Delia Blanchflower Part 23

Andrews and Winnington pursued, but were soon forced back by a retreating movement of those in front. Winnington's height enabled him to see over the heads of the crowd.

"The police are keeping a ring," he reported to his companion--"they seem to have got it in hand! Ah! now they've seen me--they'll let us through."

Meanwhile the shouts and booing of the hostile portion of the audience--just augmented by a number of rough-looking men from the neighbouring brickfields--prevented most of the remarks delivered by the male speaker on the cart from reaching the audience.

"Cowards!" said an excited woman's voice--"that's all they can do!--howl like wild beasts--that's all they're fit for!"

Winnington turned to see a tall girl, carrying an armful of newspapers.

She had flaming red hair, and she wore a black and orange scarf, with a cap of the same colours. "Foster's daughter," he thought, wondering.

"What happens to them all!" For he had known Kitty Foster from her school days, and had never thought of her except as a silly simpering flirt, bent on the pursuit of man. And now he beheld a maenad, a fury.

Suddenly another woman's voice cut across the others--

"Aren't you ashamed of those colours! Go home--and take them off. Go home and behave like a decent creature!"

Heads were turned--to see a middle-aged woman of quiet dress and commanding aspect, sternly pointing to the astonished Kitty Foster.

"Do you see that girl?"--the woman continued, addressing her neighbours,--"she's got the 'Daughters'' colours on. Do you know what the Daughters have been doing in town? You've seen about the destroying of letters in London. Well, I'll tell you what that means. I had a little servant I was very fond of. She left me to go and live near her sister in town. The sister died, and she got consumption. She went into lodgings, and there was no one to help her. She wrote to me, asking me to come to her. Her letter was destroyed in one of the pillar-boxes raided--by those women--" She pointed. "Then she broke her heart because she thought I'd given her up. She daren't write again. And now I've found her out--in hospital--dying. I've seen her to-day. If it hadn't have been for these demented creatures she might ha' lived for years."

The woman paused, her voice breaking a little. Kitty Foster tossed her head.

"What are most women in hospital for?" she said, shrilly. "By the fault of men!--one way or the other. That's what we think of."

"Yes I know--that's one of the shameless things you say--to us who have husbands and sons we thank G.o.d for!" said the elder woman, quivering.

"Go and get a husband!--if you can find one to put up with you, and hold your tongue!" She turned her back.

The girl laughed affectedly.

"I can do without one, thank you. It's you happy married women that are the chief obstacle in our path. Selfish things!--never care for anybody but yourselves!"

"Hallo--Lathrop's down--that's Miss Blanchflower!" said Andrews, excitedly. "Let's go on!"

And at the same moment a mounted constable, who had been steadily making his way to them, opened a way for the two J.P.'s through the crowd, which after the tumult of hooting mingled with a small amount of applause, which had greeted Lathrop's peroration, had relapsed into sudden silence as Delia Blanchflower came forward, so that her opening words, in a rich clear voice were audible over a large area of the market-place.

What did she say? Certainly nothing new! Winnington knew it all by heart--had read it dozens of times in their strident newspaper, which he now perused weekly, simply that he might discover if he could, what projects his ward might be up to.

The wrongs of women, their wrongs as citizens, as wives, as the victims of men, as the "refuse of the factory system"--Winnington remembered the phrase in the _Tocsin_ of the week before--the uselessness of const.i.tutional agitation--the need "to shake England to make her hear"--it was all the "common form" of the Movement; and yet she was able to infuse it with pa.s.sion, with conviction, with a wild and natural eloquence. Her voice stole upon him--hypnotized him. His political and economic knowledge told him that half the things she said were untrue, and the rest irrelevant. His moral sense revolted against her violence--her defence of violence. A girl of twenty-one addressing this ugly, indifferent crowd, and talking calmly of stone-throwing and arson, as though they were occupations as natural to her youth as dancing or love-making!--the whole thing was abhorrent--preposterous--to a man of order and peace. And yet he had never been more stirred, more conscious of the mad, mixed poetry of life, than he was, as he stood watching the slender figure on the waggon--the gestures of the upraised arm, and the play of the lights from the hotel, and from the side lamps, now on the deep white collar that lightened her serge jacket, and on the gesticulating hand, or the face that even in these disfiguring cross-lights could be nothing else than lovely.

She was speaking too long--a common fault of women.

He looked from her to the faces of the crowd, and saw that the spell, compounded partly of the speaker's good looks and partly of sheer gaping curiosity, was breaking. They were getting restless, beginning to heckle and laugh.

Then he heard her say.

"Of course we know--you think us fools--silly fools! You say it's a poor sort of fighting--and what do we hope to get by it? Pin-p.r.i.c.ks you call it--all that women can do. Well, so it is--we admit it. It _is_ a poor sort of fighting--we don't admire it any more than you. But it's all men have left to women. You have disarmed us--and fooled us--and made slaves of us. You won't allow us the const.i.tutional weapon of the vote, so we strike as we can, and with what weapons we can--"

"Makin' bonfires of innercent people an' their property, ain't politics, Miss!" shouted a voice.

"Hear, Hear!" from the crowd.

"We haven't killed anybody--but ourselves!" The answer flashed.

"Pretty near it! Them folks at Wanchester only just got out--an' there were two children among 'em," cried a man near the waggon.

"An' they've just been up to something new at Brownmouth--"

All heads turned towards a young man who spoke from the back of the audience. "News just come to the post-office," he shouted--"as the new pier was burnt out early this morning. There's a bit o' wanton mischief for you!"

