Ann Veronica Read online

  "That's the comfort of you. Well, after a time there came a fever in my blood. Don't think it was anything better than fever—or a bit beautiful. It wasn't. Quite soon, after we were married—it was just within a year—I formed a friendship with the wife of a friend, a woman eight years older than myself.... It wasn't anything splendid, you know. It was just a shabby, stupid, furtive business that began between us. Like stealing. We dressed it in a little music.... I want you to understand clearly that I was indebted to the man in many small ways. I was mean to him.... It was the gratification of an immense necessity. We were two people with a craving. We felt like thieves. We WERE thieves.... We LIKED each other well enough. Well, my friend found us out, and would give no quarter. He divorced her. How do you like the story?"

  "Go on," said Ann Veronica, a little hoarsely, "tell me all of it."

  "My wife was astounded—wounded beyond measure. She thought me—filthy. All her pride raged at me. One particularly humiliating thing came out—humiliating for me. There was a second co-respondent. I hadn't heard of him before the trial. I don't know why that should be so acutely humiliating. There's no logic in these things. It was."

  "Poor you!" said Ann Veronica.

  "My wife refused absolutely to have anything more to do with me. She could hardly speak to me; she insisted relentlessly upon a separation. She had money of her own—much more than I have—and there was no need to squabble about that. She has given herself up to social work."

  "Well—"

  "That's all. Practically all. And yet—Wait a little, you'd better have every bit of it. One doesn't go about with these passions allayed simply because they have made wreckage and a scandal. There one is! The same stuff still! One has a craving in one's blood, a craving roused, cut off from its redeeming and guiding emotional side. A man has more freedom to do evil than a woman. Irregularly, in a quite inglorious and unromantic way, you know, I am a vicious man. That's—that's my private life. Until the last few months. It isn't what I have been but what I am. I haven't taken much account of it until now. My honor has been in my scientific work and public discussion and the things I write. Lots of us are like that. But, you see, I'm smirched. For the sort of love-making you think about. I've muddled all this business. I've had my time and lost my chances. I'm damaged goods. And you're as clean as fire. You come with those clear eyes of yours, as valiant as an angel...."

  He stopped abruptly.

  "Well?" she said.

  "That's all."

  "It's so strange to think of you—troubled by such things. I didn't think—I don't know what I thought. Suddenly all this makes you human. Makes you real."

  "But don't you see how I must stand to you? Don't you see how it bars us from being lovers—You can't—at first. You must think it over. It's all outside the world of your experience."

  "I don't think it makes a rap of difference, except for one thing. I love you more. I've wanted you—always. I didn't dream, not even in my wildest dreaming, that—you might have any need of me."

  He made a little noise in his throat as if something had cried out within him, and for a time they were both too full for speech.

  They were going up the slope into Waterloo Station.

  "You go home and think of all this," he said, "and talk about it to-morrow. Don't, don't say anything now, not anything. As for loving you, I do. I do—with all my heart. It's no good hiding it any more. I could never have talked to you like this, forgetting everything that parts us, forgetting even your age, if I did not love you utterly. If I were a clean, free man—We'll have to talk of all these things. Thank goodness there's plenty of opportunity! And we two can talk. Anyhow, now you've begun it, there's nothing to keep us in all this from being the best friends in the world. And talking of every conceivable thing. Is there?"

  "Nothing," said Ann Veronica, with a radiant face.

  "Before this there was a sort of restraint—a make-believe. It's gone."

  "It's gone."

  "Friendship and love being separate things. And that confounded engagement!"

  "Gone!"

  They came upon a platform, and stood before her compartment.

  He took her hand and looked into her eyes and spoke, divided against himself, in a voice that was forced and insincere.

  "I shall be very glad to have you for a friend," he said, "loving friend. I had never dreamed of such a friend as you."

  She smiled, sure of herself beyond any pretending, into his troubled eyes. Hadn't they settled that already?

  "I want you as a friend," he persisted, almost as if he disputed something.

  Part 5

  The next morning she waited in the laboratory at the lunch-hour in the reasonable certainty that he would come to her.

  "Well, you have thought it over?" he said, sitting down beside her.

  "I've been thinking of you all night," she answered.

  "Well?"

  "I don't care a rap for all these things."

  He said nothing for a space.

  "I don't see there's any getting away from the fact that you and I love each other," he said, slowly. "So far you've got me and I you.... You've got me. I'm like a creature just wakened up. My eyes are open to you. I keep on thinking of you. I keep on thinking of little details and aspects of your voice, your eyes, the way you walk, the way your hair goes back from the side of your forehead. I believe I have always been in love with you. Always. Before ever I knew you."

  She sat motionless, with her hand tightening over the edge of the table, and he, too, said no more. She began to tremble violently.

  He stood up abruptly and went to the window.

  "We have," he said, "to be the utmost friends."

  She stood up and held her arms toward him. "I want you to kiss me," she said.

  He gripped the window-sill behind him.

