_Vivie_: "Get thee behind me, Satan! Mother, you oughtn't to make

such propositions. Don't you understand, we must all have a religion

somewhere. Some principle to which we sacrifice ourselves. Rossiter

would be horrified if he could hear you. His mistress is Science,

besides which he is really devoted to his wife and would do nothing

that could hurt her. You don't know England, it's clear. Supposing

for one moment I could consent--and I couldn't--we should be found

out to a certainty, and then Michael's career would be ruined.

"My religion, though I sometimes weary of it and sneer at it, is

Women's Rights: women must have precisely the same rights as men, no

disqualification whatever based merely on their being women. Did you

read those disgusting letters in the _Times_ by the surgeon, the

midwifery man, Sir Wrigsby Blane? Declaring that the demand for the

Vote was based on immorality, and pretending that once a month, till

they were fifty, and for several years _after_ they were fifty,

women were not responsible for their actions, because of what he

vaguely called 'physiological processes.' What poisonous rubbish!

You know as well as I do that in most cases it makes little or no

difference; and if it does, what about men? Aren't _they_ at certain

times not their normal selves? When they're full up with wine or

beer or whiskey, when they're courting, when they're pursuing some

illicit love, when after fifty they get a little odd in their ways

through this, that and the other internal trouble or change of

function? What's true of the one sex is equally true of the other.

Most men and women between twenty and sixty jolly well know what

they want, and generally they want something reasonable. We don't

legislate for the freaks, the unbalanced, the abnormal; or if we do

restrict the vote in those cases, let's restrict it for males as

well as females--But don't you see at the same time what a text I

should furnish to this malign creature if I ran away to Paris with

Michael, and made the slightest false step ... even though it had no

bearing on the main argument?..."

At this juncture Vivie, whose obsession leads her more and more to

address every one as a public meeting--is interrupted by the smiling

_bonne à tout faire_ who announces that _le déjeuner de Madame est

servi_, and the two women gathering up books and shawls go in to the

gay little _saile-à-manger_ of the Villa Beau-séjour.

On Vivie's return to London, after her Easter holiday, she threw

herself with added zest into the Suffrage struggle. The fortnight of

good feeding, of quiet nights and lazy days under her mother's roof

had done her much good. She was not quite so thin, the dark circles

under her grey eyes had vanished, and she found not only in herself

but even in the most middle-aged of her associates a delightful

spirit of tomboyishness in their swelling revolt against the Liberal

leaders. It was specially during the remainder of 1912 that Vivie

noted the enormous good which the Suffrage movement had done and was

doing to British women. It was producing a splendid camaraderie

between high and low. Heroines like Lady Constance Lytton

mingled as sister with equally heroic charwomen, factory girls,

typewriteresses, waitresses and hospital nurses. Women doctors of

Science, Music, and Medicine came down into the streets and did the

bravest actions to present their rights before a public that now

began to take them seriously. Debutantes, no longer quivering with

fright at entering the Royal Presence, modestly but audibly called

their Sovereign's attention to the injustice of Mr. Asquith's

attitude towards women, while princesses of the Blood Royal had

difficulty in not applauding. Many a tame cat had left the fire-side

and the skirts of an inane old mother (who had plenty of people to

look after her selfish wants) and emerged, dazed at first, into a

world that was unknown to her. Such had thrown away their crochet

hooks, their tatting-shuttles and fashion articles, their Church

almanacs, and Girl's Own Library books, and read and talked of

social, sexual, and industrial problems that have got to be faced

and solved. Colour came into their cheeks, assurance into their

faded manners, sense and sensibility into their talk; and whatever

happened afterwards they were never crammed back again into the

prison of Victorian spinsterhood. They learnt rough cooking, skilled

confectionery, typewriting, bicycling, jiu-jitsu perhaps. "The

maidens came, they talked, they sang, they read; till she not fair

began to gather light, and she that was became her former beauty

treble" sang in prophecy, sixty years before, the greatest of poets

and the poet-prophet of Woman's Emancipation. Many a woman has

directly owed the lengthened, happier, usefuller life that became

hers from 1910-1911-1912 onwards to the Suffrage movement for the

Liberation of Women.

The crises of 1912 moreover were not so acute as bitterly to envenom

the struggle in the way that happened during the two following

years. There was always some hope that the Ministry might permit the

passing of an amendment to the Franchise Bill which would in some

degree affirm the principle of Female Suffrage. It is true that a

certain liveliness was maintained by the Suffragettes. The W.S.P.U.

dared not relax in its militancy lest Ministers should think the

struggle waning and Woman already tiring of her claims. The vaunted

Manhood Suffrage Bill had been introduced by an anti-woman-suffrage

Quaker Minister and its Second reading been proposed by an equally

anti-feminist Secretary of State--this was in June-July, 1912; and

no member of the Cabinet had risen to say a word in favour of the

Women's claims. Still, something might be done in Committee, in the

autumn Session--if there were one--or in the following year. There

was a simmering in the Suffragist ranks rather than any alarming

explosion. In March, before Vivie went to Brussels, Mrs. Pankhurst

had carried out a window-smashing raid on Bond Street and Regent

Street and the clubs of Piccadilly, during which among the two

hundred and nineteen arrests there were brought to light as

"revolutionaries" two elderly women surgeons of great distinction

and one female Doctor of Music. In revenge the police had raided the

W.S.P.U. offices at Clifford's Inn, an event long foreseen and

provided against in the neighbouring Chancery Lane.

The Irish Nationalist Party had shown its marked hostility to the

enfranchisement of women in any Irish Parliament and so a few

impulsive Irish women had thrown things at Nationalist M.P.'s

without hurting them. Mr. Lansbury had spoken the plain truth to the

Prime Minister in the House of Commons and had been denied access to

that Chamber where Truth is so seldom welcome.

In July the slumbering movement towards resisting the payment of

taxes by vote-less women woke up into real activity, and there were

many ludicrous and pathetic scenes organized often by Vivie and

Bertie Adams at which household effects were sold and bought in by

friends to satisfy the claims of a tax-collector. In the autumn

Vivie and others of the W.S.P.U. organized great pilgrimages--the

marches of the Brown Women--from Scotland, Wales, Devon and Norfolk

to London, to some goal in Downing Street or Whitehall, some

door-step which already had every inch of its space covered by

policemen's boots. These were among the pleasantest of the

manifestations and excited great good humour in the populace of town

and country. They were extended picnics of ten days or a fortnight.

The steady tramp of sixteen to twenty miles a day did the women

good; the food _en route_ was abundant and eaten with tremendous

appetite. The pilgrims on arrival in London were a justification in

physical fitness of Woman's claim to equal privileges with Man.

Vivie after her Easter holiday took an increasingly active part in

these manifestations of usually good-humoured insurrection. As

Vivien Warren she was not much known to the authorities or to the

populace but she soon became so owing to her striking appearance,

telling voice and gift of oratory. All the arts she had learnt as

David Williams she displayed now in pleading the woman's cause at

the Albert Hall, at Manchester, in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Countess

Feenix took her up, invited her to dinner parties where she found

herself placed next to statesmen in office, who at first morose and

nervous--expecting every moment a personal assault--gradually

thawed when they found her a good conversationalist, a clever woman

of the world, becomingly dressed. After all, she had been a third

wrangler at Cambridge, almost a guarantee that her subsequent life

could not be irregular, according to a man's standard in England of

what an unmarried woman's life should be. She deprecated the

violence of the militants in this phase.

