A fortnight later Julia was recalled to London. She took a small flat in Clement’s Inn, Strand, where the W. S. P. U. was about to establish itself. She learned immediately that on the first day of the autumn session of Parliament a deputation of women intended to go to the Lobby of the House and send word to the Prime Minister that they expected some assurance from him regarding the prospects of franchise for their sex. Hundreds would await the news without.
By this time there was no danger of any definite move by the women being overlooked by the press, and they were treated as news no matter with what lack of sympathy. As to be spectacular whenever the opportunity offered was a part of their policy, they overlooked no means to that end; quite aware that Julia was as valuable an asset as they were likely to have, she was drafted to make one of the deputation to the House of Commons on October third. By this time other women of the aristocracy had flocked to their standard, and several prominent in the arts, but Julia had a very special personality, and a value for the press which insured her a separate “story” whether or not she were the chief figure in any of the carefully rehearsed scenes executed by the Militants. Therefore, having received her instructions for the third, she called on the duke the night of the second. She had not heard from him since the letter received at Keighley, nor had she heard from his solicitors.
The duke was in the library and rose ceremoniously as she was shown in, but did not offer his hand. Julia took the same chair from which she had defied him in a period of her life that now seemed identical with a lost personality.
“I should have called long ago,” she said, “but you were at Bosquith when I returned from Syria, and I have been out of London ever since.”
“I am quite aware of your movements during the past five months.” The duke spoke with all his innate formality, and infused his tone with icy sarcasm, but Julia had detected in a glance that he looked far more of a human being than of old. Bridgit had told her a strange tale of riding over to see her “Aunt Peg” when that dame was suffering from a broken leg, and catching a glimpse of the duke in an adjoining room, flat on the floor, with his boy and two little girls racing up and down his small but sacred person. Julia had accused Mrs. Herbert of trying to impose on her credulity, but as she inspected that meagre countenance she found it decidedly less gray and tight than formerly, the eyes brighter, the prim lines of the mouth relaxed. Yes; he was, conceivably, the uxorious parent.
“Of course I know you must hate what I am doing. If you and thousands like you didn’t hate it, we shouldn’t be doing it, if you don’t mind a bull. But that is the point, you see. We intend to fight to the last ditch, and then win. You don’t guess this and so you prolong the fight. I haven’t come to convert you, but because I know exactly how you feel. You have behaved splendidly toward me, for I know you have longed, for months, to recall your generous allowance. You can’t make up your mind to violate your word, so I have come to renounce it myself.”
“Ah!” The duke rose and began pacing up and down the room. “Yes—you would suspect—you are clever enough. Ah! If you would only divert your cleverness into a respectable channel. How could you go off your head about this atrocious nonsense?”
“Nonsense? Come down to Clement’s Inn and talk to the women for a few minutes. You might not approve of us any more than you do now, but you would no longer use the word nonsense. You might hate, but you would be forced to respect?—”
“Respect? Respect women that have parted with the last shred of female decency, that are distracting this poor country with their puerile demands, when she is faced by such grave problems within and without that we need every ounce of our energy, every moment of our time?—”
“Quite so. That is one of our staple arguments. We are only asking to help you. Turn the Poor Laws over to us, with the ballot, and you will have that much more time and energy to devote to the survival of the House of Lords, and to the survival of Great Britain among nations.”
“And have a new and worse problem on our hands to distract us! It is bad enough now with half female England gone mad and making this great Empire ridiculous in the eyes of the world—do you fancy we are mad enough even to argue the question of giving you power? Never. You can raid the House of Commons and force your way into the house of the Prime Minister, and fight with the police and go to gaol, and shriek and parade, until the day of doom, and you’ll be no nearer your object than you are to-day. That is what has made me lose all patience with you. I trained your mind, I watched you grow under my roof into as intellectual a woman as is possible with the limitations of the female brain; I guided you in your study of politics, and, save when you took the wrong side out of sheer perversity, I was quite satisfied with you. And now! It has saddened and angered me beyond description to see you making a public spectacle of yourself, suffering bodily injury, disgracing yourself, your sex, and your country, in a ridiculous and hopeless cause.”
“Well, you see, we don’t believe it to be hopeless, and that sustains us.”
“What difference does it make what you believe?”
“Not so much now, except as a means to an end. You said a moment ago that we had lost every shred of female decency, in other words, forgotten that we were mere women. Does not that strike you as portentous?”
“It strikes me as hideous.”
“I mean that when women have been battered and mauled and hurt, as we have been, without a second’s loss of courage or resource; when we have not once failed to score every point we have preconceived, from the heckling of candidates half out of their senses, to arresting the gaze of the civilized world,—doesn’t it strike you that we may be something more than mere women?”
“Yes, fools, and shameless ones.”
“Well, I share Nigel Herbert’s theory, that we are a new sex and a new race. A new force let loose into the world, is how he expressed it. When I went north five months ago the union in London numbered only a few hundreds. Now it’s as well known as the Liberal party. And all of the new active members have the same set grim intent look, although many are still in their teens. I believe they were born that way and only waited for the call. Not one of them looks as if she had ever given a thought to a lover?—”
“And you extol them for that?”
“No, I merely mention it. You see, all revolutions demand and breed their martyrs; people who were born, so to speak, to fight and die in that cause and for no other purpose whatever. Hundreds of thousands will join us as converts, but only a limited number will join the fighting army. That sort of thing is in a woman or it isn’t. Many will help us with money and name and sympathy, vote when their time comes, and cheerfully accept such political duties as may be thrust upon them, but they are too soft, what you call too womanly, to fight. We make no complaint. The race must go on and these women may be depended upon to take care of it. But all these girls that are flocking to our standard, that speak to jeering crowds on street corners, that are hustled and twisted and pinched by policemen—when they interrupt meetings, or sell literature on the street—they are made of different elements, they are the ones chosen to win a cause,............