Part 7

The housework led to more rebellion, she proceeded to complain. "I did my best to persuade Sarah that if she would do the cleaning in a labour-saving sort of way she would probably have time to go for a walk every day before luncheon. That caused a revolution." Pressed for particulars of the revolution, Penelope chuckled again. "First, there was Cook, who said she had never been in any place where the housemaid went for a walk before luncheon; she further intimated that she could not stay in a place where the housemaid, etc., etc. Then there was mother, who said that, of course, she would not dream of interfering when I was doing everything so nicely, and all that; but if I went away at any time it would be very awkward for her, as she couldn't have the maids going for walks at all hours of the day, with no one to see where they went. I pointed out to her that I should not dream of seeing where they went, if I were at home, also that they already went out on stated evenings, when it might be even more desirable and was certainly less possible to see where they went. Mother was just beginning to understand--mother is splendid, really, you know!--when Sarah spoiled everything by declaring that nothing would induce her to go out in the morning. She had never been expected to do such a thing in any other place, and she wasn't going to be put upon now. If she could have another evening instead and an extra Sunday--well, after that, all was sound and confusion, and mother issued from the struggle kind but triumphant. Since the plate-cleaning episode, which followed close upon the revolution, I have felt a mere flattened failure of a daughter."

The plate-cleaning episode had been caused by the attempted introduction of a cleaning-cloth, which dispensed with the necessity for plate powder or metal paste. "Sarah seemed quite pleased about it at first," said Penelope with a sigh. "She pretended to understand perfectly when I explained how nice it would be to have a clean and empty housemaid's cupboard, instead of having every shelf crowded with plate-brushes and bits of sodden rag and tins of sticky brass paste, and that horrid saucer full of plate powder that sprinkles pink dust over everything when it gets dry. You know that kind of cupboard, don't you? Well, Sarah took to the idea like a lamb, and everything was going splendidly when mother caught her rubbing up the drawing-room candlesticks with my new patent cloth; and because I couldn't prove on the spur of the moment that the Sheffield plate would be none the worse for it fifty years hence, mother said she had the utmost confidence in my judgment, but she could not help feeling that the old way was safer. After that, I found Cook putting the cloth on the fire with the tongs, while Sarah hoped impressively at the top of her voice that she hadn't given herself blood-poisoning by using the nasty-smelling thing. So now all the old pink saucers and tins and things have reappeared in the housemaid's cupboard, and the plate-cleaning once more occupies the whole of the morning, and the brass occupies another and the stair-rods another, to say nothing of all the useless copper pots and pans on the kitchen chimney-piece that Cook never uses, but won't let me put away--oh, we are jogging along quite comfortably now in the dear old way of a hundred years ago!"

The sequel to this occurred about a week later, when I went to call on Penelope's mother and found ladders placed against the front of the house, and the trailing creepers of ages given over to the ministrations of the local nurseryman.

"Yes," said Penelope's mother, complacently, "they should have been cut before. Creepers are unhealthy things; they shut out light and air and spoil the window architecture. As Penelope says, the outside is the only part of any house on which the architect has expended either skill or attention, so it is a pity to hide it."

I said something polite down her ear-trumpet about new ways of looking at these things; and Penelope's mother smiled in agreement. "Some people do not know how to move with the times," she said. "Because a thing was done in a certain way a hundred years ago, let it be done in that way for ever and ever, they say. Yet, by bringing intelligence to bear upon the common things of every day, even toil may become a pleasure, and duty--well, duty almost ceases to exist. Of course, I am speaking figuratively," she added hastily, as if she felt she had gone too far.

Not knowing exactly how duty could be a figure of speech, or how, indeed, it could ever be anything else, I remained silent before this reincarnation of the earliest Victorian lady I know; and Penelope's mother took up the silver teapot--not, however, to pour out tea, but to point out to me its shining surface.

