Produced by Suzanne Shell, Carol Spence, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) Rebel Women BY EVELYN SHARP NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMX Copyright, 1910 BY JOHN LANE COMPANY Some of these sketches have appeared in the _Manchester Guardian_, the _Daily Chronicle_, and _Votes for Women_. Contents Page I. The Women at the Gate 7 II. To Prison while the Sun Shines 20 III. Shaking Hands with the Middle Ages 27 IV. Filling the War Chest 41 V. The Conversion of Penelope's Mother 51 VI. At a Street Corner 59 VII. The Crank of all the Ages 68 VIII. Patrolling the Gutter 75 IX. The Black Spot of the Constituency 83 X. "Votes for Women--Forward!" 92 XI. The Person who cannot Escape 101 XII. The Daughter who Stays at Home 110 XIII. The Game that wasn't Cricket 118 XIV. Dissension in the Home 123 Rebel Women I The Women at the Gate "Funny, isn't it?" said the young man on the top of the omnibus. "No," said the young woman from whom he appeared to expect an answer, "I don't think it is funny." "Take care," said the young man's friend, nudging him, "perhaps she's one of them!" Everybody within hearing laughed, except the woman, who did not seem to be aware that they were talking about her. She was on her feet, steadying herself by grasping the back of the seat in front of her, and her eyes, non-committal in their lack of expression, were bent on the roaring, restless crowd that surged backwards and forwards in the Square below, where progress was gradually becoming an impossibility due to the stream of traffic struggling towards Whitehall. The thing she wanted to find was not down there, among the slipping horses, the swaying men and women, the moving lines of policemen; nor did it lurk in those denser blocks of humanity that marked a spot, here and there, where some resolute, battered woman was setting her face towards the gate of St. Stephen's; nor was the thing she sought to be found behind that locked gate of liberty where those in possession, stronger far in the convention of centuries than locks or bars could make them, stood in their well-bred security, immeasurably shocked at the scene before them and most regrettably shaken, as some of them were heard to murmur, in a lifelong devotion to the women's cause. The searching gaze of the woman on the omnibus wandered for an instant from all this, away to Westminster Bridge and the blue distance of Lambeth, where darting lamps, like will-o'-the-wisps come to town, added a touch of magic relief to the dinginess of night. Then she came back again to the sharp realism of the foreground and found no will-o'-the-wisps there, only the lights of London shining on a picture she should remember to the end of her life. It did not matter, for the thing beyond it all that she wanted to be sure of, shone through rain and mud alike. "Lookin' for a friend of yours, p'raps?" said a not unfriendly woman with a baby, who was also standing up to obtain a more comprehensive view of what was going on below. "No," was the answer again, "I am looking at something that isn't exactly there; at least----" "If I was you, miss," interrupted the facetious youth, with a wink at his companion, "I should chuck looking for what ain't there, and----" She turned and smiled at him unexpectedly. "Perhaps you are right," she said. "And yet, if I didn't hope to find what isn't there, I couldn't go through with what I have to do to-night." The amazed stare of the young man covered her, as she went swiftly down the steps of the omnibus and disappeared in the crowd. "Balmy, the whole lot of 'em!" commented the conductor briefly. The woman with the passionless eyes was threading her way through the straggling clusters of people that fringed the great crowd where it thinned out towards Broad Sanctuary. A girl wearing the militant tricolour in her hat, brushed against her, whispered, "Ten been taken, they say; they're knocking them about terribly to-night!" and passed noiselessly away. The first woman went on, as though she had not heard. A roar of voices and a sudden sway of the throng that pinned her against some railings at the bottom of Victoria Street, announced the eleventh arrest. A friendly artisan in working clothes swung her up till she stood beside him on the stone coping, and told her to "ketch on." She caught on, and recovered her breath laboriously. The woman, who had been arrested after being turned back from the doors of the House repeatedly for two successive hours, was swept past in the custody of an inspector, who had at last put a period to the mental and physical torment that a pickpocket would have been spared. A swirling mass of people, at once interested and puzzled, sympathetic and uncomprehending, was swept along with her and round her. In her eyes was the same unemotional, detached look that filled the gaze of the woman clinging to the railings. It was the only remarkable thing about her; otherwise, she was just an ordinary workaday woman, rather drab-looking, undistinguished by charm or attraction, as these things are generally understood. "Now then, please, every one who wants a vote must keep clear of the traffic. Pass along the footway, ladies, if you please; there's no votes to be had in the middle of the roadway," said the jocular voice of the mounted constable, who was backing his horse gently and insistently into the pushing, struggling throng. The jesting tone was an added humiliation; and women in the crowd, trying to see the last of their comrade and to let her know that they were near her then, were beaten back, hot with helpless anger. The mounted officer came relentlessly on, successfully sweeping the pavement clear of the people whom he was exhorting with so much official reasonableness not to invade