He had never expected anything like this. His wife was a notorious woman. The Pankhursts, Annie Kenney, Pen Muff, Lizzie Lightowler, Ann Shawcross: these and a few other names, day by day, week by week, month by month, blazed across the public prints. Campbell-Bannerman went; Asquith became Prime Minister, and the warfare went on. Mammoth processions; wild wrecking tactics at public meetings; throw ’em out, send ’em to jail, tear ’em, beat ’em.
In the House, discussions, promises, evasions, nothing done. Outside the House a growing pandemonium. Right Honourable gentlemen, immaculate between banked flowers on public platforms, suddenly not immaculate. A paper bag of flour, sailing through the air, bursts upon the Rt. Hon. gentleman’s head, drenches him in penitential white, sets him spluttering and sneezing. “Throw her out!” The stewards – used to the game by now – pounce like hawks upon their pigeon. Heels beating a tattoo on the floor, Ann is dragged, screaming “Votes for Women!” along the gallery, down the stairs, bump, bump; and hurled out into the street. She leans, half-fainting, against a doorpost, listening to the pandemonium within. For now, at her signal, there is the devil to pay. More flour bags hurtle through the air, explode on striped trousers and platform-ladies’ elegant creations. Stink-bombs nauseate the senses, rattles whir, bells clang, and the frantic stewards, rushing hither and thither, find now that the pigeons are not all docile. Walking-sticks and dog-whips flail and lash. The audience, sympathies divided, yell encouragement or abuse, lend a hand with the chucking-out or, incensed by the stewards’ rough tactics, hurl themselves in rugby tackles round necks, legs, bodies. The hall is filled with the noise of the fight. “Ladies and gentlemen!” The chairman, white-faced from flour like the clown he probably is, is attempting to make himself heard above the uproar, “This meeting is closed.”
It certainly is.
*
Hamer had given up meeting Ann when she came out of prison, For one thing, he couldn’t travel all over the country, and she was in jail in Manchester or Birmingham as often as in London. And it had gone on so long: 1906, 1907, 1908, and now they were in 1909,
She had turned into a fierce flame of a woman. Her body was being consumed. She was gone to a shadow, but out of the shadow her eyes burned and her mouth showed tense and grim. When they met, she no longer ran to him as she had done when first she came out of Holloway. Her bodily needs had abated: even her need to be comforted.
So when they went North together with Charles in the summer holidays of 1909, the child was aware of tension, of personalities estranged, not touching, not mingling. And as they had grown away from one another, so he had grown away from them. He was twelve years old. Four years at Graingers had filled his life with new ideas, new occupations. He was a quiet, introspective boy; and as the train rattled north he found plenty to think of in the silence: Hamer reading as usual, Ann busily scribbling some propaganda stuff on a writing-block.
Charles looked forward to meeting his Grannie. With her at least he had never known restraint. The old woman and the child had always met on the footing of a simple human acceptance of one another.
But this resource was now to be denied him. Ellen, who had no fear of death, had often chuckled over a remark Charles made when, as a child of five, he had been going away for a week-end. Looking at her with his candid blue eyes as he stood in the doorway holding Ann’s hand – oh, how different an Ann! – he said sweetly: “Goodbye, Grannie. I expect you’ll be dead and gone by the time I get back.”
Well, Ellen looked now as if she would soon be dead and gone. To Ann and Hamer it seemed as if the very desire of life had gone out of her. Her energetic step was changed for a slow creeping, and her body, always small, had shrunk till she seemed like an old withered nut that you could rattle in its shell.
There was nothing wrong with her, she insisted: and indeed there was nothing wrong except that her years were now too many and that for too long she had been of no account. Alone in the house, with a maid to minister to her against her will, she had no recourse except to decline upon Death, to whom she went nostalgically down the long road of her past, rather than with a forward glance. She was unloosening all the strands of her life backwards.
She spent the mornings in bed, and Charles would go and sit at her bedside, but he did so only from a sense of duty. This was not the Grannie he had known, She would talk to him a little, become disjointed and incoherent, and end in a mumbling that turned to sleep. Then the boy would creep out, and, being left now to his own devices, would run gladly in the sunshine on Baildon moor, or, sitting against a warm pad of whin and heather, while away the day with a book.
It was thus that Ann found him when she came one day, running and calling his name. But the old woman was dead before they got back. Only Hamer was with her. He had found her sitting up in bed, talking wildly, and had sent the maid to telephone for the doctor, Ann to find the boy. Then he sat at the bedside, and as he took her hand she lay back gently on the pillow. Her little claw-like hand, even now, as he clearly saw in the sunlight streaming through the window, seamed with the ineradicable lines of labour, tightened upon his with a grip that did not seem to want to let go.
He said: “Mother!”
She opened her eyes and looked at him, and was now calm and rational. “What’s the matter with you and Ann?” she said.
“Nothing, Mother, nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry about us.”
“I’ve done nothing but worry about you all my born days,” she said. “It seems to have been my job.”
Then she closed her eyes again, and he felt the tension of her grip relax. Once she murmured: “Put it right. Put it right,” but whether she meant his relations with Ann he did not know, She seemed to be talking to herself. Whatever she meant, it was the end of her talking. This was the first death-bed Hamer had ever known. It seemed to him incredible that she should be so unobtrusively gone; but he knew that she was. It was almost as though to the last she had considered how she might spare him trouble. Just as, when he was a boy aloof from her in his own little study, if she had to go out into the night, she was careful not to bang the door.
*
Now Ellen was under the ground in the graveyard on the edge of the moor; Charles was back at school; Hamer in London for the opening of the new session of Parliament; and Ann in Manchester.
It was strange to be at home again. For a long time The Limes had not seemed like home; but now she found a great friendliness in it, so crowded was it with memories that assuaged the bitterness of her present life. She wished she could stay for a while, but she knew that she could not. Tomorrow there was one of her savage jobs of work to be done; and she would no more have turned back from it than a good soldier would shirk the firing-step.
Pen was with her. Pen no longer remembered the girl in whose house she had taken a bath after the long ago Battle of the Amazons, the girl who, one night in Bingley, had carried Arnold off in a victoria. The two were now good comrades. They had shared danger, felt wounds, been beaten and abased in one another’s company. Ann’s beauty was gone, but to Pen she was fair to look at; the exaltation of her thin face was more lovely than loveliness.
Look well, Pen, at the face of the comrade you have come to love, for soon you will look no more on this face or any other.
