Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
destitute of under-clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which
hardship a trousseau would certainly be “ripping,” marriage was an
experience to be strenuously evaded.
When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen and
Alice had cried.
“Ssh!” said her mother, and then added, “A little natural feeling,
dear.”
“But didn’t Alice want to marry Doctor Ralph?”
“Oh, ssh, Vee!” said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an
advertisement board. “I am sure she will be very happy indeed with
Doctor Ralph.”
But Ann Veronica was by no means sure of that until she went over
to Wamblesmith and saw her sister, very remote and domestic and
authoritative, in a becoming tea-gown, in command of Doctor Ralph’s
home. Doctor Ralph came in to tea and put his arm round Alice and kissed
her, and Alice called him “Squiggles,” and stood in the shelter of his
arms for a moment with an expression of satisfied proprietorship. She
HAD cried, Ann Veronica knew. There had been fusses and scenes dimly
apprehended through half-open doors. She had heard Alice talking and
crying at the same time, a painful noise. Perhaps marriage hurt. But now
it was all over, and Alice was getting on well. It reminded Ann Veronica
of having a tooth stopped.
And after that Alice became remoter than ever, and, after a time, ill.
Then she had a baby and became as old as any really grown-up person, or
older, and very dull. Then she and her husband went off to a Yorkshire
practice, and had four more babies, none of whom photographed well, and
so she passed beyond the sphere of Ann Veronica’s sympathies altogether.
Part 5
The Gwen affair happened when she was away at school at
Marticombe-on-Sea, a term before she went to the High School, and was
never very clear to her.
Her mother missed writing for a week, and then she wrote in an unusual
key. “My dear,” the letter ran, “I have to tell you that your sister
Gwen has offended your father very much. I hope you will always love
her, but I want you to remember she has offended your father and married
without his consent. Your father is very angry, and will not have her
name mentioned in his hearing. She has married some one he could not
approve of, and gone right away....”
When the next holidays came Ann Veronica’s mother was ill, and Gwen was
in the sick-room when Ann Veronica returned home. She was in one of her
old walking-dresses, her hair was done in an unfamiliar manner, she wore
a wedding-ring, and she looked as if she had been crying.
“Hello, Gwen!” said Ann Veronica, trying to put every one at their ease.
“Been and married?... What’s the name of the happy man?”
Gwen owned to “Fortescue.”
“Got a photograph of him or anything?” said Ann Veronica, after kissing
her mother.
Gwen made an inquiry, and, directed by Mrs. Stanley, produced a portrait
from its hiding-place in the jewel-drawer under the mirror. It presented
a clean-shaven face with a large Corinthian nose, hair tremendously
waving off the forehead and more chin and neck than is good for a man.
“LOOKS all right,” said Ann Veronica, regarding him with her head first
on one side and then on the other, and trying to be agreeable. “What’s
the objection?”
“I suppose she ought to know?” said Gwen to her mother, trying to alter
the key of the conversation.
“You see, Vee,” said Mrs. Stanley, “Mr. Fortescue is an actor, and your
father does not approve of the profession.”
“Oh!” said Ann Veronica. “I thought they made knights of actors?”
“They may of Hal some day,” said Gwen. “But it’s a long business.”
“I suppose this makes you an actress?” said Ann Veronica.
“I don’t know whether I shall go on,” said Gwen, a novel note of
languorous professionalism creeping into her voice. “The other women
don’t much like it if husband and wife work together, and I don’t think
Hal would like me to act away from him.”
Ann Veronica regarded her sister with a new respect, but the traditions
of family life are strong. “I don’t suppose you’ll be able to do it
much,” said Ann Veronica.
Later Gwen’s trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her illness
that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in the drawing-room,
and actually shake hands with him in an entirely hopeless manner and
hope everything would turn out for the best.
The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair, and
afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr. Fortescue
rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps, the Corinthian
nose upraised and his hands behind his back, pausing to look long and
hard at the fruit-trees against the wall.
Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after some
moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden in a reverse
direction to Mr. Fortescue’s steps, and encountered him with an air of
artless surprise.
“Hello!” said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless, breathless
manner. “You Mr. Fortescue?”