the roadway. He paused once to salute and to avoid two men, who, having piloted a lady through the backwash of the torrent set in motion by the plunging horse, were now hoisting her into a place of safety just beyond the spot where the artisan and the other woman held on to the railings. "Isn't it terrible to see women going on like this?" lamented the lady breathlessly. "And they say some of them are quite nice--like us, I mean." The artisan, who, with his neighbour, had managed to evade the devastating advance of the mounted policeman, suddenly put his hand to his mouth and emitted a hoarse cheer. "Bravo, little 'un!" he roared. "Stick to it! Votes for women, I say! Votes for women!" The crowd, friendly to the point of admiring a struggle against fearful odds which they yet allowed to proceed without their help, took up the words with enthusiasm; and the mud-bespattered woman went away to the haven of the police station with her war-cry ringing in her ears. The man who had led the cheer turned to the woman beside him, as though to justify his impulse. "It's their pluck," he said. "If the unemployed had half as much, they'd have knocked sense into this Government long ago!" A couple of yards away, the lady was still lamenting what she saw in a plaintive and disturbed tone. Unconsciously, she was putting herself on the defensive. "I shouldn't blame them," she maintained, "if they did something really violent, like--like throwing bombs and things. I could understand that. But all this--all this silly business of trying to get into the House of Commons, when they know beforehand that they can't possibly do it--oh, it's so sordid and loathsome! Did you see that woman's hair, and the way her hat was bashed in, and the mud on her nose? Ugh!" "You can't have all the honour and glory of war, and expect to keep your hair tidy too," observed one of the men, slightly amused. "War!" scoffed his wife. "There's none of the glory of war in this." Her glance ranged, as the other woman's had done, over the dull black stream of humanity rolling by at her feet, over the wet and shining pavements, casting back their myriad distorted reflections in which street lamps looked like grinning figures of mockery--over the whole drear picture of London at its worst. She saw only what she saw, and she shuddered with distaste as another mounted officer came sidling through the crowd, pursuing another hunted rebel woman, who gave way only inch by inch, watching her opportunity to face once more towards the locked gate of liberty. Evidently, she had not yet given sufficient proof of her unalterable purpose to have earned the mercy of arrest; and a ring of compassionate men formed round her as a body-guard, to allow her a chance of collecting her forces. A reinforcement of mounted police at once bore down upon the danger spot, and by the time these had worked slowly through the throng, the woman and her supporters had gone, and a new crowd had taken the place of the former one. "Oh, there's none of the glory of war in that!" cried the woman again, a tremble in her voice. "There is never any glory in war--at least, not where the war is," said her second companion, speaking for the first time. His voice travelled to the ear of the other woman, still clinging to the railings with the artisan. She glanced round at him swiftly, and as swiftly let him see that she did not mean to be recognized; and he went on talking as if he had not seen her turn round. "This is the kind of thing you get on a bigger scale in war," he said, in a half-jesting tone, as if ashamed of seeming serious. "Same mud and slush, same grit, same cowardice, same stupidity and beastliness all round. The women here are fighting for something big; that's the only difference. Oh, there's another, of course; they're taking all the kicks themselves and giving none of 'em back. I suppose it has to be that way round when you're fighting for your souls and not for your bodies." "I didn't know you felt like that about it," said the woman, staring at him curiously. "Oh, but of course you can't mean that real war is anything like this wretched scuffle of women and police!" "Oh, yes," returned the other, in the same tone of gentle raillery. "Don't you remember Monsieur Bergeret? He was perfectly right. There is no separate art of war, because in war you merely practise the arts of peace rather badly, such as baking and washing, and cooking and digging, and travelling about. On the spot it is a wretched scuffle; and the side that wins is the side that succeeds in making the other side believe it to be invincible. When the women can do that, they've won." "They don't look like doing it to-night, do they?" said the woman's husband breezily. "Thirteen women and six thousand police, you know!" "Exactly. That proves it," retorted the man, who had fought in real wars. "They wouldn't bring out six thousand police to arrest thirteen men, even if they all threw bombs, as your wife here would like to see." "The police are not there only to arrest the women----" "That's the whole point," was the prompt reply. "You've got to smash an idea as well as an army in every war, still more in every revolution, which is always fought exclusively round an idea. If thirteen women batter at the gates of the House of Commons, you don't smash the idea by arresting the thirteen women, which could be done in five minutes. So you bring out six thousand police to see if that will do it. That is what lies behind the mud and the slush--the idea you can't smash." A man reeled along the pavement and lurched up against them. "Women in trousers! What's the country coming to?" he babbled; and bystanders laughed hysterically. "Come along; let's get out of this," said the woman's husband