Abigail (48 page)

Once the Institutes at Hackney and Stevenstown were established, Abigail found herself with less to do than she had expected. The day-to-day running was a matter for Dr. Stubbins and the secretary, Mrs. Fletcher, in London and their counterparts in the north country. Abigail was eager then to plan the opening of more institutes, but Victor was adamant: They needed at least a year—preferably two years—before they would know if the problem could be tackled this way at all.

Suddenly what had promised to be a life rich in work and fulfillment became flat. There was no other word for it. She did not love Victor the less; indeed, if more were possible, she loved him more. And he felt the same about her. The problem was not there. It was something to do with the Institutes. Somehow—and quite reasonably, she now realized—she had expected more of a relationship to grow between herself and the women who attended. Not the full richness of her rapport with Annie, of course, but
something
of it nevertheless. Instead, she felt nothing.

William Morris had once told her how keenly he resented his inability to get on cordial terms with working-class people, despite their evident (and his own undoubted) goodwill. She wondered if she was now to suffer that same disappointment. Was Annie just a special case in her life?

Or (she wondered guiltily) had Annie herself made it impossible for any of those women to befriend her? The recruiting speech certainly spelled out the enormous social gulf that separated them, and Annie had given her good reasons for stressing it. But Annie had behaved in strange, jealous ways in the past, so it wouldn’t be out of character now. What a funny, complicated person she was. She claimed to be so simple—and probably even believed it. All she wanted was “a good laugh.” But underneath it all she was a boxful of Chinese puzzles, and not a simple bit of grain in her.

Abigail began to look for other outlets for her energies. She attended a number of suffragist meetings that autumn, though she valued the vote so little. There were two kinds of suffragists. On the one hand were those who campaigned for woman suffrage—that is, they wanted the present franchise (which, being restricted more or less to property owners, was middle and upper class) extended to women property owners and the wives of men of property. By and large these campaigners were upper-class, Conservative women who would no more think of campaigning on behalf of all women than they would support the cause of democracy; the very word was as hateful to them as to their husbands.

On the other hand, there were the campaigners for full adult suffrage for both sexes—a small, powerless group compared with the woman suffragists.

The aims of both were so far removed from hers, or, at best, were so small a part of hers, that she decided to quit their meetings, though she continued to send donations to the adult suffragists. In any case, Victor was now beginning the series of tests that Clement had promised, which took her mind off any public involvement for a time.

The results were not encouraging, though they pretended otherwise to Victor. His high blood pressure did not respond to treatment. “He must have arteries like clay pipestems,” Clement said. His heart, responding to the extra work, was steadily enlarging, and the roots of its valves were thus being stretched. Inevitably the day would come when they were stretched too far. Then, with each heartbeat, some of the blood that ought to be pumped out into the body would instead leak back through an incompetent valve into the blood vessels of his lungs. This would increase the strain on his heart many times over, and from then on his decline would be rapid.

They told Victor none of this but, of course, he knew it anyway.

“I have travelled the railways,” he said with a smile.

Until that fatal overstretching of the valve occurred, there would be no sudden change in his general fitness; life could go on very much as it always had.

“Shall we go back to Venice this winter?” she asked. “We had such a marvellous time there.”

“And leave Walter?” he joked. “No—London’s the place for us now.”

The inevitability of death did not move her, but its nearness seemed, at first, intolerable. She thought of taking him to Heidelberg, where the world’s best doctors lived, or to Marienbad, where the regime and diet had prolonged thousands of lives, or to the Alps—perhaps the mountain air and clean sunlight would do wonders for him.

But, as one possibility succeeded another, they merged into a composite vision of precious months squandered in the fruitless cosseting of a body whose failure no external agency or regime could postpone. And with that realization came a sudden calm. It was almost an exhilaration—at least it turned each normal, uneventful day into something special. What had someone once said to her—to survive one day is a mercy! It was no exaggeration.

***

One afternoon a Mrs. Elkington-Laud came to call. Abigail remembered her as the madam chairman of the woman-suffragist meetings she had attended; she asked the maid to show this visitor into the drawing room.

