Dreamers of the Day

“Nonsense,” Wilson snapped. “We need more troops on the ground, not fewer.”

“And with Marigold ill with influenza, the whole experience was positively nightmarish!” Mrs. Churchill was saying.

I tried to look interested and sympathetic, but I was distracted by a rising tension between Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They sat side by side, staring straight ahead, but now addressed their remarks to each other. Mrs. Churchill and Lady Cox began to discuss the scandalous state of “checkers.” When I looked lost, Lawrence told me in a low voice that they were speaking not of the board game but of the prime minister’s official residence. “Chequers was built in the reign of Henry II for his clerk of the Exchequer. Hence the name,” he said. The home was last remodeled in 1580. I gathered it was in need of repair.

“Arnold,” Miss Bell was telling Colonel Wilson, “when we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there won’t be an Arab in Syria or Palestine who won’t want to be part of it, but they will never accept direct rule. You saw that last year.”

“Gertrude,” he countered, “you ca

“Well, of course,” Miss Bell said airily, “we’ll have to take Kurdish sentiments into account.”

“I rather like our Gertrude’s idea,” Mr. Churchill declared. “Saves the expense of administration in triplicate.”

“It will cost more in the long run,” Colonel Wilson insisted. “What do you propose to do about the Shi’a in Karbala and Najaf ? The level of religious bigotry in those regions is staggering! The Persian clergy spends half its time fostering hatred—”

“And what age of child do you teach, Miss Shanklin?” Mrs. Churchill asked, trying to draw me back into the ladies’ conversation.

“Fifth grade,” I said. “That would be ten-year-olds, for the most part.”

“Tikrit!” Colonel Wilson cried. “Don’t talk to me about Tikrit— that city is home to the most brutal, boorish, savage—”

“Ten? Why, that’s just my Randolph’s age,” Mrs. Churchill said, raising her voice slightly as Colonel Wilson’s grew louder.

“You must miss him very much,” I offered, hoping to send her off on a maternal soliloquy so I could hear what Miss Bell would say in reply.

“I simply do not understand that child,” Mrs. Churchill confessed. “His sister Diana is high-spirited, but Randolph!” She lifted her eyes heavenward, and I saw the look of exasperated incomprehension that my own mother so often wore in my childhood.

Half-listening to Mrs. Churchill’s complaints about her son, I thought it obvious that the boy was doing everything he could think of to get his peripatetic parents to stay home for a change and pay some attention to him. With no children of my own, I had no right to voice an opinion, so I confined myself to mute courtesy during her despairing account of the governesses her son had driven away with a dismaying series of insurrections.

“Yes, like the one last summer,” said her husband. I thought he was referring to his young son’s rebellion, but Mr. Churchill went on, “And not just in Mesopotamia. We’ll be lucky to hold off the Bolsheviks in Persia—there’s no shifting them from Russia now. There’s trouble in Ireland, and India. And Egypt! And Palestine! And why our esteemed prime minister has decided to back the Greeks against the Turks in Cyprus simply passeth understanding.”

To my astonishment, the cadaverous Lord Cox turned unblinking eyes toward me and growled, “We have your President Wilson to thank for these rebellions. All that talk about the end of colonial rule—”

“The Great Promiser,” Mr. Churchill sighed. “Freedom and democracy for all!”

“Arab nationalism is a fraud. Their loyalty is to their tribe,” Lord Cox declared, glaring at me. “They have no concept of democracy,” he said, making the word sound as though it were a synonym for “turd.” “They believe freedom is an object that can be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.”

“They must surely know what freedom isn’t,” I said. “It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation.”

At the sound of that ringing phrase, Miss Bell informed me tartly that the taxes we Americans had protested were incurred when the Plymouth colonists started a war with the Wampanoag and wiped out the buffer tribes that had shielded them from the Iroquois Confederacy. “You needed troops and we taxed you to pay for them,” she told me, and then addressed the table: “Our American cousins … often ignorant, but never without opinions.”

“Well, perhaps if you’d asked our opinion about the troops and the taxes, you might have avoided a war,” I replied. Lawrence giggled happily, and thus encouraged, I went on, even though the others began to look uncomfortable. “It appears to me that Britain proposes to follow American footsteps in the Philippines,” I said, “and I don’t recommend it. We helped the Filipinos overthrow the Spanish, but did we allow them then to choose their own form of government? No! We a

“Goodness, you are quite well informed, Miss Shanklin,” said Mrs. Churchill, her voice sweet. “And what do you think of your new president? Mr. Harding is from Ohio, I understand. That’s near Cleveland, isn’t it?”

“I passed through Cleveland on the way to Niagara Falls from Chicago,” said Miss Bell. “Dreadful. Did you vote for Harding?” she asked me, her brows arched. “Many women did, of course. Handsome man, if vacuous. So much for suffrage.”

“ ‘O! Why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven with Spirits masculine, create at last this novelty on Earth, this fair defect of Nature?’ ” Mr. Churchill declaimed, his fork stirring the air. “Be careful, Miss Shanklin. Our Gertrude has as low an opinion of her sex as the immortal Milton. She lent her considerable energies to the Anti-Suffrage League when she was at home before the war.”

I was, I must tell you, stu

“The role of women in society is fundamentally different from that of men,” Miss Bell said firmly. “They have no business meddling in the affairs of state—”

“Never stopped you, Gert,” Colonel Lawrence remarked, to general amusement.

“But then, I am hardly representative, am I, dear boy? The intelligence and experience of a few do not argue for giving the vote to masses of illiterate and exhausted women surrounded by screaming toddlers and infants wailing for milk.”

“Perhaps if they had the vote,” I said, “they could choose representatives who’d protect their interests. What they need is education—”

“Spoken like a teacher,” Lawrence said.

“I, for one, welcome the opportunity to vote,” Mrs. Churchill said, taking my side.

“But surely you’re not old enough, my dear,” said her husband.

“Women must be over thirty to vote in England,” the elderly Lady Cox informed me with another pat.

“That alone will keep most of them from the ballot box until they’re fifty,” Miss Bell added.

“I am quite old enough to vote, thank you,” said Mrs. Churchill primly, “and not too vain to admit it.”

“Clementine, don’t tell me you were a suffragette!” Lady Cox cried.

“Heavens, no! I supported votes for women, but not like that awful Mrs. Pankhurst and the harridans who followed her,” said Mrs. Churchill bitterly. “One of those women tried to push Winston in front of a train, Miss Shanklin. They threatened to kidnap our children! We had to hire armed guards.”