Affinities and Other Stories Part 34

"After that, I'll turn over the key," she promised.

The only way she could have turned over the key was, of course, to take me into a corner, stand me on my head and jounce it out! I was very nervous, I'll confess. No one had laid a hand on Poppy as yet. She was so young and good looking, and the minute anybody loomed very close, she turned her baby profile to him and he looked as if he'd been caught gunning for b.u.t.terflies.

Finally, however, the noise becoming a tumult, and Poppy and I forced back against the door; the Lord High Sheriff--which sounds like Gilbert & Sullivan--approached. The crowd made respectful way for him.

"Now, young ladies," he said, "this has been an agreeable break in our long day. But--all pleasant things must end. Open the door, please."

"Will you give me five minutes?" Poppy demanded. "I'm a tax-payer. I help to pay the people in this room. I have a right to be heard."

"Open the door," said the Sheriff.

"No."

"Then give up the key, and one of my men----"

I caught his arm. I couldn't stand it another minute. It is all well enough for Poppy to say it was cowardly, and that the situation was ours until I gave it away. The key was not down _her_ back.

"Break the lock," I said frantically. "The--the key is where I can't get it."

He was really twinkling now, but the crowd around was outraged for him and his dignity.

"You didn't swallow it, did you?" he asked in an undertone.

"It's down the back of my frock," I replied.

Poppy said afterwards that I cried and made a scene and disgraced her generally. It is not true. If tears came, they were tears of rage. It is not true that I cried on the Sheriff's breast. I only leaned my head against his arm for a minute, and he was not angry, for he patted my shoulder. I am terribly fond of Poppy, but she is not always reasonable, as you will see.

There had been a great deal of noise. I remember hearing echoes of the dining-room excitement from the hallway beyond the door, and some one pounding. They were breaking the lock from the outside. All the time Poppy was talking in her lovely soft voice. She said:

"Since woman is called on to obey the laws, she ought to have a voice in making them----"

"Hear, hear!" cried somebody.

"Since she doesn't make them, why should she obey them?" demanded Poppy, lifting violet eyes to the crowd.

"I didn't make the Ten Commandments," said a voice from the rear of the room, "but I'll get h.e.l.l just the same if I break them. What have you got to say about that?"

Poppy was stumped for once. I believe it was the most humiliating moment of her public life.

Luckily the lock broke just then, and we were hustled out of the room.

There was a crowd in the hall, and it was most disagreeable. I expected to be arrested, of course--although I'd been arrested before, and if one is sensible and eats, it is not so bad--but the crowd, feeling it had the best of things with the Ten Commandments, was in high good humor.

They let us by without a word and the Sheriff himself stood on the steps while we got into our car.

Just as Poppy's chauffeur got the engine started, the landlord ran out and demanded the key. Poppy told the chauffeur to go on, in a frantic voice, but he hesitated. All the majesty of British law was there on the steps, and the gold coach was waiting. Of course, to be arrested for disturbing the peace with a suffrage speech is one thing, but theft is another. I threw a pleading glance at the Sheriff, and he came slowly down the steps. Men with wands kept the crowd back. The fat coachman with the wig did not turn his head, but the footman at the coach door leered and avenged his calves. Even Poppy went a little pale.

"Quick," said the Sheriff, ferociously, in a low tone, "give me something that looks like a key, and then get away as quickly as you can."

I opened my pocketbook. The only thing that was even the size of a key was my smelling salts bottle. So I gave him that, and he covered it with his big hand. Then, still frowning savagely, he made us a lordly gesture to move on.

(Have you ever been in the Forum Club building that Poppy decorated? The staircase walls are wonderful--crowds of women, poor and old, young and rich with clouds around them and so on, all ascending toward a saintly person with a key--Saint Peter, or somebody. Well, the saint is the Sheriff at Guildford, and the key is a salts bottle, if you look closely.)

