Chapter I (8)

But the suffragette had, by mistake, knocked on the door of the most respectable house in the most respectable street in the district. She found a clean, though dark room, with a window blinking against the sun at a back yard filled with snowdrops. The wall-paper talked in a loud voice of tulips: wine-coloured tulips trampled on each other and wrestled for supremacy over every inch of it. The tablecloth and carpet were the colour of terra-cotta, and firmly disagreed with every word the wall-paper said. Two horse-hair chairs, in sullen brown, looked moodily at each other across the table.

The suffragette never asked more than that her body might live in a clean place. She kept her mind detachable from colour schemes. After all, what is my body for but to enclose me?

“I’ll have the room,” said the suffragette, as if it had been a cake of soap.

It was like a dream to the landlady, a dream she had never been sufficiently feverish to indulge in.

“You’ll have it?” she gasped.

“Yes. Why not? What’s the rent, by the way?”

The landlady, by means of a rapid mental process of multiplication, rose manfully to the occasion.

“All right, fifteen shillings,” said the suffragette. “I’ll come in to-morrow.”

She went to see the priest’s sister, but to her mild annoyance found the priest instead.

“My sister suggested that you should visit the Wigskys,” said the priest, who never bore malice, as far as one could see. He never allowed you for a moment to forget that he was a Christian. “Mrs. Wigsky’s latest baby hasn’t been christened. Also I think the eldest girl must be getting into bad ways; she has left the excellent place I found for her.”

“And must I persuade the baby to be christened?”

“Not the child itself. You had better do your best to persuade the mother.”

“But supposing she refuses on principle?”

The priest fixed her with his piercing eye. “There can be no principle contrary to the Right,” he said. “The opposite to Right is Wrong.”

“How simple!” said the suffragette. “But won’t Hell be terribly overcrowded?”

The priest sighed, and certainly with reason. But he remembered that he was very broad-minded, and that he had often said that everybody had a right to their own opinion. He remembered that the soft answer that turneth away the fatuity of women had found a place even in the New Testament.

“No one would be more loth than I ...” he said, “to classify as condemned all whose views do not coincide with the dictates of the Church. Let us rather call them mistaken.”

The suffragette shut in a renewed protest with a snap of her jaws. Although she badly needed a handle by which to seize the Brown Borough, surely there must be other handles than the Church. She determined secretly on determination as her unaided weapon.

But she went to see the Wigskys. She found them—a large family, red and mutually wrathful in an atmosphere of hot smells ancient and modern.

When she got inside the door she wondered why she had come. The baby screaming on its mother’s breast looked incorrigibly heathen, the eldest girl looked wholly unsuited to any “excellent place” discovered by the priest.

“Wooder _you_ want?” asked the harassed mother, a drab and dusty creature, with the used look of cold ashes.

“I’ve come from Father Christopher ...” began the suffragette, wishing she had come from some one else.

“’N you can go back to Farver Christopher,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “Becos I ain’t goin’ to ’ave no more bibies christened. It’s ’eaven ’ere, an’ ’eaven there, this biby’s goin’ ter grow up ’eeven fer a chinge. It carn’t get us into worse trouble nor wot we’ve ’ad.”

“I haven’t come to bother you,” said the suffragette. “After all, it’s your baby, not Father Christopher’s.”

“That’s wot I ses,” said the mother, slightly mollified. “Well, if you ’aven’t come abaht Biby, wot ’ave you come for?”

“I’ve come because I want to find friends in the Brown Borough. If you don’t want me, please tell me to go.”

The Brown Borough never protests if you surprise it; and in any case, Mrs. Wigsky’s soul was too dead for consistent protest. Also it was certainly a change to be visited by one who lacked the visitor’s apprising eye, who seemed unaware of an unswept floor and an unmade bed.

“As Father Christopher talked about the Brown Borough women ...” said the suffragette, “I wanted more and more to know them, because it seems to me so splendid to keep going at all in the Brown Borough. I must tell you I always love women. So you must forgive me for coming.”

“’Tain’t often as lidies come to admire us,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “They allus comes to show us ’ow wrong we are.”

“I’m not a lady,” said the suffragette.

“Ow, yus you are,” said the eldest girl, speaking for the first time.

“Are you the girl that’s out of a job?” asked the suffragette.

“Yus. Farver Christopher got me a job as general to the lidy oo keeps the post orfice. She give me three-an’-six a week an’ no food, an’ mother ain’t earnin’ now, an’ Tom’s in ’orsbital, so it weren’t good enough. I run awiy. She ’it me too, an’ mide me cerry up the coals. But ’er bein’ a lidy, I couldn’t siy much—I jus’ run awiy.”

“I wish you’d hit her back,” said the suffragette. “And I wish the word ‘lady’ had never been invented.”

“Lidies is lidies, an’ generals is generals,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “Gawd mide it so, an’ you carn’t get over it.”

“I’m sure God never made it so,” said the suffragette. “He made men and women, and nothing else. He made man in His own image, and left woman to make herself. And she’s doing it. That’s what makes us all so proud to be women.”

“I’m not proud of bein’ a woman. I’m sick of it,” said Mrs. Wigsky; but the girl said, “You do talk beautiful, miss. I b’leeve I’m a little bit proud. Anywiy, I wouldn’t be a man for somefink.”

“Men,” sniffed Mrs. Wigsky. “It’s men wot does all the ’arm. An’ yet you carn’ get along wivout ’em altogether. They’re so ’elpless.”

