parade was that of the baby. Up to that moment it had been a plain and
placid, contented baby, banging its Teddy bear happily against the side
of the perambulator. When it saw our procession coming along, with
flying colours and flapping boards, it dropped the Teddy bear on the
pavement and emitted an amazing remark that sounded to all of us, except
our literary member, like "Ga-ga-ga-ga-_ga_!" Our literary member, being
imaginative, declared that what the baby really said was--"Hooray! Votes
for Women!"--and the baby's nurse, who had to soil her white cotton
gloves by picking the Teddy bear out of the mud, seemed inclined to
agree with her.
"Them 'orrible Suffragettes!" she said crossly; and remembering the
militant countenance of the baby we had converted, we felt bound to
forgive her for feeling uneasy about the baby's future. Our triumph was
short-lived, however, for we were scarcely out of hearing of the baby's
gurgles when a gentleman outside a public-house informed us, with some
difficulty of utterance, that we were a disgrace to our sex.
"What do they mean, blocking up the King's 'Ighway, undreds and undreds
of 'em?" he grumbled fiercely. As the girl in green observed, he was not
in a condition when it would be fair to challenge his ability to count.
On the whole, the triumphs won as usual, and the insults were too funny
and pathetic, both at once, to hurt much. There was the lady who told us
very distinctly what she thought of us, and then dropped her skirts in
the mud, a real feminine sacrifice, to take one of our handbills,
because her hard heart was melted by the absent-minded smile of our
literary member, who mistook her for a supporter. There was the
clergyman who stood with his hat in his hand the whole time our
procession was going by; there was the sentimentalist who, after telling
each one of us in turn to go home and mind the baby, said in a tone of
concentrated despair to the last of us--"What would you do if you had
twins?" And, of course, there was the messenger-boy who stood just out
of reach and yelled--"Want yer rights? Then you won't git 'em! Sooner
give 'em to tomcats, I would!"
By the time we arrived in sight of home, even the woman in purple had
become hardened to the perils and vicissitudes of the road and smiled
quite easily at the postman who stood at the corner of the street. But
when we found ourselves inside the shop, in full view of the shop
looking-glass, it required all our newly won insensibility to stifle an
inward consciousness that the glories of a militant campaign still
remained rather spiritual than actual. Our hair was damp and straight,
our cardboard armour limp and bent; our skirts were caked with mud, and
our boots strongly resembled those that one sometimes sees sticking out
of river sand at low tide. For once, our literary comrade refrained from
asking us to turn to George Herbert or anybody else for poetic
consolation.
On the other hand, the postman's criticism became wildly,
disproportionately cheering.
"Votes for women!" he shouted after us with a sneer, as we slowly passed
indoors out of his sight. "Votes for a few rich women, that's all you're
after!"
Under the circumstances, it was very pleasant to be mistaken for
representatives of the rich and cultured classes.
IX
The Black Spot of the Constituency
I am inclined to think that the best general is he who never listens to
warnings. Nobody, for instance, warned us not to hold a meeting in the
Council Schools, where a number of apparently educated, if very young,
gentlemen came to express their political opinions through the medium of
motor-horns and chemical explosives. The warning would have made no
difference, of course; the point is that it was never uttered. When, on
the other hand, we announced that we meant to carry our election
campaign into the black spot of the constituency, where a criminal
population congregated thickly in a few mean streets, warnings came
quick and fast. They were the normal warnings, telling how the police
hesitated to penetrate there after dark, how it was never safe at any
time of day for a woman to walk there alone, and so on, and so on. There
is a black spot like that in most cities, and the same things, rightly
or wrongly, are generally said about it. But when you are a pioneer,
however humble a pioneer, you discover that the one person who may walk
with safety in the heart of a criminal district is the rebel man or
woman who is out fighting for a human cause.
