Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
and vanished and loathing came, and she really began to be thoroughly
sick and ashamed of the whole disgraceful quarrel and scuffle.
He, for his part, was trying to grasp the series of unexpected reactions
that had so wrecked their tete-a-tete. He had meant to be master of his
fate that evening and it had escaped him altogether. It had, as it were,
blown up at the concussion of his first step. It dawned upon him that he
had been abominably used by Ann Veronica.
“Look here,” he said, “I brought you here to make love to you.”
“I didn’t understand--your idea of making love. You had better let me go
again.”
“Not yet,” he said. “I do love you. I love you all the more for the
streak of sheer devil in you.... You are the most beautiful, the most
desirable thing I have ever met in this world. It was good to kiss you,
even at the price. But, by Jove! you are fierce! You are like those
Roman women who carry stilettos in their hair.”
“I came here to talk reasonably, Mr. Ramage. It is abominable--”
“What is the use of keeping up this note of indignation, Ann Veronica?
Here I am! I am your lover, burning for you. I mean to have you! Don’t
frown me off now. Don’t go back into Victorian respectability and
pretend you don’t know and you can’t think and all the rest of it. One
comes at last to the step from dreams to reality. This is your moment.
No one will ever love you as I love you now. I have been dreaming of
your body and you night after night. I have been imaging--”
“Mr. Ramage, I came here--I didn’t suppose for one moment you would
dare--”
“Nonsense! That is your mistake! You are too intellectual. You want to
do everything with your mind. You are afraid of kisses. You are afraid
of the warmth in your blood. It’s just because all that side of your
life hasn’t fairly begun.”
He made a step toward her.
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, sharply, “I have to make it plain to you. I
don’t think you understand. I don’t love you. I don’t. I can’t love you.
I love some one else. It is repulsive. It disgusts me that you should
touch me.”
He stared in amazement at this new aspect of the situation. “You love
some one else?” he repeated.
“I love some one else. I could not dream of loving you.”
And then he flashed his whole conception of the relations of men and
women upon her in one astonishing question. His hand went with an almost
instinctive inquiry to his jawbone again. “Then why the devil,” he
demanded, “do you let me stand you dinners and the opera--and why do you
come to a cabinet particuliar with me?”
He became radiant with anger. “You mean to tell me” he said, “that you
have a lover? While I have been keeping you! Yes--keeping you!”
This view of life he hurled at her as if it were an offensive missile.
It stunned her. She felt she must fly before it and could no longer do
so. She did not think for one moment what interpretation he might put
upon the word “lover.”
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, clinging to her one point, “I want to get out of
this horrible little room. It has all been a mistake. I have been stupid
and foolish. Will you unlock that door?”
“Never!” he said. “Confound your lover! Look here! Do you really think
I am going to run you while he makes love to you? No fear! I never heard
of anything so cool. If he wants you, let him get you. You’re mine. I’ve
paid for you and helped you, and I’m going to conquer you somehow--if
I have to break you to do it. Hitherto you’ve seen only my easy, kindly
side. But now confound it! how can you prevent it? I will kiss you.”
“You won’t!” said Ann Veronica; with the clearest note of determination.
He seemed to be about to move toward her. She stepped back quickly, and
her hand knocked a wine-glass from the table to smash noisily on the
floor. She caught at the idea. “If you come a step nearer to me,” she
said, “I will smash every glass on this table.”
“Then, by God!” he said, “you’ll be locked up!”
Ann Veronica was disconcerted for a moment. She had a vision of
policemen, reproving magistrates, a crowded court, public disgrace. She
saw her aunt in tears, her father white-faced and hard hit. “Don’t come
nearer!” she said.
There was a discreet knocking at the door, and Ramage’s face changed.
“No,” she said, under her breath, “you can’t face it.” And she knew that
she was safe.
He went to the door. “It’s all right,” he said, reassuringly to the
inquirer without.
Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover a flushed and dishevelled
disorder. She began at once a hasty readjustment of her hair, while
Ramage parleyed with inaudible interrogations. “A glass slipped from the
table,” he explained.... “Non. Fas du tout. Non.... Niente.... Bitte!...
Oui, dans la note.... Presently. Presently.” That conversation ended and
he turned to her again.