Mrs. Elkington-Laud was visibly taken aback by César’s paintings; she looked from them to Abigail and back, and so far forgot herself as to say, “Good heavens.”

“By Rodet,” Abigail said. “I shared an atelier in Rome with him and his wife for many years.” She laughed. “Of course in those days he alone knew what a great painter he was!” Her speech was long enough—and inconsequential enough—to allow Mrs. Elkington-Laud to recover herself. Abigail’s composure was helped by the fact that she didn’t give a rap for the woman’s opinions, nor for her talents as a tale bearer.

“No doubt, no doubt,” Mrs. Elkington-Laud said in a conciliatory tone. And then, pricked by a genuine curiosity, she asked, “Tell me, why do you hang them so publicly, Madame la Baronne?”

“I find it invaluable, Mrs. Elkington-Laud. Those pictures infallibly divide the world into people who believe it matters and those who know it doesn’t.”

“Yes?” she said dubiously, neither agreeing nor seeing the point.

“Well, since I know I should find the former tedious…” She smiled sweetly. “But do sit down, I’m sure you didn’t call on me to discuss paintings! I fear I’m in for a wigging for not attending your meetings?”

“A wigging! Dear me, Madame la Baronne, certainly not. The very idea. No, but, since you are good enough to mention it, I’m sure I’d be most interested to know why we have not seen you recently. Nothing is amiss, I hope?”

“To be candid, Mrs. Elkington-Laud, I find I am not enough in sympathy with your particular aims.”

The visitor made a tight-lipped smile. “Perhaps you feel, like Lady Ashburton, Lady Londonderry, Lady Jeune”—she listed more than half a dozen eminent political hostesses—“you feel you do not want to dilute your family’s influence?”

The maid brought in some tea.

“Not in the least, Mrs. Elkington-Laud. But does it not strike you as extraordinary, the number of prominent women who have made their own way in life and their own mark on the world who are antisuffragists? Ouida, Marie Corelli, John Oliver Hobbes, Violet Markham, Mary Kingsley, Gertrude Bell—even Beatrice Webb. And you know I could name dozens of other talented women, all opposed to you suffragists. And we are all very far from matching your hobble-di-hoy picture of a downtrodden, simpering, semi-invalid, know-nothing, half-child female. I’m sure there are more women of achievement and sense against woman suffrage than for it.” Abigail poured the tea as she spoke.

Mrs. Elkington-Laud was crestfallen. She sipped abstractedly, as if the arguments going on in her mind were by now too tired to muster. “You are probably correct,” she said at last. “I cannot understand it. It’s the most discouraging thing of all, Madame la Baronne.”

“Oh, please call me something less formal, Mrs. Elkington-Laud. As to our reasons for opposing suffragism, I’m sure we each have our own. For my part, I have no deep-rooted objection to our getting the vote. I simply put it very far down the list of things that cry out for attention. If the men in Parliament had tried to block higher education for women, or the new laws on women’s property, on the age of consent…the Contagious Diseases Acts…factory legislation—all the causes where women were the leading campaigners—I’m sure I’d think differently. But Parliament has proved highly responsive to our aims. If women had had the vote, I doubt if any of those measures would have gone through the quicker for it.”

Mrs. Elkington-Laud became livelier. “But that’s where they’re so clever, Madame de Bouvier. They give way to us on these lesser issues so that they may stand fast on the main issue of the vote.”

“
Lesser
issues, Mrs. Elkington-Laud?” Abigail’s patience was growing thin. “To raise the age of consent for girls from twelve to sixteen? Lesser? To end the degrading harassment of respectable women by a notoriously corrupt branch of our police? Lesser? I’m afraid this shows how different our notions are. And so much remains to be done that only we women can do.”

“For my part I see nothing more important than the vote.”