Hawley was gentle with the two women. Age and adversity had brought him if no great wisdom at any rate a little understanding. They said nothing of the night when he stood swelling with rage before this very fireplace because Ann had brought home from Ancoats a book by Robert Owen. A Radical! How he had spat it out! But now it seemed to him not to matter much that he was entertaining the wife of the boy who gave Ann the book – herself a Radical more deeply dyed than Owen ever was. He was a lonely old man. His business was dominated by Tom Hannaway, who out of pity allowed him to dodder about the office. His daughter had come home with her friend and he was glad to see them, That was all it came to.
So they sat by the fire and talked, and the two women allowed their strained nerves to relax. As they went upstairs together Ann stopped Pen with a hand laid on her arm. “I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “This time I shall do it.”
“It will kill you,” Pen said.
They stood and looked at one another, each with a heart brimming over with tenderness for the agonies the other had endured and must yet endure. Then they went to their rooms,
Old Hawley had no idea of their business when they set out together the following day after lunch. Each carried a muff, and concealed in each muff was a large jagged rock of flint. They walked the few miles to town. When they were out of jail they walked all they could to keep their bodies fit for further endurances.
It was three o’clock when they came to Market Street. The day was bright and cold, and the street surged with people. Ann and Pen walked from one end to the other, taking note of the men and women who had arranged to be there in support. These silently, unobtrusively, gathered behind them, mingling with the crowds.
“This will do,” said Ann.
Pen looked at the shop, the magnificent expanse of plate-glass glittering in the cold sunlight. “Yes,” she said, “Now don’t stop and think. Do it.”
While their resolution was hot, they stood back half-a-dozen paces, took out their flints, and hurled them into the window, The startled people looked round to see the two women surrounded now by a bodyguard unfurling the familiar defiant banner: “Votes for Women!” The words fluttered on the banner, and were cried by a score of voices, almost before the last fragment of glass had tinkled to the stone.
Then broke out the familiar pandemonium. Cheers, catcalls, voices pro and con. Someone yelled: “It’s the bloody Suffragettes again!” and there was a rush at the little band which had now begun to march down the road, Ann and Pen in the van, with the banner over their heads. The Suffragettes were fair game for anyone who wanted to manhandle a woman. Ann and Pen were used to free fights in the street, and that day they had a fierce one. They were struck in their faces; they were kicked and buffeted; and before the police took effective charge their blouses were hanging in ribbons and Ann was holding her skirt in position with her hand. But it was all in the day’s work – all in the work of the weary years – and still there were more years to go than yet had gone! Derided and reviled, looking like a couple of drunken harlots who had been at one another’s throats, their hats slanted over their eyes and their faces clawed, they tottered between the policemen to the police-station.
*
Alderman Thomas Hannaway, Justice of the Peace – yes, alderman now – sat upon the bench. Ann did not know that this was the man who had supplanted her father; but Tom knew that Ann Shawcross was the daughter of old Hawley and the wife of that stuck-up devil Hamer Shawcross, who was once employed to sprinkle the dew on the cabbages and lettuces.
Tom was glad that he had no part to play. He merely sat with a few other magistrates on the bench, leaving it all to the chairman and the magistrates’ clerk. Tom was no sentimentalist. But he would have hated to send this woman Shawcross to jail, or this woman named on the charge-sheet Penelope Ryerson. He understood she was the wife of Arnold Ryerson, who used to play about Broadbent Street with him and Shawcross.
As it happened, it was Tom’s very first day on the bench. Polly had made him dress with unusual care, and, sitting there with his plump little legs crossed, he certainly thought he must be the very picture of a successful man. He looked at the two women, so weary and heavy-eyed, still bearing scars; he thought of Polly in the new and bigger house he had bought in a better part of Didsbury; and he pitied Shawcross and Ryerson. Poor devils! He wouldn’t be in the shoes of either. Well, this would be something to tell Polly tonight over a game of bezique. Two months’ hard? ’Strewth! That would mean Christmas in quod. He called that pretty rough. He and Polly were going to spend Christmas at a big hotel in the Lakes. They’d take the bezique with them for the dark nights.
*
Now the moment was come that Ann had often envisaged, She had thought out to the last detail what she should do. She would get books from the prison library, and she would read and read, and when she wasn’t reading she would sleep and sleep. And so she would slowly dec-line, waste away, till at last, she supposed, she wouldn’t be able to read any more, and her sleep would have the quality of unconsciousness. Then they would have to let her go. These were the chief points in her programme, and another one was that to her hunger and thirst strike she would add a speech strike. She would utter no word to anyone.
The plan went wrong from the beginning, She left her breakfast skilly untouched. Her wardress asked what was wrong with it, and Ann did not answer. The woman went away, and it occurred to Ann that she could not have books to read unless she asked for them. She resolved to do without the books rather than speak.
She must, above all things, conserve her strength. She did not want to become a crying, protesting wreck: she wanted to pass out gently, peacefully. So she lay on her bed, trying to empty her mind of all thought, to forget Hamer, Charles, Hawley, even Pen, who, somewhere within these grim walls, was facing her own ordeal. But she was not left long undisturbed. The wardress returned, carrying her dish of skilly, and with her came a male official of the prison. Ann remained lying on the bed.
“Get up!” said the wardress.
Ann did not speak and did not stir. The wardress put the skilly on the table, bent down, and with arms beneath Ann’s armpits hauled her erect in one muscular movement. The jail official waited till she was standing facing him; then he looked at her like a father deploring the recalcitrance of a child, He pointed to the skilly and asked: “Are you abstaining from food for some ulterior purpose?”
Ann did not answer.
“To put it plainly: are you hunger-striking?”
She did not look at him; she kept her eyes on the floor; she did not open her mouth,
“I must warn you,” he said, “that hunger-striking is a misdemeanour. It will cause you to lose many privileges. You will have nothing to read and no writing materials. Nor will you be permitted to take exercise.” He smiled most winningly, though she did not see the smile. “Is it worth it? Isn’t it better to serve your sentence quietly, and give no trouble?”
Then they all went: the official and the wardress and the skilly, but when Ann left her midday meal also untouched, that did not go. It remained on the table, meat congealing in fat. It nauseated her to look at it, so she lay down and tried to go to sleep.
She could not. Footsteps echoing in the stony corridors, keys jangling, doors slamming, occasionally a sudden outburst of hysterical crying and banging on a door; worst of all, footsteps going by furtively, as though felt-soled, so quietly that she wondered if she were imagining them: there seemed no end to the noises which once she could happily have ignored, but which now all seemed moves in a gigantic conspiracy to keep her nerves on the stretch.
