CHAPTER THE SECOND Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story | ||
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
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
“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 hold-
“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
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.”
CHAPTER THE SECOND Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story | ||