Rebel women Part 6

"Your wife will cook it before she starts," was the ready rejoinder.

"Or, better still, she can cook it overnight, and you can bring it with you and eat it in the Park----"

"What price roast pork and greens in Hyde Park?" demanded a sporting-looking gentleman in a terrific waistcoat.

"It won't hurt you to have cold pork and salad just for once," said the resourceful speaker. "Only think how the children will love a picnic, and a picnic like ours, too, with eighty women-speakers at the end of it! You know how dull picnics generally are when there is nothing more to eat----"

"Eighty of 'em! How about Holloway?" jeered the man in the waistcoat.

She turned on him swiftly. "If you had your vote taken from you to-morrow, wouldn't you have the pluck to go to prison to get it back?"

she asked, suddenly in deadly earnest.

Any crowd loves a fighter, and this one howled with delight. The lady in the French hat noticed that listening women, who had hitherto shown no open approval of what was said, nodded furtively and caught their breath when the speaker fired up in defence of women.

"Why, they go to prison because they like it, don't they?" observed the amused man who answered to the name of Jack. He had not intended this for an audible interruption, but nothing escaped the ear of the woman on the sugar-box.

"If you think a woman's ordinary life outside prison is as dreary as all that, don't you think it's time you gave her the power to improve her conditions, so that she needn't go to Holloway for a pleasant change?"

she shot back at him, hot with scorn; and again listening women flushed with nervous pleasure. "Some of our comrades are coming out of prison next Sat.u.r.day," the speaker went on rapidly; "and if you want to give them a welcome, as I know you do"--here she paused to allow time for yells of derision and references to skilly--"come and walk in our procession from Holloway gates."

"What! And be taken for gaol-birds too? Not much!" roared the man of sporting appearance.

"We'll come, miss; we'll be there!" suddenly called the woman with the bundle; and curiously enough, the crowd respected that and stopped jeering. But the speaker of a hundred open-air meetings, knowing her crowd better than it knew itself, saw that it had had enough, and called for questions. These were swiftly disposed of, being princ.i.p.ally of the wash-tub order, already answered in her speech; and observing serenely that she concluded everybody was now converted, the Suffragette came down from her perch.

She and her companion were instantly swallowed up in the jostling, chattering crowd, and the well-dressed woman appealed to Jack.

"Do help them to get out of this," she said, clutching anxiously at his arm. "They'll be crushed to death, I know they will!"

"Eh, what? My dear girl, they're much better able to take care of themselves than I am," observed Jack tranquilly. "Besides, they're not being crushed to death. You couldn't crush a Suffragette if you tried."

A sudden swirl of the stream swept them face to face with the two suffragists, who, still distributing handbills to right and left of them as they came, were composedly wedging a way for themselves through the dispersing people.

"I--I think you're splendid; and so does Jack!" cried their new supporter, flinging mere accuracy to the winds. "And I'm coming to Holloway Gates on Sat.u.r.day and to Hyde Park on Sunday--and so is Jack!"

"Eh what?" said Jack mildly.

VII

The Crank of all the Ages

VOTES FOR WOMEN, price one penny!

Articles by Annie Kenney, Mrs. Lawrence, Christabel, Other Suffragettes as well.

Men and women, come and buy-- As you pa.s.s and hear the cry-- VOTES FOR WOMEN! here we sell Articles by Christabel, Mrs. Lawrence, Annie Kenney-- VOTES FOR WOMEN, price one penny!

(New Street Cries, 1909.)

I never knew until I became a regular newspaper seller, one day in every week, how many people there are in the world bent on reforming it. You do not discover this so long as you merely sell papers in a spasmodic fashion, appearing on fine days at the edge of the pavement with a bundle of _Votes for Women_ under your arm, and going off to tea as soon as these are sold out. Any element of amateurishness at once adds an air of detachment to the paper seller and keeps the world from really making friends with her. But as soon as the public grasps that she is a fixture, just as much so as the seller of pink football news or of green politics, except that her stock is renewed by a purple, white and green pony trap instead of by a panting boy on a bicycle, then every kind of crank who is out for an airing thinks she is there to listen to his views on every conceivable subject, from food reform up to simplicitarianism.

You divide the world into three kinds of people, roughly speaking, when you sell papers as a professional and not as an amateur. There is the person who wants to buy a paper. There is the person who wants to know where the nearest tea-shop is, or which omnibus goes to the Circus, or whether you have seen any one with pink wings--the last being a reference to millinery and not to aviation. This person really makes one feel like a professional newsboy at a street corner. Lastly, there is the crank. The crank does not want to buy a paper, or to seek information; he merely wants to talk. He leaves the ordinary newsvendor in peace, recognizing that he is there merely for the purpose of selling news, whereas the seller of suffrage papers represents an attempt to reform the world as well. So her pitch becomes a common meeting-ground for cranks.

If it be true that the character of an age is to be found in the character of its cranks, the period we are pa.s.sing through will present extraordinary difficulties to the chronicler of the future. That is the worst of living in an age when most of the big things have been established in theory, though some still remain to be established in fact. It was quite easy to be a crank with distinction when people tortured you for saying the world was round. Now, you have to fall back on rational dress or Swedish exercises, or a whole host of minor movements to educate public opinion, and the real crank has a hard struggle for existence. Personally, standing as I believe for one of the few big things that still have to be fought for because they are not yet established in fact, I have always felt inclined to look upon these lesser attempts to improve humanity as fads. But I find from standing at the edge of the pavement that the hall-mark of every crank is a firm belief that all the other cranks are only faddists.

