Ann Veronica (27 page)

Ann Veronica, with a curious sinking of the heart, regarded the black
cavities of the vans. Their doors stood open, and placards with big
letters indicated the section assigned to each. She directed the little
old woman and then made her way to van D. A young woman with a white
badge on her arm stood and counted the sections as they entered their
vans.

"When they tap the roof," she said, in a voice of authority, "you are to
come out. You will be opposite the big entrance in Old Palace Yard. It's
the public entrance. You are to make for that and get into the lobby if
you can, and so try and reach the floor of the House, crying 'Votes for
Women!' as you go."

She spoke like a mistress addressing school-children.

"Don't bunch too much as you come out," she added.

"All right?" asked the man with the light eyelashes, suddenly appearing
in the doorway. He waited for an instant, wasting an encouraging smile
in the imperfect light, and then shut the doors of the van, leaving the
women in darkness....

The van started with a jerk and rumbled on its way.

"It's like Troy!" said a voice of rapture. "It's exactly like Troy!"

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....