julia smiled all through this letter, and wondered if the original boy in some men ever grew up, and if even in the united states there were another daniel tay. then she read it over again, and then she answered it. the moment she took up her pen she came to herself with a shock. she had been travelling between san francisco and bosquith, and now she realized that she had nothing to write him about but her work in the cause upon which she was embarked. she had, these last months, bestowed barely a thought on all that had gone before, and she did not feel the least desire to write of anything else. would it bore as well as disillusionize him? well, what if it did? to write to him again was irresistible, but she must write out her present self; if he didn’t answer—well—perhaps, so much the better.
but, beyond the subject, she was at no pains to bore him. she took pride in writing him a far better letter than her first and gave the liveliest possible account of her numerous adventures. she even told him all she had felt during those twenty-four hours in prison, something she had never intended to confide to any one; but although she would not have admitted it, she had a secret hankering for his complete sympathy and understanding.
“and you’ve no idea,” she concluded, “what a wonderful thing it is to have a vital interest in life, to live wholly outside of yourself, to strive for a sort of perfection, while at the same time your vanity is titillated with the thought that you are helping to make history. i really do not know whether i have any personal ambition left or not. when i started out i was consumed with it. this great cause was merely but a means to an end. but now—i don’t know whether it is because i have never a moment to think of myself, i am so busy, or whether the cause is so much greater than any individual can be—i don’t know. i don’t know. the balance may be struck later. the only thing i strive to hold on to is my sense of humor.”
when this letter was sealed, she had a sudden access of conscience and indited another to nigel, whom she had quite neglected since her departure from london. she reminded him that he had published nothing for a year, and asked him to consider her suggestion that he go to acca and write the bahai-socialism novel. “i shall worry until you do,” she concluded this epistle, “for it would be a thousand pities if the subject were cheapened by the horde of third-raters, always nosing for new ‘copy.’ the bahais want a big man. and how you would enjoy writing on mount carmel. do write me that you will go at once.”
the landlady knocked and announced that her dinner was ready. she snatched up tay’s letter and made an instinctive movement to put it in her bosom, but was reminded that her blouse buttoned in the back. nor had she a pocket. so she put the letter into her hand-bag, and wondered if fashion would be the death of romance.
after dinner, she started for the moor. she wanted a spray of white heather, and to walk in the paths of the bront?s. the long crooked street of the village was deserted, the good people lingering over their sunday meal. but julia felt little interest in them. as she reached the end of the street and looked out over the great purple expanse undulating away until it melted into the low pale sky brushed with white, she was wondering which of these narrow paths had been charlotte’s and trying to conjure up the tragic figure of emily, one of her literary loves. she walked for several miles and managed to find the nook in the glen which she had been told by the landlady of the black bull was the spot where charlotte had sat so often to dream the books that must have transformed her bleak life into wonderland. no object she for all the sympathy that had been wasted on her. immortality! julia, whose ego was enjoying a brief recrudescence, felt that it was a small thing to be half starved and lonely, afflicted by a drunken brother, and sisters dying of consumption, when consoled with an imagination that not only swamped life for this poor sickly little mortal, but must have whispered to her of undying fame. and she had contributed her share to the cause of which this devotee at her shrine was a symbol, vastly different from all that is modern as she had been; for had she not been of the few to make the world recognize the genius of woman? she had, in truth, been one of the flaming torches.
julia climbed out of the glen and started to return. after she had traversed several of the knolls, she saw that the moor down by the village was alive with people. the landlady had told her that all haworth took its sunday afternoon walk on the moor, but she still felt no interest in them, and renewed her search for white heather.
she passed the first group and nodded, as she had a habit of doing, for she had come to feel as if the toilers of england were her especial charge. they smiled in return, and one stared and whispered to the others. julia guessed that she had been at the meeting in keighley the night before. the crowd became thicker and she was soon in the midst of it. she would have been stared at in any case, for strangers were rare in haworth. tourists came for an hour to visit the bront? museum, and hastened off to catch their train. and julia was fair to look upon and exceeding well dressed. the girls turned to look after her with approval, and when she made her way out of what would seem to be a large family party gossiping pleasantly, and, wandering off, stooped once more, a girl followed and asked her shyly if she were looking for white heather.
“oh,” said julia, “would you help me? i should like a spray for luck, and as a memento of your village.”
