The Sister Page 19

  ‘‘Hear hear,’’ said Katharine, regarding me with something akin to pride.

  ‘‘What would you do,’’ Mrs Cookson asked, ‘‘were you not …?’’

  ‘‘Do …?’’

  ‘‘I mean … ,’’ she gestured out the window, towards the Square. They waited for me to speak, full of tea and sandwiches and sacrificial zeal. ‘‘You see, it matters very much,’’ said Mrs Cookson, ‘‘what we do.’’

  I had a sudden image of myself, or not of myself but of an Alice unafflicted, dressed in breeches and waving a placard (GIVE THE WORKERS WORK!). But they were waiting to hear what I would do in a real situation were I in good health. But I was not, and it was too easy to pretend.

  At last Mrs Cookson spoke. ‘‘I am quite sure, Alice, if you were well, you would be out there lending your support one way or another.’’

  At which Wardy charged back in with, ‘‘Then I say thank the good Lord she is not well!’’

  We managed to ignore her. I thanked Mrs C for her belief in me. Then, looking hard at Katharine, ‘‘I would certainly be proud of any woman who put such beliefs as ours into action.’’

  *

  Next morning Wardy was off, breakfast-less, ‘‘to partake of the Spirit of our Lord.’’ I was about to ask, How can you pass the time in mindless prayer when the stormclouds of revolt are gathering? but I knew precisely how she would reply, her mouth all bunched up in disapproval: Stormclouds of revolt? They should all be arrested!

  ‘‘Wardy,’’ I tried, ‘‘please understand, it is not the working men who are to blame for the damage to property, but roughs and thieves. As for the police, they are behaving disgracefully.’’

  ‘‘Well,’’ taunted she, ‘‘and how would you know that, Miss?’’

  I could have snapped the little boobie’s head off. But then I thought of how she’d been chosen out of all the girls in her orphanage to go to some pathetic ragged school to learn useful things like giving injections and pills and taking blood and giving sponge-baths and lifting invalids and so on but unfortunately not how to think.

  ‘‘I should say it was very natural that the police did not want to get themselves hurt.’’ It did not help her cause that every ignorant utterance came out with a flounce.

  ‘‘How can you say that,’’ I cried shrilly, ‘‘when they wear protective armour and helmets and carry shields, while the workers wear hardly enough to keep out the cold?’’

  ‘‘Quite right too,’’ she replied, stomping off chin-ho.

  I called after her, ‘‘Where is Miss Loring?’’

  She scuttled back, hands on hips. ‘‘Out,’’ she snapped.

  Later, she arrived breathless with news of further demonstrations. ‘‘I found myself in a great crowd round the Square … In the middle there were men haranguing and shouting and …’’

  ‘‘Were they workmen or roughs?’’

  ‘‘Oh,’’ she replied, turning up her nose, ‘‘I would not for the world have looked at them!’’

  ‘‘Then why on earth tell me about it!’’ I shouted erupting with frustration.

  ‘‘I thought, Miss,’’ said that person with equal indignation, ‘‘that you would be more concerned for myself being jostled in the crowd than for a bunch of dirty men raising their fists to the sky. And next time I warrant it’ll be your brother’s windows they dash in with their bricks, mark my words.’’

  ‘‘Let us hope not,’’ I growled, ‘‘but if they do, it will not be a strike against literature but an eloquent cry for work.’’

  ‘‘Humph,’’ she went, ‘‘time for your pills.’’

  I swallowed one, then another, aware that all I’d done by trying to ‘educate’ her was merely stupefy her with my own radical notions. Still, I tried once more to extract from her some sense of what was going on in the Square. Had the shops, for one, got their windows repaired yet? The nose went heavenward again: ‘‘Oh, I have never been to see them.’’ And with that, she gave one of her girly yells and rucked up her petticoats – she’d spied another cockroach. ‘‘Oh, I’ve got my eye upon him, don’ you worry, Miss!’’

  ‘‘I’m not,’’ I muttered, my reality shrunk to the size of a black beetle. And two, three, helpless females staring at it; for by now Mrs Dickson had arrived waving a towel, ‘‘Whatever shall we do? How I wish Miss Loring was here to tell us!’’ But Miss Loring had gone out. Oh, but where? Wardy took her eye off the cockroach.

