The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (5 page)

She wrote me poems that were very bad but softened my heart. She boasted that not only had no man ever wanted her but that she had never wanted any man. She said that love was the highest law, and that the Bedouins had rites to solemnise the mutual adoption of friends.

I went home with her three years later. I took her to Wales. She said "Hang the doctors," and threw away her crutches, and we climbed Cader Idris.

If I shut my eyes I am in Hengwrt in our dark-panelled dining room, our little Rembrandt girl looking down at us with serious eyes. It cannot be long now. I have sent word that half a dozen rooms should be aired for our arrival.

I chip away at my spaniel, but it lies awkwardly on its marble rug.

Fá is shut up all day with lords and bishops and men of influence. I must order a good beef stew for dinner.

I remember Hattie Hosmer in her smock and cap, climbing the scaffolding around one of her giantesses. "Art or marriage, Mary," she used to remark; "it's one or the other."

Still no news.

I lost my temper twice this afternoon, though I kept my lips together and Fá never noticed. Would she like me better if I were a dumb beast?

We try to stick to our routines. We are always in bed by eleven o'clock. We have few friends these days. Half are lost to us because of bitter arguments over the cause. Even our beloved Harriet St. Leger looked up from brushing her great black Retriever and remarked that she could not understand us. "My dear girls, a dogs just a dog!"

But she is wrong. A dog, pinned down in a laboratory, its nostrils full of the stink of phenol and its own blood, is more than a dog. It is the whole sin of our race in miniature.

Nowadays I see vivisections everywhere. In the heels that deform women's feet, for instance; in the corsets that grip our lungs. "If we dress like slaves," Fásays, "no wonder men enslave us." I have known two women who died of having their ovaries removed, quite unnecessarily. I have heard whispers of another fashionable operation, where a part is cut away that is not diseased at all. The surgeons do it simply to kill passion. Simply to make women quieter. Simply because they can.

Three thousand doctors and scientists have signed a Memorial to the Home Secretary, protesting at the insult we do their professions by attempting to subject them to legal control. They propose amendments to every word in our Bill. A crowd of them marched into the Home Office and slapped it on the desk.

Fá got to the letters before me this morning. She cried when she read one accusing her of wearing a feather in her hat that was ripped from a living ostrich. Such an absurdity! A woman who for half a century has worn only the plainest homemade suits. I made her laugh about it, over caraway cake. I called her a slave to fashion.

Does she guess? Does she see through me? The truth is that I long for this Bill to pass not so much for the animals' sake as for ours. For this battle to be over, and the two of us to have come safe home.

I read in
The Times
about a fox who saved his own skin. A pack of hounds was on his heels when he suddenly turned in the direction of the railway, and lay down on the line. An express was approaching at a fearsome speed. Unwilling to see their hounds cut in pieces, the huntsmen had to call off the pack. The fox stayed on the track until the train got within ten paces, then slipped off into the countryside.

Knowing when to go, that's the trick of it.

No word from Lords Carnarvon or Shaftesbury. No news of the Bill. July has come in dank and windy. Fáis irritable as always when bad weather keeps her home; like a dog, she needs her constitutionals.

I have been addressing letters all morning; my hand is a claw. I have copied out Fá's table of arguments and rebuttals till I am heartily sick of them all and can no longer remember which ones I am meant to believe. I dread the next meeting of our Society, the motions and counter-motions, the pompous, desperate repetitions. Perhaps I will pretend to have taken chill.

What am I doing here, in the anteroom of a public life? I was born to live tucked away in a quiet green corner of the world, with my stones and my chisels, under the long rocky shoulder of Cader Idris. That is my true habitat. If I had known my own mind fifteen years ago—if I had met and joined my life to a different kind of woman—

I will burn this page before dinner.

As the poem goes,
I have looked coolly on my what and why.

Because when Fa is away mending the world she writes to me every evening, and keeps every letter I ever sent her in a big box.

Because greed for cake is her besetting sin.

Because she lumbers along precipices and laughs at the drop.

