The Balliols (19 page)

During the two years since Stella Balliol had been arrested at the Colingdale Town Hall, the suffrage movement had spread rapid fire through political and social England. “Votes for Women” was no longer, like socialism, an academic subject for abstract argument. It was an issue. The suffragette movement was a force. The break between the moderate and the militants had grown complete, the militants were waging relentless war. They heckled Ministers at elections; they canvassed against Liberal candidates; they scrawled “Votes for Women” on pavements, walls, shutters; they broke windows; they dog-whipped policemen. No public function was immune from their interruptions. They were abused, imprisoned, derided. They were told that they were putting back the Cause of Women's Rights by a hundred years; by illegal acts they had proved women to be unfit for franchise. They were told that they were unsexed. The music-halls made rich fun of them.

“Put me upon an island where the girls are few,

Put me among the most ferocious lions in the Zoo

Put me upon a treadmill and I'll never fret,

But for heaven's sake don't put me near a suffragette!”

Every Sunday morning a cart, hung with green, white and purple ribbons was drawn up beside the White Stone Pond. From this uncertain platform week after week were delivered arguments about equality that sounded as fantastic to the average Englishman as the arguments of Wilberforce against the Slave Trade had sounded a hundred, years earlier to West Indian planters. “How absurd,” the planters scoffed, “to talk of a negro's rights! Negroes had been born slaves; they must live as slaves; they must die as slaves; they and their children in perpetuity.” In just that way the men of Edward Balliol's generation argued about the Rights of Women. What nonsense to talk of women with a vote: women in parliament: women sitting on juries, pleading in court, directing companies. At many of their public meetings suffragettes were welcomed with over-ripe tomatoes and rotten eggs. At Hampstead on a Sunday morning a decorous regard for the Sabbath was preserved. There was heckling in plenty, but it was good-natured if persistent. Its persistence, however, made little effect on the validity of the speaker's arguments. There was an answer for every question.

Occasionally Stella Balliol would speak. She was now one of the dozen most prominent suffragettes. If a caricaturist were to select any one person to typify the militant movement, he was as likely to select Stella Balliol for his purpose as Annie Kenney, Lady Constance Lytton or Sylvia Pankhurst. Rather more likely; since the extreme and fashionable neatness of her appearance lent itself to caricature. She was always particular about her clothes.

“I may be a suffragette, but I'm not going to look a frump.”

She once seriously advanced the theory that suffragettes should wear a uniform. “It is the only way to make half of us reasonable. Do look at Miss Draft's hat!”

But in spite of the fashionable nature of her attire, there was no foppish femininity about Stella Balliol. Some speakers had a wooing, conciliatory method of addressing their audiences. But Stella marshalled her facts and arguments in a clear, straightforward way, her address lit now and again by irony; at times by oratory. She was not afraid of the purple or the bitter passage.

Lucy accompanied her when she spoke at Hampstead. For a
year now, Lucy had been an energetic worker. She had not yet taken any very active part in the militant campaign. She was considered too young for that. She did clerical work. She joined in processions. She organized bazaars, distributed pamphlets. Occasionally she made short introductory speeches. She had a good platform manner. An audience liked her, she was so young and earnest. She was not pretty, but she was so nearly beautiful that you felt that great happiness or great sadness would make a beauty of her. She was patently sincere. She would stand at the edge of the cart, her hands rested on the side, her forehead slightly furrowed. She would speak rather haltingly, not as though she were uncertain of her words, but as though she were trying to convince herself at the same time as her audience, as though she were saying: “Now, these are the facts. It must follow, mustn't it, from them, that we have to think this way? “It was a manner that in a long speech would be monotonous but was extremely effective as an interlude between two speeches of more forceful oratory. Very often she proved more convincing than her more competent colleagues; in the same way that at a theatre one very often takes away a clearer picture of a minor than of a major part; although had the minor part been given further scope, one would have found it tiresome. It was Stella's private opinion that Lucy was of greater value to the cause now than she would be later, when she was promoted to more responsible tasks. “But perhaps we shall have the vote by then.” She did not visualize the alternative by which Edward Balliol was consoled, that long before that time Lucy would have lost all interest in the movement. It was his chief consolation.

As he stood among the crowd at the White Stone Pond on a chill Sunday morning in the spring of 1911 he reflected that unless he had that consolation he would be desperately worried. With controlled, but vivid power his sister was justifying the tactics of the militants.

“You say that we should be patient, that we should wait. But we have waited, we have been patient. We accepted the Liberals' promise that our rights would be considered when they came into power. They were not considered. We realized that we should be ignored as long as we let ourselves be ignored. Yet we have always been ready to arbitrate. We have been reasonable even in battle. We called a truce of six months last year because the Government promised they would grant our rights. They did not grant our rights. The truce is over. A battle has begun that will not cease, till the claims of justice are allowed.”

At her side sat Lucy with an eager and responsive expression. Her lips were moving; what our journalists would call “drinking in her words,” he thought. If only this absurd craze of hers would end. She was twenty-one now. Sooner or later she was bound to meet some man who would stop all this nonsense. Young girls invariably had a craze of some sort. They became religious; or they went in for art; or they wanted to educate the poor. Unless they were of the snob kind that wanted “to get into Society,” or were the athletic county kind that in the old colonel's phrases “worked out that rubbish” on the hunting-field. There was the schoolroom, then there was an interval to be filled before a woman's real life began: her life as a wife, a hostess, a mother. Till that real life began, a girl had to focus her emotion somewhere. The moment her real life started, she put away her easels, her shrine, her social tracts. In a few years' time Lucy would be looking back on all this, laughing at it. But in the meantime it was very definitely a problem.

