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AN AMERICAN SUFFRAGETTE
A NOVEL
By
ISAAC N. STEVENS
Author of "The Liberators," "Popular Government
Essays," etc.
New York
William Rickey & Company
1911
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Copyright, 1911, by
William Rickey & Company
Registered at Stationers' Hall, London
(All Rights Reserved)
Printed in the United States of America
PRESS OF WILLIAM G. HEWITT, 61-67 NAVY ST., BROOKLYN, N. Y.
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DEDICATION
To those noble and courageous women of England and America who are
trying to demonstrate to the world that Civilization cannot reach the
supreme heights of progress without giving freedom to the mental,
spiritual and physical energies of women, and that government will
always lack a vital element in its functions, so long as women are
deprived of equal participation in its operations--THIS BOOK IS
RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR.
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"But life shall on and upward go;
Th' eternal step of Progress beats
To that great anthem, calm and slow,
Which God repeats."
--Whittier.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A DOCTOR RETURNS FROM INDIA 1
II. A MYSTICAL PARADE 15
III. THE MYSTERIOUS YOUNG WOMAN 22
IV. A SUFFRAGE BAZAAR AND BALL 33
V. HYPNOTISM USED FOR AN ANAESTHETIC 46
VI. SOME STRENUOUS ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS 56
VII. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND SURGERY 61
VIII. THE OMNIPRESENT EYES OF FIFTH AVENUE 74
IX. LOVE, JEALOUSY AND MUSIC 82
X. A DISCUSSION OF PROGRESSIVE WOMEN 91
XI. THE ADVANCING COLUMN OF DEMOCRACY 99
XII. A TUBERCULAR KNEE AND A WORRIED SURGEON 117
XIII. AN ANTI-SUFFRAGE MEETING 125
XIV. FAITH IS THE BASIS OF ALL PROGRESS 140
XV. AN EVIL PROPHECY BEGINS TO BEAR FRUIT 154
XVI. THE MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF EMMA BELL 164
XVII. THE ARREST OF DR. JOHN EARL 180
XVIII. DR. EARL IS INDICTED FOR MURDER 194
XIX. A GREAT MURDER TRIAL BEGINS 199
XX. A WOMAN AND SPOOKS FIND A LETTER 211
XXI. SILVIA HOLLAND'S GREAT PLEA TO THE JURY 225
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AN AMERICAN SUFFRAGETTE
CHAPTER I
A DOCTOR RETURNS FROM INDIA
Among the hundreds of people who were awaiting the arrival of the big
Cunarder there were two groups, the second of which seemed determined
that the first should not get far away. The young men of which this
second group was composed represented the various newspapers of New York
City, and while a "beat" was evidently impossible, each of them was
determined to get a line for his own journal from the returning hero,
Dr. John Earl, which he would not share with the others of the
fraternity, and several of them held anxious consultations with their
photographers who, by special permit, had been allowed upon the pier.
The other group had moved a number of times to escape the cameras, and a
red-haired youth was expatiating upon the glories of American scientific
achievement, concluding with a peroration that called forth an
exclamation from one of the older men:
"Oh, shut up, Bedford; you sound like a Fourth of July oration. Who are
the people you are trying to snapshot for your lurid sheet?" he said
wearily, as becomes a Chicago newspaper man when in New York.
The red-headed one looked at him with cheerful surprise. "Don't you know
anybody?" he asked. "The tall, handsome blonde is Mrs. Ramsey, wife of
George Ramsey, at whose frown the great gods sit tight and the little
ones scuttle to cover. Luckily, he is a kindly disposed arbiter and the
Street basks under his smile."
The Chicagoan turned and looked at the lady curiously, and the reporter
went on: "The fair-haired lady with the wild-rose face is old Gordon
Kimball's daughter; born with a diamond teething ring in her mouth, but
has never succeeded in getting anything else of value inside her pretty
head."
"Well, she doesn't have to," said the Westerner.
Young Bedford grinned. "That's what Dr. Earl thinks; he can furnish
brains for the family. Their engagement was reported two months ago. The
man with them is Earl's brother, Frank Earl, corporation lawyer, amateur
actor, one of those guys that does everything well, and never gives away
his own hand. Go after him for a story about some combination his road
has gone into and you come away with a great spiel about bumper crops;
always gives you the glad hand, but nothing in it. You'd never take him
for Mrs. Ramsey's brother, would you? She's a looker, all right. So is
Dr. Earl, one of these big, handsome, powerful-looking men that makes
folks ask who he is."
"What's all the hullabaloo about, anyhow?" asked the Chicago man.
"Where have you been that you don't know about Earl?" answered Bedford.