“I am going,” she said grimly, with three hairpins in her mouth.
She took her hat from the peg in the corner and began to put it on. He
regarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful eyes.
“Look here, Ann Veronica,” he began. “I want a plain word with you about
all this. Do you mean to tell me you didn’t understand why I wanted you
to come here?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Ann Veronica stoutly.
“You didn’t expect that I should kiss you?”
“How was I to know that a man would--would think it was possible--when
there was nothing--no love?”
“How did I know there wasn’t love?”
That silenced her for a moment. “And what on earth,” he said, “do you
think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been doing things
for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you one of the members
of that great white sisterhood that takes and does not give? The good
accepting woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to live at
free quarters on any man she meets without giving any return?”
“I thought,” said Ann Veronica, “you were my friend.”
“Friend! What have a man and a girl in common to make them friends? Ask
that lover of yours! And even with friends, would you have it all Give
on one side and all Take on the other?... Does HE know I keep you?...
You won’t have a man’s lips near you, but you’ll eat out of his hand
fast enough.”
Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.
“Mr. Ramage,” she cried, “you are outrageous! You understand nothing.
You are--horrible. Will you let me go out of this room?”
“No,” cried Ramage; “hear me out! I’ll have that satisfaction, anyhow.
You women, with your tricks of evasion, you’re a sex of swindlers.
You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites. You make yourself
charming for help. You climb by disappointing men. This lover of
yours--”
“He doesn’t know!” cried Ann Veronica.
“Well, you know.”
Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of weeping
broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, “You know as well as I do
that money was a loan!”
“Loan!”
“You yourself called it a loan!”
“Euphuism. We both understood that.”
“You shall have every penny of it back.”
“I’ll frame it--when I get it.”
“I’ll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an hour.”
“You’ll never pay me. You think you will. It’s your way of glossing over
the ethical position. It’s the sort of way a woman always does gloss
over her ethical positions. You’re all dependents--all of you. By
instinct. Only you good ones--shirk. You shirk a straightforward and
decent return for what you get from us--taking refuge in purity and
delicacy and such-like when it comes to payment.”
“Mr. Ramage,” said Ann Veronica, “I want to go--NOW!”
Part 5
But she did not get away just then.
Ramage’s bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. “Oh,
Ann Veronica!” he cried, “I cannot let you go like this! You don’t
understand. You can’t possibly understand!”
He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory apology for
his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad
to have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming and
senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly became
eloquent and plausible. He did make her perceive something of the acute,
tormenting desire for her that had arisen in him and possessed him.
She stood, as it were, directed doorward, with her eyes watching every
movement, listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.
At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an
ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all
her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be
free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate
predisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earned
and won and controlled and compelled.
He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship as
though it had never been even a disguise between them, as though
from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quite
understandingly upon their relationship. He had set out to win her, and
she had let him start. And at the thought of that other lover--he was
convinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself
unable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, the
person she loved, did not even know of her love--Ramage grew angry
and savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do
services for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such
was the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left
that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.
That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred another
man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that made her
denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And this though he
was evidently passionately in love with her.
For a while he threatened her. “You have put all your life in my hands,”
he declared. “Think of that check you endorsed. There it is--against
you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you think people will make
of that? What will this lover of yours make of that?”
At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying resolve
to repay him at any cost, and made short movements doorward.
But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door. She
emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-lit
landing. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiously
preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of the
Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, past a tall
porter in blue and crimson, into a cool, clear night.
Part 6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nerve
in her body was quivering with shame and self-disgust.
She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.
“And now,” she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into
indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, “what am I
to do?
“I’m in a hole!--mess is a better word, expresses it better. I’m in a
mess--a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!
“Do you hear, Ann Veronica?--you’re in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable
mess!
“Haven’t I just made a silly mess of things?
“Forty pounds! I haven’t got twenty!”
She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering the
lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.
“This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I’m
beginning to have my doubts about freedom!
“You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! The
smeariness of the thing!
“The smeariness of this sort of thing!... Mauled about!”
She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her
hand. “Ugh!” she said.
“The young women of Jane Austen’s time didn’t get into this sort of