An American Suffragette Part 7

"Many a hundred years, pa.s.sed over, have they labored deaf and blind; Never tidings reached their sorrow, never hope their toil might find.

Now at last they've heard and hear it, and the cry comes down the wind And their feet are marching on.

"On we march, then, we, the workers, and the rumor that ye hear Is the blended sound of battle and deliv'rance drawing near; For the hope of every creature is the banner that we bear, And the world is marching on."

Silvia Holland turned quickly when she heard the strong, unknown voice join in the ringing words, and fairly gasped when she saw that it was Frank Earl who was singing, while his brother looked at her with an air as bewildered as her own. The moment that the song was concluded she greeted them, and found them comfortable seats where they could see and hear without being too conspicuous.

"We like to have men come to our meetings, and a few generally drop in.

I expect several to-night, for we have a speaker from Colorado, but we don't often have the luxury of a baritone note for our music, so we owe you a special vote of thanks, Mr. Earl," she said to Frank.

He bowed. "Oh, no; it's the other way about," he said lightly. "You don't know how grateful I am to you for not singing the 'Day of Wrath'

verse, in which all of us who haven't succeeded in swearing off our taxes hear what is coming to us. How well that girl presides," he added, as a businesslike young woman dispatched the reading and adoption of minutes and the reports of committees without a hitch or a moment's useless delay.

"That is Florence Dresser," explained Miss Holland. "She is one of the leaders in the Laundry Girls' a.s.sociation. The secretary," indicating a young woman who might have been a twelve-year-old child, save for her sad, careworn face, "has nearly killed herself sewing for sweaters to take care of her family; we've found homes for the children and she lives here now; we are trying to make up to her for the lost years, but it is hard work," and she sighed.

"We have one meeting a month when we have a program," Miss Holland explained. "At the other three we consider various phases of industrial life as it affects our own membership or women in general. I am rather sorry that this happens to be a program night, for you would have had a better idea of the scope we try to cover at the other kind, but perhaps this will be more entertaining." She turned more directly to Frank. "A business meeting here always makes me think of the 'Antis,' and their twaddle about woman's sphere, which they would like to reduce to a demi-hemisphere."

Frank nodded. "Of course there's nothing to that with intelligent people now; woman's sphere is wherever she can make good, but I think it is a pity that she has to take so large a place in the industrial world, and I don't believe that voting will help her."

"But it has helped men," Miss Holland replied quickly.

"Not half so much as their unions," he answered. "The thing that helps is getting together and standing together."

"Now you've lost your whole case," laughed Dr. Earl. "There has never been anything that brought all sorts and conditions of women together like the suffrage cause. You see that in England. In fact, you see it everywhere. Women are waking up, and getting to their feet and stretching out their hands--to us? Not at all, to each other."

"Oh, I wish you'd say that to my comrades here," said Miss Holland. "We should all be so glad to hear you. Will you not let me present you for a few minutes during the informal discussion?"

For an instant he wavered, then the face of Leonora flashed before him, and he shook his head decisively. "I'm too new at this sort of thing,"

he answered. "Get my brother here to talk to you about Colorado, and let the audience heckle him."

"We'd be delighted," laughed Miss Holland. "The lady who is to conduct the question box, which is the main thing to-night, comes from Denver.

Her name is Carroll Renner; do you happen to know her? Will she be able to hold her own? Sometimes they ask pretty sharp questions."

"Don't give yourself a moment's uneasiness," Frank answered. "There'll be no twelve baskets needed to remove the fragments of the contumacious when she gets through. A small blotter will answer."

"You know her very well, then?" Miss Holland said, openly surprised.

"Rather," he answered laconically. "She is the most persistent lobbyist in the State, and she infallibly discovers the one deadly section in a bill that you thought so well hidden that no one would ever notice it.

She's the most troublesome woman I know and the best fellow."

Miss Holland and Dr. Earl both turned and looked at the little woman, who had come in a few minutes before with a party of people, with added interest. She was very simply gowned in black, and but for a certain twinkle of the dark gray eyes, and a rather mocking smile, there was nothing particularly distinctive about her.

