12. CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
ANN VERONICA PUTS THINGS IN ORDER
1
ANN VERONICA made a strenuous attempt to
carry out her good resolutions. She meditated
long and carefully upon her letter to her father before
she wrote it, and gravely and deliberately again before
she despatched it.
“MY DEAR FATHER,” she wrote, — “I have been thinking
hard about everything since I was sent to this prison.
All these experiences have taught me a great deal about
life and realities. I see that compromise is more necessary
to life than I ignorantly supposed it to be, and I have
been trying to get Lord Morley's book on that subject, but
it does not appear to be available in the prison library,
and the chaplain seems to regard him as an undesirable
writer.”
At this point she had perceived that she was drifting
from her subject.
“I must read him when I come out. But I see very
clearly that as things are a daughter is necessarily depend-
ent on her father and bound while she is in that posstion
to live harmoniously with his ideals.”
“Bit starchy,” said Ann Veronica, and altered the
key abruptly. Her concluding paragraph was, on the
whole, perhaps, hardly starchy enough.
“Really, daddy, I am sorry for all I have done to put
you out. May I come home and try to be a better daughter
to you?
“ANN VERONICA.”
2
Her aunt came to meet her outside Canongate, and,
being a little confused between what was official and
what was merely a rebellious slight upon our national
justice, found herself involved in a triumphal procession
to the Vindicator Vegetarian Restaurant, and was specifically
and personally cheered by a small, shabby crowd
outside that rendezvous. They decided quite audibly,
“She's an Old Dear, anyhow. Voting wouldn't do no
'arm to 'er.” She was on the very verge of a vegetarian
meal before she recovered her head again. Obeying
some fine instinct, she had come to the prison in a
dark veil, but she had pushed this up to kiss Ann
Veronica and never drawn it down again. Eggs were
procured for her, and she sat out the subsequent
emotions and eloquence with the dignity becoming an
injured lady of good family. The quiet encounter and
home-coming Ann Veronica and she had contemplated
was entirely disorganized by this misadventure; there
were no adequate explanations, and after they had
settled things at Ann Veronica's lodgings, they reached
home in the early afternoon estranged and depressed,
with headaches and the trumpet voice of the indomitable
Kitty Brett still ringing in their ears.
“Dreadful women, my dear!” said Miss Stanley.
“And some of them quite pretty and well dressed. No
need to do such things. We must never let your father
know we went. Why ever did you let me get into that
wagonette?”
“I thought we had to,” said Ann Veronica, who had
also been a little under the compulsion of the marshals
of the occasion. “It was very tiring.”
“We will have some tea in the drawing-room as soon
as ever we can —and I will take my things off. I don't
think I shall ever care for this bonnet again. We'll
have some buttered toast. Your poor cheeks are quite
sunken and hollow. . . .”
3
When Ann Veronica found herself in her father's study
that evening it seemed to her for a moment as though
all the events of the past six months had been a dream.
The big gray spaces of London, the shop-lit, greasy,
shining streets, had become very remote; the biological
laboratory with its work and emotions, the meetings
and discussions, the rides in hansoms with Ramage,
were like things in a book read and closed. The study
seemed absolutely unaltered, there was still the same
lamp with a little chip out of the shade, still the same
gas fire. still the same bundle of blue and white papers,
it seemed, with the same pink tape about them, at the
elbow of the arm-chair, still the same father. He sat in
much the same attitude, and she stood just as she had
stood when he told her she could not go to the Fadden
Dance. Both had dropped the rather elaborate politeness
of the dining-room, and in their faces an impartial
observer would have discovered little lines of obstinate
wilfulness in common; a certain hardness —sharp, indeed,
in the father and softly rounded in the daughter
—but hardness nevertheless, that made every compromise
a bargain and every charity a discount.
“And so you have been thinking?” her father began,
quoting her letter and looking over his slanting glasses
at her. “Well, my girl, I wish you had thought about
all these things before these bothers began.”
Ann Veronica perceived that she must not forget to
remain eminently reasonable.
“One has to live and learn,” she remarked, with a
passable imitation of her father's manner.
“So long as you learn,” said Mr. Stanley.
Their conversation hung.