She looked forward with a passionate longing to the night, when she would sleep by habit. Night came and she could not sleep. She had desired sleep too long and too earnestly, She began now to feel the pangs of hunger, The emptiness of her belly made her cold. She lay on the planks and shivered, her eyes, wide open, staring into the darkness. She felt as though she had never been so wide awake in her life, and she got off the bed and began to walk about in the darkness: up and down, to and fro, missing the few objects in her stony cage because even so little time had taught her every inch of its mean dimensions.
In the morning she was stretched on the planks. She did not remember lying down, She felt deathly with weariness.
When her breakfast came, her craving for food was so intense that she lay on her back and with both hands gripped the sides of the bed. She shut her eyes so that she should not see food that normally would have offended her taste. The wardress leaned over her. “Now sit up, dear,” she said. “Just stay in bed, but sit up. I’ll hold the basin and you take the spoon.”
Ann sat up. She could hear her own heart beating, feel flames behind her jaded eyes. The smell of the skilly reached her nostrils and they flared hungrily. She looked at the stuff, at the warmth-promising steam rising in invitation to her cold famished stomach. She took the spoon, and the wardress smiled.
Suddenly, to Ann, all the world’s contempt was in that smile. The woman who said she could do it, and couldn’t; the martyr who recanted at sight of the faggots; the traitor who sold the pass at the whisper of a bribe. “A mess of pottage.” The words were too dreadfully apt, and as they came into her mind she struck up sharply with her knees and spilled the basinful. Then she lay back, utterly collapsed, but knowing in her heart that now she had won.
She was removed that day to the hospital cells. They were like any other cells except that she had a mattress instead of planks. Let it never be said that Authority did not understand the chivalry due to women who were prepared to starve themselves to death.
It was luxury to lie upon the mattress. She stretched her limbs and closed her eyes. But she could not sleep. She felt light-headed, as if she were floating out of her body, but all the time her body was beneath her and she was aware of its fever, its racking torment. She wondered when she would pass through this to the phase of blissful nothingness, that nirvana which always had buoyed her resolution when she contemplated the act which she was now executing.
She came to herself with a start at the sound of voices, and sat up. She was sweating, and yet she felt cold. “Put it there.” It was the official who had visited her before. The wardress came behind him, carrying a tea-tray, daintily arranged. It was actually spread with a fair white cloth, and upon it was a brown teapot, steaming invitingly through the spout, a cup, milk, sugar, and uncut cake. The wardress put the tray on the table, and the official cut a segment out of the cake. Ann, sitting up on the bed, watched him fascinated. He broke a morsel from the fat piece he had cut and put it into his mouth. He chewed it over, savouring it slowly. “Yes,” he pronounced. “Delicious! Pour out a cup of tea for Mrs. Shawcross. Sugar?”
She stared at him, grinning idiotically, but she did not answer. “Well, we’ll leave it. Help yourself,” he said.
Then they went, and Ann sat looking at the cake and the dainty china, and sniffing the aroma of the tea. It was the most devilish torture. Tea! Oh, the teas she could think of! Tea with Arnold Ryerson in Broadbent Street that day his mother’s finger was caught in the mangle; tea at The Limes with the firelight playing on the gold fluting of the white chair legs; tea with Lizzie at Dick Hudson’s when the snow was on the Yorkshire moors without; tea in the den at Ackroyd Park as they talked and talked. Her mind whirled dizzily round the subject of tea, the drink she craved above all others, and she stared at the steaming cup that was hypnotizing her, drawing her from the bed to the table. Tea! Cold tea in a bottle, smashing angrily on the pavement at Bingley that night when she took Arnold away from Pen. Oh, Pen, Pen! Somewhere here in this very prison, enduring her own anguish, confident of Ann’s loyalty and steadfastness to the end. Tea, smashing, smashing! She was hardly aware of what she was doing, as she hurled the teapot against the wall, crashed the tempting cup to the floor, threw the cake after it, and trampled it in a frenzy on the stones.
When they rushed back at the sound of the smashing she was already on the bed again, burning and shivering.
*
Now if only I could sleep. I will imagine I am walking up the hill from Shipley to Baildon, past the long grey loose-stoned wall with sloping field above it, touching each stone as I go, counting them. One, two, three, four, five – catching fishes all alive – catching Suffragettes – God knows why – they only want to be citizens – a citizen of no mean city. They saw beautiful city of Cecrops, but I saw beautiful city of God. Beautiful city of Zion. Zion and Carmel and Horeb, where Ianto the poet loved to hear the singing. Now why did I stop counting and concentrating my mind on the grey stones? Six, seven, eight, nine...
She got off the bed again. The prison was dark, silent, bitterly cold. She could hear her heart beating. All day long she had been aware of it. Now, in the night, it was pumping like a rapid piston. She leaned against the door and put her hand over her heart. She could feel it: pump, pump, pump; then a staggering flutter like a bird in the hand.
If only I could sleep! And then again in the morning she was asleep, sitting on the cold stone, leaning against the door. It was still dark. She crawled to the mattress and lay there, and sleep came again. She woke to find that daylight had come and that her table was spread.
At first this seemed a dream, a mirage. Sitting up in the bed, with her hands pressing down into the mattress on either side, she stared incredulously at the table. It was covered with a cloth. There was a plate with a few slices of white chicken-breast, some bread and butter wafer-thin, an orange, peeled and alluring with all its juicy segments fanned out. There was a carafe full of water, and a glass. She reached out her hand and touched the things. They were real! She lifted the carafe and was surprised to find how heavy it seemed. Her wrist bent. But she filled the glass, dipped her finger into the water and was about to suck it. Then she wiped it impulsively on the bedclothes, pulled the clothes up over her head, and lay still. Her tongue, with that temptation near, seemed twice its size, hot and cracked. She swallowed convulsively and felt sick. Her tongue nearly choked her.
No one visited her till the evening. She slept fitfully, and when she was not sleeping she tottered about the cell. She felt now that she could not eat. The food was no temptation. But again and again, as she brushed against the table, she stopped, gripping its edge, looking at the water. At last she took the carafe by the neck and slowly tilted it on its side. The water soaked the cloth, dripped to the floor. Suddenly she threw herself down, lay with her back in the pool and her mouth gaping beneath the dripping hem. The drops of water fell upon her tongue: one, two, three, before she staggered unsteadily to her feet, her heart racing.
Traitress, traitress!
