Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. "I've been," she said,
"forbidden to come."
"Hul-LO!" said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy remarked
with profound emotion, "My God!"
"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "and that complicates the situation."
"Auntie?" asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica's
affairs.
"No! My father. It's—it's a serious prohibition."
"Why?" asked Hetty.
"That's the point. I asked him why, and he hadn't a reason."
"YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!" said Miss Miniver, with great
intensity.
"Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn't have it out." Ann
Veronica reflected for an instant "That's why I think I ought to come."
"You asked your father for a reason!" Miss Miniver repeated.
"We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!" said Hetty.
"He's got almost to like it."
"Men," said Miss Miniver, "NEVER have a reason. Never! And they don't
know it! They have no idea of it. It's one of their worst traits, one of
their very worst."
"But I say, Vee," said Constance, "if you come and you are forbidden to
come there'll be the deuce of a row."
Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation
was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax and
sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. "It isn't only the dance,"
she said.
"There's the classes," said Constance, the well-informed.
"There's the whole situation. Apparently I'm not to exist yet. I'm not
to study, I'm not to grow. I've got to stay at home and remain in a
state of suspended animation."
"DUSTING!" said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.
"Until you marry, Vee," said Hetty.
"Well, I don't feel like standing it."
"Thousands of women have married merely for freedom," said Miss Miniver.
"Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery."
"I suppose," said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink petals,
"it's our lot. But it's very beastly."
"What's our lot?" asked her sister.
"Slavery! Downtroddenness! When I think of it I feel all over boot
marks—men's boots. We hide it bravely, but so it is. Damn! I've
splashed."
Miss Miniver's manner became impressive. She addressed Ann Veronica
with an air of conveying great open secrets to her. "As things are at
present," she said, "it is true. We live under man-made institutions,
and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically,
except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we're underpaid and
sweated—it's dreadful to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her
generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went
on, conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things WILL be."
"I'm all for the vote," said Teddy.
"I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated," said Ann Veronica. "I
suppose there's no way of getting a decent income—independently."
"Women have practically NO economic freedom," said Miss Miniver,
"because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that. The one
profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a woman—except the
stage—is teaching, and there we trample on one another. Everywhere
else—the law, medicine, the Stock Exchange—prejudice bars us."
"There's art," said Ann Veronica, "and writing."
"Every one hasn't the Gift. Even there a woman never gets a fair chance.
Men are against her. Whatever she does is minimized. All the best
novels have been written by women, and yet see how men sneer at the lady
novelist still! There's only one way to get on for a woman, and that is
to please men. That is what they think we are for!"
"We're beasts," said Teddy. "Beasts!"
But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.
"Of course," said Miss Miniver—she went on in a regularly undulating
voice—"we DO please men. We have that gift. We can see round them and
behind them and through them, and most of us use that knowledge, in the
silent way we have, for our great ends. Not all of us, but some of us.
Too many. I wonder what men would say if we threw the mask aside—if
we really told them what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE
were." A flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.
"Maternity," she said, "has been our undoing."
From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse on the
position of women, full of wonderful statements, while Constance worked
at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty listened, and Teddy
contributed sympathetic noises and consumed cheap cigarettes. As she
talked she made weak little gestures with her hands, and she thrust her
face forward from her bent shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann
Veronica and sometimes at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near
Fluelen, that hung upon the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely
sympathizing with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and
her convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a faint
perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of fragments of sentences
heard, of passages read, or arguments indicated rather than stated, and
all of it was served in a sauce of strange enthusiasm, thin yet
intense. Ann Veronica had had some training at the Tredgold College in
disentangling threads from confused statements, and she had a curious
persuasion that in all this fluent muddle there was something—something
real, something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She did
not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through it all, the
bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver's cheeks and eyes, the
sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly accumulated. She had no
inkling of that insupportable wrong.
"We are the species," said Miss Miniver, "men are only incidents.
They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of animals
the females are more important than the males; the males have to please
them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the competition there is
everywhere, except among humans. The stags and oxen and things all
have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in man is the male made the
most important. And that happens through our maternity; it's our very
importance that degrades us.
"While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties.
The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it.
It's—Mrs. Shalford says—the accidental conquering the essential.
Originally in the first animals there were no males, none at all. It
has been proved. Then they appear among the lower things"—she made
meticulous gestures to figure the scale of life; she seemed to be
holding up specimens, and peering through her glasses at them—"among
crustaceans and things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to
the females. Mere hangers on. Things you would laugh at. And among human
beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and leaders; they owned
all the property, they invented all the arts.
"The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate! The
Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told."
"But is that really so?" said Ann Veronica.
"It has been proved," said Miss Miniver, and added, "by American
professors."
"But how did they prove it?"
"By science," said Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a
rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove. "And
now, look at us! See what we have become. Toys! Delicate trifles! A sex
of invalids. It is we who have become the parasites and toys."
