Ann Veronica Read online

  "Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the garden," said Mr. Manning, "they're a dream." And Ann Veronica found herself being carried off to an isolation even remoter and more conspicuous than the corner of the lawn, with the whole of the party aiding and abetting and glancing at them. "Damn!" said Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself for a conflict.

  Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar admission from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of beauty. He said that for him beauty justified life, that he could not imagine a good action that was not a beautiful one nor any beautiful thing that could be altogether bad. Ann Veronica hazarded an opinion that as a matter of history some very beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent, been bad, but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they were really beautiful or when they were beautiful bad. Ann Veronica found her attention wandering a little as he told her that he was not ashamed to feel almost slavish in the presence of really beautiful people, and then they came to the Michaelmas daisies. They were really very fine and abundant, with a blaze of perennial sunflowers behind them.

  "They make me want to shout," said Mr. Manning, with a sweep of the arm.

  "They're very good this year," said Ann Veronica, avoiding controversial matter.

  "Either I want to shout," said Mr. Manning, "when I see beautiful things, or else I want to weep." He paused and looked at her, and said, with a sudden drop into a confidential undertone, "Or else I want to pray."

  "When is Michaelmas Day?" said Ann Veronica, a little abruptly.

  "Heaven knows!" said Mr. Manning; and added, "the twenty-ninth."

  "I thought it was earlier," said Ann Veronica. "Wasn't Parliament to reassemble?"

  He put out his hand and leaned against a tree and crossed his legs. "You're not interested in politics?" he asked, almost with a note of protest.

  "Well, rather," said Ann Veronica. "It seems—It's interesting."

  "Do you think so? I find my interest in that sort of thing decline and decline."

  "I'm curious. Perhaps because I don't know. I suppose an intelligent person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs. They concern us all."

  "I wonder," said Mr. Manning, with a baffling smile.

  "I think they do. After all, they're history in the making."

  "A sort of history," said Mr. Manning; and repeated, "a sort of history. But look at these glorious daisies!"

  "But don't you think political questions ARE important?"

  "I don't think they are this afternoon, and I don't think they are to you."

  Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced toward the house with an air of a duty completed.

  "Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look down the other path; there's a vista of just the common sort. Better even than these."

  Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.

  "You know I'm old-fashioned, Miss Stanley. I don't think women need to trouble about political questions."

  "I want a vote," said Ann Veronica.

  "Really!" said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his hand to the alley of mauve and purple. "I wish you didn't."

  "Why not?" She turned on him.

  "It jars. It jars with all my ideas. Women to me are something so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics are by their very nature ugly. You see, I—I am a woman worshipper. I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope to worship. Long ago. And—the idea of committees, of hustings, of agenda-papers!"

  "I don't see why the responsibility of beauty should all be shifted on to the women," said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering a part of Miss Miniver's discourse.

  "It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who are queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE can't. We can't afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our Saint Catherines, our Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and fairy princesses, into a sort of man. Womanhood is sacred to me. My politics in that matter wouldn't be to give women votes. I'm a Socialist, Miss Stanley."

  "WHAT?" said Ann Veronica, startled.

  "A Socialist of the order of John Ruskin. Indeed I am! I would make this country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and women in it should be the Queen. They should never come into contact with politics or economics—or any of those things. And we men would work for them and serve them in loyal fealty."

  "That's rather the theory now," said Ann Veronica. "Only so many men neglect their duties."

  "Yes," said Mr. Manning, with an air of emerging from an elaborate demonstration, "and so each of us must, under existing conditions, being chivalrous indeed to all women, choose for himself his own particular and worshipful queen."

  "So far as one can judge from the system in practice," said Ann Veronica, speaking in a loud, common-sense, detached tone, and beginning to walk slowly but resolutely toward the lawn, "it doesn't work."

  "Every one must be experimental," said Mr. Manning, and glanced round hastily for further horticultural points of interest in secluded corners. None presented themselves to save him from that return.

  "That's all very well when one isn't the material experimented upon," Ann Veronica had remarked.

  "Women would—they DO have far more power than they think, as influences, as inspirations."

  Ann Veronica said nothing in answer to that.

  "You say you want a vote," said Mr. Manning, abruptly.

  "I think I ought to have one."

  "Well, I have two," said Mr. Manning—"one in Oxford University and one in Kensington." He caught up and went on with a sort of clumsiness: "Let me present you with them and be your voter."

  There followed an instant's pause, and then Ann Veronica had decided to misunderstand.

  "I want a vote for myself," she said. "I don't see why I should take it second-hand. Though it's very kind of you. And rather unscrupulous. Have you ever voted, Mr. Manning? I suppose there's a sort of place like a ticket-office. And a ballot-box—" Her face assumed an expression of intellectual conflict. "What is a ballot-box like, exactly?" she asked, as though it was very important to her.

  Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked his mustache. "A ballot-box, you know," he said, "is very largely just a box." He made quite a long pause, and went on, with a sigh: "You have a voting paper given you—"

  They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.

  "Yes," said Ann Veronica, "yes," to his explanation, and saw across the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of them staring frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they talked.

  Chapter the Third — The Morning of the Crisis

  *

  Part 1

  Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden Dance. It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was complicated in Ann Veronica's mind by the fact that a letter lay on the breakfast-table from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt focussed a brightly tactful disregard upon this throughout the meal. Ann Veronica had come down thinking of nothing in the world but her inflexible resolution to go to the dance in the teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning's handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its import appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair altogether. With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened color she finished her breakfast.

  She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the College had not settled down for the session. She was supposed to be reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one, she resumed the reading of Mr. Manning's letter.