Abigail sighed. “How would one describe the sky to people who had lived a lifetime in a cave? And yet,” she went on quickly, seeing the offence begin to grow in her visitor’s eyes, “there is among you suffragists an inkling of my own views. I was in conversation with Olive Schreiner at one of your meetings.” Interest began to replace that look of offence. “She told me that the parasite woman is very little different from the prostitute. ‘They shade off by degrees,’ she said, ‘the one into the other.’ Now, that…”

“Indeed!” Mrs. Elkington-Laud broke in, eager to seize on a point of agreement, however small. “I firmly believe it. But I’m sorry—I interrupted you.”

“I was saying that that is so profoundly true. The vote, you see, is only one small aspect (small to
me
)
of the entire set of relationships between men and women. I believe those relationships are wrong at their very heart. On the one hand men idolize us, on the other they belittle us, patronize us. To be blunt, they degrade us. That’s where Miss Schreiner was so exactly right—the parasite woman is the epitome of their idealization of us, and the prostitute is the very image of their degradation of us. I want in some way to help make our ideas about each other—men and women—less extreme. Why is courage a ‘manly’ virtue? I want it to become a human virtue. Why is compassion so necessarily ‘feminine’? I want us to think of it as human. I want men and women to develop a more equal view of one another, you see. That’s the
equality
I shall campaign for. All the other equalities—the vote, political power, employment, rewards—they follow. Or, to put it another way, as long as men believe we are so utterly different from them, then each one of those lesser equalities will have to be fought for piecemeal.”

Mrs. Elkington-Laud caught her first glimpse of the sweep and power of Abigail’s vision. Her eyes shone as she drew breath to speak. But Abigail had one more thought to implant. “Even worse,” she said, “such a piecemeal fight would be, at heart, irrational. The only rational basis for granting those lesser equalities would be a general acceptance of our equality as ‘humans first, male and female second.’ And I fear the irrational in us, Mrs. Elkington-Laud. I fear the violence and the passions it brews.”

Mrs. Elkington-Laud could contain her excitement no longer. “Oh, Madame de Bouvier. What a truly inspirational leader you would make. Our critics say we’re interested only in feathering our own nests—but so, I think, are they, even the women among them. And I came here believing you to be one of them! Yet you soar above us in the grandeur of your views and put us all to shame. If you cannot join us, would you at least consent to speak to us? Not even the men among us have developed a philosophy so profound. Will you? Please?”

Abigail thought for a moment, not about her acceptance—that was never in doubt—but about ways of using the occasion to the best advantage. “I’m going to suggest something that may be disagreeable to you, Mrs. Elkington-Laud,” she said at length. “I shall have to ask you to trust me. For myself, I’m honoured at what you say and I’m delighted to accept. But I would like to bring along a fellow speaker, a friend of mine, a very dear friend, who was once, long ago—a prostitute.”

Mrs. Elkington-Laud’s eyes went wide with shock.

Abigail went on. “Before you speak, let me tell you about her and say why I think you ought also to invite Mrs…ah…‘Flanders,’ let us call her. Mrs. Flanders is a highly respectable woman who owns a small haberdashery and milliner’s in one of London’s western suburbs. She has a husband, a good and kindly man—I would say a great man—with a responsible job in the City. He knows all about her past. They have a son of school age who is everything most parents desire in a boy. Yet when I first met Mrs. Flanders, long before she
was
Mrs. Flanders, so let’s call her ‘Moll,’ when I first met Moll, she was just about to embark on her brief career as a prostitute—not that I knew it then, of course, or I’d have prevented her. The point is that I know this woman’s entire life story. I know that what she has to tell would be enlightening. You talk of the ‘grandeur’ of my views. The grandest building in the world would look thin and flat without its shadows. Mrs. Flanders’s story forms, if you like, the shadows that throw my ideas into the strongest relief.”

“Well…” Mrs. Elkington-Laud was still dubious.

“There will be nothing…ah…incandescent in her tale, I assure you. She is a most fastidious and correct woman.”

And so it was agreed, though still with no great eagerness on the part of Mrs. Elkington-Laud.