hurriedly; and the trio went off in the direction of the hotel. The woman with the passionless eyes looked after them. "He sees what we see," she murmured. "Seems he's been in the army, active service, too," remarked the artisan in a sociable manner. "I like the way he conversed, myself." "He understands, that is all," explained his companion. "He sees what it all means--all this, I mean, that the ordinary person calls a failure because we don't succeed in getting into the House. Do you remember, in 'Agamemnon'--have you read 'Agamemnon'?" It did not strike her as strange that she should be clasping iron railings in Westminster, late on a wet evening, talking to a working-man about Greek tragedy. The new world she was treading to-night, in which things that mattered were given their true proportions, and important scruples of a lifetime dwindled to nothingness, gave her a fresh and a whimsical insight into everything that happened; and the odd companion that chance had flung her, half an hour ago, became quite easily the friend she wanted at the most friendless moment she had ever known. The man, without sharing her reasons for a display of unusual perception, seemed equally unaware of any strangeness in the situation. "No, miss, I haven't read it," he answered. "That's Greek mythology, isn't it? I never learnt to speak Greek." "Nor I," she told him; "but you can get it translated into English prose. It reminds me always of our demonstrations in Parliament Square, because there is a chorus in it of stupid old men, councillors, they are, I think, who never understand what is going on, however plainly it is put to them. When Cassandra prophesies that Agamemnon is going to be murdered--as we warn the Prime Minister when we are coming to see him--they pretend not to see what she is driving at, because if they did, they would have to do something. And then, when her prophecy comes true and he is murdered--of course, the analogy ends here, because we are not out to murder anybody, only to make the Prime Minister hear our demands--they run about wringing their hands and complaining; but nobody does anything to stop it. It really is rather like the evasions of the Home Office when people ask questions in Parliament about the prison treatment of the Suffragettes, isn't it?" "Seems so," agreed her new friend, affably. "And then," continued the woman, scorn rising in her voice, "when Clytaemnestra comes out of the house and explains why she has murdered her husband, they find plenty to say because there is a woman to be blamed, though they never blamed Agamemnon for doing far worse things to her. That is the way the magistrate and the daily papers will talk to-morrow, when our women are brought up in the police court." "That's it! Always put all the blame on the women," said the artisan, grasping what he could of her strange discourse. Big Ben tolled out ten strokes, and his companion, catching her breath, looked with sudden apprehension at the moving, throbbing block of people, now grown so immense that the police, giving up the attempt to keep the road clear, were merely concerned in driving back the throng on four sides and preserving an open space round the cluster of buildings known to a liberty-loving nation as the People's House. The gentlemen, who still stood in interested groups behind the barred gates of it, found the prospect less entertaining now that the action had been removed beyond the range of easy vision; and some of the bolder ones ventured out into the hollow square, formed by an unbroken line of constables, who were standing shoulder to shoulder, backed by mounted men who made little raids from time to time on the crowd behind, now fast becoming a very ugly one. Every possible precaution was being taken to avoid the chance of annoyance to any one who might still wish to preserve a decorous faith in the principle of women's liberty. Meanwhile, somewhere in that shouting, hustling, surging mass of humanity, as the woman onlooker knew full well, was the twelfth member of the women's deputation that had been broken up by the police, two hours ago, before it could reach the doors of the House; and knowing that her turn had come now, she pictured that twelfth woman beating against a barrier that had been set up against them both ever since the world grew civilized. There was not a friend near, when she nodded to the artisan and slipped down from her temporary resting-place. The respectable and sympathetic portion of the crowd was cut off from her, away up towards Whitehall, whither it had followed the twelfth woman. On this side of Parliament Square all the idlers, all the coarse-tongued reprobates of the slums of Westminster, never far distant from any London crowd, were herded together in a stupid, pitiless, ignorant mob. The slough of mud underfoot added the last sickening touch to a scene that for the flash of an instant made her heart fail. "St. James's Park is the nearest station, miss," said the man, giving her a helping hand. "Don't advise you to try the Bridge; might find it a bit rough getting across." She smiled back at him from the kerbstone, where she stood hovering a second or two on the fringe of the tumult and confusion. Her moment's hesitation was gone, and the sure look had come back to her eyes. "I am not going home," she told him. "I am the thirteenth woman, you see." She left the artisan staring at the spot near the edge of the pavement where the crowd had opened and swallowed her up. "And she so well-informed too!" he murmured. "I don't like to think of it--I don't like to think of it!" * * * * * Shortly after midnight two men paused, talking, under the shadow of Westminster Abbey, and watched a patrol of mounted police that ambled at a leisurely pace across