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Mrs. Warren's Daughter by Sir Harry Johnston

S >> Sir Harry Johnston >> Mrs. Warren\'s Daughter




Then, thanking the pleasant soldier-peer for his information, Vivie
(David Williams) left him to his duties as equerry and member of the
Jockey-Club and entered the dense crowd on either side of the race
course. It reminded her just slightly of Frith's Derby Day. There
were the gypsies, the jugglers, the acrobats, the costers with their
provision barrows; the grooms and stable hands; the beggars and
obvious pick-pockets; the low-down harlots--the high-up ones were
already entering the seats of the Grand Stand or sitting on the
four-in-hand coaches or in the open landaulettes and Silent Knights.
But evidently the professional betting men were a new growth since
the mid-nineteenth century. They were just beginning to assemble,
wiping their mouths from the oozings of the last potation; some, the
aristocrats of their calling, like sporting peers in dress and
appearance; others like knock-about actors on the music-hall stage.
The generality were remarkably similar to ordinary city men or to
the hansom-cab drivers of twenty years ago.

In the very front of the crowd on the Grand Stand side, leaning with
her elbows on the wooden rail, she descried Emily Davison. Vivie
edged and sidled through the crowd and touched her on the shoulder.
Emily looked up with a start, surprised at seeing the friendly face
of a young man, till she recognized Vivie by her voice. "Dear
Emily," said Vivie, "you look so tired. Aren't you over-trying your
strength? I don't know what you have in hand, but why not postpone
your action till you are quite strong again?"

"I shall never be stronger than I am to-day and it can't be
postponed, cost me what it will," was the reply, while the sad eyes
looked away across the course.

"Well," said Vivie, "I wanted you to know that I was close by,
prepared to back you up if need be. And there are others of our
Union about the place. That young man over there talking to the
policeman is really A---- K---- though she is supposed to be in
prison. Mrs. Tuke is somewhere about, Mrs. Despard is on the Grand
Stand, and Blanche Smith is selling _The Suffragette_."

"Thank you," said Miss Davison, turning round for an instant, and
pressing Vivie's hand, "Good-bye. I hope what I am going to do will
be effectual."

Vivie did not like to prolong the talk in case it should attract
attention. Individual action was encouraged under the W.S.P.U., and
when a member wished to do something on her own, her comrades did
not fuss with advice. So Vivie returned to the Grand Stand.

Presently there was the stir occasioned by the arrival of the Royal
personages. Vivie noted with a little dismay that while she was
wearing a Homburg hat all the men near her wore the black and
glistening topper which has become--or had, for the tyranny of
custom has lifted a little since the War--the conventional head-gear
in which to approach both God and the King. There was a great
raising of these glistening hats, there were grave bows or smiling
acknowledgments from the pavilion. Then every one sat down and the
second event was run.

Still Emily Wilding Davison made no sign. Vivie could just descry
her, still in the front of the crowd, still gazing out over the
course, pressed by the crowd against the broad white rail.

* * * * *

The race of the day had begun. The row of snickering, plunging,
rearing, and curvetting horses had dissolved, as in a kaleidoscope,
into a bunch, and a pear-shaped formation with two or three horses
streaming ahead as the stem of the pear. Then the stem became
separated from the pear-shaped mass by its superior speed, and again
this vertical line of horses formed up once more horizontally,
leaving the mass still farther behind. Then the horses seen from the
Grand Stand disappeared--and after a minute reappeared--three, four,
five--and the bunch of them, swerving round Tattenham Corner and
thundering down the incline towards the winning post.... The King's
horse seemed to be leading, another few seconds would have brought
it or one of its rivals past the winning post, when ... a slender
figure, a woman, darted with equal swiftness from the barrier to the
middle of the course, leapt to the neck of the King's horse, and in
an instant, the horse was down, kneeling on a crumpled woman, and
the jockey was flying through the air to descend on hands and knees
practically unhurt. The other horses rushed by, miraculously
avoiding the prostrate figures. Some horse passed the winning post,
a head in front of some other, but no one seemed to care. The race
was fouled. Vivie noted thirty seconds--approximately--of amazed,
horrified silence. Then a roar of mingled anger, horror, enquiry
went up from the crowd of many thousands. "It's the Suffragettes"
shouted some one. And up to then Vivie had not thought of connecting
this unprecedented act with the purposed protest of Emily Wilding
Davison. She sprang to her feet, and shouting to all who might have
tried to stop her "I'm a friend of the lady. I am a doctor"--she
didn't care what lie she told--she was soon authoritatively pushing
through the ring of police constables who like warrior ants had
surrounded the victims of the protest--the shivering, trembling
horse, now on its legs, the pitifully crushed, unconscious
woman--her hat hanging to the tresses of her hair by a dislodged
hat-pin, her thin face stained with blood from surface punctures.
The jockey was being carried from the course, still unconscious, but
not badly hurt.