"In my housemaid's cupboard," she said proudly, "you will find no pieces of sodden rag, no tins of sticky brass paste, or that unpleasant saucer that sprinkles pink dust over everything within reach. We have banished all that in favour of--ah, Penelope, my dear, run and ask Sarah for one of my new cleaning-cloths, will you?"

In the doorway stood Penelope, mockery shining from her eyes.

"And you dare to tell me that tact is more useful in the home than a sense of humour!" she cried, in a voice that thrilled with scorn.

"At all events," I retorted, "you must admit that Napoleon----"

Penelope went hastily to fetch her mother's new cleaning-cloth.

XIII

The Game that wasn't Cricket

Down the alley where I happen to live, playtime draws a sharp line between the sexes. It is not so noticeable during working hours, when girls and boys, banded together by the common grievance of compulsory education, trot off to school almost as allies, even hand-in-hand in those cases where protection is sought from the little girl by the little boy who raced her into the world and lost--or won--by half a length. But when school is over sex antagonism, largely fostered by the parent, immediately sets in. Knowing the size of the average back yard in my neighbourhood, I have plenty of sympathy for the mother who wishes to keep it clear of children. But I always want to know why, in order to secure this privacy, she gives the boy a piece of bread-and-dripping and a ball, while the girl is given a piece of bread-and-dripping and a baby. And I have not yet decided which of the two toys is the more destructive of my peace.

Every evening during the summer, cricket is played just below my window in the hour preceding sunset. Cricket, as played in my alley, is less noisy than football, in which anything that comes handy as a substitute for the ball may be used, preferably an old, jagged salmon-tin. But cricket lasts longer, the nerves of the parents whose windows overlook the cricket ground being able to stand it better. As the best working hour of my day is destroyed equally by both, I have no feeling either way, except that the cricket, as showing a more masterly evasion of difficulties, appeals to me rather more. It is comparatively easy to achieve some resemblance to a game of football even in a narrow strip of pavement bordered by houses, where you can place one goal in the porch of the model dwellings at the blind end of the alley, and the other goal among the motor traffic at the street end. But first-class cricket is more difficult of attainment when the field is so crowded as to make it hard to decide which player out of three or four has caught you out, while your only chance of not being run out first ball is to take the wicket with you--always a possibility when the wicket is somebody's coat that has a way of getting mixed up with the batsman's feet.

In spite of obstacles, however, the cricket goes on every evening before sunset; and all the while, the little girl who tripped to school on such a gay basis of equality with her brother only a few hours back, sits on the doorstep minding the baby. I do not say that she actively objects to this; I only know with acute certainty that the baby objects to it, and for a long time I felt that it would be at least interesting to see what would happen if the little girl were to stand up at the wicket for a change while her brother dealt with the baby.

And the other evening this did happen. A mother, making one of those sorties from the domestic stronghold, that in my alley always have the effect of bringing a look of guilt into the faces of the innocent, shouted something I did not hear, picked up the wicket, cuffed somebody's head with it and made him put it on, gave the baby to a brother, and sent his sister off to the oil-shop with a jar in one hand and a penny tightly clasped in the other. The interruption over, the scattered field re-formed automatically, somebody else's jacket was made into a mound, and cricket was resumed with the loss of one player, who, by the way, showed an astonishing talent for minding the baby.

Then the little girl came back from the oil-shop. I know not what spirit of revolt entered suddenly her small, subdued soul; perhaps the sight of a boy minding the baby suggested an upheaval of the universe that demanded her instant co-operation; perhaps she had no distinct idea in her mind beyond a wish to rebel. Whatever her reasons, there she stood, bat in hand, waiting for the ball, while the baby crowed delightedly in the unusual embrace of a boy who, by all the laws of custom, was unsexing himself.

Another instant, and the air was rent with sound and fury. In front of the wicket stood the Spirit of Revolt, with tumbled hair and defiant eyes, breathless with much running, intoxicated with success; around her, an outraged cricket team, strong in the conventions of a lifetime, was protesting fiercely.

