Mrs. Warren's Daughter Part 18

D'you know I'm on the verge of thirty-seven--and I have no definite career? I'm rather tired of being a well-meaning adventuress."

"Then why," Praddy would reply, "don't you go and live with your mother?"

"Ugh! I couldn't stand for long that life in Belgium or elsewhere abroad. They seem miles behind us, with all our faults. Mother only seems to think now of good things to eat and a course of the waters at Spa in September to neutralize the over-eating of the other eleven months. There is no political career for women on the Continent."

"Then why not marry and have children? That is a career in itself.

Look at Honoria, how happy she is."

"Yes--but there is only one man I could love, and he's married already."

"Pooh! nonsense. There are as many good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. If you won't do as Beryl did--by the bye isn't she a swell in these days! And _strict_ with her daughters! She won't let 'em come here, I'm told, because of some silly story some one set abroad about me! And that humbug, Francis Brimley Storrington--by the bye he's an A.R.A. now and scarcely has enough talent to design a dog kennel, yet they've given him the job of the new stables at Buckingham Palace. Well if you won't share some one else's husband, pick out a good man for yourself. There must be plenty going--some retired prize-fighter. They seem all the rage just now, and are supposed to be awfully gentlemanly out of the ring."

"Don't be perverse. You know exactly how I feel. I'm wasting the prime of my life. I see no clear course marked out before me.

Sometimes I think I would like to explore Central Africa or get up a Woman's Expedition to the South Pole. Life has seemed so flat since I gave up being David Williams. Then I lived in a perpetual thrill, always on my guard. I tire every now and then of my monkey tricks, and the praise of all these women leaves me cold. I wish I were as simple minded as most of them are. To them the Vote seems the beginning of the millennium. They seem to forget that after we've _got_ the Vote we shall have another fight to be admitted as members to the House. You may be sure the men will stand out another fifty years over _that_ surrender. I alternate in my moods between the reckless fury of an Anarchist and the la.s.situde of Lord Rosebery. To think that I was once so elated and conceited about being a Third Wrangler...!"

With the closing months of 1912, however, there was a greater tenseness, a sharpening of the struggle which once more roused Vivie to keen interest. When she returned from an autumn visit to Villa Beau-sejour she found there had been a split between the "Peths" and the "Panks." The Girondist section of the women suffragists had separated from those who could see no practical policy to win the Vote but a regime of Terrorism--mild terrorism, it is true--somewhat that of the Curate in _The Private Secretary_ who at last told his persecutors he should _really have to give them a good hard knock_. The Peths drew back before the Pankish programme (mild as this would seem, to us of Bolshevik days and of Irish insurrection). _Votes for Women_ returned to the control of the Pethick Lawrences, and the Pankhurst party to which Vivie belonged were to start a new press organ, _The Suffragette_.

The Panks, it seemed, had a more acute fore-knowledge than the Peths. The latter had felt they were forcing an open door; that the Liberal Ministry would eventually squeeze a measure of Female Suffrage into the long-discussed Franchise Bill; and that too much militancy was disgusting the general public with the Woman's cause.

The former declared all along that Women were going to be done in the eye, because all the militancy hitherto had got very little in man's way, had only excited smiles, and shoulder-shrugs. Ministers of the Crown in 1912 had compared the hoydenish b.o.o.by-traps and bloodless skirmishes of the Suffragettes with the grim fighting, the murders, burnings, mob-rule of the 1830's, when MEN were agitating for Reform; or the mutilation of cattle, the a.s.sa.s.sinations, dynamite outrages, gun-powder plots, bombs and boycotting of the long drawn-out Irish agitation for Home Rule. An agitation which was now resulting in the placing on the Statute Book of a Home Rule Bill, while another equally deadly agitation--in promise--was being worked up by Sir Edward Carson, the Duke of This and the Marquis of That, and a very rising politician, Mr. F.E. Smith, to defeat the operation of Home Rule for Ireland. In short, if one might believe the second-rate ministers who were not repudiated by their superiors in rank, the Vote for Women could only be wrung from the reluctance of the tyrant man, _if_ the women made life unbearable for the male section of the community.

It was a dangerous suggestion to make, or would have proved so, had these sneering politicians been provoking men to claim their const.i.tutional rights: bloodshed would almost certainly have followed. But the leaders of the militant women ordered (and were obeyed) that no attacks on life should be part of the Woman's militant programme. Property might be destroyed, especially such as did not impoverish the poor; but there were to be no railway accidents, no sinking of s.h.i.+ps, no violent deeds dangerous to life.

