Premonitions—so far as my gross person is concerned—are a matter of digestion, nerves and liver. If I woke up on the morning after Joyce's flight to Adelphi Terrace with a dull sense of impending disaster, I ascribe it to the fact that I had passed a more than ordinarily hideous night. Unlike the Seraph, who never went to bed, I had sufficient philosophy to turn in when the doctor had left and the nurse was comfortably established. It had been made clear to me that I could do no manner of good by staying up and getting in people's way....
I started in my own room, but quickly took refuge in the library. If there are two sounds I cannot endure, one is that of a crying child, and the other of a woman—or man for that matter—moaning in pain. Even in the library I could hear Joyce suffering. Maybury-Reynardson had told us she was all right, and there is no point in calling in experts if you are going to disbelieve them. But I do not want to experience another night of the same kind.
And in the morning the papers were calculated to heighten the horror of the worst premonitions I could experience. I opened the Times, noted in passing that Gartside had fulfilled popular expectation by being appointed to the Governorship of Bombay, and turned to the account of the Clerkenwell raid. Culling was right in saying Mrs. Millington's had been the only arrest of importance; but he had left the battlefield at the end of the fighting, and had not waited to see the conquerors march into the citadel.
I felt myself growing chilled and old as I read of the discoveries in the printing office. Mrs. Millington would stand charged with incitement to crime and public threat of abduction; serious enough, if you will, but her debt was discharged as soon as she had paid the penalty for a single article in a single paper. Her threats were embryonic, not yet materialised. Joyce stood to bear the burden of the three abductions carried out to date....
I am no criminologist, and can offer neither explanation nor theory of the mental amblyopia that leads criminals to leave one weak link, one soft brick, one bent girder, to ruin a triumph of design and construction. They always do—men and women, veterans and tiros—and Joyce was no exception. When the police broke open the safe in her editorial office, the first document they found was the half sheet of Chester Square notepaper that the journalists agreed to christen "The Time Table."
It was written in Joyce's hand, and her writing could be identified by a short-sighted illiterate at ten yards' distance. I have forgotten the dates by this time, and can only guess at them approximately; words and names have been added in full where Joyce put only initials. This was the famous Time Table:—
500, Chester Square, S.W.
May 8. Rejection of W. (women's) S. (suffrage) Amendment.
May 9. M.R. (Mavis Rawnsley) letter R. (Rawnsley).
June 17. P.—(private) M. (members') Day. [This was ruled through.]