Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
them with a queer readiness of anticipatory propitiation. She was
greatly exercised by the problem of confiding in the Widgetts; they were
dears, and she talked away two evenings with Constance without broaching
the topic; she made some vague intimations in letters to Miss Miniver
that Miss Miniver failed to mark. But she did not bother her head very
much about her relations with these sympathizers.
And at length her penultimate day in Morningside Park dawned for her.
She got up early, and walked about the garden in the dewy June sunshine
and revived her childhood. She was saying good-bye to childhood and
home, and her making; she was going out into the great, multitudinous
world; this time there would be no returning. She was at the end of
girlhood and on the eve of a woman’s crowning experience. She visited
the corner that had been her own little garden--her forget-me-nots and
candytuft had long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she
visited the raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair
with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had been
wont to read her secret letters. Here was the place behind the shed
where she had used to hide from Roddy’s persecutions, and here the
border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems was fairyland. The
back of the house had been the Alps for climbing, and the shrubs
in front of it a Terai. The knots and broken pale that made the
garden-fence scalable, and gave access to the fields behind, were still
to be traced. And here against a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of
God and wasps and her father, she had stolen plums; and once because of
discovered misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother
was dead, she had lain on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the
elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her soul in
weeping.
Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know the heart of that child
again! That child had loved fairy princes with velvet suits and golden
locks, and she was in love with a real man named Capes, with little
gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant voice and firm and shapely
hands. She was going to him soon and certainly, going to his strong,
embracing arms. She was going through a new world with him side by side.
She had been so busy with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it
seemed, she had given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of
her childhood. Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very distant,
and she had come to say farewell to them across one sundering year.
She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the eggs:
and then she went off to catch the train before her father’s. She did
this to please him. He hated travelling second-class with her--indeed,
he never did--but he also disliked travelling in the same train when his
daughter was in an inferior class, because of the look of the thing.
So he liked to go by a different train. And in the Avenue she had an
encounter with Ramage.
It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable
impressions in her mind. She was aware of him--a silk-hatted,
shiny-black figure on the opposite side of the Avenue; and then,
abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and spoke to
her.
“I MUST speak to you,” he said. “I can’t keep away from you.”
She made some inane response. She was struck by a change in his
appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost
something of its ruddy freshness.
He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they reached the
station, and left her puzzled at its drift and meaning. She quickened
her pace, and so did he, talking at her slightly averted ear. She made
lumpish and inadequate interruptions rather than replies. At times he
seemed to be claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her
with her check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible
will, and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted. He said that
his life was boring and stupid without her. Something or other--she
did not catch what--he was damned if he could stand. He was evidently
nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his projecting eyes sought
to dominate. The crowning aspect of the incident, for her mind, was the
discovery that he and her indiscretion with him no longer mattered very
much. Its importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise.
Even her debt to him was a triviality now.
And of course! She had a brilliant idea. It surprised her she hadn’t
thought of it before! She tried to explain that she was going to pay
him forty pounds without fail next week. She said as much to him. She
repeated this breathlessly.
“I was glad you did not send it back again,” he said.
He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself vainly
trying to explain--the inexplicable. “It’s because I mean to send it
back altogether,” she said.
He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line of his
own.
“Here we are, living in the same suburb,” he began. “We have to
be--modern.”
Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase. That knot also
would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial as
chipped flint.
Part 2
In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering flowers for the
dinner-table, her father came strolling across the lawn toward her with
an affectation of great deliberation.
“I want to speak to you about a little thing, Vee,” said Mr. Stanley.
Ann Veronica’s tense nerves started, and she stood still with her eyes
upon him, wondering what it might be that impended.
“You were talking to that fellow Ramage to-day--in the Avenue. Walking
to the station with him.”
So that was it!
“He came and talked to me.”
“Ye--e--es.” Mr. Stanley considered. “Well, I don’t want you to talk to
him,” he said, very firmly.
Ann Veronica paused before she answered. “Don’t you think I ought to?”
she asked, very submissively.
“No.” Mr. Stanley coughed and faced toward the house. “He is not--I
don’t like him. I think it inadvisable--I don’t want an intimacy to
spring up between you and a man of that type.”
Ann Veronica reflected. “I HAVE--had one or two talks with him, daddy.”
“Don’t let there be any more. I--In fact, I dislike him extremely.”
“Suppose he comes and talks to me?”
“A girl can always keep a man at a distance if she cares to do it.
She--She can snub him.”
Ann Veronica picked a cornflower.
