Cranky Ladies of History

by Tehani Wessely

  Higgins had no such recourse. He fell back on officialdom, his only possible riposte.

  “Doctor,” through definitely gritted teeth. But his glare added, Wait for the new law. Just wait! “I am an officer of the police. It’s not my place—or my duty! —to decide, decide medical matters. My duty is to enforce the law—including speed limits!”

  “Ssssstt!”

  Lilian whirled about and almost flew to reach the crank. Higgins was so close to the bonnet she might well have assaulted his knees had I not gestured frantically at him and mouthed, “Post the summons!” He gave me a stare as vicious as the one he had aimed at Lilian, but he moved.

  When we had chugged at a decorous eight miles an hour back between the scalloped girders of the Victoria Bridge, I said, “My dear, you know, he was doing his duty. But you made an enemy of that man.”

  Lilian actually slammed a fist on the door top. “Damn it, Jo, the moron hinders and cumbers and thwarts my duty—my sacred Hippocratic duty! every time I turn around! I am sworn to salve injury and alleviate pain! How can I leave patients to suffer because I must creep at eight miles an hour for his piddling bloody traffic regulations?”

  “Yes, dear. And it is infuriating—more than infuriating! But will it help your patients, to have a personal vendetta with Higgins, if that Bill goes through?”

  “Damn the bloody Bill!” We wheeled summarily into George Street. By the greatest good fortune the way was for once clear. “And damn Higgins too!”

  I did not reply, Yes, dear. Lilian turned short for our driveway; but as the car came to a stop, she shut off the engine, leant on the steering wheel, and sighed.

  “You were right, Jo, as always. It was a low blow. But he vexes me beyond all bearing. Why doesn’t the fool government make laws that let us both do as we’ve sworn?” She bit her lip and swung open the car door. “Only one thing for it, Jo. We must enlist more Parliamentarians. That bloody Bill must. Not. Pass.”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  That night she cornered Dr Hardie in the theatre interval, during one of our rare uninterrupted treats. By the look of his protests before they parted, I gathered that “enlist more partisans” was easier said than done.

  Already concerned, after that day’s contretemps I came near dreading the thought of the Bill’s passage, imagining Lilian torn between the compulsion to reach her patients and dread of the inevitable speeding excess. And how if the law of instant arrest was passed, and Higgins caught up with her after another incident like the Woolloongabba clash?

  However pointlessly, I came near badgering Dr Hardie too. Then by pure chance, I collected an enthusiastic helper in the cause.

  We had met Mrs Longman during my five-year term as secretary of the Pioneer Club. A brisk, humourful woman who came to Queensland in 1904, she was a force in the attainment of state women’s suffrage in ’05, though we had met seldom since. Still, when her short-clipped head popped up beside me at the Creche and Playground Association meeting, I recognised the perky grin instantly.

  “Josephine!”

  “Irene! How charming to meet again!”

  “Indeed, indeed! Albert and I are down from Toowoomba for the entire day. Shall we have tea after this?”

  An early afternoon meeting left comfortable time to visit the Shingle Inn in Edward Street. Over their excellent scones we caught up on the four year hiatus, and soon I found myself pouring out the story of the Speed War: Higgins’ bloodhound propensities, Lilian’s devotion to her patients, my own fears. “Imagine, Irene, what life will be like for Lilian if this wretched Bill comes in!”

  “And for you, Josephine.” She gave me one of her warmly sympathetic glances and patted my glove beside the Inn’s solid but shining sugar bowl. “And for all the women and children who depend upon your doctor. Lilian is right, the Bill must not pass.”

  “But the Automobile Club cannot seem to find supporters.”

  “Tut, tut! Then we need other lobbyists, Josephine.”

  “Lilian’s patients, do you mean? There are certainly plenty, but—so many of them are not important people…”

  “But over half of them,” Irene pointed out, calmly, but with a twinkle, “have just acquired the vote.”

