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Ann Veronica
by H. G. Wells
May, 1996 [Etext #524]
**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ann Veronica, by H. G. Wells**
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ANN VERONICA
A MODERN LOVE STORY
BY H. G. WELLS
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER
II. ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW
III. THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS
IV. THE CRISIS
V. THE FLIGHT TO LONDON
VI. EXPOSTULATIONS
VII. IDEALS AND A REALITY
VIII. BIOLOGY
IX. DISCORDS
X. THE SUFFRAGETTES
XI. THOUGHTS IN PRISON
XII. ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER
XIII. THE SAPPHIRE RING
XIV. THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT
XV. THE LAST DAYS AT HOME
XVI. IN THE MOUNTAINS
XVII. IN PERSPECTIVE
"The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every
well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even
ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge."
ANN VERONICA
CHAPTER THE FIRST
ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER
Part 1
One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley
came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite
resolved to have things out with her father that very evening.
She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but
this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been
reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made
up her mind in the train home that it should be a decisive
crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins with her
there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of
this crisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.
She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to
Morningside Park, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in
an attitude that would certainly have distressed her mother to
see, and horrified her grandmother beyond measure; she sat with
her knees up to her chin and her hands clasped before them, and
she was so lost in thought that she discovered with a start, from
a lettered lamp, that she was at Morningside Park, and thought
she was moving out of the station, whereas she was only moving
in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once, caught up a
leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, and a
chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from the
carriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and
that she had to traverse the full length of the platform past it
again as the result of her precipitation. "Sold again," she
remarked. "Idiot!" She raged inwardly while she walked along
with that air of self-contained serenity that is proper to a
young lady of nearly two-and-twenty under the eye of the world.
She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive
offices of the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the
wicket-gate by the butcher's shop that led to the field path to
her home. Outside the post-office stood a no-hatted, blond young
man in gray flannels, who was elaborately affixing a stamp to a
letter. At the sight of her he became rigid and a singularly
bright shade of pink. She made herself serenely unaware of his
existence, though it may be it was his presence that sent her by
the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.
"Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before
consigning it to the pillar-box. "Here goes," he said. Then he
hovered undecidedly for some seconds with his hands in his
pockets and his mouth puckered to a whistle before he turned to
go home by the Avenue.
Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and
her face resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's
either now or never," she said to herself. . . .
Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people
say, come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three
parts. There was first the Avenue, which ran in a consciously
elegant curve from the railway station into an undeveloped
wilderness of agriculture, with big, yellow brick villas on
either side, and then there was the pavement, the little clump of
shops about the post-office, and under the railway arch was a
congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton and
Epsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in
the ditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of
little red-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables
and very brassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little
hill, and an iron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a
stile under an elm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going
back into the Avenue again.
"It's either now or never," said Ann Veronica, again ascending
this stile. "Much as I hate rows, I've either got to make a
stand or give in altogether."
She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed the
backs of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the
new red-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to
be making some sort of inventory. "Ye Gods!" she said at last.
"WHAT a place!
"Stuffy isn't the word for it.
"I wonder what he takes me for?"
When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of
internal conflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her
warm-tinted face. She had now the clear and tranquil expression
of one whose mind is made up. Her back had stiffened, and her
hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.
As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted
man in gray flannels appeared. There was a certain air of forced
fortuity in his manner. He saluted awkwardly. "Hello, Vee!" he
said.
"Hello, Teddy!" she answered.
He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.
But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that
he was committed to the path across the fields, an uninteresting
walk at the best of times.
"Oh, dammit!" he remarked, "dammit!" with great bitterness as he
faced it.
Part 2
Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She
had black hair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion; and the
forces that had modelled her features had loved and lingered at
their work and made them subtle and fine. She was slender, and
sometimes she seemed tall, and walked and carried herself lightly
and joyfully as one who commonly and habitually feels well, and
sometimes she stooped a little and was preoccupied. Her lips
came together with an expression between contentment and the
faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one of quiet reserve,
and behind this mask she was wildly discontented and eager for
freedom and life.
She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient--she did not
clearly know for what--to do, to be, to experience. And
experience was slow in coming. All the world about her seemed to
be--how can one put it? --in wrappers, like a house when people
leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight
kept out, one could not tell what colors these gray swathings
hid. She wanted to know. And there was no intimation whatever
that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or doors be
opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze
of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about
her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in
undertones. . . .
During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the
world had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do,
what not to do, giving her lessons to learn and games to play and
interests of the most suitable and various kinds. Presently she
woke up to the fact that there was a considerable group of
interests called being in love and getting married, with certain
attractive and amusing subsidiary developments, such as
flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.
She approached this field with her usual liveliness of
apprehension. But here she met with a check. These interests
her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older
school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and
authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think
about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress,
was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in
indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such
matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress or
bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any
other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly
ashamed of. Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult
matter not to think of these things. However having a
considerable amount of pride, she decided she would disavow these
undesirable topics and keep her mind away from them just as far
as she could, but it left her at the end of her school days with
that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose ends.
The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no
particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a
functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels,
walks, and dusting in her father's house. She thought study
would be better. She was a clever girl, the best of her year in
the High School, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or
Newnham but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl
at a friend's dinner-table and he thought that sort of thing
unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to live at
home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile
she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science
course at the Tredgold Women's College--she had already
matriculated into London University from school--she came of age,
and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the
strength of that and her season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities
began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature
and art. She read voraciously, and presently, because of her
aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought
might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she
went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable
friend to accompany her. She passed her general science
examination with double honors and specialized in science. She
happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental
lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in
comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the
illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether
direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself
chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a
store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had
already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and
foggy--it is the test of the good comparative anatomist--upon the
skull. She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the
Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on
with her work at the fountain-head.
She had asked about that already, and her father had replied,
evasively: "We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have
to see about that." In that posture of being seen about the
matter hung until she seemed committed to another session at the
Tredgold College, and in the mean time a small conflict arose and
brought the latch-key question, and in fact the question of Ann
Veronica's position generally, to an acute issue.
In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil
servants, and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park
Avenue, there was a certain family of alien sympathies and
artistic quality, the Widgetts, with which Ann Veronica had
become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was a journalist and art
critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suit and "art" brown
ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sunday morning,
travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openly
despised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the
station. He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three
daughters with peculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found
adorable. Two of these had been her particular intimates at the
High School, and had done much to send her mind exploring beyond
the limits of the available literature at home. It was a
cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family in the key of
faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on from the
High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life
of art student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries,
talking about work, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and
again they drew Ann Veronica from her sound persistent industry
into the circle of these experiences. They had asked her to come
to the first of the two great annual Fadden Dances, the October
one, and Ann Veronica had accepted with enthusiasm. And now her
father said she must not go.
He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.
Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had been
ineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual
dignified reserve had availed her nothing. One point was that
she was to wear fancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride,
and the other was that she was to spend whatever vestiges of the
night remained after the dance was over in London with the
Widgett girls and a select party in "quite a decent little hotel"
near Fitzroy Square.
"But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.
"You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares a
difficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize-- I don't see
how I can get out of it now."
Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it
to her, not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to
her a singularly ignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't
look me in the face and say it," said Ann Veronica.
"But of course it's aunt's doing really."
And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home,
she said to herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll
have it out with him. And if he won't--"
But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at
that time.
Part 3
Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of company
business: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic,
clean-shaven man of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose,
iron-gray hair, gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small,
circular baldness at the crown of his head. His name was Peter.
He had had five children at irregular intervals, of whom Ann
Veronica was the youngest, so that as a parent he came to her
perhaps a little practised and jaded and inattentive; and he
called her his "little Vee," and patted her unexpectedly and
disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as of any age
between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a good
deal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a
game he treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of
microscopic petrography.
He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian
manner as his "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had
turned his mind to technical microscopy when he was eighteen, and
a chance friendship with a Holborn microscope dealer had
confirmed that bent. He had remarkably skilful fingers and a
love of detailed processes, and he had become one of the most
dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world. He spent
a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon the
little room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary
apparatus and new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down
slices of rock to a transparent thinness and mounting them in a
beautiful and dignified manner. He did it, he said, "to distract
his mind." His chief successes he exhibited to the Lowndean
Microscopical Society, where their high technical merit never
failed to excite admiration. Their scientific value was less
considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with a view to their
difficulty of handling or their attractiveness at conversaziones
when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the
"theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps,
but they were thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an
indiscriminating, wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts
of distinctions....
He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction with
chromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple
Robe, also in order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter
in the evening after dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with
a tendency to monopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair
of dappled fawn-skin slippers across the fender. She wondered
occasionally why his mind needed so much distraction. His
favorite newspaper was the Times, which he began at breakfast in
the morning often with manifest irritation, and carried off to
finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.
It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he
was younger, but day had followed day, and each had largely
obliterated the impression of its predecessor. But she certainly
remembered that when she was a little girl he sometimes wore
tennis flannels, and also rode a bicycle very dexterously in
through the gates to the front door. And in those days, too, he
used to help her mother with her gardening, and hover about her
while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers to the
scullery wall.
It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a
home that became less animated and various as she grew up. Her
mother had died when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters
had married off--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two
brothers had gone out into the world well ahead of her, and so
she had made what she could of her father. But he was not a
father one could make much of.
His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modest
quality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a
modern vocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably
desirable, or too pure and good for life. He made this simple
classification of a large and various sex to the exclusion of all
intermediate kinds; he held that the two classes had to be kept
apart even in thought and remote from one another. Women are
made like the potter's vessels--either for worship or contumely,
and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanted daughters.
Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealed his
chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and had
sworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom.
He was a manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he
had loved his dark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little
wife with a real vein of passion in his sentiment. But he had
always felt (he had never allowed himself to think of it) that
the promptitude of their family was a little indelicate of her,
and in a sense an intrusion. He had, however, planned brilliant
careers for his two sons, and, with a certain human amount of
warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One was in the
Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motor
business. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's
care.
He had no ideas about daughters. They happen to a man.
Of course a little daughter is a delightful thing enough. It runs
about gayly, it romps, it is bright and pretty, it has enormous
quantities of soft hair and more power of expressing affection
than its brothers. It is a lovely little appendage to the mother
who smiles over it, and it does things quaintly like her,
gestures with her very gestures. It makes wonderful sentences
that you can repeat in the City and are good enough for Punch.
You call it a lot of nicknames--"Babs" and "Bibs" and "Viddles"
and "Vee"; you whack at it playfully, and it whacks you back. It
loves to sit on your knee. All that is jolly and as it should
be.
But a little daughter is one thing and a daughter quite another.
There one comes to a relationship that Mr. Stanley had never
thought out. When he found himself thinking about it, it upset
him so that he at once resorted to distraction. The chromatic
fiction with which he relieved his mind glanced but slightly at
this aspect of life, and never with any quality of guidance. Its
heroes never had daughters, they borrowed other people's. The
one fault, indeed, of this school of fiction for him was that it
had rather a light way with parental rights. His instinct was in
the direction of considering his daughters his absolute property,
bound to obey him, his to give away or his to keep to be a
comfort in his declining years just as he thought fit. About
this conception of ownership he perceived and desired a certain
sentimental glamour, he liked everything properly dressed, but it
remained ownership. Ownership seemed only a reasonable return
for the cares and expenses of a daughter's upbringing. Daughters
were not like sons. He perceived, however, that both the novels
he read and the world he lived in discountenanced these
assumptions. Nothing else was put in their place, and they
remained sotto voce, as it were, in his mind. The new and the
old cancelled out; his daughters became quasi-independent
dependents--which is absurd. One married as he wished and one
against his wishes, and now here was Ann Veronica, his little
Vee, discontented with her beautiful, safe, and sheltering home,
going about with hatless friends to Socialist meetings and
art-class dances, and displaying a disposition to carry her
scientific ambitions to unwomanly lengths. She seemed to think
he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means of her
freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened
security of the Tredgold Women's College for Russell's unbridled
classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume
and spend the residue of the night with Widgett's ramshackle
girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!
He had done his best not to think about her at all, but the
situation and his sister had become altogether too urgent. He
had finally put aside The Lilac Sunbonnet, gone into his study,
lit the gas fire, and written the letter that had brought these
unsatisfactory relations to a head.
Part 4
MY DEAR VEE, he wrote.
These daughters! He gnawed his pen and reflected, tore the sheet
up, and began again.
"MY DEAR VERONICA,--Your aunt tells me you have involved yourself
in some arrangement with the Widgett girls about a Fancy Dress
Ball in London. I gather you wish to go up in some fantastic
get-up, wrapped about in your opera cloak, and that after the
festivities you propose to stay with these friends of yours, and
without any older people in your party, at an hotel. Now I am
sorry to cross you in anything you have set your heart upon, but
I regret to say--"
"H'm," he reflected, and crossed out the last four words.
"--but this cannot be."
"No," he said, and tried again: "but I must tell you quite
definitely that I feel it to be my duty to forbid any such
exploit."
"Damn!" he remarked at the defaced letter; and, taking a fresh
sheet, he recopied what he had written. A certain irritation
crept into his manner as he did so.
"I regret that you should ever have proposed it," he went on.
He meditated, and began a new paragraph.
"The fact of it is, and this absurd project of yours only brings
it to a head, you have begun to get hold of some very queer ideas
about what a young lady in your position may or may not venture
to do. I do not think you quite understand my ideals or what is
becoming as between father and daughter. Your attitude to me--"
He fell into a brown study. It was so difficult to put
precisely.
"--and your aunt--"
For a time he searched for the mot juste. Then he went on:
"--and, indeed, to most of the established things in life is,
frankly, unsatisfactory. You are restless, aggressive, critical
with all the crude unthinking criticism of youth. You have no
grasp upon the essential facts of life (I pray God you never
may), and in your rash ignorance you are prepared to dash into
positions that may end in lifelong regret. The life of a young
girl is set about with prowling pitfalls."
He was arrested for a moment by an indistinct picture of Veronica
reading this last sentence. But he was now too deeply moved to
trace a certain unsatisfactoriness to its source in a mixture of
metaphors. "Well," he said, argumentatively, "it IS. That's all
about it. It's time she knew."
"The life of a young girl is set about with prowling pitfalls,
from which she must be shielded at all costs."
His lips tightened, and he frowned with solemn resolution.
"So long as I am your father, so long as your life is entrusted
to my care, I feel bound by every obligation to use my authority
to check this odd disposition of yours toward extravagant
enterprises. A day will come when you will thank me. It is not,
my dear Veronica, that I think there is any harm in you; there is
not. But a girl is soiled not only by evil but by the proximity
of evil, and a reputation for rashness may do her as serious an
injury as really reprehensible conduct. So do please believe
that in this matter I am acting for the best."
He signed his name and reflected. Then he opened the study door
and called "Mollie!" and returned to assume an attitude of
authority on the hearthrug, before the blue flames and orange
glow of the gas fire.
His sister appeared.
She was dressed in one of those complicated dresses that are all
lace and work and confused patternings of black and purple and
cream about the body, and she was in many ways a younger feminine
version of the same theme as himself. She had the same sharp
nose--which, indeed, only Ann Veronica, of all the family, had
escaped. She carried herself well, whereas her brother slouched,
and there was a certain aristocratic dignity about her that she
had acquired through her long engagement to a curate of family, a
scion of the Wiltshire Edmondshaws. He had died before they
married, and when her brother became a widower she had come to
his assistance and taken over much of the care of his youngest
daughter. But from the first her rather old-fashioned conception
of life had jarred with the suburban atmosphere, the High School
spirit and the memories of the light and little Mrs. Stanley,
whose family had been by any reckoning inconsiderable--to use the
kindliest term. Miss Stanley had determined from the outset to
have the warmest affection for her youngest niece and to be a
second mother in her life--a second and a better one; but she had
found much to battle with, and there was much in herself that Ann
Veronica failed to understand. She came in now with an air of
reserved solicitude.
Mr. Stanley pointed to the letter with a pipe he had drawn from
his jacket pocket. "What do you think of that?" he asked.
She took it up in her many-ringed hands and read it judicially.
He filled his pipe slowly.
"Yes," she said at last, "it is firm and affectionate."
"I could have said more."
"You seem to have said just what had to be said. It seems to me
exactly what is wanted. She really must not go to that affair."
She paused, and he waited for her to speak.
"I don't think she quite sees the harm of those people or the
sort of life to which they would draw her," she said. "They
would spoil every chance."
"She has chances?" he said, helping her out.
"She is an extremely attractive girl," she said; and added, "to
some people. Of course, one doesn't like to talk about things
until there are things to talk about."
"All the more reason why she shouldn't get herself talked about."
"That is exactly what I feel."
Mr. Stanley took the letter and stood with it in his hand
thoughtfully for a time. "I'd give anything," he remarked, "to
see our little Vee happily and comfortably married."
He gave the note to the parlormaid the next morning in an
inadvertent, casual manner just as he was leaving the house to
catch his London train. When Ann Veronica got it she had at
first a wild, fantastic idea that it contained a tip.
Part 5
Ann Veronica's resolve to have things out with her father was not
accomplished without difficulty.
He was not due from the City until about six, and so she went and
played Badminton with the Widgett girls until dinner-time. The
atmosphere at dinner was not propitious. Her aunt was blandly
amiable above a certain tremulous undertow, and talked as if to a
caller about the alarming spread of marigolds that summer at the
end of the garden, a sort of Yellow Peril to all the smaller
hardy annuals, while her father brought some papers to table and
presented himself as preoccupied with them. "It really seems as
if we shall have to put down marigolds altogether next year,"
Aunt Molly repeated three times, "and do away with marguerites.
They seed beyond all reason." Elizabeth, the parlormaid, kept
coming in to hand vegetables whenever there seemed a chance of
Ann Veronica asking for an interview. Directly dinner was over
Mr. Stanley, having pretended to linger to smoke, fled suddenly
up-stairs to petrography, and when Veronica tapped he answered
through the locked door, "Go away, Vee! I'm busy," and made a
lapidary's wheel buzz loudly.
Breakfast, too, was an impossible occasion. He read the Times
with an unusually passionate intentness, and then declared
suddenly for the earlier of the two trains he used.
"I'll come to the station," said Ann Veronica. "I may as well
come up by this train."
"I may have to run," said her father, with an appeal to his
watch.
"I'll run, too," she volunteered.
Instead of which they walked sharply. . . .
"I say, daddy," she began, and was suddenly short of breath.
"If it's about that dance project," he said, "it's no good,
Veronica. I've made up my mind."
"You'll make me look a fool before all my friends."
"You shouldn't have made an engagement until you'd consulted your
aunt."
"I thought I was old enough," she gasped, between laughter and
crying.
Her father's step quickened to a trot. "I won't have you
quarrelling and crying in the Avenue," he said. "Stop it! . . .
If you've got anything to say, you must say it to your aunt--"
"But look here, daddy!"
He flapped the Times at her with an imperious gesture.
"It's settled. You're not to go. You're NOT to go."
"But it's about other things."
"I don't care. This isn't the place."
"Then may I come to the study to-night--after dinner?"
"I'm--BUSY!"
"It's important. If I can't talk anywhere else--I DO want an
understanding."
Ahead of them walked a gentleman whom it was evident they must at
their present pace very speedily overtake. It was Ramage, the
occupant of the big house at the end of the Avenue. He had
recently made Mr. Stanley's acquaintance in the train and shown
him one or two trifling civilities. He was an outside broker and
the proprietor of a financial newspaper; he had come up very
rapidly in the last few years, and Mr. Stanley admired and
detested him in almost equal measure. It was intolerable to
think that he might overhear words and phrases. Mr. Stanley's
pace slackened.
"You've no right to badger me like this, Veronica," he said. "I
can't see what possible benefit can come of discussing things
that are settled. If you want advice, your aunt is the person.
However, if you must air your opinions--"
"To-night, then, daddy!"
He made an angry but conceivably an assenting noise, and then
Ramage glanced back and stopped, saluted elaborately, and waited
for them to come up. He was a square-faced man of nearly fifty,
with iron-gray hair a mobile, clean-shaven mouth and rather
protuberant black eyes that now scrutinized Ann Veronica. He
dressed rather after the fashion of the West End than the City,
and affected a cultured urbanity that somehow disconcerted and
always annoyed Ann Veronica's father extremely. He did not play
golf, but took his exercise on horseback, which was also
unsympathetic.
"Stuffy these trees make the Avenue," said Mr. Stanley as they
drew alongside, to account for his own ruffled and heated
expression. "They ought to have been lopped in the spring."
"There's plenty of time," said Ramage. "Is Miss Stanley coming
up with us?"
"I go second," she said, "and change at Wimbledon."
"We'll all go second," said Ramage, "if we may?"
Mr. Stanley wanted to object strongly, but as he could not
immediately think how to put it, he contented himself with a
grunt, and the motion was carried. "How's Mrs. Ramage?" he asked.
"Very much as usual," said Ramage. "She finds lying up so much
very irksome. But, you see, she HAS to lie up."
The topic of his invalid wife bored him, and he turned at once to
Ann Veronica. "And where are YOU going?" he said. "Are you
going on again this winter with that scientific work of yours?
It's an instance of heredity, I suppose." For a moment Mr.
Stanley almost liked Ramage. "You're a biologist, aren't you?"
He began to talk of his own impressions of biology as a
commonplace magazine reader who had to get what he could from the
monthly reviews, and was glad to meet with any information from
nearer the fountainhead. In a little while he and she were
talking quite easily and agreeably. They went on talking in the
train--it seemed to her father a slight want of deference to
him--and he listened and pretended to read the Times. He was
struck disagreeably by Ramage's air of gallant consideration and
Ann Veronica's self-possessed answers. These things did not
harmonize with his conception of the forthcoming (if unavoidable)
interview. After all, it came to him suddenly as a harsh
discovery that she might be in a sense regarded as grownup. He
was a man who in all things classified without nuance, and for
him there were in the matter of age just two feminine classes and
no more--girls and women. The distinction lay chiefly in the
right to pat their heads. But here was a girl--she must be a
girl, since she was his daughter and pat-able--imitating the
woman quite remarkably and cleverly. He resumed his listening.
She was discussing one of those modern advanced plays with a
remarkable, with an extraordinary, confidence.
"His love-making," she remarked, "struck me as unconvincing. He
seemed too noisy."
The full significance of her words did not instantly appear to
him. Then it dawned. Good heavens! She was discussing
love-making. For a time he heard no more, and stared with stony
eyes at a Book-War proclamation in leaded type that filled half a
column of the Times that day. Could she understand what she was
talking about? Luckily it was a second-class carriage and the
ordinary fellow-travellers were not there. Everybody, he felt,
must be listening behind their papers.
Of course, girls repeat phrases and opinions of which they cannot
possibly understand the meaning. But a middle-aged man like
Ramage ought to know better than to draw out a girl, the daughter
of a friend and neighbor. . . .
Well, after all, he seemed to be turning the subject. "Broddick
is a heavy man," he was saying, "and the main interest of the
play was the embezzlement." Thank Heaven! Mr. Stanley allowed
his paper to drop a little, and scrutinized the hats and brows of
their three fellow-travellers .
They reached Wimbledon, and Ramage whipped out to hand Miss
Stanley to the platform as though she had been a duchess, and she
descended as though such attentions from middle-aged, but still
gallant, merchants were a matter of course. Then, as Ramage
readjusted himself in a corner, he remarked: "These young people
shoot up, Stanley. It seems only yesterday that she was running
down the Avenue, all hair and legs."
Mr. Stanley regarded him through his glasses with something
approaching animosity.
"Now she's all hat and ideas," he said, with an air of humor.
"She seems an unusually clever girl," said Ramage.
Mr. Stanley regarded his neighbor's clean-shaven face almost
warily. "I'm not sure whether we don't rather overdo all this
higher education," he said, with an effect of conveying profound
meanings.
Part 6
He became quite sure, by a sort of accumulation of reflection, as
the day wore on. He found his youngest daughter intrusive in his
thoughts all through the morning, and still more so in the
afternoon. He saw her young and graceful back as she descended
from the carriage, severely ignoring him, and recalled a glimpse
he had of her face, bright and serene, as his train ran out of
Wimbledon. He recalled with exasperating perplexity her clear,
matter-of-fact tone as she talked about love-making being
unconvincing. He was really very proud of her, and
extraordinarily angry and resentful at the innocent and audacious
self-reliance that seemed to intimate her sense of absolute
independence of him, her absolute security without him. After
all, she only LOOKED a woman. She was rash and ignorant,
absolutely inexperienced. Absolutely. He began to think of
speeches, very firm, explicit speeches, he would make.
He lunched in the Legal Club in Chancery Lane, and met Ogilvy.
Daughters were in the air that day. Ogilvy was full of a client's
trouble in that matter, a grave and even tragic trouble. He told
some of the particulars.
"Curious case," said Ogilvy, buttering his bread and cutting it
up in a way he had. "Curious case--and sets one thinking."
He resumed, after a mouthful: "Here is a girl of sixteen or
seventeen, seventeen and a half to be exact, running about, as
one might say, in London. Schoolgirl. Her family are solid West
End people, Kensington people. Father--dead. She goes out and
comes home. Afterward goes on to Oxford. Twenty-one, twenty-two.
Why doesn't she marry? Plenty of money under her father's will.
Charming girl."
He consumed Irish stew for some moments.
"Married already," he said, with his mouth full. "Shopman."
"Good God!" said Mr. Stanley.
"Good-looking rascal she met at Worthing. Very romantic and all
that. He fixed it."
"But--"
"He left her alone. Pure romantic nonsense on her part. Sheer
calculation on his. Went up to Somerset House to examine the
will before he did it. Yes. Nice position."
"She doesn't care for him now?"
"Not a bit. What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high
color and moonlight and a tenor voice. I suppose most of our
daughters would marry organ-grinders if they had a chance--at
that age. My son wanted to marry a woman of thirty in a
tobacconist's shop. Only a son's another story. We fixed that.
Well, that's the situation. My people don't know what to do.
Can't face a scandal. Can't ask the gent to go abroad and
condone a bigamy. He misstated her age and address; but you
can't get home on him for a thing like that. . . . There you
are! Girl spoilt for life. Makes one want to go back to the
Oriental system!"
Mr. Stanley poured wine. "Damned Rascal!" he said. "Isn't there
a brother to kick him?"
"Mere satisfaction," reflected Ogilvy. "Mere sensuality. I
rather think they have kicked him, from the tone of some of the
letters. Nice, of course. But it doesn't alter the situation."
"It's these Rascals," said Mr. Stanley, and paused.
"Always has been," said Ogilvy. "Our interest lies in heading
them off."
"There was a time when girls didn't get these extravagant ideas."
"Lydia Languish, for example. Anyhow, they didn't run about so
much."
"Yes. That's about the beginning. It's these damned novels. All
this torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the
press. These sham ideals and advanced notions. Women who Dids,
and all that kind of thing. . . ."
Ogilvy reflected. "This girl--she's really a very charming,
frank person--had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a
school performance of Romeo and Juliet."
Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. "There ought to
be a Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time.
Even WITH the Censorship of Plays there's hardly a decent thing
to which a man can take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint
of suggestion everywhere. What would it be without that
safeguard?"
Ogilvy pursued his own topic. "I'm inclined to think, Stanley,
myself that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and
Juliet did the mischief. If our young person hadn't had the
nurse part cut out, eh? She might have known more and done less.
I was curious about that. All they left it was the moon and
stars. And the balcony and 'My Romeo!' "
"Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff.
Altogether different. I'm not discussing Shakespeare. I don't
want to Bowdlerize Shakespeare. I'm not that sort I quite agree.
But this modern miasma--"
Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.
"Well, we won't go into Shakespeare," said Ogilvy "What interests
me is that our young women nowadays are running about as free as
air practically, with registry offices and all sorts of
accommodation round the corner. Nothing to check their
proceedings but a declining habit of telling the truth and the
limitations of their imaginations. And in that respect they stir
up one another. Not my affair, of course, but I think we ought
to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other.
They're too free for their innocence or too innocent for their
freedom. That's my point. Are you going to have any apple-tart,
Stanley? The apple-tart's been very good lately--very good!"
Part 7
At the end of dinner that evening Ann Veronica began: "Father!"
Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave
deliberation; "If there is anything you want to say to me," he
said, "you must say it in the study. I am going to smoke a
little here, and then I shall go to the study. I don't see what
you can have to say. I should have thought my note cleared up
everything. There are some papers I have to look through
to-night--important papers."
"I won't keep you very long, daddy," said Ann Veronica.
"I don't see, Mollie," he remarked, taking a cigar from the box
on the table as his sister and daughter rose, "why you and Vee
shouldn't discuss this little affair--whatever it is--without
bothering me."
It was the first time this controversy had become triangular, for
all three of them were shy by habit.
He stopped in mid-sentence, and Ann Veronica opened the door for
her aunt. The air was thick with feelings. Her aunt went out of
the room with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness
of her own room. She agreed entirely with her brother. It
distressed and confused her that the girl should not come to her.
It seemed to show a want of affection, to be a deliberate and
unmerited disregard, to justify the reprisal of being hurt.
When Ann Veronica came into the study she found every evidence of
a carefully foreseen grouping about the gas fire. Both
arm-chairs had been moved a little so as to face each other on
either side of the fender, and in the circular glow of the
green-shaded lamp there lay, conspicuously waiting, a thick
bundle of blue and white papers tied with pink tape. Her father
held some printed document in his hand, and appeared not to
observe her entry. "Sit down," he said, and perused--"perused"
is the word for it--for some moments. Then he put the paper by.
"And what is it all about, Veronica?" he asked, with a deliberate
note of irony, looking at her a little quizzically over his
glasses.
Ann Veronica looked bright and a little elated, and she
disregarded her father's invitation to be seated. She stood on
the mat instead, and looked down on him. "Look here, daddy," she
said, in a tone of great reasonableness, "I MUST go to that
dance, you know."
Her father's irony deepened. "Why?" he asked, suavely.
Her answer was not quite ready. "Well, because I don't see any
reason why I shouldn't."
"You see I do."
"Why shouldn't I go?"
"It isn't a suitable place; it isn't a suitable gathering."
"But, daddy, what do you know of the place and the gathering?"
"And it's entirely out of order; it isn't right, it isn't
correct; it's impossible for you to stay in an hotel in
London--the idea is preposterous. I can't imagine what possessed
you, Veronica."
