Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story Read online

  Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger

  ANN VERONICA

  A MODERN LOVE STORY

  By H. G. Wells

  CONTENTSCHAP. I. ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER II. ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW III. THE MORNING OF THE CRISIS IV. THE CRISIS V. THE FLIGHT TO LONDON VI. EXPOSTULATIONS VII. IDEALS AND A REALITY VIII. BIOLOGY IX. DISCORDS X. THE SUFFRAGETTES XI. THOUGHTS IN PRISON XII. ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER XIII. THE SAPPHIRE RING XIV. THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT XV. THE LAST DAYS AT HOME XVI. IN THE MOUNTAINS XVII. IN PERSPECTIVE

  "The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge."

  ANN VERONICA

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  ANN VERONICA TALKS TO HER FATHER

  Part 1

  One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley camedown from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved tohave things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled onthe verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitelyshe made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it hadbeen reached. She made up her mind in the train home that it should bea decisive crisis. It is for that reason that this novel begins withher there, and neither earlier nor later, for it is the history of thiscrisis and its consequences that this novel has to tell.

  She had a compartment to herself in the train from London to MorningsidePark, and she sat with both her feet on the seat in an attitude thatwould certainly have distressed her mother to see, and horrified hergrandmother beyond measure; she sat with her knees up to her chin andher hands clasped before them, and she was so lost in thought thatshe discovered with a start, from a lettered lamp, that she was atMorningside Park, and thought she was moving out of the station, whereasshe was only moving in. "Lord!" she said. She jumped up at once,caught up a leather clutch containing notebooks, a fat text-book, anda chocolate-and-yellow-covered pamphlet, and leaped neatly from thecarriage, only to discover that the train was slowing down and that shehad to traverse the full length of the platform past it again as theresult of her precipitation. "Sold again," she remarked. "Idiot!" Sheraged inwardly while she walked along with that air of self-containedserenity that is proper to a young lady of nearly two-and-twenty underthe eye of the world.

  She walked down the station approach, past the neat, obtrusive officesof the coal merchant and the house agent, and so to the wicket-gate bythe butcher's shop that led to the field path to her home. Outside thepost-office stood a no-hatted, blond young man in gray flannels, who waselaborately affixing a stamp to a letter. At the sight of her he becamerigid and a singularly bright shade of pink. She made herself serenelyunaware of his existence, though it may be it was his presence that senther by the field detour instead of by the direct path up the Avenue.

  "Umph!" he said, and regarded his letter doubtfully before consigning itto the pillar-box. "Here goes," he said. Then he hovered undecidedly forsome seconds with his hands in his pockets and his mouth puckered to awhistle before he turned to go home by the Avenue.

  Ann Veronica forgot him as soon as she was through the gate, and herface resumed its expression of stern preoccupation. "It's either now ornever," she said to herself....

  Morningside Park was a suburb that had not altogether, as people say,come off. It consisted, like pre-Roman Gaul, of three parts. There wasfirst the Avenue, which ran in a consciously elegant curve from therailway station into an undeveloped wilderness of agriculture, with big,yellow brick villas on either side, and then there was the pavement, thelittle clump of shops about the post-office, and under the railway archwas a congestion of workmen's dwellings. The road from Surbiton andEpsom ran under the arch, and, like a bright fungoid growth in theditch, there was now appearing a sort of fourth estate of littlered-and-white rough-cast villas, with meretricious gables and verybrassy window-blinds. Behind the Avenue was a little hill, and aniron-fenced path went over the crest of this to a stile under anelm-tree, and forked there, with one branch going back into the Avenueagain.

  "It's either now or never," said Ann Veronica, again ascending thisstile. "Much as I hate rows, I've either got to make a stand or give inaltogether."

  She seated herself in a loose and easy attitude and surveyed thebacks of the Avenue houses; then her eyes wandered to where the newred-and-white villas peeped among the trees. She seemed to be makingsome sort of inventory. "Ye Gods!" she said at last. "WHAT a place!

  "Stuffy isn't the word for it.

  "I wonder what he takes me for?"

  When presently she got down from the stile a certain note of internalconflict, a touch of doubt, had gone from her warm-tinted face. She hadnow the clear and tranquil expression of one whose mind is made up. Herback had stiffened, and her hazel eyes looked steadfastly ahead.

  As she approached the corner of the Avenue the blond, no-hatted man ingray flannels appeared. There was a certain air of forced fortuity inhis manner. He saluted awkwardly. "Hello, Vee!" he said.

  "Hello, Teddy!" she answered.

  He hung vaguely for a moment as she passed.

  But it was clear she was in no mood for Teddys. He realized that he wascommitted to the path across the fields, an uninteresting walk at thebest of times.