  ‘‘What is it?’’

  ‘‘I believe I saw Miss Loring when I was out.’’

  ‘‘Saw Miss Loring where, when?’’

  ‘‘I can’t be sure, mind, since I wasn’t looking, as I mentioned. But as I passed close to the Square, not very close but not far, I could have sworn I saw a policeman heading in her direction, if it was her that is or someone tall as her, she was raising her fist and shouting … I don’t know what but it can’t have been nice with her mouth opened wide like that. And I don’t mind saying I said to myself, ‘I don’t care if it is Miss Loring, if he arrests her she will deserve it!’’

  I asked her, very calmly, why she hadn’t told me before, to which she gave no rational reply, so then I ordered her out of my sight forever. Mrs Dickson followed. Where the cockroach went I knew not and cared less. Outside all I could make out was a dense black fog. I will go mad, I thought, living shut up with creatures of infinitesmal mind, with the vision of blinkered horses, in which only the ‘nice’ is acceptable, in which everything from a shoulder of mutton to a new frock is described as ‘pretty and sweet’. Like running one’s head into a feather-bed. As I would later tell Henry, ‘‘You’re lucky with your Smiths. My own Wardy is as ignorant as a fish and as narrow as a hatband.’’ Later still I would come across those same words in The Princess Cassimmissima.

  Thirty

  February, 1886

  ‘Black Monday’ they called it. Two marchers had been killed and over a hundred injured. And Katharine, my Katharine had been arrested during one of the demonstrations and thrown into a holding cell at Grantham Prison, along with nine other ‘rabble-rousing’ women.

  My Katharine, a ‘jail-bird’?

  Their cell is at the far end of the women’s wing. There are no beds or cots, just two long bare slatted benches ranged along opposite walls, as if meant for opposing teams of players. Katharine sits alone on one bench while the others crowd together on the other. The only sources of light are from a slit in a heavy wooden door dubbed ‘the eye’ and a small barred window far above eye level. In one corner of the cell is a ‘nuisance bucket’ with a lid that keeps sliding off. The scrap of curtain, made of torn, stained, flowery chintz, leaves a gap when closed. It would barely cover a potato,’’ she thinks. But the women know what to do: when one of them enters to ‘do her business’ the rest of them look away, cough, stamp their feet and generally make a racket. ‘‘We may not have bread to eat, but we have our dignity … .’’ ‘‘Aye, that we have.’’

  Katharine sits alone facing ‘the nine’ as if she were their teacher and they her pupils, divided from her not by age but class. ‘‘How did that arrangement happen?’’ I later asked. She shrugged. Just how it was. She’d tried to join them on their side of the cell but they’d closed ranks. It only takes one, she said, reflecting how easily a class could be led into a ‘gang’ mentality, with one ‘weak’ one being singled out for derision. So she sits across from them, odd ‘man’ out, determined to show she isn’t afraid. A couple of the women screw up their faces in sympathy or apology while the rest shuffle their feet and avoid her gaze. They themselves are divided, she sees, not a solid thing. Some are ‘for’ their own leader but not necessarily against her.

  The Warder opens the one-eyed door, throws in a pile of filthy rags and clunks down a bucket of putrid water. Looking from one bench to the other, she says, ‘‘You ladies planning a wrestling match? I wouldn’t advise it.’’ A wrestling match might be a relief, Katharine thinks. As she rests her head, the brick wall snaggles her
hair.

  The women tease her for a ‘lady’; worse, an American. ‘‘We don’t need your help, we can fight our own battles.’’

  ‘‘I was not fighting your battle.’’

  ‘‘So you weren’t with us?’’

  ‘‘Support, yes … .but driven by my own ideals.’’

  ‘‘I-deals, eh …?’’

  ‘‘Fairness … equality … the right to work … not to starve … responsibility of the state …’’ Her voice trails off.

  Wag-wag, go their heads; bat-bat, go their eyelashes. ‘‘Spare us the speechifying.’’