He put his head on one side, pulled down the corners of his
mouth, and looked at her over his glasses.
"But why is it preposterous?" asked Ann Veronica, and fiddled
with a pipe on the mantel.
"Surely!" he remarked, with an expression of worried appeal.
"You see, daddy, I don't think it IS preposterous. That's really
what I want to discuss. It comes to this--am I to be trusted to
take care of myself, or am I not?"
"To judge from this proposal of yours, I should say not."
"I think I am."
"As long as you remain under my roof--" he began, and paused.
"You are going to treat me as though I wasn't. Well, I don't
think that's fair."
"Your ideas of fairness--" he remarked, and discontinued that
sentence. "My dear girl," he said, in a tone of patient
reasonableness, "you are a mere child. You know nothing of life,
nothing of its dangers, nothing of its possibilities. You think
everything is harmless and simple, and so forth. It isn't. It
isn't. That's where you go wrong. In some things, in many
things, you must trust to your elders, to those who know more of
life than you do. Your aunt and I have discussed all this
matter. There it is. You can't go."
The conversation hung for a moment. Ann Veronica tried to keep
hold of a complicated situation and not lose her head. She had
turned round sideways, so as to look down into the fire.
"You see, father," she said, "it isn't only this affair of the
dance. I want to go to that because it's a new experience,
because I think it will be interesting and give me a view of
things. You say I know nothing. That's probably true. But how
am I to know of things?"
"Some things I hope you may never know," he said.
"I'm not so sure. I want to know--just as much as I can."
"Tut!" he said, fuming, and put out his hand to the papers in the
pink tape.
"Well, I do. It's just that I want to say. I want to be a human
being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and
not to be protected as something too precious for life, cooped up
in one narrow little corner."
"Cooped up!" he cried. "Did I stand in the way of your going to
college? Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable
hour? You've got a bicycle!"
"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and then went on "I want to be taken
seriously. A girl--at my age--is grown-up. I want to go on with
my University work under proper conditions, now that I've done
the Intermediate. It isn't as though I haven't done well. I've
never muffed an exam. yet. Roddy muffed two. . . ."
Her father interrupted. "Now look here, Veronica, let us be
plain with each other. You are not going to that infidel
Russell's classes. You are not going anywhere but to the
Tredgold College. I've thought that out, and you must make up
your mind to it. All sorts of considerations come in. While you
live in my house you must follow my ideas. You are wrong even
about that man's scientific position and his standard of work.
There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him--simply laugh at
him. And I have seen work by his pupils myself that struck me as
being--well, next door to shameful. There's stories, too, about
his demonstrator, Capes Something or other. The kind of man
who isn't content with his science, and writes articles in the
monthly reviews. Anyhow, there it is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE."
The girl received this intimation in silence. but the face that
looked down upon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy
that brought out a hitherto latent resemblance between parent and
child. When she spoke, her lips twitched.
"Then I suppose when I have graduated I am to come home?"
"It seems the natural course "
"And do nothing?"
"There are plenty of things a girl can find to do at home."
"Until some one takes pity on me and marries me?"
He raised his eyebrows in mild appeal. His foot tapped
impatiently, and he took up the papers.
"Look here, father," she said, with a change in her voice,
"suppose I won't stand it?"
He regarded her as though this was a new idea.
"Suppose, for example, I go to this dance?"
"You won't."
"Well"--her breath failed her for a moment. "How would you
prevent it?" she asked.
"But I have forbidden it!" he said, raising his voice.
"Yes, I know. But suppose I go?"
"Now, Veronica! No, no. This won't do. Understand me! I
forbid it. I do not want to hear from you even the threat of
disobedience." He spoke loudly. "The thing is forbidden!"
"I am ready to give up anything that you show to be wrong."
"You will give up anything I wish you to give up."
They stared at each other through a pause, and both faces were
flushed and obstinate.
She was trying by some wonderful, secret, and motionless
gymnastics to restrain her tears. But when she spoke her lips
quivered, and they came. "I mean to go to that dance!" she
blubbered. "I mean to go to that dance! I meant to reason with
you, but you won't reason. You're dogmatic."
At the sight of her tears his expression changed to a mingling of
triumph and concern. He stood up, apparently intending to put an
arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly. She
produced a handkerchief, and with one sweep of this and a
simultaneous gulp had abolished her fit of weeping. His voice
now had lost its ironies.
"Now, Veronica," he pleaded, "Veronica, this is most
unreasonable. All we do is for your good. Neither your aunt nor
I have any other thought but what is best for you."
"Only you won't let me live. Only you won't let me exist!"
Mr. Stanley lost patience. He bullied frankly.
"What nonsense is this? What raving! My dear child, you DO
live, you DO exist! You have this home. You have friends,
acquaintances, social standing, brothers and sisters, every
advantage! Instead of which, you want to go to some mixed
classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance about at nights in
wild costumes with casual art student friends and God knows who.
That--that isn't living! You are beside yourself. You don't
know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor
logic. I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your
good. You MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I
put my foot down like--like adamant. And a time will come,
Veronica, mark my words, a time will come when you will bless me
for my firmness to-night. It goes to my heart to disappoint you,
but this thing must not be."
He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in
possession of the hearth-rug.
"Well," she said, "good-night, father."
"What!" he asked; "not a kiss?"
She affected not to hear.
The door closed softly upon her. For a long time he remained
standing before the fire, staring at the situation. Then he sat
down and filled his pipe slowly and thoughtfully. . . .
"I don't see what else I could have said," he remarked.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW
Part 1
"Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?" asked
Constance Widgett.
Ann Veronica considered her answer. "I mean to," she replied.
"You are making your dress?"
"Such as it is."
They were in the elder Widgett girl's bedroom; Hetty was laid up,
she said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was
gossiping away her tedium. It was a large, littered,
self-forgetful apartment, decorated with unframed charcoal
sketches by various incipient masters; and an open bookcase,
surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a human skull,
displayed an odd miscellany of books--Shaw and Swinburne, Tom
Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance
Widgett's abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly
remunerative work--stencilling in colors upon rough, white
material--at a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the
purpose, while on her bed there was seated a slender lady of
thirty or so in a dingy green dress, whom Constance had
introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss Miniver. Miss Miniver
looked out on the world through large emotional blue eyes that
were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her nose was
pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant. Her
glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face.
She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her
opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words
"Votes for Women." Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the
sufferer's bed, while Teddy Widgett, being something of an
athlete, occupied the only bed-room chair--a decadent piece,
essentially a tripod and largely a formality--and smoked
cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that he was looking all
the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows. Teddy was the hatless young
man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two days
before. He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and
much broken in to feminine society. A bowl of roses, just
brought by Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and
Ann Veronica was particularly trim in preparation for a call she
was to make with her aunt later in the afternoon.
Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. "I've been," she said,
"forbidden to come."
"Hul-LO!" said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy
remarked with profound emotion, "My God!"
"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "and that complicates the situation."
"Auntie?" asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica's
affairs.
"No! My father. It's--it's a serious prohibition."
"Why?" asked Hetty.
"That's the point. I asked him why, and he hadn't a reason."
"YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!" said Miss Miniver, with
great intensity.
"Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn't have it
out. "Ann Veronica reflected for an instant "That's why I think
I ought to come."
"You asked your father for a reason!" Miss Miniver repeated.
"We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!" said
Hetty. "He's got almost to like it."
"Men," said Miss Miniver, "NEVER have a reason. Never! And they
don't know it! They have no idea of it. It's one of their worst
traits, one of their very worst."
"But I say, Vee," said Constance, "if you come and you are
forbidden to come there'll be the deuce of a row."
Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation
was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax
and sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. "It isn't only
the dance," she said.
"There's the classes," said Constance, the well-informed.
"There's the whole situation. Apparently I'm not to exist yet.
I'm not to study, I'm not to grow. I've got to stay at home and
remain in a state of suspended animation."
"DUSTING!" said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.
"Until you marry, Vee," said Hetty.
"Well, I don't feel like standing it."
"Thousands of women have married merely for freedom," said Miss
Miniver. "Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery."
"I suppose," said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink
petals, "it's our lot. But it's very beastly."
"What's our lot?" asked her sister.
"Slavery! Downtroddenness! When I think of it I feel all over
boot marks--men's boots. We hide it bravely, but so it is.
Damn! I've splashed."
Miss Miniver's manner became impressive. She addressed Ann
Veronica with an air of conveying great open secrets to her. "As
things are at present," she said, "it is true. We live under
man-made institutions, and that is what they amount to. Every
girl in the world practically, except a few of us who teach or
type-write, and then we're underpaid and sweated--it's dreadful
to think how we are sweated!" She had lost her generalization,
whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went on,
conclusively, "Until we have the vote that is how things WILL
be."
"I'm all for the vote," said Teddy.
"I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated," said Ann
Veronica. "I suppose there's no way of getting a decent
income--independently."
"Women have practically NO economic freedom," said Miss Miniver,
"because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that.
The one profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a
woman--except the stage--is teaching, and there we trample on one
another. Everywhere else--the law, medicine, the Stock
Exchange--prejudice bars us."
"There's art," said Ann Veronica, "and writing."
"Every one hasn't the Gift. Even there a woman never gets a fair
chance. Men are against her. Whatever she does is minimized.
All the best novels have been written by women, and yet see how
men sneer at the lady novelist still! There's only one way to
get on for a woman, and that is to please men. That is what they
think we are for!"
"We're beasts," said Teddy. "Beasts!"
But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.
"Of course," said Miss Miniver--she went on in a regularly
undulating voice--"we DO please men. We have that gift. We can
see round them and behind them and through them, and most of us
use that knowledge, in the silent way we have, for our great
ends. Not all of us, but some of us. Too many. I wonder what
men would say if we threw the mask aside--if we really told them
what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE were." A
flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.
"Maternity," she said, "has been our undoing."
From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse
on the position of women, full of wonderful statements, while
Constance worked at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty
listened, and Teddy contributed sympathetic noises and consumed
cheap cigarettes. As she talked she made weak little gestures
with her hands, and she thrust her face forward from her bent
shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann Veronica and sometimes
at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near Fluelen, that hung upon
the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely sympathizing
with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and her
convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a
faint perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of
fragments of sentences heard, of passages read, or arguments
indicated rather than stated, and all of it was served in a sauce
of strange enthusiasm, thin yet intense. Ann Veronica had had
some training at the Tredgold College in disentangling threads
from confused statements, and she had a curious persuasion that
in all this fluent muddle there was something--something real,
something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She
did not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through
it all, the bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver's cheeks
and eyes, the sense of some at last insupportable wrong slowly
accumulated. She had no inkling of that insupportable wrong.
"We are the species," said Miss Miniver, "men are only incidents.
They give themselves airs, but so it is. In all the species of
animals the females are more important than the males; the males
have to please them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the
competition there is everywhere, except among humans. The stags
and oxen and things all have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in
man is the male made the most important. And that happens
through our maternity; it's our very importance that degrades us.
While we were minding the children they stole our rights and
liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took
advantage of it. It's --Mrs. Shalford says--the accidental
conquering the essential. Originally in the first animals there
were no males, none at all. It has been proved. Then they
appear among the lower things"--she made meticulous gestures to
figure the scale of life; she seemed to be holding up specimens,
and peering through her glasses at them--"among crustaceans and
things, just as little creatures, ever so inferior to the
females. Mere hangers on. Things you would laugh at. And among
human beings, too, women to begin with were the rulers and
leaders; they owned all the property, they invented all the arts.
The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate!
The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were
told."
"But is that really so?" said Ann Veronica.
"It has been proved," said Miss Miniver, and added, "by American
professors."
"But how did they prove it?"
"By science," said Miss Miniver, and hurried on, putting out a
rhetorical hand that showed a slash of finger through its glove.
"And now, look at us! See what we have become. Toys! Delicate
trifles! A sex of invalids. It is we who have become the
parasites and toys."
It was, Ann Veronica felt, at once absurd and extraordinarily
right. Hetty, who had periods of lucid expression, put the thing
for her from her pillow. She charged boldly into the space of
Miss Miniver's rhetorical pause.
"It isn't quite that we're toys. Nobody toys with me. Nobody
regards Constance or Vee as a delicate trifle."
Teddy made some confused noise, a thoracic street row; some
remark was assassinated by a rival in his throat and buried
hastily under a cough.
"They'd better not," said Hetty. "The point is we're not toys,
toys isn't the word; we're litter. We're handfuls. We're
regarded as inflammable litter that mustn't be left about. We
are the species, and maternity is our game; that's all right, but
nobody wants that admitted for fear we should all catch fire, and
set about fulfilling the purpose of our beings without waiting
for further explanations. As if we didn't know! The practical
trouble is our ages. They used to marry us off at seventeen,
rush us into things before we had time to protest. They don't
now. Heaven knows why! They don't marry most of us off now
until high up in the twenties. And the age gets higher. We have
to hang about in the interval. There's a great gulf opened, and
nobody's got any plans what to do with us. So the world is
choked with waste and waiting daughters. Hanging about! And they
start thinking and asking questions, and begin to be neither one
thing nor the other. We're partly human beings and partly
females in suspense."
Miss Miniver followed with an expression of perplexity, her mouth
shaped to futile expositions. The Widgett method of thought
puzzled her weakly rhetorical mind. "There is no remedy, girls,"
she began, breathlessly, "except the Vote. Give us that--"
Ann Veronica came in with a certain disregard of Miss Miniver.
"That's it," she said. "They have no plans for us. They have no
ideas what to do with us."
"Except," said Constance, surveying her work with her head on one
side, "to keep the matches from the litter."
"And they won't let us make plans for ourselves."
"We will," said Miss Miniver, refusing to be suppressed, "if some
of us have to be killed to get it." And she pressed her lips
together in white resolution and nodded, and she was manifestly
full of that same passion for conflict and self-sacrifice that
has given the world martyrs since the beginning of things. "I
wish I could make every woman, every girl, see this as clearly as
I see it--just what the Vote means to us. Just what it means. .
. ."
Part 2
As Ann Veronica went back along the Avenue to her aunt she became
aware of a light-footed pursuer running. Teddy overtook her, a
little out of breath, his innocent face flushed, his
straw-colored hair disordered. He was out of breath, and spoke in
broken sentences.
"I say, Vee. Half a minute, Vee. It's like this: You want
freedom. Look here. You know--if you want freedom. Just an
idea of mine. You know how those Russian students do? In
Russia. Just a formal marriage. Mere formality. Liberates the
girl from parental control. See? You marry me. Simply. No
further responsibility whatever. Without hindrance--present
occupation. Why not? Quite willing. Get a license--just an
idea of mine. Doesn't matter a bit to me. Do anything to please
you, Vee. Anything. Not fit to be dust on your boots.
Still--there you are!"
He paused.
Ann Veronica's desire to laugh unrestrainedly was checked by the
tremendous earnestness of his expression. "Awfully good of you,
Teddy." she said.
He nodded silently, too full for words.
"But I don't see," said Ann Veronica, "just how it fits the
present situation."
"No! Well, I just suggested it. Threw it out. Of course, if at
any time--see reason--alter your opinion. Always at your service.
No offence, I hope. All right! I'm off. Due to play hockey.
Jackson's. Horrid snorters! So long, Vee! Just suggested it.
See? Nothing really. Passing thought."
"Teddy," said Ann Veronica, "you're a dear!"
"Oh, quite!" said Teddy, convulsively, and lifted an imaginary
hat and left her.
Part 3
The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at
first much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a
plaster statue of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carelessly
displayed interior on a dissecting-room table. The Widgetts
talked with a remarkable absence of external coverings; the
Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on its surfaces. They
seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's wrappered
world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and shabby,
but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an
almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a
knight who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was
of good seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and
distantly related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate. She was the
social leader of Morningside Park, and in her superficial and
euphuistic way an extremely kind and pleasant woman. With her
lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of the Morningside Park doctor,
and a very active and useful member of the Committee of the
Impoverished Gentlewomen's Aid Society. Both ladies were on easy
and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside Park
society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well
attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out
and gave a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized
croquet lawn and tennis beyond, and understood the art of
bringing people together. And they never talked of anything at
all, never discussed, never even encouraged gossip. They were
just nice.
Ann Veronica found herself walking back down the Avenue that had
just been the scene of her first proposal beside her aunt, and
speculating for the first time in her life about that lady's
mental attitudes. Her prevailing effect was one of quiet and
complete assurance, as though she knew all about everything, and
was only restrained by her instinctive delicacy from telling what
she knew. But the restraint exercised by her instinctive
delicacy was very great; over and above coarse or sexual matters
it covered religion and politics and any mention of money matters
or crime, and Ann Veronica found herself wondering whether these
exclusions represented, after all, anything more than
suppressions. Was there anything at all in those locked rooms of
her aunt's mind? Were they fully furnished and only a little
dusty and cobwebby and in need of an airing, or were they stark
vacancy except, perhaps, for a cockroach or so or the gnawing of
a rat? What was the mental equivalent of a rat's gnawing? The
image was going astray. But what would her aunt think of Teddy's
recent off-hand suggestion of marriage? What would she think of
the Widgett conversation? Suppose she was to tell her aunt
quietly but firmly about the parasitic males of degraded
crustacea. The girl suppressed a chuckle that would have been
inexplicable.
There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a
flare of indecorous humor. It was one of the secret troubles of
her mind, this grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as
though they rebelled and rioted. After all, she found herself
reflecting, behind her aunt's complacent visage there was a past
as lurid as any one's--not, of course, her aunt's own personal
past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly
jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things
in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture,
corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps dim
anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,
no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but
still ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a
brief and stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo
anywhere in Miss Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if
they were empty, were the equivalents of astoundingly decorated
predecessors. Perhaps it was just as well there was no inherited
memory.
Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts,
and yet they would go on with their freaks. Great vistas of
history opened, and she and her aunt were near reverting to the
primitive and passionate and entirely indecorous arboreal--were
swinging from branches by the arms, and really going on quite
dread-fully--when their arrival at the Palsworthys' happily
checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann Veronica back to the
exigencies of the wrappered life again.
Lady Palsworthy liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward,
had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in
her clothes. She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to
be, Lady Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and
free from nearly all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown,
overblown quality, the egotism and want of consideration of the
typical modern girl. But then Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann
Veronica running like the wind at hockey. She had never seen her
sitting on tables nor heard her discussing theology, and had
failed to observe that the graceful figure was a natural one and
not due to ably chosen stays. She took it for granted Ann
Veronica wore stays--mild stays, perhaps, but stays, and thought
no more of the matter. She had seen her really only at teas,
with the Stanley strain in her uppermost. There are so many
girls nowadays who are quite unpresentable at tea, with their
untrimmed laughs, their awful dispositions of their legs when
they sit down, their slangy disrespect; they no longer smoke, it
is true, like the girls of the eighties and nineties,
nevertheless to a fine intelligence they have the flavor of
tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the mellow surface
of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and Lady
Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed
surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young
people--and one must have young people just as one must have
flowers--one could ask to a little gathering without the risk of
a painful discord. Then the distant relationship to Miss Stanley
gave them a slight but pleasant sense of proprietorship in the
girl. They had their little dreams about her.
Mrs. Pramlay received them in the pretty chintz drawing-room,
which opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its
croquet lawn, its tennis-net in the middle distance, and its
remote rose alley lined with smart dahlias and flaming
sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley's understandingly, and she
was if anything a trifle more affectionate in her greeting to Ann
Veronica. Then Ann Veronica passed on toward the tea in the
garden, which was dotted with the elite of Morningside Park
society, and there she was pounced upon by Lady Palsworthy and
given tea and led about. Across the lawn and hovering
indecisively, Ann Veronica saw and immediately affected not to
see Mr. Manning, Lady Palsworthy's nephew, a tall young man of
seven-and-thirty with a handsome, thoughtful, impassive face, a
full black mustache, and a certain heavy luxuriousness of
gesture. The party resolved itself for Ann Veronica into a game
in which she manoeuvred unostentatiously and finally
unsuccessfully to avoid talking alone with this gentleman.
Mr. Manning had shown on previous occasions that he found Ann
Veronica interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was
a civil servant of some standing, and after a previous
conversation upon aesthetics of a sententious, nebulous, and
sympathetic character, he had sent her a small volume, which he
described as the fruits of his leisure and which was as a matter
of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with fine
aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind was
still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in
metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages. So that as she
saw him she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, "Oh,
golly!" and set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at
last broke down by coming directly at her as she talked with the
vicar's aunt about some of the details of the alleged smell of
the new church lamps. He did not so much cut into this
conversation as loom over it, for he was a tall, if rather
studiously stooping, man.
The face that looked down upon Ann Veronica was full of amiable
intention. "Splendid you are looking to-day, Miss Stanley," he
said. "How well and jolly you must be feeling."
He beamed over the effect of this and shook hands with effusion,
and Lady Palsworthy suddenly appeared as his confederate and
disentangled the vicar's aunt.
"I love this warm end of summer more than words can tell," he
said. "I've tried to make words tell it. It's no good. Mild,
you know, and boon. You want music."
Ann Veronica agreed, and tried to make the manner of her assent
cover a possible knowledge of a probable poem.
"Splendid it must be to be a composer. Glorious! The Pastoral.
Beethoven; he's the best of them. Don't you think? Tum, tay,
tum, tay."
Ann Veronica did.
"What have you been doing since our last talk? Still cutting up
rabbits and probing into things? I've often thought of that talk
of ours--often."
He did not appear to require any answer to his question.
"Often," he repeated, a little heavily.
"Beautiful these autumn flowers are," said Ann Veronica, in a
wide, uncomfortable pause.
"Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the
garden," said Mr. Manning, "they're a dream." And Ann Veronica
found herself being carried off to an isolation even remoter and
more conspicuous than the corner of the lawn, with the whole of
the party aiding and abetting and glancing at them. "Damn!" said
Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself for a conflict.
Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar
admission from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of
beauty. He said that for him beauty justified life, that he
could not imagine a good action that was not a beautiful one nor
any beautiful thing that could be altogether bad. Ann Veronica
hazarded an opinion that as a matter of history some very
beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent, been bad,
but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they were
really beautiful or when they were beautiful bad. Ann Veronica
found her attention wandering a little as he told her that he was
not ashamed to feel almost slavish in the presence of really
beautiful people, and then they came to the Michaelmas daisies.
They were really very fine and abundant, with a blaze of
perennial sunflowers behind them.
"They make me want to shout," said Mr. Manning, with a sweep of
the arm.
"They're very good this year," said Ann Veronica, avoiding
controversial matter.
"Either I want to shout," said Mr. Manning, "when I see beautiful
things, or else I want to weep." He paused and looked at her,
and said, with a sudden drop into a confidential undertone, "Or
else I want to pray."
"When is Michaelmas Day?" said Ann Veronica, a little abruptly.
"Heaven knows!" said Mr. Manning; and added, "the twenty-ninth."
"I thought it was earlier," said Ann Veronica. "Wasn't
Parliament to reassemble?"
He put out his hand and leaned against a tree and crossed his
legs. "You're not interested in politics?" he asked, almost with
a note of protest.
"Well, rather," said Ann Veronica. "It seems-- It's
interesting."
"Do you think so? I find my interest in that sort of thing
decline and decline."
"I'm curious. Perhaps because I don't know. I suppose an
intelligent person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs.
They concern us all."
"I wonder," said Mr. Manning, with a baffling smile.
"I think they do. After all, they're history in the making."
"A sort of history," said Mr. Manning; and repeated, "a sort of
history. But look at these glorious daisies!"
"But don't you think political questions ARE important?"
"I don't think they are this afternoon, and I don't think they
are to you."
Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced
toward the house with an air of a duty completed.
"Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look
down the other path; there's a vista of just the common sort.
Better even than these."
Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.
"You know I'm old-fashioned, Miss Stanley. I don't think women
need to trouble about political questions."
"I want a vote," said Ann Veronica.
"Really!" said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his
hand to the alley of mauve and purple. "I wish you didn't."
"Why not?" She turned on him.
"It jars. It jars with all my ideas. Women to me are something
so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so
sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's
duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully,
and politics are by their very nature ugly. You see, I--I am a
woman worshipper. I worshipped women long before I found any
woman I might ever hope to worship. Long ago. And--the idea of
committees, of hustings, of agenda-papers!"
"I don't see why the responsibility of beauty should all be
shifted on to the women," said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering
a part of Miss Miniver's discourse.
"It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who
are queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE
can't. We can't afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our
Saint Catherines, our Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and
fairy princesses, into a sort of man. Womanhood is sacred to me.
My politics in that matter wouldn't be to give women votes. I'm a
Socialist, Miss Stanley."
"WHAT?" said Ann Veronica, startled.
"A Socialist of the order of John Ruskin. Indeed I am! I would
make this country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and
women in it should be the Queen. They should never come into
contact with politics or economics--or any of those things. And
we men would work for them and serve them in loyal fealty."
"That's rather the theory now," said Ann Veronica. "Only so many
men neglect their duties."
"Yes," said Mr. Manning, with an air of emerging from an
elaborate demonstration, "and so each of us must, under existing
conditions, being chivalrous indeed to all women, choose for
himself his own particular and worshipful queen."
"So far as one can judge from the system in practice," said Ann
Veronica, speaking in a loud, common-sense, detached tone, and
beginning to walk slowly but resolutely toward the lawn, "it
doesn't work."
"Every one must be experimental," said Mr. Manning, and glanced
round hastily for further horticultural points of interest in
secluded corners. None presented themselves to save him from
that return.
"That's all very well when one isn't the material experimented
upon," Ann Veronica had remarked.
"Women would--they DO have far more power than they think, as
influences, as inspirations."
Ann Veronica said nothing in answer to that.
"You say you want a vote," said Mr. Manning, abruptly.
"I think I ought to have one."
"Well, I have two," said Mr. Manning--"one in Oxford University
and one in Kensington." He caught up and went on with a sort of
clumsiness: "Let me present you with them and be your voter."
There followed an instant's pause, and then Ann Veronica had
decided to misunderstand.
"I want a vote for myself," she said. "I don't see why I should
take it second-hand. Though it's very kind of you. And rather
unscrupulous. Have you ever voted, Mr. Manning? I suppose
there's a sort of place like a ticket-office. And a
ballot-box--" Her face assumed an expression of intellectual
conflict. "What is a ballot-box like, exactly?" she asked, as
though it was very important to her.
Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked
his mustache. "A ballot-box, you know," he said, "is very
largely just a box." He made quite a long pause, and went on,
with a sigh: "You have a voting paper given you--"
They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.
"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "yes," to his explanation, and saw
across the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of
them staring frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they
talked.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS
Part 1
Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden
Dance. It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was
complicated in Ann Veronica's mind by the fact that a letter lay
on the breakfast-table from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt
focussed a brightly tactful disregard upon this throughout the
meal. Ann Veronica had come down thinking of nothing in the
world but her inflexible resolution to go to the dance in the
teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning's
handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its
import appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair
altogether. With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened
color she finished her breakfast.
She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet
the College had not settled down for the session. She was
supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled
into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon
the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage
of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the
sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr.
Manning's letter.
Mr. Manning's handwriting had an air of being clear without being
easily legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of
definition about the letters and a disposition to treat the large
ones as liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all
amounting to the same thing really--a years-smoothed boyish
rather than an adult hand. And it filled seven sheets of
notepaper, each written only on one side.
"MY DEAR MISS STANLEY," it began,--"I hope you will forgive my
bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much
over our conversation at Lady Palsworthy's, and I feel there are
things I want to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we
meet again. It is the worst of talk under such social
circumstances that it is always getting cut off so soon as it is
beginning; and I went home that afternoon feeling I had said
nothing--literally nothing--of the things I had meant to say to
you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I
had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home
vexed and disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by
writing a few verses. I wonder if you will mind very much when I
tell you they were suggested by you. You must forgive the poet's
license I take. Here is one verse. The metrical irregularity is
intentional, because I want, as it were, to put you apart: to
change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak of you.
" 'A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY
" 'Saintly white and a lily is Mary,
Margaret's violets, sweet and shy;
Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,
Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen's eye.
Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,
Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;
But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,
She gleams and gladdens, she warms--and goes.'
"Crude, I admit. But let that verse tell my secret. All bad
verse--originally the epigram was Lang's, I believe--is written
in a state of emotion.
"My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon
of work and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the
time resenting it beyond measure. There we were discussing
whether you should have a vote, and I remembered the last
occasion we met it was about your prospects of success in the
medical profession or as a Government official such as a number
of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within
me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.' I wanted, as I have
never wanted before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry
you off and set you apart from all the strain and turmoil of
life. For nothing will ever convince me that it is not the man's
share in life to shield, to protect, to lead and toil and watch
and battle with the world at large. I want to be your knight,
your servant, your protector, your--I dare scarcely write the
word--your husband. So I come suppliant. I am five-and-thirty,
and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the quality of
life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the
Upper Division--I was third on a list of forty-seven--and since
then I have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening
sphere of social service. Before I met you I never met any one
whom I felt I could love, but you have discovered depths in my
own nature I had scarcely suspected. Except for a few early
ebullitions of passion, natural to a warm and romantic
disposition, and leaving no harmful after-effects--ebullitions
that by the standards of the higher truth I feel no one can
justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no means
ashamed--I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.
In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property
and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you
a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books,
discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and
brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has
brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have
done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea. I have a
certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I
belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the
day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of
affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally,
mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse.
That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not
only adorn but delight in.
"I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many
things I want to tell you, and they stand on such different
levels, that the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant,
and I find myself doubting if I am really giving you the thread
of emotion that should run through all this letter. For although
I must confess it reads very much like an application or a
testimonial or some such thing as that, I can assure you I am
writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart. My mind
is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and
accumulating--dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching
quietly together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music
and all that side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and
shining in some brilliant throng--mine; of your looking at
flowers in some old-world garden, our garden--there are splendid
places to be got down in Surrey, and a little runabout motor is
quite within my means. You know they say, as, indeed, I have
just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written in a state of
emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad offers of
marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one has
nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning.
And how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated
desires of what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly
sixteen months of letting my mind run on you--ever since that
jolly party at Surbiton, where we raced and beat the other boat.
