CHAPTER THE SECOND
ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW
Part 1
"Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?" asked
Constance Widgett.
Ann Veronica considered her answer. "I mean to," she replied.
"You are making your dress?"
"Such as it is."
They were in the elder Widgett girl's bedroom; Hetty was laid up,
she said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was
gossiping away her tedium. It was a large, littered,
self-forgetful apartment, decorated with unframed charcoal
sketches by various incipient masters; and an open bookcase,
surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a human skull,
displayed an odd miscellany of books--Shaw and Swinburne, Tom
Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance
Widgett's abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly
remunerative work--stencilling in colors upon rough, white
material--at a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the
purpose, while on her bed there was seated a slender lady of
thirty or so in a dingy green dress, whom Constance had
introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss Miniver. Miss Miniver
looked out on the world through large emotional blue eyes that
were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her nose was
pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant. Her
glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face.
She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her
opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words
"Votes for Women." Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the
sufferer's bed, while Teddy Widgett, being something of an
athlete, occupied the only bed-room chair--a decadent piece,
essentially a tripod and largely a formality--and smoked
cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that he was looking all
the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows. Teddy was the hatless young
man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two days
before. He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and
much broken in to feminine society. A bowl of roses, just
brought by Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and
Ann Veronica was particularly trim in preparation for a call she
was to make with her aunt later in the afternoon.
Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. "I've been," she said,
"forbidden to come."
"Hul-LO!" said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy
remarked with profound emotion, "My God!"
"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "and that complicates the situation."
"Auntie?" asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica's
affairs.
"No! My father. It's--it's a serious prohibition."
"Why?" asked Hetty.
"That's the point. I asked him why, and he hadn't a reason."
"YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!" said Miss Miniver, with
great intensity.
"Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn't have it
out. "Ann Veronica reflected for an instant "That's why I think
I ought to come."
"You asked your father for a reason!" Miss Miniver repeated.
"We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!" said
Hetty. "He's got almost to like it."
"Men," said Miss Miniver, "NEVER have a reason. Never! And they
don't know it! They have no idea of it. It's one of their worst
traits, one of their very worst."
"But I say, Vee," said Constance, "if you come and you are
forbidden to come there'll be the deuce of a row."
Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation
was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax
and sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. "It isn't only
the dance," she said.
"There's the classes," said Constance, the well-informed.
"There's the whole situation. Apparently I'm not to exist yet.
I'm not to study, I'm not to grow. I've got to stay at home and
remain in a state of suspended animation."
"DUSTING!" said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.
"Until you marry, Vee," said Hetty.
"Well, I don't feel like standing it."
"Thousands of women have married merely for freedom," said Miss
Miniver. "Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery."
"I suppose," said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink
petals, "it's our lot. But it's very beastly."
"What's our lot?" asked her sister.
"Slavery! Downtroddenness! When I think of it I feel all over
boot marks--men's boots. We hide it bravely, but so it is.
Damn! I've splashed."
Miss Miniver's manner became impressive. She addressed Ann
Veronica with an air of conveying great open secrets to her. "As
things are at present," she said, "it is true. We live under
man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to. Every
girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or
type-write, and then we're underpaid and sweated--it's dreadful
to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her generalization,
whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went on,
conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things WILL
be."
"I'm all for the vote," said Teddy.
"I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated," said Ann
Veronica. "I suppose there's no way of getting a decent
income--independently."
"Women have practically NO economic freedom," said Miss Miniver,
"because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that.
The one profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a
woman--except the stage--is teaching, and there we trample on one
another. Everywhere else--the law, medicine, the Stock
Exchange--prejudice bars us."
"There's art," said Ann Veronica, "and writing."
"Every one hasn't the Gift. Even there a woman never gets a fair
chance. Men are against her. Whatever she does is minimized.
All the best novels have been written by women, and yet see how
men sneer at the lady novelist still! There's only one way to
get on for a woman, and that is to please men. That is what they
think we are for!"
"We're beasts," said Teddy. "Beasts!"
But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.