“I suppose, daddy, you've no objection to my going
on with my work at the Imperial College?” she
asked.
“If it will keep you busy,” he said, with a faintly
ironical smile.
“The fees are paid to the end of the session.”
He nodded twice, with his eyes on the fire, as though
that was a formal statement.
“You may go on with that work,” he said, “so long
as you keep in harmony with things at home. I'm
convinced that much of Russell's investigations are
on wrong lines, unsound lines. Still —you must learn
for yourself. You're of age —you're of age.”
“The work's almost essential for the B.Sc. exam.”
“It's scandalous, but I suppose it is.”
Their agreement so far seemed remarkable, and yet
as a home-coming the thing was a little lacking in
warmth. But Ann Veronica had still to get to her
chief topic. They were silent for a time. “It's a period
of crude views and crude work,” said Mr. Stanley.
“Still, these Mendelian fellows seem likely to give Mr.
Russell trouble, a good lot of trouble. Some of their
specimens —wonderfully selected, wonderfully got up.”
“Daddy,” said Ann Veronica, “these affairs —being
away from home has —cost money.”
“I thought you would find that out.”
“As a matter of fact, I happen to have got a little into
debt.”
“Never!”
Her heart sank at the change in his expression.
“Well, lodgings and things! And I paid my fees at
the College.”
“Yes. But how could you get — Who gave you credit?
“You see,” said Ann Veronica, “my landlady kept
on my room while I was in Holloway, and the fees for the
College mounted up pretty considerably.” She spoke
rather quickly, because she found her father's question
the most awkward she had ever had to answer in her
life.
“Molly and you settled about the rooms. She said
you had some money.”
“I borrowed it,” said Ann Veronica in a casual tone,
with white despair in her heart.
“But who could have lent you money?”
“I pawned my pearl necklace. I got three pounds,
and there's three on my watch.”
“Six pounds. H'm. Got the tickets? Yes, but
then —you said you borrowed?”
“I did, too,” said Ann Veronica.
“Who from?”
She met his eye for a second and her heart failed her.
The truth was impossible, indecent. If she mentioned
Ramage he might have a fit —anything might happen.
She lied. “The Widgetts,” she said.
“Tut, tut!” he said. “Really, Vee, you seem to have
advertised our relations pretty generally!”
“They —they knew, of course. Because of the
Dance.”
“How much do you owe them?”
She knew forty pounds was a quite impossible sum
for their neighbors. She knew, too, she must not
hesitate. “Eight pounds,” she plunged, and added foolishly,
“fifteen pounds will see me clear of everything.”
She muttered some unlady-like comment upon herself
under her breath and engaged in secret additions.
Mr. Stanley determined to improve the occasion. He
seemed to deliberate. “Well,” he said at last slowly,
“I'll pay it. I'll pay it. But I do hope, Vee, I do hope
—this is the end of these adventures. I hope you have
learned your lesson now and come to see —come to realize
—how things are. People, nobody, can do as they like
in this world. Everywhere there are limitations.”
“I know,” said Ann Veronica (fifteen pounds!). “I
have learned that. I mean —I mean to do what I can.”
(Fifteen pounds. Fifteen from forty is twenty-five.)
He hesitated. She could think of nothing more to
say.
“Well,” she achieved at last. “Here goes for the new
life!”
“Here goes for the new life,” he echoed and stood up.
Father and daughter regarded each other warily, each
more than a little insecure with the other. He made a
movement toward her, and then recalled the circumstances
of their last conversation in that study. She
saw his purpose and his doubt hesitated also, and then
went to him, took his coat lapels, and kissed him on the
cheek.
“Ah, Vee,” he said, “that's better! and kissed her
back rather clumsily. “We're going to be sensible.”
She disengaged herself from him and went out of the
room with a grave, preoccupied expression. (Fifteen
pounds! And she wanted forty!)
4
It was, perhaps, the natural consequence of a long
and tiring and exciting day that Ann Veronica should
pass a broken and distressful night, a night in which the
noble and self-subduing resolutions of Canongate
displayed themselves for the first time in an atmosphere of
almost lurid dismay. Her father's peculiar stiffness of
soul presented itself now as something altogether left
out of the calculations upon which her plans were based,
and, in particular, she had not anticipated the
difficulty she would find in borrowing the forty pounds she
needed for Ramage. That had taken her by surprise,
and her tired wits had failed her. She was to have fifteen
pounds, and no more. She knew that to expect more
now was like anticipating a gold-mine in the garden.