For two weeks Annie held out. She’d die of fright, she said. She’d forgotten it all. What was the point of raking over those dead ashes? Respectable ladies gave her the terrors, always had done. People would find out who this “Mrs. Flanders” was; she’d never be able to hold her head up again. Anyway, she’d never made a public speech in her life.

Abigail was on the point of giving up when Pepe said to her, privately, that underneath it all Annie was quite keen. He was walking her, as usual, up to the cab rank at Victoria.

“The only thing I’m afraid of is that her hatred of men will start bubbling out,” Abigail said. “A hint of it would be fine. But stark hatred does put people off so.”

Pepe laughed. “Good heavens, there’s none of that left in her. That was all years ago. My fear is the opposite—I’m afraid that this speech will bring it all back. She was dreadful with it when we were first married. It kept coming out in all sorts of ways she couldn’t help. I wouldn’t like to live through that again.”

“It’s
you
,
Pepe,” Abigail said suddenly. “You’ve done that for her—with your goodness and understanding.”

“You could say,” he answered with a laugh, “that I know what it’s like to be her. An ambition achieved!” He became serious again. “But you persist with her, Abbie. She’ll agree, I’m sure. And don’t be afraid of her getting cold feet at the last minute. I’ll make sure to deliver her to the stage door in plenty of time.”

“You’re a good man, Pepe. I never deserved you,” she said. “Nor did you deserve the terrible way I treated you.”

“But it’s all turned out
for
the best,” he told her cheerfully. “You’re happy with Victor—but I doubt you’re as happy as Annie, William, and I. She and I have a strange Saturday-and-Sunday marriage, I know. But we’re the happiest people alive. So don’t talk of ‘deserve.’ None of us deserves it. Let’s just be content we’ve got it.”

***

The day of Abigail’s and Annie’s speech finally drew round. Annie had been in an agony of indecision—or, to be exact, an agony of multiple decisions—over what to wear. In the end she had agreed to Abigail’s suggestion to put on full mourning. “The veil will obscure your face,” Abigail pointed out. “Even the people beside you on the platform won’t recognize you again. And black is so respectable and so penitent. And besides it always evokes such sympathy!” When Annie said she had no full set of mourning, Abigail brushed the objection aside. “I’ll bring mine to the hall. Then anyone who waits to follow out a woman in black will have a long wait indeed!”

It was not a large meeting, by suffragist standards; only a hundred or so women were there. But the press had remembered that the Baronne de Bouvier was once Lady Abigail Stevenson, alias the Abbot, Drucilla Getz, and others who had joined the minor pantheon of journalistic legend, and who had always been good for a quote; the press was there in some strength.

“All set?” Mrs. Elkington-Laud said for the fortieth time, and for the fortieth time she dry-soaped her gloved hands in the air.

Abigail, who had given up replying, nodded and smiled all the little reassurance she could muster. Why did the buzz of a hall full of women sound so angry? The deeper-throated hum of muttering men would, she was sure, be much more soothing. And where was Annie?

Yet again she sent Frances out to the stage door to see if there was any sign of Annie and Pepe. It would be so like Annie to change her mind; but surely Pepe would keep his word. Meanwhile she began to think of things to add to her own speech, to give Annie more time. Frances returned and shook her head.

“I think we’d better begin,” Mrs. Elkington-Laud said with a smile. Annie’s nonappearance was a matter more of relief to her than of concern.

Abigail agreed; she could do nothing now but hope that Pepe would deliver Annie sometime before her speech was finished. She followed the madam chairman onto the stage.

The sight of a hundred pairs of sharp, bright eyes—all upon her, her clothes, her hair, her walk, her face—was something for which not all her nervousness had prepared her. It was terrifying. There wasn’t a woman present with whom she would not gladly have changed lives—and thrown in ten thousand pounds for the inducement. She was their prisoner, the prisoner of their expectations. She sat there hating them, shivering, while Mrs. Elkington-Laud, all calm and confidence, breezed through an introduction that would have flattered Socrates himself.

