Part 7 (2/2)
A block in the traffic caused us all to close up for a moment, and we compared notes hurriedly.
”Not so bad as we expected, is it?” said our literary comrade, who was one of those to overhear the friendly remark made by the representative of the four-wheel trade.
The girl in green reserved her opinion. ”It makes one feel desperately sorry for the poor men who have to do this sort of thing, not for a cause, but for a living,” she said feelingly.
The girl in green was by nature sentimental. Having once sold a suffrage paper in the street for half a day, she found herself incapable ever afterwards of resisting the appeal of the street hawker, with the result that her flat became a depot for patent toasting-forks, bone collar-studs, and quivering, iridescent beetles. Her latest conviction that a human link existed between her and all sandwich-men received, however, a slight shock as soon as we encountered one of these. Melting with compa.s.sion, she tried in a single look to express all she felt for his hard lot, but was met by a still more eloquent expression of pity from his eye--the one that did not wink--and became henceforth a little dubious about that particular human link. We tried, but without much success, to rekindle her faith in human links generally, by pointing out that his scorn was probably aroused by the unprofessional appearance of her sandwich boards, one of which was slipping its ribbon moorings as she went by.
Perhaps the most startling conversion we made in the course of our parade was that of the baby. Up to that moment it had been a plain and placid, contented baby, banging its Teddy bear happily against the side of the perambulator. When it saw our procession coming along, with flying colours and flapping boards, it dropped the Teddy bear on the pavement and emitted an amazing remark that sounded to all of us, except our literary member, like ”Ga-ga-ga-ga-_ga_!” Our literary member, being imaginative, declared that what the baby really said was--”Hooray! Votes for Women!”--and the baby's nurse, who had to soil her white cotton gloves by picking the Teddy bear out of the mud, seemed inclined to agree with her.
”Them 'orrible Suffragettes!” she said crossly; and remembering the militant countenance of the baby we had converted, we felt bound to forgive her for feeling uneasy about the baby's future. Our triumph was short-lived, however, for we were scarcely out of hearing of the baby's gurgles when a gentleman outside a public-house informed us, with some difficulty of utterance, that we were a disgrace to our s.e.x.
”What do they mean, blocking up the King's 'Ighway, undreds and undreds of 'em?” he grumbled fiercely. As the girl in green observed, he was not in a condition when it would be fair to challenge his ability to count.
On the whole, the triumphs won as usual, and the insults were too funny and pathetic, both at once, to hurt much. There was the lady who told us very distinctly what she thought of us, and then dropped her skirts in the mud, a real feminine sacrifice, to take one of our handbills, because her hard heart was melted by the absent-minded smile of our literary member, who mistook her for a supporter. There was the clergyman who stood with his hat in his hand the whole time our procession was going by; there was the sentimentalist who, after telling each one of us in turn to go home and mind the baby, said in a tone of concentrated despair to the last of us--”What would you do if you had twins?” And, of course, there was the messenger-boy who stood just out of reach and yelled--”Want yer rights? Then you won't git 'em! Sooner give 'em to tomcats, I would!”
By the time we arrived in sight of home, even the woman in purple had become hardened to the perils and vicissitudes of the road and smiled quite easily at the postman who stood at the corner of the street. But when we found ourselves inside the shop, in full view of the shop looking-gla.s.s, it required all our newly won insensibility to stifle an inward consciousness that the glories of a militant campaign still remained rather spiritual than actual. Our hair was damp and straight, our cardboard armour limp and bent; our skirts were caked with mud, and our boots strongly resembled those that one sometimes sees sticking out of river sand at low tide. For once, our literary comrade refrained from asking us to turn to George Herbert or anybody else for poetic consolation.
On the other hand, the postman's criticism became wildly, disproportionately cheering.
”Votes for women!” he shouted after us with a sneer, as we slowly pa.s.sed indoors out of his sight. ”Votes for a few rich women, that's all you're after!”
Under the circ.u.mstances, it was very pleasant to be mistaken for representatives of the rich and cultured cla.s.ses.