The chance had gone. It became suddenly glaringly
apparent to her that it was impossible to return fifteen
pounds or any sum less than twenty pounds to Ramage
—absolutely impossible. She realized that with a pang
of disgust and horror.
Already she had sent him twenty pounds, and never
written to explain to him why it was she had not sent it
back sharply directly he returned it. She ought to have
written at once and told him exactly what had happened.
Now if she sent fifteen pounds the suggestion that she
had spent a five-pound note in the meanwhile would be
irresistible. No! That was impossible. She would
have just to keep the fifteen pounds until she could make
it twenty. That might happen on her birthday —in
August.
She turned about, and was persecuted by visions, half
memories, half dreams, of Ramage. He became ugly
and monstrous, dunning her, threatening her, assailing
her.
“Confound sex from first to last!” said Ann Veronica.
“Why can't we propagate by sexless spores, as the ferns
do? We restrict each other, we badger each other,
friendship is poisoned and buried under it! . . . I
must pay
off that forty pounds. I must.”
For a time there seemed no comfort for her even in
Capes. She was to see Capes to-morrow, but now, in
this state of misery she had achieved, she felt assured he
would turn his back upon her, take no notice of her at
all. And if he didn't, what was the good of seeing him?
“I wish he was a woman,” she said, “then I could make
him my friend. I want him as my friend. I want to talk
to him and go about with him. Just go about with him.”
She was silent for a time, with her nose on the pillow,
and that brought her to: “What's the good of pretending?
“I love him,” she said aloud to the dim forms of her
room, and repeated it, and went on to imagine herself
doing acts of tragically dog-like devotion to the biologist,
who, for the purposes of the drama, remained entirely
unconscious of and indifferent to her proceedings.
At last some anodyne formed itself from these exercises,
and, with eyelashes wet with such feeble tears as only
three-o'clock-in-the-morning pathos can distil, she fell
asleep.
5
Pursuant to some altogether private calculations she
did not go up to the Imperial College until after mid-day,
and she found the laboratory deserted, even as she
desired. She went to the table under the end window
at which she had been accustomed to work, and found it
swept and garnished with full bottles of re-agents.
Everything was very neat; it had evidently been straightened
up and kept for her. She put down the sketch-books and apparatus she had brought with her, pulled
out her stool, and sat down. As she did so the
preparation-room door opened behind her. She heard it
open, but as she felt unable to look round in a careless
manner she pretended not to hear it. Then Capes'
footsteps approached. She turned with an effort.
“I expected you this morning,” he said. “I saw —
they knocked off your fetters yesterday.”
“I think it is very good of me to come this afternoon.”
“I began to be afraid you might not come at all.”
“Afraid!”
“Yes. I'm glad you're back for all sorts of reasons.”
He spoke a little nervously. “Among other things,
you know, I didn't understand quite —I didn't understand
that you were so keenly interested in this suffrage
question. I have it on my conscience that I offended
you —”
“Offended me when?”
“I've been haunted by the memory of you. I was
rude and stupid. We were talking about the suffrage —
and I rather scoffed.”
“You weren't rude,” she said.
“I didn't know you were so keen on this suffrage
business.”
“Nor I. You haven't had it on your mind all this
time?”
“I have rather. I felt somehow I'd hurt you.”
“You didn't. I —I hurt myself.”
“I mean —”
“I behaved like an idiot, that's all. My nerves
were in rags. I was worried. We're the hysterical
animal, Mr. Capes. I got myself locked up to cool
off. By a sort of instinct. As a dog eats grass. I'm
right again now.”
“Because your nerves were exposed, that was no
excuse for my touching them. I ought to have seen —”
“It doesn't matter a rap —if you're not disposed to
resent the —the way I behaved.”
“I resent!”
“I was only sorry I'd been so stupid.”