  "Oh, dammit!" he remarked, "dammit!" with great bitterness as he facedit.

  Part 2

  Ann Veronica Stanley was twenty-one and a half years old. She had blackhair, fine eyebrows, and a clear complexion and the forces that hadmodelled her features had loved and lingered at their work and made themsubtle and fine. She was slender, and sometimes she seemed tall, andwalked and carried herself lightly and joyfully as one who commonlyand habitually feels well, and sometimes she stooped a little andwas preoccupied. Her lips came together with an expression betweencontentment and the faintest shadow of a smile, her manner was one ofquiet reserve, and behind this mask she was wildly discontented andeager for freedom and life.

  She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient--she did not clearlyknow for what--to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow incoming. All the world about her seemed to be--how can one put it?--inwrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blindswere all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell whatcolors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was nointimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows ordoors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blazeof fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her,not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones....

  During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the worldhad been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do,giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the mostsuitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that therewas a considerable group of interests called being in love and gettingmarried, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments,such as flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. Buthere she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, throughthe agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and anumber of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her shemust on no account think about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moralinstruction mistress, was particularly explicit upon this score, andthey all agreed in indicating contempt and pity for girls whose mindsran on such matters
, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dressor bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike anyother group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of.Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult matter not to think ofthese things. However having a considerable amount of pride, she decidedshe would disavow these undesirable topics and keep her mind away fromthem just as far as she could, but it left her at the end of her schooldays with that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at looseends.

  The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particularplace for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionlessexistence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dustingin her father's house. She thought study would be better. She was aclever girl, the best of her year in the High School, and she madea valiant fight for Somerville or Newnham but her father had met andargued with a Somerville girl at a friend's dinner-table and he thoughtthat sort of thing unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her tolive at home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhileshe went on at school. They compromised at length on the science courseat the Tredgold Women's College--she had already matriculated intoLondon University from school--she came of age, and she bickered withher aunt for latch-key privileges on the strength of that and her seasonticket. Shamefaced curiosities began to come back into her mind, thinlydisguised as literature and art. She read voraciously, and presently,because of her aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books shethought might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, andshe went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friendto accompany her. She passed her general science examination with doublehonors and specialized in science. She happened to have an acute senseof form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, andparticularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest,albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was notaltogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herselfchafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a store offaded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had already realized thatthis instructress was hopelessly wrong and foggy--it is the test of thegood comparative anatomist--upon the skull. She discovered a desire toenter as a student in the Imperial College at Westminster, where Russelltaught, and go on with her work at the fountain-head.

  She had asked about that already, and her father had replied, evasively:"We'll have to see about that, little Vee; we'll have to see aboutthat." In that posture of being seen about the matter hung until sheseemed committed to another session at the Tredgold College, and in themean time a small conflict arose and brought the latch-key question, andin fact the question of Ann Veronica's position generally, to an acuteissue.

  In addition to the various business men, solicitors, civil servants,and widow ladies who lived in the Morningside Park Avenue, there was acertain family of alien sympathies and artistic quality, the Widgetts,with which Ann Veronica had become very friendly. Mr. Widgett was ajournalist and art critic, addicted to a greenish-gray tweed suitand "art" brown ties; he smoked corncob pipes in the Avenue on Sundaymorning, travelled third class to London by unusual trains, and openlydespised golf. He occupied one of the smaller houses near the station.He had one son, who had been co-educated, and three daughters withpeculiarly jolly red hair that Ann Veronica found adorable. Two of thesehad been her particular intimates at the High School, and had done muchto send her mind exploring beyond the limits of the available literatureat home. It was a cheerful, irresponsible, shamelessly hard-up family inthe key of faded green and flattened purple, and the girls went on fromthe High School to the Fadden Art School and a bright, eventful life ofart student dances, Socialist meetings, theatre galleries, talking aboutwork, and even, at intervals, work; and ever and again they drew AnnVeronica from her sound persistent industry into the circle of theseexperiences. They had asked her to come to the first of the two greatannual Fadden Dances, the October one, and Ann Veronica had acceptedwith enthusiasm. And now her father said she must not go.

  He had "put his foot down," and said she must not go.

  Going involved two things that all Ann Veronica's tact had beenineffectual to conceal from her aunt and father. Her usual dignifiedreserve had availed her nothing. One point was that she was to wearfancy dress in the likeness of a Corsair's bride, and the other was thatshe was to spend whatever vestiges of the night remained after the dancewas over in London with the Widgett girls and a select party in "quite adecent little hotel" near Fitzroy Square.

  "But, my dear!" said Ann Veronica's aunt.

  "You see," said Ann Veronica, with the air of one who shares adifficulty, "I've promised to go. I didn't realize--I don't see how Ican get out of it now."

