Ann Veronica (33 page)

"But—"

The long inconsecutive conversation by that time was getting on her
nerves. "When one wants a thing more than anything else in the world,"
she said with outrageous frankness, "one naturally wishes one had it."

She shocked him by that. She shattered the edifice he was building up
of himself as a devoted lover, waiting only his chance to win her from a
hopeless and consuming passion.

"Mr. Manning," she said, "I warned you not to idealize me. Men ought not
to idealize any woman. We aren't worth it. We've done nothing to deserve
it. And it hampers us. You don't know the thoughts we have; the things
we can do and say. You are a sisterless man; you have never heard the
ordinary talk that goes on at a girls' boarding-school."

"Oh! but you ARE splendid and open and fearless! As if I couldn't allow!
What are all these little things? Nothing! Nothing! You can't sully
yourself. You can't! I tell you frankly you may break off your
engagement to me—I shall hold myself still engaged to you, yours just
the same. As for this infatuation—it's like some obsession, some
magic thing laid upon you. It's not you—not a bit. It's a thing that's
happened to you. It is like some accident. I don't care. In a sense I
don't care. It makes no difference.... All the same, I wish I had
that fellow by the throat! Just the virile, unregenerate man in me
wishes that....

"I suppose I should let go if I had.

"You know," he went on, "this doesn't seem to me to end anything.

"I'm rather a persistent person. I'm the sort of dog, if you turn it out
of the room it lies down on the mat at the door. I'm not a lovesick
boy. I'm a man, and I know what I mean. It's a tremendous blow, of
course—but it doesn't kill me. And the situation it makes!—the
situation!"

Thus Manning, egotistical, inconsecutive, unreal. And Ann Veronica
walked beside him, trying in vain to soften her heart to him by the
thought of how she had ill-used him, and all the time, as her feet and
mind grew weary together, rejoicing more and more that at the cost
of this one interminable walk she escaped the prospect of—what was
it?—"Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights" in his company. Whatever
happened she need never return to that possibility.

"For me," Manning went on, "this isn't final. In a sense it alters
nothing. I shall still wear your favor—even if it is a stolen and
forbidden favor—in my casque.... I shall still believe in you. Trust
you."

He repeated several times that he would trust her, though it remained
obscure just exactly where the trust came in.

"Look here," he cried out of a silence, with a sudden flash of
understanding, "did you mean to throw me over when you came out with me
this afternoon?"

Ann Veronica hesitated, and with a startled mind realized the truth.
"No," she answered, reluctantly.

"Very well," said Manning. "Then I don't take this as final. That's all.
I've bored you or something.... You think you love this other man! No
doubt you do love him. Before you have lived—"

He became darkly prophetic. He thrust out a rhetorical hand.

"I will MAKE you love me! Until he has faded—faded into a memory..."

He saw her into the train at Waterloo, and stood, a tall, grave figure,
with hat upraised, as the carriage moved forward slowly and hid him.
Ann Veronica sat back with a sigh of relief. Manning might go on now
idealizing her as much as he liked. She was no longer a confederate in
that. He might go on as the devoted lover until he tired. She had done
forever with the Age of Chivalry, and her own base adaptations of its
traditions to the compromising life. She was honest again.

But when she turned her thoughts to Morningside Park she perceived the
tangled skein of life was now to be further complicated by his romantic
importunity.

Spring had held back that year until the dawn of May, and then spring
and summer came with a rush together. Two days after this conversation
between Manning and Ann Veronica, Capes came into the laboratory at
lunch-time and found her alone there standing by the open window, and
not even pretending to be doing anything.

He came in with his hands in his trousers pockets and a general air
of depression in his bearing. He was engaged in detesting Manning and
himself in almost equal measure. His face brightened at the sight of
her, and he came toward her.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Ann Veronica, and stared over her shoulder out of the
window.

"So am I.... Lassitude?"

"I suppose so."

"
I
can't work."

"Nor I," said Ann Veronica.

Pause.

"It's the spring," he said. "It's the warming up of the year, the coming
of the light mornings, the way in which everything begins to run about
and begin new things. Work becomes distasteful; one thinks of holidays.
This year—I've got it badly. I want to get away. I've never wanted to
get away so much."

"Where do you go?"

"Oh!—Alps."

"Climbing?"

"Yes."

"That's rather a fine sort of holiday!"

He made no answer for three or four seconds.

"Yes," he said, "I want to get away. I feel at moments as though I could
bolt for it.... Silly, isn't it? Undisciplined."

He went to the window and fidgeted with the blind, looking out to where
the tree-tops of Regent's Park showed distantly over the houses. He
turned round toward her and found her looking at him and standing very
still.

"It's the stir of spring," he said.

"I believe it is."

She glanced out of the window, and the distant trees were a froth of
hard spring green and almond blossom. She formed a wild resolution,
and, lest she should waver from it, she set about at once to realize it.
"I've broken off my engagement," she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and
found her heart thumping in her neck. He moved slightly, and she
went on, with a slight catching of her breath: "It's a bother and
disturbance, but you see—" She had to go through with it now, because
she could think of nothing but her preconceived words. Her voice was
weak and flat.

"I've fallen in love."

He never helped her by a sound.

"I—I didn't love the man I was engaged to," she said. She met his eyes
for a moment, and could not interpret their expression. They struck her
as cold and indifferent.

Her heart failed her and her resolution became water. She remained
standing stiffly, unable even to move. She could not look at him through
an interval that seemed to her a vast gulf of time. But she felt his lax
figure become rigid.

At last his voice came to release her tension.

"I thought you weren't keeping up to the mark. You—It's jolly of you to
confide in me. Still—" Then, with incredible and obviously deliberate
stupidity, and a voice as flat as her own, he asked, "Who is the man?"

