Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
I seen your father so moved. ‘Oh! little Vee!’ he cried, ‘little Vee!’
and put his face between his hands and sat still for a long time before
he broke out again.”
Ann Veronica had remained standing while her aunt spoke.
“Do you mean, aunt,” she asked, “that my father thought I had gone
off--with some man?”
“What else COULD he think? Would any one DREAM you would be so mad as to
go off alone?”
“After--after what had happened the night before?”
“Oh, why raise up old scores? If you could see him this morning, his
poor face as white as a sheet and all cut about with shaving! He was
for coming up by the very first train and looking for you, but I said to
him, ‘Wait for the letters,’ and there, sure enough, was yours. He could
hardly open the envelope, he trembled so. Then he threw the letter at
me. ‘Go and fetch her home,’ he said; ‘it isn’t what we thought! It’s
just a practical joke of hers.’ And with that he went off to the City,
stern and silent, leaving his bacon on his plate--a great slice of bacon
hardly touched. No breakfast, he’s had no dinner, hardly a mouthful of
soup--since yesterday at tea.”
She stopped. Aunt and niece regarded each other silently.
“You must come home to him at once,” said Miss Stanley.
Ann Veronica looked down at her fingers on the claret-colored
table-cloth. Her aunt had summoned up an altogether too vivid picture
of her father as the masterful man, overbearing, emphatic, sentimental,
noisy, aimless. Why on earth couldn’t he leave her to grow in her own
way? Her pride rose at the bare thought of return.
“I don’t think I CAN do that,” she said. She looked up and said, a
little breathlessly, “I’m sorry, aunt, but I don’t think I can.”
Part 2
Then it was the expostulations really began.
From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt expostulated for about
two hours. “But, my dear,” she began, “it is Impossible! It is quite out
of the Question. You simply can’t.” And to that, through vast rhetorical
meanderings, she clung. It reached her only slowly that Ann Veronica was
standing to her resolution. “How will you live?” she appealed. “Think
of what people will say!” That became a refrain. “Think of what Lady
Palsworthy will say! Think of what”--So-and-so--“will say! What are we
to tell people?
“Besides, what am I to tell your father?”
At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica that she would
refuse to return home; she had had some dream of a capitulation that
should leave her an enlarged and defined freedom, but as her aunt put
this aspect and that of her flight to her, as she wandered illogically
and inconsistently from one urgent consideration to another, as she
mingled assurances and aspects and emotions, it became clearer and
clearer to the girl that there could be little or no change in the
position of things if she returned. “And what will Mr. Manning think?”
said her aunt.
“I don’t care what any one thinks,” said Ann Veronica.
“I can’t imagine what has come over you,” said her aunt. “I can’t
conceive what you want. You foolish girl!”
Ann Veronica took that in silence. At the back of her mind, dim and yet
disconcerting, was the perception that she herself did not know what she
wanted. And yet she knew it was not fair to call her a foolish girl.
“Don’t you care for Mr. Manning?” said her aunt.
“I don’t see what he has to do with my coming to London?”
“He--he worships the ground you tread on. You don’t deserve it, but he
does. Or at least he did the day before yesterday. And here you are!”
Her aunt opened all the fingers of her gloved hand in a rhetorical
gesture. “It seems to me all madness--madness! Just because your
father--wouldn’t let you disobey him!”
Part 3
In the afternoon the task of expostulation was taken up by Mr. Stanley
in person. Her father’s ideas of expostulation were a little harsh and
forcible, and over the claret-colored table-cloth and under the gas
chandelier, with his hat and umbrella between them like the mace in
Parliament, he and his daughter contrived to have a violent quarrel. She
had intended to be quietly dignified, but he was in a smouldering rage
from the beginning, and began by assuming, which alone was more than
flesh and blood could stand, that the insurrection was over and that she
was coming home submissively. In his desire to be emphatic and to avenge
himself for his over-night distresses, he speedily became brutal, more
brutal than she had ever known him before.
“A nice time of anxiety you’ve given me, young lady,” he said, as he
entered the room. “I hope you’re satisfied.”
She was frightened--his anger always did frighten her--and in her
resolve to conceal her fright she carried a queen-like dignity to what
she felt even at the time was a preposterous pitch. She said she hoped
she had not distressed him by the course she had felt obliged to take,
and he told her not to be a fool. She tried to keep her side up by
declaring that he had put her into an impossible position, and he
replied by shouting, “Nonsense! Nonsense! Any father in my place would
have done what I did.”
Then he went on to say: “Well, you’ve had your little adventure, and I
hope now you’ve had enough of it. So go up-stairs and get your things
together while I look out for a hansom.”
To which the only possible reply seemed to be, “I’m not coming home.”
“Not coming home!”
“No!” And, in spite of her resolve to be a Person, Ann Veronica began
to weep with terror at herself. Apparently she was always doomed to weep
when she talked to her father. But he was always forcing her to say and
do such unexpectedly conclusive things. She feared he might take her
tears as a sign of weakness. So she said: “I won’t come home. I’d rather
starve!”
For a moment the conversation hung upon that declaration. Then Mr.
