the snowdrops should be, and only really lives when they come out. And
when she got there, it was most annoying, she thought of the gardener,
to the exclusion of everything else. After several minutes she found
that she had been occupied in committing the address she had been given
to memory.
“Number Twenty-one Penny Street. Twenty-one Penny Street.”
I cannot account for the occasional inconsistency of this woman except
by reminding you of a certain well-known natural phenomenon. Just as a
man whose arm has been amputated may still suffer from a phantom
finger-ache, so a woman who has killed her heart must, at certain points
in her life, feel the pain of a heart, as if the dead thing turned in
its grave. One of the most tragic things about loss is that it is never
annihilation.
“This is absurd,” thought the suffragette, pulling herself together. “I
must make a plan of campaign, as the M.S. Society would say. How am I
going to start?”
Brown Borough popularity is a slippery thing to seize. You must have a
handle to grasp it by.
A robin appeared, like a fairy, between two snowdrops. He did not notice
the suffragette, nevertheless he looked self-conscious. He re-arranged a
perfectly neat feather, and glanced at his waistcoat to see whether its
curve was correct. He even tried to glance over his waistcoat at his
feet, but this was physically impossible. The suffragette loved him
until she realised that he was in love, on which she wearied of him. A
chirrup behind her drew her attention to the lady in the case.
“I believe I’ll have to get hold of the priest,” said the suffragette. I
have told you that she was devoid of tact. She never took enough notice
of the world to sulk when the world was unkind, she was not human enough
to quarrel. I have seen her give great offence to the Chief M.S. by
borrowing a cigarette in the middle of a tempestuous scene of mutual
reproach. She never reviewed the past when arranging for the future, and
this, in human relations, is a fatal mistake.
She had an apple and an oatmeal biscuit in her bag. In spite of the
robin’s sentimental drawbacks, she shared the biscuit with him and gave
him the apple core. He finished the biscuit, and when about
three-quarters through with the apple core, he remembered his affair of
the heart. With the laboured altruism of the man in love, he tore
himself away, and embodied the apple core theme in a little song, by way
of informing the lady. She came, she began. Looking up with her third
mouthful, she noticed the suffragette. With a hoarse chirp, she shot
over the horizon.
“He forgot to warn her,” sighed the suffragette. “Men _are_ so
unimaginative.”
The gentleman came back and finished the apple core.
The suffragette’s mind, which was rather sleepy, turned to the occasion
when she too had shot away from destiny, over a blue horizon.
“But I left Courtesy as an apple core,” she said. “Men ought to be as
good philosophers as robins, any day.”
You and I are getting tired of this scene. And so was the suffragette.
She shook herself.
“I must wake up,” she said. “The incident is closed. I’m glad it’s
closed. But I’m very glad it was once open. By mistake I came alive for
a little while. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in love. But
I thank God I have met love—in a dream.”
She might possibly have been referring to the robin drama. But I don’t
think she was.
She put her chin up, and buttoned up the hair shirt, and exchanged the
snowdrops for a ’bus.
It was the day after this that the priest was addressing his sister’s
Girls’ Club in the Brown Borough. He was supplying food for the soul
while his sister prepared food for the body. The girls were listening
with the polite though precarious attention which Brown Borough girls
always bring to bear on the first three hundred words of any address,
especially if the addresser be a man. Factory girls are amiable
creatures with something inborn that very closely resembles good
manners. Unless you are so unfortunate as to stumble upon their sense of
humour, they will always give you a hearing. Their sense of humour is
broad, but only touched by certain restricted means. If you have a smut
on your nose, or if your hat is on one side, or if you stammer in your
speech, or if it is obvious that you have just sat in a puddle on
alighting from your ’bus, you need cherish no hopes, but be sure that
every word you say is only adding to the comedy of the situation.
The priest was extremely neat, as usual. His piercing eyes under his
grey hair looked dignified, and he was concealing moral quack remedies
in gilded anecdotes with marked success. He had reached the critical
point in a comic story about his recent adventures in the tropics, and
was just preparing to lead the roar of amusement, when, over the heads
of his audience, he saw a face that seemed terribly familiar. He
finished the story with such gravity that nobody dared to smile.
“How unwise I was to put the idea into her head,” he told himself, and,
descending from his eminence, went to meet her.
