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 indorsement 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 butterflies 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 oakum 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
classes 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 ass. 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 hell 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."
"Then perhaps he won't like our using his house for such a purpose. If
he isn't in sympathy----"
"Twaddle," Daphne remarked, poising her pen to go on. "In the first
place, it isn't a house--it's a rattletrap; and in the second place, he
won't know a thing about it."
It was all very tragic. I was thinking of them when I went out on the
terrace in Daphne's mackintosh. The air was damp and sticky, but it was
better than Daphne's conversation. I stood in the fountain court,
leaning against a column and listening to the spray as it blew over on
to the caladium leaves.
I am not sure just when I saw the figure. First it was part of the
gloom, a deeper shadow in the misty garden. I saw it, so to speak, out
of the tail of my eye. When I looked directly there was nothing there.
Finally, I called softly over my shoulder to Daphne, but she did not
hear. Instead, the shadow disengaged itself, moved forward and resolved
into Bagsby, Daphne's chauffeur.
"I wasn't sure at first that you saw me, Miss," he said, touching his
cap. "It's my turn until midnight; Clarkson 'as it until three, and the
gardener until daylight."
"Good gracious!" I gasped. "Do you mean you are guarding the house?"
"Perhaps it's more what you would call surveillance," he said
cautiously, "the picture gallery being over your head, Miss, and an easy
job from the conservatory roof. We 'aven't told Miss Wyndham, yet, Miss,
but the Wimberley Romney was stolen from the Towers last night, Miss,
and the whole countryside is up."
"The Romney?" I inquired. "Do you mean a painting?"
"Yes, Miss," he said patiently. "Cut out of its frame, and worth twenty
thousand pounds! By a gentlemanly-looking chap--a tourist by
appearances, with a bicycle, in tweeds and knickers, Miss."
Whether the bicycle or the tourist wore tweeds and knickers was not
entirely clear. Bagsby was saying that the thief was supposed to be
hiding on the moor when Daphne came out, and he disappeared.
Poppy Stafford and Ernestine came unexpectedly late that night after I
had gone to bed. I was in my first sleep and dreaming that Poppy was
braining Bagsby with a gilt-framed painting, and that he was shouting
"Votes for Women" instead of "'elp!" when somebody knocked at my door.
It turned out to be Poppy, and she said she thought there was a bat in
her room, and as she was quite pallid with fright I let her get into my
bed. I was full of my dream and I wanted to ask her some particulars
about the man she had brained the summer before. But she put her head
under the sheet, and as soon as she stopped trembling she went to sleep.
Daphne called me early and we went over to the Hall to take a look
around. As Daphne said, it would be night and the grounds would not
matter, but we would have to uncover some of the furniture. And as we
could not let the servants know, we had to do it ourselves. We took a
brush and pan, and tore up a linen sheet to dust with. Bagsby, who had
been bribed, and suspected what he wasn't told, got the brush and pan,
and later he showed us a pail and a piece of soap in the tonneau.
The place was dreadful. No doubt the park had been lovely, but it was
overshadowed and overgrown. The hedges were untrimmed; paths began,
wandered around and died in a mess of undergrowth; and the terrace had
lost an end in a wilderness where a garden-house was falling to decay.
The fading outlines of the kitchen garden seemed to shout aloud of lost
domesticity, and over everything lay a sodden layer of the previous
autumn's leaves. (For fear I am accused of plagiarism, the sentence
about the kitchen garden is not original. Madge.)
Daphne had got a key somewhere, and inside it was worse. Coverings over
the pictures and furniture, six years' dust everywhere, and a smell of
mould like a crypt of one of the Continental cathedrals, only not so
ancestor-y. While we were taking off the covers, with Bagsby's help,
Daphne alternately sang and coughed in the dust.
"Why aren't you more cheerful?" she demanded. "It will be a red-letter
day for The Cause. When I think of Mabel Fitzjames I almost weep!"
"I think it must be because I am not used to it," I said meekly. "You
see, I come from a Republican country--and Democratic, too, of
course--and we don't have any Prime Ministers to steal. One has to grow
accustomed to things like this gradually, Daffie, or be born to them.
And then--I lay awake most of last night, wondering what would happen if
he didn't--er--see the joke, you know."
Daphne jerked a cover from a moth-eaten sofa and sneezed promptly in the
dust.
"Joke!" she repeated when she could speak. "No, I don't think he will
see the joke. In fact, I don't believe he will think there is any joke
to see. If I know anything, he is going to be wild. He's going to tear
his hair and throw the vases off the mantel. He's going to use language
that you never heard--at least, I hope not."
It was then that I realised that I was not, heart and soul, a
Suffragist. If I had only had the courage to have spoken up then, to
have told her that I didn't feel The Cause the way I ought to, and that
I hoped to get married and have dozens of children, and that, anyhow, I
had a headache and I thought I ought to go on to Italy and meet Mother!
But, instead, I followed her around like a sheep, tacking up cards with
Suffrage mottoes on them all over the drawing-room, and stretching a
long canvas banner in the hall across the back of a great Gothic
hall-seat, with "Votes for Women" in red letters on it.
Bagsby brushed out a sort of oasis in the middle of the drawing-room and
a path to the door, and Daphne and I dusted seven chairs and a table. We
had brought over a duplex lamp and some candles, and when we had put a
cover on the table the middle of the room looked quite habitable. Then
Bagsby brushed the leaves off the steps, and as Daphne pleasantly
expressed it:
_Won't you step into my parlor?
Said the spider to the fly._
Mrs. Stafford, Violet and Lady Jane arrived that afternoon, after having
waited to send the wire on which the conspiracy was hung. They put
themselves into negligees and the hands of their maids at once, and were
still dressing when Ernestine and I, the advance guard, started with the
hamper of cold supper at half after six. Things went wrong from that
moment.
Ernestine started to recite her speech to me as we went down the drive,
found she had forgotten everything but the first sentence, which began,
like The Walrus and the Carpenter, "The time has come----" and had to go
back for the manuscript. We had to leave her for the second trip.
Bagsby, who was in the conspiracy to the extent of five pounds, took me
over alone and lighted the duplex lamp. He cut the telephone wire, also,
by Daphne's order, before he left. We were not leaving anything to
chance, although the thing had probably been disconnected for years.
"I 'ardly like to leave you 'ere alone, Miss," he said when everything
was ready. It was growing dark by that time and raining again. "Folks is
always ready to give a hempty 'ouse a black eye, so to speak. The 'All
ghost isn't what you might call authenticated, but the 'ouse isn't
'abitable for a lady alone, Miss."
"I am not at all nervous," I quavered as he went down the steps.
"Only--please tell them to hurry, Bagsby."