(I hope you notice this truth, one of the few unposed truths in this book. Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canary as a substitute for a husband.)

“All the same,” said the suffragette, “men are proud of being men, and that is one of the greatest virtues. I don’t suppose there is a man in London who would be general to a Post Office lady at three-and-six a week and no food.”

This was thought to be supremely witty, and the suffragette rose to depart on the crest of a ripple of popularity. The girl followed her half-way downstairs.

“You fink that I was roight then to chuck that job, miss?”

The suffragette at that moment parted company with Father Christopher.

“Certainly I think you were right. It’s very wrong to take less money than you’re worth. I’d rather lend your mother money to get on with until you can get a worth-while job than let a friend of mine go so cheap as three-and-six a week. You can give your mother this address, and tell her I’ll come to see her again very soon.”

As she reached the first landing, she became aware of a fresh twist in the maze. I think drama of a rather sombre variety is the very life of the Brown Borough, and I defy you to thread its streets or climb its stairways for half a day without meeting some Thing you never met before.

The doorway on the first landing was practically filled by a woman, whose most surprising characteristic was that her right eye was filled with blood. The blood was running down on to the breast of her dress.

“I’m feelin’ that queer,” said the woman. “It’s the sight o’ blood allus mikes me queer.”

“You must let me help you,” said the suffragette. “You must let me put you on your bed.”

The woman laughed and remained swaying in the doorway.

“Bedder standen’ ...” she mumbled hysterically.

She was an enormous woman, and effectually blocked the doorway. For one mad moment the suffragette meditated climbing over her. An obstacle always had an irresistible fascination for her.

“Don’t be so silly,” said the suffragette. “Let me come in at once. I am here to help. Stand aside.”

The woman laughed again, and her head suddenly lolled down upon her breast. A little drip of blood ran down upon the floor.

“You are making a mess on the floor,” said the suffragette.

There was a magic in the words. I suppose their power lay in their utter futility. The woman stood aside.

“Now let me get you to bed,” said the suffragette as she entered. But there was no bed.

There were a dresser, a small table, and a chair. There was also a man, noisily asleep upon the chair.

“Ran me eye agin the corner of the tible,” said the woman.

“How very unlucky,” said the suffragette, “considering the table’s practically the only thing in the room. Except the man.”

She took the back of the chair and tipped it forward. She tilted it to such an angle that nobody in their senses could have remained seated in it. But a guardian angel seems to look after the drunk at the expense of the sober. When because she was not a professional weight-lifter, the suffragette had to let the chair revert to its natural position, the man was still comfortably asleep.

The woman fainted in the corner.

“Wake up, you damned pig!” said the suffragette, with the utmost strength of her soft voice, and she struck his shoulder with all the weight of a perfectly useless fist.

“Shall I fetch a policeman?” asked Miss Wigsky.

“The Law’s no good,” said the suffragette frowning. “I don’t believe there is a law against a man being drunk in the only chair. Do you think you could borrow a cushion or two from your mother, so that we could make the woman comfy on the floor?”

By the time Miss Wigsky returned with the relic of a pillow, the suffragette had bathed the blood from the eye.

“Woz this?” inquired the woman, opening the surviving eye upon the appearance of Miss Wigsky. “Woz this? Pillers? Tike ’em awiy. I ’aven’t bin to bed in the diytime for twenty years, nor I ain’t goin’ to begin now....”

“You must lie down,” said the suffragette. “And I will fetch the doctor to sew up your eye.”

“Bless yer ...” crowed the invalid. “S’long as I’ve got legs to walk to the doctor on, you kin bet yer life ’e won’t walk to me. I’ll go’n see ’im, soon’s as I stop bein’ all of a tremble.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“As you please.”

Miss Wigsky escaped.

“Why do you allow that man to be drunk in here?” asked the suffragette after a pause.

“’E don’t arsk my leave.”

“Is he your husband?”

“No. ’E is in a manner of speakin’. But I wouldn’t really marry a soppy bloke like thet.”

“Then why do you have soppy blokes crowding you out of your own furniture?”

“Ow, one must ’ave a man about the plice. Feels more ’omely-like.”

“Does he work for you?”

“I don’t fink.”

“Is he very good to you?”

The woman, not unnaturally, began to get restive. “’Oo ye’re gettin’ at? Nat’rally a man ain’t soothin’ syrup when ’e come ’ome as my young man come ’ome an hour ago. ’E’s better’n some.”

There was a long silence. Then the suffragette said, “Women seem to be extraordinarily cheap in the market. They hire themselves out to the man who hits the hardest. It makes one almost tired of being a woman.”

“Look ’ere ...” said the patient wrathfully, but she stopped there. Presently she sat up and said, “I’m goin’ to doctor’s now. And if you ain’t still too _tired_, miss, perhaps you’ll see me as fur as the ’orspital....”

So the suffragette laid hold of the Closed Door of the Brown Borough, by the handle of her fanatic determination. She never saw the impossibility of victory. It was the earliest of the early spring, and there was hope in the air. For many weeks hope was her only luxury. With it she sweetened her bread and margarine when she rose, to the tune of it she munched her nightly tripe and onions. She saw the mirage of the end in sight, and with her great faith she almost made it real. She was a blind optimist where women were concerned.

On the initiative of the priest’s sister, she attended the Church Girls’ Club three evenings a week. On her own initiative she played the Church false, and established in its own field of labour, behind its back, the foundation of her task.

