Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story Read online

  "I expected you this morning," he said. "I saw--they knocked off yourfetters yesterday."

  "I think it is very good of me to come this afternoon."

  "I began to be afraid you might not come at all."

  "Afraid!"

  "Yes. I'm glad you're back for all sorts of reasons." He spoke a littlenervously. "Among other things, you know, I didn't understand quite--Ididn't understand that you were so keenly interested in this suffragequestion. I have it on my conscience that I offended you--"

  "Offended me when?"

  "I've been haunted by the memory of you. I was rude and stupid. We weretalking about the suffrage--and I rather scoffed."

  "You weren't rude," she said.

  "I didn't know you were so keen on this suffrage business."

  "Nor I. You haven't had it on your mind all this time?"

  "I have rather. I felt somehow I'd hurt you."

  "You didn't. I--I hurt myself."

  "I mean--"

  "I behaved like an idiot, that's all. My nerves were in rags. I wasworried. We're the hysterical animal, Mr. Capes. I got myself locked upto cool off. By a sort of instinct. As a dog eats grass. I'm right againnow."

  "Because your nerves were exposed, that was no excuse for my touchingthem. I ought to have seen--"

  "It doesn't matter a rap--if you're not disposed to resent the--the wayI behaved."

  "_I_ resent!"

  "I was only sorry I'd been so stupid."

  "Well, I take it we're straight again," said Capes with a note ofrelief, and assumed an easier position on the edge of her table. "Butif you weren't keen on the suffrage business, why on earth did you go toprison?"

  Ann Veronica reflected. "It was a phase," she said.

  He smiled. "It's a new phase in the life history," he remarked."Everybody seems to have it now. Everybody who's going to develop into awoman."

  "There's Miss Garvice."

  "She's coming on," said Capes. "And, you know, you're altering us all.I'M shaken. The campaign's a success." He met her questioning eye, andrepeated, "Oh! it IS a success. A man is so apt to--to take women alittle too lightly. Unless they remind him now and then not to....YOU did."

  "Then I didn't waste my time in prison altogether?"

  "It wasn't the prison impressed me. But I liked the things you saidhere. I felt suddenly I understood you--as an intelligent person. Ifyou'll forgive my saying that, and implying what goes with it. There'ssomething--puppyish in a man's usual attitude to women. That is whatI've had on my conscience.... I don't think we're altogether to blameif we don't take some of your lot seriously. Some of your sex, I mean.But we smirk a little, I'm afraid, habitually when we talk to you. Wesmirk, and we're a bit--furtive."

  He paused, with his eyes studying her gravely. "You, anyhow, don'tdeserve it," he said.

  Their colloquy was ended abruptly by the apparition of Miss Klegg atthe further door. When she saw Ann Veronica she stood for a moment as ifentranced, and then advanced with outstretched hands. "Veronique!" shecried with a rising intonation, though never before had she called AnnVeronica anything but Miss Stanley, and seized her and squeezed her andkissed her with profound emotion. "To think that you were going to doit--and never said a word! You are a little thin, but except for thatyou look--you look better than ever. Was it VERY horrible? I tried toget into the police-court, but the crowd was ever so much too big, pushas I would....

  "I mean to go to prison directly the session is over," said Miss Klegg."Wild horses--not if they have all the mounted police in London--shan'tkeep me out."

  Part 6

  Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon, he wasso friendly, so palpably interested in her, and glad to have her backwith him. Tea in the laboratory was a sort of suffragette reception.Miss Garvice assumed a quality of neutrality, professed herself almostwon over by Ann Veronica's example, and the Scotchman decided that ifwomen had a distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging sphere,and no one who believed in the doctrine of evolution could logicallydeny the vote to women "ultimately," however much they might be disposedto doubt the advisability of its immediate concession. It was a refusalof expediency, he said, and not an absolute refusal. The youth with hishair like Russell cleared his throat and said rather irrelevantly thathe knew a man who knew Thomas Bayard Simmons, who had rioted in theStrangers' Gallery, and then Capes, finding them all distinctly pro-AnnVeronica, if not pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started avein of speculation upon the Scotchman's idea--that there were stillhopes of women evolving into something higher.

  He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the time it seemed to AnnVeronica as a delightful possibility, as a thing not indeed to beentertained seriously, but to be half furtively felt, that he was beingso agreeable because she had come back again. She returned home througha world that was as roseate as it had been gray overnight.

  But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park Station she had ashock. She saw, twenty yards down the platform, the shiny hat and broadback and inimitable swagger of Ramage. She dived at once behind thecover of the lamp-room and affected serious trouble with her shoe-laceuntil he was out of the station, and then she followed slowly and withextreme discretion until the bifurcation of the Avenue from the fieldway insured her escape. Ramage went up the Avenue, and she hurriedalong the path with a beating heart and a disagreeable sense of unsolvedproblems in her mind.

  "That thing's going on," she told herself. "Everything goes on, confoundit! One doesn't change anything one has set going by making goodresolutions."

