Rebel women Part 8

"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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.serting 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 pa.s.ser-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the const.i.tuency, 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 att.i.tude 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 habitues 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, pa.s.sed 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 const.i.tuency.

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 a.s.sistants, 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 a.s.sistant.

"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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sistant; 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 a.s.suming 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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.

"Look at 'em," said one of these, just as we were miserably submitting to being grouped in self-conscious, affectionate att.i.tudes that did not remotely convey the business-like relations of a business-like committee. "That's what they like! Votes for women, indeed!"