Because her head, as measured by a skilled phrenologist, is twenty-three and one quarter inches in circumference.

Because nothing quells her. When she heard that Ruskin called her a clattering saucepan, she roared, "The better to boil his head down to size!"

Because she thinks every girl should be taught how to hit a nail straight.

Because she is such a bright light that no one peers behind her at me.

Justice and Mercy have gone from the earth.

The Bill has been read in the Commons. We barely recognise it. It has had its throat cut, the lifeblood drained out of its veins. It is a shadow of itself now, a mockery, a twitching monster.

It no longer protects animals from vivisection, but vivisectors from prosecution. It allows anyone to apply for a licence to do anything to any animal. It says a man of science is under no obligation to put a suffering creature (such as a blinded rabbit or an eviscerated rat) out of its misery unless in his opinion that suffering is likely to endure long.

Fá leaned against me, when the news came, and her whole weight bore down. "Mary," she said, "what have we done?"

At times like this I wish we shared a bed, as some friends I knew in Rome used to do. Then I could hold her all night. Fá has always joked about her body, calling it Kensington's own grotesque. She doesn't understand that I love every pound of flesh.

Late August, and we are in Wales. The Parliamentary Session is over, and the summer, and all our hope.

The Vivisector's Charter is passed. It is the first time I have ever cursed the Queen. We always thought Victoria was on the side of the animals; we always said she had a tender heart. How could she have signed her name to this?

Hengwrt does not seem as beautiful as it was last summer; we have missed the best of it. Or rather, all its loveliness is at a little distance, as if behind glass. The Rembrandt girl's eyes puzzle over us.

Fá never looks up. She is busy writing the bitterest letters I have ever read, to those of our supporters who have melted away. I have begun again on the business of circulars. I print them and post them and eminent people sign them and return them and I compile a list of the signatories and send it to other eminent people. Circular is the right word.

The damage is done, but we go on; nerves are cut, but still they feel. An unpopular cause has its own momentum. It bears down on you, blind and urgent as a train. Qualms are no longer permitted. We have set our faces the way we mean to go. There is no more room for nice distinctions, reservations, doubts, normal life.

Another story for my scrapbook. An old man went hunting rabbits with a ferret, and was found buried days later, halfway up a collapsed burrow.

Of course, saving them may kill us too.

Lord Shaftesbury writes to say that the Act is better than nothing, and should be given a chance. Air. Gladstone assures us, again, that his sympathies are with us—but he will sign nothing.

Some we once called comrades have given in entirely. We burn their letters. Why waste our breath pleading for reform? We will settle for nothing now but abolition. Government is corrupt. Doctors and scientists are liars, all. We will address ourselves to the hearts of the public with a simple message. No living thing should be cut open to satisfy human curiosity.

I say we, because I am as one with Fa in this.

I persuaded her to spend the afternoon in the garden, for the good of her health. The shrubs are dreadfully overgrown. She cuts the best flowers to send away to the friends we have left. I hold the basket and she wields the knife like a sabre.

This evening I looked at my plate and felt queasy. Now that I begin to consider the claims of the animals afresh, it seems to me that vivisection is only the outermost skin of the onion. Whatever about the rest of Mr. Darwin's views, he has proved that we are closer to the lower kingdoms than we ever suspected. God has made us all of one stuff. And I wonder now why, if Fá and I will not fish for sport, on principle, we still dine on salmon? Why I sit here in boots made of calfskin, holding a tortoiseshell comb, on cushions filled with down, on a horsehair stool?

These thoughts make me dizzy. I have not mentioned them to Fá; she would tell me I was getting hysterical.

But where does it end? We have fenced in the creatures of the world, made them depend on us like fearful children. We cannot seem to live without their labour, their milk, their skins. What would it mean to tear up this dreadful contract? How could we begin all over again?

From Fà's window you can see the little churchyard where, in time, we will lie together. Our souls, I hope, will be in a better place.
They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.

