Part 5
So Ann Veronica, enterprising and a little dubious as ever,
mingled with the stream of history and wrote her Christian name
upon the police-court records of the land.
But out of a belated regard for her father she wrote the surname
of some one else.
Some day, when the rewards of literature permit the arduous
research required, the Campaign of the Women will find its
Carlyle, and the particulars of that marvellous series of
exploits by which Miss Brett and her colleagues nagged the whole
Western world into the discussion of women's position become the
material for the most delightful and amazing descriptions. At
present the world waits for that writer, and the confused record
of the newspapers remains the only resource of the curious. When
he comes he will do that raid of the pantechnicons the justice it
deserves; he will picture the orderly evening scene about the
Imperial Legislature in convincing detail, the coming and going
of cabs and motor-cabs and broughams through the chill, damp
evening into New Palace Yard, the reinforced but untroubled and
unsuspecting police about the entries of those great buildings
whose square and panelled Victorian Gothic streams up from the
glare of the lamps into the murkiness of the night; Big Ben
shining overhead, an unassailable beacon, and the incidental
traffic of Westminster, cabs, carts, and glowing omnibuses going
to and from the bridge. About the Abbey and Abingdon Street
stood the outer pickets and detachments of the police, their
attention all directed westward to where the women in Caxton
Hall, Westminster, hummed like an angry hive. Squads reached to
the very portal of that centre of disturbance. And through all
these defences and into Old Palace Yard, into the very vitals of
the defenders' position, lumbered the unsuspected vans.
They travelled past the few idle sightseers who had braved the
uninviting evening to see what the Suffragettes might be doing;
they pulled up unchallenged within thirty yards of those coveted
portals.
And then they disgorged.
Were I a painter of subject pictures, I would exhaust all my
skill in proportion and perspective and atmosphere upon the
august seat of empire, I would present it gray and dignified and
immense and respectable beyond any mere verbal description, and
then, in vivid black and very small, I would put in those
valiantly impertinent vans, squatting at the base of its
altitudes and pouring out a swift, straggling rush of ominous
little black objects, minute figures of determined women at war
with the universe.
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.
