Ann Veronica (7 page)

She was not obliged to go to the Tredgold College, because as yet the
College had not settled down for the session. She was supposed to be
reading at home, and after breakfast she strolled into the vegetable
garden, and having taken up a position upon the staging of a disused
greenhouse that had the double advantage of being hidden from the
windows of the house and secure from the sudden appearance of any one,
she resumed the reading of Mr. Manning's letter.

Mr. Manning's handwriting had an air of being clear without being easily
legible; it was large and rather roundish, with a lack of definition
about the letters and a disposition to treat the large ones as
liberal-minded people nowadays treat opinions, as all amounting to the
same thing really—a years-smoothed boyish rather than an adult hand.
And it filled seven sheets of notepaper, each written only on one side.

"MY DEAR MISS STANLEY," it began,—"I hope you will forgive my
bothering you with a letter, but I have been thinking very much over our
conversation at Lady Palsworthy's, and I feel there are things I want
to say to you so much that I cannot wait until we meet again. It is the
worst of talk under such social circumstances that it is always getting
cut off so soon as it is beginning; and I went home that afternoon
feeling I had said nothing—literally nothing—of the things I had meant
to say to you and that were coursing through my head. They were things I
had meant very much to talk to you about, so that I went home vexed and
disappointed, and only relieved myself a little by writing a few verses.
I wonder if you will mind very much when I tell you they were suggested
by you. You must forgive the poet's license I take. Here is one verse.
The metrical irregularity is intentional, because I want, as it were, to
put you apart: to change the lilt and the mood altogether when I speak
of you.

"'A SONG OF LADIES AND MY LADY

"'Saintly white and a lily is Mary,
Margaret's violets, sweet and shy;
Green and dewy is Nellie-bud fairy,
Forget-me-nots live in Gwendolen's eye.
Annabel shines like a star in the darkness,
Rosamund queens it a rose, deep rose;
But the lady I love is like sunshine in April weather,
She gleams and gladdens, she warms—and goes.'

"Crude, I admit. But let that verse tell my secret. All bad
verse—originally the epigram was Lang's, I believe—is written in a
state of emotion.

"My dear Miss Stanley, when I talked to you the other afternoon of work
and politics and such-like things, my mind was all the time resenting it
beyond measure. There we were discussing whether you should have a vote,
and I remembered the last occasion we met it was about your prospects of
success in the medical profession or as a Government official such as a
number of women now are, and all the time my heart was crying out within
me, 'Here is the Queen of your career.' I wanted, as I have never wanted
before, to take you up, to make you mine, to carry you off and set you
apart from all the strain and turmoil of life. For nothing will ever
convince me that it is not the man's share in life to shield, to
protect, to lead and toil and watch and battle with the world at large.
I want to be your knight, your servant, your protector, your—I dare
scarcely write the word—your husband. So I come suppliant. I am
five-and-thirty, and I have knocked about in the world and tasted the
quality of life. I had a hard fight to begin with to win my way into the
Upper Division—I was third on a list of forty-seven—and since then I
have found myself promoted almost yearly in a widening sphere of social
service. Before I met you I never met any one whom I felt I could
love, but you have discovered depths in my own nature I had scarcely
suspected. Except for a few early ebullitions of passion, natural to
a warm and romantic disposition, and leaving no harmful
after-effects—ebullitions that by the standards of the higher truth I
feel no one can justly cast a stone at, and of which I for one am by no
means ashamed—I come to you a pure and unencumbered man. I love you.
In addition to my public salary I have a certain private property and
further expectations through my aunt, so that I can offer you a life
of wide and generous refinement, travel, books, discussion, and easy
relations with a circle of clever and brilliant and thoughtful people
with whom my literary work has brought me into contact, and of which,
seeing me only as you have done alone in Morningside Park, you can have
no idea. I have a certain standing not only as a singer but as a critic,
and I belong to one of the most brilliant causerie dinner clubs of
the day, in which successful Bohemianism, politicians, men of affairs,
artists, sculptors, and cultivated noblemen generally, mingle together
in the easiest and most delightful intercourse. That is my real milieu,
and one that I am convinced you would not only adorn but delight in.

"I find it very hard to write this letter. There are so many things
I want to tell you, and they stand on such different levels, that
the effect is necessarily confusing and discordant, and I find myself
doubting if I am really giving you the thread of emotion that should run
through all this letter. For although I must confess it reads very much
like an application or a testimonial or some such thing as that, I can
assure you I am writing this in fear and trembling with a sinking heart.
My mind is full of ideas and images that I have been cherishing and
accumulating—dreams of travelling side by side, of lunching quietly
together in some jolly restaurant, of moonlight and music and all that
side of life, of seeing you dressed like a queen and shining in some
brilliant throng—mine; of your looking at flowers in some old-world
garden, our garden—there are splendid places to be got down in Surrey,
and a little runabout motor is quite within my means. You know they say,
as, indeed, I have just quoted already, that all bad poetry is written
in a state of emotion, but I have no doubt that this is true of bad
offers of marriage. I have often felt before that it is only when one
has nothing to say that one can write easy poetry. Witness Browning. And
how can I get into one brief letter the complex accumulated desires of
what is now, I find on reference to my diary, nearly sixteen months of
letting my mind run on you—ever since that jolly party at Surbiton,
where we raced and beat the other boat. You steered and I rowed stroke.
My very sentences stumble and give way. But I do not even care if I am
absurd. I am a resolute man, and hitherto when I have wanted a thing I
have got it; but I have never yet wanted anything in my life as I have
wanted you. It isn't the same thing. I am afraid because I love you, so
that the mere thought of failure hurts. If I did not love you so much I
believe I could win you by sheer force of character, for people tell me
I am naturally of the dominating type. Most of my successes in life have
been made with a sort of reckless vigor.

