The Convert Part 28

'Just the right age to think about gettin' married,' shouted a pasty-faced youth.

'Haw! haw!'

Then a very penetrating voice screamed, 'Will you be mine?' and that started off several others. Though the interruptions did not anger nor in the least discompose this surprising young person in the cart--so far at least as could be seen--the audience looked in vain for her to give the notice to these that she had to other interruptions. It began to be plain that, ready as she was to take 'a straight ball' from anybody in the crowd, she discouraged impertinence by dint of an invincible deafness. If you wanted to get a rise out of Ernestine you had to talk about her 'bloomin' policy.' No hint in her of the cheap smartness that had wrecked the other speaker. In that highly original place for such manifestation, Ernestine offered all unconsciously a new lesson of the moral value that may lie in good-breeding. She won the loutish crowd to listen to her on her own terms.

'Both parties,' she was saying, 'have been glad enough to use women's help to get candidates elected. We've been quite intelligent enough to canva.s.s for them; we were intelligent enough to explain to the ignorant men----' She acknowledged the groans by saying, 'Of course there are none of that sort here, but elsewhere there are such things as ignorant men, and women by dozens and by scores are sent about to explain to them why they should vote this way or that. But as the chairman told you, any woman who does that kind of thing in the future is a very poor creature.

She deserves no sympathy when her candidate forgets his pledge and sneers at Womanhood in the House. If we put ourselves under men's feet we must _expect_ to be trodden on. We've come to think it's time women should give up the door-mat att.i.tude. That's why we've determined on a policy of independence. We see how well independence has worked for the Irish party--we see what a power in the House even the little Labour party is, with only thirty members. Some say those thirty Labour members lead the great Liberal majority by the nose----'

'Hear! hear!'

'Rot!'

They began to cheer Lothian Scott. Some one tossed Mr. Chamberlain's name into the air. Like a paper balloon it was kept afloat by vigorous puffings of the human breath. ''Ray fur Joe!' 'Three cheers for Joe!'--and it looked as if Ernestine had lost them.

'Listen!' She held out her hands for silence, but the tumult only grew.

'Just a moment. I want to tell you men--here's a friend of yours--he's a new-comer, but he looks just your kind! Give him a hearing.' She strained her voice to overtop the din. 'He's a _Liberal_.'

'Hooray!'

'Yes, I thought you'd listen to a Liberal. He's asking that old question, Why did we wait till the Liberals came in? Why didn't we worry the Conservatives when they were in power? The answer to that is that the Woman's Suffrage cause was then still in the stage of mild const.i.tutional propaganda. Women were still occupied in being ladylike and trying to get justice by deserving it. Now wait a moment.' She stemmed another torrent. 'Be quiet, while I tell you something. You men have taught us that women can get a great deal by coaxing, often far more than we deserve! But justice isn't one of the things that's ever got that way. Justice has to be fought for. Justice has to be won.'

Howls and uproar.

'You men----' (it began to be apparent that whenever the roaring got so loud that it threatened to drown her, she said, 'You men--' very loud, and then gave her voice a rest while the din died down that they might hear what else the irrepressible Ernestine had to say upon that absorbing topic). 'You men discovered years ago that you weren't going to get justice just by deserving it, or even by being men, so when you got tired of asking politely for the franchise, you took to smashing windows and burning down Custom Houses, and overturning Bishops'

carriages; while _we_, why, we haven't so much as upset a curate off a bicycle!'

Others might laugh, not Ernestine.

'You men,' she went on, 'got up riots in the streets--_real_ riots where people lost their lives. It may have to come to that with us. But the Government may as well know that if women's political freedom has to be bought with blood, we can pay that price, too.'

Above a volley of boos and groans she went on, 'But we are opposed to violence, and it will be our last resort. We are leaving none of the more civilized ways untried. We publish a great amount of literature--I hope you are all buying some of it--you can't understand our movement unless you do! We organize branch unions and we hire halls--we've got the Somerset Hall to-night, and we hope you'll all come and bring your friends. We have very interesting debates, and _we_ answer questions, politely!' she made her point to laughter. 'We don't leave any stone unturned. Because there are people who don't buy our literature, and who don't realize how interesting the Somerset Hall debates are, we go into the public places where the idle and the foolish, _like that man just over there!_--where they may point and laugh and make their poor little jokes. But let me tell you we never hold a meeting where we don't win friends to our cause. A lot of you who are jeering and interrupting now are going to be among our best friends. _All_ the intelligent ones are going to be on our side.'