What had happened was quite simple. Grasping in an instant of time the only possible way of eluding the crowd of fielders in the narrow space, the little impromptu batswoman had done the obvious thing and struck the ball against the wall high over their heads, whence it bounded into the open street and got lost in the traffic. Then she ran till she could run no more. Why wasn't it fair? she wanted to know.

"'Cause it ain't--there!" was one illuminating reply.

"'Cause we don't never play that way," was another upon which she was quick to pounce.

"You never thought of it, that's why!" she retorted shrewdly.

She was desperately outnumbered. It was magnificent, but it wasn't cricket; moreover, her place was the doorstep, as she was speedily reminded when the door reopened and avenging motherhood once more swooped down upon the scene. A shake here, a push there--and the boy was back again at the wicket, while a weeping baby lay unheeded on the lap of a weeping Spirit of Revolt.

And the queer thing is that the innovation made by the small batswoman in her one instant of wild rebellion has now been adopted by the team that plays cricket down my alley, every evening before sunset.

XIV

Dissension in the Home

"I should be delighted to get up a meeting for you in my house," said the enthusiastic new recruit. "I always have said that women who paid rates and taxes--I beg your pardon? Oh, speakers--of course, speakers! Well, they must be the very best you have; people get so easily bored, don't they? And that's so bad for the cause." She reflected an instant, then fired off the names of three famous Suffragettes and was astonished to hear that the well-known leaders rarely had time to address drawing-room meetings.

"Isn't that rather a mistake?" she suggested, with the splendid effrontery of the new recruit. "It is so important to attract the leisured woman who won't go to public meetings for fear of being stuck with a hatpin. I'm really afraid my crowd won't come unless they see a name they know on the cards." Finding that this made no appeal to one who had heard it often before, she asked in a resigned tone if a window breaker would be available. "If I could put on the invitation card--'Why I broke a Prime Minister's window, by One who has done it,' they'd come in flocks. No, it wouldn't matter _much_ if she had broken somebody else's window. As long as she had broken something--do _you_ speak, by the way? Your voice is hardly strong enough, perhaps?"

The suffrage organiser, hoarse with having held two open-air meetings a day for the past week, admitted that she did speak sometimes. "I've been to prison too, if that is any good," she added cynically.

The cynicism was unperceived. "Have you? But that will be perfectly delightful! Can I promise them that you will speak about picking oakum and doing the treadmill? Oh, don't they? I thought all the Suffragettes picked oakum in Holloway, and that was why they--never mind! You've really eaten skilly, and that ought to fetch them, if anything will. The Chair? Oh, I really don't think I _could_;--I should die of terror, I know I should. What should I have to do? Yes, I suppose I could tell them why I want a vote. I always have said that women who paid rates and taxes--yes, Wednesday at nine o'clock. You'll come and dine first, won't you? It's so good for the unconverted to meet you at dinner, just to see that you do know how to hold a knife and fork. My husband is so very much opposed; I like to do all I can in a _quiet_ way to show him that the Suffragettes are _not_ all--can't you really? Well, come as early as you can; I shall be simply dead with nervousness if I'm left unsupported. By the way, you'll wear your most feminine frock, won't you? I hope you don't mind my mentioning it, but it is so important to impress the leisured woman--to say nothing of my husband! I am so anxious to avoid causing dissension in the home; I think that would be _wrong_, don't you? Of course, I shall let them all think that you may turn up in goloshes and spectacles; it will make the contrast all the greater, and that is so good for the cause!"

"Mrs. Fontenella wants to give a drawing-room meeting," said the organiser, when she returned to the office. "She seems to have a curious set of friends who look upon suffrage as a sort of music hall entertainment; so she wants me to speak because I have picked oakum in Holloway, and you, because you have broken something. I think she must be an Anti by birth."

