Yes: Honoria was happy then, as indeed she had been during most of her life, except when her brother died and her mother died. What did she lack for happiness? Nothing that this world can give in the opening twentieth century ... not even a very good pianola or a motor. I feel somehow it was almost unfair (in my rage at the inequality of treatment meted out by the Powers Beyond). Shall not General Sir Petworth Armstrong die in the great débacle of the world-wide War? I shall see, later. And yet I feel that this nucleus of pure happiness housed in Kensington Square—or at Petworth Manor—was to the little world that revolved round the Armstrongs like a good radiator in a cold house. It warmed many a chilly nature into fructification; it healed many a scar, it brightened many a humble life, like that of Bertie Adams's hard-working, washerwoman mother, or the game-keeper's crippled child at Petworth or the newest, suburbanest little employé of Fraser and Claridge's huge establishment in the Brompton Road. It pulled straight the wayward life of some young subaltern, about to come a cropper, but who after a talk or two with that jolly Mrs. Armstrong took quite a different course and made a decent marriage. It conjoined with many of the social activities for good of one who might have been her twin sister—Suzanne Feenix—only that Suzanne was twenty years older and perhaps an inch or two shorter. Dear woman! My remembrance flashes a kiss to your astral cheek—which in reality I should never have dared to salute, so great was my awe of Colonel Armstrong's muscles—as, at any reasonable time before or after the birth of your last child in June, 1910, you stand in the hall of your sunny, eighteenth century house, with the gold and green glint of the Kensington garden behind you: saying with your glad eyes and bonny mouth "Come to our Suffrage Party? Such a lark! We've got Mrs. Pankhurst here and the Police daren't raid us; they're so afraid of 'Army.' Of course he's away, but he knows perfectly well what I'm doing. He's quite given in. Now Michael, you show Sir Harry and Lady Johnston to the front seats..."
(I looked round for the rather gloomy presence of Michael Rossiter, but it was his little golden-haired god-son she meant.)
You shall have your general back safe from the wars, with a wound that gives only honour, a reasonable number of well-earned decorations, and a reputation for rather better strategy than Aldershot generally produces; and he shall live out his wholesome life alongside yours, still dispensing happiness, even under a Labour Government: till, as Burton used to wind up his Arabian Nights love stories, "there came to them the Destroyer of delight and the Sunderer of societies."
Honoria acted towards the Suffrage movement somewhat as in older-fashioned days of Second Empire laxity well-to-do people evaded military service under conscription by paying a substitute to take their place in the fighting line. On account of her husband, and the children she had just had or was going to have, she did not throw herself into the physical struggle; but she still continued out of her brother's ear-marked money to subsidize the cause. Rather regretfully, she looked on from a motor, a balcony, a front window or the safe plinth of some huge statue, whilst her comrades, with less to risk physically and socially, matched their strength of will, their trained muscles, their agility, astuteness and feminine charm (seldom without some effect) against the brute force and imperturbability of the Police.
The struggle waxed hot and fierce in the early months of 1910. Vivie held herself somewhat in the background also, not wishing to strike publicly and effectively until she was sure for what principle she endangered her life and liberty. Nevertheless she became a resource of rising importance to the Suffrage cause. She was known to have had a clever barrister cousin who for some reasons best known to himself had of late kept in the background—ill-health, said some; an unfortunate love affair, said another. But his pamphlet on the White Slave Traffic on the Continent showed that he was still at work. Vivie was thought to be fully equal in her knowledge of the law to her cousin, though not allowed to qualify for the Bar. Case after case was referred to her with the hope that if she could not solve it, she might submit it to her cousin's judgment. In this way, excellent legal advice was forthcoming which drove the Home Office officials from one quandary to another.
But Vivie in the spring of 1910, looking back on nearly twelve months of womanly life (save for David's summer of continental travel) decided that she didn't like being a woman, so far as Woman was dressed in 1910 and for three or four hundred years previously.
As "David" this had been more or less her costume: an undershirt (two, in very cold weather), a pair of pants coming down to the ankle, and well-fitting woollen socks on the feet. A shirt, sometimes in day-time all of one piece with its turn-over collar; at worst with a separate collar and a tie passed through it. Braces that really braced and held up the nether garment of trousers; a waistcoat buttoning fairly high up (no pneumonia blouse)—two waistcoats if she liked, or a dandy slip buttoned innocently inside the single vest to suggest the white lie of a second inner vest. Over the waistcoat a coat or jacket. On the head a hat which fitted the head in thirty seconds (allowing for David's shock of hair). Lace-up or button boots, with perhaps at most six buttons; gloves with one button; spats—if David wanted to be very dressy—with three buttons. On top of all this a warm, easily-fitting overcoat or a mackintosh. If you were really dressing to kill (as a man) it might take half an hour; if merely to go about your business and not be specially remarked for foppishness, twenty minutes. To divest yourself of all this and get into paijamas and so to bed: ten minutes. But when Vivie returned to herself and went about the world of 1909-1910, and merely wished to pass as an inconspicuous, modest woman she had to spend hours in dressing and undressing, and this is what she had to wear and waste so much of her time in adjusting and removing:—
Next the skin, merino combinations, unwieldy garments requiring a contortionist's education to put on without entangling your front and hind limbs. The "combies" were specially buttoned with an infinitude of small, scarcely visible buttons, which always wanted sewing on and replacing, and were peevish about remaining in the button hole. Often, too, the "combies" (I really can't keep writing the full name) had to be tied here and there with little white ribbons which preferred getting into a knot (no wonder the average woman has a temper!). When the "combies" went to the wash, all these ribbonlets had to be taken out, specially washed, specially ironed, and ingeniously threaded back into position.
Next to the combinations, proceeding outwards, came the corset, a most serious affair. This exceedingly expensive instrument of torture was compounded chiefly of silk (which easily frayed) and whale-bone. Many good women of the middle class have gone to their graves for three hundred years believing that Almighty God had specially created toothless whales of the Family Balænidæ solely for the purpose of providing women with the only possible ingredient for a corset; and for three hundred years, brave seamen of the Dutch, British and Basque nations had gone to a watery grave to procure for women this indispensable aid to correct clothing. But these filaments of horny palatal processes are unamiable. Though sheathed in silk or cotton, they, after the violent movements of a Suffragette or a charwoman, break through the restraining sheath and run into the body under the fifth rib, or press forward on to the thigh. Which is why you often see a woman's face in an omnibus express severe pain and her lips utter the exclamation "Aïe, Aïe." Then this confounded corset had to be laced with pink ribbons at the back and in front and both lacings demanded unusual suppleness of arms and sense of touch in finger-tips; and when the corset went to the wash the ribbons had to be drawn out, washed, ironed, and threaded again.
From the front of the corset hung two elastic suspenders as yet awaiting their prey. But first must be drawn on the silk or stockinette knickerbockers which in the 1910 woman replaced the piteously laughable drawers of the Victorian period. Then the suspenders clutched the rims of the stockings with an arrangement of nickel and rubber which no man would have tolerated for its inefficiency but would have thrown back in the face of the shopman and have been charged with assault. In times of stress, at public meetings the suspenders would release the stockings from their hold, and the latter roll about the ankles of the embarrassed pleader for Woman's Rights ("Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow," and first of all throttle the modiste, thought Vivie).