At the height and greatest bitterness of militancy no statesman's life was in danger.

The only recklessness about life was in the militant women. They risked and sometimes lost their lives in carrying out their protests. They invented the Hunger Strike (the prospect of which as an inevitable episode ahead of her, filled Vivie with tremulous dread) to balk the Executive of its idea of turning the prisons of England into Bastilles for locking up these clamant women who had become better lawyers than the men who tried them. But think what the Hunger Strike and its concomitant, Forcible Feeding, meant in the way of pain and danger to the life of the victim. The Government were afraid (unless you were an utterly unknown man or woman of the lower cla.s.ses) of letting you die in prison; so to force them to release you, you had first to refuse for four days all food--the heroic added all drink. Then to prevent your death--and being human you, the prisoner, must have hoped they were keeping a good look-out on your growing weakness--the prison doctor must intervene with his forcible feeding. This was a form of torture the Inquisition would have been sorry to have overlooked, and one no doubt that the Bolsheviks have practised with great glee. The patient was strapped to a chair or couch or had his--usually her--limbs held down by warders (wardresses) and nurses. A steel or a wooden gag was then inserted, often with such roughness as to chip or break the teeth, and through the forced-open mouth a tube was pushed down the throat, sometimes far enough to hurt the stomach. This produced an apoplectic condition of choking and nausea, and as the stomach filled up with liquid food the retching nearly killed the patient.

The windpipe became involved. Food entered the lungs--the tongue was cut and bruised (Think what a mere pimple on the tongue means to some of us: it keeps _me_ awake half the night)--the lips were torn.

Worse still--requiring really a pathological essay to which I am not equal--was feeding by slender pipes through the nose. The far simpler and painless process _per r.e.c.t.u.m_ was debarred because it might have const.i.tuted an indecent a.s.sault.

Was ever Ministry in a greater dilemma? It was too old-fas.h.i.+oned, too antiquely educated to realize the spirit of its age, the pa.s.s at which we had arrived of conceding to Women the same rights as to men. Women were ready to die for these rights (not to kill others in order to attain them). Yet for fear of wounding the national sentimentality they must not be allowed to die; they must not be saved from suicide by any action savouring of indecency; so they must be tortured as prisoners hardly were in the worst days of the Inquisition or at the worst-conducted public school of the Victorian era.

But Vivie's gradually rising wrath was to be brought by degrees to boiling-point through the spring of 1913, and to explode at last over an incident more tragic than any one of the five or six hundred cases of forcible feeding.

Early in 1913, the Speaker intimated that any insertion of a Woman Suffrage Amendment into the Manhood Franchise Bill would be inconsistent with some unwritten code of Parliamentary procedure of which apparently he was the sole guardian and interpreter. Ministers who had probably prepared this _coup_ months before went about expressing hypocritical laments at the eccentricities of our const.i.tution; and the Franchise Act was abandoned. A little later, frightened at the renewal of arson in town and country, at interferences with their week-end golf courses, at the destruction of mails in the letter-boxes, and the slas.h.i.+ng of Old Masters at the National Gallery (purchased at about five times their intrinsic value by a minister who would not have spent one penny of national money to encourage native art), the Cabinet let it be known that a way would be found presently to give Woman Suffrage a clear run. A private member would be allowed to bring in a Bill for conferring the franchise on women, and the opinion of the House would be sought on its merits independently of party issues. The Government Whips would be withdrawn and members of the Government be left free to vote as they pleased.

It was a fair deduction, however, from what was said at that time and later, that the strongest possible pressure--arguments _ad hominem_ and in a sense _ad pecuniam_--was brought to bear on Liberals and on Irish Nationalists to vote against the Bill. Had the Second reading been carried, the Government would have resigned and a Home Rule Bill for Ireland have been once more postponed.

The rejection of Mr. d.i.c.kinson's measure by a majority of forty-seven convinced the Militants that Pharaoh had once more hardened his heart; and the hopelessness of the Woman's cause at that juncture inspired one woman with a resolution to give her life as a protest in the manner most calculated to impress the male mind of the British public.

