The Man and the Militant

AUGUST, 1913

BY ALICE BROWN

I

ON an early June morning in London, Grace Harwich stood by a pillar box at the West End. She had dropped in an enclosure, and she now put out her hand again to the slit. This time it was for another envelope, somewhat thickish and blue-gray, and she tucked the corner in with a delicate concern that might have led you to think that she was an awkward person aware of her disabilities and trying to get the best of them. You would have said: ‘There is a most charming young lady, evidently, from her dress and her carriage, an American, mailing her letters home.

But Gilbert Mills, the young man in the limousine that had been trailing her and now as softly stopped, was keeping an eye on the1 letter, not in any cursory way, but as if it held the news he feared or longed for. He stepped out of the car, took one stride that brought him to her elbow before she had time to do more than wince, and his hand fell on her wrist.

‘You little sneak!’ said he.

Grace looked at him in a perfect silence. She had not been quick enough to poke the letter in, and the hand upon her wrist had withdrawn it from the box. Unconsciously her thumb and finger grasped it tighter, and a viscid fluid trailed out of the envelope and made a little meandering rivulet on the front of her gray dress, dripping thence to her perfect shoe. She had trained rigorously for this adventure, and the first article of her code had been that she must never scream. So she stood looking, with a grave and questioning composure, out of violet-blue eyes, at Gilbert who, having drawn his brows together and set his square jaw as if he meant to subjugate by every masculine device of facial power, also looked at her. He was an American, — her countryman, — and she knew that he loved her so completely that she made no doubt of his unfailing concurrence in her aims. As she had once expressed it to him, he really did see things her way. Then she had elaborated somewhat. For she knew, as he did, that he was n’t merely, in an acquiescence to her charm or an involuntary sex-homage for the purpose of making it his own, seeing her way. They actually did look upon present life and the larger future with the same demands. They were safe in knowing that they were to be man and wife, although that finished conclusion in the mind of each had not yet been shared. Gilbert had only just come into his luck, and until he had he would not ask, and Grace had waited with the utmost tranquillity, being only a little over twenty and having adventurous things to occupy her.

Gilbert still held her wrist and answered the clear interrogation of her eyes with that savage and dominating stare. But it did not dominate. She merely inquired, in a conversational tone, —

‘What are you grabbing me for?’

‘What,’ said Gilbert, ‘are you doing to the inside of that pillar box?’

A faint smile lifted the corners of her mouth. It was the lightest little signal from the woman in her to the man in him, and Gilbert saw it and approved.

‘Why, you know,’ said she. ‘The same thing we’ve done before.’

‘I knew They’d been doing it,’ said he, with a comprehensive jerk of the head, meant to indicate the entire female contingent of the British empire. ‘But what have you got to do with it?’

Her unflinching eyes held obvious reproach.

‘Why, Gil,’ said she, ‘what did Lafayette have to do with it when he came over to us and fought our battles? ’

Gilbert lifted one foot and set it down with the emphasis of a stamp. That was all he could do as a natural expression of feeling, because he had begun to remember his own plan of campaign. The sight of an American girl playing rough house with an English pillar box had put it temporarily out of his head, and now he called upon himself to be not so much man as woman in guile and firmness fit to cope with the young desperado before him. She raised her brows with a look at once mandatory and pleading.

‘You’re holding my wrist awfully tight,’ said she.

But he did n’t loose it.

‘ Grace,’ said he, ‘ I ’ve got a message for you.’

‘For me? From Uncle? Oh, piffle! I shan’t go home. Auntie cabled the minute she found Mrs. Irvington had got to leave me unchaperoned. But I would n’t go. Of course I wouldn’t. Do you think I’m likely to quit my English sisters in bondage when I could —’

‘When you could put molasses — or what is the infernal stuff? — on your skirt? Well, whatever it is, so long as you could stick up love letters and checks and make butter-slides down Asquith’s stairs and hide gooseberry tarts in his bed and play the devil generally?’

He had, since he left the University at least, been leaning on the wellfounded conviction that he was a clever young man, as clever as need be, even at this time of competitive scrambling and sophomoric recipes for the way it is ‘done’; but now he bit his lip in a savage self-reproach. He was not being nearly so clever as he had intended. Grace had the advantage of having taken her limitations into account and steadily allowing for them. He had n’t realized that he had any limitations at all.

