THE outburst against feminine treachery had an effect upon Jenny's state of mind beyond the mere evoking of tears. These were followed by a general agitation of her point of view necessitating an outlet for her revived susceptibleness to emotion. A less sincere heart would have been caught on the rebound; but she and men were still mutually unattractive. The consequence of this renewed activity of spirit, in the aspect of its immediate cause, was paradoxical enough; for when Jenny thought she would try the pretensions of suffragism, no clear process of reasoning helped her to such a resolve, no formulated hostility to man. Whatever logic existed in the decision was fortuitous; nor did she at all perceive any absence of logic in throwing in her lot with treacherous woman.
Lilli Vergoe was proud of such a catechumen, and made haste to introduce her to the tall house in Mecklenburg Square, whose elm-shadowed rooms displayed the sober glories of the Women's Political, Social and Economic League. Something about the house reminded Jenny of her first visit to Madame Aldavini's School; but she found Miss Bailey less alarming than the dancing mistress as, rising from masses of letters and scarlet gladioli, she welcomed the candidate. Miss Bailey, the president of the League, was a tall, handsome woman, very unlike Jenny's conception of a suffragette. She had a regular profile, a thin, high-bridged nose, and clearly cut, determined lips. Her complexion was pale, her hair very brown and rich. Best of all Jenny liked her slim hands and the voice which, though marred by a slight huskiness due to public speaking, was full of quality and resonance. She was one of those women who, carrying in their presence a fine tranquillity at once kindly and ascetic, imbue the onlooker with their long and perceptive experience of humanity. She was in no sense homely or motherly; indeed, she wore about her the remoteness of the great. Yet whatever in her general appearance seemed of marble was vivified by clear hazel eyes into the reality of womanhood.
"And so you're going to join our club?" inquired Miss Bailey.
Jenny, although she had intended this first visit to be merely empirical, felt bound to commit herself to the affirmative.
"You'll soon know all about our objects."
"Oh, I've told her a lot already, Miss Bailey," declared Lilli with the eagerness of the trusted school-girl.
"That's right," said Miss Bailey, smiling. "Come along then, and I will enroll you, Miss——"
"Pearl," murmured Jenny, feeling as if her name had somehow slipped down and escaped sideways through her neck. Then with an effort clearing her throat, she added, "Jenny Pearl," blushing furiously at the confession of identity.
"Your address?"
"Better say 17 Hagworth Street, Islington. Only I'm not living there just now. Now I'm living 43 Stacpole Terrace, Camden Town."
"Have you a profession?"
"I'm on the stage."
"What a splendid profession, too—for a woman. Don't you think so?"
Jenny stared at this commendation of a state of life she had always imagined was distasteful to people like Miss Bailey.
"I don't know much about splendid, but I suppose it's all right," she agreed at last.
"Indeed it is. Are you at the Orient also?"
"Yes, you know, in the ballet," said Jenny very quickly, so that the president might not think she was trying to push herself unduly.
"I don't believe there's anything that gives more pleasure than good dancing. Dancing ought to be the expression of life's joy," said the older woman, gazing at the pigeon-holes full of docketed files, at the bookshelves stuffed with dry volumes of Ethics and Politics and Economics, as if half regretting she, too, was not in the Orient Ballet. "Dancing is the oldest art," she continued. "I like to think they danced the spring in long before calendars were made. Your subscription is half a crown a year."
Jenny produced the coin from her bag; and it said much for Miss Bailey's personality that the new member to adorn the action did not wink over her shoulder at Lilli.
"Thank you. Here's the badge. It's copied from an old Athenian medal. This is Pallas Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom."
"She isn't much to look at, is she?" commented Jenny.
"My dear child, that's the owl."
Jenny turned the medal over and contemplated the armed head. Then she put it carefully away in her purse, wondering if the badge would bring her luck.
"Now, I shall let Lilli show you round the club rooms, for I'm very busy this afternoon," said Miss Bailey in gentle dismissal.
The two girls left the study and set out to explore the rest of the house. Over the mantlepiece of the principal room Jenny saw Mona Lisa and drew back so quickly that she trod on Lilli's foot.