  And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and welcoming figure ofManning. He came as an agreeable diversion from an insoluble perplexity.She smiled at the sight of him, and thereat his radiation increased.

  "I missed the hour of your release," he said, "but I was at theVindicator Restaurant. You did not see me, I know. I was among thecommon herd in the place below, but I took good care to see you."

  "Of course you're converted?" she said.

  "To the view that all those Splendid Women in the movement ought to havevotes. Rather! Who could help it?"

  He towered up over her and smiled down at her in his fatherly way.

  "To the view that all women ought to have votes whether they like it ornot."

  He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under the black mustachewrinkled with his smile. And as he walked by her side they began awrangle that was none the less pleasant to Ann Veronica because itserved to banish a disagreeable preoccupation. It seemed to her in herrestored geniality that she liked Manning extremely. The brightnessCapes had diffused over the world glorified even his rival.

  Part 7

  The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to engage herself to marryManning were never very clear to her. A medley of motives warred in her,and it was certainly not one of the least of these that she knew herselfto be passionately in love with Capes; at moments she had a giddyintimation that he was beginning to feel keenly interested in her.She realized more and more the quality of the brink upon which shestood--the dreadful readiness with which in certain moods shemight plunge, the unmitigated wrongness and recklessness of such aself-abandonment. "He must never know," she would whisper to herself,"he must never know. Or else--Else it will be impossible that I can behis friend."

  That simple statement of the case was by no means all that went on inAnn Veronica's mind. But it was the form of her ruling determination itwas the only form that she ever allowed to see daylight. What else wasthere lurked in shadows and deep places; if in some mood of reverie itcame out into the light, it was presently overwhelmed and hustled backagain into hiding. She would never look squarely at these dream formsthat mocked the social order in which she lived, never admit shelistened to the soft whisperings in her ear. But Manning seemed more andmore clearly indicated as a refuge, as security. Certain simple purposesemerged from the disingenuous muddle of her feelings and desires. SeeingCapes from day to day made a bright eventfulness that hamper
ed her inthe course she had resolved to follow. She vanished from the laboratoryfor a week, a week of oddly interesting days....

  When she renewed her attendance at the Imperial College the third fingerof her left hand was adorned with a very fine old ring with dark bluesapphires that had once belonged to a great-aunt of Manning's.

  That ring manifestly occupied her thoughts a great deal. She keptpausing in her work and regarding it, and when Capes came round to her,she first put her hand in her lap and then rather awkwardly in front ofhim. But men are often blind to rings. He seemed to be.

  In the afternoon she had considered certain doubts very carefully,and decided on a more emphatic course of action. "Are these ordinarysapphires?" she said. He bent to her hand, and she slipped off the ringand gave it to him to examine.

  "Very good," he said. "Rather darker than most of them. But I'mgenerously ignorant of gems. Is it an old ring?" he asked, returning it.

  "I believe it is. It's an engagement ring...." She slipped it on herfinger, and added, in a voice she tried to make matter-of-fact: "It wasgiven to me last week."

  "Oh!" he said, in a colorless tone, and with his eyes on her face.

  "Yes. Last week."

  She glanced at him, and it was suddenly apparent for one instant ofillumination that this ring upon her finger was the crowning blunderof her life. It was apparent, and then it faded into the quality of aninevitable necessity.

  "Odd!" he remarked, rather surprisingly, after a little interval.

  There was a brief pause, a crowded pause, between them.

  She sat very still, and his eyes rested on that ornament for a moment,and then travelled slowly to her wrist and the soft lines of herforearm.

  "I suppose I ought to congratulate you," he said. Their eyes met, andhis expressed perplexity and curiosity. "The fact is--I don't knowwhy--this takes me by surprise. Somehow I haven't connected the ideawith you. You seemed complete--without that."

  "Did I?" she said.

  "I don't know why. But this is like--like walking round a house thatlooks square and complete and finding an unexpected long wing runningout behind."

  She looked up at him, and found he was watching her closely. For someseconds of voluminous thinking they looked at the ring between them,and neither spoke. Then Capes shifted his eyes to her microscope andthe little trays of unmounted sections beside it. "How is that carmineworking?" he asked, with a forced interest.

  "Better," said Ann Veronica, with an unreal alacrity. "But it stillmisses the nucleolus."

  CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

  THE SAPPHIRE RING

  Part 1

  For a time that ring set with sapphires seemed to be, after all, thesatisfactory solution of Ann Veronica's difficulties. It was likepouring a strong acid over dulled metal. A tarnish of constraint thathad recently spread over her intercourse with Capes vanished again. Theyembarked upon an open and declared friendship. They even talked aboutfriendship. They went to the Zoological Gardens together one Saturday tosee for themselves a point of morphological interest about the toucan'sbill--that friendly and entertaining bird--and they spent the rest ofthe afternoon walking about and elaborating in general terms this themeand the superiority of intellectual fellowship to all merely passionaterelationships. Upon this topic Capes was heavy and conscientious, butthat seemed to her to be just exactly what he ought to be. He was also,had she known it, more than a little insincere. "We are only in the dawnof the Age of Friendship," he said, "when interest, I suppose, willtake the place of passions. Either you have had to love people or hatethem--which is a sort of love, too, in its way--to get anything out ofthem. Now, more and more, we're going to be interested in them, to becurious about them and--quite mildly-experimental with them." He seemedto be elaborating ideas as he talked. They watched the chimpanzees inthe new apes' house, and admired the gentle humanity of their eyes--"somuch more human than human beings"--and they watched the Agile Gibbon inthe next apartment doing wonderful leaps and aerial somersaults.

