Women of Courage (6 page)

Sarah waited half an hour until the lamplighter came along the street with his long pole. By that time several men had passed, coming home to their respectable family houses and flats, and two had looked at her hesitantly, as though tempted to say something, before moving on. One other man, a distinguished man in top hat and grey overcoat, had rung the doorbell of number 40 and been let in, but Jonathan had not come out.

Sarah walked home, feeling lonelier and angrier and more humiliated than she had ever felt since her father died . . .

She lay on her back on the hard wooden bed and stared up at the ceiling, where a glimmer of light from the street outside made shadows flicker in the gloom. The prostitutes and the drunk in the cells down the corridor were quiet now, and the shouts and laughter in the street outside were few and far between. Her body ached with the cold and she felt alone in all the world.

It’s true then, she thought, the whole rotten system that men have set up oppresses women and destroys love. We
have
to get the vote, because that’s the only way we shall ever change these horrors. Though just now she couldn’t quite see how.

I slashed the picture, anyway, she told herself bleakly. That may do something for the movement but it won’t help me. Because the woman in the picture wasn’t just a whore as I said she was — she was me, myself, the woman Jonathan thought he had married. The woman I once thought I was. If I had stayed like that he would never have betrayed me.

She had not slept with Jonathan for over a year. It had been her own decision, part of her reaction to the trauma of her miscarriages, to her own political development. A grown man ought to be able to cope with that. If men behave like beasts they don’t deserve our love.

The words rang hollow, even to herself. All that sleepless night she tried to warm herself with hatred of him but the flame refused to burn.

If he went to a whore she had only herself to blame . . .

4

T
HE COURTROOM was crowded, but there were no women there at all. Sarah came into the dock up the stairs which led directly from the police cells, and she could hear the murmur of voices as she climbed the steps. The murmur changed to an indrawn hush, and then there she was. One moment in the cold, echoing, whitewashed underworld of the cells, the next in a warm, oak-panelled magistrates’ court, warmed by the breath and bodies of fifty or sixty men crammed together around her on wooden benches.

She stood in the centre of it all, raised above them in the dock, with only the magistrates and their clerk at her own eye level.

Her hands shook as she grasped the metal rail on the front edge of the dock. She wondered what she looked like to all these men. A slim, tall woman with a pale face, dark, deep set eyes, and untidy brown curly hair, she supposed. Not very clean or attractive. She had washed and dressed as well as she could — one of the wardresses had given her a bowl of soap and water and a comb, and had helped her to straighten out her hat which had fallen off and been bent in the National Gallery. But the woman had not produced a needle and thread, and Sarah was conscious of several rips in her grey skirt and jacket. The men could not fail to see those.

Her hands shook, too, because she was already feeling weak after twenty-four hours without sleep or food.

They had brought her food last night, but she had sent it back untasted. She had resisted again today, though the smell of breakfast had been a much greater temptation than she had expected.

I am like an animal, here to be baited, she thought. I am their victim. They could tear me apart if it entertained them. But then, that is what all men are like, in the end.

She saw Jonathan, sitting down below on the benches to the left. Immaculate as ever in morning coat and top hat — tall, bearded, handsome. But the high wing collar only partially covered the medical dressing on one cheek, and the face which looked up at her was tired, drawn and pale like her own. She wondered if he had slept since he saw her, and if he was afraid of what she might say in court this morning.

They gazed at each other bleakly. When he tried to smile she frowned and he turned away, embarrassed, conscious of the long row of journalists eagerly watching from the side benches, ready to scribble in their notebooks.

She had prepared a speech, but everything seemed to go so smoothly she thought she would have no chance to give it. Jonathan had produced a lawyer for her earlier this morning, but she had sent the man away. He had suggested she plead
insanity
, for heaven’s sake! Now, when they put the charge to her, she raised her head and proudly said: ‘Guilty’ in a clear voice which sent a buzz of comment through the court.

