suffragette. “But I do think it’s selfish. Every time a girl takes too
little money, she may be forcing another girl to take less. You know
it’s partly your fault that women’s wages are so bad. You can feel now
that you’ve had a share in the work of sweating women, ’Tilda.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” said Miss Wigsky. “Why don’t you do as I do, an’
stick out for ten?”
“But you’re not gettin’ it,” objected ’Tilda.
“I’m goin’ to get it, I am. I’m goin’ back to my ol’ tride—box-miking. I
left it becos the work was so ’ard, but the money’s better.”
“I don’t mind how hard people work, as long as they get paid for it,”
said the suffragette. “Of course, you have to do good work for good
money. What I mean is that I think it’s just as dishonest to take too
little money as it is to do too little work.”
“But wot’s the good of one standin’ out?”
“Very little good. But more good in a dozen standing out and more still
in a hundred.”
“Le’s start a sassiety,” suggested the strenuous Miss Wigsky. “You could
be the Preserdink, miss, an’ I’ll ’elp yer. We’ll call ourselves the
‘Suffragette Gels,’ an’ we won’t allow none of us to tike less money
than ten shillin’.”
“Garn ...” said ’Tilda. “Thet’s a Tride Union, thet is. A man’s gime. If
I chuck my job, ’oo’s goin’ to keep me til I get a better one. Muvver? I
don’t fink....”
“I will,” said the suffragette. “If there’s anybody here earning less
than ten shillings a week, I’ll give them seven-and-six a week for a
fortnight if they have to chuck their job, and I’ll also give a prize of
seven-and-six at the end of the fortnight to the girl who’s increased
her wages the most.”
No plan could ever have been less planned. She thought of it as she
spoke of it, a most rash method. But Miss Wigsky immediately set to work
to hew it into shape.
“You’ll ’ave to arringe for piece-work, miss,” she said. “Anybody on
piece-work could increase their wiges by working for twenty-four hours a
diy, but it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Nobody must work after eight at night,” said the suffragette.
“An’ if two or three gets the sime rise?” suggested Miss Wigsky.
“I’ll give them each seven-and-six,” said the suffragette.
Of the twenty girls present, three were earning over ten shillings and
entered a different class of the competition, working for the prize
without the maintenance, if a rise should be found possible without loss
of employment. Of the remaining seventeen, two refused to compete, and
one was too small to be worth more than her present earnings. The other
fourteen determined on an immediate attack on their employers. Chances
were discussed instead of dances for the rest of the evening.
“My boss’ll siy—the money’s there—you kin tike it or leave it. ’E’s said
that before.”
“My boss’ll smile—’e allus calls me ’Tip-a-wink, becos I’m the smallest
gel there. ’E’s never cross—my boss ain’t.”
“I think I’ll win the prize easy—don’t know why I never thought of it
before. Buster—my boss—ses I’ve got the ’andiest ’ands wiv the bristles
as ever ’e see.”
“My missus’ll siy—there’s ’undreds of sluts in the Borough twice as good
as you, an’ I like yer imperence, an’ you kin tike the sack wivout
notice. She allus calls me a slut—we won’t be sorry to part.”
“I shall stick to the fevver work, an’ tike up curlin’ an’ sewin’, as
well as the knotting. I bin too lizy up to now, but I’ve got an aunt in
the tride as ’ud learn me in no time.”
At closing time the priest drew the suffragette aside.
“I heard Jane Wigsky’s voice constantly raised in the dining-room this
evening. I want your opinion of that girl. Yerce, yerce. She seems to me
rough and coarse, and I am tempted to think she is a disturbing
influence in the Club.”
“She’s not so disturbing as I am,” said the suffragette, with a spasm of
conscience.
“Oh, don’t say that,” said the priest, whose sister had been readjusting
his manners. “Don’t be disheartened, you will soon get into our ways,
yerce, yerce. But to return to Jane Wigsky, I do not like the girl. She
is impertinent and self-assured. I feel sure she puts ideas into the
girls’ heads.”
“I shouldn’t think an idea more or less would make much difference.”
The priest sighed. I am not surprised. I quite admit that the
suffragette was an infuriating person. I yield to none in my admiration
for any one who could manage to keep their temper with her.
“You know I mean harmful ideas. She has no staying power. She left
excellent employment, apparently simply through a whim. Her mistress,
the postmistress, is a great friend of mine. In short, I consider the
girl undesirable, and we are thinking of asking her to leave the Club.”
The suffragette became red.