IX
The Black Spot of the Const.i.tuency
I am inclined to think that the best general is he who never listens to warnings. n.o.body, for instance, warned us not to hold a meeting in the Council Schools, where a number of apparently educated, if very young, gentlemen came to express their political opinions through the medium of motor-horns and chemical explosives. The warning would have made no difference, of course; the point is that it was never uttered. When, on the other hand, we announced that we meant to carry our election campaign into the black spot of the const.i.tuency, where a criminal population congregated thickly in a few mean streets, warnings came quick and fast. They were the normal warnings, telling how the police hesitated to penetrate there after dark, how it was never safe at any time of day for a woman to walk there alone, and so on, and so on. There is a black spot like that in most cities, and the same things, rightly or wrongly, are generally said about it. But when you are a pioneer, however humble a pioneer, you discover that the one person who may walk with safety in the heart of a criminal district is the rebel man or woman who is out fighting for a human cause.
No doubt, the elementary school child looks upon the Prime Minister who arranges for a general election to occur during the Christmas holidays as a sort of fairy G.o.dfather; but the pioneer, who hopes to advance her cause as a by-product of a Parliamentary election, would find the political situation considerably simplified by the elimination of the juvenile element. Anthropologists probably know all kinds of reasons why the young human creature always wants to throw things at what he cannot understand; and if I had to humanize the embryonic hooligan of our back streets, I believe I should begin by setting up a mysterious-looking target, a different one every day, in a prominent place, in order to gratify this elemental instinct at the least possible cost to the pioneer. Not having thought of this simple plan in time, however, those of us who first penetrated the black spot of our const.i.tuency on a canva.s.sing expedition met with a good deal of concrete obstruction.
”I am used to banana skins,” remarked one canva.s.ser, on her return to the committee rooms; ”I can even bear mud; and stones are never aimed with enough determination to matter much; but I should like to draw the line at red herrings. There is something so peculiarly atmospheric about red herrings.”
”Chestnuts are worse,” said another woman, producing the one that she had intercepted on its way towards her face. ”When I am advancing a suffrage argument for the hundredth time, there is a nasty subtle significance about a chestnut.”
The tax collector, happening to stroll in just then to buy a ticket for a meeting, kindly tendered us his sympathy. He had frequently to endure the same unfriendly treatment at the hands of children, he told us, when he visited their homes in his official capacity. This information did not meet with the response he evidently expected from us, and realizing that voteless women could not be reasonably expected to feel furiously hostile towards anybody who pelted a tax collector, he admitted a difference in the point of view and beat a tactful retreat, warning us as he went to refrain from attempting an open-air meeting in the criminal district.
”You won't do any good there,” he a.s.sured us; ”they are too stupid to understand, and they may make things very unpleasant for you.”
This would have been true, perhaps, of an open-air meeting in a respectable neighbourhood, not to say of a drawing-room meeting anywhere. In a respectable, law-abiding district, it is always difficult and frequently dangerous to hold an open-air meeting. To begin with, you have to stand for some time without any audience at all, saying ”We are the Suffragettes; we have come here to talk about votes for women,” over and over again, with an ingratiating smile, to a policeman with a coldly detached air, and, perhaps, a young man on the opposite side of the road, who is longing to listen but dare not cross over for fear of being identified with lawless young women whose husbands and babies languish untended in the theoretical home. Afterwards, when these preliminary efforts have successfully a.s.sembled an audience, it is generally one that is too stupid to understand, and it frequently makes things unpleasant for the speaker. All this may be confidently expected to happen in respectable neighbourhoods, where the standard of conduct is conventional enough to have brought unconventionality within the jurisdiction of lynch law.
In the black spot of our const.i.tuency, however, these familiar difficulties scarcely seemed to exist for the open-air speaker, least of all the preliminary difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment our wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that stood for no party cry and for no party candidate, the audience came in rushes from all the alleys and dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two minutes one looked down upon a swaying ma.s.s of tattered and slatternly humanity that would have been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been less than human. As it was, one merely realized that when the narrow barrier of circ.u.mstance that separates the fortunates from the unfortunates of this world has once been swept away, human points of contact are multiplied, not diminished.
The audience naturally gave the speaker in the lorry no time to make philosophic reflections.
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