“This is indeed a surprise, yerce, yerce,” he said, shaking her coldly
by the hand. He thought that she would be cut to the heart by the fact
that he failed to qualify the surprise as pleasant. She did not notice
the omission. She was not accustomed to being made very welcome.
“I have followed your advice,” she said. “I have come down to ask you
for work.”
“How very well-timed,” said the priest’s sister just behind him.
“Christopher, introduce the young lady.”
“We will talk of that later,” said the priest. “I have not finished my
address.”
But he virtually had. For he could find nothing else to say, although he
continued speaking. The girls lost interest, and began passing each
other letters and photographs from their chaps. A little plain girl,
beside whom the suffragette had taken her seat, handed her one of these
documents.
I have said that the suffragette had a hard face—it is worth noting that
no beggar ever begged of her unless he was blind. But I suppose she had
loved women so long and so fiercely that there was something in her look
that established confidence in the women she met. Nobody would have
handed a love-letter to Mrs. Rust to read, within five minutes of her
first appearance.
“The cocoa is ready, Christopher,” said the priest’s sister audibly,
from an inner room.
A remark like this, though trivial, will throw almost any orator off his
track. The priest stopped, with the resigned sigh of Christian
irritation.
The suffragette handed the letter back to her neighbour. “What a nice
chap yours must be,” she said.
“Are you the young woman wot’s come to ply the pianner?” asked the girl.
“I’m not sure,” replied the suffragette, with a guarded look at the
priest. “I rather think I am.”
This was luckily considered amusing, and over the cocoa the comments on
the new young woman were favourable.
The priest’s sister came out from the inner room, whence proceeded the
loud bubbling squeaks of cocoa-drinkers.
“Now, Christopher,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me you had found a
new helper?”
“I do not know that I have, my dear,” replied the priest. “This young
lady has misinterpreted something I said to her.”
“It’s very lucky that she did, then,” said the priest’s sister. “We are
so badly in need of a new voluntary helper.”
“You oblige me to put the matter baldly, my dear,” said the priest,
keeping his temper with a creditable effort. “This is the young lady I
mentioned to you last night in the course of conversation. All our
helpers hitherto have been of the highest moral character.”
“From your face...” said the priest’s sister to the suffragette. “I am
sure you mean well. I am sure you are not wicked. And if you have
slipped, there is nothing like hard work in the Brown Borough to make
you forget.”
The suffragette was so much startled to hear herself addressed in this
unusual vein that she very nearly cried. It is rare to have tears so
near so horny a surface as hers.
“My dear ...” said the priest. “I think you forget my position of
authority in this parish. You also forget the pure young souls committed
to your care in this club. Yerce, yerce.”
He actually imagined the factory girls to be as innocent as himself. To
him the words youth and innocence were indivisible.
“Oh, nonsense, Christopher,” said his sister. “She doesn’t necessarily
want to help with this club, and even if she did she can’t convey
infection to the girls by playing the piano to them.”
“I do not expect she does play the piano,” said the priest lamely.
“You do play, don’t you? You have such pretty hands.”
After that, of course, the suffragette felt as though she could have
played Strauss to please her. As a matter of fact she had little real
articulate gift for music, but she never forgot a tune she had heard,
and found no difficulty in rendering the songs that always sang in her
head, outwardly instead of inwardly.
The priest’s sister was not musical. Nor was she critical. She
considered that the Brown Borough had in this newcomer found something
it had lacked. The suffragette, who possessed certain secret springs of
conceit, was to some extent of the same opinion. And by the end of the
evening the majority of the girls shared this view.
“Do you know a Mrs. Smith?” asked the suffragette, as she said good-bye.
“I know perhaps five hundred Mrs. Smiths,” said the priest’s sister.
“She wears a plush coat, and a baby, and a little girl of hers died in
October.”
“About two hundred and fifty out of the five hundred wear plush coats,
and babies, and little girls that die.”
“I wonder what surnames are for,” said the suffragette pettishly, “since
they have ceased to distinguish one person from another?”
“If you come to me to-morrow,” said the priest’s sister, “I will give
you the names of various women who want visiting. If your Mrs. Smith
needs you, you will soon find her, if you live in the Brown Borough.”
The suffragette was a rash woman. She always abode by her own first
choice. Before she went to see the priest’s sister in the morning, she
found herself a Brown Borough lodging. She did this by the simple device
of knocking on the door of the first house she saw that displayed a
notice, “Apartment.”