"I'm not going in there," she said.
"Why not? It's a nice room."
"I'm not going in. I don't want to," she repeated, without any explanation of her whim.
"All right. Let's go downstairs. We can have tea."
It was a fine afternoon towards the end of July, so the tea-room was empty. Jenny looked cautiously at all the pictures but none of them conjured up the past. There was a large photograph of the beautiful sad head of Jeanne d'Arc, but Jenny did not bother to read that it came originally from the church of St. Maurice in Orleans. There was a number of somewhat dreary engravings of famous pioneers of feminism like Mary Wolstonecraft, whose faces, she thought, would look better turned round to the wall. Below these hung several statistical maps showing the density of population in various London slums, with black splodges for criminal districts. Most of the furniture was of green fumed oak fretted with hearts, and the crockery that lived dustily on a shelf following the line of the frieze came from Hanley disguised in Flemish or Breton patterns, whose studied irregularity of design and roughness of workmanship was symbolic of much. In order, apparently, to accentuate the flimsiness of the green fumed oak, there were several mid-Victorian settees that, having faded in back rooms of Wimpole Street and Portman Square, were now exposed round the sides of their new abode in a succession of hillocks. On the wall by the door hung a framed tariff, on which poached eggs in every permutation of number and combination of additional delicacies figured most prominently. Here and there on tables not occupied with green teacups were scattered pamphlets, journals, and the literary propaganda of the feminine movement. The general atmosphere of the room was permeated by an odor of damp toast and the stale fumes of asthma cigarettes.
"What an unnatural smell," murmured Jenny.
"It's those asthma cigarettes," Lilli explained. "One of the members has got it very bad."
Jenny was glad to escape very soon after tea, and told her friend a second visit to Mecklenburg Square was not to be done.
"I used to think they was nice houses when I passed by the other side in that green 'bus going to Covent Garden, but I think they're very stuffy, and what wall-paper! More like blotting-paper."
However, one Saturday evening in August, as Jenny was leaving the theater, Lilli begged her to come and hear Miss Ragstead speak on the general aims of the movement, with particular attention to a proposed demonstration on the occasion of the re-opening of Parliament.
"When's the old crow going to speak?" Jenny inquired.
"To-morrow evening."
"On a Sunday?"
"Yes."
So, because there was nothing else to do and because nowadays Sunday was a long grim moping, a procession of pretty hours irrevocable, Jenny promised to accompany her friend.
It was a wet evening, and Bloomsbury seemed the wettest place in London as the two girls turned into the sparse lamplight of Mecklenburg Square and hurried along under the dank, fast-fading planes and elms. Inside the house, however, there was an air of energetic jollity owing to the arrival of several girl students from Oxford and Cambridge, who stumped in and out of the rooms, greeting each other with tales of Swiss mountains and comparisons of industry. In their strong, low-heeled boots they stumped about consumed by holiday sunshine and the acquisition of facts. With friendly smiles and fresh complexions, they talked enthusiastically to several young men, whose Adam's apples raced up and down their long necks, giving them the appearance of chickens swallowing maize very quickly.
"Talk about funny turns," whispered Jenny.
"They're all very clever," Miss Vergoe apologized, as she steered her intolerant friend past the group.
"Yes, I should say they ought to be clever, too. They look as though they were pecking each other's brains out."
Miss Bailey encountered them here.
"Why, this is capital," she said. "Miss Ragstead won't be long now. Let me introduce a dear young friend of mine, Miss Worrill."
"How are you?" Miss Worrill asked heartily.
She was a pleasant girl dressed in Harris tweed strongly odorous from the rain. Her hair might have been arranged to set off her features to greater advantage, and it was a pity her complexion was spoilt by a network of tiny purple veins which always attracted the concentration of those who talked to her. Jenny began to count them at once.
"Come to hear Connie Ragstead?" asked Miss Worrill. "Jolly good crowd for August," she went on, throwing a satisfied glance round the room. "Have you ever heard her?"
"No," Jenny replied, wondering why something in this girl's way of speaking reminded her of Maurice.
