Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story Read online

  She could not hide her face. She attempted by a sheer act of will toend the scene, to will herself out of it anywhere. She had a horribleglimpse of the once nice little old lady being also borne stationward,still faintly battling and very muddy--one lock of grayish hairstraggling over her neck, her face scared, white, but triumphant. Herbonnet dropped off and was trampled into the gutter. A little Cockneyrecovered it, and made ridiculous attempts to get to her and replace it.

  "You must arrest me!" she gasped, breathlessly, insisting insanely on apoint already carried; "you shall!"

  The police-station at the end seemed to Ann Veronica like a refuge fromunnamable disgraces. She hesitated about her name, and, being prompted,gave it at last as Ann Veronica Smith, 107A, Chancery Lane....

  Indignation carried her through that night, that men and the worldcould so entreat her. The arrested women were herded in a passage ofthe Panton Street Police-station that opened upon a cell too unclean foroccupation, and most of them spent the night standing. Hot coffeeand cakes were sent in to them in the morning by some intelligentsympathizer, or she would have starved all day. Submission to theinevitable carried her through the circumstances of her appearancebefore the magistrate.

  He was no doubt doing his best to express the attitude of society towardthese wearily heroic defendants, but he seemed to be merely rude andunfair to Ann Veronica. He was not, it seemed, the proper stipendiary atall, and there had been some demur to his jurisdiction that had ruffledhim. He resented being regarded as irregular. He felt he was humanwisdom prudentially interpolated.... "You silly wimmin," he said overand over again throughout the hearing, plucking at his blotting-padwith busy hands. "You silly creatures! Ugh! Fie upon you!" The court wascrowded with people, for the most part supporters and admirers of thedefendants, and the man with the light eyelashes was conspicuouslyactive and omnipresent.

  Ann Veronica's appearance was brief and undistinguished. She had nothingto say for herself. She was guided into the dock and prompted by ahelpful police inspector. She was aware of the body of the court,of clerks seated at a black table littered with papers, of policemenstanding about stiffly with expressions of conscious integrity, anda murmuring background of the heads and shoulders of spectators closebehind her. On a high chair behind a raised counter the stipendiary'ssubstitute regarded her malevolently over his glasses. A disagreeableyoung man, with red hair and a loose mouth, seated at the reporter'stable, was only too manifestly sketching her.

  She was interested by the swearing of the witnesses. The kissing of thebook struck her as particularly odd, and then the policemen gave theirevidence in staccato jerks and stereotyped phrases.

  "Have you anything to ask the witness?" asked the helpful inspector.

  The ribald demons that infested the back of Ann Veronica's mind urgedvarious facetious interrogations upon her, as, for example, wherethe witness had acquired his prose style. She controlled herself, andanswered meekly, "No."

  "Well, Ann Veronica Smith," the magistrate remarked when the case wasall before him, "you're a good-looking, strong, respectable gell, andit's a pity you silly young wimmin can't find something better to dowith your exuberance. Two-and-twenty! I can't imagine what your parentscan be thinking about to let you get into these scrapes."

  Ann Veronica's mind was filled with confused unutterable replies.

  "You are persuaded to come and take part in these outrageousproceedings--many of you, I am convinced, have no idea whatever oftheir nature. I don't suppose you could tell me even the derivation ofsuffrage if I asked you. No! not even the derivation! But the fashion'sbeen set and in it you must be."

  The men at the reporter's table lifted their eyebrows, smiled faintly,and leaned back to watch how she took her scolding. One with theappearance of a bald little gnome yawned agonizingly. They had got allthis down already--they heard the substance of it now for the fourteenthtime. The stipendiary would have done it all very differently.

  She found presently she was out of the dock and confronted with thealternative of being bound over in one surety for the sum of fortypounds--whatever that might mean or a month's imprisonment.

  "Second class," said some one, but first and second were all alike toher. She elected to go to prison.

  At last, after a long rumbling journey in a stuffy windowless van, shereached Canongate Prison--for Holloway had its quota already. It was badluck to go to Canongate.

  Prison was beastly. Prison was bleak without spaciousness, and pervadedby a faint, oppressive smell; and she had to wait two hours in thesullenly defiant company of two unclean women thieves before a cellcould be assigned to her. Its dreariness, like the filthiness of thepolice cell, was a discovery for her. She had imagined that prisonswere white-tiled places, reeking of lime-wash and immaculatelysanitary. Instead, they appeared to be at the hygienic level of tramps'lodging-houses. She was bathed in turbid water that had already beenused. She was not allowed to bathe herself: another prisoner, with aprivileged manner, washed her. Conscientious objectors to that processare not permitted, she found, in Canongate. Her hair was washed for heralso. Then they dressed her in a dirty dress of coarse serge and a cap,and took away her own clothes. The dress came to her only too manifestlyunwashed from its former wearer; even the under-linen they gave herseemed unclean. Horrible memories of things seen beneath the microscopeof the baser forms of life crawled across her mind and set hershuddering with imagined irritations. She sat on the edge of thebed--the wardress was too busy with the flood of arrivals that dayto discover that she had it down--and her skin was shivering from thecontact of these garments. She surveyed accommodation that seemed atfirst merely austere, and became more and more manifestly inadequate asthe moments fled by. She meditated profoundly through several enormouscold hours on all that had happened and all that she had done since theswirl of the suffrage movement had submerged her personal affairs....

