CHAPTER X

THE ZEAL THAT OUTRUNS DISCRETION

"Selina! The time has arrived to impart The covert design of my passionate heart. No vulgar solicitudes torture my breast, No common ambition deprives me of rest.... My soul is absorbed in a scheme as sublime As ever was carved on the tablets of time. To-morrow, at latest, through London shall ring The echo and crash of a notable thing. I start from my fetters, I scorn to be dumb, Selina! the Hour and the Woman are come... Hither to the rescue, ladies! Let not fear your spirits vex. On the plan by me that made is Hangs the future of your sex... Shall she then be left to mourn her Isolation and her shame? Come in troops round Hyde Park Corner, Every true Belgravian dame."

SIR GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN: "The Modern Ecclesiazusæ."

I ought to have known better than to go round to Cadogan Square next morning. Bereaved families, like swarming bees, are best left alone; and I knew beforehand that I could render no assistance. At the same time, I felt it would be unfriendly to treat Sylvia's disappearance as part of the trivial round and common task, especially after my overnight conversation with Philip. And if I could bring back any news to the Seraph, I knew I should be more than compensated for my journey.

Save for its master and mistress, I found the house deserted. Philip had organised himself into one search party, Robin into another: Nigel Rawnsley appeared to be successfully usurping authority at Scotland Yard, and from Sloane Street and Chiswick respectively Gartside and Culling paced slowly to a central place of meeting. Every shopkeeper, loafer, postman, and hawker along the route was subjected to searching inquisition: the car, its passenger, and black-bearded driver were described and re-described. My two detective friends from Henley, as I afterwards found out, passed a cheerful day at headquarters, drinking down unsweetened reprimands and striving to explain the difficulties of protecting a young woman who refused to be shadowed.

I admired the way Arthur Roden took punishment. When armchair critics scoff at a generation of opportunist politicians, I think of him--and of Rawnsley, who suffered first and longest. Their public pronouncements never wavered; the Suffrage must be opposed and defeated on its own merits or demerits, and no attacks on property, no menaces to person could shake them from what they regarded as a national duty. Even if I chose to think old Rawnsley's mechanical, cold-blooded inhumanity extended to the members of his own family, it would be impossible to charge Jefferson with indifference to his only child, or Roden with want of affection towards his only daughter. I know of no girl who exacted as much admiring devotion from the members of her own family as Sylvia: or one who repaid the exaction so generously.

Their wives were even more uncompromising than the Ministers. I have no doubt the New Militants thought to strike at the fathers through the mothers, and the reasoning seemed tolerably sound. I admit I expected at first to find Mrs. Rawnsley and Mrs. Jefferson calling for quarter before their husbands, and if the New Militants miscalculated, I miscalculated with them. I had not expected their policy of abduction to arouse much active sympathy, but the bitter, uncompromising resentment it evoked far surpassed my anticipations. Had the perpetrators been discovered, I believe they would have been lynched in the street; and without going to such lengths, I feel confident that the mothers themselves would have sacrificed their own children rather than yield a single inch to women who had so outraged every maternal instinct. Had their own feelings inclined to surrender, Rawnsley, Jefferson, and Roden would have surrendered only over their wives' bodies.

"We shall go on exactly as before," Arthur told me when I asked his plans. "The enemy has varied its usual form of communication; this is what I have received."

He threw me a typed sheet of paper.

"We shall be glad to know _within the next ten days_ (expiring Saturday) when the Government will guarantee the introduction of a bill to give women the parliamentary vote on the same terms as it is enjoyed by men."

"How are you answering this?" I asked.

"My campaign in the Midlands is all arranged," was the reply, "and will go forward in due course."

"And Sylvia?"

"Anything that can be done will be done. I am offering two thousand pounds reward...."

"Are you making the whole thing public?"

"It's more than half public already. We tried to keep it secret, as you know. To avoid giving them a free advertisement. However, they've advertised themselves by broad hints in the _New Militant_; the gutter-press has taken it up until half England knows and the other half suspects. Rawnsley's seeing the _Times_, and you'll have the whole story in to-morrow's papers. I shall confirm it at Birmingham next week." He paused, and drummed with his fingers on the library table. "I can't answer for the men, but there's not a mother in the length and breadth of the land who won't be on our side when the story comes out."

The ultimate collapse of the whole New Militant campaign has proved his sagacity as a prophet.

"You've got no traces yet of Mavis Rawnsley and the Jefferson boy?" I asked.

"So far the police are completely baffled. They're clever, these women, very clever."

"No clue?"