It was originally Miss Wigsky’s fault. Miss Wigsky was a girl of practical energy, a warring spirit, a potential suffragette. She had long been a militant resister of the Church Club ideal, but when the suffragette became one of its regular adherents, Miss Wigsky joined it at once. Hers was the active responsibility for what followed, and ’Tilda’s the passive. I think I have mentioned ’Tilda before, though not by name. She was a small white creature who had committed the absurdity of losing her heart to the suffragette at first sight, and had sealed her admiration by laying bare the letter of her chap at their first meeting.

The moment of cocoa-drinking was always the moment of confidences. It was during this comparatively peaceful time that the suffragette made friends, and it was at this point that ’Tilda one evening approached her.

“Jenny Wigsky’s a funny gel,” said ’Tilda. “She’s bin talkin’ about you, miss. I got a new job the other day, very little money—piece-work—on’y shillin’ a diy if I work ever so ’ard. I ses to Jenny, ‘I’m a good gel I am, to tike less money than I’m worth just to ’elp my muvver.’ But Jenny ses I’m a very bad gel—she ses you ses as it’s wicked to tike bad money.”

“I didn’t say it was wicked—I wouldn’t use the word,” said the suffragette. “But I do think it’s selfish. Every time a girl takes too little money, she may be forcing another girl to take less. You know it’s partly your fault that women’s wages are so bad. You can feel now that you’ve had a share in the work of sweating women, ’Tilda.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Miss Wigsky. “Why don’t you do as I do, an’ stick out for ten?”

“But you’re not gettin’ it,” objected ’Tilda.

“I’m goin’ to get it, I am. I’m goin’ back to my ol’ tride—box-miking. I left it becos the work was so ’ard, but the money’s better.”

“I don’t mind how hard people work, as long as they get paid for it,” said the suffragette. “Of course, you have to do good work for good money. What I mean is that I think it’s just as dishonest to take too little money as it is to do too little work.”

“But wot’s the good of one standin’ out?”

“Very little good. But more good in a dozen standing out and more still in a hundred.”

“Le’s start a sassiety,” suggested the strenuous Miss Wigsky. “You could be the Preserdink, miss, an’ I’ll ’elp yer. We’ll call ourselves the ‘Suffragette Gels,’ an’ we won’t allow none of us to tike less money than ten shillin’.”

“Garn ...” said ’Tilda. “Thet’s a Tride Union, thet is. A man’s gime. If I chuck my job, ’oo’s goin’ to keep me til I get a better one. Muvver? I don’t fink....”

“I will,” said the suffragette. “If there’s anybody here earning less than ten shillings a week, I’ll give them seven-and-six a week for a fortnight if they have to chuck their job, and I’ll also give a prize of seven-and-six at the end of the fortnight to the girl who’s increased her wages the most.”

No plan could ever have been less planned. She thought of it as she spoke of it, a most rash method. But Miss Wigsky immediately set to work to hew it into shape.

“You’ll ’ave to arringe for piece-work, miss,” she said. “Anybody on piece-work could increase their wiges by working for twenty-four hours a diy, but it wouldn’t be fair.”

“Nobody must work after eight at night,” said the suffragette.

“An’ if two or three gets the sime rise?” suggested Miss Wigsky.

“I’ll give them each seven-and-six,” said the suffragette.

Of the twenty girls present, three were earning over ten shillings and entered a different class of the competition, working for the prize without the maintenance, if a rise should be found possible without loss of employment. Of the remaining seventeen, two refused to compete, and one was too small to be worth more than her present earnings. The other fourteen determined on an immediate attack on their employers. Chances were discussed instead of dances for the rest of the evening.

“My boss’ll siy—the money’s there—you kin tike it or leave it. ’E’s said that before.”

“My boss’ll smile—’e allus calls me ’Tip-a-wink, becos I’m the smallest gel there. ’E’s never cross—my boss ain’t.”

“I think I’ll win the prize easy—don’t know why I never thought of it before. Buster—my boss—ses I’ve got the ’andiest ’ands wiv the bristles as ever ’e see.”

“My missus’ll siy—there’s ’undreds of sluts in the Borough twice as good as you, an’ I like yer imperence, an’ you kin tike the sack wivout notice. She allus calls me a slut—we won’t be sorry to part.”

“I shall stick to the fevver work, an’ tike up curlin’ an’ sewin’, as well as the knotting. I bin too lizy up to now, but I’ve got an aunt in the tride as ’ud learn me in no time.”

At closing time the priest drew the suffragette aside.

“I heard Jane Wigsky’s voice constantly raised in the dining-room this evening. I want your opinion of that girl. Yerce, yerce. She seems to me rough and coarse, and I am tempted to think she is a disturbing influence in the Club.”

“She’s not so disturbing as I am,” said the suffragette, with a spasm of conscience.

“Oh, don’t say that,” said the priest, whose sister had been readjusting his manners. “Don’t be disheartened, you will soon get into our ways, yerce, yerce. But to return to Jane Wigsky, I do not like the girl. She is impertinent and self-assured. I feel sure she puts ideas into the girls’ heads.”

“I shouldn’t think an idea more or less would make much difference.”

The priest sighed. I am not surprised. I quite admit that the suffragette was an infuriating person. I yield to none in my admiration for any one who could manage to keep their temper with her.

“You know I mean harmful ideas. She has no staying power. She left excellent employment, apparently simply through a whim. Her mistress, the postmistress, is a great friend of mine. In short, I consider the girl undesirable, and we are thinking of asking her to leave the Club.”

The suffragette became red.

