The lady of the manor seemed gently amused when I criticized the architecture of the cottage in which I had taken rooms, on the farther side of the village.
"It is not picturesque, like those that belong to us," she admitted; "and I always think it was a little unwise of Horace to let that piece of land for building purposes without having the plans submitted to us first. Still, the land was no good for anything else, not even for allotments; and if we had stipulated for gables and things of that sort we might have it still on our hands, a prey to taxation."
"I'm not thinking of the outside," I said; "it's the inside that matters when you have to live in a place. Nor am I thinking of myself, being in a position to leave whenever I find it impossible to endure the discomfort another minute——"
"My dear," said the lady of the manor, looking concerned, "is it as bad as that? I told you it was absurd to expect to find rooms in a primitive place like this——"
"I am not thinking of myself," I repeated, "butof poor Mr. and Mrs. Jim Bunce, who have to live there always because there isn't another cottage in the place, to say nothing of all the little Bunces, three boys and a little——"
"Oh!" she smiled, instantly reassured; "don't worry about them. They are not writing books, like their lodger. You must remember that the poor do not feel things, as you and I do; otherwise, they would appreciate nice houses when they get them. Only think how disheartened Horace and I were over those sweet gabled cottages we re-fronted for them down by the marsh——"
"Were those the ones you told me on no account to go to?" I interrupted, presuming unkindly on an old friendship.
I was told not to be unreasonable. "Naturally, I advised you to go to a newer place where the sanitation would be better," said my hostess. "I am sorry you don't like the Bunces' house, but that is your own fault for not coming here when you were invited."
"It seems to me rather more the fault of the man who built the Bunces' house," I represented, still unreasonably, as I gathered from her expression. "Have you seriously studied its front elevation? A child could draw it on a slate:—two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs; two windows upstairs, two windows downstairs; chimneys anywhere you like, but never in direct communication with fireplaces, as the lodger discovers when the fire is lighted in the sitting-room."
"It is no use trying to teach these people anything,"murmured the lady of the manor; "of course, damp wood, badly laid——"
"It reminds me," I continued, "of a dolls' house I once had, made out of a packing-case, neatly divided into four compartments, with a staircase jammed against one side of it and brought to an abrupt termination by the doorstep. The staircase is exactly like my dolls' house one, so steep that a false step lands one straight in the front garden with no conscious interval for falling. Mrs. Jim kindly provides against this contingency by leaving the front door always open," I added hastily, in deference to a look of renewed concern.
The lady of the manor agreed that there was something in what I said about the defects of modern architecture. "They do not build as they once did," she observed sententiously; "but then, the peasantry is not what it used to be. If the poor were still thrifty and hard-working, and did their own brewing and baking——"
"How can they?" I interposed. "You should see Mrs. Bunce's daily attempt to cook me a milk-pudding in an oven that never bakes anything equally on both sides, and sometimes refuses to bake at all. Oh! I never know what or why the poor are supposed to brew, but I do know that they cannot bake in the houses they are obliged to live in."
"My dear," was the reply I received to all this, "you have only yourself to blame for seeking impossibilities in a country cottage, when you might have settled down with your typewriter in the blueroom over the library, and had your meals regularly. I do not pity you in the least."
"I do not pity myself," I said. "The person to be pitied is the person who cannot escape, never the person who can."
As I walked back to the cottage that was built on the plan of a dolls' house, I wondered how long it would be before I availed myself of my privilege of escape. When I first became Mrs. Jim Bunce's lodger, a polite fiction existed that I was to dwell apart in the two front rooms, away from the family, a detached and superior position that might have made the writing of books a possibility. Unfortunately, this magnificent isolation had to yield to the force of numbers. There was only a sketchy, ill-fitting door between me and the kitchen, and I shared to some extent in the family joys and sorrows—they were generally sorrows—even when this was closed. More often it gave way before sudden pressure, and burst open to admit a crawling baby, followed by an assortment of small boys, pigs, chickens, puppies, and anything else that was young and undisciplined, brought up tempestuously at the rear by Mrs. Bunce and a broom. The writing of books did not thrive under these conditions, nor in the more strenuous moments that followed when the baby girl, bored and whimpering, had been carried off and set upon the flagstones under my window with nothing more thrilling to engage her attention than a piece of firewood.
