Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
which the two ladies subordinated themselves intelligently. The
burning topic of the Mendelian controversy was approached on one or two
occasions, but avoided dexterously; and they talked chiefly of letters
and art and the censorship of the English stage. Mr. Stanley was
inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of
what he styled latter-day fiction; good wholesome stories were being
ousted, he said, by “vicious, corrupting stuff” that “left a bad taste
in the mouth.” He declared that no book could be satisfactory that left
a bad taste in the mouth, however much it seized and interested the
reader at the time. He did not like it, he said, with a significant
look, to be reminded of either his books or his dinners after he had
done with them. Capes agreed with the utmost cordiality.
“Life is upsetting enough, without the novels taking a share,” said Mr.
Stanley.
For a time Ann Veronica’s attention was diverted by her aunt’s interest
in the salted almonds.
“Quite particularly nice,” said her aunt. “Exceptionally so.”
When Ann Veronica could attend again she found the men were discussing
the ethics of the depreciation of house property through the increasing
tumult of traffic in the West End, and agreeing with each other to a
devastating extent. It came into her head with real emotional force that
this must be some particularly fantastic sort of dream. It seemed to her
that her father was in some inexplicable way meaner-looking than she
had supposed, and yet also, as unaccountably, appealing. His tie had
demanded a struggle; he ought to have taken a clean one after his
first failure. Why was she noting things like this? Capes seemed
self-possessed and elaborately genial and commonplace, but she knew him
to be nervous by a little occasional clumsiness, by the faintest shadow
of vulgarity in the urgency of his hospitality. She wished he could
smoke and dull his nerves a little. A gust of irrational impatience blew
through her being. Well, they’d got to the pheasants, and in a little
while he would smoke. What was it she had expected? Surely her moods
were getting a little out of hand.
She wished her father and aunt would not enjoy their dinner with such
quiet determination. Her father and her husband, who had both been a
little pale at their first encounter, were growing now just faintly
flushed. It was a pity people had to eat food.
“I suppose,” said her father, “I have read at least half the novels that
have been at all successful during the last twenty years. Three a week
is my allowance, and, if I get short ones, four. I change them in the
morning at Cannon Street, and take my book as I come down.”
It occurred to her that she had never seen her father dining out
before, never watched him critically as an equal. To Capes he was almost
deferential, and she had never seen him deferential in the old time,
never. The dinner was stranger than she had ever anticipated. It was
as if she had grown right past her father into something older and
of infinitely wider outlook, as if he had always been unsuspectedly a
flattened figure, and now she had discovered him from the other side.
It was a great relief to arrive at last at that pause when she could say
to her aunt, “Now, dear?” and rise and hold back the curtain through the
archway. Capes and her father stood up, and her father made a belated
movement toward the curtain. She realized that he was the sort of man
one does not think much about at dinners. And Capes was thinking that
his wife was a supremely beautiful woman. He reached a silver cigar and
cigarette box from the sideboard and put it before his father-in-law,
and for a time the preliminaries of smoking occupied them both. Then
Capes flittered to the hearthrug and poked the fire, stood up, and
turned about. “Ann Veronica is looking very well, don’t you think?” he
said, a little awkwardly.
“Very,” said Mr. Stanley. “Very,” and cracked a walnut appreciatively.
“Life--things--I don’t think her prospects now--Hopeful outlook.”
“You were in a difficult position,” Mr. Stanley pronounced, and seemed
to hesitate whether he had not gone too far. He looked at his port wine
as though that tawny ruby contained the solution of the matter. “All’s
well that ends well,” he said; “and the less one says about things the
better.”
“Of course,” said Capes, and threw a newly lit cigar into the fire
through sheer nervousness. “Have some more port wine, sir?”
“It’s a very sound wine,” said Mr. Stanley, consenting with dignity.
“Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think,” said Capes,
clinging, because of a preconceived plan, to the suppressed topic.
Part 3
At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife had gone down to
see Mr. Stanley and his sister into a taxicab, and had waved an amiable
farewell from the pavement steps.
“Great dears!” said Capes, as the vehicle passed out of sight.
“Yes, aren’t they?” said Ann Veronica, after a thoughtful pause. And
then, “They seem changed.”