But she was Protean. Much of her work, the lawless part of it, was

organized in the shape and dress of Mr. Michaelis. Some of her

letters to the Press were signed Edgar McKenna, Albert Birrell,

Andrew Asquith, Edgmont Harcourt, Felicia Ward, Millicent Curzon,

Judith Pease, Edith Spenser-Churchhill, Marianne Chamberlain, or

Emily Burns; and affected to be pleas for the granting of the

Suffrage emanating from the revolting sons or daughters, aunts,

sisters or wives of great statesmen, prominent for their opposition

to the Women's Cause. The W.S.P.U. had plenty of funds and it did

not cost much getting visiting cards engraved with such names and

supplied with the home address of the great personage whom it was

intended to annoy. One such card as an evidence of good faith would

be attached to the plausibly-worded letter. The _Times_ was seldom

taken in, but great success often attended these audacious

deceptions, especially in the important organs of the provincial

press. Editors and sub-editors seldom took the trouble and the time

to hunt through _Who's Who_, or a Peerage to identify the writer of

the letter claiming the Vote for Women. No real combination of names

was given, thus forgery was avoided; but the public and the

unsuspecting Editor were left with the impression that the

Premier's, Colonial Secretary's, Home Secretary's, Board of Trade

President's, or prominent anti-suffragist woman's son, daughter,

brother, sister, wife or mother-in-law did not at all agree with the

anti-feminist opinions of its father, mother, brother or husband.

If the politician were foolish enough to answer and protest, he was

generally at a disadvantage; the public thought it a good joke and

no one (in the provinces) believed his disclaimers.

Vivie generally heckled ministers on the stump and parliamentary

candidates dressed as a woman of the lower middle class. It would

have been unwise to do so in man's guise, in case there should be a

rough-and-tumble afterwards and her sex be discovered. Although in

order to avoid premature arrest she did not herself take part

in those most ingenious--and from the view of endurance,

heroic--stow-aways of women interrupters in the roofs, attics,

inaccessible organ lofts or music galleries of public halls, she

organized many of these surprises beforehand. It was Vivie to whom

the brilliant idea came of once baffling the police in the rearrest

of either Mrs. Pankhurst or Annie Kenney. Knowing when the police

would come to the building where one or other of these ladies was to

make her sensational re-appearance, she had previously secreted

there forty other women who were dressed and veiled precisely

similarly to the fugitive from justice. Thus, when the force of

constables claimed admittance, forty-one women, virtually

indistinguishable one from the other, ran out into the street, and

the bewildered minions of the law were left lifting their helmets to

scratch puzzled heads and admitting "the wimmen were a bit too much

for us, this time, they were."

In her bedroom at 88-90 she kept an equipment of theatrical

disguises; very natural-looking moustaches which could be easily

applied and which remained firmly adhering save under the

application of the right solvent; pairs of tinted spectacles; wigs

of credible appearance; different styles of suiting, different types

of women's dress. She sometimes sat in trains as a handsome,

impressive matron of fifty-five, with a Pompadour confection and a

tortoiseshell _face-à-main_, conversing with ministers of state or

permanent officials on their way to their country seats, and saying

"_Horrid_ creatures!" if any one referred to the activities of the

Suffragettes. Thus disguised she elicited considerable information

sometimes, though she might really be on her way to organize the

break-up of the statesman's public meeting, the enquiry into

discreditable circumstances which might compel his withdrawal from

public life, or merely the burning down of his shooting box.

This life had its risks and perils, but it agreed with her health.

It was exciting and took her mind off Rossiter.

Rossiter for his part experienced a slackening in the tension of his

mind during the same year 1912. He was touched by his wife's faint

suspicion of his alienated affection and by her dogged determination

to be sufficient to him as a companion and a helper; and a little

ashamed at his middle-aged--he was forty-seven--infatuation for a

woman who was herself well on in the thirties. There were times when

a rift came in the cloud of his passion for Vivie, when he looked

out dispassionately on the prospect of the rest of his life--he

could hope at most for twenty more years of mental and bodily

activity and energy. Was this all too brief period to be filled up

with a senile renewal of sexual longing! He felt ashamed of the

thoughts that had occupied so much of his mind since he had laid

David Williams on the couch of his library, to find it was Vivie

Warren whose arms were round his neck. He was not sorry this love

for a woman he could not possess had sent him into Parliament. He

was beginning to enjoy himself there. He had found himself, had lost

that craven fear of the Speaker that paralyzes most new members. He

knew when to speak and when to be silent; and when he spoke

unsuspected gifts of biting sarcasm, clever characterization,

convincing scorn of the uneducated minister type came to his aid.

His tongue played round his victims, unequipped as they were with

his vast experience of reality, vaguely discursive, on the surface

as are most lawyers, at a loss for similes and tropes as are most

men of business, or dull of wits as are most of the fine flowers of

the public schools, stultified with the classics and scripture

history. He knew that unless there was some radical change of

government he could not be a minister; but he cared little for that.

He was rich--thanks to his wife--he was recovering his influence and

his European and American reputation as a great discoverer, a deep

thinker. He enjoyed pulverizing the Ministry over their suffrage

insincerities and displaying his contempt of the politician elected

only for his money influence in borough, county, or in the

subscription lists of the Chief Whip. Though his pulses still beat a

little quicker when he held Vivie's hand in his at some reception of

Lady Feenix's or a dinner party at the Gorings--Vivie as the child

of a "fallen" woman had a prescriptive right of entrance to Diana's

circle--he had not the slightest intention of running away with her,

of nipping his career in two, just as he might be scaling the last

heights to the citadel of fame: either as a politician of the new

type, the type of high education, or as one of the giants of

inductive science. Besides in 1912, if I mistake not, Dr.

Smith-Woodward and Mr. Charles Dawson made that discovery of the

remains of an ape-like man in the gravels of mid-Sussex; and the

hounds of Anthropology went off on a new scent at full cry, Rossiter

foremost in the pack.

Mrs. Rossiter in the same year allowed herself more and more to be

tempted into anti-suffrage discussions at the houses of peers or of

strong-minded, influential ladies who were on the easiest terms with

peers and potentates. She still resented the line her husband

had taken in politics and believed it to be chiefly due to an

inexplicable interest in Vivien Warren who she began to feel was the

same person as "David Williams."

If she could only master the "Anti" arguments--they sounded so

convincing from the lips of Miss Violet Markham or Mrs. Humphry Ward

or some suave King's Counsel with the remnants of mutton-chop

whiskers--if she could wean Michael away from that disturbing

nonsense--he could assign "militancy" as the justification of his

change of mind...! All that was asked by Authority, so far as she

could interpret hints from great ladies, was neutrality, the return

of Professor Rossiter to the paths of pure science in which area no

one disputed his eminence. _Then_ he might receive that knighthood

that was long overdue; better still his next lot of discoveries in

anatomy might bring him the peerage he richly deserved and which her

wealth would support. He could then rest on his oars, cease his more

or less nasty investigations; they could take a place in the country

and move from this much too large house which lay almost outside the

limits of Society's London to a really well-appointed flat in

Westminster and have a thoroughly enjoyable old age.

Honoria in these times did not see so much of Vivie as before. Her

warrior husband spent a good deal of 1912 at home as he had a

Hounslow command. He had come to realize--some spiteful person had

told him--who Vivie's mother had been, and told Honoria in accents

of finality that the "Aunt Vivie" nonsense must be dropped and Vivie

must not come to the house. At the most, if she _must_ meet her

friend of college days--oh, he was quite willing to believe in her

personal propriety, though there were odd stories in circulation

about her dressing as a man and doing some very rum things for the

W.S.P.U.--still if she _must_ see her, it would have to be in public

places or at her friends, at Lady Feenix's, if she liked. No. He

wasn't attacking the cause of Suffrage. Women could have the vote

and welcome so far as he was concerned: they couldn't be greater

fools than the men, and they were probably less corrupt. He himself

never remembered voting in his life, so Honoria was no worse off

than her husband. But he drew the line in his children's friends at

the daughter of a....

Here Honoria to avoid hearing something she could not forgive put

her plump hand over his bristly mouth. He kissed it and somehow she

couldn't take the high tone she had at first intended. She simply

said "she would see about it" and met the difficulty by giving up

her suffrage parties for a bit and attending Lady Maud's instead;

where you met not only poor Vivie, but--had she been in London and

guaranteed reformed and _rangée_--you might have met Vivie's mother;

as well as the Duchess of Dulborough--American, and intensely

Suffrage--the charwoman from Little Francis Street, the bookseller's

wife, the "mother of the maids" from Derry and Toms; and that very

clever chemist who had mended Juliet Duff's nose when she fell on

the ice at Princes'--they would both be there. Honoria said nothing

to Vivie and Vivie said nothing to Honoria about the inhibition, but

together with her irrational jealousy of _Eoanthropos dawsoni_ and

irritation at the growing contentedness with things as they were on

the part of Rossiter, it made her a trifle more reckless in her

militancy.