The baby for once was not crying when I arrived back at my rooms, a state of grace that was accountedfor when I came upon her mother, who was laying my tea, with the baby tucked under one arm.
"She be that okkard I canna keep her quiet another way," was Mrs. Jim's simple explanation of her feat of skill.
It seemed an opportunity to make friends with the greatest disturber of my peace, and I rashly flirted with the baby until it was converted into the firmest of allies. Nothing, as it turned out, could have been more destructive of my future hopes of accomplishing work. If it was difficult to write when the baby cried, it became impossible when the baby laughed. I cannot recommend the game of "peep-bo" to any one who seriously wishes to combine business and recreation, though the baby's mother seemed to regard it habitually from this point of view. I have seen her play "peep-bo" while she mixed puddings, fed pigs or boys, washed clothes, scrubbed floors, buried a dead chicken, or parcelled out the weekly income into its amazing weekly budget. Perhaps she led a less chequered existence during the month I stayed with her; for without acquiring her agility in doing housework with the baby under one arm, I became an expert in distracting the baby's attention from an insistent tooth, and found this far harder work than any job I was ever paid for. I came to the conclusion that one does not know much about hard work until one has lived with somebody whose work is never done and never paid for.
This was particularly impressed upon me oneevening, when, having put the children to bed, fed every live thing that clamoured in the thickly populated back yard, cleared away her husband's supper and watched him start for the village club, Mrs. Bunce told me she was going to step across the road to do the week's washing for a sick neighbour. This little act of humanity, mentioned so casually as to divest it of the slightest taint of charity, kept her at the wash-tub till past midnight; and at five the next morning I heard her go downstairs to get her man's breakfast. After that, one felt it would be an immense relief to hear her grumble. She never did; and there were moments when I began to see points in the comfortable theory held by the lady of the manor with regard to the insensibility of "these people."
There was the day, for instance, when the baby, after crying fretfully for two hours, took to battering a saucepan lid with a tin spoon. I had borne its wails with set teeth, but this new and excruciating din took me into the back room, bent on remonstrance. I was met with a beatific smile from Mrs. Jim, who was peeling potatoes at the sink.
"Bless her heart!" she said placidly. "That be the first time as ever she's been quiet this morning!"
Finally came the day when stolid, undemonstrative Mrs. Bunce upset all theories as to the wonderful patience of the poor. The lady of the manor called with an annual invitation to a mothers' tea. It was Saturday afternoon, and the weekly house-cleaning was in full swing. The inopportune visitor,stepping over a heap of small boys whose tangled arms and legs suggested the interior of a fisherman's worm-can, came next upon the baby, who, in her week-end pinafore, was still hopefully sucking a spoon that had once held jam. The jam was distributed impartially over the baby's countenance, and no one could pretend she was looking her best, a criticism that might have been applied with equal truth to her mother, who was engaged in cleaning the kitchen flues. The general effect of Mrs. Bunce's home was certainly not that of the picturesque cottage interior so dear to the imagination of those who live remotely in manor-houses; and it was easy to see that this lady of the manor welcomed such a heaven-sent opportunity of being feudal, as she alluded in a perfectly kind and courteous manner to the disarranged condition of the kitchen stove and the mottled complexion of the baby.
She gave her invitation as a sort of consolation prize at the end, and went away without waiting to hear if it was accepted—as in the good old days, I suppose, when a refusal would have been met with theoubliette. I walked up the road with her, and learned how necessary it was to speak out now and then; otherwise these young mothers grew so careless and slovenly. The idea of slovenliness in connection with this particular young mother, who to my knowledge did the work of all the servants in the manor-house, in addition to being a wife and a mother and a dressmaker, left me incapable of speech.
Mrs. Jim Bunce, who had remained silent and immovable while the duty of the rich in speaking plainly to the poor was being fulfilled, sat playing with the baby on her lap when I returned to the house. There was just time to reflect that she had chosen a curious moment at which to suspend her weekly attack upon the flues, before she gave me a further surprise.
"You wouldna think as I didn't never want to have a girl when I had this one, would ye, miss?" she jerked out abruptly.
