The mating impulse

Author of “The Peace Advocate,” “Under the Orion,” Etc.

A comedy of “The Cause”--which almost became a tragedy. How an American girl became the most militant of militant suffragists and narrowly escaped a chance for a hunger strike in an English prison.

It was the day in autumn which, in Scotland and England, opens the season for red grouse, the great game bird of the northern counties and the highlands of heather; and at five o’clock in the glorious, clear afternoon, the Northeastern’s extra train from London, hurrying special parties of sportsmen to their Scotch shooting boxes, had gained the wooded hills of Durham and Northumberland.

Peace and tranquillity--almost somnolency--lay over the land. Gentle slopes of brown grain ripened in the sun; in meadows, red and white cattle grazed; a few farmers envied the passing sportsmen from gardens of late lettuce and greens. Beyond and all about were heavy woodlands, deep green with the sun on oak leaves, burnished with the copper of beeches and with the ground all dark with the shade of ancient, guarded trees. A lane through them showed an English gentleman’s home unchanged in four hundred years; the towers of a Norman cathedral asked no more favors of the woods than it had eight centuries earlier, when Northumberland knight and esquire looked to the stone summits from the road upon which the train now ran. The sparkle of water sometimes shone as the land lowered to the right. There was the North Sea; and if it brought to the sportsmen disturbing thoughts of Germany beyond, it showed them also a British dreadnaught steaming off the coast on watch.

The newspapers brought reports of grouse in unusual numbers; coveys clouded the moors. As the train ran more silently, the eager yelp of the bird dogs in the forward vans came to the men in the reserved compartments. Servants entered to lift tea baskets down from the racks heavy with guns; they lit spirit lamps and arranged sandwiches. The English, upon the extra train for Scotland, sighed with deep content.

Andy Farnham, the American in Lord Morton’s party, alone marred the universal satisfaction. He sat at his window--and the possession of a forward window seat in a compartment with seven Englishmen proved him a young man of no mean enterprise--disconsolate, discouraged. He was a tall, lithe-shouldered gentleman of some twenty-five tanned summers, with the firm hand of the racing motorist, the enviable poise of a man who has survived a pair of monoplanes, and with the abiding faith in his final fortunes which such repeated survival begets. Now, however, between depths of despondency, he opened the pages of an English quarterly review and read--in open disregard of his companions in the compartment--an article by a leading German authority entitled “The Psychology of the Suffragist Outbreaks.”

Anon, the English disported themselves after their fashion.

“I say, Andrew, dear fellow, perk up! Some one will surely arrest her for you soon. Monte, how’s this? Suppose the police chaps, who are after Miss Leigh, catch her; and then Andy, here, finding her, you see, should get her to marry him--would you call that marriage by capture? Rather rare, what?”

“Oh, put it in Punch,” Andy appealed and let a servant hand him tea.

He was in England, as his world knew, to find Roberta Leigh. She, as all the world was widely aware, had passed a very, very stirring summer in Britain burning and laying waste to win votes for women. Yet for more than a month, Andy had followed her trail vainly. Therefore, he now was abandoning the search; first, because it had begun to dawn upon him that, unless Roberta wished him to find her, the results of success in his search would be decidedly doubtful; and second, for some weeks the efforts of the London police, aided by the outraged local authorities of nine shocked shires and counties, had made any purely private pursuit of Miss Leigh seem superfluous. So, as he proceeded north, he contented himself with buying the papers to learn what the police were accomplishing. Between times he read his review.

“Those observers who see in the feminist movement a weakening of the mating impulse in the woman,” he repeatedly rehearsed one paragraph, “are grievously mistaken. Indeed, the feminist movement--particularly in its most violent manifestations on the part of the so-called militant suffragettes--is only a newer phase of the pseudo defiance of man by woman which, from the earliest times, has been employed by woman to attract man.”

He looked up and, carefully putting his finger in the place at the paragraph, he stared out the car window as the train stopped. It was at only a little country station where a spur of track ran from the main line. Passengers were changing to a couple of stubby cars standing on that spur. Since he personally resolutely had abandoned the search for Roberta, he did not scrutinize the passengers closely. He merely made sure that there were only two girls in sight, and that the one, who might possibly be mistaken for Roberta, was not she; then he drew his head back within the window. His train started deliberately. He was glancing down to find his page in the pleasant quarterly review, when a pile of luggage on the platform appeared. On top of the pile stood a small, black, oblong, week-end box--half trunk, half hand bag--much pasted with customs labels and scratched with chalk, but quite definite and individual of size and shape. Andy saw it, and, with the startled cry of the incredulous, jumped to his feet, reckless of where the tea splashed.