You steered and I rowed stroke. My very sentences stumble and
give way. But I do not even care if I am absurd. I am a
resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I have got
it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have
wanted you. It isn't the same thing. I am afraid because I love
you, so that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not
love you so much I believe I could win you by sheer force of
character, for people tell me I am naturally of the dominating
type. Most of my successes in life have been made with a sort of
reckless vigor.
"Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and
baldly. But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of
getting what I have to say better said. It would be easy enough
for me to write an eloquent letter about something else. Only I
do not care to write about anything else. Let me put the main
question to you now that I could not put the other afternoon.
Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?
Very sincerely yours,
"HUBERT MANNING."
Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave, attentive eyes.
Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared.
Twice she smiled, but not unkindly. Then she went back and mixed
up the sheets in a search for particular passages. Finally she
fell into reflection.
"Odd!" she said. "I suppose I shall have to write an answer.
It's so different from what one has been led to expect."
She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the
greenhouse, advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from
among the raspberry canes.
"No you don't!" said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and
business-like pace toward the house.
"I'm going for a long tramp, auntie," she said.
"Alone, dear?"
"Yes, aunt. I've got a lot of things to think about."
Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house.
She thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and
self-confident. She ought to be softened and tender and
confidential at this phase of her life. She seemed to have no
idea whatever of the emotional states that were becoming to her
age and position. Miss Stanley walked round the garden thinking,
and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann Veronica's
slamming of the front door.
"I wonder!" said Miss Stanley.
For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as
though they offered an explanation. Then she went in and
up-stairs, hesitated on the landing, and finally, a little
breathless and with an air of great dignity, opened the door and
walked into Ann Veronica's room. It was a neat, efficient-looking
room, with a writing-table placed with a business-like regard to
the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a pig's skull, a
dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of shiny,
black-covered note-books. In the corner of the room were two
hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann
Veronica, by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities
in art. But Miss Stanley took no notice of these things. She
walked straight across to the wardrobe and opened it. There,
hanging among Ann Veronica's more normal clothing, was a skimpy
dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap and tawdry braid, and
short--it could hardly reach below the knee. On the same peg and
evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave jacket. And
then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.
Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of
the constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.
The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt.
As she raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy
crimson masses.
"TROUSERS!" she whispered.
Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very
chairs.
Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish
slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye. She
walked over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and
stooped to examine them. They were ingenious disguises of gilt
paper destructively gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas' best
dancing-slippers.
Then she reverted to the trousers.
"How CAN I tell him?" whispered Miss Stanley.
Part 2
Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick.
She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the
proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these
fields came into a pretty overhung lane that led toward
Caddington and the Downs. And then her pace slackened. She
tucked her stick under her arm and re-read Manning's letter.
"Let me think," said Ann Veronica. "I wish this hadn't turned up
to-day of all days."
She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was
anything but clear what it was she had to think about.
Practically it was most of the chief interests in life that she
proposed to settle in this pedestrian meditation. Primarily it
was her own problem, and in particular the answer she had to give
to Mr. Manning's letter, but in order to get data for that she
found that she, having a logical and ordered mind, had to decide
upon the general relations of men to women, the objects and
conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the welfare of the
race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of
everything. . . .
"Frightful lot of things aren't settled," said Ann Veronica. In
addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion,
occupied the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color
of rebellion over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking
about Mr. Manning's proposal of marriage and finding she was
thinking of the dance.
For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration
were dispersed by the passage of the village street of
Caddington, the passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and
the struggles of a stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse
and leading another. When she got back to her questions again in
the monotonous high-road that led up the hill, she found the
image of Mr. Manning central in her mind. He stood there, large
and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from beneath his large
mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly. He
proposed, he wanted to possess her! He loved her.
Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning
loved her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any
imaginative quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The
relationship seemed to have almost as much to do with blood and
body as a mortgage. It was something that would create a mutual
claim, a relationship. It was in another world from that in
which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands lights fires
that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of
passionately beautiful things.
But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it,
was always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and
crannies, and rustling and raiding into the order in which she
chose to live, shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics
and music; it invaded her dreams, it wrote up broken and
enigmatical sentences upon the passage walls of her mind. She
was aware of it now as if it were a voice shouting outside a
house, shouting passionate verities in a hot sunlight, a voice
that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened room and
pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner
convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though
he was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and
adequately prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But
there was, it insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement,
nothing about him that warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put
words to that song they would have been, "Hot-blooded marriage or
none!" but she was far too indistinct in this matter to frame any
words at all.
"I don't love him," said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. "I don't
see that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about
that. . . . But it means no end of a row."
For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the
downland turf. "But I wish," she said, "I had some idea what I
was really up to."
Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to
a lark singing.
"Marriage and mothering," said Ann Veronica, with her mind
crystallizing out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the
turf. "And all the rest of it perhaps is a song."
Part 3
Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.
She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would
stop her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose
her father turned her out of doors! She did not care, she meant
to go. She would just walk out of the house and go. . . .
She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable
satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger
with large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer
in her room. She was to be a Corsair's Bride. "Fancy stabbing a
man for jealousy!" she thought. "You'd have to think how to get
in between his bones."
She thought of her father, and with an effort dismissed him from
her mind.
She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball;
she had never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life. Mr.
Manning came into her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark,
self-contained presence at the Fadden. One might suppose him
turning up; he knew a lot of clever people, and some of them
might belong to the class. What would he come as?
Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of
dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though
he was a doll. She had tried him as a Crusader, in which guise
he seemed plausible but heavy--"There IS something heavy about
him; I wonder if it's his mustache?"--and as a Hussar, which made
him preposterous, and as a Black Brunswicker, which was better,
and as an Arab sheik. Also she had tried him as a dragoman and
as a gendarme, which seemed the most suitable of all to his
severely handsome, immobile profile. She felt he would tell
people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission to public
buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest
explicit feelings possible. For each costume she had devised a
suitable form of matrimonial refusal. "Oh, Lord!" she said,
discovering what she was up to, and dropped lightly from the
fence upon the turf and went on her way toward the crest.
"I shall never marry," said Ann Veronica, resolutely; "I'm not
the sort. That's why it's so important I should take my own line
now."
Part 4
Ann Veronica's ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic.
Her teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind
with an ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously
important, and on no account to be thought about. Her first
intimations of marriage as a fact of extreme significance in a
woman's life had come with the marriage of Alice and the
elopement of her second sister, Gwen.
These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve.
There was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of
her brace of sisters--an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by
two noisy brothers. These sisters moved in a grown-up world
inaccessible to Ann Veronica's sympathies, and to a large extent
remote from her curiosity. She got into rows through meddling
with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had moments of carefully
concealed admiration when she was privileged to see them just
before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink or
amber and prepared to go out with her mother. She thought Alice
a bit of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather
a snatch at meals. She saw nothing of their love-making, and
came home from her boarding-school in a state of decently
suppressed curiosity for Alice's wedding.
Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused,
complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no
reciprocal fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen
and a lace collar, who assisted as a page. She followed him
about persistently, and succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous
struggle (in which he pinched and asked her to "cheese it"), in
kissing him among the raspberries behind the greenhouse.
Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen, feeling
rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis's
head.
A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely
disorganizing. Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind
and make the cat wretched. All the furniture was moved, all the
meals were disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included,
appeared in new, bright costumes. She had to wear cream and a
brown sash and a short frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream
and a brown sash and a long skirt and her hair up. And her
mother, looking unusually alert and hectic, wore cream and brown
also, made up in a more complicated manner.
Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and
altering and fussing about Alice's "things"--Alice was being
re-costumed from garret to cellar, with a walking-dress and
walking-boots to measure, and a bride's costume of the most
ravishing description, and stockings and such like beyond the
dreams of avarice --and a constant and increasing dripping into
the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as--
Real lace bedspread;
Gilt travelling clock;
Ornamental pewter plaque;
Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;
Madgett's "English Poets" (twelve volumes), bound purple morocco;
Etc., etc.
Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a
solicitous, preoccupied, almost depressed figure. It was Doctor
Ralph, formerly the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and
now with a thriving practice of his own in Wamblesmith. He had
shaved his side-whiskers and come over in flannels, but he was
still indisputably the same person who had attended Ann Veronica
for the measles and when she swallowed the fish-bone. But his
role was altered, and he was now playing the bridegroom in this
remarkable drama. Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph. He came in
apologetically; all the old "Well, and how ARE we?" note gone;
and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,
"How's Alice getting on, Vee?" Finally, on the Day, he appeared
like his old professional self transfigured, in the most
beautiful light gray trousers Ann Veronica had ever seen and a
new shiny silk hat with a most becoming roll. . . .
It was not simply that all the rooms were rearranged and
everybody dressed in unusual fashions, and all the routines of
life abolished and put away: people's tempers and emotions also
seemed strangely disturbed and shifted about. Her father was
distinctly irascible, and disposed more than ever to hide away
among the petrological things--the study was turned out. At
table he carved in a gloomy but resolute manner. On the Day he
had trumpet-like outbreaks of cordiality, varied by a watchful
preoccupation. Gwen and Alice were fantastically friendly, which
seemed to annoy him, and Mrs. Stanley was throughout enigmatical,
with an anxious eye on her husband and Alice.
There was a confused impression of livery carriages and whips
with white favors, people fussily wanting other people to get in
before them, and then the church. People sat in unusual pews, and
a wide margin of hassocky emptiness intervened between the
ceremony and the walls.
Ann Veronica had a number of fragmentary impressions of Alice
strangely transfigured in bridal raiment. It seemed to make her
sister downcast beyond any precedent. The bridesmaids and pages
got rather jumbled in the aisle, and she had an effect of Alice's
white back and sloping shoulders and veiled head receding toward
the altar. In some incomprehensible way that back view made her
feel sorry for Alice. Also she remembered very vividly the smell
of orange blossom, and Alice, drooping and spiritless, mumbling
responses, facing Doctor Ralph, while the Rev. Edward Bribble
stood between them with an open book. Doctor Ralph looked kind
and large, and listened to Alice's responses as though he was
listening to symptoms and thought that on the whole she was
progressing favorably.
And afterward her mother and Alice kissed long and clung to each
other. And Doctor Ralph stood by looking considerate. He and
her father shook hands manfully.
Ann Veronica had got quite interested in Mr. Bribble's rendering
of the service--he had the sort of voice that brings out
things--and was still teeming with ideas about it when finally a
wild outburst from the organ made it clear that, whatever
snivelling there might be down in the chancel, that excellent
wind instrument was, in its Mendelssohnian way, as glad as ever
it could be. "Pump, pump, per-um-pump, Pum, Pump, Per-um. . . ."
The wedding-breakfast was for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the
unreal consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until
she was carelessly served against her expressed wishes with
mayonnaise. She was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she
valued, making faces at Roddy because he had exulted at this.
Of the vast mass of these impressions Ann Veronica could make
nothing at the time; there they were--Fact! She stored them away
in a mind naturally retentive, as a squirrel stores away nuts,
for further digestion. Only one thing emerged with any
reasonable clarity in her mind at once, and that was that unless
she was saved from drowning by an unmarried man, in which case
the ceremony is unavoidable, or totally destitute of under-
clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which hardship a
trousseau would certainly be "ripping," marriage was an
experience to be strenuously evaded.
When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen
and Alice had cried.
"Ssh!" said her mother, and then added, "A little natural
feeling, dear."
"But didn't Alice want to marry Doctor Ralph?"
"Oh, ssh, Vee!" said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an
advertisement board. "I am sure she will be very happy indeed
with Doctor Ralph."
But Ann Veronica was by no means sure of that until she went over
to Wamblesmith and saw her sister, very remote and domestic and
authoritative, in a becoming tea-gown, in command of Doctor
Ralph's home. Doctor Ralph came in to tea and put his arm round
Alice and kissed her, and Alice called him "Squiggles," and stood
in the shelter of his arms for a moment with an expression of
satisfied proprietorship. She HAD cried, Ann Veronica knew.
There had been fusses and scenes dimly apprehended through
half-open doors. She had heard Alice talking and crying at the
same time, a painful noise. Perhaps marriage hurt. But now it
was all over, and Alice was getting on well. It reminded Ann
Veronica of having a tooth stopped.
And after that Alice became remoter than ever, and, after a time,
ill. Then she had a baby and became as old as any really
grown-up person, or older, and very dull. Then she and her
husband went off to a Yorkshire practice, and had four more
babies, none of whom photographed well, and so she passed beyond
the sphere of Ann Veronica's sympathies altogether.
Part 5
The Gwen affair happened when she was away at school at
Marticombe-on-Sea, a term before she went to the High School, and
was never very clear to her.
Her mother missed writing for a week, and then she wrote in an
unusual key. "My dear," the letter ran, "I have to tell you that
your sister Gwen has offended your father very much. I hope you
will always love her, but I want you to remember she has offended
your father and married without his consent. Your father is very
angry, and will not have her name mentioned in his hearing. She
has married some one he could not approve of, and gone right
away. . . ."
When the next holidays came Ann Veronica's mother was ill, and
Gwen was in the sick-room when Ann Veronica returned home. She
was in one of her old walking-dresses, her hair was done in an
unfamiliar manner, she wore a wedding-ring, and she looked as if
she had been crying.
"Hello, Gwen!" said Ann Veronica, trying to put every one at
their ease. "Been and married? . . . What's the name of the
happy man?"
Gwen owned to "Fortescue."
"Got a photograph of him or anything?" said Ann Veronica, after
kissing her mother.
Gwen made an inquiry, and, directed by Mrs. Stanley, produced a
portrait from its hiding-place in the jewel-drawer under the
mirror. It presented a clean-shaven face with a large Corinthian
nose, hair tremendously waving off the forehead and more chin and
neck than is good for a man.
"LOOKS all right," said Ann Veronica, regarding him with her head
first on one side and then on the other, and trying to be
agreeable. "What's the objection?"
"I suppose she ought to know?" said Gwen to her mother, trying to
alter the key of the conversation.
"You see, Vee," said Mrs. Stanley, "Mr. Fortescue is an actor,
and your father does not approve of the profession."
"Oh!" said Ann Veronica. "I thought they made knights of
actors?"
"They may of Hal some day," said Gwen. "But it's a long
business."
"I suppose this makes you an actress?" said Ann Veronica.
"I don't know whether I shall go on," said Gwen, a novel note of
languorous professionalism creeping into her voice. "The other
women don't much like it if husband and wife work together, and I
don't think Hal would like me to act away from him."
Ann Veronica regarded her sister with a new respect, but the
traditions of family life are strong. "I don't suppose you'll be
able to do it much," said Ann Veronica.
Later Gwen's trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her
illness that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in
the drawing-room, and actually shake hands with him in an
entirely hopeless manner and hope everything would turn out for
the best.
The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair,
and afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr.
Fortescue rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps,
the Corinthian nose upraised and his hands behind his back,
pausing to look long and hard at the fruit-trees against the
wall.
Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after
some moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden
in a reverse direction to Mr. Fortescue's steps, and encountered
him with an air of artless surprise.
"Hello!" said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless,
breathless manner. "You Mr. Fortescue?"
"At your service. You Ann Veronica?"
"Rather! I say--did you marry Gwen?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy
expression. "I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica."
"Rum," said Ann Veronica. "Have you got to keep her now?"
"To the best of my ability," said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.
"Have you much ability?" asked Ann Veronica.
Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its
reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions
about acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she
beautiful enough for it, and who would make her dresses, and so
on.
As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep
her sister, and a little while after her mother's death Ann
Veronica met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her
father's study, shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful
and resentful, and after that Gwen receded from the Morningside
Park world, and not even the begging letters and distressful
communications that her father and aunt received, but only a
vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of incidental
comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that blackguard," came to
Ann Veronica's ears.
Part 6
These were Ann Veronica's leading cases in the question of
marriage. They were the only real marriages she had seen
clearly. For the rest, she derived her ideas of the married
state from the observed behavior of married women, which
impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and dull and
inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a
remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had
come to think of all married people much as one thinks of insects
that have lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched
creatures who had scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a
dim image of herself cooped up in a house under the benevolent
shadow of Mr. Manning. Who knows?--on the analogy of "Squiggles"
she might come to call him "Mangles!"
"I don't think I can ever marry any one," she said, and fell
suddenly into another set of considerations that perplexed her
for a time. Had romance to be banished from life? . . .
It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so
keenly to go on with her University work in her life as she did
that day. She had never felt so acutely the desire for free
initiative, for a life unhampered by others. At any cost! Her
brothers had it practically--at least they had it far more than
it seemed likely she would unless she exerted herself with quite
exceptional vigor. Between her and the fair, far prospect of
freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her aunt and
father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to
her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw
them over her directly her movements became in any manner truly
free.
She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes,
as though she had just discovered herself for the first
time--discovered herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly
among dangers, hindrances, and perplexities, on the verge of a
cardinal crisis.
The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and
heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by
others, and going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.
And in its way it was very well. Then suddenly with a rush came
reality, came "growing up"; a hasty imperative appeal for
seriousness, for supreme seriousness. The Ralphs and Mannings
and Fortescues came down upon the raw inexperience, upon the
blinking ignorance of the newcomer; and before her eyes were
fairly open, before she knew what had happened, a new set of
guides and controls, a new set of obligations and
responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old. "I want
to be a Person," said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky;
"I will not have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in
its place."
Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time
when, a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a
gate between a bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole
wide stretch of country between Chalking and Waldersham.
Firstly, she did not intend to marry at all, and particularly she
did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly, by some measure or
other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at the Tredgold
Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was, as an
immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she
stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that
night to the Fadden Ball.
But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face.
So far she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that
vitally important matter. The whole of that relationship
persisted in remaining obscure. What would happen when next
morning she returned to Morningside Park?
He couldn't turn her out of doors. But what he could do or might
do she could not imagine. She was not afraid of violence, but
she was afraid of something mean, some secondary kind of force.
Suppose he stopped all her allowance, made it imperative that she
should either stay ineffectually resentful at home or earn a
living for herself at once. . . . It appeared highly probable to
her that he would stop her allowance.
What can a girl do?
Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica's speculations were
interrupted and turned aside by the approach of a horse and
rider. Mr. Ramage, that iron-gray man of the world, appeared
dressed in a bowler hat and a suit of hard gray, astride of a
black horse. He pulled rein at the sight of her, saluted, and
regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes. The girl's
gaze met his in interested inquiry.
"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second. "I always
get off here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so
to-day?"
"It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first. It's for
you to say if I may sit on it."
He slipped off the horse. "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he
said; and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his
nose was, and secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth.
Ramage tethered the horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar
blew heavily and began to investigate the hedge.
Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a
moment there was silence.
He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its
autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and
village, below.
"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and
putting a well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.
Part 7
"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at
her face, "wandering alone so far from home?"
"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.
"Solitary walks?"
"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."
"Problems?"
"Sometimes quite difficult problems."
"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,
for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at
home--under inspection."
She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of
her free young poise show in his face.
"I suppose things have changed?" she said.
"Never was such an age of transition."
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto
me is the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an
epigram.
"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl
intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those people who are
interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else.
I don't conceal it. And the change, the change of attitude! The
way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing.
And all the old--the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a
touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been
called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in
life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to
understand."
"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that
one doesn't understand."
"Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg
your pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite
well in your heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young
Person! she's vanished. Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young
Person! . . . I hope we may never find her again."
He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about
every man of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We
wore invisible chains and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can
gossip at a gate, and {}Honi soit qui mal y pense. The change
has
given man one good thing he never had before," he said. "Girl
friends. And I am coming to believe the best as well as the most
beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."
He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man
alive."
"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica,
keeping the question general.
"Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties
broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles--my young days go back
to the very beginnings of that--it's been one triumphant
relaxation."
"Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?"
"Well?"
"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the
same. A woman isn't much freer--in reality."
Mr. Ramage demurred.
"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes."
"But it's on condition one doesn't do anything."
"Do what?"
"Oh!--anything."
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long
run," said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go
away as a son does and earn her independent income, she's still
on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to
tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster
pulls, home she must go. That's what I mean."
Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed
by Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed
to Hetty Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he
asked, abruptly. "I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It
isn't such fun as it seems."
"Every one wants to be independent," said Ann Veronica. "Every
one. Man or woman."
"And you?"
"Rather!"
"I wonder why?"
"There's no why. It's just to feel--one owns one's self."
"Nobody does that," said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.
"But a boy--a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on
his own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company,
makes his own way of living."
"You'd like to do that?"
"Exactly."
"Would you like to be a boy?"
"I wonder! It's out of the question, any way."
Ramage reflected. "Why don't you?"
"Well, it might mean rather a row."
"I know--" said Ramage, with sympathy.
"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside,
"what could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession.
But--it's one of the things I've just been thinking over.
Suppose--suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life
for herself--" She looked him frankly in the eyes. "What ought
she to do?"
"Suppose you--"
"Yes, suppose I--"
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more
personal and intimate. "I wonder what you could do?" he said.
"I should think YOU could do all sorts of things. . . .
"What ought you to do?" He began to produce his knowledge of the
world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong,
rank flavor of "savoir faire." He took an optimist view of her
chances. Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on
the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to
discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized
her face, ran his eyes over her careless, gracious poise,
wondered hard about her. He described her privately to himself
as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from
home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While
the front of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the
hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea
that for women of initiative, quite as much as for men, the world
of business had by far the best chances, the back chambers of his
brain were busy with the problem of that "Why?"
His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by
a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he
dismissed that because then she would ask her lover and not him
all these things. Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple
restlessness: home bored her. He could quite understand the
daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was
that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital
wandered about his mind. Was the young lady impatient for
experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did
not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more
than a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept.
If it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the
lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected. . . .
He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that
his chief interest in life was women. It wasn't so much women as
Woman that engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking;
he had fallen in love at thirteen, and he was still capable--he
prided himself--of falling in love. His invalid wife and her
money had been only the thin thread that held his life together;
beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving
series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing,
interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from
the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive
freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men
could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful
research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing,
these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and
mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest
of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for
it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.
So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly
protuberant eyes were noting the gracious balance of her limbs
and body across the gate, the fine lines of her chin and neck.
Her grave fine face, her warm clear complexion, had already
aroused his curiosity as he had gone to and fro in Morningside
Park, and here suddenly he was near to her and talking freely and
intimately. He had found her in a communicative mood, and he
used the accumulated skill of years in turning that to account.
She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest and
sympathy. She became eager to explain herself, to show herself
in the right light. He was manifestly exerting his mind for her,
and she found herself fully disposed to justify his interest.
She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as a fine
person unduly limited. She even touched lightly on her father's
unreasonableness.
"I wonder," said Ramage, "that more girls don't think as you do
and want to strike out in the world."
And then he speculated. "I wonder if you will?"
"Let me say one thing," he said. "If ever you do and I can help
you in any way, by advice or inquiry or recommendation-- You see,
I'm no believer in feminine incapacity, but I do perceive there
is such a thing as feminine inexperience. As a sex you're a
little under-trained--in affairs. I'd take it--forgive me if I
seem a little urgent--as a sort of proof of friendliness. I can
imagine nothing more pleasant in life than to help you, because I
know it would pay to help you. There's something about you, a
little flavor of Will, I suppose, that makes one feel--good luck
about you and success. . . ."
And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she answered,
and behind her listening watched and thought about him. She
liked the animated eagerness of his manner.
His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his knowledge of
detailed reality came in just where her own mind was most weakly
equipped. Through all he said ran one quality that pleased
her--the quality of a man who feels that things can be done, that
one need not wait for the world to push one before one moved.
Compared with her father and Mr. Manning and the men in "fixed"
positions generally that she knew, Ramage, presented by himself,
had a fine suggestion of freedom, of power, of deliberate and
sustained adventure. . . .
She was particularly charmed by his theory or friendship. It was
really very jolly to talk to a man in this way--who saw the woman
in her and did not treat her as a child. She was inclined to
think that perhaps for a girl the converse of his method was the
case; an older man, a man beyond the range of anything
"nonsensical," was, perhaps, the most interesting sort of friend
one could meet. But in that reservation it may be she went a
little beyond the converse of his view. . . .
They got on wonderfully well together. They talked for the
better part of an hour, and at last walked together to the
junction of highroad and the bridle-path. There, after
protestations of friendliness and helpfulness that were almost
ardent, he mounted a little clumsily and rode off at an amiable
pace, looking his best, making a leg with his riding gaiters,
smiling and saluting, while Ann Veronica turned northward and so
came to Micklechesil. There, in a little tea and sweet-stuff
shop, she bought and consumed slowly and absent-mindedly the
insufficient nourishment that is natural to her sex on such
occasions.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE CRISIS
Part 1
We left Miss Stanley with Ann Veronica's fancy dress in her hands
and her eyes directed to Ann Veronica's pseudo-Turkish slippers.
When Mr. Stanley came home at a quarter to six--an earlier train
by fifteen minutes than he affected--his sister met him in the
hall with a hushed expression. "I'm so glad you're here, Peter,"
she said. "She means to go."
"Go!" he said. "Where?"
"To that ball."
"What ball?" The question was rhetorical. He knew.
"I believe she's dressing up-stairs--now."
"Then tell her to undress, confound her!" The City had been
thoroughly annoying that day, and he was angry from the outset.
Miss Stanley reflected on this proposal for a moment.
"I don't think she will," she said.
"She must," said Mr. Stanley, and went into his study. His
sister followed. "She can't go now. She'll have to wait for
dinner," he said, uncomfortably.
"She's going to have some sort of meal with the Widgetts down the
Avenue, and go up with them.
"She told you that?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"At tea."
"But why didn't you prohibit once for all the whole thing? How
dared she tell you that?"
"Out of defiance. She just sat and told me that was her
arrangement. I've never seen her quite so sure of herself."
"What did you say?"
"I said, 'My dear Veronica! how can you think of such things?' "
"And then?"
"She had two more cups of tea and some cake, and told me of her
walk."
"She'll meet somebody one of these days--walking about like
that."
"She didn't say she'd met any one."
"But didn't you say some more about that ball?"
"I said everything I could say as soon as I realized she was
trying to avoid the topic. I said, 'It is no use your telling me
about this walk and pretend I've been told about the ball,
because you haven't. Your father has forbidden you to go!' "
"Well?"
"She said, 'I hate being horrid to you and father, but I feel it
my duty to go to that ball!' "
"Felt it her duty!"
" 'Very well,' I said, 'then I wash my hands of the whole
business. Your disobedience be upon your own head.' "
"But that is flat rebellion!" said Mr. Stanley, standing on the
hearthrug with his back to the unlit gas-fire. "You ought at
once--you ought at once to have told her that. What duty does a
girl owe to any one before her father? Obedience to him, that is
surely the first law. What CAN she put before that?" His voice
began to rise. "One would think I had said nothing about the
matter. One would think I had agreed to her going. I suppose
this is what she learns in her infernal London colleges. I
suppose this is the sort of damned rubbish--"
"Oh! Ssh, Peter!" cried Miss Stanley.
He stopped abruptly. In the pause a door could be heard opening
and closing on the landing up-stairs. Then light footsteps became
audible, descending the staircase with a certain deliberation and
a faint rustle of skirts.
"Tell her," said Mr. Stanley, with an imperious gesture, "to come
in here."
Part 2
Miss Stanley emerged from the study and stood watching Ann
Veronica descend.
The girl was flushed with excitement, bright-eyed, and braced for
a struggle; her aunt had never seen her looking so fine or so
pretty. Her fancy dress, save for the green-gray stockings, the
pseudo-Turkish slippers, and baggy silk trousered ends natural to
a Corsair's bride, was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded
opera-cloak. Beneath the hood it was evident that her rebellious
hair was bound up with red silk, and fastened by some device in
her ears (unless she had them pierced, which was too dreadful a
thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree earrings.
"I'm just off, aunt," said Ann Veronica.
"Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to you."
Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open doorway and
regarded her father's stern presence. She spoke with an entirely
false note of cheerful off-handedness. "I'm just in time to say
good-bye before I go, father. I'm going up to London with the
Widgetts to that ball."
"Now look here, Ann Veronica," said Mr. Stanley, "just a moment.
You are NOT going to that ball!"
Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.
"I thought we had discussed that, father."
"You are not going to that ball! You are not going out of this
house in that get-up!"
Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him, as she would
treat any man, with an insistence upon her due of masculine
respect. "You see," she said, very gently, "I AM going. I am
sorry to seem to disobey you, but I am. I wish"--she found she
had embarked on a bad sentence--"I wish we needn't have
quarrelled."
She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the front door. In
a moment he was beside her. "I don't think you can have heard
me, Vee," he said, with intensely controlled fury. "I said you
were"--he shouted--"NOT TO GO!"
She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a princess. She
tossed her head, and, having no further words, moved toward the
door. Her father intercepted her, and for a moment she and he
struggled with their hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed
their faces. "Let go!" she gasped at him, a blaze of anger.
"Veronica!" cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and, "Peter!"
For a moment they seemed on the verge of an altogether desperate
scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two
since long ago he had, in spite of her mother's protest in the
background, carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for
some forgotten crime. With something near to horror they found
themselves thus confronted.
The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an inside key,
to which at night a chain and two bolts were added. Carefully
abstaining from thrusting against each other, Ann Veronica and
her father began an absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open
the door, the other to keep it fastened. She seized the key, and
he grasped her hand and squeezed it roughly and painfully between
the handle and the ward as she tried to turn it. His grip
twisted her wrist. She cried out with the pain of it.
A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over her. Her
spirit awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins, to the immense
undignified disaster that had come to them.
Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled up-stairs.
She made noises between weeping and laughter as she went. She
gained her room, and slammed her door and locked it as though she
feared violence and pursuit.
"Oh God!" she cried, "Oh God!" and flung aside her opera-cloak,
and for a time walked about the room--a Corsair's bride at a
crisis of emotion. "Why can't he reason with me," she said,
again and again, "instead of doing this?"
Part 3
There presently came a phase in which she said: "I WON'T stand
it even now. I will go to-night."
She went as far as her door, then turned to the window. She
opened this and scrambled out--a thing she had not done for five
long years of adolescence--upon the leaded space above the
built-out bath-room on the first floor. Once upon a time she and
Roddy had descended thence by the drain-pipe.