“Come in out of the cold,” said Capes, and took her arm.
“They seem smaller, you know, even physically smaller,” she said.
“You’ve grown out of them.... Your aunt liked the pheasant.”
“She liked everything. Did you hear us through the archway, talking
cookery?”
They went up by the lift in silence.
“It’s odd,” said Ann Veronica, re-entering the flat.
“What’s odd?”
“Oh, everything!”
She shivered, and went to the fire and poked it. Capes sat down in the
arm-chair beside her.
“Life’s so queer,” she said, kneeling and looking into the flames. “I
wonder--I wonder if we shall ever get like that.”
She turned a firelit face to her husband. “Did you tell him?”
Capes smiled faintly. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Well--a little clumsily.”
“But how?”
“I poured him out some port wine, and I said--let me see--oh, ‘You are
going to be a grandfather!’”
“Yes. Was he pleased?”
“Calmly! He said--you won’t mind my telling you?”
“Not a bit.”
“He said, ‘Poor Alice has got no end!’”
“Alice’s are different,” said Ann Veronica, after an interval. “Quite
different. She didn’t choose her man.... Well, I told aunt....
Husband of mine, I think we have rather overrated the emotional capacity
of those--those dears.”
“What did your aunt say?”
“She didn’t even kiss me. She said”--Ann Veronica shivered again--“‘I
hope it won’t make you uncomfortable, my dear’--like that--‘and
whatever you do, do be careful of your hair!’ I think--I judge from
her manner--that she thought it was just a little indelicate of
us--considering everything; but she tried to be practical and
sympathetic and live down to our standards.”
Capes looked at his wife’s unsmiling face.
“Your father,” he said, “remarked that all’s well that ends well, and
that he was disposed to let bygones be bygones. He then spoke with a
certain fatherly kindliness of the past....”
“And my heart has ached for him!”
“Oh, no doubt it cut him at the time. It must have cut him.”
“We might even have--given it up for them!”
“I wonder if we could.”
“I suppose all IS well that ends well. Somehow to-night--I don’t know.”
“I suppose so. I’m glad the old sore is assuaged. Very glad. But if we
had gone under--!”
They regarded one another silently, and Ann Veronica had one of her
penetrating flashes.
“We are not the sort that goes under,” said Ann Veronica, holding her
hands so that the red reflections vanished from her eyes. “We settled
long ago--we’re hard stuff. We’re hard stuff!”
Then she went on: “To think that is my father! Oh, my dear! He stood
over me like a cliff; the thought of him nearly turned me aside from
everything we have done. He was the social order; he was law and wisdom.
And they come here, and they look at our furniture to see if it is good;
and they are not glad, it does not stir them, that at last, at last we
can dare to have children.”
She dropped back into a crouching attitude and began to weep. “Oh,
my dear!” she cried, and suddenly flung herself, kneeling, into her
husband’s arms.
“Do you remember the mountains? Do you remember how we loved one
another? How intensely we loved one another! Do you remember the light
on things and the glory of things? I’m greedy, I’m greedy! I want
children like the mountains and life like the sky. Oh! and love--love!
We’ve had so splendid a time, and fought our fight and won. And it’s
like the petals falling from a flower. Oh, I’ve loved love, dear! I’ve
loved love and you, and the glory of you; and the great time is over,
and I have to go carefully and bear children, and--take care of my
hair--and when I am done with that I shall be an old woman. The petals
have fallen--the red petals we loved so. We’re hedged about with
discretions--and all this furniture--and successes! We are successful
at last! Successful! But the mountains, dear! We won’t forget the
mountains, dear, ever. That shining slope of snow, and how we talked of
death! We might have died! Even when we are old, when we are rich as we
may be, we won’t forget the tune when we cared nothing for anything but
the joy of one another, when we risked everything for one another, when
all the wrappings and coverings seemed to have fallen from life and left
it light and fire. Stark and stark! Do you remember it all?... Say
you will never forget! That these common things and secondary things
sha’n’t overwhelm us. These petals! I’ve been wanting to cry all the
evening, cry here on your shoulder for my petals. Petals!... Silly
woman!... I’ve never had these crying fits before....”
“Blood of my heart!” whispered Capes, holding her close to him. “I know.
I understand.”