Ann Veronica (28 page)

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

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

Capes came back into her mind. He haunted a state between hectic
dreaming and mild delirium, and she found herself talking aloud to
him. All through the night an entirely impossible and monumental
Capes confronted her, and she argued with him about men and women. She
visualized him as in a policeman's uniform and quite impassive. On some
insane score she fancied she had to state her case in verse. "We are the
music and you are the instrument," she said; "we are verse and you are
prose.

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

This couplet sprang into her mind from nowhere, and immediately begot an
endless series of similar couplets that she began to compose and address
to 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, damn!" she cried, as the hundred-and-first couplet or so presented
itself in her unwilling brain.

For a time she worried about that compulsory bath and cutaneous
diseases.

Then she fell into a fever of remorse for the habit of bad language she
had 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 shut
out the rhythm from her mind. She lay still for a long time, and her
mind resumed at a more tolerable pace. She found herself talking to
Capes in an undertone of rational admission.

"There is something to be said for the lady-like theory after all," she
admitted. "Women ought to be gentle and submissive persons, strong only
in virtue and in resistance to evil compulsion. My dear—I can call you
that here, anyhow—I know that. The Victorians over-did it a little, I
admit. Their idea of maidenly innocence was just a blank white—the sort
of flat white that doesn't shine. But that doesn't alter the fact
that there IS innocence. And I've read, and thought, and guessed, and
looked—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 be
clean, 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 that
I'm not a GOOD woman. My poor brain is so mixed, dear, I hardly know
what I am saying. I mean I'm not a good specimen of a woman. I've got a
streak of male. Things happen to women—proper women—and all they have
to do is to take them well. They've just got to keep white. But I'm
always 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 is
worshipped and betrayed—the martyr-queen of men, the white mother....
You can't do that sort of thing unless you do it over religion, and
there'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 of
mind. A good woman's mind has angels with flaming swords at the portals
to 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.... It
developed into a sort of secret and private bad manners. It's got to be
at 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!"

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

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

"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 everything
and give a rule for everything. We haven't. I haven't, anyhow. And it's
no good pretending there is one when there isn't.... I suppose I
believe in God.... Never really thought about Him—people don't..
.. I suppose my creed is, 'I believe rather indistinctly in God the
Father Almighty, substratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a vein
of 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 when
one doesn't....

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

"We've all been mixing our ideas, and we've got intellectual hot
coppers—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,' they
would 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 remained
for a long time in silence.

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

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

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

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

"Oh!" he said, profoundly.

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

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

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

She was always initiating petty breaches of discipline. Her greatest
exploit was the howling before the mid-day meal. This was an imitation
of the noises made by the carnivora at the Zoological Gardens at
feeding-time; the idea was taken up by prisoner after prisoner until
the whole place was alive with barkings, yappings, roarings, pelican
chatterings, and feline yowlings, interspersed with shrieks of
hysterical laughter. To many in that crowded solitude it came as an
extraordinary relief. It was better even than the hymn-singing. But it
annoyed Ann Veronica.

"Idiots!" she said, when she heard this pandemonium, and with particular
reference 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 and
something 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 of
definite attitudes and conclusions in her mind.

One of these was a classification of women into women who are and women
who are not hostile to men. "The real reason why I am out of place
here," she said, "is because I like men. I can talk with them. I've
never found them hostile. I've got no feminine class feeling. I don't
want any laws or freedoms to protect me from a man like Mr. Capes. I
know that in my heart I would take whatever he gave....

"A woman wants a proper alliance with a man, a man who is better stuff
than herself. She wants that and needs it more than anything else in
the world. It may not be just, it may not be fair, but things are so. It
isn't law, nor custom, nor masculine violence settled that. It is just
how things happen to be. She wants to be free—she wants to be legally
and economically free, so as not to be subject to the wrong man; but
only God, who made the world, can alter things to prevent her being
slave to the right one.

"And if she can't have the right one?

"We've developed such a quality of preference!"

She rubbed her knuckles into her forehead. "Oh, but life is difficult!"
she groaned. "When you loosen the tangle in one place you tie a knot in
another.... Before there is any change, any real change, I shall be
dead—dead—dead and finished—two hundred years!..."

One afternoon, while everything was still, the wardress heard her cry
out suddenly and alarmingly, and with great and unmistakable passion,
"Why in the name of goodness did I burn that twenty pounds?"

She sat regarding her dinner. The meat was coarse and disagreeably
served.

"I suppose some one makes a bit on the food," she said....

"One has such ridiculous ideas of the wicked common people and the
beautiful machinery of order that ropes them in. And here are these
places, full of contagion!

"Of course, this is the real texture of life, this is what we refined
secure people forget. We think the whole thing is straight and noble at
bottom, and it isn't. We think if we just defy the friends we have and
go out into the world everything will become easy and splendid.
One doesn't realize that even the sort of civilization one has at
Morningside Park is held together with difficulty. By policemen one
mustn't shock.

"This isn't a world for an innocent girl to walk about in. It's a world
of dirt and skin diseases and parasites. It's a world in which the
law can be a stupid pig and the police-stations dirty dens. One wants
helpers and protectors—and clean water.

"Am I becoming reasonable or am I being tamed?

"I'm simply discovering that life is many-sided and complex and
puzzling. I thought one had only to take it by the throat.

"It hasn't GOT a throat!"

One day the idea of self-sacrifice came into her head, and she made, she
thought, some important moral discoveries.

It came with an extreme effect of re-discovery, a remarkable novelty.
"What have I been all this time?" she asked herself, and answered, "Just
stark egotism, crude assertion of Ann Veronica, without a modest rag of
religion or discipline or respect for authority to cover me!"

It seemed to her as though she had at last found the touchstone of
conduct. She perceived she had never really thought of any one but
herself in all her acts and plans. Even Capes had been for her merely an
excitant to passionate love—a mere idol at whose feet one could enjoy
imaginative wallowings. She had set out to get a beautiful life, a free,
untrammelled life, self-development, without counting the cost either
for herself or others.