Chapter I (7)

The gardener was now an expert at saving Mrs. Rust from herself. Although she entangled herself habitually in contradictions, her real mind was not subtle enough to be well hidden, and to guide her action into the path of her desire was a matter that only required a little delicacy. The gardener, being a gardener, was always ready with tactful guidance and unseen support in such matters. In this case, he would have been surprised if you had told him that his secret desire pointed the same way as Mrs. Rust’s. He thought he had killed desire. But he was tired of the Island, and he had by that mail received a quarterly instalment of his income.

“Courtesy,” said Mrs. Rust, “we sail for home next Wednesday. Unreasonable—indeed. And none the worse for that.”

“We have engaged the car for a week from Friday,” said Courtesy. “Mr. Wise is lunching with us on Thursday. And the hotel insists on a week’s notice.”

“I am paying you two hundred a year,” said Mrs. Rust brutally, “to save me from these vulgar details.”

“Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy.

“But what about Scottie?” asked the gardener.

“Scottie’s your affair, not mine. I’m not paying you £200 a year to follow me about.”

The gardener is a very difficult person to snub.

“Scottie and I are coming gratis.”

And Mrs. Rust said, “Good.”

But the little boat, with the suffragette on board of her, fled across the Atlantic, as if aware of the projected pursuit of the great mail steamer.

The suffragette, a morose unit on a desert island of her own making, stood separated from the world by a gulf of gossip. She used to sit on the poop, where nobody else would sit, with the wind in her hair and the sun in her eyes, building theories.

There are some people who can never see a little cloud of fantasy float across the horizon of their dreams without building a heavy castle in the air upon it, and bringing it to earth. Whenever the suffragette thought of the gardener, she broke the thought with a theory. It is sad to be burdened with a brain that must always track illusion to disillusionment. She had one consolation, one persistent and glorious contradiction, one shining truth in a welter of self-questioning:—“I’m alone—I’m alone—I’m alone....”

It was not until they had passed the Azores that a voice from the outer world spoke to her. They had reached those islands late one moonlit night. The little square houses, climbing up the hill-side in orderly ranks, looked like silver bricks in a castle of dreams. There was a white fringe of breaking waves threaded between the black sea and the black land. From the boats that hurried between the shore and the steamer, little lamps swung and thin voices cut the darkness. Thundering silence seemed to invade the emptiness left by the ceasing of the propeller. The ceaseless loom that always sang behind the turmoil of the suffragette’s consciousness spun the moon into a quiet melody. The still lap of the sea against the ship’s stern struck the ear like a word never spoken before. You could hear the gods creating new things. You could hear the tread of the stars across the sky.

“I am sorry to disturb you,” said Miss Brown; “it’s Albert. I knew something would come of his going to the fancy-dress dance as Galileo, with such a thin tunic on; but he is so wilful. And now he has a high temperature, and a worse pain in his side than ever. He is crying for you.”

It was a strange sensation for the suffragette, after all these days of loneliness, to be cried for. Tears, like all things that belong to women, appealed to her beyond words.

She found Albert beating on the wall of his cabin. When he cried—it hurt. When he breathed—it hurt. When he moved—it hurt. And yet he had to cry and pant and struggle. There was something in the suffragette’s plain and ordinary face that acted as an antidote to Albert’s hectic personality. She was a poor nurse; her only experience of the sick-room had been from her own sick-bed. But she had a cold hand, an imagination which she only allowed to escape at a crisis, and nerves very difficult to excite. All that night, while the ship climbed the steep seas of the Bay, she and the doctor kept something that was very big from invading the little cabin. The battle was, of course, a losing one. There is something almost funny in the futility of fighting Heaven on an issue like this.

I said there should be no death-bed scenes in this book, so I will only add that after much battling Albert managed at last to get to sleep, and he died before he woke.

The suffragette was there, but she was not needed. She went away and cried because no one would ever cry for her again.

She marconied for Miss Brown’s brother to meet the bereaved aunt at Southampton. And when the boat reached home, she carried her mustard-coloured portmanteau up the gangway, and, by disappearing, closed the incident.

In this wonderful age we do our disappearing by machinery. Fairy godmothers prefer Rolls-Royce cars to broomsticks, the pirate employs a submarine instead of a gallant three-decker, the black sheep of the piece, instead of donning a mask and confining the rest of his career to Maidenhead Thicket, books his passage to a Transatlantic sheepfold on a thirty-knot liner.

The suffragette disappeared by the London train. By travelling third, she hoped to escape the majority of her fellow-passengers, and it was not until the train began to leave the station that she identified a hitherto unnoticed person opposite to her as the priest.

The priest was always overcome by a feeling of virtue when he travelled third.

“So our modesty is mutual,” he said jovially to the suffragette. “Yerce, yerce, in England I travel third on principle. My parish, you know, is in a poor part of London, and I think a shepherd should as far as possible share the circumstances of his flock.”

The suffragette hovered for a moment over a very crude flower of repartee dealing with cattle-trucks, but discarded the idea. She was always cautious, when she allowed herself time for caution. Her principle in conversation was, “When in doubt—don’t.” But being a militant suffragette, she was seldom in doubt.

