We did not talk. Sir George watched the door to the inner room and sneezed frequently. Part of the time he examined his revolver, which he put on the keg in front of him. He was very clumsy with it; I suppose a Prime Minister has an armour-bearer usually, or something of that sort. Once we heard an automobile far off, and Sir George ran out to the gates and closed them. But the machine went past, and from the voices it seemed to be filled with men. I saw it again later.
While Sir George was outside in the rain I emptied his revolver. It is one thing to have a man arrested for stealing one's jewels, and quite a different one to murder him in cold blood. I had the cartridges in my hand when Sir George opened the door, and in my excitement I threw them into the fire. From that moment until we left I stood behind one of the packing-cases and waited for the hearth to open fire on us. But for some reason the cartridges did not explode. Perhaps they fell too far back in the chimney.
(I. E. This would make a good plot for a detective story. Some time I shall try it. Writing is much easier than I had thought it would be, especially conversation. The villain could put a row of shells on a fire-log, pointing toward the hero's easy-chair. The hero comes home and lights the fire, and then the heroine, whom the villain loves, comes on some agonised errand to the hero's room at night, sits in his chair and is murdered. Of course, the hero is suspected, or perhaps the villain jumps from behind a curtain to save the lady, kneels on the hearthrug and gets a broadside that finishes him. You can see the possibilities.)
Sir George was growing distinctly less agreeable. He made another appeal to the prisoner to give up the necklace and put it out under the door, but the prisoner did not make any reply.
At three o'clock Bagsby came. We hurried out to the little porch and watched him stop the car just beside us, with its nose at the gates. As he was getting out, muttering, to open them, Sir George caught him by the shoulder and held the revolver under his nose.
"Get back into the car," he commanded, "and take this young woman and myself to Newbury. And mind you do it. No nonsense. Do you know the road?"
Bagsby muttered sullenly that he did, and then, just when I was safely in the tonneau and had drawn a long breath, Sir George stopped with his foot on the step and—I think he swore. Then he put the revolver in my hand and pointed it at Bagsby's neck.
"Do you know how to shoot?" he demanded.
"Ye—yes."
"I have forgotten my mackintosh," he explained curtly. "Shoot him if he attempts to start the car." He turned in the doorway to say: "Don't take your finger off the trigger." I might just as well have been pointing the automobile wrench, for there was nothing in the revolver.
Then he went into the cottage, and was gone fully a minute. But the strange thing was that as he went into the house a lightning flash lit up his figure, and he had his mackintosh over his arm! However, he might have meant his goloshes, which is English for overshoes and sounds like mackintosh. (I know at home I always confuse Wabash and Oshkosh.) While he was in the house the second strange thing happened. Bagsby squirmed in his seat in front of me and said in a muffled voice: "Be easy with that trigger, Miss!"
It was not Bagsby at all!It was the prisoner we had locked in the inner room!
"Oh!" I said limply, and the revolver slid out of my lap. He turned cautiously and bent over the back of the driver's seat.
"Everything's all right," he said quickly. "You are perfectly safe; I am going to take you home. Unload that revolver, won't you, before he gets back? Or let me do it."
"It is unloaded," I quavered. "I did it myself. But why——?"
"Sh! Hold out your hand."
I did, slowly, and I felt my necklace drop into it. He caught my fingers and held them.
"Now, will you trust me?" he whispered. We could hear Sir George falling over boxes in the house and talking to himself. "I have been fair withyou, haven't I?"
"I—yes!" I couldn't say less, could I, with the pearls in my hand? "I—I suppose I can trust you. I only want to go home and have a cup of weak tea and go to bed."
"Good girl!" he said. "Of course you can trust me." And leaning over, without any warning, he kissed my palm, while the necklace slid to the floor of the tonneau beside the revolver. It was all most amazing. "Not a word to Sir George, please. He is upset enough as it is. It is my turn to trust you."
"But I don't understand," I was beginning, when Sir George came to the door of the cottage. At that moment one of the cartridges in the fire exploded, and without looking back he leaped off the porch and into the car. I had only time to pick up the revolver and to point its harmless barrel at the chauffeur's back. I have no doubt that to this minute Sir George thinks that a desperate attempt was made that night on his life. For reasons that I am coming to, I never explained. I am very vague about the next thirty minutes. We passed a man, I recall, some distance down the lane, a man who turned and yelled at us through the storm, and I rather thought that it was Bagsby. I couldn't be quite certain. And after we had gone perhaps a mile we met the automobile we had heard earlier coming back through the mud. We made a détour which almost ditched us, and passed them without slackening speed.
The pace was terrific. Sir George and I rattled about in the tonneau, now jammed together at one side and now at another. I was much too busy trying to stay in the car to have time to wonder what it all meant. But I found out soon enough.
The other car had turned and was following us! It was coming very fast, too; and they had taken off the muffler, which made it even more alarming. When Sir George saw that we were being pursued he became frantic. After threatening the supposed Bagsby he began to offer bribes. For, of course, one could understand that the position was an ignominious one for any Prime Minister, and that his dignity would be sure to suffer if we were overtaken and the story came out. How many times at home I have sat in a theatre and seen cinematograph pictures of people in a motor being followed at top speed, with perhaps an angry father shaking his fist from the pursuing car. But never had I expected to be playing castanets with the Premier of Great Britain in the tonneau of a machine driven by a highwayman, and flying from unknown pursuers who were chasing us for Heaven knows what reason. Even at the time I remember thinking what a cinematograph picture we would make.
Up to this point the story has been mild enough. Now it becomes tragic. For at the place where the car should have kept straight on to go to Newbury it turned suddenly, putting me in Sir George's lap for a moment, and jounced along over mud and ruts, through a narrow lane. Sir George threw me off ungallantly and yelled. Then he leaned over and held the revolver against the driver's neck.
"What do you mean?" he almost shrieked. "Where are you going, sir? This is not the road to Newbury!" But the car kept on. Sir George was frantic. He demanded that the car be stopped, so he could get out and hide in the hedge. He snapped the trigger, regardless of the fact that had it been loaded we would have gone crashing into eternity and a tree at forty miles an hour.
Then he commanded our chauffeur to turn around and ram the pursuing car to destruction, although he put it differently. And then, finding he made no impression on the hooded and goggled figure in the driver's seat, he stood up frantically and poised the revolver to brain the man at the wheel.
He was quite mad. It was not courage on my part that made me leap and catch his arm. It was sheer self-preservation. The revolver hurtled into the road. (I cannot find the dictionary, but I'm sure "hurtled" is correct, and certainly it is forceful.) The revolver hurtled into the road, and Sir George collapsed, with me on top of him. Afterwards, of course, I had chills, because, being the Prime Minister, no doubt he could have me put in the Tower or beheaded, or something dreadful. And would it be "lèse-majesté" to knock over the King's representative?
By this time we were well up the lane, and the other car shot past along the highroad. But our pace did not moderate, and after a little the other car found its mistake and came back. We could hear it a quarter of a mile or so behind us. And at that precise instant we began to slow up: the engine struggled for a few yards, began to pant, gave two or three exhausted gasps, and then turned over on its side and died. The next moment we were all three in the road and running like mad up a hill.