“That’s hers. Join you later, if I’m wrong,” he condensed explanation, farewell, and promise to his hosts; and, as the train was still moving slowly, and the compartment was private and not locked, he opened the door and sprang down upon the end of the platform.

The train for Scotland kept on; the passengers for the stubby cars on the spur were settling themselves in their seats. Swiftly but thoroughly, Andy searched through each compartment. He was beginning to think he might have been impulsive in leaving his party when he returned to the pile of luggage. But there was no possible doubt of the week-end box. Its owner might not be present; but it was, or at least it had been, possessed by her for whom he--and the police also--searched.

“Who’s with that?” he demanded of the luggage porter bearing it toward the train.

“Wot?” the man put it down with resigned reproach. “And now you clime it, sir?”

Andy assured that, so far from asserting possession, his whole desire was to discover the owner.

She, it appeared, had proceeded some twenty-four hours previously through this junction to the ancient and historic town of Stoketon to which definite designation, the porter fervently prayed, the stubby train safely and swiftly would convey the box and thereby spare a hitherto careful and completely competent porter from further blame for misunderstanding the direction of the index finger of a gentleman much under the influence of liquor the day before, who appeared to claim the black box for his own, and was satisfied to take it with him twenty miles in the wrong direction. Simultaneously with the gentleman’s sobering up and returning the box, female inquiry had come from Stoketon. No, nothing more alarming than the loss of luggage had been heard from Stoketon.

Apparently, Roberta was still there and would remain, as nothing yet had happened. Possibly the contents of the box were such that she could not proceed to the business of her visit without it. Andy watched, not without apprehension, as the porter dumped the box onto the luggage van. Nothing eventuated; and, as the stubby train was starting, he got into the nearest passenger compartment.

Two American girls shared the seats with him--one was the girl who, for a moment, he had believed might be Roberta when he saw her on the platform. But these were not of the caste of mind to be among Roberta’s associates. An adventure was up for discussion between them; it was nothing more violent or destructive in character than a project to purchase certain extra items of dress at the price of returning to America second class or, perhaps, steerage. The girl, something like Roberta, and about her age of twenty-four, urged this. Andy groped absently on the seat beside him for his magazine. He had dropped it on the other train; so he contented himself, as he sat back, with rehearsing its most encouraging paragraphs.

The shadows of the long English twilight rose from the hills; the smoke of the evening fires lifted lazily from the chimney pots of a little town as the train stopped at Stoketon. Andy, stepping out at the station, stood staring about a moment, looking, listening, as if expectant. An old castle showed on a hill; in another quarter, a church from which chimes sounded softly. He looked from one of these to the other, and then glanced toward a third prominent structure, the nature of which he could not determine. He seemed expecting some sudden change in one of them. The moving off of the train recalled him. The girls who had shared the compartment with him had alighted there, too, and were instructing the porters where to take their luggage. The men moved off, leaving Roberta’s black, week-end box on the platform alone.

Andy sat down and watched it; but concern over it had ceased. It was left on the platform, unclaimed and uncalled for, when the last porter lit the lamps and placed them on the switches and in the signal positions. Evidently the stubby train was to return that night; but not soon. The last porter closed the station and started away.

“Which are the inns to which ladies might go alone?” Andy asked the man. “Not very timid ladies,” he particularized.

The first three hostelries suggested gave Andy only blanks; but at the fourth, which he reached when at last the twilight had gone into the soft autumn night, he studied the register of guests with greater care. Roberta’s name did not appear; but another name was written by a hand which, though disguised, could have been hers. He sent up his card to Miss Constance Everett in room eighteen. She was stopping there, it appeared, with an English aunt, and she had gone to her room early with the aunt who had a headache.

Andy looked about as he waited. The place was perfect for the planning of catastrophe--an ancient inn with dim, paneled walls, ceiling beamed and smoked by sweet wood fires, a sleepy, unsuspicious guest house, offering always its old flagon of cherry cordial to greet each visitor, and holding other traditions unchanged to charm old ladies traveling.

Miss Everett did not respond to the knock on her door; her aunt also seemed asleep. Did the gentleman, who undoubtedly was a close friend, if not a connection, wish Miss Everett awakened?

“Please,” Andy requested; but before the servant left the hall, he recalled caution. “No, do not disturb her; let no one disturb her. Give me a room, please.”

As he followed his guide, he noted carefully the position of room eighteen. He went down again, and, denying his need for supper, stepped out to smoke in the garden.