"He said to me—'You go to the Suffragettes yonder,' he said; 'they'll help you if anyone can,' he said. So I came in on the chance like."
We were rather sorry that our friend on the point sent us no more ticket-of-leave men to vary the monotony of business life and to add to the circle of acquaintance of our militant member. She, however, always maintained that it was an error of judgment, if not of taste, on our part, to present the policeman who had once arrested her with the hand-painted tobacco-pouch, though she admitted that he might use it for the rest of his life without discovering what the sketch of Holloway Gaol was meant for.
The customer who was most destructive of our peace was the kind of amiable person who, having completed an infinitesimal purchase, stayed to chat, monopolizing the one shop chair and barricading a diminutive counter against anybody else who might really want to buy something. We greatly preferred the flippant jester who, attracted by our ingenuous notice inviting people to come in and ask for what they did not see in the window, would sometimes put his head in at the door to ask facetiously for a vote; but we were rather glad that the humorist of the street was, as a rule, too short to reach the latch, and had to satisfy his sense of humour by assuming that the name of every woman in the shop, not excluding the charwoman, was Pankhurst, a quip that afforded exquisite joy to the little crowd that loved to hang round our doorway, besides advertising the object of our shop very nicely. Sometimes, the limitations of the street repertoire became a little tiresome. Admitting that the phrase "Votes for Women" could not be said seriously too often in a reactionary world, we felt that it was out of place when hurled as an original remark through the letter-box by somebody who instantly ran away. This method of backing a belief in any cause, though practised in high places, might well be eradicated, we thought, in very small and very elementary school children before it was too late; so we caught one of them, a little girl staggering under the burden of a large baby, and made her listen to reason. She was extremely friendly about it, said she didn't see but what we were right, even if we did smack policemen's faces, and kindly promised to come and have a look round, as soon as her little sister was free to take over the responsibility of the baby.
It became increasingly difficult to sustain our professional pose as the shop grew more popular, because kindly old ladies insisted on coming in to ask if we took our meals regularly, and to beg us not to fall down the spiral staircase, which looked perilous, I suppose, to any one who saw us for the first time steering a tea-tray down its ramifications, but always seemed to us pleasantly emblematic of our mounting aspirations. Curiously enough, it was on the day the shop was photographed that we finally won our way to the respect of the trade, though at the time nothing in our business experience had made us feel so much like children playing at shop.
Everything in the neighbourhood under the age of twelve rushed helter-skelter to the spot. As fast as the photographer swept them to one side of the pavement, they closed up on the other; and only his experienced agility and a lightning camera enabled him to procure a picture that did not resemble an advertisement of the Children's Holiday Fund. All this was in the nature of a Roman holiday for the neighbourhood, but we, summoned to the doorstep to form part of the picture, felt it was to be counted among the lesser sacrifices that have to be made for a cause. The bystanders, of course, did not take this view of our behaviour.
"Look at 'em," said one of these, just as we were miserably submitting to being grouped in self-conscious, affectionate attitudes that did not remotely convey the business-like relations of a business-like committee. "That's what they like! Votes for women, indeed!"
Fixed by the glassy eye of the camera, we were unable to reply to this; so our scornful critic went away, doubtless confirmed in his belief that there is no higher reward for a rebel woman than that of standing in a thin blouse, at a street corner, to be photographed, blown about by a cutting east wind, jostled by yelling children, and exposed to the chance of recognition at any minute by some disapproving friend or relative.
"Nobody will ever look upon us as real people in business, after that," sighed one of our shop assistants when we regained comparative privacy behind the counter.
"Nobody," acquiesced our militant member, gloomily. "And only this morning, I was really feeling like a genuine tradesman when I took down the shutters and agreed with the man next door that trade will never improve as long as this Government is in power."
"Our trade certainly won't," agreed a chorus of anti-Government agitators.