Still the guard hesitated. Finally he left the gate and carried the message a distance of a few rods into the Executive offices. He had scarcely got inside when he rushed back to his post. When we sought to ascertain what had happened to the cards—had they been given and what the answer was—he quietly confided to us that he had been reprimanded for even attempting to bring them in and informed us that the cards were still in his pocket. “I have orders to answer no questions and to carry no messages. If you have anything to leave here you might take it to the entrance below the Executive offices, and-when I go off my beat at six o’clock I will leave it as I go by the White House.”
We examined this last entrance suggested. It, did not strike us as the proper place to leave an important message for the President.
“What is this entrance used for?” I asked the guard.
“It’s all right, lady. If you’ve got something you’d like to leave, leave it with me. It will be safe.”
I retorted that we were not seeking safety for our message, but speed in delivery.
The guard continued: “This is the gate where Mrs. Wilson’s clothes and other packages are left.”
It struck us as scarcely fitting that we should leave our resolutions amongst “Mrs. Wilson’s clothes and other packages,” so we returned to the last locked gate to ask the guard if he had any message in the meantime for us. He shook his head regretfully.
Meanwhile the women marched and marched, and the rain fell harder and as the afternoon wore on the cold seemed almost unendurable.
The white-haired grandmothers in the procession—there were some as old as 84—were as energetic as the young girls of 20. What was this immediate hardship compared to eternal subjection! Women marched and waited—waited and marched, under the sting of the biting elements and under the worse sting of the indignities heaped upon them. It was impossible to believe that in democratic America they could not see the President to lay before him their grievance.
It was only when they saw the Presidential limousine, in the late afternoon, roll luxuriously out of the grounds, and through the gates down Pennsylvania Avenue, that the weary marchers realized that President Wilson had deliberately turned them away unheard!