Part 3

As a passer-by, I had known that spot in a busy street all my life; or rather, I thought I knew it. It was only when I took my courage in both hands and a money-box in one of them, and went to stand there every day for a week, that I discovered how wide a gulf it is that separates the passer-by from those who are passed by.

It was all right as long as the sun shone and sent charming side-lights across the bunches of colour in the flower-lady's basket, and put gay and human feelings into the heart of the public so that it lingered and bought daffodils and pink newspapers and ephemeral air-balls from my companions of the gutter, and even sometimes gave me a coin as well as an amused smile. One liked it almost as well when the wind blew up unimportant showers, so hurriedly and unexpectedly that the rain seemed almost out of breath when it came; for this turned the bit of western sky that blocked the end of the street into a fine country sky, that ought to have swept across a moor instead of scudding past a London Tube station. But when it snowed, or rained long and uncompromisingly, and when the wind blew swift and cold without blowing up anything interesting with it, there were no street effects and no smiles, and the public shut its impressionable heart against colour and pink news and polemics, and everything else we were hawking; and one learned suddenly the meaning of being passed by. Perhaps it was worth learning--one of those odd, disagreeable experiences that are worth gathering up by the way when you stand on the edge of a London pavement, helping to fill a war chest for rebel women. Certainly I might not otherwise have reached the heart of my fellows in the gutter.

"It's a 'ard life, ain't it?" said the flower-lady sympathetically. I had known her in the past, too--the past that seemed so long ago and yet dated back only to last week--had sometimes bought flowers of her because she looked cold, and had generally found her unprepossessing and much inclined to grumble. I thought I knew now, as I stamped my feet to keep warm, and shook my box invitingly in front of cold and distant people who refused to be invited, how very much she might have had to grumble at. The queer part of it was that she was not grumbling now; she had ceased to grumble, in fact, for the very reason that made me understand for the first time why she should grumble. Standing there beside her, in God's rain that knew no respect of persons, I was no longer a client out of whom another penny might with tact be wheedled; I was just a boon companion, bent like herself on wheedling that penny from a miserly public that eternally hurried by. So she gave me her pity, though I wore a fur coat and she only a threadbare shawl, and the same biting wind bit at us both.

The newspaper sellers at first held aloof; so did the girl who sold air-balls.

"I haven't took a bloomin' copper all the afternoon," she complained, looking pointedly after the lady who had just dropped a shilling in my box. I considered the wisdom of explaining that what I was doing was going to help her in the long run, but decided that under similar circumstances I should prefer a more practical and immediate evidence of good-will from any one who offered me such an explanation. For the worst of the long run, mean this what it may, is that it never, never runs.

Luckily for our future relations, a gust of wind carried off a blue air-ball, and in the chase that followed I came off victorious, and was able to hand it to the owner with a disarming smile. She unbent slightly in return.

"Dessay you find it chilly out here, not bein' used to it," she suggested, pulling the knot in the string tighter with her teeth.

"What are they doin' it for? That's what I arst! What are they doin' it for?" said the lame newsboy in a slightly peevish tone.

My agility in capturing the air-ball had made him sore, I think, though he had no reason to feel any envy on that score. Seeing the alertness and speed with which he dragged his useless limb after him when he came to show me anything uncomplimentary about the Suffragettes that happened to appear in his pink newspaper, I could but marvel at the thought of what he might have accomplished on two legs. One could only suppose that his agility, like the flower-lady's sympathy, was the result of a lifelong evasion of difficulties.

The elderly gentleman who sold the penny Conservative paper knew why we were doing it. He never failed to wink joyously to his friends if a male elector stopped to argue across my money-box about the cause for which I was shaking it.

"Doin' it to git theirselves 'usbands, that's what they're doin' it for," he would say conclusively, in denial of the usual contention of the anti-suffragist, that we are doing it because of our distaste for husbands.

When the enemy attacked, my fellow-hawkers waited with grim anticipation for my replies.

"Is not this a terrible condescension on your part?" asked one disapproving lady, putting up her lorgnette to read the inscription on the box. "Oh, I quite believe in your cause, but why do this sort of thing? How much better to get round the men another way!"

She looked gently pained when I explained rather obviously that I should consider that a condescension, and so would the right sort of man; and my companions looked with puzzled eyes after the retreating lady who seemed to belong to a strange world out of their ken, in which helplessness had a market value. It was pleasantly illuminating to find, however, as the week wore on, that they had come to accept me as an equal, not because I could hold my own against the passer-by, but because they saw me, like themselves, exposed to all the discomforts of being passed by. That, I am sure, is why the elderly paper-seller gave me so much friendly information about goloshes, and why the lame boy observed so sympathetically, one wet evening, that I had had a quiet day.