“I’m sorry the postmistress is a friend of yours,” she said. “Because she can’t be a very admirable friend. She herself admits that she only paid the girl three-and-six a week, with no food except a cup of tea at mid-day.”

“Poor wages, yerce, yerce. But far better than idleness.”

“Infinitely worse,” said the suffragette.

A rather feverish silence fell for a moment. I think the priest said a prayer. At any rate he thought he did.

“Surely you have some sympathy with our aims in this Club. Surely you agree that it is a worthy ideal to try to raise the level of the young womanhood of the Borough. Surely you see that we cannot do this unless we keep the girls in good uplifting company. Jane Wigsky is a bad girl. One must draw the line between good and bad.”

“One may draw a line, but one needn’t build a barrier. And even to draw a line, one should have very good sight.”

“I think I hardly need your advice on the management of a parish I have served for twenty-two years. If this were my Club I should request you to find some other outlet for your energies. But my sister is very obstinate. Good evening.”

A certain amount of success attended the efforts of the Suffragette Girls. By the end of that week, three girls had been given a rise for the asking, the extent of it varying from sixpence to two shillings. Several had got a promise of a rise when work should be less slack, only three had taken the drastic step of leaving their employment. The piece-workers with few exceptions were working for a wage which seemed unalterable. An envelope-folder raised her earnings from three halfpence a thousand to twopence. But as a rule there is no labour groove so deep as the piece-worker’s.

It was on the Thursday night before Good Friday that the suffragette, dressed in a dressing-gown, sat before her fire remembering the simplest character in this simple book—Scottie Brown.

“It’s dog-stealing,” she thought, “no less. Miss Brown may return to the Island any time crying out for Scottie to come and comfort her. And Scottie will be languishing in England, undergoing quarantine. We are dog-thieves.”

The “we” sent a little heat-wave over the place where her heart should have been.

She had been working very hard all day, walking about the Brown Borough collecting its worries. She was so tired that she could not rest, could not go to bed, could not do anything except sit on her hearthrug and think feverishly of things that did not matter.

Outwardly the suffragette, when in her dressing-gown, and with her hair drawn into a small smooth plait, approached more nearly her vocation than under any other circumstances. She was a nun, dedicated to an unknown God.

“A person to see you,” said the landlady, and flung open the door. The suffragette shot to her feet, with a momentary terrible suspicion that the landlady had said “parson.” Visions of a bashful curate brought face to face with a militant suffragette in her dressing-gown, were, however, swept away by the entrance of Miss Wigsky.

“It’s a —— shime,” remarked the visitor loudly, discarding the convention of greeting.

“Sure to be,” said the suffragette, sinking down upon the hearthrug again. “Nearly everything’s that kind of shame. Sit down and tell me.”

“I tol’ you I’d got a job, you know, at Smiff’s—boot-uppers. A lucky find it were, I thought, ten shillin’ a week an’ I was to be learnt ’ow to work a machine. ’E ses ’e thought I was a likely sort on Monday when I went, but ’e ses as ’e was goin’ to learn me somethink, an’ ’e wanted a special sort of gel, like, ’e ars’t for references. Knowin’ as ’e was a religious sort of gentleman, an’ give ’eaps of money to the Church, I tol’ ’im Farver Christopher for my reference, because Farver Christopher’s known Muvver sence she married, an’ allus said ’e would ’elp ’er whenever ’e could. So when I went agine yesterday, to Smiff’s, ’e ses as ’ow Farver Christopher ’adn’t spoke well of me—said I was unreliable, an’ never stuck to one job. So Mr. Smiff ses in thet cise I wouldn’t suit, but ’e ses as I looked likely ’e’d give me a job as packer at six shillin’. I ses as I couldn’ afford to tike so little money, an’ I tol’ ’im about you an’ the Suffragette Gels. ’E ses you oughter be ashimed of yoursel’, an’ ’e’d write an’ tell Farver Christopher as ’ow ’is Club was an ’otbed of somethink or other. I ’ites Farver Christopher—curse ’im—an’ ’e miking belief to be so ’elpful. I was in my first job free years, an’ jus’ because I chucked the —— job ’e found for me, ’e does me dirty like this. Curse ’im.”

“Don’t,” said the suffragette. “Suffragettes don’t waste breath in cursing—even when there seems to be nothing to do but curse.”

“This evenin’ ...” continued Miss Wigsky, “I went to the Club to see if you was there, though it wasn’t your night. Farver Christopher turned me out, ’e did. ’E’s turned out fifteen of the gels, an’ tol’ them never to come back no more. ’E found out from the others which was the suffragette gels, an’ turned ’em out. I stood up to ’im, and arsk’ ’im wotever we’ve done that’s wrong, there ain’t no ’arm, I ses, in tryin’ to get a livin’ wige. I arsk’ ’im ’ow ’e’d like to live under seven shillin’ a week. ’E ses as ’ow God ’ad called us to this stite of life, an’ it was wicked to try an’ alter it. ’E ses as women are pide what they’re worth, an’ God mide rich an’ poor an’ men an’ women, an’ never meant the poor to be rich, or women to be pretending they was as good as men ... I spit at ’im, miss, I ’ope you’ll excuse me.”

“I’ll excuse you,” said the suffragette, “though I don’t think it was a very artistic protest. I am most awfully sorry for you, Jenny, but I’m not surprised. For you know when you became a suffragette you agreed to fight, and now you’ve found out what you’re fighting, that’s all. Suffragettes are just soldiers—only more sober—and when they meet the enemy, they just get more determined, not more excited. If you were a soldier and got wounded, we should be sorry for you, but also rather proud of you. We must collect the suffragette girls somewhere else, and make the army grow.”

