Affinities and Other Stories Part 25

She brought me tea and toast herself the next morning and offered it on her knees, which means something for Daphne--she is very stout and almost unbendable--and explained that I had been her patent of respectability, and that it had been a _coup_; that Mrs. Langley, of the Woman's Liberty League, had hired as a maid for the reception and had never got her foot out of the dressing-room! Red hair? Yes. And when I told Daphne that Mrs. Langley had helped me into my wrap she got up heavily and hopped three steps one way and three another, which is the way Daphne dances with joy.

I am afraid I have digressed. It is much harder to write a thing than to tell it. I used to write stories for our Journal at school and the girls were mad over them. But they were love stories, and this one deals with English politics and criminals--yes, you might call it a crime story. Of course there is love, too, but it comes in rather unexpectedly.

I left Daphne hopping three steps each way in triumph. Well, after that she did not take me around with her, although her friends came in and talked about The Cause to me quite often. And gradually I began to see that there was something to it, and why, if I paid taxes, shouldn't I vote? And hadn't I as much intelligence as the cab drivers and street sweepers? And why couldn't I will my money to my children if I ever had any?--children, not money. Of course, as Father pointed out afterward, I should have been using my abilities in America; but most of the American women I knew were so cravenly and abjectly contented. But even after my conversion Daphne would not take me in the balloon. She said I represented too much money to risk dumping in the Thames or hanging on a chimney.

The meeting at Daphne's was mainly to talk over the failure of the balloon ascension and to plan something new. But the actual conspiracy that followed was really an accident. It came about in the most casual way.

Violet Harcourt-Standish got up and went to the mirror to put on her veil, and some of the people began to gather their wraps.

"I'm tired," Daphne said suddenly. "We don't seem to get anywhere. We always come out the door we go in."

"Sometimes forcibly," Poppy said to me aside.

"And I haven't been strong, you know, since last summer," Daphne went on. Everybody nodded sympathetically. Daffie had raised a disturbance when Royalty was laying a cornerstone and had been jailed for it. (They put her to making bags and she sewed "Votes for Women" in white thread on every bag she made.) "I am going to take Madge down to Ivry for a week." I am Madge.

Violet turned from the mirror and raised her eyebrows. "Ivry!" she said.

"How familiar it sounds! Do you remember, Daphne, when pressure at the Hall became too strong for me, how I used to ride over to Ivry and have hysterics in the Tudor Room? And how once I wept on your Louis-Seize divan and had to have the purple stains bleached off my face? You lived a sort of vicarious matrimonial existence in those days, didn't you?"

Whatever she may have done to the Louis-Seize divan in earlier days, she was cheerful enough now, and I hailed her with delight.

"Do you live near Ivry?" I exclaimed. "How jolly! That is English; I am frightfully English in my speech after a few weeks in London."

Somebody laughed and Daphne chuckled. It isn't especially feminine to chuckle, but neither is Daphne.

"My dear child," Mrs. Harcourt-Standish said, turning to me, "Harcourt Hall is closed. Mr. Harcourt is no longer my husband. The one is empty, the other in Canada"--vague, but rhetorical--"I have forgotten them both." There was nothing ambiguous about that. "I recall the house as miles from everything that was joyful. I shall always regard my being taken there as nothing short of kidnapping."

Then--she stopped short and glanced at Daphne. From Daphne her eyes travelled to Ernestine Sutcliffe, who put down her teacup with a clatter. There was a sudden hushed silence in the room; then Lady Jane Willoughby, who had been tying her motor veil, took it off and folded it in her lap. The Staffords, Poppy and her mother, exchanged glances.

Without in the least understanding it I saw that something psychological was happening.

"Why not?" said Daphne quietly, looking around. "The house is still furnished, isn't it, Violet? And I suppose you could get in?"

Violet shrugged her shoulders. "I dare say; as I recall it, one could enter any one of the doors by merely leaning against it. The place is a million years old."

Everybody talked at once for a few minutes. I gave up trying to understand and took a fresh tea-cake. Then I noticed Lady Willoughby. In all that militant body, whatever adventure was afoot, hers was the only craven soul. She was picking at her veil with nervous fingers.

"I--don't you think it is very radical?" she ventured when she could be heard. Here Mrs. Stafford objected to the word "radical," and she subst.i.tuted "revolutionary." "I should not wish anything to happen to him. He was a great friend of Willoughby's mother while she lived."

"That's all right among ourselves, Jane," Mrs. Stafford put in, "but if I recall the circ.u.mstances I wouldn't lay any emphasis on _that_.

Anyhow, we don't intend to murder the man."

Lady Jane was only partially rea.s.sured. "Of course, you wouldn't mean to," she retorted, "but there is no use asking me to forget what Poppy Stafford did to the president of the Board of Trade last summer."

Poppy glanced up and shook her curls. "You are envious, Willieboy," she said, and put four lumps of sugar in her tea. "Willieboy" is Lady Willoughby's affectionate diminutive. They had started the tea all over again and I rather edged away from Poppy, but Daphne said afterward it was only a matter of a chair Poppy threw from the gallery at a public meeting, and that the man it fell on was only a secretary to the president of the Board of Trade.

Finally, I made out what the plan was, and mentally during the rest of the meeting I was making bags in jail.

_They were going to abduct the Prime Minister!_

Lady Jane had stopped looking back and had put her hand to the plow.

