by H. G. Wells
Part 7
For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue. Hersleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an houror so the work distracted her altogether from her troubles.
Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it came toher that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediatecollapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhapsshe would never set eyes on him again. After that consolations fled.
The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became inattentiveto the work before her, and it did not get on. She felt sleepy andunusually irritable. She lunched at a creamery in Great Portland Street,and as the day was full of wintry sunshine, spent the rest of thelunch-hour in a drowsy gloom, which she imagined to be thought upon theproblems of her position, on a seat in Regent's Park. A girl of fifteenor sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until shesaw "Votes for Women" at the top. That turned her mind to the moregeneralized aspects of her perplexities again. She had never been sodisposed to agree that the position of women in the modern world isintolerable.
Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an impishmood that sometimes possessed him. He did not notice that Ann Veronicawas preoccupied and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised the question ofwomen's suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a duel between her andMiss Garvice. The youth with the hair brushed back and the spectacledScotchman joined in the fray for and against the women's vote.
Ever and again Capes appealed to Ann Veronica. He liked to draw her in,and she did her best to talk. But she did not talk readily, and inorder to say something she plunged a little, and felt she plunged.Capes scored back with an uncompromising vigor that was his way ofcomplimenting her intelligence. But this afternoon it discovered anunusual vein of irritability in her. He had been reading Belfort Bax,and declared himself a convert. He contrasted the lot of women ingeneral with the lot of men, presented men as patient, self-immolatingmartyrs, and women as the pampered favorites of Nature. A vein ofconviction mingled with his burlesque.
For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one another.
The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became suddenlytragically real for Ann Veronica. There he sat, cheerfully friendlyin his sex's freedom--the man she loved, the one man she caredshould unlock the way to the wide world for her imprisoned femininepossibilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled under his eyes;he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence of the souls of womenagainst the fate of their conditions.
Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used atevery discussion, her contribution to the great question.
She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil oflife--their place was the little world, the home; that their power laynot in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of theirchildren 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 influencingthey can exercise now."
"There IS something sound in that position," said Capes, intervening asif 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--fightingindividuals in a scramble. I don't see how they can be. Every home is alittle recess, a niche, out of the world of business and competition, inwhich 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 andinstinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a mother; hersympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man tothe shorn woman."
"I wish," said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, "that you could knowwhat 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 thatpit can be. The way--the way we are led on! We are taught to believe weare 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. Hewants you--or he doesn't; and then he helps some other woman againstyou.... What you say is probably all true and necessary.... Butthink 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 hadnot 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 havea sort of freedom.... Have you ever tried to run and jump inpetticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them--souland 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 speechand made her stop abruptly. She was sore and overstrung, and it wasintolerable to her that he should stand within three yards of herunsuspectingly, with an incalculably vast power over her happiness. Shewas sore with the perplexities of her preposterous position. She wassick of herself, of her life, of everything but him; and for him all hermasked and hidden being was crying out.
She stopped abruptly at the sound of his voice, and lost the threadof what she was saying. In the pause she realized the attention of theothers converged upon her, and that the tears were brimming over hereyes. She felt a storm of emotion surging up within her. She becameaware of the Scotch student regarding her with stupendous amazement,a tea-cup poised in one hairy hand and his faceted glasses showing avarious enlargement of segments of his eye.
The door into the passage offered itself with an irresistibleinvitation--the one alternative to a public, inexplicable passion ofweeping.
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 thestaircase.
She went to the post-office and drew out and sent off her moneyto Ramage. And then she came out into the street, sure only of onething--that she could not return directly to her lodgings. She wantedair--and the distraction of having moving and changing things about her.The evenings were beginning to draw out, and it would not be dark foran 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 wouldwander about in the kindly darkness. And think things out....
Presently she became aware of footsteps hurrying after her, and glancedback 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, evenvoice; "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 hegot up and took refuge in the preparation-room. Or else _I_ would havefinished him."
Ann Veronica said nothing, and Miss Klegg went on: "He
very oftenIS--most unfair. He has a way of sitting on people. He wouldn't like itif people did it to him. He jumps the words out of your mouth; he takeshold of what you have to say before you have had time to express itproperly."
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 ayoung man."
"Married?" said Ann Veronica.
"Didn't you know he was married?" asked Miss Klegg, and was struck by athought that made her glance quickly at her companion.
Ann Veronica had no answer for a moment. She turned her head awaysharply. Some automaton within her produced in a quite unfamiliar voicethe 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 theconversation 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 wasa case, or something, some years ago."
"What case?"
"A divorce--or something--I don't know. But I have heard that he almosthad to leave the schools. If it hadn't been for Professor Russellstanding 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 theparticulars, but I know it was something very disagreeable. It was amongartistic people."
Ann Veronica was silent for a while.
