The Eleventh Virgin · Part II · Chapter 2 3 (2/4)

What followed took more courage. In the midst of the reception when all the guests had arrived, Miss Drummond went quietly up to Lloyd George while her companion took his station directly behind the minister. When she began her little speech which she had been repeating frantically all the way in the cab, the strong young man seized the arms of Lloyd George from behind and held him fast. The minister couldn’t release himself from the iron grip and it would have been most undignified to wriggle. So he stood and listened to what Miss Drummond had to say. Her remarks were short and swift and to the point and no one had time to interfere or do more than stand thunderstruck until the little scene was over. Then miraculously enough, the two were able to get away and the end of the story was that she sat in the cab and wept on the way back to the suffrage headquarters.

This was the woman who was to head the line of picketers and join Miss Worth in jail. Not that the headquarters were to be left without control during the thirty days or six months that the women were in prison. Many were there to carry out the directions and work of the militant party.

The parade began at the close of the late fall day, just at the time when the workers in the government buildings were on their way home from work. It was expected by both police and outsiders that the parade would take place, so the little park across from the White House was crowded with spectators, and the workers did not go directly home, but stood around and waited for the excitement. Many policemen held back the crowd and kept the road clear for the suffragists.

They started out, two by two, with colored ribbons of purple and gold across the bosoms of their dresses and banners in their hands. June was reminded as she walked in the slow and stately procession of the man at the head of the choir in the Episcopalian service who carried the cross. There was a religious flavor about the silent proceeding and a holy light shone on the faces of the suffragists. They forgot at that time the various reasons for joining the demonstration (June felt without doubt that there were various reasons besides that of suffrage, save perhaps in the case of Helen Drummond and those who had been working for the cause for years.)

To get to the White House gates you had to walk halfway round the little park, and as the procession moved forward in groups of six, the bystanders grew in number. There were old women, who cheered, young women whose faces glowed or were apathetic. Men were generally indignant, except perhaps the newspaper reporters, and they were enthusiastic because the suffragists were providing them with so many good stories. Some men shouted, “Shame! In wartime too! Hasn’t the president enough to bother him?” and others hissed. By the time the third contingent reached the gates and took their stand there, small boys were jeering and trying to throw stones and groups of sailors and soldiers had come to the front of the crowd and were trying to wrest the banners from the hands of the prisoners.

The police had been very busy. It was all they could do to keep back the crowd and the little boys slipped between their legs and were unmanageable. But at the sight of the first group of suffragists, patrol wagons had been called for and when June took her place and began wrestling for her banner with a red-faced young sailor, the first one came clanging up the street, pushing its way through the crowd. One by one, the suffragists were passed along a line of policemen to the curb and assisted into the wagon. Their banners would have taken up too much room, so they were piled on the roof. Then the wagon clanged its way out of the crowd and speeded through the streets of Washington to the Central Station, making as much of a demonstration owing to the banners on top of the car, as the parade had been.

All that was required of the women at the police station were their names and addresses and then they were released. Bail had already been provided and trial was set for the following morning at ten o’clock. But the next morning, the judge refused to do anything but pronounce them guilty and postpone sentence.

“He’s afraid to sentence all of us at once,” the suffragists said triumphantly. “We are too much for him!” And they picketed again that afternoon with the same result. Sentence was again postponed.

“We can go on picketing indefinitely,” Miss Drummond pointed out, “but that is not what we want. We wish to be sent to jail because in that way more attention is paid to the cause and it’s more likely there will be results. We’ve got to get to jail and hunger strike, otherwise Miss Worth and Miss Britton will be kept there hunger striking indefinitely. People won’t be worried much at the idea of two women striking for a cause, but when thirty-five go to jail and start a strike, the United States will have to sit up and take notice.”

So there was more picketing that afternoon and when they were asked their names in the police station, they refused to answer or to give bail. The result was that they were sent to a detention home which had no facilities for so many prisoners at once. They slept fifteen in a room which usually held only two and the next morning were again arraigned before the distraught judge.

“Isn’t this fun?” Billy whispered to June when all were being sentenced to from fifteen days to six months in the city jail.