(This sounds well, so I won't cut it out; but wasn't it Lot's wife that looked back? And wasn't that before the day of plows? Or was it?) And it was she who finally settled the whole thing, for it seems that the P. M.

had confided to Lord Willoughby that the town was so noisy with Suffragettes that he could not find a quiet spot for a rubber of bridge; that since the balloon incident he slept in his clothes with the windows shut and locked; and that since the latest kitchen-maid had turned out to be the Honourable Maude Twombley, who slipped handbills into his entrees and served warnings in his dessert, he was going to travel, incognito and alone, to his daughter's place, The Oaks, outside of West Newbury, and get a little sleep.

And West Newbury was only four miles from the empty Harcourt Hall! In short, as Daphne succinctly put it: "Our Jonah was about to jump voluntarily overboard from the ship of state into the whaleboned jaws of the Suffragette whale."

Everybody went mad at that point, but as they grew excited I got cold.

It began with my toes and went all over me.

Ernestine Sutcliffe stood on one of Daphne's tulip-wood and marquetry chairs and made a speech, gesticulating with her cup and dripping tea on me. And then somebody asked me to stand up and say what I thought. (I have never really spoken in public, but I always second the motions in a little club I belong to at home. It is a current-events club--so much easier to get the news that way than to read the newspaper.)

So I got up and made a short speech. I said: "I am only a feeble voice in this clamour of outraged womanhood against the oppressor, Man. I believe in the franchise for women, the ballot instead of the ballet.

But at home, in America, when we want to take a bath we don't jump off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River to do it."

Then I sat down. Daphne was raging.

"You are exceedingly vulgar," she said, "but since you insist on that figure of speech, you in America have waited a long time for the bath, and if you continue your present methods you won't get it before you need it."

II

Now that they had thought of it, they were all frantic for fear Mrs.

Cobden-Fitzjames and the Woman's Liberty League might think of it, too, kidnap the Prime Minister, and leave us a miserable president of the Local Government Board or a wretched under-secretary of something or other.

The plan we evolved before the meeting broke up was to send a wire to Mrs. Gresham, the Premier's daughter, that he had been delayed, and to meet a later train. Then, Daphne's motor would meet the proper train--he was to arrive somewhere between seven and eight in the evening--carry his Impressiveness to Harcourt Hall and deliver him into the hands of the enemy. As Violet Harcourt-Standish voiced it: the motor gone, the railway miles away, what can he do? He will keep awake, because he will have slept in the train going down, and we can give him a cold supper.

Nothing heavy to make him drowsy. Perhaps it would be better not to give him anything. (Hear! Hear!) Then, six speeches, each an hour long. At the end of that time we can promise him something to eat and a machine to take him to West Newbury on one condition. Every one looked up. "He must sign an indors.e.m.e.nt of Suffrage for Women." (Loud applause.)

"Why not have a table laid," I suggested, "and show it to him? Let him smell it, so to speak. Visualise your temptation. You know,--'And the devil----'"

"This is the Prime Minister, Madge," Daphne broke in shortly, "and you are not happy in your Scriptural references."

Things went along with suspicious smoothness. Daphne really took the onus of the whole thing, and, of course, I helped her.

We all got new clothes, for everybody knows that if you can attract a man's eye you can get and maybe hold his ear. And Daphne wrote a fresh speech, one she had thought out in jail. It began, "Words! Words!!

Words!!!" She wrote a poem, too, called the Song of the Vote, with the meter of the Song of a Shirt, and she wanted me to recite it, but even before I read it I refused.

The gown Mother had ordered for me at Paquin's on her way to the Riviera came just in time, a nice white thing over silver, with a square-cut neck and bits of sleeves made of gauze and silver fringe. Daphne got a pink velvet, although she is stout and inclined to be florid. She had jet b.u.t.terflies embroidered over it, a flight of them climbing up one side of her skirt and crawling to the opposite shoulder, so that if one stood off at a distance she had a curiously diagonal appearance, as if she had listed heavily to one side.

By hurrying we got to Ivry on Thursday evening, and I was in a blue funk. Daphne was militantly cheerful, and, in the drawing-room after dinner, she put the finishing touches to her speech. It was warm and rainy, and I wandered aimlessly around, looking at hideous English photographs and wondering if picking oak.u.m in an English jail was worse than making bags--and if they could arrest me, after all. Could they touch an American citizen? (But was I an American citizen? Perhaps I should have been naturalised, or something of that kind!) And I thought of Mother at Florence, in the villa on the Via Michelangelo--Mother, who cla.s.ses Suffragists with Anti-Vaccinationists and Theosophists.

I would have gone up to bed, but that meant a candle and queer, shaky shadows on the wall; so I stayed with Daphne and looked at the picture of a young man in a uniform.

"Basil Harcourt," Daphne said absently, with a pen in her mouth, when I asked about it. "Taken years ago before he became an a.s.s. How do you spell 'Supererogation'?"

"I haven't an idea," I admitted. "I don't even know what it means. I always confuse it with 'eleemosynary'." Daphne grunted. "Do you mean that this is Violet's husband?"

"It was--her first. Don't ask me about him: he always gives me indigestion. The man's mad! He stood right in this room, where he had eaten my ginger-cakes all his life and where he came to show me his first Eton collar and long trousers, and told me that he expected The Cause for his wife to be himself, and if she would rather raise h.e.l.l for women than a family of children she would have to choose at once. And Violet stood just where you are, Madge, and retorted that maternity was not a Cause, and that any hen in the barnyard could raise a family.

"'I suppose you want to crow,' Basil said furiously, and slammed out. He went to Canada very soon after."