No doubt, the elementary school child looks upon the Prime Minister who
arranges for a general election to occur during the Christmas holidays
as a sort of fairy godfather; but the pioneer, who hopes to advance her
cause as a by-product of a Parliamentary election, would find the
political situation considerably simplified by the elimination of the
juvenile element. Anthropologists probably know all kinds of reasons why
the young human creature always wants to throw things at what he cannot
understand; and if I had to humanize the embryonic hooligan of our back
streets, I believe I should begin by setting up a mysterious-looking
target, a different one every day, in a prominent place, in order to
gratify this elemental instinct at the least possible cost to the
pioneer. Not having thought of this simple plan in time, however, those
of us who first penetrated the black spot of our constituency on a
canvassing expedition met with a good deal of concrete obstruction.
"I am used to banana skins," remarked one canvasser, on her return to
the committee rooms; "I can even bear mud; and stones are never aimed
with enough determination to matter much; but I should like to draw the
line at red herrings. There is something so peculiarly atmospheric about
red herrings."
"Chestnuts are worse," said another woman, producing the one that she
had intercepted on its way towards her face. "When I am advancing a
suffrage argument for the hundredth time, there is a nasty subtle
significance about a chestnut."
The tax collector, happening to stroll in just then to buy a ticket for
a meeting, kindly tendered us his sympathy. He had frequently to endure
the same unfriendly treatment at the hands of children, he told us, when
he visited their homes in his official capacity. This information did
not meet with the response he evidently expected from us, and realizing
that voteless women could not be reasonably expected to feel furiously
hostile towards anybody who pelted a tax collector, he admitted a
difference in the point of view and beat a tactful retreat, warning us
as he went to refrain from attempting an open-air meeting in the
criminal district.
"You won't do any good there," he assured us; "they are too stupid to
understand, and they may make things very unpleasant for you."
This would have been true, perhaps, of an open-air meeting in a
respectable neighbourhood, not to say of a drawing-room meeting
anywhere. In a respectable, law-abiding district, it is always difficult
and frequently dangerous to hold an open-air meeting. To begin with, you
have to stand for some time without any audience at all, saying "We are
the Suffragettes; we have come here to talk about votes for women," over
and over again, with an ingratiating smile, to a policeman with a coldly
detached air, and, perhaps, a young man on the opposite side of the
road, who is longing to listen but dare not cross over for fear of being
identified with lawless young women whose husbands and babies languish
untended in the theoretical home. Afterwards, when these preliminary
efforts have successfully assembled an audience, it is generally one
that is too stupid to understand, and it frequently makes things
unpleasant for the speaker. All this may be confidently expected to
happen in respectable neighbourhoods, where the standard of conduct is
conventional enough to have brought unconventionality within the
jurisdiction of lynch law.
In the black spot of our constituency, however, these familiar
difficulties scarcely seemed to exist for the open-air speaker, least of
all the preliminary difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment our
wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that stood for no party cry
and for no party candidate, the audience came in rushes from all the
alleys and dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two minutes one
looked down upon a swaying mass of tattered and slatternly humanity that
would have been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been less
than human. As it was, one merely realized that when the narrow barrier
of circumstance that separates the fortunates from the unfortunates of
this world has once been swept away, human points of contact are
multiplied, not diminished.
The audience naturally gave the speaker in the lorry no time to make
philosophic reflections.
"Don't look as though she'd been fed on skilly, do she?" was a sally
that produced instant applause.
"Here, miss!" shouted a young hooligan, pushing into prominence a
good-looking girl whose open, laughing face might have belonged to any
child of twenty in any sheltered home. "She's been to 'Olloway; can she
have a vote?"
"Not much!" roared the crowd.
Our militant member, distributing leaflets on the edge of the crowd,
smiled on the girl as she went shuffling off. "I've been to prison
myself," she said, by way of breaking the ice; "what can you have done
at your age to get there?"
The girl threw back her head with another laugh. "Oh, a drop of beer and
a few words with a copper!" was the easy reply.
After that, it was a simple matter to get into conversation, and other
women, who were not laughing, gathered round to listen.
"You Suffragettes have made things in the 'jug' a lot better for us pore
women," said one, more intelligent-looking than the rest. "They give us
chiny mugs now, 'stead of them tins, and----"
"I 'ope as you'll git inter Parlyment, that I do!" chimed in another.