“it’s hard to find, miss, but we can look. i’ve found many a bit.”
they strayed off together, julia good-naturedly answering the eager questions. suddenly the girl turned.
“why!” she exclaimed. “they’re all coming this way, and that excited!”
julia looked and saw that the whole company was streaming toward her. they paused, held a hurried conference, and then one of the younger women came directly up to the stranger.
“we are thinking,” she said diffidently, “that you may be mrs. france, who spoke last night at keighley, and has been speaking all over the north.”
“yes, i am mrs. france,” said julia, wondering what was coming.
“and you really are a suffragette?”
“that is what they call us.”
“we’ve never seen one, only one or two of us who were at the meeting last night. the rest of us didn’t go, we was that tired, and we’re wondering if you wouldn’t give us a speech here.”
“oh—really—i rarely speak on sunday, and even suffragettes must rest, you know.”
the woman’s face fell, but she said politely, “of course. we know what work is. but we may never have another chance—and we’re that curious. we’d like to know what it’s all about.”
julia hesitated. what right had she to refuse this simple request? it was her business to advance the cause of suffrage and make converts wherever she could. nor was she tired. she was merely in a dreaming mood, and wanted to think of the bront?s; to anticipate, as she realized in a flash of annoyance, the rereading of tay’s letter. she had deliberately been trying to forget it.
“i will speak with pleasure,” she said. “have you something i could stand on? i’m not very tall, you know.”
“one of the men went for a table. we made sure you would be so kind.”
the man was even now stalking up the moor with a kitchen table balanced on his head. as julia walked toward the smiling company she felt once more the ardent propagandist.
“if i may, ma’am,” said a tall young man. he lifted her lightly and stood her on the table.
“now,” said julia, smiling down into several hundred faces, a few set in disdain, but for the most part friendly, “what is it you wish me to tell you? how much do you know of this great movement?”
“well,” said one of the older women, “we read a lot about militants, and suffragettes, and fighting the police, and going to prison, and big meetings all over england, and we’d like to know what it’s all about. that’s all.”
“you might begin,” said one of the men, with a faint accent of sarcasm, “by telling us what good the vote’ll do you when you get it.”
julia began by reminding them of the interest that so many of the factory women of the north had taken in the enfranchisement of their sex for several years before the militant movement began, and of the many annie kennys whose eyes were opened to the injustice of the absence of a minimum wage for women. one of the men interrupted her.
“yes, ma’am, and if you raise women’s wages so that they can no longer undercut men, the lot of ’em’ll be kicked out.”
“not all. the best will be retained, for the best are as efficient as the men. the inferior ones will find other employment, or be taken care of by men, who will then be able to support their families. they can return to their place in the home, that woman’s sphere of which we hear so much.”
this was received with cheers, but the man growled:?—
“it’ll take time. it’ll take time. better let well enough alone.”
“as it is the women that suffer, it is for them to say whether it is well enough. of course it will take time. we do not promise utopia in a day—nor ever, for that matter. but, if you will take the trouble to observe, it is the women of this country that are waging war on poverty, not the men. without the ballot they are forced to advance at a snail’s pace. on all the boards to which they are admitted they do the work, and the men, who outnumber them, defeat every project for the betterment of the poor that would force the ratepayers to disgorge a few more shillings. doctors, and all thinking and humane men, for that matter, would be thankful if these boards were composed entirely of women, for they alone understand the needs of other women and of children. man lacks the instinct, to begin with, and has long since grown callous to the sources of his income. higher wages mean smaller dividends, and he chooses to close his eyes to the fact that his dividends are largely due to the toil of wornout women and stunted children; of women that have all the duties of their households to discharge after they come home from the mills, children whose minds must remain as undeveloped as their ill-nourished bodies.”
“you want to go to parliament, and right all that, i suppose?”
“we have not even thought of it. what we want is the power to send men to parliament, who will be forced to keep their election promises if they would be returned a second time. doubtless an ultimate result of the ballot would be a woman’s parliament which would deal exclusively with the poor laws. then the men who oppose us now will be profoundly relieved that they no longer are obliged to waste valuable hours solemnly sitting upon such questions as the proper sort of nursing bottles to be adopted for pauper children, what shall be done with milk, or whether cabbage is a normal breakfast for school children. do you know that if the house sat day and night for 365 days of the year, they could not begin to dispose of all the bills brought before it, and that many of these bills are of a pressing domestic nature? however well disposed, they cannot deal adequately with the poor laws, and that they do not welcome the assistance of women is but one more evidence of that conservatism in men’s minds which is a logical result of having had their own way, uncriticised, too long. their fear of us is childish. they would not be thrown out of business. every day they are confronted by questions of the gravest nature—questions of national and international policy which require their best faculties and all of their time. women have more time than man ever thinks he has, in any case; and we have the maternal instincts and the nagging conscience which would force us to discharge our duties to the poor.
