Chapter I · (continued 4)

“There is love between us.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not mutual.”

“Love is an automatically mutual thing.”

“Then I’m afraid that proves that whatever may be between us is not love. Here is Park View.”

“Damn Park View!”

Words are supposed to be a woman’s luxury, but it always seems to me that men put a more touching faith in argument than ever women did. I believe the gardener thought that if Park View had been five miles farther on, he might have made a woman of the suffragette.

205“And what do you expect me to do now?” he asked pathetically.

“Get busy,” advised the suffragette, “somewhere else. Dear little gardener, remember that this road has been trodden before. Being young is a devastating time, anyway. It always comforts me to think that there are crowds before and behind me, and that even a cow has had a delirious calfhood. After all, the past is such a little thing, one can drown it in a drop. And the future is so big.”

“That’s what I complain of—the size of the future.”

“Oh, no, don’t. Size is space and space is growth. Good gracious, what a prig I am becoming!”

“For God’s sake, come and fill up a little corner of my big future, then. You little thing, I could hold you in my hand.... And you can hold me with no hand at all, but only with your heart.”

“Good-bye.”

“But why? Why?”

She was climbing the steep drive. She never looked round. She always looked up.

With excellent intentions the suffragette had, I think, succeeded in killing her heart. She was so heartless that even the hole where her heart should have been was a very shallow one. Some rudimentary emotion turned in her breast as she walked up the drive, and if she could have had the gardener 206as a friend, she would have turned even then and tendered him the friendly mailed fist of the independent woman. But if one is a fanatic, one cannot also be a lover. She suffered from the cold humility that sometimes attacks women. Every morning she occupied three minutes in the thankless task of pinning her hair into a shape conformable with convention’s barest requirements, and was then confronted with her own thin short face, white—but not white like a flower as the face of a beloved woman should be; her small eyes, grey—but not grey like the sea; her straight and drooping hair, made out of the ashes of the flame that burns in real women’s hair; her thin pressed lips, her hard set chin, the little defiant wrinkles over her brows.... It was impossible for her to believe that such a thing could be indispensable to any eyes. Her attitude towards the paradox was always sceptical, and the idea that there is nothing a woman can offer as a substitute for such a small gift as herself was beyond her. The little ordinary fiery things of youth had been shorn out of her life, she had been crushed by the responsibility of being a woman and a devotee.

No man would believe that such a woman exists. The pathetic vanity of man would never be convinced that any woman could prefer her own independence to his kisses.

By the time the suffragette had reached the front door of Park View, the interview with the gardener was but a pulse beating at the back of her mind.

207Miss Brown, looking as nearly dishevelled as a persistently Real Lady could possibly look, was standing in the hall, ankle-deep in her own prostrate property. Trunks yawned on every side, highly respectable dresses, like limp ghosts of Miss Brown herself, embellished every chair.

“And I haven’t even begun on Albert’s books yet.”

“The more of Albert’s books we leave behind the better,” replied the suffragette. “I have got him Treasure Island to read on the boat, and he might take that one on Chemistry for Sundays.”

“I’m sure I don’t know how you manage Albert,” said Miss Brown. “I could never even get him to read the Bible. It really looks as if Providence had sent you to us at this crisis.”

“Providence would never have chosen a militant suffragette.”

“Well, but really one wouldn’t notice your opinions,” said Miss Brown in an encouraging voice.

“What about Scottie?” asked the suffragette. “Has anybody thought what is going to happen to him?”

“I haven’t thought of any details,” answered Miss Brown. “The doctor’s orders were so sudden, they altogether upset me. I suppose Scottie can be left with John.”

“I hope he won’t,” said the suffragette. “I caught John using Scottie as a target yesterday. He scored two bull’s-eyes before I got there.”

208“I can’t think what to do with him. There is nobody but Mr. Wise, and he already has a fierce bulldog. Have you any ideas?”

“Yes, one. I have a sort of friend on the Island. If I left Scottie with him, he would act as a brake in the pursuit, because of the difficulties of quarantine.”

“I don’t quite follow your meaning,” said Miss Brown, not unnaturally. “I didn’t know you had a gentleman friend on the Island.”

“I haven’t. But I’m sure he will be kind to Scottie.”

Very late that night, when Courtesy, Mrs. Rust, the gardener, and an unknown young man picked up at the club by the gardener, were playing Bridge in the verandah, a very young boy with a very fat dog appeared, asking for Mr. Gardener. The boy was too well educated to be afraid of duppies. The solid Scottie, too, was felt to be a sound defence against the supernatural.