The priest was aggrieved with the suffragette, partly because he felt obliged to speak to her. He would have preferred to ignore her, but she had behaved too well during the last few days. She had tried as hard to save a life as ever he had tried to save a soul, and had failed with equal dignity. Inconsistency annoyed him very much. You must be one of two things, a sheep or a goat, preferably the latter until the priest himself had had time to lead you to the fold. For a confessed goat suddenly to don wool without any help from him looked very much like deliberate prevarication. He did not now know how to classify the suffragette, and not knowing how to do a thing in which he had specialised was naturally exasperating.

“You were asking for my advice about the problem of your future,” he said, leaning confidentially towards her. “I have been thinking much about you, and I believe I have solved the problem.”

I need hardly say that the suffragette never asked for advice. When circumstances obliged her to follow the advisable course, she hid her docility like a sin.

“My future always looks after itself, thank you,” she said in a polite voice, “and so does my past. It’s old enough.”

The priest stiffened for a moment, but when on the track of a goat he was hard to check. Besides, the suffragette’s voice was so low and calm that her words seemed like a mistake, not to be taken seriously.

“My idea is that you should join in the glorious campaign against poverty and sin in the slums,” he continued. “I assure you that peace lies that way. My sister once had a love affair with a freethinker; she lost a great deal of weight at the time, and became almost hysterical. But she followed my advice, and now runs several social clubs in connection with my Church in the Brown Borough, North London, where the poor may buy cocoa and cake and listen to discourses by earnest Christian workers.”

“And what does she weigh now?” asked the suffragette, after a pause.

“She is a splendid example of a Christian woman,” said the priest, “a woman of unwavering faith, indefatigable in charitable works.”

“I think I shall come down to your parish as an antidote,” said the suffragette, “the only sort of Anti I ever could tolerate.”

Certainly my suffragette is not worthy to be the heroine of a book. I must apologise for presenting a nature so undiluted by any of the qualities that go to make good fiction. A pun, I admit, is the last straw, but it is unfortunately a straw occasionally clutched at by erring humanity, though rarely admitted by the novelist.

“I should not advise you to choose the Brown Borough for the scene of your endeavour,” said the priest hurriedly. “There is little scope for workers unconnected with a church there. I had in my mind for you the neighbourhood of Southwark, or Walworth, South London. Much more suitable, yerce, yerce. The Brown Borough is very unhealthy for those unaccustomed to London slums.”

“Yet your sister gained weight and lost hysteria there,” said the suffragette maliciously. “I myself might be said to have room for improvement on both these points.”

“I strongly advise you to choose another parish,” said the priest, bitterly repenting of his zeal. “So much excellent work has been done in the Brown Borough that the majority of the people ought by now to be on the way to find salvation, both in body and soul.”

“That’s why I propose to come as an antidote,” said the suffragette.

The conversation closed itself. They opened the _Spectator_ and _Votes for Women_ simultaneously.

London provided the sort of weather it reserves for those who return from sun-blessed lands. It was a day with rain in the past and rain in the future, but never rain in the present. The sort of day that makes you feel glad you thought of bringing your umbrella, and then sorry to find you left it in the last bus. The streets looked like wet slates splashed with tears.

The suffragette kept a lonely flat not far from Covent Garden, apparently with the object of ensuring herself the right to exercise a vote when she should have procured that luxury. For she very seldom put the flat to the ordinary uses of flats. It contained a table and two chairs, as a provision against the unlikely event of its owner’s succumbing to social weaknesses. It also contained a bed. Curtains and carpets, and any cooking arrangement more elaborate than a gas-ring, are not included in the Theory of the Hair Shirt, the motto of which is, “I can very well do without.”

The suffragette deposited the mustard-coloured portmanteau at this Spartan abode, and went to report herself to her Society. She was not a famous suffragette. If I told you her name, you would not raise your eyebrows and laugh facetiously and say, “Oh—_that_ maniac....” She was nominally one of the rank and file, although, being rebellious even against co-rebels, she seldom acted under orders.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never has time to be busy.

The Chief Militant Suffragette, who believed that she held feminism in the hollow of her hand, was a born leader of women. She was familiar with the knack of wringing sacrifices from other people. She was a little lady in a minor key, pale and plaintive, with short hair, like spun sand. She dressed as nearly as possible like a man, and affected an eyeglass. She probably thought that in doing this she sacrificed enough for the cause of women. She had safely found a husband before she cut her hair. I suppose she had sent more women to prison than any one magistrate in London, but she had never been to prison herself.

The cause of the Suffrage, while attracting the finest women in the country, also attracts those who consider themselves to be the finest. It has an equal fascination for those who can work but can never lead and for those who can lead but never work.

“I have written to you three times,” said the Chief M.S. pathetically to the suffragette. “I do think you might have answered.”

“So do I,” admitted the suffragette, “only that I have been abroad. What did you write to me about?”

“Abroad?” said the Chief M.S., and raised her eyebrows. She had none really, but she raised the place where they should have been. “Abroad? Enjoying yourself at such a time as this?”

“What do you mean?” asked the suffragette. “What has happened? Have we got the Vote?”

The eyeglass of the Chief M.S. fell out with annoyance. “Of course not,” she said, “but it’s the great massed procession and deputation to-morrow, and I wanted you to help with the North London section.”