CHAPTER XV

IMPRISONMENT

Prior to the Derby day of 1913, Vivie had heard of Emily Wilding Davison as a Northumbrian woman, distantly related to the Rossiters and also to the Lady s.h.i.+llito she had once defended. She came from Morpeth in Northumberland and had had a very distinguished University career at Oxford and in London, of which latter university she was a B.A. The theme of the electoral enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of Women had gradually possessed her mind to the exclusion of all other subjects; she became in fact a fanatic in the cause and a predestined martyr to it. In 1909 she had received her first sentence of imprisonment for making a const.i.tutional protest, and to escape forcible feeding had barricaded her cell. The Visiting Committee had driven her from this position by directing the warders to turn a hose pipe on her and knock her senseless with a douche of cold water; for which irregularity they were afterwards fined and mulcted in costs. Two years later, for another Suffragist offence (setting fire to a pillar box after giving warning of her intention) she went to prison for six months. Here the tortures of forcible feeding so overcame her reason--it was alleged--that she flung herself from an upper gallery, believing she would be smashed on the pavement below and that her death under such circ.u.mstances might call attention to the agony of forcible feeding and the reckless disregard of consequences which now inspired educated women who were resolved to obtain the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of their s.e.x. But an iron wire grating eight feet below broke her fall and only cut her face and hands. The accident or attempted suicide, however, procured the shortening of her sentence.

Vivie and she often met in the early months of 1913, and on the first day of June she confided to a few of the W.S.P.U. her intention of making at Epsom a public protest against public indifference to the cause of the Woman's Franchise. This protest was to be made in the most striking manner possible at the supreme moment of the Derby race on the 4th of June. Probably no one to whom she mentioned the matter thought she contemplated offering up her own life; at most they must have imagined some speech from the Grand Stand, some address to Royalty thrown into the Royal pavilion, some waving of a Suffrage Flag or early-morning placarding of the bookies' stands.

Vivie however had been turning her thoughts to horse-racing as a field of activity. She was amused and interested at the effect that had been produced in ministerial circles by her interference with the game of golf. If now something was done by the militants seriously to impede the greatest of the sports, the national form of gambling, the protected form of swindling, the main interest in life of the working-cla.s.s, of half the peerage, all the beerage, the chief lure of the newspapers between October and July, and the preoccupation of princes, she might awaken the male mind in a very effectual way to the need for settling the Suffrage question.

So she determined also to see the running of the Derby, as a preliminary to deciding on a plan of campaign. She had become hardened to pus.h.i.+ng and scrouging, so that the struggle to get a seat in one of the fifty or sixty race trains leaving Waterloo or Victoria left her comparatively calm. She was dressed as a young man and had no clothing impediments, and as a young man she was better able to travel down with racing rascality. In that guise she did not attract too much attention. Rough play may have been in the mind of the card-playing, spirit-drinking scoundrels that occupied the other seats in the compartment, but Vivie in her man's dress created a certain amount of suspicion and caution. "Look's like a 'tec,'"

one man whispered to another. So the card-playing was not thrust on her as a round-about form of plunder, and the stories told were more those derived from the spicy columns of the sporting papers, in words of double meaning, than the outspoken, stable obscenity characteristic of the race-course rabble.

Vivie arriving early managed to secure a fairly good seat on the Grand Stand, to which she could have recourse when the crowd on the race course became too repulsive or too dangerous. She wished as much as possible to see all aspects of the premier race meeting.

Indeed, meeting a friend of Lady Feenix's, a good-natured young peer who halted irresolute between four worlds--the philosophic, the political, the philanthropic, and the sporting, she introduced herself as "David Williams"--hoping no Bencher was within hearing--said "Dare say you remember me? Lady Feenix's? Been much abroad lately--really feel quite strange on an English race course,"

and persuaded him to take her round before the great people of the day were all a.s.sembled. She was shown the Royal pavilion being got ready for the King and Queen, the weighing room of the jockeys, the paddock and temporary stables of the horses that were to race that day. Here was a celebrated actress in a magnificent lace dress and a superb hat, walking up and down on the sun-burnt, trodden turf, in a devil of a temper. Her horse--for with her lovers' money she kept a racing stable--had been scratched for the race--I really can't tell you why, not having been able to study all the _minutiae_ of racing. [Talking of that, _how_ annoying it is--or was--when one cared about things of great moment, to take up an evening newspaper's last edition and read in large type "Official Scratchings," with a silly algebraic formula underneath about horses being withdrawn from some race, when you thought it was a bear fight in the Cabinet.] Vivie gathered from her guide that to-day would be rather a special Derby, because it did not often happen that a King-Emperor was there to see a horse from his own racing stables running in the cla.s.sic race.