Above the laughter, a rich groggy voice was heard, 'Them that's against yer are all drunk, miss' (hiccup). 'D--don't mind 'em!'

Ernestine just gave them time to appreciate that, and then went on--

'Men and women were never meant to fight except side by side. You've been told by one of the other speakers how the men suffer by the women more and more underselling them in the Labour market----'

'Don't need no tellin'.'

'b.l.o.o.d.y black-legs!'

'Do you know how that has come about? I'll tell you. It's come about through your keeping the women out of your Unions. You never would have done that if they'd had votes. You saw the important people ignored them. You thought it was safe for you to do the same. But I tell you it _isn't ever_ safe to ignore the women!'

High over the groans and laughter the voice went on, 'You men have got to realize that if our battle against the common enemy is to be won, you've got to bring the women into line.'

'What's to become of chivalry?'

'What _has_ become of chivalry?' she retorted; and no one seemed to have an answer ready, but the crowd fell silent, like people determined to puzzle out a conundrum.

'Don't you know that there are girls and women in this very city who are working early and late for rich men, and who are expected by those same employers to live on six shillings a week? Perhaps I'm wrong in saying the men expect the women to live on that. It may be they _know_ that no girl can--it may be the men know how that struggle ends. But do they care? Do _they_ bother about chivalry? Yet they and all of you are dreadfully exercised for fear having a vote would uns.e.x women. We are too delicate--women are such fragile flowers.' The little face was ablaze with scorn. 'I saw some of those fragile flowers last week--and I'll tell you where. Not a very good place for gardening. It was a back street in Liverpool. The "flowers"' (oh, the contempt with which she loaded the innocent word!)--'the flowers looked pretty dusty--but they weren't quite dead. I stood and looked at them! hundreds of worn women coming down steep stairs and pouring out into the street. What had they all been doing there in that--garden, I was going to say!--that big grimy building? They had been making cigars!--spending the best years of their lives, spending all their youth in that grim dirty street making cigars for men. Whose chivalry prevents that? Why were they coming out at that hour of the day? Because their poor little wages were going to be lowered, and with the courage of despair they were going on strike.

No chivalry prevents men from getting women at the very lowest possible wage--(I want you to notice the low wage is the main consideration in all this)--men get these women, that they say are so tender and delicate, to undertake the almost intolerable toil of the rope-walk.

They get women to make bricks. Girls are driven--when they are not driven to worse--they are driven to being lodging-house slaveys or over-worked scullions. _That's_ all right! Women are graciously permitted to sweat over other people's washing, when they should be caring for their own babies. In Birmingham'--she raised the clear voice and bent her flushed face over the crowd--'in Birmingham those same "fragile flowers" make bicycles to keep alive! At Cradley Heath we make chains. At the pit brows we sort coal. But a vote would soil our hands!

You may wear out women's lives in factories, you may sweat them in the slums, you may drive them to the streets. You _do_. But a vote would uns.e.x them.'

Her full throat choked. She pressed her clenched fist against her chest and seemed to admonish herself that emotion wasn't her line.

'If you are intelligent you know as well as I do that women are exploited the length and the breadth of the land. And yet you come talking about chivalry! Now, I'll just tell you men something for your future guidance.' She leaned far out over the crowd and won a watchful silence. '_That talk about chivalry makes women sick._' In the midst of the roar, she cried, 'Yes, they mayn't always show it, for women have had to learn to conceal their deepest feelings, but depend on it that's how they feel.'

Then, apparently thinking she'd been serious enough, 'There might be some sense in talking to us about chivalry if you paid our taxes for us,' she said; while the people recovered their spirits in roaring with delight at the coolness of that suggestion.