  “Oh! Oh, Irene, of course!”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  With suffrage won, Lilian and I had dropped out of electoral campaigning circles. Irene had not. Inside a week she had set her forces in motion through almost all Brisbane electorates; a good number of women responded, and many pledged to urge their husbands to join as well. “We have the perfect lever,” Irene told me cheerfully. “What patient or parent that Lilian’s helped will want to lose her? How many others will understand, when shown the consequences of the Bill for themselves?”

  The Doctor’s Protection League, as Irene wickedly termed it, was under way early in November, undeterred by a season of particularly fierce storms. In mid-November, Irene and I again took tea at the Shingle Inn. Though Irene’s neat head looked as perky as ever, I felt a qualm at the disparate expression on her face.

  “Try the rock cakes this time, Josephine, they really don’t live up to their name.”

  “Thank you, Irene, I will. How is dear Albert?”

  “Busy as always, the clever man.” She returned the menu to the arriving waitress. “Very willing to address his legislative member over that wretched Bill, as you might expect.”

  “So kind of him.” I concentrated on straightening the place mat. “And how is the whole campaign, Irene?”

  Irene made an all-too-graphic face. Not for the first time, I wished I felt as free to curse as Lilian.

  “There is support, Josephine, I assure you. Unfortunately, the motor-car has such a poor overall reputation, that,” she sighed and pushed her folded fan into her bag, “that even Lilian’s reputation has not—yet—managed to turn the scales.”

  She glanced back up at me and assumed cheerfulness. “We will keep working, Josephine, I do assure you. It’s not finished yet!”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  By the end of November, even Irene’s assurance could not ease my rising qualms. As Lilian and I drove home from attending a bad fall at a building site in Windsor, I reflected wretchedly on that morning’s gloat in the Truth: however eager, even impassioned, our supporters, the Parliamentary majority remained, by a narrow margin, in favour of the Bill.

  It was a torrid afternoon, the air heavy, the whey-and-charcoal clouds already milky with oncoming storm. Glancing up and back as we turned onto Lutwyche Road, Lilian remarked, “I hope we get through consulting hours before it breaks.”

  I could not help adding, “I hope no one founders horses, getting home,” and she gave me a warm smile.

  “One thing to be said for the new motor-cabs, Jo.”

  Lilian had been delighted by the reception of my paper at the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but preaching to the converted does not always bring wider change. She also knew the plight of cab-horses over-driven or under-watered distressed me almost more than any other abuse.

  I produced a matching smile. Lilian transferred her attention back to the road ahead, and stiffened with a jerk.

  “And here’s a very bad case.”

  The traffic that far up Lutwyche Road is lightest between two and three o’clock, with few delivery carts or vans or workers’ bicycles, only the occasional omnibus and horse or motor-cab, and rarer private cars. But from the haze of dust and fumes and glittering metal a rider was racing at near full gallop on a lathered horse.

  I caught a glimpse as they flew by: a grey horse blackened with sweat and white with foam, a spatter of red from over-used spurs, some kind of bag or pack over a blue workman’s shirt, hat pulled down to hide all but a flying moustache. The horse swerved past an approaching wagonette and Lilian exclaimed, “The damn fool!” I could not help crying, “That poor beast!”

  “I’d go back, but…” Lilian touched my elbow lightly b
efore she turned her attention to the road. I knew the “but”: I already have people ahead, waiting for evening surgery, also expecting my help.

  “No.” I understand. I tried to divert my attention. “Do you imagine, an urgent telegram? A crisis at the Post Office? Some kind of telegraph break-down? That satchel—was it mail?”

  “A good question, Jo. And a good thing they don’t apply speed limits to horses, or Higgins would be hot on his tracks—Good God! There he is!”

  “Higgins! Surely not—good heavens! But what has happened to him?”

  Lilian slapped on the brakes to cut behind yet another omnibus and whipping the car through a convenient gap pulled across and up behind the furious figure at the gutter edge.

  Higgins was as black with sweat and dust as the unfortunate horse, and crimson enough to herald a coronary. His bicycle was crumpled at his feet; he was alternately kicking its frame out of shape and waving furiously at oncoming motor traffic, which, unable to distinguish his uniform and unnerved by his behaviour, kept swerving wildly out around him in the street.

  “Constable, what’s wrong?”

