After the departure of our first customer, we reconsidered the position. It was evident that as shopkeepers we started with a distinct handicap, being ourselves amateurs in selling, whereas no customer is ever an amateur in buying. A woman may never have entered a suffrage shop in order to buy an instructive pamphlet, but most women know how to pass a pleasant half-hour in a hat shop without buying anything. We must be on our guard, we decided, against the customer who came, not to buy, but to shop, the opportunities open to the customer for falling short of the shopkeeper's ideal of her being greatly multiplied when the shop at which she shops is one for the dissemination of suffrage literature and not for the display of spring millinery. Also, on the initiative of the militant member of our committee, it was resolved that only one person at a time should serve any one customer, and that if a second customer should enter while everybody was still hunting for the pamphlet the first customer wanted to buy, somebody should call "Shop!" in a professional tone up the spiral staircase, in order to disabuse the minds of both customers of the notion that we were new at our work. We found, on carrying this last precept into practice, that it had a marked effect on the waiting customer, though very little on the mythical resources of the spiral staircase.
Having settled down to wait for the customers who were going to make our shop a thriving business, we found that the majority of them belonged to those who went out to shop and not to buy. Numbers of them, indeed, seemed to be there on the assumption that if you want to buy something, one shop is as good as another in which to seek it. A good deal of useful experience is probably gained in this way by the one who shops; but when you are the shopkeeper, you wish it could be gained at somebody else's expense. We felt this very strongly the day that our door was burst abruptly open by a ragged, unkempt gentleman who wanted a soup ticket.
The childlike confidence of this particular gentleman in the ability of the Suffragettes to supply his wants, was at once pathetic and complimentary; but the pathos of it did not reveal itself to the haughty, disapproving lady who was already in the shop, giving advice to us all. She left at once, clearly convinced that really good unsought advice was wasted on people who kept such low company, an opinion that would have been startlingly confirmed had she waited long enough to see the ticket-of-leave man.
The ticket-of-leave man came in to ask if we could give him a job. Obviously, he belonged to the great army of those who can do "anything"; we had no job to give, and told him so—a little curtly, I am afraid, as a consequence of many previous interruptions from those who did not come to buy. He stood a moment, fumbling at the latch of the door without raising it; then he turned round again.
"Don't send me away, lady," he pleaded. "I've been to prison too, same as all of you."
The woman who alone among us answered to this generic description of a mild and blameless local committee, came swiftly forward.
"I'm sorry," she said. "What can we do for you, and what made you come to us?"
The man jerked his hand towards the corner of the street where a policeman stood on the point. "Said he couldn't help me himself," was the reply. "Oh, he spoke kind enough, I'm not complaining of the coppers——"
"No, of course not," agreed our militant member. "He's especially nice, that one. He's the one that arrested me in Parliament Square."
Another customer, who was making a genuine purchase, was struck speechless by this calm announcement on the part of an amiable-looking shop assistant; but the ticket-of-leave man went on with his tale unemotionally.