When Abigail stood to speak she was as curious as anyone there to know what her voice sounded like; and to her astonishment it sounded calm and assured. To be sure, there were little tremblings and catchings of breath at unintended pauses, now and then, but its ringing clarity in no way mirrored the turmoil that still seethed within.

“From Mrs. Elkington-Laud’s most flattering introduction,” she said, “you must imagine I make it a daily exercise to address large crowds. I assure you this is the first such occasion in my life. And I must tell you, it is a chastening experience to live for…well, I shall admit to thirty-nine years in the closest intimacy with the English language, and then to stand here and to see the entire dictionary and syntax departing quietly by one of the side doors. It is both novel and humiliating!”

There was a laugh at that. Her heart began to slow its manic hammering. She could breathe more deeply.
Come,
she thought,
this isn’t so bad.
She continued:

“I fear, madam chairman, that you may inadvertently have given the impression that I am in some ways opposed to suffragism. Far from it, as I hope to show this evening. Indeed, I must begin by confessing a profound gratitude to the movement. Why, only today it has helped me to elucidate a puzzle that has tormented me for…well, thirty-nine years at least.”

The laugh again. It relaxed her still further.

“A letter in this morning’s papers from a worthy gentleman points out that if women are ever called upon to vote, the exercise of so grave a responsibility will unhinge many delicate minds.”

They laughed scornfully.

“Oh, yes. He confidently predicts a doubling or even a trebling of the incidence of neurasthenia.” There was laughter again, for neurasthenia, an imaginary disease attributed to tight lacing and too little exercise, was often imputed to suffragists by their opponents. She added: “I believe he quoted as his authority the late Sir Henry James!”

The laughter rose to a roar. James had been the archenemy of all suffragists in the 1870s; he occupied a special seat of loathing in the demonology of the movement. She had picked well (for, of course, the letter was her own invention).

“Now, all my life I have wondered why such an unearthly hush settles upon the country at every election. Why do groups of silent men sit and about the streets with such drawn faces, their brows so pale? Why do our husbands and fathers and brothers refuse their food, preferring to stand long hours at the window, tugging at their beards and muttering strange formulae?”

A titter grew through the hall as the more astute of her listeners began to anticipate her drift.

“Why do they start up in the night, uttering harsh cries of pain, and fall back upon the pillow, wild-eyed and sleepless? I had no idea. Until I read that letter this morning, I was not aware that this demented behaviour was but the merest outward, flickering show of a titanic inner struggle. A struggle so valiantly and uncomplainingly endured by our menfolk out of their deep-seated instinct to protect us. A struggle that only their rugged and manly constitutions can survive. A struggle, in short, with the dreaded toils of…forgive me—in this company I must whisper the word:
neurasthenia
!”

It was a very stage whisper. And it was a platform from which her listeners launched a delighted and prolonged roar of laughter.

“And, as I say,” she shouted over their laughter, forcing them to stop, “but for the suffragist movement, such a revealing letter would never have been written. But for the suffragist movement, our menfolk would have kept forever secret from us what a hellish torment it is”—she paused and smiled in apparent wonder—“to mark an X upon a slip of paper”—she held aloft the first page of her speech—“and drop it…in a box!” She let go the paper and, wide-eyed, watched it fall.

From that moment on, they were hers. She let loose several more barbs, all pointed as sharply, at the “antis.” Each time her listeners’ delight and laughter rose to a new height; and each time she let the laughter draw out a bit longer before she interrupted with her next dart. Finally she let the laughter and applause work itself out entirely. She looked at Frances in the wings; Frances shook her head—still no Annie.

She let the last titters die, the last sighs, the last little clearings of the throat. She looked around with a smile more wistful than satisfied. She waited for a small rustle of bewilderment to begin. Only then did she continue.

“Yes. It’s a sad movement that can find no cause for laughter—and a sad world, indeed, that yields none. Yet it
is
a sad world, and it is upon one aspect of that sadness that I wish—no! that I
fear—
I must dwell tonight. Please bear with me.”