But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short skirts are not
things to be done by a young lady of twenty-one in fancy dress
and an opera-cloak, and just as she was coming unaided to an
adequate realization of this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the
wholesale druggist, who lived three gardens away, and who had
been mowing his lawn to get an appetite for dinner, standing in a
fascinated attitude beside the forgotten lawn-mower and watching
her intently.
She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of quiet
correctitude into her return through the window, and when she was
safely inside she waved clinched fists and executed a noiseless
dance of rage.
When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew Mr. Ramage, and
might describe the affair to him, she cried "Oh!" with renewed
vexation, and repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more
ecstatic measure.
Part 4
At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica's
bedroom door.
"I've brought you up some dinner, Vee," she said.
Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room staring at
the ceiling. She reflected before answering. She was frightfully
hungry. She had eaten little or no tea, and her mid-day meal had
been worse than nothing.
She got up and unlocked the door.
Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war, or the
industrial system or casual wards, or flogging of criminals or
the Congo Free State, because none of these things really got
hold of her imagination; but she did object, she did not like,
she could not bear to think of people not having and enjoying
their meals. It was her distinctive test of an emotional state,
its interference with a kindly normal digestion. Any one very
badly moved choked down a few mouthfuls; the symptom of supreme
distress was not to be able to touch a bit. So that the thought
of Ann Veronica up-stairs had been extremely painful for her
through all the silent dinner-time that night. As soon as dinner
was over she went into the kitchen and devoted herself to
compiling a tray --not a tray merely of half-cooled dinner
things, but a specially prepared "nice" tray, suitable for
tempting any one. With this she now entered.
Ann Veronica found herself in the presence of the most
disconcerting fact in human experience, the kindliness of people
you believe to be thoroughly wrong. She took the tray with both
hands, gulped, and gave way to tears.
Her aunt leaped unhappily to the thought of penitence.
"My dear," she began, with an affectionate hand on Ann Veronica's
shoulder, "I do SO wish you would realize how it grieves your
father."
Ann Veronica flung away from her hand, and the pepper-pot on the
tray upset, sending a puff of pepper into the air and instantly
filling them both with an intense desire to sneeze.
"I don't think you see," she replied, with tears on her cheeks,
and her brows knitting, "how it shames and, ah!--disgraces me--AH
TISHU!"
She put down the tray with a concussion on her toilet-table.
"But, dear, think! He is your father. SHOOH!"
"That's no reason," said Ann Veronica, speaking through her
handkerchief and stopping abruptly.
Niece and aunt regarded each other for a moment over their
pocket-handkerchiefs with watery but antagonistic eyes, each far
too profoundly moved to see the absurdity of the position.
"I hope," said Miss Stanley, with dignity, and turned doorward
with features in civil warfare. "Better state of mind," she
gasped. . . .
Ann Veronica stood in the twilight room staring at the door that
had slammed upon her aunt, her pocket-handkerchief rolled tightly
in her hand. Her soul was full of the sense of disaster. She
had made her first fight for dignity and freedom as a grown-up
and independent Person, and this was how the universe had treated
her. It had neither succumbed to her nor wrathfully overwhelmed
her. It had thrust her back with an undignified scuffle, with
vulgar comedy, with an unendurable, scornful grin.
"By God!" said Ann Veronica for the first time in her life. "But
I will! I will!"
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE FLIGHT TO LONDON
Part 1
Ann Veronica had an impression that she did not sleep at all that
night, and at any rate she got through an immense amount of
feverish feeling and thinking.
What was she going to do?
One main idea possessed her: she must get away from home, she
must assert herself at once or perish. "Very well," she would
say, "then I must go." To remain, she felt, was to concede
everything. And she would have to go to-morrow. It was clear it
must be to-morrow. If she delayed a day she would delay two
days, if she delayed two days she would delay a week, and after a
week things would be adjusted to submission forever. "I'll go,"
she vowed to the night, "or I'll die!" She made plans and
estimated means and resources. These and her general
preparations had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold
watch, a very good gold watch that had been her mother's, a pearl
necklace that was also pretty good, some unpretending rings, some
silver bangles and a few other such inferior trinkets, three
pounds thirteen shillings unspent of her dress and book allowance
and a few good salable books. So equipped, she proposed to set
up a separate establishment in the world.
And then she would find work.
For most of a long and fluctuating night she was fairly confident
that she would find work; she knew herself to be strong,
intelligent, and capable by the standards of most of the girls
she knew. She was not quite clear how she should find it, but
she felt she would. Then she would write and tell her father
what she had done, and put their relationship on a new footing.
That was how she projected it, and in general terms it seemed
plausible and possible. But in between these wider phases of
comparative confidence were gaps of disconcerting doubt, when the
universe was presented as making sinister and threatening faces
at her, defying her to defy, preparing a humiliating and shameful
overthrow. "I don't care," said Ann Veronica to the darkness;
"I'll fight it."
She tried to plan her proceedings in detail. The only
difficulties that presented themselves clearly to her were the
difficulties of getting away from Morningside Park, and not the
difficulties at the other end of the journey. These were so
outside her experience that she found it possible to thrust them
almost out of sight by saying they would be "all right" in
confident tones to herself. But still she knew they were not
right, and at times they became a horrible obsession as of
something waiting for her round the corner. She tried to imagine
herself "getting something," to project herself as sitting down
at a desk and writing, or as returning after her work to some
pleasantly equipped and free and independent flat. For a time
she furnished the flat. But even with that furniture it remained
extremely vague, the possible good and the possible evil as well!
The possible evil! "I'll go," said Ann Veronica for the
hundredth time. "I'll go. I don't care WHAT happens."
She awoke out of a doze, as though she had never been sleeping.
It was time to get up.
She sat on the edge of her bed and looked about her, at her room,
at the row of black-covered books and the pig's skull. "I must
take them," she said, to help herself over her own incredulity.
"How shall I get my luggage out of the house? . . ."
The figure of her aunt, a little distant, a little propitiatory,
behind the coffee things, filled her with a sense of almost
catastrophic adventure. Perhaps she might never come back to
that breakfast-room again. Never! Perhaps some day, quite soon,
she might regret that breakfast-room. She helped herself to the
remainder of the slightly congealed bacon, and reverted to the
problem of getting her luggage out of the house. She decided to
call in the help of Teddy Widgett, or, failing him, of one of his
sisters.
Part 2
She found the younger generation of the Widgetts engaged in
languid reminiscences, and all, as they expressed it, a "bit
decayed." Every one became tremendously animated when they heard
that Ann Veronica had failed them because she had been, as she
expressed it, "locked in."
"My God!" said Teddy, more impressively than ever.
"But what are you going to do?" asked Hetty.
"What can one do?" asked Ann Veronica. "Would you stand it? I'm
going to clear out."
"Clear out?" cried Hetty.
"Go to London," said Ann Veronica.
She had expected sympathetic admiration, but instead the whole
Widgett family, except Teddy, expressed a common dismay. "But
how can you?" asked Constance. "Who will you stop with?"
"I shall go on my own. Take a room!"
"I say!" said Constance. "But who's going to pay for the room?"
"I've got money," said Ann Veronica. "Anything is better than
this--this stifled life down here." And seeing that Hetty and
Constance were obviously developing objections, she plunged at
once into a demand for help. "I've got nothing in the world to
pack with except a toy size portmanteau. Can you lend me some
stuff?"
"You ARE a chap!" said Constance, and warmed only slowly from the
idea of dissuasion to the idea of help. But they did what they
could for her. They agreed to lend her their hold-all and a
large, formless bag which they called the communal trunk. And
Teddy declared himself ready to go to the ends of the earth for
her, and carry her luggage all the way.
Hetty, looking out of the window--she always smoked her
after-breakfast cigarette at the window for the benefit of the
less advanced section of Morningside Park society--and trying not
to raise objections, saw Miss Stanley going down toward the
shops.
"If you must go on with it," said Hetty, "now's your time." And
Ann Veronica at once went back with the hold-all, trying not to
hurry indecently but to keep up her dignified air of being a
wronged person doing the right thing at a smart trot, to pack.
Teddy went round by the garden backs and dropped the bag over the
fence. All this was exciting and entertaining. Her aunt
returned before the packing was done, and Ann Veronica lunched
with an uneasy sense of bag and hold-all packed up-stairs and
inadequately hidden from chance intruders by the valance of the
bed. She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the Widgetts'
after lunch to make some final arrangements and then, as soon as
her aunt had retired to lie down for her usual digestive hour,
took the risk of the servants having the enterprise to report her
proceedings and carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate,
whence Teddy, in a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the
railway station. Then she went up-stairs again, dressed herself
carefully for town, put on her most businesslike-looking hat, and
with a wave of emotion she found it hard to control, walked down
to catch the 3.17 up-train.
Teddy handed her into the second-class compartment her
season-ticket warranted, and declared she was "simply splendid."
"If you want anything," he said, "or get into any trouble, wire
me. I'd come back from the ends of the earth. I'd do anything,
Vee. It's horrible to think of you!"
"You're an awful brick, Teddy!" she said.
"Who wouldn't be for you?"
The train began to move. "You're splendid!" said Teddy, with his
hair wild in the wind. "Good luck! Good luck!"
She waved from the window until the bend hid him.
She found herself alone in the train asking herself what she must
do next, and trying not to think of herself as cut off from home
or any refuge whatever from the world she had resolved to face.
She felt smaller and more adventurous even than she had expected
to feel. "Let me see," she said to herself, trying to control a
slight sinking of the heart, "I am going to take a room in a
lodging-house because that is cheaper. . . . But perhaps I had
better get a room in an hotel to-night and look round. . . .
"It's bound to be all right," she said.
But her heart kept on sinking. What hotel should she go to? If
she told a cabman to drive to an hotel, any hotel, what would he
do--or say? He might drive to something dreadfully expensive,
and not at all the quiet sort of thing she required. Finally she
decided that even for an hotel she must look round, and that
meanwhile she would "book" her luggage at Waterloo. She told the
porter to take it to the booking-office, and it was only after a
disconcerting moment or so that she found she ought to have
directed him to go to the cloak-room. But that was soon put
right, and she walked out into London with a peculiar exaltation
of mind, an exaltation that partook of panic and defiance, but
was chiefly a sense of vast unexampled release.
She inhaled a deep breath of air--London air.
Part 3
She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why,
mainly perhaps from the mere dread of entering them, and crossed
Waterloo Bridge at a leisurely pace. It was high afternoon,
there was no great throng of foot-passengers, and many an eye
from omnibus and pavement rested gratefully on her fresh, trim
presence as she passed young and erect, with the light of
determination shining through the quiet self-possession of her
face. She was dressed as English girls do dress for town,
without either coquetry or harshness: her collarless blouse
confessed a pretty neck, her eyes were bright and steady, and her
dark hair waved loosely and graciously over her ears. . . .
It seemed at first the most beautiful afternoon of all time to
her, and perhaps the thrill of her excitement did add a
distinctive and culminating keenness to the day. The river, the
big buildings on the north bank, Westminster, and St. Paul's,
were rich and wonderful with the soft sunshine of London, the
softest, the finest grained, the most penetrating and least
emphatic sunshine in the world. The very carts and vans and cabs
that Wellington Street poured out incessantly upon the bridge
seemed ripe and good in her eyes. A traffic of copious barges
slumbered over the face of the river-barges either altogether
stagnant or dreaming along in the wake of fussy tugs; and above
circled, urbanely voracious, the London seagulls. She had never
been there before at that hour, in that light, and it seemed to
her as if she came to it all for the first time. And this great
mellow place, this London, now was hers, to struggle with, to go
where she pleased in, to overcome and live in. "I am glad," she
told herself, "I came."
She marked an hotel that seemed neither opulent nor odd in a
little side street opening on the Embankment, made up her mind
with an effort, and, returning by Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo,
took a cab to this chosen refuge with her two pieces of luggage.
There was just a minute's hesitation before they gave her a room.
The young lady in the bureau said she would inquire, and Ann
Veronica, while she affected to read the appeal on a hospital
collecting-box upon the bureau counter, had a disagreeable sense
of being surveyed from behind by a small, whiskered gentleman in
a frock-coat, who came out of the inner office and into the hall
among a number of equally observant green porters to look at her
and her bags. But the survey was satisfactory, and she found
herself presently in Room No. 47, straightening her hat and
waiting for her luggage to appear.
"All right so far," she said to herself. . . .
Part 4
But presently, as she sat on the one antimacassared red silk
chair and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that tidy, rather
vacant, and dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe and
desert toilet-table and pictureless walls and stereotyped
furnishings, a sudden blankness came upon her as though she
didn't matter, and had been thrust away into this impersonal
corner, she and her gear. . . .
She decided to go out into the London afternoon again and get
something to eat in an Aerated Bread shop or some such place, and
perhaps find a cheap room for herself. Of course that was what
she had to do; she had to find a cheap room for herself and work!
This Room No. 47 was no more than a sort of railway compartment
on the way to that.
How does one get work?
She walked along the Strand and across Trafalgar Square, and by
the Haymarket to Piccadilly, and so through dignified squares and
palatial alleys to Oxford Street; and her mind was divided
between a speculative treatment of employment on the one hand,
and breezes --zephyr breezes--of the keenest appreciation for
London, on the other. The jolly part of it was that for the
first time in her life so far as London was concerned, she was
not going anywhere in particular; for the first time in her life
it seemed to her she was taking London in.
She tried to think how people get work. Ought she to walk into
some of these places and tell them what she could do? She
hesitated at the window of a shipping-office in Cockspur Street
and at the Army and Navy Stores, but decided that perhaps there
would be some special and customary hour, and that it would be
better for her to find this out before she made her attempt. And,
besides, she didn't just immediately want to make her attempt.
She fell into a pleasant dream of positions and work. Behind
every one of these myriad fronts she passed there must be a
career or careers. Her ideas of women's employment and a modern
woman's pose in life were based largely on the figure of Vivie
Warren in Mrs. Warren's Profession. She had seen Mrs. Warren's
Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the gallery of a
Stage Society performance one Monday afternoon. Most of it had
been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that
checked further curiosity, but the figure of Vivien, hard,
capable, successful, and bullying, and ordering about a veritable
Teddy in the person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She saw
herself in very much Vivie's position--managing something.
Her thoughts were deflected from Vivie Warren by the peculiar
behavior of a middle-aged gentleman in Piccadilly. He appeared
suddenly from the infinite in the neighborhood of the Burlington
Arcade, crossing the pavement toward her and with his eyes upon
her. He seemed to her indistinguishably about her father's age.
He wore a silk hat a little tilted, and a morning coat buttoned
round a tight, contained figure; and a white slip gave a finish
to his costume and endorsed the quiet distinction of his tie.
His face was a little flushed perhaps, and his small, brown eyes
were bright. He stopped on the curb-stone, not facing her but as
if he was on his way to cross the road, and spoke to her suddenly
over his shoulder.
"Whither away?" he said, very distinctly in a curiously wheedling
voice. Ann Veronica stared at his foolish, propitiatory smile,
his hungry gaze, through one moment of amazement, then stepped
aside and went on her way with a quickened step. But her mind
was ruffled, and its mirror-like surface of satisfaction was not
easily restored.
Queer old gentleman!
The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every
well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even
ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge. Ann Veronica
could at the same time ask herself what this queer old gentleman
could have meant by speaking to her, and know--know in general
terms, at least--what that accosting signified. About her, as
she had gone day by day to and from the Tredgold College, she had
seen and not seen many an incidental aspect of those sides of
life about which girls are expected to know nothing, aspects that
were extraordinarily relevant to her own position and outlook on
the world, and yet by convention ineffably remote. For all that
she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise, she had never yet
considered these things with unaverted eyes. She had viewed them
askance, and without exchanging ideas with any one else in the
world about them.
She went on her way now no longer dreaming and appreciative, but
disturbed and unwillingly observant behind her mask of serene
contentment.
That delightful sense of free, unembarrassed movement was gone.
As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she saw a woman
approaching her from the opposite direction--a tall woman who at
the first glance seemed altogether beautiful and fine. She came
along with the fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as
she drew nearer paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose
behind the quiet expression of her open countenance, and a sort
of unreality in her splendor betrayed itself for which Ann
Veronica could not recall the right word --a word, half
understood, that lurked and hid in her mind, the word
"meretricious." Behind this woman and a little to the side of
her, walked a man smartly dressed, with desire and appraisal in
his eyes. Something insisted that those two were mysteriously
linked--that the woman knew the man was there.
It was a second reminder that against her claim to go free and
untrammelled there was a case to be made, that after all it was
true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor
ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad
and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers,
lurk.
It was in the quiet streets and squares toward Oxford Street that
it first came into her head disagreeably that she herself was
being followed. She observed a man walking on the opposite side
of the way and looking toward her.
"Bother it all!" she swore. "Bother!" and decided that this was
not so, and would not look to right or left again.
Beyond the Circus Ann Veronica went into a British Tea-Table
Company shop to get some tea. And as she was yet waiting for her
tea to come she saw this man again. Either it was an unfortunate
recovery of a trail, or he had followed her from Mayfair. There
was no mistaking his intentions this time. He came down the shop
looking for her quite obviously, and took up a position on the
other side against a mirror in which he was able to regard her
steadfastly.
Beneath the serene unconcern of Ann Veronica's face was a boiling
tumult. She was furiously angry. She gazed with a quiet
detachment toward the window and the Oxford Street traffic, and
in her heart she was busy kicking this man to death. He HAD
followed her! What had he followed her for? He must have
followed her all the way from beyond Grosvenor Square.
He was a tall man and fair, with bluish eyes that were rather
protuberant, and long white hands of which he made a display. He
had removed his silk hat, and now sat looking at Ann Veronica
over an untouched cup of tea; he sat gloating upon her, trying to
catch her eye. Once, when he thought he had done so, he smiled an
ingratiating smile. He moved, after quiet intervals, with a
quick little movement, and ever and again stroked his small
mustache and coughed a self-conscious cough.
"That he should be in the same world with me!" said Ann Veronica,
reduced to reading the list of good things the British Tea-Table
Company had priced for its patrons.
Heaven knows what dim and tawdry conceptions of passion and
desire were in that blond cranium, what romance-begotten dreams
of intrigue and adventure! but they sufficed, when presently Ann
Veronica went out into the darkling street again, to inspire a
flitting, dogged pursuit, idiotic, exasperating, indecent.
She had no idea what she should do. If she spoke to a policeman
she did not know what would ensue. Perhaps she would have to
charge this man and appear in a police-court next day.
She became angry with herself. She would not be driven in by
this persistent, sneaking aggression. She would ignore him.
Surely she could ignore him. She stopped abruptly, and looked in
a flower-shop window. He passed, and came loitering back and
stood beside her, silently looking into her face.
The afternoon had passed now into twilight. The shops were
lighting up into gigantic lanterns of color, the street lamps
were glowing into existence, and she had lost her way. She had
lost her sense of direction, and was among unfamiliar streets.
She went on from street to street, and all the glory of London
had departed. Against the sinister, the threatening, monstrous
inhumanity of the limitless city, there was nothing now but this
supreme, ugly fact of a pursuit--the pursuit of the undesired,
persistent male.
For a second time Ann Veronica wanted to swear at the universe.
There were moments when she thought of turning upon this man and
talking to him. But there was something in his face at once
stupid and invincible that told her he would go on forcing
himself upon her, that he would esteem speech with her a great
point gained. In the twilight he had ceased to be a person one
could tackle and shame; he had become something more general, a
something that crawled and sneaked toward her and would not let
her alone. . . .
Then, when the tension was getting unendurable, and she was on
the verge of speaking to some casual passer-by and demanding
help, her follower vanished. For a time she could scarcely
believe he was gone. He had. The night had swallowed him up,
but his work on her was done. She had lost her nerve, and there
was no more freedom in London for her that night. She was glad to
join in the stream of hurrying homeward workers that was now
welling out of a thousand places of employment, and to imitate
their driven, preoccupied haste. She had followed a bobbing
white hat and gray jacket until she reached the Euston Road
corner of Tottenham Court Road, and there, by the name on a bus
and the cries of a conductor, she made a guess of her way. And
she did not merely affect to be driven--she felt driven. She was
afraid people would follow her, she was afraid of the dark, open
doorways she passed, and afraid of the blazes of light; she was
afraid to be alone, and she knew not what it was she feared.
It was past seven when she got back to her hotel. She thought
then that she had shaken off the man of the bulging blue eyes
forever, but that night she found he followed her into her
dreams. He stalked her, he stared at her, he craved her, he
sidled slinking and propitiatory and yet relentlessly toward her,
until at last she awoke from the suffocating nightmare nearness
of his approach, and lay awake in fear and horror listening to
the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.
She came very near that night to resolving that she would return
to her home next morning. But the morning brought courage again,
and those first intimations of horror vanished completely from
her mind.
Part 5
She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand
post-office worded thus:
| All | is | well | with | me |
|---------|-----------|----------|----------|---------|
| and | quite | safe | Veronica | |
-----------------------------------------------------
and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had
then set herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning's proposal of
marriage. But she had found it very difficult.
"DEAR MR. MANNING, she had begun. So far it had been plain
sailing, and it had seemed fairly evident to go on: "I find it
very difficult to answer your letter."
But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come and she had
fallen thinking of the events of the day. She had decided that
she would spend the next morning answering advertisements in the
papers that abounded in the writing-room; and so, after half an
hour's perusal of back numbers of the Sketch in the drawing-room,
she had gone to bed.
She found next morning, when she came to this advertisement
answering, that it was more difficult than she had supposed. In
the first place there were not so many suitable advertisements as
she had expected. She sat down by the paper-rack with a general
feeling of resemblance to Vivie Warren, and looked through the
Morning Post and Standard and Telegraph, and afterward the
half-penny sheets. The Morning Post was hungry for governesses
and nursery governesses, but held out no other hopes; the Daily
Telegraph that morning seemed eager only for skirt hands. She
went to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet of
note-paper, and then remembered that she had no address as yet to
which letters could be sent.
She decided to leave this matter until the morrow and devote the
morning to settling up with Mr. Manning. At the cost of quite a
number of torn drafts she succeeded in evolving this:
"DEAR MR. MANNING,--I find it very difficult to answer your
letter. I hope you won't mind if I say first that I think it
does me an extraordinary honor that you should think of any one
like myself so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish
it had not been written."
She surveyed this sentence for some time before going on. "I
wonder," she said, "why one writes him sentences like that?
It'll have to go," she decided, "I've written too many already."
She went on, with a desperate attempt to be easy and colloquial:
"You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and now perhaps
it will be difficult for us to get back to the old friendly
footing. But if that can possibly be done I want it to be done.
You see, the plain fact of the case is that I think I am too
young and ignorant for marriage. I have been thinking these
things over lately, and it seems to me that marriage for a girl
is just the supremest thing in life. It isn't just one among a
number of important things; for her it is the important thing,
and until she knows far more than I know of the facts of life,
how is she to undertake it? So please; if you will, forget that
you wrote that letter, and forgive this answer. I want you to
think of me just as if I was a man, and quite outside marriage
altogether.
"I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value men
friends. I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you for a
friend. I think that there is no better friend for a girl than a
man rather older than herself.
"Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step I have
taken in leaving my home. Very likely you will disapprove highly
of what I have done--l wonder? You may, perhaps, think I have
done it just in a fit of childish petulance because my father
locked me in when I wanted to go to a ball of which he did not
approve. But really it is much more than that. At Morningside
Park I feel as though all my growing up was presently to stop, as
though I was being shut in from the light of life, and, as they
say in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy that
does things as it is told--that is to say, as the strings are
pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my own
strings. I had rather have trouble and hardship like that than
be taken care of by others. I want to be myself. l wonder if a
man can quite understand that passionate feeling? It is quite a
passionate feeling. So I am already no longer the girl you knew
at Morningside Park. I am a young person seeking employment and
freedom and self-development, just as in quite our first talk of
all I said I wanted to be.
"I do hope you will see how things are, and not be offended with
me or frightfully shocked and distressed by what I have done.
"Very sincerely yours,
"ANN VERONICA STANLEY."
Part 6
In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The
intoxicating sense of novelty had given place to a more
business-like mood. She drifted northward from the Strand, and
came on some queer and dingy quarters.
She had never imagined life was half so sinister as it looked to
her in the beginning of these investigations. She found herself
again in the presence of some element in life about which she had
been trained not to think, about which she was perhaps
instinctively indisposed to think; something which jarred, in
spite of all her mental resistance, with all her preconceptions
of a clean and courageous girl walking out from Morningside Park
as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious world. One or
two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue that
she found hard to explain. "We don't let to ladies," they said.
She drifted, via Theobald's Road, obliquely toward the region
about Titchfield Street. Such apartments as she saw were either
scandalously dirty or unaccountably dear, or both. And some were
adorned with engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and
undesirable than anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann
Veronica loved beautiful things, and the beauty of undraped
loveliness not least among them; but these were pictures that did
but insist coarsely upon the roundness of women's bodies. The
windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies, their floors
a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels were of
a class apart. After the first onset several of the women who
had apartments to let said she would not do for them, and in
effect dismissed her. This also struck her as odd.
About many of these houses hung a mysterious taint as of
something weakly and commonly and dustily evil; the women who
negotiated the rooms looked out through a friendly manner as
though it was a mask, with hard, defiant eyes. Then one old
crone, short-sighted and shaky-handed, called Ann Veronica
"dearie," and made some remark, obscure and slangy, of which the
spirit rather than the words penetrated to her understanding.
For a time she looked at no more apartments, and walked through
gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through the sordid under side of
life, perplexed and troubled, ashamed of her previous obtuseness.
She had something of the feeling a Hindoo must experience who has
been into surroundings or touched something that offends his
caste. She passed people in the streets and regarded them with a
quickening apprehension, once or twice came girls dressed in
slatternly finery, going toward Regent Street from out these
places. It did not occur to her that they at least had found a
way of earning a living, and had that much economic superiority
to herself. It did not occur to her that save for some accidents
of education and character they had souls like her own.
For a time Ann Veronica went on her way gauging the quality of
sordid streets. At last, a little way to the northward of Euston
Road, the moral cloud seemed to lift, the moral atmosphere to
change; clean blinds appeared in the windows, clean doorsteps
before the doors, a different appeal in the neatly placed cards
bearing the word
--------------------------
| APARTMENTS |
--------------------------
in the clear bright windows. At last in a street near the
Hampstead Road she hit upon a room that had an exceptional
quality of space and order, and a tall woman with a kindly face
to show it. "You're a student, perhaps?" said the tall woman.
"At the Tredgold Women's College," said Ann Veronica. She felt
it would save explanations if she did not state she had left her
home and was looking for employment. The room was papered with
green, large-patterned paper that was at worst a trifle dingy,
and the arm-chair and the seats of the other chairs were covered
with the unusual brightness of a large-patterned chintz, which
also supplied the window-curtain. There was a round table
covered, not with the usual "tapestry" cover, but with a plain
green cloth that went passably with the wall-paper. In the
recess beside the fireplace were some open bookshelves. The
carpet was a quiet drugget and not excessively worn, and the bed
in the corner was covered by a white quilt. There were neither
texts nor rubbish on the walls, but only a stirring version of
Belshazzar's feast, a steel engraving in the early Victorian
manner that had some satisfactory blacks. And the woman who
showed this room was tall, with an understanding eye and the
quiet manner of the well-trained servant.
Ann Veronica brought her luggage in a cab from the hotel; she
tipped the hotel porter sixpence and overpaid the cabman
eighteenpence, unpacked some of her books and possessions, and so
made the room a little homelike, and then sat down in a by no
means uncomfortable arm-chair before the fire. She had arranged
for a supper of tea, a boiled egg, and some tinned peaches. She
had discussed the general question of supplies with the helpful
landlady. "And now," said Ann Veronica surveying her apartment
with an unprecedented sense of proprietorship, "what is the next
step?"
She spent the evening in writing--it was a little difficult--to
her father and--which was easier--to the Widgetts. She was
greatly heartened by doing this. The necessity of defending
herself and assuming a confident and secure tone did much to
dispell the sense of being exposed and indefensible in a huge
dingy world that abounded in sinister possibilities. She
addressed her letters, meditated on them for a time, and then
took them out and posted them. Afterward she wanted to get her
letter to her father back in order to read it over again, and, if
it tallied with her general impression of it, re-write it.
He would know her address to-morrow. She reflected upon that
with a thrill of terror that was also, somehow, in some faint
remote way, gleeful.
"Dear old Daddy," she said, "he'll make a fearful fuss. Well, it
had to happen somewhen. . . . Somehow. I wonder what he'll say?"
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
EXPOSTULATIONS
Part 1
The next morning opened calmly, and Ann Veronica sat in her own
room, her very own room, and consumed an egg and marmalade, and
read the advertisements in the Daily Telegraph. Then began
expostulations, preluded by a telegram and headed by her aunt.
The telegram reminded Ann Veronica that she had no place for
interviews except her bed-sitting-room, and she sought her
landlady and negotiated hastily for the use of the ground floor
parlor, which very fortunately was vacant. She explained she was
expecting an important interview, and asked that her visitor
should be duly shown in. Her aunt arrived about half-past ten,
in black and with an unusually thick spotted veil. She raised
this with the air of a conspirator unmasking, and displayed a
tear-flushed face. For a moment she remained silent.
"My dear," she said, when she could get her breath, "you must
come home at once."
Ann Veronica closed the door quite softly and stood still.
"This has almost killed your father. . . . After Gwen!"
"I sent a telegram."
"He cares so much for you. He did so care for you."
"I sent a telegram to say I was all right."
"All right! And I never dreamed anything of the sort was going
on. I had no idea!" She sat down abruptly and threw her wrists
limply upon the table. "Oh, Veronica!" she said, "to leave your
home!"
She had been weeping. She was weeping now. Ann Veronica was
overcome by this amount of emotion.
"Why did you do it?" her aunt urged. "Why could you not confide
in us?"
"Do what?" said Ann Veronica.
"What you have done."
"But what have I done?"
"Elope! Go off in this way. We had no idea. We had such a
pride in you, such hope in you. I had no idea you were not the
happiest girl. Everything I could do! Your father sat up all
night. Until at last I persuaded him to go to bed. He wanted to
put on his overcoat and come after you and look for you--in
London. We made sure it was just like Gwen. Only Gwen left a
letter on the pincushion. You didn't even do that Vee; not even
that."
"I sent a telegram, aunt," said Ann Veronica.
