H G Wells Omnibus, page 22
“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!”
3.
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.
4.
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!… “
5.
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?”
6.
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!”
7.
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.
“I have hurt my father,” she said; “I have hurt my aunt. I have hurt and snubbed poor Teddy. I’ve made no one happy. I deserve pretty much what I’ve got… .
“If only because of the way one hurts others if one kicks loose and free, one has to submit… .
“Broken-in people! I suppose the world is just all egotistical children and broken-in people.
“Your little flag of pride must flutter down with the rest of them, Ann Veronica… .
“Compromise—and kindness.
“Compromise and kindness.
“Who are YOU that the world should lie down at your feet?
“You’ve got to be a decent citizen, Ann Veronica. Take your half loaf with the others. You mustn’t go clawing after a man that doesn’t belong to you—that isn’t even interested in you. That’s one thing clear.
“You’ve got to take the decent reasonable way. You’ve got to adjust yourself to the people God has set about you. Every one else does.”
She thought more and more along that line. There was no reason why she shouldn’t be Capes’ friend. He did like her, anyhow; he was always pleased to be with her. There was no reason why she shouldn’t be his restrained and dignified friend. After all, that was life. Nothing was given away, and no one came so rich to the stall as to command all that it had to offer. Every one has to make a deal with the world.
It would be very good to be Capes’ friend.
She might be able to go on with biology, possibly even work upon the same questions that he dealt with… .
Perhaps her granddaughter might marry his grandson… .
It grew clear to her that throughout all her wild raid for independence she had done nothing for anybody, and many people had done things for her. She thought of her aunt and that purse that was dropped on the table, and of many troublesome and ill-requited kindnesses; she thought of the help of the Widgetts, of Teddy’s admiration; she thought, with a new-born charity, of her father, of Manning’s conscientious unselfishness, of Miss Miniver’s devotion.
“And for me it has been Pride and Pride and Pride!
“I am the prodigal daughter. I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him—
“I suppose pride and self-assertion are sin? Sinned against heaven—Yes, I have sinned against heaven and before thee… .
“Poor old daddy! I wonder if he’ll spend much on the fatted calf?…
“The wrappered life-discipline! One comes to that at last. I begin to understand Jane Austen and chintz covers and decency and refinement and all the rest of it. One puts gloves on one’s greedy fingers. One learns to sit up…
“And somehow or other,” she added, after a long interval, “I must pay Mr. Ramage back his forty pounds.”
Chapter 12
ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER
1.
Ann Veronica made a strenuous attempt to carry out her good resolutions. She meditated long and carefully upon her letter to her father before she wrote it, and gravely and deliberately again before she despatched it.
“MY DEAR FATHER,” she wrote,—“I have been thinking hard about everything since I was sent to this prison. All these experiences have taught me a great deal about life and realities. I see that compromise is more necessary to life than I ignorantly supposed it to be, and I have been trying to get Lord Morley’s book on that subject, but it does not appear to be available in the prison library, and the chaplain seems to regard him as an undesirable writer.”
At this point she had perceived that she was drifting from her subject.
“I must read him when I come out. But I see very clearly that as things are a daughter is necessarily dependent on her father and bound while she is in that position to live harmoniously with his ideals.”
“Bit starchy,” said Ann Veronica, and altered the key abruptly. Her concluding paragraph was, on the whole, perhaps, hardly starchy enough.
“Really, daddy, I am sorry for all I have done to put you out. May I come home and try to be a better daughter to you?
“ANN VERONICA.”
2.
Her aunt came to meet her outside Canongate, and, being a little confused between what was official and what was merely a rebellious slight upon our national justice, found herself involved in a triumphal procession to the Vindicator Vegetarian Restaurant, and was specifically and personally cheered by a small, shabby crowd outside that rendezvous. They decided quite audibly, “She’s an Old Dear, anyhow. Voting wouldn’t do no ‘arm to ‘er.” She was on the very verge of a vegetarian meal before she recovered her head again. Obeying some fine instinct, she had come to the prison in a dark veil, but she had pushed this up to kiss Ann Veronica and never drawn it down again. Eggs were procured for her, and she sat out the subsequent emotions and eloquence with the dignity becoming an injured lady of good family. The quiet encounter and home-coming Ann Veronica and she had contemplated was entirely disorganized by this misadventure; there were no adequate explanations, and after they had settled things at Ann Veronica’s lodgings, they reached home in the early afternoon estranged and depressed, with headaches and the trumpet voice of the indomitable Kitty Brett still ringing in their ears.
“Dreadful women, my dear!” said Miss Stanley. “And some of them quite pretty and well dressed. No need to do such things. We must never let your father know we went. Why ever did you let me get into that wagonette?”