"You'll like her most awfully. I met her once at the Lady Maggie 'Gaudy.'"
"At the what?"
"Our Gaude at Lady Margaret's. Festive occasion and all that. I say, do you play hockey? I'm getting up a team to play at Wembley this winter."
"My friend and I are too busy," Miss Vergoe explained, looking nervously round at Jenny to see how she took the suggestion.
"But one can always find time for 'ecker.'"
"I could find time to fly kites. Only I don't want to," said Jenny dangerously. "You see, I'm on the stage."
"I'm frightfully keen on the stage," Miss Worrill volunteered. "I believe it could be such a force. I thought of acting myself once—you know, in real plays, not musical comedy, of course. A friend of mine was in the 'Ecclesiasuzæ' at the Afternoon Theater. She wore a rather jolly vermilion tunic and had bare legs. Absolutely realistic."
Jenny now began to giggle, and whispered "Cocoanut knees" to Lilli, who, notwithstanding the importance of the occasion, also began to giggle. So Miss Worrill, presumably shy of their want of sensibility, retired.
Soon, when the rumor of the speaker's arrival ran round the assemblage, a general move was made in the direction of the large room on the first floor. Jenny, as she entered with the stream, saw Leonardo's sinister portrait and tried to retreat; but there were too many eager listeners in the way, and she had to sit down and prepare to endure the damnable smile of La Gioconda that seemed directed to the very corner where she was sitting.
During the earlier part of Miss Ragstead's address, Jenny's attention was chiefly occupied by her neighbors. She thought that never before was such a collection of freaks gathered together. Close beside her, dressed in a green djibbeh embroidered with daisies of terra-cotta silk, was a tallowy woman who from time to time let several books slide from her lap on to the floor—a piece of carelessness which always provoked the audience to a lullaby of protest. In front of this lady were two Hindu students with flowing orange ties; and just beyond her, in black velvet, was a tall woman with a flat, pallid face, who gnawed alternately her nails and the extinguished end of a cigarette. Then came a group of girl students, all very much alike, all full of cocoa and the binomial theorem; while the rest of the audience was made up of typists, clerks, civil servants, copper-workers, palmists, nurses, Americans and poets, all lending their ears to the speaker's words as in the Zoological Gardens elephants, swaying gently, offer their trunks for buns. Gradually, however, from this hotchpotch of types, the personality of the speaker detached itself and was able to impress Jenny's attention. Gradually, as she grew tired of watching the audience, she began to watch Miss Ragstead and, after a critical appreciation of her countenance, to make an attempt to comprehend the intention of the discourse.
Miss Constance Ragstead was a woman of about forty, possessing much of the remote and chastened beauty that was evident in Miss Bailey. She, too, was pale, not unhealthily, but with the impression of having lived long in a rarefied atmosphere. Virginity has its fires, and Miss Ragstead was an inheritor of the spirit which animated Saint Theresa and Mary Magdalene of Pazzi. Her social schemes were crowned with aureoles, her plans were lapped by tenuous gold flames. She was a mystic of humanity, one who from the contemplation of mortality in its individual aspirations, had arrived at the acknowledgment of man as a perfect idea and was able from his virtues to create her theogony. This woman's presence implied the purification of ceaseless effort. Activity as expressed by her was a sacrament. It conveyed the isolated solemnity of a force that does not depend for its reality on human conceptions or practical altruism. Her activity was a moral radium never consumed by the expenditure of its energy; it was dynamic whether it effected little or much. When she recalled the factory in which for a year she had worked as a hand, the enterprise was hallowed with the romance of a saint's pilgrimage. When she spoke of her green garden, where June had healed the hearts of many young women, she seemed like an eremite in whose consolation was absolute peace. Her voice was modulated with those half-tones that thrushes ring upon the evening air; and since they were produced suddenly with no hint of premeditation, the feeblest listener was at some time inevitably waylaid.