“What is this?” asked the gardener, who had assumed the melancholy pose of the Rejected One, and had unconsciously acquired a sad sweet smile to correspond. Even on his death-bed the gardener will pose as a dying man.

The young boy put a note into his hand, and dragged Scottie from the shadow where he had modestly seated himself.

“By Jove,” said the unknown young man, who happened to be Mr. Wise. “It’s Scottie, the Park View dog.”

209The gardener literally burst the envelope open. The enclosure said: “Dear Gardener—Will you please keep Scottie until I ask you for him again.—Your fairly sincere suffragette.”

The note went round the Bridge Table.

“I have always wondered,” said Mrs. Rust, “whether politics were really good for women. Now I am sure that they have an unhinging tendency. What does it mean?”

“It means that they are going on an expedition,” said Courtesy. “They want the dog looked after for a day or two.”

“Why, but Park View is a regular palace in Greyville,” said Mr. Wise. “There are three servants in it, all competent to look after Scottie for a day or two.”

“I shall have to do what she says,” said the gardener. “The suffragette’s only fault is that she leaves almost too much to the imagination.”

The boy had vanished.

“Better go round and ask for an explanation,” said Courtesy.

“He must play out these doubled lilies,” said Mrs. Rust.

“It must be nearly twelve,” said Mr. Wise. “The cocks have been crowing for an hour.”

The Island cock proclaims the night rather than the day. Not even a cock can feel much enthusiasm for such a tyrant as the Trinity Island sun.

“I can’t go now,” said the gardener.

210But next morning at breakfast he said, “I daren’t go now.” He had hardly slept at all, and looked white. The light of the Seeker had gone out of his eyes, there had been no wish in him for a wild walk in the early sun. He was not even posing. He had been pathetically late for breakfast, and Mrs. Rust and the lady novelist had disappeared to read the English Review and the Lady’s Pictorial respectively on the front verandah.

“Why daren’t you?” asked Courtesy.

“Oh, Courtesy—she’s beaten me. She’s left me without hope.”

Courtesy took several mouthfuls of porridge before she replied, “You’re young yet, gardener. And she isn’t so extra unique, after all. If you like, I’ll go round and ask for an explanation of the dog.”

“You don’t know the way,” said the gardener tragically.

It was lucky that Mr. Wise at that moment arrived in his buggy to invite Courtesy and Mrs. Rust (if she wasn’t too tired) for a drive. The buggy was a single one, and held two only, so there was a transparency about his motives which did him credit. Courtesy never even passed on the invitation to Mrs. Rust, and the owner of the vehicle failed to repeat it.

Armed with her inevitable box of sweets, Courtesy set forth on her romance.

“Ripping woods,” she said, as the sun winked through the delicate lace of the forest.

211“Ripping,” agreed Mr. Wise. “But full of ticks.”

Courtesy suffered that beautiful shock that attacks a woman when she first realises that the man by her side is an uncommon person, and that he holds the same view about herself. She offered him a chocolate cream.

They went to Park View by the longest way possible, but I think the nearest approach to romance that they reached was when Courtesy said, “Oh, Lor’, I am enjoying myself!”

And Mr. Wise replied, “So am I. I hope you’ll come again.”

When they reached Park View they were neither of them observant enough to notice the forsaken look of the house.

“I’ll just go and tackle that funny little suffragette,” said Courtesy. “I won’t be half a mo.”

She looked back and smiled at him as she climbed the drive.

“Dey all gone, missis,” said John, who was sitting in the hall, reading the letters out of the waste-paper basket.

“Gone? Where to?”

“Gone to Lunnon Town to see a doctah man, please, missis.”

“Union Town, you mean.”

“No, please thank you, missis. Gone lars’ night to catch a big steamboat.”

212“How many of them went?”

“Missis Brown, and Mars’ Albert, an’ de visitor-missis.”

“Do you know their address? Where are you forwarding their letters to?”

John laughed shrilly at this joke.

“Carn’t say, please, missis. Post-missis wouldn’t send me de letters, now de fambly gone.”

The Island is the home of elusive information.

“What’s the matter with the woman, anyway?” said Courtesy, as she remounted the buggy. “I never can understand a woman that doesn’t know her vocation.”

“What is her vocation?” asked Mr. Wise.

“Ou, I don’t know,” giggled Courtesy.

“I think all women ought to marry,” said Mr. Wise. “Somehow it keeps them softer.”

“It wouldn’t make a hard woman soft,” said Courtesy. “Only all the soft women do marry.”

