When Abigail stood to speak she was as curious as anyone there to know what her voice sounded like; and to her astonishment it sounded calm and assured. To be sure, there were little tremblings and catchings of breath at unintended pauses, now and then, but its ringing clarity in no way mirrored the turmoil that still seethed within.
“From Mrs. Elkington-Laud’s most flattering introduction,” she said, “you must imagine I make it a daily exercise to address large crowds. I assure you this is the first such occasion in my life. And I must tell you, it is a chastening experience to live for…well, I shall admit to thirty-nine years in the closest intimacy with the English language, and then to stand here and to see the entire dictionary and syntax departing quietly by one of the side doors. It is both novel and humiliating!”
There was a laugh at that. Her heart began to slow its manic hammering. She could breathe more deeply. Come, she thought, this isn’t so bad. She continued:
“I fear, madam chairman, that you may inadvertently have given the impression that I am in some ways opposed to suffragism. Far from it, as I hope to show this evening. Indeed, I must begin by confessing a profound gratitude to the movement. Why, only today it has helped me to elucidate a puzzle that has tormented me for…well, thirty-nine years at least.”
The laugh again. It relaxed her still further.
“A letter in this morning’s papers from a worthy gentleman points out that if women are ever called upon to vote, the exercise of so grave a responsibility will unhinge many delicate minds.”
They laughed scornfully.
“Oh, yes. He confidently predicts a doubling or even a trebling of the incidence of neurasthenia.” There was laughter again, for neurasthenia, an imaginary disease attributed to tight lacing and too little exercise, was often imputed to suffragists by their opponents. She added: “I believe he quoted as his authority the late Sir Henry James!”
The laughter rose to a roar. James had been the archenemy of all suffragists in the 1870s; he occupied a special seat of loathing in the demonology of the movement. She had picked well (for, of course, the letter was her own invention).
“Now, all my life I have wondered why such an unearthly hush settles upon the country at every election. Why do groups of silent men sit and about the streets with such drawn faces, their brows so pale? Why do our husbands and fathers and brothers refuse their food, preferring to stand long hours at the window, tugging at their beards and muttering strange formulae?”
A titter grew through the hall as the more astute of her listeners began to anticipate her drift.
“Why do they start up in the night, uttering harsh cries of pain, and fall back upon the pillow, wild-eyed and sleepless? I had no idea. Until I read that letter this morning, I was not aware that this demented behaviour was but the merest outward, flickering show of a titanic inner struggle. A struggle so valiantly and uncomplainingly endured by our menfolk out of their deep-seated instinct to protect us. A struggle that only their rugged and manly constitutions can survive. A struggle, in short, with the dreaded toils of…forgive me—in this company I must whisper the word: neurasthenia!”
It was a very stage whisper. And it was a platform from which her listeners launched a delighted and prolonged roar of laughter.
“And, as I say,” she shouted over their laughter, forcing them to stop, “but for the suffragist movement, such a revealing letter would never have been written. But for the suffragist movement, our menfolk would have kept forever secret from us what a hellish torment it is”—she paused and smiled in apparent wonder—“to mark an X upon a slip of paper”—she held aloft the first page of her speech—“and drop it…in a box!” She let go the paper and, wide-eyed, watched it fall.
From that moment on, they were hers. She let loose several more barbs, all pointed as sharply, at the “antis.” Each time her listeners’ delight and laughter rose to a new height; and each time she let the laughter draw out a bit longer before she interrupted with her next dart. Finally she let the laughter and applause work itself out entirely. She looked at Frances in the wings; Frances shook her head—still no Annie.
She let the last titters die, the last sighs, the last little clearings of the throat. She looked around with a smile more wistful than satisfied. She waited for a small rustle of bewilderment to begin. Only then did she continue.
“Yes. It’s a sad movement that can find no cause for laughter—and a sad world, indeed, that yields none. Yet it is a sad world, and it is upon one aspect of that sadness that I wish—no! that I fear—I must dwell tonight. Please bear with me.”
