to the chronicler of the future. That is the
worst of living in an age when most of the big things have been
established in theory, though some still remain to be established in
fact. It was quite easy to be a crank with distinction when people
tortured you for saying the world was round. Now, you have to fall back
on rational dress or Swedish exercises, or a whole host of minor
movements to educate public opinion, and the real crank has a hard
struggle for existence. Personally, standing as I believe for one of the
few big things that still have to be fought for because they are not yet
established in fact, I have always felt inclined to look upon these
lesser attempts to improve humanity as fads. But I find from standing at
the edge of the pavement that the hall-mark of every crank is a firm
belief that all the other cranks are only faddists.
"No," said the tailor-made lady with firmness, as she prepared to pass
on after reading my newsbill; "I have no time for fads. Before I
married, when I earned my own living and paid rates and taxes and--and
gas, I quite believed in this sort of thing. In fact, I never condemn
any woman for wanting a vote."
She seemed to think that she deserved some praise for this evidence of
self-restraint; and I said something inane about thinking of other
people. She looked injured.
"Naturally, I do not mean that I lead an idle or a selfish life," she
said. "Sport, that is my strong point--outdoor sport." I suppose she
gathered that this did not quite fill my conception of human usefulness,
for she added hastily--"And charity. Sport and charity--that is my
life."
"You could indulge in both, selling our paper," I said. I concluded from
the haste with which she went away that she did not agree with me.
"Ah!" said the elderly gentleman, who excused himself quite
unnecessarily for buying a paper by explaining that it was for his wife,
"who is quite foolish about your question,"--"the great mistake you
ladies make is in not concentrating upon the educational test. You'd
have thousands more on your side--myself, in fact--if you didn't want to
flood the electorate with illiterate----"
An interruption occurred here, as the conductor of a waiting omnibus
whistled to me for a paper and gave me his confidential opinion that we
"were going to get it soon." The elderly gentleman turned triumphantly
to the nearest newsboy.
"There! What did I say?" he demanded. "Socialists, every one of them!
Socialists!"
The newsboy shrugged his shoulders as he looked after him, then turned
and gave me a wink out of pure friendliness. "Chronic, ain't it?" he
remarked.
Everything, by the way, is "chronic" to my companions in the
paper-selling trade; and I have some difficulty in not letting the
expression, whatever it may mean, creep into my vocabulary.
The temperance reformer was less easy to rout because he was so
desperately in earnest. It was no use pointing out to him that we were
both travelling along the same road, really. His was the one and only
possible scheme for regenerating the world, and the women who actually
wanted the power to help him were wilfully obstructing his path.
"Local option!" he repeated several times with enthusiasm, describing
circles on the pavement with his umbrella and effectually keeping all
possible customers at a distance. "Local option! That's the ticket.
Votes for women, indeed!"
I said mildly that I supposed the reform of the goose was always the fad
of the gander, and was sorry to see that he appeared hurt. "Of course,"
I added hurriedly, "I admit that I am the goose." He still looked
offended, but the remark happily put him to flight after he had spoilt
the newspaper trade at our corner for nearly ten minutes.
The most determined instance of the crank who sees all the rest of the
world as faddists, or worse, is, I think, the animal faddist. Of course,
we all advocate kindness to animals: but that is different from being a
faddist about it. Still, I admit I am a little prejudice in the matter,
owing to my encounter with the old lady, the toy dog, and the
Kindness-to-pet-animals Christmas card.
She arrived breathless on the kerb at my side, having been placed there
by a policeman, while criticism of the toy dog rained plentifully from a
brewer's dray, a bicycle, and a taxicab, all of which were mixed up in
the road through their noble endeavours not to annihilate the yapping
creature. I came into the situation because I unwound its chain, which
had tied itself round the old lady's skirts, and placed the thing on her
ermine muff. I received no acknowledgment of all this--first, because I
picked him up by the head, seeing nothing else large enough to afford
one a grip, and secondly, because she discovered I was a Suffragette.