“Well, I take it we're straight again,” said Capes
with a note of relief, and assumed an easier position
on the edge of her table. “But if you weren't keen
on the suffrage business, why on earth did you go to
prison?”
Ann Veronica reflected. “It was a phase,” she said.
He smiled. “It's a new phase in the life history,”
he remarked. “Everybody seems to have it now.
Everybody who's going to develop into a woman.”
“There's Miss Garvice.”
“She's coming on,” said Capes. “And, you know,
you're altering us all. I'm shaken. The
campaign's
a success.” He met her questioning eye, and repeated,
“Oh! it is a success. A man is so apt
to —to take
women a little too lightly. Unless they remind him now
and then not to. . . . You did.”
“Then I didn't waste my time in prison altogether?”
“It wasn't the prison impressed me. But I liked
the things you said here. I felt suddenly I understood
you —as an intelligent person. If you'll forgive my
saying that, and implying what goes with it. There's
something —puppyish in a man's usual attitude to
women. That is what I've had on my conscience. . . .
I don't think we're altogether to blame if we don't
take some of your lot seriously. Some of your sex,
I mean. But we smirk a little, I'm afraid, habitually
when we talk to you. We smirk, and we're a bit —
furtive.”
He paused, with his eyes studying her gravely.
You, anyhow, don't deserve it,” he said.
Their colloquy was ended abruptly by the apparition
of Miss Klegg at the further door. When she saw
Ann Veronica she stood for a moment as if entranced,
and then advanced with outstretched hands. “Véronique!”
she cried with a rising intonation, though never
before had she called Ann Veronica anything but Miss
Stanley, and seized her and squeezed her and kissed
her with profound emotion. “To think that you were
going to do it —and never said a word! You are a little
thin, but except for that you look —you look better than
ever. Was it very horrible? I tried to get
into the
police-court, but the crowd was ever so much too big,
push as I would. . . .
“I mean to go to prison directly the session is over,”
said Miss Klegg. “Wild horses —not if they have all
the mounted police in London —shan't keep me out.”
6
Capes lit things wonderfully for Ann Veronica all
that afternoon, he was so friendly, so palpably
interested in her, and glad to have her back with him.
Tea in the laboratory was a sort of suffragette reception.
Miss Garvice assumed a quality of neutrality,
professed herself almost won over by Ann Veronica's
example, and the Scotchman decided that if women
had a distinctive sphere it was, at any rate, an enlarging
sphere, and no one who believed in the doctrine of
evolution could logically deny the vote to women
“ultimately,” however much they might be disposed
to doubt the advisability of its immediate concession.
It was a refusal of expediency, he said, and not an
absolute refusal. The youth with his hair like Russell
cleared his throat and said rather irrelevantly that he
knew a man who knew Thomas Bayard Simmons,
who had rioted in the Strangers' Gallery, and then Capes,
finding them all distinctly pro-Ann Veronica, if not
pro-feminist, ventured to be perverse, and started a
vein of speculation upon the Scotchman's idea —that
there were still hopes of women evolving into something
higher.
He was unusually absurd and ready, and all the
time it seemed to Ann Veronica as a delightful possibility,
as a thing not indeed to be entertained seriously, but
to be half furtively felt, that he was being so agreeable
because she had come back again. She returned home
through a world that was as roseate as it had been
gray overnight.
But as she got out of the train at Morningside Park
Station she had a shock. She saw, twenty yards down
the platform, the shiny hat and broad back and
inimitable swagger of Ramage. She dived at once behind
the cover of the lamp-room and affected serious trouble
with her shoe-lace until he was out of the station,
and then she followed slowly and with extreme discretion
until the bifurcation of the Avenue from the field
way insured her escape. Ramage went up the Avenue,
and she hurried along the path with a beating heart and
a disagreeable sense of unsolved problems in her mind.
“That thing's going on,” she told herself. “Everything
goes on, confound it! One doesn't change anything
one has set going by making good resolutions.”
And then ahead of her she saw the radiant and
welcoming figure of Manning. He came as an agreeable
diversion from an insoluble perplexity. She smiled
at the sight of him, and thereat his radiation increased.
“I missed the hour of your release,” he said, “but
I was at the Vindicator Restaurant. You did not see
me, I know. I was among the common herd in the
place below, but I took good care to see you.”