It was not astonishing Jenny should find herself caught in the melodious twilight of the oration, should find that the craning audience was less important than the speaker. She came to believe that Mona Lisa's smile was kindlier. She began to take in some of the rhetoric of the peroration:
"I wish I could persuade you that, if our cause is a worthy cause, it must exist and endure through the sanity of its adherents. It must never depend upon the trivial eccentricities of a few. I want to see the average woman fired with zeal to make the best of herself. I do not want us to be contemptuously put aside as exceptions. Nor am I anxious to recruit our strength from the discontented, the disappointed and the disillusioned. Let us do away with the reproach that we voice a minority's opinion. Let us preserve the grace and magic of womanhood, so that with the spiritual power of virginity, the physical grandeur of motherhood, in a devoted phalanx huge as the army of Darius, we may achieve our purpose."
Here the speaker paused and, as if afraid she might be deemed to offer counsels of pusillanimity, broke forth more passionately:
"But because I wish to see our ambition succeed through the aggregate of dignified opinion, I do not want to discredit or seek to dishearten the advance-guard. Let us who represent the van of an army so mighty as to be mute and inexpressive, let us, not thinking ourselves martyrs nor displaying like Amazons our severed breasts, let us resolve to endure ignominy and contempt, slander, disgrace and imprisonment. Some day men will speak well of us; some day the shrieking sisterhood will be forgotten, and those leaders of women whom to-day we alone venerate, will be venerated by all. Pay no heed to that subtle propaganda of passivity. Reject the lily-white counsels of moderation. Remember that without visible audible agitation this phlegmatic people cannot be roused. Therefore I call on you who murmur your agreement to join the great march on Westminster. I implore you to be brave, to despise calumny, to be careless of abuse and, because you believe you are in the right, to alarm once more this blind and stolid mass of public opinion with the contingency of your ultimate triumph."
The speaker sat down, lost in the haze which shrouds a room full of people deeply wrought by eloquence and emotion. There was a moment's silence and then, after prolonged applause, the audience began to babble.
Jenny sat still. She had not listened to the reasoned arguments and statistical illustrations of the main portion of the speech, nor had she properly comprehended the peroration. Yet she was charged with resolves, primed with determination and surgingly impelled to some sort of action. She was the microcosm of a mob's awakening to the clarion of an orator. A cataract of formless actions was thundering through her mind; the dam of indifference had been burst by mere weight of rhetoric, that powerful dam proof against the tampering of logic. Perhaps she was passing through the psychical crisis of conversion. Perhaps, in her dead emotional state, anything that aroused her slightly would have aroused her violently. No doubt a deep-voiced bishop could have secured a similar result, had she been leaning against the cold stone of a cathedral rather than the gray flock wall-paper of Mecklenburg Square.
"I'd like to talk to her," she told Lilli.
"She doesn't half stir you up, eh?"
"I don't know so much about stirring up, Mrs. Pudding," said Jenny, unwilling to admit any renascence of sensibility. "But I think she's nice. I'd like to see what sort she'd be to talk to quiet."
No opportunity for a conversation with Miss Ragstead presented itself that evening; but Lilli, somewhat elated by the capture of Jenny, told Miss Bailey of her admiration; and the president, who had been attracted to the neophyte, promised to arrange a meeting. Lilli knew better than to breathe a word to Jenny of any plan, and merely threw out a casual suggestion to take tea at the club.
So without any premonitory shyness Jenny found herself talking quite easily in a corner of the tea-room to Miss Ragstead, who was not merely persuasive with assemblages, but also acutely sympathetic with individuals.
"But I don't want a vote," Jenny was saying. "I shouldn't know what to do with it. I don't see any use in it. My father's got one and it's a regular nuisance. It keeps him out late every night."
"My dear, you may not want a vote," said Miss Ragstead, "but I do, and I want the help of girls like you to get it. I want to represent you. As things are now, you have no say in the government of yourself. Tell me, now, Jenny—I'm going to call you Jenny straight away—you wouldn't like to be at the mercy of one man, would you?"
"But I wouldn't. Not me," said Jenny. Yet somehow she spoke not quite so bravely as once, and even as the assertion was made, her heart throbbed to a memory of Maurice. After all, she had been at the mercy of one man.
"Of course you wouldn't," Miss Ragstead went on. "Well, we women who want the vote have the same feeling. We don't like to be at the mercy of men. I suppose you'd be horrified if I asked you to join our demonstration in October?"
