I
"And the things the balloon man said!" observed Daphne, stirring her tea. Daphne is my English cousin, and misnamed. "He went too high and Poppy's nose began to bleed."
"It poured," Poppy confirmed plaintively to me. "I leaned over the edge of the basket and it poured. And the next day the papers said it had rained blood in Tooting and that quantities of people had gone to the churches!" Poppy is short and wears her hair cut close and curled with an iron all over her head. She affects plaids.
"Then," Daphne went on, addressing the room in general, "he let some gas out of the bag and we began to settle. But just when we were directly over the Tower he grew excited and threw out sand. He said he wasn't going to hang his balloon on the Houses of Parliament like a penny ornament on a Christmas tree. And then the wind carried us north and we missed it altogether."
Mrs. Harcourt-Standish took a tea-cake. "I was sea-sick," she remarked pensively, "and he was unpleasant about that, too. It was really mountain sickness, although, of course, there wasn't any mountain. When we began to throw out the handbills he asked if I had swallowed them, too."
Mrs. Harcourt-Standish plays up the feminine. She is slim and blond, and wears slinky clothes and a bang—only they call it a fringe—across her forehead. She has been in prison five times and is supposed to have influence with the Cabinet. She showed me a lot of photographs of herself in the dock and in jail, put up in a frame that was made to represent a barred window. It was Violet Harcourt-Standish, you remember, who broke up the meeting of the Woman's Liberty League, the rival Suffragette association, by engaging the suite below their rooms, burning chemicals in the grates, and sending in a fire alarm when the smoke poured out of the windows.
I had been in England visiting Daphne for four months while Mother went to Italy, and I had had a very queer time. One was apt to go shopping with Daphne and end up on a carriage block or the box of a hansom cab, passing out handbills about votes for women. And once, when we dressed in our best gowns and went to a reception for the Cabinet, or something of the kind, Daphne stood on the stairs and began to make a speech. It turned out that she hadn't been invited at all and they put her out immediately—politely, but firmly. I slid away into the crowd, quite pale with the shock and disgrace, and stood in a corner, waiting to be arrested and searched for the spoons. But for a long time no one noticed me. Then a sunburned gentleman who was passing in the crowd saw me, hesitated and came back.
"I beg pardon," he said, and my heart turned entirely over, "but I think you came with Miss Wyndham? If you will allow me——"
"I am afraid you have made a mistake," I replied frigidly, with my lips stiff with fright. He bowed at that and passed on, but not before he had looked straight into my eyes and read the lie there.
After ages I left the window where I had taken shelter and got somehow to the dressing-room. Of course, Daphne had taken the carriage, so I told a sad-eyed maid that I was ill and would not wait for my brougham, and to call a cab. I was perfectly numb with rage when I got to Daphne's apartment, and burst in like a whirlwind. But Daphne was not at home. She came in at three that morning, maudlin with triumph, and found me asleep on the floor in my ball-gown, with a half-packed trunk before me.
She brought me tea and toast herself the next morning and offered it on her knees, which means something for Daphne—she is very stout and almost unbendable—and explained that I had been her patent of respectability, and that it had been a coup; that Mrs. Langley, of the Woman's Liberty League, had hired as a maid for the reception and had never got her foot out of the dressing-room! Red hair? Yes. And when I told Daphne that Mrs. Langley had helped me into my wrap she got up heavily and hopped three steps one way and three another, which is the way Daphne dances with joy.
I am afraid I have digressed. It is much harder to write a thing than to tell it. I used to write stories for our Journal at school and the girls were mad over them. But they were love stories, and this one deals with English politics and criminals—yes, you might call it a crime story. Of course there is love, too, but it comes in rather unexpectedly.
I left Daphne hopping three steps each way in triumph. Well, after that she did not take me around with her, although her friends came in and talked about The Cause to me quite often. And gradually I began to see that there was something to it, and why, if I paid taxes, shouldn't I vote? And hadn't I as much intelligence as the cab drivers and street sweepers? And why couldn't I will my money to my children if I ever had any?—children, not money. Of course, as Father pointed out afterward, I should have been using my abilities in America; but most of the American women I knew were so cravenly and abjectly contented. But even after my conversion Daphne would not take me in the balloon. She said I represented too much money to risk dumping in the Thames or hanging on a chimney.
The meeting at Daphne's was mainly to talk over the failure of the balloon ascension and to plan something new. But the actual conspiracy that followed was really an accident. It came about in the most casual way.
Violet Harcourt-Standish got up and went to the mirror to put on her veil, and some of the people began to gather their wraps.
"I'm tired," Daphne said suddenly. "We don't seem to get anywhere. We always come out the door we go in."
"Sometimes forcibly," Poppy said to me aside.
"And I haven't been strong, you know, since last summer," Daphne went on. Everybody nodded sympathetically. Daffie had raised a disturbance when Royalty was laying a cornerstone and had been jailed for it. (They put her to making bags and she sewed "Votes for Women" in white thread on every bag she made.) "I am going to take Madge down to Ivry for a week." I am Madge.