“Do you consider——”

“Ou, Lor’, this is a killing conversation!” interrupted the lady. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“All right. That’s a very pretty dress you’ve got on.”

They found the gardener sitting on tenterhooks on the verandah, pulling Scottie’s ears.

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t. She’s gone to London.”

“I hope they’ll take care of Westminster Abbey,” said Mrs. Rust.

213The gardener said nothing.

By this time the suffragette was putting romance behind her by means of a little boat limping across a heavy sea. Compared to the Caribbeania, this boat was like my suffragette compared with Mr. Shakespeare’s Desdemona. There was rust on the little boat’s metal, and her paint still bore memories of London smuts. The purser was occasionally to be seen in his shirt sleeves, and the Captain had a button off his coat.

The priest was on board, returning to his flock, overflowing with material for sermons. By mutual consent he and the suffragette ignored each other. He made an attempt to approach Albert, with his special children’s manner, but that cultured youth quickly silenced him. So he occupied himself in trying to save the soul of the second officer, a docile youth, of humble and virtuous tendency.

Within two days the little boat reached the Isthmus which has lately been converted into one of the wonders of the world.

“My poor Albert,” said the suffragette. “I’m afraid the doctor says you mustn’t go to see the Canal. It’s so dusty. And you know such a lot about it, don’t you? It is disappointing.”

“I dow quite edough about it,” replied Albert. “I have do wish whatever to see it. I dow every detail of its codstructiod.”

“That’s all right, then. The doctor says when it’s cool after dark, you may walk as far as the 214gardens behind the quay, and listen to the band.”

“I do dot wish to hear the badd. I wish you ad Ah-Bargaret to go away for the whole day, ad let the youggest stewardess cob ad sit with be. She is a charbig persod, ad it would be very good for you to see the Cadal.”

In Albert’s eyes the halo of the suffragette was to some extent evaporating. Her attitude towards science alienated him in his capacity as an educated man, although as a child in pain he still clung to her. And she had that morning offended him by buying him a bottle of sweets from the barber’s shop.

“I really thigk you sobetibes forget I ab do logger a baby,” he observed, and forthwith began to lay great stress on the charm of the youngest stewardess.

Miss Brown was delighted at the fall of her nephew’s latest idol.

“You’d better come away,” she said. “Let’s go and see the Canal. If you stay with Albert when he is displeased, you get on his nerves.”

So they landed on the quay of one of the two terrible towns that guard the entrances of the Canal. They paid a great price and manned a train that cost humanity a very great price indeed to create. That train is built of dead men, the embankment on which it runs has largely peopled purgatory, the very sleepers might as well be coffins, yet the train moves with the same callous rhythm as the train from Surbiton to Waterloo. In it you may see the calm inheritors 215of the fatal past sit upon spread handkerchiefs upon the smutty seats, and stick their tickets in their hats that the passing of the conductor may not disturb their train of thought; and all as if there were no ghosts to keep them company. Only outside the windows you can see the haunted land, white water enveloping a dead forest, ashen trees suffering slow drowning, tall grey birds standing amid floating desolation, and the Canal, a strip of successful tragedy, creeping between its treacherous red banks. The train leaves the Canal for a while, and returns to find it in a different mood. The First Lock is the crown of that great endeavour. I am assured that much more genius has been spent on the Cuts than on the Locks, but to you and me, ignorantly seeking copy, the First Lock triumphantly dominating the weary water-way, seems like the seal of success, as if Man had built this stupendous thing as a barrier between him and failure.

When you see the Lock you feel like an ant seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The suffragette, as she stood on the iron way that goes along the top edge of one of the gates, had to think of all the biggest things she had ever imagined to keep herself from dwindling out of existence. Even Women’s Rights grew small in the light of this man-made immensity. She was standing on the highest gate, and she could look across a perspective of three empty cube-worlds, at the white Canal and the white sea beyond it.

216“Really,” she said, “there is very little to choose between God and Man.”

“Good gracious me, what a thing to say!” said Miss Brown, bridling. “God could knock all this down with one stroke.”

“He couldn’t knock down the spirit that would make man build it up again. Why do we pray to a Creator, if we can ourselves create?”

“I think you had better come out of the sun,” said Miss Brown coldly. “I am feeling a little sick myself.”

But on their way across the gate back to the white paving that borders the Lock, they found their way blocked by the priest, who was advancing in the opposite direction.

It is impossible for a stout Miss Brown and a stout priest to pass each other on this route. Two suffragettes might have passed, but fortunately for the Isthmus there was only one present.

