Part 5

After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a world that could always be counted upon to feed the most unsatisfied sense of humour. Otherwise, for the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have felt acutely conscious of anything but the traffic. Glorious as it may seem to the imaginative to suffer for a cause, one finds it difficult, when carrying sandwich-boards in its service, to detach from this distant and problematic reward the more immediate prospect of being run down from behind by a skidding motor-omnibus. In time, no doubt, it would be possible to acquire the easy swagger of the real sandwich man, though the real sandwich man would under no circumstances be submitted, as we were, to a definite onslaught from every impudent tradesman's boy who whizzed past us on a tricycle. As it was, no one could have said that our pace bore the slightest resemblance to the leisurely saunter of the professional patroller of the gutter. In spite of conscientious efforts on our part to maintain the regulation distance from one another, none of us could resist the impulse to catch up the next woman in front; and as our leader, the tall woman in purple, desired nothing more than to cover the prescribed route and return to the shelter of home as quickly as possible, only he who ran could have read the announcement printed on our boards, as we raced breathlessly along the edge of the pavement. At the same time, we found, nobody had the slightest difficulty in reading the identity of those who carried the boards.

"Suffer-a-gettes! Look at 'em!" roared an omnibus driver.

"Well, why not?" responded a gallant cabman from the shelter we were approaching. "Why shouldn't Mrs. Pank'urst 'ave a vote, same as you an' me? Ain't she got as much sense in her 'ead as what _I_ 'ave?" He modulated his belligerent shout to a dulcet undertone as we came alongside. "The whole of the four-wheel trade is with you, ladies," he told us confidentially.

A block in the traffic caused us all to close up for a moment, and we compared notes hurriedly.

"Not so bad as we expected, is it?" said our literary comrade, who was one of those to overhear the friendly remark made by the representative of the four-wheel trade.

The girl in green reserved her opinion. "It makes one feel desperately sorry for the poor men who have to do this sort of thing, not for a cause, but for a living," she said feelingly.

The girl in green was by nature sentimental. Having once sold a suffrage paper in the street for half a day, she found herself incapable ever afterwards of resisting the appeal of the street hawker, with the result that her flat became a depôt for patent toasting-forks, bone collar-studs, and quivering, iridescent beetles. Her latest conviction that a human link existed between her and all sandwich-men received, however, a slight shock as soon as we encountered one of these. Melting with compassion, she tried in a single look to express all she felt for his hard lot, but was met by a still more eloquent expression of pity from his eye--the one that did not wink--and became henceforth a little dubious about that particular human link. We tried, but without much success, to rekindle her faith in human links generally, by pointing out that his scorn was probably aroused by the unprofessional appearance of her sandwich boards, one of which was slipping its ribbon moorings as she went by.

Perhaps the most startling conversion we made in the course of our parade was that of the baby. Up to that moment it had been a plain and placid, contented baby, banging its Teddy bear happily against the side of the perambulator. When it saw our procession coming along, with flying colours and flapping boards, it dropped the Teddy bear on the pavement and emitted an amazing remark that sounded to all of us, except our literary member, like "Ga-ga-ga-ga-_ga_!" Our literary member, being imaginative, declared that what the baby really said was--"Hooray! Votes for Women!"--and the baby's nurse, who had to soil her white cotton gloves by picking the Teddy bear out of the mud, seemed inclined to agree with her.

"Them 'orrible Suffragettes!" she said crossly; and remembering the militant countenance of the baby we had converted, we felt bound to forgive her for feeling uneasy about the baby's future. Our triumph was short-lived, however, for we were scarcely out of hearing of the baby's gurgles when a gentleman outside a public-house informed us, with some difficulty of utterance, that we were a disgrace to our sex.

"What do they mean, blocking up the King's 'Ighway, undreds and undreds of 'em?" he grumbled fiercely. As the girl in green observed, he was not in a condition when it would be fair to challenge his ability to count.

On the whole, the triumphs won as usual, and the insults were too funny and pathetic, both at once, to hurt much. There was the lady who told us very distinctly what she thought of us, and then dropped her skirts in the mud, a real feminine sacrifice, to take one of our handbills, because her hard heart was melted by the absent-minded smile of our literary member, who mistook her for a supporter. There was the clergyman who stood with his hat in his hand the whole time our procession was going by; there was the sentimentalist who, after telling each one of us in turn to go home and mind the baby, said in a tone of concentrated despair to the last of us--"What would you do if you had twins?" And, of course, there was the messenger-boy who stood just out of reach and yelled--"Want yer rights? Then you won't git 'em! Sooner give 'em to tomcats, I would!"

By the time we arrived in sight of home, even the woman in purple had become hardened to the perils and vicissitudes of the road and smiled quite easily at the postman who stood at the corner of the street. But when we found ourselves inside the shop, in full view of the shop looking-glass, it required all our newly won insensibility to stifle an inward consciousness that the glories of a militant campaign still remained rather spiritual than actual. Our hair was damp and straight, our cardboard armour limp and bent; our skirts were caked with mud, and our boots strongly resembled those that one sometimes sees sticking out of river sand at low tide. For once, our literary comrade refrained from asking us to turn to George Herbert or anybody else for poetic consolation.

