Ann Veronica (8 page)

"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."

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."

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
destitute of under-clothing, and so driven to get a trousseau, in which
hardship a trousseau would certainly be "ripping," marriage was an
experience to be strenuously evaded.

When they were going home she asked her mother why she and Gwen and
Alice had cried.

"Ssh!" said her mother, and then added, "A little natural feeling,
dear."

"But didn't Alice want to marry Doctor Ralph?"

"Oh, ssh, Vee!" said her mother, with an evasion as patent as an
advertisement board. "I am sure she will be very happy indeed with
Doctor Ralph."

But Ann Veronica was by no means sure of that until she went over
to Wamblesmith and saw her sister, very remote and domestic and
authoritative, in a becoming tea-gown, in command of Doctor Ralph's
home. Doctor Ralph came in to tea and put his arm round Alice and kissed
her, and Alice called him "Squiggles," and stood in the shelter of his
arms for a moment with an expression of satisfied proprietorship. She
HAD cried, Ann Veronica knew. There had been fusses and scenes dimly
apprehended through half-open doors. She had heard Alice talking and
crying at the same time, a painful noise. Perhaps marriage hurt. But now
it was all over, and Alice was getting on well. It reminded Ann Veronica
of having a tooth stopped.

And after that Alice became remoter than ever, and, after a time, ill.
Then she had a baby and became as old as any really grown-up person, or
older, and very dull. Then she and her husband went off to a Yorkshire
practice, and had four more babies, none of whom photographed well, and
so she passed beyond the sphere of Ann Veronica's sympathies altogether.

The Gwen affair happened when she was away at school at
Marticombe-on-Sea, a term before she went to the High School, and was
never very clear to her.

Her mother missed writing for a week, and then she wrote in an unusual
key. "My dear," the letter ran, "I have to tell you that your sister
Gwen has offended your father very much. I hope you will always love
her, but I want you to remember she has offended your father and married
without his consent. Your father is very angry, and will not have her
name mentioned in his hearing. She has married some one he could not
approve of, and gone right away...."

When the next holidays came Ann Veronica's mother was ill, and Gwen was
in the sick-room when Ann Veronica returned home. She was in one of her
old walking-dresses, her hair was done in an unfamiliar manner, she wore
a wedding-ring, and she looked as if she had been crying.

"Hello, Gwen!" said Ann Veronica, trying to put every one at their ease.
"Been and married?... What's the name of the happy man?"

Gwen owned to "Fortescue."

"Got a photograph of him or anything?" said Ann Veronica, after kissing
her mother.

Gwen made an inquiry, and, directed by Mrs. Stanley, produced a portrait
from its hiding-place in the jewel-drawer under the mirror. It presented
a clean-shaven face with a large Corinthian nose, hair tremendously
waving off the forehead and more chin and neck than is good for a man.

"LOOKS all right," said Ann Veronica, regarding him with her head first
on one side and then on the other, and trying to be agreeable. "What's
the objection?"

"I suppose she ought to know?" said Gwen to her mother, trying to alter
the key of the conversation.

"You see, Vee," said Mrs. Stanley, "Mr. Fortescue is an actor, and your
father does not approve of the profession."

"Oh!" said Ann Veronica. "I thought they made knights of actors?"

"They may of Hal some day," said Gwen. "But it's a long business."

"I suppose this makes you an actress?" said Ann Veronica.

"I don't know whether I shall go on," said Gwen, a novel note of
languorous professionalism creeping into her voice. "The other women
don't much like it if husband and wife work together, and I don't think
Hal would like me to act away from him."

Ann Veronica regarded her sister with a new respect, but the traditions
of family life are strong. "I don't suppose you'll be able to do it
much," said Ann Veronica.

Later Gwen's trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her illness
that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in the drawing-room,
and actually shake hands with him in an entirely hopeless manner and
hope everything would turn out for the best.