What she was alluding to were the speeches which all the middle-aged school teachers took the opportunity of making as they received their sentences. Their attitude was that of their profession and indeed the judge looked like a miserable small boy who knows he is in the wrong but doesn’t quite know what to do about it. The same judge had acquitted some of these prisoners when they started their militant tactics and now he had to follow the order of someone higher up and send them to jail. He reminded June of her father, with his patient Southern drawl. He seemed to feel that what he was doing was not what a Southern gentleman should do. But without doubt, the women were, as Mr. Henreddy would say, “ornery.”

Both June and Billy were sentenced to a month in jail. Old Mrs. Angell by reason of her years and feebleness was given five days. She stood up bravely and spoke scathingly to the judge and her little speech was almost the only one which June and Billy didn’t snigger at.

Miss Drummond by virtue of being leader of the picketers received six months.

By general consent, the hunger strike started after they had received their sentences. So the scant meal of weak coffee and bread and oatmeal was the last one which they expected until their demands were granted or they were released. Not that they wanted to eat. There was too much excitement around to allow an appetite yet.

For many hours the women had to wait in a little room back of the court and then at four o’clock more things began to happen. Prison wagons were brought, wagons that had only slits along the top for ventilation and were otherwise closed. Two of them sufficed to carry the prisoners to the jail and when they reached that barren institution on the outskirts of the town, backed by a cemetery and surrounded by dreary, bare fields, there was a long halt at the entrance. Evidently there was some hitch in the proceedings. After a low argument at the entrance, an argument which none of the women could hear, the wagons turned away and started off in another direction.

“Well, I’m surprised,” Billy’s pert little voice broke through the darkness. “They don’t seem to want us. We were sentenced to the city jail and I know that there isn’t more than one in Washington.”

“They’re probably taking us out of town to the workhouse,” another woman said in a sepulchral voice, for many stories had been told of what the suffrage prisoners suffered at the hands of the violent keeper there. Talking was carried on in whispers until the two wagons reached the station.

It had been completely black in the prison wagons, but when the thirty-five women were ushered by a number of policewomen into a waiting train which rolled out of the station immediately, the lamps along the roads had not yet been lit.

June pressed her face against the window and watched the blue twilight pierced with the bare black shapes of many scrawny trees. Here and there lamps glowed in the farmhouse windows. In the west the sky still held radiance which gradually faded. It was drearily beautiful at that time of night, and all feeling of excitement dropped from the girl. The eager low voices of the suffragists coming through the noise of the wheels jarred upon her. Billy, sitting across from her also gazed silently out of the window.

“Somehow,” June told her when they reached the little country station which was their destination, “life and struggle seem very tawdry in the twilight. This bleak countryside makes me feel that I should struggle for my soul instead of my political rights.⁠ ⁠… I feel peculiarly small and lonely tonight. I’m glad you’re with me, Billy. We must stick together and probably they’ll put us in the same cell.”

But they weren’t cellmates that first ugly night.

There was more waiting after they had been driven from the railroad station to the administration building of the workhouse. There a matron asked them their names and histories, which all refused to give.

Miss Prindiville, the stately representative of the Philadelphia family, was appointed spokesman and announced to the matron that they wished to speak to the superintendent before they were assigned to their cells. The matron sniffed, turned to her knitting and the thirty-five suffragists found chairs for themselves and prepared to wait. It wasn’t until ten o’clock that Morrison appeared upon the scene.

He entered the room like a storm cloud, leaving the door open on the large porch outside, from which came the sounds of shuffling feet and expectant coughs.

“We wish to announce a hunger strike unless⁠—” but Miss Prindiville was allowed no further words. Morrison turned to the door and beckoned and immediately the room was filled with men, two of whom seized the elderly lady under the arms and giving her no chance to accompany them voluntarily, lifted her out of the room. As she was pulled backwards through the door, she looked like the stiff figure of a dressmaker’s dummy. Billy laughed hysterically and was immediately seized in her turn.

June made an instinctive movement to join her and was grabbed at by Morrison who stood there blazing triumphantly. As he reached his hand towards her she struck at him contemptuously and she had the satisfaction of seeing him start back and swear viciously before she found two men holding her fast by either arm. She had the feeling of being lifted, carried over the porch and along the path, before she felt her feet dragging on firm ground.

