The Children's Book

Elsie did not ask who would teach the barefoot girl. She made a remark about the view across the Marsh, and the larks singing. Methley followed her lead, and they sauntered on, demonstrating great interest in wild flowers and marsh sheep, in windblown trees and the Royal Military Canal, along whose deliberately designed bank they walked for some way. Methley turned off the road before it turned towards the drive to Purchase Hall. Elsie thanked him, with some constraint, for his help and for the belt. He said “I think you should come to a public meeting about the rights of women that Miss Dace is organising in Lydd. I think you should take an interest. Women’s lives are about to change utterly. You—you yourself—need to think about that.”

Elsie said she would need to think about whether it could be managed.

“My wife and I will be there. You would be among friends.”

“I shall need to ask,” Elsie said, already a little mutinous at having to ask Seraphita for anything.

“Maybe Mrs. Fludd would also consider coming? We need to speak to all women.”

Elsie did not know how greatly Seraphita Fludd feared that Elsie herself would leave as suddenly and mysteriously as she had come.

25

Miss Dace had booked a kind of glorified wooden hut, in Lydd, known vaguely as the Club Hall, though it did not belong exclusively to any particular club. The army used it, for lectures and social events. The Chapel used it for bring and buy sales. The University Extension Lecturers used it in the evenings, for workers’ education. Miss Dace had put up posters advertising a full day of discussions on the general theme of “The Woman of the Future.” There were five speakers, beginning with Miss Dace herself, and ending with Herbert Methley. There was always the risk that the number of the audience would only equal the number of speakers. Miss Dace enticed the Theosophists and the sewing circle with promises of a very good cold lunch to break the day. She spoke to a major’s wife who was a Theosophist, and asked her to encourage other wives to come. The colonel’s wife was known to be a vehement Anti-Suffragist. She might even come—or send a minion—to heckle. The Vicar of All Saints in Lydd could not be expected to come, though some independent women from his congregation might do so. Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin would come, because they were good disciples of Edward Carpenter, and because one of the speakers was the schoolmistress at Puxty, Mrs. Marian Oakeshott.

The family at Purchase House were sent a flyleaf. Seraphita put it listlessly down on the kitchen table. Elsie said, slightly too firmly, “I should like to go to that, if that’s all right.”

Seraphita put her head on one side and looked as though she was considering objections, with difficulty.

“Do you think you will go?” Elsie asked Seraphita.

“Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t believe in all this agitation about votes, which is what I suppose it’s about. I don’t see how votes could change anything important. Women are … women must…”

She left most such sentences trailing unfinished.

“I will go with you,” said Pomona. “It will make a change of scene.” She yawned, prettily. Elsie was briefly annoyed. She had wanted to do something on her own. But Pomona was right—she did most desperately need a change of scene.

They set out across the Denge Marsh. It was a hot, still morning. Elsie had dressed carefully. She wore a white cotton blouse, her willow-bough skirt, the red belt and the new shoes. She had made herself a hat, on the base of a broken-crowned straw hat retrieved from Frank Mallett’s hand-ons. She had stitched it together, and trimmed it with some ends of red braid, retrieved from Seraphita’s sewing, and a kind of flower-form she had twisted out of bits of lace and gauze. It was the first time she had gone out in public in a hat. Pomona wore a flowing shep- herdessy smock in apple-green, liberally embroidered with butterflies and blossoms. She was hatless. Her pale hair flowed over her shoulders. She looked as though she might be going to comment on Elsie’s appearance, and in the end, did not.

The hall was one of those wooden structures with windows too high to see out of. There was a platform, on which the speakers sat, and rows of wooden chairs, of which maybe the first six were taken, the heads of the women sitting there quite invisible under the great dishes and wheels of their hats, their shoulders a mixture of decorous spinsterly dove-colours and brighter greens and purples. There were six men, including Herbert Methley, who was on the platform next to his wife, Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin, and Leslie Skinner, who had come to support Etta, who was also speaking. There was one soldier, an explosives expert, who had come with his wife, who was a member of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Anti-Suffrage League. There was one grocer, who was bookish, and went to the evening classes of Mrs. Marian Oakeshott, who was also on the platform.

Elsie and Pomona sat down two or three rows behind the last occupied row. From the platform, Herbert Methley smiled down on them, approving their presence. Elsie gave a tight little smile in return. Pomona folded her pale hands in her flowery lap, and turned her face to the light from the dusty window.

There were five speakers, three before lunch and two afterwards. Miss Dace spoke first. She was precisely eloquent about the injustice to women of being unrepresented in Parliament, unable to vote on matters which concerned their lives, their work, their health. She noted drily that when the words “Woman” or “Women” appeared in the names of laws, these were always laws which made the condition of women less free, more uncomfortable. Voters were householders and taxpayers, but women who were both must pay their taxes without any right to have their views, or needs, consulted or represented. Elsie tried hard to listen carefully. She liked Miss Dace’s dry, ironic, passionate tone. She managed to work out what “suffrage” meant, having always vaguely thought that it was to do with women suffering. It must be like that bit of the Bible “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” But Miss Dace wanted Parliament to suffer single householders and taxpayers like herself to vote in elections, and a kind of anger welled up in Elsie, for she was not sure how this helped a penniless young woman, camped in a house with a pantry full of beautiful, obscene female jars and vessels, who was full of bodily needs she could not describe, and was certainly suffering. But Miss Dace was a good woman, she put things straight, she was a reasonable woman, as far as she went.

When Patty Dace had come to her conclusion, the colonel’s wife rose to speak. The country was fighting a terrible war, in a distant country, she said, and the British Empire entailed military responsibility in far-flung places which British housewives could neither imagine nor understand. Let women guard the Home, and the values of the Home, and leave armies and economics to the men whose work they naturally were. Miss Dace replied that those intrepid women who had visited the concentration camps in which the Boer women and children were kept by the British army might be thought to have contributed to the moral well-being of the army and the well-being of the suffering Boers. There was rustling and tapping in the room. Elsie didn’t know what a “concentration” camp was. Miss Dace turned on the colonel’s wife and asked her, would she then remove women from the local government and Poor Law Boards to which they could now be elected and on which they worked efficaciously? No, said the colonel’s wife, she admitted they did competent