Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
“She must,” said Mr. Stanley, and went into his study. His sister
followed. “She can’t go now. She’ll have to wait for dinner,” he said,
uncomfortably.
“She’s going to have some sort of meal with the Widgetts down the
Avenue, and go up with them.
“She told you that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“At tea.”
“But why didn’t you prohibit once for all the whole thing? How dared she
tell you that?”
“Out of defiance. She just sat and told me that was her arrangement.
I’ve never seen her quite so sure of herself.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘My dear Veronica! how can you think of such things?’”
“And then?”
“She had two more cups of tea and some cake, and told me of her walk.”
“She’ll meet somebody one of these days--walking about like that.”
“She didn’t say she’d met any one.”
“But didn’t you say some more about that ball?”
“I said everything I could say as soon as I realized she was trying to
avoid the topic. I said, ‘It is no use your telling me about this walk
and pretend I’ve been told about the ball, because you haven’t. Your
father has forbidden you to go!’”
“Well?”
“She said, ‘I hate being horrid to you and father, but I feel it my duty
to go to that ball!’”
“Felt it her duty!”
“‘Very well,’ I said, ‘then I wash my hands of the whole business. Your
disobedience be upon your own head.’”
“But that is flat rebellion!” said Mr. Stanley, standing on the
hearthrug with his back to the unlit gas-fire. “You ought at once--you
ought at once to have told her that. What duty does a girl owe to any
one before her father? Obedience to him, that is surely the first law.
What CAN she put before that?” His voice began to rise. “One would think
I had said nothing about the matter. One would think I had agreed to
her going. I suppose this is what she learns in her infernal London
colleges. I suppose this is the sort of damned rubbish--”
“Oh! Ssh, Peter!” cried Miss Stanley.
He stopped abruptly. In the pause a door could be heard opening and
closing on the landing up-stairs. Then light footsteps became audible,
descending the staircase with a certain deliberation and a faint rustle
of skirts.
“Tell her,” said Mr. Stanley, with an imperious gesture, “to come in
here.”
Part 2
Miss Stanley emerged from the study and stood watching Ann Veronica
descend.
The girl was flushed with excitement, bright-eyed, and braced for a
struggle; her aunt had never seen her looking so fine or so pretty.
Her fancy dress, save for the green-gray stockings, the pseudo-Turkish
slippers, and baggy silk trousered ends natural to a Corsair’s bride,
was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded opera-cloak. Beneath the hood
it was evident that her rebellious hair was bound up with red silk, and
fastened by some device in her ears (unless she had them pierced, which
was too dreadful a thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree earrings.
“I’m just off, aunt,” said Ann Veronica.
“Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to you.”
Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open doorway and regarded
her father’s stern presence. She spoke with an entirely false note of
cheerful off-handedness. “I’m just in time to say good-bye before I go,
father. I’m going up to London with the Widgetts to that ball.”
“Now look here, Ann Veronica,” said Mr. Stanley, “just a moment. You are
NOT going to that ball!”
Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.
“I thought we had discussed that, father.”
“You are not going to that ball! You are not going out of this house in
that get-up!”
Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him, as she would treat
any man, with an insistence upon her due of masculine respect. “You
see,” she said, very gently, “I AM going. I am sorry to seem to disobey
you, but I am. I wish”--she found she had embarked on a bad sentence--“I
wish we needn’t have quarrelled.”
She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the front door. In a
moment he was beside her. “I don’t think you can have heard me, Vee,”
he said, with intensely controlled fury. “I said you were”--he
shouted--“NOT TO GO!”
She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a princess. She tossed
her head, and, having no further words, moved toward the door. Her
father intercepted her, and for a moment she and he struggled with their
hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed their faces. “Let go!” she
gasped at him, a blaze of anger.
“Veronica!” cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and, “Peter!”
For a moment they seemed on the verge of an altogether desperate
scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two since
long ago he had, in spite of her mother’s protest in the background,
carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for some forgotten
crime. With something near to horror they found themselves thus
confronted.
The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an inside key, to
which at night a chain and two bolts were added. Carefully abstaining
from thrusting against each other, Ann Veronica and her father began an
absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open the door, the other to keep
it fastened. She seized the key, and he grasped her hand and squeezed
it roughly and painfully between the handle and the ward as she tried to
turn it. His grip twisted her wrist. She cried out with the pain of it.
A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over her. Her spirit
awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins, to the immense undignified
disaster that had come to them.
Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled up-stairs.
She made noises between weeping and laughter as she went. She gained her
room, and slammed her door and locked it as though she feared violence
and pursuit.
“Oh God!” she cried, “Oh God!” and flung aside her opera-cloak, and for
a time walked about the room--a Corsair’s bride at a crisis of emotion.
