H G Wells Omnibus, page 21
Ann Veronica was in their very forefront.
In an instant the expectant calm of Westminster was ended, and the very Speaker in the chair blenched at the sound of the policemen’s whistles. The bolder members in the House left their places to go lobbyward, grinning. Others pulled hats over their noses, cowered in their seats, and feigned that all was right with the world. In Old Palace Yard everybody ran. They either ran to see or ran for shelter. Even two Cabinet Ministers took to their heels, grinning insincerely. At the opening of the van doors and the emergence into the fresh air Ann Veronica’s doubt and depression gave place to the wildest exhilaration. That same adventurousness that had already buoyed her through crises that would have overwhelmed any normally feminine girl with shame and horror now became uppermost again. Before her was a great Gothic portal. Through that she had to go.
Past her shot the little old lady in the bonnet, running incredibly fast, but otherwise still alertly respectable, and she was making a strange threatening sound as she ran, such as one would use in driving ducks out of a garden—“B-r-r-r-r-r—!” and pawing with black-gloved hands. The policemen were closing in from the sides to intervene. The little old lady struck like a projectile upon the resounding chest of the foremost of these, and then Ann Veronica had got past and was ascending the steps.
Then most horribly she was clasped about the waist from behind and lifted from the ground.
At that a new element poured into her excitement, an element of wild disgust and terror. She had never experienced anything so disagreeable in her life as the sense of being held helplessly off her feet. She screamed involuntarily—she had never in her life screamed before—and then she began to wriggle and fight like a frightened animal against the men who were holding her.
The affair passed at one leap from a spree to a nightmare of violence and disgust. Her hair got loose, her hat came over one eye, and she had no arm free to replace it. She felt she must suffocate if these men did not put her down, and for a time they would not put her down. Then with an indescribable relief her feet were on the pavement, and she was being urged along by two policemen, who were gripping her wrists in an irresistible expert manner. She was writhing to get her hands loose and found herself gasping with passionate violence, “It’s damnable!—damnable!” to the manifest disgust of the fatherly policeman on her right.
Then they had released her arms and were trying to push her away.
“You be off, missie,” said the fatherly policeman. “This ain’t no place for you.”
He pushed her a dozen yards along the greasy pavement with flat, well-trained hands that there seemed to be no opposing. Before her stretched blank spaces, dotted with running people coming toward her, and below them railings and a statue. She almost submitted to this ending of her adventure. But at the word “home” she turned again.
“I won’t go home,” she said; “I won’t!” and she evaded the clutch of the fatherly policeman and tried to thrust herself past him in the direction of that big portal. “Steady on!” he cried.
A diversion was created by the violent struggles of the little old lady. She seemed to be endowed with superhuman strength. A knot of three policemen in conflict with her staggered toward Ann Veronica’s attendants and distracted their attention. “I WILL be arrested! I WON’T go home!” the little old lady was screaming over and over again. They put her down, and she leaped at them; she smote a helmet to the ground.
“You’ll have to take her!” shouted an inspector on horseback, and she echoed his cry: “You’ll have to take me!” They seized upon her and lifted her, and she screamed. Ann Veronica became violently excited at the sight. “You cowards!” said Ann Veronica, “put her down!” and tore herself from a detaining hand and battered with her fists upon the big red ear and blue shoulder of the policeman who held the little old lady.
So Ann Veronica also was arrested.
And then came the vile experience of being forced and borne along the street to the police-station. Whatever anticipation Ann Veronica had formed of this vanished in the reality. Presently she was going through a swaying, noisy crowd, whose faces grinned and stared pitilessly in the light of the electric standards. “Go it, miss!” cried one. “Kick aht at ‘em!” though, indeed, she went now with Christian meekness, resenting only the thrusting policemen’s hands. Several people in the crowd seemed to be fighting. Insulting cries became frequent and various, but for the most part she could not understand what was said. “Who’ll mind the baby nar?” was one of the night’s inspirations, and very frequent. A lean young man in spectacles pursued her for some time, crying “Courage! Courage!” Somebody threw a dab of mud at her, and some of it got down her neck. Immeasurable disgust possessed her. She felt draggled and insulted beyond redemption.
She could not hide her face. She attempted by a sheer act of will to end the scene, to will herself out of it anywhere. She had a horrible glimpse of the once nice little old lady being also borne stationward, still faintly battling and very muddy—one lock of grayish hair straggling over her neck, her face scared, white, but triumphant. Her bonnet dropped off and was trampled into the gutter. A little Cockney recovered it, and made ridiculous attempts to get to her and replace it.
“You must arrest me!” she gasped, breathlessly, insisting insanely on a point already carried; “you shall!”