"Nothing you could take into court. We're not even sure where to look for the perpetrators."

"You've no suspicions?" I ventured to ask.

"Oh, suspicions, certainly." He looked at me shrewdly and with a spice of disfavour. "Candidly, I suspect your friend Miss Davenant."

"Why her in particular?" I asked carelessly.

"By a process of exclusion. The old constitutional agitators, the Blacks and the Campions and that lot, are out of the question; they've publicly denounced the slightest breach of the law. I acquit the Old Militants, too--the Gregorys and Haseldines and Ganons. They're too stupid, for one thing; they go on burning houses and breaking windows in their old fatuous way. And for another thing they haven't the nerve...."

"There are a good many Hunger-Strikers among them," I interposed, probably with the dishonest intention of spreading his suspicions over the widest possible area.

"Less than before," he answered. "And their arch-Hunger-Striker, the Haseldine woman, carried meat lozenges with her the last time she visited Holloway. No, they're cowards. If you want brain and courage you must look to a little group of women who detached themselves from the Old Militant party. Mrs. Millington was one and Miss Davenant was another."

"The eminently moderate staff of the ultra-constitutional _New Militant_," I said as I prepared to leave.

"If you've any influence with either of those women and want to save them a long stretch of penal servitude, now's your time to warn them."

"Good Heavens! you don't suppose I'm admitted to their counsels!"

"You could advise them as a friend."

"When you tell me there's not enough suspicion to carry into court? I fear they wouldn't listen."

"They might prefer to stop play before their luck turns," he answered as he accompanied me to the door. "Their quiescent state is the most significant, most suspicious, most damning thing about them. If a house-breaker opened a religious bookshop, you might think he had reformed. Or you might think he was preparing an extra large coup. Or you might think he sold sermons by day and cracked cribs by night."

"What cynics you public men are!" I exclaimed as I ran down the steps and turned in the direction of Chester Square.

I have said that "Providence" is not one of my star _rôles_, and I had every reason to know that my eloquence was unavailing when set to the task of converting Joyce from her militant campaign. However, I have seen stones worn away by constant dripping.... And in any case I had not been near the house for nearly two days.

"I'm afraid you can't see Joyce," Elsie told me as we shook hands. "She wouldn't go to bed when the doctor told her, and now she's really rather bad."

I was more upset by the news than I care to say, but Elsie hastened to assure me.

"It's nothing much so far," she said. "But she's got a temperature and can't sleep, and worries a good deal."

"Can't we get her away?" I exclaimed impatiently.

Elsie shook her head.

"I've tried, but she simply won't leave town."

"But what's to keep her?"

"There's the paper every week."

It always annoys me to find any one thinking the world will come to an end unless run on his or her own favourite lines.

"If she died, some one else would have to edit it," I pointed out. "Who's doing it now?"

"Mrs. Millington. I'm afraid it's no use telling people that till they _are_ dead."

"And then it's a little late in the day," I answered irritably.

Elsie proceeded to give me the real reason for Joyce's obstinacy.

"When you're dead you don't have to take responsibility for your deputy's mistakes."

"That's it, is it? Mrs. Millington setting the Thames on fire?"

"Her zeal sometimes outruns her discretion," said Elsie with a smile. "That's what's chiefly worrying Joyce."

I picked up my hat and stick and moved towards the door.

"And Joyce is losing her nerve?" I hazarded.

"She's not up to her usual form," was all Elsie would answer.

"Give her my love," I said at the door, "and best wishes for a quick recovery. If she isn't well in two days' time, I shall carry her off by main force and put her into a nursing home."

Then I went off to lunch at the Club, and found fault with the food, the wine, the cigars and all creation. Paddy Culling opened a subscription list to buy me a box of liver pills. The Seraph--after I had been two minutes at Adelphi Terrace--said he was sorry Joyce was no better.... I thanked him for his sympathy, and sat down to read the current copy of the _New Militant_.

In my careless, hot-blooded youth I made a collection of inanimate journalistic curiosities. It was my sole offence against the wise rule that to collect anything--from wives up to postage stamps--is a mark of incipient mental decay. There was the _Punch_, with the cartoon showing the relief of Khartoum; and I remember I had a copy of the suppressed issue of the _Times_, when the compositors usurped control of Empire and edited one of Harcourt's Budget speeches on lines of their own. There was also a pink _Pall Mall Gazette_, bought wet from the machine at a shilling the copy, when paper ran out and they borrowed the pink reserve rolls of the _Globe_. I had a copy of another journal that described in moving language the massacre of the Peking Legations. The Legations were, in fact, never massacred, but they should have been on any theory of probability, and, for aught I know, the enterprising journalist may have believed with Wilde that Nature tends to copy Art.

