Mrs. Warren's Daughter — Chapter XIV, Militancy, Part 3

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