Ann Veronica (12 page)

This Room No. 47 was no more than a sort of railway compartment on the
way to that.

How does one get work?

She walked along the Strand and across Trafalgar Square, and by the
Haymarket to Piccadilly, and so through dignified squares and palatial
alleys to Oxford Street; and her mind was divided between a speculative
treatment of employment on the one hand, and breezes—zephyr breezes—of
the keenest appreciation for London, on the other. The jolly part of it
was that for the first time in her life so far as London was concerned,
she was not going anywhere in particular; for the first time in her life
it seemed to her she was taking London in.

She tried to think how people get work. Ought she to walk into some
of these places and tell them what she could do? She hesitated at the
window of a shipping-office in Cockspur Street and at the Army and
Navy Stores, but decided that perhaps there would be some special and
customary hour, and that it would be better for her to find this out
before she made her attempt. And, besides, she didn't just immediately
want to make her attempt.

She fell into a pleasant dream of positions and work. Behind every one
of these myriad fronts she passed there must be a career or careers. Her
ideas of women's employment and a modern woman's pose in life were based
largely on the figure of Vivie Warren in Mrs. Warren's Profession. She
had seen Mrs. Warren's Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the
gallery of a Stage Society performance one Monday afternoon. Most of
it had been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that
checked further curiosity, but the figure of Vivien, hard, capable,
successful, and bullying, and ordering about a veritable Teddy in the
person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She saw herself in very much
Vivie's position—managing something.

Her thoughts were deflected from Vivie Warren by the peculiar behavior
of a middle-aged gentleman in Piccadilly. He appeared suddenly from
the infinite in the neighborhood of the Burlington Arcade, crossing
the pavement toward her and with his eyes upon her. He seemed to her
indistinguishably about her father's age. He wore a silk hat a little
tilted, and a morning coat buttoned round a tight, contained figure;
and a white slip gave a finish to his costume and endorsed the quiet
distinction of his tie. His face was a little flushed perhaps, and his
small, brown eyes were bright. He stopped on the curb-stone, not facing
her but as if he was on his way to cross the road, and spoke to her
suddenly over his shoulder.

"Whither away?" he said, very distinctly in a curiously wheedling voice.
Ann Veronica stared at his foolish, propitiatory smile, his hungry gaze,
through one moment of amazement, then stepped aside and went on her way
with a quickened step. But her mind was ruffled, and its mirror-like
surface of satisfaction was not easily restored.

Queer old gentleman!

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred
girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own
thoughts and her own knowledge. Ann Veronica could at the same time ask
herself what this queer old gentleman could have meant by speaking to
her, and know—know in general terms, at least—what that accosting
signified. About her, as she had gone day by day to and from the
Tredgold College, she had seen and not seen many an incidental aspect
of those sides of life about which girls are expected to know nothing,
aspects that were extraordinarily relevant to her own position and
outlook on the world, and yet by convention ineffably remote. For all
that she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise, she had never
yet considered these things with unaverted eyes. She had viewed them
askance, and without exchanging ideas with any one else in the world
about them.

She went on her way now no longer dreaming and appreciative, but
disturbed and unwillingly observant behind her mask of serene
contentment.

That delightful sense of free, unembarrassed movement was gone.

As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she saw a woman
approaching her from the opposite direction—a tall woman who at the
first glance seemed altogether beautiful and fine. She came along with
the fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as she drew nearer
paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose behind the quiet
expression of her open countenance, and a sort of unreality in her
splendor betrayed itself for which Ann Veronica could not recall the
right word—a word, half understood, that lurked and hid in her mind,
the word "meretricious." Behind this woman and a little to the side
of her, walked a man smartly dressed, with desire and appraisal in his
eyes. Something insisted that those two were mysteriously linked—that
the woman knew the man was there.

It was a second reminder that against her claim to go free and
untrammelled there was a case to be made, that after all it was true
that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has
gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and
petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.

It was in the quiet streets and squares toward Oxford Street that
it first came into her head disagreeably that she herself was being
followed. She observed a man walking on the opposite side of the way and
looking toward her.

"Bother it all!" she swore. "Bother!" and decided that this was not so,
and would not look to right or left again.

Beyond the Circus Ann Veronica went into a British Tea-Table Company
shop to get some tea. And as she was yet waiting for her tea to come she
saw this man again. Either it was an unfortunate recovery of a trail, or
he had followed her from Mayfair. There was no mistaking his intentions
this time. He came down the shop looking for her quite obviously, and
took up a position on the other side against a mirror in which he was
able to regard her steadfastly.

Beneath the serene unconcern of Ann Veronica's face was a boiling
tumult. She was furiously angry. She gazed with a quiet detachment
toward the window and the Oxford Street traffic, and in her heart she
was busy kicking this man to death. He HAD followed her! What had he
followed her for? He must have followed her all the way from beyond
Grosvenor Square.

He was a tall man and fair, with bluish eyes that were rather
protuberant, and long white hands of which he made a display. He had
removed his silk hat, and now sat looking at Ann Veronica over an
untouched cup of tea; he sat gloating upon her, trying to catch her eye.
Once, when he thought he had done so, he smiled an ingratiating smile.
He moved, after quiet intervals, with a quick little movement, and ever
and again stroked his small mustache and coughed a self-conscious cough.

"That he should be in the same world with me!" said Ann Veronica,
reduced to reading the list of good things the British Tea-Table Company
had priced for its patrons.

Heaven knows what dim and tawdry conceptions of passion and desire were
in that blond cranium, what romance-begotten dreams of intrigue and
adventure! but they sufficed, when presently Ann Veronica went out
into the darkling street again, to inspire a flitting, dogged pursuit,
idiotic, exasperating, indecent.