"Yes; nice and quiet, wasn't it?" I answered gladly, being a militant suffragist of many and strenuous experiences that would not generally be called either nice or quiet. It was only when I caught his astonished expression that I understood him to be referring, not to political passions, but to trade.

Even when you are filling the war chest at the edge of the pavement it is not impossible, I find, to spare a little pity for those who pass as well as for those who are passed by. "_L'homme oisif tue le temps; le temps tue l'homme oisif_," as it is expressed by the nation that knows better than any other, possibly, how to kill time gracefully. Time seemed to be killing a good many idle people, I thought, during the week of days that I stood outside that Tube station. The habitual hawker, of course, was a loiterer by profession; so was the friendly constable who remarked, "Well, you ladies do have to face somethink, you do!" referring, I imagine, to the snow, which was soft and soothing compared to some of the street witticisms I had to face in the course of business. The real waster was rather the person who stood at the entrance of the station, sometimes for hours, waiting, not for something to happen, or even in most cases for somebody to come, but just waiting.

Sometimes the idler was a man. For one whole afternoon it was a man with a pale and purposeless blue eye that stamped him at once as being one of those who, in killing time, are being gradually killed by it. He said something about the weather to the policeman, something about the winners to the boy who sold pink information about winners; but he did not spend a halfpenny on the information, nor did he look as though he had spent a halfpenny on information in the whole of his life. Even when a motor-car broke down opposite, he did not cross the road to look at it. You have to be really interested in life, I suppose, to form one of a street crowd.

Most of the women loiterers seemed to be the victims, either of their small unearned incomes, or of somebody else's unpunctuality. One of these, after stamping her feet in unison with mine for more than half an hour, asked me if I had seen a lady in a green hat. I think I had seen hundreds, which was not very helpful; but the enquiry made an opening, and I shook my box gently and seductively in her direction. She was quite affable, told me she had believed in woman suffrage all her life, and thought it an excellent idea for other people to stand out in the rain collecting money for it.

"It gives you a pinched look, and then people throw you something before they see what it is for," she added genially.

Evidently my complexion had not taken her unawares in this way, for she made no effort to support the cause in which she had believed all her life. She had so many claims, she said. I understood what she meant when one of the claims, wearing a mountainous hat in emerald-green straw, bore down upon her with torrential apologies for being late, and carried her off to the shops.

"It's for something to do up my every-evening black, and you have such a good eye for colour," was the cryptic remark I overheard, as they went. In about half an hour they were back again, and the girl in the green mountain was dropping two-pence in my box. She smiled rather nicely, and on a sudden impulse I asked her what she had bought for the every-evening black.

She stared, laughed a little, and ended on a sigh. "Nothing," she confessed. "Isn't it tragic?"

"It must be," I tried to agree. I suppose I succeeded in sounding a human note, for she still lingered.

"I hope you'll get your vote soon, and not have to go on wasting your time like this," she said.

"It isn't my vote particularly, or my waste of time," I called after her. But she was gone, her ridiculous hat bobbing up and down in the crowd like a Chinese lantern on a stick; and I wondered if she would some day make a truce with time and save her soul alive.

Time, though a deadly murderer, does not succeed in killing all the people who are trying so hard to kill him; and hope, even for a serious cause, lurked sometimes in that stream of bored and idle passers-by, who seemed so bent on cheating their nature out of everything it demanded of them. It was always a pleasant shock when women and girls, wearing the most preposterous hats and the most fearsome of purple-spotted veils, slid something into my hand and hurried on, trying to look as if they had done nothing of the kind. And my knowledge of things human played me entirely false over the expensive dowager in sable and velvet.

She had stood in front of the nearest shop window for some minutes, discussing with a patient companion the rival qualities of jet trimming and gold braid. "Jet lasts," she observed ponderously.

"It does last," agreed the companion.

"Perhaps that gold edging would look handsomer," proceeded the old lady, assailed by sudden doubts.

"Oh, yes, it might," said the companion hastily, adapting her tone.

"You are looking at the wrong one," said the old lady bluntly. "It isn't likely I should put a four-three edging on my best satin between-wrap." Then she veered round and saw me.

Naturally I expected something very cutting, the more so that a kindly supporter threw me a shilling just then from the top of an omnibus, and a money-box not being so handy as a tambourine, I spent the next few seconds grovelling in the snow at the lady's feet. When I came up again, successful but apprehensive, I found her smiling blandly.

"If I were ten years younger I should be out in the street fighting with you," was the astonishing remark that accompanied a handsome donation to the war chest.

"Do come, all the same," I urged, caught by the lightning gleam in her little grey eye. But she shook her head and returned to the jet and the gold edging--a wicked waste of a warlike grey eye!