"You ought to be locked up in a lunatic asylum," she said sternly.
For a moment I did not see the connection. Then I made allowances for
her age and the peril she had just gone through and said--"Oh, no!" as
soothingly as I could.
She put the dog with some difficulty inside her muff, tail first, which
I felt was an indignity it scarcely deserved, even if it had dislocated
the traffic. "When the world is full of tortured and suffering dumb
animals!" she went on, glaring at the contents bill that fluttered from
my hand.
I wished energetically that dumbness had been one of the disabilities of
the particular tortured animal she was still trying to back into a hot
ermine muff, for when I tried to say that my only objection to dumb
animals was that they were never dumb, my remark was drowned in piercing
yelps.
At the end of ten minutes I had learnt every detail of her private and
special society for protecting pampered pets against those who pampered
them--this, by the way, was not what she called it--and of the dear
little children who paid their pennies weekly, and of the Christmas card
to advertise the cause, that she had designed herself. The Christmas
card was extricated from the ermine muff, with no inconsiderable
ingenuity, for the toy dog, making a wild dash for liberty, very nearly
emerged with it; and my criticism was condescendingly invited. It is not
easy to give an intelligent opinion on a drawing of a cat, a dog, a
donkey, a parrot, a tadpole, a pony, a pigeon, and a newt; and I found I
had said quite the wrong thing when I murmured that it was very pretty.
Prettiness, I was told sternly, was not its object. I looked again, and
was fortunately inspired to detect that she had not included a rabbit.
She thought she might squeeze in the rabbit between the Newfoundland dog
and the newt; and after that I forced my own goods upon her in a
determined manner until she went.
It is sometimes helpful to remind yourself, if you are the crank who
stands at a street corner selling papers for a cause, that cranks are
the salt of the earth. But, as Henry Harland once wrote in a frivolous
moment--"_Il faut souffrir pour être sel._"
VIII
Patrolling the Gutter
"I suppose we had better start," faltered the tall woman in purple.
"I can't think of a reasonable excuse for delaying any longer," sighed
the girl in green.
"Come along!" said a third, making a great show of the courage she did
not feel.
Nobody came along. Under some pretext or another we still lingered,
though there were ten of us and the space in our Suffragette shop was
uncomfortably limited. Most people, the even tenor of whose lives had
not been ruffled by the call of a great cause, might have thought the
day an unpropitious one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even for
the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women in the Albert Hall. A
strong south-west wind, a real London drizzle overhead and thick mud
underfoot, could hardly be held to offer striking attractions to a band
of naturally timorous ladies, girt about with sandwich-boards, preparing
to issue forth in procession into the conventional streets of
Kensington. If we had been less timorous we should probably have
postponed the expedition; but the last fear that rebel women ever learn
to overcome is the fear of being thought afraid, so this was an
alternative that did not suggest itself to anybody.
"I never realized before what it meant to be a belted knight, but I do
now," remarked our literary member, trying in vain to free her hands
from their cardboard bonds in order to straighten a crooked hat. "If
anything or anybody were to unhorse us and make us bite the dust--isn't
that what belted knights were always doing to one another in the Middle
Ages?--we should have to lie on our backs, as they did, till some one
came and picked us up."
"I feel like a pantomime super, myself," observed somebody else,
twirling round in order to get a full-length back view of herself in the
glass. "I shall never get accustomed to the make-up," she added
ruefully, as she once more swept the greater part of our stock of
pamphlets from the counter to the floor, and had to stand helpless and
repentant while the shop secretary picked them up, not for the first
time in the course of these trial manoeuvres.
"If you don't start soon, there will be nothing saleable left in the
place," said the shop secretary pointedly.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" demanded the girl in green, trying to
infuse a little real impatience into her tone.
"Courage," confessed the woman in purple, gloomily.
"Oh, nonsense!" said our literary member, without, however, moving any
nearer to the door. "Think of George Herbert:
God gave thy soul brave wings; put not those feathers
Into a bed to sleep out all ill weathers."