She had no idea what she should do. If she spoke to a policeman she did
not know what would ensue. Perhaps she would have to charge this man and
appear in a police-court next day.

She became angry with herself. She would not be driven in by this
persistent, sneaking aggression. She would ignore him. Surely she could
ignore him. She stopped abruptly, and looked in a flower-shop window. He
passed, and came loitering back and stood beside her, silently looking
into her face.

The afternoon had passed now into twilight. The shops were lighting
up into gigantic lanterns of color, the street lamps were glowing
into existence, and she had lost her way. She had lost her sense of
direction, and was among unfamiliar streets. She went on from street to
street, and all the glory of London had departed. Against the sinister,
the threatening, monstrous inhumanity of the limitless city, there was
nothing now but this supreme, ugly fact of a pursuit—the pursuit of the
undesired, persistent male.

For a second time Ann Veronica wanted to swear at the universe.

There were moments when she thought of turning upon this man and
talking to him. But there was something in his face at once stupid and
invincible that told her he would go on forcing himself upon her, that
he would esteem speech with her a great point gained. In the twilight
he had ceased to be a person one could tackle and shame; he had become
something more general, a something that crawled and sneaked toward her
and would not let her alone....

Then, when the tension was getting unendurable, and she was on the verge
of speaking to some casual passer-by and demanding help, her follower
vanished. For a time she could scarcely believe he was gone. He had. The
night had swallowed him up, but his work on her was done. She had lost
her nerve, and there was no more freedom in London for her that night.
She was glad to join in the stream of hurrying homeward workers that was
now welling out of a thousand places of employment, and to imitate their
driven, preoccupied haste. She had followed a bobbing white hat and gray
jacket until she reached the Euston Road corner of Tottenham Court Road,
and there, by the name on a bus and the cries of a conductor, she made
a guess of her way. And she did not merely affect to be driven—she felt
driven. She was afraid people would follow her, she was afraid of the
dark, open doorways she passed, and afraid of the blazes of light; she
was afraid to be alone, and she knew not what it was she feared.

It was past seven when she got back to her hotel. She thought then that
she had shaken off the man of the bulging blue eyes forever, but that
night she found he followed her into her dreams. He stalked her, he
stared at her, he craved her, he sidled slinking and propitiatory
and yet relentlessly toward her, until at last she awoke from the
suffocating nightmare nearness of his approach, and lay awake in fear
and horror listening to the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.

She came very near that night to resolving that she would return to
her home next morning. But the morning brought courage again, and those
first intimations of horror vanished completely from her mind.

She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand post-office
worded thus:

| All | is | well | with | me | and | quite | safe | Veronica |

and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had then set
herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning's proposal of marriage. But
she had found it very difficult.

"DEAR MR. MANNING," she had begun. So far it had been plain sailing,
and it had seemed fairly evident to go on: "I find it very difficult to
answer your letter."

But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come and she had fallen
thinking of the events of the day. She had decided that she would spend
the next morning answering advertisements in the papers that abounded in
the writing-room; and so, after half an hour's perusal of back numbers
of the Sketch in the drawing-room, she had gone to bed.

She found next morning, when she came to this advertisement answering,
that it was more difficult than she had supposed. In the first place
there were not so many suitable advertisements as she had expected.
She sat down by the paper-rack with a general feeling of resemblance
to Vivie Warren, and looked through the Morning Post and Standard and
Telegraph, and afterward the half-penny sheets. The Morning Post was
hungry for governesses and nursery governesses, but held out no other
hopes; the Daily Telegraph that morning seemed eager only for skirt
hands. She went to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet of
note-paper, and then remembered that she had no address as yet to which
letters could be sent.

She decided to leave this matter until the morrow and devote the morning
to settling up with Mr. Manning. At the cost of quite a number of torn
drafts she succeeded in evolving this:

"DEAR MR. MANNING,—I find it very difficult to answer your letter.
I hope you won't mind if I say first that I think it does me an
extraordinary honor that you should think of any one like myself
so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish it had not been
written."

She surveyed this sentence for some time before going on. "I wonder,"
she said, "why one writes him sentences like that? It'll have to go,"
she decided, "I've written too many already." She went on, with a
desperate attempt to be easy and colloquial:

"You see, we were rather good friends, I thought, and now perhaps it
will be difficult for us to get back to the old friendly footing. But if
that can possibly be done I want it to be done. You see, the plain fact
of the case is that I think I am too young and ignorant for marriage.
I have been thinking these things over lately, and it seems to me that
marriage for a girl is just the supremest thing in life. It isn't just
one among a number of important things; for her it is the important
thing, and until she knows far more than I know of the facts of life,
how is she to undertake it? So please; if you will, forget that you
wrote that letter, and forgive this answer. I want you to think of me
just as if I was a man, and quite outside marriage altogether.

"I do hope you will be able to do this, because I value men friends.
I shall be very sorry if I cannot have you for a friend. I think that
there is no better friend for a girl than a man rather older than
herself.

"Perhaps by this time you will have heard of the step I have taken in
leaving my home. Very likely you will disapprove highly of what I have
done—I wonder? You may, perhaps, think I have done it just in a fit of
childish petulance because my father locked me in when I wanted to go
to a ball of which he did not approve. But really it is much more
than that. At Morningside Park I feel as though all my growing up was
presently to stop, as though I was being shut in from the light of life,
and, as they say in botany, etiolated. I was just like a sort of dummy
that does things as it is told—that is to say, as the strings are
pulled. I want to be a person by myself, and to pull my own strings. I
had rather have trouble and hardship like that than be taken care of by
others. I want to be myself. I wonder if a man can quite understand that
passionate feeling? It is quite a passionate feeling. So I am already
no longer the girl you knew at Morningside Park. I am a young person
seeking employment and freedom and self-development, just as in quite
our first talk of all I said I wanted to be.