"Like a stab. You didn't even put the twelve words."
"I said I was all right."
"Gwen said she was happy. Before that came your father didn't
even know you were gone. He was just getting cross about your
being late for dinner--you know his way--when it came. He opened
it--just off-hand, and then when he saw what it was he hit at the
table and sent his soup spoon flying and splashing on to the
tablecloth. 'My God!' he said, 'I'll go after them and kill him.
I'll go after them and kill him.' For the moment I thought it
was a telegram from Gwen."
"But what did father imagine?"
"Of course he imagined! Any one would! 'What has happened,
Peter?' I asked. He was standing up with the telegram crumpled
in his hand. He used a most awful word! Then he said, 'It's Ann
Veronica gone to join her sister!' 'Gone!' I said. 'Gone!' he
said. 'Read that,' and threw the telegram at me, so that it went
into the tureen. He swore when I tried to get it out with the
ladle, and told me what it said. Then he sat down again in a
chair and said that people who wrote novels ought to be strung
up. It was as much as I could do to prevent him flying out of
the house there and then and coming after you. Never since I was
a girl have I seen your father so moved. 'Oh! little Vee!' he
cried, 'little Vee!' and put his face between his hands and sat
still for a long time before he broke out again."
Ann Veronica had remained standing while her aunt spoke.
"Do you mean, aunt," she asked, "that my father thought I had
gone off--with some man?"
"What else COULD he think? Would any one DREAM you would be so
mad as to go off alone?"
"After--after what had happened the night before?"
"Oh, why raise up old scores? If you could see him this morning,
his poor face as white as a sheet and all cut about with shaving!
He was for coming up by the very first train and looking for you,
but I said to him, 'Wait for the letters,' and there, sure
enough, was yours. He could hardly open the envelope, he trembled
so. Then he threw the letter at me. 'Go and fetch her home,' he
said; 'it isn't what we thought! It's just a practical joke of
hers.' And with that he went off to the City, stern and silent,
leaving his bacon on his plate--a great slice of bacon hardly
touched. No breakfast, he's had no dinner, hardly a mouthful of
soup--since yesterday at tea."
She stopped. Aunt and niece regarded each other silently.
"You must come home to him at once," said Miss Stanley.
Ann Veronica looked down at her fingers on the claret-colored
table-cloth. Her aunt had summoned up an altogether too vivid
picture of her father as the masterful man, overbearing,
emphatic, sentimental, noisy, aimless. Why on earth couldn't he
leave her to grow in her own way? Her pride rose at the bare
thought of return
"I don't think I CAN do that," she said. She looked up and said,
a little breathlessly, "I'm sorry, aunt, but I don't think I
can."
Part 2
Then it was the expostulations really began.
From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt expostulated for
about two hours. "But, my dear," she began, "it is Impossible!
It is quite out of the Question. You simply can't." And to that,
through vast rhetorical meanderings, she clung. It reached her
only slowly that Ann Veronica was standing to her resolution.
"How will you live?" she appealed. "Think of what people will
say!" That became a refrain. "Think of what Lady Palsworthy
will say! Think of what"--So-and-so--"will say! What are we to
tell people?
"Besides, what am I to tell your father?"
At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica that she
would refuse to return home; she had had some dream of a
capitulation that should leave her an enlarged and defined
freedom, but as her aunt put this aspect and that of her flight
to her, as she wandered illogically and inconsistently from one
urgent consideration to another, as she mingled assurances and
aspects and emotions, it became clearer and clearer to the girl
that there could be little or no change in the position of things
if she returned. "And what will Mr. Manning think?" said her
aunt.
"I don't care what any one thinks," said Ann Veronica.
"I can't imagine what has come over you," said her aunt. "I
can't conceive what you want. You foolish girl!"
Ann Veronica took that in silence. At the back of her mind, dim
and yet disconcerting, was the perception that she herself did
not know what she wanted. And yet she knew it was not fair to
call her a foolish girl.
"Don't you care for Mr. Manning?" said her aunt.
"I don't see what he has to do with my coming to London?"
"He--he worships the ground you tread on. You don't deserve it,
but he does. Or at least he did the day before yesterday. And
here you are!"
Her aunt opened all the fingers of her gloved hand in a
rhetorical gesture. "It seems to me all madness--madness! Just
because your father--wouldn't let you disobey him!"
Part 3
In the afternoon the task of expostulation was taken up by Mr.
Stanley in person. Her father's ideas of expostulation were a
little harsh and forcible, and over the claret-colored
table-cloth and under the gas chandelier, with his hat and
umbrella between them like the mace in Parliament, he and his
daughter contrived to have a violent quarrel. She had intended
to be quietly dignified, but he was in a smouldering rage from
the beginning, and began by assuming, which alone was more than
flesh and blood could stand, that the insurrection was over and
that she was coming home submissively. In his desire to be
emphatic and to avenge himself for his over-night distresses, he
speedily became brutal, more brutal than she had ever known him
before.
"A nice time of anxiety you've given me, young lady," he said, as
he entered the room. "I hope you're satisfied."
She was frightened--his anger always did frighten her--and in her
resolve to conceal her fright she carried a queen-like dignity to
what she felt even at the time was a preposterous pitch. She
said she hoped she had not distressed him by the course she had
felt obliged to take, and he told her not to be a fool. She
tried to keep her side up by declaring that he had put her into
an impossible position, and he replied by shouting, "Nonsense!
Nonsense! Any father in my place would have done what I did."
Then he went on to say: "Well, you've had your little adventure,
and I hope now you've had enough of it. So go up-stairs and get
your things together while I look out for a hansom."
To which the only possible reply seemed to be, "I'm not coming
home."
"Not coming home!"
"No!" And, in spite of her resolve to be a Person, Ann Veronica
began to weep with terror at herself. Apparently she was always
doomed to weep when she talked to her father. But he was always
forcing her to say and do such unexpectedly conclusive things.
She feared he might take her tears as a sign of weakness. So she
said: "I won't come home. I'd rather starve!"
For a moment the conversation hung upon that declaration. Then
Mr. Stanley, putting his hands on the table in the manner rather
of a barrister than a solicitor, and regarding her balefully
through his glasses with quite undisguised animosity, asked, "And
may I presume to inquire, then, what you mean to do?--how do you
propose to live?"
"I shall live," sobbed Ann Veronica. "You needn't be anxious
about that! I shall contrive to live."
"But I AM anxious," said Mr. Stanley, "I am anxious. Do you
think it's nothing to me to have my daughter running about London
looking for odd jobs and disgracing herself?"
"Sha'n't get odd jobs," said Ann Veronica, wiping her eyes.
And from that point they went on to a thoroughly embittering
wrangle. Mr. Stanley used his authority, and commanded Ann
Veronica to come home, to which, of course, she said she
wouldn't; and then he warned her not to defy him, warned her very
solemnly, and then commanded her again. He then said that if she
would not obey him in this course she should "never darken his
doors again," and was, indeed, frightfully abusive. This threat
terrified Ann Veronica so much that she declared with sobs and
vehemence that she would never come home again, and for a time
both talked at once and very wildly. He asked her whether she
understood what she was saying, and went on to say still more
precisely that she should never touch a penny of his money until
she came home again--not one penny. Ann Veronica said she didn't
care.
Then abruptly Mr. Stanley changed his key. "You poor child!" he
said; "don't you see the infinite folly of these proceedings?
Think! Think of the love and affection you abandon! Think of
your aunt, a second mother to you. Think if your own mother was
alive!"
He paused, deeply moved.
"If my own mother was alive," sobbed Ann Veronica, "she would
understand."
The talk became more and more inconclusive and exhausting. Ann
Veronica found herself incompetent, undignified, and detestable,
holding on desperately to a hardening antagonism to her father,
quarrelling with him, wrangling with him, thinking of
repartees--almost as if he was a brother. It was horrible, but
what could she do? She meant to live her own life, and he meant,
with contempt and insults, to prevent her. Anything else that
was said she now regarded only as an aspect of or diversion from
that.
In the retrospect she was amazed to think how things had gone to
pieces, for at the outset she had been quite prepared to go home
again upon terms. While waiting for his coming she had stated
her present and future relations with him with what had seemed to
her the most satisfactory lucidity and completeness. She had
looked forward to an explanation. Instead had come this storm,
this shouting, this weeping, this confusion of threats and
irrelevant appeals. It was not only that her father had said all
sorts of inconsistent and unreasonable things, but that by some
incomprehensible infection she herself had replied in the same
vein. He had assumed that her leaving home was the point at
issue, that everything turned on that, and that the sole
alternative was obedience, and she had fallen in with that
assumption until rebellion seemed a sacred principle. Moreover,
atrociously and inexorably, he allowed it to appear ever and
again in horrible gleams that he suspected there was some man in
the case. . . . Some man!
And to conclude it all was the figure of her father in the
doorway, giving her a last chance, his hat in one hand, his
umbrella in the other, shaken at her to emphasize his point.
"You understand, then," he was saying, "you understand?"
"I understand," said Ann Veronica, tear-wet and flushed with a
reciprocal passion, but standing up to him with an equality that
amazed even herself, "I understand." She controlled a sob. "Not
a penny--not one penny--and never darken your doors again!"
Part 4
The next day her aunt came again and expostulated, and was just
saying it was "an unheard-of thing" for a girl to leave her home
as Ann Veronica had done, when her father arrived, and was shown
in by the pleasant-faced landlady.
Her father had determined on a new line. He put down his hat and
umbrella, rested his hands on his hips, and regarded Ann Veronica
firmly.
"Now," he said, quietly, "it's time we stopped this nonsense."
Ann Veronica was about to reply, when he went on, with a still
more deadly quiet: "I am not here to bandy words with you. Let
us have no more of this humbug. You are to come home."
"I thought I explained--"
"I don't think you can have heard me," said her father; "I have
told you to come home."
"I thought I explained--"
"Come home!"
Ann Veronica shrugged her shoulders.
"Very well," said her father.
"I think this ends the business," he said, turning to his sister.
"It's not for us to supplicate any more. She must learn
wisdom--as God pleases."
"But, my dear Peter!" said Miss Stanley.
"No," said her brother, conclusively, "it's not for a parent to
go on persuading a child."
Miss Stanley rose and regarded Ann Veronica fixedly. The girl
stood with her hands behind her back, sulky, resolute, and
intelligent, a strand of her black hair over one eye and looking
more than usually delicate-featured, and more than ever like an
obdurate child.
"She doesn't know."
"She does."
"I can't imagine what makes you fly out against everything like
this," said Miss Stanley to her niece.
"What is the good of talking?" said her brother. "She must go her
own way. A man's children nowadays are not his own. That's the
fact of the matter. Their minds are turned against him. . . .
Rubbishy novels and pernicious rascals. We can't even protect
them from themselves."
An immense gulf seemed to open between father and daughter as he
said these words.
"I don't see," gasped Ann Veronica, "why parents and children . .
. shouldn't be friends."
"Friends!" said her father. "When we see you going through
disobedience to the devil! Come, Molly, she must go her own way.
I've tried to use my authority. And she defies me. What more is
there to be said? She defies me!"
It was extraordinary. Ann Veronica felt suddenly an effect of
tremendous pathos; she would have given anything to have been
able to frame and make some appeal, some utterance that should
bridge this bottomless chasm that had opened between her and her
father, and she could find nothing whatever to say that was in
the least sincere and appealing.
"Father," she cried, "I have to live!"
He misunderstood her. "That," he said, grimly, with his hand on
the door-handle, "must be your own affair, unless you choose to
live at Morningside Park."
Miss Stanley turned to her. "Vee," she said, "come home. Before
it is too late."
"Come, Molly," said Mr. Stanley, at the door.
"Vee!" said Miss Stanley, "you hear what your father says!"
Miss Stanley struggled with emotion. She made a curious movement
toward her niece, then suddenly, convulsively, she dabbed down
something lumpy on the table and turned to follow her brother.
Ann Veronica stared for a moment in amazement at this dark-green
object that clashed as it was put down. It was a purse. She made
a step forward. "Aunt!" she said, "I can't--"
Then she caught a wild appeal in her aunt's blue eye, halted, and
the door clicked upon them.
There was a pause, and then the front door slammed. . . .
Ann Veronica realized that she was alone with the world. And
this time the departure had a tremendous effect of finality. She
had to resist an impulse of sheer terror, to run out after them
and give in.
"Gods," she said, at last, "I've done it this time!"
"Well!" She took up the neat morocco purse, opened it, and
examined the contents.
It contained three sovereigns, six and fourpence, two postage
stamps, a small key, and her aunt's return half ticket to
Morningside Park.
Part 5
After the interview Ann Veronica considered herself formally cut
off from home. If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had.
Nevertheless there came a residuum of expostulations. Her
brother Roddy, who was in the motor line, came to expostulate;
her sister Alice wrote. And Mr. Manning called.
Her sister Alice seemed to have developed a religious sense away
there in Yorkshire, and made appeals that had no meaning for Ann
Veronica's mind. She exhorted Ann Veronica not to become one of
"those unsexed intellectuals, neither man nor woman."
Ann Veronica meditated over that phrase. "That's HIM," said Ann
Veronica, in sound, idiomatic English. "Poor old Alice!"
Her brother Roddy came to her and demanded tea, and asked her to
state a case. "Bit thick on the old man, isn't it?" said Roddy,
who had developed a bluff, straightforward style in the motor
shop.
"Mind my smoking?" said Roddy. "I don't see quite what your game
is, Vee, but I suppose you've got a game on somewhere.
"Rummy lot we are!" said Roddy. "Alice--Alice gone dotty, and
all over kids. Gwen--I saw Gwen the other day, and the paint's
thicker than ever. Jim is up to the neck in Mahatmas and
Theosophy and Higher Thought and rot--writes letters worse than
Alice. And now YOU'RE on the war-path. I believe I'm the only
sane member of the family left. The G.V.'s as mad as any of you,
in spite of all his respectability; not a bit of him straight
anywhere, not one bit."
"Straight?"
"Not a bit of it! He's been out after eight per cent. since the
beginning. Eight per cent.! He'll come a cropper one of these
days, if you ask me. He's been near it once or twice already.
That's got his nerves to rags. I suppose we're all human beings
really, but what price the sacred Institution of the Family! Us
as a bundle! Eh? . . . I don't half disagree with you, Vee,
really; only thing is, I don't see how you're going to pull it
off. A home MAY be a sort of cage, but still--it's a home.
Gives you a right to hang on to the old man until he
busts--practically. Jolly hard life for a girl, getting a
living. Not MY affair."
He asked questions and listened to her views for a time.
"I'd chuck this lark right off if I were you, Vee," he said.
"I'm five years older than you, and no end wiser, being a man.
What you're after is too risky. It's a damned hard thing to do.
It's all very handsome starting out on your own, but it's too
damned hard. That's my opinion, if you ask me. There's nothing a
girl can do that isn't sweated to the bone. You square the G.V.,
and go home before you have to. That's my advice. If you don't
eat humble-pie now you may live to fare worse later. _I_ can't
help you a cent. Life's hard enough nowadays for an unprotected
male. Let alone a girl. You got to take the world as it is, and
the only possible trade for a girl that isn't sweated is to get
hold of a man and make him do it for her. It's no good flying
out at that, Vee; _I_ didn't arrange it. It's Providence.
That's how things are; that's the order of the world. Like
appendicitis. It isn't pretty, but we're made so. Rot, no
doubt; but we can't alter it. You go home and live on the G.V.,
and get some other man to live on as soon as possible. It isn't
sentiment but it's horse sense. All this Woman-who-Diddery--no
damn good. After all, old P.--Providence, I mean--HAS arranged
it so that men will keep you, more or less. He made the universe
on those lines. You've got to take what you can get."
That was the quintessence of her brother Roddy.
He played variations on this theme for the better part of an
hour.
"You go home," he said, at parting; "you go home. It's all very
fine and all that, Vee, this freedom, but it isn't going to work.
The world isn't ready for girls to start out on their own yet;
that's the plain fact of the case. Babies and females have got
to keep hold of somebody or go under--anyhow, for the next few
generations. You go home and wait a century, Vee, and then try
again. Then you may have a bit of a chance. Now you haven't the
ghost of one--not if you play the game fair."
Part 6
It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely Mr. Manning, in
his entirely different dialect, indorsed her brother Roddy's view
of things. He came along, he said, just to call, with large,
loud apologies, radiantly kind and good. Miss Stanley, it was
manifest, had given him Ann Veronica's address. The kindly faced
landlady had failed to catch his name, and said he was a tall,
handsome gentleman with a great black mustache. Ann Veronica,
with a sigh at the cost of hospitality, made a hasty negotiation
for an extra tea and for a fire in the ground-floor apartment,
and preened herself carefully for the interview. In the little
apartment, under the gas chandelier, his inches and his stoop
were certainly very effective. In the bad light he looked at
once military and sentimental and studious, like one of Ouida's
guardsmen revised by Mr. Haldane and the London School of
Economics and finished in the Keltic school.
"It's unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley," he said, shaking
hands in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; "but you know you
said we might be friends."
"It's dreadful for you to be here," he said, indicating the
yellow presence of the first fog of the year without, "but your
aunt told me something of what had happened. It's just like your
Splendid Pride to do it. Quite!"
He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the
extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and
expressed himself, looking very earnestly at her with his
deep-set eyes, and carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache
the while. Ann Veronica sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite
unconsciously, the air of an expert hostess.
"But how is it all going to end?" said Mr. Manning.
"Your father, of course," he said, "must come to realize just how
Splendid you are! He doesn't understand. I've seen him, and he
doesn't a bit understand. _I_ didn't understand before that
letter. It makes me want to be just everything I CAN be to you.
You're like some splendid Princess in Exile in these Dreadful
Dingy apartments!"
"I'm afraid I'm anything but a Princess when it comes to earning
a salary," said Ann Veronica. "But frankly, I mean to fight this
through if I possibly can."
"My God!" said Manning, in a stage-aside. "Earning a salary!"
"You're like a Princess in Exile!" he repeated, overruling her.
"You come into these sordid surroundings--you mustn't mind my
calling them sordid--and it makes them seem as though they didn't
matter. . . . I don't think they do matter. I don't think any
surroundings could throw a shadow on you."
Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. "Won't you have some
more tea, Mr. Manning?" she asked.
"You know--," said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without
answering her question, "when I hear you talk of earning a
living, it's as if I heard of an archangel going on the Stock
Exchange--or Christ selling doves. . . . Forgive my daring. I
couldn't help the thought."
"It's a very good image," said Ann Veronica.
"I knew you wouldn't mind."
"But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr.
Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but
does it correspond with the realities? Are women truly such
angelic things and men so chivalrous? You men have, I know,
meant to make us Queens and Goddesses, but in practice--well,
look, for example, at the stream of girls one meets going to work
of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and underfed! They aren't
queens, and no one is treating them as queens. And look, again,
at the women one finds letting lodgings. . . . I was looking for
rooms last week. It got on my nerves--the women I saw. Worse
than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found
behind it another dreadful dingy woman--another fallen queen, I
suppose--dingier than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their
poor hands!"
"I know," said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.
"And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety,
their limitations, their swarms of children!"
Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from
him with the rump of his fourth piece of cake. "I know that our
social order is dreadful enough," he said, "and sacrifices all
that is best and most beautiful in life. I don't defend it."
"And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens," Ann Veronica
went on, "there's twenty-one and a half million women to twenty
million men. Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that
leaves over a million shrines short, not reckoning widows who
re-marry. And more boys die than girls, so that the real
disproportion among adults is even greater."
"I know," said Mr Manning, "I know these Dreadful Statistics. I
know there's a sort of right in your impatience at the slowness
of Progress. But tell me one thing I don't understand--tell me
one thing: How can you help it by coming down into the battle
and the mire? That's the thing that concerns me."
"Oh, I'm not trying to help it," said Ann Veronica. "I'm only
arguing against your position of what a woman should be, and
trying to get it clear in my own mind. I'm in this apartment and
looking for work because-- Well, what else can I do, when my
father practically locks me up?"
"I know," said Mr. Manning, "I know. Don't think I can't
sympathize and understand. Still, here we are in this dingy,
foggy city. Ye gods! what a wilderness it is! Every one trying
to get the better of every one, every one regardless of every
one--it's one of those days when every one bumps against
you--every one pouring coal smoke into the air and making
confusion worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and
smelling, a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman
at the corner coughing dreadfully--all the painful sights of a
great city, and here you come into it to take your chances. It's
too valiant, Miss Stanley, too valiant altogether!"
Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days of
employment-seeking now. "I wonder if it is."
"It isn't," said Mr. Manning, "that I mind Courage in a Woman--I
love and admire Courage. What could be more splendid than a
beautiful girl facing a great, glorious tiger? Una and the Lion
again, and all that! But this isn't that sort of thing; this is
just a great, ugly, endless wilderness of selfish, sweating,
vulgar competition!"
"That you want to keep me out of?"
"Exactly!" said Mr. Manning.
"In a sort of beautiful garden-close--wearing lovely dresses and
picking beautiful flowers?"
"Ah! If one could!"
"While those other girls trudge to business and those other women
let lodgings. And in reality even that magic garden-close
resolves itself into a villa at Morningside Park and my father
being more and more cross and overbearing at meals--and a general
feeling of insecurity and futility."
Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked meaningly at Ann
Veronica. "There," he said, "you don't treat me fairly, Miss
Stanley. My garden-close would be a better thing than that."
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
IDEALS AND A REALITY
Part 1
And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value
in the world. She went about in a negligent November London that
had become very dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed,
and tried to find that modest but independent employment she had
so rashly assumed. She went about, intent-looking and
self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing her emotions whatever
they were, as the realities of her position opened out before
her. Her little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she went
out from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray
houses, its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets of homes,
its orange-lit windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray
or black, much as an animal goes out to seek food. She would
come back and write letters, carefully planned and written
letters, or read some book she had fetched from Mudie's--she had
invested a half-guinea with Mudie's--or sit over her fire and
think.
Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was
what is called an "ideal." There were no such girls and no such
positions. No work that offered was at all of the quality she
had vaguely postulated for herself. With such qualifications as
she possessed, two chief channels of employment lay open, and
neither attracted her, neither seemed really to offer a
conclusive escape from that subjection to mankind against which,
in the person of her father, she was rebelling. One main avenue
was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife or
mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a
very high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into
business --into a photographer's reception-room, for example, or
a costumer's or hat-shop. The first set of occupations seemed to
her to be altogether too domestic and restricted; for the latter
she was dreadfully handicapped by her want of experience. And
also she didn't like them. She didn't like the shops, she didn't
like the other women's faces; she thought the smirking men in
frock-coats who dominated these establishments the most
intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her
very distinctly "My dear!"
Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in
which, at least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood;
one was under a Radical Member of Parliament, and the other under
a Harley Street doctor, and both men declined her proffered
services with the utmost civility and admiration and terror.
There was also a curious interview at a big hotel with a
middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered with jewels and
reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not think Ann
Veronica would do as her companion.
And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried
no more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her
time and energy. She had heard of women journalists, women
writers, and so forth; but she was not even admitted to the
presence of the editors she demanded to see, and by no means sure
that if she had been she could have done any work they might have
given her. One day she desisted from her search and went
unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place was not filled;
she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a comforting day
of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so
interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety
of her search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if
she was still living at home. Then a third secretarial opening
occurred and renewed her hopes again: a position as
amanuensis--with which some of the lighter duties of a nurse were
combined--to an infirm gentleman of means living at Twickenham,
and engaged upon a great literary research to prove that the
"Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular chemistry
written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.
Part 2
Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings in the
industrial sea, and measuring herself against the world as it is,
she was also making extensive explorations among the ideas and
attitudes of a number of human beings who seemed to be largely
concerned with the world as it ought to be. She was drawn first
by Miss Miniver, and then by her own natural interest, into a
curious stratum of people who are busied with dreams of world
progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a New Age that is
to replace all the stresses and disorders of contemporary life.
Miss Miniver learned of her flight and got her address from the
Widgetts. She arrived about nine o'clock the next evening in a
state of tremulous enthusiasm. She followed the landlady half way
up-stairs, and called up to Ann Veronica, "May I come up? It's
me! You know--Nettie Miniver!" She appeared before Ann Veronica
could clearly recall who Nettie Miniver might be.
There was a wild light in her eye, and her straight hair was out
demonstrating and suffragetting upon some independent notions of
its own. Her fingers were bursting through her gloves, as if to
get at once into touch with Ann Veronica. "You're Glorious!"
said Miss Miniver in tones of rapture, holding a hand in each of
hers and peering up into Ann Veronica's face. "Glorious! You're
so calm, dear, and so resolute, so serene!
"It's girls like you who will show them what We are," said Miss
Miniver; "girls whose spirits have not been broken!"
Ann Veronica sunned herself a little in this warmth.
"I was watching you at Morningside Park, dear," said Miss
Miniver. "I am getting to watch all women. I thought then
perhaps you didn't care, that you were like so many of them. NOW
it's just as though you had grown up suddenly."
She stopped, and then suggested: "I wonder--I should love--if it
was anything _I_ said."
She did not wait for Ann Veronica's reply. She seemed to assume
that it must certainly be something she had said. "They all
catch on," she said. "It spreads like wildfire. This is such a
grand time! Such a glorious time! There never was such a time
as this! Everything seems so close to fruition, so coming on and
leading on! The Insurrection of Women! They spring up
everywhere. Tell me all that happened, one sister-woman to
another."
She chilled Ann Veronica a little by that last phrase, and yet
the magnetism of her fellowship and enthusiasm was very strong;
and it was pleasant to be made out a heroine after so much
expostulation and so many secret doubts.
But she did not listen long; she wanted to talk. She sat,
crouched together, by the corner of the hearthrug under the
bookcase that supported the pig's skull, and looked into the fire
and up at Ann Veronica's face, and let herself go. "Let us put
the lamp out," she said; "the flames are ever so much better for
talking," and Ann Veronica agreed. "You are coming right out
into life--facing it all."
Ann Veronica sat with her chin on her hand, red-lit and saying
little, and Miss Miniver discoursed. As she talked, the drift
and significance of what she was saying shaped itself slowly to
Ann Veronica's apprehension. It presented itself in the likeness
of a great, gray, dull world--a brutal, superstitious, confused,
and wrong-headed world, that hurt people and limited people
unaccountably. In remote times and countries its evil tendencies
had expressed themselves in the form of tyrannies, massacres,
wars, and what not; but just at present in England they shaped as
commercialism and competition, silk hats, suburban morals, the
sweating system, and the subjection of women. So far the thing
was acceptable enough. But over against the world Miss Miniver
assembled a small but energetic minority, the Children of
Light--people she described as "being in the van," or "altogether
in the van," about whom Ann Veronica's mind was disposed to be
more sceptical.
Everything, Miss Miniver said, was "working up," everything was
"coming on"--the Higher Thought, the Simple Life, Socialism,
Humanitarianism, it was all the same really. She loved to be
there, taking part in it all, breathing it, being it. Hitherto
in the world's history there had been precursors of this Progress
at great intervals, voices that had spoken and ceased, but now it
was all coming on together in a rush. She mentioned, with
familiar respect, Christ and Buddha and Shelley and Nietzsche and
Plato. Pioneers all of them. Such names shone brightly in the
darkness, with black spaces of unilluminated emptiness about
them, as stars shine in the night; but now--now it was different;
now it was dawn--the real dawn.
"The women are taking it up," said Miss Miniver; "the women and
the common people, all pressing forward, all roused."
Ann Veronica listened with her eyes on the fire.
"Everybody is taking it up," said Miss Miniver. "YOU had to come
in. You couldn't help it. Something drew you. Something draws
everybody. From suburbs, from country towns--everywhere. I see
all the Movements. As far as I can, I belong to them all. I keep
my finger on the pulse of things."
Ann Veronica said nothing.
"The dawn!" said Miss Miniver, with her glasses reflecting the
fire like pools of blood-red flame.
"I came to London," said Ann Veronica, "rather because of my own
difficulty. I don't know that I understand altogether."
"Of course you don't," said Miss Miniver, gesticulating
triumphantly with her thin hand and thinner wrist, and patting
Ann Veronica's knee. "Of course you don't. That's the wonder of
it. But you will, you will. You must let me take you to
things--to meetings and things, to conferences and talks. Then
you will begin to see. You will begin to see it all opening out.
I am up to the ears in it all--every moment I can spare. I throw
up work--everything! I just teach in one school, one good
school, three days a week. All the rest--Movements! I can live
now on fourpence a day. Think how free that leaves me to follow
things up! I must take you everywhere. I must take you to the
Suffrage people, and the Tolstoyans, and the Fabians."
"I have heard of the Fabians," said Ann Veronica.
"It's THE Society!" said Miss Miniver. "It's the centre of the
intellectuals. Some of the meetings are wonderful! Such
earnest, beautiful women! Such deep-browed men! . . . And to
think that there they are making history! There they are putting
together the plans of a new world. Almos light-heartedly. There
is Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins the author, and Toomer, and Doctor
Tumpany--the most wonderful people! There you see them
discussing, deciding, planning! Just think--THEY ARE MAKING A NEW
WORLD!"
"But ARE these people going to alter everything?" said Ann
Veronica.
"What else can happen?" asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak
gesture at the glow. "What else can possibly happen--as things
are going now?"
Part 3
Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar levels of the
world with so enthusiastic a generosity that it seemed
ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann
Veronica became habituated to the peculiar appearance and the
peculiar manners of the people "in the van." The shock of their
intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first
quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many respects
so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the
paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in
direct relation to that rightness, absurd.
Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the Goopes. The
Goopes were the oddest little couple conceivable, following a
fruitarian career upon an upper floor in Theobald's Road. They
were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple
living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica
gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his
wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery,
vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis,
and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management
of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very
furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes
when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas
sacking tied with brown ribbons, while his wife wore a purple
djibbah with a richly embroidered yoke. He was a small, dark,
reserved man, with a large inflexible-looking convex forehead,
and his wife was very pink and high-spirited, with one of those
chins that pass insensibly into a full, strong neck. Once a
week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering from nine till
the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and
fruitarian refreshments--chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut
tose, and so forth--and lemonade and unfermented wine; and to one
of these symposia Miss Miniver after a good deal of preliminary
solicitude, conducted Ann Veronica.