If one knowswhereone is going, and whom one is with, and who is behind one shouting "Stop thief!" it is not so bad. But to have a man you don't know take you by the arm and drag you along through briers and mud toward Heaven knows where, with half a dozen other men just below climbing faster than you can run, and it is raining, and you haven't an idea what it is all about—well, it is not pleasant. And I had lost a heel off one slipper and was three inches shorter on one side than on the other.
Sir George was for refusing the hill and for dodging among the trees, but our deliverer (?) held him tight. Once, in a frenzy of alarm, he did break loose, but he was promptly captured and brought back, with apologies, but firmness. It was easy to see why. He would have caught his death of cold if he had wandered over those hills all night in the rain, and what would have become of England? (I am very glad there are no Prime Ministers in America, and most of the Presidents that I recall would be as easy to run away with as a bull hippopotamus.)
And then we found ourselves at a side entry of what seemed to be a colossal house. The door was partly open and a man in livery was asleep on a bench just inside the door.
The hold on my arm was released. The Prime Minister, assisted by The Unknown, went up the steps and in through the door.
I struggled up alone, with my lungs suddenly collapsed and yells from somewhere behind me in the darkness. I could hardly lift my feet, and yet I knew I must get up the steps and through that open door before somebody reached out from the black behind me and clutched me. It was a nightmare come to life. And then the footman caught my outstretched hand and dragged me in, the door slammed, and I sat down very quietly on the hall bench and fainted away.
(One of the people in this story insists that I wasnotleft to drag myself up the steps alone, and that he took me up and put me on the bench. But he was excited, and I should know what really happened. He never even glanced at me.)
I am sure, gentle reader—you can see what facility I am gaining; I would not have dared the "gentle reader" in Chapter I—I am sure you will think me stupid not to have understood the situation by that time. But I did not. When I came to myself the footman was standing by, very stiffly, with a glass of wine on a tray, and it was easy to see that he knew I had lost my heel and that one of my lace sleeves was gone. When I unclenched my hand and found the necklace still there, and then dropped it on the tray while I drank the wine, his jaw fell. But where he had said, "Will you have some wine, Miss?" before, now he said, "Shall I call 'Awkins, my lady?"
"Don't call any one," I said wearily. "Or—I wish you would find the—the person who just came in with Sir George." And as he turned to go, looking very puzzled, "Where am I?" I asked.
This really should have been said when I first roused.
"At Wimberley Towers, my lady," the man answered, but he looked at me again curiously.
There was loud talking going on down the hall, and, as I sat, I could make out scraps of it. A man's voice, vaguely familiar, in an even monotone, followed by a shrill, excited one, also masculine.
"Berthold said there was a woman in the car, and that was what threw us off, sir. He's always seeing women."
A cold, high English voice came next and then another, but without the incisiveness of the earlier night—Sir George's voice, heavy and lifeless, yet with an undercurrent of scorn.
"Surely you do not thinkthatnecessary," he said.
The door was closed again, but a word reached me now and then, occasional raisins in the loaf of my darkness. (This is a better metaphor than I expected it to be, because I was loafing and the hall was dark!) There was talk about Three-Mile Lane, and somebody being accosted at a station, and a jingle of something that sounded like money, followed by the heavy tramping of men along a distant corridor and the closing of a door. Then a machine started somewhere outside with half a dozen shot-like reports followed by the soft hum of the engine. I had a queer feeling of being deserted in a strange place, and it came over me suddenly that I had heard there was a Lady Lethbridge at Wimberley, only they mostly called her Snooksie—English people use the queerest diminutives—and what if she came and asked me what I was doing and how I got there? Or perhaps Sir George would wire to town and bring down a lot of people to take me off to the Tower. The more I thought of it, the surer I felt that this was what was coming. I hoped they would let me change my gown, anyhow—white satin and what was left of bits of lace sleeves would look so queer being carried off to prison. And to think how I had dreamed of that gown, and how, because it was my first really dignified evening gown—all the rest being tulle and dancing frocks—how I had thought I would wear it just once and perhaps meet somebody who liked it terribly and me in it. And then I would lay it away, and some time later—much later—I would bring it out, a little yellow, and say, "Do you remember it?" And he would say, "Remember it? As long as I live." And I would say, "I thought of having baby's christening cloak made of it on account of the sentiment." And then he would hold out his arms and say, "Please don't!"
I had not heard any one come along the hall, because I was sniffling; so, when something touched me on the shoulder I looked up, and therehewas, just as I had been—well, there he was. And he sat down on the bench beside me, in a puddle, and helped me find my handkerchief.
"I didn't mean to leave you," he said gently, "but there was something that had to be attended to and couldn't wait. Can you walk as far as the library? There is a fire there and I will get you something dry. We can't go upstairs, because I suppose you don't care to let Blanche in on this?"
"Blanche?" I said, trying to balance on my one heel.
"My brother's wife," he explained. "Luckily, she's a little deaf, and Thad has gone up to see she doesn't snoop. What in the world is the matter? Just now you were quite tall and stately, and now you are hardly to my shoulder!"
So I told him about my heel, and he said he liked little women, and that no person who was just five feet two inches and had really curly hair was ever a Militant at heart, and that he had always thought young American girls were well heeled. It was an astonishing joke for an Englishman, until it developed that he had been living in California for a dozen years and was only home on a visit. And that his name was John, although he was mostly called Jack. When we were nicely settled by the library fire and the man had brought me a cup of tea that would have floated an egg, I asked him quite casually if there was a Mrs. John. He drew his chair up just opposite me and leaned forward with his chin in his hands.
"Not yet," he said.
Something made me draw my breath in sharply—I think it was his tone—and I quite scalded my throat with the tea. The fire was very hot, and little clouds of steam began to rise from my white satin.
"I have spoiled my gown," I said ruefully, "and I had such plans for it."
"What kind of plans?" he asked, moving his chair forward a little. "Do tell me. I'm always making plans myself. And pretty soon, when you are dry and the motor is ready, I shall have to take you back to Ivry, and when we meet again—if we ever do, for Daphne is going to kill me on sight—you will be very, very formal and have both your heels."
"I hope you will forgive me," I said stiffly, "for calling you a—a thief and locking you up and—everything. I don't understand anything yet; it must be because I am so sleepy."
"Poor little girl!" he said. "What you have gone through! And as for forgiving you, you saved my life to-night. Why, if you thought me a thief, did you unload that revolver? If you tell me that I will try to clear up the rest of the mysteries."
"I was afraid he might become excited and shoot you," I returned simply. And he bent over and took my hand.
"I hoped that was it," he said, just as simply. He did not relinquish my hand.
(When I told Daphne the story I merely said of this: "I dried myself by the library fire.")
But suddenly I saw something that fairly made my blood chill in my veins. On the floor, at his very feet, the firelight dancing on their polished metal, lay a pair of handcuffs.