Now that her wit had won them, she could say the things she could otherwise never have said. “It’s a sad world in which people build entirely false pictures of one another—and sadder still when they live their lives in the shadow of that falsehood, never once experiencing the golden radiance of truth. One of the saddest falsehoods of all is the view of womanhood now common, if not universal, among men.”
“Hear, hear,” came from several parts of the hall.
Abigail held up a finger. “For this let me say I blame womankind every bit as much as I blame the men. We have connived at a falsehood, because it was flattering to us. And now our connivance is proving to be our undoing. We have allowed to go forth a picture of ourselves—a picture, do I say? An icon, in which the humanity is barely present while the spirituality is all-pervasive. Woman is tender, gentle, and modest. Woman is shy and retiring. Woman is emotional and intuitive. Woman is rudderless without a man. Her natural environment is domestic. Her natural mood is sympathy. Her natural inclination is to sacrifice herself.
“No one can deny that most of these statements are true—they may be true for as long a time as five minutes each week. For the rest of the time we are reassuringly human. Or would be, if we had not made the fatal error of conniving at this iconography. For now when we lapse, we do not lapse into our common humanity; we fall from grace—into the very pit we helped to dig!
“We are not united with men by our and their humanity; we are divided from them by a false—and cruelly false—iconography.
“Yes, cruel. For we are judged, and we judge ourselves, by an impossibly superhuman standard. And when we lapse from it, as lapse we must, into mere humanity, we are called fickle…feather-brained…selfish…petty…frivolous…female! I wish we could adopt a view of ourselves at once more humble and more honest. We are tender, gentle, and brusque. We are retiring and aggressive. Shy and brash. Emotional and calm. Intuitive in this, logical in that. We love and like, dislike and loathe, men and other women, and, for heaven’s sake, our own selves! We can be callous. We can feel sympathy. We can be yielding. We can be implacable.
“What man—what honest man—could put his hand on his heart and say that none of those statements also applies to men in general? Is tenderness unknown among them? Is the ‘gentle’ to be struck from gentle-man? Is modesty no longer on the curriculum at our sons’ schools? You may continue the list at your leisure. But you see my point.
“We have this vast and endlessly fascinating reservoir of human strengths and failings. It continually irrigates our characters, men and women alike. Yet we have become so obsessed with the minor variations which separate us that—to judge by the utterances of the more virulent antis and, I have to say it, of the more extreme suffragists—you would think we were two different species.
“You may ask the relevance of this to your struggle. It is this: I do not believe we will win the vote as long as the false and cruel icon of woman hangs, as it were, in the hearts and minds of our menfolk. How we may change that icon, I (who have but lately, though after half a lifetime’s thought, come to hold these ideas) cannot presume to say. Certainly we must not do it by acting out the opposite, for that would be to replace the spiritual by the devilish—one icon for another. Then indeed we would justify that least worthy of all the sayings of the great and wise Dr. Joh
nson. We should be like dogs walking on their hind legs, and men would marvel, not that we did it well, but that we did it at all!”
She deliberately pitched this sentence like an ending, to force their applause. Mrs. Elkington-Laud drew breath to thank her. But Abigail raised a hand for silence. In the corner of her eye she could see Frances, frantically shaking her head. Still no Annie. But she was committed now—emotionally, if not in practice. One way or another she was going to proclaim the point that was her sole reason for coming here tonight.
“You applaud,” she said, when they were silent again. “I’m glad. Though it was an easy point to applaud. I told you of truths you already knew well. I showed you how we suffer because men have developed an entirely false and hopelessly idealized picture of us—but you already knew that. I showed you how the counterpart to that idealization by men is a subtle kind of degradation—but you already knew that, too.
