The motor-car had been chosen as a means of transit for the reason that the railway stations were being watched for notorious suffragettes by members of a police force whose reputations were at stake. Audrey owed her possession of a motor-car to the fact that the Union officials had seemed both startled and grieved when, in response to questions, she admitted that she had no car. It was communicated to her that members of the Union as rich as she reputedly was were expected to own cars for the general good. Audrey thereupon took measures to own a car. Having seen in many newspapers an advertisement in which a firm of middlemen implored the public thus: “Let us run your car for you. Let us take all the worry and responsibility,” she interviewed the firm, and by writing out a cheque disembarrassed herself at a stroke of every anxiety incident to defective magnetos, bad petrol, bad rubber, punctures, driving licences, bursts, collisions, damages, and human chauffeurs. She had all the satisfactions of owning a car without any of the cares. One of the evidences of progress in the Blue City was an exhibit of this very firm of middlemen.
From the pale blue tripod table at which sat the three women could be plainly seen the vast Imperial Hall, flanked on one side by the great American Dragon Slide, a side-show loudly demonstrating progress, and on the other by the unique Joy Wheel side-show. At the doorway of the latter a man was bawling proofs of progress through a megaphone.
Immense crowds had been gathering in the Imperial Hall, and the lines of political enthusiasts bound thither were now thinning. The Blue City was full of rumours, as that the Cabinet Minister was too afraid to come, as that he had been smuggled to the hall inside a tea-chest, and as that he had walked openly and unchallenged through the whole Exhibition. It was no rumour, but a sure fact, that two women had been caught hiding on the roof of the Imperial Hall, under natural shelters formed by the beams and boarding supporting the pediment of the eastern façade, and that they were ammunitioned with flags and leaflets and a silk ladder, and had made a hole in the roof exactly over the platform. These two women had been seen in charge of policemen at the Exhibition police-station. It was understood by many that they were the last hope of militancy that afternoon; many others, on the contrary, were convinced that they had been simply a feint.
“Well,” said Miss Ingate suddenly, glancing up at the Imperial clock, “I think I shall move outside and sit in the car. I think that’ll be the best place for me. I said that night in Paris that I’d get my arm broken, but I’ve changed my mind about that.” She rose.
“Winnie,” protested Audrey, “aren’t you going to see it out?”
“No,” said Miss Ingate.
“Are you afraid?”
“I don’t know that I’m afraid. I played the barrel organ all the way down Regent Street, and it was smashed to pieces. But I don’t want to go to prison. Really, I don’t want to. If me going to prison would bring the Vote a single year nearer, I should say: ‘Let it wait a year.’ If me not going to prison meant no Vote for ever and ever, I should say: ‘Well, struggle on without the Vote.’ I’ve no objection to other people going to prison, if it suits them, but it wouldn’t suit me. I know it wouldn’t. So I shall go outside and sit in the car. If you don’t come, I shall know what’s happened, and you needn’t worry about me.”
The dame duly departed, her lips and eyes equally ironic about her own prudence and about the rashness of others.
“Let’s have some more lemonade—shall we?” said Jane Foley.