Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
stable lad mounted on one recalcitrant horse and leading another. When
she got back to her questions again in the monotonous high-road that led
up the hill, she found the image of Mr. Manning central in her mind.
He stood there, large and dark, enunciating, in his clear voice from
beneath his large mustache, clear flat sentences, deliberately kindly.
He proposed, he wanted to possess her! He loved her.
Ann Veronica felt no repulsion at the prospect. That Mr. Manning loved
her presented itself to her bloodlessly, stilled from any imaginative
quiver or thrill of passion or disgust. The relationship seemed to have
almost as much to do with blood and body as a mortgage. It was something
that would create a mutual claim, a relationship. It was in another
world from that in which men will die for a kiss, and touching hands
lights fires that burn up lives--the world of romance, the world of
passionately beautiful things.
But that other world, in spite of her resolute exclusion of it, was
always looking round corners and peeping through chinks and crannies,
and rustling and raiding into the order in which she chose to live,
shining out of pictures at her, echoing in lyrics and music; it invaded
her dreams, it wrote up broken and enigmatical sentences upon the
passage walls of her mind. She was aware of it now as if it were a
voice shouting outside a house, shouting passionate verities in a hot
sunlight, a voice that cries while people talk insincerely in a darkened
room and pretend not to hear. Its shouting now did in some occult manner
convey a protest that Mr. Manning would on no account do, though he
was tall and dark and handsome and kind, and thirty-five and adequately
prosperous, and all that a husband should be. But there was, it
insisted, no mobility in his face, no movement, nothing about him that
warmed. If Ann Veronica could have put words to that song they
would have been, “Hot-blooded marriage or none!” but she was far too
indistinct in this matter to frame any words at all.
“I don’t love him,” said Ann Veronica, getting a gleam. “I don’t see
that his being a good sort matters. That really settles about that....
But it means no end of a row.”
For a time she sat on a rail before leaving the road for the downland
turf. “But I wish,” she said, “I had some idea what I was really up to.”
Her thoughts went into solution for a time, while she listened to a lark
singing.
“Marriage and mothering,” said Ann Veronica, with her mind crystallizing
out again as the lark dropped to the nest in the turf. “And all the rest
of it perhaps is a song.”
Part 3
Her mind got back to the Fadden Ball.
She meant to go, she meant to go, she meant to go. Nothing would stop
her, and she was prepared to face the consequences. Suppose her father
turned her out of doors! She did not care, she meant to go. She would
just walk out of the house and go....
She thought of her costume in some detail and with considerable
satisfaction, and particularly of a very jolly property dagger with
large glass jewels in the handle, that reposed in a drawer in her room.
She was to be a Corsair’s Bride. “Fancy stabbing a man for jealousy!”
she thought. “You’d have to think how to get in between his bones.”
She thought of her father, and with an effort dismissed him from her
mind.
She tried to imagine the collective effect of the Fadden Ball; she had
never seen a fancy-dress gathering in her life. Mr. Manning came into
her thoughts again, an unexpected, tall, dark, self-contained presence
at the Fadden. One might suppose him turning up; he knew a lot of clever
people, and some of them might belong to the class. What would he come
as?
Presently she roused herself with a guilty start from the task of
dressing and re-dressing Mr. Manning in fancy costume, as though he
was a doll. She had tried him as a Crusader, in which guise he seemed
plausible but heavy--“There IS something heavy about him; I wonder if
it’s his mustache?”--and as a Hussar, which made him preposterous, and
as a Black Brunswicker, which was better, and as an Arab sheik. Also
she had tried him as a dragoman and as a gendarme, which seemed the most
suitable of all to his severely handsome, immobile profile. She felt
he would tell people the way, control traffic, and refuse admission
to public buildings with invincible correctness and the very finest
explicit feelings possible. For each costume she had devised a suitable
form of matrimonial refusal. “Oh, Lord!” she said, discovering what she
was up to, and dropped lightly from the fence upon the turf and went on
her way toward the crest.
“I shall never marry,” said Ann Veronica, resolutely; “I’m not the sort.
That’s why it’s so important I should take my own line now.”
Part 4
Ann Veronica’s ideas of marriage were limited and unsystematic. Her
teachers and mistresses had done their best to stamp her mind with an
ineradicable persuasion that it was tremendously important, and on no
account to be thought about. Her first intimations of marriage as a fact
of extreme significance in a woman’s life had come with the marriage of
Alice and the elopement of her second sister, Gwen.
These convulsions occurred when Ann Veronica was about twelve. There
was a gulf of eight years between her and the youngest of her brace of
sisters--an impassable gulf inhabited chaotically by two noisy brothers.
These sisters moved in a grown-up world inaccessible to Ann Veronica’s
sympathies, and to a large extent remote from her curiosity. She got
into rows through meddling with their shoes and tennis-rackets, and had
moments of carefully concealed admiration when she was privileged to see
them just before her bedtime, rather radiantly dressed in white or pink
or amber and prepared to go out with her mother. She thought Alice a bit
of a sneak, an opinion her brothers shared, and Gwen rather a snatch
at meals. She saw nothing of their love-making, and came home from her
boarding-school in a state of decently suppressed curiosity for Alice’s
wedding.