The suffragette loathed processions. She loathed working or walking with a herd. She would rather have blown up Westminster Abbey than stewarded at a meeting. A less honest woman would have flattered herself that these are the signs of a great and lonely mind, but the suffragette knew them as the signs of vanity. And to cure vanity is, of course, the business of a hair shirt.

“When have I got to be there? And where?” she asked.

In the eyes of the Chief M.S. punctuality in other people was the ideal virtue. The moment she named to her assistants was always an hour before the correct time, and two hours before the one she chose for her own appearance.

The suffragette had long been a servant of the Society. By an instinctive calculation she managed to arrive at Little South Lane next day punctually at the moment when help began to be needed. She collected some of the native enthusiasts who were adding fuel to their ardour on the door-steps of neighbouring public-houses. She quelled the political antagonism of a bevy of little boys who were vocally competing with a Great Woman’s preliminary address. She soothed the objections of the paid banner-bearers, who had not been led to expect the additional opposition of a high wind. She eliminated from the procession as far as possible all suffragists below the age of four. She lent a moment’s friendly attention to the reasons why Woman’s Sphere is the Home, expounded by a hoarse spinster from an upper window. She courageously approached an enormous dock-hand, who had snatched a banner from its rightful bearer, and was waving it with many oaths.

“Might I trouble you for that banner?” said the suffragette.

The gentleman’s reply was simple but obscene.

“Might I trouble you at once to move out of my way, and let the procession join up?” said the suffragette in a red voice.

“Gaw-love yer, me gal, I’m comin’ along,” said the gentleman. “Wot price me for a ... suffragette? You’ll need a few fists, if you git as fur as the Delta way.”

How very rare it is to mistake the staff for the broken reed. The suffragette recovered herself quickly.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought to have known from your face that you were a sensible man. How good of you to carry a banner!”

The procession, like a snake, reared its head and moved. In the van a marching song was begun, in the rear—a ragtime. The police, looking dignified, but feeling silly, marched in single file on either flank, and kept an eye on the interests of the traffic. The one mounted policeman obviously regretted the prominence of his position, his horse was an anti, and showed a man-like tendency to argue with its hoofs.

The suffragette walked between a little woman in a plush coat with a baby and a person who might have been a poetess, or a philosopher, or a Low Church missionary, but was certainly very earnest. The long brown streets swung by. The flares on the coster’s barrows anchored to the kerb, danced in the yellow air. A hum of barbaric voices, and the large firm pulse of many feet marching, made a background to the few clear curses and the fewer clearer blessings from the pavement.

“I wish to Gawd my kiddie ’ed been a gel,” said the little mother beside the suffragette. “Bein’ a woman—mikes yer proud-like....”

The suffragette put her chin up and laughed. “As a man, your kiddie’ll make you proud. There’s sure to be something splendid about a man whose mother was proud to be a woman.”

“Men ...” said the little mother, with more alliteration than refinement, “are ... brute beasts.”

“’Ere, draw it mild,” said the dock-hand, who was just in front.

“There’s men, wytin’ for us, somewhere down the Delta wy now. Wytin’ to mike us yell an’ run, wytin’ to ’urt us—jus’ becos we was proud to be women.”

“Waiting for us?” gasped the poetess. “Why—how dreadful.... I wasn’t told there would be any fighting.”

“You might have known there would be,” said the suffragette. “You can’t assert facts without fighting for them.”

The poetess, obviously wishing she had left such dangerous weapons as facts to themselves, gave a hoarse giggle, and said, “I declare, I’m quite frightened....”

“It is frightening,” agreed the suffragette. “Not the bruises, but the stone-wallness of men. I’m always frightened by opposition that I can’t see through at all. I am frightened of Delta Street hooligans. I am also frightened in exactly the same way by a polite enemy. You go into the law courts, for instance, and watch those men wearing their wigs like haloes and their robes like saints’ armour——”

“You do talk nice, miss,” said the little mother. “I wish you’d come down to the Brown Borough, an’ jaw my young man.”

The suffragette, though a trifle damped, continued, “It isn’t that their arguments are strong, nobody minds that, but it’s that they don’t bother to have any arguments. Just like the hooligans, only in different words. It’s no more an argument than it is one between God and Satan. One side is established, the other doesn’t exist. It makes you see that to-morrow is never strong enough to fight to-day. It would take an angel to admit to-morrow as a fact at all, and unfortunately it’s men we’re up against.”

“Then what’s the good of all this?” asked the poetess, who was naturally becoming more and more depressed.

“Oh, a losing battle’s fine,” said the suffragette. “I’d rather wear a black eye than a wig, or a crown, any day.”

“’Ear, ’ear,” said the dock-hand.

“Wiv Parliament, for instance,” said the little mother, who was evidently accustomed to fill her sphere with her voice. “They sits an’ argoos about Welsh Establishment, an’ all the while I ’ed my little gel die of underfeeding, becos I wuz carryin’ this one, and couldn’t get work.”