She had thought that would hurry things along, but it seemed that a great deal of time had to be given to the prosecution lawyer to ramble on stating perfectly obvious facts, such as the time of day she had entered the National Gallery and even the knife she had used — he held it up. When he called the manager of the Gallery into the witness box to explain the value of the painting, Sarah lost patience.

In a loud, clear voice, she said: ‘I do not recognise the jurisdiction of this court.’

All the heads of the men, who had been concentrating on the oath the manager was about to take, turned her way. the manager’s mouth was actually open in surprise. The clerk of the court scowled.

‘Please be quiet, madam. You will be given your chance to speak in due course.’

‘But I don’t want to be given a chance to speak, I want to speak
now!
I have been here many times before and listened to you — now it is my turn. Freedom of speech is not a thing for men to grant to women — we have it of right. And I say here and now that I do not recognise this court, because it is a court composed only of men, granted its powers by a parliament composed only of men, which in its turn was elected by male voters only. Whereas half of the citizens of this country are women . . .’

‘Madam! You will be silent!’ The clerk banged furiously with his wooden gavel, and the policeman in the dock moved to Sarah’s side and held her by the arm. But he hasn’t got my mouth, Sarah thought, that still works.

She raised her voice and spoke louder into the uproar.

‘That man there is only going to testify that the painting I slashed was priceless, which we all know anyway. What he won’t tell you, because no one will ask, is that it was a painting of a naked woman lying voluptuously across a bed, which was painted with the clear intention of giving lascivious pleasure to men — the same men who not only deny the vote to women, but refuse to pay them equal wages, live off their sweated labour in laundries and brush factories, and seduce the daughters of the poor into prostitution. I know that happens, and I am quite sure that many men here know that it happens, too. Even my husband knows it is true. He is as bad as the rest . . .’

Heads turned, swung towards Jonathan. The reporters scribbled frantically.
Oh Jonathan, Jonathan!

‘And the painting which was exhibited by that man there . . .’

The noise was so great now that she wondered if anyone could hear. The policeman, embarrassed, began to drag her by the arm sideways out of the dock. But she caught hold of the brass rail and clung on. Perhaps no one would hear her but it was
her
trial, she would speak when she wanted to! She saw the reporters scribbling away in shorthand below her to the right, and a great feeling of joy and defiance bubbled up inside her. This was what she had come here for! Whatever they did to her later, tomorrow people would read her words in the papers and understand what she had done, and why!

‘You men care so much about that painting which is just a matter of canvas and paint, and nothing at all about the real living women that are all around you! What do you have to say about Mrs Pankhurst and all my sister suffragettes, who are locked up in prison and tortured as I suppose I shall be, tortured until they can scarcely walk? Do you care about the damage you do to their bodies? Bodies of real living women, not paintings! We are your mothers, your sisters, your wives — don’t you think we deserve the same right that you have — the right to vote for the government whose laws we live under?’

The policeman had been joined by a colleague, who managed to prise her hands free from the rail, finger by finger, bending them back until they almost broke. The first policeman wrapped his arms round her waist and lifted her bodily backwards out of the dock. For a moment she struggled, kicking the shins behind her, but it was futile. The bearhug drove the breath from her body, and the second policeman held her wrists to prevent her fighting back with them.

The last thing she saw as she was carried backwards like a naughty child out of the dock was Jonathan. He was on his feet, angrily shouting from the far side of the court. She wondered if he had understood that she knew his secret. She had shouted it out clearly enough. But even if he had, there was nothing he could say to her now.

The policeman lugged her down into the bare whitewashed staircase leading to the cells. The walls echoed with laughter from the courtroom above. That hurt her more than anything else had so far. It’s all for nothing, she thought. I’m just a freak, a monster to these men.

A child who got married and thought she was loved. A doll that thought it was human . . .

The collecting cell below the court was a long narrow room with wooden benches down either side and a toilet at one end. There were several women there when Sarah arrived, and more appeared throughout the afternoon. Most had been convicted of various petty crimes, and some were merely being remanded in custody until a later trial. There were pickpockets, prostitutes, thieves — several only fifteen or sixteen years old. Some were in despair, others proud and defiant. All, at one time or another, felt the need to use the toilet at the end of the room, in full view of the rest.

