Harry Johnston

“ Rossiter—as many a public man does and has to do—shoves his vain regrets, remorse, anxiety, weary longing for the unattainable—somewhere to the back of his brain, where these feelings will not revive till he lies awake at three in the morning; and prepares to entertain half-a-dozen hearty men and buxom women who are easily impressed by a little spoon-fed science. Linda is soon distracted from the scrap of paper in her bosom and gives all her attention to her cousins and grown-up school friends from Bradford and Northallerton who are delighted to see the New Year in amid the gaieties of London. ”

“ Deceiving Man while his vile laws and restrictions remain in force is no crime. Be prudent, so far as compromising our poor little firm here is concerned, because if you bring down my grey hairs with sorrow to the grave we shall lose a valuable source of income. Besides: any public scandal just now in which I was mixed up might kill my mother. Want any money?"
Vivie: "You generous darling! Never, never shall I forget your kindness and your trust in me. You have at any rate saved one soul alive." (Honoria deprecates gratitude.) ”

“ Vivie, never having consciously been abroad before (though she was later to learn she had actually been born in Brussels) , began to experience all the delights of travel in a foreign land. She woke up the next morning to the country pleasures of Villa Beau-séjour, a preposterous chateau-villa it might be, but attached to a charming Flemish farm; with cows and pigs, geese and ducks, plump poultry and white pigeons, with clumps of poplars and copses of hawthorns and wild cherry trees which joined the little domain on to the splendid forest of Tervueren. ”

“ At present the only people who knew of her prank and guessed or knew her purpose were Honoria and Bertie Adams. Honoria! what a noble woman, what a true friend. Somehow, now she was David, she saw Honoria in a different light. Poor Norie! She too had her wistful leanings, her sorrows and disappointments. What a good thing it would be if her mother decided to die—of course she would, could, never say any such thing to Norie—to die and set free Honoria to marry Major Petworth Armstrong! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Michael! why are we tortured like this? Why mayn't we love where we please? Is this discipline necessary to the improvement of the race? I only know that if we sinned against these human laws and conventions, your great career in Science—and again, why in Science? Lightness in love does not seem to affect the career of orchestral conductors, actors, singers, play-wrights and house painters—why weren't you one of these, and not a High Priest of the only real religion? ”

“ At night she could walk about the town, go to the theatre, stroll along the Embankment and attract no man's offensive attentions. She could enter where she liked for a meal, a cup of tea, frequent the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons when she would without waiting for a "ladies" day; stop to look at a street fight, cause no sour looks if she entered a smoking compartment on the train, mingle with the man-world unquestioned, unhindered, unnoticed, exciting at most a pleasant off-hand camaraderie due to her youth and good looks. ”

“ Vivie: "Crime? What nonsense! I should consider I was justified in a Court of Equity if I burnt down or blew up the Law Courts or one of the Inns or broke the windows of the Chartered Institute of Actuaries or the Incorporated Law Society. All these institutions and many others bar the way to honourable and lucrative careers for educated women, and a male parliament gives us no redress, and a male press laughs at us for our feeble attempts to claim common rights with men. ”

“ How different from the drab horizons that encircled poor Vivie Warren less than a year ago! Poor Vivie, whom even FitzJohn's Avenue at Hampstead had rejected, who had long since been dropped—no doubt on account of rumours concerning her mother—by the few acquaintances she had made at Cambridge, who had parents living in South Kensington, Bayswater, and Bloomsbury. Here was Portland Place receiving her in her guise as David Williams with open arms. Men and women looked at her kindly, interestedly, and she could look back at them without that protective frown. ”

“ She was no "anti-man," like Vivie. She liked men, if truth were told, a tiny wee bit more than women. But she wished in the moods that followed her brother's death in 1894 to be a mother by adoption, a refuge for the fallen, the bewildered, the unstrung. She helped young men back into the path of respectability and wage-earning as well as young women. ”

“ No doubt in 1950 most women will talk as she does to-day, but the advance is too abrupt. It not only robs her parents of all happiness, but it upsets my mother. She now wrings her hands over her own past and fears that by working so strenuously for the emancipation of women she has assisted to breach the dam—Can't you imagine the way the old cats of both sexes go on at her?—the dam which held up female virtue, and that Society now will be drowned in a flood of Free Love... ”

“ He had travelled much in his pursuit of metallurgy and chemistry; at forty he saw rising before him the prospect of a peerage, due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense wealth. What is the good of a peerage if it ends with your life? He was not without his vanities, though one of the most cynical men of his cynical period.
He arrived therefore at the decision that he would marry some young and buxom creature of decent birth and fit in appearance to be a peeress, and decided on Arbella Rossiter. ”