Then, thanking the pleasant soldier-peer for his information, Vivie (David Williams) left him to his duties as equerry and member of the Jockey-Club and entered the dense crowd on either side of the race course. It reminded her just slightly of Frith's Derby Day. There were the gypsies, the jugglers, the acrobats, the costers with their provision barrows; the grooms and stable hands; the beggars and obvious pick-pockets; the low-down harlots--the high-up ones were already entering the seats of the Grand Stand or sitting on the four-in-hand coaches or in the open landaulettes and Silent Knights.

But evidently the professional betting men were a new growth since the mid-nineteenth century. They were just beginning to a.s.semble, wiping their mouths from the oozings of the last potation; some, the aristocrats of their calling, like sporting peers in dress and appearance; others like knock-about actors on the music-hall stage.

The generality were remarkably similar to ordinary city men or to the hansom-cab drivers of twenty years ago.

In the very front of the crowd on the Grand Stand side, leaning with her elbows on the wooden rail, she descried Emily Davison. Vivie edged and sidled through the crowd and touched her on the shoulder.

Emily looked up with a start, surprised at seeing the friendly face of a young man, till she recognized Vivie by her voice. "Dear Emily," said Vivie, "you look so tired. Aren't you over-trying your strength? I don't know what you have in hand, but why not postpone your action till you are quite strong again?"

"I shall never be stronger than I am to-day and it can't be postponed, cost me what it will," was the reply, while the sad eyes looked away across the course.

"Well," said Vivie, "I wanted you to know that I was close by, prepared to back you up if need be. And there are others of our Union about the place. That young man over there talking to the policeman is really A---- K---- though she is supposed to be in prison. Mrs. Tuke is somewhere about, Mrs. Despard is on the Grand Stand, and Blanche Smith is selling _The Suffragette_."

"Thank you," said Miss Davison, turning round for an instant, and pressing Vivie's hand, "Good-bye. I hope what I am going to do will be effectual."

Vivie did not like to prolong the talk in case it should attract attention. Individual action was encouraged under the W.S.P.U., and when a member wished to do something on her own, her comrades did not fuss with advice. So Vivie returned to the Grand Stand.

Presently there was the stir occasioned by the arrival of the Royal personages. Vivie noted with a little dismay that while she was wearing a Homburg hat all the men near her wore the black and glistening topper which has become--or had, for the tyranny of custom has lifted a little since the War--the conventional head-gear in which to approach both G.o.d and the King. There was a great raising of these glistening hats, there were grave bows or smiling acknowledgments from the pavilion. Then every one sat down and the second event was run.

Still Emily Wilding Davison made no sign. Vivie could just descry her, still in the front of the crowd, still gazing out over the course, pressed by the crowd against the broad white rail.

The race of the day had begun. The row of snickering, plunging, rearing, and curvetting horses had dissolved, as in a kaleidoscope, into a bunch, and a pear-shaped formation with two or three horses streaming ahead as the stem of the pear. Then the stem became separated from the pear-shaped ma.s.s by its superior speed, and again this vertical line of horses formed up once more horizontally, leaving the ma.s.s still farther behind. Then the horses seen from the Grand Stand disappeared--and after a minute reappeared--three, four, five--and the bunch of them, swerving round Tattenham Corner and thundering down the incline towards the winning post.... The King's horse seemed to be leading, another few seconds would have brought it or one of its rivals past the winning post, when ... a slender figure, a woman, darted with equal swiftness from the barrier to the middle of the course, leapt to the neck of the King's horse, and in an instant, the horse was down, kneeling on a crumpled woman, and the jockey was flying through the air to descend on hands and knees practically unhurt. The other horses rushed by, miraculously avoiding the prostrate figures. Some horse pa.s.sed the winning post, a head in front of some other, but no one seemed to care. The race was fouled. Vivie noted thirty seconds--approximately--of amazed, horrified silence. Then a roar of mingled anger, horror, enquiry went up from the crowd of many thousands. "It's the Suffragettes"

shouted some one. And up to then Vivie had not thought of connecting this unprecedented act with the purposed protest of Emily Wilding Davison. She sprang to her feet, and shouting to all who might have tried to stop her "I'm a friend of the lady. I am a doctor"--she didn't care what lie she told--she was soon authoritatively pus.h.i.+ng through the ring of police constables who like warrior ants had surrounded the victims of the protest--the s.h.i.+vering, trembling horse, now on its legs, the pitifully crushed, unconscious woman--her hat hanging to the tresses of her hair by a dislodged hat-pin, her thin face stained with blood from surface punctures.

The jockey was being carried from the course, still unconscious, but not badly hurt.