“I’m sorry the postmistress is a friend of yours,” she said. “Because
she can’t be a very admirable friend. She herself admits that she only
paid the girl three-and-six a week, with no food except a cup of tea at
mid-day.”
“Poor wages, yerce, yerce. But far better than idleness.”
“Infinitely worse,” said the suffragette.
A rather feverish silence fell for a moment. I think the priest said a
prayer. At any rate he thought he did.
“Surely you have some sympathy with our aims in this Club. Surely you
agree that it is a worthy ideal to try to raise the level of the young
womanhood of the Borough. Surely you see that we cannot do this unless
we keep the girls in good uplifting company. Jane Wigsky is a bad girl.
One must draw the line between good and bad.”
“One may draw a line, but one needn’t build a barrier. And even to draw
a line, one should have very good sight.”
“I think I hardly need your advice on the management of a parish I have
served for twenty-two years. If this were my Club I should request you
to find some other outlet for your energies. But my sister is very
obstinate. Good evening.”
A certain amount of success attended the efforts of the Suffragette
Girls. By the end of that week, three girls had been given a rise for
the asking, the extent of it varying from sixpence to two shillings.
Several had got a promise of a rise when work should be less slack, only
three had taken the drastic step of leaving their employment. The
piece-workers with few exceptions were working for a wage which seemed
unalterable. An envelope-folder raised her earnings from three halfpence
a thousand to twopence. But as a rule there is no labour groove so deep
as the piece-worker’s.
It was on the Thursday night before Good Friday that the suffragette,
dressed in a dressing-gown, sat before her fire remembering the simplest
character in this simple book—Scottie Brown.
“It’s dog-stealing,” she thought, “no less. Miss Brown may return to the
Island any time crying out for Scottie to come and comfort her. And
Scottie will be languishing in England, undergoing quarantine. We are
dog-thieves.”
The “we” sent a little heat-wave over the place where her heart should
have been.
She had been working very hard all day, walking about the Brown Borough
collecting its worries. She was so tired that she could not rest, could
not go to bed, could not do anything except sit on her hearthrug and
think feverishly of things that did not matter.
Outwardly the suffragette, when in her dressing-gown, and with her hair
drawn into a small smooth plait, approached more nearly her vocation
than under any other circumstances. She was a nun, dedicated to an
unknown God.
“A person to see you,” said the landlady, and flung open the door. The
suffragette shot to her feet, with a momentary terrible suspicion that
the landlady had said “parson.” Visions of a bashful curate brought face
to face with a militant suffragette in her dressing-gown, were, however,
swept away by the entrance of Miss Wigsky.
“It’s a —— shime,” remarked the visitor loudly, discarding the
convention of greeting.
“Sure to be,” said the suffragette, sinking down upon the hearthrug
again. “Nearly everything’s that kind of shame. Sit down and tell me.”
“I tol’ you I’d got a job, you know, at Smiff’s—boot-uppers. A lucky
find it were, I thought, ten shillin’ a week an’ I was to be learnt ’ow
to work a machine. ’E ses ’e thought I was a likely sort on Monday when
I went, but ’e ses as ’e was goin’ to learn me somethink, an’ ’e wanted
a special sort of gel, like, ’e ars’t for references. Knowin’ as ’e was
a religious sort of gentleman, an’ give ’eaps of money to the Church, I
tol’ ’im Farver Christopher for my reference, because Farver
Christopher’s known Muvver sence she married, an’ allus said ’e would
’elp ’er whenever ’e could. So when I went agine yesterday, to Smiff’s,
’e ses as ’ow Farver Christopher ’adn’t spoke well of me—said I was
unreliable, an’ never stuck to one job. So Mr. Smiff ses in thet cise I
wouldn’t suit, but ’e ses as I looked likely ’e’d give me a job as
packer at six shillin’. I ses as I couldn’ afford to tike so little
money, an’ I tol’ ’im about you an’ the Suffragette Gels. ’E ses you
oughter be ashimed of yoursel’, an’ ’e’d write an’ tell Farver
Christopher as ’ow ’is Club was an ’otbed of somethink or other. I ’ites
Farver Christopher—curse ’im—an’ ’e miking belief to be so ’elpful. I
was in my first job free years, an’ jus’ because I chucked the —— job ’e
found for me, ’e does me dirty like this. Curse ’im.”
“Don’t,” said the suffragette. “Suffragettes don’t waste breath in
cursing—even when there seems to be nothing to do but curse.”