“I thought we had to,” said Ann Veronica, who had also been a little under the compulsion of the marshals of the occasion. “It was very tiring.”
“We will have some tea in the drawing-room as soon as ever we can—and I will take my things off. I don’t think I shall ever care for this bonnet again. We’ll have some buttered toast. Your poor cheeks are quite sunken and hollow… .”
3.
When Ann Veronica found herself in her father’s study that evening it seemed to her for a moment as though all the events of the past six months had been a dream. The big gray spaces of London, the shop-lit, greasy, shining streets, had become very remote; the biological laboratory with its work and emotions, the meetings and discussions, the rides in hansoms with Ramage, were like things in a book read and closed. The study seemed absolutely unaltered, there was still the same lamp with a little chip out of the shade, still the same gas fire, still the same bundle of blue and white papers, it seemed, with the same pink tape about them, at the elbow of the arm-chair, still the same father. He sat in much the same attitude, and she stood just as she had stood when he told her she could not go to the Fadden Dance. Both had dropped the rather elaborate politeness of the dining-room, and in their faces an impartial observer would have discovered little lines of obstinate wilfulness in common; a certain hardness—sharp, indeed, in the father and softly rounded in the daughter—but hardness nevertheless, that made every compromise a bargain and every charity a discount.
“And so you have been thinking?” her father began, quoting her letter and looking over his slanting glasses at her. “Well, my girl, I wish you had thought about all these things before these bothers began.”
Ann Veronica perceived that she must not forget to remain eminently reasonable.
“One has to live and learn,” she remarked, with a passable imitation of her father’s manner.
“So long as you learn,” said Mr. Stanley.
Their conversation hung.
“I suppose, daddy, you’ve no objection to my going on with my work at the Imperial College?” she asked.
“If it will keep you busy,” he said, with a faintly ironical smile.
“The fees are paid to the end of the session.”
He nodded twice, with his eyes on the fire, as though that was a formal statement.
“You may go on with that work,” he said, “so long as you keep in harmony with things at home. I’m convinced that much of Russell’s investigations are on wrong lines, unsound lines. Still—you must learn for yourself. You’re of age—you’re of age.”
“The work’s almost essential for the B.Sc. exam.”
“It’s scandalous, but I suppose it is.”
Their agreement so far seemed remarkable, and yet as a home-coming the thing was a little lacking in warmth. But Ann Veronica had still to get to her chief topic. They were silent for a time. “It’s a period of crude views and crude work,” said Mr. Stanley. “Still, these Mendelian fellows seem likely to give Mr. Russell trouble, a good lot of trouble. Some of their specimens—wonderfully selected, wonderfully got up.”
“Daddy,” said Ann Veronica, “these affairs—being away from home has—cost money.”
“I thought you would find that out.”
“As a matter of fact, I happen to have got a little into debt.”
“NEVER!”
Her heart sank at the change in his expression.
“Well, lodgings and things! And I paid my fees at the College.”
“Yes. But how could you get—Who gave you credit?
“You see,” said Ann Veronica, “my landlady kept on my room while I was in Holloway, and the fees for the College mounted up pretty considerably.” She spoke rather quickly, because she found her father’s question the most awkward she had ever had to answer in her life.
“Molly and you settled about the rooms. She said you HAD some money.”
“I borrowed it,” said Ann Veronica in a casual tone, with white despair in her heart.
“But who could have lent you money?”
“I pawned my pearl necklace. I got three pounds, and there’s three on my watch.”
“Six pounds. H’m. Got the tickets? Yes, but then—you said you borrowed?”
“I did, too,” said Ann Veronica.
“Who from?”
She met his eye for a second and her heart failed her. The truth was impossible, indecent. If she mentioned Ramage he might have a fit—anything might happen. She lied. “The Widgetts,” she said.
“Tut, tut!” he said. “Really, Vee, you seem to have advertised our relations pretty generally!”
“They—they knew, of course. Because of the Dance.”
“How much do you owe them?”
She knew forty pounds was a quite impossible sum for their neighbors. She knew, too, she must not hesitate. “Eight pounds,” she plunged, and added foolishly, “fifteen pounds will see me clear of everything.” She muttered some unlady-like comment upon herself under her breath and engaged in secret additions.
Mr. Stanley determined to improve the occasion. He seemed to deliberate. “Well,” he said at last slowly, “I’ll pay it. I’ll pay it. But I do hope, Vee, I do hope—this is the end of these adventures. I hope you have learned your lesson now and come to see—come to realize—how things are. People, nobody, can do as they like in this world. Everywhere there are limitations.”
