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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. *** 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 *** 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 *** 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--I 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. I 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 *** 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
*** 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. "*** letters he writes," she said.
"I suppose most people's letters are ***.
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."
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