The suffragette went up to London on Monday—Bank Holiday—to contemplate finally the ruin of her work. For it was dead. I suppose if she had not felt so old and tired she might have thought of a fresh beginning, but she was always more passionate than persistent. I don’t think the Brown Borough ever made her suffer so much as it did the day she came back to it and found no place for her. You must remember she had always put work before pleasure, and a new joy born had no place in her mind with the pain of work killed. The gardener of yesterday retreated from the foreground of her mind, and for a while she never thought at all of the gardener of to-morrow.
Henceforward we part company with that suffragette whom I have loved perhaps a good deal, and of whom you have wearied. Her heart seemed to take on a different colour as she returned for the last time to the Brown Borough. What she had preached for years conquered her beyond hope at last, the world she had fought became suddenly victor.
She went to Jenny Wigsky, and found her gone.
She went to see ’Tilda, who was out. But ’Tilda’s mother spoke out ’Tilda’s mind.
306She went to see the priest’s sister, and she was away for Easter. But the priest was at home.
“I had no wish ever to see you again,” said the priest. “But it is as well that we should meet, for I should like to make my position and that of my sister perfectly clear to you, yerce, yerce.”
“It is perfectly clear,” said the suffragette, who felt curiously numb.
“Excuse me, but I do not wish that you should go away under the delusion that you are in the right though persecuted, and in your self-absorption proceed to make havoc of another field of work. Setting aside the fact that you have been guilty of bad faith towards us, you have approached the work from a wilfully wrong standpoint. You have mixed your despicable little political jealousies with Christian work, to the serious danger of young and innocent souls.”
“I worked for the honour of women, and you—possibly—for the honour of your God. Certainly your work sounds better—to men.”
“If there is a thing that women excel in, it is the art of evading the point,” said the priest bitterly. “The affair, bluntly put, is this: Jane Wigsky, an idle, vicious, and immoral girl, had the impudence to go to my very good friend, Mr. Smith, of Smith, Bird and Co., and, presuming on her showy appearance, to apply for a responsible post, a post which is in every way suited to be the reward of virtue, rather than something for the covetous to grasp at. Mr. 307Smith is, as I say, a friend of mine, and a most generous friend to the Church, having only last week presented a beautiful carved chancel screen. Naturally it was my duty to tell him all I knew about the girl.”
“And what did you know?”
“I am not obliged to answer to you for my statements, but, as a matter of fact, I told him that the girl was not a ‘stayer’—in colloquial language—and that she was of immoral tendency.”
“That was only what you fancied. What did you know?”
There was a swallowing sound in the priest’s throat, a sound as of one keeping his temper.
“May I ask if you are aware that the girl has now disappeared, with her lover?”
“But that was since you wrote.”
“I have not worked for twenty-two years among the poor without reaching a certain insight into character; I am not blind to such things, whatever you may be, yerce, yerce. But that is beside the point. I reminded Smith that he might be able to give her less important employment—I was willing to help the girl up to a certain point. I suggested a protégé of my own for the better post, to whom the generous opportunity offered would be far more suitable, a very deserving young man, who is debarred from ordinary employment by the loss of a leg. Mr. Smith accepted my suggestion, and offered Jane Wigsky a post as packer, at seven-and-six a week, a much 308larger wage than she has been getting lately. She refused, and put the responsibility of her refusal on you. She also mentioned that other girls in the Church Club were under your influence on the question of wages. I made enquiries and found that my sister’s club was in a fair way to turn into a female Trade union, an abominable anomaly. I took the only course possible. I dismissed all the misguided girls from the Club. There is nothing more to be said.”
“Nothing,” said the suffragette, who had become very white, “except—what must your God be like to have a servant like you?”
“If you are going to blaspheme,” said the priest, “kindly leave my house at once.”
“If God is like that ...” she said, “I pray the Devil may win.”
She ran out of the house childishly, and slammed the door.
The gardener, on Tuesday morning, was parting his hair for the third time, when he received a telegram:
“Don’t come.—Suffragette.”
It startled him, but not very much. He looked at the third attempt at a parting in the glass, and saw that it was an excellent parting for a man on his wedding-day. He reflected that a militant suffragette would naturally tend to become ultra-militant on this final day. And if the worst came to the worst, it could do no harm to go up and find out how bad the 309worst was. So he went up to London by the eleven train.
He was to meet her at the little bun-shop that clings for protection to the Brown Borough Town Hall. There the suffragette had a fourpenny meal daily, and there they had arranged to have an eightpenny meal together, before assuming the married pose. There was a “wedding-shop” round the corner. I don’t suppose any couple ever made less impressive plans.
And the gardener pursued the plan. He entirely ignored the telegram.
I don’t know whether the suffragette was confident that he would obey it, or that he would ignore it. I am entirely doubtful about her state of mind on tha............