“It’s you we’re going to arrest. It’s you that’s obstructing traffic and collecting crowds, not them. They’re out for their ’arf ’oliday.”
“But I tell you they threatened me with violence.”
“Serves you right. You come along, and if you make any fuss you’ll get hurt, sure enough.”
And Julia, filled with a wrath of which she had never dreamed herself capable, was dragged off between the two policemen, while the crowd jeered and howled, and the Liberal candidate stood on the other side of the street laughing softly.
Once her fury so far overcame her that she struggled and attempted to break away, but one of the men gave her arm such a wrench that she walked quietly to the Town Hall, thankful that anger had burned up her tears.
At the Town Hall she was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing traffic, and promptly committed to a cell, to await trial on Monday morning.
So Julia spent twenty-four hours in prison. She could have summoned sleep at night had she been disposed, but nothing was farther from her thought. She was too infuriated to sleep and forget for a moment the gross injustice to which she had been subjected by the laws of a country supposed to be the most enlightened on the globe. She had mounted a box to make a peaceable—not an incendiary—speech, something men did whenever they listed, and with no fear of punishment. Her denouncement of the Liberal candidate and her plea for Suffrage would have contained no offence against law and order; but she had been treated as if she had incited a riot, while the vile creatures that had insulted and threatened her were not even reprimanded.
In a mind naturally fair and just, nothing will cause rebellion so profound as an act of gross injustice. Had Julia, from a safe vantage point, seen Mrs. Lime or any other woman treated as she had been, her soul would have boiled with righteous wrath; but it takes the personal indignity to sink deep and bear results. Julia in that long night and the day that followed, cold, half-fed, alone, in a vermin-ridden cell, forgot her ambitions, her artistic pleasure in playing a part well, and became as rampant a suffragette as any of the little band in Park Walk. She would war against these stupid brutes in power as long as they left breath in her, fight to give women the opportunity to do better. Something was rotten when justice worked automatically without logic; and if men were too indifferent to effect a cure, it was time another sex took hold. No wonder these chosen women were indifferent to femininity, and gowns, and all that had given woman her superficial power in the past. What mortal happiness they missed mattered nothing. They were equipped for one purpose only, to avenge and protect the millions ignored by nature and fortune, and the victims of man-made laws; and if they were mauled, and torn, and despised, and killed, it was but the common fate of the advance guard, the martyrs in all great reforms; they were quite consistent in being as indifferent to sympathy as to the denunciations of the fools that saw in them but a new variety of the unwomanly woman.
And so Julia received her baptism of fire.