[VIII]
Patrolling the Gutter
"I suppose we had better start," faltered the tall woman in purple.
"I can't think of a reasonable excuse for delaying any longer," sighed the girl in green.
"Come along!" said a third, making a great show of the courage she did not feel.
Nobody came along. Under some pretext or another we still lingered, though there were ten of us and the space in our Suffragette shop was uncomfortably limited. Most people, the even tenor of whose lives had not been ruffled by the call of a great cause, might have thought the day an unpropitious one to choose for patrolling the gutter, even for the sake of advertising a meeting of rebel women in the Albert Hall. A strong south-west wind, a real London drizzle overhead and thick mud underfoot, could hardly be held to offer striking attractions to a band of naturally timorous ladies, girt about with sandwich-boards, preparing to issue forth in procession into the conventional streets of Kensington. If we had been less timorous we should probably have postponed the expedition; but the last fear that rebel women ever learn to overcome is the fear of being thought afraid, so this was an alternative that did not suggest itself to anybody.
"I never realized before what it meant to be a belted knight, but I do now," remarked our literary member, trying in vain to free her hands from their cardboard bonds in order to straighten a crooked hat. "If anything or anybody were to unhorse us and make us bite the dust—isn't that what belted knights were always doing to one another in the Middle Ages?—we should have to lie on our backs, as they did, till some one came and picked us up."
"I feel like a pantomime super, myself," observed somebody else, twirling round in order to get a full-length back view of herself in the glass. "I shall never get accustomed to the make-up," she added ruefully, as she once more swept the greater part of our stock of pamphlets from the counter to the floor, and had to stand helpless and repentant while the shop secretary picked them up, not for the first time in the course of these trial manœuvres.
"If you don't start soon, there will be nothing saleable left in the place," said the shop secretary pointedly.