“This evenin’ ...” continued Miss Wigsky, “I went to the Club to see if
you was there, though it wasn’t your night. Farver Christopher turned me
out, ’e did. ’E’s turned out fifteen of the gels, an’ tol’ them never to
come back no more. ’E found out from the others which was the
suffragette gels, an’ turned ’em out. I stood up to ’im, and arsk’ ’im
wotever we’ve done that’s wrong, there ain’t no ’arm, I ses, in tryin’
to get a livin’ wige. I arsk’ ’im ’ow ’e’d like to live under seven
shillin’ a week. ’E ses as ’ow God ’ad called us to this stite of life,
an’ it was wicked to try an’ alter it. ’E ses as women are pide what
they’re worth, an’ God mide rich an’ poor an’ men an’ women, an’ never
meant the poor to be rich, or women to be pretending they was as good as
men ... I spit at ’im, miss, I ’ope you’ll excuse me.”
“I’ll excuse you,” said the suffragette, “though I don’t think it was a
very artistic protest. I am most awfully sorry for you, Jenny, but I’m
not surprised. For you know when you became a suffragette you agreed to
fight, and now you’ve found out what you’re fighting, that’s all.
Suffragettes are just soldiers—only more sober—and when they meet the
enemy, they just get more determined, not more excited. If you were a
soldier and got wounded, we should be sorry for you, but also rather
proud of you. We must collect the suffragette girls somewhere else, and
make the army grow.”
“I don’t believe you can, miss. I went to see ’Tilda, an’ she was pretty
near soppy about it. She’s piece-work, an’ carn’ get ’er boss to rise
’er, so she ain’t done nothink to be turned out of the Club for, she
ses. She ses as ’ow she won’t never ’ave nuffink more to do wiv them
suffragettes. Then I met Lil, the tow-’aired gel—she was drunk—at the
corner of the Delta. She puts it all on you, miss.”
“Do you feel like that?” asked the suffragette.
“Ow well, in a manner o’ speakin’, it wouldn’ ’ave ’appened if it ’adn’t
bin for you, miss. But I don’t feel sore against you, not really. You
did it for the best. You miy be right about fightin’ the enemy, on’y the
enemy’s too strong. P’r’aps Farver Christopher’s right, an’ God mide
women to starve till they marry, an’ get beaten till they die....”
“If there is a God,” said the suffragette in a low voice, “the only
possible conclusion is that he is an Anti. Still, even a God can be
fought.”
“Ow, I’m sick o’ fightin’,” said Miss Wigsky. “I shall go orf wiv my
chap, though ’e is out of work....”
The gardener was at 21 Penny Street, waiting for an answer to his
message. To pass the time he had found work, or rather work had found
him, for he was a man of luck. Eventually, instead of an answer, Mrs.
Paul Rust called on him.
“How’s your son?” asked the gardener, who was pleased to meet some one
who had met the suffragette.
Beneath his superficial “unscathed” pose, there was a layer of deep
faithfulness. He knew by now that the suffragette was not worthy of the
love of a sober Assistant Secretary to a Society Which Believed Itself
of Great Importance (one of his latest practical poses). But the thing
one knows makes no difference to the thing one feels, if one is young.
The gardener was under the impression that his wisdom had dethroned the
suffragette from her eminence, but his heart, with the obstinacy
peculiar to hearts, continued to look up.
“My son is bad. He gets no stronger. There is no reason why he shouldn’t
get up, except that he isn’t strong enough to walk.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” said Mrs. Rust automatically, and stood checked by such a
decided lie.
“What annoys me is Courtesy,” she said after a pause. “Courtesy indeed,
she hasn’t treated me fairly. She had the impertinence to tell me last
week that she was engaged to that ridiculous young Wise she picked up at
Greyville. Engaged indeed, it’s stuff and nonsense, pure defiance. She’s
treated me as a sort of matrimonial agent. I wasn’t paying her £200 a
year to look for a husband.”
“No,” agreed the gardener. “Then why don’t you forbid the banns?”
Poor Mrs. Rust’s helplessness in the hands of Courtesy rose vaguely to
her memory. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “I haven’t yet decided what
steps I shall take in the matter. There is no immediate hurry. She has
suggested letting the matter drop until Samuel is better. She has many
failings, but I think she is fond of me.”
“That’s a very attractive failing,” admitted the gardener.
“I didn’t come here to discuss Courtesy with you,” snapped Mrs. Rust,
suddenly remembering her temper. “I came because Samuel wanted me to
come. He seems to be under delusions about you, he thinks he owes you
gratitude. In fact—probably under the influence of delirium—he once said
you financed his hotel. As a matter of fact I financed it myself, it
owes its present success to me.”