"Well, I have said what I had to say, stumblingly and badly, and baldly.
But I am sick of tearing up letters and hopeless of getting what I have
to say better said. It would be easy enough for me to write an eloquent
letter about something else. Only I do not care to write about anything
else. Let me put the main question to you now that I could not put the
other afternoon. Will you marry me, Ann Veronica?

"Very sincerely yours,

"HUBERT MANNING."

Ann Veronica read this letter through with grave, attentive eyes.

Her interest grew as she read, a certain distaste disappeared. Twice she
smiled, but not unkindly. Then she went back and mixed up the sheets in
a search for particular passages. Finally she fell into reflection.

"Odd!" she said. "I suppose I shall have to write an answer. It's so
different from what one has been led to expect."

She became aware of her aunt, through the panes of the greenhouse,
advancing with an air of serene unconsciousness from among the raspberry
canes.

"No you don't!" said Ann Veronica, and walked out at a brisk and
business-like pace toward the house.

"I'm going for a long tramp, auntie," she said.

"Alone, dear?"

"Yes, aunt. I've got a lot of things to think about."

Miss Stanley reflected as Ann Veronica went toward the house. She
thought her niece very hard and very self-possessed and self-confident.
She ought to be softened and tender and confidential at this phase of
her life. She seemed to have no idea whatever of the emotional states
that were becoming to her age and position. Miss Stanley walked round
the garden thinking, and presently house and garden reverberated to Ann
Veronica's slamming of the front door.

"I wonder!" said Miss Stanley.

For a long time she surveyed a row of towering holly-hocks, as though
they offered an explanation. Then she went in and up-stairs, hesitated
on the landing, and finally, a little breathless and with an air of
great dignity, opened the door and walked into Ann Veronica's room. It
was a neat, efficient-looking room, with a writing-table placed with a
business-like regard to the window, and a bookcase surmounted by a
pig's skull, a dissected frog in a sealed bottle, and a pile of
shiny, black-covered note-books. In the corner of the room were two
hockey-sticks and a tennis-racket, and upon the walls Ann Veronica,
by means of autotypes, had indicated her proclivities in art. But Miss
Stanley took no notice of these things. She walked straight across to
the wardrobe and opened it. There, hanging among Ann Veronica's more
normal clothing, was a skimpy dress of red canvas, trimmed with cheap
and tawdry braid, and short—it could hardly reach below the knee. On
the same peg and evidently belonging to it was a black velvet Zouave
jacket. And then! a garment that was conceivably a secondary skirt.

Miss Stanley hesitated, and took first one and then another of the
constituents of this costume off its peg and surveyed it.

The third item she took with a trembling hand by its waistbelt. As she
raised it, its lower portion fell apart into two baggy crimson masses.

"TROUSERS!" she whispered.

Her eyes travelled about the room as if in appeal to the very chairs.

Tucked under the writing-table a pair of yellow and gold Turkish
slippers of a highly meretricious quality caught her eye. She walked
over to them still carrying the trousers in her hands, and stooped to
examine them. They were ingenious disguises of gilt paper destructively
gummed, it would seem, to Ann Veronicas' best dancing-slippers.

Then she reverted to the trousers.

"How CAN I tell him?" whispered Miss Stanley.

Ann Veronica carried a light but business-like walking-stick. She walked
with an easy quickness down the Avenue and through the proletarian
portion of Morningside Park, and crossing these fields came into a
pretty overhung lane that led toward Caddington and the Downs. And
then her pace slackened. She tucked her stick under her arm and re-read
Manning's letter.

"Let me think," said Ann Veronica. "I wish this hadn't turned up to-day
of all days."

She found it difficult to begin thinking, and indeed she was anything
but clear what it was she had to think about. Practically it was most
of the chief interests in life that she proposed to settle in this
pedestrian meditation. Primarily it was her own problem, and in
particular the answer she had to give to Mr. Manning's letter, but in
order to get data for that she found that she, having a logical and
ordered mind, had to decide upon the general relations of men to women,
the objects and conditions of marriage and its bearing upon the
welfare of the race, the purpose of the race, the purpose, if any, of
everything....

"Frightful lot of things aren't settled," said Ann Veronica. In
addition, the Fadden Dance business, all out of proportion, occupied
the whole foreground of her thoughts and threw a color of rebellion
over everything. She kept thinking she was thinking about Mr. Manning's
proposal of marriage and finding she was thinking of the dance.

For a time her efforts to achieve a comprehensive concentration were
dispersed by the passage of the village street of Caddington, the
passing of a goggled car-load of motorists, and the struggles of a
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.