Shortly after Sarah had been brought down, a policeman had come in to tell her her sentence. ‘For cutting the picture — five months. And for contempt of His Majesty’s Court of Justice — one month. All in the third division.
Consecutive!’

He said the last word with malicious relish and emphasis and one of the other women grinned as he went out.

‘Must have hurt his pride, dearie, when he had to carry you down. Or did you catch him a good one in the cockles?’

‘What? No — no, I don’t think so,’ said Sarah dazedly. Six months! She could never survive that long! But then she wasn’t going to have to. They would let her out because she wouldn’t eat.

She gazed at the woman vaguely, wondering what such a large, blowsy, motherly-looking woman could be doing here. ‘What are you charged with?’

The woman laughed, her double chin wobbling up and down. ‘Solicitin’,’ she said, shortly. ‘Picked me up in Piccadilly Circus.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Sarah said bitterly. What man could possibly pay to make love to a woman like that? She must be at least forty, and plump in all the wrong sorts of places. Did Jonathan betray me with a woman like that, she wondered. Or with a child? Both ideas were equally grotesque.

Something in her expression seemed to offend the woman. ‘There’s no need to turn up yer nose, milady. Suffragette, are yer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Going to starve yourself to get out?’ The rest of the women in the cell were watching with interest now. Previously, when Sarah had been arrested, she had had other suffragettes around her. She had never been quite alone like this before.

‘Yes, I am. I shan’t be in here for six months, whatever they say. I’m not going to do anything they tell me.’

The woman raised her eyebrows. The others in the cell contemplated her with a flat, incurious stare. Not exactly hostile, but there was no sympathy there, either. No sense of sisterly solidarity.

‘I wouldn’t like to do that,’ the woman said. ‘Hunger strikin’ an’ all that. They’re pretty bitter about that in Holloway now, you know. Some of the doctors used to be sorry for the suffragettes once, but they left. Governor slung ‘em out.’

Sarah had no response to this, and for a while the conversation lagged. More women came in as the court continued its process up above, and by midday the cell was quite full. There were women of all ages — a grandmother of sixty with wrinkled face and black teeth, convicted of stealing fruit; a young servant girl with wide, scared eyes and a pinafore over her drab grey dress, who had taken the spoons and a silver teapot from her employer’s house; shop-girls who had stolen from the till or walked out with clothes stuffed under their skirts; a middle-aged woman with a swollen lip and black eye who sat in a corner and glared at a girl with a scratched cheek on the far side of the room, ostentatiously ignoring her.

And then there were the prostitutes. As well as the fat blowsy woman who had spoken to Sarah earlier there were half a dozen girls aged between about sixteen and twenty-five who had been picked up for soliciting in the streets. Most still wore their finery, splashed round the hems with the mud of the gutters and crumpled after a night in the cells. Most had hard, strained faces, some garishly covered with too much make-up, smeared from the night before. None of them were in the least bit beautiful. The make-up made it worse.

Two of the older ones were crushed up against Sarah as the cell filled. They glanced at her curiously, taking in her fine, good quality clothes, the plain gold ring on her finger.

‘Lady, are yer?’

‘Yes. I’m a suffragette.’

The fat woman on the other side of the cell laughed, a deep, throaty, suggestive chuckle. ‘Not just any suffragette, neither! She slashed the picture in the National Gallery, she did! You mind your manners, Sal — we got a top-notch dafty ‘ere!’

‘You may think it’s crazy, but I did it out of principle. You ought to understand.’

‘Oh yeah? Go on, tell us, then.’

For a while Sarah tried to explain. The oppression of women, the low wages, the exploitation, the futility of their lives, the way the whole of society worked to the advantage of men. She was not a great orator, and had only spoken in public once or twice before, but here in the crowded airless cell she provided a welcome distraction. Her audience was captive, but sullen, frightened and cynical too.