I also had several illustrated weeklies depicting--by the pen of Our Special Artist--that first Coronation Ceremony of Edward the Seventh, and the verbal account of it given by "A Peeress" who had been present. More lately I acquired the original American paper which sent the _Titanic_ to her grave with the band playing "Nearer, my God, to Thee."...

I am half sorry the collection is dispersed. I should have liked to add the one historic number of the _New Militant_ that appeared under Mrs. Millington's fire-and-brimstone editorship. To the collector it is curious, as being the last issue of the paper; by the mental pathologist it is regarded as an interesting example of what is by common consent called "Militant Hysteria." The general public will remember it as the documentary evidence which at last enabled the police to secure a warrant of arrest against the "proprietors, printers and publishers of the newspaper called and known as the _New Militant_," to raid the printing office in Clerkenwell, and lay bare the private memoranda of the New Militant organisation.

My own copy did not survive my departure from England, and I could not do Mrs. Millington the injustice of trying to reproduce her deathless periods. I remember there was a great deal of "Where is Miss Rawnsley? Where is Master Jefferson? Where is Miss Roden?" Such questions implicated no one, and only annoyed inconsequential persons like myself, who detest being set conundrums of which I do not know the answer by some one who obviously does. The practice is futile and vexatious.

The incriminating words came heavy-typed in the last paragraph of the leading article, and contained an unmistakable threat that the policy of abduction would continue until female suffrage had been secured.

After dinner that night I strolled round to the Club to hear what people were saying.

"They've done for themselves this time," Gartside told me with much assurance when I ran across him in the hall. "Don't ask me where I got it from, and don't let it go any further, but there's a warrant out against some one."

I was conscious of a very uncomfortable sensation of hollowness.

"Is it indiscreet to ask who?"

"I can't tell you, because I don't know. I fancy you proceed against the whole lot, printers included."

"They've not wasted much time," I said.

It was Tuesday night. The _New Militant_ went to press at midday and was on sale next morning throughout the country. In London, of course, it could be obtained overnight, and I had secured an early copy by calling at the office itself.

I stood in the middle of the hall wondering exactly what I could do to prevent the arm of the law stretching out and folding Chester Square in its embrace. I was still wondering when Paddy Culling bounded up the steps and seized Gartside and myself by either hand.

"It's yourself should have been there," he panted, momentarily releasing my arm in order to mop a red, dripping forehead. His broken collar and caved-in hat suggested a fight: his brogue reminded me that the offer of a golden throne in heaven will not avail to keep an Irishman out of a brawl. "Down Clerkenwell way ut was, the War of the Woild Women. The polis...."

He was settling down to a narrative of epic proportions. The Irish are this world's finest raconteurs as they are its finest fighters, riders and gentlemen. It was an insult, but I could not wait.

"Have they raided the place, Paddy?" I asked.

"They have." His eyes reproached me for my interruption. "The polis...."

"Did they get any one?"

"Am I telling ye or am I not? Answer me that."

"I know, Paddy," I said with all the contrition at my command. "But I've got to go, and I just wanted the main outline...."

"They got Mrs. Millington," he began again, "and she fighting the way ye'd say she'd passed her born days being evicted. There was one had the finger bitten off him and another scratched in the face till the gutters ran blood. Five strong men held her down and stamped out the life of her, and five more dragged her down the road by the hair of her head and droppit her like a swung cat over the railings of the common mortuary. The vultures...."

"Did they get any one else?" I interrupted.

"It's the fine tale ye're spoiling," he complained.

"But just tell me that," I pleaded.

"They did not," he answered with ill-concealed disgust. "Unless ye'd be calling a printer's devil one of God's fine men and women. But the polis...."

I hurried down the steps and jumped into a taxi. I thought first of calling to warn them at Chester Square. Then I decided to communicate by telephone. If Joyce had not already been arrested, and if I was to be of any assistance later on, I could not afford to be discovered in the incriminating neighbourhood of her house.

I gave the Seraph the heads of my story as I looked up the number and waited for my call.

"You're through," the Exchange told me after an interminable delay.

"Hallo, hallo!" I kept calling, for what seemed like half an hour. "Will you give another ring, please, Exchange?"

A further age dragged its course, and I was told that there did not seem to be any one at the other end.

"Now will you tell me what we're to do, Seraph?" I exclaimed.

We sat and stared at each other for the best part of five minutes. Then the decision was taken out of our hands. I saw him prick up his ears to catch a sound too faint for my grosser senses.