Her spirit raged within her at the dumbness, the paralysis that had
fallen upon her. Grace, confidence, the power of movement even, seemed
gone from her. A fever of shame ran through her being. Horrible doubts
assailed her. She sat down awkwardly and helplessly on one of the little
stools by her table and covered her face with her hands.

"Can't you SEE how things are?" she said.

Before Capes could answer her in any way the door at the end of the
laboratory opened noisily and Miss Klegg appeared. She went to her own
table and sat down. At the sound of the door Ann Veronica uncovered
a tearless face, and with one swift movement assumed a conversational
attitude. Things hung for a moment in an awkward silence.

"You see," said Ann Veronica, staring before her at the window-sash,
"that's the form my question takes at the present time."

Capes had not quite the same power of recovery. He stood with his
hands in his pockets looking at Miss Klegg's back. His face was white.
"It's—it's a difficult question." He appeared to be paralyzed by
abstruse acoustic calculations. Then, very awkwardly, he took a stool
and placed it at the end of Ann Veronica's table, and sat down. He
glanced at Miss Klegg again, and spoke quickly and furtively, with eager
eyes on Ann Veronica's face.

"I had a faint idea once that things were as you say they are, but the
affair of the ring—of the unexpected ring—puzzled me. Wish SHE"—he
indicated Miss Klegg's back with a nod—"was at the bottom of the
sea.... I would like to talk to you about this—soon. If you don't think
it would be a social outrage, perhaps I might walk with you to your
railway station."

"I will wait," said Ann Veronica, still not looking at him, "and we will
go into Regent's Park. No—you shall come with me to Waterloo."

"Right!" he said, and hesitated, and then got up and went into the
preparation-room.

For a time they walked in silence through the back streets that lead
southward from the College. Capes bore a face of infinite perplexity.

"The thing I feel most disposed to say, Miss Stanley," he began at last,
"is that this is very sudden."

"It's been coming on since first I came into the laboratory."

"What do you want?" he asked, bluntly.

"You!" said Ann Veronica.

The sense of publicity, of people coming and going about them, kept
them both unemotional. And neither had any of that theatricality which
demands gestures and facial expression.

"I suppose you know I like you tremendously?" he pursued.

"You told me that in the Zoological Gardens."

She found her muscles a-tremble. But there was nothing in her bearing
that a passer-by would have noted, to tell of the excitement that
possessed her.

"I"—he seemed to have a difficulty with the word—"I love you. I've
told you that practically already. But I can give it its name now. You
needn't be in any doubt about it. I tell you that because it puts us on
a footing...."

They went on for a time without another word.

"But don't you know about me?" he said at last.

"Something. Not much."

"I'm a married man. And my wife won't live with me for reasons that I
think most women would consider sound.... Or I should have made love
to you long ago."

There came a silence again.

"I don't care," said Ann Veronica.

"But if you knew anything of that—"

"I did. It doesn't matter."

"Why did you tell me? I thought—I thought we were going to be friends."

He was suddenly resentful. He seemed to charge her with the ruin of
their situation. "Why on earth did you TELL me?" he cried.

"I couldn't help it. It was an impulse. I HAD to."

"But it changes things. I thought you understood."

"I had to," she repeated. "I was sick of the make-believe. I don't care!
I'm glad I did. I'm glad I did."

"Look here!" said Capes, "what on earth do you want? What do you think
we can do? Don't you know what men are, and what life is?—to come to me
and talk to me like this!"

"I know—something, anyhow. But I don't care; I haven't a spark of
shame. I don't see any good in life if it hasn't got you in it. I wanted
you to know. And now you know. And the fences are down for good. You
can't look me in the eyes and say you don't care for me."

"I've told you," he said.

"Very well," said Ann Veronica, with an air of concluding the
discussion.

They walked side by side for a time.

"In that laboratory one gets to disregard these passions," began Capes.
"Men are curious animals, with a trick of falling in love readily
with girls about your age. One has to train one's self not to. I've
accustomed myself to think of you—as if you were like every other
girl who works at the schools—as something quite outside these
possibilities. If only out of loyalty to co-education one has to do
that. Apart from everything else, this meeting of ours is a breach of a
good rule."

"Rules are for every day," said Ann Veronica. "This is not every day.
This is something above all rules."

"For you."

"Not for you?"

"No. No; I'm going to stick to the rules.... It's odd, but nothing
but cliche seems to meet this case. You've placed me in a very
exceptional position, Miss Stanley." The note of his own voice
exasperated him. "Oh, damn!" he said.

She made no answer, and for a time he debated some problems with
himself.

"No!" he said aloud at last.

"The plain common-sense of the case," he said, "is that we can't
possibly be lovers in the ordinary sense. That, I think, is manifest.
You know, I've done no work at all this afternoon. I've been smoking
cigarettes in the preparation-room and thinking this out. We can't be
lovers in the ordinary sense, but we can be great and intimate friends."

"We are," said Ann Veronica.

"You've interested me enormously...."

He paused with a sense of ineptitude. "I want to be your friend," he
said. "I said that at the Zoo, and I mean it. Let us be friends—as near
and close as friends can be."

Ann Veronica gave him a pallid profile.

"What is the good of pretending?" she said.

"We don't pretend."

"We do. Love is one thing and friendship quite another. Because I'm
younger than you.... I've got imagination.... I know what I am
talking about. Mr. Capes, do you think... do you think I don't know
the meaning of love?"

Capes made no answer for a time.

"My mind is full of confused stuff," he said at length. "I've been
thinking—all the afternoon. Oh, and weeks and months of thought and
feeling there are bottled up too.... I feel a mixture of beast and
uncle. I feel like a fraudulent trustee. Every rule is against me—Why
did I let you begin this? I might have told—"

"I don't see that you could help—"

"I might have helped—"