Ann Veronica

Part 7

For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue. Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an hour or so the work distracted her altogether from her troubles.

Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it came to her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediate collapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps she would never set eyes on him again. After that consolations fled.

The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became inattentive to the work before her, and it did not get on. She felt sleepy and unusually irritable. She lunched at a creamery in Great Portland Street, and as the day was full of wintry sunshine, spent the rest of the lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom, which she imagined to be thought upon the problems of her position, on a seat in Regent’s Park. A girl of fifteen or sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until she saw “Votes for Women” at the top. That turned her mind to the more generalized aspects of her perplexities again. She had never been so disposed to agree that the position of women in the modern world is intolerable.

Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an impish mood that sometimes possessed him. He did not notice that Ann Veronica was preoccupied and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised the question of women’s suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a duel between her and Miss Garvice. The youth with the hair brushed back and the spectacled Scotchman 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 in order to say something she plunged a little, and felt she plunged. Capes scored back with an uncompromising vigor that was his way of complimenting her intelligence. But this afternoon it discovered an unusual vein of irritability in her. He had been reading Belfort Bax, and declared himself a convert. He contrasted the lot of women in general with the lot of men, presented men as patient, self-immolating martyrs, and women as the pampered favorites of Nature. A vein of conviction 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 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.