  Then it was her father issued his ultimatum. He had conveyed it to her,not verbally, but by means of a letter, which seemed to her a singularlyignoble method of prohibition. "He couldn't look me in the face and sayit," said Ann Veronica.

  "But of course it's aunt's doing really."

  And thus it was that as Ann Veronica neared the gates of home, she saidto herself: "I'll have it out with him somehow. I'll have it out withhim. And if he won't--"

  But she did not give even unspoken words to the alternative at thattime.

  Part 3

  Ann Veronica's father was a solicitor with a good deal of companybusiness: a lean, trustworthy, worried-looking, neuralgic, clean-shavenman of fifty-three, with a hard mouth, a sharp nose, iron-gray hair,gray eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a small, circular baldness at thecrown of his head. His name was Peter. He had had five children atirregular intervals, of whom Ann Veronica was the youngest, so that asa parent he came to her perhaps a little practised and jaded andinattentive; and he called her his "little Vee," and patted herunexpectedly and disconcertingly, and treated her promiscuously as ofany age between eleven and eight-and-twenty. The City worried him a gooddeal, and what energy he had left over he spent partly in golf, a gamehe treated very seriously, and partly in the practices of microscopicpetrography.

  He "went in" for microscopy in the unphilosophical Victorian manner ashis "hobby." A birthday present of a microscope had turned his mind totechnical microscopy when he was eighteen, and a chance friendship witha Holborn microscope dealer had confirmed that bent. He had remarkablyskilful fingers and a love of detailed processes, and he had become oneof the most dexterous amateur makers of rock sections in the world.He spent a good deal more money and time than he could afford upon thelittle room at the top of the house, in producing new lapidary apparatusand new microscopic accessories and in rubbing down slices of rock toa transparent thinness and mounting them in a beautiful and dignifiedmanner. He did it, he said, "to distract his mind." His chief successeshe exhibited to the Lowndean Microscopical Society, where their hightechnical merit never failed to excite admiration. Their scientificvalue was less considerable, since he chose rocks entirely with aview to their difficulty of handling or their attractiveness atconversaziones when done. He had a great contempt for the sections the"theorizers" produced. They proved all sorts of things perhaps, but theywere thick, unequal, pitiful pieces of work. Yet an indiscriminating,wrong-headed world gave such fellows all sorts of distinctions....

  He read but little, and that chiefly healthy light fiction withchromatic titles, The Red Sword, The Black Helmet, The Purple Robe, alsoin order "to distract his mind." He read it in winter in the eveningafter dinner, and Ann Veronica associated it with a tendency tomonopolize the lamp, and to spread a very worn pair of dappled fawn-skinslippers across the fender. She wondered occasionally why his mindneeded so much distraction. His favorite newspaper was the Times, whichhe began at breakfast in the morning often with manifest irritation, andcarried off to finish in the train, leaving no other paper at home.

  It occurred to Ann Veronica once that she had known him when he wasyounger, but day had followed day, and each had largely obliterated theimpression of its predecessor. But she certainly remembered that whenshe was a little girl h
e sometimes wore tennis flannels, and also rode abicycle very dexterously in through the gates to the front door. Andin those days, too, he used to help her mother with her gardening, andhover about her while she stood on the ladder and hammered creepers tothe scullery wall.

  It had been Ann Veronica's lot as the youngest child to live in a homethat became less animated and various as she grew up. Her mother haddied when she was thirteen, her two much older sisters had marriedoff--one submissively, one insubordinately; her two brothers had goneout into the world well ahead of her, and so she had made what she couldof her father. But he was not a father one could make much of.

  His ideas about girls and women were of a sentimental and modestquality; they were creatures, he thought, either too bad for a modernvocabulary, and then frequently most undesirably desirable, or too pureand good for life. He made this simple classification of a large andvarious sex to the exclusion of all intermediate kinds; he held thatthe two classes had to be kept apart even in thought and remote from oneanother. Women are made like the potter's vessels--either for worshipor contumely, and are withal fragile vessels. He had never wanteddaughters. Each time a daughter had been born to him he had concealedhis chagrin with great tenderness and effusion from his wife, and hadsworn unwontedly and with passionate sincerity in the bathroom. He wasa manly man, free from any strong maternal strain, and he had loved hisdark-eyed, dainty bright-colored, and active little wife with a realvein of passion in his sentiment. But he had always felt (he had neverallowed himself to think of it) that the promptitude of their familywas a little indelicate of her, and in a sense an intrusion. He had,however, planned brilliant careers for his two sons, and, with a certainhuman amount of warping and delay, they were pursuing these. One wasin the Indian Civil Service and one in the rapidly developing motorbusiness. The daughters, he had hoped, would be their mother's care.