‘But Gil,’ said she with the same mild dignity, though a slight twitching of the brow was meant to remind him that her wrist did indeed hurt her increasingly, ‘we are simply convincing the nation that we are a power in it.’

‘What’s the matter with staying at home and convincing your own nation?’ said Gilbert. ‘I don’t mean by butter-slides and stealing knockers—’

‘The need is greater here,’ she said gravely. ‘You really do hurt me very much.’

Somehow now it seemed as if the hurt referred not only to the excoriating wrist but to the discovery that he did not see things as she did. She seemed to break out, at one uncalculated bound, from the enclosure of her determined action.

‘ O Gil,’ said she meltingly, ‘ I thought you were one of us.’

And he was melted, chiefly because he saw this was not artifice. She was indeed hurt to the soul to suspect a flaw in the oneness of their aims.

‘I am,’ said he. ’If you mean votes for women, of course I’m with you. Do you suppose I’d go back on Mother and Grandmother? to say nothing of you and the trend of things. Didn’t I march in that infernal procession, and did n’t I help you put up balloons on Palm Beach? Well, I should say! I’ve disgraced myself plenty, to prove it.'

‘Thank you, Gil,’ said she faintly. ‘You’ve got an awful grip, haven’t you? Is that Treherne in the car?’

She was indicating the leather-colored chauffeur who sat with his gaze set discreetly forward, waiting in a perfect stolidity, yet still, even to the casual gaze, with an air of tense readiness, as if he needed only the first syllable of the word to ‘let her out’ and cover the distance from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s. The still presence of Treherne and the certainty of his readiness brought Gilbert with a shock to a recognition of the way he was fumbling his own job. He summoned to his face a beautiful smile. He did it with the feeling of signaling wildly for reinforcements, and was grateful to his muscles when t hey answered him.

’Grace,’ said he, ’I’m all there. I’m simply glad to see you. It’s made me daffy. Had to take it out in kidding you. Now I’m in dead earnest. I’ve got a message for you.’

‘Auntie?’ she asked now with a faint concern. ‘Nothing’s happened?’

‘No, not Auntie. I’ve had a conference with two of your leaders. Hang it, Grace! I’m not going to mention names, even at this hour, in the open street. Jump into the car and we’ll tool round a little and I’ll tell you about it there.'

‘Surely,’ said she; and then he did open his hand and free the ill-used wrist. She looked down at it ruefully and gave it a rub with the other hand. But she did not intermit her delicate grasp of the envelope.

‘Here,’ said Gilbert, ‘give me that.’ He plucked it from her, did it up in the morning paper Treherne respectfully proffered, and tossed it into the car. ‘Let the devilish thing leak there all it wants to.’

Grace put her foot, in its slightly sticky shoe, in after it, and gaye her pretty hop of pleasurable excitement to the seat. Gilbert knew that spring. It always meant, ‘We’re off,’ and caught him in the throat because it seemed to indicate a longer journey to the peal of bells. They were seated now, and the car, as if Treherne had whispered the one magic word, shot forward, gliding on glass.

‘You have n’t told him where to go,’ said Grace.

‘He knows,’ said Gilbert. He had taken out his handkerchief and was rubbing at her skirt in a frowning care. ‘Look what you’ve done to your pretty dress! ’

She laughed, a little burst of pleasure like the topmost drops of a fountain where they are colored by the sun.

‘Now tell,’ she said. ‘You went to headquarters here. What for? You had my address.’

‘I went for news,’ said Gilbert. ‘Don’t forget I’ve got my own paper now. I really intended to ask for a set of articles on the situation, and I wanted a prominent person to do them. And then, because I was an American, she spoke of other Americans, and you especially.’

‘Gil! What did she say?’

‘Why, there’s but one thing she could say. She thought, your Votesfor-Women shower in Saint Paul’s an admirable coup.’

‘Yes,’said Grace modestly, ‘it was rather well managed, I think myself.'

She sat forward in her seat and gazed at the road running so hard to meet them. Gilbert knew that look of high excitement. She was happy, and Treherne was speeding. For a time she had not noticed that, but now the motion madness touched her brain, and she turned to Gilbert. There was no apprehension in her face: merely wonder.

‘Why,’ said she, ‘we’re going some.’

Gilbert apparently did n’t. hear.