"Yuss! Good luck to you!" cried a chorus of voices.
They vented their new-found enthusiasm upon a bibulous gentleman, who
was asserting with drowsy monotony that he didn't want women to have
votes, not he! He wanted them to love, honour, and obey----
"Stow it!" they broke in impatiently. "Forgettin' your manners, ain't
you?"
The woman in the lorry was telling them why she went to prison, two
months ago. She soon had her audience well in hand, human points of
contact not being far to seek in a crowd to whom it was at least
unnecessary to explain that women did not go to gaol for fun. A
passer-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the
constituency, stopped to make this hackneyed insinuation and was well
hooted for his pains by a crowd that knew more than he did of the
experiences described by the speaker. Even the drowsy sentimentalist,
realizing, one might almost suppose, that his proper place was rather at
a drawing-room meeting than at a street-corner one, went elsewhere in
search of love and obedience; and the crowd of derelicts that remained,
growing more numerous every minute, pressed closer and closer to the
lorry till they swarmed up the wheels and over the sides and sat at the
feet of the woman who had been where they had been, and suffered what
they had suffered, for a cause they dimly began to understand because it
appeared to be connected with prison and suffering. Even their primitive
minds could receive an impression of the woman standing up above them,
against the crude light of the street lamp, standing for something that
was going to bring a little warmth and brilliance into a cold neutral
world, the warmth and brilliance that they had somehow missed.
Emphatically, these people were not of the stuff that melodrama and
novelettes are made of. They had never discovered what is sensationally
called the romance of crime, and there was nothing splendid or
attractive in the offences that had sent them to gaol. Some day or
another, in a dull past, they had exchanged the dinginess of
unemployment for the ingloriousness of petty crime, that was all.
A woman, bedraggled and dishevelled, strayed across from the
public-house and stood for a moment gazing vacantly up at the trim
little figure of the woman in the cart. She was past listening to
anything that might be said.
"Shameless!" she commented, and drifted away again, unheeded. The
adjustment of standards was bewildering; and one felt that here was
another interrupter whose mental attitude was that of the drawing-room
and not of the street corner.
The speaker made an end and asked for questions. They did not come with
any rapidity. People who have done with the conventions of conduct are
not anxious to know what is to become of the baby and the washing of the
housewife who wants to cast a vote at a Parliamentary election. There
was a pause; then the speaker declared the meeting closed. The meeting,
however, declined to be closed. The crowd stood motionless, waiting for
more; and they had it, when a real electioneer, wearing party colours
and bristling with party commonplaces, stepped up to the fringe of the
audience. He brought a breath of prosperous unreality with him, and when
his objection, the usual apprehensive one about future women members of
Parliament, was aptly answered from the lorry, the habitués of the place
broke into noisy exultation.
"Nipped 'im in the bud, she has! Give it 'im agin, miss; give it 'im
'ot!"
As it happened, she had to give it to him again and again, he being one
of those hecklers who are never nipped in the bud, but think that if
they ask the same question often enough they will catch the speaker
unawares in the end. Unable to do this, after failing to accept or
indeed to comprehend the answer that was patiently repeated four times,
the ingenuous heckler wanted to know if the lady did not think he could
sufficiently safeguard her interests in Parliament, and went away
feeling sure he had the best of it, but wondering slightly why she
laughed so immoderately at his parting shaft.
The wagon moved slowly off, and the meeting reluctantly broke up. The
woman who had been speaking looked down upon her slowly dispersing
audience, and tried to draw conclusions.
"One feels at home with these people," she said. "I wonder why it is?"
"Society has broken down their barriers, and they haven't learnt to set
up new ones," suggested some one.
"'The saints and the sinners meet in the gaols,'" quoted our literary
member, softly. "Suffragettes forced to be sinners, and sinners who are
not given a chance to be saints--oh, it's easy to see why we two should
be fellow-creatures!"
The saints and the sinners, slouching back to their dens, passed a
similar verdict, if differently expressed, on the woman who had been
speaking.