A howl of wrath rose from the audience, amid which the closing words of Delia's speech were lost. Winnington caught a glimpse of her face--pale and excited--as she retreated from the front of the waggon in order to make room for her co-speaker.

Gertrude Marvell, as Winnington soon saw, was far more skilled in street oratory than her pupil. By sheer audacity she caught her audience at once, and very soon, mingling defiance with sarcasm, she had turned the news of the burnt pier into a Suffragist parable. What was that blaze in the night, lighting up earth and sea, but an emblem of women's revolt flaming up in the face of dark injustice and oppression? Let them rage! The women mocked. All tyrannies disliked being disturbed--since the days of Nebuchadnezzar. And thereupon, without any trace of excitement, or any fraction of Delia's eloquence, she built up bit by bit, and in face of the growing hostility of the crowd, an edifice of selected statements, which could not have been more adroit. It did not touch or persuade, but it silenced; till at the end she said--each word slow and distinct--

"Now--all these things _you_ may do to women, and n.o.body minds--n.o.body troubles at all. But if _we_ make a bonfire of a pier, or an empty house, by way of drawing attention to your proceedings, then, you see red. Well, here we are!--do what you like--torture, imprison us!--you are only longing, I know--some of you--to pull us down now and trample on us, so that you may _show_ us how much stronger men are than women!

All right!--but where one woman falls, another will spring up. And meanwhile the candle we are lighting will go on burning till you give us the vote. Nothing simpler--nothing easier. _Give us the vote_!--and send your canting Governments, Liberal, or Tory, packing, till we get it. But until then--windows and empty houses, and piers and such-like, are nothing--but so many opportunities of making our masters uncomfortable, till they free their slaves! Lucky for you, if the thing is no worse!"

She paused a moment, and then added with sharp and quiet emphasis--

"And why is it specially necessary that we should try to stir up this district--whether you like our methods or whether you don't?

Because--you have living here among you, one of the worst of the persecutors of women! You have here a man who has backed up every cruelty of the Government--who has denied us every right, and scoffed at all our const.i.tutional demands--your neighbour and great landlord, Sir Wilfrid Lang! I call upon every woman in this district, to avenge women on Sir Wilfrid Lang! We are not out indeed to destroy life or limb--we leave that to the men who are trying to coerce women--but we mean to sweep men like Sir Wilfrid Lang out of our way! Meanwhile we can pay special attention to his meetings--we can hara.s.s him at railway stations--we can sit on his doorstep--we can put the fear of G.o.d into him in a hundred ways--in short we can make his life a tenth part as disagreeable to him as he can make ours to us. We can, if we please, make it a _burden_ to him--and we intend to do so! And don't let men--or women either--waste their breath in preaching to us of 'law and order.' Slaves who have no part in making the law, are not bound by the law. Enforce it if you can! But while you refuse to free us, we despise both the law and the making of the law. Justice--which is a very different thing from law--Justice is our mistress!--and to her we appeal."

Folding her arms, she looked the crowd in the face. They seemed to measure each other; on one side, the lines of upturned faces, gaping youths, and smoking workmen, farmers and cattlemen, women and children; on the other, defying them, one thin, neatly-dressed woman, her face, under the lamps, a gleaming point in the dark.

Then a voice rose from a lounging group of men, smoking like chimneys--powerful fellows; smeared with the clay of the brickfields.

"Who's a-makin' slaves of you, Ma'am? There's most of us workin' for a woman!"

A woman in the middle of the crowd laughed shrilly--a queer, tall figure in a battered hat--

"Aye--and a lot yo' give 'er ov a Sat.u.r.day night, don't yer?"

"Sir Wilfrid's a jolly good feller, miss," shouted another man. "Pays 'is men good money, an' no tricks. If you come meddlin' with him, in these parts, you'll catch it."

"An' we don't want no suffragettes here, thank you!" cried a sarcastic woman's voice. "We was quite 'appy till you come along, an' we're quite willin' now for to say 'Good-bye, an' G.o.d bless yer!'"

The crowd laughed wildly, and suddenly a lad on the outskirts of the crowd picked up a cabbage-stalk that had fallen from one of the market-stalls, and flung it at the waggon. The hooligan element, scattered through the market-place, took up the hint at once; brutal things began to be shouted; and in a moment the air was thick with missiles of various sorts, derived from the refuse of the day's market--vegetable remains of all kinds, fragments of wood and cardboard boxes, sc.r.a.ps of filthy matting, and anything else that came handy.

The audience at first disapproved. There were loud cries of "Stow it!"--"Shut up!"--"Let the ladies alone!"--and there was little attempt to obstruct the police as they moved forward. But then, by ill-luck, the powerfully-built fair-haired man, who had been speaking when Winnington and Andrews entered the market place, rushed to the front of the waggon, and in a white heat of fury, began to denounce both the a.s.sailants of the speakers, and the crowd in general, as "cowardly louts"--on whom argument was thrown away--who could only be reached "through their backs, or their pockets"--with other compliments of the same sort, under which the temper of the "moderates" rapidly gave way.

"What an a.s.s! What a d.a.m.ned a.s.s!" groaned Andrews indignantly. "Look here Winnington, you take care of Miss Blanchflower--I'll answer for the other!"

And amid a general shouting and scuffling, through which some stones were beginning to fly, Winnington found himself leaping on the waggon, followed by Andrews and a couple of police.

Delia confronted him--undaunted, though breathless.

"What do you want? We're all right!"

"You must come away at once. I can get you through the hotel."