“Now I’m going to ask you to do something you will find much more difficult. I have said that somehow we must induce our menfolk to do us the courtesy of seeing us as human beings. Now I am going to suggest that you should extend that same courtesy to another group in our society, a group that has also suffered, and suffered cruelly, from false views, generally held—and from a denial of its humanity. I am going to introduce you to one member of that group, though the introduction is superfluous: You already know her well.
“She has brought you tea in your drawing rooms. She has scrubbed your scullery floors. She has served you ribbons at your haberdashers. When you bought your last dress, you did not see her, but hers were the deft fingers that made it so inexpensive. And, in all honesty I must tell you, you have looked briefly into her shame-filled eyes (and looked long away) when you have seen her in all her tawdry finery on the pavements of Piccadilly.”
Here there was a sharp, indrawn gasp. But the earlier half of her speech, combined with her blazing sincerity now, gave her enough authority to hold up a hand and say, “In her later years you failed to recognize her, for she was not the human wreck you expected, but a respectable small shopkeeper, happily married, a devoted wife, a fond mother, and a pillar of her local church.
“I asked men to see the humanity in us, and you applauded me. Now I ask you to see the humanity in this person, and I shall applaud you. I said that the vote, and other measures of equality, will not come until men have acquired a truer and more honest picture of womankind. You agreed with that notion. When you have heard this woman’s story, ask yourselves if men will ever form that honest picture while some women—not you, not me, but some women, some tens of thousands of women—can undergo the sort of life you are about to hear unfolded? Can we achieve recognition of our humanity and still withhold it from such as these? If we can, then what sort of humanity is ours—and is it worth the achievement?”
The applause was greater than she had expected. Clearly it did much to ease Mrs. Elkington-Laud’s mind, too. Now surely Annie had arrived—she’d had over half an hour of grace. She turned to Frances. But Frances was not there.
What on earth to do now?
As an afterthought—and as a last, desperate play for time—she turned back to the audience and added, “For your peace of mind I should tell you that you will hear nothing tonight that you could not repeat in mixed company to an unmarried grown-up daughter.” She looked to one side of the hall. “I’m sorry if that disappoints the gentlemen of the press.” She hoped Annie would make it true.
The little joke did much to ease their mood.
“Where is she?” Mrs. Elkington-Laud hissed.
“She must be there by now,” Abigail said. “I’ll run and see.”
She walked off the stage and dashed toward the street door. Frances was there, looking wildly up and down. “Not a sign of her,” she said bitterly. “Oh, to let you down like this, Abbie. It’s too bad.”
“I’m afraid it’s rather like her, though,” Abigail said. “She has the greatest heart in the world, but…”
“What’ll you do?”
“Go back and apologize, I suppose.”
“Couldn’t you at least tell them what she would have said?”
Abigail stared at the girl, openmouthed. “Genius!” she cried. Then, wringing her hands and beginning to pace up and down, she said, “But dare I? Dare I?!”
“What?”
Her heart beating like a flail, Abigail said, “Find a cloak. I haven’t time to change everything but I’ll put on the boots, the skirt, and the veil. I’ll put on your navy-blue cloak.”
“No!” Frances said, half-fearful, half-delighted. “You’d never be able to do it.”
“Just watch!” Abigail said. And she ran back to the stage. An expectant hush fell. “I’m sorry, everyone,” she called out. “Your next speaker feels no relish for the story she has to tell. You will understand that she tells it with no sense of pride. Indeed, she is, it seems, terrified—not of telling it to you, but of telling it to you in my presence. So—by your leave.” She bowed her head.
While the applause rained down, Abigail said to Mrs. Elkington-Laud, “Have you any news or administrative matters to announce?”
“Always!”
“Now would be a convenient moment for them.”
She walked off stage again and then dashed to the cloakroom.
“Please don’t,” Frances said, though she had everything ready. “If you fail, if they find out, it’ll be such a humiliation for you.”
