Ann Veronica

by H. G. Wells

  For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one another.

  The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became suddenly tragically real for Ann Veronica. There he sat, cheerfully friendly in his sex's freedom—the man she loved, the one man she cared should unlock the way to the wide world for her imprisoned feminine possibilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled under his eyes; he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence of the souls of women against the fate of their conditions.

  Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used at every discussion, her contribution to the great question.

  She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of life—their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their children fine and splendid.

  "Women should understand men's affairs, perhaps," said Miss Garvice, "but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise now."

  "There IS something sound in that position," said Capes, intervening as if to defend Miss Garvice against a possible attack from Ann Veronica. "It may not be just and so forth, but, after all, it is how things are. Women are not in the world in the same sense that men are—fighting individuals in a scramble. I don't see how they can be. Every home is a little recess, a niche, out of the world of business and competition, in which women and the future shelter."

  "A little pit!" said Ann Veronica; "a little prison!"

  "It's just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things are."

  "And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den."

  "As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training and tradition and instinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a mother; her sympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to the shorn woman."

  "I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, "that you could know what it is to live in a pit!"

  She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup beside Miss Garvice's. She addressed Capes as though she spoke to him alone.

  "I can't endure it," she said.

  Every one turned to her in astonishment.

  She felt she had to go on. "No man can realize," she said, "what that pit can be. The way—the way we are led on! We are taught to believe we are free in the world, to think we are queens.... Then we find out. We find out no man will treat a woman fairly as man to man—no man. He wants you—or he doesn't; and then he helps some other woman against you.... What you say is probably all true and necessary.... But think of the disillusionment! Except for our sex we have minds like men, desires like men. We come out into the world, some of us—"

  She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed to her to mean nothing, and there was so much that struggled for expression. "Women are mocked," she said. "Whenever they try to take hold of life a man intervenes."

  She felt, with a sudden horror, that she might weep. She wished she had not stood up. She wondered wildly why she had stood up. No one spoke, and she was impelled to flounder on. "Think of the mockery!" she said. "Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled! I know we seem to have a sort of freedom.... Have you ever tried to run and jump in petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them—soul and mind and body! It's fun for a man to jest at our position."

  "I wasn't jesting," said Capes, abruptly.

  She stood face to face with him, and his voice cut across her speech and made her stop abruptly. She was sore and overstrung, and it was intolerable to her that he should stand within three yards of her unsuspectingly, with an incalculably vast power over her happiness. She was sore with the perplexities of her preposterous position. She was sick of herself, of her life, of everything but him; and for him all her masked and hidden being was crying out.

  She stopped abruptly at the sound of his voice, and lost the thread of what she was saying. In the pause she realized the attention of the others converged upon her, and that the tears were brimming over her eyes. She felt a storm of emotion surging up within her. She became aware of the Scotch student regarding her with stupendous amazement, a tea-cup poised in one hairy hand and his faceted glasses showing a various enlargement of segments of his eye.

  The door into the passage offered itself with an irresistible invitation—the one alternative to a public, inexplicable passion of weeping.

  Capes flashed to an understanding of her intention, sprang to his feet, and opened the door for her retreat.

  Part 8

  "Why should I ever come back?" she said to herself, as she went down the staircase.

  She went to the post-office and drew out and sent off her money to Ramage. And then she came out into the street, sure only of one thing—that she could not return directly to her lodgings. She wanted air—and the distraction of having moving and changing things about her. The evenings were beginning to draw out, and it would not be dark for an hour. She resolved to walk across the Park to the Zoological gardens, and so on by way of Primrose Hill to Hampstead Heath. There she would wander about in the kindly darkness. And think things out....

  Presently she became aware of footsteps hurrying after her, and glanced back to find Miss Klegg, a little out of breath, in pursuit.

  Ann Veronica halted a pace, and Miss Klegg came alongside.

  "Do YOU go across the Park?"

  "Not usually. But I'm going to-day. I want a walk."

  "I'm not surprised at it. I thought Mr. Capes most trying."

  "Oh, it wasn't that. I've had a headache all day."

  "I thought Mr. Capes most unfair," Miss Klegg went on in a small, even voice; "MOST unfair! I'm glad you spoke out as you did."

  "I didn't mind that little argument."

  "You gave it him well. What you said wanted saying. After you went he got up and took refuge in the preparation-room. Or else I would have finished him."

  Ann Veronica said nothing, and Miss Klegg went on: "He very often IS—most unfair. He has a way of sitting on people. He wouldn't like it if people did it to him. He jumps the words out of your mouth; he takes hold of what you have to say before you have had time to express it properly."

  Pause.

  "I suppose he's frightfully clever," said Miss Klegg.

  "He's a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he can't be much over thirty," said Miss Klegg.