“Now then, wot’s the matter?” asked the lady who opened the door.
The suffragette, though impossible to silence, was easy to abash. And
there is certainly something disheartening in such a salutation.
However, she suggested that the notice in the window might excuse an
intrusion.
She was very lucky; one always is when one doesn’t deserve to be so. She
might have found a room with a brown wet ceiling curtseying floorward
under the stress of many rains. She might have found a room peopled by a
smell incredible, with rags stuffed into panes that had been broken by a
merciful accident. She might have found walls discoloured by dark
patches that looked like old blood. All these things are apt to decorate
Woman’s Sphere in the Brown Borough.
But the suffragette had, by mistake, knocked on the door of the most
respectable house in the most respectable street in the district. She
found a clean, though dark room, with a window blinking against the sun
at a back yard filled with snowdrops. The wall-paper talked in a loud
voice of tulips: wine-coloured tulips trampled on each other and
wrestled for supremacy over every inch of it. The tablecloth and carpet
were the colour of terra-cotta, and firmly disagreed with every word the
wall-paper said. Two horse-hair chairs, in sullen brown, looked moodily
at each other across the table.
The suffragette never asked more than that her body might live in a
clean place. She kept her mind detachable from colour schemes. After
all, what is my body for but to enclose me?
“I’ll have the room,” said the suffragette, as if it had been a cake of
soap.
It was like a dream to the landlady, a dream she had never been
sufficiently feverish to indulge in.
“You’ll have it?” she gasped.
“Yes. Why not? What’s the rent, by the way?”
The landlady, by means of a rapid mental process of multiplication, rose
manfully to the occasion.
“All right, fifteen shillings,” said the suffragette. “I’ll come in
to-morrow.”
She went to see the priest’s sister, but to her mild annoyance found the
priest instead.
“My sister suggested that you should visit the Wigskys,” said the
priest, who never bore malice, as far as one could see. He never allowed
you for a moment to forget that he was a Christian. “Mrs. Wigsky’s
latest baby hasn’t been christened. Also I think the eldest girl must be
getting into bad ways; she has left the excellent place I found for
her.”
“And must I persuade the baby to be christened?”
“Not the child itself. You had better do your best to persuade the
mother.”
“But supposing she refuses on principle?”
The priest fixed her with his piercing eye. “There can be no principle
contrary to the Right,” he said. “The opposite to Right is Wrong.”
“How simple!” said the suffragette. “But won’t Hell be terribly
overcrowded?”
The priest sighed, and certainly with reason. But he remembered that he
was very broad-minded, and that he had often said that everybody had a
right to their own opinion. He remembered that the soft answer that
turneth away the fatuity of women had found a place even in the New
Testament.
“No one would be more loth than I ...” he said, “to classify as
condemned all whose views do not coincide with the dictates of the
Church. Let us rather call them mistaken.”
The suffragette shut in a renewed protest with a snap of her jaws.
Although she badly needed a handle by which to seize the Brown Borough,
surely there must be other handles than the Church. She determined
secretly on determination as her unaided weapon.
But she went to see the Wigskys. She found them—a large family, red and
mutually wrathful in an atmosphere of hot smells ancient and modern.
When she got inside the door she wondered why she had come. The baby
screaming on its mother’s breast looked incorrigibly heathen, the eldest
girl looked wholly unsuited to any “excellent place” discovered by the
priest.
“Wooder _you_ want?” asked the harassed mother, a drab and dusty
creature, with the used look of cold ashes.
“I’ve come from Father Christopher ...” began the suffragette, wishing
she had come from some one else.
“’N you can go back to Farver Christopher,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “Becos I
ain’t goin’ to ’ave no more bibies christened. It’s ’eaven ’ere, an’
’eaven there, this biby’s goin’ ter grow up ’eeven fer a chinge. It
carn’t get us into worse trouble nor wot we’ve ’ad.”
“I haven’t come to bother you,” said the suffragette. “After all, it’s
your baby, not Father Christopher’s.”
“That’s wot I ses,” said the mother, slightly mollified. “Well, if you
’aven’t come abaht Biby, wot ’ave you come for?”
“I’ve come because I want to find friends in the Brown Borough. If you
don’t want me, please tell me to go.”