"Good old sport, that's what _I_ call the old gal!" cried a young
fellow, challenging criticism in a threatening tone.
"Same 'ere," returned the pretty girl-sinner, or saint, not laughing
this time, as she looked after the flapping flag that had brought a
streak of colour, for one hour of her turbulent existence, into the
black spot of the constituency.
X
"Votes for Women--Forward!"
When our local committee determined, in the words of the minutes book,
to open a shop and offices in the local main street, "for the
dissemination of suffrage literature," we made up our minds that we
would not be amateur shopkeepers. The success of our venture, we argued
solemnly, depended on convincing the neighbourhood that we meant to be
taken as seriously as any other tradesman in the street. Unfortunately,
in saying this, we reckoned without our customer; for, if you attempt to
be taken seriously as a shopkeeper, the one error to be avoided is that
of taking the customer seriously.
Naturally, we began by taking the customer very seriously. The first one
who entered the shop was instantly confronted with three eager shop
assistants, who asked him breathlessly and in unison what they might
have the pleasure of showing him. He replied politely that he had known
perfectly well what they might have the pleasure of showing him, before
they asked him what it was, but that their unbroken front and commercial
zeal had entirely put it out of his head. Two of us thereupon beat a
wise retreat and left the field to the militant member of our
committee, who promptly told our first customer that she was sure he
wanted a suffrage tie in the colours. He agreed to this, dubiously at
first, afterwards with real alacrity when she offered him the
alternative of a tobacco-pouch, prettily decorated with a hand-painted
sketch of Holloway Gaol, done from memory.
"I never smoke a pipe," he explained, excusing himself for his firmness
over the tobacco-pouch; "but I can wear the tie, perhaps, when I call on
people who won't allow me to talk about votes for women."
"This tie will speak for itself," said the shop assistant.
"It will," agreed her customer with a warmth that seemed to us
excessive, until we perceived that the tie was oozing forth in all
directions from the insufficient piece of paper in which it was being
wrapped up.
After the departure of our first customer, we reconsidered the position.
It was evident that as shopkeepers we started with a distinct handicap,
being ourselves amateurs in selling, whereas no customer is ever an
amateur in buying. A woman may never have entered a suffrage shop in
order to buy an instructive pamphlet, but most women know how to pass a
pleasant half-hour in a hat shop without buying anything. We must be on
our guard, we decided, against the customer who came, not to buy, but to
shop, the opportunities open to the customer for falling short of the
shopkeeper's ideal of her being greatly multiplied when the shop at
which she shops is one for the dissemination of suffrage literature and
not for the display of spring millinery. Also, on the initiative of the
militant member of our committee, it was resolved that only one person
at a time should serve any one customer, and that if a second customer
should enter while everybody was still hunting for the pamphlet the
first customer wanted to buy, somebody should call "Shop!" in a
professional tone up the spiral staircase, in order to disabuse the
minds of both customers of the notion that we were new at our work. We
found, on carrying this last precept into practice, that it had a marked
effect on the waiting customer, though very little on the mythical
resources of the spiral staircase.
Having settled down to wait for the customers who were going to make our
shop a thriving business, we found that the majority of them belonged to
those who went out to shop and not to buy. Numbers of them, indeed,
seemed to be there on the assumption that if you want to buy something,
one shop is as good as another in which to seek it. A good deal of
useful experience is probably gained in this way by the one who shops;
but when you are the shopkeeper, you wish it could be gained at somebody
else's expense. We felt this very strongly the day that our door was
burst abruptly open by a ragged, unkempt gentleman who wanted a soup
ticket.
The childlike confidence of this particular gentleman in the ability of
the Suffragettes to supply his wants, was at once pathetic and
complimentary; but the pathos of it did not reveal itself to the
haughty, disapproving lady who was already in the shop, giving advice to
us all. She left at once, clearly convinced that really good unsought
advice was wasted on people who kept such low company, an opinion that
would have been startlingly confirmed had she waited long enough to see
the ticket-of-leave man.
The ticket-of-leave man came in to ask if we could give him a job.