“I can’t draw back now, Frances. I’m on fire, I tell you. I shan’t fail. Have no fear. Oops! Me beads!” She slipped into character as swiftly as she slipped into her black skirt and boots. “Blimey, gel,” she said to Frances, “what’s that long face for then? Let’s have a bit of a laugh, eh! How do I look?”
Frances inspected her minutely. “Well—I don’t recognize you.”
“I can’t hardly see through this veil.”
Frances put her hand to her mouth. “I must go outside,” she said, shivering with fear, “or I’ll be sick.”
“Suit yourself, me old love. Just point me the right way.”
She felt not the least bit afraid. Not the veil, not her disguise, but Annie’s accent and personality made the perfect mask; she understood how an actress who might be terrified of addressing a crowd as herself could go on stage as a character and feel only the faintest stirrings of the butterflies in her stomach. She was a little drunk with the power of her concealment.
She edged onto the stage and stood irresolute. A deathly hush fell. Then a sibilant whispering. Mrs. Elkington-Laud, all brave smiles, beckoned her to the table with encouraging dips of her head. Abigail stood beside her and forced her own hands to tremble. Silence returned.
“I’m not proud of what I’m going to tell you,” she began. “I’m not proud of what I had to do. But if any lady here can tell me what I might of done different, then—like Lady Bouvier says, there’s ten thousand girls and more want telling.”
The veil was a perfect ambush. Through it she could look at people. She realized that when she had spoken earlier, as herself, she had not actually looked at any single member of the audience but rather had let her eyes flit over them as over a sea of small waves. Now she looked to see if recognition lighted any eye. None did.
“It’s hard to believe I had a happy childhood, but I did. There was ten of us shared one room. Me dad was a billposter, which pays about a farthing above portering—and portering often don’t pay nothing at all.”
Someone giggled and corrected her English. A small, uncomfortable laugh spread among them.
“Yeah,” she answered. “Another thing was me governess. She was often away drinking when she should’ve been teaching me grammar.” The laugh that followed this was much more wholehearted.
A movement, about the fifth or sixth row back, caught her eye. It was the sort of movement she was on the lookout for—an exc
ited dart of the body and a whisper in a neighbour’s ear as the discovery was made and communicated.
But a moment later it was not fear that moved her. It was terror—stark, numbing terror. The woman who had moved was her sister Winifred. Beside her sat Steamer. And beside him sat their mother.
Abigail’s knees jellified. Her innards fell into the perpetual vacuum of her midriff. Her throat went as dry as a ship’s biscuit. A violent ague of shivering paralyzed her.
“Have a drink, my dear,” Mrs. Elkington-Laud advised.
She raised the tumbler like an alcoholic at his breakfast; water slopped and spilled over the table and all down her cape.
“Take it off, there’s a good woman,” Mrs. Elkington-Laud advised, standing to assist. “I’m sure it’s too cumbersome anyway.”
“No!” Abigail said, still in Annie’s precise tones. She clutched the cape to her. This real threat to her imposture did more to calm her than the psychic terrors induced by the presence of her family.
“Yeah. Ten in a room,” she said. “And often we’d have to take in a lodger to help with the rent.”
And she told them Annie’s tale, in Annie’s bright words, with Annie’s surprise in her voice that it should have happened to her and that she should have survived it. She told it just as she had heard it in those whispered, giggling memories as they had lain in bed in the dark, in Buckingham Street, at the Villa Corot, and in Italy.
She told them of the workhouse and orphanage, of the joy when their father got into work. She made them understand that hers had, indeed, been a happy childhood.
In a curious way she found she soon ceased to be Abigail; that is, she began to think of “Abigail” as another person. She did not become Annie, though, but hovered some undetermined way between the two. Or perhaps she became an amalgam of them—a nameless person inhabited by both. Her story was no longer being assembled in her mind and then passed down to her throat; it welled up from unsuspected sources within. The talk was no longer an intellectual and dramatic exercise; it had become a compulsion.
Abigail Page 49
