Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [14]
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.