Obviously, he belonged to the great army of those who can do "anything";
we had no job to give, and told him so--a little curtly, I am afraid, as
a consequence of many previous interruptions from those who did not come
to buy. He stood a moment, fumbling at the latch of the door without
raising it; then he turned round again.
"Don't send me away, lady," he pleaded. "I've been to prison too, same
as all of you."
The woman who alone among us answered to this generic description of a
mild and blameless local committee, came swiftly forward.
"I'm sorry," she said. "What can we do for you, and what made you come
to us?"
The man jerked his hand towards the corner of the street where a
policeman stood on the point. "Said he couldn't help me himself," was
the reply. "Oh, he spoke kind enough, I'm not complaining of the
coppers----"
"No, of course not," agreed our militant member. "He's especially nice,
that one. He's the one that arrested me in Parliament Square."
Another customer, who was making a genuine purchase, was struck
speechless by this calm announcement on the part of an amiable-looking
shop assistant; but the ticket-of-leave man went on with his tale
unemotionally.
"He said to me--'You go to the Suffragettes yonder,' he said; 'they'll
help you if anyone can,' he said. So I came in on the chance like."
We were rather sorry that our friend on the point sent us no more
ticket-of-leave men to vary the monotony of business life and to add to
the circle of acquaintance of our militant member. She, however, always
maintained that it was an error of judgment, if not of taste, on our
part, to present the policeman who had once arrested her with the
hand-painted tobacco-pouch, though she admitted that he might use it for
the rest of his life without discovering what the sketch of Holloway
Gaol was meant for.
The customer who was most destructive of our peace was the kind of
amiable person who, having completed an infinitesimal purchase, stayed
to chat, monopolizing the one shop chair and barricading a diminutive
counter against anybody else who might really want to buy something. We
greatly preferred the flippant jester who, attracted by our ingenuous
notice inviting people to come in and ask for what they did not see in
the window, would sometimes put his head in at the door to ask
facetiously for a vote; but we were rather glad that the humorist of the
street was, as a rule, too short to reach the latch, and had to satisfy
his sense of humour by assuming that the name of every woman in the
shop, not excluding the charwoman, was Pankhurst, a quip that afforded
exquisite joy to the little crowd that loved to hang round our doorway,
besides advertising the object of our shop very nicely. Sometimes, the
limitations of the street repertoire became a little tiresome. Admitting
that the phrase "Votes for Women" could not be said seriously too often
in a reactionary world, we felt that it was out of place when hurled as
an original remark through the letter-box by somebody who instantly ran
away. This method of backing a belief in any cause, though practised in
high places, might well be eradicated, we thought, in very small and
very elementary school children before it was too late; so we caught one
of them, a little girl staggering under the burden of a large baby, and
made her listen to reason. She was extremely friendly about it, said she
didn't see but what we were right, even if we did smack policemen's
faces, and kindly promised to come and have a look round, as soon as her
little sister was free to take over the responsibility of the baby.
It became increasingly difficult to sustain our professional pose as the
shop grew more popular, because kindly old ladies insisted on coming in
to ask if we took our meals regularly, and to beg us not to fall down
the spiral staircase, which looked perilous, I suppose, to any one who
saw us for the first time steering a tea-tray down its ramifications,
but always seemed to us pleasantly emblematic of our mounting
aspirations. Curiously enough, it was on the day the shop was
photographed that we finally won our way to the respect of the trade,
though at the time nothing in our business experience had made us feel
so much like children playing at shop.
Everything in the neighbourhood under the age of twelve rushed
helter-skelter to the spot. As fast as the photographer swept them to
one side of the pavement, they closed up on the other; and only his
experienced agility and a lightning camera enabled him to procure a
picture that did not resemble an advertisement of the Children's Holiday
Fund. All this was in the nature of a Roman holiday for the
neighbourhood, but we, summoned to the doorstep to form part of the
picture, felt it was to be counted among the lesser sacrifices that have
to be made for a cause. The bystanders, of course, did not take this
view of our behaviour.