And Praddy? How did he fare in these times? Praed felt himself

increasingly out of the picture. He was not far gone in the sixties,

sixty-one, perhaps at most. But out of the movement. In his prime

the people of his set--the cultivated upper middle class, with a few

recruits from the peerage--cared only about Art in some shape or

form--recondite music, the themes of which were never obvious enough

to be hummed, the androgyne poetry of the 'nineties, morbidities

from the Yellow Book, and Scarlet Sins that you disclaimed for

yourself, to avoid unpleasantness with the Criminal Investigation

Department, but freely attributed to people who were not in the

room; the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and successors in audacity

and ugly indecency who left Beardsley a mere disciple of Raphael

Tuck; also architecture which ignored the housemaid's sink, the

box-room and the fire-escape.

The people who still came to his studio because he had the

reputation of being a wit and the husband of his parlour-maid (whom

to her indignation they called Queen Cophetua) cared not a straw

about Art in any shape or form. The women wanted the Vote--few of

them knew why--the men wanted to be aviators, motorists beating the

record in speed on French trial trips, or Apaches in their relations

with the female sex or prize-fighters--Jimmy Wilde had displaced

Oscar, to the advantage of humanity, even Praddy agreed.

To Praed however Vivie took the bitterness, the disillusions which

came over her at intervals:

"I feel, Praddy, I'm getting older and I seem to be at a loose end.

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 lassitude 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-séjour 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 booby-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 assassinations,

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

constitutional 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 ships, 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 classes) 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 rectum_ was debarred because it

might have constituted an indecent assault.

Was ever Ministry in a greater dilemma? It was too old-fashioned,

too antiquely educated to realize the spirit of its age, the pass 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

constitution; 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 slashing 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. Dickinson'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 Shillito 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 enfranchisement

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 constitutional 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 circumstances 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 enfranchisement of their sex. 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-class, 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 pushing 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 assembled. 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 _minutiæ_ 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 classic 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 assemble,

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 God 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 mass by its superior speed, and again

this vertical line of horses formed up once more horizontally,

leaving the mass 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 passed 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 pushing

through the ring of police constables who like warrior ants had

surrounded the victims of the protest--the shivering, 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 Dyke, 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.

Mrs. Rossiter thought the whole thing profoundly improper. In the

first place the young woman had committed suicide, which of itself

was a crime and disentitled you to Christian burial; in the second

she had died in a way greatly to inconvenience persons in the

highest society; in the third she had always understood that racing

was a perfectly proper pastime for gentlemen; and in the fourth this

incident, touching Michael through his relationship with the

deceased, would bring him again in contact with that Vivie

Warren--_there_ she was and there was _he_, in close converse--and

make a knighthood from a nearly relenting Government well-nigh

impossible. Rossiter, after the service, had begged Vivie to come

back to tea with them in Park Crescent and give Mrs. Rossiter and

himself a full account of what took place at Epsom. Vivie had

declined. She had not even spoken to the angry little woman, who had

refused to attend the service and had sat fuming all through the

half hour in her electric brougham, wishing she had the courage and

determination to order the chauffeur to turn round and run her home,

leaving the Professor to follow in a taxi. But perhaps if she did

that, he would go off somewhere with that Warren woman.

Michael presently re-entered the carriage and in silence they

returned to Portland Place.

The next day his wife meeting one of her Anti-Suffrage friends said:

"Er--supposing--er--you had got to know something about these

dreadful militant women, something which might help the police, yet

didn't want to get _too_ much mixed up with it yourself, and

_certainly_ not bring your husband into it--the Professor

_thoroughly_ disapproves of militancy, even though he may have

foolish ideas about the Vote--er--what would you do?"

"Well, what is it?"

"It's part of a letter."

"Well, I should just send it to the Criminal Investigation

Department, New Scotland Yard, and tell them under what

circumstances it came into your possession. You needn't even give

your name or address. They'll soon know whether it's any use or

not." So Mrs. Rossiter took from her desk that scrap of partly burnt

paper with the typewritten words on it which she had picked out of

the grate two and a half years before, and posted it to the Criminal

Investigation Department, with the intimation that this fragment had

come into the possession of the sender some time ago, and seemed to

refer to a militant Suffragist who called herself "Vivie Warren" or

"David Williams," and perhaps it might be of some assistance to the

authorities in tracking down these dangerous women who now stuck at

nothing. She posted the letter with her own hands in the North West

district. Park Crescent, Portland Place, she always reflected, was

still in the _Western_ district, though it lay perilously near the

North West border line, beyond which Lady Jeune had once written, no

one in Society thought of living. This was a dictum that at one time

had occasioned Mrs. Rossiter considerable perturbation. It was

alarming to think that by crossing the Marylebone Road or migrating

to Cambridge Terrace you had passed out of Society.

It took the police a deuce of a time--two months--to make use

effectively of the information contained in Mrs. Rossiter's scrap of

burnt paper; though the statement of their anonymous correspondent

that Vivie Warren and David Williams were probably the same person

helped to locate Mr. Michaelis's office. It was soon ascertained

that Miss Vivien Warren, well known as a sort of Society speaker on

Suffrage, lived at the Lilacs in Victoria Road, Kensington. But when

a plain-clothes policeman called at Victoria Road he was only told

by the Suffragette caretaker (whose mother now usually lived with

her to console her for her mistress's frequent absences) that Miss

Warren was away just then, had recently been much away from home,

probably abroad where her mother lived. (Here the enquirer

registered a mental note: Miss Warren has a mother living abroad:

could it be _the_ Mrs. Warren?). Polite and respectful calls on Lady

Feenix, Lady Maud Parry, and Mrs. Armstrong--Vivie's known

associates--elicted no information, till on leaving the last-named

lady's house in Kensington Square the detective heard Colonel

Armstrong come in from the garden and call out "Ho-no-ria."

"'--ria," he said to himself, "'-ria kept the keys, and

now--' Honoria. What was her name before she married Colonel

Armstrong?--why--" He soon found out--"Fraser." "Wasn't there once a

firm, _Fraser and Warren_, which set up to be some new dodge for

establishing women in a city career?--Accountancy? Stockbroking?

Where did _Fraser and Warren_ have their office? Fifth floor of

Midland Insurance office in Chancery Lane. What was that building

now called? No. 88-90." Done.

These two sentences run over a period of--what did I say? Two

months?--in their deductions and guesses and consultation of

out-of-date telephone directories. But on one day in September,

1913, two plain-clothes policemen made their way up to the fifth

floor of 88-90 Chancery Lane and found the outer door of Mr.

Michaelis's office locked and a notice board on it saying "Absent

till Monday." Not deterred by this, they forced open the door--to

the thrilling interest of a spectacled typewriteress, who had no

business on that landing at all, but she usually made assignations

there with the lift man. And on the writing table in the outer

office they found a note addressed to Miss Annie Kenney, which said

inside: "Dear Annie. If you should chance to look in between your

many imprisonments and find me out, you will know I am away on the

Firm's business, livening up the racing establishments of the Right

Honble Sir ---- ----, Bart. Bart. No one knows anything about this

at No. 94."

(This note was purely unnecessary--a bit of swagger perhaps, lest

Miss Kenney should think Vivie never did anything dangerous, but

only planned dangerous escapades for others. Like the long letter of

Vivie to Michael Rossiter, written on the last day of December,

1910, which he had imperfectly destroyed, it was a reminder of that

all-too-true saying: "Litera scripta manet.")