  "He writes very well," said Ann Veronica.

  "He can't be more than thirty. He must have married when he was quite a young man."

  "Married?" said Ann Veronica.

  "Didn't you know he was married?" asked Miss Klegg, and was struck by a thought that made her glance quickly at her companion.

  Ann Veronica had no answer for a moment. She turned her head away sharply. Some automaton within her produced in a quite unfamiliar voice the remark, "They're playing football."

  "It's too far for the ball to reach us," said Miss Klegg.

  "I didn't know Mr. Capes was married," said Ann Veronica, resuming the conversation with an entire disappearance of her former lassitude.

  "Oh yes," said Miss Klegg; "I thought every one knew."

  "No," said Ann Veronica, offhandedly. "Never heard anything of it."

  "I thought every one knew. I thought every one had heard about it."

  "But why?"

  "He's married—and, I believe, living separated from his wife. There was a case, or something, some years ago."

  "What case?"

  "A divorce—or something—I don't know. But I have heard that he almost had to leave the schools. If it hadn't been for Professor Russell standing up for him, they say he would have had to leave."

  "Was he divorced, do you mean?"

  "No, but he got himself mixed up in a divorce case. I forget the particulars, but I know it was something very disagreeable. It was among artistic people."

  Ann Veronica was silent for a while.

  "I thought every one had heard," said Miss Klegg. "Or I wouldn't have said any
thing about it."

  "I suppose all men," said Ann Veronica, in a tone of detached criticism, "get some such entanglement. And, anyhow, it doesn't matter to us." She turned abruptly at right angles to the path they followed. "This is my way back to my side of the Park," she said.

  "I thought you were coming right across the Park."

  "Oh no," said Ann Veronica; "I have some work to do. I just wanted a breath of air. And they'll shut the gates presently. It's not far from twilight."

  Part 9

  She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock that night when a sealed and registered envelope was brought up to her.

  She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded within it were the notes she had sent off to Ramage that day. The letter began:

  "MY DEAREST GIRL,—I cannot let you do this foolish thing—"

  She crumpled notes and letter together in her hand, and then with a passionate gesture flung them into the fire. Instantly she seized the poker and made a desperate effort to get them out again. But she was only able to save a corner of the letter. The twenty pounds burned with avidity.

  She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender, poker in hand.

  "By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about finishes it, Ann Veronica!"

  Chapter the Tenth — The Suffragettes

  *

  Part 1

  "There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica, sitting up in her little bed in the darkness and biting at her nails.

  "I thought I was just up against Morningside Park and father, but it's the whole order of things—the whole blessed order of things...."

  She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands about her knees very tightly. Her mind developed into savage wrath at the present conditions of a woman's life.

  "I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman's life is all chance. It's artificially chance. Find your man, that's the rule. All the rest is humbug and delicacy. He's the handle of life for you. He will let you live if it pleases him....

  "Can't it be altered?

  "I suppose an actress is free?..."

  She tried to think of some altered state of affairs in which these monstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women would stand on their own feet in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded on the ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the vague intimations of an Endowment of Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intense individual dependence for women which is woven into the existing social order. At the back of her mind there seemed always one irrelevant qualifying spectator whose presence she sought to disregard. She would not look at him, would not think of him; when her mind wavered, then she muttered to herself in the darkness so as to keep hold of her generalizations.

  "It is true. It is no good waiving the thing; it is true. Unless women are never to be free, never to be even respected, there must be a generation of martyrs.... Why shouldn't we be martyrs? There's nothing else for most of us, anyhow. It's a sort of blacklegging to want to have a life of one's own...."

  She repeated, as if she answered an objector: "A sort of blacklegging.

  "A sex of blacklegging clients."

  Her mind diverged to other aspects, and another type of womanhood.

  "Poor little Miniver! What can she be but what she is?... Because she states her case in a tangle, drags it through swamps of nonsense, it doesn't alter the fact that she is right."

  That phrase about dragging the truth through swamps of nonsense she remembered from Capes. At the recollection that it was his, she seemed to fall through a thin surface, as one might fall through the crust of a lava into glowing depths. She wallowed for a time in the thought of Capes, unable to escape from his image and the idea of his presence in her life.

  She let her mind run into dreams of that cloud paradise of an altered world in which the Goopes and Minivers, the Fabians and reforming people believed. Across that world was written in letters of light, "Endowment of Motherhood." Suppose in some complex yet conceivable way women were endowed, were no longer economically and socially dependent on men. "If one was free," she said, "one could go to him.... This vile hovering to catch a man's eye!... One could go to him and tell him one loved him. I want to love him. A little love from him would be enough. It would hurt no one. It would not burden him with any obligation."

