CHAPTER XII.

The street through which the women were to pass was, we found when we reached it, already thickly lined with men, many of whom bore marks of their fearful struggle with fire of the night before. Arms and hands bound up in slings, and foreheads bandaged with cloths, told of the scathing wounds that had been received in the fiery conflict. Blanched and haggard faces and heavy eyes also told of sleepless anxiety before and after the fire. Some of those who had been so injured as to be unable to appear on the streets, were propped in easy chairs at the open windows. Not to see womankind after such an unprecedented absence, was a deprivation not to be endured. It would have been like missing the sight of the sun after a dreary, Arctic winter.

But though all the men in the town, excepting those who were disabled by wounds, were on the streets and squares through which the women were to pass, there was a silence like a spell upon the vast multitude. It was a perfectly noiseless congregation that had gathered there. Anything like gossip or badinage were as utterly absent as they would have been from before the altar of a cathedral. Truly there was no place for speech in that strange concourse, and Mr. Lister and I took our places in it without uttering a word. A feeling of solemnity akin to awe had taken possession of me. I recalled Mr. Lister’s words when he first told me of the parade: “The women wish man to see in a simple panorama exactly what woman has been up to this day.”

What could the panorama be?

But I did not have long to wait. And the tense excitement of the moment when the women appeared on the bridge, toward which all eyes were strained, how can I describe it! It seemed for a moment to make me dizzy. When the mist which swam before my eyes had cleared away, the head of a majestic host had crossed the bridge, and was slowly advancing, without noise or gesture, toward the spot where I stood.

Seen from a little distance, I remember a first vague impression that the women had taken great liberties with the fashions that had existed when I last saw them. I called to mind that Mr. Lister had told me that among the other relics of what had become to them an obsolete and withered past, the women had cast off many of the unreasoning fetters of fashion that they had spent much earnest study and practical experiment in their retirement in finding the most natural and comely dress for women. I will not say that the sight of woman in any garb would not have been thrilling under such strange circumstances as those under which I was now about to behold her, but certainly the women who were approaching me were dressed with a simplicity and taste such as I had never before seen. Their comely outlines seemed invested with a new sense of freedom of motion such as one might have who had been suddenly released from a weary, dragging ball and chain.

But all thought of the vesture of these self-banished daughters of the Universe vanished like a breath the instant they drew near enough for me to note the rise and fall of their tremulous bosoms, to search their serious faces, and to study the arrangement of their noiseless and modest pageant. Their speechless procession was divided in a way that I did not at first comprehend, but there was a sense of plain, critical sincerity about it, a perception that it was intended to be a bare exposition of simple, unvarnished truth, that sharpened my intellect so that I was not long in perceiving its vivid meaning.

First in this strange procession came the unmarried women, or “old maids” as they had always been called, and although there were no upbraidings in their serious, modest eyes, the intolerable injustice and cruelty which had been meted out by man to these patient, helpless souls, was made as clear as the blackly vivid painting of a guilty conscience.

“These are they,” a voice seemed to say, “whom man has for ages taunted with a derision as contemptible and unchivalrous as the striking of a cripple. These gentle sisters of men, who have been by their nature ever ready to perform the kindest and most sisterly acts for their recreant brothers, have been laughed to scorn if they manifested the slightest desire for marriage, and bitterly mocked if they failed. Spurred by contumely toward the only goal which man had allowed them, they had been heartlessly derided for missing it, and relegated to a life of coldness and contempt as cruel as the grave. Instead of reaching a strong, brotherly arm toward these sisters, man had added to her natural weakness the abuse of a coarse ridicule and the unutterably grievous burden of a cruel disrespect. To this had been added in innumerable instances, the single-handed struggle with dire poverty.” Before these unreproaching creatures, who had suffered such unnumerable cruelties at the hands of their natural protectors, I felt a self-abasement that was akin to remorse. I longed to throw myself in the dust before them, to kiss their hands and to crave their forgiveness. Surely the woes of the “old maids” called for the just vengeance of Heaven. And how many there were of them! Who would have dreamed, without seeing such a panorama as this, that so large a proportion of women were old maids, living in a state of contemptuous abasement or humiliating sufferance? As I gazed at them, strange and confusing questions, never before thought of, began to thrust themselves into my mind. Had not this great mass of women social and maternal instincts as deep and inexpugnable as any of their kind? What sort of social system was this, then, that remorselessly crushed and cruelly starved the strongest and most innocent desires of a great majority of its subjects? Could it be possible that sane men and women believed that a just Heaven looked with any complaisance upon such a system?

