Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story Read online

  The thing rankled in her mind night and day. She would wake in the nightto repeat her bitter cry: "Oh, why did I burn those notes?"

  It added greatly to the annoyance of the situation that she had twiceseen Ramage in the Avenue since her return to the shelter of herfather's roof. He had saluted her with elaborate civility, his eyesdistended with indecipherable meanings.

  She felt she was bound in honor to tell the whole affair to Manningsooner or later. Indeed, it seemed inevitable that she must clear it upwith his assistance, or not at all. And when Manning was not aboutthe thing seemed simple enough. She would compose extremely lucid andhonorable explanations. But when it came to broaching them, it proved tobe much more difficult than she had supposed.

  They went down the great staircase of the building, and, while shesought in her mind for a beginning, he broke into appreciation of hersimple dress and self-congratulations upon their engagement.

  "It makes me feel," he said, "that nothing is impossible--to have youhere beside me. I said, that day at Surbiton, 'There's many good thingsin life, but there's only one best, and that's the wild-haired girlwho's pulling away at that oar. I will make her my Grail, and some day,perhaps, if God wills, she shall become my wife!'"

  He looked very hard before him as he said this, and his voice was fullof deep feeling.

  "Grail!" said Ann Veronica, and then: "Oh, yes--of course! Anything buta holy one, I'm afraid."

  "Altogether holy, Ann Veronica. Ah! but you can't imagine what you areto me and what you mean to me! I suppose there is something mystical andwonderful about all women."

  "There is something mystical and wonderful about all human beings. Idon't see that men need bank it with the women."

  "A man does," said Manning--"a true man, anyhow. And for me there isonly one treasure-house. By Jove! When I think of it I want to leap andshout!"

  "It would astonish that man with the barrow."

  "It astonishes me that I don't," said Manning, in a tone of intenseself-enjoyment.

  "I think," began Ann Veronica, "that you don't realize--"

  He disregarded her entirely. He waved an arm and spoke with a peculiarresonance. "I feel like a giant! I believe now I shall do great things.Gods! what it must be to pour out strong, splendid verse--mightylines! mighty lines! If I do, Ann Veronica, it will be you. It will bealtogether you. I will dedicate my books to you. I will lay them all atyour feet."

  He beamed upon her.

  "I don't think you realize," Ann Veronica began again, "that I am rathera defective human being."

  "I don't want to," said Manning. "They say there are spots on the sun.Not for me. It warms me, and lights me, and fills my world with flowers.Why should I peep at it through smoked glass to see things that don'taffect me?" He smiled his delight at his companion.

  "I've got bad faults."

  He shook his head slowly, smiling mysteriously.

  "But perhaps I want to confess them."

  "I grant you absolution."

  "I don't want absolution. I want to make myself visible to you."

  "I wish I could make you visible to yourself. I don't believe in thefaults. They're just a joyous softening of the outline--more beautifulthan perfection. Like the flaws of an old marble. If you talk of yourfaults, I shall talk of your splendors."

  "I do want to tell you things, nevertheless."

  "We'll have, thank God! ten myriad days to tell each other things. WhenI think of it--"

  "But these are things I want to tell you now!"

  "I made a little song of it. Let me say it to you. I've no name for ityet. Epithalamy might do.

  "Like him who stood on Darien I view uncharted sea Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights Before my Queen and me.

  "And that only brings me up to about sixty-five!

  "A glittering wilderness of time That to the sunset reaches No keel as yet its waves has ploughed Or gritted on its beaches.

  "And we will sail that splendor wide, From day to day together, From isle to isle of happiness Through year's of God's own weather."

  "Yes," said his prospective fellow-sailor, "that's very pretty." Shestopped short, full of things un-said. Pretty! Ten thousand days, tenthousand nights!

  "You shall tell me your faults," said Manning. "If they matter to you,they matter."

  "It isn't precisely faults," said Ann Veronica. "It's something thatbothers me." Ten thousand! Put that way it seemed so different.

  "Then assuredly!" said Manning.

  She found a little difficulty in beginning. She was glad when he wenton: "I want to be your city of refuge from every sort of bother. I wantto stand between you and all the force and vileness of the world. I wantto make you feel that here is a place where the crowd does not clamornor ill-winds blow."

  "That is all very well," said Ann Veronica, unheeded.

  "That is my dream of you," said Manning, warming. "I want my life to bebeaten gold just in order to make it a fitting setting for yours. Thereyou will be, in an inner temple. I want to enrich it with hangings andgladden it with verses. I want to fill it with fine and precious things.And by degrees, perhaps, that maiden distrust of yours that makes youshrink from my kisses, will vanish.... Forgive me if a certainwarmth creeps into my words! The Park is green and gray to-day, but I amglowing pink and gold.... It is difficult to express these things."

  Part 4

  They sat with tea and strawberries and cream before them at a littletable in front of the pavilion in Regent's Park. Her confession wasstill unmade. Manning leaned forward on the table, talking discursivelyon the probable brilliance of their married life. Ann Veronica sat backin an attitude of inattention, her eyes on a distant game of cricket,her mind perplexed and busy. She was recalling the circumstances underwhich she had engaged herself to Manning, and trying to understand acurious development of the quality of this relationship.