the deserted Square. The light in the Clock Tower was out. Thirteen women, granted a few hours' freedom in return for a word of honour, had gone to their homes, proudly conscious of having once more vindicated the invincibility of their cause; and some five or six hundred gentlemen had been able to issue in safety from the stronghold of liberty, which they had once more proved to themselves to be impregnable. And on the morrow the prisoners of war would again pay the price of the victory that both sides thought they had won. "If that is like real war too," said one of the men to the other, who had just made these observations aloud, "how does anybody ever know which side has won?" "By looking to see which side pays the price of victory," answered the man who had fought in real wars. II To Prison while the Sun Shines Once, when I went to Holloway Gaol to visit a friend who had been sent there by a puzzled Government, the wardress who led me across the echoing stone yard was inspired to make a little pleasant conversation. "It's pretty here in summer," she remarked sombrely. At the time it was natural, perhaps, to credit her with a grim sense of humour; but a morning spent not long afterwards in a London police court suggested another explanation. You cannot sit in a police court and watch while men and women pass out into captivity, without realizing how many there are of us who go through the world snatching desperately at the air for some of the colour of life. I think my wardress-guide would scarcely have burst out with her involuntary remark had not some one come in from the outside to remind her that she lived in a grey semblance of a world, full of people who had tried to take a short cut to happiness and managed to get lost on the way. It was her instinctive human defence of a system that thinks to cure a desire for sunshine by shutting it out. All the people I saw convicted in the police court that morning went to prison while the sun shone; for it was one of those irrepressible summer days that even London smoke cannot succeed in dimming. The brilliance of it had touched the official soul of the constable who guarded the door; and the little crowd on the pavement, clamouring with or without justification for admittance, was at least being handled with wit and good humour. "Only those under remand, if you please!" remonstrated the doorkeeper politely, placing on one side the little woman who was waving a visiting-card at him. "Press, did you say, madam? Pressing to get in, I should call it, wouldn't you? Well, well, I can't say what might happen presently if you care to wait on the chance. Those under remand only. Yes, yes, to be sure! If you were let out on bail the previous evening, you're under remand; but you're not a prisoner yet, or you wouldn't be out here, would you now? Pass inside, please. The other lady is your mother? Some of you ladies can show a lot of mothers to-day, it seems to me. Right along the footway, ladies, if you please. Those under remand only!" A man with a blue paper in his hand made a path with some difficulty through the crowd of waiting women who continued to throng the pavement with courageous patience. He was admitted without question, but wore the air of a man who felt that his natural prerogative as a frequenter of police courts was being infringed. Certainly the constable who guarded the door took far less interest in him than in the ladies on remand; and he was received without any wit at all. After him came the gentlemen of the press, who were also passed in without comment; and seeing this, the lady with the visiting-card resumed her plea. "Oh, come along," said the indulgent constable; and she found herself at last inside, confronted by more constables and an inspector. They were all smiling. She dived in her bag for credentials, but was instantly waved aside with fresh humour. "We don't ask any questions, and it's best to give no answers," she was told pleasantly, as they took her across an empty ante-room that seemed unnecessarily large, into a crowded court that was certainly unnecessarily small. It was all very still; the wit and the clamour and the sunshine outside seemed suddenly very far away. Admitting freely that tradition and fact are at variance in most countries, one felt that the little judgment hall, with its want of space, of sunlight, of air and sound and all the things that matter, was strangely at war with the accepted notion of the publicity of British justice. The British public was there, it is true--a dozen strong, perhaps, very self-conscious, and eaten up with pride at having succeeded in getting past the constable at the door. But it was a distinctly exclusive, not to say private, sort of public. One forgot all this, however, when the magistrate came in and began to hear the cases. There were a good many, and they were heard with extraordinary rapidity. I suppose the offenders knew beforehand what they were charged with--an advantage they sometimes had over the magistrate when he mixed up the charge sheets. But the British public, jammed together on the one bench reserved for it, could only gather occasionally why this or that person was fined or sent to prison or remanded. One thing could be clearly deduced from the progress of that heart-breaking procession of human failures, as they passed, generally in hopeless silence, from the greyness of the police court to the more complete greyness beyond. They were all people who had snatched desperately at the air for some of the colour of life, and had succumbed helplessly before they found it. No court of justice could help them. You could not expect a magistrate, faced with something like forty cases, to stop and consider the terrible monotony of existence that had driven the little scullery-maid to be "drunk and disorderly," or the poor clerk to steal his employer's money, thinking to steal his happiness with it; or the lad with the jolly fearless face to beg in the streets because he was "out of work"--at fifteen!