  Very slowly emerging out of a phase of stupefaction, these personalaffairs and her personal problem resumed possession of her mind. She hadimagined she had drowned them altogether.

  CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

  THOUGHTS IN PRISON

  Part 1

  The first night in prison she found it impossible to sleep. The bedwas hard beyond any experience of hers, the bed-clothes coarse andinsufficient, the cell at once cold and stuffy. The little gratingin the door, the sense of constant inspection, worried her. She keptopening her eyes and looking at it. She was fatigued physically andmentally, and neither mind nor body could rest. She became aware thatat regular intervals a light flashed upon her face and a bodiless eyeregarded her, and this, as the night wore on, became a torment....

  Capes came back into her mind. He haunted a state between hecticdreaming and mild delirium, and she found herself talking aloud tohim. All through the night an entirely impossible and monumentalCapes confronted her, and she argued with him about men and women. Shevisualized him as in a policeman's uniform and quite impassive. On someinsane score she fancied she had to state her case in verse. "We are themusic and you are the instrument," she said; "we are verse and you areprose.

  "For men have reason, women rhyme A man scores always, all the time."

  This couplet sprang into her mind from nowhere, and immediately begot anendless series of similar couplets that she began to compose and addressto Capes. They came teeming distressfully through her aching brain:

  "A man can kick, his skirts don't tear; A man scores always, everywhere.

  "His dress for no man lays a snare; A man scores always, everywhere. For hats that fail and hats that flare; Toppers their universal wear; A man scores always, everywhere.

  "Men's waists are neither here nor there; A man scores always, everywhere.

  "A man can manage without hair; A man scores always, everywhere.

  "There are no males at men to stare; A man scores always, everywhere.

  "And children must we women bear--

  "Oh, da
mn!" she cried, as the hundred-and-first couplet or so presenteditself in her unwilling brain.

  For a time she worried about that compulsory bath and cutaneousdiseases.

  Then she fell into a fever of remorse for the habit of bad language shehad acquired.

  "A man can smoke, a man can swear; A man scores always, everywhere."

  She rolled over on her face, and stuffed her fingers in her ears to shutout the rhythm from her mind. She lay still for a long time, and hermind resumed at a more tolerable pace. She found herself talking toCapes in an undertone of rational admission.

  "There is something to be said for the lady-like theory after all," sheadmitted. "Women ought to be gentle and submissive persons, strong onlyin virtue and in resistance to evil compulsion. My dear--I can call youthat here, anyhow--I know that. The Victorians over-did it a little, Iadmit. Their idea of maidenly innocence was just a blank white--the sortof flat white that doesn't shine. But that doesn't alter the factthat there IS innocence. And I've read, and thought, and guessed, andlooked--until MY innocence--it's smirched.

  "Smirched!...

  "You see, dear, one IS passionately anxious for something--what is it?One wants to be CLEAN. You want me to be clean. You would want me to beclean, if you gave me a thought, that is....

  "I wonder if you give me a thought....

  "I'm not a good woman. I don't mean I'm not a good woman--I mean thatI'm not a GOOD woman. My poor brain is so mixed, dear, I hardly knowwhat I am saying. I mean I'm not a good specimen of a woman. I've got astreak of male. Things happen to women--proper women--and all they haveto do is to take them well. They've just got to keep white. But I'malways trying to make things happen. And I get myself dirty...

  "It's all dirt that washes off, dear, but it's dirt.

  "The white unaggressive woman who corrects and nurses and serves, and isworshipped and betrayed--the martyr-queen of men, the white mother....You can't do that sort of thing unless you do it over religion, andthere's no religion in me--of that sort--worth a rap.

  "I'm not gentle. Certainly not a gentlewoman.

  "I'm not coarse--no! But I've got no purity of mind--no real purity ofmind. A good woman's mind has angels with flaming swords at the portalsto keep out fallen thoughts....

  "I wonder if there are any good women really.

  "I wish I didn't swear. I do swear. It began as a joke.... Itdeveloped into a sort of secret and private bad manners. It's got to beat last like tobacco-ash over all my sayings and doings....

  "'Go it, missie,' they said; "kick aht!'

  "I swore at that policeman--and disgusted him. Disgusted him!

  "For men policemen never blush; A man in all things scores so much...

  "Damn! Things are getting plainer. It must be the dawn creeping in.

  "Now here hath been dawning another blue day; I'm just a poor woman, please take it away.

  "Oh, sleep! Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!"

  Part 2

  "Now," said Ann Veronica, after the half-hour of exercise, and sittingon the uncomfortable wooden seat without a back that was her perch byday, "it's no good staying here in a sort of maze. I've got nothing todo for a month but think. I may as well think. I ought to be able tothink things out.

  "How shall I put the question? What am I? What have I got to do withmyself?...

  "I wonder if many people HAVE thought things out?