“It’s awfully good of you to come all this way to bring me misdirected
gratitude,” said the gardener.
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I wouldn’t stir an inch out of my
way to make you more conceited than you are. But that is the worst of
having a son, you have to pay occasional attention to his wishes.
Besides, Courtesy brought me up to town and gave the address to the
chauffeur, so I really wasn’t consulted. Samuel wishes to see you. All
the time he was ill he was asking for the Tra-la-la young man, and now I
find he means you. I might have said that right at the beginning, and
not have wasted all this time listening to your chatter.”
“I’m very glad you didn’t,” said the gardener. “I couldn’t bear a caller
who came straight to the point in five words and then left.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “Are you coming?”
It was half-past three on Good Friday afternoon. There is something
about that little Easter cluster of Sundays that weighs your heart down,
if you are in postless London, and expecting a letter.
“Where is your son?” he asked.
“In Hampshire, in the Cottage Hospital, near the Red Place. You could
put up at the Red Place. Samuel, being a fool, said you might have the
big black and white room on the first floor. He might have let it for
five guineas over Bank Holiday.”
“What time is the train?” asked the gardener.
“My car is at the door. The chauffeur is a dangerous lunatic, and there
seems to me to be every likelihood that the back wheel will come off
before we get out of London. But—are you coming?”
So the gardener came. Seated behind the dangerous lunatic, over the
dangerous back wheel, and beside a hostess in a musical comedy motor
bonnet, he followed once more the road that led to the gods.
He had left his address with Miss Shakespeare for the forwarding of
letters.
The great surprise of spring awaited them outside London. There were
lambs under a pale sky, and violets under pale green hedges. Gnarled
trees, like strong men’s muscles, curved out of roadside copses, lit
with a green radiance. There was lilac smiling across the cottage
gardens, there were wallflowers blotted dark against whitewashed walls.
But when they reached the pines and heath they left the spring behind.
Only the larches preached its gospel.
“You had better come and see Samuel first,” said Mrs. Rust. “He is
anxious to see you. He always was a fool.”
So they passed the Red Place. It flared out at them along a sombre ride
that cut the woods in two.
“Samuel says his gods look after the place as well as any manager, while
he is away. But of course he has a chef now, and a competent bureau
clerk.”
“I suppose you couldn’t ask the gods to dish up the dinner, or make out
the bills,” admitted the gardener regretfully. “But I wonder if there’s
room for the gods as well as the chef and the competent bureau clerk.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “A good dinner’s worth all the
gods in mythology.”
They drove up to their destination.
The cottage hospital had only recruited to the service of the sick in
later life. For a hundred years or so it had been the haunt of the
wicked landowner. Worldly squires’ wives had given tea in its paved
pergola to curates’ wives in their best hats. But as the house grew
older it reformed. Its walls, steeped in the purple village gossip of a
century, now echoed only to the innocent if technical prattle of nurses.
The only person who walked in its garden was Sister: she threw crumbs to
the goldfish as severely as though the crumbs were for their good. For
the blessing which the house inherited from its past was its garden. A
small garden, like a cut emerald, but reflecting all other jewels. It
was a garden that tried to enshrine sombre peace amid the vivid riot of
spring. Its high clipped hedges drew decorously angular reflections in
the pools. Brown wallflowers hid the feet of the hedges. The lilacs
seemed somehow turned to half mourning by the proximity of a copper
beech. A veil of tree seeds spinning down the wind fell diagonally
across the garden. The pink horse chestnut was very symmetrical. Only
the little saxifrages protested against the geometrical correctness of
the paving-stones, and forget-me-nots sang a shrill song in blue from
the restraining chaperonage of red pottery tubs. A little cupid with a
dislocated hip played a noiseless flute from a pedestal. The garden was
a prig, but it was the sort of prig that makes you wonder whether after
all it is worth while to be so exquisitely sinful.
They found Samuel Rust, who was the only patient in the hospital, the
centre of a mist of nurses. He was lying in the shade of a great smooth
yew pyramid with a military-looking bird fashioned on the top of it.
Samuel Rust, that unusual young man, could never be much paler than he
had been when in health, but he was grey now, rather than white, and his
round sequins of eyes were set in a deeper setting.
“The Tra-la-la young man,” he said as the gardener approached. “I have
been wondering why I wanted to see you.”
“So have I,” said Mrs. Rust, who, after a momentary lapse into a
maternal expression, had turned her back on the invalid.
“Let’s pretend I’m just an ordinary sick-bed visitor, then,” suggested
the gardener. “One never knows why—or whether—one wants to see that sort
of visitor. In that case I have to begin:—Dear Mr. Rust, I hope you are
much better.”