--or the boy, whose eyes were swollen with crying, to be so unmanageable that his father had to bring him to a place where no child should be, at an age when, in happier circumstances, he would be just starting for Eton with a prospect before him of unlimited opportunities for "ragging."[A] The magistrate was not unkind; nobody was unkind. All the prisoners were scrupulously asked if they had anything to say, if they would like to call a witness. Anything to say! You might as well try to discharge a mountain torrent through a bath tap. As for witnesses, a bewildered woman, convicted of drunkenness because she had been found lying unconscious on the pavement, could not be expected under the circumstances to have secured a witness to prove her contention that she was merely faint. One by one, they all shook their heads mutely, and went away to prison while the sun shone. [A] Since the above was written children's courts have been established. Then the remand prisoners, the women who had thronged the doorstep in the early morning, who were there to answer for their rebellious manner of demanding a human and a political right, were brought into the dock by ones and twos; and there crept a change, a subtle change, into the musty atmosphere of ages. The court was still bathed in its queer half light. There was the same feeling in it of spectral unreality. You knew even more certainly than before that the machinery of the little judgment hall was entirely inadequate to deal with the prisoners in the dock. But the hopelessness of the whole thing was gone. These were not people whose spirit had been driven out of them by monotony and bad luck, as it had been driven out of the derelicts who stood in the dock before them. These were not people who were going to give in before they had won from life what they demanded from it. It may be a perilous business to hunt down the colour of life for other people; but it is a less hopeless kind of job than hunting it down for yourself. The great British public, represented by the handful of spectators who had evaded the censorship of the constable at the door, might, without cudgelling its brains unduly, have found some connection between the dreary convictions it had just witnessed, between the clumsy if kindly handling of habitual offenders, and this passage through the dock of imperturbably serene young women who, by the grace of God and the aid of a good cause, did not belong to the criminal classes. It might even have discovered that the one set of offenders had brought the other after it, into a police court on a summer morning. There was the same rapidity in hearing the cases, the same courteous farce of asking for questions that could only be answered outside the police court, and then, perhaps, only once in a hundred years or so. And there was the same unimaginative treatment of those who thought it worth while to accept the invitation to speak. "Have you anything to say?" came the regulation enquiry, hallowed by centuries of official belief in the innocence of unconvicted prisoners who yet felt their cases to be prejudged. Then, as the woman in the dock showed every indication of having a great deal to say, this would be followed up with a hasty "Yes, yes; but I have nothing to do with that. I am here to administer the law as it stands." So the law was administered as it stood; and the colour of life still flickered elusive beyond the grasp of all of us, as thirteen more offenders, a rebel woman every one of them, went away to prison while the sun shone. III Shaking Hands with the Middle Ages "Going to be a good meeting, don't you think?" chatted one of the men wearing a steward's button to a woman dressed in black, who sat in the front row of the little block of seats reserved for ladies, just below the platform. She gave an indifferent glance round the hall. "Yes," she acquiesced; "I suppose it is. I've never been to a political meeting before." "Really?" said the steward blandly. "Quite an experience for you, then, with a Cabinet Minister coming!" He hurried away, unaware of the touch of condescension that had jarred indescribably, and spoke in an eager undertone to a large stout gentleman who was inspecting tickets at the ladies' entrance. "It's all right," he said officiously. "I've just been talking to her. She isn't one of them." The stout gentleman looked over his shoulder. "Who? That one next my wife? Oh, no! She's not their sort. Besides, they all wear green or purple, or both. I'm up to their dodges by this time--just had to turn away quite a nice little girl in a green hat----" "My sister!" observed the other. "Oh, it don't matter; I let her in by the side door, and it won't do her any harm. They've got so out of hand, some of these canvassers, since the general election." The large steward observed with an indulgent smile that one must make allowances. He did not say for what or for whom, but his meaning seemed to be clear to the other steward. "The eternal feminine, eh?" he remarked with a knowing nod; and all the men standing round laughed immoderately. Under cover of this exhibition of humour, a girl in grey, with a fur cap and muff, was allowed to pass in without any special scrutiny. She moved very deliberately along the front chairs, which were now filled, stood for an instant facing the audience while she selected her seat, then made her way to one in the middle of a row. "Votes for women!" piped a wit in the gallery, reproducing the popular impression of the