"Oh!" I cried and jumped to my feet, pointing. "You haven't been telling me the truth. They have given you a few minutes, and then they are coming back to take you away. Oh, don't let them to do it. I couldn't stand it!"
Yes, that is what I said. It was utterly shameless, of course, and no properly-behaved young woman would ever have said it. But no properly-behaved young woman would have kidnapped a Prime Minister, anyhow, and sat in a strange house while her hostess was asleep, drinking tea at four o'clock in the morning.
When I stood uphestood up, too, and looked down at me. "It is worth while having been a brute and a villain," he said soberly, "to hear that. I am not under arrest or going to be. The fact is that two entirely different and—if you will forgive me—nefarious schemes have been under way at the same time, and the lines crossed. You and I got tangled in them and nearly submerged. But that was not accident; it was destiny." He took my other hand.
At that absorbing moment the footman announced cautiously that the motor was at the door. It was horribly disappointing. From destiny to motor wraps is such a descent.
"Do we have to go right away?" I said.
It was just dawn when we started, one of the grey dawns that have a suggestion of pink, like a smoke-coloured chiffon over a rose foundation. The rain was over, and down in the valley below us lay shadowy white lakes of mist. I threw back my head and took a great breath.
"How beautiful!" I said. And he repeated, "Beautiful!" But he looked directly at me. I had a queer, thrilly feeling in the back of my neck.
And then we were flying down the hillside we had climbed so painfully the night before, and were dipping into the mist pools. Here and there grey shadows moved under the trees and resolved themselves first into rocks and then into sheep. (My descriptions are improving.) And as we went along he told me the story.
It seems he had come back from America for a visit, and on the second day of his stay the Wimberley Romney had been stolen by an expert picture thief posing as a tourist. He had caught a glimpse of the visitor, so when the Romney was missed he started out at once on the search, taking a motor cycle. The whole countryside was roused, and three detectives came down from London. But he had an idea that he would find his man somewhere on the moor, and he had lost himself there. After a night under a rock he had found a cottage and got his bearings. But the rain kept him there. He had got as far as Harcourt Hall when another storm came up. To his surprise he found the place almost in decay, but the house open. He went in, dropped asleep in the morning-room on a divan, wakened by hearing me pass within a foot of where he lay, and followed me. When I threw my necklace at him, at first he was puzzled and amused. Later, he kept it deliberately.
The next part of his story he had secured, I think he said, by sitting on Bagsby's chest down the road, after he had escaped by means of a broken shutter from the rear room where we had locked him. Bagsby had had a puncture, and finding he had no time to go back to Ivry for Daphne and the rest, he went directly to the station. A train had just pulled out, and a man in an ulster and travelling-cap was standing on the platform. He said, "The car for Gresham Place, sir"—which is what he was to say—and the gentleman climbed in. But about two miles out of town he (the passenger) had discovered he had made a mistake, and demanded to be set down. But Bagsby had his orders. He carried him to the door of the Hall on the third speed, and the rest we knew.
"Then," I cried breathlessly, "Sir George wasnot—Sir George!"
"Far from it," he said cheerfully. "Poor old chap, what a front he put up! It seems that after he got the picture the alarm was raised too soon for him. He cut back over the country to make the railroad at Hepburn, and was overtaken by a storm. He found the Hall, crawled in through a rear window, concealed the picture there—it is still rolled in that carpet in the room where we hid, and waited for the storm to cease. But hunger drove him out. The picture off his hands, he made a break for it, got to Newbury just in time to miss the train, saw the constable and a posse approaching in a machine and bristling with guns, and at that minute Bagsby said: 'Gresham Place, sir.' From that time on he was virtually our prisoner, poor chap. He fell in with the plot because he didn't know what else to do. But what a shock it must have been when Bagsby dumped him back at the Hall, after he had walked six miles to get away from it."
"But you?" I exclaimed in bewilderment. "If you knew all the time——"
"I didn't. I did not recognise him until he took off his mackintosh at the lodge. After that I had two problems: to capture him without alarming you, and to prevent the old-woman constable of the country from discovering us and dragging you and Daphne and all the rest into notoriety. Thanks to your coöperation it will never be known that a Suffragette plot to kidnap the Prime Minister was foiled last night."
"Then—the real Prime Minister"—I could hardly speak. I was horribly disappointed. I had hitched my wagon to a star and it had turned out to be a dirt-grubbing little meteorite.
"His grandchildren at Gresham Place took measles and they telegraphed him not to come."
There was silence for a moment. We were both thinking. Then:
"I am sure you managed it all very nicely," I conceded, "and I am very grateful now that you saved my necklace and—and all that. But if you think you capturedhimwithout alarming me you are mistaken. I shall never, never be the same person again. And as for the reward, I don't want it. I shall give it to Daphne for The Cause."
He looked around at me quickly. "To take my place," I amended. "I don't really care anything about voting, and, anyhow, I should never do it properly. They will welcome the money in my place, although doesn't it really belong to you?"
"I have already three rewards," he said, looking straight ahead. "The revolver which you emptied for fear our friend might shoot me, the limp little ball that is your handkerchief in my breast pocket, and this hour that belongs to me—the dawn, the empty world, and you sharing it all with me. Do you know," he went on, "that Daphne has seventeen pictures of you, and that I used to say I was going to marry you? There was one in very short skirts and long, white——"
"Mercy!" I broke in. "What is that over there?"
The mist had parted like a curtain, and on a lower road we saw, moving slowly, a strange procession. We stopped the machine and watched. Daphne was leading. She had the tail of her pink velvet gown thrown up over her shoulders andshe was in her stocking feet. She carried her slippers dejectedly in her hand and she was ploughing along without ever troubling to seek a path. Behind her trailed the others. Most of them limped: all were mud-stained and dishevelled. An early sun-ray touched Violet and showed her wrapped, toga-fashion, in the hall banner. The red letters of "Votes for Women" ran around her diagonally like the stripes of a barber-pole. Poppy was trailing listlessly at the end of the procession, her gown abandoned to its fate and sweeping two yards behind her; a ribbon fillet with a blue satin rose that had nestled above her ear had become dislodged and the rose now hung dispiritedly at the back of her neck. Her short hair was all out of curl and lay matted in very straight little strands over her head.
And bringing up the tail of the procession—kicking viciously at Poppy's blue satin train in front of him—came Bagsby, a sheepish Bagsby loaded down with the hamper, a pail, a broom and a double-burner lamp with green shades. Even as he watched he took a hasty look ahead at the plodding back of his mistress, raised the lamp aloft and flung it against a stone. The crash was colossal, but not one head was turned to see the cause. They struggled along, sunk in deep bitterness and gloom.
And so they passed across our perspective, unseeing, unheeding, and the mists of the valley claimed them again.
The man beside me turned to me, his hands on the wheel. "Are you sorry you are not with them?" he asked gently. But I cowered back in my wraps and shook my head. "Take me home," I implored, "and please don't look at me again. If they all look like that I must be unspeakable!"
