H. Wells - Ann Veronica

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

Part 1

The first night in prison she found it impossible to sleep. The

bed was hard beyond any experience of hers, the bed-clothes

coarse and insufficient, the cell at once cold and stuffy. The

little grating in the door, the sense of constant inspection,

worried her. She kept opening her eyes and looking at it. She

was fatigued physically and mentally, and neither mind nor body

could rest. She became aware that at regular intervals a light

flashed upon her face and a bodiless eye regarded her, and this,

as the night wore on, became a torment. . . .

Capes came back into her mind. He haunted a state between hectic

dreaming and mild delirium, and she found herself talking aloud

to him. All through the night an entirely impossible and

monumental Capes confronted her, and she argued with him about

men and women. She visualized him as in a policeman's uniform

and quite impassive. On some insane score she fancied she had to

state her case in verse. "We are the music and you are the

instrument," she said; "we are verse and you are prose.

"For men have reason, women rhyme

A man scores always, all the time."

This couplet sprang into her mind from nowhere, and immediately

begot an endless series of similar couplets that she began to