"Some one coming upstairs," he whispered. "It's a woman, and she's coming slowly. Now she's stopped. Now she's coming on again."

I rose from my chair and tiptoed across the room.

"Can it be Joyce?" I asked, sinking my own voice to a whisper.

"She's going on to the next floor," he answered with a shake of the head; and then with sudden excitement, "Now she's coming back."

"She mustn't ring the bell," I cried, running out into the hall.

"It's all right, there's nobody here but ourselves," he called out as I opened the door and ran out onto the landing.

Ten feet in front of me, leaning back against the banisters, stood Joyce Davenant. One hand covered her eyes and the other was pressed to her heart. She was trembling with fever and panting with the exertion of climbing four flights of stairs. A long fur coat stretched down to bare feet thrust into slippers, her head was covered by a shawl, though the hair fell loosely inside her coat. At the neck I could see the frilled collar of a nightdress.

"Joyce!" I exclaimed.

She uncovered her face and showed eyes preternaturally bright, and white cheeks lit by a single spot of brilliant colour.

"I said I'd come when there was a warrant out," she panted with game, gallant attempt at a smile. Then I caught her in my arms as she fell forward, and carried her as gently as I could inside the flat.

I left it to the Seraph to take off her coat and lay her in his own bed. He did it as tenderly as any woman. Then we went to the far side of the room and held a whispered consultation. I am afraid I could suggest nothing of value, and the credit of our arrangement lies wholly at his door.

"We must get a nurse," he began. "Elsie mustn't be seen coming near the place or the game's up. What about that woman who helped you bring Connie Matheson home from Malta this spring? Can you trust her? Have you got her address? Well, you must see if you can get her to-night. No, not yet. We want a doctor. Her own man? No! It would give us away at once. Look out Maybury-Reynardson's address in the telephone book, somewhere in Cavendish Square. He's a sportsman; he'll do it if you say it's for me. You must go and see him in person; we don't want the Exchange-girls listening. Anything more? I'll square my man and his wife when they come in. Oh, tell your nurse the condition this poor child's come in; say it's a bachelor establishment and we haven't got a stitch of anything, and can't send to Chester Square for it. Tell her to bring...."

He paused to listen as heavy feet ascended the stairs. The noise was loud enough even for me this time. There was a ring at the door.

"Wine cellar. Locked. Haven't got key," he whispered turning out the light and locking himself inside the room with Joyce.

I opened the front door and found myself faced with the two Roden detectives I had corrupted with bottled beer at Henley.

"Why, this is like old times!" I said. "Have you been able to find any trace of Miss Roden?"

They had not, and I see now that my question was singularly tactless. They bore no resentment, however, and told me they had called on other business. There was a warrant out against Miss Davenant. She was not to be found at the Clerkenwell printing office, and while Chester Square was being searched, a woman had slipped out of the house by a side door, entered a car and driven away.

"Could you follow her?" I asked, with all the Englishman's love of the chase.

That, it appeared, had been difficult, as the number of the car seemed to have been wilfully obscured.

"That's an offence, isn't it?" I asked.

It was, and the driver--if traced--would find himself in trouble. They had followed a likely-looking car and seen it turn southward out of the Strand. When they reached Adelphi Terrace, however, there was only one car in sight, drawn up outside our door and presenting a creditably clear number-plate. Its driver had vaguely seen another car, but had not particularly noticed it. They called on chance, as this was the only suite with lights in it. Had I seen or heard anything of the car or a woman getting out of it?

"I've only just come in myself," I told them. "Half an hour, to be exact. That was possibly my taxi you saw outside. I didn't notice the number. How long ago did you see your suspected car turn into Adelphi Terrace? Ten minutes? Oh, then I should have seen any one who came up here, shouldn't I? Would you like to look round to make sure?"

The senior man stepped back and glanced up at the name painted over the door.

"It's Mr. Aintree's flat," I explained. "I'm staying with him."

The man hesitated uncertainly.

"I haven't any authority," he began.

"Oh, hang the authority!" I said. "Mr. Aintree wouldn't mind. Dining-room, wine-cellar, library.... Won't you come in? Not even for a drink? Sure? Well, good-night. Oh, it's no trouble."

Detectives--or such few of them as I have met--remind me of Customs-house officials: if you offer your keys and go out of your way to lay bare your secrets before their eyes, they will in all probability let you through without opening a single trunk. They are perverse as women--and simple as children.