"We will get there ahead and wait for them together," he said. "And to-night I shall bring Thad and Blanche over to meet you. You—you won't mind seeing me again so soon?"
"Oh, no," I said hastily. "It—it is hours until evening."
"It will seem like eternities," he reflected.
"Yes, it will," I said.
(For it would to me, and if a man likes you and you like him, why not let him know it? And if he liked me the way I looked then, what would he think when he saw me clothed properly and in my right mind?)
He leaned over and kissed my hands as they lay in my lap. "Bless you!" he said. "I suppose you couldn't possibly wear that gown? Will you have to throw it away?"
"No," I announced, "I am going to lay it away. I—I may use it some time."
"How?" He was as curious as a child. "Are you going to make a banner of it, with gold fringe all round and 'Votes for Women' embroidered on it?"
"No!" I said decisively.
It was on a Thursday evening that Basil Ward came to Poppy's house at Lancaster Gate. We had been very glum at dinner, with Poppy staring through me with her fork half raised, and dabs of powder around her eyes so I wouldn't know she had been crying. Vivian's place was laid, but of course he was not there. And after dinner we went up to the drawing room, and Poppy worked at the kitchen clock.
We heard Basil coming up the stairs, and Poppy went quite pale. The alarm on the clock went off just then, too, and for a minute we both thought we'd been blown up.
Basil stood in the doorway—he's very good-looking, Basil, especially when he is excited. And he was excited now. Poppy rose and stared at him. It was very dramatic.
"Well?" she said.
"I'm deucedly sorry, Poppy," said Basil. "He absolutely refuses. He says he'll stay. Says he likes it. It's extremely quiet. He wants his pens and some paper sent over—has an idea for the new book."
Poppy's color came back in two spots in her cheeks.
"So he likes it!" she observed. "Very well. Then that's settled." She turned to me. "You've heard Basil, Madge, and you've heard me. That's all there is to it."
Poppy is very excitable, and as long as she had the clock in her hand Basil stayed near the door. Now, however, she put it down, and Basil came in.
"You and Vivian are a pair of young geese," he said to Poppy. "It's a horrible place."
"Vivian likes it."
"You are going to let him stay?"
"I didn't make the law. You men make these laws. Now try living up to them. When women have the vote——"
But Basil headed her off. He dropped his voice.
"That isn't the worst, Mrs. Viv," he said slowly. "He's—gone on a hunger strike!"
I'd been in England for six months visiting Daphne Delaney, who is my cousin. But visiting Daphne had been hard work. She is so earnest. One started out to go shopping with her, and ended up on a counter in Harrod's demanding of a mob of women hunting bargains in one-and-six kids (gloves) why they were sheep.
"Sheep!" she would say, eyeing them scornfully. "Silly sheep who do nothing but bleat—with but one occupation, or reason for living, to cover your backs!"
Then two or three stately gentlemen in frock-coats would pull her down, and I would try to pretend I was not with her.
Now I believe in Suffrage. I own a house back home in America. Father gave it to me so I could dress myself out of the rent. (But between plumbers and taxes and a baby with a hammer, which ruined the paint, I never get much. Mother has to help.) The first thing I knew, the men voted to pave the street in front of the old thing, and I had to give up a rose-coloured charmeuse and pass over a check. But that isn't all. The minute the street was paved, some more men came along and raised my taxes because the street was improved! So I paid two hundred dollars to have my taxes raised! Just wait!
That made me strong for Suffrage. And of course there are a lot of other things. But I'm not militant. You know as well as I do that it's coming. The American men are just doing what father does at Christmas time. For about a month beforehand he talks about hard times, and not seeing his way clear and all that. And on Christmas morning he comes down stairs awfully glum, with one hand behind him. He looks perfectly miserable, but he's really having the time of his life. We always play up. We kiss him and tell him never to mind; maybe he can do it next year. And we're always awfully surprised when he brings his hand around with checks for everybody, bigger than they'd expected.
(That's the way with Suffrage in America. The men are holding off, and having a good time doing it. But they'll hand it over pretty soon, with bells on. The American man always gives his womenkind what they want, if they want it hard enough. Only he's holding off a little, so they'll appreciate it when they get it.)
It was after the affair of the Prime Minister that I left Daphne. We kidnapped him, you remember, only it turned out to be someone else, and Violet Harcourt-Standish got in awfully wrong and had to go to the Riviera. I really did not wish to kidnap him, but the thing came up at tea at Daphne's one day, and one hates to stay out of things.
Poppy was going on a motor trip just then, and when she asked me to go along, I agreed. I was spending a Sunday with her.
"I'm not running away, Madge," she explained. "But I'm stony broke, and that's the truth. I'll have to get back to work."
"You can't work in the motor."
Poppy paints, and makes a lot of money—mural decorations, you know, panels for public buildings, and all that sort of thing.
"I want sea, sea with mist over it, and rocks. And a cave——"
"Caves are damp. There are plenty of hotels."
"A cave," she said, examining her cigarette dreamily, "with the sea coming in against a setting sun, and the spray every color in the world. I think it's Tintagel, Madge."
Poppy is terribly pretty, and this is her story, not mine.
"That's a sweet frock," I said. "Did you hear that man to-day, when you were speaking at the Monument? He said, 'Bless its pretty 'eart——'"
Poppy's hair is the softest, straightest hair you ever saw, and her nose is short and childish. Her eyes are soft, too, and her profile is so helpless that the bobbies help her across the streets. But her full face is full of character.
"Was he in front of me?" she demanded.
"At the side."
We both understood. It was her profile again. She fell back in her chair and sighed.
"If you could address the House of Lords in profile," I said, "you'd get the vote."
"That's rot, you know," she retorted. But she coloured. She knew and she knew I knew that her new photographs were profile ones. And we both knew, too, that they were taken because Vivian Harcourt had demanded a picture.
"You're not doing the right thing, Poppy," I accused her. "For one day in the week that Viv sees you, there are six days for him to look at that picture."
"He isn't obliged to look at it at all."
"So long as women beg the question like that," I said severely, "just so long do they postpone serious consideration for the Cause."
She leaned back and laughed—rather rudely. The English can be very rude sometimes. They call it frankness.
"The ridiculous thing about you is that you don't know anything about the Cause," she said. "With you, it's a fad. It's the only thing you can't have, so you want it, little Madge. With some of us it's—well, I can't talk about it."
It made me furious. The idea of dedicating your life to a thing, and then being accused——
"I think enough of the Cause to stand out all day in a broiling sun," I snapped, "and be burnt to a cinder. Didn't I pass out your wretched literature for hours and make six shillings?"
"Don't call it wretched literature," she said gently. "But—now think a minute. If it came to a showdown—your own expression, isn't it—a question between one of these men who are so mad about you, Basil or any of the others—and the Cause, which would it be?"
"Both," I replied promptly.
She laughed again.
"You delightful little hypocrite!" she cried. "A Compromise, then! Not victory, but a truce! Oh, martyr to the Cause!"
"And you?"