"Tell me some more," said Miss Holland curiously. "Sometimes the voting woman helps and sometimes she hurts; if they're freaky, and of course some of them are, they hurt dreadfully."

"I've seen her a good deal while I've been watching the Senate," he said. "I'd been out there for several sessions of the General a.s.sembly before I located there. She came in one day with a letter from some national woman's organization--wanted the Beveridge Child Labor Law endorsed, I think. Anyhow, time was of the essence of the contract, so we drew up a concurrent resolution, and she got a Republican and a Democrat to introduce it together, and it slid along on its way to Washington within forty-eight hours; she and a Mrs. Platt worked it together. All they said was that the women wanted it."

Miss Holland gasped. "Go on," she said.

He lowered his voice, for the president was introducing a handsome girl who was to give a reading.

"Another time there was a bill--I don't recollect it, but something about committing girl prisoners, or something of the sort; I saw her get pretty white, and shut her lips hard, and then she got up and started to walk out, and one of the Senators saw her, too. 'Say, you don't like that bill?' he said, and she answered, as if she could hardly control her anger, 'It's infamous!' 'Oh, it is, is it?' he said. 'Well, then, we'll make them adjourn over until we can get a conference and amend the thing.' No fuss, no talk; just straight goods. That's Carroll Renner."

"And that's what it means to be an enfranchised woman!" said Miss Holland, with a long breath. "None of us could do that here!"

"Well, that's part of it," acquiesced Frank, and then they listened silently. The girl who was reading was not particularly well-trained, but there were pa.s.sion and pathos in her voice as she told the story of the eaglet, chained to a log for fear it might fall if permitted to attempt to fly.

"We also have our dream of a Garden," the strong young voice went on.

"But it lies in a distant future. We dream that woman shall eat of the tree of knowledge together with man, and that side by side and hand close to hand, through ages of much toil and labor, they shall together raise about them an Eden n.o.bler than any the Chaldean dreamed of; an Eden created by their own labor and made beautiful by their own fellowship.

"In his Apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth; we see a new earth; but therein dwells love--the love of comrades and co-workers.

"It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the future, so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a pa.s.sive acquiescence in the present, that to-day we are found everywhere raising our strange new cry, 'Labor, and the training that fits us for labor!'"

"You recognize it, of course?" Silvia said to Dr. Earl, but he shook his head, and Frank answered, "It's Olive Schreiner, isn't it? She does good work, but I've never read anything that compared with that book on 'Woman and Economics,' and when an American writer has the whole world sitting up and taking notice, I don't see why we don't boost her game."

There was a little buzz and stir while slips of paper and pencils were distributed to the audience, and the questions collected for the next speaker.

The presiding officer made the usual preliminary remarks, and introduced Miss Renner, who gathered up the goodly sheaf of white slips in her hands and ran over them as if looking for some query that would make a specially apt beginning. Her face lit up as she came across one with which she was evidently familiar.

"This is a favorite question of mine," she said cheerfully. "I should miss it dreadfully if it failed to turn up, but it is such a troublesome and comprehensive question to answer that I have set the reply to music, and will have it sung for you, in order that you may all remember it.

The question is, 'What have Colorado women done with the ballot?' I don't, myself, consider that a fair question, since none of us come down to Philadelphia or New York or Pittsburg or any of the other cities of sweetness and light and ask what you men have done with your all-powerful vote, but this seems to be the main one, especially to the masculine mind."

Dr. Earl laughed, for he had written the question, and seating herself at the piano, Miss Renner looked up at a merry-faced girl, who began singing to her rippling accompaniment a song of miraculous changes which should have ensued upon woman's enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, and concluded with a long chant, recounting some of the more notable achievements of the voting woman, ranging all the way from joint ownership of children and property, minimum salary laws, juvenile courts, medical inspection of school children, State inst.i.tutions built and endowed, equality in inheritance and a host of other things, up to the adoption by her State of the initiative and referendum.