She lurched to the mattress, collapsed upon it, and pulled the clothes over her head. She lay shivering, blinded by tears, and passed off into nightmare-ridden sleep.
She came to with a start at the sound of the cell door opening. The light flashed up, dazzling her. Two men she had not seen before were standing diffidently on the threshold, wearing the conventional garb of their profession: trousers neatly creased and striped, black coats, stiff collars, butterfly-winged. One wore a stethoscope round his neck.
Ann stared at them in affright. Never in her life, save when Charles was coming, had she had any commerce with doctors. She had an unreasoning fear and hatred of them, and she shrank from these two as though they were undertakers come to measure her for her coffin.
The doctor with the stethoscope came over to the bed. She shut her eyes as he bent above her and took her wrist, feeling the pulse. Then she felt his fingers at her breast, opening her clothing. She seized his hands and struggled violently, her vow of silence breaking down. “Let me alone!” she gasped. “Let me die.”
“Please be reasonable,” he said politely, taking his hands off her.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. He seemed a decent man, very grave, rather sad. She ceased to resist and lay still, crying feebly. He applied the stethoscope to her racing heart; then his colleague sounded her too. They stood apart, talking in whispers, and then the first of them came to the bedside again, swinging the stethoscope.
“You would save yourself and everyone else such a lot of unpleasantness if you would take a little nourishment,” he said reasonably.
Her head rolled slowly to and fro in negation. The doctor sighed heavily, looked down at her in commiseration. “You have quite made up your mind?” he asked.
She did not answer. “Very well,” he said. “We cannot have you dying on our hands, We shall have to feed you by force.”
*
When they were gone she could not sleep again. She got up and tried to walk, but body and soul were exhausted. She fell full length on the stone floor, crawled to the bed, climbed upon it, and lay still.
If only they had said when it was to be! Waiting was the horror: waiting in the cold darkness, with the furtive footsteps passing and repassing in the corridor, with the sudden alarming cries tearing at her nerves, with the keys jangling. Ah! those keys! As long as she lived Ann could hear them: the most devilish of all the noises that distracted her, the symbolic noise of the whole prison gamut, the noise that branded her an animal, dangerous, locked away out of sight and sound of the lovely radiant world.
So she waited, hot-eyed in the dark, stringing her nerves up to resistance, to conflict, to the wild-cat struggle that was all she now had left to oppose to Authority that debased her. But hour followed hour, and as she lay there taut as a wire, with the wind of her emotions twanging it madly, she could not have said whether she had lain there for moments or months.
She lay there till the next morning, The grey grudging light, all that ever penetrated the cell, was present again like the sad ghost of day when she heard the keys jangling outside the door. She leapt off the bed, quivering with fear. Leapt! She did not know how it had happened. Last night she was crawling, But now she leapt, sprang to an angle of the cell wall, and waited, her breast heaving, her eyes wide, her fists clenched.
She had expected the doctors. They did not appear. She counted the women who filed silently into the cell: one, two, three, four, five, six. Muscular Amazons, unsmiling, watchful-eyed. They closed upon her in a half-circle. They came so slowly, so inevitably, so doomfully, not looking her in the eyes but watching every movement of her body, that she could not wait for them but sprang forward, striking out with her fists, kicking with her shoes. They were not six separate women: they were one force against which she was pitted with all her strength of body and will. She was seized; she writhed, squirmed, twisted, gasping and panting; once she actually escaped from the twelve clutching hands, stood for one second upright, eyes flashing, breast heaving; then was overborne. By head and heels she was carried to the bed and dropped upon it, and before her struggle could begin again the six women flung themselves at her. She was pinned down: by the ankles, the knees, the thighs, the wrists, the elbows, the forehead. She closed her eyes, felt the warm breath, heard the quick panting, of the women above her. It sickened her.
“Try and open her mouth.” She must almost have lost consciousness. The words brought her back with a start, She did not open her eyes, but instinctively her teeth gritted together and her lips firmed their line. She felt a hand on her face, and knew it was a man’s hand. It smelled soft and soapy, slightly scented, nauseating. She felt the hand manipulating her lips, trying to force them back over her teeth, as though she were a mare whose age must be ascertained. She resisted, clenching her teeth till she felt that her jaw would break. Her heart was racing madly. Surely they could hear its wild alarum? Surely they knew that this would kill her?
“No good,” the voice said softly.
“Give me that,” said another voice. “No – the other.”
She felt steel forcing her lips apart, grating on her teeth. It searched along the line of clenched teeth, slipped, cut into her gums, She tried to heave her body up, to escape this awful indignity, but the six heavy women were leaning down upon her, so that she felt as if she were buried under a fallen building.
One of the voices spoke again. “Look! There! There’s a tooth gone.”
The steel moved through her mouth, found the breach in the defence. It slipped through, touching her tongue. She tried to draw her tongue back, retching. She could hear the rasp of a screw, The noise seemed to fill all her head. Pressing hard against the inexorable lever, she felt as though her jaw would be pulled off her skull. Her lips, her gums, her tongue, were torn and bleeding, and now that her mouth was open she could taste the salt of her own blood dribbling down her throat,
Slowly the screw forced the jaw open. The voice said: “That’ll do. Quick! The tube.”
Now Ann was more dead than alive. She felt the tube in her throat which convulsively contracted with nausea. Then the blessed nirvana came for which she had so desperately hoped, When she came to herself she was alone in the cell. She sat up on the bed, drenched with perspiration. Her whole being heaved suddenly as though she were disrupted. She leaned sideways and vomited. Then she fell back on the bed and lay there staring at the wall, listening to her heart trying to tear itself out of her side. Her legs and shoulders burned with their bruising, but worse than that was the wounding of her mind. She felt obscene, disgusting, like a woman brutally raped.
All day long she did not stir from the bed. In the later afternoon she awoke from sleep, aching in the body, twitching in the wounded mouth, but feeling a little easier in her mind, Now at least she knew the worst that could happen, and she had triumphed. Now she would be left in peace for a while. Peace and quiet. The very thought of them was balm, and she felt beneficent rest flowing down her weary limbs, soothing her tortured mind,
Then she was wide awake, upright on the bed, shivering like a frightened horse. Steps! They stopped at her door. The keys jangled. The six doomful women entered, this time the doctors were close behind them, carrying their instruments. Ann did not stir; she could resist no more; but she let out a great screech that echoed through the cold inhuman corridors of the prison. Then she lay back, feeling the sweat break out and drench her again, and let them do as they would. The six women were not needed. She was held passive by her own broken heart. She was sick while they were still in the room, and when they were gone she turned her face to the wall and cried like an abandoned child.
