Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
scrape! At least--one thinks so.... I wonder if some of them did--and
it didn’t get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of
them didn’t, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still and
straight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should.
And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. They
knew they were all Bogey in disguise. I didn’t! I didn’t! After all--”
For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive restraints
as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed
cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and
refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the
brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost
paradise.
“I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners,” she said. “I
wonder if I’ve been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and
white and dignified, wouldn’t it have been different? Would he have
dared?...”
For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly
disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated
desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously--to be, in
effect, prim.
Horrible details recurred to her.
“Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his
neck--deliberately to hurt him?”
She tried to sound the humorous note.
“Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that gentleman?”
Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.
“You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Cad!... Why
aren’t you folded up clean in lavender--as every young woman ought to
be? What have you been doing with yourself?...”
She raked into the fire with the poker.
“All of which doesn’t help me in the slightest degree to pay back that
money.”
That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever
spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she went
to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more
she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her
self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became
unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered
abuse of herself--usually until she hit against some article of
furniture.
Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, “Now
look here! Let me think it all out!”
For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman’s
position in the world--the meagre realities of such freedom as it
permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man
under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had
flung away from her father’s support with the finest assumption of
personal independence. And here she was--in a mess because it had
been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had
thought--What had she thought? That this dependence of women was but
an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it
with vigor, and here she was!
She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her
insoluble individual problem again: “What am I to do?”
She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage’s
face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of how
such a sum could be made good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and
desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.
She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithets
for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window at
a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the
edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going home? No alternative
appeared in that darkness.
It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself beaten.
She did most urgently desire to save her face in Morningside Park, and
for long hours she could think of no way of putting it that would not be
in the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.
“I’d rather go as a chorus-girl,” she said.
She was not very clear about the position and duties of a chorus-girl,
but it certainly had the air of being a last desperate resort.
There sprang from that a vague hope that perhaps she might extort a
capitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and then
with overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever happened she
would never be able to tell her father about her debt. The completest
capitulation would not wipe out that trouble. And she felt that if she
went home it was imperative to pay. She would always be going to and fro
up the Avenue, getting glimpses of Ramage, seeing him in trains....
For a time she promenaded the room.
“Why did I ever take that loan? An idiot girl in an asylum would have
known better than that!
“Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind--the worst of all conceivable
combinations. I wish some one would kill Ramage by accident!...
“But then they would find that check endorsed in his bureau....
“I wonder what he will do?” She tried to imagine situations that might
arise out of Ramage’s antagonism, for he had been so bitter and savage
that she could not believe that he would leave things as they were.
The next morning she went out with her post-office savings bank-book,
and telegraphed for a warrant to draw out all the money she had in the
world. It amounted to two-and-twenty pounds. She addressed an envelope
to Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, “The rest shall
follow.” The money would be available in the afternoon, and she would
send him four five-pound notes. The rest she meant to keep for
her immediate necessities. A little relieved by this step toward
reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College to forget her muddle
of problems for a time, if she could, in the presence of Capes.
Part 7
For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue. Her
sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an hour
or so the work distracted her altogether from her troubles.
Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it came to
her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediate
collapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps
she would never set eyes on him again. After that consolations fled.
The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became inattentive
to the work before her, and it did not get on. She felt sleepy and
unusually irritable. She lunched at a creamery in Great Portland Street,
and as the day was full of wintry sunshine, spent the rest of the
lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom, which she imagined to be thought upon the
problems of her position, on a seat in Regent’s Park. A girl of fifteen
or sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until she
saw “Votes for Women” at the top. That turned her mind to the more
generalized aspects of her perplexities again. She had never been so
disposed to agree that the position of women in the modern world is
intolerable.
Capes joined the students at tea, and displayed himself in an impish
mood that sometimes possessed him. He did not notice that Ann Veronica
was preoccupied and heavy-eyed. Miss Klegg raised the question of
women’s suffrage, and he set himself to provoke a duel between her and
Miss Garvice. The youth with the hair brushed back and the spectacled
Scotchman joined in the fray for and against the women’s vote.
Ever and again Capes appealed to Ann Veronica. He liked to draw her in,
and she did her best to talk. But she did not talk readily, and in
order to say something she plunged a little, and felt she plunged.
Capes scored back with an uncompromising vigor that was his way of
complimenting her intelligence. But this afternoon it discovered an
unusual vein of irritability in her. He had been reading Belfort Bax,
and declared himself a convert. He contrasted the lot of women in
general with the lot of men, presented men as patient, self-immolating
martyrs, and women as the pampered favorites of Nature. A vein of
conviction mingled with his burlesque.
For a time he and Miss Klegg contradicted one another.
The question ceased to be a tea-table talk, and became suddenly
tragically real for Ann Veronica. There he sat, cheerfully friendly
in his sex’s freedom--the man she loved, the one man she cared
should unlock the way to the wide world for her imprisoned feminine
possibilities, and he seemed regardless that she stifled under his eyes;
he made a jest of all this passionate insurgence of the souls of women
against the fate of their conditions.
Miss Garvice repeated again, and almost in the same words she used at
every discussion, her contribution to the great question.
She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of
life--their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay
not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their
children fine and splendid.
“Women should understand men’s affairs, perhaps,” said Miss Garvice,
“but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing
they can exercise now.”
“There IS something sound in that position,” said Capes, intervening as
if to defend Miss Garvice against a possible attack from Ann Veronica.
“It may not be just and so forth, but, after all, it is how things are.
Women are not in the world in the same sense that men are--fighting
individuals in a scramble. I don’t see how they can be. Every home is a
little recess, a niche, out of the world of business and competition, in
which women and the future shelter.”
“A little pit!” said Ann Veronica; “a little prison!”
“It’s just as often a little refuge. Anyhow, that is how things are.”
“And the man stands as the master at the mouth of the den.”
“As sentinel. You forget all the mass of training and tradition and
instinct that go to make him a tolerable master. Nature is a mother; her
sympathies have always been feminist, and she has tempered the man to
the shorn woman.”
“I wish,” said Ann Veronica, with sudden anger, “that you could know
what it is to live in a pit!”
She stood up as she spoke, and put down her cup beside Miss Garvice’s.
She addressed Capes as though she spoke to him alone.
“I can’t endure it,” she said.
Every one turned to her in astonishment.
She felt she had to go on. “No man can realize,” she said, “what that
pit can be. The way--the way we are led on! We are taught to believe we
are free in the world, to think we are queens.... Then we find out.
We find out no man will treat a woman fairly as man to man--no man. He
wants you--or he doesn’t; and then he helps some other woman against
you.... What you say is probably all true and necessary.... But
think of the disillusionment! Except for our sex we have minds like men,
desires like men. We come out into the world, some of us--”
She paused. Her words, as she said them, seemed to her to mean nothing,
and there was so much that struggled for expression. “Women are mocked,”
she said. “Whenever they try to take hold of life a man intervenes.”
She felt, with a sudden horror, that she might weep. She wished she had
not stood up. She wondered wildly why she had stood up. No one spoke,
and she was impelled to flounder on. “Think of the mockery!” she said.
“Think how dumb we find ourselves and stifled! I know we seem to have
a sort of freedom.... Have you ever tried to run and jump in
petticoats, Mr. Capes? Well, think what it must be to live in them--soul
and mind and body! It’s fun for a man to jest at our position.”
“I wasn’t jesting,” said Capes, abruptly.
She stood face to face with him, and his voice cut across her speech