I tapped at the Seraph's door and told him I had disposed of the police without uttering a single falsehood. It was almost the last time I was able to make that boast. We gave our friends ten minutes' start, and I then set out in search of nurse and doctor. Joyce looked shockingly ill when I left, but her breathing was peaceful. Occasionally she moved or moaned in her sleep; as I turned at the door for a last look, the Seraph was rearranging her pillow and smoothing the hair back from her face.

I had to walk into the Strand to find a taxi. Outside the Vaudeville I met my brother and his wife, and was bidden to sup with them at the Savoy. I refused for many reasons, the first being that a man who starts a career of crime at the age of forty-two must not for very decency be seen eating in company with a judge of the High Court. My meeting did good in giving me the idea of establishing a succession of _alibis_. When I had made the necessary arrangements with Maybury-Reynardson and the nurse, I looked in once more at the Club.

Culling, Gartside and Nigel Rawnsley had the north smoking-room to themselves. They seemed to be discussing some plan of campaign, and the rescue of Sylvia was its object. Perhaps I should not say "discussing": Nigel was holding forth in a way that made me think he must have been a Grand Inquisitor in some previous incarnation. The ruthlessness of a Torquemada was directed by Napoleonic statecraft and brought down to date by the terrorism of a brow-beating counsel. The combination was highly impressive; his own contribution consisted in an exquisite choice of epithets.

"Talk to the Chief," I heard him say in summary of his plan of campaign. "Get him to arrange for Merivale, J., to try the case, and you'll find the woman Millington will exhibit surprising celerity in imparting whatever information she may have gathered in respect of the whereabouts of Mavis and Sylvia and the Jefferson boy."

"King's Evidence, d'you mean?" asked Gartside. "Not she!"

"Inconceivably less ornate than that. I agree with you that she might withhold her consent. It is therefore more expedient to coax her into the confessional without implicating her fellow conspirators. If you were being tried by Merivale and saw seven years' penal servitude stretching in pleasing prospect before you, you'd want to start the day on terms of reasonable amity with your judge. If you knew Merivale's daughter was engaged to marry a man whose sister had been spirited away, would you not strive to acquire merit in the eyes of your judge's family by saying where the sister could be found? It is approximately equivalent to a year's reduction of sentence."

Paddy Culling scratched his head thoughtfully with a paper knife.

"If Miss Davenant's afther hiding herself in one of the coops where the other little chicken's stored away...." he began.

"She's not," Nigel interrupted decisively. "The risk's too considerable; she wouldn't want to betray herself and her hostages at the same moment. She's in London...."

"Is she?" asked Gartside.

"She was to-day at lunch-time, because her doctor called at the house. Of course, the police in their infinite sagacity must needs start searching at the wrong end and afford her opportunities of escape."

"Out of London if she wanted to," persisted Gartside.

"Not by train," said Nigel. "Every station's watched...."

"By car."

"By airship, equally. The woman's seriously ill; you'd kill her."

Paddy Culling looked at his friend a little enviously.

"You know a lot about the inside of that house," he said.

"By the simple expedient of the sovereign in season to the kitchen-maid, who, like the rest of her class, was unquestionably loyal, but more unquestionably impecunious. The woman Davenant's in London, and they'll find her in three days. Where she is, I can't tell you. I may know more when I've seen the officers' reports to-morrow morning. Sylvia I'll undertake to find within a week. The woman Millington will give her away, and if she doesn't, the woman Davenant will have to."

"When you've caught her," said Culling quietly.

"Not even when you've caught her," said Gartside with greater knowledge. "I know the breed. It's pedigree stock."

Nigel lit a cigarette with ostentatious elaboration.

"Even pedigree stock has its less spirited moments," he said. "For example, when it's seriously ill. I fancy I could make the woman Davenant tell me all I wanted in three minutes."

The tone was extraordinarily sinister. I seemed to realise in a flash why Sylvia, with a woman's quicker, deeper insight, kept the speaker at a distance.... However, I had come to the Club to establish an _alibi_, not to reflect on the character of Sylvia's admirers. And I wanted to get back to Adelphi Terrace as soon as my purpose was effected.

"I was sorry to run away in the middle of your story, Paddy," I said. "I'd promised to meet a man, and I was rather late as it was. You'd got as far as the disposal of Mrs. Millington's body in the common mortuary and the arrest of a poor, mean printer's devil. What happened then? Was any one else caught?"

Paddy looked at me almost with affection, his eyes alight with oratorical fire.

"It's yourself should have been there to see it," he began, grasping my arm with one hand and making his points with the other. "The polis and red coats was there, and the newspaper men in their thousands, and the gravediggers in their tens of thousands...."