Rebel women Part 11

"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 gla.s.s 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; n.o.body 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 it is 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 plat.i.tudes 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 a.s.sumed 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 oak.u.m and defied wardresses--their hostess had omitted no detail likely to attract her "crowd"--had no 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 untwisted it 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 sc.r.a.p 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 circ.u.mstances.

"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 rea.s.suring 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 longer faltered 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 with the 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 END

THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN

BY WINWOOD READE

_Cloth. 12mo. $1.50 net. Postage 15 cents_

_A Biographical Sketch of the Author and an Estimate of his Work. Also Portrait Frontispiece_

Some of the Topics:

Egypt--Western Asia--The Greeks--The Macedonians--The Natural History of Religion--The Israelites--The Jews--The Character of Jesus--The Character of Mahomet--Ancient Europe--The Slave Trade--Abolition in Europe--Abolition in America--Animal Period of the Earth--The Future of the Human Race--The Religion of Reason and Love.

SOCIALISM AND SUCCESS

Some Uninvited Messages

BY W. J. GHENT

_$1.00 net. Postage 15 cents_

"Socialism and Success" bears a pertinent message "To the Seekers of Success," "To the Reformers," "To the Retainers," "To Some Socialists,"

"To Mr. John Smith, Workingman," and "To the Sceptics and Doubters."

Every reader will find food for thought in its keen a.n.a.lysis of motives, its fearless criticism, and its pointed suggestion. Although a socialist, Mr. Ghent is not blind to the faults and weaknesses of the socialist movement, and he states them frankly.

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 SHAW AS ARTIST-PHILOSOPHER