If the outer door of Michaelis's office was locked how could Miss

Kenney be expected to call and find this note awaiting her? Why,

_here_ came in the "No. 94" of the scrap of paper. There was an

over-the-roofs communication between the block of 88-90 and House

No. 94. The policemen in fact found that the large casement of the

partners' room was only pulled to, so that it was easily opened from

the outside. From the parapet they passed to the fire-escapes and

through the labyrinth of chimney stacks to a similar window leading

into the top storey of 94, the office of Mr. Algernon Mainwaring,

Hygienic Corset-maker. This office at the time of their unexpected

entry was fairly full of Suffragettes planning all sorts of direful

things. So the plain-clothes policemen had a rare haul that day and

certainly had Mrs. Rossiter to thank for rising to be Inspectors and

receiving some modest Order of later days. It was about the worst

blow the W.S.P.U. had; before the outbreak of War turned suddenly

the revolting women into the stanchest patriots and the right hands

of muddling ministers. For in addition to many a rich find in No. 94

and a dozen captives caught red-handed in making mock of the

Authorities, the plain-clothes policemen made themselves thoroughly

at home in Mr. Michaelis's quarters till the following Monday. And

when in the fore-noon of that day, Mr. Michaelis entered his rooms,

puzzled and perturbed at finding the outer door ajar, he was

promptly arrested on a multiform charge of arson ... and on being

conveyed to a police station and searched he was found to be Miss

Vivien Warren.

At intervals in the summer and early autumn of 1913 the male section

of the public had been horrified and scandalized at the destruction

going on in racing establishments, particularly those of Sir George

Crofts and of a well-known South American millionaire, whose

distinguished services to British commerce and immense donations to

Hospitals and Homes would probably be rewarded by a grateful

government. If these outrages were not stopped, horse-racing and

race-horse breeding must come to a stand-still; and we leave our

readers to realize what _that_ would mean! There would be no horses

for the plough or the gig, or the artillery gun-carriage;

no--er--fox-hunting, and without fox-hunting and steeple-chasing and

point-to-point races you could have no cavalry and without cavalry

you could have no army. If we neglected blood stock we would deal

the farmer a deadly blow, we should--er--

You know the sort of argument? Reduced to its essentials it is

simply this:--That a few rich people are fond of gambling and fond

of the excitement that is concentrated in the few minutes of the

horse race. Some others, not so rich, believe that by combining

horse-racing with a certain amount of cunning and bold cheating

they can make a great deal of money. A few speculators have invested

funds in spaces of open turf, and turn these spaces into race

courses. Having no alternative, no safer method of gambling offered

them, and being as fond of gambling as other peoples of the world,

the men of the labouring classes and a few of their women, the

publicans and their frequenters, army officers, farmers, and women

of uncertain virtue stake their money on horses they have never

seen, who may not even exist, and thus keep the industry going. And

the chevaliers of this "industry," the go-betweens, the parasites of

this sport, are the twelve thousand professional book-makers and

racing touts.

Somehow the Turf has during the last hundred years, together with

its allies the Distillers and Brewers, the Licensed Victuallers and

the Press that is supported by these agencies, acquired such a hold

over the Government Departments, the Labour Party, the Conservative

Party, and Liberal politicians who are descended from county

families, that it has more interest with those who govern us than

the Church, the Nonconformist Conscience, the County Palatine of

Lancaster or any other body of corporate opinion. So that when in

September, 1913, representatives of the Turf (and no doubt of the

Trade Unions) went to the Home Secretary in reference to the burning

and bombing of racing stables, trainers' houses, Grand Stands and

the residences of racing potentates, and said "Look here! This has

GOT TO STOP," the Home Secretary and the Cabinet knew they were up

against no ordinary crisis. At the same time Sir Edward Carson, the

Marquis of Londonderry, the Duke of Abercorn, Mr. F.E. Smith and

nearly a third of the Colonels in the British Army of Ulster descent

were actively organizing armed resistance to any measure of Home

Rule; while Keltiberian Ireland was setting up the Irish Volunteers

to start a Home Rule insurrection. You can therefore imagine for

yourselves the mental irritability of members of the Liberal Cabinet

in the autumn of the sinister year 1913. I have been told that there

were days at the House of Commons during the Autumn Session of that

year when the leading ministers would just shut themselves up in

their Private Rooms and scream on end for a quarter of an hour....

Of course an exaggeration, a sorry jest.

In retrospect one feels almost sorry for them: the Great War must

have come almost as a relief. Not one of them was what you would

call a bad man. Some of them suffered over forcible feeding and the

Cat and Mouse Act as acutely as does the loving father or mother who

says to the recently spanked child, "You _know_, dear, it hurts _me_

almost as much as it hurts _you_." If one met them out at dinner

parties, or in an express train which they could not stop by pulling

the communication cord, and sympathized with their dilemma, they

would ask plaintively _what_ they could do. They could not yield to

violence and anarchy; yet they could not let women die in prison.

Of course the answer was this, but it was one they waved aside:

"Dissolve Parliament and go to the Country on the one question of

Votes for Women. If the Country returns a great majority favourable

to that concession, you must bring in a Bill for eliminating the sex

distinction in the suffrage. If on the other hand, the Country votes

against the reform, then you must leave it to the women to make a

male electorate change its mind. And meantime if men and women, to

enforce some principle, rioted and were sent to prison for it, and

then started to abstain from food and drink, why they must please

themselves and die if they wanted to."

But this was just what the Liberal Ministry of those days would not

do; at all costs they must stick to office, emoluments, patronage,

the bestowal of honours, and the control of foreign policy. They

clung to power, in fact, at all costs; even inconsistency with the

bedrock principle of Liberalism: no Taxation without Representation.

It was decided in the innermost arcana of the Home Office that an

example should be made of Vivie. They had evidently in her got hold

of something far more dangerous than a Pankhurst or a Pethick

Lawrence, a Constance Lytton or an Emily Davison. The very probable

story--though the Benchers were loth to take it up--that she had

actually in man's garb passed for the Bar and pleaded successfully

before juries, appalled some of the lawyer-ministers by its

revolutionary audacity. They might not be able to punish her on that

count or on several others of the misdemeanours imputed to her; but

they had got her, for sure, on Arson; and on the arson not of

suburban churches, which occurred sometimes at Peckham or in the

suburbs of Birmingham and made people laugh a little in the trains

coming up to town and say there were far too many churches, seemed

to them; _but_ the burning down of racing establishments. _That_ was

Bolshevism, indeed, they would have said, had they been able to

project their minds five years ahead. Being only in 1913 they called

Vivie by the enfeebled term of Anarchist, the word applied by

_Punch_ to Mr. John Burns in 1888 for wishing to address the Public

in Trafalgar Square.

So it was arranged that Vivie's trial should take place in October

at the Old Bailey and that a judge should try her who was quite

certain he had never stayed at a Warren Hotel; who would be careful

to keep great names out of court; and restrain counsel from dragging

anything in to the simple and provable charge of arson which might

give Miss Warren a chance to say something those beastly newspapers

would get hold of.

I am not going to give you the full story of Vivie's trial. I have

got so much else to say about her, before I can leave her in a quiet

backwater of middle age, that this must be a story which has gaps to

be filled up by the reader's imagination. You can, besides, read for

yourself elsewhere--for this is a thinly veiled chronicle of real

events--how she was charged, and how the magistrate refused bail

though it was offered in large amounts by Rossiter and Praed, the

latter with Mrs. Warren's purse behind him. How she was first lodged

in Brixton Prison and at length appeared in the dock at the Old

Bailey before a Court that might have been set for a Cinematograph.

There was a judge with a full-bottomed wig, a scarlet and ermine

vesture, there was a jury of prosperous shopkeepers, retired half

pay officers, a hotelkeeper or two, a journalist, an architect, and

a builder. A very celebrated King's Counsel prosecuted--the Cabinet

thus said to the Racing World "We've done _all_ we can"--and Vivie

defended herself with the aid of a clever solicitor whom Bertie

Adams had found for her.

From the very moment of her arrest, Bertie Adams had refused--even

though they took away his salary--to think of anything but Vivie's

trial and how she might issue from it triumphant. He must have lost

a stone in weight. He was ready to give evidence himself, though he

was really quite unconcerned with the offences for which Vivie was

on trial; prepared to swear to anything; to swear he arranged the

conflagrations; that Miss Warren had really been in London when

witness had seen her purchasing explosives at Newmarket (both

stories were equally untrue). Bertie Adams only asked to be allowed

to perjure himself to the tune of Five Years' penal servitude if

that would set Vivie free. Yet at a word or a look from her he

became manageable.