“I will retire,” said the priest. “Place aux dames, yerce, yerce.”

“Oh, how good of you!” said Miss Brown, bridling. “I am sorry to put you to such inconvenience.”

With a jocular reference or two to goods trains at a shunting station the priest retired from the dilemma. But when they had all reached the safety of the broad paving again he seemed to have shed his desire to cross the gate. He was by himself, which he detested; there were countless morals to be 217humorously drawn from the Canal, and nobody to point them out to.

“This is a marvel of workmanship, is it not?” he said to Miss Brown, pointedly excluding the suffragette.

Miss Brown agreed, and asked whether he had felt pretty well on the voyage so far. Thus the Canal introduced them, and when the acquaintance was safely formed, Miss Brown strove to introduce the suffragette.

“Yerce, yerce,” said the priest hurriedly. “We have met before. An introduction is unnecessary.”

Fortunately for the suffragette she saw a dog at a little distance, and hurried to speak to it. The dog is blessedly cosmopolitan. Wherever you may meet him he speaks your home tongue to you, and his eyes are the eyes of a friend in a strange land.

The suffragette and the dog walked along the side of the Lock some twenty yards behind their elders and betters, and the suffragette watched her character falling in shreds between them. Some people like safe hunting, and there is no prey so defenceless as prey that is not there. The priest’s conscience had been for some time accumulating reasons why the modest Miss Brown should be warned of the true character of her immodest companion.

The suffragette allowed them half an hour to finish the destruction, and joined them at the train, when the dog reluctantly remembered another engagement.

The party returned to the town in dead silence. 218At the station the priest left them, with promises to come and read to Albert. The suffragette and Miss Brown made their way across the gardens to the quay. Under a great palm, Miss Brown stopped tragically, and spoke to her companion for the first time since leaving the Lock.

“I trusted you,” she said, rather dramatically, though, of course, she was too ladylike for melodrama. “I gave you my hospitality, I succoured you when you needed help (this was an echo of the priest), and all the while you deceived me, you took advantage of my kindness.”

“Certainly you were all that to me,” said the suffragette mildly, “and certainly I am very grateful for all your kindness. But I don’t remember deceiving you.”

“You are an immoral woman,” said Miss Brown, with a great effort, “and you never told me.”

“It is hardly expected that I should have told you that. Partly because it would have been silly, and partly because it would have been quite untrue.”

“No one could dislike gossip more than I do,” said Miss Brown, who loved it. “But a priest is a priest, and this one is such a truly nice man, so good-hearted, never said a word yesterday when the steward upset the soup into his lap. Why did you never tell me that you travelled from England in company with a man who was not your husband?”

Now the suffragette, though she was distrustful of the reasoning of men, seldom failed to see the point 219of view of a woman, even though that woman was an anti. She specialised in feminism, and in her eyes to be a woman was in itself a good argument.

“Of course I ought to have told you, Miss Brown,” she said in a warmer voice than was usual with her. “As a matter of fact it never occurred to me that the thing was worth telling, but that, I admit, is no excuse. I do see that I have been accepting your kindness under false pretences. It is perhaps useless to say I am sorry, and worse than useless to tell you that I would rather die than be married, and that I would rather be hanged than live unmarried with a man. Still I admit I allowed all the fools on the Caribbeania to think I was also such a fool as to be married. I will not bother you again, Miss Brown, I will keep out of your way as much as possible on the boat. It’s only a fortnight.”

Miss Brown was mollified, and when she spoke again it was like the angel Gabriel sympathising with the difficulties of a beetle. “Of course if you are penitent,” she said, “I should like to help you to retrace as far as possible the false step you have taken. I believe there are Homes.... But perhaps you had better not come near Albert.”

The little boat was indulging in a two days’ rest at the Isthmus. It is a problem worthy of the superwoman to avoid a fellow-passenger on a small boat in port. The bearable space on board becomes limited to inches. The side nearest the quay affords nothing but coal-dust to breathe, the other side allows a small 220percentage of air to dilute the coal-dust. There is no scope for choice.

After-dinner, however, Miss Brown settled down to play chess with Albert. Chess with Miss Brown is a most satisfactory game, a crescendo of “Checks” leading to a triumphant “Mate” in a delightfully short time.

So the suffragette went on shore to listen to the band.