"Why, I thought everybody in the country had heard of him. He's the chap
that raises the dead, you know; just takes 'em by the hand, makes a few
passes, and says, 'Say, it's time to wake up, old fellow,' and the dead
one sits up and asks for beefsteak. He's the man that saved Hall, the
copper mines king, over in Paris. Hall was finished, all done but
putting him in a box, when in comes Dr. Earl. 'Let him alone,' he says.
'He's tired out. When he finishes this nap he'll be just as good as
new.' But you know how impetuous the French are, and they were going to
have poor old Hall done for, sure enough, when this Earl man stands them
off, and promises to bring Hall 'round in six hours. And he does it
after the whole bunch of them have parleyed over him and waved
looking-glasses across his mouth, and found him as dead as Rameses."
There was a general buzz among the newspaper men, and one of them, older
and more dignified in manner than the others, said quietly, "Bedford,
you ought not to hand out that kind of fiction, even in your unreliable
journal."
Bedford winked slyly at the Chicagoan. "It was my only hope," he said in
a rapid aside. "That's Tourney. He was over there at the time, and he'll
tell us all about it trying to put me right."
"If you don't like my story you can give us the straight steer yourself,
Tourney," he said, and, nothing loath, the older man told how Hall had
been suddenly stricken with appendicitis in such severe form that an
operation was necessary at once. Upon this the French surgeons agreed,
but his heart action was so bad that they dared not administer an
anaesthetic, and one of them, who was a noted hypnotist, expressed a
doubt whether he would be able to rouse the patient from a hypnosis
sufficiently profound to enable them to perform the operation.
"This Frenchman," Tourney went on, warming to his subject, "had seen
Earl do some wonderful things and he knew he was in Paris and where he
was stopping. He put the case to Hall, and seeing that it was all day
with him unless something was done, he told them to send for Earl and
they got him there on the double-quick. I was waiting in the hall when
he went into the operating room and I stayed there until he came out,
and as I had done him one or two good turns he told me about it before
he realized that I was a newspaper man. When he saw me last I was
coaching Harvard students with more money than brains. That has nothing
to do with it, except to show that he isn't one of these 'for
publication only' wonder workers."
"Hurry up," said the Chicagoan, "he'll be here in a few minutes, and if
he's one of these human clams you are the hope of the press. What did he
tell you?"
"He agreed with the others in the main points, but he said if Hall was
willing to take the chance, he believed he could pull him through by a
system he had seen used in India. Then he cleared them all out, and when
they came back Hall was comatose. The appendix was removed in record
time, and the wound cleansed. Just before Earl finished, one of the
Frenchmen noticed that the patient was not breathing, apparently, and
exclaimed that he was dead. Dr. Earl pointed out the fact that the blood
showed no signs of other than a normal condition, such as would be found
in a patient under hypnosis. His idea, as I got it, was that the patient
must be kept unconscious long enough for the body to regain its
functions and get over the strain of the operation. He told them if he
were more familiar with Hall's constitution, he would be inclined to
prolong his condition of suspended animation, but under the
circumstances he would restore him to consciousness in three hours.
"One or two of them got excited and swore the man was dead, and
according to a lot of tests he was, but the rest, knowing he would have
died anyhow, were willing to wait, and at the end of the time Earl
brought him back to consciousness in such good condition that the other
doctors were wild over it. In their enthusiastic French way they
heralded the story everywhere. I thought he'd never be allowed to leave
Paris. They wanted to keep him right there and string medals around his
neck and pin ribbons all over his coat, but he wouldn't stand for it.
He's an awfully modest fellow, and he went over to London with Hall, who
swears by him; says he believes he put a new heart in him, and all that
sort of thing. There comes the boat now. Better have your photographers
ready, for all you'll get will be a picture of him keeping his mouth
shut."
As the big English boat swung slowly into its dock, with the help of
half a dozen tugs that puffed and pounded at its side, the newspaper men
and Dr. Earl's family caught sight of him simultaneously, as he waved
his hand and called across the intervening space with all the abandon
of a returning traveler.
He could make them hear now. "Leonora, dear, how are you!" as a
remarkably sweet-faced girl threw a shower of kisses in his direction,
which passed on their way an equal number of his own. "And Hilda! And
for the life of me, there's Frank! Love to all of you!" A few minutes
more and he was with them. He caught the girl in his arms and gave her a
long and tender embrace. Then he turned to the others and greeted them
with all the fraternal warmth natural after eighteen months' separation.
"How splendid it is to see you all again! What brought you to New York,
Frank?"
"Oh, just to see if I could cross Broadway without being bumped into by
a trolley car or a taxi-cab or an airship. Incidentally, to keep you
from losing your breath and hearing in the new tunnels through which you
will be shot under these New York rivers."
