“Thank you,” she said, “thank you.” I looked up at her, as I had not liked to do till that minute. A changed being stood before me. I had noticed that she had changed from the night before, she had changed unbelievably at this minute, and all that strength, determination, complete forgetfulness of self could give her, were with her now.
We parted. I went back to the others. The next thing I heard of her was in the other office, where we provided ourselves with stones. A little girl of about sixteen, who kept on running messages for us, came rapidly into the room. “Miss X.,” she said, “has thrown her stone, broken her window, and been arrested.” Then she went out. From that moment I knew that all was well. Miss X. got through the two days in the police-court, the trial, the hunger strike, and the forcible feeding that followed for the space of fourteen days, as did the others. Her body was weakness, but her soul was strength.
No particular job was given to me. Miss Emily Davison and I were to keep together. It was still early, and first we had to make sure of our stones. We went to the other office to get them. I was doing up mine in brown paper, double thick. “You will not be able to throw those,” said the organiser, “if there is the least bit of wind, it will get inside and send them you don’t know where.” That was true. I found some much thinner paper which kept closely round the stone. I took four or five. On each one I wrote a different thing, I think they were all taken from Mr. Lloyd George’s recent speech. I put them into my pockets and went out. Miss Davison had been speaking from every part of the town during the last week. I recommended her to buy another hat for partial disguise. We went into a hat shop and did so. In the shop there was a fascinating little black kitten which it was hard to leave. Then we went into an eating shop, thinking it was as well to have some luncheon. The shop was overpoweringly stuffy and hot. I had not met Miss Davison before, and it was most interesting to hear her experiences. Still, we could neither of us speak nor listen with anything but effort. We decided to go and see what it was like at the Haymarket, a large, open space, where the car with Mr. Lloyd George would probably pass. There was still more than an hour before he could come. The crowd was already considerable. Nearly every woman that I saw looked friendly; this was probably my imagination, but it did me good. The Suffragettes were greatly thought of that day. The place, we found, was divided in two by a hoarding of about ten feet in height; there was a space, guarded by police, that could be opened to let a carriage through. We looked round at the windows of all the adjacent buildings, but they were not of an official or of a sufficiently conspicuous character for our stones. Presently a man in front of us--the crowd now was pretty thick--was twirling round one of his cards in his hands which were folded behind him. He then held it up, so that we could see there was writing on it. At last his signals grew more desperate. One of us took the card from him. On it was written his deferential greeting, that he knew what we were out for, could he help us in any way, run messages for us or anything? We answered, writing on the other side, that we thanked him cordially, but as we had no particular job, it was best for him to “wait and see.” He had a kindly face and looked the right sort, but we thought it was just as well that this was the true answer. There was a monument to the soldiers who had died in the war in the midst of the open space. Their names were written on it, and the little boys were clambering up the monument to see above the crowd. They had died for their country, that was the one fact which seemed to stand out very clearly from the monument. Yes, nobly, and in a good fight, they had died--where is the statue to the women who had given their lives to the nation?