Her impressions of this cardinal ceremony were rich and confused,
complicated by a quite transitory passion that awakened no reciprocal
fire for a fat curly headed cousin in black velveteen and a lace
collar, who assisted as a page. She followed him about persistently, and
succeeded, after a brisk, unchivalrous struggle (in which he pinched and
asked her to “cheese it”), in kissing him among the raspberries behind
the greenhouse. Afterward her brother Roddy, also strange in velveteen,
feeling rather than knowing of this relationship, punched this Adonis’s
head.
A marriage in the house proved to be exciting but extremely
disorganizing. Everything seemed designed to unhinge the mind and
make the cat wretched. All the furniture was moved, all the meals were
disarranged, and everybody, Ann Veronica included, appeared in new,
bright costumes. She had to wear cream and a brown sash and a short
frock and her hair down, and Gwen cream and a brown sash and a long
skirt and her hair up. And her mother, looking unusually alert and
hectic, wore cream and brown also, made up in a more complicated manner.
Ann Veronica was much impressed by a mighty trying on and altering and
fussing about Alice’s “things”--Alice was being re-costumed from garret
to cellar, with a walking-dress and walking-boots to measure, and a
bride’s costume of the most ravishing description, and stockings and
such like beyond the dreams of avarice--and a constant and increasing
dripping into the house of irrelevant remarkable objects, such as--
Real lace bedspread;
Gilt travelling clock;
Ornamental pewter plaque;
Salad bowl (silver mounted) and servers;
Madgett’s “English Poets” (twelve volumes), bound purple morocco;
Etc., etc.
Through all this flutter of novelty there came and went a solicitous,
preoccupied, almost depressed figure. It was Doctor Ralph, formerly
the partner of Doctor Stickell in the Avenue, and now with a thriving
practice of his own in Wamblesmith. He had shaved his side-whiskers and
come over in flannels, but he was still indisputably the same person
who had attended Ann Veronica for the measles and when she swallowed
the fish-bone. But his role was altered, and he was now playing the
bridegroom in this remarkable drama. Alice was going to be Mrs. Ralph.
He came in apologetically; all the old “Well, and how ARE we?” note
gone; and once he asked Ann Veronica, almost furtively,
“How’s Alice getting on, Vee?” Finally, on the Day, he appeared like
his old professional self transfigured, in the most beautiful light gray
trousers Ann Veronica had ever seen and a new shiny silk hat with a most
becoming roll....
It was not simply that all the rooms were rearranged and everybody
dressed in unusual fashions, and all the routines of life abolished and
put away: people’s tempers and emotions also seemed strangely disturbed
and shifted about. Her father was distinctly irascible, and disposed
more than ever to hide away among the petrological things--the study was
turned out. At table he carved in a gloomy but resolute manner. On the
Day he had trumpet-like outbreaks of cordiality, varied by a watchful
preoccupation. Gwen and Alice were fantastically friendly, which seemed
to annoy him, and Mrs. Stanley was throughout enigmatical, with an
anxious eye on her husband and Alice.
There was a confused impression of livery carriages and whips with white
favors, people fussily wanting other people to get in before them,
and then the church. People sat in unusual pews, and a wide margin of
hassocky emptiness intervened between the ceremony and the walls.
Ann Veronica had a number of fragmentary impressions of Alice strangely
transfigured in bridal raiment. It seemed to make her sister downcast
beyond any precedent. The bridesmaids and pages got rather jumbled
in the aisle, and she had an effect of Alice’s white back and
sloping shoulders and veiled head receding toward the altar. In some
incomprehensible way that back view made her feel sorry for Alice. Also
she remembered very vividly the smell of orange blossom, and Alice,
drooping and spiritless, mumbling responses, facing Doctor Ralph, while
the Rev. Edward Bribble stood between them with an open book. Doctor
Ralph looked kind and large, and listened to Alice’s responses as though
he was listening to symptoms and thought that on the whole she was
progressing favorably.
And afterward her mother and Alice kissed long and clung to each other.
And Doctor Ralph stood by looking considerate. He and her father shook
hands manfully.
Ann Veronica had got quite interested in Mr. Bribble’s rendering of the
service--he had the sort of voice that brings out things--and was still
teeming with ideas about it when finally a wild outburst from the organ
made it clear that, whatever snivelling there might be down in the
chancel, that excellent wind instrument was, in its Mendelssohnian
way, as glad as ever it could be. “Pump, pump, per-um-pump, Pum, Pump,
Per-um....”
The wedding-breakfast was for Ann Veronica a spectacle of the unreal
consuming the real; she liked that part very well, until she was
carelessly served against her expressed wishes with mayonnaise. She
was caught by an uncle, whose opinion she valued, making faces at Roddy
because he had exulted at this.
Of the vast mass of these impressions Ann Veronica could make nothing
at the time; there they were--Fact! She stored them away in a mind
naturally retentive, as a squirrel stores away nuts, for further
digestion. Only one thing emerged with any reasonable clarity in her
mind at once, and that was that unless she was saved from drowning by
an unmarried man, in which case the ceremony is unavoidable, or totally