THE SUFFRAGETTES
Part 1
"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."She groaned aloud and bowed her forehead to her knees. She floundered deep. She wanted to kiss his feet. His feet would have the firm texture of his hands.
Then suddenly her spirit rose in revolt. "I will not have this slavery," she said. "I will not have this slavery."She shook her fist ceilingward. "Do you hear!" she said "whatever you are, wherever you are! I will not be slave to the thought of any man, slave to the customs of any time. Confound this slavery of sex! I am a man! I will get this under if I am killed in doing it!"She scowled into the cold blacknesses about her.
"Manning," she said, and contemplated a figure of inaggressive persistence. "No!" Her thoughts had turned in a new direction.
"It doesn't matter," she said, after a long interval, "if they are absurd. They mean something. They mean everything that women can mean--except submission. The vote is only the beginning, the necessary beginning. If we do not begin--"She had come to a resolution. Abruptly she got out of bed, smoothed her sheet and straightened her pillow and lay down, and fell almost instantly asleep.
Part 2
The next morning was as dark and foggy as if it was mid-November instead of early March. Ann Veronica woke rather later than usual, and lay awake for some minutes before she remembered a certain resolution she had taken in the small hours. Then instantly she got out of bed and proceeded to dress.
She did not start for the Imperial College. She spent the morning up to ten in writing a series of unsuccessful letters to Ramage, which she tore up unfinished; and finally she desisted and put on her jacket and went out into the lamp-lit obscurity and slimy streets. She turned a resolute face southward.
She followed Oxford Street into Holborn, and then she inquired for Chancery Lane. There she sought and at last found 107A, one of those heterogeneous piles of offices which occupy the eastern side of the lane. She studied the painted names of firms and persons and enterprises on the wall, and discovered that the Women's Bond of Freedom occupied several contiguous suites on the first floor. She went up-stairs and hesitated between four doors with ground-glass panes, each of which professed "The Women's Bond of Freedom" in neat black letters. She opened one and found herself in a large untidy room set with chairs that were a little disarranged as if by an overnight meeting. On the walls were notice-boards bearing clusters of newspaper slips, three or four big posters of monster meetings, one of which Ann Veronica had attended with Miss Miniver, and a series of announcements in purple copying-ink, and in one corner was a pile of banners.
There was no one at all in this room, but through the half-open door of one of the small apartments that gave upon it she had a glimpse of two very young girls sitting at a littered table and writing briskly.