“Of course you're converted?” she said.
“To the view that all those Splendid Women in the
movement ought to have votes. Rather! Who could
help it?”
He towered up over her and smiled down at her in
his fatherly way.
“To the view that all women ought to have votes
whether they like it or not.”
He shook his head, and his eyes and the mouth under
the black mustache wrinkled with his smile. And as
he walked by her side they began a wrangle that was
none the less pleasant to Ann Veronica because it served
to banish a disagreeable preoccupation. It seemed to
her in her restored geniality that she liked Manning
extremely. The brightness Capes had diffused over
the world glorified even his rival.
7
The steps by which Ann Veronica determined to
engage herself to marry Manning were never very clear
to her. A medley of motives warred in her, and it was
certainly not one of the least of these that she knew
herself to be passionately in love with Capes; at moments
she had a giddy intimation that he was beginning to
feel keenly interested in her. She realized more and
more the quality of the brink upon which she stood —
the dreadful readiness with which in certain moods she
might plunge, the unmitigated wrongness and recklessness
of such a self-abandonment. “He must never
know,” she would whisper to herself, “he must never
know. Or else — Else it will be impossible that I can
be his friend.”
That simple statement of the case was by no means
all that went on in Ann Veronica's mind. But it was
the form of her ruling determination; it was the only
form that she ever allowed to see daylight. What else
was there lurked in shadows and deep places; if in some
mood of reverie it came out into the light, it was
presently overwhelmed and hustled back again into hiding.
She would never look squarely at these dream forms
that mocked the social order in which she lived, never
admit she listened to the soft whisperings in her ear.
But Manning seemed more and more clearly indicated
as a refuge, as security. Certain simple purposes
emerged from the disingenuous muddle of her feelings
and desires. Seeing Capes from day to day made a
bright eventfulness that hampered her in the course
she had resolved to follow. She vanished from the
laboratory for a week, a week of oddly interesting
days. . . .
When she renewed her attendance at the Imperial
College the third finger of her left hand was adorned
with a very fine old ring with dark blue sapphires that
had once belonged to a great-aunt of Manning's.
That ring manifestly occupied her thoughts a great
deal. She kept pausing in her work and regarding it,
and when Capes came round to her, she first put her
hand in her lap and then rather awkwardly in front of
him. But men are often blind to rings. He seemed
to be.
In the afternoon she had considered certain doubts
very carefully, and decided on a more emphatic course
of action. “Are these ordinary sapphires?” she said.
He bent to her hand, and she slipped off the ring and
gave it to him to examine.
“Very good,” he said. “Rather darker than most
of them. But I'm generously ignorant of gems. Is it
an old ring?” he asked, returning it.
“I believe it is. It's an engagement ring. . . .” She
slipped it on her finger, and added, in a voice she tried
to make matter-of-fact: “It was given to me last week.”
“Oh!” he said, in a colorless tone, and with his eyes
on her face.
“Yes. Last week.”
She glanced at him, and it was suddenly apparent for
one instant of illumination that this ring upon her finger
was the crowning blunder of her life. It was apparent,
and then it faded into the quality of an inevitable
necessity.
“Odd!” he remarked, rather surprisingly, after a
little interval.
There was a brief pause, a crowded pause, between
them.
She sat very still, and his eyes rested on that
ornament for a moment, and then travelled slowly to her
wrist and the soft lines of her forearm.
“I suppose I ought to congratulate you,” he said.
Their eyes met, and his expressed perplexity and
curiosity. “The fact is —I don't know why —this takes me
by surprise. Somehow I haven't connected the idea
with you. You seemed complete —without that.”
“Did I?” she said.
“I don't know why. But this is like —like walking
round a house that looks square and complete and finding
an unexpected long wing running out behind.”
She looked up at him, and found he was watching
her closely. For some seconds of voluminous thinking
they looked at the ring between them, and neither
spoke. Then Capes shifted his eyes to her microscope
and the little trays of unmounted sections beside it.
“How is that carmine working?” he asked, with a forced
interest.
“Better,” said Ann Veronica, with an unreal alacrity.
“But it still misses the nucleolus.”