  "If I do," he said.... "No! I want to do without that. I want to do without that for a time. I want to give you time to think. I am a man—of a sort of experience. You are a girl with very little. Just sit down on that stool again and let's talk of this in cold blood. People of your sort—I don't want the instincts to—to rush our situation. Are you sure what it is you want of me?"

  "I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want to give myself to you. I want to be whatever I can to you." She paused for a moment. "Is that plain?" she asked.

  "If I didn't love you better than myself," said Capes, "I wouldn't fence like this with you.

  "I am convinced you haven't thought this out," he went on. "You do not know what such a relation means. We are in love. Our heads swim with the thought of being together. But what can we do? Here am I, fixed to respectability and this laboratory; you're living at home. It means... just furtive meetings."

  "I don't care how we meet," she said.

  "It will spoil your life."

  "It will make it. I want you. I am clear I want you. You are different from all the world for me. You can think all round me. You are the one person I can understand and feel—feel right with. I don't idealize you. Don't imagine that. It isn't because you're good, but because I may be rotten bad; and there's something—something living and understanding in you. Something that is born anew each time we meet, and pines when we are separated. You see, I'm selfish. I'm rather scornful. I think too much about myself. You're the only person I've really given good, straight, unselfish thought to. I'm making a mess of my life—unless you come in and take it. I am. In you—if you can love me—there is salvation. Salvation. I know what I am doing better than you do. Think—think of that engagement!"

  Their talk had come to eloquent silences that contradicted all he had to say.

  She stood up before him, smiling faintly.

  "I think we've exhausted this discussion," she said.

  "I think we have," he answered, gravely, and took her in his arms, and smoothed her hair from her forehead, and very tenderly kissed her lips.

  Part 6

  They spent the next Sunday in Richmond Pa
rk, and mingled the happy sensation of being together uninterruptedly through the long sunshine of a summer's day with the ample discussion of their position. "This has all the clean freshness of spring and youth," said Capes; "it is love with the down on; it is like the glitter of dew in the sunlight to be lovers such as we are, with no more than one warm kiss between us. I love everything to-day, and all of you, but I love this, this—this innocence upon us most of all.

  "You can't imagine," he said, "what a beastly thing a furtive love affair can be.

  "This isn't furtive," said Ann Veronica.

  "Not a bit of it. And we won't make it so.... We mustn't make it so."

  They loitered under trees, they sat on mossy banks they gossiped on friendly benches, they came back to lunch at the "Star and Garter," and talked their afternoon away in the garden that looks out upon the crescent of the river. They had a universe to talk about—two universes.

  "What are we going to do?" said Capes, with his eyes on the broad distances beyond the ribbon of the river.

  "I will do whatever you want," said Ann Veronica.

  "My first love was all blundering," said Capes.

  He thought for a moment, and went on: "Love is something that has to be taken care of. One has to be so careful.... It's a beautiful plant, but a tender one.... I didn't know. I've a dread of love dropping its petals, becoming mean and ugly. How can I tell you all I feel? I love you beyond measure. And I'm afraid.... I'm anxious, joyfully anxious, like a man when he has found a treasure."

  "YOU know," said Ann Veronica. "I just came to you and put myself in your hands."

  "That's why, in a way, I'm prudish. I've—dreads. I don't want to tear at you with hot, rough hands."

  "As you will, dear lover. But for me it doesn't matter. Nothing is wrong that you do. Nothing. I am quite clear about this. I know exactly what I am doing. I give myself to you."

  "God send you may never repent it!" cried Capes.

  She put her hand in his to be squeezed.

  "You see," he said, "it is doubtful if we can ever marry. Very doubtful. I have been thinking—I will go to my wife again. I will do my utmost. But for a long time, anyhow, we lovers have to be as if we were no more than friends."

  He paused. She answered slowly. "That is as you will," she said.

  "Why should it matter?" he said.

  And then, as she answered nothing, "Seeing that we are lovers."

  Part 7

  It was rather less than a week after that walk that Capes came and sat down beside Ann Veronica for their customary talk in the lunch hour. He took a handful of almonds and raisins that she held out to him—for both these young people had given up the practice of going out for luncheon—and kept her hand for a moment to kiss her finger-tips. He did not speak for a moment.

  "Well?" she said.

  "I say!" he said, without any movement. "Let's go."

  "Go!" She did not understand him at first, and then her heart began to beat very rapidly.

  "Stop this—this humbugging," he explained. "It's like the Picture and the Bust. I can't stand it. Let's go. Go off and live together—until we can marry. Dare you?"

  "Do you mean NOW?"

  "At the end of the session. It's the only clean way for us. Are you prepared to do it?"

  Her hands clenched. "Yes," she said, very faintly. And then: "Of course! Always. It is what I have wanted, what I have meant all along."

  She stared before her, trying to keep back a rush of tears.

  Capes kept obstinately stiff, and spoke between his teeth.

  "There's endless reasons, no doubt, why we shouldn't," he said. "Endless. It's wrong in the eyes of most people. For many of them it will smirch us forever.... You DO understand?"

  "Who cares for most people?" she said, not looking at him.

