Ann Veronica (24 page)

Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover a flushed and dishevelled
disorder. She began at once a hasty readjustment of her hair, while
Ramage parleyed with inaudible interrogations. "A glass slipped from the
table," he explained.... "Non. Fas du tout. Non.... Niente.... Bitte!...
Oui, dans la note.... Presently. Presently." That conversation ended and
he turned to her again.

"I am going," she said grimly, with three hairpins in her mouth.

She took her hat from the peg in the corner and began to put it on. He
regarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful eyes.

"Look here, Ann Veronica," he began. "I want a plain word with you about
all this. Do you mean to tell me you didn't understand why I wanted you
to come here?"

"Not a bit of it," said Ann Veronica stoutly.

"You didn't expect that I should kiss you?"

"How was I to know that a man would—would think it was possible—when
there was nothing—no love?"

"How did I know there wasn't love?"

That silenced her for a moment. "And what on earth," he said, "do you
think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been doing things
for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you one of the members
of that great white sisterhood that takes and does not give? The good
accepting woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to live at
free quarters on any man she meets without giving any return?"

"I thought," said Ann Veronica, "you were my friend."

"Friend! What have a man and a girl in common to make them friends? Ask
that lover of yours! And even with friends, would you have it all Give
on one side and all Take on the other?... Does HE know I keep you?...
You won't have a man's lips near you, but you'll eat out of his hand
fast enough."

Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.

"Mr. Ramage," she cried, "you are outrageous! You understand nothing.
You are—horrible. Will you let me go out of this room?"

"No," cried Ramage; "hear me out! I'll have that satisfaction, anyhow.
You women, with your tricks of evasion, you're a sex of swindlers.
You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites. You make yourself
charming for help. You climb by disappointing men. This lover of
yours—"

"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.

"Well, you know."

Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of weeping
broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, "You know as well as I do
that money was a loan!"

"Loan!"

"You yourself called it a loan!"

"Euphuism. We both understood that."

"You shall have every penny of it back."

"I'll frame it—when I get it."

"I'll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an hour."

"You'll never pay me. You think you will. It's your way of glossing over
the ethical position. It's the sort of way a woman always does gloss
over her ethical positions. You're all dependents—all of you. By
instinct. Only you good ones—shirk. You shirk a straightforward and
decent return for what you get from us—taking refuge in purity and
delicacy and such-like when it comes to payment."

"Mr. Ramage," said Ann Veronica, "I want to go—NOW!"

But she did not get away just then.

Ramage's bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. "Oh,
Ann Veronica!" he cried, "I cannot let you go like this! You don't
understand. You can't possibly understand!"

He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory apology for
his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad
to have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming and
senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly became
eloquent and plausible. He did make her perceive something of the acute,
tormenting desire for her that had arisen in him and possessed him.
She stood, as it were, directed doorward, with her eyes watching every
movement, listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.

At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an
ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all
her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be
free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate
predisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earned
and won and controlled and compelled.

He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship as
though it had never been even a disguise between them, as though
from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quite
understandingly upon their relationship. He had set out to win her, and
she had let him start. And at the thought of that other lover—he was
convinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself
unable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, the
person she loved, did not even know of her love—Ramage grew angry
and savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do
services for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such
was the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left
that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.

That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred another
man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that made her
denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And this though he
was evidently passionately in love with her.

For a while he threatened her. "You have put all your life in my hands,"
he declared. "Think of that check you endorsed. There it is—against
you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you think people will make
of that? What will this lover of yours make of that?"

At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying resolve
to repay him at any cost, and made short movements doorward.

But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door. She
emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-lit
landing. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiously
preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of the
Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, past a tall
porter in blue and crimson, into a cool, clear night.

When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nerve
in her body was quivering with shame and self-disgust.

She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.

"And now," she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into
indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what am I
to do?

"I'm in a hole!—mess is a better word, expresses it better. I'm in a
mess—a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!

"Do you hear, Ann Veronica?—you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable
mess!

"Haven't I just made a silly mess of things?

"Forty pounds! I haven't got twenty!"

She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering the
lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.

"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I'm
beginning to have my doubts about freedom!

"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! The
smeariness of the thing!

"The smeariness of this sort of thing!... Mauled about!"

She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her
hand. "Ugh!" she said.

"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort of
scrape! At least—one thinks so.... I wonder if some of them did—and
it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of
them didn't, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still and
straight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should.
And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. They
knew they were all Bogey in disguise. I didn't! I didn't! After all—"

For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive restraints
as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed
cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and
refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the
brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost
paradise.

"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said. "I
wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and
white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he have
dared?..."

For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly
disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated
desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously—to be, in
effect, prim.

Horrible details recurred to her.

"Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his
neck—deliberately to hurt him?"

She tried to sound the humorous note.

"Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that gentleman?"

Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.

"You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Cad!... Why
aren't you folded up clean in lavender—as every young woman ought to
be? What have you been doing with yourself?..."

She raked into the fire with the poker.

"All of which doesn't help me in the slightest degree to pay back that
money."

That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever
spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she went
to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more
she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her
self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became
unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered
abuse of herself—usually until she hit against some article of
furniture.

Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, "Now
look here! Let me think it all out!"

For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman's
position in the world—the meagre realities of such freedom as it
permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man
under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had
flung away from her father's support with the finest assumption of
personal independence. And here she was—in a mess because it had
been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had
thought—What had she thought? That this dependence of women was but
an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it
with vigor, and here she was!

She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her
insoluble individual problem again: "What am I to do?"

She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage's
face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of how
such a sum could be made good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and
desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.

She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithets
for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window at
a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the
edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going home? No alternative
appeared in that darkness.

It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself beaten.
She did most urgently desire to save her face in Morningside Park, and
for long hours she could think of no way of putting it that would not be
in the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.

"I'd rather go as a chorus-girl," she said.

She was not very clear about the position and duties of a chorus-girl,
but it certainly had the air of being a last desperate resort.
There sprang from that a vague hope that perhaps she might extort a
capitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and then
with overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever happened she
would never be able to tell her father about her debt. The completest
capitulation would not wipe out that trouble. And she felt that if she
went home it was imperative to pay. She would always be going to and fro
up the Avenue, getting glimpses of Ramage, seeing him in trains....

For a time she promenaded the room.

"Why did I ever take that loan? An idiot girl in an asylum would have
known better than that!

"Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind—the worst of all conceivable
combinations. I wish some one would kill Ramage by accident!...

"But then they would find that check endorsed in his bureau....

"I wonder what he will do?" She tried to imagine situations that might
arise out of Ramage's antagonism, for he had been so bitter and savage
that she could not believe that he would leave things as they were.

The next morning she went out with her post-office savings bank-book,
and telegraphed for a warrant to draw out all the money she had in the
world. It amounted to two-and-twenty pounds. She addressed an envelope
to Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, "The rest shall
follow." The money would be available in the afternoon, and she would
send him four five-pound notes. The rest she meant to keep for
her immediate necessities. A little relieved by this step toward
reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College to forget her muddle
of problems for a time, if she could, in the presence of Capes.

For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue. Her
sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an hour
or so the work distracted her altogether from her troubles.

Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it came to
her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediate
collapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps
she would never set eyes on him again. After that consolations fled.