The Mating Impulse by Edwin Balmer
Andy Farnham, an American traveling in Lord Morton's shooting party through Durham and Northumberland, has been searching England for Roberta Leigh, an American girl who has spent the summer as a militant suffragette, burning and destroying property for "the Cause." Convinced his pursuit is hopeless, Andy has stopped actively searching, but at a small junction station he spots Roberta's distinctive black week-end box on the platform. He traces the porter's account of its journey and follows the box's trail to the town of Stoketon, where he registers at an inn and discovers a room, taken under the name Constance Everett, with a climbing rope hung from its window. That night he waits in the garden and witnesses Roberta descend the rope moments after an explosion destroys the town armory, which she has set ablaze. Police and townspeople give chase; Andy hides her, and she becomes terrified on overhearing that Reedy and his wife may have been sleeping inside the burning building. Andy investigates, learns no one was harmed, and diverts the pursuing officers by pointing them toward another American girl, Harriet Dale, who resembles Roberta and is mistaken for her. Andy then persuades Roberta to flee with him, proposing they pose as eloping lovers—the one disguise no one would associate with a militant suffragette—arranging for Harriet to unknowingly continue the impersonation aboard the liner Corinthian while he and Roberta sail for America on the Cumberland. At sea, wireless bulletins report that officers aboard the Corinthian have identified their passenger as Roberta and that she will be rushed back to England for trial once the ship reaches New York. Andy and Roberta, sailing under assumed circumstances as an eloping couple, fence over her true feelings, both for him and for the suffrage cause, as the faster Corinthian steadily overtakes the fog-bound Cumberland. Learning from the ship's sympathetic relief wireless operator that his sister supports suffrage, Andy bribes him into sending a false distress signal—impersonating the freighter Wellington, actually far to the east—hoping to lure the Corinthian off course. The operator only transmits the message after much hesitation and a large bribe, and in the ensuing panic when Andy tries to disable the apparatus so the ruse cannot be retracted, a genuine fire breaks out in the ship's stores, and the wireless is wrecked in the struggle. With the Cumberland now truly ablaze and unable to summon real help, Roberta calms passengers' panic by using sandpaper blocks to fake the rasping sound of a working wireless while the crew fights the fire and fires rescue rockets. The ship's officers, deducing that the German liner Elbe may also have received the false distress call, steer to intercept her, and the Elbe arrives in time to take off the Cumberland's passengers; the Corinthian, having chased the phantom distress call, returns too late and instead stands by the burning, salvaged Cumberland. Because the Elbe reaches New York first, Roberta's arrest is delayed until the Corinthian docks, and the misidentified Harriet Dale's exposure again throws the authorities off Roberta's trail. On the Sunday before the Corinthian's arrival, Andy visits Roberta at a classmate's country place up the Hudson and urges her to marry him for safety. Roberta reveals she has already instructed her lawyer to pay for all the property damage she caused, explaining that her acts of militancy were never truly about suffrage but were provoked by wanting to prove indifference toward Andy, whom she had loved since childhood. They reconcile, marry, and sail for Brazil the next morning. British officials react with fresh outrage on discovering the Corinthian's passenger is not Roberta after all, while suffragist leaders denounce Roberta's restitution payments as proof of insincerity and cite her marriage as final confirmation of her defection from the Cause.
By Edwin Balmer · First published 1911 · Genre: Romance, Satire, Comedy · 13,700 words
First lines
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.
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Genres
- Romance — The central emotional arc traces Andy's romantic pursuit of Roberta from their childhood rivalry through passion and commitment, culminating in marriage as the narrative's resolution.
- Satire — The work satirizes both militant suffragism and gender dynamics, using irony to expose how courtship and attraction operate beneath ideological posturing, particularly through the German psychologist's 'mating impulse' theory.
- Comedy — Explicitly labeled as 'A comedy of The Cause,' the narrative employs witty dialogue, situational irony, and humorous observations about courtship, misidentification, and social conventions throughout.
- Adventure — Major plot components include arson, police pursuit, escape across jurisdictions, false identity assumption, and high-stakes survival on the burning Cumberland at sea.
Tags
suffragettes · women's suffrage · feminism · militant activism · romance · love story · adventure · comedy · romantic comedy · fugitive · evasion · police pursuit
What this Textopian page supports
The Mating Impulse is listed on Textopian as a novella by Edwin Balmer, dated 1911 CE.
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- Work type: Novella
- Author: Edwin Balmer
- Date: 1911 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Romance, Satire, Comedy, Adventure, Romantic Comedy
- Length: 13,700 words
- Structure: 1 section, 283 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
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- Work identity for The Mating Impulse by Edwin Balmer
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
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