She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously for her taste,
as a girl who was standing out against her people, to a gathering
that consisted of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin
and a deep voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's
inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy,
blond young man with a narrow forehead and glasses, two
undistinguished women in plain skirts and blouses, and a
middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr. and Mrs.
Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone. These
were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very
copper-adorned fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood
inscription:
"DO IT NOW."
And to them were presently added a roguish-looking young man,
with reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy tweed suit, and
others who, in Ann Veronica's memory, in spite of her efforts to
recall details, remained obstinately just "others."
The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant in form even
when it ceased to be brilliant in substance. There were moments
when Ann Veronica rather more than suspected the chief speakers
to be, as school-boys say, showing off at her.
They talked of a new substitute for dripping in vegetarian
cookery that Mrs. Goopes was convinced exercised an exceptionally
purifying influence on the mind. And then they talked of
Anarchism and Socialism, and whether the former was the exact
opposite of the latter or only a higher form. The reddish-haired
young man contributed allusions to the Hegelian philosophy that
momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alderman Dunstable,
who had hitherto been silent, broke out into speech and went off
at a tangent, and gave his personal impressions of quite a number
of his fellow-councillors. He continued to do this for the rest
of the evening intermittently, in and out, among other topics. He
addressed himself chiefly to Goopes, and spoke as if in reply to
long-sustained inquiries on the part of Goopes into the personnel
of the Marylebone Borough Council. "If you were to ask me," he
would say, "I should say Blinders is straight. An ordinary type,
of course--"
Mrs. Dunstable's contributions to the conversation were entirely
in the form of nods; whenever Alderman Dunstable praised or
blamed she nodded twice or thrice, according to the requirements
of his emphasis. And she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann
Veronica's dress. Mrs. Goopes disconcerted the Alderman a little
by abruptly challenging the roguish-looking young man in the
orange tie (who, it seemed, was the assistant editor of New
Ideas) upon a critique of Nietzsche and Tolstoy that had appeared
in his paper, in which doubts had been cast upon the perfect
sincerity of the latter. Everybody seemed greatly concerned about
the sincerity of Tolstoy.
Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in Tolstoy's
sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter much any more,
and she appealed to Ann Veronica whether she did not feel the
same; and Mr. Goopes said that we must distinguish between
sincerity and irony, which was often indeed no more than
sincerity at the sublimated level.
Alderman Dunstable said that sincerity was often a matter of
opportunity, and illustrated the point to the fair young man with
an anecdote about Blinders on the Dust Destructor Committee,
during which the young man in the orange tie succeeded in giving
the whole discussion a daring and erotic flavor by questioning
whether any one could be perfectly sincere in love.
Miss Miniver thought that there was no true sincerity except in
love, and appealed to Ann Veronica, but the young man in the
orange tie went on to declare that it was quite possible to be
sincerely in love with two people at the same time, although
perhaps on different planes with each individual, and deceiving
them both. But that brought Mrs. Goopes down on him with the
lesson Titian teaches so beautifully in his "Sacred and Profane
Love," and became quite eloquent upon the impossibility of any
deception in the former.
Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alderman Dunstable,
turning back to the shy, blond young man and speaking in
undertones of the utmost clearness, gave a brief and confidential
account of an unfounded rumor of the bifurcation of the
affections of Blinders that had led to a situation of some
unpleasantness upon the Borough Council.
The very old lady in the antimacassar touched Ann Veronica's arm
suddenly, and said, in a deep, arch voice:
"Talking of love again; spring again, love again. Oh! you young
people!"
The young man with the orange tie, in spite of Sisyphus-like
efforts on the part of Goopes to get the topic on to a higher
plane, displayed great persistence in speculating upon the
possible distribution of the affections of highly developed
modern types.
The old lady in the antimacassar said, abruptly, "Ah! you young
people, you young people, if you only knew!" and then laughed and
then mused in a marked manner; and the young man with the narrow
forehead and glasses cleared his throat and asked the young man
in the orange tie whether he believed that Platonic love was
possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed in nothing else, and
with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a little abruptly,
and directed Goopes and the shy young man in the handing of
refreshments.
But the young man with the orange tie remained in his place,
disputing whether the body had not something or other which he
called its legitimate claims. And from that they came back by way
of the Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection to Tolstoy again.
So the talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been a little
reserved, resorted presently to the Socratic method to restrain
the young man with the orange tie, and bent his forehead over
him, and brought out at last very clearly from him that the body
was only illusion and everything nothing but just spirit and
molecules of thought. It became a sort of duel at last between
them, and all the others sat and listened--every one, that is,
except the Alderman, who had got the blond young man into a
corner by the green-stained dresser with the aluminum things, and
was sitting with his back to every one else, holding one hand
over his mouth for greater privacy, and telling him, with an
accent of confidential admission, in whispers of the chronic
struggle between the natural modesty and general inoffensiveness
of the Borough Council and the social evil in Marylebone.
So the talk went on, and presently they were criticising
novelists, and certain daring essays of Wilkins got their due
share of attention, and then they were discussing the future of
the theatre. Ann Veronica intervened a little in the novelist
discussion with a defence of Esmond and a denial that the Egoist
was obscure, and when she spoke every one else stopped talking
and listened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard Shaw ought
to go into Parliament. And that brought them to vegetarianism
and teetotalism, and the young man in the orange tie and Mrs.
Goopes had a great set-to about the sincerity of Chesterton and
Belloc that was ended by Goopes showing signs of resuming the
Socratic method.
And at last Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver came down the dark
staircase and out into the foggy spaces of the London squares,
and crossed Russell Square, Woburn Square, Gordon Square, making
an oblique route to Ann Veronica's lodging. They trudged along a
little hungry, because of the fruitarian refreshments, and
mentally very active. And Miss Miniver fell discussing whether
Goopes or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Doctor Tumpany or Wilkins
the author had the more powerful and perfect mind in existence at
the present time. She was clear there were no other minds like
them in all the world.
Part 4
Then one evening Ann Veronica went with Miss Miniver into the
back seats of the gallery at Essex Hall, and heard and saw the
giant leaders of the Fabian Society who are re-making the world:
Bernard Shaw and Toomer and Doctor Tumpany and Wilkins the
author, all displayed upon a platform. The place was crowded,
and the people about her were almost equally made up of very
good-looking and enthusiastic young people and a great variety of
Goopes-like types. In the discussion there was the oddest
mixture of things that were personal and petty with an idealist
devotion that was fine beyond dispute. In nearly every speech
she heard was the same implication of great and necessary changes
in the world--changes to be won by effort and sacrifice indeed,
but surely to be won. And afterward she saw a very much larger
and more enthusiastic gathering, a meeting of the advanced
section of the woman movement in Caxton Hall, where the same note
of vast changes in progress sounded; and she went to a soiree of
the Dress Reform Association and visited a Food Reform
Exhibition, where imminent change was made even alarmingly
visible. The women's meeting was much more charged with
emotional force than the Socialists'. Ann Veronica was carried
off her intellectual and critical feet by it altogether, and
applauded and uttered cries that subsequent reflection failed to
endorse. "I knew you would feel it," said Miss Miniver, as they
came away flushed and heated. "I knew you would begin to see how
it all falls into place together."
It did begin to fall into place together. She became more and
more alive, not so much to a system of ideas as to a big diffused
impulse toward change, to a great discontent with and criticism
of life as it is lived, to a clamorous confusion of ideas for
reconstruction--reconstruction of the methods of business, of
economic development, of the rules of property, of the status of
children, of the clothing and feeding and teaching of every one;
she developed a quite exaggerated consciousness of a multitude of
people going about the swarming spaces of London with their minds
full, their talk and gestures full, their very clothing charged
with the suggestion of the urgency of this pervasive project of
alteration. Some indeed carried themselves, dressed themselves
even, rather as foreign visitors from the land of "Looking
Backward" and "News from Nowhere" than as the indigenous
Londoners they were. For the most part these were detached
people: men practising the plastic arts, young writers, young men
in employment, a very large proportion of girls and women--self-
supporting women or girls of the student class. They made a
stratum into which Ann Veronica was now plunged up to her neck;
it had become her stratum.
None of the things they said and did were altogether new to Ann
Veronica, but now she got them massed and alive, instead of by
glimpses or in books--alive and articulate and insistent. The
London backgrounds, in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, against which
these people went to and fro, took on, by reason of their gray
facades, their implacably respectable windows and window-blinds,
their reiterated unmeaning iron railings, a stronger and stronger
suggestion of the flavor of her father at his most obdurate
phase, and of all that she felt herself fighting against.
She was already a little prepared by her discursive reading and
discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements,"
though temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist
and criticise than embrace them. But the people among whom she
was now thrown through the social exertions of Miss Miniver and
the Widgetts--for Teddy and Hetty came up from Morningside Park
and took her to an eighteen-penny dinner in Soho and introduced
her to some art students, who were also Socialists, and so opened
the way to an evening of meandering talk in a studio--carried
with them like an atmosphere this implication, not only that the
world was in some stupid and even obvious way WRONG, with which
indeed she was quite prepared to agree, but that it needed only a
few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and
indiscriminately "advanced," for the new order to achieve itself.
When ninety per cent. out of the ten or twelve people one meets
in a month not only say but feel and assume a thing, it is very
hard not to fall into the belief that the thing is so.
Imperceptibly almost Ann Veronica began to acquire the new
attitude, even while her mind still resisted the felted ideas
that went with it. And Miss Miniver began to sway her.
The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument
clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense of
self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency
of statement than a washerwoman has for wisps of vapor, which
made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at their first encounter
in Morningside Park, became at last with constant association the
secret of Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain tires of
resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently
active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it has already
slain, exposed and dissected and buried, it becomes less and less
energetic to repeat the operation. There must be something, one
feels, in ideas that achieve persistently a successful
resurrection. What Miss Miniver would have called the Higher
Truth supervenes.
Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these
movements and efforts, Ann Veronica, for all that she went with
her friend, and at times applauded with her enthusiastically, yet
went nevertheless with eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and
fine eyebrows more and more disposed to knit. She was with these
movements--akin to them, she felt it at times intensely--and yet
something eluded her. Morningside Park had been passive and
defective; all this rushed about and was active, but it was still
defective. It still failed in something. It did seem germane to
the matter that so many of the people "in the van" were plain
people, or faded people, or tired-looking people. It did affect
the business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in
their manners and inconsistent in their phrases. There were
moments when she doubted whether the whole mass of movements and
societies and gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent
spectacle of failure protecting itself from abjection by the
glamour of its own assertions. It happened that at the extremest
point of Ann Veronica's social circle from the Widgetts was the
family of the Morningside Park horse-dealer, a company of
extremely dressy and hilarious young women, with one equestrian
brother addicted to fancy waistcoats, cigars, and facial spots.
These girls wore hats at remarkable angles and bows to startle
and kill; they liked to be right on the spot every time and up to
everything that was it from the very beginning and they rendered
their conception of Socialists and all reformers by the words
"positively frightening" and "weird." Well, it was beyond
dispute that these words did convey a certain quality of the
Movements in general amid which Miss Miniver disported herself.
They WERE weird. And yet for all that--
It got into Ann Veronica's nights at last and kept her awake, the
perplexing contrast between the advanced thought and the advanced
thinker. The general propositions of Socialism, for example,
struck her as admirable, but she certainly did not extend her
admiration to any of its exponents. She was still more stirred
by the idea of the equal citizenship of men and women, by the
realization that a big and growing organization of women were
giving form and a generalized expression to just that personal
pride, that aspiration for personal freedom and respect which had
brought her to London; but when she heard Miss Miniver
discoursing on the next step in the suffrage campaign, or read of
women badgering Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or
getting up in a public meeting to pipe out a demand for votes and
be carried out kicking and screaming, her soul revolted. She
could not part with dignity. Something as yet unformulated
within her kept her estranged from all these practical aspects of
her beliefs.
"Not for these things, O Ann Veronica, have you revolted," it
said; "and this is not your appropriate purpose."
It was as if she faced a darkness in which was something very
beautiful and wonderful as yet unimagined. The little pucker in
her brows became more perceptible.
Part 5
In the beginning of December Ann Veronica began to speculate
privately upon the procedure of pawning. She had decided that she
would begin with her pearl necklace. She spent a very
disagreeable afternoon and evening--it was raining fast outside,
and she had very unwisely left her soundest pair of boots in the
boothole of her father's house in Morningside Park--thinking over
the economic situation and planning a course of action. Her aunt
had secretly sent on to Ann Veronica some new warm underclothing,
a dozen pairs of stockings, and her last winter's jacket, but the
dear lady had overlooked those boots.
These things illuminated her situation extremely. Finally she
decided upon a step that had always seemed reasonable to her, but
that hitherto she had, from motives too faint for her to
formulate, refrained from taking. She resolved to go into the
City to Ramage and ask for his advice. And next morning she
attired herself with especial care and neatness, found his
address in the Directory at a post-office, and went to him.
She had to wait some minutes in an outer office, wherein three
young men of spirited costume and appearance regarded her with
ill-concealed curiosity and admiration. Then Ramage appeared
with effusion, and ushered her into his inner apartment. The
three young men exchanged expressive glances.
The inner apartment was rather gracefully furnished with a thick,
fine Turkish carpet, a good brass fender, a fine old bureau, and
on the walls were engravings of two young girls' heads by Greuze,
and of some modern picture of boys bathing in a sunlit pool.
"But this is a surprise!" said Ramage. "This is wonderful! I've
been feeling that you had vanished from my world. Have you been
away from Morningside Park?"
"I'm not interrupting you?"
"You are. Splendidly. Business exists for such interruptions.
There you are, the best client's chair."
Ann Veronica sat down, and Ramage's eager eyes feasted on her.
"I've been looking out for you," he said. "I confess it."
She had not, she reflected, remembered how prominent his eyes
were.
"I want some advice," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes?"
"You remember once, how we talked--at a gate on the Downs? We
talked about how a girl might get an independent living."
"Yes, yes."
"Well, you see, something has happened at home."
She paused.
"Nothing has happened to Mr. Stanley?"
"I've fallen out with my father. It was about--a question of
what I might do or might not do. He--In fact, he--he locked me
in my room. Practically."
Her breath left her for a moment.
"I SAY!" said Mr. Ramage.
"I wanted to go to an art-student ball of which he disapproved."
"And why shouldn't you?"
"I felt that sort of thing couldn't go on. So I packed up and
came to London next day."
"To a friend?"
"To lodgings--alone."
"I say, you know, you have some pluck. You did it on your own?"
Ann Veronica smiled. "Quite on my own," she said.
"It's magnificent!" He leaned back and regarded her with his
head a little on one side. "By Jove!" he said, "there is
something direct about you. I wonder if I should have locked you
up if I'd been your father. Luckily I'm not. And you started out
forthwith to fight the world and be a citizen on your own basis?"
He came forward again and folded his hands under him on his desk.
"How has the world taken it?" he asked. "If I was the world I
think I should have put down a crimson carpet, and asked you to
say what you wanted, and generally walk over me. But the world
didn't do that."
"Not exactly."
"It presented a large impenetrable back, and went on thinking
about something else."
"It offered from fifteen to two-and-twenty shillings a week--for
drudgery."
"The world has no sense of what is due to youth and courage. It
never has had."
"Yes," said Ann Veronica. "But the thing is, I want a job."
"Exactly! And so you came along to me. And you see, I don't
turn my back, and I am looking at you and thinking about you from
top to toe."
"And what do you think I ought to do?"
"Exactly!" He lifted a paper-weight and dabbed it gently down
again. "What ought you to do?"
"I've hunted up all sorts of things."
"The point to note is that fundamentally you don't want
particularly to do it."
"I don't understand."
"You want to be free and so forth, yes. But you don't
particularly want to do the job that sets you free--for its own
sake. I mean that it doesn't interest you in itself."
"I suppose not."
"That's one of our differences. We men are like children. We
can get absorbed in play, in games, in the business we do.
That's really why we do them sometimes rather well and get on.
But women--women as a rule don't throw themselves into things
like that. As a matter of fact it isn't their affair. And as a
natural consequence, they don't do so well, and they don't get
on--and so the world doesn't pay them. They don't catch on to
discursive interests, you see, because they are more serious,
they are concentrated on the central reality of life, and a
little impatient of its--its outer aspects. At least that, I
think, is what makes a clever woman's independent career so much
more difficult than a clever man's."
"She doesn't develop a specialty." Ann Veronica was doing her
best to follow him.
"She has one, that's why. Her specialty is the central thing in
life, it is life itself, the warmth of life, sex--and love."
He pronounced this with an air of profound conviction and with
his eyes on Ann Veronica's face. He had an air of having told
her a deep, personal secret. She winced as he thrust the fact at
her, was about to answer, and checked herself. She colored
faintly.
"That doesn't touch the question I asked you," she said. "It may
be true, but it isn't quite what I have in mind."
"Of course not," said Ramage, as one who rouses himself from deep
preoccupations And he began to question her in a business-like
way upon the steps she had taken and the inquiries she had made.
He displayed none of the airy optimism of their previous talk
over the downland gate. He was helpful, but gravely dubious.
"You see," he said, "from my point of view you're grown
up--you're as old as all the goddesses and the contemporary of
any man alive. But from the--the economic point of view you're a
very young and altogether inexperienced person."
He returned to and developed that idea. "You're still," he said,
"in the educational years. From the point of view of most things
in the world of employment which a woman can do reasonably well
and earn a living by, you're unripe and half-educated. If you
had taken your degree, for example."
He spoke of secretarial work, but even there she would need to be
able to do typing and shorthand. He made it more and more evident
to her that her proper course was not to earn a salary but to
accumulate equipment. "You see," he said, "you are like an
inaccessible gold-mine in all this sort of matter. You're
splendid stuff, you know, but you've got nothing ready to sell.
That's the flat business situation."
He thought. Then he slapped his hand on his desk and looked up
with the air of a man struck by a brilliant idea. "Look here,"
he said, protruding his eyes; "why get anything to do at all just
yet? Why, if you must be free, why not do the sensible thing?
Make yourself worth a decent freedom. Go on with your studies at
the Imperial College, for example, get a degree, and make
yourself good value. Or become a thorough-going typist and
stenographer and secretarial expert."
"But I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"You see, if I do go home my father objects to the College, and
as for typing--"
"Don't go home."
"Yes, but you forget; how am I to live?"
"Easily. Easily. . . . Borrow. . . . From me."
"I couldn't do that," said Ann Veronica, sharply.
"I see no reason why you shouldn't."
"It's impossible."
"As one friend to another. Men are always doing it, and if you
set up to be a man--"
"No, it's absolutely out of the question, Mr. Ramage." And Ann
Veronica's face was hot.
Ramage pursed his rather loose lips and shrugged his shoulders,
with his eyes fixed steadily upon her. "Well anyhow-- I don't
see the force of your objection, you know. That's my advice to
you. Here I am. Consider you've got resources deposited with
me. Perhaps at the first blush--it strikes you as odd. People
are brought up to be so shy about money. As though it was
indelicate--it's just a sort of shyness. But here I am to
draw upon. Here I am as an alternative either to nasty work--or
going home."
"It's very kind of you--" began Ann Veronica.
"Not a bit. Just a friendly polite suggestion. I don't suggest
any philanthropy. I shall charge you five per cent., you know,
fair and square."
Ann Veronica opened her lips quickly and did not speak. But the
five per cent. certainly did seem to improve the aspect of
Ramage's suggestion.
"Well, anyhow, consider it open." He dabbed with his
paper-weight again, and spoke in an entirely indifferent tone.
"And now tell me, please, how you eloped from Morningside Park.
How did you get your luggage out of the house? Wasn't it--wasn't
it rather in some respects--rather a lark? It's one of my
regrets for my lost youth. I never ran away from anywhere with
anybody anywhen. And now--I suppose I should be considered too
old. I don't feel it. . . . Didn't you feel rather EVENTFUL--in
the train--coming up to Waterloo?"
Part 6
Before Christmas Ann Veronica had gone to Ramage again and
accepted this offer she had at first declined.
Many little things had contributed to that decision. The chief
influence was her awakening sense of the need of money. She had
been forced to buy herself that pair of boots and a
walking-skirt, and the pearl necklace at the pawnbrokers' had
yielded very disappointingly. And, also, she wanted to borrow
that money. It did seem in so many ways exactly what Ramage said
it was--the sensible thing to do. There it was--to be borrowed.
It would put the whole adventure on a broader and better footing;
it seemed, indeed, almost the only possible way in which she
might emerge from her rebellion with anything like success. If
only for the sake of her argument with her home, she wanted
success. And why, after all, should she not borrow money from
Ramage?
It was so true what he said; middle-class people WERE
ridiculously squeamish about money. Why should they be?
She and Ramage were friends, very good friends. If she was in a
position to help him she would help him; only it happened to be
the other way round. He was in a position to help her. What was
the objection?
She found it impossible to look her own diffidence in the face.
So she went to Ramage and came to the point almost at once.
"Can you spare me forty pounds?" she said.
Mr. Ramage controlled his expression and thought very quickly.
"Agreed," he said, "certainly," and drew a checkbook toward him.
"It's best," he said, "to make it a good round sum.
"I won't give you a check though-- Yes, I will. I'll give you an
uncrossed check, and then you can get it at the bank here, quite
close by. . . . You'd better not have all the money on you; you
had better open a small account in the post-office and draw it
out a fiver at a time. That won't involve references, as a bank
account would--and all that sort of thing. The money will last
longer, and--it won't bother you."
He stood up rather close to her and looked into her eyes. He
seemed to be trying to understand something very perplexing and
elusive. "It's jolly," he said, "to feel you have come to me.
It's a sort of guarantee of confidence. Last time--you made me
feel snubbed."
He hesitated, and went off at a tangent. "There's no end of
things I'd like to talk over with you. It's just upon my
lunch-time. Come and have lunch with me."
Ann Veronica fenced for a moment. "I don't want to take up your
time."
"We won't go to any of these City places. They're just all men,
and no one is safe from scandal. But I know a little place where
we'll get a little quiet talk."
Ann Veronica for some indefinable reason did not want to lunch
with him, a reason indeed so indefinable that she dismissed it,
and Ramage went through the outer office with her, alert and
attentive, to the vivid interest of the three clerks. The three
clerks fought for the only window, and saw her whisked into a
hansom. Their subsequent conversation is outside the scope of our
story.
"Ritter's!" said Ramage to the driver, "Dean Street."
It was rare that Ann Veronica used hansoms, and to be in one was
itself eventful and exhilarating. She liked the high, easy swing
of the thing over its big wheels, the quick clatter-patter of the
horse, the passage of the teeming streets. She admitted her
pleasure to Ramage.
And Ritter's, too, was very amusing and foreign and discreet; a
little rambling room with a number of small tables, with red
electric light shades and flowers. It was an overcast day,
albeit not foggy, and the electric light shades glowed warmly,
and an Italian waiter with insufficient English took Ramage's
orders, and waited with an appearance of affection. Ann Veronica
thought the whole affair rather jolly. Ritter sold better food
than most of his compatriots, and cooked it better, and Ramage,
with a fine perception of a feminine palate, ordered Vero Capri.
It was, Ann Veronica felt, as a sip or so of that remarkable
blend warmed her blood, just the sort of thing that her aunt
would not approve, to be lunching thus, tete-a-tete with a man;
and yet at the same time it was a perfectly innocent as well as
agreeable proceeding.
They talked across their meal in an easy and friendly manner
about Ann Veronica's affairs. He was really very bright and
clever, with a sort of conversational boldness that was just
within the limits of permissible daring. She described the
Goopes and the Fabians to him, and gave him a sketch of her
landlady; and he talked in the most liberal and entertaining way
of a modern young woman's outlook. He seemed to know a great
deal about life. He gave glimpses of possibilities. He roused
curiosities. He contrasted wonderfully with the empty
showing-off of Teddy. His friendship seemed a thing worth
having. . . .
But when she was thinking it over in her room that evening vague
and baffling doubts came drifting across this conviction. She
doubted how she stood toward him and what the restrained gleam of
his face might signify. She felt that perhaps, in her desire to
play an adequate part in the conversation, she had talked rather
more freely than she ought to have done, and given him a wrong
impression of herself.
Part 7
That was two days before Christmas Eve. The next morning came a
compact letter from her father.
"MY DEAR DAUGHTER," it ran,--"Here, on the verge of the season of
forgiveness I hold out a last hand to you in the hope of a
reconciliation. I ask you, although it is not my place to ask
you, to return home. This roof is still open to you. You will
not be taunted if you return and everything that can be done will
be done to make you happy.
"Indeed, I must implore you to return. This adventure of yours
has gone on altogether too long; it has become a serious distress
to both your aunt and myself. We fail altogether to understand
your motives in doing what you are doing, or, indeed, how you are
managing to do it, or what you are managing on. If you will
think only of one trifling aspect--the inconvenience it must be
to us to explain your absence--I think you may begin to realize
what it all means for us. I need hardly say that your aunt joins
with me very heartily in this request.
"Please come home. You will not find me unreasonable with you.
"Your affectionate
"FATHER."
Ann Veronica sat over her fire with her father's note in her
hand. "Queer letters he writes," she said. "I suppose most
people's letters are queer. Roof open--like a Noah's Ark. I
wonder if he really wants me to go home. It's odd how little I
know of him, and of how he feels and what he feels."
"I wonder how he treated Gwen."
Her mind drifted into a speculation about her sister. "I ought to
look up Gwen," she said. "I wonder what happened."
Then she fell to thinking about her aunt. "I would like to go
home," she cried, "to please her. She has been a dear.
Considering how little he lets her have."
The truth prevailed. "The unaccountable thing is that I wouldn't
go home to please her. She is, in her way, a dear. One OUGHT to
want to please her. And I don't. I don't care. I can't even
make myself care."
Presently, as if for comparison with her father's letter, she got
out Ramage's check from the box that contained her papers. For
so far she had kept it uncashed. She had not even endorsed it.
"Suppose I chuck it," she remarked, standing with the mauve slip
in her hand--"suppose I chuck it, and surrender and go home!
Perhaps, after all, Roddy was right!
"Father keeps opening the door and shutting it, but a time will
come--
"I could still go home!"
She held Ramage's check as if to tear it across. "No," she said
at last; "I'm a human being--not a timid female. What could I do
at home? The other's a crumple-up--just surrender. Funk! I'll
see it out."
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
BIOLOGY
Part 1
January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory
of the Central Imperial College that towers up from among the
back streets in the angle between Euston Road and Great Portland
Street. She was working very steadily at the Advanced Course in
Comparative Anatomy, wonderfully relieved to have her mind
engaged upon one methodically developing theme in the place of
the discursive uncertainties of the previous two months, and
doing her utmost to keep right in the back of her mind and out of
sight the facts, firstly, that she had achieved this haven of
satisfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of forty
pounds, and, secondly, that her present position was necessarily
temporary and her outlook quite uncertain.
The biological laboratory had an atmosphere that was all its own.
It was at the top of the building, and looked clear over a
clustering mass of inferior buildings toward Regent's Park. It
was long and narrow, a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery
of small tables and sinks, pervaded by a thin smell of methylated
spirit and of a mitigated and sterilized organic decay. Along
the inner side was a wonderfully arranged series of displayed
specimens that Russell himself had prepared. The supreme effect
for Ann Veronica was its surpassing relevance; it made every
other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and confused. The
whole place and everything in it aimed at one thing--to
illustrate, to elaborate, to criticise and illuminate, and make
ever plainer and plainer the significance of animal and vegetable
structure. It dealt from floor to ceiling and end to end with
the Theory of the Forms of Life; the very duster by the
blackboard was there to do its share in that work, the very
washers in the taps; the room was more simply concentrated in aim
even than a church. To that, perhaps, a large part of its
satisfyingness was due. Contrasted with the confused movement
and presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable enthusiasm
behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were partly
egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly
incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends, compared with the
comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the
eddy-driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet,
methodical chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.
Day after day for a measured hour in the lecture-theatre, with
elaborate power and patience, Russell pieced together difficulty
and suggestion, instance and counter-instance, in the elaborate
construction of the family tree of life. And then the students
went into the long laboratory and followed out these facts in
almost living tissue with microscope and scalpel, probe and
microtome, and the utmost of their skill and care, making now and
then a raid into the compact museum of illustration next door, in
which specimens and models and directions stood in disciplined
ranks, under the direction of the demonstrator Capes. There was
a couple of blackboards at each end of the aisle of tables, and
at these Capes, with quick and nervous speech that contrasted
vividly with Russell's slow, definitive articulation, directed
the dissection and made illuminating comments on the structures
under examination. Then he would come along the laboratory,
sitting down by each student in turn, checking the work and
discussing its difficulties, and answering questions arising out
of Russell's lecture.
Ann Veronica had come to the Imperial College obsessed by the
great figure of Russell, by the part he had played in the
Darwinian controversies, and by the resolute effect of the
grim-lipped, yellow, leonine face beneath the mane of silvery
hair. Capes was rather a discovery. Capes was something
superadded. Russell burned like a beacon, but Capes illuminated
by darting flashes and threw light, even if it was but momentary
light, into a hundred corners that Russell left steadfastly in
the shade.
Capes was an exceptionally fair man of two or three-and-thirty,
so ruddily blond that it was a mercy he had escaped light
eyelashes, and with a minor but by no means contemptible
reputation of his own. He talked at the blackboard in a
pleasant, very slightly lisping voice with a curious spontaneity,
and was sometimes very clumsy in his exposition, and sometimes
very vivid. He dissected rather awkwardly and hurriedly, but, on
the whole, effectively, and drew with an impatient directness
that made up in significance what it lacked in precision. Across
the blackboard the colored chalks flew like flights of variously
tinted rockets as diagram after diagram flickered into being.
There happened that year to be an unusual proportion of girls and
women in the advanced laboratory, perhaps because the class as a
whole was an exceptionally small one. It numbered nine, and four
of these were women students. As a consequence of its small
size, it was possible to get along with the work on a much easier
and more colloquial footing than a larger class would have
permitted. And a custom had grown up of a general tea at four
o'clock, under the auspices of a Miss Garvice, a tall and
graceful girl of distinguished intellectual incompetence, in whom
the hostess instinct seemed to be abnormally developed.
Capes would come to these teas; he evidently liked to come, and
he would appear in the doorway of the preparation-room, a
pleasing note of shyness in his manner, hovering for an
invitation.