“I wouldn’t make this objection,” Mr. Stanley went on, “but there are
things--there are stories about Ramage. He’s--He lives in a world of
possibilities outside your imagination. His treatment of his wife
is most unsatisfactory. Most unsatisfactory. A bad man, in fact. A
dissipated, loose-living man.”
“I’ll try not to see him again,” said Ann Veronica. “I didn’t know you
objected to him, daddy.”
“Strongly,” said Mr. Stanley, “very strongly.”
The conversation hung. Ann Veronica wondered what her father would do if
she were to tell him the full story of her relations with Ramage.
“A man like that taints a girl by looking at her, by his mere
conversation.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose. There was another
little thing he had to say. “One has to be so careful of one’s friends
and acquaintances,” he remarked, by way of transition. “They mould one
insensibly.” His voice assumed an easy detached tone. “I suppose, Vee,
you don’t see much of those Widgetts now?”
“I go in and talk to Constance sometimes.”
“Do you?”
“We were great friends at school.”
“No doubt.... Still--I don’t know whether I quite like--Something
ramshackle about those people, Vee. While I am talking about your
friends, I feel--I think you ought to know how I look at it.” His voice
conveyed studied moderation. “I don’t mind, of course, your seeing
her sometimes, still there are differences--differences in social
atmospheres. One gets drawn into things. Before you know where you
are you find yourself in a complication. I don’t want to influence you
unduly--But--They’re artistic people, Vee. That’s the fact about them.
We’re different.”
“I suppose we are,” said Vee, rearranging the flowers in her hand.
“Friendships that are all very well between school-girls don’t always go
on into later life. It’s--it’s a social difference.”
“I like Constance very much.”
“No doubt. Still, one has to be reasonable. As you admitted to me--one
has to square one’s self with the world. You don’t know. With people
of that sort all sorts of things may happen. We don’t want things to
happen.”
Ann Veronica made no answer.
A vague desire to justify himself ruffled her father. “I may seem
unduly--anxious. I can’t forget about your sister. It’s that has always
made me--SHE, you know, was drawn into a set--didn’t discriminate
Private theatricals.”
Ann Veronica remained anxious to hear more of her sister’s story from
her father’s point of view, but he did not go on. Even so much allusion
as this to that family shadow, she felt, was an immense recognition of
her ripening years. She glanced at him. He stood a little anxious and
fussy, bothered by the responsibility of her, entirely careless of what
her life was or was likely to be, ignoring her thoughts and feelings,
ignorant of every fact of importance in her life, explaining everything
he could not understand in her as nonsense and perversity, concerned
only with a terror of bothers and undesirable situations. “We don’t want
things to happen!” Never had he shown his daughter so clearly that the
womenkind he was persuaded he had to protect and control could please
him in one way, and in one way only, and that was by doing nothing
except the punctual domestic duties and being nothing except restful
appearances. He had quite enough to see to and worry about in the City
without their doing things. He had no use for Ann Veronica; he had
never had a use for her since she had been too old to sit upon his knee.
Nothing but the constraint of social usage now linked him to her. And
the less “anything” happened the better. The less she lived, in fact,
the better. These realizations rushed into Ann Veronica’s mind and
hardened her heart against him. She spoke slowly. “I may not see the
Widgetts for some little time, father,” she said. “I don’t think I
shall.”
“Some little tiff?”
“No; but I don’t think I shall see them.”
Suppose she were to add, “I am going away!”
“I’m glad to hear you say it,” said Mr. Stanley, and was so evidently
pleased that Ann Veronica’s heart smote her.
“I am very glad to hear you say it,” he repeated, and refrained from
further inquiry. “I think we are growing sensible,” he said. “I think
you are getting to understand me better.”
He hesitated, and walked away from her toward the house. Her eyes
followed him. The curve of his shoulders, the very angle of his feet,
expressed relief at her apparent obedience. “Thank goodness!” said
that retreating aspect, “that’s said and over. Vee’s all right. There’s
nothing happened at all!” She didn’t mean, he concluded, to give him any
more trouble ever, and he was free to begin a fresh chromatic novel--he
had just finished the Blue Lagoon, which he thought very beautiful and
tender and absolutely irrelevant to Morningside Park--or work in peace
at his microtome without bothering about her in the least.
The immense disillusionment that awaited him! The devastating
disillusionment! She had a vague desire to run after him, to state her
case to him, to wring some understanding from him of what life was to
her. She felt a cheat and a sneak to his unsuspecting retreating back.
“But what can one do?” asked Ann Veronica.
Part 3
She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father