After that, Miss Renner had her audience with her until she dropped the last twist of paper on the table beside her. "You ask me why it took us so many years to pa.s.s a good law regulating child labor, and why we have failed in limiting the hours of woman's labor. As to the first, it is true that our law was by no means equal to yours, but we had the means to enforce it, and as a consequence we have little or no child labor.

You have a good statute, one of the best in the Union"--there was a ripple of applause--"but in addition to this excellent law prohibiting child labor," she went on evenly, "you have in this city alone over twenty thousand child wage-earners.

"When we have gone to our legislatures asking for laws for the protection of the weak, we have generally obtained them easily, when they did not interfere with 'big business.' It took Illinois women nine years to get a State Home for children. We pa.s.sed such a law without any effort whatever. In two-thirds of the States of the Union women are trying to make mothers co-equal guardians of their children, and trying in vain. That was the first law our enfranchised women wrote upon our statute books. One only learns to understand these things by experience.

You may find it hard to see why railroads should go into a deal to defeat an eight-hour law for women, but that statute was flagged by a Pullman palace car towel and fell asleep at the switch, because that company complained that it couldn't get a change of sheets unless laundry girls could be compelled to work overtime. You don't dream when you talk of 'big business' to what little business it will descend."

There was a sudden hush, and she flung out her hands with an impulsive gesture, and there was a pa.s.sionate earnestness in her voice that gripped her hearers. "Let me tell you something you do not know when you hold the women in the suffrage States responsible for conditions they are the first to deplore. A handful of men in this city have more to do with Western industries and their regulation than have both the men and women. We have steel works; their policy is dictated from lower Broadway. We have smelters; they are closed at the order of a syndicate in this city. We have railroads, all of them controlled by your fellow citizens, and it was the deals entered into between the representatives of these interests and our local corporations that defeated the eight-hour law for women, and every bit of reform legislation pledged to the people. It was this condition, this failure of alleged democracy, that made us go on record for real democracy, for the initiative that makes it possible for us to enact the laws our representatives are cajoled into pigeon-holing, for the referendum that enables us to scotch the snake so that the people may have a chance to kill it. This was the first great fundamental reform which the women demanded, and it was owing to the work of education they began twenty years ago, and kept up untiringly, that Colorado has won this great victory. Woman suffrage is not alone for women, or to enable us to secure certain readjustments of law. It is for our country, which cannot exist half enfranchised and half irresponsible, half democracy and half a feudalism; half of it privileged to shirk or exercise its civic rights, and half denied aught but the burden of those rights. Women need the franchise if only to make their influence, of which we hear so much, effective, but more than they need the ballot, this nation needs the active devotion of its women to trans.m.u.te to golden fulfillment its leaden life; it needs, it must have all that we can give it, your life and mine; if it is to go forward, its sons and daughters must go forward--together!"

There was generous applause, and the two young men followed Miss Holland, and she presented Dr. Earl and was about to introduce his brother, when Miss Renner held out both hands to him.

"Hast thou found me, O mine enemy," she cried. "I'm awfully glad to see you, Frank. I was much minded to tell how you helped me get my dove bill through, but I feared they might hold you responsible for the defeat of the eight-hour law and turn and rend you."

"You promised never to reveal any of my good deeds," he answered. "Keep it out of the papers, Miss Holland. I can't afford to lose prestige as the exponent of the Mammon of Unrighteousness."

"Unfortunately, he is a great G.o.d with legislatures, East as well as West," answered Miss Holland, and then they all went out together.

CHAPTER XII

A TUBERCULAR KNEE AND A WORRIED SURGEON

Dr. Earl found his hands uncommonly full for the next few weeks. What with the endless detail attendant upon the arrangements for his new offices, and the perfection of his equipment, it seemed as if there were not enough hours in the day to meet all the calls upon him. Leonora looked aggrieved, and Hilda complained loudly that he had deserted them.