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.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

THOUGHTS IN PRISON