So the week drew to an end, and I was no longer to be numbered among those who are passed by at the edge of the pavement. In my foolishness I thought it would be easy to remain on friendly terms with my fellow-hawkers of yesterday; and with that idea in my mind I took an early opportunity of returning to the spot and buying a halfpenny pink paper and a penny white paper and a blue air-ball and a bunch of daffodils.

I met with a chilly civility from them all, with the exception of the flower lady, who shamelessly overcharged me for the daffodils.

"Yes, lady, they are dear this morning; cost me that in the market, they did--thank you, lady, much obliged, I'm sure. Yes, it is cold for a body, sitting out here all day."

That was all--from the friend and sister who had almost offered me her shawl, a week ago, because she saw me shivering.

The sun was shining, and the snow had gone, and I suppose the patch of sky at the western end of the street was all right. But I had been put back in my place as a passer-by; and neither sun nor sky belonged to me any longer.

V

The Conversion of Penelope's Mother

"In converting the heathen," I told Penelope, "never make the mistake of converting your friends. There is nothing so unconquerable as the immortal grudge that your friend owes you for having had the impertinence to interfere with his opinions. You see, friendship, being a rare and elusive and provoking condition of the soul, has nothing to do with opinions. It matters what your casual acquaintance thinks about the subject of the hour, because you have to talk with him. It doesn't matter in the least what your friend thinks, because there is no conversation among friends, there is only intercourse, which has nothing to do with opinions. Naturally, I am not talking of eternal truths, because if your friend does not see eye to eye with you about those, no friendship is possible. One never converts people to eternal truths, only to the particular manifestation of these that is being revealed to the age through which we are passing."

"According to that," objected Penelope, "there is no possibility of converting people to anything, unless they are already converted without knowing it."

"Exactly," I said. "That is why it is waste of time as well as impertinence to convert the person who is your friend. And as your mother is one of the few mothers I know who is also a friend to her children, I strongly advise you not to----"

"That is all very well," again objected Penelope; "but mother has not yet discovered that she is converted to the particular manifestation of eternal truth known as Votes for Women; and, to put it plainly, you can't go on living with some one who thinks all suffragists are hooligans, when you are one of the hooligans."

"Theoretically," I argued, "you could, if----"

"But I don't live with mother theoretically," interrupted Penelope; "and if you seriously mean that you cannot convert her because of the immortal grudge she would owe you for doing it, I suppose I shall have to take that risk myself. It is not at all easy to convert an old lady to eternal truth at the mouth of an ear-trumpet," she added insinuatingly.

In the end I was persuaded to undertake the conversion, being no wiser than other apostles of great movements who have bartered friendships for causes since the world began; and Sarah's greeting, when she opened the door to me the day I called upon Penelope's mother by appointment, was therefore disconcerting.

"Miss Penelope said, would you please wait in the back drawing-room till she's finished converting the mistress," said Sarah in the impassive tone of one whom no message, however strange, could disconcert. "It's the Suffragettics, I think," she added for my enlightenment. To Sarah all manifestations of the eternal truths rest on the level of rheumatics and other mortal infirmities.

I suggested that, folding-doors not being soundproof, I had better wait downstairs. Sarah led the way up to the back drawing-room without giving this proposal a moment's serious consideration.

"You can hear anything that's said to the mistress from the top of the house to the bottom--that is, if the mistress can hear it," she explained unemotionally.

The controversy had reached the acute stage when I arrived in the back drawing-room, an unwilling eavesdropper. This I gathered from the significant circumstance that both speakers were talking at once. Presently there came a calm, in the course of which Penelope seemed to be getting on rather well. She was keeping her temper wonderfully, I thought, and was apparently convincing the enemy beyond the power of retort. The absence of retort became, indeed, astonishing, until it was explained by a sudden interruption from Penelope's mother, just as her daughter reached a fine pitch of persuasive eloquence.

"I can't hear a word you are saying, my dear. I wish you would pick up my ear-trumpet," said Penelope's mother, breaking unconsciously into the middle of a sentence.

Evidently the ear-trumpet was found and adjusted, for retorts came thick and fast as soon as Penelope began patiently to say it all over again.

