The lieutenant looks at his watch. “I had breakfast at seven. It’s now one o’clock. That’s lunch time.”
“Don’t let me detain you,” I suggest pleasantly. He shakes his head. “I’ve got to put this job through.”
I am this job. But the lieutenant has smiled. The conversation eases up. “Pretty good suffrage data down at the Houses of Parliament,” he himself suggests. “Do you know, I’m almost willing now that women should vote. I didn’t used to be. But the war has changed my mind.”
“By the way,” he asked suddenly, “you’re not mixed up with any of those militants, are you?” I explain that I am not a suffragette, just a plain suffragist. “Because I think those militants ought to be shot,” he adds. I can only bite my tongue. Has the lieutenant no sense of humour? No militant in Holloway Jail was ever more militant than he is with his sword and pistol at this moment.
“There’s a question I’d like to ask,” he goes on. “In your country where women have the franchise, do you find that they all vote alike?” “No more than all the men,” I answer. “Then that’s all right,” he says in a relieved tone. “I’ve been afraid that if we let women vote, they might all vote against war.”
SHALL WE GO DOWN OR ACROSS?
“You really aren’t a militant, are you?” he says again, thoughtfully. “Well, I’ll let you go.” So that’s my last steel line.
The boat begins to move in the Mersey. And the ship’s siren sounds shrilly. It is the summons to shipwreck drill. We assemble quickly in the lounge on the top deck, every one wearing a life-preserver. At a second call of the siren, we file out following the captain’s lead, to stand by our boats in which the crew are already clambering to their oars.
So now we know how for the moment of disaster. The whole steamship waits for it. This is a weird voyage that we begin. Mine-sweepers out there ahead of us are cleaning up the seas. A Scandinavian boat has just been sowing mines all over the water. The Baltic, here beside us, poked her nose out yesterday, scented danger and returned to the river. We wait now in the Mersey twenty-four hours before the mysterious signal is given that it is the propitious moment for our boat to get away. We steal softly to sea under cover of a dense fog and a white snow-storm. The sea-gulls are screaming shrilly above us like birds of prey. And we who look into each other’s eyes are facing we know not whither, it may be America or the Farthest Country of all.
Three men pace the wind-swept captain’s bridge, scanning the horizon, and there are always two clinging in the crow’s nest in the icy gale. This boat is manned by a pedigreed crew. From the captain to the last cabin-boy, everybody has been torpedoed at least once. The Marconi operator never smiles. He sits at his instrument with a grey, drawn look about his young boyish mouth. He was on the Lusitania when she went down. He was the last man off the Laconia the other day. The wrinkled suit he’s wearing is the one they picked him up in out of the sea.