Ann Veronica (36 page)

"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.

She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father
liked, and that made her look serious and responsible. Dinner was quite
uneventful. Her father read a draft prospectus warily, and her aunt
dropped fragments of her projects for managing while the cook had a
holiday. After dinner Ann Veronica went into the drawing-room with Miss
Stanley, and her father went up to his den for his pipe and pensive
petrography. Later in the evening she heard him whistling, poor man!

She felt very restless and excited. She refused coffee, though she knew
that anyhow she was doomed to a sleepless night. She took up one of her
father's novels and put it down again, fretted up to her own room for
some work, sat on her bed and meditated upon the room that she was now
really abandoning forever, and returned at length with a stocking to
darn. Her aunt was making herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion
under the newly lit lamp.

Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm-chair and darned badly for a
minute or so. Then she looked at her aunt, and traced with a curious eye
the careful arrangement of her hair, her sharp nose, the little drooping
lines of mouth and chin and cheek.

Her thought spoke aloud. "Were you ever in love, aunt?" she asked.

Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still, with hands that
had ceased to work. "What makes you ask such a question, Vee?" she said.

"I wondered."

Her aunt answered in a low voice: "I was engaged to him, dear, for seven
years, and then he died."

Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur.

"He was in holy orders, and we were to have been married when he got a
living. He was a Wiltshire Edmondshaw, a very old family."

She sat very still.

Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had leaped up in her mind,
and that she felt was cruel. "Are you sorry you waited, aunt?" she said.

Her aunt was a long time before she answered. "His stipend forbade it,"
she said, and seemed to fall into a train of thought. "It would have
been rash and unwise," she said at the end of a meditation. "What he had
was altogether insufficient."

Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes and the comfortable,
rather refined face with a penetrating curiosity. Presently her aunt
sighed deeply and looked at the clock. "Time for my Patience," she said.
She got up, put the neat cuffs she had made into her work-basket,
and went to the bureau for the little cards in the morocco case. Ann
Veronica jumped up to get her the card-table. "I haven't seen the new
Patience, dear," she said. "May I sit beside you?"

"It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. "Perhaps you will help me
shuffle?"

Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements of the
rows of eight with which the struggle began. Then she sat watching the
play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion, sometimes letting her
attention wander to the smoothly shining arms she had folded across her
knees just below the edge of the table. She was feeling extraordinarily
well that night, so that the sense of her body was a deep delight, a
realization of a gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness. Then
she glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt's many-ringed hand
played, and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that surveyed its
operations.

It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful beyond measure. It
seemed incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the
same blood, only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that
same broad interlacing stream of human life that has invented the fauns
and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite, Freya, and all the twining beauty of
the gods. The love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood, the
scent of night stock from the garden filled the air, and the moths that
beat upon the closed frames of the window next the lamp set her mind
dreaming of kisses in the dusk. Yet her aunt, with a ringed hand
flitting to her lips and a puzzled, worried look in her eyes, deaf
to all this riot of warmth and flitting desire, was playing
Patience—playing Patience, as if Dionysius and her curate had died
together. A faint buzz above the ceiling witnessed that petrography,
too, was active. Gray and tranquil world! Amazing, passionless world! A
world in which days without meaning, days in which "we don't want things
to happen" followed days without meaning—until the last thing happened,
the ultimate, unavoidable, coarse, "disagreeable." It was her last
evening in that wrappered life against which she had rebelled. Warm
reality was now so near her she could hear it beating in her ears. Away
in London even now Capes was packing and preparing; Capes, the magic man
whose touch turned one to trembling fire. What was he doing? What was he
thinking? It was less than a day now, less than twenty hours. Seventeen
hours, sixteen hours. She glanced at the soft-ticking clock with the
exposed brass pendulum upon the white marble mantel, and made a rapid
calculation. To be exact, it was just sixteen hours and twenty minutes.
The slow stars circled on to the moment of their meeting. The softly
glittering summer stars! She saw them shining over mountains of snow,
over valleys of haze and warm darkness.... There would be no moon.

"I believe after all it's coming out!" said Miss Stanley. "The aces made
it easy."

Ann Veronica started from her reverie, sat up in her chair, became
attentive. "Look, dear," she said presently, "you can put the ten on the
Jack."

Next day Ann Veronica and Capes felt like newborn things. It seemed
to them they could never have been really alive before, but only
dimly anticipating existence. They sat face to face beneath an
experienced-looking rucksack and a brand new portmanteau and a leather
handbag, in the afternoon-boat train that goes from Charing Cross to
Folkestone for Boulogne. They tried to read illustrated papers in an
unconcerned manner and with forced attention, lest they should catch
the leaping exultation in each other's eyes. And they admired Kent
sedulously from the windows.

They crossed the Channel in sunshine and a breeze that just ruffled the
sea to glittering scales of silver. Some of the people who watched them
standing side by side thought they must be newly wedded because of their
happy faces, and others that they were an old-established couple because
of their easy confidence in each other.

At Boulogne they took train to Basle; next morning they breakfasted
together in the buffet of that station, and thence they caught the
Interlaken express, and so went by way of Spies to Frutigen. There was
no railway beyond Frutigen in those days; they sent their baggage by
post to Kandersteg, and walked along the mule path to the left of the
stream to that queer hollow among the precipices, Blau See, where the
petrifying branches of trees lie in the blue deeps of an icy lake, and
pine-trees clamber among gigantic boulders. A little inn flying a
Swiss flag nestles under a great rock, and there they put aside their
knapsacks and lunched and rested in the mid-day shadow of the gorge
and the scent of resin. And later they paddled in a boat above the
mysterious deeps of the See, and peered down into the green-blues and
the blue-greens together. By that time it seemed to them they had lived
together twenty years.

Except for one memorable school excursion to Paris, Ann Veronica had
never yet been outside England. So that it seemed to her the whole world
had changed—the very light of it had changed. Instead of English villas
and cottages there were chalets and Italian-built houses shining white;
there were lakes of emerald and sapphire and clustering castles, and
such sweeps of hill and mountain, such shining uplands of snow, as she
had never seen before. Everything was fresh and bright, from the kindly
manners of the Frutigen cobbler, who hammered mountain nails into her
boots, to the unfamiliar wild flowers that spangled the wayside. And
Capes had changed into the easiest and jolliest companion in the world.
The mere fact that he was there in the train alongside her, helping her,
sitting opposite to her in the dining-car, presently sleeping on a seat
within a yard of her, made her heart sing until she was afraid their
fellow passengers would hear it. It was too good to be true. She would
not sleep for fear of losing a moment of that sense of his proximity. To
walk beside him, dressed akin to him, rucksacked and companionable, was
bliss in itself; each step she took was like stepping once more across
the threshold of heaven.

One trouble, however, shot its slanting bolts athwart the shining warmth
of that opening day and marred its perfection, and that was the thought
of her father.

She had treated him badly; she had hurt him and her aunt; she had done
wrong by their standards, and she would never persuade them that she
had done right. She thought of her father in the garden, and of her aunt
with her Patience, as she had seen them—how many ages was it ago? Just
one day intervened. She felt as if she had struck them unawares. The
thought of them distressed her without subtracting at all from the
oceans of happiness in which she swam. But she wished she could put the
thing she had done in some way to them so that it would not hurt them
so much as the truth would certainly do. The thought of their faces,
and particularly of her aunt's, as it would meet the fact—disconcerted,
unfriendly, condemning, pained—occurred to her again and again.

"Oh! I wish," she said, "that people thought alike about these things."

Capes watched the limpid water dripping from his oar. "I wish they did,"
he said, "but they don't."