  The particulars of her engagement were very clear in her memory. She hadtaken care he should have this momentous talk with her on a garden-seatcommanded by the windows of the house. They had been playing tennis,with his manifest intention looming over her.

  "Let us sit down for a moment," he had said. He made his speech a littleelaborately. She plucked at the knots of her racket and heard him to theend, then spoke in a restrained undertone.

  "You ask me to be engaged to you, Mr. Manning," she began.

  "I want to lay all my life at your feet."

  "Mr. Manning, I do not think I love you.... I want to be very plainwith you. I have nothing, nothing that can possibly be passion for you.I am sure. Nothing at all."

  He was silent for some moments.

  "Perhaps that is only sleeping," he said. "How can you know?"

  "I think--perhaps I am rather a cold-blooded person."

  She stopped. He remained listening attentively.

  "You have been very kind to me," she said.

  "I would give my life for you."

  Her heart had warmed toward him. It had seemed to her that life mightbe very good indeed with his kindliness and sacrifice about her. Shethought of him as always courteous and helpful, as realizing, indeed,his ideal of protection and service, as chivalrously leaving her free tolive her own life, rejoicing with an infinite generosity in every detailof her irresponsive being. She twanged the catgut under her fingers.

  "It seems so unfair," she said, "to take all you offer me and give solittle in return."

  "It is all the world to me. And we are not traders looking atequivalents."

  "You know, Mr. Manning, I do not really want to marry."

  "No."

  "It seems so--so unworthy"--she picked among her phrases "of the noblelove you give--"

  She stopped, through the difficulty she found in expressing herself.

  "But I am judge of that," said Manning.

  "Would you wait for me?"

  Manning was silent for a space. "As my lady wills."

  "Would you let me go on studying
for a time?"

  "If you order patience."

  "I think, Mr. Manning... I do not know. It is so difficult. When Ithink of the love you give me--One ought to give you back love."

  "You like me?"

  "Yes. And I am grateful to you...."

  Manning tapped with his racket on the turf through some moments ofsilence. "You are the most perfect, the most glorious of createdthings--tender, frank intellectual, brave, beautiful. I am yourservitor. I am ready to wait for you, to wait your pleasure, to give allmy life to winning it. Let me only wear your livery. Give me but leaveto try. You want to think for a time, to be free for a time. That is solike you, Diana--Pallas Athene! (Pallas Athene is better.) You are allthe slender goddesses. I understand. Let me engage myself. That is all Iask."

  She looked at him; his face, downcast and in profile, was handsome andstrong. Her gratitude swelled within her.

  "You are too good for me," she said in a low voice.

  "Then you--you will?"

  A long pause.

  "It isn't fair...."

  "But will you?"

  "YES."

  For some seconds he had remained quite still.

  "If I sit here," he said, standing up before her abruptly, "I shallhave to shout. Let us walk about. Tum, tum, tirray, tum, tum, tum,te-tum--that thing of Mendelssohn's! If making one human beingabsolutely happy is any satisfaction to you--"

  He held out his hands, and she also stood up.

  He drew her close up to him with a strong, steady pull. Then suddenly,in front of all those windows, he folded her in his arms and pressed herto him, and kissed her unresisting face.

  "Don't!" cried Ann Veronica, struggling faintly, and he released her.

  "Forgive me," he said. "But I am at singing-pitch."

  She had a moment of sheer panic at the thing she had done. "Mr.Manning," she said, "for a time--Will you tell no one? Will you keepthis--our secret? I'm doubtful--Will you please not even tell my aunt?"

  "As you will," he said. "But if my manner tells! I cannot help it ifthat shows. You only mean a secret for a little time?"

  "Just for a little time," she said; "yes...."

  But the ring, and her aunt's triumphant eye, and a note of approval inher father's manner, and a novel disposition in him to praise Manningin a just, impartial voice had soon placed very definite qualificationsupon that covenanted secrecy.

  Part 5

  At first the quality of her relationship to Manning seemed moving andbeautiful to Ann Veronica. She admired and rather pitied him, and shewas unfeignedly grateful to him. She even thought that perhaps she mightcome to love him, in spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurditythat pervaded his courtly bearing. She would never love him as sheloved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love.For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much moretemperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant,condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement withhim and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise whichdistinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the wrappered worldalmost at its best. She saw herself building up a life upon that--alife restrained, kindly, beautiful, a little pathetic and altogetherdignified; a life of great disciplines and suppressions and extensivereserves...

  But the Ramage affair needed clearing up, of course; it was a flaw uponthat project. She had to explain about and pay off that forty pounds....