Stanley, putting his hands on the table in the manner rather of a
barrister than a solicitor, and regarding her balefully through his
glasses with quite undisguised animosity, asked, “And may I presume to
inquire, then, what you mean to do?--how do you propose to live?”
“I shall live,” sobbed Ann Veronica. “You needn’t be anxious about that!
I shall contrive to live.”
“But I AM anxious,” said Mr. Stanley, “I am anxious. Do you think it’s
nothing to me to have my daughter running about London looking for odd
jobs and disgracing herself?”
“Sha’n’t get odd jobs,” said Ann Veronica, wiping her eyes.
And from that point they went on to a thoroughly embittering wrangle.
Mr. Stanley used his authority, and commanded Ann Veronica to come home,
to which, of course, she said she wouldn’t; and then he warned her not
to defy him, warned her very solemnly, and then commanded her again.
He then said that if she would not obey him in this course she should
“never darken his doors again,” and was, indeed, frightfully abusive.
This threat terrified Ann Veronica so much that she declared with sobs
and vehemence that she would never come home again, and for a time both
talked at once and very wildly. He asked her whether she understood what
she was saying, and went on to say still more precisely that she should
never touch a penny of his money until she came home again--not one
penny. Ann Veronica said she didn’t care.
Then abruptly Mr. Stanley changed his key. “You poor child!” he said;
“don’t you see the infinite folly of these proceedings? Think! Think of
the love and affection you abandon! Think of your aunt, a second mother
to you. Think if your own mother was alive!”
He paused, deeply moved.
“If my own mother was alive,” sobbed Ann Veronica, “she would
understand.”
The talk became more and more inconclusive and exhausting. Ann Veronica
found herself incompetent, undignified, and detestable, holding on
desperately to a hardening antagonism to her father, quarrelling with
him, wrangling with him, thinking of repartees--almost as if he was a
brother. It was horrible, but what could she do? She meant to live
her own life, and he meant, with contempt and insults, to prevent her.
Anything else that was said she now regarded only as an aspect of or
diversion from that.
In the retrospect she was amazed to think how things had gone to pieces,
for at the outset she had been quite prepared to go home again upon
terms. While waiting for his coming she had stated her present
and future relations with him with what had seemed to her the most
satisfactory lucidity and completeness. She had looked forward to an
explanation. Instead had come this storm, this shouting, this weeping,
this confusion of threats and irrelevant appeals. It was not only that
her father had said all sorts of inconsistent and unreasonable things,
but that by some incomprehensible infection she herself had replied in
the same vein. He had assumed that her leaving home was the point at
issue, that everything turned on that, and that the sole alternative was
obedience, and she had fallen in with that assumption until rebellion
seemed a sacred principle. Moreover, atrociously and inexorably, he
allowed it to appear ever and again in horrible gleams that he suspected
there was some man in the case.... Some man!
And to conclude it all was the figure of her father in the doorway,
giving her a last chance, his hat in one hand, his umbrella in the
other, shaken at her to emphasize his point.
“You understand, then,” he was saying, “you understand?”
“I understand,” said Ann Veronica, tear-wet and flushed with a
reciprocal passion, but standing up to him with an equality that amazed
even herself, “I understand.” She controlled a sob. “Not a penny--not
one penny--and never darken your doors again!”
Part 4
The next day her aunt came again and expostulated, and was just saying
it was “an unheard-of thing” for a girl to leave her home as Ann
Veronica had done, when her father arrived, and was shown in by the
pleasant-faced landlady.
Her father had determined on a new line. He put down his hat and
umbrella, rested his hands on his hips, and regarded Ann Veronica
firmly.
“Now,” he said, quietly, “it’s time we stopped this nonsense.”
Ann Veronica was about to reply, when he went on, with a still more
deadly quiet: “I am not here to bandy words with you. Let us have no
more of this humbug. You are to come home.”
“I thought I explained--”
“I don’t think you can have heard me,” said her father; “I have told you
to come home.”
“I thought I explained--”
“Come home!”
Ann Veronica shrugged her shoulders.
“Very well,” said her father.
“I think this ends the business,” he said, turning to his sister.
“It’s not for us to supplicate any more. She must learn wisdom--as God
pleases.”
“But, my dear Peter!” said Miss Stanley.
“No,” said her brother, conclusively, “it’s not for a parent to go on
persuading a child.”
Miss Stanley rose and regarded Ann Veronica fixedly. The girl stood with
her hands behind her back, sulky, resolute, and intelligent, a strand
of her black hair over one eye and looking more than usually
delicate-featured, and more than ever like an obdurate child.
“She doesn’t know.”
“She does.”
“I can’t imagine what makes you fly out against everything like this,”
said Miss Stanley to her niece.
“What is the good of talking?” said her brother. “She must go her own
way. A man’s children nowadays are not his own. That’s the fact of the
matter. Their minds are turned against him.... Rubbishy novels and
pernicious rascals. We can’t even protect them from themselves.”
An immense gulf seemed to open between father and daughter as he said
these words.
“I don’t see,” gasped Ann Veronica, “why parents and children...
shouldn’t be friends.”
“Friends!” said her father. “When we see you going through disobedience
to the devil! Come, Molly, she must go her own way. I’ve tried to use my