From the first, Ann Veronica found him an exceptionally
interesting man. To begin with, he struck her as being the most
variable person she had ever encountered. At times he was
brilliant and masterful, talked round and over every one, and
would have been domineering if he had not been extraordinarily
kindly; at times he was almost monosyllabic, and defeated Miss
Garvice's most skilful attempts to draw him out. Sometimes he was
obviously irritable and uncomfortable and unfortunate in his
efforts to seem at ease. And sometimes he overflowed with a
peculiarly malignant wit that played, with devastating effect,
upon any topics that had the courage to face it. Ann Veronica's
experiences of men had been among more stable types--Teddy, who
was always absurd; her father, who was always authoritative and
sentimental; Manning, who was always Manning. And most of the
others she had met had, she felt, the same steadfastness.
Goopes, she was sure was always high-browed and slow and
Socratic. And Ramage too--about Ramage there would always be
that air of avidity, that air of knowledge and inquiry, the
mixture of things in his talk that were rather good with things
that were rather poor. But one could not count with any
confidence upon Capes.
The five men students were a mixed company. There was a very
white-faced youngster of eighteen who brushed back his hair
exactly in Russell's manner, and was disposed to be uncomfortably
silent when he was near her, and to whom she felt it was only
Christian kindness to be consistently pleasant; and a lax young
man of five-and-twenty in navy blue, who mingled Marx and Bebel
with the more orthodox gods of the biological pantheon. There
was a short, red-faced, resolute youth who inherited an
authoritative attitude upon bacteriology from his father; a
Japanese student of unassuming manners who drew beautifully and
had an imperfect knowledge of English; and a dark, unwashed
Scotchman with complicated spectacles, who would come every
morning as a sort of volunteer supplementary demonstrator, look
very closely at her work and her, tell her that her dissections
were "fairish," or "very fairish indeed," or "high above the
normal female standard," hover as if for some outbreak of
passionate gratitude and with admiring retrospects that made the
facetted spectacles gleam like diamonds, return to his own place.
The women, Ann Veronica thought, were not quite so interesting as
the men. There were two school-mistresses, one of whom--Miss
Klegg--might have been a first cousin to Miss Miniver, she had so
many Miniver traits; there was a preoccupied girl whose name Ann
Veronica never learned, but who worked remarkably well; and Miss
Garvice, who began by attracting her very greatly--she moved so
beautifully--and ended by giving her the impression that moving
beautifully was the beginning and end of her being.
Part 2
The next few weeks were a time of the very liveliest thought and
growth for Ann Veronica. The crowding impressions of the
previous weeks seemed to run together directly her mind left the
chaotic search for employment and came into touch again with a
coherent and systematic development of ideas. The advanced work
at the Central Imperial College was in the closest touch with
living interests and current controversies; it drew its
illustrations and material from Russell's two great
researches--upon the relation of the brachiopods to the
echinodermata, and upon the secondary and tertiary mammalian and
pseudo-mammalian factors in the free larval forms of various
marine organisms. Moreover, a vigorous fire of mutual criticism
was going on now between the Imperial College and the Cambridge
Mendelians and echoed in the lectures. From beginning to end it
was first-hand stuff.
But the influence of the science radiated far beyond its own
special field--beyond those beautiful but highly technical
problems with which we do not propose for a moment to trouble the
naturally terrified reader. Biology is an extraordinarily
digestive science. It throws out a number of broad experimental
generalizations, and then sets out to bring into harmony or
relation with these an infinitely multifarious collection of
phenomena. The little streaks upon the germinating area of an
egg, the nervous movements of an impatient horse, the trick of a
calculating boy, the senses of a fish, the fungus at the root of
a garden flower, and the slime upon a sea-wet rock--ten thousand
such things bear their witness and are illuminated. And not only
did these tentacular generalizations gather all the facts of
natural history and comparative anatomy together, but they seemed
always stretching out further and further into a world of
interests that lay altogether outside their legitimate bounds.
It came to Ann Veronica one night after a long talk with Miss
Miniver, as a sudden remarkable thing, as a grotesque, novel
aspect, that this slowly elaborating biological scheme had
something more than an academic interest for herself. And not
only so, but that it was after all, a more systematic and
particular method of examining just the same questions that
underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the talk of the
West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the deep,
the bottomless discussions of the simple-life homes. It was the
same Bios whose nature and drift and ways and methods and aspects
engaged them all. And she, she in her own person too, was this
eternal Bios, beginning again its recurrent journey to selection
and multiplication and failure or survival.
But this was but a momentary gleam of personal application, and
at this time she followed it up no further.
And now Ann Veronica's evenings were also becoming very busy.
She pursued her interest in the Socialist movement and in the
Suffragist agitation in the company of Miss Miniver. They went
to various central and local Fabian gatherings, and to a number
of suffrage meetings. Teddy Widgett hovered on the fringe of all
these gatherings, blinking at Ann Veronica and occasionally
making a wildly friendly dash at her, and carrying her and Miss
Miniver off to drink cocoa with a choice diversity of other
youthful and congenial Fabians after the meetings. Then Mr.
Manning loomed up ever and again into her world, full of a futile
solicitude, and almost always declaring she was splendid,
splendid, and wishing he could talk things out with her. Teas he
contributed to the commissariat of Ann Veronica's campaign--quite
a number of teas. He would get her to come to tea with him,
usually in a pleasant tea-room over a fruit-shop in Tottenham
Court Road, and he would discuss his own point of view and hint
at a thousand devotions were she but to command him. And he
would express various artistic sensibilities and aesthetic
appreciations in carefully punctuated sentences and a large,
clear voice. At Christmas he gave her a set of a small edition
of Meredith's novels, very prettily bound in flexible leather,
being guided in the choice of an author, as he intimated, rather
by her preferences than his own.
There was something markedly and deliberately liberal-minded in
his manner in all their encounters. He conveyed not only his
sense of the extreme want of correctitude in their unsanctioned
meetings, but also that, so far as he was concerned, this
irregularity mattered not at all, that he had flung--and kept on
flinging --such considerations to the wind.
And, in addition, she was now seeing and talking to Ramage almost
weekly, on a theory which she took very gravely, that they were
exceptionally friends. He would ask her to come to dinner with
him in some little Italian or semi-Bohemian restaurant in the
district toward Soho, or in one of the more stylish and
magnificent establishments about Piccadilly Circus, and for the
most part she did not care to refuse. Nor, indeed, did she want
to refuse. These dinners, from their lavish display of ambiguous
hors d'oeuvre to their skimpy ices in dishes of frilled paper,
with their Chianti flasks and Parmesan dishes and their polyglot
waiters and polyglot clientele, were very funny and bright; and
she really liked Ramage, and valued his help and advice. It was
interesting to see how different and characteristic his mode of
approach was to all sorts of questions that interested her, and
it was amusing to discover this other side to the life of a
Morningside Park inhabitant. She had thought that all
Morningside Park householders came home before seven at the
latest, as her father usually did. Ramage talked always about
women or some woman's concern, and very much about Ann Veronica's
own outlook upon life. He was always drawing contrasts between a
woman's lot and a man's, and treating her as a wonderful new
departure in this comparison. Ann Veronica liked their
relationship all the more because it was an unusual one.
After these dinners they would have a walk, usually to the Thames
Embankment to see the two sweeps of river on either side of
Waterloo Bridge; and then they would part at Westminster Bridge,
perhaps, and he would go on to Waterloo. Once he suggested they
should go to a music-hall and see a wonderful new dancer, but Ann
Veronica did not feel she cared to see a new dancer. So,
instead, they talked of dancing and what it might mean in a human
life. Ann Veronica thought it was a spontaneous release of
energy expressive of well-being, but Ramage thought that by
dancing, men, and such birds and animals as dance, come to feel
and think of their bodies.
This intercourse, which had been planned to warm Ann Veronica to
a familiar affection with Ramage, was certainly warming Ramage to
a constantly deepening interest in Ann Veronica. He felt that he
was getting on with her very slowly indeed, but he did not see
how he could get on faster. He had, he felt, to create certain
ideas and vivify certain curiosities and feelings in her. Until
that was done a certain experience of life assured him that a
girl is a locked coldness against a man's approach. She had all
the fascination of being absolutely perplexing in this respect.
On the one hand, she seemed to think plainly and simply, and
would talk serenely and freely about topics that most women have
been trained either to avoid or conceal; and on the other she was
unconscious, or else she had an air of being unconscious--that
was the riddle--to all sorts of personal applications that almost
any girl or woman, one might have thought, would have made. He
was always doing his best to call her attention to the fact that
he was a man of spirit and quality and experience, and she a
young and beautiful woman, and that all sorts of constructions
upon their relationship were possible, trusting her to go on from
that to the idea that all sorts of relationships were possible.
She responded with an unfaltering appearance of insensibility,
and never as a young and beautiful woman conscious of sex; always
in the character of an intelligent girl student.
His perception of her personal beauty deepened and quickened with
each encounter. Every now and then her general presence became
radiantly dazzling in his eyes; she would appear in the street
coming toward him, a surprise, so fine and smiling and welcoming
was she, so expanded and illuminated and living, in contrast with
his mere expectation. Or he would find something--a wave in her
hair, a little line in the contour of her brow or neck, that made
an exquisite discovery.
He was beginning to think about her inordinately. He would sit in
his inner office and compose conversations with her, penetrating,
illuminating, and nearly conclusive--conversations that never
proved to be of the slightest use at all with her when he met her
face to face. And he began also at times to wake at night and
think about her.
He thought of her and himself, and no longer in that vein of
incidental adventure in which he had begun. He thought, too, of
the fretful invalid who lay in the next room to his, whose money
had created his business and made his position in the world.
"I've had most of the things I wanted," said Ramage, in the
stillness of the night.
Part 3
For a time Ann Veronica's family had desisted from direct offers
of a free pardon; they were evidently waiting for her resources
to come to an end. Neither father, aunt, nor brothers made a
sign, and then one afternoon in early February her aunt came up
in a state between expostulation and dignified resentment, but
obviously very anxious for Ann Veronica's welfare. "I had a dream
in the night," she said. "I saw you in a sort of sloping,
slippery place, holding on by your hands and slipping. You
seemed to me to be slipping and slipping, and your face was
white. It was really most vivid, most vivid! You seemed to be
slipping and just going to tumble and holding on. It made me
wake up, and there I lay thinking of you, spending your nights up
here all alone, and no one to look after you. I wondered what
you could be doing and what might be happening to you. I said to
myself at once, 'Either this is a coincidence or the caper
sauce.' But I made sure it was you. I felt I MUST do something
anyhow, and up I came just as soon as I could to see you."
She had spoken rather rapidly. "I can't help saying it," she
said, with the quality of her voice altering, "but I do NOT think
it is right for an unprotected girl to be in London alone as you
are."
"But I'm quite equal to taking care of myself, aunt."
"It must be most uncomfortable here. It is most uncomfortable
for every one concerned."
She spoke with a certain asperity. She felt that Ann Veronica
had duped her in that dream, and now that she had come up to
London she might as well speak her mind.
"No Christmas dinner," she said, "or anything nice! One doesn't
even know what you are doing."
"I'm going on working for my degree."
"Why couldn't you do that at home?"
"I'm working at the Imperial College. You see, aunt, it's the
only possible way for me to get a good degree in my subjects, and
father won't hear of it. There'd only be endless rows if I was at
home. And how could I come home--when he locks me in rooms and
all that?"
"I do wish this wasn't going on," said Miss Stanley, after a
pause. "I do wish you and your father could come to some
agreement."
Ann Veronica responded with conviction: "I wish so, too."
"Can't we arrange something? Can't we make a sort of treaty?"
"He wouldn't keep it. He would get very cross one evening and no
one would dare to remind him of it."
"How can you say such things?"
"But he would!"
"Still, it isn't your place to say so."
"It prevents a treaty."
"Couldn't _I_ make a treaty?"
Ann Veronica thought, and could not see any possible treaty that
would leave it open for her to have quasi-surreptitious dinners
with Ramage or go on walking round the London squares discussing
Socialism with Miss Miniver toward the small hours. She had
tasted freedom now, and so far she had not felt the need of
protection. Still, there certainly was something in the idea of
a treaty.
"I don't see at all how you can be managing," said Miss Stanley,
and Ann Veronica hastened to reply, "I do on very little." Her
mind went back to that treaty.
"And aren't there fees to pay at the Imperial College?" her aunt
was saying--a disagreeable question.
"There are a few fees."
"Then how have you managed?"
"Bother!" said Ann Veronica to herself, and tried not to look
guilty. "I was able to borrow the money."
"Borrow the money! But who lent you the money?"
"A friend," said Ann Veronica.
She felt herself getting into a corner. She sought hastily in
her mind for a plausible answer to an obvious question that
didn't come. Her aunt went off at a tangent. "But my dear Ann
Veronica, you will be getting into debt!"
Ann Veronica at once, and with a feeling of immense relief, took
refuge in her dignity. "I think, aunt," she said, "you might
trust to my self-respect to keep me out of that."
For the moment her aunt could not think of any reply to this
counterstroke, and Ann Veronica followed up her advantage by a
sudden inquiry about her abandoned boots.
But in the train going home her aunt reasoned it out.
"If she is borrowing money," said Miss Stanley, "she MUST be
getting into debt. It's all nonsense. . . ."
Part 4
It was by imperceptible degrees that Capes became important in
Ann Veronica's thoughts. But then he began to take steps, and,
at last, strides to something more and more like predominance.
She began by being interested in his demonstrations and his
biological theory, then she was attracted by his character, and
then, in a manner, she fell in love with his mind.
One day they were at tea in the laboratory and a discussion
sprang up about the question of women's suffrage. The movement
was then in its earlier militant phases, and one of the women
only, Miss Garvice, opposed it, though Ann Veronica was disposed
to be lukewarm. But a man's opposition always inclined her to
the suffrage side; she had a curious feeling of loyalty in seeing
the more aggressive women through. Capes was irritatingly
judicial in the matter, neither absurdly against, in which case
one might have smashed him, or hopelessly undecided, but tepidly
sceptical. Miss Klegg and the youngest girl made a vigorous
attack on Miss Garvice, who had said she thought women lost
something infinitely precious by mingling in the conflicts of
life. The discussion wandered, and was punctuated with bread and
butter. Capes was inclined to support Miss Klegg until Miss
Garvice cornered him by quoting him against himself, and citing a
recent paper in the Nineteenth Century, in which, following
Atkinson, he had made a vigorous and damaging attack on Lester
Ward's case for the primitive matriarchate and the predominant
importance of the female throughout the animal kingdom.
Ann Veronica was not aware of this literary side of her teacher;
she had a little tinge of annoyance at Miss Garvice's advantage.
Afterwards she hunted up the article in question, and it seemed
to her quite delightfully written and argued. Capes had the gift
of easy, unaffected writing, coupled with very clear and logical
thinking, and to follow his written thought gave her the
sensation of cutting things with a perfectly new, perfectly sharp
knife. She found herself anxious to read more of him, and the
next Wednesday she went to the British Museum and hunted first
among the half-crown magazines for his essays and then through
various scientific quarterlies for his research papers. The
ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing,
is apt to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was
delighted to find the same easy and confident luminosity that
distinguished his work for the general reader. She returned to
these latter, and at the back of her mind, as she looked them
over again, was a very distinct resolve to quote them after the
manner of Miss Garvice at the very first opportunity.
When she got home to her lodgings that evening she reflected with
something like surprise upon her half-day's employment, and
decided that it showed nothing more nor less than that Capes was
a really very interesting person indeed.
And then she fell into a musing about Capes. She wondered why he
was so distinctive, so unlike other men, and it never occurred to
her for some time that this might be because she was falling in
love with him.
Part 5
Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love. A
dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked
or broken down in her mind. All the influences about her worked
with her own predisposition and against all the traditions of her
home and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an
unabashed manner. Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints had led her
to realize that the problem of her own life was inseparably
associated with, and indeed only one special case of, the
problems of any woman's life, and that the problem of a woman's
life is love.
"A young man comes into life asking how best he may place
himself," Ramage had said; "a woman comes into life thinking
instinctively how best she may give herself."
She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated and spread
tentacles of explanation through her brain. The biological
laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and
selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a
translated generalization of that assertion. And all the talk of
the Miniver people and the Widgett people seemed always to be
like a ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love. "For
seven years," said Ann Veronica, "I have been trying to keep
myself from thinking about love. . . .
"I have been training myself to look askance at beautiful
things."
She gave herself permission now to look at this squarely. She
made herself a private declaration of liberty. "This is mere
nonsense, mere tongue-tied fear!" she said. "This is the slavery
of the veiled life. I might as well be at Morningside Park.
This business of love is the supreme affair in life, it is the
woman's one event and crisis that makes up for all her other
restrictions, and I cower--as we all cower--with a blushing and
paralyzed mind until it overtakes me! . . .
"I'll be hanged if I do."
But she could not talk freely about love, she found, for all that
manumission.
Ramage seemed always fencing about the forbidden topic, probing
for openings, and she wondered why she did not give him them.
But something instinctive prevented that, and with the finest
resolve not to be "silly" and prudish she found that whenever he
became at all bold in this matter she became severely scientific
and impersonal, almost entomological indeed, in her method; she
killed every remark as he made it and pinned it out for
examination. In the biological laboratory that was their
invincible tone. But she disapproved more and more of her own
mental austerity. Here was an experienced man of the world, her
friend, who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic
and was willing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why
should not she be at her ease with him? Why should not she know
things? It is hard enough anyhow for a human being to learn, she
decided, but it is a dozen times more difficult than it need be
because of all this locking of the lips and thoughts.
She contrived to break down the barriers of shyness at last in
one direction, and talked one night of love and the facts of love
with Miss Miniver.
But Miss Miniver was highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases
of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people," she said, with an air of
great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE love. 'He prayeth best
who loveth best--all things both great and small.' For my own
part I go about loving."
"Yes, but men;" said Ann Veronica, plunging; "don't you want the
love of men?"
For some seconds they remained silent, both shocked by this
question.
Miss Miniver looked over her glasses at her friend almost
balefully. "NO!" she said, at last, with something in her voice
that reminded Ann Veronica of a sprung tennis-racket.
"I've been through all that," she went on, after a pause.
She spoke slowly. "I have never yet met a man whose intellect I
could respect."
Ann Veronica looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and decided
to persist on principle.
"But if you had?" she said.
"I can't imagine it," said Miss Miniver. "And think, think"--her
voice sank--"of the horrible coarseness!"
"What coarseness?" said Ann Veronica.
"My dear Vee!" Her voice became very low. "Don't you know?"
"Oh! I know--"
"Well--" Her face was an unaccustomed pink.
Ann Veronica ignored her friend's confusion.
"Don't we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I
mean," said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt.
"We pretend bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful
things in the world. We pretend we never think of everything
that makes us what we are."
"No," cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. "You are wrong! I
did not think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible
things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not
animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love
him" --her voice dropped again--"platonically."
She made her glasses glint. "Absolutely platonically," she said.
"Soul to soul."
She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her
elbows, and drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. "Ugh!"
she said.
Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.
"We do not want the men," said Miss Miniver; "we do not want
them, with their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse
brutes. Brutes! They are the brute still with us! Science some
day may teach us a way to do without them. It is only the women
matter. It is not every sort of creature needs--these males. Some
have no males."
"There's green-fly," admitted Ann Veronica. "And even then--"
The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.
Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. "I wonder which of
us is right," she said. "I haven't a scrap--of this sort of
aversion."
"Tolstoy is so good about this," said Miss Miniver, regardless of
her friend's attitude. "He sees through it all. The Higher Life
and the Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts,
coarse ways of living cruelties. Simply because they are
hardened by--by bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat
slain in anger and fermented drinks--fancy! drinks that have been
swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horrible little
bacteria!"
"It's yeast," said Ann Veronica--"a vegetable."
"It's all the same," said Miss Miniver. "And then they are
swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are
blinded to all fine and subtle things--they look at life with
bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and
unjust and dogmatic and brutish and lustful."
"But do you really think men's minds are altered by the food they
eat?"
"I know it," said Miss Miniver. "Experte credo. When I am
leading a true life, a pure and simple life free of all
stimulants and excitements, I think--I think --oh! with pellucid
clearness; but if I so much as take a mouthful of meat--or
anything--the mirror is all blurred."
Part 6
Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a
craving in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty.
It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. Her mind
turned and accused itself of having been cold and hard. She
began to look for beauty and discover it in unexpected aspects
and places. Hitherto she had seen it chiefly in pictures and
other works of art, incidentally, and as a thing taken out of
life. Now the sense of beauty was spreading to a multitude of
hitherto unsuspected aspects of the world about her.
The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her
biological work. She found herself asking more and more
curiously, "Why, on the principle of the survival of the fittest,
have I any sense of beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on
thinking about beauty when it seemed to her right that she should
be thinking about biology.
She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values--the
two series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the
one hand and her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her
thoughts. She could not make up her mind which was the finer,
more elemental thing, which gave its values to the other. Was it
that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of
necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations,
or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove
life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of
survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? She
went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully
and clearly, and he talked well--he always talked at some length
when she took a difficulty to him--and sent her to a various
literature upon the markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible
elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds'
plumes, the patterning of tigers, and a leopard's spots. He was
interesting and inconclusive, and the original papers to which he
referred her discursive were at best only suggestive. Afterward,
one afternoon, he hovered about her, and came and sat beside her
and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty for some time. He
displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in the matter.
He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were, so
to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their talk drifted to the beauty
of music, and they took that up again at tea-time.
But as the students sat about Miss Garvice's tea-pot and drank
tea or smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The
Scotchman informed Ann Veronica that your view of beauty
necessarily depended on your metaphysical premises, and the young
man with the Russell-like hair became anxious to distinguish
himself by telling the Japanese student that Western art was
symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that among the
higher organisms the tendency was toward an external symmetry
veiling an internal want of balance. Ann Veronica decided she
would have to go on with Capes another day, and, looking up,
discovered him sitting on a stool with his hands in his pockets
and his head a little on one side, regarding her with a
thoughtful expression. She met his eye for a moment in curious
surprise.
He turned his eyes and stared at Miss Garvice like one who wakes
from a reverie, and then got up and strolled down the laboratory
toward his refuge, the preparation-room.
Part 7
Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself in
significance.
She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome sections of the
developing salamander, and he came to see what she had made of
them. She stood up and he sat down at the microscope, and for a
time he was busy scrutinizing one section after another. She
looked down at him and saw that the sunlight was gleaming from
his cheeks, and that all over his cheeks was a fine golden down
of delicate hairs. And at the sight something leaped within her.
Something changed for her.
She became aware of his presence as she had never been aware of
any human being in her life before. She became aware of the
modelling of his ear, of the muscles of his neck and the textures
of the hair that came off his brow, the soft minute curve of
eyelid that she could just see beyond his brow; she perceived all
these familiar objects as though they were acutely beautiful
things. They WERE, she realized, acutely beautiful things. Her
sense followed the shoulders under his coat, down to where his
flexible, sensitive-looking hand rested lightly upon the table.
She felt him as something solid and strong and trustworthy beyond
measure. The perception of him flooded her being.
He got up. "Here's something rather good," he said, and with a
start and an effort she took his place at the microscope, while
he stood beside her and almost leaning over her.
She found she was trembling at his nearness and full of a
thrilling dread that he might touch her. She pulled herself
together and put her eye to the eye-piece.
"You see the pointer?" he asked.
"I see the pointer," she said.
"It's like this," he said, and dragged a stool beside her and sat
down with his elbow four inches from hers and made a sketch.
Then he got up and left her.
She had a feeling at his departure as of an immense cavity, of
something enormously gone; she could not tell whether it was
infinite regret or infinite relief. . . .
But now Ann Veronica knew what was the matter with her.
Part 8
And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-undressed,
she began to run one hand down her arm and scrutinize the soft
flow of muscle under her skin. She thought of the marvellous
beauty of skin, and all the delightfulness of living texture. Oh
the back of her arm she found the faintest down of hair in the
world. "Etherialized monkey," she said. She held out her arm
straight before her, and turned her hand this way and that.
"Why should one pretend?" she whispered. "Why should one
pretend?
"Think of all the beauty in the world that is covered up and
overlaid."
She glanced shyly at the mirror above her dressing-table, and
then about her at the furniture, as though it might penetrate to
the thoughts that peeped in her mind.
"I wonder," said Ann Veronica at last, "if I am beautiful? I
wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a translucent
goddess?--
"I wonder--
"I suppose girls and women have prayed for this, have come to
this-- In Babylon, in Nineveh.
"Why shouldn't one face the facts of one's self?"
She stood up. She posed herself before her mirror and surveyed
herself with gravely thoughtful, gravely critical, and yet
admiring eyes. "And, after all, I am just one common person!"
She watched the throb of the arteries in the stem of her neck,
and put her hand at last gently and almost timidly to where her
heart beat beneath her breast.
Part 9
The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica's mind,
and altered the quality of all its topics.
She began to think persistently of Capes, and it seemed to her
now that for some weeks at least she must have been thinking
persistently of him unawares. She was surprised to find how
stored her mind was with impressions and memories of him, how
vividly she remembered his gestures and little things that he had
said. It occurred to her that it was absurd and wrong to be so
continuously thinking of one engrossing topic, and she made a
strenuous effort to force her mind to other questions.
But it was extraordinary what seemingly irrelevant things could
restore her to the thought of Capes again. And when she went to
sleep, then always Capes became the novel and wonderful guest of
her dreams.
For a time it really seemed all-sufficient to her that she should
love. That Capes should love her seemed beyond the compass of
her imagination. Indeed, she did not want to think of him as
loving her. She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to
be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this
and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too
remained unconscious of herself. To think of him as loving her
would make all that different. Then he would turn his face to
her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes. She
would become defensive--what she did would be the thing that
mattered. He would require things of her, and she would be
passionately concerned to meet his requirements. Loving was
better than that. Loving was self-forgetfulness, pure delighting
in another human being. She felt that with Capes near to her she
would be content always to go on loving.
She went next day to the schools, and her world seemed all made
of happiness just worked up roughly into shapes and occasions and
duties. She found she could do her microscope work all the
better for being in love. She winced when first she heard the
preparation-room door open and Capes came down the laboratory;
but when at last he reached her she was self-possessed. She put
a stool for him at a little distance from her own, and after he
had seen the day's work he hesitated, and then plunged into a
resumption of their discussion about beauty.
"I think," he said, "I was a little too mystical about beauty the
other day."
"I like the mystical way," she said.
"Our business here is the right way. I've been thinking, you
know-- I'm not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn't
just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception
without any tissue destruction."
"I like the mystical way better," said Ann Veronica, and thought.
"A number of beautiful things are not intense."
"But delicacy, for example, may be intensely perceived."
"But why is one face beautiful and another not?" objected Ann
Veronica; "on your theory any two faces side by side in the
sunlight ought to be equally beautiful. One must get them with
exactly the same intensity."
He did not agree with that. "I don't mean simply intensity of
sensation. I said intensity of perception. You may perceive
harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely. They are things faint
and slight in themselves, as physical facts, but they are like
the detonator of a bomb: they let loose the explosive. There's
the internal factor as well as the external. . . . I don't know
if I express myself clearly. I mean that the point is that
vividness of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but,
of course, vividness may be created by a whisper."
"That brings us back," said Ann Veronica, "to the mystery. Why
should some things and not others open the deeps?"
"Well, that might, after all, be an outcome of selection --like
the preference for blue flowers, which are not nearly so bright
as yellow, of some insects."
"That doesn't explain sunsets."
"Not quite so easily as it explains an insect alighting on
colored paper. But perhaps if people didn't like clear, bright,
healthy eyes--which is biologically understandable--they couldn't
like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of
the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is
the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and go on with
life."
"H'm!" said Ann Veronica, and shook her head.
Capes smiled cheerfully with his eyes meeting hers. "I throw it
out in passing," he said. "What I am after is that beauty isn't
a special inserted sort of thing; that's my idea. It's just
life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong."
He stood up to go on to the next student.
"There's morbid beauty," said Ann Veronica.
"I wonder if there is!" said Capes, and paused, and then bent
down over the boy who wore his hair like Russell.
Ann Veronica surveyed his sloping back for a moment, and then
drew her microscope toward her. Then for a time she sat very
still. She felt that she had passed a difficult corner, and that
now she could go on talking with him again, just as she had been
used to do before she understood what was the matter with her. .
. .
She had one idea, she found, very clear in her mind--that she
would get a Research Scholarship, and so contrive another year in
the laboratory.
"Now I see what everything means," said Ann Veronica to herself;
and it really felt for some days as though the secret of the
universe, that had been wrapped and hidden from her so
obstinately, was at last altogether displayed.
CHAPTER THE NINTH
DISCORDS
Part 1
One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica's great discovery, a
telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran:
---------------------------------------------------
| Bored | and | nothing | to | do |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|
| will | you | dine | with | me |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|
| to-night | somewhere | and | talk | I |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|
| shall | be | grateful | Ramage | |
---------------------------------------------------
Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had not seen Ramage
for ten or eleven days, and she was quite ready for a gossip with
him. And now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in
love--in love!--that marvellous state! that I really believe she
had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any rate, it
would be good to hear him saying the sort of things he
did--perhaps now she would grasp them better--with this
world--shaking secret brandishing itself about inside her head
within a yard of him.
She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.
"I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week," he
said.
"That's exhilarating," said Ann Veronica.
"Not a bit of it," he said; "it's only a score in a game."
"It's a score you can buy all sorts of things with."
"Nothing that one wants."
He turned to the waiter, who held a wine-card. "Nothing can cheer
me," he said, "except champagne." He meditated. "This," he said,
and then: "No! Is this sweeter? Very well."
"Everything goes well with me," he said, folding his arms under
him and regarding Ann Veronica with the slightly projecting eyes
wide open. "And I'm not happy. I believe I'm in love."
He leaned back for his soup.
Presently he resumed: "I believe I must be in love."
"You can't be that," said Ann Veronica, wisely.
"How do you know?"
"Well, it isn't exactly a depressing state, is it?"
"YOU don't know."
"One has theories," said Ann Veronica, radiantly.
"Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact."
"It ought to make one happy."
