Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
authority. And she defies me. What more is there to be said? She defies
me!”
It was extraordinary. Ann Veronica felt suddenly an effect of tremendous
pathos; she would have given anything to have been able to frame and
make some appeal, some utterance that should bridge this bottomless
chasm that had opened between her and her father, and she could find
nothing whatever to say that was in the least sincere and appealing.
“Father,” she cried, “I have to live!”
He misunderstood her. “That,” he said, grimly, with his hand on the
door-handle, “must be your own affair, unless you choose to live at
Morningside Park.”
Miss Stanley turned to her. “Vee,” she said, “come home. Before it is
too late.”
“Come, Molly,” said Mr. Stanley, at the door.
“Vee!” said Miss Stanley, “you hear what your father says!”
Miss Stanley struggled with emotion. She made a curious movement toward
her niece, then suddenly, convulsively, she dabbed down something lumpy
on the table and turned to follow her brother. Ann Veronica stared for a
moment in amazement at this dark-green object that clashed as it was
put down. It was a purse. She made a step forward. “Aunt!” she said, “I
can’t--”
Then she caught a wild appeal in her aunt’s blue eye, halted, and the
door clicked upon them.
There was a pause, and then the front door slammed....
Ann Veronica realized that she was alone with the world. And this time
the departure had a tremendous effect of finality. She had to resist an
impulse of sheer terror, to run out after them and give in.
“Gods,” she said, at last, “I’ve done it this time!”
“Well!” She took up the neat morocco purse, opened it, and examined the
contents.
It contained three sovereigns, six and fourpence, two postage stamps, a
small key, and her aunt’s return half ticket to Morningside Park.
Part 5
After the interview Ann Veronica considered herself formally cut off
from home. If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had.
Nevertheless there came a residuum of expostulations. Her brother Roddy,
who was in the motor line, came to expostulate; her sister Alice wrote.
And Mr. Manning called.
Her sister Alice seemed to have developed a religious sense away there
in Yorkshire, and made appeals that had no meaning for Ann Veronica’s
mind. She exhorted Ann Veronica not to become one of “those unsexed
intellectuals, neither man nor woman.”
Ann Veronica meditated over that phrase. “That’s HIM,” said Ann
Veronica, in sound, idiomatic English. “Poor old Alice!”
Her brother Roddy came to her and demanded tea, and asked her to state
a case. “Bit thick on the old man, isn’t it?” said Roddy, who had
developed a bluff, straightforward style in the motor shop.
“Mind my smoking?” said Roddy. “I don’t see quite what your game is,
Vee, but I suppose you’ve got a game on somewhere.
“Rummy lot we are!” said Roddy. “Alice--Alice gone dotty, and all over
kids. Gwen--I saw Gwen the other day, and the paint’s thicker than ever.
Jim is up to the neck in Mahatmas and Theosophy and Higher Thought and
rot--writes letters worse than Alice. And now YOU’RE on the war-path. I
believe I’m the only sane member of the family left. The G.V.’s as mad
as any of you, in spite of all his respectability; not a bit of him
straight anywhere, not one bit.”
“Straight?”
“Not a bit of it! He’s been out after eight per cent. since the
beginning. Eight per cent.! He’ll come a cropper one of these days,
if you ask me. He’s been near it once or twice already. That’s got his
nerves to rags. I suppose we’re all human beings really, but what price
the sacred Institution of the Family! Us as a bundle! Eh?... I don’t
half disagree with you, Vee, really; only thing is, I don’t see
how you’re going to pull it off. A home MAY be a sort of cage, but
still--it’s a home. Gives you a right to hang on to the old man until he
busts--practically. Jolly hard life for a girl, getting a living. Not MY
affair.”
He asked questions and listened to her views for a time.
“I’d chuck this lark right off if I were you, Vee,” he said. “I’m five
years older than you, and no end wiser, being a man. What you’re after
is too risky. It’s a damned hard thing to do. It’s all very handsome
starting out on your own, but it’s too damned hard. That’s my opinion,
if you ask me. There’s nothing a girl can do that isn’t sweated to the
bone. You square the G.V., and go home before you have to. That’s my
advice. If you don’t eat humble-pie now you may live to fare worse
later. _I_ can’t help you a cent. Life’s hard enough nowadays for an
unprotected male. Let alone a girl. You got to take the world as it is,
and the only possible trade for a girl that isn’t sweated is to get hold
of a man and make him do it for her. It’s no good flying out at that,
Vee; _I_ didn’t arrange it. It’s Providence. That’s how things are;
that’s the order of the world. Like appendicitis. It isn’t pretty, but
we’re made so. Rot, no doubt; but we can’t alter it. You go home and
live on the G.V., and get some other man to live on as soon as possible.