The Attorney General of course began something like this. "I am

very anxious to impress on you," he said, addressing the jury, "that

from the moment we begin to deal with the facts of this case, all

questions of whether a woman is entitled to the Parliamentary

franchise, whether she should have the same right of franchise as a

man are matters which in no sense are involved in the trial of this

issue. All you have to decide is whether the prisoner in the dock

committed or procured and assisted others to commit the very serious

acts of arson of which she is accused..."

Nevertheless he or the hounds he kept in leash, the lesser counsel,

sought subtly to prejudice the jury's mind against Vivie by dragging

in her parentage and the eccentricities of her own career. As

thus:--

_Counsel for the prosecution_: "We have in you the mainspring of

this rebellious movement..."

_Vivie_: "Have you?"

_Counsel_: "Are you not the daughter of the notorious Mrs. Warren?"

_Vivie_: "My mother's name certainly is Warren. For what is she

notorious?"

_Counsel_: "Well--er--for being associated abroad with--er--a

certain type of hotel synonymous with a disorderly house--"

_Vivie_: "Indeed? Have you tried them? My mother has managed the

hotels of an English Company abroad till she retired altogether from

the management some years ago. It was a Company in which Sir George

Crofts--"

_Judge_, interposing: "We need not go into that--I think the Counsel

for the prosecution is not entitled to ask such questions."

_Counsel_: "I submit, Me Lud, that it is germane to my case that the

prisoner's upbringing might have--"

_Vivie_: "I am quite willing to give you all the information I

possess as to my upbringing. My mother who has resided mainly at

Brussels for many years preferred that I should be educated in

England. I was placed at well-known boarding schools till I was old

enough to enter Newnham. I passed as a Third Wrangler at Cambridge

and then joined the firm of Fraser and Warren. As you seem so

interested in my relations, I might inform you that I have not many.

My mother's sister, Mrs. Burstall, the widow of Canon Burstall,

resides at Winchester; my grandfather, Lieutenant Warren, was killed

in the Crimea--or more likely died of neglected wounds owing to the

shamefully misconducted, man-conducted Army Medical Service of those

days. My mother in early days was better known as Miss Kate

Vavasour. She was the intimate friend of a celebrated barrister

who--"

_Judge_, intervening: "We have had enough of this discursive

evidence which really does not bear on the case at all. I must ask

the prosecuting counsel to keep to the point and not waste the time

of the court."

_Prosecuting Counsel_ (who has meantime received three or four

energetic notes from his leader, begging him to remember his

instructions and not to be an ass): "Very good M'Lud." (To Vivie)

"Do you know Mr. David Vavasour Williams, a barrister?"

_Vivie_: "I have heard of him."

_Counsel_: "Have you spoken of him as your cousin?"

_Vivie_: "I may have done. He is closely related to me."

_Counsel_: "I put it to you that _you_ are David Williams, or at any

rate that you have posed as being that person."

_Judge_, interposing with a weary air: "_Who_ is David Williams?"

_Counsel_: "Well--er--a member of the Bar--well known in the

criminal courts--Shillito case--"

_Judge_: "Really? I had not heard of him. Proceed."

_Counsel_ (to Vivie): "You heard my questions?"

_Vivie_: "I have never posed as being other than what I am, a woman

much interested in claiming the Parliamentary Franchise for Women;

and I do not see what these questions have to do with my indictment,

which is a charge of arson. You introduce all manner of irrelevant

matter--"

_Counsel_: "You decline to answer my questions?"

(Vivie turns her head away.)

_Judge_, to Counsel: "I do not quite see the bearing of your

enquiries."

_Counsel_: "Why, Me Lud, it is common talk that prisoner is the

well-known barrister, David Vavasour Williams; that in this disguise

and as a pretended man she passed the necessary examinations and was

called to the Bar, and--"

_Judge_: "But what bearing has this on the present charge, which is

one of Arson?"

_Counsel_: "I was endeavouring by my examination to show that the

prisoner has often and successfully passed as a man, and that the

evidence of witnesses who affirmed that they only saw _a young man_

at or near the scene of these incendiary fires, that a young man,

supposed to have set the stables alight, once dashed in and rescued

two horses which had been overlooked, might well have been the

prisoner who is alleged to have committed most of these crimes in

man's apparel--"

_Judge_: "I see." (To Vivie) "Are you David Vavasour Williams?"

_Vivie_: "Obviously not, my Lord. My name is Vivien Warren and my

sex is feminine."

_Judge_, to Counsel: "Well, proceed with your examination--" (But

here the Leader of the prosecution takes up the rôle and brushes his

junior on one side).

Vivie of course was convicted. The case was plain from the start, as

to her guilt in having organized and carried out the destruction of

several great Racing establishments or buildings connected with

racing. There had been no loss of life, but great damage to

property--perhaps two or three hundred thousand pounds, and a

serious interruption in the racing fixtures of the late summer and

early autumn. The jury took note that on one occasion the prisoner

in the guise of a young man had personally carried out the rescue of

two endangered horses; and added a faintly-worded recommendation to

mercy, seeing that the incentive to the crimes was political

passion.

But the judge put this on one side. In passing sentence he said: "It

is my duty, Vivien Warren, to inflict what in my opinion is a

suitable and adequate sentence for the crime of which you have been

most properly convicted. I must point out to you that whatever may

have been your motives, your deeds have been truly wicked because

they have exposed hard-working people who had done you no wrong to

the danger of being burnt, maimed or killed, or at the least to the

loss of employment. You have destroyed property of great value

belonging to persons in no way concerned with the granting or

withholding of the rights you claim for women. In addition, you have

for some time past been luring other people--young men and young

women--to the committal of crime as your assistants or associates. I

cannot regard your case as having any political justification or

standing, or as being susceptible of any mitigation by the

recommendation of the jury. The least sentence I can pass upon you

is a sentence of Three years' penal servitude."

Vivie took the blow without flinching and merely bowed to the judge.

There was the usual "sensation in Court." Women's voices were heard

saying "Shame!" "Shame!" "Three cheers for Vivie Warren," and a

slightly ironical "Three cheers for David Whatyoumay-callem

Williams." The judge uttered the usual unavailing threats of prison

for those who profaned the majesty of the Court; Honoria, Rossiter,

Praed (in tears), Bertie Adams, looking white and ill, all the noted

Suffragists who were out of prison for the time being and could

obtain admittance to the Court, crowded round Vivie before the

wardresses led her away from the dock, assuring her they would move

Heaven and Earth, first to get the sentence mitigated, and secondly

to have her removed to the First Division.

But on both points the Government proved adamant. An interview

between Rossiter and the Home Secretary nearly ended in a personal

assault. All the officials concerned refused to see Honoria, who

almost had a serious quarrel with her husband, the latter averring

that Vivien Warren had only got what she asked for. Vivien was

therefore taken to Holloway to serve her sentence as a common felon.

"Didn't she hunger-strike to force the Authorities to accord her

better prison treatment?" She did. But she was very soon, and with

extra business-like brutality, forcibly fed; and that and the

previous starvation made her so ill that she spent weeks in

hospital. Here it was very plainly hinted to her that between

hunger-striking and forcible feeding she might very soon die; and

that in her case the Government were prepared to stand the racket.

Moreover she heard by some intended channel about this time that

scores of imprisoned suffragists were hunger-striking to secure her

better treatment and were endangering if not their lives at any rate

their future health and validity. So she conveyed them an earnest

message--and was granted facilities to do so--imploring them to do

nothing more on her account; adding that she was resolved to go

through with her imprisonment; it might teach her valuable lessons.

The Governor of the prison fortunately was a humane and reasonable

man--unlike some of the Home Office or Scotland Yard officials. He

read the newspapers and reviews of the day and was aware who Vivie

Warren was. He probably made no unfair difference in her case from

any other, but so far as he could mould and bend the prison

discipline and rules it was his practice not to use a razor for

stone-chipping or a cold-chisel for shaving. He therefore put Vivie

to tasks co-ordinated with her ability and the deftness of her

hands--such as book-binding. She had of course to wear prison

dress--a thing of no importance in her eyes--and her cell was like

all the cells in that and other British prisons previous to the

newest reforms--dark, rather damp, cruelly cold in winter, and

disagreeable in smell; badly ventilated and oppressively ugly. But

it was at any rate clean. She had not the cockroaches, bugs, fleas

and lice that the earliest Suffragists of 1908 had to complain of.