*
Now all was gone except her resolution. She did not wake up now expecting a little peace. She woke up, emaciated, bruised, swollen-eyed, praying for the day’s strength. Beyond the day she could not look. Every morning and every evening the agony was forced upon her. Sometimes she was wild and fighting-mad, and the women pinned her down like a butterfly on a board. Sometimes she shrieked; and sometimes she was an inert log into which the odious injection was made. But always she was sick, automatically rejecting the food that was poured into her.
At last there came a day when the two doctors entered the cell alone. She knew they were there, but she did not open her eyes. She did not know whether this was their morning or evening visit. When after some time there was no touch of offensive hands, no rasp of steel, she opened her eyes. They were looking at her ponderingly, with interest and commiseration. They sounded her with a stethoscope; they felt her pulse; tapped her chest; lifted her eyelids and peered into her eyes.
“Mrs. Shawcross,” one of them said, “my colleague and I have decided that an application for your release must be made to the Home Office.”
She was too apathetic, too dazed, altogether too far gone, to notice for a moment what they were saying, One of them put an arm round her and raised her gently, as if she were his own sick child, and said: “Do you understand? It is all over.”
She understood, and she cried a little very quietly, and nodded.
“It must be some days before your papers come through from London. While we are waiting for them, will you take a little nourishment – now that you have – er – won?”
Again she nodded. It did not seem to matter that she had won or that she might take food again. She was so feeble, sitting there in the bed, that one of the doctors remained with an arm about her shoulders till the other returned with a small cup of broth. Small as it was, she could take only half of it, the doctor feeding her with a spoon. Then she was laid back gently on the bed, and the bedclothes were tucked round her, and the doctors went. They gave her the impression that they felt as though they were glad to be finally stealing away from the scene of a crime.
Peace and quiet. Peace and quiet at last. She slept, and in the morning she drank a little warm milk. When she tried to get out of bed she staggered and fell, but there was a wardress ready now not to pin her down but to pick her up. On the third day she crawled feebly round the exercise-yard. It was not till the fifth day that she was free. A wardress accompanied her in a cab to the railway station and remained till the train drew out.
Ann slept the whole way to London. She felt as if she could sleep for ever. At St. Pancras she got into a cab and was taken to North Street. That was the time when Hamer rushed to the door and picked her up and called her his darling. She lay all that day in North Street, feeling broken, shattered. She wondered if ever again she could bring herself to endure an experience so devastating to body and mind. She did, not once or twice, but many times.
*
It was not all jam, Tom Hannaway discovered, being a Justice of the Peace. You could get publicly into hot water. You could innocently cause a national outcry. What you imagined to be a brilliant inspiration might have to be apologized for in Parliament by no less a person than the Home Secretary, son of the great W. E. Gladstone, and denounced as a “grave error of judgment.” All through that wretched woman Pen Muff.
Pen had never wanted to sink into a state of nirvana. She had spent all her life in a tough, fighting atmosphere. She was renowned as the most bellicose and destructive of the Suffragettes, always ingenious in devising new means of being a nuisance. She resolved to join Ann in her hunger-strike, but there was no speech-strike in her case. Every time food was placed before her, she hurled the vessels at those who brought it, denounced and abused them.
She hunger-struck for five days, and at the end of that time was not broken. She slept little, prowling her stony cage like a starved she-wolf, ready to snap and bite. She was horribly emaciated; her bones, always prominent, were almost through the skin, and her face was like a skull, balefully lit by dark staring eyes.
Then they began upon her with their jaw-prising instruments and their tubes. She smashed a wardress’s face with the heel of her shoe before they got her on her back, and then it was like holding down a squirming snake. When the doctors forcibly handled her, she had no sense of shame, of outrage, like Ann’s, only a blind, passionate fury that she vented in a torrent of abusive speech. They never left her cell without being white, shaken and ashamed.
For four days she endured the torture which did not so much nauseate as infuriate her; and the doctors and wardresses alike marvelled at the end of that time that her physical resistance still seemed sustained by some quenchless flame of the spirit. She never stumbled or staggered or crawled. Always when they entered the cell they found her upright, wary, untamed, all their brutal work of subjugation to be done anew.
On the morning of the fifth day she was brought back from the lavatory, and said nothing when the wardress who accompanied her locked her by mistake into a cell that was not hers. One cell was like another to Pen. She began at once her hungry, tigerish prowling round it, then stood still, staring at the floor, The cell had not been used for some time; a spare plank bed had been pushed into it and lay there alongside the one that was the normal furniture.
A ghastly grin broke out on Pen’s face. Here was a chance to make trouble! She heaved one bed head-on against the door, placed the head of the second to the foot of the first. Still she hadn’t quite filled the space between door and wall; still they could force her fortress. So she placed the legs of the wooden stool against the foot of the second bed, and found that now, sitting with her back against the stool’s seat, her own feet reached the wall. That was the barricade: two beds, a stool, and a starving, outraged woman. When all was arranged, Pen crouched, waiting.
She had not long to wait. Soon came the well-known odious jangling of the keys and, when the door did not yield, a wardress’s voice. “Open the door! Let me in!”
Pen tensed her knees, thrusting her feet with all her might against the wall. She said nothing, heard the key turn, locking her in again, and the sound of feet echoing down the corridor. She relaxed, smiled, waited.
They could not budge her. They came and shoved till she felt as though her back would break, as though her tensed knees would snap or her feet be driven into the wall. But some superhuman strength was vouchsafed to her: she held on, with the veins in her sunken temples swelling with the magnitude of her exertion.
They wheedled with soft promises; they tried to frighten her with threats of punishment; she answered nothing to threat or promise but sat grimly on the floor, knees up, feet to the wall.
At last they went away again. She heard the key turn and took a deep breath, But she did not get up. She smiled, and waited.
Alderman Thomas Hannaway, J.P., was in the prison. He was a Visiting Magistrate, and with other visiting magistrates he was assuring himself that the law of the realm was being administered without fear or favour. To the visiting magistrates now came the perplexed, perspiring officials to report that a woman had them at bay.
The magistrates walked along the cold corridors, pondering the problem that had been laid before them. It made Tom Hannaway wrinkle his brow. Here was a test case; here was the opportunity for a magistrate to prove his sagacity and worth. His eye fell on a hose-pipe, neatly coiled, ready for use, all spick and span with penal brightness, white linen and sparkling brass.