"I thought every one had heard," said Miss Klegg. "Or I wouldn't havesaid anything 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." Sheturned abruptly at right angles to the path they followed. "This is myway 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 abreath of air. And they'll shut the gates presently. It's not far fromtwilight."
Part 9
She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock that night whena sealed and registered envelope was brought up to her.
She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded within it were the notesshe 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 apassionate gesture flung them into the fire. Instantly she seized thepoker and made a desperate effort to get them out again. But she wasonly able to save a corner of the letter. The twenty pounds burned withavidity.
She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender, poker in hand.
"By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about finishes it, AnnVeronica!"
CHAPTER THE TENTH
THE SUFFRAGETTES
Part 1
"There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica, sitting upin her little bed in the darkness and biting at her nails.
"I thought I was just up against Morningside Park and father, but it'sthe whole order of things--the whole blessed order of things...."
She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands about her knees verytightly. Her mind developed into savage wrath at the present conditionsof a woman's life.
"I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman's life is allchance. It's artificially chance. Find your man, that's the rule. Allthe rest is humbug and delicacy. He's the handle of life for you. Hewill 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 thesemonstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women would stand ontheir own feet in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded onthe ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the vague intimationsof an Endowment of Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intenseindividual dependence for women which is woven into the existing socialorder. At the back of her mind there seemed always one irrelevantqualifying spectator whose presence she sought to disregard. She wouldnot look at him, would not think of him; when her mind wavered, thenshe muttered to herself in the darkness so as to keep hold of hergeneralizations.
"It is true. It is no good waiving the thing; it is true. Unless womenare never to be free, never to be even respected, there must be ageneration of martyrs.... Why shouldn't we be martyrs? There'snothing else for most of us, anyhow. It's a sort of blacklegging to wantto 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?... Becauseshe states her case in a tangle, drags it through swamps of nonsense, itdoesn't alter the fact that she is right."
That phrase about dragging the truth through swamps of nonsense sheremembered from Capes. At the recollection that it was his, she seemedto fall through a thin surface, as one might fall through the crust ofa lava into glowing depths. She wallowed for a time in the thought ofCapes, unable to escape from his image and the idea of his presence inher life.
She let her mind run into dreams of that cloud paradise of an alteredworld in which the Goopes and Minivers, the Fabians and reforming peoplebelieved. Across that world was written in letters of light, "Endowmentof Motherhood." Suppose in some complex yet conceivable way women wereendowed, were no longer economically and socially dependent on men. "Ifone was free," she said, "one could go to him.... This vile hoveringto catch a man's eye!... One could go to him and tell him one lovedhim. I want to love him. A little love from him would be enough. Itwould hurt no one. It would not burden him with any obligation."
She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her knees. She floundereddeep. She wanted to kiss his feet. His feet would have the firm textureof 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 youare, 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 aman! 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 inaggressivepersistence. "No!" Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.
"It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval, "if they areabsurd. They mean something. They mean everything that women canmean--except submission. The vote is only the beginning, the necessarybeginning. If we do not begin--"
She had come to a resolution. Abruptly she got out of bed, smoothedher sheet and straightened her pillow and lay down, and fell almostinstantly asleep.
Part 2
The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November insteadof early March. Ann Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awakefor some minutes before she remembered a certain resolution shehad taken in the small hours. Then instantly she got out of bed andproceeded to dress.
She did not start for the Imperial College. She spent the morning upto ten in writing a series of unsuccessful letters to Ramage, which shetore up unfinished; and finally she desisted and put on her jacket andwent out into the lamp-lit obscurity and slimy streets. She turned aresolute face southward.
&nbs
p; She followed Oxford Street into Holborn, and then she inquired forChancery Lane. There she sought and at last found 107A, one of thoseheterogeneous piles of offices which occupy the eastern side of thelane. She studied the painted names of firms and persons and enterpriseson the wall, and discovered that the Women's Bond of Freedom occupiedseveral contiguous suites on the first floor. She went up-stairs andhesitated between four doors with ground-glass panes, each of whichprofessed "The Women's Bond of Freedom" in neat black letters. Sheopened one and found herself in a large untidy room set with chairs thatwere a little disarranged as if by an overnight meeting. On the wallswere notice-boards bearing clusters of newspaper slips, three or fourbig posters of monster meetings, one of which Ann Veronica had attendedwith 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 thisroom, but through the half-open door of one of the small apartmentsthat gave upon it she had a glimpse of two very young girls sitting at alittered table and writing briskly.
She walked across to this apartment and, opening the door a littlewider, 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 witha tired face under the tired hat she wore, sitting at a desk openingletters while a dusky, untidy girl of eight-or nine-and-twenty hammeredindustriously at a typewriter. The tired woman looked up in inquiringsilence at Ann Veronica's diffident entry.