‘So she asked me,’ he continued, ‘if I thought you were game for a big job.’

‘She did? Oh, that ’s tremendous! That’s the most amazing compliment I ever had in all my life.’

Gilbert remembered a few he had handed her, colossal pieces of sterling value, he had thought, and swallowed.

‘She asked me.' he continued in a rush, ‘if a certain person —we’ll ment ion no names —’

‘But we could,’ said she, wideeyed, ‘ here in the car. Treherne won’t listen.’

‘It’s a good precaution,’ said Gilbert firmly, ‘to mention no names anywhere, even if you’re alone at midday on an open prairie. It’s an excellent habit. It gets you into the way of being all there.’

‘You’re right,’ said she. ‘Go on.’

‘She asked me if a certain person now in France in hiding —’

‘Oh!’ screamed Grace. ‘Is she there ? ’

Gilbert nodded.

‘If that person decided to charter a boat and come over and land in Cornwall — ’

‘Like Boney!’ Her eyes ran over with wild light. She looked like youth and hope incarnate on its brave adventure. ‘Like the invading Kaiser. But she can’t land except incog. She can’t. There are a thousand eyes out, and a million regulations got up for German Willie. They ’d spot her in an instant.'

‘That’s the point,’ said Gilbert. ‘She’s not going to be spotted. She’s coming to a little Cornish port, to lie off the shore and signal. And we’re going out at midnight, you and I and Treherne, in a sailboat, and bring her in. And the news will filter round through Cornwall — Treherne sees to that — and the Cornish women are all primed to rally to the standard, and by George, you’ll break every window in Cornwall! ’

Grace had turned upon him, her face a bright mask of eager wonder.

‘I never heard of anything so absolutely magnificent in all my life,’ she said. ‘But why does she take me?’

‘Because the whole adventure is to be made as spectacular as possible. Think how the women of Paris marched to Versailles. Wouldn’t it have been still more dramatic then if they had had a leader in a woman of another country— a woman who simply had to come into it because their wrongs were so terrific? Same reason that our fugitive comes over and lands in a little boat when she might disguise herself and go to any port. The adventure! Consider the adventure! That delicate woman dares to land at midnight, like smuggled goods, and an American girl meets her and leads the forces on to Victory.’

Grace threaded her hands together in her lap and strained them till the knuckles blanched. She was ecstatically serious now, like a sacrificial victim who believes in the gods that slaughter him. And Treherne was speeding. Gilbert pulled out his letter case and drew a paper from it.

‘Here,’ said he, ‘read your orders. Her signature!’

Grace took the paper and spread it before her dazzled eyes. It was laconic, to the extent of five terse lines, and it was signed by the name of her loved leader. She reverently folded it.

‘Yes,’she said, ‘it’s her signature, But Gil, how fast we’re going! ’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Gilbert. His tone conveyed a hollow nonchalance. ‘We’re outside London. In fact, we’re on the road to Guilford. That’s a part of it.’ She had accepted his authority, and that, while it moved him warmly, brought also its prick of helpless selfreproach. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘we’re on the road to Cornwall.’

Grace rose in her seat with the surprise of it, but the motion, gliding as it was, threw her back again. It was not so much, indeed, the motion, as the swift vision of the road running to meet her and being extinguished as it came. ’Sit still,’ the road seemed to say. ’You and I are in the hands of a greater than we. It is my lot to run to you and be cast behind; it is yours to leave me lying there like a discarded ribbon.’ Then, sitting, she did cry out, —

‘I can’t go to Cornwall like this.’

‘Not when you’ve got your marching orders?’ inquired Gilbert sternly. ’What kind of soldiers are you women anyway? ’

She plucked up a doubting spirit.

' I’ve got to have some clothes.’

‘Your clothes are all right. I saw Marie this morning and she gave me a suitcase. It’s behind there.’

‘My Marie?’

‘Your maid.’

‘While I was out?’

‘While you were putting molasses in the pillar box.’

‘But why not have consulted me?’

‘You were n’t there, I tell you. You were gluing up the correspondence of the British Empire and the world.’

‘Why not have telephoned in advance?’

‘Now see here, Grace,’ said Gilbert, ‘if you’re going to take orders, you can’t question ’em. You’re talking too much. She — you know whom I mean —?’

Grace nodded. It was her loved leader.