Still failing to understand that anything unusual was happening, I said something stupid and polite about a personal preference for little girls. She smiled across at me rather queerly as she started suddenly to her feet and caught the baby to her with a quick, passionate gesture that made it cry out with astonishment.
"It bain't that," she said roughly. "I didna want to bring another woman into it."
She stood there, looking at me fiercely, and the baby gave another whimper to express its outraged sense of the fitness of things. There was nothing heroic in the woman's figure; I think her hair was coming down, and there was soot about her, and her blouse wore a general air of bulgy disorder. At her feet lay strewn the symbols of inartistic toil, a hairless stove broom, a cracked saucer with a mess of blacklead in it, some indescribable bits of rag. Over it all hung the sickly smell of stale, unventilated air, mingled with the fumes of damp and smouldering wood. It was assuredly not thesetting for a great situation. Yet, as we stood there, looking at each other, in the little hush that fell upon us after that outburst of the rebel mother, I found myself wondering if I had ever known how great situations are made.
The baby struggled to escape from an embrace it did not understand; and, of course, the baby was right. Mrs. Jim Bunce recognized the call of convention, and acknowledged it by giving a sound scolding to those portions of her family that happened to be within reach. The flues were attacked afresh with tempestuous energy; the baby was left sobbing and neglected in one corner, the sprawling boys scurried to another. I was told as plainly as looks could tell that my place on a Saturday afternoon was not the home.
I decided that this was not the moment to explain to Mrs. Jim Bunce that an age was dawning in which women would be glad instead of afraid "to bring another woman into it."
"I suppose you think," Penelope threw at me with unnecessary vehemence, "that it is only the daughter who lives away from home who is really a rebel."
"On the contrary," I said, "most rebellion is bred in the home. Napoleon said——"
"Oh, I know what Napoleon said," interrupted Penelope. "At least, I know the kind of thing he must have said, if you want to quote it. Seriously, I don't think you know what it feels like to be the daughter who comes back to live at home, after being handicapped by a modern education. You see, the daughter has gone on, and the home hasn't. It isn't mother's fault, because she naturally thought she was fitting me for home life when she let me take a college course in housewifery. But what is the use of knowing all about the chemistry of cooking and the science of house-cleaning, if you have to apply it in a home that has stayed in the same place for a hundred years? Everything and everybody is against one, from the abominable kitchen-range to the cook who has been with mother ever since shewas married. You are going to say Napoleon again."
"I was going to say," was the cautious reply she received to this, "that the only victories which leave no regret are those that are gained over ignorance."
"Who said that?" demanded Penelope suspiciously.
"Napoleon," I admitted.
"Now that we have got rid of Napoleon," proceeded Penelope, coldly, "perhaps you will take some interest in—oh, what rubbish to say that about the victories that are gained over ignorance! All the victories you win at home are victories over ignorance, and they always leave regret behind, always, always! That is why it is much worse to win than to lose, when you fight at home, ever so much worse!"
"Having got rid of Napoleon," I said soothingly, "why do we not talk as though we had? Tell me what is wrong with your mother's house, from the college point of view."
Penelope stopped looking crestfallen, and chuckled. "It is all creepers outside and old sinks inside," she exclaimed concisely. "But when I said that to mother, she didn't understand one bit. She even seemed a little hurt. I didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings, naturally; I was trying to be funny. Do you think," she added irrelevantly, "that there was ever a time when my grandmother called my mother new-fangled?"
Knowing Penelope's mother, I said I thought this possible; knowing Penelope, I went on to suggestthat tact was an excellent substitute for humour in the home.
"I know," she sighed. "But it is only in books that the daughter of the house is a monument of tact and goes about her household duties, rattling an enormous bunch of keys and singing snatches of gay song. I don't know how you sing snatches of anything, but if it in the least resembles what Sarah sings when she is cleaning plate, I am very glad that only one of us does it. Of course, there is mother's old bunch of keys if I want to rattle as I walk; but as soon as I found out that only two of these opened anything, I took off those two and tied them together with a piece of ribbon. Even mother admitted the wisdom of suppressing five-and-twenty keys that belonged to no existing locks; but Cook regards my piece of unofficial key ribbon as one more proof of new-fangled ways. You don't know how difficult it is to be a daughter of the house with success when half the house knew you as a baby, and the other half wishes it had never known you and your new-fangled ways at all."
