Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
even about that man’s scientific position and his standard of work.
There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him--simply laugh at him.
And I have seen work by his pupils myself that struck me as being--well,
next door to shameful. There’s stories, too, about his demonstrator,
Capes Something or other. The kind of man who isn’t content with his
science, and writes articles in the monthly reviews. Anyhow, there it
is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE.”
The girl received this intimation in silence, but the face that looked
down upon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy that brought out
a hitherto latent resemblance between parent and child. When she spoke,
her lips twitched.
“Then I suppose when I have graduated I am to come home?”
“It seems the natural course--”
“And do nothing?”
“There are plenty of things a girl can find to do at home.”
“Until some one takes pity on me and marries me?”
He raised his eyebrows in mild appeal. His foot tapped impatiently, and
he took up the papers.
“Look here, father,” she said, with a change in her voice, “suppose I
won’t stand it?”
He regarded her as though this was a new idea.
“Suppose, for example, I go to this dance?”
“You won’t.”
“Well”--her breath failed her for a moment. “How would you prevent it?”
she asked.
“But I have forbidden it!” he said, raising his voice.
“Yes, I know. But suppose I go?”
“Now, Veronica! No, no. This won’t do. Understand me! I forbid it. I
do not want to hear from you even the threat of disobedience.” He spoke
loudly. “The thing is forbidden!”
“I am ready to give up anything that you show to be wrong.”
“You will give up anything I wish you to give up.”
They stared at each other through a pause, and both faces were flushed
and obstinate.
She was trying by some wonderful, secret, and motionless gymnastics to
restrain her tears. But when she spoke her lips quivered, and they
came. “I mean to go to that dance!” she blubbered. “I mean to go to
that dance! I meant to reason with you, but you won’t reason. You’re
dogmatic.”
At the sight of her tears his expression changed to a mingling of
triumph and concern. He stood up, apparently intending to put an
arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly. She produced a
handkerchief, and with one sweep of this and a simultaneous gulp had
abolished her fit of weeping. His voice now had lost its ironies.
“Now, Veronica,” he pleaded, “Veronica, this is most unreasonable. All
we do is for your good. Neither your aunt nor I have any other thought
but what is best for you.”
“Only you won’t let me live. Only you won’t let me exist!”
Mr. Stanley lost patience. He bullied frankly.
“What nonsense is this? What raving! My dear child, you DO live, you
DO exist! You have this home. You have friends, acquaintances, social
standing, brothers and sisters, every advantage! Instead of which, you
want to go to some mixed classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance
about at nights in wild costumes with casual art student friends and God
knows who. That--that isn’t living! You are beside yourself. You don’t
know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor logic.
I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your good. You
MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I put my foot down
like--like adamant. And a time will come, Veronica, mark my words, a
time will come when you will bless me for my firmness to-night. It goes
to my heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be.”
He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in
possession of the hearth-rug.
“Well,” she said, “good-night, father.”
“What!” he asked; “not a kiss?”
She affected not to hear.
The door closed softly upon her. For a long time he remained standing
before the fire, staring at the situation. Then he sat down and filled
his pipe slowly and thoughtfully....
“I don’t see what else I could have said,” he remarked.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW
Part 1
“Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?” asked Constance
Widgett.
Ann Veronica considered her answer. “I mean to,” she replied.
“You are making your dress?”
“Such as it is.”
They were in the elder Widgett girl’s bedroom; Hetty was laid up, she
said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was gossiping
away her tedium. It was a large, littered, self-forgetful apartment,
decorated with unframed charcoal sketches by various incipient masters;
and an open bookcase, surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a
human skull, displayed an odd miscellany of books--Shaw and Swinburne,
Tom Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance
Widgett’s abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly
remunerative work--stencilling in colors upon rough, white material--at
a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the purpose, while on her
bed there was seated a slender lady of thirty or so in a dingy green
dress, whom Constance had introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss
Miniver. Miss Miniver looked out on the world through large emotional
blue eyes that were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her
nose was pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant. Her
glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face.
She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her
opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words “Votes
for Women.” Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the sufferer’s bed, while
Teddy Widgett, being something of an athlete, occupied the only
bed-room chair--a decadent piece, essentially a tripod and largely a
formality--and smoked cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that
he was looking all the time at Ann Veronica’s eyebrows. Teddy was the
hatless young man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two
days before. He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and
much broken in to feminine society. A bowl of roses, just brought by
Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and Ann Veronica was
particularly trim in preparation for a call she was to make with her
aunt later in the afternoon.
Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. “I’ve been,” she said,
“forbidden to come.”
“Hul-LO!” said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy remarked
with profound emotion, “My God!”
