"It seems to me that much of a woman's difficulties are economic."
"That will follow," said Kitty Brett—"that will follow."
She interrupted as Ann Veronica was about to speak again, with a bright contagious hopefulness. "Everything will follow," she said.
"Yes," said Ann Veronica, trying to think where they were, trying to get things plain again that had seemed plain enough in the quiet of the night.
"Nothing was ever done," Miss Brett asserted, "without a certain element of Faith. After we have got the Vote and are recognized as citizens, then we can come to all these other things."
Even in the glamour of Miss Brett's assurance it seemed to Ann Veronica that this was, after all, no more than the gospel of Miss Miniver with a new set of resonances. And like that gospel it meant something, something different from its phrases, something elusive, and yet something that in spite of the superficial incoherence of its phrasing, was largely essentially true. There was something holding women down, holding women back, and if it wasn't exactly man-made law, man-made law was an aspect of it. There was something indeed holding the whole species back from the imaginable largeness of life....
"The Vote is the symbol of everything," said Miss Brett.
She made an abrupt personal appeal.
"Oh! please don't lose yourself in a wilderness of secondary considerations," she said. "Don't ask me to tell you all that women can do, all that women can be. There is a new life, different from the old life of dependence, possible. If only we are not divided. If only we work together. This is the one movement that brings women of different classes together for a common purpose. If you could see how it gives them souls, women who have taken things for granted, who have given themselves up altogether to pettiness and vanity...."
"Give me something to do," said Ann Veronica, interrupting her persuasions at last. "It has been very kind of you to see me, but I don't want to sit and talk and use your time any longer. I want to do something. I want to hammer myself against all this that pens women in. I feel that I shall stifle unless I can do something—and do something soon."
Part 4
It was not Ann Veronica's fault that the night's work should have taken upon itself the forms of wild burlesque. She was in deadly earnest in everything she did. It seemed to her the last desperate attack upon the universe that would not let her live as she desired to live, that penned her in and controlled her and directed her and disapproved of her, the same invincible wrappering, the same leaden tyranny of a universe that she had vowed to overcome after that memorable conflict with her father at Morningside Park.
She was listed for the raid—she was informed it was to be a raid upon the House of Commons, though no particulars were given her—and told to go alone to 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, and not to ask any policeman to direct her. 14, Dexter Street, Westminster, she found was not a house but a yard in an obscure street, with big gates and the name of Podgers & Carlo, Carriers and Furniture Removers, thereon. She was perplexed by this, and stood for some seconds in the empty street hesitating, until the appearance of another circumspect woman under the street lamp at the corner reassured her. In one of the big gates was a little door, and she rapped at this. It was immediately opened by a man with light eyelashes and a manner suggestive of restrained passion. "Come right in," he hissed under his breath, with the true conspirator's note, closed the door very softly and pointed, "Through there!"
By the meagre light of a gas lamp she perceived a cobbled yard with four large furniture vans standing with horses and lamps alight. A slender young man, wearing glasses, appeared from the shadow of the nearest van. "Are you A, B, C, or D?" he asked.
"They told me D," said Ann Veronica.
"Through there," he said, and pointed with the pamphlet he was carrying.
Ann Veronica found herself in a little stirring crowd of excited women, whispering and tittering and speaking in undertones.
The light was poor, so that she saw their gleaming faces dimly and indistinctly. No one spoke to her. She stood among them, watching them and feeling curiously alien to them. The oblique ruddy lighting distorted them oddly, made queer bars and patches of shadow upon their clothes. "It's Kitty's idea," said one, "we are to go in the vans."
"Kitty is wonderful," said another.
"Wonderful!"
"I have always longed for prison service," said a voice, "always. From the beginning. But it's only now I'm able to do it."
A little blond creature close at hand suddenly gave way to a fit of hysterical laughter, and caught up the end of it with a sob.
"Before I took up the Suffrage," a firm, flat voice remarked, "I could scarcely walk up-stairs without palpitations."
Some one hidden from Ann Veronica appeared to be marshalling the assembly. "We have to get in, I think," said a nice little old lady in a bonnet to Ann Veronica, speaking with a voice that quavered a little. "My dear, can you see in this light? I think I would like to get in. Which is C?"
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!"
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.