feminine voice; and the audience, strung up to the point of snatching at any outlet for emotion, rocked with mirth. The girl in grey joined in the laughter. "Every one seems very jumpy to-night," she observed to her neighbour, a lady in tight black satin who wore the badge of some Women's Federation. "I was actually taken for a Suffragette in the market-place just now." "Were you, now?" returned the lady, sociably. "No wonder they're a trifle apprehensive after the way those dreadful creatures went on at the Corn Exchange, last week. You were there, perhaps?" The girl in grey said she was there, and the Federation woman proceeded to converse genially. "Thought I'd seen your face somewhere," she said. "A splendid gathering, that would have been a glorious triumph for the Party, if it hadn't been for those----" She paused for a word, and found it with satisfaction--"females. Females," she repeated distinctly. "You really can't call them anything else." "I suppose you can't," said the girl demurely. The sparkle lit up her eyes again. "Our minister called them bipeds, in the pulpit, last Sunday," she added. "And so they are!" cried the lady in tight black satin. "So they are." "They are," agreed the girl in grey. In the front row of chairs, speculation was rife as to the possible presence of Suffragettes. The wife of the man at the door, a homely little woman with a pleasant face, was assuring everybody who cared to know that the thing was impossible. "They've drafted five hundred police into the town, I'm told; and my husband arranged for thirty extra stewards at the last minute, because the detectives wired that two of them had travelled down in the London train," she informed a circle of interested listeners. "Is that why there are so many men wearing little buttons?" asked the woman on her left. "I wondered if that was usual at political meetings." "I think I heard you say you'd never been to a meeting before, didn't I?" said her neighbour pleasantly. "Neither have I, and I wouldn't be wasting my time here to-night if it wasn't to please my husband. He likes to see women take an interest in politics; it was him that got our member a hundred and twenty-eight canvassers, last election. Oh, he thinks a lot of women, does my husband; says he hasn't any objection to their having a vote, either, only they ought to be ashamed of themselves for going on so about it. I don't hold with votes myself. It's only men that's got all that idle time on their hands, and if they're respectable married men, there's nothing else to occupy them but politics. But for a woman it's work, work, work, from her wedding-day till her funeral, and how can she find time for such nonsense? 'You've got to be made to think, Martha,' he says to me, coming here to-night. Think? If a woman stops to think, she don't stop with her husband, chances are. Of course, he don't believe me when I say that. He's too sure of me, that's where it is." "That is always where it is," said the woman in black, quietly. Her neighbour took out some knitting. "They laugh at me for bringing my knitting everywhere," she said. "I can't listen if I sit idle. Not that I want to listen," she concluded, as she settled down comfortably to the counting of stitches. The organ boomed out a jerky tune with elephantine lightness, and the audience vented its impatience in a lusty rendering of some song about England and liberty. The music was uninspiring, the words were clap-trap, and seemed to convey the singular idea that freedom had been invented and patented within recent years by a particular political party; but the indifferent expression of the woman in black changed and softened as the chorus rose and fell, and a tall man with a lean, humorous face, who stood looking at her, gave her a smile of understanding as the echoing sounds died away. He too was wearing a steward's button, she noticed. "There's a sort of barbaric splendour about that, isn't there?" he remarked. She felt none of the irritation that had been roused by the conversational advances of the other steward. It was a relief, indeed, to talk about something ordinary with a man who, she felt instinctively, knew how to give even ordinary things their true values. "It's the whole effect," she answered impulsively. "The cathedral outside, and this thirteenth-century interior, and then--this!" She looked round the magnificent old County Hall, and along the densely packed rows of restless modern men and women, and then back again, half whimsically, at the man who had spoken to her. "It is like reaching back to shake hands with the Middle Ages," she said. "To fight with the Middle Ages," he amended, and they both laughed. "You will find," he added, narrowing his eyes a little to look at her, "that the Middle Ages generally win, when we hold political meetings here in the provinces." There was a distant sound of cheering, and every one stiffened into attention. A stir ran round the hall; doors were closed with a good deal of noise, and the stewards, looking apprehensively at the little block of seats in the front, gradually closed round them until the gangways were entirely blocked at that end of the hall. One lady, who complained that she could not see the platform for stewards, instantly found herself placed under observation, and was only freed from suspicion when one of the gentlemen identified her as his aunt and pledged his word that she did not want a Parliamentary vote. Her neighbours congratulated her, but in accents that betrayed disappointment. The stir was followed by an expectant hush. The tall man looked steadily at the fingers of the woman in black, which locked and unlocked ceaselessly, though she leaned back in her chair with a vast assumption of unconcern. Those tireless, nervous