“Thet’s all very well,” said the dock-hand; “but wot do you expec’? You carn’t expec’ the lawyers to frow up their wig an’ say the Law’s a Liar. (Not but wot it ain’t.) You carn’t expec’ the Prime Minister to tell ’isself ‘There’s Mrs. Smiff’s biby dyin’, I mus’ go dahn an’ see abaht it.’ (Not but wot it ain’t ’ard.”)

“There are lots of things you can’t kill,” said the suffragette. “But you can always try. Men don’t try, because impossibility is one of the things they believe in.”

“You carn’t kill Votes fer Women,” shouted the little mother, with a burst of enthusiasm. She waved her baby instead of a banner.

At that moment a yelling horror dropped like a bomb upon the level street. The suffragette saw the mounted policeman, complete with his horse, fall sideways, like a toy. She saw a chequered crowd of perspiring faces come upon her like a breaking wave. She saw the banners ahead stagger like flowers before a wind. She saw the poetess fall, and some one stamp on her shoulder. She saw a man with a fierce-coloured handkerchief knotted round his throat seize the little mother’s chin and wrench it up and down, as he cursed in her face. The suffragette, who never could be angry in a dignified way, gave a hoarse croak and snatched his arm. Possibly she felt like the child Hercules during his interview with the serpents, but she did not look like that at all. The man jerked his arm up, the suffragette’s seven stone went up too. She was waved like a flag. The tears were shaken out of her eyes. Her feet kicked the air. And then she alighted against a wall. She saw a chinless and unshaven face heave into her upper vision, and a great hand, like black lightning, cleft the fog. The knuckles of the hand cut like a blunt knife. In North London we always repeat our arguments, when we consider them good ones. The suffragette, who was a person of no muscular ability at all, gave up hoping for the chance of a retort in kind, after the third repetition. So the argument went on undisputed, until the dock-hand perceived it, when it was successfully overborne.

The suffragette picked up her hat. She hated it because it looked so dirty. She hated her heart because it felt so sick. She picked up the poetess and hated her because she was crying. She was crying herself, but she thought she looked courageously wrathful.

“What do we do now?” sobbed the poetess.

“We walk on,” said the suffragette, and took her, not very gently, by the arm.

“But I can’t, I can’t. It may happen again,” wailed the poetess. “Policeman, can’t I go home?”

“Yes, miss,” said the policeman, wiping his brow.

“But there are no taxis.”

“No, miss,” said the policeman.

You never can tell what strange thing you may do at a crisis. The poetess slipped a confiding hand into that of the policeman, and walked meekly by his side.

“Murderers ...” exclaimed the little mother. “They might ’ev done biby in. Your ’ead’s bleedin’, miss. So’s my gum, but I kin swaller that.”

The suffragette felt as if she had been divided in two. Her militant spirit, clothed in its hair shirt, seemed to be moving at a height, undaunted, monopolised as usual by the splendour of its cause. And below, very near the dust, a terribly tired woman, a unit among several hundreds of other terribly tired women, put one foot before the other along an endless road.

You must stride over a gap here, as the procession did mentally. For a very long time I don’t think anybody thought anything except—“How long, O Lord, how long?”

When I am very tired and see the high and friendly smile of St. Paul’s curved across the sky, I feel as if I am near home. I always think St. Paul’s is like a mother to all London, while Westminster Abbey is like a nun, the bride of heaven, with an infinite scorn of you and me. St. Paul’s stands at the top of the hill of difficulty, and after that your feet walk by themselves down Ludgate Hill.

There was a burst of song from all parts of the procession as it passed that friendly doomed milestone. The burst was simultaneous, but the song was too various to be really effective.

“Votes for Women,” shouted the little mother. “I sy, miss, when are you comin’ dahn to the Brown Borough to ’elp wiv votes for women? We ain’t got nobody there as kin talk like you.”

“Am I coming down?” asked the suffragette, who had a vague idea that she had said many things, now forgotten. “I never speak at meetings now. My brain is always wanting to say the next thing but one, and my tongue is always saying the thing before last. There’s too much to be said about Votes for Women.”

“Meetin’s...” said the little mother in a voice of scorn. “Tain’t meetin’s we want. It’s somebody jus’ to talk ornery, as if they was a friend-like. Somebody to live up the street—if you unnerstan’ me—an’ drop in, an’ be interested. When my little gel died, lars’ October, an’ ’ole lot of lidies made enquiries, an’ got me a few ’alfpence a week to git on wiv till I could get back to the box-miking. I useter ’ave to go to an orfice an’ answer questions, an’ the lidy useter sy she was sorry to seem ’quisitive, but she ses—If some on yer cheat, you mus’ all on yer suffer.... Bless you, I didn’ mind answering questions, but I was very low then, an’ I useter tike it ’ard that none o’ them lidies never seemed interested. Nobody never as’t wot was the nime o’ my little gel that died, nor ’ow old she was, nor nothink about ’er pretty wys that she useter ’ave.... ’Tisn’t that they ain’t kind, but it’s being treated in a crowd-like as comes ’ard, an’ there’s many feels the sime....”

“What do you expect?” asked the poetess, who was now detached from the policeman. “I am myself a C.O.S. secretary, so I know something about it. None of us have time to do more than is really necessary. And when there’s public money in question—well, it’s all very well, but one can’t be too careful.”