"Tubes, you mean, brother dear, tubes. I've been doing nothing else but
shoot the London tubes for the last fortnight."
"Where I live, in the wild and woolly Rockies, we call them tunnels,"
answered his brother. "Wouldn't the railroad builder howl at the idea
of 'tubing the mountains,' and the miner would have a war-dance of
delight at the suggestion that he must 'tube his claim.' These English
airs are all right, Dr. John Earl, but you may as well learn to talk
real American if you expect to chop bones and exploit microbes in this
country," and the young man glowed his admiration while plying him with
badinage.
The first greetings were scarcely over when the newspaper men made known
their mission, Tourney acting as spokesman for them all. Earl shook his
hand warmly.
"I'm awfully glad to see you," he said, "but you know I never give
interviews. I don't know how, to begin with, and I couldn't say anything
that would interest your readers. I have come back to practice my
profession in New York City; that is all I can tell you."
"But that Paris case," pleaded Bedford. "Do tell us about that."
"Did you use the Hindoo method of respiration that the Swami
Bramachunenda gave an exposition of here two or three years ago?" asked
another of the fraternity, and the others followed with different
interrogatives, but Earl laughed and waved them all away.
"I don't know what the Swami did," he said, "but if he is like some of
his brothers I'm ready to believe anything. All that I did, and a great
deal that I never thought of doing myself, or heard of anybody else
doing on this planet, was told in your papers at the time. Really, if I
had anything worth your while as a news story I would be glad to give it
to you--one of these days I may have, but you must excuse me now."
His manner was courteous but unmistakable, and turning away from them he
was soon absorbed in conversation with the pretty girl and his brother
and sister. He hardly took his eyes off the former as he recounted his
adventures abroad.
Three months previously he and Leonora Kimball had been betrothed in
Vienna, and it was agreed that they were to be married soon after his
arrival home. In a social way, the match met the approval of New York's
select set, for they belonged to equally wealthy and prominent families.
The Earls had come to New York from New England, two generations ago,
and the foundation of the family fortune had been laid in a small block
of New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, which had grown into a huge
block of both stocks and bonds from the various expansions of stock and
consolidations of property that had meanwhile taken place. The Kimballs
had come from the Pacific coast, where the same alchemist's result had
been wrought with a block of Southern Pacific Railway stock. The family
tree of the Earls had rooted itself into the subsoil of real culture,
while that of the Kimballs was mostly displayed above ground with only
here and there a stray fibre that had sunk to any depth.
Leonora Kimball, who at this time was slightly over twenty-three years
of age, possessed a most winning and gracious manner--a face that might
have served as a better model for a madonna than many of those
apparently used by the old masters; a lithe and graceful figure and an
abundance of vivacity when doing the things that pleased her. She had so
captivated John Earl from their first meeting that he had never tried
nor cared to analyze her. Indeed, had he so wished, he would have found
it a difficult undertaking, for he was too content with the pleasure he
felt in her presence to care to question it.
Dr. Earl had taken infinite pains to search the world for the sources of
disease and its prevention and cure. He had delved deeply into the
mysteries of mental and spiritual therapeutics, and had closely studied
the influences surrounding the origin of individual human beings. But
while he had harnessed many more or less occult forces into scientific
service in treating invalids, strangely enough, it never occurred to him
that similar elements might have an important mission in determining the
natural affinity of those attracted by the tenderest passion in the
world, and might do much, if properly regarded, to render stable that
one-time sacred bond of the sexes known as the marriage relation, which
at this time, everywhere, was resting upon such shifting quicksands of
mismating as to menace its existence.
"Love is of man's life a thing apart," applied with full force to Dr.
Earl, and he accepted his relations with Leonora Kimball with the same
confidence and light heart that might characterize the least thoughtful
man on Manhattan Island. While he had traveled many thousands of miles
and burned many a midnight lamp to ascertain if improvement could not be
made in the prevailing orthodox method of treating disease, he blindly
accepted, as millions of strong men before him had done, the prevailing
orthodox method of selecting a wife.
In any event, after the brother and sister had been left at the Ramsey
mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, he and Leonora proceeded to spend the
time from eleven to three o'clock very much as other lovers similarly
situated would have consumed those four hours. They motored until one
o'clock, when they went to her house, not far from his sister's
residence, where he had luncheon with her and her widowed mother, and at
three o'clock he arrived at the Hotel Gotham, where he had engaged
apartments.
When he stepped into his new sitting-room a large photograph of Leonora
confronted him on the dressing-case, his valet being a man of rare sense
and tact.
As he looked into the counterfeit impression of the large blue eyes and
reflected back her smile he declared to himself for the twentieth time
that day that she was the most fascinating creature in the world.