I asked for details of the new-fangled ways, and the unsuccessful daughter of the house cheered up slightly. "You should have seen their faces," she said, "when I drew up a time-table of meals for a whole week in advance, to save wasting Cook's time, and mine, every morning. Cook nearly gave notice."
To my objection that somebody's unusual appetite or the arrival of an unexpected guest would upset the time-table for the rest of the week, she retortedthat the same might be said of the time-table for any one day. "In both cases you would merely send out for something extra," she represented. "But I can't induce Cook to see that. She says it has never been done that way, and—oh, you know the rest! It's so queer, isn't it, that people think there is something abnormal and unfeminine about you if you get the housekeeping done in ten minutes instead of spreading it over the whole morning? Besides, when I set out to make a list of meals for a whole week, I choose a moment when I am feeling hungry and therefore inspired. That gives one a chance of inventing something new; but if I go into the kitchen directly I have eaten a large breakfast, the thought of more meals is intolerable, and I say 'Yes' to all the dull old dishes that Cook suggests."
The housework led to more rebellion, she proceeded to complain. "I did my best to persuade Sarah that if she would do the cleaning in a labour-saving sort of way she would probably have time to go for a walk every day before luncheon. That caused a revolution." Pressed for particulars of the revolution, Penelope chuckled again. "First, there was Cook, who said she had never been in any place where the housemaid went for a walk before luncheon; she further intimated that she could not stay in a place where the housemaid, etc., etc. Then there was mother, who said that, of course, she would not dream of interfering when I was doing everything so nicely, and all that; but if I went away at any time it would be very awkward for her, asshe couldn't have the maids going for walks at all hours of the day, with no one to see where they went. I pointed out to her that I should not dream of seeing where they went, if I were at home, also that they already went out on stated evenings, when it might be even more desirable and was certainly less possible to see where they went. Mother was just beginning to understand—mother is splendid, really, you know!—when Sarah spoiled everything by declaring that nothing would induce her to go out in the morning. She had never been expected to do such a thing in any other place, and she wasn't going to be put upon now. If she could have another evening instead and an extra Sunday—well, after that, all was sound and confusion, and mother issued from the struggle kind but triumphant. Since the plate-cleaning episode, which followed close upon the revolution, I have felt a mere flattened failure of a daughter."
The plate-cleaning episode had been caused by the attempted introduction of a cleaning-cloth, which dispensed with the necessity for plate powder or metal paste. "Sarah seemed quite pleased about it at first," said Penelope with a sigh. "She pretended to understand perfectly when I explained how nice it would be to have a clean and empty housemaid's cupboard, instead of having every shelf crowded with plate-brushes and bits of sodden rag and tins of sticky brass paste, and that horrid saucer full of plate powder that sprinkles pink dust over everything when it gets dry. You know thatkind of cupboard, don't you? Well, Sarah took to the idea like a lamb, and everything was going splendidly when mother caught her rubbing up the drawing-room candlesticks with my new patent cloth; and because I couldn't prove on the spur of the moment that the Sheffield plate would be none the worse for it fifty years hence, mother said she had the utmost confidence in my judgment, but she could not help feeling that the old way was safer. After that, I found Cook putting the cloth on the fire with the tongs, while Sarah hoped impressively at the top of her voice that she hadn't given herself blood-poisoning by using the nasty-smelling thing. So now all the old pink saucers and tins and things have reappeared in the housemaid's cupboard, and the plate-cleaning once more occupies the whole of the morning, and the brass occupies another and the stair-rods another, to say nothing of all the useless copper pots and pans on the kitchen chimney-piece that Cook never uses, but won't let me put away—oh, we are jogging along quite comfortably now in the dear old way of a hundred years ago!"
The sequel to this occurred about a week later, when I went to call on Penelope's mother and found ladders placed against the front of the house, and the trailing creepers of ages given over to the ministrations of the local nurseryman.