‘She has given me a perfectly clear plan of action. I may not agree with it. I may not see why the deuce she should be so much of a martinet.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Grace. Her loyalty had been woven wit hout the break of a thread. ‘It has to be. Think of the thousands she’s in command of I see perfectly.’

‘Very well then.’ He blinked his eyes two or three times, as if the relief of that were almost, too unexpected to be borne. ‘Then I’ve only to tell you that I’m carrying out. instructions to the letter. You and I are to drive like the devil to Penreath.’

‘Why,’ said Grace, ‘that’s where your cottage is.’

‘Yes. I haven’t been there this summer, but it’s in order waiting for us.’

‘And was n’t it Penreath where you got Treherne?’

’Yes. Treherne’s sister is in the cottage now. She ’ll give us plain food and act as your maid in a way while you’re there.’

‘ Is she,’ Grace asked with a pretty simplicity that challenged him to be as direct with her, ‘is she an older woman — a widow or anything?’

‘No,’ said Gilbert, with robust imperviousness. ‘No. Wenna’s never been married. She’s about nineteen.’

‘But Gil,’ said she, ‘we can’t stay there together, you and I, with Treherne and that girl. Auntie’d raise the roof.’

‘Great Cæsar!’ said Gilbert, now meeting her glance with an impact of amazement equal to her own,’you don’t mean to tell me you can stick up letterboxes and heckle the Prime Minister of England and then cringe before the out-worn conventions of the past?’

Gilbert sat the straighter after he had said that. He thought it rather good. And so did she.

‘I’m sorry,’ she owned humbly. ’I was only thinking of Auntie.’

‘I wonder if Lafayette thought, of Auntie when he set sail for America?' inquired Gilbert caustically; and she owned that she supposed not.

Now that she fairly knew her road and the adventure unrolled itself, a responsive excitement took possession of her. She sat straight and sniffed the air. Gilbert thought she sat as buoyantly as if she might spurn the flying car and take to wings. He had never loved his car so well, valiant dear thing without fault or flaw, as if it had pledged itself to that day’s run. Yet throughout he felt he was denying Grace the pleasures of the road, delights her eyes besought him for. As they slipped through Winchester, she recalled him to that other summer when he and she, bulwarked by Auntie, had eaten strawberries in the Itchin meadows; but though she knew his mind was one with hers, he would not stop. In the middle of the day they ate delicious things from the hamper, and Treherne, accepting his sandwiches as if they were cartridges for another round, stoked himself hurriedly and drove on. Grace had caught the infection of it now. The madness of speed ran in her nerves.

She hardly spoke, and when the air changed to the softness off the moors and then the tang of salt, she breathed it in as if to hearten her for the predestined act. She looked very serious and, to Gilbert, beautiful. She had taken off her hat, and her thick light hair lay disordered above her brows. Through the aura of the coming quest she was more the woman than the girl. This grave reflectiveness, new in her face, was maternal even, and brought deep thoughts to birth in him. When the coolness of the afternoon came on, he put a fur coat round her, and she received it with a smile. She had done, he saw, with questioning. She had accepted her appointed task, and with it the inevitable mystery.

It was damp and dark when they ran along Cornish lanes and stopped at a cottage set by itself in wide space. The windows were alight, and Wenna, sweet as pink thrift, stood in the door, shading a candle with a careful hand. Grace, under the braided spell of air and speed and mystery, smiled at the girl as if they had been old friends.

‘0 Wenna,’ she said drowsily, out of the narcotism of that windy rush, ‘just hear the seal’

Then Wenna brought food to a dim fragrant chamber, and Grace ate and hurried into the white bed by the latticed window to the east.

II

Grace slept sweetly, and when she woke late in the morning, lay for a time and loved the air of Cornwall on her cheek. The cottage awoke presently to the sound of Wenna, who brought salt water, and Grace, uprising, knotted her long hair and asked for a secluded pool where she could dip. Wenna decisively said No. There was no pool, and Mr. Mills had sent up this bucket quite freshly filled by himself, for a sponge. He was waiting breakfast in the garden. Grace made a quick toilet and at, the end looked in the glass, approving. Here was rich color and noble line. She looked as fit and splendid as she felt. Her loved leader had done well to summon her. Whatever the task demanded, she had for it the mad devotion, the muscle and the nerve. Just here she went to the window, and found that although theair came in buoyantly, it was through latticed iron. The glazed window opened inward. The diamonds were firm. She shook them—for no reason—then smiled. She was balking, it seemed, at the very thought, of bars.