“At your service. You Ann Veronica?”
“Rather! I say--did you marry Gwen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy expression.
“I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica.”
“Rum,” said Ann Veronica. “Have you got to keep her now?”
“To the best of my ability,” said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.
“Have you much ability?” asked Ann Veronica.
Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its
reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions about
acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she beautiful enough
for it, and who would make her dresses, and so on.
As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep her
sister, and a little while after her mother’s death Ann Veronica
met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her father’s study,
shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful and resentful, and after
that Gwen receded from the Morningside Park world, and not even the
begging letters and distressful communications that her father and aunt
received, but only a vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of
incidental comment, flashes of paternal anger at “that blackguard,” came
to Ann Veronica’s ears.
Part 6
These were Ann Veronica’s leading cases in the question of marriage.
They were the only real marriages she had seen clearly. For the rest,
she derived her ideas of the married state from the observed behavior of
married women, which impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and
dull and inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a
remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had come to
think of all married people much as one thinks of insects that have
lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched creatures who had
scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a dim image of herself
cooped up in a house under the benevolent shadow of Mr. Manning.
Who knows?--on the analogy of “Squiggles” she might come to call him
“Mangles!”
“I don’t think I can ever marry any one,” she said, and fell suddenly
into another set of considerations that perplexed her for a time. Had
romance to be banished from life?...
It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so keenly
to go on with her University work in her life as she did that day. She
had never felt so acutely the desire for free initiative, for a life
unhampered by others. At any cost! Her brothers had it practically--at
least they had it far more than it seemed likely she would unless she
exerted herself with quite exceptional vigor. Between her and the fair,
far prospect of freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her
aunt and father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to
her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw them
over her directly her movements became in any manner truly free.
She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes, as
though she had just discovered herself for the first time--discovered
herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly among dangers, hindrances,
and perplexities, on the verge of a cardinal crisis.
The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and
heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by others, and
going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.
And in its way it was very well. Then suddenly with a rush came reality,
came “growing up”; a hasty imperative appeal for seriousness, for
supreme seriousness. The Ralphs and Mannings and Fortescues came down
upon the raw inexperience, upon the blinking ignorance of the newcomer;
and before her eyes were fairly open, before she knew what had
happened, a new set of guides and controls, a new set of obligations and
responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old. “I want to be
a Person,” said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky; “I will not
have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place.”
Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time when,
a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a gate between a
bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole wide stretch of country
between Chalking and Waldersham. Firstly, she did not intend to marry at
all, and particularly she did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly,
by some measure or other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at
the Tredgold Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was,
as an immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she
stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that night to
the Fadden Ball.
But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face. So far
she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that vitally important
matter. The whole of that relationship persisted in remaining obscure.
What would happen when next morning she returned to Morningside Park?
He couldn’t turn her out of doors. But what he could do or might do she
could not imagine. She was not afraid of violence, but she was afraid of
something mean, some secondary kind of force. Suppose he stopped all her
allowance, made it imperative that she should either stay ineffectually
resentful at home or earn a living for herself at once.... It
appeared highly probable to her that he would stop her allowance.
What can a girl do?
Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica’s speculations were interrupted
and turned aside by the approach of a horse and rider. Mr. Ramage, that
iron-gray man of the world, appeared dressed in a bowler hat and a suit
of hard gray, astride of a black horse. He pulled rein at the sight of
her, saluted, and regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes. The
girl’s gaze met his in interested inquiry.
“You’ve got my view,” he said, after a pensive second. “I always get off
here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so to-day?”
“It’s your gate,” she said, amiably; “you got it first. It’s for you to
say if I may sit on it.”
He slipped off the horse. “Let me introduce you to Caesar,” he said;
and she patted Caesar’s neck, and remarked how soft his nose was, and
secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth. Ramage tethered the
horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar blew heavily and began to
investigate the hedge.
Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica’s side, and for a moment
there was silence.
He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its
autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and village,
below.
“It’s as broad as life,” said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and putting a
well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.
Part 7
“And what are you doing here, young lady,” he said, looking up at her
face, “wandering alone so far from home?”