hands told him what he wanted to know. The little officious steward was back at his side, whispering in his ear. He shook his head impatiently in reply. "I'm not going to stay," he said shortly. "You've got enough without me, even to deal with two Suffragettes who may not be here; and--well, it's a sickening business, and I'd sooner be out of it." He went, and all that was of her world seemed to the woman in black to go with him, as she looked after him, half disappointed, half contemptuous. Up to this point, the Middle Ages were certainly winning, she decided. The next quarter of an hour was the longest she had ever lived through. Afterwards, looking back, she remembered every detail of what took place, all the impressiveness of it, all the ironic absurdity. At the time, it felt like holding one's breath for interminable minutes while unfamiliar things went on somewhere in the thick of a mist, as things happen in a bad dream that just escapes the final incoherence of a nightmare. There was the roar that broke through the mist in a huge wave of sound, when the speakers walked on to the platform. Looking round at that swaying, white-faced multitude, mad with a hero-worship that lost not a jot of its attraction in her eyes because for her there was no hero, the woman in the front row, who had never been to a political meeting before, felt a moment's amazement at her own temerity in coming there, alone with one other, to defy an enthusiasm that had all the appearance of invincibility. Then the mist began to roll away, as somebody started the usual popular chorus. Translated in terms of jolly good-fellowship, hero-worship no longer appeared unconquerable. To the woman in black it seemed as though a thousand chairs scraped, a thousand throats grated, while the audience settled down, and the chairman delivered carefully prepared compliments, and the great man sorted slips of paper. Then two women, out of the hundred or so who had been admitted because they did not appear to want the historic liberties they came to applaud, clenched lips and hands as the roar burst out once more. The great man was on his feet, facing it with a gratified smile. To one at least of his audience that smile restored a courage that was in full flight the minute before. That he should strike so egregiously the wrong note, that a fine situation should be met with affability, argued something wrong with the situation or something wrong with the man. There was a false note, too, in that second roar, and it stopped so unexpectedly that one man was left cheering alone in a high, falsetto voice, provocative of instant derision. The fineness had gone out of the situation, and the immediate future of the woman in black, full as it was of unfamiliar fears, came back into some sort of a line with the present. The absolute silence that greeted the opening period of the ministerial oration had something abnormal in it. It was a silence that almost hurt. The smallest movement put stewards on the alert, made heads go round. The speaker felt the strain, shuffled his notes, stumbled once or twice. Yet, as the tension tightened to breaking-point, the woman in the front row knew the grip over her own nerves to be strengthening by minutes. In the mental commotion around her, she felt the battle already half won that she had come to fight. A man's voice, challenging a fact, caused a sensation of relief out of all proportion to the slightness of the interruption. Some wag said amiably, "Turn him out!" and there was laughter. The man, a well-known local Socialist, repeated his objection, and was supported this time by several other voices. There was quite a little stir, and the great man put out his hand benevolently. "No, no, gentlemen, let him stay!" he adjured the stewards, none of whom had shown one sign of wishing to do otherwise. "I stand here as the champion of free speech----" The rest of his sentence was drowned in a spontaneous outburst of applause, during which it was to be supposed that he dealt with the objection that had been raised, for when his words again became audible he had gone on to another point. His next interrupter was a Tariff Reformer, at whose expense he was courteously humorous. The emotional audience rewarded him with appreciative laughter, in which the Tariff Reformer joined good-humouredly. Speaker and listeners were rapidly coming into touch with one another. The great man, growing sure of his ground, made an eloquent appeal to the records of the past. The woman, who had never heard a politician speak before, leaned forward, hanging on every word. She felt strangely elated, strangely sure of herself, now. This man, believing all that about liberty, seeing all that behind the commonplace of democracy, should surely understand where others had failed even to tolerate. She felt disproportionately irritated by the click of knitting-needles, wondering how any woman could occupy mind and fingers with wool while eternal principles of justice were being thundered over her head. Then there came a pause in the thunder; and sight and sound were blotted out as she took the opportunity, rose to her feet, and stared up blindly at the spot where she knew the speaker to be standing. "Then give all that to the women," she said, in a voice she never seemed to have heard before. "If you think so much of justice and freedom for men, don't keep it any longer from the women." For a little space of time, a couple of seconds, probably, her eyes went on seeing nothing, and her ears drummed. She thought she had never known what it really meant to be alone until that moment. She was a woman who had known loneliness very early, when it came to her in an uncongenial nursery; she knew it still, in some houses, where