“I don’t believe you can, miss. I went to see ’Tilda, an’ she was pretty near soppy about it. She’s piece-work, an’ carn’ get ’er boss to rise ’er, so she ain’t done nothink to be turned out of the Club for, she ses. She ses as ’ow she won’t never ’ave nuffink more to do wiv them suffragettes. Then I met Lil, the tow-’aired gel—she was drunk—at the corner of the Delta. She puts it all on you, miss.”

“Do you feel like that?” asked the suffragette.

“Ow well, in a manner o’ speakin’, it wouldn’ ’ave ’appened if it ’adn’t bin for you, miss. But I don’t feel sore against you, not really. You did it for the best. You miy be right about fightin’ the enemy, on’y the enemy’s too strong. P’r’aps Farver Christopher’s right, an’ God mide women to starve till they marry, an’ get beaten till they die....”

“If there is a God,” said the suffragette in a low voice, “the only possible conclusion is that he is an Anti. Still, even a God can be fought.”

“Ow, I’m sick o’ fightin’,” said Miss Wigsky. “I shall go orf wiv my chap, though ’e is out of work....”

The gardener was at 21 Penny Street, waiting for an answer to his message. To pass the time he had found work, or rather work had found him, for he was a man of luck. Eventually, instead of an answer, Mrs. Paul Rust called on him.

“How’s your son?” asked the gardener, who was pleased to meet some one who had met the suffragette.

Beneath his superficial “unscathed” pose, there was a layer of deep faithfulness. He knew by now that the suffragette was not worthy of the love of a sober Assistant Secretary to a Society Which Believed Itself of Great Importance (one of his latest practical poses). But the thing one knows makes no difference to the thing one feels, if one is young. The gardener was under the impression that his wisdom had dethroned the suffragette from her eminence, but his heart, with the obstinacy peculiar to hearts, continued to look up.

“My son is bad. He gets no stronger. There is no reason why he shouldn’t get up, except that he isn’t strong enough to walk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” said Mrs. Rust automatically, and stood checked by such a decided lie.

“What annoys me is Courtesy,” she said after a pause. “Courtesy indeed, she hasn’t treated me fairly. She had the impertinence to tell me last week that she was engaged to that ridiculous young Wise she picked up at Greyville. Engaged indeed, it’s stuff and nonsense, pure defiance. She’s treated me as a sort of matrimonial agent. I wasn’t paying her £200 a year to look for a husband.”

“No,” agreed the gardener. “Then why don’t you forbid the banns?”

Poor Mrs. Rust’s helplessness in the hands of Courtesy rose vaguely to her memory. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “I haven’t yet decided what steps I shall take in the matter. There is no immediate hurry. She has suggested letting the matter drop until Samuel is better. She has many failings, but I think she is fond of me.”

“That’s a very attractive failing,” admitted the gardener.

“I didn’t come here to discuss Courtesy with you,” snapped Mrs. Rust, suddenly remembering her temper. “I came because Samuel wanted me to come. He seems to be under delusions about you, he thinks he owes you gratitude. In fact—probably under the influence of delirium—he once said you financed his hotel. As a matter of fact I financed it myself, it owes its present success to me.”

“It’s awfully good of you to come all this way to bring me misdirected gratitude,” said the gardener.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I wouldn’t stir an inch out of my way to make you more conceited than you are. But that is the worst of having a son, you have to pay occasional attention to his wishes. Besides, Courtesy brought me up to town and gave the address to the chauffeur, so I really wasn’t consulted. Samuel wishes to see you. All the time he was ill he was asking for the Tra-la-la young man, and now I find he means you. I might have said that right at the beginning, and not have wasted all this time listening to your chatter.”

“I’m very glad you didn’t,” said the gardener. “I couldn’t bear a caller who came straight to the point in five words and then left.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “Are you coming?”

It was half-past three on Good Friday afternoon. There is something about that little Easter cluster of Sundays that weighs your heart down, if you are in postless London, and expecting a letter.

“Where is your son?” he asked.

“In Hampshire, in the Cottage Hospital, near the Red Place. You could put up at the Red Place. Samuel, being a fool, said you might have the big black and white room on the first floor. He might have let it for five guineas over Bank Holiday.”

“What time is the train?” asked the gardener.

“My car is at the door. The chauffeur is a dangerous lunatic, and there seems to me to be every likelihood that the back wheel will come off before we get out of London. But—are you coming?”

So the gardener came. Seated behind the dangerous lunatic, over the dangerous back wheel, and beside a hostess in a musical comedy motor bonnet, he followed once more the road that led to the gods.

He had left his address with Miss Shakespeare for the forwarding of letters.

The great surprise of spring awaited them outside London. There were lambs under a pale sky, and violets under pale green hedges. Gnarled trees, like strong men’s muscles, curved out of roadside copses, lit with a green radiance. There was lilac smiling across the cottage gardens, there were wallflowers blotted dark against whitewashed walls. But when they reached the pines and heath they left the spring behind. Only the larches preached its gospel.

“You had better come and see Samuel first,” said Mrs. Rust. “He is anxious to see you. He always was a fool.”

So they passed the Red Place. It flared out at them along a sombre ride that cut the woods in two.

“Samuel says his gods look after the place as well as any manager, while he is away. But of course he has a chef now, and a competent bureau clerk.”

