Evelyn Sharp

“ In the black spot of our constituency, however, these familiar difficulties scarcely seemed to exist for the open-air speaker, least of all the preliminary difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment our wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that stood for no party cry and for no party candidate, the audience came in rushes from all the alleys and dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two minutes one looked down upon a swaying mass of tattered and slatternly humanity that would have been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been less than human. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His voice travelled to [13] 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. ”

“ Encouraged by this quaint process of exhaustion to regard herself as an orator, the woman who had never been to a political meeting till she went to be thrown out of one, walked across the market-place to shake hands with the Middle Ages on a spot where men and women were made to die, centuries ago, for having been born too soon. ”

“ 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." ”

“ After that, it was easy to laugh and go ahead in a world that could always be counted upon to feed the most unsatisfied sense of humour. Otherwise, for the first half-hour or so, I doubt if we should have felt acutely conscious of anything but the traffic. Glorious as it may seem to the imaginative to suffer for a cause, one finds it difficult, when carrying sandwich-boards in its service, to detach from this distant and problematic reward the more immediate prospect of being run down from behind by a skidding motor-omnibus. ”

“ It doesn't matter what you say," she added consolingly, as she went towards two approaching women with outstretched hand and an ingratiating smile.
"Ah! ce sont les suffragettes!" exclaimed one of these unexpectedly. "Nous sommes des suffragistes françaises, nous aussi! Vive le féminisme!"
"Oh, how perfectly delightful!" said the English suffragist, beaming on them. "Do stop and listen. Nous allons avoir un—oh, bother! What is 'meeting'?—un rendez-vous, mesdames!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?" [14] said the woman's husband breezily. "Thirteen women and six thousand police, you know!" ”

“ Personally, standing as I believe for one of the few big things that still have to be fought for because they are not yet established in fact, I have always felt inclined to look upon these lesser attempts to improve humanity as fads. But I find from standing at the edge of the pavement that the hall-mark of every crank is a firm belief that all the other cranks are only faddists. ”

“ Any element of amateurishness at once adds an air of detachment to the paper seller and keeps the world from really making friends with her. But as soon as the public grasps that she is a fixture, just as much so as the seller of pink football news or of green politics, except that her stock is renewed by a purple, white [69] and green pony trap instead of by a panting boy on a bicycle, then every kind of crank who is out for an airing thinks she is there to listen to his views on every conceivable subject, from food reform up to simplicitarianism. ”

“ I said. "That is why it is waste of time as well as impertinence to convert the person who is your friend. And as your mother is one of the few mothers I know who is also a friend to her children, I strongly advise you not to——"
"That is all very well," again objected Penelope; "but mother has not yet discovered that she is converted to the particular manifestation of eternal truth known as Votes for Women; and, to put it plainly, you can't go on living with some one who thinks all suffragists are hooligans, when you are one of the hooligans." ”

“ Most people, the even tenor of whose lives had not been ruffled by the call of a great cause, might have thought the day an unpropitious one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even for the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women in the Albert Hall. A strong south-west wind, a real London drizzle overhead and thick mud underfoot, could hardly be held to offer striking attractions to a band of naturally timorous ladies, girt about with sandwich-boards, preparing to issue forth in procession into the conventional streets of Kensington. ”

“ It became increasingly difficult to sustain our professional pose as the shop grew more popular, because kindly old ladies insisted on coming in to ask if we took our meals regularly, and to beg us not to fall down the spiral staircase, which looked perilous, I suppose, to any one who saw us for the first time steering a tea-tray down its ramifications, but always seemed to us pleasantly emblematic of our mounting aspirations. ”

“ 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 made [122] by 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. ”

“ Dissension in the Home
"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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ People who have done with the conventions of conduct are not anxious to know what is to become of the baby and the washing 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any crowd loves a fighter, and this one howled with delight. The lady in the French hat noticed that listening women, who had hitherto shown no open approval of what was said, nodded furtively and caught their breath when the speaker fired up in defence of women.
"Why, they go to prison because they like it, don't they?" observed the amused man who answered to the name of Jack. He had not intended this for an audible interruption, but nothing escaped the ear of the woman on the sugar-box. ”

“ When our local committee determined, in the words of the minutes book, to open a shop and offices in the local main street, "for the dissemination of suffrage literature," we made up our minds that we would not be amateur shopkeepers. The success of our venture, we argued solemnly, depended on convincing the neighbourhood that we meant to be taken as seriously as any other tradesman in the street. Unfortunately, in saying this, we reckoned without our customer; for, if you attempt to be taken seriously as a shopkeeper, the one error to be avoided is that of taking the customer seriously. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So her pitch becomes a common meeting-ground for cranks.
If it be true that the character of an age is to be found in the character of its cranks, the period we are passing through will present extraordinary difficulties to the chronicler of the future. That is the worst of living in an age when most of the big things have been established in theory, though some still remain to be established in fact. It was quite easy to be a crank with distinction when people tortured you for saying the world was round. ”

“ The customer who was most destructive of our peace was the kind of amiable person who, having completed an infinitesimal purchase, stayed to chat, monopolizing the one shop chair and barricading a diminutive counter against anybody else who might really want to buy something. We greatly preferred the flippant jester who, attracted by our ingenuous notice inviting people to come in and ask for what they did not see in the window, would sometimes put his head in at the door to ask facetiously for a vote ”

“ Standing there beside her, in God's rain that knew no respect of persons, I was no longer a client out of whom another penny might with tact be wheedled; I was just a boon companion, bent like herself on wheedling that penny from [43] a miserly public that eternally hurried by. ”

“ 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 she [111] was married. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Creepers are unhealthy things; they shut out light and air and spoil the window architecture. As Penelope says, [116] 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. ”

“ Why don't they cook the old man's dinner? Why don't they——?"
"This gentleman evidently thinks it is question time," struck in the real speaker with undisturbed composure. "Perhaps, when he reaches the age that will entitle him to use a vote, he will know more about the procedure of a political meeting——"
"Well, you ain't got a vote yourself, anyhow!" said the incensed youth, turning round amid the laughter of the crowd to face the woman on the sugar-box, which, of course, was exactly what she wanted him to do. ”

“ 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. ”