everything was wrong, from the wall-papers to the people. But the meaning of utter isolation she had never learnt until that moment when clamour and confusion reigned around her and she saw and heard none of it. Then her senses were invaded by the sound and the look of it all; and to her own perplexity she found herself on the point of smiling. She thought of a hundred things, many of them irrelevant, as she tried in vain to walk to the door, and was obstructed at every step by stewards, who fought to get hold of some part of her in their curious method of restoring order and decorum. She wondered why the meeting was interrupting itself with such complete success, because one woman had made the mistake of thinking that the hero they had welcomed with bad music was a man who meant what he said. She thought of plays she had seen, dealing with the French Revolution, very bad plays most of them, she reminded herself as she was dragged this way and that by excited gentlemen, divided in opinion as to the door by which she was to be ejected. The sea of distorted faces past which they took her, the memory of the knitting-needles, even the intolerable smile of the great man as he made little jokes about her for the amusement of the platform--all this was very suggestive of the French Revolution, as portrayed in a badly written play. In all the plays she had seen, however, she did not remember that there had ever been women who cried a little, or men who sat silent and ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed to put a stop to what was going on. These two things appeared to be really happening, here and there among the audience; and she supposed this was why they hurt the most. She thought of the fastidiousness that made her a jest to her friends, as she felt her hat knocked sideways, looked down and saw the lace at her wrists dangling in rags. The blow that some one aimed at her, as she was dragged unresisting by, seemed a little thing in comparison with those torn strips of lace. Apparently, she was not alone in this eccentric adjustment of proportions; for the little fussy steward who, unbalanced to the point of irresponsibility, had struck the blow, was apologizing clumsily the next minute for treading on her skirt. He did not seem to understand when she told him gently that he was the man who had boasted of protecting women since the world began. Sky and stars looked very remote when at last by circuitous ways they brought her to a door and thrust her out into the night. A final push from the gentleman who liked to see women take an interest in politics, sent her stumbling down stone steps into a moonlit market-place. Everything looked very big, very still, out there, after the banality and the bad staging of the play from which she had just made her unrehearsed exit. In the clearness of thought that came to her, freed at last of hands that dragged at her and voices that coarsened to say things to her that she only now dimly began to comprehend, she knew what it was that had made women, ordinary quiet women like herself, into rebels who were out to fight for the right to protect themselves even against their protectors. A cheer greeted her from the farther side of the market-place, where the police kept back a crowd that had waited all the evening to see the two Suffragettes from London, and not, as the local paper afterwards somewhat flamboyantly put it, to "worship from afar the apostle of progress and democracy, almost as the servants of the gods might wait at Olympic banquets for crumbs to fall from the rich man's table." It was a friendly cheer, she noticed, though this did not matter much. Nothing seemed to matter much, just then, except that the black mass of the cathedral towered overhead and looked unshakable. A little altercation floated down to her from the top of the steps, as she leaned motionless against the worn stones of the old balustrade. "Martha! You of all people! Disgracing me like that! However did you come to be mistaken for one of those screaming----?" "Well, I couldn't stand the humbug of it, there! Talking about free speech and all that fal-lal nonsense, and then----! I wouldn't let my cat be treated as they treated her, all for nothing----" "Nothing, do you call it? Coming here on purpose to interrupt----" "So did that ranting Socialist you think so much of! So did Mr. What's-his-name with the husky voice. Why didn't they tear _them_ to pieces? Now, you listen to me, James. You brought me here to-night because you said I'd got to be made to think. Very well. I've been made. If you don't like it, you should ha' let me stay at home, as I wanted to." She stuffed a mass of dropped stitches into a torn work-bag, and went down the steps, her chin in the air. "If that's politics," she called back to him from the pavement, "then it's time women got the vote, if it's only to put a stop to them!" The girl in grey came round the corner of the building and joined her comrade, who still waited in the shadow cast by the cathedral. Her muff was gone, her cap lopped over one eye, and she held her hand to her throat where the collar had been wrenched at; but her eyes shone with their unalterable courage and spirit. She knew better than any one that every skirmish in the battle they were out to fight was always won before a single blow was struck. "All right, are you? You did splendidly, for a first shot! Come along to the Martyrs' Cross; the police say we may hold a meeting there. Oh, I know you never have, but you can come and try. Any _idiot_ can speak after being chucked out of a Cabinet Minister's meeting!" Encouraged by this quaint process of exhaustion to regard
{'title': 'Rebel women by Evelyn Sharp', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}