Ann Veronica (35 page)

"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."

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."

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.

She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the eggs:
and then she went off to catch the train before her father's. She did
this to please him. He hated travelling second-class with her—indeed,
he never did—but he also disliked travelling in the same train when his
daughter was in an inferior class, because of the look of the thing.
So he liked to go by a different train. And in the Avenue she had an
encounter with Ramage.

It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable
impressions in her mind. She was aware of him—a silk-hatted,
shiny-black figure on the opposite side of the Avenue; and then,
abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and spoke to
her.

"I MUST speak to you," he said. "I can't keep away from you."

She made some inane response. She was struck by a change in his
appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost
something of its ruddy freshness.

He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they reached the
station, and left her puzzled at its drift and meaning. She quickened
her pace, and so did he, talking at her slightly averted ear. She made
lumpish and inadequate interruptions rather than replies. At times he
seemed to be claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her
with her check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible
will, and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted. He said that
his life was boring and stupid without her. Something or other—she
did not catch what—he was damned if he could stand. He was evidently
nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his projecting eyes sought
to dominate. The crowning aspect of the incident, for her mind, was the
discovery that he and her indiscretion with him no longer mattered very
much. Its importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise.
Even her debt to him was a triviality now.

And of course! She had a brilliant idea. It surprised her she hadn't
thought of it before! She tried to explain that she was going to pay
him forty pounds without fail next week. She said as much to him. She
repeated this breathlessly.

"I was glad you did not send it back again," he said.

He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself vainly
trying to explain—the inexplicable. "It's because I mean to send it
back altogether," she said.

He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line of his
own.

"Here we are, living in the same suburb," he began. "We have to
be—modern."

Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase. That knot also
would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial as
chipped flint.

In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering flowers for the
dinner-table, her father came strolling across the lawn toward her with
an affectation of great deliberation.

"I want to speak to you about a little thing, Vee," said Mr. Stanley.

Ann Veronica's tense nerves started, and she stood still with her eyes
upon him, wondering what it might be that impended.

"You were talking to that fellow Ramage to-day—in the Avenue. Walking
to the station with him."

So that was it!

"He came and talked to me."

"Ye—e—es." Mr. Stanley considered. "Well, I don't want you to talk to
him," he said, very firmly.

Ann Veronica paused before she answered. "Don't you think I ought to?"
she asked, very submissively.

"No." Mr. Stanley coughed and faced toward the house. "He is not—I
don't like him. I think it inadvisable—I don't want an intimacy to
spring up between you and a man of that type."

Ann Veronica reflected. "I HAVE—had one or two talks with him, daddy."

"Don't let there be any more. I—In fact, I dislike him extremely."

"Suppose he comes and talks to me?"

"A girl can always keep a man at a distance if she cares to do it.
She—She can snub him."

Ann Veronica picked a cornflower.

"I wouldn't make this objection," Mr. Stanley went on, "but there are
things—there are stories about Ramage. He's—He lives in a world of
possibilities outside your imagination. His treatment of his wife
is most unsatisfactory. Most unsatisfactory. A bad man, in fact. A
dissipated, loose-living man."

"I'll try not to see him again," said Ann Veronica. "I didn't know you
objected to him, daddy."

"Strongly," said Mr. Stanley, "very strongly."

The conversation hung. Ann Veronica wondered what her father would do if
she were to tell him the full story of her relations with Ramage.

"A man like that taints a girl by looking at her, by his mere
conversation." He adjusted his glasses on his nose. There was another
little thing he had to say. "One has to be so careful of one's friends
and acquaintances," he remarked, by way of transition. "They mould one
insensibly." His voice assumed an easy detached tone. "I suppose, Vee,
you don't see much of those Widgetts now?"