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.
"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.
"I didn't know Mr. Capes was married," said Ann Veronica, resuming the
conversation 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 was
a case, or something, some years ago."
"What case?"
"A divorce—or something—I don't know. But I have heard that he almost
had to leave the schools. If it hadn't been for Professor Russell
standing 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 the
particulars, but I know it was something very disagreeable. It was among
artistic people."
Ann Veronica was silent for a while.
"I thought every one had heard," said Miss Klegg. "Or I wouldn't have
said 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." She
turned abruptly at right angles to the path they followed. "This is my
way 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 a
breath of air. And they'll shut the gates presently. It's not far from
twilight."
She was sitting brooding over her fire about ten o'clock that night when
a sealed and registered envelope was brought up to her.
She opened it and drew out a letter, and folded within it were the notes
she 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 a
passionate gesture flung them into the fire. Instantly she seized the
poker and made a desperate effort to get them out again. But she was
only able to save a corner of the letter. The twenty pounds burned with
avidity.
She remained for some seconds crouching at the fender, poker in hand.
"By Jove!" she said, standing up at last, "that about finishes it, Ann
Veronica!"
"There is only one way out of all this," said Ann Veronica, sitting up
in her little bed in the darkness and biting at her nails.
"I thought I was just up against Morningside Park and father, but it's
the whole order of things—the whole blessed order of things...."
She shivered. She frowned and gripped her hands about her knees very
tightly. Her mind developed into savage wrath at the present conditions
of a woman's life.
"I suppose all life is an affair of chances. But a woman's life is all
chance. It's artificially chance. Find your man, that's the rule. All
the rest is humbug and delicacy. He's the handle of life for you. He
will 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 these
monstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women would stand on
their own feet in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded on
the ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the vague intimations
of an Endowment of Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intense
individual dependence for women which is woven into the existing social
order. At the back of her mind there seemed always one irrelevant
qualifying spectator whose presence she sought to disregard. She would
not look at him, would not think of him; when her mind wavered, then
she muttered to herself in the darkness so as to keep hold of her
generalizations.
"It is true. It is no good waiving the thing; it is true. Unless women
are never to be free, never to be even respected, there must be a
generation of martyrs.... Why shouldn't we be martyrs? There's
nothing else for most of us, anyhow. It's a sort of blacklegging to want
to 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?... Because
she states her case in a tangle, drags it through swamps of nonsense, it
doesn't alter the fact that she is right."
That phrase about dragging the truth through swamps of nonsense she
remembered from Capes. At the recollection that it was his, she seemed
to fall through a thin surface, as one might fall through the crust of
a lava into glowing depths. She wallowed for a time in the thought of
Capes, unable to escape from his image and the idea of his presence in
her life.
She let her mind run into dreams of that cloud paradise of an altered
world in which the Goopes and Minivers, the Fabians and reforming people
believed. Across that world was written in letters of light, "Endowment
of Motherhood." Suppose in some complex yet conceivable way women were
endowed, were no longer economically and socially dependent on men. "If
one was free," she said, "one could go to him.... This vile hovering
to catch a man's eye!... One could go to him and tell him one loved
him. I want to love him. A little love from him would be enough. It
would hurt no one. It would not burden him with any obligation."