If one will dig deeply enough into the psychology of those great enthusiasms which have altered the course of history, one will generally discover some personal, overlaid, self-forgotten motive which bred the martyrs and kindled the leaders necessary to arrest the attention of the world, and make the vast number of converts essential to give any cause dignity and insure to it victory. It may be an acute disappointment in human nature, some assault upon highest instincts or treasured convictions, or even disappointed ambition; but above all is it likely to have its seed in that burning hatred of injustice which animates all minds with a natural bias for reform. The Prophets may have been inspired and preordained, but leaders and martyrs hardly, although they are entitled to the first rank in the history of the Great Causes.
With Bridgit Herbert it had been not only the profound reaction of a fine mind from the empty life of society, but the bitter recognition that she had lavished the wealth of her nature on a handsome fool, who laughed and kissed her when her ego struggled out of its embryo and looked for wings on his. Then had come the amazing discovery that the men she most liked, of whose friendly devotion she had felt assured, had no possible use for her when they found that she purposed to console herself with her intellect instead of with themselves; that so slight was the impression the greatness in her nature had made on them, they would be the first to balk her on every issue she held most dear. Her vanity soon healed, but she had been cut to the quick; and all the obstinacy, scorn, and strength in her arose, and counselled her to pay back to man something of what woman had suffered at his hand throughout the ages.
It is possible that if Christabel Pankhurst, bred on suffrage as she was, had not been refused admission to the Bar when she applied to the Benchers of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she might not have conceived the Militant Movement at the psychological moment. Julia needed no further inducement to enter the career she once for all elected to follow that afternoon in Chelsea, but she, too, needed the sharp personal jolt to banish the abstract, and substitute the concrete enthusiasm; and she got it long before her impersonal ardor had time to cool.
Ten days after she had received her first instructions, she arrived with Mrs. Lime in the Midland town where the by-election campaign was to open. Mrs. Lime was an experienced heckler, and was already acquainted with the inside of prison and gaol, but unknown in the Midlands. Julia had found much inspiration in Mrs. Lime, a typical product of that awakening which began in 1901. Her small body looked as if it might have an unbreakable skeleton of steel, and her gaunt, dark, rapt face was deeply lined, although she was but twenty-four. Like Annie Kenny, she had been a half-timer at the loom at the age of ten, and had worked in the cotton mill until she married a plumber eight years later. Her husband died when she was twenty-two, and she was using his savings in the cause which she knew to be the one hope for thousands of girls, overworked and underfed, as she had been. In her early youth she had managed, against desperate odds, to acquire an education of sorts, and her speeches were remarkably effective; terse, logical, and informing. Once she would have worshipped the luminous beauty of this new recruit, but now she merely regarded it as a practical asset.
“Don’t let yourself run down,” she said to Julia as they sat in their hotel the night before the opening of the campaign, discussing their own. “Keep that hair bright, and wear your good clothes, as long as you’ve got them. Our ladies think too little about clothes, and its natural, being at this business all their lives, as you might say. But with you it’s different. You’ve got the born style, and you’d have hard work looking dingy. Don’t try. You’ve got just the air and the beauty to attract the crowd at the street corner, although you’ll soon be too familiar a figure to the police to get past the door. But ugly little things like me can do the heckling.”
The Liberal candidate made his first speech on the following night, but neither Julia nor Mrs. Lime found it possible to enter the hall. Men were learning wisdom. All women without cards or escorts were barred. Both the girls were roughly handled as they attempted again and again to obtain entrance; and as there was no crowd outside to address, they went back to the hotel to await the candidate’s return. They sat in the passage, and when he came in, shortly after eleven o’clock, Mrs. Lime immediately confronted him.
“You will tell us, if you please,” she said, “what you mean to do about giving the ballot to women.”
The candidate, who had congratulated himself upon accomplishing the exclusion of suffragettes from the hall, and had even taken the precaution to leave by the back door, colored with annoyance; and his eyes flashed contempt upon the plain little figure planted in his path.
“I state my intentions on the platform,” he said haughtily, and attempted to brush past her. But Mrs. Lime changed her own position and once more impeded his progress.
“Your intentions regarding votes for women,” she said in her even emotionless voice. “You are said to oppose it. I warn you that unless you assert that this is not true, and that you will do all in your power to assist us in winning the ballot, we shall do all we can to defeat you in this election.”
“We?” He laughed outright. “How many more of them are there like you?”
Julia rose and came forward. “Two,” she said. “And two against one is a proportion never to be despised.”
The man stared at her and his overbearing manner underwent a change.
“Oh, you!” he said. “Well you might get something out of a man if you tried hard enough.”
France had more than once burst ............