Ann Veronica (31 page)

"I wonder which of us enjoys that most," said Capes—"does he, or do
we?"

"He seems to get a zest—"

"He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These joyful bounds just
lace into the stuff of my memories and stay there forever. Living's just
material."

"It's very good to be alive."

"It's better to know life than be life."

"One may do both," said Ann Veronica.

She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, "Let's
go and see the wart-hog," she thought no one ever had had so quick a
flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns
was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she marvelled at his
practical omniscience.

Finally, at the exit into Regent's Park, they ran against Miss Klegg.
It was the expression of Miss Klegg's face that put the idea into Ann
Veronica's head of showing Manning at the College one day, an idea which
she didn't for some reason or other carry out for a fortnight.

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality in the
imagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of liberty and a remote
and quite abstracted person, and became suddenly and very disagreeably
the token of a large and portentous body visible and tangible.

Manning appeared just at the end of the afternoon's work, and the
biologist was going through some perplexities the Scotchman had created
by a metaphysical treatment of the skulls of Hyrax and a young African
elephant. He was clearing up these difficulties by tracing a partially
obliterated suture the Scotchman had overlooked when the door from the
passage opened, and Manning came into his universe.

Seen down the length of the laboratory, Manning looked a very handsome
and shapely gentleman indeed, and, at the sight of his eager advance to
his fiancee, Miss Klegg replaced one long-cherished romance about Ann
Veronica by one more normal and simple. He carried a cane and a silk
hat with a mourning-band in one gray-gloved hand; his frock-coat and
trousers were admirable; his handsome face, his black mustache, his
prominent brow conveyed an eager solicitude.

"I want," he said, with a white hand outstretched, "to take you out to
tea."

"I've been clearing up," said Ann Veronica, brightly.

"All your dreadful scientific things?" he said, with a smile that Miss
Klegg thought extraordinarily kindly.

"All my dreadful scientific things," said Ann Veronica.

He stood back, smiling with an air of proprietorship, and looking about
him at the business-like equipment of the room. The low ceiling made him
seem abnormally tall. Ann Veronica wiped a scalpel, put a card over a
watch-glass containing thin shreds of embryonic guinea-pig swimming in
mauve stain, and dismantled her microscope.

"I wish I understood more of biology," said Manning.

"I'm ready," said Ann Veronica, closing her microscope-box with a click,
and looking for one brief instant up the laboratory. "We have no airs
and graces here, and my hat hangs from a peg in the passage."

She led the way to the door, and Manning passed behind her and round her
and opened the door for her. When Capes glanced up at them for a moment,
Manning seemed to be holding his arms all about her, and there was
nothing but quiet acquiescence in her bearing.

After Capes had finished the Scotchman's troubles he went back into the
preparation-room. He sat down on the sill of the open window, folded his
arms, and stared straight before him for a long time over the wilderness
of tiles and chimney-pots into a sky that was blue and empty. He was not
addicted to monologue, and the only audible comment he permitted himself
at first upon a universe that was evidently anything but satisfactory to
him that afternoon, was one compact and entirely unassigned "Damn!"

The word must have had some gratifying quality, because he repeated
it. Then he stood up and repeated it again. "The fool I have been!" he
cried; and now speech was coming to him. He tried this sentence with
expletives. "Ass!" he went on, still warming. "Muck-headed moral ass! I
ought to have done anything.

"I ought to have done anything!

"What's a man for?

"Friendship!"

He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate thrusting it through
the window. He turned his back on that temptation. Then suddenly he
seized a new preparation bottle that stood upon his table and contained
the better part of a week's work—a displayed dissection of a snail,
beautifully done—and hurled it across the room, to smash resoundingly
upon the cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either haste
or pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-agents and sent them to
mingle with the debris on the floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes.
"H'm!" he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage. "Silly!" he
remarked after a pause. "One hardly knows—all the time."

He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puckered to a whistle, and he
went to the door of the outer preparation-room and stood there, looking,
save for the faintest intensification of his natural ruddiness, the
embodiment of blond serenity.

"Gellett," he called, "just come and clear up a mess, will you? I've
smashed some things."

There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica's arrangements for
self-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage. He hung over her—he and his
loan to her and his connection with her and that terrible evening—a
vague, disconcerting possibility of annoyance and exposure. She could
not see any relief from this anxiety except repayment, and repayment
seemed impossible. The raising of twenty-five pounds was a task
altogether beyond her powers. Her birthday was four months away, and
that, at its extremist point, might give her another five pounds.

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

It added greatly to the annoyance of the situation that she had twice
seen Ramage in the Avenue since her return to the shelter of her
father's roof. He had saluted her with elaborate civility, his eyes
distended with indecipherable meanings.

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

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

"It makes me feel," he said, "that nothing is impossible—to have you
here beside me. I said, that day at Surbiton, 'There's many good things
in life, but there's only one best, and that's the wild-haired girl
who'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 full
of deep feeling.

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

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

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

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

"It would astonish that man with the barrow."

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

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

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

He beamed upon her.

"I don't think you realize," Ann Veronica began again, "that I am rather
a 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't
affect 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 the
faults. They're just a joyous softening of the outline—more beautiful
than perfection. Like the flaws of an old marble. If you talk of your
faults, 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. When
I 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 it
yet. 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." She
stopped short, full of things un-said. Pretty! Ten thousand days, ten
thousand 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 that
bothers 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 went
on: "I want to be your city of refuge from every sort of bother. I want
to stand between you and all the force and vileness of the world. I want
to make you feel that here is a place where the crowd does not clamor
nor 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 be
beaten gold just in order to make it a fitting setting for yours. There
you will be, in an inner temple. I want to enrich it with hangings and
gladden it with verses. I want to fill it with fine and precious things.
And by degrees, perhaps, that maiden distrust of yours that makes you
shrink from my kisses, will vanish.... Forgive me if a certain
warmth creeps into my words! The Park is green and gray to-day, but I am
glowing pink and gold.... It is difficult to express these things."

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

The particulars of her engagement were very clear in her memory. She had
taken care he should have this momentous talk with her on a garden-seat
commanded 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 little
elaborately. She plucked at the knots of her racket and heard him to the
end, 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 plain
with 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 might
be very good indeed with his kindliness and sacrifice about her. She
thought of him as always courteous and helpful, as realizing, indeed,
his ideal of protection and service, as chivalrously leaving her free to
live her own life, rejoicing with an infinite generosity in every detail
of her irresponsive being. She twanged the catgut under her fingers.

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

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

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

"No."

"It seems so—so unworthy"—she picked among her phrases "of the noble
love 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?"