4. CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE CRISIS
1
WE left Miss Stanley with Ann Veronica's fancy
dress in her hands and her eyes directed to Ann
Veronica's pseudo-Turkish slippers.
When Mr. Stanley came home at a quarter to six —
an earlier train by fifteen minutes than he affected —
his sister met him in the hall with a hushed expression.
“I'm so glad you're here, Peter,” she said. “She means
to go.”
“Go!” he said. “Where?”
“To that ball.”
“What ball?” The question was rhetorical. He
knew.
“I believe she's dressing up-stairs —now.”
“Then tell her to undress, confound her!” The City
had been thoroughly annoying that day, and he was
angry from the outset.
Miss Stanley reflected on this proposal for a moment.
“I don't think she will,” she said.
“She must,” said Mr. Stanley, and went into his
study. His sister followed. “She can't go now. She'll
have to wait for dinner,” he said, uncomfortably.
“She's going to have some sort of meal with the
Widgetts down the Avenue, and go up with them.
“She told you that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“At tea.”
“But why didn't you prohibit once for all the whole
thing? How dared she tell you that?”
“Out of defiance. She just sat and told me that
was her arrangement. I've never seen her quite so
sure of herself.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, `My dear Veronica! how can you think of
such things?' ”
“And then?”
“She had two more cups of tea and some cake, and
told me of her walk.”
“She'll meet somebody one of these days —walking
about like that.”
“She didn't say she'd met any one.”
“But didn't you say some more about that ball?”
“I said everything I could say as soon as I realized
she was trying to avoid the topic. I said, `It is no use
your telling me about this walk and pretend I've been
told about the ball, because you haven't. Your father
has forbidden you to go!' ”
“Well?”
“She said, `I hate being horrid to you and father,
but I feel it my duty to go to that ball!' ”
“Felt it her duty!”
“ `Very well,' I said, `then I wash my hands of the whole
business. Your disobedience be upon your own head.' ”
“But that is flat rebellion!” said Mr. Stanley, standing
on the hearthrug with his back to the unlit gas-fire.
“You ought at once —you ought at once to have told
her that. What duty does a girl owe to any one before
her father? Obedience to him, that is surely the first
law. What can she put before that?” His
voice began
to rise. “One would think I had said nothing about
the matter. One would think I had agreed to her going.
I suppose this is what she learns in her infernal London
colleges. I suppose this is the sort of damned
rubbish —”
“Oh! Ssh, Peter!” cried Miss Stanley.
He stopped abruptly. In the pause a door could
be heard opening and closing on the landing up-stairs.
Then light footsteps became audible, descending the
staircase with a certain deliberation and a faint rustle
of skirts.
“Tell her,” said Mr. Stanley, with an imperious
gesture, “to come in here.”
2
Miss Stanley emerged from the study and stood
watching Ann Veronica descend.
The girl was flushed with excitement, bright-eyed,
and braced for a struggle; her aunt had never seen her
looking so fine or so pretty. Her fancy dress, save for the
green-gray stockings, the pseudo-Turkish slippers, and
baggy silk trousered ends natural to a Corsair's bride,
was hidden in a large black-silk-hooded opera-cloak.
Beneath the hood it was evident that her rebellious hair
was bound up with red silk, and fastened by some de-
vice in her ears (unless she had them pierced, which was
too dreadful a thing to suppose!) were long brass filigree
earrings.
“I'm just off, aunt,” said Ann Veronica.
“Your father is in the study and wishes to speak to
you.”
Ann Veronica hesitated, and then stood in the open
doorway and regarded her father's stern presence. She
spoke with an entirely false note of cheerful off-handedness. “I'm just in time to say good-bye before I go,
father. I'm going up to London with the Widgetts to
that ball.”
“Now look here, Ann Veronica,” said Mr. Stanley,
“just a moment. You are not going to that
ball!”
Ann Veronica tried a less genial, more dignified note.
“I thought we had discussed that, father.”
“You are not going to that ball! You are not going
out of this house in that get-up!”
Ann Veronica tried yet more earnestly to treat him,
as she would treat any man, with an insistence upon her
due of masculine respect. “You see,” she said, very
gently, “I am going. I am sorry to seem to
disobey
you, but I am. I wish” —she found she had embarked
on a bad sentence — “I wish we needn't have quarrelled.”
She stopped abruptly, and turned about toward the
front door. In a moment he was beside her. “I don't
think you can have heard me, Vee,” he said, with
intensely controlled fury. “I said you were” —he shouted —
“not to go!”
She made, and overdid, an immense effort to be a
princess. She tossed her head, and, having no further
words, moved toward the door. Her father intercepted
her, and for a moment she and he struggled with their
hands upon the latch. A common rage flushed their
faces. “Let go!” she gasped at him, a blaze of anger.
“Veronica!” cried Miss Stanley, warningly, and,
“Peter!”
For a moment they seemed on the verge of an
altogether desperate scuffle. Never for a moment had
violence come between these two since long ago he had,
in spite of her mother's protest in the background,
carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for
some forgotten crime. With something near to horror
they found themselves thus confronted.