"Of course," said Miss Miniver--she went on in a regularly
undulating voice--"we DO please men. We have that gift. We can
see round them and behind them and through them, and most of us
use that knowledge, in the silent way we have, for our great
ends. Not all of us, but some of us. Too many. I wonder what
men would say if we threw the mask aside--if we really told them
what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE were." A
flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.
"Maternity," she said, "has been our undoing."
From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse
on the position of women, full of wonderful statements, while
Constance worked at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty
listened, and Teddy contributed sympathetic noises and consumed
cheap cigarettes. As she talked she made weak little gestures
with her hands, and she thrust her face forward from her bent
shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann Veronica and sometimes
at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near Fluelen, that hung upon
the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely sympathizing
with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and her
convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a
faint perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of
fragments of sentences heard, of passages read, or arguments
indicated rather than stated, and all of it was served in a sauce
of strange enthusiasm, thin yet intense. Ann Veronica had had
some training at the Tredgold College in disentangling threads
from confused statements, and she had a curious persuasion that
in all this fluent muddle there was something--something real,
something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She
did not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through
it all, the bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver's cheeks
and eyes, the sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly
accumulated. She had no inkling of that insupportable wrong.
"We are the species," said Miss Miniver, "men are only incidents.
They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of
animals the females are more important than the males; the males
have to please them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the
competition there is everywhere, except among humans. The stags
and oxen and things all have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in
man is the male made the most important. And that happens
through our maternity; it's our very importance that degrades us.
While we were minding the children they stole our rights and
liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took
advantage of it. It's --Mrs. Shalford says--the accidental
conquering the essential. Originally in the first animals there
were no males, none at all. It has been proved. Then they
appear among the lower things"--she made meticulous gestures to
figure the scale of life; she seemed to be holding up specimens,
and peering through her glasses at them--"among crustaceans and
things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to the
females. Mere hangers on. Things you would laugh at. And among
human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and
leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts.
The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate!
The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were
told."
"But is that really so?" said Ann Veronica.
"It has been proved," said Miss Miniver, and added, "by American
professors."
"But how did they prove it?"
"By science," said Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a
rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove.
"And now, look at us! See what we have become. Toys! Delicate
trifles! A sex of invalids. It is we who have become the
parasites and toys."
It was, Ann Veronica felt, at once absurd and extraordinarily
right. Hetty, who had periods of lucid expression, put the thing
for her from her pillow. She charged boldly into the space of
Miss Miniver's rhetorical pause.
"It isn't quite that we're toys. Nobody toys with me. Nobody
regards Constance or Vee as a delicate trifle."
Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some
remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried
hastily under a cough.
"They'd better not," said Hetty. "The point is we're not toys,
toys isn't the word; we're litter. We're handfuls. We're
regarded as inflammable litter that mustn't be left about. We
are the species, and maternity is our game; that's all right, but
nobody wants that admitted for fear we should all catch fire, and
set about fulfilling the purpose of our beings without waiting
for further explanations. As if we didn't know! The practical
trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at seventeen,
rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don't
now. Heaven knows why! They don't marry most of us off now
until high up in the twenties. And the age gets higher. We have
to hang about in the interval. There's a great gulf opened, and
nobody's got any plans what to do with us. So the world is
choked with waste and waiting daughters. Hanging about! And they
start thinking and asking questions, and begin to be neither one
thing nor the other. We're partly human beings and partly
females in suspense."
Miss Miniver followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth
shaped to futile expositions. The Widgett method of thought
puzzled her weakly rhetorical mind. "There is no remedy, girls,"
she began, breathlessly, "except the Vote. Give us that--"
Ann Veronica came in with a certain disregard of Miss Miniver.
"That's it," she said. "They have no plans for us. They have no
ideas what to do with us."
"Except," said Constance, surveying her work with her head on one
side, "to keep the matches from the litter."
"And they won't let us make plans for ourselves."
"We will," said Miss Miniver, refusing to be suppressed, "if some
of us have to be killed to get it." And she pressed her lips
together in white resolution and nodded, and she was manifestly
full of that same passion for conflict and self-sacrifice that
has given the world martyrs since the beginning of things. "I
wish I could make every woman, every girl, see this as clearly as
I see it--just what the Vote means to us. Just what it means. .
. ."
