Rebel women.
by Evelyn Sharp.
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 pa.s.sionless eyes was threading her way through the straggling cl.u.s.ters 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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. Pa.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 compa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sionless 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."