"It's an unrest--a longing-- What's that?" The waiter had
intervened. "Parmesan--take it away!"
He glanced at Ann Veronica's face, and it seemed to him that she
really was exceptionally radiant. He wondered why she thought
love made people happy, and began to talk of the smilax and pinks
that adorned the table. He filled her glass with champagne.
"You MUST," he said, "because of my depression."
They were eating quails when they returned to the topic of love.
"What made you think" he said, abruptly, with the gleam of
avidity in his face, "that love makes people happy?"
"I know it must."
"But how?"
He was, she thought, a little too insistent. "Women know these
things by instinct," she answered.
"I wonder," he said, "if women do know things by instinct? I
have my doubts about feminine instinct. It's one of our
conventional superstitions. A woman is supposed to know when a
man is in love with her. Do you think she does?"
Ann Veronica picked among her salad with a judicial expression of
face. "I think she would," she decided.
"Ah!" said Ramage, impressively.
Ann Veronica looked up at him and found him regarding her with
eyes that were almost woebegone, and into which, indeed, he was
trying to throw much more expression than they could carry.
There was a little pause between them, full for Ann Veronica of
rapid elusive suspicions and intimations.
"Perhaps one talks nonsense about a woman's instinct," she said.
"It's a way of avoiding explanations. And girls and women,
perhaps, are different. I don't know. I don't suppose a girl
can tell if a man is in love with her or not in love with her."
Her mind went off to Capes. Her thoughts took words for
themselves. "She can't. I suppose it depends on her own state of
mind. If one wants a thing very much, perhaps one is inclined to
think one can't have it. I suppose if one were to love some one,
one would feel doubtful. And if one were to love some one very
much, it's just so that one would be blindest, just when one
wanted most to see."
She stopped abruptly, afraid that Ramage might be able to infer
Capes from the things she had said, and indeed his face was very
eager.
"Yes?" he said.
Ann Veronica blushed. "That's all," she said "I'm afraid I'm a
little confused about these things."
Ramage looked at her, and then fell into deep reflection as the
waiter came to paragraph their talk again.
"Have you ever been to the opera, Ann Veronica?" said Ramage.
"Once or twice."
"Shall we go now?"
"I think I would like to listen to music. What is there?"
"Tristan."
"I've never heard Tristan and Isolde."
"That settles it. We'll go. There's sure to be a place
somewhere."
"It's rather jolly of you," said Ann Veronica.
"It's jolly of you to come," said Ramage.
So presently they got into a hansom together, and Ann Veronica
sat back feeling very luxurious and pleasant, and looked at the
light and stir and misty glitter of the street traffic from under
slightly drooping eyelids, while Ramage sat closer to her than he
need have done, and glanced ever and again at her face, and made
to speak and said nothing. And when they got to Covent Garden
Ramage secured one of the little upper boxes, and they came into
it as the overture began.
Ann Veronica took off her jacket and sat down in the corner
chair, and leaned forward to look into the great hazy warm brown
cavity of the house, and Ramage placed his chair to sit beside
her and near her, facing the stage. The music took hold of her
slowly as her eyes wandered from the indistinct still ranks of
the audience to the little busy orchestra with its quivering
violins, its methodical movements of brown and silver
instruments, its brightly lit scores and shaded lights. She had
never been to the opera before except as one of a congested mass
of people in the cheaper seats, and with backs and heads and
women's hats for the frame of the spectacle; there was by
contrast a fine large sense of space and ease in her present
position. The curtain rose out of the concluding bars of the
overture and revealed Isolde on the prow of the barbaric ship.
The voice of the young seaman came floating down from the
masthead, and the story of the immortal lovers had begun. She
knew the story only imperfectly, and followed it now with a
passionate and deepening interest. The splendid voices sang on
from phase to phase of love's unfolding, the ship drove across
the sea to the beating rhythm of the rowers. The lovers broke
into passionate knowledge of themselves and each other, and then,
a jarring intervention, came King Mark amidst the shouts of the
sailormen, and stood beside them.
The curtain came festooning slowly down, the music ceased, the
lights in the auditorium glowed out, and Ann Veronica woke out of
her confused dream of involuntary and commanding love in a glory
of sound and colors to discover that Ramage was sitting close
beside her with one hand resting lightly on her waist. She made a
quick movement, and the hand fell away.
"By God! Ann Veronica," he said, sighing deeply. "This stirs
one."
She sat quite still looking at him.
"I wish you and I had drunk that love potion," he said.
She found no ready reply to that, and he went on: "This music is
the food of love. It makes me desire life beyond measure. Life!
Life and love! It makes me want to be always young, always
strong, always devoting my life--and dying splendidly."
"It is very beautiful," said Ann Veronica in a low tone.
They said no more for a moment, and each was now acutely aware of
the other. Ann Veronica was excited and puzzled, with a sense of
a strange and disconcerting new light breaking over her relations
with Ramage. She had never thought of him at all in that way
before. It did not shock her; it amazed her, interested her
beyond measure. But also this must not go on. She felt he was
going to say something more--something still more personal and
intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved
she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some
impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind.
"What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random.
"Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic
descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She
gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of
patterned stuff coming up again and again."
She stopped with an air of interrogation.
Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval
without speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses
of action. "I don't know much about the technique of music," he
said at last, with his eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling
with me."
He contradicted himself by plunging into an exposition of motifs.
By a tacit agreement they ignored the significant thing between
them, ignored the slipping away of the ground on which they had
stood together hitherto. . . .
All through the love music of the second act, until the hunting
horns of Mark break in upon the dream, Ann Veronica's
consciousness was flooded with the perception of a man close
beside her, preparing some new thing to say to her, preparing,
perhaps, to touch her, stretching hungry invisible tentacles
about her. She tried to think what she should do in this
eventuality or that. Her mind had been and was full of the
thought of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some
incomprehensible way, Ramage was confused with Capes; she had a
grotesque disposition to persuade herself that this was really
Capes who surrounded her, as it were, with wings of desire. The
fact that it was her trusted friend making illicit love to her
remained, in spite of all her effort, an insignificant thing in
her mind. The music confused and distracted her, and made her
struggle against a feeling of intoxication. Her head swam. That
was the inconvenience of it; her head was swimming. The music
throbbed into the warnings that preceded the king's irruption.
Abruptly he gripped her wrist. "I love you, Ann Veronica. I
love you--with all my heart and soul."
She put her face closer to his. She felt the warm nearness of
his. "DON'T!" she said, and wrenched her wrist from his
retaining hand.
"My God! Ann Veronica," he said, struggling to keep his hold
upon her; "my God! Tell me--tell me now--tell me you love me!"
His expression was as it were rapaciously furtive. She answered
in whispers, for there was the white arm of a woman in the next
box peeping beyond the partition within a yard of him.
"My hand! This isn't the place."
He released her hand and talked in eager undertones against an
auditory background of urgency and distress.
"Ann Veronica," he said, "I tell you this is love. I love the
soles of your feet. I love your very breath. I have tried not to
tell you--tried to be simply your friend. It is no good. I want
you. I worship you. I would do anything--I would give anything
to make you mine. . . . Do you hear me? Do you hear what I am
saying? . . . Love!"
He held her arm and abandoned it again at her quick defensive
movement. For a long time neither spoke again.
She sat drawn together in her chair in the corner of the box, at
a loss what to say or do--afraid, curious, perplexed. It seemed
to her that it was her duty to get up and clamor to go home to
her room, to protest against his advances as an insult. But she
did not in the least want to do that. These sweeping dignities
were not within the compass of her will; she remembered she liked
Ramage, and owed things to him, and she was interested--she was
profoundly interested. He was in love with her! She tried to
grasp all the welter of values in the situation simultaneously,
and draw some conclusion from their disorder.
He began to talk again in quick undertones that she could not
clearly hear.
"I have loved you," he was saying, "ever since you sat on that
gate and talked. I have always loved you. I don't care what
divides us. I don't care what else there is in the world. I
want you beyond measure or reckoning. . . ."
His voice rose and fell amidst the music and the singing of
Tristan and King Mark, like a voice heard in a badly connected
telephone. She stared at his pleading face.
She turned to the stage, and Tristan was wounded in Kurvenal's
arms, with Isolde at his feet, and King Mark, the incarnation of
masculine force and obligation, the masculine creditor of love
and beauty, stood over him, and the second climax was ending in
wreaths and reek of melodies; and then the curtain was coming
down in a series of short rushes, the music had ended, and the
people were stirring and breaking out into applause, and the
lights of the auditorium were resuming. The lighting-up pierced
the obscurity of the box, and Ramage stopped his urgent flow of
words abruptly and sat back. This helped to restore Ann
Veronica's self-command.
She turned her eyes to him again, and saw her late friend and
pleasant and trusted companion, who had seen fit suddenly to
change into a lover, babbling interesting inacceptable things.
He looked eager and flushed and troubled. His eyes caught at
hers with passionate inquiries. "Tell me," he said; "speak to
me." She realized it was possible to be sorry for him--acutely
sorry for the situation. Of course this thing was absolutely
impossible. But she was disturbed, mysteriously disturbed. She
remembered abruptly that she was really living upon his money.
She leaned forward and addressed him.
"Mr. Ramage," she said, "please don't talk like this."
He made to speak and did not.
"I don't want you to do it, to go on talking to me. I don't want
to hear you. If I had known that you had meant to talk like this
I wouldn't have come here."
"But how can I help it? How can I keep silence?"
"Please!" she insisted. "Please not now."
"I MUST talk with you. I must say what I have to say!"
"But not now--not here."
"It came," he said. "I never planned it-- And now I have
begun--"
She felt acutely that he was entitled to explanations, and as
acutely that explanations were impossible that night. She wanted
to think.
"Mr. Ramage," she said, "I can't-- Not now. Will you please--
Not now, or I must go."
He stared at her, trying to guess at the mystery of her thoughts.
"You don't want to go?"
"No. But I must--I ought--"
"I MUST talk about this. Indeed I must."
"Not now."
"But I love you. I love you--unendurably."
"Then don't talk to me now. I don't want you to talk to me now.
There is a place-- This isn't the place. You have misunderstood.
I can't explain--"
They regarded one another, each blinded to the other. "Forgive
me," he decided to say at last, and his voice had a little quiver
of emotion, and he laid his hand on hers upon her knee. "I am
the most foolish of men. I was stupid--stupid and impulsive
beyond measure to burst upon you in this way. I--I am a love-
sick idiot, and not accountable for my actions. Will you forgive
me--if I say no more?"
She looked at him with perplexed, earnest eyes.
"Pretend," he said, "that all I have said hasn't been said. And
let us go on with our evening. Why not? Imagine I've had a fit
of hysteria--and that I've come round."
"Yes," she said, and abruptly she liked him enormously. She felt
this was the sensible way out of this oddly sinister situation.
He still watched her and questioned her.
"And let us have a talk about this--some other time. Somewhere,
where we can talk without interruption. Will you?"
She thought, and it seemed to him she had never looked so
self-disciplined and deliberate and beautiful. "Yes," she said,
"that is what we ought to do." But now she doubted again of the
quality of the armistice they had just made.
He had a wild impulse to shout. "Agreed," he said with queer
exaltation, and his grip tightened on her hand. "And to-night we
are friends?"
"We are friends," said Ann Veronica, and drew her hand quickly
away from him.
"To-night we are as we have always been. Except that this music
we have been swimming in is divine. While I have been pestering
you, have you heard it? At least, you heard the first act. And
all the third act is love-sick music. Tristan dying and Isolde
coming to crown his death. Wagner had just been in love when he
wrote it all. It begins with that queer piccolo solo. Now I
shall never hear it but what this evening will come pouring back
over me."
The lights sank, the prelude to the third act was beginning, the
music rose and fell in crowded intimations of lovers
separated--lovers separated with scars and memories between them,
and the curtain went reefing up to display Tristan lying wounded
on his couch and the shepherd crouching with his pipe.
Part 2
They had their explanations the next evening, but they were
explanations in quite other terms than Ann Veronica had
anticipated, quite other and much more startling and illuminating
terms. Ramage came for her at her lodgings, and she met him
graciously and kindly as a queen who knows she must needs give
sorrow to a faithful liege. She was unusually soft and gentle in
her manner to him. He was wearing a new silk hat, with a
slightly more generous brim than its predecessor, and it suited
his type of face, robbed his dark eyes a little of their
aggressiveness and gave him a solid and dignified and benevolent
air. A faint anticipation of triumph showed in his manner and a
subdued excitement.
"We'll go to a place where we can have a private room," he said.
"Then--then we can talk things out."
So they went this time to the Rococo, in Germain Street, and
up-stairs to a landing upon which stood a bald-headed waiter with
whiskers like a French admiral and discretion beyond all limits
in his manner. He seemed to have expected them. He ushered them
with an amiable flat hand into a minute apartment with a little
gas-stove, a silk crimson-covered sofa, and a bright little
table, gay with napery and hot-house flowers.
"Odd little room," said Ann Veronica, dimly apprehending that
obtrusive sofa.
"One can talk without undertones, so to speak," said Ramage.
"It's--private." He stood looking at the preparations before
them with an unusual preoccupation of manner, then roused himself
to take her jacket, a little awkwardly, and hand it to the waiter
who hung it in the corner of the room. It appeared he had
already ordered dinner and wine, and the whiskered waiter waved
in his subordinate with the soup forthwith.
"I'm going to talk of indifferent themes," said Ramage, a little
fussily, "until these interruptions of the service are over.
Then--then we shall be together. . . . How did you like Tristan?"
Ann Veronica paused the fraction of a second before her reply
came.
"I thought much of it amazingly beautiful."
"Isn't it. And to think that man got it all out of the poorest
little love-story for a respectable titled lady! Have you read of
it?"
"Never."
"It gives in a nutshell the miracle of art and the imagination.
You get this queer irascible musician quite impossibly and
unfortunately in love with a wealthy patroness, and then out of
his brain comes THIS, a tapestry of glorious music, setting out
love to lovers, lovers who love in spite of all that is wise and
respectable and right."
Ann Veronica thought. She did not want to seem to shrink from
conversation, but all sorts of odd questions were running through
her mind. "I wonder why people in love are so defiant, so
careless of other considerations?"
"The very hares grow brave. I suppose because it IS the chief
thing in life." He stopped and said earnestly: "It is the chief
thing in life, and everything else goes down before it.
Everything, my dear, everything! . . . But we have got to talk
upon indifferent themes until we have done with this blond young
gentleman from Bavaria. . . ."
The dinner came to an end at last, and the whiskered waiter
presented his bill and evacuated the apartment and closed the
door behind him with an almost ostentatious discretion. Ramage
stood up, and suddenly turned the key in the door in an off-hand
manner. "Now," he said, "no one can blunder in upon us. We are
alone and we can say and do what we please. We two." He stood
still, looking at her.
Ann Veronica tried to seem absolutely unconcerned. The turning of
the key startled her, but she did not see how she could make an
objection. She felt she had stepped into a world of unknown
usages.
"I have waited for this," he said, and stood quite still, looking
at her until the silence became oppressive.
"Won't you sit down," she said, "and tell me what you want to
say?" Her voice was flat and faint. Suddenly she had become
afraid. She struggled not to be afraid. After all, what could
happen?
He was looking at her very hard and earnestly. "Ann Veronica," he
said.
Then before she could say a word to arrest him he was at her
side. "Don't!" she said, weakly, as he had bent down and put one
arm about her and seized her hands with his disengaged hand and
kissed her--kissed her almost upon her lips. He seemed to do ten
things before she could think to do one, to leap upon her and
take possession.
Ann Veronica's universe, which had never been altogether so
respectful to her as she could have wished, gave a shout and
whirled head over heels. Everything in the world had changed for
her. If hate could kill, Ramage would have been killed by a
flash of hate. "Mr. Ramage!" she cried, and struggled to her
feet.
"My darling!" he said, clasping her resolutely in his arms, "my
dearest!"
"Mr. Ramage!" she began, and his mouth sealed hers and his breath
was mixed with her breath. Her eye met his four inches away, and
his was glaring, immense, and full of resolution, a stupendous
monster of an eye.
She shut her lips hard, her jaw hardened, and she set herself to
struggle with him. She wrenched her head away from his grip and
got her arm between his chest and hers. They began to wrestle
fiercely. Each became frightfully aware of the other as a
plastic energetic body, of the strong muscles of neck against
cheek, of hands gripping shoulder-blade and waist. "How dare
you!" she panted, with her world screaming and grimacing insult
at her. "How dare you!"
They were both astonished at the other's strength. Perhaps Ramage
was the more astonished. Ann Veronica had been an ardent hockey
player and had had a course of jiu-jitsu in the High School. Her
defence ceased rapidly to be in any sense ladylike, and became
vigorous and effective; a strand of black hair that had escaped
its hairpins came athwart Ramage's eyes, and then the knuckles of
a small but very hardly clinched fist had thrust itself with
extreme effectiveness and painfulness under his jawbone and ear.
"Let go!" said Ann Veronica, through her teeth, strenuously
inflicting agony, and he cried out sharply and let go and receded
a pace.
"NOW!" said Ann Veronica. "Why did you dare to do that?"
Part 3
Each of them stared at the other, set in a universe that had
changed its system of values with kaleidoscopic completeness.
She was flushed, and her eyes were bright and angry; her breath
came sobbing, and her hair was all abroad in wandering strands of
black. He too was flushed and ruffled; one side of his collar had
slipped from its stud and he held a hand to the corner of his
jaw.
"You vixen!" said Mr. Ramage, speaking the simplest first thought
of his heart.
"You had no right--" panted Ann Veronica.
"Why on earth," he asked, "did you hurt me like that?"
Ann Veronica did her best to think she had not deliberately
attempted to cause him pain. She ignored his question.
"I never dreamt!" she said.
"What on earth did you expect me to do, then?" he asked.
Part 4
Interpretation came pouring down upon her almost blindingly; she
understood now the room, the waiter, the whole situation. She
understood. She leaped to a world of shabby knowledge, of
furtive base realizations. She wanted to cry out upon herself for
the uttermost fool in existence.
"I thought you wanted to have a talk to me," she said.
"I wanted to make love to you.
"You knew it," he added, in her momentary silence.
"You said you were in love with me," said Ann Veronica; "I wanted
to explain--"
"I said I loved and wanted you." The brutality of his first
astonishment was evaporating. "I am in love with you. You know
I am in love with you. And then you go--and half throttle me. .
. . I believe you've crushed a gland or something. It feels
like it."
"I am sorry," said Ann Veronica. "What else was I to do?"
For some seconds she stood watching him. and both were thinking
very quickly. Her state of mind would have seemed altogether
discreditable to her grandmother. She ought to have been disposed
to faint and scream at all these happenings; she ought to have
maintained a front of outraged dignity to veil the sinking of her
heart. I would like to have to tell it so. But indeed that is
not at all a good description of her attitude. She was an
indignant queen, no doubt she was alarmed and disgusted within
limits; but she was highly excited, and there was something, some
low adventurous strain in her being, some element, subtle at
least if base, going about the rioting ways and crowded insurgent
meeting-places of her mind declaring that the whole affair was
after all--they are the only words that express it--a very great
lark indeed. At the bottom of her heart she was not a bit afraid
of Ramage. She had unaccountable gleams of sympathy with and
liking for him. And the grotesquest fact was that she did not so
much loathe, as experience with a quite critical condemnation
this strange sensation of being kissed. Never before had any
human being kissed her lips. . . .
It was only some hours after that these ambiguous elements
evaporated and vanished and loathing came, and she really began
to be thoroughly sick and ashamed of the whole disgraceful
quarrel and scuffle.
He, for his part, was trying to grasp the series of unexpected
reactions that had so wrecked their tete-a-tete. He had meant to
be master of his fate that evening and it had escaped him
altogether. It had, as it were, blown up at the concussion of
his first step. It dawned upon him that he had been abominably
used by Ann Veronica.
"Look here," he said, "I brought you here to make love to you."
"I didn't understand--your idea of making love. You had better
let me go again."
"Not yet," he said. "I do love you. I love you all the more for
the streak of sheer devil in you. . . . You are the most
beautiful, the most desirable thing I have ever met in this
world. It was good to kiss you, even at the price. But, by
Jove! you are fierce! You are like those Roman women who carry
stilettos in their hair."
"I came here to talk reasonably, Mr. Ramage. It is abominable--"
"What is the use of keeping up this note of indignation, Ann
Veronica? Here I am! I am your lover, burning for you. I mean
to have you! Don't frown me off now. Don't go back into
Victorian respectability and pretend you don't know and you can't
think and all the rest of it. One comes at last to the step from
dreams to reality. This is your moment. No one will ever love
you as I love you now. I have been dreaming of your body and you
night after night. I have been imaging--"
"Mr. Ramage, I came here-- I didn't suppose for one moment you
would dare--"
"Nonsense! That is your mistake! You are too intellectual. You
want to do everything with your mind. You are afraid of kisses.
You are afraid of the warmth in your blood. It's just because
all that side of your life hasn't fairly begun."
He made a step toward her.
"Mr. Ramage," she said, sharply, "I have to make it plain to you.
I don't think you understand. I don't love you. I don't. I
can't love you. I love some one else. It is repulsive. It
disgusts me that you should touch me."
He stared in amazement at this new aspect of the situation. "You
love some one else?" he repeated.
"I love some one else. I could not dream of loving you."
And then he flashed his whole conception of the relations of men
and women upon her in one astonishing question. His hand went
with an almost instinctive inquiry to his jawbone again. "Then
why the devil," he demanded, "do you let me stand you dinners and
the opera--and why do you come to a cabinet particulier with me?"
He became radiant with anger. "You mean to tell me" he said,
"that you have a lover? While I have been keeping you!
Yes--keeping you!"
This view of life he hurled at her as if it were an offensive
missile. It stunned her. She felt she must fly before it and
could no longer do so. She did not think for one moment what
interpretation he might put upon the word "lover."
"Mr. Ramage," she said, clinging to her one point, "I want to get
out of this horrible little room. It has all been a mistake. I
have been stupid and foolish. Will you unlock that door?"
"Never!" he said. "Confound your lover! Look here! Do you
really think I am going to run you while he makes love to you?
No fear! I never heard of anything so cool. If he wants you,
let him get you. You're mine. I've paid for you and helped you,
and I'm going to conquer you somehow--if I have to break you to
do it. Hitherto you've seen only my easy, kindly side. But now
confound it! how can you prevent it? I will kiss you."
"You won't!" said Ann Veronica; with the clearest note of
determination.
He seemed to be about to move toward her. She stepped back
quickly, and her hand knocked a wine-glass from the table to
smash noisily on the floor. She caught at the idea. "If you
come a step nearer to me," she said, "I will smash every glass on
this table."
"Then, by God!" he said, "you'll be locked up!"
Ann Veronica was disconcerted for a moment. She had a vision of
policemen, reproving magistrates, a crowded court, public
disgrace. She saw her aunt in tears, her father white-faced and
hard hit. "Don't come nearer!" she said.
There was a discreet knocking at the door, and Ramage's face
changed.
"No," she said, under her breath, "you can't face it." And she
knew that she was safe.
He went to the door. "It's all right," he said, reassuringly to
the inquirer without.
Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover a flushed and
dishevelled disorder. She began at once a hasty readjustment of
her hair, while Ramage parleyed with inaudible interrogations.
"A glass slipped from the table," he explained. . . . "Non. Fas
du tout. Non. . . . Niente. . . . Bitte! . . . Oui, dans la
note. . . . Presently. Presently." That conversation ended and
he turned to her again.
"I am going," she said grimly, with three hairpins in her mouth.
She took her hat from the peg in the corner and began to put it
on. He regarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful
eyes.
"Look here, Ann Veronica," he began. "I want a plain word with
you about all this. Do you mean to tell me you didn't understand
why I wanted you to come here?"
"Not a bit of it," said Ann Veronica stoutly.
"You didn't expect that I should kiss you?"
"How was I to know that a man would--would think it was
possible--when there was nothing--no love?"
"How did I know there wasn't love?"
That silenced her for a moment. "And what on earth," he said,
"do you think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been
doing things for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are
you one of the members of that great white sisterhood that takes
and does not give? The good accepting woman! Do you really
suppose a girl is entitled to live at free quarters on any man
she meets without giving any return?"
"I thought," said Ann Veronica, "you were my friend."
"Friend! What have a man and a girl in common to make them
friends? Ask that lover of yours! And even with friends, would
you have it all Give on one side and all Take on the other? . . .
Does HE know I keep you? . . . You won't have a man's lips near
you, but you'll eat out of his hand fast enough."
Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.
"Mr. Ramage," she cried, "you are outrageous! You understand
nothing. You are--horrible. Will you let me go out of this
room?"
"No," cried Ramage; "hear me out! I'll have that satisfaction,
anyhow. You women, with your tricks of evasion, you're a sex of
swindlers. You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites.
You make yourself charming for help. You climb by disappointing
men. This lover of yours--"
"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.
"Well, you know."
Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of
weeping broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, "You know
as well as I do that money was a loan!"
"Loan!"
"You yourself called it a loan!"
"Euphuism. We both understood that."
"You shall have every penny of it back."
"I'll frame it--when I get it."
"I'll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an
hour."
"You'll never pay me. You think you will. It's your way of
glossing over the ethical position. It's the sort of way a woman
always does gloss over her ethical positions. You're all
dependents--all of you. By instinct. Only you good ones--shirk.
You shirk a straightforward and decent return for what you get
from us--taking refuge in purity and delicacy and such-like when
it comes to payment."
"Mr. Ramage," said Ann Veronica, "I want to go--NOW!"
Part 5
But she did not get away just then.
Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. "Oh,
Ann Veronica!" he cried, "I cannot let you go like this! You
don't understand. You can't possibly understand!"
He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory
apology for his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he
said; he was so mad to have her that he defeated himself, and did
crude and alarming and senseless things. His vicious abusiveness
vanished. He suddenly became eloquent and plausible. He did make
her perceive something of the acute, tormenting desire for her
that had arisen in him and possessed him. She stood, as it were,
directed doorward, with her eyes watching every movement,
listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.
At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an
ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must
shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would
enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and
that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that the
love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.
He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship
as though it had never been even a disguise between them, as
though from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had
put quite understandingly upon their relationship. He had set
out to win her, and she had let him start. And at the thought of
that other lover--he was convinced that that beloved person was a
lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to
him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even
know of her love--Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and
returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services for the
love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such was the
simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left
that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.
That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred
another man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that
made her denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And
this though he was evidently passionately in love with her.
For a while he threatened her. "You have put all your life in my
hands," he declared. "Think of that check you endorsed. There
it is--against you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you
think people will make of that? What will this lover of yours
make of that?"
At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying
resolve to repay him at any cost, and made short movements
doorward.
But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door.
She emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little,
red-lit landing. She went past three keenly observant and
ostentatiously preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted
staircase and out of the Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory
of relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson, into a
cool, clear night.
Part 6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again,
every nerve in her body was quivering with shame and
self-disgust.
She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.
"And now," she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into
indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what
am I to do?
"I'm in a hole!--mess is a better word, expresses it better .
I'm in a mess--a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!
Do you hear, Ann Veronica?--you're in a nasty, filthy,
unforgivable mess!
"Haven't I just made a silly mess of things?
"Forty pounds! I haven't got twenty!"
She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering
the lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.
"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove!
I'm beginning to have my doubts about freedom!
"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman!
The smeariness of the thing!
"The smeariness of this sort of thing! . . . Mauled about!"
She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of
her hand. "Ugh!" she said.
"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort
of scrape! At least--one thinks so. . . . I wonder if some of
them did--and it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet
moments. Most of them didn't, anyhow. They were properly
brought up, and sat still and straight, and took the luck fate
brought them as gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what
men were like behind all their nicety. They knew they were all
Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all--"
For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive
restraints as though it was the one desirable thing. That world
of fine printed cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate
secondary meanings and refined allusiveness, presented itself to
her imagination with the brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed
for many women it is a lost paradise.
"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said.
"I wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite
quiet and white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different?
Would he have dared? . . ."
For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly
disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and
belated desire to move gently, to speak softly and
ambiguously--to be, in effect, prim.
Horrible details recurred to her.
"Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his
neck--deliberately to hurt him?"
She tried to sound the humorous note.
"Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that
gentleman?"
Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.
"You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Cad!
. . . Why aren't you folded up clean in lavender--as every young
woman ought to be? What have you been doing with yourself? . .
."
She raked into the fire with the poker.
"All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree to pay back
that money."
That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had
ever spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before
she went to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not
sleep. The more she disentangled the lines of her situation the
deeper grew her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of
lying in bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched
about her room and whispered abuse of herself--usually until she
hit against some article of furniture.
Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to
herself, "Now look here! Let me think it all out!"
For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a
woman's position in the world--the meagre realities of such
freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to
some individual man under which she must labor for even a
foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father's
support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And
here she was--in a mess because it had been impossible for her to
avoid leaning upon another man. She had thought--What had she
thought? That this dependence of women was but an illusion which
needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with
vigor, and here she was!
She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it
to her insoluble individual problem again: "What am I to do?"
She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into
Ramage's face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no
conception of how such a sum could be made good again. She
thought of all sorts of odd and desperate expedients, and with
passionate petulance rejected them all.
She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting
epithets for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared
out of window at a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and
then went and sat on the edge of her bed. What was the
alternative to going home? No alternative appeared in that
darkness.
It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself
beaten. She did most urgently desire to save her face in
Morningside Park, and for long hours she could think of no way of
putting it that would not be in the nature of unconditional
admission of defeat.
"I'd rather go as a chorus-girl," she said.
She was not very clear about the position and duties of a
chorus-girl, but it certainly had the air of being a last
desperate resort. There sprang from that a vague hope that
perhaps she might extort a capitulation from her father by a
threat to seek that position, and then with overwhelming
clearness it came to her that whatever happened she would never
be able to tell her father about her debt. The completest
capitulation would not wipe out that trouble. And she felt that
if she went home it was imperative to pay. She would always be
going to and fro up the Avenue, getting glimpses of Ramage,
seeing him in trains. . . .
For a time she promenaded the room.
"Why did I ever take that loan? An idiot girl in an asylum would
have known better than that!
"Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind--the worst of all
conceivable combinations. I wish some one would kill Ramage by
accident! . . .
"But then they would find that check endorsed in his bureau. . .