A great surgeon happening to be at Epsom Race course on a friend's
drag, had hurried to offer his services. He was examining the
unconscious woman and striving very gently to straighten and
disentangle her crooked body. Presently there was a respectful stir
in the privileged ring, and Vivie was conscious by the raising of
hats that the King stood amongst them looking down on the woman who
had offered up her life before his eyes to enforce the Woman's
appeal. He put his enquiries and offered his suggestions in a low
voice, but Vivie withdrew, less with the fear that her right to be
there and her connection with the tragedy might be questioned, as
from some instinctive modesty. The occasion was too momentous for
the presence of a supernumerary. Emily Wilding Davison should have
her audience of her Sovereign without spectators.

Returning with a blanched face to the seething crowd, and presently
to the Grand Stand, Vivie's mood altered from awe to anger. The
"bookies" were beside themselves with fury. She noted the more
frequent of the nouns and adjectives they applied to the dying woman
for having spoilt the Derby of 1913, but although she went to the
trouble, in framing her indictment of the Turf, of writing down
these phrases, my jury of matrons opposes itself to their appearance
here, though I am all for realism and completeness of statement.
After conversing briefly and in a lowered voice with such
Suffragettes as gathered round her, so that this one could carry the
news to town and that one his to communicate with Miss Davison's
relations, Vivie--recklessly calling herself to any police
questioner, "David Williams" and eliciting "Yes, sir, I have seen
you once or twice in the courts," reached once more the Grand Stand
with its knots of shocked, puzzled, indignant, cynical, consternated
men and women. Most of them spoke in low tones; but one--a blond Jew
of middle age--was raving in uncontrolled anger, careless of what he
said or of who heard him. He was short of stature with protruding
bloodshot eyes, an undulating nose, slightly prognathous muzzle and
full lips, and a harsh red moustache which enhanced the prognathism.
His silk hat tilted back showed a great bald forehead, in which
angry, bluish veins stood out like swollen earth worms. "Those
Suffragettes!" he was shouting or rather shrieking in a nasal whine,
"if I had _my_ way, I'd lay 'em out along the course and have 'em
---- by ----. The ----'s!"

The shocked auditory around him drew away. Vivie gathered he was
Mr. ---- well, perhaps I had better not give his name,[1] even
in a disguised form. He had had a chequered career in South
America--Mexico oil, Peruvian rubber, Buenos Aires railways, and a
corner in Argentine beef--but had become exceedingly rich, a fortune
perhaps of twenty millions. He had given five times more than any
other aspirant in benefactions to charities and to the party chest
of the dominant Party, but the authorities dared not reward him with
a baronetcy because of the stories of his early life which had to be
fought out in libel cases with Baxendale Strangeways and others. But
he had won through these libel cases, and now devoted his vast
wealth to improving our breed of horses by racing at Newmarket,
Epsom, Doncaster, Gatwick, Sandown and Brighton. Racing had, in
fact, become to him what Auction Bridge was to the Society gamblers
of those days, only instead of losing and winning tens and hundreds
of pounds, his fluctuations in gains and losses were in thousands,
generally with a summing up on the right side of the annual account.
But whether on the Turf, at the billiard table, or in the stock
market he was or had become a bad loser. He lost his temper at the
same time. On this occasion Miss Davison's suicide or martyrdom
would leave him perhaps on the wrong side in making up his day's
book to the extent of fifteen hundred pounds. Viewed in the right
proportion it would be equivalent to our--you and me--having given a
florin to a newspaper boy as the train was moving, instead of a
penny. But no doubt her unfortunate impulse had spoiled the day for
him in other ways, upset schemes that were bound up with the winning
of the King's horse. Yet his outburst and the shocking language he
applied to the Suffrage movement made history: for they fixed on him
Vivie's attention when she was looking out for some one or something
on whom to avenge the loss of a comrade.