"The Cause," she said, and turned, fullface to me.
Well, of course that was Poppy's affair. I believe in living up to one's conviction, and all that. But when you think of the lengths to which she carried her conviction, and the horrible situation that developed, it seems an exceedingly selfish theory of life. I believe in diplomatic compromise.
(I wrote the whole conversation that night to father, and he cabled a reply. He generally cables, being very busy. He said, "Life is a series of compromises. Who is Basil?")
Well, we got started at last. Poppy left in a raging temper over something or other—a bill before the house, I think. I was so busy getting packed that I forgot what it was, if I ever knew—and hardly spoke for twenty miles. But at Guildford she recovered her temper. It was the time of the Assizes, and the Sheriff was lunching at our hotel. His gilt coach was at the door, with a footman in wig and plush, white stockings and buckles, and a most magnificent coachman. Poppy's eyes narrowed. She pointed to the footman's ornamented legs.
"The great babies!" she said. "How a man loves to dress! Government, is it? Eighteenth century costumes and mediæval laws! Government—in gold lace and a cocked hat! Law in its majesty, Madge, with common sense and common justice in rags.Thatcan vote, while you and I——" she stopped for breath.
The footman's calves twitched, but he looked straight ahead.
I got her into the building somehow or other. She looked quite calm, except that she was breathing hard. I confess that I thought she was ashamed of herself; I reminded her that she had promised to be quiet on this trip, and I told her, as firmly as I could, that it wasn't proper to make fun of a man's legs.
She powdered her nose and looked penitent and distractingly pretty.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's this parade of authority that gets on my nerves, and this glittering show of half the people ruling all the people."
When she came back from ordering the luncheon she was smiling. I thought it was all over. (I am telling this incident, not because it belongs to the story, but because it sheds a light on Poppy's character, and perhaps explains what came later.)
"Luncheon!" she said, cheerfully, "with strawberries as big as a teacup, and clotted cream."
I think my mind was on the clotted cream, for I followed her past one dining-room to a second, a long, low room, full of men. She pushed me in ahead.
"I—I think it's the wrong room, Poppy," I said. "There's the——"
Itwasthe wrong room, and she knew it. The Sheriff was at the centre table and near him was a great serving stand, with hot and cold roasts and joints.
I tried to back out, but at that moment Poppy slammed the door and locked it.
"Don't yell!" she said to me under her breath, anddropped something ice-cold down my back. The key!
About half the men started to their feet. Poppy raised a hand.
"Gentlemen," she said, "you need not rise! I have a few things I would like to say while you finish luncheon. I shall be entirely orderly. The question of the Suffrage——"
They dodged as if she had been loaded with shrapnel instead of a speech. They shouted and clamored. They ordered us out. And all the time the door was locked and the key was down my back.
"Poppy!" I said, clutching her arm. "Poppy, for the love of heaven——"
She had forgotten me absolutely. When she finally turned her eyes on me, she never even saw me.
"The door is locked, gentlemen," she said. "Locked and the key hidden. If you will give me five minutes——"
But they would not listen. The Sheriff sat still and ate his luncheon. Time might come and time might go, tides flow and ebb, old eras give way to new—but the British lion must be fed. But once I caught his eye, and I almost thought it twinkled. Perish the thought! The old order wink at the new!
They demanded the key. The lunch hour was over. The Assizes waited. In vain Poppy plead for five minutes to talk.
"After that, I'll turn over the key," she promised.
The only way she could have turned over the key was, of course, to take me into a corner, stand me on my head and jounce it out! I was very nervous, I'll confess. No one had laid a hand on Poppy as yet. She was so young and good looking, and the minute anybody loomed very close, she turned her baby profile to him and he looked as if he'd been caught gunning for butterflies.
Finally, however, the noise becoming a tumult, and Poppy and I forced back against the door; the Lord High Sheriff—which sounds like Gilbert & Sullivan—approached. The crowd made respectful way for him.
"Now, young ladies," he said, "this has been an agreeable break in our long day. But—all pleasant things must end. Open the door, please."
"Will you give me five minutes?" Poppy demanded. "I'm a tax-payer. I help to pay the people in this room. I have a right to be heard."
"Open the door," said the Sheriff.
"No."
"Then give up the key, and one of my men——"
I caught his arm. I couldn't stand it another minute. It is all well enough for Poppy to say it was cowardly, and that the situation was ours until I gave it away. The key was not downherback.
"Break the lock," I said frantically. "The—the key is where I can't get it."
He was really twinkling now, but the crowd around was outraged for him and his dignity.
"You didn't swallow it, did you?" he asked in an undertone.
"It's down the back of my frock," I replied.
Poppy said afterwards that I cried and made a scene and disgraced her generally. It is not true. If tears came, they were tears of rage. It is not true that I cried on the Sheriff's breast. I only leaned my head against his arm for a minute, and he was not angry, for he patted my shoulder. I am terribly fond of Poppy, but she is not always reasonable, as you will see.
There had been a great deal of noise. I remember hearing echoes of the dining-room excitement from the hallway beyond the door, and some one pounding. They were breaking the lock from the outside. All the time Poppy was talking in her lovely soft voice. She said:
"Since woman is called on to obey the laws, she ought to have a voice in making them——"
"Hear, hear!" cried somebody.
"Since she doesn't make them, why should she obey them?" demanded Poppy, lifting violet eyes to the crowd.
"I didn't make the Ten Commandments," said a voice from the rear of the room, "but I'll get hell just the same if I break them. What have you got to say about that?"
Poppy was stumped for once. I believe it was the most humiliating moment of her public life.
Luckily the lock broke just then, and we were hustled out of the room. There was a crowd in the hall, and it was most disagreeable. I expected to be arrested, of course—although I'd been arrested before, and if one is sensible and eats, it is not so bad—but the crowd, feeling it had the best of things with the Ten Commandments, was in high good humor. They let us by without a word and the Sheriff himself stood on the steps while we got into our car.
Just as Poppy's chauffeur got the engine started, the landlord ran out and demanded the key. Poppy told the chauffeur to go on, in a frantic voice, but he hesitated. All the majesty of British law was there on the steps, and the gold coach was waiting. Of course, to be arrested for disturbing the peace with a suffrage speech is one thing, but theft is another. I threw a pleading glance at the Sheriff, and he came slowly down the steps. Men with wands kept the crowd back. The fat coachman with the wig did not turn his head, but the footman at the coach door leered and avenged his calves. Even Poppy went a little pale.
"Quick," said the Sheriff, ferociously, in a low tone, "give me something that looks like a key, and then get away as quickly as you can."
I opened my pocketbook. The only thing that was even the size of a key was my smelling salts bottle. So I gave him that, and he covered it with his big hand. Then, still frowning savagely, he made us a lordly gesture to move on.
(Have you ever been in the Forum Club building that Poppy decorated? The staircase walls are wonderful—crowds of women, poor and old, young and rich with clouds around them and so on, all ascending toward a saintly person with a key—Saint Peter, or somebody. Well, the saint is the Sheriff at Guildford, and the key is a salts bottle, if you look closely.)
