With her usual promptness and decision Alice Paul crossed the corridor and pulled the window open. There was no place to fasten the rope so she stood there holding it. The matron called for the guards. Two of them, unusually big and husky in comparison with Alice Paul’s ninety-five pounds, tried to take the rope away. It broke in her hands, the window closed, and the guards carried Miss Paul to her cell.
Alice Paul had brought, in the pocket of her coat, a volume of Browning. Before they closed the door, she threw it with what Florence Boeckel describes as a “desperate, sure aim,” through the window.
Miss Paul’s confrères say that it is amusingly symbolic of the perfection of her aim in all things that she hit one of the little panes of that far-away window. As the glass had not been repaired when the Suffragists left jail, they had the pure air they demanded. They said that the old-timers told them it was the first good air they had ever smelled in jail.
Alice Paul and Rose Winslow went on hunger-strike at once. This strike lasted three weeks and a day. The last two weeks they were forcibly fed. Both women became so weak that they were finally moved to the hospital.
Two or three alienists with Commissioner Gardner were brought in to examine Alice Paul. They usually referred to her in her presence as “this case.” One of the alienists, visiting her for the first time, said to the nurse, “Will this patient talk?” Alice Paul burst into laughter.
“Talk!” she exclaimed. “That’s our business to talk. Why shouldn’t we talk?”
“Well, some of them don’t talk, you know,” the alienist said.
“Well, if you want me to talk——” Weak as she was, Miss Paul sat up in bed and gave him a history of the Suffrage movement beginning just before the period of Susan B. Anthony and coming down to that moment. It lasted an hour. This alienist told the present writer that in his report to the authorities he said in effect:
“There is a spirit like Joan of Arc, and it is as useless to try to change it as to change Joan of Arc. She will die but she will never give up.”
Alice Paul says that she realized after a while that the questions of the alienists were directed towards establishing in her one of the well-known insane phobias—the mania of persecution. The inquiries converged again and again toward one point: “Did she think the President personally responsible for what was occurring?” As it happened her sincere conclusion in this matter helped in establishing their conviction of her sanity. She always answered that she did not think the President was responsible in her case—that he was perhaps uninformed as to what was going on.