[Footnote 1: He died in 1917. My jury of matrons has excised his
phrases.]

She forthwith set out for London and wrote up the dossier of Mr.
----. In the secret list of buildings which were to be destroyed by
fire or bombs, with as little risk as possible to human or animal
life, she noted down the racing stables, trainers' houses and
palaces of Mr. ---- at Newmarket, Epsom, the Devil's Dyke, and the
neighbourhood of Doncaster.


Rossiter and Vivie met for the first time for a year at Emily
Davison's funeral. Rossiter had been profoundly moved at her
self-sacrifice; she was moreover a Northumbrian and a distant
kinswoman. Perhaps, also, he felt that he had of late been a little
lukewarm over the Suffrage agitation. His motor-brougham,
containing with himself the very unwilling Mrs. Rossiter, followed
in the procession of six thousand persons which escorted the coffin
across London from Victoria station to King's Cross. A halt was made
outside a church in Bloomsbury where a funeral service was read.

Mrs. Rossiter thought the whole thing profoundly improper. In the
first place the young woman had committed suicide, which of itself
was a crime and disentitled you to Christian burial; in the second
she had died in a way greatly to inconvenience persons in the
highest society; in the third she had always understood that racing
was a perfectly proper pastime for gentlemen; and in the fourth this
incident, touching Michael through his relationship with the
deceased, would bring him again in contact with that Vivie
Warren--_there_ she was and there was _he_, in close converse--and
make a knighthood from a nearly relenting Government well-nigh
impossible. Rossiter, after the service, had begged Vivie to come
back to tea with them in Park Crescent and give Mrs. Rossiter and
himself a full account of what took place at Epsom. Vivie had
declined. She had not even spoken to the angry little woman, who had
refused to attend the service and had sat fuming all through the
half hour in her electric brougham, wishing she had the courage and
determination to order the chauffeur to turn round and run her home,
leaving the Professor to follow in a taxi. But perhaps if she did
that, he would go off somewhere with that Warren woman.

Michael presently re-entered the carriage and in silence they
returned to Portland Place.

The next day his wife meeting one of her Anti-Suffrage friends said:

"Er--supposing--er--you had got to know something about these
dreadful militant women, something which might help the police, yet
didn't want to get _too_ much mixed up with it yourself, and
_certainly_ not bring your husband into it--the Professor
_thoroughly_ disapproves of militancy, even though he may have
foolish ideas about the Vote--er--what would you do?"

"Well, what is it?"

"It's part of a letter."

"Well, I should just send it to the Criminal Investigation
Department, New Scotland Yard, and tell them under what
circumstances it came into your possession. You needn't even give
your name or address. They'll soon know whether it's any use or
not." So Mrs. Rossiter took from her desk that scrap of partly burnt
paper with the typewritten words on it which she had picked out of
the grate two and a half years before, and posted it to the Criminal
Investigation Department, with the intimation that this fragment had
come into the possession of the sender some time ago, and seemed to
refer to a militant Suffragist who called herself "Vivie Warren" or
"David Williams," and perhaps it might be of some assistance to the
authorities in tracking down these dangerous women who now stuck at
nothing. She posted the letter with her own hands in the North West
district. Park Crescent, Portland Place, she always reflected, was
still in the _Western_ district, though it lay perilously near the
North West border line, beyond which Lady Jeune had once written, no
one in Society thought of living. This was a dictum that at one time
had occasioned Mrs. Rossiter considerable perturbation. It was
alarming to think that by crossing the Marylebone Road or migrating
to Cambridge Terrace you had passed out of Society.