"Oh, no," answered the woman who had broken something. "She is really a Suffragette by birth, and only an Anti by marriage. I am glad we have won her back again."

"Then why does she talk as if we were all mountebanks?" asked the other, unconvinced.

The breaker of Government plate glass shook her head slowly. "I don't know," she said. "I think, perhaps, it may be because she has lived eleven years with somebody from whom she is obliged to conceal what she really feels about things."

"She isn't obliged to conceal anything; nobody is!" cried the organiser, hotly. "If these people had the courage to show fight--"

"They have--when the fight is worth it," struck in the older woman. "Those are just the people whose courage is inexhaustible, when real courage is required. I don't know why it is so, unless it is that they haven't wasted it over things that don't matter, and so they have a reserve fund to draw upon for a great occasion. That's the best of a cause like ours--it furnishes them with the great occasion."

"Mrs. Fontenella's reserve fund must be colossal," said the organiser, still unconvinced.

The audience that was lured to Mrs. Fontenella's house on Wednesday evening by a prospect of meeting two eccentric females who had been to gaol--doubtless because they richly deserved it--was composed of the elements that usually go to make up such audiences. It was very rich, very idle, very limited; it was polite by education and rather insolent by nature; and, with the exception of one or two of the men, who nursed an academic belief in the woman's vote because they hoped that under masculine influence it might be used to strengthen the right political party, it was not interested in politics. The men were there because they thought it was a sporting idea of the most popular hostess in their set to pretend to be a Suffragette; and the women were there to show their disapproval of a shrieking minority, who, for the sake of notoriety, were rapidly destroying the ideal of womanhood that had been implanted in every Englishman's breast by his mother;--at least, those were the reasons they gave one another for being there, as they sat in rows on gilded upright chairs, waiting for the fun to begin. When it did begin, they experienced a distinct sensation of having been cheated of their entertainment.

It was not that they found it difficult to recognise the most popular hostess they knew in the apologetic lady who stood up, glittering with gems, against an expensive background of hothouse plants, and read out platitudes from a type-written paper in a high-pitched, jerky voice; though everything was wrong in that opening speech from the Chair. It was flippant without being funny; it threw up defences where it should have attacked; it jarred where it should have conciliated. One at least of the two women who shared the platform with her, chafing under the huge mistake of her speech, felt inclined to agree with the audience that the speaker was only pretending to be a Suffragette. It was not this that disappointed the audience, however. It had expected nothing else from one of its own set, who was obviously unfitted both by nature and upbringing to sustain a part that she had only assumed because it was something new--just as she might have hired a pianola or a gramophone when these two were novelties. But it was not fair to invite people to meet two hooligans who had fought with policemen, and then to confront them with two normal looking, normally dressed women, of whom it was impossible to believe anything that was not consistent with breeding and good form. Disappointment grew when the faltering little speech of the Chairman came to an end, and the younger of the two Suffragettes, with a fleeting glance at her notes, rose to her feet. A woman who had picked oakum and defied wardresses--their hostess had omitted no detail likely to attract her "crowd"--had no right to a soft, humorous voice, or to an educated accent. Entertainment there was of a sort; for the most obdurate Anti-suffragist could scarcely have remained proof against the wit and good temper of the girl who stood there, undaunted by the atmosphere of opposition that filled the room, turning the laugh against her opponents with every point that she made. Still, it was not the kind of entertainment they had been led to expect, and a certain amount of discomfiture mingled with the laughter and the applause that she won by the time she sat down.

Then the older woman, the one who had broken windows, took her place. There was nothing conciliatory, nothing amusing in what she said. She did not raise a laugh once; she uttered no sort of appeal; she never so much as hinted at an apology for what she and other women like her had felt impelled to do. She made some of her listeners angry; some of them she moved deeply; others she greatly perplexed; but she left none of them precisely where they had been when she began to speak, and when she sat down there was hardly any applause. Nearly every man in the room was staring at his boots; the women played with their lace and their rings, avoiding one another's eyes. A few were horribly ashamed of having tears in theirs.