“I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she told them fiercely. But they held her the more tightly, so she vented her wrath by kicking them on the shins whenever she had the chance.

They passed many white buildings gleaming in the darkness before they entered a bare stone building smelling strongly of steam heat and dampness and antiseptic. There on the other side of the room she saw Billy, sitting very straight on a bench which ran around the room and chatting brightly with her guards who tried hard to remain grim and unsmiling. June retained an antagonistic attitude and when she got up from her bench and started to walk to her friend on the other side of the room, she was pounced upon by not only her own guards but two more and pulled this way and that until she finally found herself at the bench she had set out for. She had little consciousness of struggling, but dimly, through the restraining arms, she heard a suffragist (even in that moment she identified her as one of the school teachers) screaming and futilely trying to pluck off one of her captors, which merely served to make them cling the more. Billy was laughing again, not hysterically but with wholehearted enjoyment. June was too mad to laugh, but she knew she was grinning, grinning as she had seen David grin as a small boy when he was giving and receiving hard blows, a grin of pure wrath.

And then she was shuffled into a cell and the gate clanged on her and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“My dear child, are you hurt in any way? And isn’t this splendid? It’s the worst treatment the suffragists have had yet and with all the influential women we’ve got in here with us, the newspapers won’t stand for it. They’ve been pretty hostile so far, but now they’ll have to protest.”

And June turned to find Helen Drummond straightening her disordered hair and dress.

“It reminds me of a stiff hockey game,” June said, “when the other side plays dirty,” and she too straightened her middy and felt tenderly of her arms and legs.

One by one, the suffragists were being led past the cell door and placed in cells along the corridor. Miss Drummond called to each as they passed, asking them if they were all right and trying to find out what had become of all her thirty-four charges.

And while she talked, Morrison stood at the door, his black eyes burning and his grey hair disheveled and threatened her with the straightjacket, a gag, handcuffs⁠—whatever he could think of. But he received no attention whatever and wrathfully ordered the guard to bring the bracelets and chain her arms high to the door of the cell. Which was done, much to Miss Drummond’s satisfaction.

“Splendid,” she murmured to June, her eyes shining. “It gets worse and worse.” She was almost disappointed when an hour later the old guard who had obeyed Morrison’s orders, shuffled quietly to their cell and unlocked the cuffs around her numb wrists.

“Got to keep ’em on all night, I’m sorry, Miss,” he said. “I call it a shame the way that old brute⁠—” and he went away mumbling to himself.

“Well, child, you’ll just have to help me off with my shoes and you’ll find two blankets over there in the corner. They’re filthy, but we can’t sleep without covers in this dampness. Do you suppose we can squeeze up together on that little slab?”

A slab was all it was and obviously meant for only one person. But Miss Drummond and June both being very slim, were able to stretch out on one of the coarse thick blankets which they had spread beneath them and keeping the other one well away from their faces, tried to rest.

And ever after that night, June loved the memory of Helen Drummond, not because she was a suffragist, but because she didn’t talk of it at a time when it was quite pardonable to talk of nothing else. It was Conrad’s novels and travelling and the spell of the sea which they talked of until they fell asleep which was very shortly, for both had the healthy weariness of youth which enabled the one to sleep in spite of handcuffs and the other in spite of continuous fear of falling off the narrow ledge on which she was poised.

They were awakened by a guard who came to the cell in the early morning to lead Miss Drummond away to what June afterwards learned was a padded cell reserved for delirium tremens patients. Not that any such slight matter could disturb her nerve.

All the long morning, June lay there on her stiff blankets waiting for something to happen, and nothing happened. Guards were stationed at the end of the corridor and when any of the women tried to call to each other, they were immediately silenced harshly. There was a disagreeable feeling of suspense in the air, and the suffragists worn out with the excitement of the day before, remained silent. Through the narrow ventilators at the top of the rear wall of the cell, the sun shone dimly for a time and then disappeared. But there was a remaining brightness which allowed June to examine her surroundings.