The Brown Borough never protests if you surprise it; and in any case,
Mrs. Wigsky’s soul was too dead for consistent protest. Also it was
certainly a change to be visited by one who lacked the visitor’s
apprising eye, who seemed unaware of an unswept floor and an unmade bed.
“As Father Christopher talked about the Brown Borough women ...” said
the suffragette, “I wanted more and more to know them, because it seems
to me so splendid to keep going at all in the Brown Borough. I must tell
you I always love women. So you must forgive me for coming.”
“’Tain’t often as lidies come to admire us,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “They
allus comes to show us ’ow wrong we are.”
“I’m not a lady,” said the suffragette.
“Ow, yus you are,” said the eldest girl, speaking for the first time.
“Are you the girl that’s out of a job?” asked the suffragette.
“Yus. Farver Christopher got me a job as general to the lidy oo keeps
the post orfice. She give me three-an’-six a week an’ no food, an’
mother ain’t earnin’ now, an’ Tom’s in ’orsbital, so it weren’t good
enough. I run awiy. She ’it me too, an’ mide me cerry up the coals. But
’er bein’ a lidy, I couldn’t siy much—I jus’ run awiy.”
“I wish you’d hit her back,” said the suffragette. “And I wish the word
‘lady’ had never been invented.”
“Lidies is lidies, an’ generals is generals,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “Gawd
mide it so, an’ you carn’t get over it.”
“I’m sure God never made it so,” said the suffragette. “He made men and
women, and nothing else. He made man in His own image, and left woman to
make herself. And she’s doing it. That’s what makes us all so proud to
be women.”
“I’m not proud of bein’ a woman. I’m sick of it,” said Mrs. Wigsky; but
the girl said, “You do talk beautiful, miss. I b’leeve I’m a little bit
proud. Anywiy, I wouldn’t be a man for somefink.”
“Men,” sniffed Mrs. Wigsky. “It’s men wot does all the ’arm. An’ yet you
carn’ get along wivout ’em altogether. They’re so ’elpless.”
(I hope you notice this truth, one of the few unposed truths in this
book. Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman
depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is
pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no
one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps
a canary as a substitute for a husband.)
“All the same,” said the suffragette, “men are proud of being men, and
that is one of the greatest virtues. I don’t suppose there is a man in
London who would be general to a Post Office lady at three-and-six a
week and no food.”
This was thought to be supremely witty, and the suffragette rose to
depart on the crest of a ripple of popularity. The girl followed her
half-way downstairs.
“You fink that I was roight then to chuck that job, miss?”
The suffragette at that moment parted company with Father Christopher.
“Certainly I think you were right. It’s very wrong to take less money
than you’re worth. I’d rather lend your mother money to get on with
until you can get a worth-while job than let a friend of mine go so
cheap as three-and-six a week. You can give your mother this address,
and tell her I’ll come to see her again very soon.”
As she reached the first landing, she became aware of a fresh twist in
the maze. I think drama of a rather sombre variety is the very life of
the Brown Borough, and I defy you to thread its streets or climb its
stairways for half a day without meeting some Thing you never met
before.
The doorway on the first landing was practically filled by a woman,
whose most surprising characteristic was that her right eye was filled
with blood. The blood was running down on to the breast of her dress.
“I’m feelin’ that queer,” said the woman. “It’s the sight o’ blood allus
mikes me queer.”
“You must let me help you,” said the suffragette. “You must let me put
you on your bed.”
The woman laughed and remained swaying in the doorway.
“Bedder standen’ ...” she mumbled hysterically.
She was an enormous woman, and effectually blocked the doorway. For one
mad moment the suffragette meditated climbing over her. An obstacle
always had an irresistible fascination for her.
“Don’t be so silly,” said the suffragette. “Let me come in at once. I am
here to help. Stand aside.”
The woman laughed again, and her head suddenly lolled down upon her
breast. A little drip of blood ran down upon the floor.
“You are making a mess on the floor,” said the suffragette.
There was a magic in the words. I suppose their power lay in their utter
futility. The woman stood aside.
“Now let me get you to bed,” said the suffragette as she entered. But
there was no bed.
There were a dresser, a small table, and a chair. There was also a man,
noisily asleep upon the chair.
“Ran me eye agin the corner of the tible,” said the woman.
“How very unlucky,” said the suffragette, “considering the table’s
practically the only thing in the room. Except the man.”