Now that her wit had won them, she could say the things she could otherwise never have said. “It’s a sad world in which people build entirely false pictures of one another—and sadder still when they live their lives in the shadow of that falsehood, never once experiencing the golden radiance of truth. One of the saddest falsehoods of all is the view of womanhood now common, if not universal, among men.”

“Hear, hear,” came from several parts of the hall.

Abigail held up a finger. “For this let me say I blame womankind every bit as much as I blame the men. We have connived at a falsehood, because it was flattering to us. And now our connivance is proving to be our undoing. We have allowed to go forth a picture of ourselves—a picture, do I say? An
icon
,
in which the humanity is barely present while the spirituality is all-pervasive. Woman is tender, gentle, and modest. Woman is shy and retiring. Woman is emotional and intuitive. Woman is rudderless without a man. Her natural environment is domestic. Her natural mood is sympathy. Her natural inclination is to sacrifice herself.

“No one can deny that most of these statements are true—they may be true for as long a time as five minutes each week. For the rest of the time we are reassuringly human. Or would be, if we had not made the fatal error of conniving at this iconography. For now when we lapse, we do not lapse into our common humanity; we fall from grace—into the very pit we helped to dig!

“We are not united with men by our and their humanity; we are divided from them by a false—and cruelly false—iconography.

“Yes, cruel. For we are judged, and we judge ourselves, by an impossibly superhuman standard. And when we lapse from it, as lapse we must, into mere humanity, we are called fickle…feather-brained…selfish…petty…frivolous…
female
!
I wish we could adopt a view of ourselves at once more humble and more honest. We are tender, gentle,
and
brusque. We are retiring
and
aggressive. Shy and brash. Emotional and calm. Intuitive in this, logical in that. We love and like, dislike and loathe, men and other women,
and
,
for heaven’s sake, our own selves! We can be callous. We can feel sympathy. We can be yielding. We can be implacable.

“What man—what honest man—could put his hand on his heart and say that none of those statements also applies to men in general? Is tenderness unknown among them? Is the ‘gentle’ to be struck from gentle-man? Is modesty no longer on the curriculum at our sons’ schools? You may continue the list at your leisure. But you see my point.

“We have this vast and endlessly fascinating reservoir of human strengths and failings. It continually irrigates our characters, men and women alike. Yet we have become so obsessed with the minor variations which separate us that—to judge by the utterances of the more virulent antis
and
,
I have to say it, of the more extreme suffragists—you would think we were two different species.

“You may ask the relevance of this to your struggle. It is this: I do not believe we will win the vote as long as the false and cruel icon of woman hangs, as it were, in the hearts and minds of our menfolk. How we may change that icon, I (who have but lately, though after half a lifetime’s thought, come to hold these ideas) cannot presume to say. Certainly we must not do it by acting out the opposite, for that would be to replace the spiritual by the devilish—one icon for another. Then indeed we would justify that least worthy of all the sayings of the great and wise Dr. Johnson. We should be like dogs walking on their hind legs, and men would marvel, not that we did it well, but that we did it at all!”

She deliberately pitched this sentence like an ending, to force their applause. Mrs. Elkington-Laud drew breath to thank her. But Abigail raised a hand for silence. In the corner of her eye she could see Frances, frantically shaking her head. Still no Annie. But she was committed now—emotionally, if not in practice. One way or another she was going to proclaim the point that was her sole reason for coming here tonight.

“You applaud,” she said, when they were silent again. “I’m glad. Though it was an easy point to applaud. I told you of truths you already knew well. I showed you how we suffer because men have developed an entirely false and hopelessly idealized picture of us—but you already knew that. I showed you how the counterpart to that idealization by men is a subtle kind of degradation—but you already knew that, too.

“Now I’m going to ask you to do something you will find much more difficult. I have said that somehow we must induce our menfolk to do us the courtesy of seeing us as human beings. Now I am going to suggest that
you
should extend that same courtesy to another group in our society, a group that has also suffered, and suffered cruelly, from false views, generally held—and from a denial of its humanity. I am going to introduce you to one member of that group, though the introduction is superfluous: You already know her well.