We slept at Bournemouth that night. Or rather, we didn't sleep. Poppy sat up half the night trying to think of an answer to the ten commandment thing. She said she'd get that again—she felt it—and what was she to say? I had recovered the key and my good humor by that time, but I could not help much. Seeing her so disturbed, I had not the heart to tell her what I suspected. But I was sure that I had seen Vivian Harcourt on the edge of the crowd at Guildford. It would have made her furious to think that she was under any sort of espionage. But Vivian was following us, I felt confident, with enough money to bail us out if she did anything reckless. He knew her, you see.
That is why all the rest of it seems so silly. Vivian knew Poppy; he knew her convictions, and her courage. For him to do the baby thing later was stupid. And anyhow, if it was hard on him, what was it for me?
Poppy slept late in the morning, and I got up and went down to the pier, a melancholy place, wet with morning mist and almost deserted. There were rows of beach chairs, and bathing machines and overturned boats littering the beach, and not a soul in sight but a few fishermen. I sat there and thought of Newport on a bright July morning, with children and nurses on the sand, and throngs of people, and white sailboats and nice young men in flannels——I was awfully homesick for a minute. And it came over me, too, that I had no particular business helping the Cause in England, and having keys put down my back, and giving up my gold-topped salts bottle, which was a present from Basil Ward, when all the time the Cause at home was fighting just as grimly and much more politely.
Vivian was on the pier, at the very end. He was sitting looking out, with his finger hooked around his cigarette (which is Cambridge fashion, I believe, or may be the King does it) and looking very glum.
"Where is she? In jail?" he demanded.
"She's asleep, poor thing," I said.
He snorted.
"Lots of sleep I've had," he said. "Look here, Madge, is she going to take her vacation by locking up Sheriffs all along the route? Because if she is, I'm going back to London."
"I think it very likely," I replied, coldly. "You'd better go back anyhow; she'll be murderous if she knows she's followed."
He groaned.
"I can't leave her alone, can I?"
"I'm along."
He laughed. It was rude of him.
"You!" he said. "Madge, tell me honestly—wherewas the key?"
"She put it down my back."
He fairly howled with joy. I hated him. But he calmed before long, and offered me a cigarette as a peace offering. I declined.
"You'd better go along," he said. "She may need the—back again. Madge, is there any chance for me with her?"
"Well, she likes you, when you are not in the way."
"I'd be in the way now, I suppose, if I turned up to-night at—where do you stop?"
"At Torquay. Look here, Vivian, I've just thought of something. She's put out about a thing a man said yesterday. She wants an answer. She's got arguments, but what she wants is a retort—about six words and smart. If you could give her one, she'd probably forgive you hanging around, and all that."
So I told him about the ten commandments and Poppy knowing she'd get it again and sitting up to worry it out. He said it was easy. He'd have something to break his appearance at Torquay. But it wasn't as easy as it seemed at first. I left him sitting there, looking out to sea, with a notebook on his knee. He called after me that he'd follow us, a few miles behind, but he wouldn't turn up until he had thought of something worth while.
According to Basil, it was he who finally thought of something. It seems that Vivian wrote out pages of a reply, saying that if the questioner compared man-made law with the ten commandments, then he made Parliament and the House of Lords divine, and that this was areductio ad absurdum, which is Greek or something for ridiculous. But he almost went mad trying to make it short, and it wasn't funny at all. Whereas, as he knew very well, the only chance the speaker had, in such a case, was to get a laugh. What he really needed was a retort, not a reply.
We made rather slow progress. In the first place, Poppy learned that thechauffeur, who was a new one and quite intelligent, was not in favour of suffrage, and for hours we crawled along, while she argued with him. And in the second place, we stopped frequently to nail up posters along the roadside. Vivian said later that he trailed us quite easily, and that there were times when he was only one curve in the road behind. He used to get out and putter over the engine to pass the time and let us get ahead. He did not appear at Torquay, so I knew he wasn't getting along well with the ten commandments.
But except being put out of a hotel at Exeter for discovering a member of Parliament there, in bed with the gout, and flinging some handbills in through the transom, the rest of the trip was very peaceful. Dartmoor put Poppy into a trance; the heather was in bloom, and she made sketches and colour bits, and lay back in the car in a sort of dream, planning the next winter's work.
She was irritable when she was disturbed, too. The creative instinct is a queer thing. Once Bootles, the chauffeur, asked her a question when she was trying to catch some combination or other, and she answered him sharply.
"When the women go to vote, Miss," he said, turning around and touching his cap, "who is going to mind the children?"
"We intend to establish a messenger service," said Poppy, with a crayon in her mouth.
"Amessengerservice?" Bootles' eyes stuck out.
"Yes. To summon the fathers home from the pubs to hold the babies."
(A "pub" of course is an English saloon.)
The T. C. matter was still bothering Poppy at intervals. She knew as well as anyone that she needed a laugh in her retort, and as you have seen, Poppy is too earnest to be funny. I said this to Basil Ward the night we got to Tintagel.
Poppy was tired, and went to bed early. I walked out on the terrace, and Basil was there. He said Viv had sent for him on the T. C. matter, and he had something in view.
"He gave it up, poor chap," he said. "He isn't humorous, you know. As a matter of fact, he and Poppy are both so bally serious that it makes me wonder how they'll hit it off."
"If she's as earnest about matrimony as she is about Suffrage," I said, "she'll be a sincere wife."
Basil said nothing. We had walked out to the edge of the cliff, and were leaning against the rough stone parapet.
"It's rather nice, isn't it," he said suddenly. "Here we are, almost at Land's End, and the old Atlantic—Madge, will you give me a perfectly honest answer to a question?"
I braced myself.
"Yes."
"Did you stay over here in England because your whole heart is in the Cause?"
"Ye—es."
"Yourwholeheart?"
"Our motives are always mixed, Basil," I said kindly. "It would have been awfully silly to have endured that miserable spring and not have stayed for June and July."
"You get a great many cablegrams from America."
"That," I said, with dignity, "is of course my own affair."
"About the Cause?"
"Not—always."
"From a man, of course."
"Yes," I said sweetly, and went back to the hotel.
I broke the news to Poppy about Vivian and she stormed. But suddenly she stopped, with a calculating gleam in her eye.
"He's a fool to follow me," she said, "but he has gleams of intelligence, Madge. I shall put the T. C. matter up to him!"
So I sent Viv a note that night. You see one must manage Poppy.
"Dear Viv: She knows and the worst is over. Breakfast early and keep out of the way until noon. She is going to work, and anyhow, it will make her curious. If you have a good retort to the T. C. business, don't give it at once. It would humiliate her. Then, when you've given it to her, if she's pleased, you can ask herthe other. She's silly about you, Viv, but she won't acknowledge it to herself."Madge."P. S. Don't make any stipulation about Suffrage, but make her promise to let you do and think as you like.Be sure.Get her to write it, if you can. I happen to know that if she marries you, she hopes you'll take alternate Sundays with her at the Monument, so she can speak at Camberwell."M."