Violet turned from the mirror and raised her eyebrows. "Ivry!" she said. "How familiar it sounds! Do you remember, Daphne, when pressure at the Hall became too strong for me, how I used to ride over to Ivry and have hysterics in the Tudor Room? And how once I wept on your Louis-Seize divan and had to have the purple stains bleached off my face? You lived a sort of vicarious matrimonial existence in those days, didn't you?"
Whatever she may have done to the Louis-Seize divan in earlier days, she was cheerful enough now, and I hailed her with delight.
"Do you live near Ivry?" I exclaimed. "How jolly! That is English; I am frightfully English in my speech after a few weeks in London."
Somebody laughed and Daphne chuckled. It isn't especially feminine to chuckle, but neither is Daphne.
"My dear child," Mrs. Harcourt-Standish said, turning to me, "Harcourt Hall is closed. Mr. Harcourt is no longer my husband. The one is empty, the other in Canada"—vague, but rhetorical—"I have forgotten them both." There was nothing ambiguous about that. "I recall the house as miles from everything that was joyful. I shall always regard my being taken there as nothing short of kidnapping."
Then—she stopped short and glanced at Daphne. From Daphne her eyes travelled to Ernestine Sutcliffe, who put down her teacup with a clatter. There was a sudden hushed silence in the room; then Lady Jane Willoughby, who had been tying her motor veil, took it off and folded it in her lap. The Staffords, Poppy and her mother, exchanged glances. Without in the least understanding it I saw that something psychological was happening.
"Why not?" said Daphne quietly, looking around. "The house is still furnished, isn't it, Violet? And I suppose you could get in?"
Violet shrugged her shoulders. "I dare say; as I recall it, one could enter any one of the doors by merely leaning against it. The place is a million years old."
Everybody talked at once for a few minutes. I gave up trying to understand and took a fresh tea-cake. Then I noticed Lady Willoughby. In all that militant body, whatever adventure was afoot, hers was the only craven soul. She was picking at her veil with nervous fingers.
"I—don't you think it is very radical?" she ventured when she could be heard. Here Mrs. Stafford objected to the word "radical," and she substituted "revolutionary." "I should not wish anything to happen to him. He was a great friend of Willoughby's mother while she lived."
"That's all right among ourselves, Jane," Mrs. Stafford put in, "but if I recall the circumstances I wouldn't lay any emphasis on that. Anyhow, we don't intend to murder the man."
Lady Jane was only partially reassured. "Of course, you wouldn't mean to," she retorted, "but there is no use asking me to forget what Poppy Stafford did to the president of the Board of Trade last summer."
Poppy glanced up and shook her curls. "You are envious, Willieboy," she said, and put four lumps of sugar in her tea. "Willieboy" is Lady Willoughby's affectionate diminutive. They had started the tea all over again and I rather edged away from Poppy, but Daphne said afterward it was only a matter of a chair Poppy threw from the gallery at a public meeting, and that the man it fell on was only a secretary to the president of the Board of Trade.
Finally, I made out what the plan was, and mentally during the rest of the meeting I was making bags in jail.
They were going to abduct the Prime Minister!
Lady Jane had stopped looking back and had put her hand to the plow. (This sounds well, so I won't cut it out; but wasn't it Lot's wife that looked back? And wasn't that before the day of plows? Or was it?) And it was she who finally settled the whole thing, for it seems that the P. M. had confided to Lord Willoughby that the town was so noisy with Suffragettes that he could not find a quiet spot for a rubber of bridge; that since the balloon incident he slept in his clothes with the windows shut and locked; and that since the latest kitchen-maid had turned out to be the Honourable Maude Twombley, who slipped handbills into his entrées and served warnings in his dessert, he was going to travel, incognito and alone, to his daughter's place, The Oaks, outside of West Newbury, and get a little sleep.
And West Newbury was only four miles from the empty Harcourt Hall! In short, as Daphne succinctly put it: "Our Jonah was about to jump voluntarily overboard from the ship of state into the whaleboned jaws of the Suffragette whale."
Everybody went mad at that point, but as they grew excited I got cold. It began with my toes and went all over me.
Ernestine Sutcliffe stood on one of Daphne's tulip-wood and marquetry chairs and made a speech, gesticulating with her cup and dripping tea on me. And then somebody asked me to stand up and say what I thought. (I have never really spoken in public, but I always second the motions in a little club I belong to at home. It is a current-events club—so much easier to get the news that way than to read the newspaper.)
So I got up and made a short speech. I said: "I am only a feeble voice in this clamour of outraged womanhood against the oppressor, Man. I believe in the franchise for women, the ballot instead of the ballet. But at home, in America, when we want to take a bath we don't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River to do it."
Then I sat down. Daphne was raging.
"You are exceedingly vulgar," she said, "but since you insist on that figure of speech, you in America have waited a long time for the bath, and if you continue your present methods you won't get it before you need it."