It isn’t sentiment but it’s horse sense. All this Woman-who-Diddery--no
damn good. After all, old P.--Providence, I mean--HAS arranged it so
that men will keep you, more or less. He made the universe on those
lines. You’ve got to take what you can get.”
That was the quintessence of her brother Roddy.
He played variations on this theme for the better part of an hour.
“You go home,” he said, at parting; “you go home. It’s all very fine and
all that, Vee, this freedom, but it isn’t going to work. The world isn’t
ready for girls to start out on their own yet; that’s the plain fact of
the case. Babies and females have got to keep hold of somebody or go
under--anyhow, for the next few generations. You go home and wait a
century, Vee, and then try again. Then you may have a bit of a chance.
Now you haven’t the ghost of one--not if you play the game fair.”
Part 6
It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely Mr. Manning, in his
entirely different dialect, indorsed her brother Roddy’s view of things.
He came along, he said, just to call, with large, loud apologies,
radiantly kind and good. Miss Stanley, it was manifest, had given him
Ann Veronica’s address. The kindly faced landlady had failed to catch
his name, and said he was a tall, handsome gentleman with a great black
mustache. Ann Veronica, with a sigh at the cost of hospitality, made a
hasty negotiation for an extra tea and for a fire in the ground-floor
apartment, and preened herself carefully for the interview. In the
little apartment, under the gas chandelier, his inches and his stoop
were certainly very effective. In the bad light he looked at once
military and sentimental and studious, like one of Ouida’s guardsmen
revised by Mr. Haldane and the London School of Economics and finished
in the Keltic school.
“It’s unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley,” he said, shaking hands
in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; “but you know you said we might
be friends.”
“It’s dreadful for you to be here,” he said, indicating the yellow
presence of the first fog of the year without, “but your aunt told me
something of what had happened. It’s just like your Splendid Pride to do
it. Quite!”
He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the
extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and expressed
himself, looking very earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and
carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann Veronica
sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite unconsciously, the air of an
expert hostess.
“But how is it all going to end?” said Mr. Manning.
“Your father, of course,” he said, “must come to realize just how
Splendid you are! He doesn’t understand. I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t
a bit understand. _I_ didn’t understand before that letter. It makes me
want to be just everything I CAN be to you. You’re like some splendid
Princess in Exile in these Dreadful Dingy apartments!”
“I’m afraid I’m anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a
salary,” said Ann Veronica. “But frankly, I mean to fight this through
if I possibly can.”
“My God!” said Manning, in a stage-aside. “Earning a salary!”
“You’re like a Princess in Exile!” he repeated, overruling her. “You
come into these sordid surroundings--you mustn’t mind my calling them
sordid--and it makes them seem as though they didn’t matter.... I
don’t think they do matter. I don’t think any surroundings could throw a
shadow on you.”
Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. “Won’t you have some more tea,
Mr. Manning?” she asked.
“You know--,” said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without answering
her question, “when I hear you talk of earning a living, it’s as if I
heard of an archangel going on the Stock Exchange--or Christ selling
doves.... Forgive my daring. I couldn’t help the thought.”
“It’s a very good image,” said Ann Veronica.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr.
Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but does it
correspond with the realities? Are women truly such angelic things and
men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to make us Queens and
Goddesses, but in practice--well, look, for example, at the stream of
girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and
underfed! They aren’t queens, and no one is treating them as queens.
And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings.... I was
looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves--the women I saw. Worse
than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it
another dreadful dingy woman--another fallen queen, I suppose--dingier
than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!”
“I know,” said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.
“And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety, their
limitations, their swarms of children!”
Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from him with
the rump of his fourth piece of cake. “I know that our social order is
dreadful enough,” he said, “and sacrifices all that is best and most
beautiful in life. I don’t defend it.”
“And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens,” Ann Veronica went
on, “there’s twenty-one and a half million women to twenty million men.
Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that leaves over a million
shrines short, not reckoning widows who re-marry. And more boys die than
girls, so that the real disproportion among adults is even greater.”
“I know,” said Mr Manning, “I know these Dreadful Statistics. I know
there’s a sort of right in your impatience at the slowness of Progress.
But tell me one thing I don’t understand--tell me one thing: How can you
help it by coming down into the battle and the mire? That’s the thing
that concerns me.”
“Oh, I’m not trying to help it,” said Ann Veronica. “I’m only arguing
against your position of what a woman should be, and trying to get
it clear in my own mind. I’m in this apartment and looking for work
because--Well, what else can I do, when my father practically locks me
up?”
“I know,” said Mr. Manning, “I know. Don’t think I can’t sympathize and
understand. Still, here we are in this dingy, foggy city. Ye gods! what
a wilderness it is! Every one trying to get the better of every one,
every one regardless of every one--it’s one of those days when every one
bumps against you--every one pouring coal smoke into the air and making
confusion worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and smelling,
a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman at the corner
coughing dreadfully--all the painful sights of a great city, and here