“ British wounded now began to cease coming into Brussels, so Vivie was free to attend to her own affairs.
Enormous quantities of German plunder were streaming out of Belgium by train, by motor, in military lorries, in carts and waggons. Nearly all this belonged to the officers, and the already-rebellious soldiers broke out in protestations. "Why should they who had done all the fighting have none of the loot?" So they won over the Belgian engine-drivers—delighted to see this quarrel between the hyenas—and held up the trains in the suburban stations north of Brussels. ”

“ Vivie: "Oh, they ache rather, but it is such joy to have such friends as you and Praddy and Michael Rossiter, that I don't mind what I go through..."
Frank: "But I say, Viv, about this Rossiter man. He seems awfully gone on you...?"
Vivie (flushing in the firelight) : "Does he? It's only friendship. I really don't see them often but he came to my assistance once at a critical time. And now that Praddy's all-powerful parlour-maid's definitely left us, I will tell you my story." ”

“ There were, indeed, times when the peace and comfort and beauty of Pontystrad got hold of him and he asked himself: "Why not settle down here for the rest of his life, put aside other ambitions, attempt no more than this initial fraud, leave the hateful world wherein women had only three chances to men's seven." Then there would arise once more fierce ambition, the resolve to avenge Vivien Warren for her handicaps, the desire to keep tryst with Honoria and to enjoy more of Rossiter's society. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I might introduce you to Mark Stansfield the Q.C. Do you know any one in London, by the bye?"
"Oh yes," said David, smiling with all but one tear dried on a still coloured cheek. "I know Honoria Fraser—I know Mr. Praed the architect—"
"The A.R.A.? Of course; you or your father said you had been his pupil. H'm. Praed. Yes, I visualize him. Rather a dilettante—whimsical—I didn't like what I heard of him at one time. However it's no affair of mine. And Honoria Fraser! She's simply one of the best women I know. ”

“ If, then, there is any lien between the mouldering fragments of our bodies and the inexplicable personality which has been generated in the living brain, the former office boy of Fraser and Warren will know that he is always present in the memory of Vivien Rossiter, that she has placed the few physical fragments still representing him in such a setting as would have delighted his honest, simple nature in his lifetime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Vivie went. Out of hearing, Gräfin von Stachelberg—who, however, to facilitate intercourse, begged Vivie to call her "Minna,"—"We may all be dead, my dear, before long of blood-poisoning, bombs from your aeroplanes, a rising against us in the Marolles quarter—" said very plainly what she thought of Edith Cavell's execution. "It makes me think of Talleyrand—was it not?—who said 'It is a blunder; worse than a crime' ... these terrible old generals, they know nothing of the world outside Germany." ”

“ Warren it was going for her to be the last hour of fully conscious life—fully conscious and yet a curious mingling in it of the past and present. She had sat here in the middle of the 'seventies with Vivie's father, the young Irish seminarist, her lover for six months. He had a vague interest in botany, and during his convalescence after his typhoid fever, when she was still his nurse, not yet his mistress, she used to bring him here to rest and to enjoy the aspect of these ferns and palms. What a strange variety of men she had known. ”

“ Should she go on with the bold adventure? A thousand times yes! David should break no law in Vivie's code of honour, do real wrong to no one; but Vivie should see the life best worth living in London from a man's standpoint.
David however must be armed at every point and have his course clearly marked out before his contemplation. He must steep himself in the geography of South Africa—Why not get Rossiter to propose him as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society? That would be a lark because they wouldn't admit women as members: they had refused Honoria Fraser. ”

“ 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 think that after spending the first five months of 1919 in London, getting No. 1 Park Crescent tidy again and fully repaired (because Michael wished to pursue more thoroughly than ever his biological researches) , Vivie and Michael went off to spend their real honeymoon in the Occupied Territory of the Rhineland, in that never-to-be forgotten June, memorable for its splendid sunshine and the beauty of its flowers and foliage. I think they did this expressly (under the guise of a visit to General Armstrong) , so that Vivie and Minna von Stachelberg—now Minna Schultz—might foregather at Bonn. ”

“ How I hate men; how I despise them! We can do anything they can if we train and educate. I have taken to your business because it is one of the crafty paths we can follow to creep into Man's fastnesses of the Law, the Stock-Market, the Banks and Actuarial work..."
Norie: "My dear! You have quite a platform manner already. I predict you will soon be addressing audiences of rebellious women.... But I am more the Booker Washington of my sex. I want women to work—even at quite humble things—before they insist on equal rights with man. ”

“ 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. ”