  But something is happening outside the prison. Katharine puts her finger to her lips then climbs up onto the stool placed below the window. She looks out, turns. ‘‘Snow,’’ she mouths. She expects to be mocked but that is not what happens; instead, they are excited, wide-eyed. They take turns clambering up to peer out. Katharine imagines the grubby, rank air of their cell filling up, flakes leaping over and under one another, perishing but endlessly renewing themselves, undaunted blobs, until they’re enclosed in a continually circulating whiteness, snowflakes without end, as if someone is turning their cell over and over like a glass paper-weight, with them floating about inside.

  Yes, well. Prison is no place for snow, or fanciful visions. But if you check the papers for that date in February, ’86, you will find a snowfall recorded in London of 3-1/4 inches.

  Their food is brought in on carts: billy cans with greasy soup; hard bread; tin mugs with bitter tea.

  No prayers are expected of them.

  They listen for the prison bells to help them mark the hours.

  They begin to feel like a class of dunces, envying the criminally-inclined ‘regulars’ in their flannel dresses and warm underskirts and stockings: the prostitutes, the thieves, the pick-pockets, the poisoners, the arsonists, the drunkards, the murderesses; in other words, the ordinary ‘fallen’ women, the simple-minded wicked and the villanous ‘trash’. They – the rabble-rousers, the politically motivated mischief-makers – are kept to themselves, denied uniforms and exercise, lest they ‘infect’ and incite the ‘real’ prisoners, who may have been wicked in their ways but are now tamed, quiet and content. Any contact with ‘the demonstrators’, it is feared, might revive dissatisfaction, breed open revolution.

  Katharine thinks they look like nuns in their grey and white uniforms.

  Soon the cell is in total darkness except for the square of gauzy, luminous snow-light. At some point they are thrown a pile of dirty, damp mats. The nine women arrange themselves in a circle. Katharine drops to her knees. Someone pulls her in amongst them. Fair’s fair.

  ‘‘Where are your children, then?’’ a voice asks.

  Katharine gazes up towards the light. ‘‘No, nothing like that,’’ she replies. She blames the War. ‘‘So many of our young men were killed, many of my generation had to remain unmarried.’’ It’s a story she has told before, and in a way it’s true. ‘‘A bloody shame,’’ says one; ‘‘Well out of it, for my money,’’ says another; while a third offers to ‘fix her up’ with her brother.

  ‘‘Were you tempted?’’ I later asked.

  ‘‘Only slightly.’’

  ‘‘What did you do before marriage?’’ she asks the women.

  ‘‘Farm worker … hat-maker … dressmaker,’’ they count off. Three say domestic service; two nurses … two factory workers.

  Katharine’s ‘vision’ is by now taking shape. She will contact Lady Charlotte Guest who started a night school for young females. She will argue for the right of working-class women to learn at home; more radically, for bringing learning into women’s prisons. Education, she rehearses, must be unbiased with free access to all, and must be spread as wide as possible. She thinks of asking the women if they would ever consider attending one of the new ‘night schools’, but she knows they will only scoff. But if you could learn in your own home, wouldn’t that make all the difference?

  Education, thinks Katharine, is the key. Education is her solution to the ills and inequalities of the world. (Did I also fit into her educational program: Care for the Hopeless Housebound Hysteric?) The Society for Study at Home. If the women trapped at home with tots, the elderly and infirm and otherwise housebound, could not come to the classroom, why, the classroom would come to them, with specially prepared lessons in history, literature, the sciences, which they would study and absorb; and in due course the knowledge they acquired would lift them out of ignorance and squalor and oppression; and they would learn – learnlearnlearn, the very word a lock-breaker – to stand up for themselves, to free them from their chains.

  But they want to know more about her: where, for instance, did she come from? She tells them about her family home, a twenty-five-acre farm overlooking the sea on Boston’s Gold Coast. Surprisingly they listen, rapt, as to a fairy tale. Someone imitates her accent, Beverly ‘Faahms’, like a sheep baaing. Their section of the town, she tells – white, wealthy, ‘purebred’ – was divided by the railroad tracks from the rest of Beverly, or ‘beggerly’. ‘‘No blacks allowed except as servants: no riff-raff. Private, keep out …’’

  ‘‘What brought you over to this country?’’

  ‘‘My friend Alice.’’

  ‘‘Your friend?’’