“When there’s money in question you may be right, miss,” said the little mother. “But it ain’t allus a question of money, an’ it seems to me as ’ow, wiv votes fer women, if some on them suffragettes ’ud stop talking about women’s wiges at meetin’s, an’ come an’ look at wiges at ’ome, they’d ’it a lot of women wot thinks now as ’ow votes for women is only a public thing an’ don’t matter outside Trafalgar Square. It seems to ’it you ’arder if a person’s friendly than if they’re heloquent....”

“Something is happening in front,” said the poetess, looking wildly round for her policeman.

“The police have turned on us,” said the suffragette. “They always do in the Strand. Downing Street gets nervous when we get as near as this.”

It was too true. The police, relieved to be at last freed from the burden of their false position, were characteristic of their profession.

“But I was told I was to walk to the Houses of Parliament,” said the poetess, finding her quondam protector’s hand on her shoulder.

“You may walk to Jericho, miss,” replied the policeman with a wit as heavy as his hand. “Only not more than three in a group, _if_ you please.”

A great crowd of little groups trickled on to the Embankment and followed the tide of the river towards Westminster. There was a moon. I think the moon is really the heroine of this unheroic book. Half the blessing of London belongs to the river, and half the blessing of the river belongs to the moon. Do you know how beautifully a full moon bends out of her sky to trail her fingers in the river? Do you know how faerily she shoots shavings of her silver under the bridges, and how she makes tender the blackness of the barges and the shadows of the little wharves? I always think the moon has in her quiver of charms a special shaft for the river of London. She never smiles like that elsewhere.

It was no surprise to Westminster to see the deputation and procession arrive, albeit in a less neat form than that in which it started. The police force has moments of wonderful insight into the psychology of law-breakers, and in this case it seemed aware that a procession of women disbanded and told to go home in the Strand is nevertheless likely to appear sooner or later in Parliament Square. The great space resounded to the tramp of the feet of the law. A detachment of mounted police strove to look unconcerned in the Whitehall direction. I always think it is unjust to drag dumb animals into these political questions. I wonder the S.P.C.A. doesn’t step in. Imagine the feelings of a grey mare, for instance, on being called upon to charge into the ranks of a female deputation to Downing Street.

Neither the suffragette nor I are familiar with the great ways of deputations. We are of the humble ranks which suffer physical buffetings in the shadow of St. Stephen’s, while our superiors suffer moral buffetings in the shadow of the English Constitution. There is very little sport in being a shuttlecock anyway, but while the head gets the straight hit, the feathers feel most the stress of adverse winds.

The object of the police in a crowd is to keep it moving. The direction in which it is to move is never explained to it. Whether you move to the right or the left you are sure to be wrong in the eyes of the law. If you weigh seven stone, your tendency is to move either upwards or downwards. Correctly speaking, the suffragette never set foot in Parliament Square for some time after she arrived there. She was caught in a gust of crowd, and borne in an unexpected direction. She did not mind which way she went, but she was human enough to mind whether her ribs got broken. Even in a good cause, matters like these touch you personally. The shoulders of partisans and martyrs, packed closely against your ribs, feel just as hard as the shoulders of the less enlightened. The suffragette began to feel a cold whiteness creeping up from her boots to her heart. She began to take a series of last looks at the moon and the spires of the Abbey. She reached the earth just when she had decided that she had reached the door-step of Heaven, and found herself cast by an eddy into a tiny peace. There, in an alcove, was the Chief M.S., protected by a stout husband. The Chief M.S., whose hair was too short to have been dragged down, and whose eyeglass was trembling on her breast with pleasurable excitement, was looking cool and peaceful.

“You do look a wreck,” she said brightly to the suffragette. “I have been wanting to talk to you about something I want you to do for me.”

This was such a frequent remark on the lips of the Chief M.S. that, as a rule, it made no impression on her followers and acquaintances. But the suffragette was incredibly tired, and the power of kicking against pricks was taken from her. She had no spirit in her except the ghost of her hair shirt theory, that fiend which croaks—“Go on, go on....” She made a great effort. She pulled her hat down on her head, she put her chin up, she wrapped her cloak of endurance more closely round her. “Talk on,” she said.

“Oh, not now, child,” said the Chief M.S. “Come and see me next Wednesday. I shall be away for a long week-end after this.”

It seemed like making an appointment for a hundred years hence. The suffragette agreed, because it seemed impossible that she could live so long as next Wednesday.

At that moment the mounted police charged. The careful husband of the Chief M.S. whisked her away. The forelegs of a horse entered the suffragette’s alcove. The safest place in a police charge is under the noses of the horses. These animals, usually anxious to preserve neutrality, have mastered the art of playing upon the fleeing backs of agitators as gently as the pianist plays upon the keys. I have had a horse’s hoofs fanning my shoulder-blades for minutes on end, and yet only suffered from the elbows of my fellow-fugitives.

The suffragette, alone on the strip of pavement between the rearing horses and the recoiling crowd, conceived the sensational idea of charging the chargers. This is the sort of idea that comes to one after a five-hour march and a series of street fights. I have never been drunk with liquor, but I know what it is to be drunk all the same. The suffragette determined that those horses should never see her coattails. She heard a voice shouting, “Women ... women ... women ...” and on finding it was her own, added, “Don’t run back—run forward.” And she flung herself on the breast of the nearest horse.