On the other hand, the postman's criticism became wildly, disproportionately cheering.

"Votes for women!" he shouted after us with a sneer, as we slowly passed indoors out of his sight. "Votes for a few rich women, that's all you're after!"

Under the circumstances, it was very pleasant to be mistaken for representatives of the rich and cultured classes.

IX

The Black Spot of the Constituency

I am inclined to think that the best general is he who never listens to warnings. Nobody, for instance, warned us not to hold a meeting in the Council Schools, where a number of apparently educated, if very young, gentlemen came to express their political opinions through the medium of motor-horns and chemical explosives. The warning would have made no difference, of course; the point is that it was never uttered. When, on the other hand, we announced that we meant to carry our election campaign into the black spot of the constituency, where a criminal population congregated thickly in a few mean streets, warnings came quick and fast. They were the normal warnings, telling how the police hesitated to penetrate there after dark, how it was never safe at any time of day for a woman to walk there alone, and so on, and so on. There is a black spot like that in most cities, and the same things, rightly or wrongly, are generally said about it. But when you are a pioneer, however humble a pioneer, you discover that the one person who may walk with safety in the heart of a criminal district is the rebel man or woman who is out fighting for a human cause.

No doubt, the elementary school child looks upon the Prime Minister who arranges for a general election to occur during the Christmas holidays as a sort of fairy godfather; but the pioneer, who hopes to advance her cause as a by-product of a Parliamentary election, would find the political situation considerably simplified by the elimination of the juvenile element. Anthropologists probably know all kinds of reasons why the young human creature always wants to throw things at what he cannot understand; and if I had to humanize the embryonic hooligan of our back streets, I believe I should begin by setting up a mysterious-looking target, a different one every day, in a prominent place, in order to gratify this elemental instinct at the least possible cost to the pioneer. Not having thought of this simple plan in time, however, those of us who first penetrated the black spot of our constituency on a canvassing expedition met with a good deal of concrete obstruction.

"I am used to banana skins," remarked one canvasser, on her return to the committee rooms; "I can even bear mud; and stones are never aimed with enough determination to matter much; but I should like to draw the line at red herrings. There is something so peculiarly atmospheric about red herrings."

"Chestnuts are worse," said another woman, producing the one that she had intercepted on its way towards her face. "When I am advancing a suffrage argument for the hundredth time, there is a nasty subtle significance about a chestnut."

The tax collector, happening to stroll in just then to buy a ticket for a meeting, kindly tendered us his sympathy. He had frequently to endure the same unfriendly treatment at the hands of children, he told us, when he visited their homes in his official capacity. This information did not meet with the response he evidently expected from us, and realizing that voteless women could not be reasonably expected to feel furiously hostile towards anybody who pelted a tax collector, he admitted a difference in the point of view and beat a tactful retreat, warning us as he went to refrain from attempting an open-air meeting in the criminal district.

"You won't do any good there," he assured us; "they are too stupid to understand, and they may make things very unpleasant for you."

This would have been true, perhaps, of an open-air meeting in a respectable neighbourhood, not to say of a drawing-room meeting anywhere. In a respectable, law-abiding district, it is always difficult and frequently dangerous to hold an open-air meeting. To begin with, you have to stand for some time without any audience at all, saying "We are the Suffragettes; we have come here to talk about votes for women," over and over again, with an ingratiating smile, to a policeman with a coldly detached air, and, perhaps, a young man on the opposite side of the road, who is longing to listen but dare not cross over for fear of being identified with lawless young women whose husbands and babies languish untended in the theoretical home. Afterwards, when these preliminary efforts have successfully assembled an audience, it is generally one that is too stupid to understand, and it frequently makes things unpleasant for the speaker. All this may be confidently expected to happen in respectable neighbourhoods, where the standard of conduct is conventional enough to have brought unconventionality within the jurisdiction of lynch law.

In the black spot of our constituency, however, these familiar difficulties scarcely seemed to exist for the open-air speaker, least of all the preliminary difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment our wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that stood for no party cry and for no party candidate, the audience came in rushes from all the alleys and dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two minutes one looked down upon a swaying mass of tattered and slatternly humanity that would have been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been less than human. As it was, one merely realized that when the narrow barrier of circumstance that separates the fortunates from the unfortunates of this world has once been swept away, human points of contact are multiplied, not diminished.

The audience naturally gave the speaker in the lorry no time to make philosophic reflections.

"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, pushing 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 asserting 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 passer-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the constituency, 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 attitude 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 washing 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 habitués 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, passed 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 constituency.

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 assistants, 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 assistant.

"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 pass 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 assumption 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----"