In the room below — a room all sweet Cornish air through iron-latticed panes — Wenna was waiting.

‘This way, miss,’said Wenna.

She indicated an open door, and through this Grace walked into a garden where Gilbert met her. She looked at him and found him, with that vital throb of pleasure in him responsive to her own fine youth, as fit and splendid as the girl that met her from the glass. Then she looked at the garden. This was a little paradise shut in by a high brick wall; it had flagged walks through bright luxuriance, and in a shady corner a round table with the breakfast things. Grace opened her mouth to commend it all, but she said, out of a desultory wonder at the bottom of her mind, —

‘Gil, are n’t your windows queer?’

‘Queer? They’re all right.’

‘They’re barred. The pattern’s in diamonds, but they’re perfectly tight. Burglar-proof— is that it?'

‘Oh,’ said Gilbert, ‘so they are. We’ll take a look at ’em, after breakfast, when we ’re fortified.’

Wenna came then with a tray, and Treherne with another. It was an admirable breakfast, suited to hungry youth. When it was over, Grace, exhilarated by the day, the comfort of a well-used body, and the man’s enhancing presence, looked at him across the table and smiled in a way to indicate her readiness.

‘Now,’ said she.

Gilbert looked suddenly haggard and very grave. He folded his napkin seriously, the motion of one gaining time, and dumped it, as if it represented a conclusion.

‘After they take these things,’ he said. He seemed to crave that slight delay.

Treherne presently cleared the table, and then Gilbert, as if he had been waiting only to lean his arm upon it, began, tapping slightly with his fingers:

‘I’ve been lying to you.’

Now for a long minute there was nothing but the rote of the sea and the delicate insistence of the breeze, less a whisper than a touch. Grace stared at him.

‘That note of instructions,’ he said. ‘It was n’t from her at all.’

‘Not from her?’

‘No.’

‘Her name was signed.’

‘ I signed it.’

‘You — forged her name?’

‘Yes,’ said Gilbert. He was answering her questions in a leaden quiet, as if they were what he had expected in some form, and he had to go through with the heavy task.

‘Gil,’ said she, ‘will you explain yourself? ’

‘Oh, yes,’ said he at once. ‘Shall I do it as it comes, or will you ask me questions?’

‘I have n’t any questions,’ she said, as grave as he. ‘I’m too puzzled.’

‘It goes back,’ he said, ‘to what you’ve been doing here in England. I’ve kept pretty accurate track of you ever since you wrote me you were a militant. When I could n’t stand it any longer, I came over. And here I am.’

She looked really alarmed now. A spark had come into her eyes, and her anxious face besought him.

‘Gil,’ she said, ‘don’t tell me you’ve gone back on suffrage.’

‘Oh, no,’said he, ‘I could n’t. I should if I were an Englishman, of course, that is, I should be mighty near it. But for our women — oh, no, I’ve not changed.'

‘Then what is it? Is it because you don’t like me to do things that are — conspicuous?’

Gilbert looked up at her now, brightening in a whimsical response.

‘You’ve always been conspicuous, dear,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing else visible when you’re round. But now you’ve sunk into the criminal class, you see, the conspicuousness is n’t because you’re so charming. It’s because you’re — conspicuous.’

‘Gilbert,’said she, ‘do you want to know what I think? You’re crazy.’

‘No,’ said he, ‘I’m not. I’m simply worried.’

‘About me?’

‘All of you. You chiefly, of course, because I thought I was going to marry you.’

‘Well, but —’ She stopped so short on the word that he knew she was about to add, ‘Are n’t you?’ and that he could not answer.

‘You ’re discouraging me frightfully,’ he said, ‘all of you. Don’t you see what you ’re proving? You’ve reverted. You’ve gone back to the oldest type of all, the woman that cries till she gets it, that won’t let any peace settle on the house till she is given her way. The individual hysteria of the spoiled child has culminated in the hysteria of a class. That type used to say to its husband or its lover, “ I’ll cry all night if you don’t back down.” That’s what you’re saying in concert to the English nation.’

‘Gilbert,’ said she, ‘do you mean to tell me you don’t think it’s of infinite importance for us to have the vote?’