  Then, quite insensibly, her queenliness had declined. She was never ableto trace the changes her attitude had undergone, from the time when shebelieved herself to be the pampered Queen of Fortune, the crown of agood man's love (and secretly, but nobly, worshipping some one else),to the time when she realized she was in fact just a mannequin for herlover's imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of herbeing, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreamsthat might move her, than a child cares for the sawdust in its doll. Shewas the actress his whim had chosen to play a passive part....

  It was one of the most educational disillusionments in Ann Veronica'scareer.

  But did many women get anything better?

  This afternoon, when she was urgent to explain her hampering andtainting complication with Ramage, the realization of this alien qualityin her relationship with Manning became acute. Hitherto it had beenqualified by her conception of all life as a compromise, by her neweffort to be unexacting of life. But she perceived that to tell Manningof her Ramage adventures as they had happened would be like tarringfigures upon a water-color. They were in different key, they had adifferent timbre. How could she tell him what indeed already began topuzzle herself, why she had borrowed that money at all? The plain factwas that she had grabbed a bait. She had grabbed! She became less andless attentive to his meditative, self-complacent fragments of talk asshe told herself this. Her secret thoughts made some hasty, half-heartedexcursions into the possibility of telling the thing in romantictones--Ramage was as a black villain, she as a white, fantasticallywhite, maiden.... She doubted if Manning would even listen to that.He would refuse to listen and absolve her unshriven.

  Then it came to her with a shock, as an extraordinary oversight, thatshe could never tell Manning about Ramage--never.

  She dismissed the idea of doing so. But that still left the fortypounds!...

  Her mind went on generalizing. So it would always be between herself andManning. She saw her life before her robbed of all generous illusions,the wrappered life unwrappered forever, vistas of dull responses, crisesof make-believe, years of exacting mutual disregard in a misty garden offine sentiments.

  But did any woman get anything better from a man? Perhaps every womanconceals herself from a man perforce!...

  She thought of Capes. She could not help thinking of Capes. SurelyCapes was different. Capes looked at one and not over one, spoke to one,treated one as a visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her,cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did notsentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in theZoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Littlethings, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that doubt; somethingin his manner had belied his words. Did he not look for her in themorning when she entered--come very quickly to her? She thought of himas she had last seen him looking down the length of the laboratory tosee her go. Why had he glanced up--quite in that way?...

  The thought of Capes flooded her being like long-veiled sunlightbreaking again through clouds. It came to her like a dear thingrediscovered, that she loved Capes. It came to her that to marry anyone but Capes was impossible. If she could not marry him, she would notmarry any one. She would end this sham with Manning. It ought neverto have begun. It was cheating, pitiful cheating. And then if some dayCapes wanted her--saw fit to alter his views upon friendship....

  Dim possibilities that she would not seem to look at even to herselfgesticulated in the twilight background of her mind.

  She leaped suddenly at a desperate resolution, and in one moment hadmade it into a new self. She flung aside every plan she had in life,every discretion. Of course, why not? She would be honest, anyhow!

  She turned her eyes to Manning.

  He was sitting back from the table now, with one arm over the backof his green chair and the other resting on the little table. He wassmiling under his heavy mustache, and his head was a little on one sideas he looked at her.

  "And what was that dreadful confession you had to make?" he was saying.His quiet, kindly smile implied his serene disbelief in any confessiblething. Ann Veronica pushed aside a tea-cup and the vestiges of herstrawberries and cream, and put her elbows before her on the table. "Mr.Manning," she said, "I HAVE a confession to make."

  "I wish you would use my Christian name," he said.

  She attended to that, and then dismissed it as unimportant.

  Something in her voice and manner conveyed an effect of unwonted gravityto him. For the first time he seemed to wonder what
it might be that shehad to confess. His smile faded.

  "I don't think our engagement can go on," she plunged, and felt exactlythat loss of breath that comes with a dive into icy water.

  "But, how," he said, sitting up astonished beyond measure, "not go on?"

  "I have been thinking while you have been talking. You see--I didn'tunderstand."

  She stared hard at her finger-nails. "It is hard to express one's self,but I do want to be honest with you. When I promised to marry you Ithought I could; I thought it was a possible arrangement. I did think itcould be done. I admired your chivalry. I was grateful."

  She paused.

  "Go on," he said.

  She moved her elbow nearer to him and spoke in a still lower tone. "Itold you I did not love you."

  "I know," said Manning, nodding gravely. "It was fine and brave of you."

  "But there is something more."

  She paused again.

  "I--I am sorry--I didn't explain. These things are difficult. It wasn'tclear to me that I had to explain.... I love some one else."

  They remained looking at each other for three or four seconds. ThenManning flopped back in his chair and dropped his chin like a man shot.There was a long silence between them.

  "My God!" he said at last, with tremendous feeling, and then again, "MyGod!"

  Now that this thing was said her mind was clear and calm. She heard thisstandard expression of a strong soul wrung with a critical coldness thatastonished herself. She realized dimly that there was no personal thingbehind his cry, that countless myriads of Mannings had "My God!"-ed withan equal gusto at situations as flatly apprehended. This mitigatedher remorse enormously. He rested his brow on his hand and conveyedmagnificent tragedy by his pose.