  She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her knees. She floundered deep. She wanted to kiss his feet. His feet would have the firm texture of his hands.

  Then suddenly her spirit rose in revolt. "I will not have this slavery," she said. "I will not have this slavery."

  She shook her fist ceilingward. "Do you hear!" she said "whatever you are, wherever you are! I will not be slave to the thought of any man, slave to the customs of any time. Confound this slavery of sex! I am a man! I will get this under if I am killed in doing it!"

  She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.

  "Manning," she said, and contemplated a figure of inaggressive persistence. "No!" Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.

  "It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval, "if they are absurd. They mean something. They mean everything that women can mean—except submission. The vote is only the beginning, the necessary beginning. If we do not begin—"

  She had come to a resolution. Abruptly she got out of bed, smoothed her sheet and straightened her pillow and lay down, and fell almost instantly asleep.

  Part 2

  The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November instead of early March. Ann Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awake for some minutes before she remembered a certain resolution she had taken in the small hours. Then instantly she got out of bed and proceeded to dress.

  She did not start for the Imperial College. She spent the morning up to ten in writing a series of unsuccessful letters to Ramage, which she tore up unfinished; and finally she desisted and put on her jacket and went out into the lamp-lit obscurity and slimy streets. She turned a resolute face southward.

  She followed Oxford Street into Holborn, and then she inquired for Chancery Lane. There she sought and at last found 107A, one of those heterogeneous piles of offices which occupy the eastern side of the lane. She studied the painted names of firms and persons and enterprises on the wall, and discovered that the Women's Bond of Freedom occupied several contiguous suites on the first floor. She went up-stairs and hesitated between four doors with ground-glass panes, each of which professed "The Women's Bond of Freedom" in neat black letters. She opened one and found herself in a large untidy room set with chairs that were a little disarranged as if by an overnight meeting. On the walls were notice-boards bearing clusters of newspaper slips, three or four big posters of monster meetings, one of which Ann Veronica had attended with Miss Miniver, and a series of announcements in purple copying-ink, and in one corner was a pile of banners. There was no one at all in this room, but through the half-open door of one of the small apartments that gave upon it she had a glimpse of two very young girls sitting at a littered table and writing briskly.

  She walked across to this apartment and, opening the door a little wider, discovered a press section of the movement at work.

  "I want to inquire," said Ann Veronica.

  "Next door," said a spectacled young person of seventeen or eighteen, with an impatient indication of the direction.

  In the adjacent apartment Ann Veronica found a middle-aged woman with a tired face under the tired hat she wore, sitting at a desk opening letters while a dusky, untidy girl of eight-or nine-and-twenty hammered industriously at a typewriter. The tired woman looked up in inquiring silence at Ann Veronica's diffident entry.

  "I want to know more about this movement," said Ann Veronica.

  "Are you with us?" said the tired woman.

  "I don't know," said Ann Veronica; "I think I am. I want very much to do something for women. But I want to know what you are doing."

  The tired woman
sat still for a moment. "You haven't come here to make a lot of difficulties?" she asked.

  "No," said Ann Veronica, "but I want to know."

  The tired woman shut her eyes tightly for a moment, and then looked with them at Ann Veronica. "What can you do?" she asked.

  "Do?"

  "Are you prepared to do things for us? Distribute bills? Write letters? Interrupt meetings? Canvass at elections? Face dangers?"

  "If I am satisfied—"

  "If we satisfy you?"

  "Then, if possible, I would like to go to prison."

  "It isn't nice going to prison."

  "It would suit me."

  "It isn't nice getting there."

  "That's a question of detail," said Ann Veronica.

  The tired woman looked quietly at her. "What are your objections?" she said.

  "It isn't objections exactly. I want to know what you are doing; how you think this work of yours really does serve women."

  "We are working for the equal citizenship of men and women," said the tired woman. "Women have been and are treated as the inferiors of men, we want to make them their equals."

  "Yes," said Ann Veronica, "I agree to that. But—"

  The tired woman raised her eyebrows in mild protest.

  "Isn't the question more complicated than that?" said Ann Veronica.

  "You could have a talk to Miss Kitty Brett this afternoon, if you liked. Shall I make an appointment for you?"

  Miss Kitty Brett was one of the most conspicuous leaders of the movement. Ann Veronica snatched at the opportunity, and spent most of the intervening time in the Assyrian Court of the British Museum, reading and thinking over a little book upon the feminist movement the tired woman had made her buy. She got a bun and some cocoa in the little refreshment-room, and then wandered through the galleries up-stairs, crowded with Polynesian idols and Polynesian dancing-garments, and all the simple immodest accessories to life in Polynesia, to a seat among the mummies. She was trying to bring her problems to a head, and her mind insisted upon being even more discursive and atmospheric than usual. It generalized everything she put to it.