Part 7 (1/2)
VIII
Patrolling the Gutter
”I suppose we had better start,” faltered the tall woman in purple.
”I can't think of a reasonable excuse for delaying any longer,” sighed the girl in green.
”Come along!” said a third, making a great show of the courage she did not feel.
n.o.body came along. Under some pretext or another we still lingered, though there were ten of us and the s.p.a.ce in our Suffragette shop was uncomfortably limited. Most people, the even tenor of whose lives had not been ruffled by the call of a great cause, might have thought the day an unpropitious one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even for the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women in the Albert Hall. A strong south-west wind, a real London drizzle overhead and thick mud underfoot, could hardly be held to offer striking attractions to a band of naturally timorous ladies, girt about with sandwich-boards, preparing to issue forth in procession into the conventional streets of Kensington. If we had been less timorous we should probably have postponed the expedition; but the last fear that rebel women ever learn to overcome is the fear of being thought afraid, so this was an alternative that did not suggest itself to anybody.
”I never realized before what it meant to be a belted knight, but I do now,” remarked our literary member, trying in vain to free her hands from their cardboard bonds in order to straighten a crooked hat. ”If anything or anybody were to unhorse us and make us bite the dust--isn't that what belted knights were always doing to one another in the Middle Ages?--we should have to lie on our backs, as they did, till some one came and picked us up.”
”I feel like a pantomime super, myself,” observed somebody else, twirling round in order to get a full-length back view of herself in the gla.s.s. ”I shall never get accustomed to the make-up,” she added ruefully, as she once more swept the greater part of our stock of pamphlets from the counter to the floor, and had to stand helpless and repentant while the shop secretary picked them up, not for the first time in the course of these trial manoeuvres.
”If you don't start soon, there will be nothing saleable left in the place,” said the shop secretary pointedly.
”Well, what are you waiting for?” demanded the girl in green, trying to infuse a little real impatience into her tone.
”Courage,” confessed the woman in purple, gloomily.
”Oh, nonsense!” said our literary member, without, however, moving any nearer to the door. ”Think of George Herbert:
G.o.d gave thy soul brave wings; put not those feathers Into a bed to sleep out all ill weathers.”
We all tried to think of George Herbert, but without marked success.
”I can't think of anything but the ill weather waiting for us outside and all the people I know in Kensington,” said the tall woman, voicing bluntly and concisely what the rest of us were feeling.
”Do you think the people we know would ever recognize us in these things?” asked some one in a moment of real inspiration; and under the influence of this new and cheering suggestion we formed up hastily in single file and really made a start.
The secretary of another local branch, who had dropped in to seek recruits for a similar poster parade in her district, observed significantly as we filed past her that it was most important to be as well dressed as possible in her neighbourhood. Neither this, nor the first comment that reached our ears as we plunged into the street, added particularly to our good opinion of ourselves.
”Well, I must say you ladies don't think of appearances, that you don't!” was the comment of the street. At a less sensitive moment we might have derived comfort from the tone of admiration in which this was uttered. As it was, an outrageous remark that followed did far more to raise our drooping spirits. This one was made by a girl, wearing a flaming hat and blouse that not one of us would have had the courage to put on before going for a walk, even if supported by so magnificent a youth as the one on whose arm she leaned as she criticized.
”Brazen, ain't they?” she said.
After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a world that could always be counted upon to feed the most unsatisfied sense of humour.
Otherwise, for the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have felt acutely conscious of anything but the traffic. Glorious as it may seem to the imaginative to suffer for a cause, one finds it difficult, when carrying sandwich-boards in its service, to detach from this distant and problematic reward the more immediate prospect of being run down from behind by a skidding motor-omnibus. In time, no doubt, it would be possible to acquire the easy swagger of the real sandwich man, though the real sandwich man would under no circ.u.mstances be submitted, as we were, to a definite onslaught from every impudent tradesman's boy who whizzed past us on a tricycle. As it was, no one could have said that our pace bore the slightest resemblance to the leisurely saunter of the professional patroller of the gutter. In spite of conscientious efforts on our part to maintain the regulation distance from one another, none of us could resist the impulse to catch up the next woman in front; and as our leader, the tall woman in purple, desired nothing more than to cover the prescribed route and return to the shelter of home as quickly as possible, only he who ran could have read the announcement printed on our boards, as we raced breathlessly along the edge of the pavement. At the same time, we found, n.o.body had the slightest difficulty in reading the ident.i.ty of those who carried the boards.
”Suffer-a-gettes! Look at 'em!” roared an omnibus driver.
”Well, why not?” responded a gallant cabman from the shelter we were approaching. ”Why shouldn't Mrs. Pank'urst 'ave a vote, same as you an'
me? Ain't she got as much sense in her 'ead as what _I_ 'ave?” He modulated his belligerent shout to a dulcet undertone as we came alongside. ”The whole of the four-wheel trade is with you, ladies,” he told us confidentially.