The Complete Novels of H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells

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."

      9.

      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!"

      Chapter 10 THE SUFFRAGETTES

      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.

      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