A space divided the old maids from the part of the procession that came next, and I turned with curiosity to look at the faces of the men by whom I was surrounded. To my satisfaction, I saw plainly written there the poignant workings of a deeply troubled conscience; I saw there the unutterable shame of having done an unchivalrous act, and the still heavier reproach of having done a cruel one. There was no need of upbraiding words.

The part of the procession which next drew near seemed to be nearly as numerous as the “old maids.” With a sudden shock, I saw that it was the “courtesans,” or rather those who had been courtesans, for I remembered that Woman had, by an irrevocable edict, forever banished the name and calling of the courtesan from the earth.

But if the contemplation of the soul-wearying burdens borne by the uncomplaining “old maids” produced in the men who gazed upon them the compunctions of pity and remorse, the scarred and wasted wrecks of man’s passion which now passed in long review before him, reproached him with a poignancy ten-fold greater. These women, bearing the ineffaceable marks of man’s ravages, had differed, it appeared, only by an accident from those whom he esteemed pure. Dragged from the garden of purity by man’s own perfidy, they had been doomed without hope of forgiveness, to forever minister to his lust. Disregarding for ages the example and spirit of the Great Teacher, man had thrust the victims he had thus made, deeper and deeper into the blackness of a bottomless pit. I turned away my head with a shudder from a spectacle before which all men stood in awful condemnation!

Fully two-thirds of the procession had passed by, and the woman’s panorama had shown nothing but unmerited contumely or ruthless devastation. What could there be left?

It was a band of exceedingly frail and wasted women, that I next looked upon. Feeble invalids they appeared with but a remnant of days before them. Borne down by disease they dragged out lives of continual pain. The ashes of hope were in their eyes, the ashes of beauty were in their faces, and the ashes of strength were in their feeble frames. These, it appeared, were women who had married young profligates, “to save them.” They looked like flowers which had been hopelessly blasted by a deadly, blighting wind. The fearful scars and moral pollution which had been in the souls of their husbands, had been wrecked upon them to the uttermost, and there had been no voice to protest, no sheltering arm to interpose.

These were followed by a very small band of women who were said to have been happily married. But the chains of these seemed in many respects as heavy, though a little more gilded, than those of the women who had preceded them. They appeared to have paid their all for the narrow happiness which they enjoyed, and it had been fraught with deadly perils, against which they had had no adequate protection. Even some of these, it seemed, had been bartered for gold or titles, and only a filmy legal fiction stood between them and the name and stain of the concubine. Following them closely was the army of married women, who, unfortunately mismated or overborne by the evils of undesired maternity and its dire accompaniment, poverty, formed the strong rank and file of the Great Woman’s Strike.

As I gazed upon them, a strange hallucination possessed me. It seemed to me that I was looking, not merely at the passing procession, but at the tender mothers of all mankind, and that, with them, I saw the mountain of anguish, the unremembered toil, the care and undying self-sacrifice which they had borne since the race began. What did not man owe to woman!

In the close of the procession came the young women who were just verging upon marriageable age, the tender and blooming maidens who were still dallying in the primrose path of free and beautiful girlhood. The sight of these innocent and care-free creatures would seem to have lightened and dissipated the effect of the sight of the unabated misery that had preceded them, but on the contrary, it immeasurably heightened the awful effect. For these, it appeared, were the perfumed and garlanded victims who were soon to be offered up to the fearful Moloch who presided over woman’s destiny. “A few short years,” it seemed to say, “and the rosy hours of youth’s unfettered dance will be over. Then, I claim you for the three great classes into which women are divided,--despised old maids, feeding on the social crusts thrown from a profligate’s table; equally despised courtesans, sitting at that table with man in wanton revelry; and married menials, propagative drudges, meekly waiting upon that table, having no voice in the allotment of their own destiny, and no power over their own persons.”

This voice ringing in my ears, together with the woeful procession which had passed before my eyes, had completely daunted me. I could bear it no longer. It was as if my conscience had been preternaturally aroused, and had brought before my mind’s eye, in long defile, a black array of unsuspected sins. Rapt as I had been in the contemplation of this strange procession, I felt that I must flee from it as I would flee from a spot where I had committed a dastardly crime. I turned in anguish to break my way through the crowd of men, anywhere to get away from the awful evidence of misery in the producing of which I had been an accomplice with all men. Judge, then, of my speechless amazement, my absolute horror, on turning, to find that there was not a man in sight. Pierced as I had been with an agonising contrition, it still appeared that I was more callous than the men by whom I had been surrounded. Unable to bear the heavy reproach of their consciences, they had slunk away one after another, till I, without knowing it, had been left entirely alone. This discovery was too great for my nerves, weakened as they had been by the ceaseless shocks of the past few days. My brain whirled. I was conscious of a sudden movement toward me by some of the women in the procession and then all was a blank.

I had fainted.

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