"Yes," said Penelope's mother, complacently, "they should have been cut before. Creepers are unhealthy things; they shut out light and air and spoil the window architecture. As Penelope says,the outside is the only part of any house on which the architect has expended either skill or attention, so it is a pity to hide it."
I said something polite down her ear-trumpet about new ways of looking at these things; and Penelope's mother smiled in agreement. "Some people do not know how to move with the times," she said. "Because a thing was done in a certain way a hundred years ago, let it be done in that way for ever and ever, they say. Yet, by bringing intelligence to bear upon the common things of every day, even toil may become a pleasure, and duty—well, duty almost ceases to exist. Of course, I am speaking figuratively," she added hastily, as if she felt she had gone too far.
Not knowing exactly how duty could be a figure of speech, or how, indeed, it could ever be anything else, I remained silent before this reincarnation of the earliest Victorian lady I know; and Penelope's mother took up the silver teapot—not, however, to pour out tea, but to point out to me its shining surface.
"In my housemaid's cupboard," she said proudly, "you will find no pieces of sodden rag, no tins of sticky brass paste, or that unpleasant saucer that sprinkles pink dust over everything within reach. We have banished all that in favour of—ah, Penelope, my dear, run and ask Sarah for one of my new cleaning-cloths, will you?"
In the doorway stood Penelope, mockery shining from her eyes.
"And you dare to tell me that tact is more usefulin the home than a sense of humour!" she cried, in a voice that thrilled with scorn.
"At all events," I retorted, "you must admit that Napoleon——"
Penelope went hastily to fetch her mother's new cleaning-cloth.
Down the alley where I happen to live, playtime draws a sharp line between the sexes. It is not so noticeable during working hours, when girls and boys, banded together by the common grievance of compulsory education, trot off to school almost as allies, even hand-in-hand in those cases where protection is sought from the little girl by the little boy who raced her into the world and lost—or won—by half a length. But when school is over sex antagonism, largely fostered by the parent, immediately sets in. Knowing the size of the average back yard in my neighbourhood, I have plenty of sympathy for the mother who wishes to keep it clear of children. But I always want to know why, in order to secure this privacy, she gives the boy a piece of bread-and-dripping and a ball, while the girl is given a piece of bread-and-dripping and a baby. And I have not yet decided which of the two toys is the more destructive of my peace.
Every evening during the summer, cricket is played just below my window in the hour precedingsunset. Cricket, as played in my alley, is less noisy than football, in which anything that comes handy as a substitute for the ball may be used, preferably an old, jagged salmon-tin. But cricket lasts longer, the nerves of the parents whose windows overlook the cricket ground being able to stand it better. As the best working hour of my day is destroyed equally by both, I have no feeling either way, except that the cricket, as showing a more masterly evasion of difficulties, appeals to me rather more. It is comparatively easy to achieve some resemblance to a game of football even in a narrow strip of pavement bordered by houses, where you can place one goal in the porch of the model dwellings at the blind end of the alley, and the other goal among the motor traffic at the street end. But first-class cricket is more difficult of attainment when the field is so crowded as to make it hard to decide which player out of three or four has caught you out, while your only chance of not being run out first ball is to take the wicket with you—always a possibility when the wicket is somebody's coat that has a way of getting mixed up with the batsman's feet.
In spite of obstacles, however, the cricket goes on every evening before sunset; and all the while, the little girl who tripped to school on such a gay basis of equality with her brother only a few hours back, sits on the doorstep minding the baby. I do not say that she actively objects to this; I only know with acute certainty that the baby objects to it, and for a long time I felt that it wouldbe at least interesting to see what would happen if the little girl were to stand up at the wicket for a change while her brother dealt with the baby.
And the other evening this did happen. A mother, making one of those sorties from the domestic stronghold, that in my alley always have the effect of bringing a look of guilt into the faces of the innocent, shouted something I did not hear, picked up the wicket, cuffed somebody's head with it and made him put it on, gave the baby to a brother, and sent his sister off to the oil-shop with a jar in one hand and a penny tightly clasped in the other. The interruption over, the scattered field re-formed automatically, somebody else's jacket was made into a mound, and cricket was resumed with the loss of one player, who, by the way, showed an astonishing talent for minding the baby.