The Chairman did not rise for a moment or two. She was scribbling something rapidly on a piece of paper, which she twisted up and sent down the length of the brilliantly lighted room to a man who stood lounging carelessly in the doorway. He untwisted it with extreme deliberation, crushed it up in his hand when he had read it, and looked his wife straight in the eyes, across the backs of the waiting people in the chairs. She met his look for just two seconds before she stood up and cleared her throat.

The rows of people in the chairs stirred with a sensation of relief. Eloquence and wit, they knew, were not in the repertory of Mrs. Fontenella when she was posing as a Suffragette; but at least she could be counted upon not to make them feel uncomfortable. When she stood there silent, gripping the table with both hands and looking straight down the room, along the road that her twisted scrap of paper had taken to the man in the doorway, they began to think something was a little wrong.

Did she, realising that the last speaker had overstepped the limits of good taste, feel incapable of dealing with the situation? It was certainly a little awkward for her to continue to occupy the Chair, under the circumstances.

"Ask for questions," prompted the organiser who sat on her left; and she pushed the agenda paper towards her, thinking she was nervous and could think of nothing to say.

Mrs. Fontenella was not nervous. She glanced round at her prompter with a reassuring smile and brushed aside the agenda paper. Then she faced the crowd she had brought there under false pretences, and gave them the second shock they had received that evening.

"Friends," she said, in a voice that no longer faltered or apologised, a voice that was pitched exactly right and held her listeners strangely, "the last speaker has told us that another deputation of women will try to reach the presence of the Prime Minister, next week. You know what that means--almost certain imprisonment for the women who go on that deputation, but also a certain chance for every one of us to do something towards winning a great reform. I am going on that deputation. Which of you will come with me?"

Those who managed furtively to look round at the man in the doorway, were extremely puzzled by the interested smile he wore.

* * * * *

"You were right about that woman, and I was utterly wrong," confessed the organiser, as she walked away from the house with the other speaker. "I do hope she won't have a bad time with that Anti husband of hers!"

"You never know," said her companion, who had seen the interested smile of the man in the doorway. "That's the blessed thing about marriage;--you never know."

"What!" exclaimed the younger woman. "Do you mean to say he is a Suffragette by birth, too?"

"No," was the reply. "I should say he was an Anti by birth; but I think he may be a Suffragette by marriage, though I doubt if he or his wife had found it out until to-night."

In a long and brilliantly lighted drawing-room, desolate with its rows of empty chairs, the popular hostess who was also a Suffragette stood alone with the man whose smile had puzzled every one who saw it, half-an-hour ago, except the woman who had broken windows.

"It's simply magnificent of you," said his wife.

He took a walk round and moved some of the expensive hothouse plants. "I hate these things," he said. "Why do we have them? Let's open some more windows and get rid of the smell."

She laughed, and watched him go across to manipulate blinds and bolts. "You are always the same man I married, even when you are quite different, as you were this evening," she remarked, with equal inconsequence.

"You're not the same woman as the one I married!" he shot back at her.

"But I am!" she cried. "I am, I am! And that's the whole point!"

He looked round at her, the smile back in his face. "Perhaps it is," he said. "Perhaps it is. Pity we've both missed it for eleven years, isn't it?"

THE END

THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN

BY WINWOOD READE

_Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 15 cents_

_A Biographical Sketch of the Author and an Estimate of his Work. Also Portrait Frontispiece_

Some of the Topics:

Egypt--Western Asia--The Greeks--The Macedonians--The Natural History of Religion--The Israelites--The Jews--The Character of Jesus--The Character of Mahomet--Ancient Europe--The Slave Trade--Abolition in Europe--Abolition in America--Animal Period of the Earth--The Future of the Human Race--The Religion of Reason and Love.