  She ignores the rude snooks, and soon they die away. Most of the women are asleep, variously snoring or whimpering or dreaming their impenetrable, protective dreams inside the cold. It is almost dawn before a new Warder throws them a pile of blankets.

  *

  Henry’s first stop was to reassure me about the damage to his flat. ‘‘Two windows have been smashed; I, however, as you will have observed, remain unsmashed.’’ He was looking jaunty and jowly. The bowtie a mistake.

  ‘‘Katharine is in prison,’’ I announced. I explained the circumstances.

  He stood. ‘‘Is it possible?’’

  ‘‘Perfectly.’’

  ‘‘Where is she? She must be bailed out immediately.’’

  ‘‘I believe they’ve been denied bail – and visitors.’’

  ‘‘Quite outrageous.’’ Was this remark aimed at an unreasonable penal system, I wondered, or Katharine for her troublesome action?

  Later – so we discovered – he contacted his friend Lord Rosebery, then Chairman of the London County Council, who ‘pulled strings’ to get her out. She refused, of course, but the prison authorities more or less ordered her release. She would leave, she insisted, only on condition that the other nine were also released. Against all expectation, they acceded to her demand. As Rosebery told Henry, they were relieved to be shot of the lot of them.

  Thirty-one

  Katharine had done up her briefcase and was drawing on her gloves. She would soon be meeting her cronies Josephine Butler and Charlotte Guest. I imagined them at Lady Guest’s house in Chelsea perched on chairs with cabriole legs sipping ditchwater tea and tutting over the snow and the Education Bill and Home Rule – was it really such a wise thing? – and had any of them had a phrenological reading lately and wasn’t it thrilling to discover what part related to which? … and what was one to do about a society that cared more for a dog with a broken leg than a starving underclass? But it was a flawed picture. The chairs would just as likely be capacious and of a good quality but threadbare with use by adults, children, dogs & cats … and the tea might well be strong and dark as coffee and be accompanied by slices of rich fruitcake. As for the talk, it would begin with themselves – wasn’t that what was missing in male chambers? – a kind of introductory intimacy, a warming-up before they turned (oh must we? yes I guess we must) to the ‘business’ of the day; and while the men (liberals and radicals alike) might call it gossiping and sneer at it, these intellectually brave women who would also sip quite strong tea would defend it on the grounds that one’s society and one’s self were in an analogous relationship; that is to say, if you expected your society to have a heart, you yourself would have to demonstrate you were in possessi
on of one.

  But how was it in prison? they wanted to know … And how was her poor invalid companion Alice … and how was Lady Guest’s husband’s gout … and Josephine’s boys; and then the weather (the snow had turned to slush outside but it was still raw and damp). And, finally, there would be work: education; plans for.

  Katharine stood before the hall mirror. She had her spectacles with her; she would put them on later. But it was time to do up her tunic, the black-watch with the onyx buttons, fifteen from throat to hem, aligned right of center like an admiral’s coat. Her hat, a bowler with a peony-like paper bloom erupting from its black velvet band, sat squarely upon her head. Reaching round to the back brim she gave it a small shove sideways so that it sat rakishly forward and cocked to one side, thus balancing the right-of-center tunic.

  How could Henry think her pinched and plain?

  ‘‘I don’t suppose you can see much like that,’’ I grumped.

  ‘‘Well enough,’’ she replied tersely, stiff with tension.

  There she stood, unmoving, while I observed her standing and so it went on until something gave in her and ‘‘Oh, Alice,’’ she unfroze and came and placed her cheek against mine: ‘‘It will be alright, everything will be alright.’’ Then she straightened, that whole long spine of hers righting itself inside the tunic; and there was the hat filling her out with its roundness, and the blue-cupboard eyes in shadow; and at last she aimed herself at the door and swept out – off to talk ‘plans’ – leaving me to recall Dorothea Brooke’s plans, and Harriett Martineau’s plans, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s plans, and The Ladies National Association’s plans, and The Society For Promoting Employment for Women’s (SPEW’s) plans, and everyone else’s plans but my own.

  The wolves commiserated: a whole furry fanged pack joining me in a chorus of howls as I sat with my knees up writing useless letters to politicians who would pass them on to even lesser flunkies for reply, and newspaper editors who would not deign to print them.