Then the little girl came back from the oil-shop. I know not what spirit of revolt entered suddenly her small, subdued soul; perhaps the sight of a boy minding the baby suggested an upheaval of the universe that demanded her instant co-operation; perhaps she had no distinct idea in her mind beyond a wish to rebel. Whatever her reasons, there she stood,batin hand, waiting for the ball, while the baby crowed delightedly in the unusual embrace of a boy who, by all the laws of custom, was unsexing himself.
Another instant, and the air was rent with soundand fury. In front of the wicket stood the Spirit of Revolt, with tumbled hair and defiant eyes, breathless with much running, intoxicated with success; around her, an outraged cricket team, strong in the conventions of a lifetime, was protesting fiercely.
What had happened was quite simple. Grasping in an instant of time the only possible way of eluding the crowd of fielders in the narrow space, the little impromptu batswoman had done the obvious thing and struck the ball against the wall high over their heads, whence it bounded into the open street and got lost in the traffic. Then she ran till she could run no more. Why wasn't it fair? she wanted to know.
"'Cause it ain't—there!" was one illuminating reply.
"'Cause we don't never play that way," was another upon which she was quick to pounce.
"You never thought of it, that's why!" she retorted shrewdly.
She was desperately outnumbered. It was magnificent, but it wasn't cricket; moreover, her place was the doorstep, as she was speedily reminded when the door reopened and avenging motherhood once more swooped down upon the scene. A shake here, a push there—and the boy was back again at the wicket, while a weeping baby lay unheeded on the lap of a weeping Spirit of Revolt.
And the queer thing is that the innovation madeby the small batswoman in her one instant of wild rebellion has now been adopted by the team that plays cricket down my alley, every evening before sunset.
"I should be delighted to get up a meeting for you in my house," said the enthusiastic new recruit. "I always have said that women who paid rates and taxes—I beg your pardon? Oh, speakers—of course, speakers! Well, they must be the very best you have; people get so easily bored, don't they? And that's so bad for the cause." She reflected an instant, then fired off the names of three famous Suffragettes and was astonished to hear that the well-known leaders rarely had time to address drawing-room meetings.
"Isn't that rather a mistake?" she suggested, with the splendid effrontery of the new recruit. "It is so important to attract the leisured woman who won't go to public meetings for fear of being stuck with a hatpin. I'm really afraid my crowd won't come unless they see a name they know on the cards." Finding that this made no appeal to one who had heard it often before, she asked in a resigned tone if a window breaker would be available. "If I could put on the invitation card—'Why I broke a Prime Minister's window, by One who has done it,' they'd come in flocks. No, it wouldn't mattermuchif she had broken somebody else's window.As long as she had broken something—doyouspeak, by the way? Your voice is hardly strong enough, perhaps?"
The suffrage organiser, hoarse with having held two open-air meetings a day for the past week, admitted that she did speak sometimes. "I've been to prison too, if that is any good," she added cynically.
The cynicism was unperceived. "Have you? But that will be perfectly delightful! Can I promise them that you will speak about picking oakum and doing the treadmill? Oh, don't they? I thought all the Suffragettes picked oakum in Holloway, and that was why they—never mind! You've really eaten skilly, and that ought to fetch them, if anything will. The Chair? Oh, I really don't think Icould;—I should die of terror, I know I should. What should I have to do? Yes, I suppose I could tell them why I want a vote. I always have said that women who paid rates and taxes—yes, Wednesday at nine o'clock. You'll come and dine first, won't you? It's so good for the unconverted to meet you at dinner, just to see that you do know how to hold a knife and fork. My husband is so very much opposed; I like to do all I can in aquietway to show him that the Suffragettes arenotall—can't you really? Well, come as early as you can; I shall be simply dead with nervousness if I'm left unsupported. By the way, you'll wear your most feminine frock, won't you? I hope you don't mind my mentioning it, but it is so important to impress the leisured woman—tosay nothing of my husband! I am so anxious to avoid causing dissension in the home; I think that would bewrong, don't you? Of course, I shall let them all think that you may turn up in goloshes and spectacles; it will make the contrast all the greater, and that is so good for the cause!"