We slept at Bournemouth that night. Or rather, we didn't sleep. Poppy sat up half the night trying to think of an answer to the ten commandment thing. She said she'd get that again--she felt it--and what was she to say? I had recovered the key and my good humor by that time, but I could not help much. Seeing her so disturbed, I had not the heart to tell her what I suspected. But I was sure that I had seen Vivian Harcourt on the edge of the crowd at Guildford. It would have made her furious to think that she was under any sort of espionage. But Vivian was following us, I felt confident, with enough money to bail us out if she did anything reckless. He knew her, you see.

That is why all the rest of it seems so silly. Vivian knew Poppy; he knew her convictions, and her courage. For him to do the baby thing later was stupid. And anyhow, if it was hard on him, what was it for me?

Poppy slept late in the morning, and I got up and went down to the pier, a melancholy place, wet with morning mist and almost deserted. There were rows of beach chairs, and bathing machines and overturned boats littering the beach, and not a soul in sight but a few fishermen. I sat there and thought of Newport on a bright July morning, with children and nurses on the sand, and throngs of people, and white sailboats and nice young men in flannels----I was awfully homesick for a minute. And it came over me, too, that I had no particular business helping the Cause in England, and having keys put down my back, and giving up my gold-topped salts bottle, which was a present from Basil Ward, when all the time the Cause at home was fighting just as grimly and much more politely.

Vivian was on the pier, at the very end. He was sitting looking out, with his finger hooked around his cigarette (which is Cambridge fas.h.i.+on, I believe, or may be the King does it) and looking very glum.

"Where is she? In jail?" he demanded.

"She's asleep, poor thing," I said.

He snorted.

"Lots of sleep I've had," he said. "Look here, Madge, is she going to take her vacation by locking up Sheriffs all along the route? Because if she is, I'm going back to London."

"I think it very likely," I replied, coldly. "You'd better go back anyhow; she'll be murderous if she knows she's followed."

He groaned.

"I can't leave her alone, can I?"

"I'm along."

He laughed. It was rude of him.

"You!" he said. "Madge, tell me honestly--_where_ was the key?"

"She put it down my back."

He fairly howled with joy. I hated him. But he calmed before long, and offered me a cigarette as a peace offering. I declined.

"You'd better go along," he said. "She may need the--back again. Madge, is there any chance for me with her?"

"Well, she likes you, when you are not in the way."

"I'd be in the way now, I suppose, if I turned up to-night at--where do you stop?"

"At Torquay. Look here, Vivian, I've just thought of something. She's put out about a thing a man said yesterday. She wants an answer. She's got arguments, but what she wants is a retort--about six words and smart. If you could give her one, she'd probably forgive you hanging around, and all that."

So I told him about the ten commandments and Poppy knowing she'd get it again and sitting up to worry it out. He said it was easy. He'd have something to break his appearance at Torquay. But it wasn't as easy as it seemed at first. I left him sitting there, looking out to sea, with a notebook on his knee. He called after me that he'd follow us, a few miles behind, but he wouldn't turn up until he had thought of something worth while.

According to Basil, it was he who finally thought of something. It seems that Vivian wrote out pages of a reply, saying that if the questioner compared man-made law with the ten commandments, then he made Parliament and the House of Lords divine, and that this was a _reductio ad absurdum_, which is Greek or something for ridiculous. But he almost went mad trying to make it short, and it wasn't funny at all. Whereas, as he knew very well, the only chance the speaker had, in such a case, was to get a laugh. What he really needed was a retort, not a reply.

We made rather slow progress. In the first place, Poppy learned that the _chauffeur_, who was a new one and quite intelligent, was not in favour of suffrage, and for hours we crawled along, while she argued with him.

And in the second place, we stopped frequently to nail up posters along the roadside. Vivian said later that he trailed us quite easily, and that there were times when he was only one curve in the road behind. He used to get out and putter over the engine to pa.s.s the time and let us get ahead. He did not appear at Torquay, so I knew he wasn't getting along well with the ten commandments.

But except being put out of a hotel at Exeter for discovering a member of Parliament there, in bed with the gout, and flinging some handbills in through the transom, the rest of the trip was very peaceful. Dartmoor put Poppy into a trance; the heather was in bloom, and she made sketches and colour bits, and lay back in the car in a sort of dream, planning the next winter's work.