“Yes,” said Ann Veronica, “and that complicates the situation.”
“Auntie?” asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica’s
affairs.
“No! My father. It’s--it’s a serious prohibition.”
“Why?” asked Hetty.
“That’s the point. I asked him why, and he hadn’t a reason.”
“YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!” said Miss Miniver, with great
intensity.
“Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn’t have it out.” Ann
Veronica reflected for an instant “That’s why I think I ought to come.”
“You asked your father for a reason!” Miss Miniver repeated.
“We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!” said Hetty.
“He’s got almost to like it.”
“Men,” said Miss Miniver, “NEVER have a reason. Never! And they don’t
know it! They have no idea of it. It’s one of their worst traits, one of
their very worst.”
“But I say, Vee,” said Constance, “if you come and you are forbidden to
come there’ll be the deuce of a row.”
Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation
was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax and
sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. “It isn’t only the dance,”
she said.
“There’s the classes,” said Constance, the well-informed.
“There’s the whole situation. Apparently I’m not to exist yet. I’m not
to study, I’m not to grow. I’ve got to stay at home and remain in a
state of suspended animation.”
“DUSTING!” said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.
“Until you marry, Vee,” said Hetty.
“Well, I don’t feel like standing it.”
“Thousands of women have married merely for freedom,” said Miss Miniver.
“Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery.”
“I suppose,” said Constance, stencilling away at bright pink petals,
“it’s our lot. But it’s very beastly.”
“What’s our lot?” asked her sister.
“Slavery! Downtroddenness! When I think of it I feel all over boot
marks--men’s boots. We hide it bravely, but so it is. Damn! I’ve
splashed.”
Miss Miniver’s manner became impressive. She addressed Ann Veronica
with an air of conveying great open secrets to her. “As things are at
present,” she said, “it is true. We live under man-made institutions,
and that is what they amount to. Every girl in the world practically,
except a few of us who teach or type-write, and then we’re underpaid and
sweated--it’s dreadful to think how we are sweated!” She had lost her
generalization, whatever it was. She hung for a moment, and then went
on, conclusively, “Until we have the vote that is how things WILL be.”
“I’m all for the vote,” said Teddy.
“I suppose a girl MUST be underpaid and sweated,” said Ann Veronica. “I
suppose there’s no way of getting a decent income--independently.”
“Women have practically NO economic freedom,” said Miss Miniver,
“because they have no political freedom. Men have seen to that. The one
profession, the one decent profession, I mean, for a woman--except the
stage--is teaching, and there we trample on one another. Everywhere
else--the law, medicine, the Stock Exchange--prejudice bars us.”
“There’s art,” said Ann Veronica, “and writing.”
“Every one hasn’t the Gift. Even there a woman never gets a fair chance.
Men are against her. Whatever she does is minimized. All the best
novels have been written by women, and yet see how men sneer at the lady
novelist still! There’s only one way to get on for a woman, and that is
to please men. That is what they think we are for!”
“We’re beasts,” said Teddy. “Beasts!”
But Miss Miniver took no notice of his admission.
“Of course,” said Miss Miniver--she went on in a regularly undulating
voice--“we DO please men. We have that gift. We can see round them and
behind them and through them, and most of us use that knowledge, in the
silent way we have, for our great ends. Not all of us, but some of us.
Too many. I wonder what men would say if we threw the mask aside--if
we really told them what WE thought of them, really showed them what WE
were.” A flush of excitement crept into her cheeks.
“Maternity,” she said, “has been our undoing.”
From that she opened out into a long, confused emphatic discourse on the
position of women, full of wonderful statements, while Constance worked
at her stencilling and Ann Veronica and Hetty listened, and Teddy
contributed sympathetic noises and consumed cheap cigarettes. As she
talked she made weak little gestures with her hands, and she thrust her
face forward from her bent shoulders; and she peered sometimes at Ann
Veronica and sometimes at a photograph of the Axenstrasse, near
Fluelen, that hung upon the wall. Ann Veronica watched her face, vaguely
sympathizing with her, vaguely disliking her physical insufficiency and
her convulsive movements, and the fine eyebrows were knit with a faint
perplexity. Essentially the talk was a mixture of fragments of sentences
heard, of passages read, or arguments indicated rather than stated, and
all of it was served in a sauce of strange enthusiasm, thin yet
intense. Ann Veronica had had some training at the Tredgold College in
disentangling threads from confused statements, and she had a curious
persuasion that in all this fluent muddle there was something--something
real, something that signified. But it was very hard to follow. She did
not understand the note of hostility to men that ran through it all, the
bitter vindictiveness that lit Miss Miniver’s cheeks and eyes, the