  "I do. It means social isolation—struggle."

  "If you dare—I dare," said Ann Veronica. "I was never so clear in all my life as I have been in this business." She lifted steadfast eyes to him. "Dare!" she said. The tears were welling over now, but her voice was steady. "You're not a man for me—not one of a sex, I mean. You're just a particular being with nothing else in the world to class with you. You are just necessary to life for me. I've never met any one like you. To have you is all important. Nothing else weighs against it. Morals only begin when that is settled. I sha'n't care a rap if we can never marry. I'm not a bit afraid of anything—scandal, difficulty, struggle.... I rather want them. I do want them."

  "You'll get them," he said. "This means a plunge."

  "Are you afraid?"

  "Only for you! Most of my income will vanish. Even unbelieving biological demonstrators must respect decorum; and besides, you see—you were a student. We shall have—hardly any money."

  "I don't care."

  "Hardship and danger."

  "With you!"

  "And as for your people?"

  "They don't count. That is the dreadful truth. This—all this swamps them. They don't count, and I don't care."

  Capes suddenly abandoned his attitude of meditative restraint. "By Jove!" he broke out, "one tries to take a serious, sober view. I don't quite know why. But this is a great lark, Ann Veronica! This turns life into a glorious adventure!"

  "Ah!" she cried in triumph.

  "I shall have to give up biology, anyhow. I've always had a sneaking desire for the writing-trade. That is what I must do. I can."

  "Of course you can."

  "And biology was beginning to bore me a bit. One research is very like another.... Latterly I've been doing things.... Creative work appeals to me wonderfully. Things seem to come rather easily.... But that, and that sort of thing, is just a day-dream. For a time I must do journalism and work hard.... What isn't a day-dream is this: that you and I are going to put an end to flummery—and go!"

  "Go!" said Ann Veronica, clenching her hands.

  "For better or worse."

  "For richer or poorer."

  She could not go on, for she was laughing and crying at the same time. "We were bound to do this when you kissed me," she sobbed through her tears. "We have been all this time—Only your queer code of honor—Honor! Once you begin with love you have to see it through."

  Chapter the Fifteenth — The Last Days at Home

  *

  Part 1

  They decided to go to Switzerland at the session's end. "We'll clean up everything tidy," said Capes....

  For her pride's sake, and to save herself from long day-dreams and an unappeasable longing for her lover, Ann Veronica worked hard at her biology during those closing weeks. She was, as Capes had said, a hard young woman. She was keenly resolved to do well in the school examination, and not to be drowned in the seas of emotion that threatened to submerge her intellectual being.

  Nevertheless, she could not prevent a rising excitement as the dawn of the new life drew near to her—a thrilling of the nerves, a secret and delicious exaltation above the common circumstances of existence. Sometimes her straying mind would become astonishingly active—embroidering bright and decorative things that she could say to Capes; sometimes it passed into a state of passive acquiescence, into a radiant, formless, golden joy. She was aware of people—her aunt, her father, her fellow-students, friends, and neighbors—moving about outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor is aware of the dim audience beyond the barrier of the footlights. They might applaud, or object, or interfere, but the drama was her very own. She was going through with that, anyhow.

  The feeling of last days grew stronger with her as their number diminished. She went about the familiar home with a clearer and clearer sense of inevitable conclusions. She became exceptionally considerate and affectionate with her father and aunt, and more and more concerned about the coming catastrophe that she was about to precipitate upon them. Her aunt had a once exasperating habit of interrupting her work with demands for small household services, but now Ann Veronica rendered them with a queer readiness of anticipatory propitiation.
She was greatly exercised by the problem of confiding in the Widgetts; they were dears, and she talked away two evenings with Constance without broaching the topic; she made some vague intimations in letters to Miss Miniver that Miss Miniver failed to mark. But she did not bother her head very much about her relations with these sympathizers.

  And at length her penultimate day in Morningside Park dawned for her. She got up early, and walked about the garden in the dewy June sunshine and revived her childhood. She was saying good-bye to childhood and home, and her making; she was going out into the great, multitudinous world; this time there would be no returning. She was at the end of girlhood and on the eve of a woman's crowning experience. She visited the corner that had been her own little garden—her forget-me-nots and candytuft had long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she visited the raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had been wont to read her secret letters. Here was the place behind the shed where she had used to hide from Roddy's persecutions, and here the border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems was fairyland. The back of the house had been the Alps for climbing, and the shrubs in front of it a Terai. The knots and broken pale that made the garden-fence scalable, and gave access to the fields behind, were still to be traced. And here against a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of God and wasps and her father, she had stolen plums; and once because of discovered misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother was dead, she had lain on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her soul in weeping.

  Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know the heart of that child again! That child had loved fairy princes with velvet suits and golden locks, and she was in love with a real man named Capes, with little gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant voice and firm and shapely hands. She was going to him soon and certainly, going to his strong, embracing arms. She was going through a new world with him side by side. She had been so busy with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it seemed, she had given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of her childhood. Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very distant, and she had come to say farewell to them across one sundering year.