A foot-policeman caught her on the rebound. She was not in the least hurt, but he picked her up and carried her across his shoulder. She hit her fists against his helmet; it sounded like a drum. It seems hard to believe, but I assure you that even on that high though humble perch, she was revelling in the thought that it concerned nobody but herself that she was going to prison.

My poor heroine, I am afraid, has stepped beyond the limits of your toleration, but if you look, you will find I never asked you to admire her.

The policeman lowered her, and stood her like a doll on the steps of the Metropolitan Railway. That excellent institution, shocked at the doings outside, had drawn its grill modestly across its entrance, and its employés, like good lions at the Zoo watching the rampant behaviour of the public, were gazing through the bars.

“You’re not the right size for this job, young woman,” said the policeman.

The suffragette’s reply was a further struggle. The policeman held both her arms.

“You go ’ome,” he said. “The deputation’s goin’ ’ome now, like a good gel. What’s your station?”

A terrible exhaustion drooped like a weight released upon the suffragette. The only retort that came to her mind was, “Leicester Square, please.”

“Change at the Embankment,” said a railway official, and opened eighteen inches of the gate. The policeman pushed her in. She took her ticket, and went home as meekly as any Anti.

You may be surprised to hear that the suffragette spent the next day in bed. A day in bed is not, of course, part of the Hair Shirt Theory, but this was a Sunday, and Sunday is a day of weakness, though it seems politer to the Old Testament to call it a day of relaxation. The suffragette always spent Sunday as she liked, with the hair shirt doffed and neatly folded on a chair beside her. She smoked as many cigarettes as she pleased, instead of the strict two of ordinary life, she occasionally ate as many as three large meals, she had been known to invest in nougat. Sundays were the oases in her desert, and if the gardener had chanced on one for the scene of one of his luckless spasms, this story might have been much prettier. It is very tiring to be yourself with such ardour as the suffragette employed, and to be somebody else for twenty-four hours once a week becomes almost a necessity.

Besides, she had court plaster on her forehead, and the publicly court-plastered pose was one that the suffragette loathed.

If the Chief M.S. had had the luck to catch a painless black eye in the Cause of the Vote, she would have flaunted it like a flag up and down Piccadilly. But the husband had been almost too effective. She had not even broken her eyeglass.

One of the most striking differences between the suffragette and the gardener was that the gardener told himself: “When I die, they will be sorry, and they will perhaps understand.” But the suffragette thought: “When I die, nobody except the charwoman will know.”

The suffragette went to see the Chief M.S. on Wednesday.

“How curious you should come this afternoon,” said the Chief M.S. “Some one was here asking for you only this morning.”

The suffragette hardly ever explained herself. She did not remind the Chief M.S. that she was there by appointment. Nor did she ask who had been inquiring for her. Perhaps she knew.

“He asked for your address,” said the Chief M.S. “But as he was a man, I didn’t give it to him. He didn’t leave his name, but he asked me to tell you that your dog was now in the hands of the quarantine officials. I attacked him on the suffrage question, as I always do strange men.”

“What did he say?”

“He had nothing to say. I pointed out to him how ludicrous was the argument that just because a person wore two tubes on his legs instead of one, he was competent to rule.”

“I have never heard that argument used,” said the suffragette soberly. “I didn’t know that even men——”

“Why, you’re as dense as he was,” snapped the Chief M.S. “Of course they don’t put it like that. He asked me which M.P. was responsible for the tubular argument. I saw it was no use going on. He left his address for me to give you.”

“What was it you wanted to see me about?” asked the suffragette.

“Did I want—Oh, yes.... Well, I have been thinking you have done nothing for the Cause lately, have you?”

The suffragette fingered a sore dint under the shadow of her hat. “Hardly anything,” she admitted.

“I think the slum districts want working up,” said the Chief M.S. “Somebody who walked behind you in the procession said you hobnobbed wonderfully with the North London women. How would it be if you were to undertake a series of informal meetings——”

“It isn’t meetings they want, they told me so themselves,” said the suffragette.

“It’s meetings everybody wants,” retorted the Chief M.S. “I thought also that you might start a soup kitchen or a turkey club, or one of those things that one does start in the slums. You can’t educate the poor without feeding them, I’m sure.”

“Nonsense!” said the suffragette, who was certainly no more accommodating as a follower than as a woman. “I don’t believe the anatomy of the poor is one bit different from the anatomy of the rich. And I don’t believe the way to anybody’s soul lies through their stomach. Only if one is hungry, one naturally pretends that blind alley is a thoroughfare.”

“How do you suggest that the slums should be worked up, then, may I ask?” said the Chief M.S. coldly. There is no point in being a born leader, if the rank and file refuses to behave suitably.

The suffragette loathed the wording of this remark, but kindly refrained from further criticism. “If you like ...” she said, “I’ll try an experiment on the Brown Borough. I’ll give no meetings and I’ll give no membership cards, but if you leave me time I’ll bring as many women to the Cause as ever did a dozen meetings in Trafalgar Square.”

To hear of other people busy always cheered the Chief M.S.

“You will have done a good work,” she said warmly.