"What, walk in procession?" Jenny gasped.
"Yes, it's not so very dreadful. Who would object? Your mother?"
"She'd make fun of it, but that wouldn't matter. She'd make everyone laugh to hear her telling about me in a procession."
Jenny remembered how her mother had teased her father when she saw him supporting a banner of the Order of Foresters on the occasion of a beanfeast at Clacton.
"Well, your lover?"
Jenny looked sharply at Miss Ragstead to ascertain if she were laughing. The word sent such a pang through her. It was a favorite word of Maurice.
"I haven't got one," she coldly answered.
"No?" said Miss Ragstead, gently skeptical. "I can hardly believe that, you know, for you surely must be a most attractive girl."
"I did have one," said Jenny, surprised out of her reserve. "Only we just ended it all of a sudden."
"My dear," said Miss Ragstead softly, "I don't think you're a very happy little girl. I'm sure you're not. Won't you tell me about it?"
"There's nothing to tell. Men are rotters, that's all. If I thought I could pay them out by being a suffragette, I'd be a suffragette."
Jenny spoke with decision, pointing the avowal by flinging her cigarette into the grate.
"Yes, I know that's a reason with some. But I don't think that revenge is the best of reasons, somehow. I would rather you were convinced that the movement is right."
"If it annoys men, it must be right," Jenny argued. "Only I don't think it does. I think they just laugh."
"I see you're in a turbulent state of mind," Miss Ragstead observed. "And I'm glad in a way, because it proves that you have temperament and character. You ought to resent a wrong. Of course, I know you'll disagree with me when I tell you that you're too young to be permanently injured by any man—and, I think I might add, too proud."
"Yes, I am most shocking proud," Jenny admitted, looking down on the floor and, as it were, regarding her character incarnate before her.
"But it's just these problems of behavior under difficulties that our club wants to solve. I'd like to put you on the road to express yourself and your ambitions without the necessity of—say marriage for convenience. You're a dancer, aren't you?"
"Um, a ballet girl," said Jenny as usual, careful not to presume the false grandeur of an isolated stellar existence.
"Are you keen on your dancing?"
"I was once. When I began. Only they crush you at the Orient. Girls there hate to see you get on. I'm sick of it."
"I wonder," said Miss Ragstead half to herself; "I wonder if active work for the cause would give you a new zest for life. It might. You feel all upside down just now, don't you?"
"I feel as if nothing didn't matter. Not anything," replied Jenny decidedly.
"That's terrible for a girl of your age. You can't be more than eighteen or nineteen."
"Twenty-one in October."
"So much as that? Yes"—the older woman continued after a reflective pause—"yes, I believe you want some spur, some excitement quite outside your ordinary experience. You know I am a doctor, so without impertinence I can fairly prescribe for you."
"Well, what have I got to do?" Jenny asked. She was almost fascinated by this lady with her cool hands and deep-set, passionate eyes.
"I wish I could invite you to spend some time with me in Somerset, but I'm too busy now for a holiday. I feel rather uncertain whether, after all, to advise you to plunge into the excitement of this demonstration. And yet I'm sure it would be good for you. Dear child, I hope I'm not giving bad advice," said Miss Ragstead earnestly as she leaned forward and took hold of Jenny's hand.
So it came about that Jenny was enrolled in the ranks of the great demonstration that was to impress the autumnal session of Parliament. She kept very quiet about her intention and no one, except Lilli, knew anything about it. The worst preliminary was the purple, green and white sash which contained her unlucky color. Indeed, at first she could hardly be persuaded to put it across her shoulders. But when the booming of the big drum marked the beat, she felt aflame with nervous expectation and never bothered about the sash or the chance of casual recognition.
