I look back, no longer “dreaming dreams”, but seeing “visions”—and the visions I see are of women coming from all parts of England, from the factories of Lancashire, from Yorkshire, from the hunting-fields, from offices, schools, and from every place where women might be found, who wanted to see the dawn of the new era, giving up much which made life pleasant and easy, braving scorn, ridicule, and often bodily danger, to do what they might to “right a wrong”. I like to remember that “I did what I could” and was, at anyrate, one of the rank and file in that great army.

I go back to August, 1914, and think how all those women put aside their political ambitions, even their demand for recognition, and declared a truce, so that they might concentrate against a common enemy which threatened their country. “I hated war,” one of them said to me, speaking of ’14, “I was and always had called myself a pacifist, but, when the war came, well, I worked with the rest of us, to help to win it.”

The war was over, and at a luncheon given at the Savoy I met Mr. Lloyd George. I told him that I had not seen him for a long time, and reminded him that the last time was when I came, as a member of a deputation on behalf of Women’s Suffrage, to see him at 10 Downing Street. “Yes,” he said, “I remember. Well, I always told Christabel Pankhurst you should all have the vote, and I kept my word!” After nearly forty years of “constitutional methods”, of spade-work and propaganda, and after nearly a decade of active work—nearly ten years during which constitutional methods were flung to the winds, and the women fought for the franchise as “the men had fought”—they won that which they demanded: their political freedom—obtained, as all freedom has been obtained, “with a great price”, and that “great price” was years of self-sacrifice, culminating in the European War.

So political swords were turned to ploughshares, for, as Mrs. Pankhurst used to say, “Remember when you have gained the vote your work is only beginning”; and the women of England were at last able to say, each one, “I am a citizen of no mean city.”

CHAPTER VIII
PEOPLE I HAVE MET

“There is so much in Nature—so many sides.”

—Love and the Man.

If all these “impressions that remain” seem—what, indeed, they are—very disjointed, remember that Life as one lives it is, after all, a “patchy” and disjointed business.

Mrs. John Wood.—I have spoken elsewhere of Mrs. John Wood, and the following incident happened when I was playing under her management at the Court Theatre. I came to the theatre by Underground, and one night the train stopped and was held up between Kensington and Sloane Square Stations. I looked nervously at my watch, and saw the time was rapidly approaching when I ought to be in my dressing-room. Still the train remained stationary. I began to feel rather desperate, so decided to do all I could to “get ready” in the train. I was wearing buttoned boots—I undid the buttons; I was wearing a dress with many small buttons down the front—I undid them all, keeping my coat buttoned tight to hide the state of “undress”. (I remember an unfortunate man who was in the same carriage, gazing at me, evidently thinking I was a dangerous lunatic and wondering what I should do next.) At last the train moved, and I got out and rushed into the theatre, gained my dressing-room, and began to tear off my clothes. I did not attempt to “make up”—there was no time; I directed all my energies to getting into my stage frock—which, by the way, was a dress for a “drawing-room”, with train and feathers all complete. The stage manager, who was not blessed with the capacity for doing the right thing at the right moment, chose the moment when I was struggling into this very elaborate costume to come to the door and to begin to expostulate with me for being late. “What has made you so late, Miss Moore?”, “Do you know you should have been in the theatre half an hour ago?”, “Do you know you’ll be off?”, and so on, until in sheer exasperation I called to him (and I do not regret it), “Oh! for Heaven’s sake, go away, you fool!” He did. He went and told Mrs. John Wood that I had been very rude to him, and she sent for me, after the performance, to “know why”. I told her the whole story, and as it was unfolded to her I saw her lips begin to quiver and her eyes dance with amused understanding. When I finished, she gave her verdict. I know she felt the discipline of the theatre must be upheld at all costs, but she saw the humour of it. “I understand,” she said. “We will say no more about it, this time—but it must not happen again!”