The suffragette went out with those words singing in her head. A thing that very seldom happened to other people’s words in the ears of this self-absorbed young woman.

“To have done a good work ...” she said, on the top of a west-bound ’bus.

“To have done a good work.... But if it were a good work it could never be done. The way of good work goes on for ever. And that’s why I swear I’ll do this work till I die....”

It was fine to feel busy again. The suffragette had always liked to have the measure of her day pressed down and running over, but she had never yet known the luxury of having enough of what she liked. In the home—which is Woman’s Sphere—there is always time to think how little time there is. Even the career of an incendiary, though hectic, often fails to give the illusion of persistent industry. The suffragette was so lost in enthusiasm over the discovery of a good long road under her feet at last, that she presently found herself at Kew.

If you must drift, there are few places better to drift to than Kew Gardens. Only if you go there just when the months have reached the bleak curve of the hill that runs down into spring, you must know where to find the best and most secret snowdrops. The suffragette knew. She was very familiar with the art of being alone in London.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that never once in her life had her leisure meant some one else’s pleasure. There had never been any one who would have been in the least interested to know that the suffragette had a few hours unbooked. She never regretted this fact, because she never noticed it. With the exception of Excursion Agents, I should think no one ever knew the holiday resorts around London better than she did. She could enjoy herself very much indeed sitting seriously on grass, watching a world dotted with sentimental cockneyism. It gave her no pang to be one among many twos.

To-day she found the seat that sits forever looking at the place where the snowdrops should be, and only really lives when they come out. And when she got there, it was most annoying, she thought of the gardener, to the exclusion of everything else. After several minutes she found that she had been occupied in committing the address she had been given to memory.

“Number Twenty-one Penny Street. Twenty-one Penny Street.”

I cannot account for the occasional inconsistency of this woman except by reminding you of a certain well-known natural phenomenon. Just as a man whose arm has been amputated may still suffer from a phantom finger-ache, so a woman who has killed her heart must, at certain points in her life, feel the pain of a heart, as if the dead thing turned in its grave. One of the most tragic things about loss is that it is never annihilation.

“This is absurd,” thought the suffragette, pulling herself together. “I must make a plan of campaign, as the M.S. Society would say. How am I going to start?”

Brown Borough popularity is a slippery thing to seize. You must have a handle to grasp it by.

A robin appeared, like a fairy, between two snowdrops. He did not notice the suffragette, nevertheless he looked self-conscious. He re-arranged a perfectly neat feather, and glanced at his waistcoat to see whether its curve was correct. He even tried to glance over his waistcoat at his feet, but this was physically impossible. The suffragette loved him until she realised that he was in love, on which she wearied of him. A chirrup behind her drew her attention to the lady in the case.

“I believe I’ll have to get hold of the priest,” said the suffragette. I have told you that she was devoid of tact. She never took enough notice of the world to sulk when the world was unkind, she was not human enough to quarrel. I have seen her give great offence to the Chief M.S. by borrowing a cigarette in the middle of a tempestuous scene of mutual reproach. She never reviewed the past when arranging for the future, and this, in human relations, is a fatal mistake.

She had an apple and an oatmeal biscuit in her bag. In spite of the robin’s sentimental drawbacks, she shared the biscuit with him and gave him the apple core. He finished the biscuit, and when about three-quarters through with the apple core, he remembered his affair of the heart. With the laboured altruism of the man in love, he tore himself away, and embodied the apple core theme in a little song, by way of informing the lady. She came, she began. Looking up with her third mouthful, she noticed the suffragette. With a hoarse chirp, she shot over the horizon.

“He forgot to warn her,” sighed the suffragette. “Men _are_ so unimaginative.”

The gentleman came back and finished the apple core.

The suffragette’s mind, which was rather sleepy, turned to the occasion when she too had shot away from destiny, over a blue horizon.

“But I left Courtesy as an apple core,” she said. “Men ought to be as good philosophers as robins, any day.”

You and I are getting tired of this scene. And so was the suffragette. She shook herself.

“I must wake up,” she said. “The incident is closed. I’m glad it’s closed. But I’m very glad it was once open. By mistake I came alive for a little while. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in love. But I thank God I have met love—in a dream.”

She might possibly have been referring to the robin drama. But I don’t think she was.

She put her chin up, and buttoned up the hair shirt, and exchanged the snowdrops for a ’bus.

It was the day after this that the priest was addressing his sister’s Girls’ Club in the Brown Borough. He was supplying food for the soul while his sister prepared food for the body. The girls were listening with the polite though precarious attention which Brown Borough girls always bring to bear on the first three hundred words of any address, especially if the addresser be a man. Factory girls are amiable creatures with something inborn that very closely resembles good manners. Unless you are so unfortunate as to stumble upon their sense of humour, they will always give you a hearing. Their sense of humour is broad, but only touched by certain restricted means. If you have a smut on your nose, or if your hat is on one side, or if you stammer in your speech, or if it is obvious that you have just sat in a puddle on alighting from your ’bus, you need cherish no hopes, but be sure that every word you say is only adding to the comedy of the situation.