The rhythm of the march, the crashing of the band, the lilting motion, the unreality of the crowds gaping on the pavements intoxicated her, and she went swinging on to the tune in a dream of excitement. In the narrower streets the music blazed with sound and fury of determination, urging them on, inspiring them with indomitable energy, inexorable progress. The tops of the houses here seemed to converge, blotting out the sky; and Jenny felt that she was stationary, while they moved on like the landscape of a cinematograph. As the procession swept into Trafalgar Square with its great open space of London sky, the music unconfined achieved a more poignant appeal and infected the mass of arduous women with sentiment, making their temper the more dangerous. The procession became a pilgrimage to some abstract nobility, to no set place. Jenny was now bewitched by the steady motion into an almost complete unconsciousness of the gaping sightseers, thought of them, if she thought of them at all, as figures in a fair-booth to be knocked carelessly backwards as she passed, more vital than they were with their painted grins.
In Whitehall the air was again charged with anger. The tall banners far ahead floated on airs of victory. The mounted women rode like conquerors. Then for an instant as Jenny heard from one of the pavement-watchers a coarse and mocking comment on the demonstration, she thought the whole business mere matter for ridicule and recalled the circus processions that flaunted through towns on sunny seaside holiday mornings long ago. Soon, however, the tune reëstablished itself in her brain, and once more she swept on to the noble achievement. The houses grew taller than ever; faded into remote mists; quaked and shimmered as if to a fall. Far down the line above the brass and drums was a sound of screaming, a dull mutter of revolution, a wave of execration and encouragement. The procession stopped dead: the music ceased in discords. Two or three of the women fainted. The crowd on either side suddenly came to life and pressed forward with hot, inquisitive breath. Somewhere, a long way off, a leader shrieked, "Forward." Policemen were conjured from the quivering throng. Somebody tore off Jenny's sash. Somebody trod on her foot. The confusion increased. Nothing was left of any procession: everyone was pushing, yelling, groaning, scratching, struggling in a wreck of passions. Jenny was cut off from the disorganized main body, was helpless in a mob of men. The police were behaving with that magnificent want of discrimination which characterizes their behavior in a crisis of disorder. Their tactics were justified by success, and as they would rely on mutual support in the official account of the riot, individual idiocy would escape censure.
In so far as Jenny was pushing her way out of the mob, was seeking desperately to gain the sanctuary of a side street and forever escape from feminine demonstrations, she was acting in a way likely to cause a breach of the peace. So it was not surprising that a young plough-boy lately invested with an uniform should feel impelled to arrest her.
"Now then, you come along of me," commanded the yokel as a blush ebbed and flowed upon his cheeks glistening with down and perspiration.
"Who are you pushing, you?" cried Jenny, enraged to find her arm in the tight grasp of a podgy, freckled hand.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he declared.
"Don't you speak to me, you. Why, what are you? Invisible blue when you're wanted. Let go of me. I won't be held. I wasn't doing anything. I was going home. Let go."
The young policeman, disinclined to risk the adventure single-handed, looked around for a fellow-constable to assist at the conveyance of Jenny to the station. All his companions, however, seemed busily engaged tugging at recalcitrant women; and instead of being congratulated on his first arrest, a well-groomed man, white with rage, shouted: "Look here, you blackguard, I've got your number and I'll have your coat off for this. This lady was doing absolutely nothing but trying to escape from the crowd."
The young policeman looked about him once more with watery, unintelligent eyes. He was hoping that someone would arrest the well-groomed man; but as nobody did, and as the latter was not unlike the Captain of the Volunteer Company from whose ranks he had climbed into the force, the novice released his grip of Jenny and said:
"Now, you be off. You won't get another chance."
"No, you turnip-headed bumpkin," shouted the well-groomed man, "nor will you, when I've had five minutes at Scotland Yard. I'm going to watch you, my friend. You're not fit for a position of responsibility."
Jenny, free of the crowd, walked through the peace of Whitehall Court and promised herself that never again would she have anything to do with suffragettes.
"Soppy fools," she thought, "they can't do nothing. They can only jabber, jabber." She reproached herself for imagining it was possible to consummate a revenge on man by such means. She had effected nothing but the exposure of her person to the freckled paws of a policeman.
"Not again," said Jenny to herself, "not ever again will I be such a silly, soppy idiot."
In the distance she could still hear the shouting of the riot; but as she drew nearer to Charing Cross railway station, the noise of trains took its place.