"Dear Viv: She knows and the worst is over. Breakfast early and keep out of the way until noon. She is going to work, and anyhow, it will make her curious. If you have a good retort to the T. C. business, don't give it at once. It would humiliate her. Then, when you've given it to her, if she's pleased, you can ask herthe other. She's silly about you, Viv, but she won't acknowledge it to herself.
"Madge.
"P. S. Don't make any stipulation about Suffrage, but make her promise to let you do and think as you like.Be sure.Get her to write it, if you can. I happen to know that if she marries you, she hopes you'll take alternate Sundays with her at the Monument, so she can speak at Camberwell.
"M."
Poppy came down to breakfast in her best morning frock, looking lovely, and sat with her profile to the room. I thought she watched the door, too, and she took only an egg, although she usually has a kipper also.
But neither of the men showed up. She loitered over theTimes, but at last she got her sketching things, and we went out to the cliff head, where there's a bench. It is a long tongue of rock, about twenty feet wide or so, and far below, on each side, the ocean. There was a rough-haired pony out there also, and the three of us were crowded. The pony wanted sugar or something, and kept getting in the way. Poppy sketched, but her heart wasn't in it and at every new halloo from some tourist exploring King Arthur's ruins (The Castle, of course) she looked up expectantly.
At last I caught sight of Basil waving to me from the hotel, and I went back. I left Poppy there alone, pretending to sketch, although it was perfectly clear to every one that the only view she had was of the pony's mangy side. Shortly after, I saw Vivian, in walking tweeds, going along one of the sheep's paths toward her, and looking very handsome and determined.
Basil and I sat on the terrace and "concentrated." It was my idea.
"Will her to take him," I said.
"I am," said Basil, looking at me.
"She's so pretty," said I.
"Lovely!" said Basil.
"And it's such anaturalthing," I went on. "He has a lot of character, and he's gentle as well as firm."
"I thank you," said Basil, and bowed.
"I don't believe," I said severely, "that you are concentrating."
The pony had got around behind the bench, and we lost them for a moment. But the little beast moved off just then, and it was like lifting a curtain. Poppy's head was on Vivian's shoulder.
"Good old Viv!" said Basil. "Happy chap!" and sighed.
I met Vivian as I went down to luncheon. He was coming up three stairs at a time, but he stopped and drew me into a corner.
"All fixed," he said. "You're a trump, Madge. The T. C. did it. She's promised all sorts of things."
"And you?" I demanded. I thought he evaded my eye.
"I?" he said. "Well, I've agreed not to interfere with her career. That's only reasonable."
"And—Suffrage?"
"She's going to be less militant," he said. "Of course, her conviction is the same. I want her to stand by her principle. I wouldn't respect her if she didn't."
It didn't quite satisfy me. I knew Poppy. But he was so happy that I said nothing. After all, what could I say? Viv after all had never opposed Suffrage, except in its militant form—although I don't believe he had felt the necessity for it. But the trouble was that Poppy was a born militant, a born aggressor. And he had promised her the strength of her convictions!
(I wrote it all to father that afternoon and his cablegram came when I was back in London again and settled.
"No great revolution ever accomplished without bloodshed.")
When Poppy and Vivian had been married and gone to Brittany, I went back to Daphne's. Daphne was very discouraging about them. I remember her standing by the fire and orating, with her tea cup in her hand.
"There's a loss somewhere—bound to be," she said. Daphne is short and stout, and wears her hair short and curled over her head with an iron. "Either Suffrage loses her, or she loses a husband. I've watched it. It doesn't do, Maggie," which is her pet name for me. "A Suffragist as valuable as Poppy should not marry. You remember what Jane Willoughby's husband said to her, that he expected The Cause for his wife to be himself, and that if she'd rather raise votes for women than a family of children she would have to choose at once. When she asked him why she couldn't do both, he went to Africa!"
"Without giving her an answer?"
"Bless the child, there isn't any answer! It isn't wisdom that takes refuge in silence. It's silly, besotted, dumbheaded idiocy."
"Viv isn't an imbecile," I said feebly.
"He's a male," she snapped, and ran her fingers up through her fringe, so that she appeared to stand in a gale of wind.
The first blow fell about a week after. Poppy and Vivian came home from their wedding trip. They were settled in Viv's house in Lancaster Gate, and one part of the wings was being turned into a studio for Poppy, with a glass roof. Vivian is the playwright, you know, and his study was to be beneath her work shop, with a private staircase connecting. She was most awfully happy. She'd brought home some stunning sketches, and her first work was going to be his study walls.
Basil and I were asked to dinner. Poppy wanted to talk over her plans with us, and there was no one else. Poppy was radiant. We drank to the pony at Tintagel, and to the key at Guildford, and to the new play and the new paintings. The thing was a great success until half way through the dinner, when suddenly Poppy said:
"By the way, Viv, the income tax man was here to-day."
I felt, for some reason, as I had felt when the key went down my back.
Viv smiled, and went to his doom.
"Just imagine, Basil," he said. "The sweet young person across the table made more than I did last year! Four thousand pounds!"
"I'm too commercially successful to think I have any real genius," said Poppy, complacently.
"And some small sum the same sweet young person will have to pay over to the tax man," Basil observed.
Poppy raised her violet eyes.
"I don't intend to pay it," she said.
Vivian put down his glass.
"That's what Madge would call a 'bluff,'" he said, with his eyes on her. "You'll be obliged to pay it, dearest. You know that."
"'Taxation without representation' is what it amounts to." Poppy's face was dangerously agreeable. "The American colonies seceded, didn't they, for something like that? I paid it last year, but I made up my mind then I'd never do it again."
Basil was looking very uncomfortable.
"I gave you the privilege of your convictions," said Viv, stiffly. "Of course, if that's your intention, there is nothing more to be said."
Poppy looked puzzled.
"But itiswrong, isn't it?" she demanded. "Surely that's the a.b.c. of the reason for the discontent of Englishwomen."
"The principle may not be entirely equitable. Few laws work equally well for all." Vivian now, a little white about the lips. "But, such as it is, it's the law of your country."
"I didn't choose my country, or make it's laws," Poppy said coldly. "I have a right to protest; I'll not pay it."
Now, as I have said before, motives are seldom unmixed. I think what Poppy meant to do was simply to register a protest, refuse to pay, make a lot of fuss about it. If they sent her to jail, being the prominent person she was—she was the Honourable Poppy, I think I forgot to say that before—it would make a lot of feeling. She did not mind jail very much. She'd been there twice. Then, having asserted her principles, she could get sick or go on a hunger strike, and Vivian would pay the tax and get her out.
Basil laughed with assumed cheerfulness.
"Then Viv is stuck for the tax," he said.
Vivian looked across the table and met Poppy's eyes.
"That's hardly what you are getting at, is it?" he asked. "Your protest is against the imposition of the tax, isn't it? It's a matter of principle, isn't it? My paying it wouldn't help."