"Mrs. Fontenella wants to give a drawing-room meeting," said the organiser, when she returned to the office. "She seems to have a curious set of friends who look upon suffrage as a sort of music hall entertainment; so she wants me to speak because I have picked oakum in Holloway, and you, because you have broken something. I think she must be an Anti by birth."
"Oh, no," answered the woman who had broken something. "She is really a Suffragette by birth, and only an Anti by marriage. I am glad we have won her back again."
"Then why does she talk as if we were all mountebanks?" asked the other, unconvinced.
The breaker of Government plate glass shook her head slowly. "I don't know," she said. "I think, perhaps, it may be because she has lived eleven years with somebody from whom she is obliged to conceal what she really feels about things."
"She isn't obliged to conceal anything; nobody is!" cried the organiser, hotly. "If these people had the courage to show fight—"
"They have—when the fight is worth it," struck in the older woman. "Those are just the people whose courage is inexhaustible, when real courage is required. I don't know why it is so, unless itis that they haven't wasted it over things that don't matter, and so they have a reserve fund to draw upon for a great occasion. That's the best of a cause like ours—it furnishes them with the great occasion."
"Mrs. Fontenella's reserve fund must be colossal," said the organiser, still unconvinced.
The audience that was lured to Mrs. Fontenella's house on Wednesday evening by a prospect of meeting two eccentric females who had been to gaol—doubtless because they richly deserved it—was composed of the elements that usually go to make up such audiences. It was very rich, very idle, very limited; it was polite by education and rather insolent by nature; and, with the exception of one or two of the men, who nursed an academic belief in the woman's vote because they hoped that under masculine influence it might be used to strengthen the right political party, it was not interested in politics. The men were there because they thought it was a sporting idea of the most popular hostess in their set to pretend to be a Suffragette; and the women were there to show their disapproval of a shrieking minority, who, for the sake of notoriety, were rapidly destroying the ideal of womanhood that had been implanted in every Englishman's breast by his mother;—at least, those were the reasons they gave one another for being there, as they sat in rows on gilded upright chairs, waiting for the fun to begin. When it did begin, they experienced a distinct sensation of having been cheated of their entertainment.
It was not that they found it difficult to recognise the most popular hostess they knew in the apologetic lady who stood up, glittering with gems, against an expensive background of hothouse plants, and read out platitudes from a type-written paper in a high-pitched, jerky voice; though everything was wrong in that opening speech from the Chair. It was flippant without being funny; it threw up defences where it should have attacked; it jarred where it should have conciliated. One at least of the two women who shared the platform with her, chafing under the huge mistake of her speech, felt inclined to agree with the audience that the speaker was only pretending to be a Suffragette. It was not this that disappointed the audience, however. It had expected nothing else from one of its own set, who was obviously unfitted both by nature and upbringing to sustain a part that she had only assumed because it was something new—just as she might have hired a pianola or a gramophone when these two were novelties. But it was not fair to invite people to meet two hooligans who had fought with policemen, and then to confront them with two normal looking, normally dressed women, of whom it was impossible to believe anything that was not consistent with breeding and good form. Disappointment grew when the faltering little speech of the Chairman came to an end, and the younger of the two Suffragettes, with a fleeting glance at her notes, rose to her feet. A woman who had picked oakum and defied wardresses—their hostess had omitted no detail likely to attract her "crowd"—hadno right to a soft, humorous voice, or to an educated accent. Entertainment there was of a sort; for the most obdurate Anti-suffragist could scarcely have remained proof against the wit and good temper of the girl who stood there, undaunted by the atmosphere of opposition that filled the room, turning the laugh against her opponents with every point that she made. Still, it was not the kind of entertainment they had been led to expect, and a certain amount of discomfiture mingled with the laughter and the applause that she won by the time she sat down.
Then the older woman, the one who had broken windows, took her place. There was nothing conciliatory, nothing amusing in what she said. She did not raise a laugh once; she uttered no sort of appeal; she never so much as hinted at an apology for what she and other women like her had felt impelled to do. She made some of her listeners angry; some of them she moved deeply; others she greatly perplexed; but she left none of them precisely where they had been when she began to speak, and when she sat down there was hardly any applause. Nearly every man in the room was staring at his boots; the women played with their lace and their rings, avoiding one another's eyes. A few were horribly ashamed of having tears in theirs.