The police-station at the end seemed to Ann Veronica like a refuge from unnamable disgraces. She hesitated about her name, and, being prompted, gave it at last as Ann Veronica Smith, 107A, Chancery Lane… .
Indignation carried her through that night, that men and the world could so entreat her. The arrested women were herded in a passage of the Panton Street Police-station that opened upon a cell too unclean for occupation, and most of them spent the night standing. Hot coffee and cakes were sent in to them in the morning by some intelligent sympathizer, or she would have starved all day. Submission to the inevitable carried her through the circumstances of her appearance before the magistrate.
He was no doubt doing his best to express the attitude of society toward these wearily heroic defendants, but he seemed to be merely rude and unfair to Ann Veronica. He was not, it seemed, the proper stipendiary at all, and there had been some demur to his jurisdiction that had ruffled him. He resented being regarded as irregular. He felt he was human wisdom prudentially interpolated… . “You silly wimmin,” he said over and over again throughout the hearing, plucking at his blotting-pad with busy hands. “You silly creatures! Ugh! Fie upon you!” The court was crowded with people, for the most part supporters and admirers of the defendants, and the man with the light eyelashes was conspicuously active and omnipresent.
Ann Veronica’s appearance was brief and undistinguished. She had nothing to say for herself. She was guided into the dock and prompted by a helpful police inspector. She was aware of the body of the court, of clerks seated at a black table littered with papers, of policemen standing about stiffly with expressions of conscious integrity, and a murmuring background of the heads and shoulders of spectators close behind her. On a high chair behind a raised counter the stipendiary’s substitute regarded her malevolently over his glasses. A disagreeable young man, with red hair and a loose mouth, seated at the reporter’s table, was only too manifestly sketching her.
She was interested by the swearing of the witnesses. The kissing of the book struck her as particularly odd, and then the policemen gave their evidence in staccato jerks and stereotyped phrases.
“Have you anything to ask the witness?” asked the helpful inspector.
The ribald demons that infested the back of Ann Veronica’s mind urged various facetious interrogations upon her, as, for example, where the witness had acquired his prose style. She controlled herself, and answered meekly, “No.”
“Well, Ann Veronica Smith,” the magistrate remarked when the case was all before him, “you’re a good-looking, strong, respectable gell, and it’s a pity you silly young wimmin can’t find something better to do with your exuberance. Two-and-twenty! I can’t imagine what your parents can be thinking about to let you get into these scrapes.”
Ann Veronica’s mind was filled with confused unutterable replies.
“You are persuaded to come and take part in these outrageous proceedings—many of you, I am convinced, have no idea whatever of their nature. I don’t suppose you could tell me even the derivation of suffrage if I asked you. No! not even the derivation! But the fashion’s been set and in it you must be.”
The men at the reporter’s table lifted their eyebrows, smiled faintly, and leaned back to watch how she took her scolding. One with the appearance of a bald little gnome yawned agonizingly. They had got all this down already—they heard the substance of it now for the fourteenth time. The stipendiary would have done it all very differently.
She found presently she was out of the dock and confronted with the alternative of being bound over in one surety for the sum of forty pounds—whatever that might mean or a month’s imprisonment.
“Second class,” said some one, but first and second were all alike to her. She elected to go to prison.
At last, after a long rumbling journey in a stuffy windowless van, she reached Canongate Prison—for Holloway had its quota already. It was bad luck to go to Canongate.
Prison was beastly. Prison was bleak without spaciousness, and pervaded by a faint, oppressive smell; and she had to wait two hours in the sullenly defiant company of two unclean women thieves before a cell could be assigned to her. Its dreariness, like the filthiness of the police cell, was a discovery for her. She had imagined that prisons were white-tiled places, reeking of lime-wash and immaculately sanitary. Instead, they appeared to be at the hygienic level of tramps’ lodging-houses. She was bathed in turbid water that had already been used. She was not allowed to bathe herself: another prisoner, with a privileged manner, washed her. Conscientious objectors to that process are not permitted, she found, in Canongate. Her hair was washed for her also. Then they dressed her in a dirty dress of coarse serge and a cap, and took away her own clothes. The dress came to her only too manifestly unwashed from its former wearer; even the under-linen they gave her seemed unclean. Horrible memories of things seen beneath the microscope of the baser forms of life crawled across her mind and set her shuddering with imagined irritations. She sat on the edge of the bed—the wardress was too busy with the flood of arrivals that day to discover that she had it down—and her skin was shivering from the contact of these garments. She surveyed accommodation that seemed at first merely austere, and became more and more manifestly inadequate as the moments fled by. She meditated profoundly through several enormous cold hours on all that had happened and all that she had done since the swirl of the suffrage movement had submerged her personal affairs… .
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.
Chapter 11
THOUGHTS IN PRISON
1.
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!”
2.
“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!…