"I have not asked you to pay it."
"As a matter of fact, I haven't the slightest intention of paying it, Poppy. You put me in an absurd position, that's all."
We had finished dinner, and the men went up to the drawing room with us. A funny thought struck Basil on the way up. He chuckled.
"Of course, Viv," he said, "if Poppy sticks to that, you'll have to do something. There's the Husband's Liability Act. You're liable, you know."
Basil is a barrister.
Well, we talked of other things and pretended not to notice Vivian's strained eyes and Poppy's high color. She took me off after a time to see the new studio, and it did not take me long to tell her what I thought.
"It's absurd," I said. "Do you expect to break down iron bars by banging a head against them?"
"It's my head," she said sulkily.
"Not at all. It's Vivian's. They will jail him."
"I didn't make the law."
"Like the man with the Ten Commandments at Guildford!" I retorted. "He didn't make them, but you know where he said he'd go if he broke them. By the way, Poppy, I've always meant to ask you, did you ever get a retort ready in case the T. C. came up again?"
But the men came in just then, and I did not learn. It was rather a ghastly evening. We were all most polite and formal and Basil took me home. I told him about my house at home in the United States, and the way I'd been treated, and having nothing at the end of a year but plumber's bills and tax receipts.
"I'm glad you haven't any particular income," he said at last. "That's one element of discord removed."
"I don't understand."
"Yes, you do," he said calmly. "You know exactly what I mean, and what I hope and what I feel. I don't dare to say it, because if I start I'll—Madge, I shallnotpropose to you until my Uncle Egbert dies. I don't want you until I can support you comfortably—that's a lie. I want you damnably, all the time."
I do not remember that we said anything more until we reached Daphne's. Then, as he helped me out, I said:
"How old is Uncle Egbert?"
"Eighty-six," he replied grimly, and went away without shaking hands.
Well, to go back to Poppy, for of course it is her story I am telling, not mine. Mother came over soon after that and I went with her to Mentone for two months. Then she went back to America from Genoa, and I went back to London. Mother is the sweetest person in the world, and I adore her, but she represents the old-fashioned woman, and of course I stand for the advanced. For instance, she was much more interested in Basil Ward than in the Cause, and she absolutely disapproved of Poppy's stand about the income tax.
"I don't care to discuss the Cause," she said to me. "We have trouble enough now with only the men voting. Why should we double our anxieties?"
"That's silly, mother," I retorted. "Because one baby is a trouble and naughty sometimes, should one have only one child?"
Basil met me at Charing Cross, and I knew there was something up by the very way his stick hung to his arm.
"How's everything?" I asked, when he had called a cab and settled me in it. "How nice and sooty it is, after the Riviera!"
"Filthy hole!" said Basil grumpily. "Haven't had a decent day since you left."
(This was remarkable, because the papers had all said the weather in London was wonderful for that time of year.)
"And Poppy?"
"Poppy's a fool," Basil broke out. "I'm glad you're back, Madge. Maybe you can do something with her."
But he refused to tell me anything further. He asked if I would mind going directly to Lancaster Gate, and sat back in a corner eyeing me most of the way.
"You make me nervous," I said at last. "If you can't look at me pleasantly, why look at all?"
"I can't help looking at you, and I'm blessed if I can look pleasant. Madge, just how much is your heart and soul in the—er—Cause?"
Well, I was pretty tired of being questioned all the time. I said:
"There isn't any sacrifice I wouldn't make for it."
"If you were married——"
"I wouldn't marry a man who didn't think as I do."
He seemed to drop back further into his corner.
The whole thing puzzled me. For Basil said nothing, but looked dejected andbeaten, somehow. And yet he had always believed that women should vote.
We found Poppy in her studio, but Viv's workroom below was empty and the door into the passage stood open. His desk was orderly and his pens in a row. It looked queer. Poppy was painting, standing before a huge canvas and looking very smeary; she gave me a cheek to kiss, and she was thin! Positively thin!
"You're looking very fit, Maggie," she said, without a smile. "We've missed her, haven't we, Basil?"
Basil grunted something. Suddenly it occurred to me that he and Poppy hardly glanced at one another, and that he was still holding his hat and gloves. Their constraint, and Viv not around and everything—I was very uncomfortable. Of course, if Basil cared for Poppy and I used to think he did, and if Vivian had found it out—
"No, thanks, Poppy," said Basil, "I'll—I'll drop in again."
"Crumpets for tea!" said Poppy. They'd engaged the cook for her crumpets.
"Thanks awfully," Basil muttered and having said something about seeing me again very soon, he got out. I stared after him. Could this be Basil the arrogant? Basil the abject? This brooding individual who did nothing but stare at me as if he were trying to work something out!
Poppy came over to me, with her fists in the pockets of her painting apron, and looked down at me.
"Frightened, like all the rest!" she said. "They say I'm responsible for hundreds of broken engagements! They made the law themselves, and now, when they see it in operation, they squeal."
It came over me then; Poppy's strained eyes, and her painting without a cigarette, and Basil looking so queer.
"Then Viv——"
"Viv is in jail, my dear," she said. "Men made the law, of course, but I wish you'd hear them! The Husband's Liability Act, child. A married woman's husband is responsible for her debts. I refused to pay my income tax as taxation without representation. Viv got stubborn, and saidhewouldn't. Result, the entire male population screaming for help, engaged men breaking with Suffragist fiancées, the population prospects of the country poor, and—Viv in jail!"
I could hardly speak for a minute.
"That—that's what is wrong with Basil?"
"Of course I'm sorry, Maggie. You see, you have an income of your own and at any moment, by refusing to pay the tax on it, you can send Basil to jail."
"If he were any sort of a husband," I said furiously, "he could pay the tax and save all the trouble."
"Not at all. The men have banded together. They call it the Husband's Defence! They take turns at visiting Viv, and sending him books and things. It's—it's maddening."
Poppy asked me to stay with her. She was really in a bad way. She wasn't eating or sleeping, and that very night a crowd of men gathered in front of the house, and hissed and called her things. One of them made a speech. We listened from behind the curtains. He said his wife was holding out her taxes on him and he expected to "go up" the next day. Poppy went out on the balcony and tried to tell them why she had done it, and that it was a matter of principle, and all that. But they would not listen, and only jeered. She came back into the drawing room quite beaten, and covered her face with her hands.
It was the next evening that Basil told us that Vivian, feeling as he did that he represented the married men of the Kingdom and that he stood for principle also, had gone on a hunger strike!
After all, it was Daphne who came to the rescue. She came over to luncheon the day after and found Poppy in bed with cold cloths on her head, and her wedding ring off. Daphne sniffed.
"You and Viv are two children," she said. "You're a silly for thinking you can beat the government at its own game, which is taxation, and Viv's a fool for letting you be one."
Poppy is not placid of disposition, and she flung the cold cloths at Daphne and ordered her out. But Daphne only wrung out the cloths and hung them up, and raised the shades.
"You haven't got a headache; you have a pain in your disposition," she said. "Put this on again."