Tom paused and pointed to the hose. “Drown her out,” he said tersely.
The other magistrates concurred, looking at Tom with respect. Simple, practical, brilliant! Drown her out.
*
They were away a long time, but Pen had no illusions. They would be back. She couldn’t win. She could only make trouble. Very well then. She would make all the trouble she could. She still expected the assault to come from the doorway, and was startled to hear suddenly a shattering of glass and to see that the cell window had been stove in. She was wondering what this portended when a jet of water struck her in the middle. It was terrific, like the kick of a horse, and she gasped, putting her hand to her side. She looked up and saw the nozzle.
Already she was drenched from head to foot. Her clothes were clinging to her as though she had emerged from the sea, and the icy shock of the water set her skeleton frame shivering, She got up from the floor and climbed upon a bed, but the nozzle found her. It quartered the tiny room. The water whacked into the wall and fell back on her in showers. It hit the ceiling and descended like a thunder-storm. It sprayed up from the floor like a fountain. Pen lay face downward on the bed with her hands over her head, spluttering and gasping. So small was the room, so powerful the jet, that the water fell upon her as though she were in a shower-bath, and so narrow was the vent under the door that it began to rise upon the floor. She peeped over the edge of the bed at the encroaching water, rising so rapidly that now terror at last seized her. They had found her one fear: fear of water. She lay still, her heart pounding. This little cubic box would fill. She would be drowned! Already the terror of imagination was upon her. She was struggling, choking, going down, down, down.
But she would not cry out. She bit her pallid lips till they bled lest a sound of surrender should be torn from them. It was not Pen’s voice but a voice without that cried: “Stop!”
The cold bombardment ended. Her teeth chattering as if with ague, her hair streaming in sodden rats’-tails down her face, Pen heaved herself up on hands and knees and stared about her. There were six inches of water on the floor.
Then suddenly the pressure on the door was renewed. Now there was no last human link in the chain of defence. The beds swung away over the slippery floor, and they entered to look upon their victory. They saw a woman on hands and knees, sodden, battered, wild-eyed, leaden-lipped, glaring at them over the head of a bed. None of them ever forgot that burning stare of loathing and contempt. “You bastards!” she gasped after a while. “You dirty, rotten, bloody bastards!”
*
These things were not done in a corner. The case of Pen Muff caused a national outcry; the sufferings of the forcibly-fed were notorious throughout the land. Year followed year; 1909 became 1910; 1911 and 1912 went by; the warfare continued, The women were carried face downwards in prison by their arms and legs, their faces bumping on the floor; they were chased over roofs like burglars; they were struck by doctors and reviled by magistrates.
The country was dizzy with argument. In the House, Bills, Conciliation Bills, amendments to Bills; promises, easily made, easily broken. Bills and talk, talk and Bills, and at last an Act: the Cat and Mouse Act. Ah, my friends, a glorious Act this! An Act to bring a glow of pride to the face of British statesmanship. Consider how it works. Take one woman (hereinafter to be referred to as the Mouse) and one policeman (hereinafter to be referred to as the Cat). The Mouse is arrested and thrown into jail. She refuses to eat and at last is forcibly fed. This legal saving of her life is so well calculated to bring her to death’s door that it can be only a matter of time before the cage is opened and the Mouse is allowed to go free.
Hitherto, that had been the end of the matter until the Mouse committed some new offence. But now when the Mouse leaves the cage the Cat follows. The Cat sits down before the Mouse’s hole, watches the Mouse vigilantly until satisfied that it is now a restored Mouse, fit to go back to the cage. Then the Cat pounces and bears away the Mouse to complete its term of incarceration; but as the Mouse will immediately refuse food, be forcibly fed again, and soon be out once more, possibly with days or weeks added to the sentence for prison misdemeanour, the Cat will have a busy time chasing the Mouse to and fro, and the Mouse, poor fool in search of the illusory cheese of politics, will endure weeks and months of alternating starvation, outrage and recuperation.
A Mouse called Pen Muff crawled out of a London jail on a morning of late summer in 1914. A taxicab took her to the house in East London where she lodged. She went to bed at once, but she was up early the next morning. The resiliency of her body and mind was extraordinary, Ann Shawcross by this time was morose and neurasthenic, enduring with a sullen acquiescence what Pen still encountered with passionate aggression.
For a long time Pen had lodged in this East London house. She got on well with her landlady, whose husband was a stevedore at the East India Docks. Her landlady was proud of her. She was a character in the district. As she went by people would point out the woman whose exploits now included an attempted suicide in jail, arson and a horsewhip assault on a Cabinet Minister.
Pen was tired of being a Mouse. Even at this moment, for aught she knew, the Cat was behind the curtains of a hired house opposite, waiting the moment to pounce. Well, this time the Cat would be sucked in, Pen reflected grimly.
At ten o’clock a baker’s delivery van drove up to the door. A youth sat in the driver’s seat with another beside him. A sad and sorry person, this other, with a raging toothache that necessitated the comforting of his face with a woollen muffler. He got down from the van and carried a basket of loaves to the front door.
“Whatever’s the matter with you?” demanded the stevedore’s wife, and the poor wretch pointed to his face and groaned.
“You’d better come in and drink a cup of tea. That’ll ease you,” said the stevedore’s wife; and the youth in the driver’s seat shouted: “Don’t keep him long, Ma. And bring me a cup while you’re at it.”
Yes, a pretty comedy altogether for the benefit of any Cat who might be licking his whiskers in the neighbourhood. Pen, all prepared, was wearing nothing but a dressing-gown. She whipped it off as the young man began unceremoniously to shed his clothes. The exchange was soon made, and the young man, slender as Pen herself, carefully tied on the muffler,
“There! You look fine, Mother,” she said. “That hides your face.”
Pen, carrying the basket, came out as the stevedore’s wife was recovering her cup from the driver. She climbed up behide him; he clicked to the pony; they turned a nearby corner, and then went spanking along with remarkable unconcern for the delivery of bread.
It was not till the bread van had been returned to its owner, one of Pen’s admirers and supporters, that she turned to him and said: “Thank you, Charles. You did well.”
Charles Shawcross blushed with pleasure. The child who had built up in his mind the hero, Hamer Shawcross, was now the boy who was vividly following the exploits of the heroine, Pen Muff. It was in the nature of Charles, gentle and unassertive, that he must be led. This seemed to him a grand romantic way to be spending one of the earliest days of the long school holiday – the last, as it happened, before he went up to Oxford.
“It was splendid of Alice,” he said modestly.
