Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
you look--you look better than ever. Was it VERY horrible? I tried to
get into the police-court, but the crowd was ever so much too big, push
as I would....
“I mean to go to prison directly the session is over,” said Miss Klegg.
“Wild horses--not if they have all the mounted police in London--shan’t
keep me out.”
Part 6
Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all that afternoon, he was
so friendly, so palpably interested in her, and glad to have her back
with him. Tea in the laboratory was a sort of suffragette reception.
Miss Garvice assumed a quality of neutrality, professed herself almost
won over by Ann Veronica’s example, and the Scotchman decided that if
women had a distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging sphere,
and no one who believed in the doctrine of evolution could logically
deny the vote to women “ultimately,” however much they might be disposed
to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession. It was a refusal
of expediency, he said, and not an absolute refusal. The youth with his
hair like Russell cleared his throat and said rather irrelevantly that
he knew a man who knew Thomas Bayard Simmons, who had rioted in the
Strangers’ Gallery, and then Capes, finding them all distinctly pro-Ann
Veronica, if not pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a
vein of speculation upon the Scotchman’s idea--that there were still
hopes of women evolving into something higher.
He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the time it seemed to Ann
Veronica as a delightful possibility, as a thing not indeed to be
entertained seriously, but to be half furtively felt, that he was being
so agreeable because she had come back again. She returned home through
a world that was as roseate as it had been gray overnight.
But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park Station she had a
shock. She saw, twenty yards down the platform, the shiny hat and broad
back and inimitable swagger of Ramage. She dived at once behind the
cover of the lamp-room and affected serious trouble with her shoe-lace
until he was out of the station, and then she followed slowly and with
extreme discretion until the bifurcation of the Avenue from the field
way insured her escape. Ramage went up the Avenue, and she hurried
along the path with a beating heart and a disagreeable sense of unsolved
problems in her mind.
“That thing’s going on,” she told herself. “Everything goes on, confound
it! One doesn’t change anything one has set going by making good
resolutions.”
And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and welcoming figure of
Manning. He came as an agreeable diversion from an insoluble perplexity.
She smiled at the sight of him, and thereat his radiation increased.
“I missed the hour of your release,” he said, “but I was at the
Vindicator Restaurant. You did not see me, I know. I was among the
common herd in the place below, but I took good care to see you.”
“Of course you’re converted?” she said.
“To the view that all those Splendid Women in the movement ought to have
votes. Rather! Who could help it?”
He towered up over her and smiled down at her in his fatherly way.
“To the view that all women ought to have votes whether they like it or
not.”
He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under the black mustache
wrinkled with his smile. And as he walked by her side they began a
wrangle that was none the less pleasant to Ann Veronica because it
served to banish a disagreeable preoccupation. It seemed to her in her
restored geniality that she liked Manning extremely. The brightness
Capes had diffused over the world glorified even his rival.
Part 7
The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to engage herself to marry
Manning were never very clear to her. A medley of motives warred in her,
and it was certainly not one of the least of these that she knew herself
to be passionately in love with Capes; at moments she had a giddy
intimation that he was beginning to feel keenly interested in her.
She realized more and more the quality of the brink upon which she
stood--the dreadful readiness with which in certain moods she
might plunge, the unmitigated wrongness and recklessness of such a
self-abandonment. “He must never know,” she would whisper to herself,
“he must never know. Or else--Else it will be impossible that I can be
his friend.”
That simple statement of the case was by no means all that went on in
Ann Veronica’s mind. But it was the form of her ruling determination; it
was the only form that she ever allowed to see daylight. What else was
there lurked in shadows and deep places; if in some mood of reverie it
came out into the light, it was presently overwhelmed and hustled back
again into hiding. She would never look squarely at these dream forms
that mocked the social order in which she lived, never admit she
listened to the soft whisperings in her ear. But Manning seemed more and
more clearly indicated as a refuge, as security. Certain simple purposes
emerged from the disingenuous muddle of her feelings and desires. Seeing
Capes from day to day made a bright eventfulness that hampered her in
the course she had resolved to follow. She vanished from the laboratory
for a week, a week of oddly interesting days....
When she renewed her attendance at the Imperial College the third finger
of her left hand was adorned with a very fine old ring with dark blue
sapphires that had once belonged to a great-aunt of Manning’s.
That ring manifestly occupied her thoughts a great deal. She kept
pausing in her work and regarding it, and when Capes came round to her,
she first put her hand in her lap and then rather awkwardly in front of
him. But men are often blind to rings. He seemed to be.
In the afternoon she had considered certain doubts very carefully,
and decided on a more emphatic course of action. “Are these ordinary
sapphires?” she said. He bent to her hand, and she slipped off the ring
and gave it to him to examine.
“Very good,” he said. “Rather darker than most of them. But I’m
generously ignorant of gems. Is it an old ring?” he asked, returning it.
