Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [13]
The day our Bill becomes law, no experiment whatsoever may be performed on a living cat, dog, horse, ass, or mule, nor on any other animal except (in almost all cases) under conditions of complete anaesthesia from beginning to end. The reign of terror is almost over.
I wish we were in Wales. It is easier to believe in a state of nature there.
No news.
Last year Fá and I passed through the Vale of Llan-gollen and visited the pretty house where the Ladies lived. It is said the two of them never slept a night away from home. Nothing parted them; nothing disturbed them. They supported no causes. They took no part in public life. They did nothing; they were ladies in the old sense. They looked no farther than the ends of their aristocratic noses.
Shall I confess? Sometimes I long for such a life. A narrow, private existence, as Fáwould call it; a limited life. House and hearth and daily bread. Like Rosa Bonheur and her friend, when we visited, with their horses, goats, sheep, monkeys, donkeys, lapwings, and hoopoes! I can imagine us at Hengwrt with our animals around us, well fed and tended, and no thought of all the others. No memory of all the viciousness of the world.
Fifteen years ago we made our bargain. A trip to Wales every summer, but Kensington all the rest of the year. Meetings, dinners, petitions, debates, dinners, appeals, circulars, dinners, calls, printings, meetings, dinners. There are things to be said on platforms; things to be said at tea-tables. And things not to be said at all.
A lady lion-tamer put her head in a lion's mouth last week, and he bit it off. If a lion attempted to put his head in my mouth I expect I would do the same.
Lord Carnarvon has been called away from London to his dying mother. She lingers; he has been gone for a fortnight now. Meanwhile our Bill lacks a midwife to see it through the House. Fa rages at Carnarvon for what she calls his dereliction of duty. But how is the poor man to choose? On one side, the muffled cries of hundreds of thousands of creatures; on the other, his mother. It would drive anybody mad.
The slightest things set us ajitter, at this eleventh hour. On the way home from chapel I panicked at the bray of an ass. Yesterday I snapped at Fa over the grocer's bill. She asked if I would prefer her to earn a thousand a year or do God's work on earth?
If we cannot love each other through times like these, then what we thought a rock beneath us is turned to shifting sands.
She was on crutches when I met her. Summer in Rome; I was working on a model of my little Arab horse when Charlotte Cushman was announced, with a visitor. To think of a time when it was not familiar, that warm bulk, lurching across the room! An Irish lady of honourable birth, Miss Frances Power Cobbe. She told me very cheerfully about the doctor who had left her crippled. I asked her to come riding on the Campagna. I was merely being polite; I never thought she would come.
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,"