It took the police a deuce of a time--two months--to make use
effectively of the information contained in Mrs. Rossiter's scrap of
burnt paper; though the statement of their anonymous correspondent
that Vivie Warren and David Williams were probably the same person
helped to locate Mr. Michaelis's office. It was soon ascertained
that Miss Vivien Warren, well known as a sort of Society speaker on
Suffrage, lived at the Lilacs in Victoria Road, Kensington. But when
a plain-clothes policeman called at Victoria Road he was only told
by the Suffragette caretaker (whose mother now usually lived with
her to console her for her mistress's frequent absences) that Miss
Warren was away just then, had recently been much away from home,
probably abroad where her mother lived. (Here the enquirer
registered a mental note: Miss Warren has a mother living abroad:
could it be _the_ Mrs. Warren?). Polite and respectful calls on Lady
Feenix, Lady Maud Parry, and Mrs. Armstrong--Vivie's known
associates--elicted no information, till on leaving the last-named
lady's house in Kensington Square the detective heard Colonel
Armstrong come in from the garden and call out "Ho-no-ria."
"'--ria," he said to himself, "'-ria kept the keys, and
now--' Honoria. What was her name before she married Colonel
Armstrong?--why--" He soon found out--"Fraser." "Wasn't there once a
firm, _Fraser and Warren_, which set up to be some new dodge for
establishing women in a city career?--Accountancy? Stockbroking?
Where did _Fraser and Warren_ have their office? Fifth floor of
Midland Insurance office in Chancery Lane. What was that building
now called? No. 88-90." Done.

These two sentences run over a period of--what did I say? Two
months?--in their deductions and guesses and consultation of
out-of-date telephone directories. But on one day in September,
1913, two plain-clothes policemen made their way up to the fifth
floor of 88-90 Chancery Lane and found the outer door of Mr.
Michaelis's office locked and a notice board on it saying "Absent
till Monday." Not deterred by this, they forced open the door--to
the thrilling interest of a spectacled typewriteress, who had no
business on that landing at all, but she usually made assignations
there with the lift man. And on the writing table in the outer
office they found a note addressed to Miss Annie Kenney, which said
inside: "Dear Annie. If you should chance to look in between your
many imprisonments and find me out, you will know I am away on the
Firm's business, livening up the racing establishments of the Right
Honble Sir ---- ----, Bart. Bart. No one knows anything about this
at No. 94."

(This note was purely unnecessary--a bit of swagger perhaps, lest
Miss Kenney should think Vivie never did anything dangerous, but
only planned dangerous escapades for others. Like the long letter of
Vivie to Michael Rossiter, written on the last day of December,
1910, which he had imperfectly destroyed, it was a reminder of that
all-too-true saying: "Litera scripta manet.")

If the outer door of Michaelis's office was locked how could Miss
Kenney be expected to call and find this note awaiting her? Why,
_here_ came in the "No. 94" of the scrap of paper. There was an
over-the-roofs communication between the block of 88-90 and House
No. 94. The policemen in fact found that the large casement of the
partners' room was only pulled to, so that it was easily opened from
the outside. From the parapet they passed to the fire-escapes and
through the labyrinth of chimney stacks to a similar window leading
into the top storey of 94, the office of Mr. Algernon Mainwaring,
Hygienic Corset-maker. This office at the time of their unexpected
entry was fairly full of Suffragettes planning all sorts of direful
things. So the plain-clothes policemen had a rare haul that day and
certainly had Mrs. Rossiter to thank for rising to be Inspectors and
receiving some modest Order of later days. It was about the worst
blow the W.S.P.U. had; before the outbreak of War turned suddenly
the revolting women into the stanchest patriots and the right hands
of muddling ministers. For in addition to many a rich find in No. 94
and a dozen captives caught red-handed in making mock of the
Authorities, the plain-clothes policemen made themselves thoroughly
at home in Mr. Michaelis's quarters till the following Monday. And
when in the fore-noon of that day, Mr. Michaelis entered his rooms,
puzzled and perturbed at finding the outer door ajar, he was
promptly arrested on a multiform charge of arson ... and on being
conveyed to a police station and searched he was found to be Miss
Vivien Warren.