“I suppose you couldn’t ask the gods to dish up the dinner, or make out the bills,” admitted the gardener regretfully. “But I wonder if there’s room for the gods as well as the chef and the competent bureau clerk.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “A good dinner’s worth all the gods in mythology.”

They drove up to their destination.

The cottage hospital had only recruited to the service of the sick in later life. For a hundred years or so it had been the haunt of the wicked landowner. Worldly squires’ wives had given tea in its paved pergola to curates’ wives in their best hats. But as the house grew older it reformed. Its walls, steeped in the purple village gossip of a century, now echoed only to the innocent if technical prattle of nurses. The only person who walked in its garden was Sister: she threw crumbs to the goldfish as severely as though the crumbs were for their good. For the blessing which the house inherited from its past was its garden. A small garden, like a cut emerald, but reflecting all other jewels. It was a garden that tried to enshrine sombre peace amid the vivid riot of spring. Its high clipped hedges drew decorously angular reflections in the pools. Brown wallflowers hid the feet of the hedges. The lilacs seemed somehow turned to half mourning by the proximity of a copper beech. A veil of tree seeds spinning down the wind fell diagonally across the garden. The pink horse chestnut was very symmetrical. Only the little saxifrages protested against the geometrical correctness of the paving-stones, and forget-me-nots sang a shrill song in blue from the restraining chaperonage of red pottery tubs. A little cupid with a dislocated hip played a noiseless flute from a pedestal. The garden was a prig, but it was the sort of prig that makes you wonder whether after all it is worth while to be so exquisitely sinful.

They found Samuel Rust, who was the only patient in the hospital, the centre of a mist of nurses. He was lying in the shade of a great smooth yew pyramid with a military-looking bird fashioned on the top of it. Samuel Rust, that unusual young man, could never be much paler than he had been when in health, but he was grey now, rather than white, and his round sequins of eyes were set in a deeper setting.

“The Tra-la-la young man,” he said as the gardener approached. “I have been wondering why I wanted to see you.”

“So have I,” said Mrs. Rust, who, after a momentary lapse into a maternal expression, had turned her back on the invalid.

“Let’s pretend I’m just an ordinary sick-bed visitor, then,” suggested the gardener. “One never knows why—or whether—one wants to see that sort of visitor. In that case I have to begin:—Dear Mr. Rust, I hope you are much better.”

“Still posing,” said Samuel. “What is your latest attitude?”

“I never pose,” said the gardener. “I have a horror of the pose. My mind’s eye sometimes changes the spectacles it wears, but that’s all. I now find that all along the gods were intending me to be a business man.”

“Hard luck,” said Samuel.

The nurses had melted away, and Mrs. Rust followed them into the house. The sun was making ready for his triumph in the west and a diffident moon perched on the peak of the pink horse chestnut.

“Perhaps one ought to have foreseen the gods’ intention of making you a business man,” said Samuel, “for you certainly carried out the unscrupulous deceiver part with wonderful success—That is—jolly well—what? My Red Place now sings a hymn of praise to you, to the tune of ten pounds a week—clear.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the gardener. “It didn’t need much unscrupulous deceiving to persuade your mother to get her heart to work. And, to tell you the truth, the end was rather drowned in the means on that journey. I got so busy living—I only thought of you when absolutely necessary.”

“I didn’t expect you to wear my image graven on your heart, what?” said Samuel. “You are young, and living should certainly be your business. Is that why you said you were a business man? I have often thought that being young and only lately set up in business, you had no business to saddle yourself with a wife.”

“No business whatever,” admitted the gardener.

“Then why did you?”

“I didn’t.”

“Good heavens,” said Samuel fretfully, “why was I born in such a cryptic age?”

“The truth is—I spoke in a futurist sense when I called her my wife.”

“In other words, you lied,” suggested Samuel. “You just took a little tame woman on a string for a trip, as many better men have done before you?”

“I dragged a woman by force across the Atlantic, and then she ran away. She ran back home.”

“The silly ass,” said Mr. Rust irritably. “Why did she do that?”

“The attitude of women towards force ...” said the gardener sententiously, “is not what psychologists make it out to be. By some of the books I’ve read, I would have thought that women worshipped brute force; I would have thought that they kept their hair long specially in order to be dragged about by it.”

“I have known very few women really well,” said Samuel; “and the ones I knew didn’t wear hair that they could be dragged about by. I should think the final disappearance of your post-impressionist wife was rather a good riddance.”

“It was neither good nor a riddance. In the same futurist sense I still call her my wife. It’s an effort, I admit, to continue to be fond of a militant suffragette, and yet somehow it’s an effort I can’t help making.”

Courtesy appeared, her hair an impudent rival to the sunset.

“I’ve brought your book from the library,” she said. “I couldn’t get any books by Somethingevsky, as you asked, so I brought _The Rosary_.

“I ought to congratulate you on your engagement,” said the gardener. “In fact—Mrs. Rust being out of earshot—I do.”

“Thank you,” said Courtesy, looking wonderfully pretty. “I wish everybody in the world was as happy as I am, though of course marriage is an awful risk. How’s your young woman, gardener?”

“As militant as ever,” said the gardener. “I’m expecting a letter from her any day, or a telegram any minute.”

“Why, is she coming down here?”

“Probably,” said the gardener. He had absolutely no grounds for his confidence except the ground of youth, and that, of course, is only a quicksand.

But the funny thing was she came.

For she cried all her current stock of militancy away on Thursday night, and by three o’clock on Good Friday afternoon she was on the door-step of 21 Penny Street.

