Part 8 (1/2)
”Don't look as though she'd been fed on skilly, do she?” was a sally that produced instant applause.
”Here, miss!” shouted a young hooligan, pus.h.i.+ng into prominence a good-looking girl whose open, laughing face might have belonged to any child of twenty in any sheltered home. ”She's been to 'Olloway; can she have a vote?”
”Not much!” roared the crowd.
Our militant member, distributing leaflets on the edge of the crowd, smiled on the girl as she went shuffling off. ”I've been to prison myself,” she said, by way of breaking the ice; ”what can you have done at your age to get there?”
The girl threw back her head with another laugh. ”Oh, a drop of beer and a few words with a copper!” was the easy reply.
After that, it was a simple matter to get into conversation, and other women, who were not laughing, gathered round to listen.
”You Suffragettes have made things in the 'jug' a lot better for us pore women,” said one, more intelligent-looking than the rest. ”They give us chiny mugs now, 'stead of them tins, and----”
”I 'ope as you'll git inter Parlyment, that I do!” chimed in another.
”Yuss! Good luck to you!” cried a chorus of voices.
They vented their new-found enthusiasm upon a bibulous gentleman, who was a.s.serting with drowsy monotony that he didn't want women to have votes, not he! He wanted them to love, honour, and obey----
”Stow it!” they broke in impatiently. ”Forgettin' your manners, ain't you?”
The woman in the lorry was telling them why she went to prison, two months ago. She soon had her audience well in hand, human points of contact not being far to seek in a crowd to whom it was at least unnecessary to explain that women did not go to gaol for fun. A pa.s.ser-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the const.i.tuency, stopped to make this hackneyed insinuation and was well hooted for his pains by a crowd that knew more than he did of the experiences described by the speaker. Even the drowsy sentimentalist, realizing, one might almost suppose, that his proper place was rather at a drawing-room meeting than at a street-corner one, went elsewhere in search of love and obedience; and the crowd of derelicts that remained, growing more numerous every minute, pressed closer and closer to the lorry till they swarmed up the wheels and over the sides and sat at the feet of the woman who had been where they had been, and suffered what they had suffered, for a cause they dimly began to understand because it appeared to be connected with prison and suffering. Even their primitive minds could receive an impression of the woman standing up above them, against the crude light of the street lamp, standing for something that was going to bring a little warmth and brilliance into a cold neutral world, the warmth and brilliance that they had somehow missed.
Emphatically, these people were not of the stuff that melodrama and novelettes are made of. They had never discovered what is sensationally called the romance of crime, and there was nothing splendid or attractive in the offences that had sent them to gaol. Some day or another, in a dull past, they had exchanged the dinginess of unemployment for the ingloriousness of petty crime, that was all.
A woman, bedraggled and dishevelled, strayed across from the public-house and stood for a moment gazing vacantly up at the trim little figure of the woman in the cart. She was past listening to anything that might be said.
”Shameless!” she commented, and drifted away again, unheeded. The adjustment of standards was bewildering; and one felt that here was another interrupter whose mental att.i.tude was that of the drawing-room and not of the street corner.
The speaker made an end and asked for questions. They did not come with any rapidity. People who have done with the conventions of conduct are not anxious to know what is to become of the baby and the was.h.i.+ng of the housewife who wants to cast a vote at a Parliamentary election. There was a pause; then the speaker declared the meeting closed. The meeting, however, declined to be closed. The crowd stood motionless, waiting for more; and they had it, when a real electioneer, wearing party colours and bristling with party commonplaces, stepped up to the fringe of the audience. He brought a breath of prosperous unreality with him, and when his objection, the usual apprehensive one about future women members of Parliament, was aptly answered from the lorry, the habitues of the place broke into noisy exultation.
”Nipped 'im in the bud, she has! Give it 'im agin, miss; give it 'im 'ot!”
As it happened, she had to give it to him again and again, he being one of those hecklers who are never nipped in the bud, but think that if they ask the same question often enough they will catch the speaker unawares in the end. Unable to do this, after failing to accept or indeed to comprehend the answer that was patiently repeated four times, the ingenuous heckler wanted to know if the lady did not think he could sufficiently safeguard her interests in Parliament, and went away feeling sure he had the best of it, but wondering slightly why she laughed so immoderately at his parting shaft.
The wagon moved slowly off, and the meeting reluctantly broke up. The woman who had been speaking looked down upon her slowly dispersing audience, and tried to draw conclusions.
”One feels at home with these people,” she said. ”I wonder why it is?”
”Society has broken down their barriers, and they haven't learnt to set up new ones,” suggested some one.
”'The saints and the sinners meet in the gaols,'” quoted our literary member, softly. ”Suffragettes forced to be sinners, and sinners who are not given a chance to be saints--oh, it's easy to see why we two should be fellow-creatures!”
The saints and the sinners, slouching back to their dens, pa.s.sed a similar verdict, if differently expressed, on the woman who had been speaking.
”Good old sport, that's what _I_ call the old gal!” cried a young fellow, challenging criticism in a threatening tone.
”Same 'ere,” returned the pretty girl-sinner, or saint, not laughing this time, as she looked after the flapping flag that had brought a streak of colour, for one hour of her turbulent existence, into the black spot of the const.i.tuency.
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