Whenever Stella addressed a meeting on the Heath, she lunched afterwards at Ilex. The placid, comfortable atmosphere of her brother's dining-room provided a pleasantly ironic contrast to the tub that a few moments before she had been thumping.

“I wonder if those toughs who heckle me realize that I'm quite a normal human being off the platform.”

Ordinarily no reference was made to Stella's public life; in much the same way that her brother never discussed his business in his home. The view was held that careers were not quite good form and that you discussed friends, families and all such sections of the newspaper as did not personally concern you. On this afternoon, however, when they were alone together, after lunch, Balliol did bring up the question.

“I suppose there is no doubt that you've embarked on what we used to call in the nursery ‘War to death'?”

“More or less.”

“You can scarcely expect a parent not to feel rather alarmed when his daughter is called on active service.”

“It's scarcely as serious as that.”

“No, but.…” He paused. Then, abandoning his habitual flippancy: “You must have a great many members of your movement who are not actual militants; who don't, I mean to say, take part in any of your more spectacular demonstrations; in whom you have some equivalent for the Army Service Corps. You're not all fighting forces?”

“Of course. There are a great many women who're too old,
some have dependents that would make it impossible for them to get into trouble.”

“How far is it a matter of choice with them?”

“To a large extent. But all our demonstrations are organized centrally. Nothing militant is done without our sanction. We allow no hooliganism. Everything is planned.”

“Then it would be quite possible for you to prevent anybody, whom for various reasons you did not consider fitted for that kind of exploit, from militant activities?”

“Perfectly.”

“In that case, I should be very grateful if you could see that Lucy's share was of a routine nature.”

He flushed slightly as he spoke. He was not in the habit of asking favours. He gave or took. He did not ordinarily give the impression of caring enough to be bothered to ask for what he was not strong enough to take. Stella was surprised. Also a little touched. It humanized her brother. He had put the request in the one way that could have influenced her against her judgment.

“I suppose I could, for a time, at any rate. It'll be difficult later on. These young people are very keen. They encourage one another. They feel out of it.”

“But there's no need to encourage her yourself.”

“None at all.”

“As long as you can, then, keep her out of it.”

“I'll try.”

But Stella knew that it would not be easy. The suffragettes who had not been arrested, who had not been in prison, who at least had not taken part in some exploit that if detected would have resulted in prison, felt out of things, when the others were describing their experiences. They felt themselves to be non-combatants. The hunger strikers were the heroines of the movement. They formed a kind of aristocracy. To have been in prison was like joining an exclusive club of which every suffragette was a potential candidate. Stella knew how anxious her niece must be to join. She would have difficulties with her, she knew that.

A few days later, at the end of the morning's dictation, Lucy did not, as usual, gather up her pad, pencils and the pile of correspondence to which she had taken the replies. She stood at the side of Stella's desk, hesitating.

“Well, what is it?” Stella asked.

“There's something that I want to ask you.”

“Ask away.”

“It's about my work. I want to do more than I'm doing.”

“You're working long hours here. I could, of course, find you evening work. A lot of our women aren't here till after six. But it might be more than you ought to undertake.”

“I didn't mean more work in that way. I meant a different kind of work. I don't want to spend my whole time in an office. I want to be out, doing things.”

“You're more valuable where you are.”

“Oh, but I'm not. Anyone could do this work. Any old woman could. There are things I could do that no old woman could. I'm young. I'm strong. I want to do active work—militant work.”

It was the plea that Stella had expected; she knew how useless it would be to make the excuse that Lucy was too young. Lucy would quote examples in plenty of girls no older than herself who had taken their share in the actual fighting. That argument would carry little weight with Lucy. Stella resorted to that first simile of her brother's; the Army Service Corps.

“I'm sorry, Lucy, I know how you feel. But there are certain works that are not spectacular but are essential. In a battle, for instance, the actual fighting troops are dependent upon their supplies; upon a smooth running organization. Battles are won just as much by the people who never fight as by those who do. The W.S.M. is like an army. I am one of its generals, it's more important that I should have an adjutant whom I can trust, whom I can rely on, who will see my orders carried out, than that there should be seven rather than six militants waving flags at an Asquith meeting.”

Lucy looked at her, pensively, dubiously.

“You really mean that: that my being your secretary is as important as all that?”

“Of course it is. I can't tell you how much trouble you save me; how everything is made easier for me by my knowing that there's you to look after things.”

“Oh well, in that case, then…” she hesitated: then quickly and quietly gathered up her papers and left the room. There had been a thoughtful, enquiring, self-questioning expression on her face that puzzled Stella. “That's an odd child,” she thought.

Lucy rarely discussed with her parents and never with her father the extent of her association with the W.S.M. There was a tacit agreement to leave it undiscussed, to accept the pleasant fiction that she was her aunt's secretary, to ignore the unpleasant nature of her
aunt's occupation. For that matter, she very rarely did discuss anything serious with her father. He had a way of taking any statement that she was worried as a criticism of himself: as though it were his fault that she was not completely and ecstatically happy. So worried, indeed, did he become about any worry of hers, that she soon realized that he became more worried about it than she was herself, and that instead of his consoling her, she found herself saying to him: “But, Daddy darling, there's nothing to worry about, truly there isn't. I'm really quite all right.”

With her mother it was different. She thought of her mother less as a mother than an elder sister, with whom she could discuss herself impersonally; who was fond of her, and interested in her, but was not going to spend sleepless nights on her account. In consequence she confided far more in her mother than in her father.

It was to her that she brought the account of her interview with Stella.

“I had so wanted to do something real. It's not exciting, sitting in a room being dictated to, typing, answering telephones; particularly when all those letters and telephone calls are about exciting things. I feel out of it.”