A great surgeon happening to be at Epsom Race course on a friend's drag, had hurried to offer his services. He was examining the unconscious woman and striving very gently to straighten and disentangle her crooked body. Presently there was a respectful stir in the privileged ring, and Vivie was conscious by the raising of hats that the King stood amongst them looking down on the woman who had offered up her life before his eyes to enforce the Woman's appeal. He put his enquiries and offered his suggestions in a low voice, but Vivie withdrew, less with the fear that her right to be there and her connection with the tragedy might be questioned, as from some instinctive modesty. The occasion was too momentous for the presence of a supernumerary. Emily Wilding Davison should have her audience of her Sovereign without spectators.

Returning with a blanched face to the seething crowd, and presently to the Grand Stand, Vivie's mood altered from awe to anger. The "bookies" were beside themselves with fury. She noted the more frequent of the nouns and adjectives they applied to the dying woman for having spoilt the Derby of 1913, but although she went to the trouble, in framing her indictment of the Turf, of writing down these phrases, my jury of matrons opposes itself to their appearance here, though I am all for realism and completeness of statement.

After conversing briefly and in a lowered voice with such Suffragettes as gathered round her, so that this one could carry the news to town and that one his to communicate with Miss Davison's relations, Vivie--recklessly calling herself to any police questioner, "David Williams" and eliciting "Yes, sir, I have seen you once or twice in the courts," reached once more the Grand Stand with its knots of shocked, puzzled, indignant, cynical, consternated men and women. Most of them spoke in low tones; but one--a blond Jew of middle age--was raving in uncontrolled anger, careless of what he said or of who heard him. He was short of stature with protruding bloodshot eyes, an undulating nose, slightly prognathous muzzle and full lips, and a harsh red moustache which enhanced the prognathism.

His silk hat tilted back showed a great bald forehead, in which angry, bluish veins stood out like swollen earth worms. "Those Suffragettes!" he was shouting or rather shrieking in a nasal whine, "if I had _my_ way, I'd lay 'em out along the course and have 'em ---- by ----. The ----'s!"

The shocked auditory around him drew away. Vivie gathered he was Mr. ---- well, perhaps I had better not give his name,[1] even in a disguised form. He had had a chequered career in South America--Mexico oil, Peruvian rubber, Buenos Aires railways, and a corner in Argentine beef--but had become exceedingly rich, a fortune perhaps of twenty millions. He had given five times more than any other aspirant in benefactions to charities and to the party chest of the dominant Party, but the authorities dared not reward him with a baronetcy because of the stories of his early life which had to be fought out in libel cases with Baxendale Strangeways and others. But he had won through these libel cases, and now devoted his vast wealth to improving our breed of horses by racing at Newmarket, Epsom, Doncaster, Gatwick, Sandown and Brighton. Racing had, in fact, become to him what Auction Bridge was to the Society gamblers of those days, only instead of losing and winning tens and hundreds of pounds, his fluctuations in gains and losses were in thousands, generally with a summing up on the right side of the annual account.

But whether on the Turf, at the billiard table, or in the stock market he was or had become a bad loser. He lost his temper at the same time. On this occasion Miss Davison's suicide or martyrdom would leave him perhaps on the wrong side in making up his day's book to the extent of fifteen hundred pounds. Viewed in the right proportion it would be equivalent to our--you and me--having given a florin to a newspaper boy as the train was moving, instead of a penny. But no doubt her unfortunate impulse had spoiled the day for him in other ways, upset schemes that were bound up with the winning of the King's horse. Yet his outburst and the shocking language he applied to the Suffrage movement made history: for they fixed on him Vivie's attention when she was looking out for some one or something on whom to avenge the loss of a comrade.

[Footnote 1: He died in 1917. My jury of matrons has excised his phrases.]

She forthwith set out for London and wrote up the dossier of Mr.

----. In the secret list of buildings which were to be destroyed by fire or bombs, with as little risk as possible to human or animal life, she noted down the racing stables, trainers' houses and palaces of Mr. ---- at Newmarket, Epsom, the Devil's d.y.k.e, and the neighbourhood of Doncaster.

Rossiter and Vivie met for the first time for a year at Emily Davison's funeral. Rossiter had been profoundly moved at her self-sacrifice; she was moreover a Northumbrian and a distant kinswoman. Perhaps, also, he felt that he had of late been a little lukewarm over the Suffrage agitation. His motor-brougham, containing with himself the very unwilling Mrs. Rossiter, followed in the procession of six thousand persons which escorted the coffin across London from Victoria station to King's Cross. A halt was made outside a church in Bloomsbury where a funeral service was read.