Five years of outspoken protests on the part of educated,

delicate-minded women had wrought great reforms in our prisons--the

need for which till then was not apparent to the perceptions of

Visiting Magistrates.

The food was better, the wardresses were less harsh, the chaplains a

little more endurable, though still the worst feature in the prison

personnel, with their unreasoning Bibliolatry, their contemptuous

patronage, their lack of Christian pity--Christ had never spoken to

_them_, Vivie often thought--their snobbishness. The chaplain of her

imprisonment became quite chummy when he learnt that she had been a

Third Wrangler at Cambridge, knew Lady Feenix, and had lived in

Kensington prior to committing the offences for which she was

imprisoned. However this helped to alleviate her dreary seclusion

from the world as he occasionally dropped fragments of news as to

what was going on outside, and he got her books through the prison

library that were not evangelical pap.

One day when she had been in prison two months she had a great

surprise--a visit from her mother. Strictly speaking this was only

to last fifteen minutes, but the wardress who had conceived a liking

for her intimated that she wouldn't look too closely at her watch.

Honoria came too--with Mrs. Warren--but after kissing her friend and

leaving some beautiful flowers (which the wardress took away at once

with pretended sternness and brought back in a vase after the

visitors had left) Honoria with glistening eyes and a smile that was

all tremulous sweetness, intimated that Mrs. Warren had so much to

say that she, Honoria, was not going to stay more than that _one_

minute.

Mrs. Warren had indeed so much to impart in the precious half hour

that it was one long gabbled monologue.

"When I heard you'd got into trouble, my darling, I _was_ put about.

Some'ow I'd never thought of your being pinched and acshally sent to

prison. It was in the Belgian papers, and a German friend of

mine--Oh! quite proper I assure you! He's a Secretary of their

legation at Brussels and ages ago he used to be one of my clients

when the Hotel had a different name. Well, he was full of it.

'Madam,' 'e said, 'your English women are splendid. They're going to

bring about a revolt, you'll see, and that, an' your Ulster movement

'll give you a lot of trouble next year.'

"Well: I wrote at once to Praddy, givin' him an order on my London

agents, 'case he should want cash for your defence. I offered to

come over meself, but he replied that for the present I'd better

keep away. Soon as I heard you was sent to prison I come over and

went straight to Praddy. My! He _was_ good. He made me put up with

him, knowin' I wanted to live quiet and keep away from the old set.

'There's my parlour-maid,' 'e says, 'sort of housekeeper to

me--good sort too, but wants a bit of yumourin.' You'll fix it up

with her,' he says. And I jolly soon did. I give her to begin with

a good tip, an' I said: 'Look 'ere, my gal--she's forty-five I

should think--Every one's in trouble _some_ time or other in their

lives, and _I'm_ in trouble now, if you like. And the day's come,' I

said, 'when all women ought to stick by one another.' 'Pears she's

always had the highest opinion of you; very different, you was, from

_some_ of 'er master's friends. I says 'Right-o; then _now_ we know

where we are.'

"Praddy soon got into touch with the authorities, but for some

reason they wouldn't pass on a letter or let me come and see you,

till to-day. But here I am, and here I'm goin' to stay--with

Praddy--till they lets you out. I'm told that if you be'ave yourself

they'll let me send you a passel of food, once a week. Think of

that! My! won't I find some goodies, and paté de foie gras. I'll

come here once a month, as often as they'll let me, till I gets you

out. 'N after that, we'll leave this 'orrid, 'yprocritical old

country and live 'appily at my Villa, or travel a bit. Fortunately

I've plenty of money. Bein' over here I've bin rearranging my

investments a bit. Fact is, I 'ad a bit of a scare this autumn. They

say in Belgium, War is comin'. Talkin' to this same German--He's

always pumpin' me about the Suffragettes so I occasionally put a

question or so to 'im, 'e knowing 'what's, what' in the money

market--'e says to me just before I come over, 'What's your English

proverb, Madame Varennes, about 'avin' all your eggs in one basket?

Is all your money in English and Belgian securities?' I says

'Chiefly Belgian and German and Austrian, and some I've giv' to me

daughter to do as she likes with.' 'Well' 'e says, 'friend speakin'

to friend, you've giv' me several good tips this autumn,' he says.

'Now I'll give you one in return. Sell out your Austrian

investments--there's goin' to be a big war in the Balkans next year

and as like as not _we_ shall be here in Belgium. Sell out most of

yer Belgian stock and put all your money into German funds. They'll

be safe there, come what may.' I thanked 'im; but I haven't quite

done what he suggested. I'm takin' all my money out of Austrian

things and all but Ten thousand out of Belgian funds. I'm leavin' my

German stock as it was, but I'm puttin' Forty thousand pounds--I've

got Sixty thousand altogether--all yours some day--into Canadian

Pacifics and Royal Mail--people 'll always want steamships--and New

Zealand Five per cents. I don't like the look of things in old

England nor yet on the Continent. Now me time's up. Keep up your

heart, old girl; it'll soon be over, specially if you don't play the

fool and rile the prison people or start that silly hunger strike

and ruin your digestion. G--good-bye; and G-God b-bless you, my

darlin'" added Mrs. Warren relapsing into tears and the conventional

prayer, of common humanity, which always hopes there _may_ be a

pitiful Deity, somewhere in Cosmos.

Going out into the corridor, she attempted to press a sovereign into

the wardress's hard palm. The latter indignantly repudiated the gift

and said if Mrs. Warren tried on such a thing again, her visits

would be stopped. But her indignation was very brief. She was

carrying Honoria's flowers at the time, and as she put them on the

slab in Vivie's cell, she remarked that say what you liked, there

was nothing to come up to a mother, give her a mother rather than a

man any day.

On other occasions Bertie Adams came with Mrs. Warren; even

Professor Rossiter, who also went to see Vivie's mother at Praed's,

and conceived a whimsical liking for the unrepentant, outspoken old

lady.

Vivie's health gradually recovered from the effects of the forcible

feeding; the prison fare, supplemented by the weekly parcels, suited

her digestion; the peace of the prison life and the regular work at

interesting trades soothed her nerves. She enjoyed the respite from

the worries of her complicated toilettes, the perplexity of what to

wear and how to wear it; in short, she was finding a spell of prison

life quite bearable, except for the cold and the attentions of the

chaplain. She gathered from the fortnightly letter which her

industry and good conduct allowed her to receive, and to answer,

that unwearied efforts were being made by her friends outside to

shorten her sentence. Mrs. Warren through Bertie Adams had found out

the cases where jockeys and stable lads had lost their effects in

the fires or explosions which had followed Vivie's visits to their

employers' premises, and had made good their losses. As to their

employers, they had all been heavily insured, and recovered the

value of their buildings; and as to the insurance companies _they_

had all been so enriched by Mr. Lloyd George's legislation that the

one-or-two hundred thousand pounds they had lost, through Vivie's

revenge for the seemingly-fruitless death of Emily Wilding Davison,

was a bagatelle not worth bothering about. But all attempts to get

the Home Office to reconsider Miss Warren's case or to shorten her

imprisonment (except by the abridgment that could be earned in the

prison itself) were unavailing. So long as the Cabinet held Vivie

under lock and key, the Suffrage movement--they foolishly

believed--was hamstrung.

So the months went by, and Vivie almost lost count of time and

almost became content to wait. Till War was declared on August 4th,

1914. A few days afterwards followed the amnesty to Suffragist

prisoners. From this the Home Office strove at first to exclude

Vivien Warren on the plea that her crime was an ordinary crime and

admitted of no political justification; but at this the wrath of

Rossiter and the indignation of the W.S.P.U. became so alarming that

the agitated Secretary of State--not at all sure how we were going

to come out of the War--gave way, and an order was signed for

Vivie's release on the 11th of August; on the understanding that she

would immediately proceed abroad; an understanding to which she

would not subscribe but which in her slowly-formed hatred of the

British Government she resolved to carry out.