The door was fastened by a catch and a latch with an
inside key, to which at night a chain and two bolts were
added. Carefully abstaining from thrusting against
each other, Ann Veronica and her father began an
absurdly desperate struggle, the one to open the door,
the other to keep it fastened. She seized the key, and
he grasped her hand and squeezed it roughly and painfully
between the handle and the ward as she tried to
turn it. His grip twisted her wrist. She cried out with
the pain of it.
A wild passion of shame and self-disgust swept over
her. Her spirit awoke in dismay to an affection in ruins,
to the immense undignified disaster that had come to
them.
Abruptly she desisted, recoiled, and turned and fled
up-stairs.
She made noises between weeping and laughter as
she went. She gained her room, and slammed her door
and locked it as though she feared violence and pursuit.
“Oh God!” she cried, “Oh God!” and flung aside her
opera-cloak, and for a time walked about the room —a
Corsair's bride at a crisis of emotion. “Why can't he
reason with me,” she said, again and again, “instead of
doing this?”
3
There presently came a phase in which she said: “I
won't stand it even now. I will go
to-night.”
She went as far as her door, then turned to the
window. She opened this and scrambled out —a thing she
had not done for five long years of adolescence —upon
the leaded space above the built-out bath-room on the
first floor. Once upon a time she and Roddy had
descended thence by the drain-pipe.
But things that a girl of sixteen may do in short
skirts are not things to be done by a young lady of
twenty-one in fancy dress and an opera-cloak, and just
as she was coming unaided to an adequate realization of
this, she discovered Mr. Pragmar, the wholesale druggist,
who lived three gardens away, and who had been mowing
his lawn to get an appetite for dinner, standing in a
fascinated attitude beside the forgotten lawn-mower
and watching her intently.
She found it extremely difficult to infuse an air of
quiet correctitude into her return through the window,
and when she was safely inside she waved clinched fists
and executed a noiseless dance of rage.
When she reflected that Mr. Pragmar probably knew
Mr. Ramage, and might describe the affair to him, she
cried “Oh!” with renewed vexation, and repeated some
steps of her dance in a new and more ecstatic measure.
4
At eight that evening Miss Stanley tapped at Ann
Veronica's bedroom door.
“I've brought you up some dinner, Vee,” she said.
Ann Veronica was lying on her bed in a darkling room
staring at the ceiling. She reflected before answering.
She was frightfully hungry. She had eaten little or no
tea, and her mid-day meal had been worse than nothing.
She got up and unlocked the door.
Her aunt did not object to capital punishment or war,
or the industrial system or casual wards, or flogging of
criminals or the Congo Free State, because none of these
things really got hold of her imagination; but she did
object, she did not like, she could not bear to think of
people not having and enjoying their meals. It was
her distinctive test of an emotional state, its interference
with a kindly normal digestion. Any one very badly
moved choked down a few mouthfuls; the symptom of
supreme distress was not to be able to touch a bit. So
that the thought of Ann Veronica up-stairs had been
extremely painful for her through all the silent dinner-time that night. As soon as dinner was over she went
into the kitchen and devoted herself to compiling a tray
—not a tray merely of half-cooled dinner things, but a
specially prepared “nice” tray, suitable for tempting
any one. With this she now entered.
Ann Veronica found herself in the presence of the
most disconcerting fact in human experience, the kindliness
of people you believe to be thoroughly wrong. She
took the tray with both hands, gulped, and gave way
to tears.
Her aunt leaped unhappily to the thought of penitence.
“My dear,” she began, with an affectionate hand on
Ann Veronica's shoulder, “I do so wish you
would
realize how it grieves your father.”
Ann Veronica flung away from her hand, and the
pepper-pot on the tray upset, sending a puff of pepper
into the air and instantly filling them both with an
intense desire to sneeze.
“I don't think you see,” she replied, with tears on her
cheeks, and her brows knitting, “how it shames and,
ah! —disgraces me —ah tishu!”
She put down the tray with a concussion on her toilet-table.
“But, dear, think! He is your father. Shooh!”
“That's no reason,” said Ann Veronica, speaking
through her handkerchief and stopping abruptly.
Niece and aunt regarded each other for a moment
over their pocket-handkerchiefs with watery but
antagonistic eyes, each far too profoundly moved to see
the absurdity of the position.
“I hope,” said Miss Stanley, with dignity, and turned
doorward with features in civil warfare. “Better state
of mind,” she gasped. . . .
Ann Veronica stood in the twilight room staring at
the door that had slammed upon her aunt, her pocket-handkerchief rolled tightly in her hand. Her soul was
full of the sense of disaster. She had made her first
fight for dignity and freedom as a grown-up and inde-
pendent Person, and this was how the universe had
treated her. It had neither succumbed to her nor
wrathfully overwhelmed her. It had thrust her back
with an undignified scuffle, with vulgar comedy, with
an unendurable, scornful grin.
“By God!” said Ann Veronica for the first time in
her life. “But I will! I will!”