"No," said the tailor-made lady with firmness, as she prepared to pa.s.s on after reading my newsbill; "I have no time for fads. Before I married, when I earned my own living and paid rates and taxes and--and gas, I quite believed in this sort of thing. In fact, I never condemn any woman for wanting a vote."

She seemed to think that she deserved some praise for this evidence of self-restraint; and I said something inane about thinking of other people. She looked injured.

"Naturally, I do not mean that I lead an idle or a selfish life," she said. "Sport, that is my strong point--outdoor sport." I suppose she gathered that this did not quite fill my conception of human usefulness, for she added hastily--"And charity. Sport and charity--that is my life."

"You could indulge in both, selling our paper," I said. I concluded from the haste with which she went away that she did not agree with me.

"Ah!" said the elderly gentleman, who excused himself quite unnecessarily for buying a paper by explaining that it was for his wife, "who is quite foolish about your question,"--"the great mistake you ladies make is in not concentrating upon the educational test. You'd have thousands more on your side--myself, in fact--if you didn't want to flood the electorate with illiterate----"

An interruption occurred here, as the conductor of a waiting omnibus whistled to me for a paper and gave me his confidential opinion that we "were going to get it soon." The elderly gentleman turned triumphantly to the nearest newsboy.

"There! What did I say?" he demanded. "Socialists, every one of them!

Socialists!"

The newsboy shrugged his shoulders as he looked after him, then turned and gave me a wink out of pure friendliness. "Chronic, ain't it?" he remarked.

Everything, by the way, is "chronic" to my companions in the paper-selling trade; and I have some difficulty in not letting the expression, whatever it may mean, creep into my vocabulary.

The temperance reformer was less easy to rout because he was so desperately in earnest. It was no use pointing out to him that we were both travelling along the same road, really. His was the one and only possible scheme for regenerating the world, and the women who actually wanted the power to help him were wilfully obstructing his path.

"Local option!" he repeated several times with enthusiasm, describing circles on the pavement with his umbrella and effectually keeping all possible customers at a distance. "Local option! That's the ticket.

Votes for women, indeed!"

I said mildly that I supposed the reform of the goose was always the fad of the gander, and was sorry to see that he appeared hurt. "Of course,"

I added hurriedly, "I admit that I am the goose." He still looked offended, but the remark happily put him to flight after he had spoilt the newspaper trade at our corner for nearly ten minutes.

The most determined instance of the crank who sees all the rest of the world as faddists, or worse, is, I think, the animal faddist. Of course, we all advocate kindness to animals: but that is different from being a faddist about it. Still, I admit I am a little prejudice in the matter, owing to my encounter with the old lady, the toy dog, and the Kindness-to-pet-animals Christmas card.

She arrived breathless on the kerb at my side, having been placed there by a policeman, while criticism of the toy dog rained plentifully from a brewer's dray, a bicycle, and a taxicab, all of which were mixed up in the road through their n.o.ble endeavours not to annihilate the yapping creature. I came into the situation because I unwound its chain, which had tied itself round the old lady's skirts, and placed the thing on her ermine m.u.f.f. I received no acknowledgment of all this--first, because I picked him up by the head, seeing nothing else large enough to afford one a grip, and secondly, because she discovered I was a Suffragette.

"You ought to be locked up in a lunatic asylum," she said sternly.

For a moment I did not see the connection. Then I made allowances for her age and the peril she had just gone through and said--"Oh, no!" as soothingly as I could.

She put the dog with some difficulty inside her m.u.f.f, tail first, which I felt was an indignity it scarcely deserved, even if it had dislocated the traffic. "When the world is full of tortured and suffering dumb animals!" she went on, glaring at the contents bill that fluttered from my hand.

I wished energetically that dumbness had been one of the disabilities of the particular tortured animal she was still trying to back into a hot ermine m.u.f.f, for when I tried to say that my only objection to dumb animals was that they were never dumb, my remark was drowned in piercing yelps.

At the end of ten minutes I had learnt every detail of her private and special society for protecting pampered pets against those who pampered them--this, by the way, was not what she called it--and of the dear little children who paid their pennies weekly, and of the Christmas card to advertise the cause, that she had designed herself. The Christmas card was extricated from the ermine m.u.f.f, with no inconsiderable ingenuity, for the toy dog, making a wild dash for liberty, very nearly emerged with it; and my criticism was condescendingly invited. It is not easy to give an intelligent opinion on a drawing of a cat, a dog, a donkey, a parrot, a tadpole, a pony, a pigeon, and a newt; and I found I had said quite the wrong thing when I murmured that it was very pretty.

Prettiness, I was told sternly, was not its object. I looked again, and was fortunately inspired to detect that she had not included a rabbit.

She thought she might squeeze in the rabbit between the Newfoundland dog and the newt; and after that I forced my own goods upon her in a determined manner until she went.

It is sometimes helpful to remind yourself, if you are the crank who stands at a street corner selling papers for a cause, that cranks are the salt of the earth. But, as Henry Harland once wrote in a frivolous moment--"_Il faut souffrir pour etre sel._"