Part 6 (1/2)
”Your wife will cook it before she starts,” was the ready rejoinder.
”Or, better still, she can cook it overnight, and you can bring it with you and eat it in the Park----”
”What price roast pork and greens in Hyde Park?” demanded a sporting-looking gentleman in a terrific waistcoat.
”It won't hurt you to have cold pork and salad just for once,” said the resourceful speaker. ”Only think how the children will love a picnic, and a picnic like ours, too, with eighty women-speakers at the end of it! You know how dull picnics generally are when there is nothing more to eat----”
”Eighty of 'em! How about Holloway?” jeered the man in the waistcoat.
She turned on him swiftly. ”If you had your vote taken from you to-morrow, wouldn't you have the pluck to go to prison to get it back?”
she asked, suddenly in deadly earnest.
Any crowd loves a fighter, and this one howled with delight. The lady in the French hat noticed that listening women, who had hitherto shown no open approval of what was said, nodded furtively and caught their breath when the speaker fired up in defence of women.
”Why, they go to prison because they like it, don't they?” observed the amused man who answered to the name of Jack. He had not intended this for an audible interruption, but nothing escaped the ear of the woman on the sugar-box.
”If you think a woman's ordinary life outside prison is as dreary as all that, don't you think it's time you gave her the power to improve her conditions, so that she needn't go to Holloway for a pleasant change?”
she shot back at him, hot with scorn; and again listening women flushed with nervous pleasure. ”Some of our comrades are coming out of prison next Sat.u.r.day,” the speaker went on rapidly; ”and if you want to give them a welcome, as I know you do”--here she paused to allow time for yells of derision and references to skilly--”come and walk in our procession from Holloway gates.”
”What! And be taken for gaol-birds too? Not much!” roared the man of sporting appearance.
”We'll come, miss; we'll be there!” suddenly called the woman with the bundle; and curiously enough, the crowd respected that and stopped jeering. But the speaker of a hundred open-air meetings, knowing her crowd better than it knew itself, saw that it had had enough, and called for questions. These were swiftly disposed of, being princ.i.p.ally of the wash-tub order, already answered in her speech; and observing serenely that she concluded everybody was now converted, the Suffragette came down from her perch.
She and her companion were instantly swallowed up in the jostling, chattering crowd, and the well-dressed woman appealed to Jack.
”Do help them to get out of this,” she said, clutching anxiously at his arm. ”They'll be crushed to death, I know they will!”
”Eh, what? My dear girl, they're much better able to take care of themselves than I am,” observed Jack tranquilly. ”Besides, they're not being crushed to death. You couldn't crush a Suffragette if you tried.”
A sudden swirl of the stream swept them face to face with the two suffragists, who, still distributing handbills to right and left of them as they came, were composedly wedging a way for themselves through the dispersing people.
”I--I think you're splendid; and so does Jack!” cried their new supporter, flinging mere accuracy to the winds. ”And I'm coming to Holloway Gates on Sat.u.r.day and to Hyde Park on Sunday--and so is Jack!”
”Eh what?” said Jack mildly.
VII
The Crank of all the Ages
VOTES FOR WOMEN, price one penny!
Articles by Annie Kenney, Mrs. Lawrence, Christabel, Other Suffragettes as well.
Men and women, come and buy-- As you pa.s.s and hear the cry-- VOTES FOR WOMEN! here we sell Articles by Christabel, Mrs. Lawrence, Annie Kenney-- VOTES FOR WOMEN, price one penny!
(New Street Cries, 1909.)
I never knew until I became a regular newspaper seller, one day in every week, how many people there are in the world bent on reforming it. You do not discover this so long as you merely sell papers in a spasmodic fas.h.i.+on, appearing on fine days at the edge of the pavement with a bundle of _Votes for Women_ under your arm, and going off to tea as soon as these are sold out. Any element of amateurishness at once adds an air of detachment to the paper seller and keeps the world from really making friends with her. But as soon as the public grasps that she is a fixture, just as much so as the seller of pink football news or of green politics, except that her stock is renewed by a purple, white and green pony trap instead of by a panting boy on a bicycle, then every kind of crank who is out for an airing thinks she is there to listen to his views on every conceivable subject, from food reform up to simplicitarianism.
You divide the world into three kinds of people, roughly speaking, when you sell papers as a professional and not as an amateur. There is the person who wants to buy a paper. There is the person who wants to know where the nearest tea-shop is, or which omnibus goes to the Circus, or whether you have seen any one with pink wings--the last being a reference to millinery and not to aviation. This person really makes one feel like a professional newsboy at a street corner. Lastly, there is the crank. The crank does not want to buy a paper, or to seek information; he merely wants to talk. He leaves the ordinary newsvendor in peace, recognizing that he is there merely for the purpose of selling news, whereas the seller of suffrage papers represents an attempt to reform the world as well. So her pitch becomes a common meeting-ground for cranks.