The Chairman did not rise for a moment or two. She was scribbling something rapidly on a piece of paper, which she twisted up and sent down the length of the brilliantly lighted room to a man who stood lounging carelessly in the doorway. He untwistedit with extreme deliberation, crushed it up in his hand when he had read it, and looked his wife straight in the eyes, across the backs of the waiting people in the chairs. She met his look for just two seconds before she stood up and cleared her throat.
The rows of people in the chairs stirred with a sensation of relief. Eloquence and wit, they knew, were not in the repertory of Mrs. Fontenella when she was posing as a Suffragette; but at least she could be counted upon not to make them feel uncomfortable. When she stood there silent, gripping the table with both hands and looking straight down the room, along the road that her twisted scrap of paper had taken to the man in the doorway, they began to think something was a little wrong.
Did she, realising that the last speaker had overstepped the limits of good taste, feel incapable of dealing with the situation? It was certainly a little awkward for her to continue to occupy the Chair, under the circumstances.
"Ask for questions," prompted the organiser who sat on her left; and she pushed the agenda paper towards her, thinking she was nervous and could think of nothing to say.
Mrs. Fontenella was not nervous. She glanced round at her prompter with a reassuring smile and brushed aside the agenda paper. Then she faced the crowd she had brought there under false pretences, and gave them the second shock they had received that evening.
"Friends," she said, in a voice that no longerfaltered or apologised, a voice that was pitched exactly right and held her listeners strangely, "the last speaker has told us that another deputation of women will try to reach the presence of the Prime Minister, next week. You know what that means—almost certain imprisonment for the women who go on that deputation, but also a certain chance for every one of us to do something towards winning a great reform. I am going on that deputation. Which of you will come with me?"
Those who managed furtively to look round at the man in the doorway, were extremely puzzled by the interested smile he wore.
"You were right about that woman, and I was utterly wrong," confessed the organiser, as she walked away from the house with the other speaker. "I do hope she won't have a bad time with that Anti husband of hers!"
"You never know," said her companion, who had seen the interested smile of the man in the doorway. "That's the blessed thing about marriage;—you never know."
"What!" exclaimed the younger woman. "Do you mean to say he is a Suffragette by birth, too?"
"No," was the reply. "I should say he was an Anti by birth; but I think he may be a Suffragette by marriage, though I doubt if he or his wife had found it out until to-night."
In a long and brilliantly lighted drawing-room, desolate with its rows of empty chairs, the popular hostess who was also a Suffragette stood alone withthe man whose smile had puzzled every one who saw it, half-an-hour ago, except the woman who had broken windows.
"It's simply magnificent of you," said his wife.
He took a walk round and moved some of the expensive hothouse plants. "I hate these things," he said. "Why do we have them? Let's open some more windows and get rid of the smell."
She laughed, and watched him go across to manipulate blinds and bolts. "You are always the same man I married, even when you are quite different, as you were this evening," she remarked, with equal inconsequence.
"You're not the same woman as the one I married!" he shot back at her.
"But I am!" she cried. "I am, I am! And that's the whole point!"
He looked round at her, the smile back in his face. "Perhaps it is," he said. "Perhaps it is. Pity we've both missed it for eleven years, isn't it?"
THE MARTYRDOM OF MANBY WINWOOD READE
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A Biographical Sketch of the Author and an Estimate of hisWork. Also Portrait Frontispiece
Some of the Topics:
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SOCIALISM AND SUCCESSSome Uninvited MessagesBY W. J. GHENT
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This is a book that will cause controversy, a book that hits hard at human foibles, a book that will win high praise and severe censure. No socialist or non-socialist can afford to miss the live argument and pithy suggestion contained in its pages.
BERNARD SHAWAS ARTIST-PHILOSOPHERBYRENEE M. DEACON
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*** A brief account of the Shavian philosophy, in which the main trend of Bernard Shaw's thought is clearly indicated, and his attitude toward life is revealed.
*** "Perhaps the best examination of Bernard Shaw that has been published in English."—Dundee Advertiser.
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