“Even if slavery and polygamy become the fashion,” she argued characteristically, “Scottie Brown will still be wrongfully detained in quarantine.”

It was not to Scottie Brown that her thoughts turned when the maid told her that Mr. Gardener had gone to the country for Easter.

“But I must see him,” said the suffragette, who was a little drunk with the bitter beverage of tears.

“It’s impossible,” said the maid. “I tell you—he’s away.”

The word “impossible” as usual acted as a challenge.

“Might I have his address?” said the caller.

After consultation with Miss Shakespeare the address was produced, and the suffragette’s decision made.

“The Red Place.... His friend lives there—Mrs. Rust’s son. Anyway there’s no harm in going to a country hotel for Easter.”

It was quite an advance for the suffragette to be human enough to consider whether there was any harm or not.

So she went home and had a ten minutes’ interview with the mustard-coloured portmanteau, and then she put it and herself into a third-class carriage marked Girton Magna.

At sunset she arrived at the Red Place, and by luck extraordinary managed to procure a small attic which the tide of holiday-makers had passed by.

She saw the gardener first at dinner-time, and he looked almost as incredible to her as she did to him. It always surprises me to see a person looking exactly like themselves after absence.

When the gardener first saw the suffragette, he swallowed a spoonful of soup which was very much too hot, and rose. Courtesy was in the middle of a remark, and looked surprised to see him go.

“I knew I should hear or see something of you soon,” said the gardener, shaking the suffragette’s hand as usual an excessive number of times. “And yet I’m awfully surprised too,” admitted the suffragette.

“Just an Easter holiday?” suggested the gardener carelessly. “But what luck you chose the Red Place.”

“It wasn’t exactly luck. I knew you were here.”

Tears had been trembling in the gardener’s eyes since the swallowing of the soup, he very nearly shed them now.

“Waiter,” he called, “move that lady’s place to our table.”

The suffragette was excited and flushed. She looked almost pretty.

“I can’t imagine why I came,” she said when the change was effected and greetings had been exchanged. “I think I must have come in delirium. The woman I used to be never comes into the country except on business, and, in the case of friends, makes a principle of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’”

“I hope you left that woman behind—permanently,” said the gardener.

“No. That’s the worst of it. They’re both here. Each acts as conscience while the other one’s in power. Why wasn’t one brought into the world by oneself?”

“Why, weren’t you?” asked Courtesy; “were you twins?”

“I still am. One of me is quite a good sort, really, almost an ‘Oh, my dear’ girl. She is the one who was described in the paper as ‘Boadicea Smith, a young woman of prepossessing appearance.’ The reporter went on to say that the name was probably assumed—(which it was)—and that he knew who I really was—(which he didn’t). He hinted that I was a deluded patrician incog. Do you know, I treasure that paragraph as if it were a love-letter. It’s the only compliment I ever had.”

“I should like to shake the hand of that reporter,” said the gardener.

“But after that he referred to me all through as ‘Smith,’ without prefix, which is the sign of a criminal.”

“The puppy!” exclaimed the gardener.

“What were you doing to get into the paper?” asked Courtesy sternly. “I never get into the paper.”

“It’s inconceivable that you should get into the paper, Courtesy dear,” said the gardener, “except when you get born or married or dead.”

“It’d be like a sultana in a seed-cake,” said the suffragette, “or like a sunrise at tea-time. Or as if a Forty-nine ’bus went to the Bank.”

I really think she was a little delirious, and perhaps she felt it herself, for she added apologetically, “I always think Forty-nine is such an innocent ’bus, it never knows the City.”

Next morning it was raining in the persistently militant sort of way reserved by the weather for public holidays.

“A pity,” said the gardener at breakfast. “I meant to take you over to the village to introduce you to Mr. Rust. And there are no ’buses or taxis here.”

“Let’s dispense with the ’buses and taxis,” suggested the suffragette. “Let’s forget London and get country-wet.”

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” said the gardener delightedly, and presently they started.

“I don’t really want to be introduced to your friend,” said the suffragette. “Only I wanted a chance to speak to you alone. Do you know, beneath a militant exterior I am horribly shy?”

“It’s obvious,” retorted the gardener.

“Is it?” asked the suffragette, annoyed, and relapsed into silence for a moment.

“I wanted to tell you ...” she began again presently, “that I beg your pardon for coming here. It’s unforgivable of me. You know, as regards men, I’m not a woman at all; I haven’t the unselfish instincts that other women have. I came because I had—reached the limit—and I wanted a friend....”

“Well, you didn’t come far wrong,” said the gardener. “I love you.”

“I didn’t think of your feelings at all, which is only another proof that it is no good your loving me.”

“May I take the risk?”

The suffragette stopped, and stood leaning against the rain-whipped wind. Rain was trapped in the mesh of her soft hair. She clenched her fists upon her breast.

“Won’t you believe me ...” she said, “when I tell you it would be best to break up that poor little dream of yours—as I have broken mine. I told you once that I had somehow been born the wrong side of the ropes in the race. One can’t love across a barrier.”

“Love is not a dream,” said the gardener. “It’s your barrier that’s a dream. Why don’t you try breaking that?”

“You are a man, little gardener, and I am a thing. Not a bad thing, really, but certainly not a woman. And even a thing can reach the point which I have reached, the point at which there seems nothing to do but grope and cry....”

They walked a little way in silence.

“I seem to have come to the edge of the world by myself,” she went on. “And I can’t go on—by myself. Oh, gardener, couldn’t we be friends without being lovers?”