  "Are we all just seizing hold of phrases and obeying moods?

  "It wasn't so with old-fashioned people, they knew right from wrong;they had a clear-cut, religious faith that seemed to explain everythingand give a rule for everything. We haven't. I haven't, anyhow. And it'sno good pretending there is one when there isn't.... I suppose Ibelieve in God.... Never really thought about Him--people don't.... I suppose my creed is, 'I believe rather indistinctly in God theFather Almighty, substratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a veinof vague sentimentality that doesn't give a datum for anything at all,in Jesus Christ, His Son.'...

  "It's no sort of good, Ann Veronica, pretending one does believe whenone doesn't....

  "And as for praying for faith--this sort of monologue is about as nearas any one of my sort ever gets to prayer. Aren't I asking--askingplainly now?...

  "We've all been mixing our ideas, and we've got intellectual hotcoppers--every blessed one of us....

  "A confusion of motives--that's what I am!...

  "There is this absurd craving for Mr. Capes--the 'Capes crave,' theywould call it in America. Why do I want him so badly? Why do I want him,and think about him, and fail to get away from him?

  "It isn't all of me.

  "The first person you love, Ann Veronica, is yourself--get hold of that!The soul you have to save is Ann Veronica's soul...."

  She knelt upon the floor of her cell and clasped her hands, and remainedfor a long time in silence.

  "Oh, God!" she said at last, "how I wish I had been taught to pray!"

  Part 3

  She had some idea of putting these subtle and difficult issues to thechaplain when she was warned of his advent. But she had not reckonedwith the etiquette of Canongate. She got up, as she had been told todo, at his appearance, and he amazed her by sitting down, according tocustom, on her stool. He still wore his hat, to show that the daysof miracles and Christ being civil to sinners are over forever. Sheperceived that his countenance was only composed by a great effort, hisfeatures severely compressed. He was ruffled, and his ears were red,no doubt from some adjacent controversy. He classified her as he seatedhimself.

  "Another young woman, I suppose," he said, "who knows better than herMaker about her place in the world. Have you anything to ask me?"

  Ann Veronica readjusted her mind hastily. Her back stiffened. Sheproduced from the depths of her pride the ugly investigatory note ofthe modern district visitor. "Are you a special sort of clergyman," shesaid, after a pause, and looking down her nose at him, "or do you go tothe Universities?"

  "Oh!" he said, profoundly.

  He panted for a moment with unuttered replies, and then, with a scornfulgesture, got up and left the cell.

  So that Ann Veronica was not able to get the expert advice she certainlyneeded upon her spiritual state.

  Part 4

  After a day or so she thought more steadily. She found herself in aphase of violent reaction against the suffrage movement, a phasegreatly promoted by one of those unreasonable objections people of AnnVeronica's temperament take at times--to the girl in the next cell toher own. She was a large, resilient girl, with a foolish smile, a stillmore foolish expression of earnestness, and a throaty contralto voice.She was noisy and hilarious and enthusiastic, and her hair was alwaysabominably done. In the chapel she sang with an open-lunged gusto thatsilenced Ann Veronica altogether, and in the exercising-yard slouchedround with carelessly dispersed feet. Ann Veronica decided that"hoydenish ragger" was the only phrase to express her. She was alwaysbreaking rules, whispering asides, intimating signals. She became attimes an embodiment for Ann Veronica of all that made the suffragemovement defective and unsatisfying.

  She was always initiating petty breaches of discipline. Her greatestexploit was the howling before the mid-day meal. This was an imitationof the noises made by the carnivora at the Zoological Gardens atfeeding-time; the idea was taken up by prisoner after prisoner untilthe whole place was alive with barkings, yappings, roarings, pelicanchatterings, and feline yowlings, interspersed with shrieks ofhysterical laughter. To many in that crowded solitude it came as anextraordinary relief. It was better even than the hymn-singing. But itannoyed Ann Veronica.

  "Idiots!" she said, when she heard this pandemonium, and with particularreference to this young lady with the throaty contralto next door."Intolerable idiots!..."

  It took some days for this phase to pass, and it left some scars andsomething like a decision. "Violence won't do it," said Ann Veronica."Begin violence, and the woman goes under....

  "But all the rest of our case is right.... Yes."


  As the long, solitary days wore on, Ann Veronica found a number ofdefinite attitudes and conclusions in her mind.

  One of these was a classification of women into women who are and womenwho are not hostile to men. "The real reason why I am out of placehere," she said, "is because I like men. I can talk with them. I'venever found them hostile. I've got no feminine class feeling. I don'twant any laws or freedoms to protect me from a man like Mr. Capes. Iknow that in my heart I would take whatever he gave....

  "A woman wants a proper alliance with a man, a man who is better stuffthan herself. She wants that and needs it more than anything else inthe world. It may not be just, it may not be fair, but things are so. Itisn't law, nor custom, nor masculine violence settled that. It is justhow things happen to be. She wants to be free--she wants to be legallyand economically free, so as not to be subject to the wrong man; butonly God, who made the world, can alter things to prevent her beingslave to the right one.