Page:Women Wanted.djvu/316

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
288
WOMEN WANTED

continents to attention. It is the hand that hurled the stone that cracked the windows of houses of government around the world.

To-day, as England's most active recruiting agent, the greatest leader of the woman's cause is calling men to the colours to win the war. Had she once a slogan, Votes for Women? 'Tis a phrase forgot. In the public squares of London since the war, her countrymen have heard from Mrs. Pankhurst only "Work for Women." Round and round, you see, the world has turned.

A puzzled Sergeant Jones asked the next day for a book about the woman movement. It was Olive Schreiner's "Woman and Labour" the librarian in khaki brought him. "But I wanted to know about the suffragettes, the suffragettes. Did you ever hear of them?" he questioned. So Rip Van Winkle might have asked, I suppose, why, say, for women who once wore hoop skirts.

The woman beside the hospital bed smiled inscrutably for an instant. "Sergeant," she said with a level glance, "I was one, a militant, Sergeant," she added evenly. "And the doctor was in Holloway jail, and your nurse. And the girl who drove your car yesterday was a hunger striker and—" She stopped. The truce! By the pact that was signed in Kingsway, the most radical suffragists in the world, along with all the others, were war workers now in their country's cause and not their own.

The woman in khaki was still. Jones stared. She was dropping no bombs. Only the armies were