“That has been suggested before,” said the gardener slowly. “And it has never succeeded. But—we—might—try....”

All the rest of the way to the village I suppose they were practising being friends and not lovers. For neither spoke a word.

“So this is the militant suffragette,” said Samuel Rust, who was sitting in the hospital sitting-room. “I am most interested to meet you. I have long wished to meet a suffragette to ask her why she wanted the vote.”

“Why do men want it?”

“Personally I don’t.”

“Personally I do,” said the suffragette. “And mine is as good an answer as yours.”

“Both answers are very poor,” admitted Samuel. “You want the vote so badly that you think it worth while to become hysterical over it.”

“There is not much hysteria in the movement, only hysteria is the thing that strikes a hysterical press as most worthy of note. What hysteria there is, is a result—not a cause. Women never invented hysteria. How should we be anything but irresponsible, since you have taken responsibility from us? If we are bitter, you must remember that somebody mixed the dose. If the womanliness you admire is dead, bear in mind that nothing can be dead without being killed.”

“But who is your enemy? Who are your murderers? I have never noticed that the majority of men are fiends incarnate. You may not believe me, but I do assure you that at frequent intervals in my life I have met honest, just, and moral men. Have you met none?”

“In the Brown Borough I meet excellent men. Older and wiser men, who sit on committees and behave like one conglomerate uncle to the poor; young lovers too hopelessly out of work to marry, and yet always gay and good-hearted; large tired fathers who come in after a day’s work and sit under dripping washing and never slap the children.... But that such just men are not in a majority is proved by the fact that women continue to suffer.”

“Yes, but perhaps they suffer at the hands—not of men—but of circumstances.”

“Circumstances always favour people with a public voice.”

“And do militant suffragettes really think that by smashing windows they will attain to a public voice?”

“In what we do, we’re a poor argument for the Franchise. In what we are, we’re the very best. It’s not possible for the community to be hit without deserving it. It must look round and find out why it is hit—not how. Punishment is no good to a smasher of windows. Any woman can see if she’s wrong without punishment. If she thinks she’s right, punishment can never alter her opinion.”

“Smashers must be punished. It would be impossible to allow even the righteous to take the law into their own hands.”

“In whose hands should we leave it? In the hands of those who declare themselves to be our enemies? A fair question from a woman never gets a fair answer. Windows are smashed—not as an argument, but as a protest.”

“A protest strikes me as a futile thing. No one ever does anything that looks unfair or tyrannical without being perfectly sure that was the thing they meant to do. If a protest is successful it creates discord without altering what is done. If it’s unsuccessful, it leaves you with a high temperature and bruised hands, and what is gained by that?”

“Protest isn’t a thing you argue about,” said the suffragette. “It’s a thing you do when you see red. You seem to think that men have the monopoly of the last straw.”

“It is hard to believe that you have reached the last straw,” said Samuel. “It is very hard for men to picture women as an oppressed race. We are miles and miles away from each other. I can still think of a lot of things to say, but I can’t say them without a moral megaphone. Shall we call a draw?”

“Let’s,” said the suffragette, relaxing her militant expression. “Only let me have the last word—a rather long one. Of one thing I am certain—when we have the vote, men will see what a small gift it was, and future generations will ask why it was grudged so bitterly. Only to us who have fought for it and suffered for it, it will always seem high and splendid—like a flag captured in battle....”

“The country is looking pretty just now, isn’t it?” said Mr. Samuel Rust.

The gardener was standing at the window, watching the clipped yew bird outside curtseying to the wind. He had been pathetically silent, like a snubbed child, ever since he had consented to be a friend and not a lover. His white keen face was a striking illustration of enthusiasm damped. His jaw looked as if he were clenching his teeth on something bitter. I think he was regretting the days when gold hair with a ripple in it as laboured as the ripples in an old Master’s seascape, wide blue eyes alight with matrimonial instinct, and the very red lips of a very small mouth, were all that his heart needed.

And I wonder what the suffragette saw in his face that made her say in a very non-militant voice, “Come, gardener.”

They both shook hands in rather an absent-minded way with Mr. Samuel Rust. They started from the door with the wind behind them. It was with her hair blowing forward along her cheeks that the gardener always remembered the suffragette most vividly. It brought a brave idea to his mind, connected vaguely with a picture of Grace Darling with which he had been in love fifteen years ago.

“Gardener,” said the suffragette hurriedly. “Can you imagine me sitting by the fire bathing a baby?”

“Easily,” he replied. “I can imagine how the firelight would dance upon your hair.”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all,” she said, with a catch in her voice. “Can you imagine me, looking sleepy and cross, giving you early breakfast before you went to work?”

“I can imagine you with the sun behind you, saying good-morning, so that the word seemed like a blessing through the day.”

“It’s a lie—you poet,” she said. “Why don’t you open your eyes and see me as I am?”

“I’ve had my eyes open all along. It’s you who are blind.”

“Then—suppose we become both lovers and friends.... Suppose we get married on Tuesday....”

To-morrow I will don my cloak
Of opal-grey, and I will stand
Where the palm shadows stride like smoke
Across the dazzle of the sand.
To-morrow I will throw this blind
Blind whiteness from my soul away,
And pluck this blackness from my mind,
And only leave the medium—grey.

To-morrow I will cry for gains
Upon the blue and brazen sky:
The precious venom in my veins
To-morrow will be parched and dry.
To-morrow it shall be my goal
To throw myself away from me,
To lose the outline of my soul
Against the greyness of the sea.