“Let’s go on now to the teashop on the corner,” Pen said. “I could do with a cup, and Alice is going to meet us there.”
*
For the moment, Ann Shawcross was not a Mouse. The house in North Street was not under observation. Pen was to spend a few days there, quietly regaining her strength, and then she was going to take a holiday in some remote place where Mice could circulate freely without fear of Cats. It had been difficult to persuade her, but Ann and Lizzie Lightowler had made her see reason at last. After all, for anything they knew, this barbarous warfare might go on yet for years. It was to be a communal holiday: Lizzie and Ann and Pen, with Charles and Alice.
Nothing of all this had been said to Hamer. Hamer was having a very busy year. It was the year of the Independent Labour Party’s coming of age, and for one thing Hamer was writing a book that was to blow a fanfare of praise for the emergence of true democracy. He had announced that he would go to Baildon when the House rose, and complete the work in solitude at The Hut. Writing books had once been a high-spirited affair for Hamer, an affair of glad co-operation between him and Ann. Now it was a solemn matter. Jimmy Newboult, who was in the House as member for an industrial division in the North, came in to look up references, check data, do all the donkey-work; and also once or twice a week there was a girl to do the typing.
Hamer was at work in his room when Charles arrived with Pen and Alice. He was standing at the window, looking down into North Street, a figure to catch and please any eye that beheld it. He had given up all eccentricities of dress. There was no more of the Spanish cloak, the fluttering bow, the wide sombrero. The mad divagation of Ann and Lizzie from the normal tended to throw him in self-defence back upon normality; and a remark that Lady Lostwithiel made on that charming morning when they had talked so happily together in Bond Street finished the matter for him. It happened that the pictures they were looking at were chiefly of Spanish subjects. They stood for a long time before one that showed a piratical-looking fellow dressed so much as Hamer then was that Lettice could not resist a little titter. She referred to her catalogue and said: “No, it’s not you.” Then, after a pause, and with a sideways glance at him: “Somehow, they don’t look right – don’t you think? – these gay raffish ruffians? Too Barnum altogether.”
Hamer was no Barnum now. He dressed with an exact English correctitude, and to see the six-foot-two of him in full evening fig was a sight for sore eyes. There had been a dinner – some affair arranged by the Lostwithiels with a pseudo-philanthropic purpose – some jabber about combining all parties so that differences might be forgotten and a common ground agreed on for helping the unemployed. Keir Hardie had been invited, and instead of a formal declining had published the invitation in the Labour Leader – the new guise of that old Miner which Pen used to hand to Arnold in Thursley Road. “They ask,” Hardie wrote, “that all differences may be forgotten. Let me tell you what the differences are. For every ton of coal Lord Lostwithiel graciously permits to be dug out of his mines he receives fourteen pence, while the miner who goes down into the bowels of the earth to dig it and send it to the surface receives sevenpence. I do not accept your invitation, my lord, because I do not want this difference to be forgotten. I want it to be remembered and at last abolished.”
Hamer went, and Lettice said to her husband that night: “Did you notice Shawcross’s shirt-front? It was crying aloud for the ribbon of the Garter.”
Very correct, very conventional, but seeming by his magnificent presence, his greying hair, his commanding eye, to make convention itself romantic: that was Hamer Shawcross at forty-nine. He liked to wear a dressing-gown when he wrote, and standing there at the window in North Street, pondering on the chapter in hand, with the garment of severe black silk upon him, he wondered who the thin youth with the wrapped-up face could be, entering with Charles and Alice.
Alice was a problem that puzzled him. He pretended to himself that he was keeping an open mind about her, but he knew that in his heart he disliked her association with Charles. It had all begun in the most natural way. Charles had gone on from Graingers to Hungerbury, and Hungerbury, with a new headmaster priding himself on modern ideas, was full of social activity. The boys were taken to view, from their privileged pedestals, the lot of those less fortunately circumstanced; and Charles, at sixteen, had been one of a squad taken to examine life in the Rhondda Valley. Hamer could do no less than suggest that the boy should stay for the week-end with Arnold Ryerson.
Charles never forgot that week-end. He liked Arnold, and, as Pen was away on some Suffragette exploit, the two spent the first evening in the den at Horeb Terrace, where Arnold boiled over on the subject of Alice. It was remarkable to Arnold that Alice, off her own bat, had been able to do for herself all that Hamer had done for Charles. But she had. With scholarships she had passed from Cwmdulais to a secondary school in Cardiff. With more, and more brilliant, scholarships, she had passed from Cardiff to Oxford. Her first year at Somerville was just ending; she was expected back at Cwmdulais the next day.
That day, the Hungerbury boys went down a coal-mine: the mine where Richard Richards had lost a leg, where Ianto had died, crying, with his arms round the neck of Hugh Price Hughes; the mine where Evan Vaughan had toiled, by God, nourishing on sweat resentment against oppression. But the Hungerbury boys, in neat little bogus suits of dungarees, knew nothing of all this as they excitedly chattered along the dark roads, swinging their lamps and furtively daubing their faces with coal-dust so that when they emerged into the light of day they should look like real miners.
When they came up, Arnold was waiting to meet Charles, and he had Alice with him. Charles ran to him in his boyish way, eager to show himself off in all the glory of this grimy panoply; and while Arnold smiled gravely at this attractive eagerness, the girl with him broke into a merry, mocking laugh that showed her white teeth and red tongue. Her mockery comprehended the whole Hungerbury squad thinking that it was learning with this one little sip something about the bitter draught of a life which she herself had known so long and so deeply.
“Well,” she said, as she took Charles’s grimy paw, “I suppose you know the Rhondda now, inside out?”
There was the trace of a Welsh lilt in her voice, and now, whenever Charles thought of his own adventure into Oxford, so soon to come, he heard Alice’s singing tones and remembered with pleasure her white teeth and red tongue.
*
Hamer went downstairs to see who the boy with the muffled face might be. In the narrow passage-way which was all the North Street house had for a hall he stopped, for there was a knock at the door. He opened it himself. Keir Hardie stood on the threshold. He was wearing his customary tweeds and rough woollen shirt. He looked Hamer up and down, his shrewd eye taking in the silk dressing-gown, the cared-for hands, the gleaming brush-back wing of hair. “Ye’re looking bonny, lad,” he said dryly. “The auld leddie up at Baildon would have been proud of you. May I come in?”