The Isthmus band is as gaudy in attire as it is sombre in complexion, and it plays to a stratum of society as striking to the eye as any in the world. The Isthmus is the centre of nigger fashion. Here, under the glare and the flare of a hot night in the season, you may see the effect of a layer of civilisation on an aboriginal worship of colour. Crimson, gold, and silver are the prevailing motifs. As to the coiffure of the ladies, for every plait to be found on a Trinity Island head there are half a dozen on the Isthmus. There is something uniquely wicked in the appearance of rouge and powder on a mahogany ground. The look of vice which the Parisian or London lady strives to attain by means of a shopful of cosmetics can be acquired by the lady-nigger with one dab of the flour-dredger. Once more I pause to ask when we may expect the decree that we must further conceal our incurable virtue by means of a complexion dyed copper colour.

There was a moon, and there were stars standing aloof in the sky; and there were many lights about 221the garden. There were shrill brass voices everywhere, and the band was playing that tune of resigned sentimentality, “My Old Kentucky Home.”

The suffragette felt slightly drunk. She had had a day of emotions, and it was an unusual and intoxicating experience for her to find her emotions escaping from the iron bound cask in which she kept them. She felt totally irresponsible, and when the priest came along, looking as conceited as the moon, and as sentimentally benign as the stars, she discovered a lunatic longing to tear the hat from his head and stamp upon it, to make him look a fool, to prick his pride; not because of any personal enmity—or so she thought—but because he seemed eternally on the side of sanity and of yesterday, and barred the path of young and mad modernity. She approached him.

The priest suddenly perceived in front of him a soul dangerously in need of salvation.

“My dear young lady, I have been seeking an opportunity for a quiet chat with you, yerce, yerce. Whatever you may think of me, I assure you that I am not the hard and inhuman man you think me. I should be only too thankful to be of service to you. Let us sit on that quiet seat, away from the crowd.”

“It is good of you to risk contamination,” said the suffragette.

“My calling leads me among the publicans and sinners,” said the priest. “It is not my business to divide the sheep from the goats.”

222“Not your business, but your pleasure,” suggested the suffragette.

The priest stiffened.

“I wish you had not hardened your heart against my help,” he said. “Believe me, I have every sympathy with a young and unprotected woman in your position. I think sometimes life seems hard on the weaker sex, yerce, yerce.”

“It is a great honour to be a woman,” said the suffragette. “Your God certainly turns his back on the individual, but he is very just to the mass. The day of women is just dawning.”

“There may be something in what you say,” observed the priest, feeling that she was somehow erasing all that he had meant to say. “I am sure we shall all be glad to see Woman come into her own. But....”

“Men may possess the past, but women have the future,” continued the suffragette, who was certainly very much excited. “We have suddenly found what you have lost—the courage of our convictions. The art of being a fanatic seems to me to be the pivot of progress; but men have lost, and women have caught that blessed disease.”

“I do not see how all this applies to the matter in hand,” said the priest. “Unless you are trying to convey to me, by way of an excuse, the craving which I am told possesses most women of your persuasion—the craving for fame, the morbid wish to be talked about.”

223“I did not hope to convey anything at all to you. And certainly not fame, for there is no such thing. I have seen pigeons sitting on the heads of statues of great men in London, and I have seen little critics sitting on their fame. This is a world of isolated people, and there can be no fame where there is no mutual understanding.”

“You are oddly pessimistic, and you are also wilfully evading the point. When I saw you just now, I hoped that you had repented of your sin and needed my help.”

“I have committed no sin that would appeal to you,” said the suffragette. “But that is, of course, beside the point. What you want is that I should repent of being myself, and become a sort of inferior female you.”

“Indeed you have come to hasty and mistaken conclusions about my intentions,” said the priest, whose principal virtue was perseverance. “Regarding your political opinions, I have every sympathy with your cause, though none for your methods. There is something so very coarse about militancy.”

“Have you ever tried denying a creature the food it needs? I think you would find that even a white mouse would be coarse if you starved it.”

“You may be right. My sister is a member of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage. Perhaps you also belong to that sisterhood?”

“No,” she answered. “I belong to the Shrieking Sisterhood.”

224“It seems useless for me to try and help you in this mood,” sighed the priest. “I can only pray that I may be shown the way to your heart....”

“I have none,” she said.

In a garden not five hundred miles away from the garden in which she sat was the Fact which she had Forgotten, set in a silver light among the silver trees. The gardener stood among the pale grape-fruit trees, with his head back in his usual conceited way, with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the wet grass.

“This is nonsense,” he thought.

“She is only half human.”

“Love for a thing only half human is only half love.”

“You can’t build a world out of words, as she tries to do.”