Gilbert answered wearily.

‘I think it’s of infinite importance for you to be civilized enough to deserve the vote and then to have it. But I should n’t admit any woman to a finger in the pie who would go out and stick up letter-boxes and call it a Holy War. I should be afraid to. As soon as she does n’t get her measures passed, what is she going to do? She’s going to say, “Sisters, here’s another call to smash things. Come on."'

‘ It’s war. Don’t you know it’s war ? ’

‘Oh, no, it is n’t,’ said Gilbert dolefully. ‘I’ve tried to make myself think so, but I can’t. War is training yourself to be the best man and going out and fight ing like a man. It. is n’t sneaking round destroying private property.’

‘But we let ourselves be caught.’ Her cheeks were scarlet now. He glanced up at her and thought he would not willingly do it again. She seemed literally to blaze. He might take fire himself at her fine passion. ‘We glory in getting caught.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and then you don’t take your punishment like men. You stop eating and call it sport.’

‘Am I to be shut up here in Penreath?’ she inquired, in a tone of ominous composure.

‘For a while.’

‘ Is that why the windows are barred ?’

‘Yes. That’s why.’

‘Is that why you’ve built a brick wall round the garden? I notice the bricks are new.’

‘ Yes. That ’s why.’

‘Have Wenna and her brother been corrupted ?’

‘They won’t help you.’

‘How long is this state of things to last ? ’

‘Until we have come to terms.’

‘Until you have made me promise things?’

‘Until we mutually decide on your future course, and what our relations are to be.’

She was silent. He did not look at her, but he was aware that she was deliberating on her next move, as a captive might study a long time on the quick turn that should free her wrists.

‘What are your terms?’ she inquired finally, in a perfectly unmoved voice. He saw she had called upon her emergency training, and he admired her for the speed and coolness of her tactics.

‘What I should like to do,’ he said, in an attempt at similar composure, ‘ is to have you marry me, after whatever formality of residence and special license they require, and sail with me for home.’

’Oh!’ Her voice took on something of an edge here, and he did wince. ‘I fancied from something you said a minute ago that I’d ceased to be eligible.’

’Of course,’ said he, avoiding the edge and feeling a droll relief that it really had not cut him badly, ‘that would be after we had come to terms. You would have agreed with me that the only road to eligibility for marriage to any man would be through returning to the old code of private honor.’

‘Gil,’ she flashed, with a touch of temper very pretty and beguiling, ‘you’re talking like a book. You must have been a long time getting this up.’

If he knew himself caught, he did not show it.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘I’ve some tremendously keen ideas on marriage. You know what they are. And I should n’t marry a woman who was a criminal, or who could be incited by even the most understandable form of hysteria to criminal acts.’

She got up and made him a low courtesy. Wenna, watching incidentally while she did her kitchen work, almost broke a dish.

’I shall try,’ said Grace, ‘to bear my rejection with fortitude.’

‘Don’t be a silly. Sit down, dear.’

She obeyed him because she was too curious to go. Besides, she liked it. The instinct of battle ran thrillingly through her, and the question where it was to end was nothing to the charm of its still going on.

’If we were savages on an island,’ said Gilbert, ‘I don’t suppose I should mind your indulging your instincts once in a while. I might indulge my own and hit you over the head with a cocoanut. But in Salem! I could n’t live in Salem with a wife out of the aboriginal past. I could n’t practice law knowing I might go home any noon and find her and the cook and the housemaid all breaking the furniture together.’

’Don’t chaff,’ she said, frowning. ‘We are talking about serious matters.’

‘I mean it,’ said Gilbert. ‘If you cut down the cook’s wages, the cook, if she’s got a saltspoon of logic in her nut, will hack your furniture. For she’ll remember you were the celebrated Lafayette Grace who, in the year of our Lord 1913, hacked into England. And if I don’t vote as my wife wants me to, my militant wife will cut up my cravats and dint my razors and starve herself. I’m not being funny, Grace. I mean it. You are the only girl in the world for me. I ’d rather marry you than own a football team. But unless you get back your sense of honor I’m afraid to.’

While the warmest of his declarations had caressed her she had leaned toward him, lips apart, eyes misty, ingenuously expectant. But he did not look at her. She collected herself and spoke reflectively.