“Still posing,” said Samuel. “What is your latest attitude?”
“I never pose,” said the gardener. “I have a horror of the pose. My
mind’s eye sometimes changes the spectacles it wears, but that’s all. I
now find that all along the gods were intending me to be a business
man.”
“Hard luck,” said Samuel.
The nurses had melted away, and Mrs. Rust followed them into the house.
The sun was making ready for his triumph in the west and a diffident
moon perched on the peak of the pink horse chestnut.
“Perhaps one ought to have foreseen the gods’ intention of making you a
business man,” said Samuel, “for you certainly carried out the
unscrupulous deceiver part with wonderful success—That is—jolly
well—what? My Red Place now sings a hymn of praise to you, to the tune
of ten pounds a week—clear.”
“Don’t mention it,” said the gardener. “It didn’t need much unscrupulous
deceiving to persuade your mother to get her heart to work. And, to tell
you the truth, the end was rather drowned in the means on that journey.
I got so busy living—I only thought of you when absolutely necessary.”
“I didn’t expect you to wear my image graven on your heart, what?” said
Samuel. “You are young, and living should certainly be your business. Is
that why you said you were a business man? I have often thought that
being young and only lately set up in business, you had no business to
saddle yourself with a wife.”
“No business whatever,” admitted the gardener.
“Then why did you?”
“I didn’t.”
“Good heavens,” said Samuel fretfully, “why was I born in such a cryptic
age?”
“The truth is—I spoke in a futurist sense when I called her my wife.”
“In other words, you lied,” suggested Samuel. “You just took a little
tame woman on a string for a trip, as many better men have done before
you?”
“I dragged a woman by force across the Atlantic, and then she ran away.
She ran back home.”
“The silly ass,” said Mr. Rust irritably. “Why did she do that?”
“The attitude of women towards force ...” said the gardener
sententiously, “is not what psychologists make it out to be. By some of
the books I’ve read, I would have thought that women worshipped brute
force; I would have thought that they kept their hair long specially in
order to be dragged about by it.”
“I have known very few women really well,” said Samuel; “and the ones I
knew didn’t wear hair that they could be dragged about by. I should
think the final disappearance of your post-impressionist wife was rather
a good riddance.”
“It was neither good nor a riddance. In the same futurist sense I still
call her my wife. It’s an effort, I admit, to continue to be fond of a
militant suffragette, and yet somehow it’s an effort I can’t help
making.”
Courtesy appeared, her hair an impudent rival to the sunset.
“I’ve brought your book from the library,” she said. “I couldn’t get any
books by Somethingevsky, as you asked, so I brought _The Rosary_.
“I ought to congratulate you on your engagement,” said the gardener. “In
fact—Mrs. Rust being out of earshot—I do.”
“Thank you,” said Courtesy, looking wonderfully pretty. “I wish
everybody in the world was as happy as I am, though of course marriage
is an awful risk. How’s your young woman, gardener?”
“As militant as ever,” said the gardener. “I’m expecting a letter from
her any day, or a telegram any minute.”
“Why, is she coming down here?”
“Probably,” said the gardener. He had absolutely no grounds for his
confidence except the ground of youth, and that, of course, is only a
quicksand.
But the funny thing was she came.
For she cried all her current stock of militancy away on Thursday night,
and by three o’clock on Good Friday afternoon she was on the door-step
of 21 Penny Street.
“Even if slavery and polygamy become the fashion,” she argued
characteristically, “Scottie Brown will still be wrongfully detained in
quarantine.”
It was not to Scottie Brown that her thoughts turned when the maid told
her that Mr. Gardener had gone to the country for Easter.
“But I must see him,” said the suffragette, who was a little drunk with
the bitter beverage of tears.
“It’s impossible,” said the maid. “I tell you—he’s away.”
The word “impossible” as usual acted as a challenge.
“Might I have his address?” said the caller.
After consultation with Miss Shakespeare the address was produced, and
the suffragette’s decision made.
“The Red Place.... His friend lives there—Mrs. Rust’s son. Anyway
there’s no harm in going to a country hotel for Easter.”
It was quite an advance for the suffragette to be human enough to
consider whether there was any harm or not.
So she went home and had a ten minutes’ interview with the
mustard-coloured portmanteau, and then she put it and herself into a
third-class carriage marked Girton Magna.
At sunset she arrived at the Red Place, and by luck extraordinary
managed to procure a small attic which the tide of holiday-makers had
passed by.