“Why can’t he reason with me,” she said, again and again, “instead of
doing this?”
Part 3
There presently came a phase in which she said: “I WON’T stand it even
now. I will go to-night.”
She went as far as her door, then turned to the window. She opened
this and scrambled out--a thing she had not done for five long years of
adolescence--upon the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the
first floor. Once upon a time she and Roddy had descended thence by the
drain-pipe.
But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short skirts are not
things to be done by a young lady of twenty-one in fancy dress and
an opera-cloak, and just as she was coming unaided to an adequate
realization of this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the wholesale druggist,
who lived three gardens away, and who had been mowing his lawn to get
an appetite for dinner, standing in a fascinated attitude beside the
forgotten lawn-mower and watching her intently.
She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of quiet correctitude
into her return through the window, and when she was safely inside she
waved clinched fists and executed a noiseless dance of rage.
When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew Mr. Ramage, and might
describe the affair to him, she cried “Oh!” with renewed vexation, and
repeated some steps of her dance in a new and more ecstatic measure.
Part 4
At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann Veronica’s bedroom
door.
“I’ve brought you up some dinner, Vee,” she said.
Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room staring at the
ceiling. She reflected before answering. She was frightfully hungry.
She had eaten little or no tea, and her mid-day meal had been worse than
nothing.
She got up and unlocked the door.
Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war, or the industrial
system or casual wards, or flogging of criminals or the Congo Free
State, because none of these things really got hold of her imagination;
but she did object, she did not like, she could not bear to think of
people not having and enjoying their meals. It was her distinctive test
of an emotional state, its interference with a kindly normal digestion.
Any one very badly moved choked down a few mouthfuls; the symptom of
supreme distress was not to be able to touch a bit. So that the thought
of Ann Veronica up-stairs had been extremely painful for her through all
the silent dinner-time that night. As soon as dinner was over she went
into the kitchen and devoted herself to compiling a tray--not a tray
merely of half-cooled dinner things, but a specially prepared “nice”
tray, suitable for tempting any one. With this she now entered.
Ann Veronica found herself in the presence of the most disconcerting
fact in human experience, the kindliness of people you believe to be
thoroughly wrong. She took the tray with both hands, gulped, and gave
way to tears.
Her aunt leaped unhappily to the thought of penitence.
“My dear,” she began, with an affectionate hand on Ann Veronica’s
shoulder, “I do SO wish you would realize how it grieves your father.”
Ann Veronica flung away from her hand, and the pepper-pot on the tray
upset, sending a puff of pepper into the air and instantly filling them
both with an intense desire to sneeze.
“I don’t think you see,” she replied, with tears on her cheeks, and her
brows knitting, “how it shames and, ah!--disgraces me--AH TISHU!”
She put down the tray with a concussion on her toilet-table.
“But, dear, think! He is your father. SHOOH!”
“That’s no reason,” said Ann Veronica, speaking through her handkerchief
and stopping abruptly.
Niece and aunt regarded each other for a moment over their
pocket-handkerchiefs with watery but antagonistic eyes, each far too
profoundly moved to see the absurdity of the position.
“I hope,” said Miss Stanley, with dignity, and turned doorward with
features in civil warfare. “Better state of mind,” she gasped....
Ann Veronica stood in the twilight room staring at the door that had
slammed upon her aunt, her pocket-handkerchief rolled tightly in her
hand. Her soul was full of the sense of disaster. She had made her first
fight for dignity and freedom as a grown-up and independent Person, and
this was how the universe had treated her. It had neither succumbed
to her nor wrathfully overwhelmed her. It had thrust her back with an
undignified scuffle, with vulgar comedy, with an unendurable, scornful
grin.
“By God!” said Ann Veronica for the first time in her life. “But I will!
I will!”
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE FLIGHT TO LONDON
Part 1
Ann Veronica had an impression that she did not sleep at all that night,
and at any rate she got through an immense amount of feverish feeling
and thinking.
What was she going to do?
One main idea possessed her: she must get away from home, she must
assert herself at once or perish. “Very well,” she would say, “then I
must go.” To remain, she felt, was to concede everything. And she would
have to go to-morrow. It was clear it must be to-morrow. If she delayed
a day she would delay two days, if she delayed two days she would delay
a week, and after a week things would be adjusted to submission forever.
“I’ll go,” she vowed to the night, “or I’ll die!” She made plans and
estimated means and resources. These and her general preparations had
perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold watch, a very good gold
watch that had been her mother’s, a pearl necklace that was also pretty
good, some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few other such
inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen shillings unspent of her
dress and book allowance and a few good salable books. So equipped, she
proposed to set up a separate establishment in the world.
And then she would find work.
For most of a long and fluctuating night she was fairly confident that