"It's unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley," he said, shaking hands
in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; "but you know you said we might
be friends."
"It's dreadful for you to be here," he said, indicating the yellow
presence of the first fog of the year without, "but your aunt told me
something of what had happened. It's just like your Splendid Pride to do
it. Quite!"
He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the
extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and expressed
himself, looking very earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and
carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann Veronica
sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite unconsciously, the air of an
expert hostess.
"But how is it all going to end?" said Mr. Manning.
"Your father, of course," he said, "must come to realize just how
Splendid you are! He doesn't understand. I've seen him, and he doesn't
a bit understand.
I
didn't understand before that letter. It makes me
want to be just everything I CAN be to you. You're like some splendid
Princess in Exile in these Dreadful Dingy apartments!"
"I'm afraid I'm anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a
salary," said Ann Veronica. "But frankly, I mean to fight this through
if I possibly can."
"My God!" said Manning, in a stage-aside. "Earning a salary!"
"You're like a Princess in Exile!" he repeated, overruling her. "You
come into these sordid surroundings—you mustn't mind my calling them
sordid—and it makes them seem as though they didn't matter.... I
don't think they do matter. I don't think any surroundings could throw a
shadow on you."
Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. "Won't you have some more tea,
Mr. Manning?" she asked.
"You know—," said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without answering
her question, "when I hear you talk of earning a living, it's as if I
heard of an archangel going on the Stock Exchange—or Christ selling
doves.... Forgive my daring. I couldn't help the thought."
"It's a very good image," said Ann Veronica.
"I knew you wouldn't mind."
"But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr.
Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but does it
correspond with the realities? Are women truly such angelic things and
men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to make us Queens and
Goddesses, but in practice—well, look, for example, at the stream of
girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and
underfed! They aren't queens, and no one is treating them as queens.
And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings.... I was
looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves—the women I saw. Worse
than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it
another dreadful dingy woman—another fallen queen, I suppose—dingier
than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!"
"I know," said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.
"And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety, their
limitations, their swarms of children!"
Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from him with
the rump of his fourth piece of cake. "I know that our social order is
dreadful enough," he said, "and sacrifices all that is best and most
beautiful in life. I don't defend it."
"And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens," Ann Veronica went
on, "there's twenty-one and a half million women to twenty million men.
Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that leaves over a million
shrines short, not reckoning widows who re-marry. And more boys die than
girls, so that the real disproportion among adults is even greater."
"I know," said Mr Manning, "I know these Dreadful Statistics. I know
there's a sort of right in your impatience at the slowness of Progress.
But tell me one thing I don't understand—tell me one thing: How can you
help it by coming down into the battle and the mire? That's the thing
that concerns me."
"Oh, I'm not trying to help it," said Ann Veronica. "I'm only arguing
against your position of what a woman should be, and trying to get
it clear in my own mind. I'm in this apartment and looking for work
because—Well, what else can I do, when my father practically locks me
up?"
"I know," said Mr. Manning, "I know. Don't think I can't sympathize and
understand. Still, here we are in this dingy, foggy city. Ye gods! what
a wilderness it is! Every one trying to get the better of every one,
every one regardless of every one—it's one of those days when every one
bumps against you—every one pouring coal smoke into the air and making
confusion worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and smelling,
a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman at the corner
coughing dreadfully—all the painful sights of a great city, and here
you come into it to take your chances. It's too valiant, Miss Stanley,
too valiant altogether!"
Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days of employment-seeking now.
"I wonder if it is."
"It isn't," said Mr. Manning, "that I mind Courage in a Woman—I love
and admire Courage. What could be more splendid than a beautiful girl
facing a great, glorious tiger? Una and the Lion again, and all that!
But this isn't that sort of thing; this is just a great, ugly, endless
wilderness of selfish, sweating, vulgar competition!"
"That you want to keep me out of?"
"Exactly!" said Mr. Manning.
"In a sort of beautiful garden-close—wearing lovely dresses and picking
beautiful flowers?"
"Ah! If one could!"
"While those other girls trudge to business and those other women let
lodgings. And in reality even that magic garden-close resolves itself
into a villa at Morningside Park and my father being more and more
cross and overbearing at meals—and a general feeling of insecurity and
futility."
Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked meaningly at Ann Veronica.
"There," he said, "you don't treat me fairly, Miss Stanley. My
garden-close would be a better thing than that."
And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value in the
world. She went about in a negligent November London that had become
very dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed, and tried to find
that modest but independent employment she had so rashly assumed. She
went about, intent-looking and self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing
her emotions whatever they were, as the realities of her position opened
out before her. Her little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she
went out from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray houses,
its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets of homes, its orange-lit
windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray or black, much as an
animal goes out to seek food. She would come back and write letters,
carefully planned and written letters, or read some book she had fetched
from Mudie's—she had invested a half-guinea with Mudie's—or sit over
her fire and think.
Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was what
is called an "ideal." There were no such girls and no such positions. No
work that offered was at all of the quality she had vaguely postulated
for herself. With such qualifications as she possessed, two chief
channels of employment lay open, and neither attracted her, neither
seemed really to offer a conclusive escape from that subjection to
mankind against which, in the person of her father, she was rebelling.
One main avenue was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife
or mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a very
high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into business—into a
photographer's reception-room, for example, or a costumer's or hat-shop.
The first set of occupations seemed to her to be altogether too domestic
and restricted; for the latter she was dreadfully handicapped by her
want of experience. And also she didn't like them. She didn't like the
shops, she didn't like the other women's faces; she thought the
smirking men in frock-coats who dominated these establishments the
most intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her very
distinctly "My dear!"
Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in which, at
least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood; one was under
a Radical Member of Parliament, and the other under a Harley Street
doctor, and both men declined her proffered services with the utmost
civility and admiration and terror. There was also a curious interview
at a big hotel with a middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered
with jewels and reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not
think Ann Veronica would do as her companion.
And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried no
more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her time and
energy. She had heard of women journalists, women writers, and so
forth; but she was not even admitted to the presence of the editors she
demanded to see, and by no means sure that if she had been she could
have done any work they might have given her. One day she desisted from
her search and went unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place
was not filled; she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a
comforting day of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so
interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety of her
search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if she was still
living at home. Then a third secretarial opening occurred and renewed
her hopes again: a position as amanuensis—with which some of the
lighter duties of a nurse were combined—to an infirm gentleman of means
living at Twickenham, and engaged upon a great literary research to
prove that the "Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular
chemistry written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.
Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings in the industrial
sea, and measuring herself against the world as it is, she was also
making extensive explorations among the ideas and attitudes of a number
of human beings who seemed to be largely concerned with the world as it
ought to be. She was drawn first by Miss Miniver, and then by her own
natural interest, into a curious stratum of people who are busied with
dreams of world progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a New Age
that is to replace all the stresses and disorders of contemporary life.
Miss Miniver learned of her flight and got her address from the
Widgetts. She arrived about nine o'clock the next evening in a state of
tremulous enthusiasm. She followed the landlady half way up-stairs, and
called up to Ann Veronica, "May I come up? It's me! You know—Nettie
Miniver!" She appeared before Ann Veronica could clearly recall who
Nettie Miniver might be.
There was a wild light in her eye, and her straight hair was out
demonstrating and suffragetting upon some independent notions of its
own. Her fingers were bursting through her gloves, as if to get at once
into touch with Ann Veronica. "You're Glorious!" said Miss Miniver in
tones of rapture, holding a hand in each of hers and peering up into Ann
Veronica's face. "Glorious! You're so calm, dear, and so resolute, so
serene!
"It's girls like you who will show them what We are," said Miss Miniver;
"girls whose spirits have not been broken!"
Ann Veronica sunned herself a little in this warmth.
"I was watching you at Morningside Park, dear," said Miss Miniver. "I am
getting to watch all women. I thought then perhaps you didn't care, that
you were like so many of them. NOW it's just as though you had grown up
suddenly."
She stopped, and then suggested: "I wonder—I should love—if it was
anything
I
said."
She did not wait for Ann Veronica's reply. She seemed to assume that it
must certainly be something she had said. "They all catch on," she said.
"It spreads like wildfire. This is such a grand time! Such a glorious
time! There never was such a time as this! Everything seems so close to
fruition, so coming on and leading on! The Insurrection of Women! They
spring up everywhere. Tell me all that happened, one sister-woman to
another."
She chilled Ann Veronica a little by that last phrase, and yet the
magnetism of her fellowship and enthusiasm was very strong; and it was
pleasant to be made out a heroine after so much expostulation and so
many secret doubts.
But she did not listen long; she wanted to talk. She sat, crouched
together, by the corner of the hearthrug under the bookcase that
supported the pig's skull, and looked into the fire and up at Ann
Veronica's face, and let herself go. "Let us put the lamp out," she
said; "the flames are ever so much better for talking," and Ann Veronica
agreed. "You are coming right out into life—facing it all."
Ann Veronica sat with her chin on her hand, red-lit and saying little,
and Miss Miniver discoursed. As she talked, the drift and significance
of what she was saying shaped itself slowly to Ann Veronica's
apprehension. It presented itself in the likeness of a great, gray, dull
world—a brutal, superstitious, confused, and wrong-headed world,
that hurt people and limited people unaccountably. In remote times and
countries its evil tendencies had expressed themselves in the form of
tyrannies, massacres, wars, and what not; but just at present in England
they shaped as commercialism and competition, silk hats, suburban
morals, the sweating system, and the subjection of women. So far the
thing was acceptable enough. But over against the world Miss Miniver
assembled a small but energetic minority, the Children of Light—people
she described as "being in the van," or "altogether in the van," about
whom Ann Veronica's mind was disposed to be more sceptical.