The priest was extremely neat, as usual. His piercing eyes under his grey hair looked dignified, and he was concealing moral quack remedies in gilded anecdotes with marked success. He had reached the critical point in a comic story about his recent adventures in the tropics, and was just preparing to lead the roar of amusement, when, over the heads of his audience, he saw a face that seemed terribly familiar. He finished the story with such gravity that nobody dared to smile.

“How unwise I was to put the idea into her head,” he told himself, and, descending from his eminence, went to meet her.

“This is indeed a surprise, yerce, yerce,” he said, shaking her coldly by the hand. He thought that she would be cut to the heart by the fact that he failed to qualify the surprise as pleasant. She did not notice the omission. She was not accustomed to being made very welcome.

“I have followed your advice,” she said. “I have come down to ask you for work.”

“How very well-timed,” said the priest’s sister just behind him. “Christopher, introduce the young lady.”

“We will talk of that later,” said the priest. “I have not finished my address.”

But he virtually had. For he could find nothing else to say, although he continued speaking. The girls lost interest, and began passing each other letters and photographs from their chaps. A little plain girl, beside whom the suffragette had taken her seat, handed her one of these documents.

I have said that the suffragette had a hard face—it is worth noting that no beggar ever begged of her unless he was blind. But I suppose she had loved women so long and so fiercely that there was something in her look that established confidence in the women she met. Nobody would have handed a love-letter to Mrs. Rust to read, within five minutes of her first appearance.

“The cocoa is ready, Christopher,” said the priest’s sister audibly, from an inner room.

A remark like this, though trivial, will throw almost any orator off his track. The priest stopped, with the resigned sigh of Christian irritation.

The suffragette handed the letter back to her neighbour. “What a nice chap yours must be,” she said.

“Are you the young woman wot’s come to ply the pianner?” asked the girl.

“I’m not sure,” replied the suffragette, with a guarded look at the priest. “I rather think I am.”

This was luckily considered amusing, and over the cocoa the comments on the new young woman were favourable.

The priest’s sister came out from the inner room, whence proceeded the loud bubbling squeaks of cocoa-drinkers.

“Now, Christopher,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me you had found a new helper?”

“I do not know that I have, my dear,” replied the priest. “This young lady has misinterpreted something I said to her.”

“It’s very lucky that she did, then,” said the priest’s sister. “We are so badly in need of a new voluntary helper.”

“You oblige me to put the matter baldly, my dear,” said the priest, keeping his temper with a creditable effort. “This is the young lady I mentioned to you last night in the course of conversation. All our helpers hitherto have been of the highest moral character.”

“From your face...” said the priest’s sister to the suffragette. “I am sure you mean well. I am sure you are not wicked. And if you have slipped, there is nothing like hard work in the Brown Borough to make you forget.”

The suffragette was so much startled to hear herself addressed in this unusual vein that she very nearly cried. It is rare to have tears so near so horny a surface as hers.

“My dear ...” said the priest. “I think you forget my position of authority in this parish. You also forget the pure young souls committed to your care in this club. Yerce, yerce.”

He actually imagined the factory girls to be as innocent as himself. To him the words youth and innocence were indivisible.

“Oh, nonsense, Christopher,” said his sister. “She doesn’t necessarily want to help with this club, and even if she did she can’t convey infection to the girls by playing the piano to them.”

“I do not expect she does play the piano,” said the priest lamely.

“You do play, don’t you? You have such pretty hands.”

After that, of course, the suffragette felt as though she could have played Strauss to please her. As a matter of fact she had little real articulate gift for music, but she never forgot a tune she had heard, and found no difficulty in rendering the songs that always sang in her head, outwardly instead of inwardly.

The priest’s sister was not musical. Nor was she critical. She considered that the Brown Borough had in this newcomer found something it had lacked. The suffragette, who possessed certain secret springs of conceit, was to some extent of the same opinion. And by the end of the evening the majority of the girls shared this view.

“Do you know a Mrs. Smith?” asked the suffragette, as she said good-bye.

“I know perhaps five hundred Mrs. Smiths,” said the priest’s sister.

“She wears a plush coat, and a baby, and a little girl of hers died in October.”

“About two hundred and fifty out of the five hundred wear plush coats, and babies, and little girls that die.”

“I wonder what surnames are for,” said the suffragette pettishly, “since they have ceased to distinguish one person from another?”

“If you come to me to-morrow,” said the priest’s sister, “I will give you the names of various women who want visiting. If your Mrs. Smith needs you, you will soon find her, if you live in the Brown Borough.”

The suffragette was a rash woman. She always abode by her own first choice. Before she went to see the priest’s sister in the morning, she found herself a Brown Borough lodging. She did this by the simple device of knocking on the door of the first house she saw that displayed a notice, “Apartment.”

“Now then, wot’s the matter?” asked the lady who opened the door.

The suffragette, though impossible to silence, was easy to abash. And there is certainly something disheartening in such a salutation. However, she suggested that the notice in the window might excuse an intrusion.

She was very lucky; one always is when one doesn’t deserve to be so. She might have found a room with a brown wet ceiling curtseying floorward under the stress of many rains. She might have found a room peopled by a smell incredible, with rags stuffed into panes that had been broken by a merciful accident. She might have found walls discoloured by dark patches that looked like old blood. All these things are apt to decorate Woman’s Sphere in the Brown Borough.