  Mr. Manning's handwriting had an
air of being clear without being easily legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of definition about the letters and a disposition to treat the large ones as liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all amounting to the same thing really—a years-smoothed boyish rather than an adult hand. And it filled seven sheets of notepaper, each written only on one side.

  "MY DEAR MISS STANLEY," it began,—"I hope you will forgive my bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much over our conversation at Lady Palsworthy's, and I feel there are things I want to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we meet again. It is the worst of talk under such social circumstances that it is always getting cut off so soon as it is beginning; and I went home that afternoon feeling I had said nothing—literally nothing—of the things I had meant to say to you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home vexed and disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by writing a few verses. I wonder if you will mind very much when I tell you they were suggested by you. You must forgive the poet's license I take. Here is one verse. The metrical irregularity is intentional, because I want, as it were, to put you apart: to change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak of you.

  "'A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY

  "'Saintly white and a lily is Mary,

  Margaret's violets, sweet and shy;

  Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,

  Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen's eye.

  Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,

  Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;

  But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,

  She gleams and gladdens, she warms—and goes.'

  "Crude, I admit. But let that verse tell my secret. All bad verse—originally the epigram was Lang's, I believe—is written in a state of emotion.

  "My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon of work and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the time resenting it beyond measure. There we were discussing whether you should have a vote, and I remembered the last occasion we met it was about your prospects of success in the medical profession or as a Government official such as a number of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.' I wanted, as I have never wanted before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry you off and set you apart from all the strain and turmoil of life. For nothing will ever convince me that it is not the man's share in life to shield, to protect, to lead and toil and watch and battle with the world at large. I want to be your knight, your servant, your protector, your—I dare scarcely write the word—your husband. So I come suppliant. I am five-and-thirty, and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the quality of life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the Upper Division—I was third on a list of forty-seven—and since then I have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening sphere of social service. Before I met you I never met any one whom I felt I could love, but you have discovered depths in my own nature I had scarcely suspected. Except for a few early ebullitions of passion, natural to a warm and romantic disposition, and leaving no harmful after-effects—ebullitions that by the standards of the higher truth I feel no one can justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no means ashamed—I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you. In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life of wide and generous refinement, travel, books, discussion, and easy relations with a circle of clever and brilliant and thoughtful people with whom my literary work has brought me into contact, and of which, seeing me only as you have done alone in Morningside Park, you can have no idea. I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic, and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs, artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together in the easiest and most delightful intercourse. That is my real milieu, and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in.

  "I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many things I want to tell you, and they stand on such different levels, that the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant, and I find myself doubting if I am really giving you the thread of emotion that should run through all this letter. For although I must confess it reads very much like an application or a testimonial or some such thing as that, I can assure you I am writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart. My mind is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and accumulating—dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching quietly together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music and all that side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and shining in some brilliant throng—mine; of your looking at flowers in some old-world garden, our garden—there are splendid places to be got down in Surrey, and a little runabout motor is quite within my means. You know they say, as, indeed, I have just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written in a state of emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad offers of marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning. And how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated desires of what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly sixteen months of letting my mind run on you—ever since that jolly party at Surbiton, where we raced and beat the other boat. You steered and I rowed stroke. My very sentences stumble and give way. But I do not even care if I am absurd. I am a resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I have got it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have wanted you. It isn't the same thing. I am afraid because I love you, so that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not love you so much I believe I could win you by sheer force of character, for people tell me I am naturally of the dominating type. Most of my successes in life have been made with a sort of reckless vigor.

  "Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and baldly. But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of getting what I have to say better said. It would be easy enough for me to write an eloquent letter about something else. Only I do not care to write about anything else. Let me put the main question to you now that I could not put the other afternoon. Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?

  "Very sincerely yours,

  "HUBERT MANNING."

  Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave, attentive eyes.

  Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared. Twice she smiled, but not unkindly. Then she went back and mixed up the sheets in a search for particular passages. Finally she fell into reflection.

  "Odd!" she said. "I suppose I shall have to write an answer. It's so different from what one has been led to expect."

  She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the greenhouse, advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from among the raspberry canes.

  "No you don't!" said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and business-like pace toward the house.

  "I'm going for a long tramp, auntie," she said.

  "Alone, dear?"

  "Yes, aunt. I've got a lot of things to think about."

  Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house. She thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and self-confident. She ought to be softened and tender and confidential at this phase of her life. She seemed to have no idea whatever of the emotional states that were becoming to her age and position. Miss Stanley walked round the garden thinking, and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann Veronica's slamming of the front door.

  "I wonder!" said Miss Stanley.

  For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as though they offered an explanation. Then she went in and up-stairs, hesitated on the landing, and finally, a little breathless and with an air of great dignity, opened the door and walked into
Ann Veronica's room. It was a neat, efficient-looking room, with a writing-table placed with a business-like regard to the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a pig's skull, a dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of shiny, black-covered note-books. In the corner of the room were two hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann Veronica, by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities in art. But Miss Stanley took no notice of these things. She walked straight across to the wardrobe and opened it. There, hanging among Ann Veronica's more normal clothing, was a skimpy dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap and tawdry braid, and short—it could hardly reach below the knee. On the same peg and evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave jacket. And then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.

  Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of the constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.

  The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt. As she raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy crimson masses.

  "TROUSERS!" she whispered.

  Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very chairs.

  Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye. She walked over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and stooped to examine them. They were ingenious disguises of gilt paper destructively gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas' best dancing-slippers.

  Then she reverted to the trousers.

  "How CAN I tell him?" whispered Miss Stanley.

  Part 2

  Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick. She walked with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the proletarian portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these fields came into a pretty overhung lane that led toward Caddington and the Downs. And then her pace slackened. She tucked her stick under her arm and re-read Manning's letter.