“I believe it is. It’s an engagement ring....” She slipped it on her
finger, and added, in a voice she tried to make matter-of-fact: “It was
given to me last week.”
“Oh!” he said, in a colorless tone, and with his eyes on her face.
“Yes. Last week.”
She glanced at him, and it was suddenly apparent for one instant of
illumination that this ring upon her finger was the crowning blunder
of her life. It was apparent, and then it faded into the quality of an
inevitable necessity.
“Odd!” he remarked, rather surprisingly, after a little interval.
There was a brief pause, a crowded pause, between them.
She sat very still, and his eyes rested on that ornament for a moment,
and then travelled slowly to her wrist and the soft lines of her
forearm.
“I suppose I ought to congratulate you,” he said. Their eyes met, and
his expressed perplexity and curiosity. “The fact is--I don’t know
why--this takes me by surprise. Somehow I haven’t connected the idea
with you. You seemed complete--without that.”
“Did I?” she said.
“I don’t know why. But this is like--like walking round a house that
looks square and complete and finding an unexpected long wing running
out behind.”
She looked up at him, and found he was watching her closely. For some
seconds of voluminous thinking they looked at the ring between them,
and neither spoke. Then Capes shifted his eyes to her microscope and
the little trays of unmounted sections beside it. “How is that carmine
working?” he asked, with a forced interest.
“Better,” said Ann Veronica, with an unreal alacrity. “But it still
misses the nucleolus.”
CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH
THE SAPPHIRE RING
Part 1
For a time that ring set with sapphires seemed to be, after all, the
satisfactory solution of Ann Veronica’s difficulties. It was like
pouring a strong acid over dulled metal. A tarnish of constraint that
had recently spread over her intercourse with Capes vanished again. They
embarked upon an open and declared friendship. They even talked about
friendship. They went to the Zoological Gardens together one Saturday to
see for themselves a point of morphological interest about the toucan’s
bill--that friendly and entertaining bird--and they spent the rest of
the afternoon walking about and elaborating in general terms this theme
and the superiority of intellectual fellowship to all merely passionate
relationships. Upon this topic Capes was heavy and conscientious, but
that seemed to her to be just exactly what he ought to be. He was also,
had she known it, more than a little insincere. “We are only in the dawn
of the Age of Friendship,” he said, “when interest, I suppose, will
take the place of passions. Either you have had to love people or hate
them--which is a sort of love, too, in its way--to get anything out of
them. Now, more and more, we’re going to be interested in them, to be
curious about them and--quite mildly-experimental with them.” He seemed
to be elaborating ideas as he talked. They watched the chimpanzees in
the new apes’ house, and admired the gentle humanity of their eyes--“so
much more human than human beings”--and they watched the Agile Gibbon in
the next apartment doing wonderful leaps and aerial somersaults.
“I wonder which of us enjoys that most,” said Capes--“does he, or do
we?”
“He seems to get a zest--”
“He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These joyful bounds just
lace into the stuff of my memories and stay there forever. Living’s just
material.”
“It’s very good to be alive.”
“It’s better to know life than be life.”
“One may do both,” said Ann Veronica.
She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, “Let’s
go and see the wart-hog,” she thought no one ever had had so quick a
flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns
was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she marvelled at his
practical omniscience.
Finally, at the exit into Regent’s Park, they ran against Miss Klegg.
It was the expression of Miss Klegg’s face that put the idea into Ann
Veronica’s head of showing Manning at the College one day, an idea which
she didn’t for some reason or other carry out for a fortnight.
Part 2
When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality in the
imagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of liberty and a remote
and quite abstracted person, and became suddenly and very disagreeably
the token of a large and portentous body visible and tangible.
Manning appeared just at the end of the afternoon’s work, and the
biologist was going through some perplexities the Scotchman had created
by a metaphysical treatment of the skulls of Hyrax and a young African
elephant. He was clearing up these difficulties by tracing a partially
obliterated suture the Scotchman had overlooked when the door from the
passage opened, and Manning came into his universe.
Seen down the length of the laboratory, Manning looked a very handsome
and shapely gentleman indeed, and, at the sight of his eager advance to
his fiancee, Miss Klegg replaced one long-cherished romance about Ann
Veronica by one more normal and simple. He carried a cane and a silk
hat with a mourning-band in one gray-gloved hand; his frock-coat and
trousers were admirable; his handsome face, his black mustache, his
prominent brow conveyed an eager solicitude.
“I want,” he said, with a white hand outstretched, “to take you out to
tea.”
“I’ve been clearing up,” said Ann Veronica, brightly.
“All your dreadful scientific things?” he said, with a smile that Miss
Klegg thought extraordinarily kindly.
“All my dreadful scientific things,” said Ann Veronica.