It was, Ann Veronica felt, at once absurd and extraordinarily right.
Hetty, who had periods of lucid expression, put the thing for her
from her pillow. She charged boldly into the space of Miss Miniver's
rhetorical pause.
"It isn't quite that we're toys. Nobody toys with me. Nobody regards
Constance or Vee as a delicate trifle."
Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some remark was
assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried hastily under a cough.
"They'd better not," said Hetty. "The point is we're not toys, toys
isn't the word; we're litter. We're handfuls. We're regarded as
inflammable litter that mustn't be left about. We are the species, and
maternity is our game; that's all right, but nobody wants that admitted
for fear we should all catch fire, and set about fulfilling the purpose
of our beings without waiting for further explanations. As if we didn't
know! The practical trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at
seventeen, rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don't
now. Heaven knows why! They don't marry most of us off now until high up
in the twenties. And the age gets higher. We have to hang about in the
interval. There's a great gulf opened, and nobody's got any plans what
to do with us. So the world is choked with waste and waiting daughters.
Hanging about! And they start thinking and asking questions, and begin
to be neither one thing nor the other. We're partly human beings and
partly females in suspense."
Miss Miniver followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth shaped
to futile expositions. The Widgett method of thought puzzled her weakly
rhetorical mind. "There is no remedy, girls," she began, breathlessly,
"except the Vote. Give us that—"
Ann Veronica came in with a certain disregard of Miss Miniver. "That's
it," she said. "They have no plans for us. They have no ideas what to do
with us."
"Except," said Constance, surveying her work with her head on one side,
"to keep the matches from the litter."
"And they won't let us make plans for ourselves."
"We will," said Miss Miniver, refusing to be suppressed, "if some of us
have to be killed to get it." And she pressed her lips together in white
resolution and nodded, and she was manifestly full of that same passion
for conflict and self-sacrifice that has given the world martyrs since
the beginning of things. "I wish I could make every woman, every girl,
see this as clearly as I see it—just what the Vote means to us. Just
what it means...."
As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her aunt she became aware
of a light-footed pursuer running. Teddy overtook her, a little out of
breath, his innocent face flushed, his straw-colored hair disordered. He
was out of breath, and spoke in broken sentences.
"I say, Vee. Half a minute, Vee. It's like this: You want freedom. Look
here. You know—if you want freedom. Just an idea of mine. You know
how those Russian students do? In Russia. Just a formal marriage. Mere
formality. Liberates the girl from parental control. See? You marry me.
Simply. No further responsibility whatever. Without hindrance—present
occupation. Why not? Quite willing. Get a license—just an idea of mine.
Doesn't matter a bit to me. Do anything to please you, Vee. Anything.
Not fit to be dust on your boots. Still—there you are!"
He paused.
Ann Veronica's desire to laugh unrestrainedly was checked by the
tremendous earnestness of his expression. "Awfully good of you, Teddy."
she said.
He nodded silently, too full for words.
"But I don't see," said Ann Veronica, "just how it fits the present
situation."
"No! Well, I just suggested it. Threw it out. Of course, if at any
time—see reason—alter your opinion. Always at your service. No
offence, I hope. All right! I'm off. Due to play hockey. Jackson's.
Horrid snorters! So long, Vee! Just suggested it. See? Nothing really.
Passing thought."
"Teddy," said Ann Veronica, "you're a dear!"
"Oh, quite!" said Teddy, convulsively, and lifted an imaginary hat and
left her.
The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first
much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue
of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a
dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of
external coverings; the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on
its surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's
wrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and
shabby, but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an
almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight
who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good
seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly
related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate. She was the social leader of
Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely
kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of
the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the
Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen's Aid Society. Both ladies
were on easy and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside
Park society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well
attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out and gave
a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized croquet lawn and
tennis beyond, and understood the art of bringing people together.
And they never talked of anything at all, never discussed, never even
encouraged gossip. They were just nice.
Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had just
been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and speculating
for the first time in her life about that lady's mental attitudes. Her
prevailing effect was one of quiet and complete assurance, as though she
knew all about everything, and was only restrained by her instinctive
delicacy from telling what she knew. But the restraint exercised by her
instinctive delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual
matters it covered religion and politics and any mention of money
matters or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these
exclusions represented, after all, anything more than suppressions. Was
there anything at all in those locked rooms of her aunt's mind? Were
they fully furnished and only a little dusty and cobwebby and in need of
an airing, or were they stark vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach
or so or the gnawing of a rat? What was the mental equivalent of a rat's
gnawing? The image was going astray. But what would her aunt think of
Teddy's recent off-hand suggestion of marriage? What would she think of
the Widgett conversation? Suppose she was to tell her aunt quietly
but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded crustacea. The girl
suppressed a chuckle that would have been inexplicable.