'If you forgave us our crimes because we are women! If you gave annuities to the eighty-two women out of every hundred in this country who are slaving to earn their bread--many of them having to provide for their children; some of them having to feed sick husbands or old parents. But chivalry doesn't carry you men as far as that! No! No further than the door! You'll hold that open for a lady and then expect her to grovel before such an exhibition of _chivalry_! We don't need it, thank you! We can open doors for ourselves.'

She had quite recovered her self-possession, and it looked, as she faced the wind and the raindrops, as if she were going to wind up in first-cla.s.s fighting form. The umbrellas went down before a gleam of returning sun. An aged woman in rusty black, who late in the proceedings had timidly adventured a little way into the crowd, stood there lost and wondering. She had peered about during the last part of Miss Blunt's speech with faded incredulous eyes, listened to a sentence or two, and then, turning with a pathetic little nervous laugh of apology, consulted the faces of the Lords of Creation. When the speaker was warned that a policeman had his eye on her, the little old woman's instant solicitude showed that the dauntless Suffragist had both touched and frightened her. She craned forward with a fluttering anxiety till she could see for herself. Yes! A stern-looking policeman coming slow and majestic through the crowd. Was he going to hale the girl off to Holloway? No; he came to a standstill near some rowdy boys, and he stared straight before him--herculean, impa.s.sive, the very image of conscious authority.

Whenever Ernestine said anything particularly dreadful, the old lady craned her neck to see how the policeman was taking it. When Ernestine fell to drubbing the Government, the old lady, in her agitation greatly daring, squeezed up a little nearer as if half of a mind to try to placate that august image of the Power that was being flouted. But it ended only in trembling and furtive watching, till Ernestine's reckless scorn at the idea of chivalry moved the ancient dame faintly to admonish the girl, as a nurse might speak to a wilful child. 'Dear! _Dear!_'--and then furtively trying to soothe the great policeman she twittered at his elbow, 'No! No! she don't mean it!'

When Ernestine declared that women could open doors for themselves, some one called out--

'When do you expect to be a K.C.?'

'Oh, quite soon,' she answered cheerfully, with her wind-blown hat rakishly over one ear, while the boys jeered.

'Well,' said the policeman, 'she's pawsed 'er law examination!' As some of the rowdiest boys, naturally surprised at this interjection, looked round, he rubbed it in. 'Did better than the men,' he a.s.sured them.

Was it possible that this dread myrmidon of the law was vaunting the prowess of the small rebel?

Miss Levering moved nearer. 'Is that so? Did I understand you----'

With a surly face he glanced round at her. Not for this lady's benefit had the admission been made.

'So they say!' he observed, with an a.s.sumption of indifference, quite other than the tone in which he had betrayed where his sympathies, in spite of himself, really were. Well, well, there were all kinds, even of people who looked so much alike as policemen.

Now the crowd, with him and Miss Levering as sole exceptions, were dissolved again in laughter. What had that girl been saying?

'Yes, we're spectres at the Liberal feast; and we're becoming inconveniently numerous. We've got friends everywhere. Up and down the country we go organizing----'

''Ow do you go--in a pram?' At which the crowd rocked with delight.

The only person who hadn't heard the sally, you would say, was the orator. On she went--

'Organizing branches and carrying forward the work of propaganda. You people in London stroll about with your hands in your pockets and your hats on the back of your heads, and with never a _notion_ of what's going on in the world that thinks and works. That's the world that's making the future. Some of you understand it so little you think all that we tell you is a joke--just as the governing cla.s.s used to laugh at the idea of a Labour Party in conservative England. While those people were laughing, the Labour men were at work. They talked and wrote; they lectured, and printed, and distributed, and organized, and one fine day there was a General Election! To everybody's astonishment, thirty Labour men were returned to Parliament! Just that same sort of thing is going on now among women. We have our people at work everywhere. And let me tell you, the most wonderful part of it all is to discover how little teaching we have to do. How _ready_ the women are, all over the three kingdoms.'

'Rot!'

'The women are against it.'

'Read the letters in the papers.'

'Why don't more women come to hear you if they're so in favour?'