She took the back of the chair and tipped it forward. She tilted it to
such an angle that nobody in their senses could have remained seated in
it. But a guardian angel seems to look after the drunk at the expense of
the sober. When because she was not a professional weight-lifter, the
suffragette had to let the chair revert to its natural position, the man
was still comfortably asleep.
The woman fainted in the corner.
“Wake up, you damned pig!” said the suffragette, with the utmost
strength of her soft voice, and she struck his shoulder with all the
weight of a perfectly useless fist.
“Shall I fetch a policeman?” asked Miss Wigsky.
“The Law’s no good,” said the suffragette frowning. “I don’t believe
there is a law against a man being drunk in the only chair. Do you think
you could borrow a cushion or two from your mother, so that we could
make the woman comfy on the floor?”
By the time Miss Wigsky returned with the relic of a pillow, the
suffragette had bathed the blood from the eye.
“Woz this?” inquired the woman, opening the surviving eye upon the
appearance of Miss Wigsky. “Woz this? Pillers? Tike ’em awiy. I ’aven’t
bin to bed in the diytime for twenty years, nor I ain’t goin’ to begin
now....”
“You must lie down,” said the suffragette. “And I will fetch the doctor
to sew up your eye.”
“Bless yer ...” crowed the invalid. “S’long as I’ve got legs to walk to
the doctor on, you kin bet yer life ’e won’t walk to me. I’ll go’n see
’im, soon’s as I stop bein’ all of a tremble.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“As you please.”
Miss Wigsky escaped.
“Why do you allow that man to be drunk in here?” asked the suffragette
after a pause.
“’E don’t arsk my leave.”
“Is he your husband?”
“No. ’E is in a manner of speakin’. But I wouldn’t really marry a soppy
bloke like thet.”
“Then why do you have soppy blokes crowding you out of your own
furniture?”
“Ow, one must ’ave a man about the plice. Feels more ’omely-like.”
“Does he work for you?”
“I don’t fink.”
“Is he very good to you?”
The woman, not unnaturally, began to get restive. “’Oo ye’re gettin’ at?
Nat’rally a man ain’t soothin’ syrup when ’e come ’ome as my young man
come ’ome an hour ago. ’E’s better’n some.”
There was a long silence. Then the suffragette said, “Women seem to be
extraordinarily cheap in the market. They hire themselves out to the man
who hits the hardest. It makes one almost tired of being a woman.”
“Look ’ere ...” said the patient wrathfully, but she stopped there.
Presently she sat up and said, “I’m goin’ to doctor’s now. And if you
ain’t still too _tired_, miss, perhaps you’ll see me as fur as the
’orspital....”
So the suffragette laid hold of the Closed Door of the Brown Borough, by
the handle of her fanatic determination. She never saw the impossibility
of victory. It was the earliest of the early spring, and there was hope
in the air. For many weeks hope was her only luxury. With it she
sweetened her bread and margarine when she rose, to the tune of it she
munched her nightly tripe and onions. She saw the mirage of the end in
sight, and with her great faith she almost made it real. She was a blind
optimist where women were concerned.
On the initiative of the priest’s sister, she attended the Church Girls’
Club three evenings a week. On her own initiative she played the Church
false, and established in its own field of labour, behind its back, the
foundation of her task.
It was originally Miss Wigsky’s fault. Miss Wigsky was a girl of
practical energy, a warring spirit, a potential suffragette. She had
long been a militant resister of the Church Club ideal, but when the
suffragette became one of its regular adherents, Miss Wigsky joined it
at once. Hers was the active responsibility for what followed, and
’Tilda’s the passive. I think I have mentioned ’Tilda before, though not
by name. She was a small white creature who had committed the absurdity
of losing her heart to the suffragette at first sight, and had sealed
her admiration by laying bare the letter of her chap at their first
meeting.
The moment of cocoa-drinking was always the moment of confidences. It
was during this comparatively peaceful time that the suffragette made
friends, and it was at this point that ’Tilda one evening approached
her.
“Jenny Wigsky’s a funny gel,” said ’Tilda. “She’s bin talkin’ about you,
miss. I got a new job the other day, very little money—piece-work—on’y
shillin’ a diy if I work ever so ’ard. I ses to Jenny, ‘I’m a good gel I
am, to tike less money than I’m worth just to ’elp my muvver.’ But Jenny
ses I’m a very bad gel—she ses you ses as it’s wicked to tike bad
money.”