  Lilian can make herself heard on a building site. Higgins whirled about and noticed us for the first time.

  He went purple as an egg-plant fruit: rage, embarrassment, chagrin, fury churned visibly over his features. I called out before he could either expire or burst.

  “Is it the man on the grey horse?”

  “The—the—”

  He strangled a fresh gout of profanity. “Madam—police business—” He almost choked. Another motor-cab escaped his clutches and he kicked the fallen bicycle a car length down the street. “Ah, ah, DAMN!”

  Lilian suddenly pulled the handbrake on. “Jo,” she said crisply, “can you get in the tonneau? And keep safe?”

  I understood almost as she spoke. “Of course, my dear.” Flinging my own door open, I scrambled round among the surgical impedimenta in the tonneau, even as Lilian leant out and shouted, “Constable Higgins! Over here!”

  Higgins glared. Lilian used her operating theatre voice. “Get in my car. The horse went straight on up Lutwyche Road.”

  Higgins’ jaw dropped. Then the eyes sparked blue in his scarlet face and he charged for my open door.

  Lilian put the car in gear, revved hard, and before Higgins landed had catapulted us into the street.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Clinging for dear life to the tonneau side I had a mad urge to declaim dear Mr Paterson’s “Lay of the Motor-Car”: We’re away! And the wind whistles shrewd/ In our whiskers and teeth! For the wind was certainly whistling in Higgins’ whiskers and he was clinging to the dashboard harder than I.

  Lilian whipped round another slow wagonette. Higgins came as near as a grown man can to a squeak and I suddenly understood he had never driven with her at speed, maybe never driven at speed in a motor-car at all.

  Lilian hit an open furlong and put her foot down. The speedometer crept round past twenty, reached for twenty-five. Higgins made a noise that might have been, “Oh, Gawd,” and I shouted into the gale, “What did he do? The man on the horse?”

  Higgins spluttered. I expected another cry of “Police business!” Instead he straightened half an inch and bawled, “The ba—the mongrel shot through with the whole Lennons’ payroll!”

  “Oh, damn!”

  Higgins boggled. I knew Lilian and I were both remembering scores of cooks, maids, charwomen and washerwomen we had tended. People whose loss of a week’s pay from the big hotel would mean not merely vexation but privation for them and their families. I yelled, “How did he get out here?”

  Lilian threw the car down a gear behind another omnibus, revved up, swirled round the bus and cut across the bows of an approaching wagon. Higgins gurgled and seized the distraction.

  “Bailed up the bank-van right at the door—arp!” Lilian had ducked round a pair of cyclists so close I saw the whites of their eyes. “Got clear up Queen Street, dodged the blokes at Brunswick corner—I was at the General, the station called—oof!” We flew across an intersection just ahead of a smartly trotting dog-cart. “Ahh…” With a wheeze Higgins regained his breath. “I cut him at the hospital crossing. Horse was lathered, reckoned to hang on him till the horse dropped—then I done the bloody bike!”

  “And not a cab would stop.” I could not help feeling sympathy. No wonder he had kicked the offending bicycle down the street!

  “Nobody else out here, if I coulda kept him in sight—!”

  “We’ll get him back.” Lilian said it the way she told patients’ panicking relatives that their loved ones were “as bad as they could be, but I’ll get them through.” Higgins’ shoulders shifted. Then he actually turned his head to give her one wind-teary, astonished, almost, I thought, wondering glance.

  Lilian did not notice. Her eyes were slitted at the road, where ahead of us an empty space ended in another clutch of cyclists. And beyond them, the silhouette of a racing horse.

  “There he is!” Higgins slammed the dashboard. “By Gawd, Doctor, you get me up with him and we’ll run that beast into the ground!”

  “Oh, Lilian.” The protest was torn out of me. I could not bear the thought of the innocent, helpless horse destroyed, and by those on the side of the law.