Mrs. Warren, assured by Praed and Rossiter that Vivie's release was

a mere matter of a few days, had left for Brussels on the 5th of

August. If--as was then hoped--the French and Belgian armies would

suffice to keep the Germans at bay on the frontier of Belgium, she

would prefer to resume her life there in the Villa de Beau-séjour.

If however Belgium was going to be invaded it was better she should

secure her property as far as possible, transfer her funds, and make

her way somehow to a safe part of France. Vivie would join her as

soon as she could leave the prison.

CHAPTER XVI

BRUSSELS AND THE WAR: 1914

The Lilacs in Victoria Road had been disposed of--through

Honoria--as soon as possible, after the sentence of Three years'

imprisonment had been pronounced on Vivie; and the faithful

Suffragette maid had passed into Honoria's employ at Petworth, a

fact that was not fully understood by Colonel Armstrong until he had

become General Armstrong and perfectly indifferent to the Suffrage

agitation which had by that time attained its end. So when Vivie had

come out of prison and had promised to write to all the wardresses

and to meet them some day on non-professional ground; had found

Rossiter waiting for her in his motor and Honoria in hers; had

thanked them both for their never-to-be-forgotten kindness, and had

insisted on walking away in her rather creased and rumpled clothes

of the previous year with Bertie Adams; she sought the hospitality

of Praddy at Hans Place. The parlour-maid received her sumptuously,

and Praddy's eyes watered with senile tears.

But Vivie would have no melancholy. "Oh Praddy! If you only knew.

It's worth going to prison to know the joy of coming out of it! I'm

so happy at thinking this is my last day in England for ever so

long. When the War is over, I think I shall settle in Switzerland

with mother--or perhaps all three of us--you with us, I mean--in

Italy. We'll only come back here when the Women have got the Vote.

Now to-night you shall take me to the theatre--or rather I'll take

_you_. I've thought it all out beforehand, and Bertie Adams has

secured the seats. It's _The Chocolate Soldier_ at the Adelphi, the

only war piece they had ready; there are two stalls for us and

Bertie and his wife are going to the Dress Circle. My Cook's ticket

is taken for Brussels and I leave to-morrow by the Ostende route."

"To-morrow" was the 12th of August, and Dora was not yet in being to

interpose every possible obstacle in the way of the civilian

traveller. Down to the Battle of the Marne in September, 1914, very

little difficulty was made about crossing the Channel, especially

off the main Dover-Calais route.

So in the radiant noon of that August day Vivie looked her last on

the brown-white promontories, cliffs and grey castle of Dover,

scarcely troubling about any anticipations one way or the other, and

certainly having no prevision she would not recross the Channel for

four years and four months, and not see Dover again for five or six

years.

British war vessels were off the port and inside it. But there was

not much excitement or crowding on the Ostende steamer or any of

those sensational precautions against being torpedoed or mined,

which soon afterwards oppressed the spirits of cross-Channel

passengers. Vessels arriving from Belgium were full of passengers of

the superior refugee class, American and British tourists, or

wealthy people who though they preferred living abroad had begun to

think that the Continent just now was not very healthy and England

the securest refuge for those who wished to be comfortable.

Vivie being a good sailor and economical by nature, never thought of

securing a cabin for the four or five hours' sea-journey. She sat on

the upper deck with her scanty luggage round her. A nice-looking

young man who had a cabin the door of which he locked, was walking

up and down on the level deck and scrutinizing her discreetly. And

when at last they worked their way backwards into Ostende--the

harbour was full of vessels, chiefly mine-dredgers and torpedo

boats--she noticed the obsequiousness of the steamer people and how

he left the ship before any one else.

She followed soon afterwards, having little encumbrances in the way

of luggage; but she observed that he just showed a glimpse of some

paper and was allowed to walk straight through the Douane with

unexamined luggage, and so, on to the Brussels train.

But she herself had little difficulty. She put her hand luggage--she

had no other--into a first-class compartment, and having an hour and

a half to wait walked out to look at Ostende.

Summer tourists were still there; the Casino was full of people, the

shops were doing an active trade; the restaurants were crowded with

English, Americans, Belgians taking tea, chocolate, or liqueurs at

little tables and creating a babel of talk. Newspapers were being

sold everywhere by ragamuffin boys who shouted their head-lines in

French, Flemish, and quite understandable English. A fort or two at

Liége had fallen, but it was of no consequence. General Léman could

hold out indefinitely, and the mere fact that German soldiers had

entered the town of Liége counted for nothing. Belgium had virtually

won the war by holding up the immense German army. France was

overrunning Alsace, Russia was invading East Prussia and also

sending uncountable thousands of soldiers, via Archangel, to

England, whence they were being despatched to Calais for the relief

of Belgium.

"It looks," thought Vivie, after glancing at the _Indépendance

Belge_, "As though Belgium were going to be extremely interesting

during the next few weeks; I may be privileged to witness--from a

safe distance--another Waterloo."

Then she returned to the train which in her absence had been so

crowded with soldiers and civilian passengers that she had great

difficulty in finding her place and seating herself. The young man

whom she had seen pacing the deck of the steamer approached her and

said: "There is more room in my compartment; in fact I have

selfishly got one all to myself. Won't you share it?"

She thanked him and moved in there with her suit case and rugs.

When the train had started and she had parried one or two polite

enquiries as to place and ventilation, she said: "I think I ought to

tell you who I am, in case you would not like to be seen speaking to

me--I imagine you are in diplomacy, as I noticed you went through

with a Red passport.--I am Vivien Warren, just out of prison, and an

outlaw, more or less."

"'The outlaws of to-day are the in-laws of to-morrow,' as the

English barrister said when he married the Boer general's daughter.

I have thought I recognized you. I have heard you speak at Lady

Maud's and also at Lady Feenix's Suffrage parties. My name is Hawk.

I suppose you've been in prison for some Suffrage offence? So has my

aunt, for the matter of that."

_Vivie_: "Yes, but in her case they only sentenced her to the First

Division; whereas _I_ have been doing nine months' hard."

_Hawk_: "What was your crime?"

_Vivie_: "I admit nothing, it is always wisest. But I was accused of

burning down Mr. ----'s racing stables--and other things..."

_Hawk_: "_That_ beast. Well, I suppose it was very wrong. Can't

quite make up my mind about militancy, one way or the other. But

here we are up against the biggest war in history, and such

peccadilloes as yours sink into insignificance. By the bye, my aunt

was amnestied and so I suppose were you?"

_Vivie_: "Yes, but not so handsomely. I was requested to go away

from England for a time, so here I am, about to join my mother in

Brussels--or in a little country place near Brussels."

_Hawk_: "Well, I've been Secretary of Legation there. I'm just going

back to--to--well I'm just going back."

At Bruges they were told that the train would not leave for Ghent

and Brussels for another two hours--some mobilization delay; so Hawk

proposed they should go and see the Memlings and then have some

dinner.

"Don't you think they're perfectly wonderful?"--_àpropos_ of the

pictures in the Hospital of St. Jean.

_Vivie_: "It depends on what you mean by 'wonderful.' If you admire

the fidelity of the reproduction in colour and texture of the

Flemish costumes of the fifteenth century, I agree with you. It is

also interesting to see the revelations of their domestic

architecture and furniture of that time, and the types of domestic

dog, cow and horse. But if you admire them as being true pictures of

life in Palestine in the time of Christ, or in the Rhineland of the

fifth century, then I think they--like most Old Masters--are

perfectly rotten. And have you ever remarked another thing about all

paintings prior to the seventeenth century: how _plain_, how _ugly_

all the people are? You never see a single good-looking man or

woman. Do let's go and have that dinner you spoke of. I've got a

prison appetite."