At intervals in the summer and early autumn of 1913 the male section
of the public had been horrified and scandalized at the destruction
going on in racing establishments, particularly those of Sir George
Crofts and of a well-known South American millionaire, whose
distinguished services to British commerce and immense donations to
Hospitals and Homes would probably be rewarded by a grateful
government. If these outrages were not stopped, horse-racing and
race-horse breeding must come to a stand-still; and we leave our
readers to realize what _that_ would mean! There would be no horses
for the plough or the gig, or the artillery gun-carriage;
no--er--fox-hunting, and without fox-hunting and steeple-chasing and
point-to-point races you could have no cavalry and without cavalry
you could have no army. If we neglected blood stock we would deal
the farmer a deadly blow, we should--er--

You know the sort of argument? Reduced to its essentials it is
simply this:--That a few rich people are fond of gambling and fond
of the excitement that is concentrated in the few minutes of the
horse race. Some others, not so rich, believe that by combining
horse-racing with a certain amount of cunning and bold cheating
they can make a great deal of money. A few speculators have invested
funds in spaces of open turf, and turn these spaces into race
courses. Having no alternative, no safer method of gambling offered
them, and being as fond of gambling as other peoples of the world,
the men of the labouring classes and a few of their women, the
publicans and their frequenters, army officers, farmers, and women
of uncertain virtue stake their money on horses they have never
seen, who may not even exist, and thus keep the industry going. And
the chevaliers of this "industry," the go-betweens, the parasites of
this sport, are the twelve thousand professional book-makers and
racing touts.

Somehow the Turf has during the last hundred years, together with
its allies the Distillers and Brewers, the Licensed Victuallers and
the Press that is supported by these agencies, acquired such a hold
over the Government Departments, the Labour Party, the Conservative
Party, and Liberal politicians who are descended from county
families, that it has more interest with those who govern us than
the Church, the Nonconformist Conscience, the County Palatine of
Lancaster or any other body of corporate opinion. So that when in
September, 1913, representatives of the Turf (and no doubt of the
Trade Unions) went to the Home Secretary in reference to the burning
and bombing of racing stables, trainers' houses, Grand Stands and
the residences of racing potentates, and said "Look here! This has
GOT TO STOP," the Home Secretary and the Cabinet knew they were up
against no ordinary crisis. At the same time Sir Edward Carson, the
Marquis of Londonderry, the Duke of Abercorn, Mr. F.E. Smith and
nearly a third of the Colonels in the British Army of Ulster descent
were actively organizing armed resistance to any measure of Home
Rule; while Keltiberian Ireland was setting up the Irish Volunteers
to start a Home Rule insurrection. You can therefore imagine for
yourselves the mental irritability of members of the Liberal Cabinet
in the autumn of the sinister year 1913. I have been told that there
were days at the House of Commons during the Autumn Session of that
year when the leading ministers would just shut themselves up in
their Private Rooms and scream on end for a quarter of an hour....
Of course an exaggeration, a sorry jest.

In retrospect one feels almost sorry for them: the Great War must
have come almost as a relief. Not one of them was what you would
call a bad man. Some of them suffered over forcible feeding and the
Cat and Mouse Act as acutely as does the loving father or mother who
says to the recently spanked child, "You _know_, dear, it hurts _me_
almost as much as it hurts _you_." If one met them out at dinner
parties, or in an express train which they could not stop by pulling
the communication cord, and sympathized with their dilemma, they
would ask plaintively _what_ they could do. They could not yield to
violence and anarchy; yet they could not let women die in prison.

Of course the answer was this, but it was one they waved aside:
"Dissolve Parliament and go to the Country on the one question of
Votes for Women. If the Country returns a great majority favourable
to that concession, you must bring in a Bill for eliminating the sex
distinction in the suffrage. If on the other hand, the Country votes
against the reform, then you must leave it to the women to make a
male electorate change its mind. And meantime if men and women, to
enforce some principle, rioted and were sent to prison for it, and
then started to abstain from food and drink, why they must please
themselves and die if they wanted to."

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. The very probable
story--though the Benchers were loth to take it up--that she had
actually in man's garb passed for the Bar and pleaded successfully
before juries, appalled some of the lawyer-ministers by its
revolutionary audacity. They might not be able to punish her on that
count or on several others of the misdemeanours imputed to her; but
they had got her, for sure, on Arson; and on the arson not of
suburban churches, which occurred sometimes at Peckham or in the
suburbs of Birmingham and made people laugh a little in the trains
coming up to town and say there were far too many churches, seemed
to them; _but_ the burning down of racing establishments. _That_ was
Bolshevism, indeed, they would have said, had they been able to
project their minds five years ahead. Being only in 1913 they called
Vivie by the enfeebled term of Anarchist, the word applied by
_Punch_ to Mr. John Burns in 1888 for wishing to address the Public
in Trafalgar Square.

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