We all tried to think of George Herbert, but without marked success.
"I can't think of anything but the ill weather waiting for us outside
and all the people I know in Kensington," said the tall woman, voicing
bluntly and concisely what the rest of us were feeling.
"Do you think the people we know would ever recognize us in these
things?" asked some one in a moment of real inspiration; and under the
influence of this new and cheering suggestion we formed up hastily in
single file and really made a start.
The secretary of another local branch, who had dropped in to seek
recruits for a similar poster parade in her district, observed
significantly as we filed past her that it was most important to be as
well dressed as possible in her neighbourhood. Neither this, nor the
first comment that reached our ears as we plunged into the street, added
particularly to our good opinion of ourselves.
"Well, I must say you ladies don't think of appearances, that you
don't!" was the comment of the street. At a less sensitive moment we
might have derived comfort from the tone of admiration in which this was
uttered. As it was, an outrageous remark that followed did far more to
raise our drooping spirits. This one was made by a girl, wearing a
flaming hat and blouse that not one of us would have had the courage to
put on before going for a walk, even if supported by so magnificent a
youth as the one on whose arm she leaned as she criticized.
"Brazen, ain't they?" she said.
After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a world that could
always be counted upon to feed the most unsatisfied sense of humour.
Otherwise, for the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have felt
acutely conscious of anything but the traffic. Glorious as it may seem
to the imaginative to suffer for a cause, one finds it difficult, when
carrying sandwich-boards in its service, to detach from this distant and
problematic reward the more immediate prospect of being run down from
behind by a skidding motor-omnibus. In time, no doubt, it would be
possible to acquire the easy swagger of the real sandwich man, though
the real sandwich man would under no circumstances be submitted, as we
were, to a definite onslaught from every impudent tradesman's boy who
whizzed past us on a tricycle. As it was, no one could have said that
our pace bore the slightest resemblance to the leisurely saunter of the
professional patroller of the gutter. In spite of conscientious efforts
on our part to maintain the regulation distance from one another, none
of us could resist the impulse to catch up the next woman in front; and
as our leader, the tall woman in purple, desired nothing more than to
cover the prescribed route and return to the shelter of home as quickly
as possible, only he who ran could have read the announcement printed on
our boards, as we raced breathlessly along the edge of the pavement. At
the same time, we found, nobody had the slightest difficulty in reading
the identity of those who carried the boards.
"Suffer-a-gettes! Look at 'em!" roared an omnibus driver.
"Well, why not?" responded a gallant cabman from the shelter we were
approaching. "Why shouldn't Mrs. Pank'urst 'ave a vote, same as you an'
me? Ain't she got as much sense in her 'ead as what _I_ 'ave?" He
modulated his belligerent shout to a dulcet undertone as we came
alongside. "The whole of the four-wheel trade is with you, ladies," he
told us confidentially.
A block in the traffic caused us all to close up for a moment, and we
compared notes hurriedly.
"Not so bad as we expected, is it?" said our literary comrade, who was
one of those to overhear the friendly remark made by the representative
of the four-wheel trade.
The girl in green reserved her opinion. "It makes one feel desperately
sorry for the poor men who have to do this sort of thing, not for a
cause, but for a living," she said feelingly.
The girl in green was by nature sentimental. Having once sold a suffrage
paper in the street for half a day, she found herself incapable ever
afterwards of resisting the appeal of the street hawker, with the result
that her flat became a depôt for patent toasting-forks, bone
collar-studs, and quivering, iridescent beetles. Her latest conviction
that a human link existed between her and all sandwich-men received,
however, a slight shock as soon as we encountered one of these. Melting
with compassion, she tried in a single look to express all she felt for
his hard lot, but was met by a still more eloquent expression of pity
from his eye--the one that did not wink--and became henceforth a little
dubious about that particular human link. We tried, but without much
success, to rekindle her faith in human links generally, by pointing out
that his scorn was probably aroused by the unprofessional appearance of
her sandwich boards, one of which was slipping its ribbon moorings as
she went by.