  "I wonder which of us enjoys that most," said Capes--"does he, or dowe?"

  "He seems to get a zest--"

  "He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These joyful bounds justlace into the stuff of my memories and stay there forever. Living's justmaterial."

  "It's very good to be alive."

  "It's better to know life than be life."

  "One may do both," said Ann Veronica.

  She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, "Let'sgo and see the wart-hog," she thought no one ever had had so quick aflow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not bunswas the talisman of popularity among the animals, she marvelled at hispractical omniscience.

  Finally, at the exit into Regent's Park, they ran against Miss Klegg.It was the expression of Miss Klegg's face that put the idea into AnnVeronica's head of showing Manning at the College one day, an idea whichshe didn't for some reason or other carry out for a fortnight.

  Part 2

  When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality in theimagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of liberty and a remoteand quite abstracted person, and became suddenly and very disagreeablythe token of a large and portentous body visible and tangible.

  Manning appeared just at the end of the afternoon's work, and thebiologist was going through some perplexities the Scotchman had createdby a metaphysical treatment of the skulls of Hyrax and a young Africanelephant. He was clearing up these difficulties by tracing a partiallyobliterated suture the Scotchman had overlooked when the door from thepassage opened, and Manning came into his universe.

  Seen down the length of the laboratory, Manning looked a very handsomeand shapely gentleman indeed, and, at the sight of his eager advance tohis fiancee, Miss Klegg replaced one long-cherished romance about AnnVeronica by one more normal and simple. He carried a cane and a silkhat with a mourning-band in one gray-gloved hand; his frock-coat andtrousers were admirable; his handsome face, his black mustache, hisprominent brow conveyed an eager solicitude.

  "I want," he said, with a white hand outstretched, "to take you out totea."

  "I've been clearing up," said Ann Veronica, brightly.

  "All your dreadful scientific things?" he said, with a smile that MissKlegg thought extraordinarily kindly.

  "All my dreadful scientific things," said Ann Veronica.

  He stood back, smiling with an air of proprietorship, and looking abouthim at the business-like equipment of the room. The low ceiling made himseem abnormally tall. Ann Veronica wiped a scalpel, put a card over awatch-glass containing thin shreds of embryonic guinea-pig swimming inmauve stain, and dismantled her microscope.

  "I wish I understood more of biology," said Manning.

  "I'm ready," said Ann Veronica, closing her microscope-box with a click,and looking for one brief instant up the laboratory. "We have no airsand graces here, and my hat hangs from a peg in the passage."

  She led the way to the door, and Manning passed behind her and round herand opened the door for her. When Capes glanced up at them for a moment,Manning seemed to be holding his arms all about her, and there wasnothing but quiet acquiescence in her bearing.

  After Capes had finished the Scotchman's troubles he went back into thepreparation-room. He sat down on the sill of the open window, folded hisarms, and stared straight before him for a long time over the wildernessof tiles and chimney-pots into a sky that was blue and empty. He was notaddicted to monologue, and the only audible comment he permitted himselfat first upon a universe that was evidently anything but satisfactory tohim that afternoon, was one compact and entirely unassigned "Damn!"

  The word must have had some gratifying quality, because he repeatedit. Then he stood up and repeated it again. "The fool I have been!" hecried; and now speech was coming to him. He tried this sentence withexpletives. "Ass!" he went on, still warming. "Muck-headed moral ass! Iought to have done anything.

  "I ought to have done anything!

  "Wha
t's a man for?

  "Friendship!"

  He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate thrusting it throughthe window. He turned his back on that temptation. Then suddenly heseized a new preparation bottle that stood upon his table and containedthe better part of a week's work--a displayed dissection of a snail,beautifully done--and hurled it across the room, to smash resoundinglyupon the cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either hasteor pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-agents and sent them tomingle with the debris on the floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes."H'm!" he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage. "Silly!" heremarked after a pause. "One hardly knows--all the time."

  He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puckered to a whistle, and hewent to the door of the outer preparation-room and stood there, looking,save for the faintest intensification of his natural ruddiness, theembodiment of blond serenity.

  "Gellett," he called, "just come and clear up a mess, will you? I'vesmashed some things."

  Part 3

  There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica's arrangements forself-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage. He hung over her--he and hisloan to her and his connection with her and that terrible evening--avague, disconcerting possibility of annoyance and exposure. She couldnot see any relief from this anxiety except repayment, and repaymentseemed impossible. The raising of twenty-five pounds was a taskaltogether beyond her powers. Her birthday was four months away, andthat, at its extremist point, might give her another five pounds.