At Ghent another delay and a few uneasy rumours. The Court was said

to be removing from Brussels and establishing itself at Antwerp. The

train at last drew into the main station at Brussels half an hour

after midnight. Vivie's mother was nowhere to be seen. She had

evidently gone back to the Villa Beau-séjour while she could. It was

too late for any tram in the direction of Tervueren. There were no

taxis owing to the drivers being called up. Leaving most of her

luggage at the cloak-room--it took her about three-quarters of an

hour even to approach the receiving counter--Vivie walked across to

the _Palace Hotel_ and asked the night porter to get her a room. But

every room was occupied, they said--Americans, British, wealthy war

refugees from southern Belgium, military officers of the Allies. The

only concession made to her--for the porter could hold out little

hope of any neighbouring hotel having an empty room--was to allow

her to sit and sleep in one of the comfortable basket chairs in the

long atrium. At six o'clock a compassionate waiter who knew the name

of Mrs. Warren gave her daughter some coffee and milk and a

_brioche_. At seven she managed to get her luggage taken to one of

the trams at the corner of the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique. The

train service to Tervueren was suspended--and at the Porte de Namur

she would be transferred to the No. 45 tram which would take her out

to Tervueren.

Even at an early hour Brussels seemed crowded and as the tram passed

along the handsome boulevards the shops were being opened and

tourists were on their way to Waterloo in brakes. Every one seemed

to think in mid-August, 1914, that Germany was destined to receive

her _coup-de-grâce_ on the field of Waterloo. It would be so

appropriate. And no one--at any rate of those who spoke their

thoughts aloud--seemed to consider that Brussels was menaced.

Leaving her luggage at the tram terminus, Vivie sped on foot through

forest roads, where the dew still glistened, to the Villa

Beau-séjour. Mrs. Warren was not yet dressed, but was rapturous in

her greeting. Her chauffeur had been called up, so the auto could

not go out, but a farm cart would be sent for the luggage.

"I believe, mother, I'm going to enjoy myself enormously," said

Vivie as she sat in the verandah in the morning sunshine, making a

delicious _petit déjeuner_ out of fresh rolls, the butter of the

farm, a few slices of sausage, and a big cup of frothing chocolate

topped with whipped cream. The scene that spread before her was

idyllic, from a bucolic point of view. The beech woods of Tervueren

shut out any horizon of town activity; black and white cows were

being driven out to pasture, a flock of geese with necks raised

vertically waggled sedately along their own chosen path, a little

disturbed and querulous over the arrival of a stranger; turkey hens

and their half-grown poults and a swelling, strutting turkey cock, a

peacock that had already lost nearly all his tail and therefore

declined combat with the turkey and was, moreover, an isolated

bachelor; guinea-fowls scratching and running about alternately; and

plump cocks and hens of mixed breed covered most of the ground in

the adjacent farm yard and the turf of an apple orchard, where the

fruit was already reddening under the August sun. Pigeons circled

against the sky with the distinct musical notes struck out by their

wings, or cooed and cooed round the dove cots. The dairy women of

the farm laughed and sang and called out to one another in Flemish

and Wallon rough chaff about their men-folk who were called to the

Colours. There was nothing suggestive here of any coming tragedy.

This was the morning of the 13th of August. For three more days

Vivie lived deliriously, isolated from the world. She took new books

to the shade of the forest, and a rug on which she could repose, and

read there with avidity, read also all the newspapers her mother had

brought over from England, tried to master the events which had so

rapidly and irresistibly plunged Europe into War. Were the Germans

to blame, she asked herself? Of course they were, technically, in

invading Belgium and in forcing this war on France. But were they

not being surrounded by a hostile Alliance? Was not this hostility

on the part of Servia towards Austria stimulated by Russia in order

to forestal the Central Powers by a Russian occupation of

Constantinople? Why should the Russian Empire be allowed to stretch

for nine millions of square miles over half Asia, much of Persia,

and now claim to control the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor? If

England might claim a large section of Persia as her sphere of

influence, and Egypt likewise and a fourth part of Africa, much of

Arabia, and Cyprus in the Mediterranean, why might not Germany and

Austria expect to have their little spheres of influence in the

Balkans, in Asia Minor, in Mesopotamia? We had helped France to

Morocco and Italy to Tripoli; why should we bother about Servia? It

might be unkind, but then were we not unkind towards her father's

country, Ireland? Were we very tender towards national independence

in Egypt, in Persia?

Yet this brutal invasion of France, this unprovoked attack on Liège

were ugly things. France had shown no disposition to egg Servia on

against Austria, and Sir Edward Grey in the last days of June--she

now learnt for the first time, for she had seen no newspapers in

prison, where it is part of the dehumanizing policy of the Home

Office to prevent their entry, or the dissemination of any

information about current events--Sir Edward Grey had clearly shown

Great Britain did not approve of Servian intrigues in Bosnia. Well:

let the best man win. Germany was just as likely to give the Vote to

her women as was Britain. The Germans were first in Music and in

Science. She for her part didn't wish to become a German subject,

but once the War was over she would willingly naturalize herself

Belgian or Swiss.

And the War must soon be over. Europe as a whole could not allow

this devastation of resources. America would intervene. Already the

Germans realized their gigantic blunder in starting the attack.

Their men were said to be--she read--much less brave than people had

expected. The mighty German Armies had been held up for ten days by

a puny Belgian force and the forts of Liège and Namur. There would

presently be an armistice and Germany would have to make peace with

perhaps the cession to France of Metz as a _solatium_, while Germany

was given a little bit more of Africa, and Austria got nothing....

Meantime the Villa Beau-séjour seemed after Holloway Prison a

paradise upon earth. Why quarrel with her fate? Why not drop

politics and take up philosophy? She felt herself capable of writing

a Universal History which would be far truer if more cynical than

any previous attempt to show civilized man the route he had followed

and the martyrdom he had undergone.

On the 17th of August she took the tram into Brussels. It seemed

however as if it would never get there, and when she reached the

Porte de Namur she was too impatient to wait for the connection. She

could not find any gendarme, but at a superior-looking flower-shop

she obtained the address of the British Legation.

She asked at the lodge for Mr. Hawk; but there was only a Belgian

coachman in charge, and he told her the Minister and his staff had

followed the Court to Antwerp. Mr. Hawk had only left that morning.

"What a nuisance," said Vivie to herself. "I might have found out

from him whether there is any truth in the rumours that are flying

about Tervueren."

These rumours were to the effect that the Germans had captured all

the forts of Liège and their brave defender, General Léman; that

they were in Namur and were advancing on Louvain. "I wonder what we

had better do?" pondered Vivie.

In her bewilderment she took the bold step of calling at the Hotel

de Ville, gave her name and nationality, and asked the advice of

the municipal employé who saw her as to what course she and her

mother had better pursue: leave Tervueren and seek a lodging in

Brussels; or retreat as far as Ghent or Bruges or even Holland? The

clerk reassured her. The Germans had certainly occupied the

south-east of Belgium, but dared not push as far to the west and

north as Brussels. They risked otherwise being nipped between the

Belgian army of Antwerp and the British force marching on Mons....

He directed her attention to the last _communiqué_ of the Ministry

of War: "La situation n'a jamais été meilleure. Bruxelles, à l'abri

d'un coup de main, est défendue par vingt mille gardes civiques

armés d'un excellent fusil," etc.

Vivie returned therefore a trifle reassured. At the same time she

and her mother spent some hours in packing up and posting valuable

securities to London, via Ostende, in packing for deposit in the

strong rooms of a Brussels bank Mrs. Warren's jewellery and plate.

The tram service from Tervueren had ceased to run. So they induced a

neighbour to drive them into Brussels in a chaise: a slow and

wearisome journey under a broiling sun. Arrived in Brussels they

found the town in consternation. Placarded on the walls was a notice

signed by the Burgomaster--the celebrated Adolphe Max--informing the

Bruxellois that in spite of the resistances of the Belgian army it

was to be feared the enemy might soon be in occupation of Brussels.

In such an event he adjured the citizens to avoid all panic, to give

no legitimate cause of offence to the Germans, to renounce any idea

of resorting to arms! The Germans on their part were bound

by the laws of war to respect private property, the lives of

non-combatants, the honour of women, and the exercise of religion.