‘Sense of honor! Who lied to me, to trick me into coming here?’

‘Oh, I did,’ he said. ‘Deliberately. You’re outside the line, you know. You’ve been sneaking. I had to sneak to catch you.’

She deliberated a moment. Then, —

‘You don’t like our methods,’ she said.

’I utterly repudiate them,’ said he, ‘just as I repudiate the noble sabotage of the working-man. You’re all of a piece.’

‘Your father was a soldier, Gil,’ she softly reminded him. ‘You would n’t be, would you? Don’t believe in war ? ’

‘By George, I do,’ he said. ‘There’s something mighty fine in a man’s saying “I believe in this thing so much I’ll die for it,” But that’s not putting marmalade in Asquith’s boots.’

‘Do you believe in strikes?’

‘Once in a dog’s age.’

‘Very well. The nature of the cause determines the form of strike. Now I give you notice that, from this minute, I’m going on strike.’

‘Hunger?’

‘Yes.’

‘I foresaw that. So I ordered a good breakfast . It was all the start I could give you.’

Remembering three eggs apiece, she frowned.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘I’m forced to tell you again that the woman who does that is no man. Still, I supposed you’d do it. I’d thought it out. And I thought I’d fast as long as you did.’

‘Ah!’ she breathed. She liked the clash of wills.

‘That was my first thought. Then I said to myself, “I won’t be such an ass. I’ll serve three excellent meals a day. If she refuses to eat them, it’s at her own risk.” '

She rose.

‘ May I ask again,’ she said, with some ceremony, ‘how long I am to be detained here?'

He hesitated. At length, ‘I can’t go into that,’ he said.

She knitted her brows and studied him. ‘There’s something behind this,’ she avowed.

‘There is,’ he lightly owned. ‘The whole militant movement.’

‘You’ve found out!’ she cried, so stridently that Wenna ran again to look.

‘Yes,’ said he gravely, ‘I’ve found out.’

‘You know what is going to be done within the week.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And you’ve told.’

‘No, I haven’t told—yet. But by God! you’re not going to be in it.’

She was breathing hard.

‘Gil,’ she said, ‘what would make you let me go?’

He looked up at her. She saw, with a shock of terror lest it was not to concern her any more, that his face, in its stern sincerity, was beautiful.

‘Your word of honor,’ he said. ‘I’d still take it in spite of the things you’ve done. Your word of honor that you’ll stop short —and fight fair.’

‘Have men,’ she challenged him passionately, ‘have men fought fair?’

‘Not often.’

‘Look at the Great Powers when they want an inch of land. Do they fight fair?’

‘No. But you, Grace — you fight fair. I’m with you. I’ll help you fight. You ’d have cut me when I came on here for the games that time if I’d sneaked it by a hair. Why, girl, you have n’t forgotten “the game”?’

Their eyes were encountering in a scrutiny made of passionate memory and dying hope.

‘Give me your word,’ he pleaded.

Then there was another pause while they felt the breeze and heard the sea, and both weighed to the full the poignant cruelty of the sunlit day that has not a tear to drop for youth and love in ruins.

‘I can’t, Gil,’ she said; but in mercy to them both she said it gently.

She walked into the house and up to her own room, and when Wenna tapped there at luncheon time, the door was locked.

III

The siege lasted three days. To the four in the cottage, though they could exchange no words about it, it was man’s siege of woman’s heart. Wenna, as if she suffered not only for the moment and these two lovers, but for her whole sex, tragically paled. Three times a day she carried up food prepared with an excess of daintiness, the trays even, at length, decked with flowers; this might have had a sacrificial look though Wenna meant the flowers also to implore. She also appeared at odd moments with tea. Everybody, Wenna thought, had to have a cup of tea. It was the universal fluid.

At the end of the third day she found the door ajar, and though there was no answer to her knock, went in. The room was in beautiful order; Grace was refusing service in the house of her enemies, and she sat by the window, her arms outstretched on the arms of the chair, her hands hanging in pale beauty. Wenna ran, dropped at her feet and cried. But though Grace did not notice her except by a touch of the white fingers on her pretty hair, it was not from any coldness. She was thinking her own thoughts, and Wenna was no more than a mote in that big sea.