Until then I will do nothing, say nothing to divide us. Fáalways says she cannot abide a lie, but I think a little discretion is necessary if two lives are to lie alongside each other as quiet as cutlery in the drawer. So I will never let her suspect: my disloyalty to the cause, the weariness that comes over me as I gum down another envelope, the utter indifference with which I set it aside for the post. I will keep my treachery locked up in my heart.

I am making her a cat in alabaster for her fifty-fourth birthday.

Last spring Fit took a solemn vow never to go to bed at night leaving a stone unturned that might help to stop vivisection. My own oath is a more private one. To stand by her in this doomed cause, as in everything else. And with my last breath—because for all her girth and aches, she is sure to outlive me—I will urge her to keep up the good fight. Yes, that's the phrase she will want to hear. 1 will say it not because I believe, anymore, that she or anyone else can save the animals, but because she is most herself in battle. Like the Cavalier in the old poem: she could not love me, loved she not honour more.

My main source for "The Fox on the Line" is
The Life of Frances Power Cobbe (
1898, 1904); I have also drawn on her
Essays on the Pursuits of Women (
1863) and
The Duties of Women (
1881). A brief mention of the career of Mary Lloyd is found in the Reverend T. Mardy Rees,
Welsh Painters, Engravers, Sculptors (
1912). The line of poetry quoted, "I have looked coolly on my what and why," is from Augusta Webster's 1870 monologue, "A Castaway.
"

After the passing of the watered-down Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, Cobbe and her Victoria Street Society changed tactics and fought for a total ban on live animal testing (incidentally, a cause yet to be won). After twenty years based in London together, in 1884 Mary and Fä (as Cobbe was called by her intimates) retired to Wales, but continued to be involved in the campaign. When Mary Lloyd died in 1898, her will forbade Cobbe to "commemorate her by any written record.
"

Games played by James the Fourth, King of Scotland: tennis, bowls, backgammon, and dice.

Year in which the King rode to Drummond Castle: 1496.

Number of Lairds who had already given their daughters to the King as mistresses: unknown.

Month in which the King rode to Drummond Castle: April.

Number of languages spoken by the King: 8 (English, Gaelic, Latin, French, German, Flemish, Italian, Spanish).

Number of children already born to the King by 1496: unknown.

Number of hours the King could stay in the saddle without a rest: 10.

Price of the Kings falcon in gold: £150.

Age of the King in 1496: 23.

Number of years since the Drummond Clan had locked the Murray Clan into the church at Monzievaird and burnt it down: 4.

Number of Murrays who died in that church on that occasion: 120.

Number of Lord Drummond's sons who were executed as a consequence: 1.

Number of daughters of Lord Drummond: 3 (Margaret, Euphemia, Sibilla).

Number of languages in which Lord Drummond's daughters could say "Yes, Sire": 3.

Number of Lord Drummond's daughters invited to and installed in Stirling Castle, two months after the King's visit to the Drummonds in 1496: 1 (Margaret).

Number of retainers who travelled with the King: 100.

Time the King's party could spend in each of his castles before the smell from the garderobes made it necessary for them to move on: 3 weeks.

Number of times a day the King washed his hands: 5.

Number of new links the King added every year to the rusted chain he wore around his waist as a penance for having let the rebel Lairds kill his father: 1.

Age of the King at the time of his father's death: 15.

Number of hands on the King's clock: 1.

Age of Margaret Tudor in 1496 when her father, the King of England, offered her to the King of Scotland as a bride, and the King of Scotland refused: 7.

Years in which Scotland and England went to war: 1496, 1497, and 1498.

Number of daughters borne to the King of Scotland by Margaret Drummond in 1496: 1.

Number of months after becoming the King's mistress that Margaret Drummond and her infant were sent home to her family: 11.

Reward received by Margaret Drummond from the King in 1497: a 9-year lease of lands in the earldom of Strathearn.

Year in which Lord Kennedy gave his daughter Janet to the King as a mistress: 1498.

Year in which Janet Kennedy bore the King a son: 1499.

Year in which the King announced that he would in fact marry Margaret Tudor, now ten years old, daughter of the King of England: 1499.