"What rubbish, child!" was an early interruption. "I have never done anything to hinder your development, as you call it. I drew the line at ju-jitsu, I admit, because I didn't like the appearance of the unpleasant little yellow person with the pigtail--he had no pigtail? Well, he was the style of person to whom one expects to find a pigtail attached. That is neither here nor there--"

"No, mother darling, it isn't," interposed Penelope firmly; "and I never said you hindered my development. We are not Suffragettes because we have personal grievances, but because of the general attitude towards women----"

"You will never persuade me, my dear, that you can cure anybody's attitude towards women by knocking off policemen's helmets----"

"We don't knock off----"

"I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a picture, in the _Daily Illustrated_, I think it was, of a woman knocking off a policeman's helmet. Her mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an umbrella--a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature she looked! I remember it distinctly. The _Daily Illustrated_ is a most respectable paper; it would never----"

"Darling, you know you have told me over and over again how all the respectable papers of the day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful, unwomanly creature for wanting to go out to the war to nurse grown-up men without a chaperon, instead of staying at home to nurse the baby she hadn't got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet.

"And so they did," cried her mother, as though her veracity were being called in question. "All sorts of wicked and untrue things were said about that noble woman, for whom I have the utmost veneration, because she taught me to air a room by opening the window a few minutes at the bottom instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking the things they said about her! But now----"

"Now," said the wily Penelope, "no woman in England is more honoured. That shows, doesn't it, that we should not believe everything the papers----"

"Penelope," said her mother abruptly, "I have dropped my ear-trumpet again, so you had better ring the bell for tea."

Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah admitted me to the front drawing-room. The ear-trumpet was sticking out of the coal-box, always a sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home; and both she and her mother were looking for the spectacles which had been swept momentarily out of existence.

"I cannot think what I did with them," complained Penelope's mother, as though her loss were not an hourly occurrence. "If you had not upset me so dreadfully, Penelope----"

Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's lusty announcement of my name having passed over her unheeded through the temporary disablement of the ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her hand she banished eternal truths and their tiresome topical manifestations to oblivion, and received me in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years ago, to hide from visitors and servants alike that the head of the house ever had any private emotions or any public interests. Now, as then, it deceived nobody; but it bridged the gulf between eternal truths and afternoon tea very pleasantly.

"How charming of you to look in just as Penelope and I were going to have tea! Come and sit near me," was the gracious greeting I received. She turned a serene countenance towards Penelope, who was showing no inherited instinct for bridging impassable gulfs. "My dear, can you find my ear-trumpet? I am sure I had it a moment ago."

"You had," murmured the rebellious Penelope. "It might just as well have stayed in the coal-box the whole time, for all the good it was to either of us!"

It was only when, at the conclusion of a blameless discourse on ribbon embroidery, Penelope had been sent upstairs to look for a piece of needle-work, that Penelope's mother stopped being my Early Victorian hostess and became the mother of all the ages.

"I suppose," she said, with the true motherly mixture of appeal and disapproval in her tone, "it is you who have converted Penelope to all this nonsense."

"No," I said. "The age has converted her. Penelope is the child of the age."

"She has no business to be anybody's child but her mother's," was the indignant reply. "When I was a girl daughters were their mother's own children----"

I interrupted to ask if she really thought that this had ever been true. The ear-trumpet described furious circles in the air--another danger signal, as I knew from experience.

"When I was a girl," said Penelope's mother once more, "we had the good manners not to let our mothers guess that we knew more than they did--even if we did."

I asked a depressed Penelope, on the way downstairs, why she had not taken my advice and left me to risk my friendship with her mother, instead of imperilling her own?

"It was idiotic of me," confessed Penelope; "she said something unfair about 'those dreadful women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I haven't converted mother in the drawing-room, I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a few more Antis concealed about the house while I was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?"

"Listen!" I interrupted.

Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the open drawing-room door came scraps of conversation.

"It is only right to study both sides of a question, Sarah."

"Yes'm."

"Florence Nightingale, the noblest Englishwoman who ever lived--I hope you open the window and not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom, Sarah?--Florence Nightingale was misrepresented just in the same way."

"Yes'm."

"I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and order a suffrage periodical for the kitchen instead."

"Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's already. Thank you, ma'am."

Penelope and I fled downstairs to escape detection.

"She was converted all the time; I told you she would be," I remarked on the doorstep.

"Now for the immortal grudge!" sighed Penelope.

VI

At a Street Corner

"People of London!" faltered the lady who had just stepped upon the sugar-box at the edge of the pavement.

The people of London, who happened just then to be a very little girl carrying a very large baby, stared in some astonishment. Another lady, who had been distributing handbills farther along the street, came back and prompted the speaker encouragingly.

"Go on; that's splendid!" she said with friendly warmth.

The woman on the sugar-box, who had never stood on a sugar-box before, smiled wanly. "Why do they never have earthquakes except in countries where people don't want them?" she sighed. Her friend being engaged at the moment in pressing a handbill upon the little girl, who obligingly gripped the baby with one hand and her chin in order to take it, there came no response to the appeal of the orator in the gutter; and she pulled herself together and made a fresh start.