The outer beauty of the days had been unbearable, taken with the ache of her own heart. Even the scent from the kind garden sickened her. Down there striding through its bloom or even at the stair foot, listening day and night in anguish equal to her own, was her lover, made by the strange sad chance of time her enemy. The creature who longed to fight for her was warring against her. The being she should foster, she was denying the comfort of her breast. The immemorial alliance of the two who needed each other so inexorably had been turned into fight by the age-long ignorance of both, and the man was driving the woman into the wilderness, and the woman’s milk was poisoning the men-children it should nourish. For a time she blamed him in his own person. Then, as hunger clarified the inner workshop of her brain, and her soul seemed to rise and float above the body and look understandingly upon its trials, she thought of him tenderly as condemned to suffer with her in the rush of time. They were no longer light-hearted man and maid meeting in the rose-garden of their pure desire. Her life seemed to her now but the breath blown out of the trumpets of revolt. His walled garden had turned into a symbol. Outside it, like a sea girdling her paradise, she seemed to hear the clamoring cry of women — the hunted, the unshielded — condemned to cry in dissonance without her own voice to make it harmony. She loved him, the ‘young man in his beauty,’ but he was no longer Gilbert Mills alone: he was child of the traditions that had made revolt inevitable. What room was there on this ‘darkling plain’ where ‘ignorant armies clash by night’ for the bride bower and the vows of cherishing according to what she called a specious ritual?

Yet so gently did she think of him that when she heard his voice at her door, that late twilight, she could answer.

‘Grace,’ he said, ‘will you listen?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.'

‘You ’ve forced my hand. This can’t go on.’

‘Yes, it can. I’m up to it.’

‘The doors are open. You can go. I’ve given Wenna a rigid schedule for your food. You ‘ll abide by it, won’t you? Nothing else till you’re in shape.’

' That was good of you. Yes, I believe it upsets you to eat after —'

She paused. She wanted very much to save him the crude sound of things. Still it seemed to her that this was n’t Gil starving her: only the cruelty of time that had starved women in so many ways, — starved them into hysteria if Gil were right. Now they were no longer wives and maidens. They were Judiths; they were Bacchae on the mountain drinking blood.

’Treherne will be ready,’ he continued, ’to take you up to London in the car.’

‘Shall you come too?’ The question leaped from her.

‘I had n’t meant to. I thought you’d rather not. I wish you’d let me — to make sure you’re all right.’

‘I shall be all right.’ She heard Wenna on the stairs, bringing, she knew, a spoonful of food for which appetite had gone. ‘But I think you’d better come.’

This she said to give him less anxiety over her state, and he thanked her humbly. Wenna slipped in with her spoon and cup. Wenna was crying in a low-spirited way as if she had cried for days and was tired of it. But Grace took the liquid like medicine, and then called again to the man outside the door.

‘Gil!’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Have you done it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You ’ve betrayed us?’

‘I’ve given you away.’

‘The whole plan, Gil, the whole big plan? ’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Then it has n’t happened?’

‘No. I’ve saved you from that, at least.’

She got on her feet.

‘Tell Treherne,’ she said, ‘to be ready in half an hour. I’m going to London.’

‘Grace, you can’t do anything. It never can happen now, I tell you, never to the end of time. There’ll be a thousand pairs of eyes on it, all watching — till you and I are dead and the world is sane again.’

‘It isn’t that,’ she said. She was trembling, and her teeth chattered. ‘But you’ve done it, Gil — and I’m glad it’s done, too. I loved it. I could n’t bear to have it destroyed. But somehow because you’ve done it I can’t stay here in your house and eat your food. Wenna, get my coat and tell Treherne.’

And after all, she let him go with her, and through the moonlit night, past the unheard nightingale in copses their car ran by, they sat in deep love of each other and a sick distrust, and drove to London. He left her at her door in the leaden dawn. She looked like the spirit of it, her soft cheeks grayed.

‘ Good-bye, Wenna,’ she said. ‘ Goodbye, Treherne.’ She turned to Gilbert. ‘Good-bye. You’ll be sailing soon.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as soon as I know you ’re fit again. Won’t you — ’ He had her hand now and drew her a pace away from the two sad Cornish servitors who seemed to have shut themselves into their reserve. ‘Grace, won’t you come with me? Come home.’

‘Last call?’ she asked, in a loving mockery of him. She smiled, a little wry, old smile. ‘No, Gil. Give my love to Salem.’