“let me add that the women of this new militant movement have eliminated from their compositions all the old sentimentality and bathos which weakened the suffrage cause for so many years. sentimentality is sympathy run am?k. it roused that distrust of men we are fighting to-day, and made many of their public utterances asinine. you will hear no frantic protests to-day that women want the vote because they have as much right to it as men. that is a good argument in itself, but the women of to-day have progressed far beyond that or even of the old war cry, ‘taxation without representation.’ they are animated, in their greater experience, by one purpose only, the desire to eliminate poverty and all the evils, moral and physical, that are always its partners; to reduce the hours of work and increase wages, to give every child good food, a decent education, and a comfortable home. the millions must work, but we are determined that they shall work for their own comfort as well as for that of their employers, that they shall have a reasonable amount of leisure and of the pleasures of life, cease to be machines whose only object in living is to contribute to the comfort and idleness of the thousands above them. we appreciate the wastage among the poor of england. given strong bodies and a fair education, many would rise in the world and have respectable if not distinguished careers. what we further desire is to give these exceptional boys and girls a chance, the same chance they would have if born in the middle class. beyond that we promise nothing. the point now is, not only that the misery in this country is appalling, but that these boys and girls have no chance of rising out of the rut unless possessed of positive genius. hundreds have latent talent, thousands a certain amount of ability which would raise them above the station in which they were born?—”
“are you a socialist?” demanded an abrupt voice.
“yes, and england is already half socialistic in her institutions, only the pill has been gilded with less offensive names, so that she need not recognize it. but that old-time socialism, which was only a weak step-sister of anarchy, no longer exists save in the minds of the old and tired theorists. the younger men and women who are giving their brains and time to the question would do nothing so futile as to divide the wealth of the world into small and equal shares. the modern socialists would have as little mercy on the idle and vicious and lazy as society has. all must work, and if the confiscation of much land forces the aristocrat to work, so much the better for him. all will be given the chance to work, to rise. more than that no mortal laws can accomplish, or should attempt, in justice to the human race. socialism perfected is neither more nor less than the primal law of nature re?stablished, rescued from the vagaries of a blundering civilization and crystallized into brain. man will work, do his share, or go out into the by-ways, lie down and die.
“a word as to our much-abused militant tactics. although we are women we are by no means too proud to learn from men. if you will glance back to that time when the laboring men of england were demanding the franchise,—in the ’30’s,—you may recall that they did not confine themselves to heckling, holding indignation meetings, forcing their way into halls where great men were speaking, and demanding their rights. they arose and smashed things. they burned the mansion house in bristol, the custom house, the bishop’s palace, the excise office, three prisons, four toll houses, and forty-two private dwellings, and they set several towns on fire. so far we have borrowed only the mildest of their tactics. we have hurt no one physically, and we have been moderate in all our demonstrations; but because we are women we are as severely criticised as if we had blown up the entire cabinet and set fire to london. such is the hopeless conservatism of the human mind. but because we are women and enlightened, we hope we never shall have to resort to measures so extreme. we hope to educate the average mind out of its conservatism. if we fail, then of course we shall have to forget that we are women and emulate the great sex which now thinks it despises us, but is proving every day how much it fears us. as yet, it does not fear us enough. that is the whole trouble at present.”
although she had too much tact and experience to talk down to any audience, however humble, she knew when to drop the abstract and divert with anecdote and illustration. her address had been listened to respectfully, and interrupted with many a “hear! hear!” and when she paused, flung out her hands, smiled, and said, “now let me tell you the true story of several of our adventures with the police,” they clapped and cheered. she talked for ten minutes longer, and her anecdotes, while making them laugh delightedly, inspired as much indignation as if they had been delivered with solemn passion; no doubt more so. when she finally leaped down, they escorted her in a body to the inn, where those that were not too bashful shook hands with her heartily; and many vowed they would “turn it over” and “pass the word on” to those that had not had the good fortune to hear her.