“In a thing like love, there is fact and there is theory. Theory is only falsehood disguised as fact.”

“She is not a bit pretty.”

“I believe she would rather make an enemy than make a friend.”

“Something has gone wrong with the woman of to-day. She has left the man behind, but she has not gone forward.”

“What have I been about to allow such a woman to disturb me? I came to this island a king, and I have made myself a slave.”

“It is youth that has burnt me. I am done with youth. It is fine to have reached age in theory, and 225yet in practice still to have one’s life ahead. My youth has been a fire in my path, and she has stamped it out.”

The moon explored the spangled sky. The fireless interwove with the pale purring noises of the night. The mad still shadows of the palms blotted the grass.

The gardener went into the verandah firmly posed as He Who has Passed through Fire, and has emerged, cured of the silly disease of youth, into a pale silver light.

For the gardener made his theories, while the suffragette’s theories made her.

The gardener was awakened next morning by the loud noise of Scottie chasing lizards across the room. Scottie was a bristly Northerner, and never became really used to the conditions of tropical life. To this day he labours under the delusion that lizards are only bald or naked mice, that have deceitfully changed their smell and their taste.

The gardener thought that he awoke perfectly light-hearted. He did not recognise the curious thing that throbbed in the back of his consciousness as his heart.

He whistled in his bath. He whistled as he came out on to the verandah for breakfast.

Courtesy had risen for early breakfast by mistake.

“Stopped brooding?” she asked. “Brave boy.”

“Two and two is such a poor formation after all,” 226said the gardener. “One and one is much more comfortable.”

Courtesy giggled. “There are times,” she said, “when two and two is ripping. Mr. Wise is coming up to lunch.”

“He came up to lunch yesterday. And he’s coming up to tea to-morrow.”

“Yesterday and to-morrow are not to-day,” said Courtesy, that practical girl.

The gardener had not time to ponder, for Mrs. Rust then appeared. Her complexion was even more of a contrast to her hair than usual.

“I had a letter last night,” she said. “I didn’t tell you at once, because it’s such a vulgar habit to blurt out news. I don’t know whether I have mentioned my son Samuel to you?”

“You have,” said Courtesy.

“So have I,” added the gardener.

“His house has played him false—I knew it would. One of the ceilings gave way—on to Samuel. Him and his house—he always was a fool. I believe he thought the Almighty built his house for him.”

“Yes, but what happened to Samuel?”

“I told you—the ceiling fell on him.”

“Yes, but what is the result?”

“Oh, the rest of the house is still standing. It was only one of the ceilings. He put the billiard table upstairs, and probably had his rafters made of bamboo.”

227“Yes, but I mean what was the result as far as Samuel was concerned?”

“He was concussion. There have been one or two people staying in the house since he started the atrocious practice of advertising, and they had him taken to a hospital. My letter is from the matron.”

“Poor Mrs. Rust,” said Courtesy, “you must be terribly worried. I suppose you’ll be wantin’ to get home by the next boat.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” snapped the mother. “Haven’t you noticed by now that I have iron nerves. Next boat—indeed.”

“But I should have thought——” began Courtesy, and the gardener kicked her under the table.

“There is only one perfectly obvious thing to do,” said the gardener, “and that is wait till the next mail, a fortnight hence. Knowing Mrs. Rust as I do, Courtesy, I am sure she will follow this obvious course.”

“Obvious course—indeed,” said Mrs. Rust, much relieved. “Stuff and nonsense. I shall do exactly as I please, whether it’s obvious or not. Suppose I decide to go home by Wednesday’s boat, what then, young man?”

The gardener shook his head. “You won’t, I know,” he said. “You are too reasonable.”

“Reason be blowed,” said Mrs. Rust with spirit. “You don’t know me very well, young man, if you think I’m like all the other old cats, to be persuaded by that sort of argument.”

228The 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.”

229But 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 230to 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 231that 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.

232The 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.

233“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 234woman,” 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.”

235“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, 236“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.”

237“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 238Society. 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 239broken 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.”

240“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.”

241The 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.”)

242“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, 243when 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 244as 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. 245There’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 246allus 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? 247Do 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.

248The 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.”

249This 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 250the 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.

251“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 252else 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 253officials. 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——”

254“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 255in 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 256would 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 257herself 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 258his 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.

259It 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.

260“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.

261“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. 262All 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, 263and 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 264a 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.

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. 265Two 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.”

266“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.

267“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 268seems 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 269it,” 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 270you 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 271lolled 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.