Hamer loked at his old leader, the man whose life had been all fighting, and whose fighting was nearly done. Hardie’s hair and beard were white; his eyes were troubled and sad and weary. He looked, as he was, sick to death. Hamer’s heart had a sudden motion of reverence and envy for an integrity which, he knew, he could never emulate. He stood aside silently, and Hardie entered the passage, throwing down his cap on a chair. “MacDonald’s just come from Asquith,” he said. “He was sent for.”
Hamer paused with his hand on the handle of the drawing-room door. “There are some visitors,” he said, “and Lizzie and my wife are both in, too. If it’s anything private—?”
“It’s nothing the world won’t know soon enough,” said Hardie. “And if Lizzie’s in I’d like to see her. The auld body always cheers me up.”
They went into the drawing-room together, and Hamer’s face darkened when he saw Pen Muff, her bandage gone, sitting there in her boy’s clothes. There was no love lost between them. “Good morning, Mrs. Ryerson,” he said stiffly.
Pen replied, with a hint of mockery: “Good morning, Mr. Shawcross. I hope I shan’t incommode you during the few days I stay here.”
Lizzie was warmly greeting Keir Hardie, introducing him to Charles and Alice; and she turned now to Hamer and said: “We ought to have explained all this to you before, I’ve no doubt. But you’ve been so busy and we’ve been so busy, there’s been no chance to talk about anything. All it comes to is that Pen’s a Mouse, and she’s hiding here so that the Cat shan’t jump. We’re all packing off for a holiday together in a few days – the whole lot of us – Charles and Alice and all – while you’re up in Baildon finishing your book. So that ought to be satisfactory all round.”
She got it all out in a rush. It was growing on her, this habit of gushing speech; and now she turned to Hardie and appealed to him: “Don’t you think a poor Mouse should use any trick to dodge the Cats?”
“I have publicly expressed the view,” said Hardie, “that the Cat and Mouse Act substitutes murder for suicide, and that the only alternative is to give women the vote. But I know I don’t go fast enough or far enough for some of the ladies. I believe Miss Pen Muff herself has used a stick on me.”
He stated this truth without rancour. Pen remained silent; and Hamer, fearing that the discussion would trickle into the endless channels of the suffrage question, broke in. “The point is, Mrs. Ryerson is breaking the law. Whether you like it or dislike it, the Cat and Mouse Act has been passed. I do not see that a constitutional representative government can afford to repeal any Act under the threat of force. I for one am not willing to be a party to such an endeavour. You make me a party by bringing Mrs. Ryerson here to my house. I cannot consent to this.”
Lizzie raised her eyebrows, “Your house?”
Hamer stammered. “The house I live in. I cannot be dragged into this. All this violence creates a precedent that could be used against our own party when it takes office. There are other ways out if Mrs. Ryerson wants to evade the consequences of her own actions. You know that Lady Lostwithiel is organizing a regular network of getaways for Mice, as you call them. Get in touch with her.”
“Aye,” said Pen, speaking for the first time, “she’s a grand lass. She’s doin’ everything for t’cause except go to quod. And when women have got t’vote she’ll say: ‘Remember what Ah did for thee. Be a good lass, an’ vote Tory.’ Nay, keep thi Lady Lostwithiel. And keep this house, too. Come on, Alice lass. Ah’m off back to t’East End. Ah wouldn’t offend Mr. Shawcross by evading the consequences of my own actions. When Ah invite people to riot, Ah riot myself, and Ah tak the consequences of riotin’. As Arnold did at Cwmdulais,” she shot over her shoulder.
Alice followed as Pen went impulsively out of the room. The front door banged. Charles would have gone after them, but Hamer gave him a look which said: “Stay where you are,” and the boy obeyed.
Keir Hardie sighed and shook his white head. “There’s so much to be done,” he said, “and for me there’s such a little time for doing it, and all about me, in the Party and out, I see nothing but quarrelling and dissension, men and women swelling up their chests with their own little ambitions and interests. Hamer, my boy, do you ever think what a fine figure you’d cut on the Government front bench?”
“I’ve never given the matter a thought,” said Hamer.
Hardie looked at him sorrowfully. “Ye’re a liar,” he said.
Hamer stiffened. His handsome face went red. Hardie stilled the rising outburst with a wave of the hand. “There was a youth in the Bible,” he said, “who went out to find the lost asses, and he found a Kingdom. I’m talking to you as a dying man, Hamer, and I tell you that’s how Labour must find its Kingdom – by getting on with the day’s work. There’s a certain virtue” – he smiled – “in lighting your own fires, and cleaning your own boots, and cooking your own food, as I do in my wee place behind Fetter Lane. There’s more virtue in that than in hob-nobbing with the Lostwithiels, who are robbers of the poor, or in turning that poor misguided woman out of your house on a barren point of legality.”
“The law must be the law, to Labour people as to everyone else,” said Hamer. “And as to hob-nobbing – are we to divide the world into hostile camps?”
“It is so divided,” said Hardie.
“I place myself second to no man,” Hamer declared, “in my attack on abuses, but I think personalities should be kept out of debate.”
“In a sty of starving pigs,” Hardie said whimsically, “the abuse to be attacked is not the abstract idea of fat hoggishness but the particular fat hog who has cornered the food.”
“I am busy—” Hamer began, and Hardie interrupted him. “The world will be busier soon. We are on the brink of war.”
There was a sudden silence in the room. Hamer had been expecting the news. To the other three it came with the shock of a thunderclap.
Looking utterly grey and worn, Hardie went on: “Asquith has sent for MacDonald, as leader of the Party, to know what his attitude, and what the Party’s attitude, would be. As to my attitude, I suppose you can be in no doubt.”
“No,” said Hamer sincerely. “No one could be in any doubt about that.”
“Thank you,” Hardie said. “I shall stand by what I have always preached.” He added with prescience: “I am prepared to be mobbed, hooted, called a traitor. Before it is all over, I suppose there will be jobs in the Cabinet for Labour men. They’ll be willing to pay for our support. But on our side there’ll be no pay. We have to choose.”
He sat sunk in his chair, his white beard in his chest. It was a long time before he ventured to say, almost timorously: “Where will you be, Hamer? I am not asking you now as your old leader. As a friend, tell me, where will you be?”
He was almost afraid to look up into the bright handsome, ambitious face. When he did so, he said sadly: “I see.”
“It is not a thing that can be decided off-hand,” said Hamer. “There are a thousand considerations.”
“There is one consideration,” Hardie answered. “Thou shalt not kill.”
He got up wearily and held out his hand. “Good-bye,” he said, “Think of me at cock-crow.”