"Not much!" roared the crowd.
Our militant member, distributing leaflets on the edge of the crowd, smiled on the girl as she went shuffling off. "I've been to prison myself," she said, by way of breaking the ice; "what can you have done at your age to get there?"
The girl threw back her head with another laugh. "Oh, a drop of beer and a few words with a copper!" was the easy reply.
After that, it was a simple matter to get into conversation, and other women, who were not laughing, gathered round to listen.
"You Suffragettes have made things in the 'jug' a lot better for us pore women," said one, more intelligent-looking than the rest. "They give us chiny mugs now, 'stead of them tins, and——"
"I 'ope as you'll git inter Parlyment, that I do!" chimed in another.
"Yuss! Good luck to you!" cried a chorus of voices.
They vented their new-found enthusiasm upon a bibulous gentleman, who was asserting with drowsy monotony that he didn't want women to have votes, not he! He wanted them to love, honour, and obey——
"Stow it!" they broke in impatiently. "Forgettin' your manners, ain't you?"
The woman in the lorry was telling them why she went to prison, two months ago. She soon had her audience well in hand, human points of contact not being far to seek in a crowd to whom it was at least unnecessary to explain that women did not go to gaol for fun. A passer-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the constituency, stopped to make this hackneyed insinuation and was well hooted for his pains by a crowd that knew more than he did of the experiences described by the speaker. Even the drowsy sentimentalist, realizing, one might almost suppose, that his proper place was rather at a drawing-room meeting than at a street-corner one, went elsewhere in search of love and obedience; and the crowd of derelicts that remained, growing more numerous every minute, pressed closer and closer to the lorry till they swarmed up the wheels and over the sides and sat at the feet of the woman who had been where they had been, and suffered what they had suffered, for a cause they dimly began to understand because it appeared to be connected with prison and suffering. Even their primitive minds could receive an impression of the woman standing up above them, against the crude light of the street lamp, standing for something that was going to bring a little warmth and brilliance into a cold neutral world, the warmth and brilliance that they had somehow missed. Emphatically, these people were not of the stuff that melodrama and novelettes are made of. They had never discovered what is sensationally called the romance of crime, and there was nothing splendid or attractive in the offences that had sent them to gaol. Some day or another, in a dull past, they had exchanged the dinginess of unemployment for the ingloriousness of petty crime, that was all.