  “Can’t run it down, Constable.” Lillian accelerated across another intersection. The speedometer hit thirty and two astonished butcher-boys fell off their cart-poles. “Jo wouldn’t like it. But…”

  The speedometer dropped back to twenty-five. Lilian remarked into the almost conversation-level lull, “This car’s supposed to be quiet as a ghost. ”

  “Huh?” was Higgins’ contribution. But I had seen a goat-cart emerge from what must be a back-lane some quarter-mile ahead. Still well in front of the now labouring, barely trotting horse.

  “Oh!” I cried thankfully. “Oh, Lilian, yes!”

  “Hang on, all.”

  Again it was the surgeon’s voice. The intervening traffic, another fruiterer’s cart, sailed under Higgins’ elbow. The road opened, two hundred yards perhaps to the horse, another hundred to the lane.

  Lilian floored the accelerator. The car surged forward with a high version of its usual muffled roar. House-fronts whipped past, the horse’s quarters suddenly loomed in the windscreen and Lilian whisked the car right up beside it and hit the brakes.

  The Humber screeched its loudest and best. The man shouted, the horse tried to hurl itself sideways and blundered head-first into the alley mouth. Lilian stood on the brakes again and leant on the steering wheel so the car propped short and then shot round into the noisome alley, just as the horse stumbled over a deep rut and went down, flinging its rider out ahead.

  Lilian braked us dead and rapped, “Constable?”

  Your man, your business. Higgins had not needed the invitation. He was already wrenching at the door. The handle gave, he tumbled out and charged, with the weight and velocity of an angry elephant, and a veritable gorilla’s roar.

  Law-maker and breaker hit the alley-dirt amid a mighty dust cloud. Lilian said in satisfaction, “There you are, Jo,” switched off, and got out.

  I was out as fast and making for the horse. Lilian delayed only to seize the spare rope we keep under the seats, before she swept down on Higgins and his prey.

  Higgins had already made his own arrangements, I found, when I had time to spare from capturing the horse’s reins and soothing it to its feet. Lilian had the rope ready, but Higgins had dislodged the haversack with a knee in the middle of the prone captive’s back, produced a pair of handcuffs from somewhere, and got one round a flailing wrist. Lilian was just in time to rope the other close enough for the second cuff.

  Wheezing, puffing, uniform black with dust and sweat, lurid face powdered with dust like a floured oven-roast, Higgins rose to his feet, replaced the pinning knee with a foot, and in a pose like a triumphant big-game hunter, began declaiming, “I arrest you in the name of the King for armed robbery, illegal discharge
of fire-arms, wilful attempt to injure police-officers, and…and…”

  There he had to stop and wheeze. The prone captive was too winded to protest, but Lilian’s lips suddenly twitched.

  “And riding without due care and attention, Constable?”

  Higgins’ head whipped round. They stared for what seemed a full minute. Then, to my utter disbelief, Higgins’ dust-caked countenance split in a slow, magnificent grin.

  “Orright, doc.” He made a dab at his temple, whence his hat had long since fled. “We’ll call it quits, hey? That was, um—quite a chase. But I’ve—we’ve got him. And the money. Ain’t even ruined the horse.” His chest seemed to swell. “With a single-handed arrest. I reckon, you’ll do me a bitta good over this.” The grin subsided into sober promise. “And I reckon, I’m gonna do a bitta good for you.”

  Lilian’s amusement had also vanished. After a moment she began to coil up the rope. Then, as soberly as Higgins had spoken, she said, “Yes, Constable. Whatever you chance to do, we’ll call it quits.”

  A moment later shouts, police whistles and the reverberations of another over-heated car motor began to ricochet down the alleyway. Lillian stepped back, Higgins resumed his big-game hunter’s pose, and we led the hobbling horse clear as the rest of the police arrived.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Precisely what Higgins did and how he did it we have never been privileged to learn. What we do know is that shortly after the briefly notorious “Lennons’ Payroll Robbery” arrest, he was promoted to Sergeant. We hear, via the newspapers, that as finances become available the Police Commissioner plans to expand police car numbers from two to something nearer a fleet.

  Better still, Mr Feez and other reputable sources inform us that the Police Commissioner has withdrawn support for the Police Jurisdiction and Summary Offences Bill. It may never come before Parliament, and if it does, it will not pass.