He thought. Then he slapped his hand on his desk and looked up with
the air of a man struck by a brilliant idea. "Look here," he said,
protruding his eyes; "why get anything to do at all just yet? Why, if
you must be free, why not do the sensible thing? Make yourself worth
a decent freedom. Go on with your studies at the Imperial College,
for example, get a degree, and make yourself good value. Or become a
thorough-going typist and stenographer and secretarial expert."
"But I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"You see, if I do go home my father objects to the College, and as for
typing—"
"Don't go home."
"Yes, but you forget; how am I to live?"
"Easily. Easily.... Borrow.... From me."
"I couldn't do that," said Ann Veronica, sharply.
"I see no reason why you shouldn't."
"It's impossible."
"As one friend to another. Men are always doing it, and if you set up to
be a man—"
"No, it's absolutely out of the question, Mr. Ramage." And Ann
Veronica's face was hot.
Ramage pursed his rather loose lips and shrugged his shoulders, with
his eyes fixed steadily upon her. "Well anyhow—I don't see the force of
your objection, you know. That's my advice to you. Here I am. Consider
you've got resources deposited with me. Perhaps at the first blush—it
strikes you as odd. People are brought up to be so shy about money. As
though it was indelicate—it's just a sort of shyness. But here I am to
draw upon. Here I am as an alternative either to nasty work—or going
home."
"It's very kind of you—" began Ann Veronica.
"Not a bit. Just a friendly polite suggestion. I don't suggest any
philanthropy. I shall charge you five per cent., you know, fair and
square."
Ann Veronica opened her lips quickly and did not speak. But the five per
cent. certainly did seem to improve the aspect of Ramage's suggestion.
"Well, anyhow, consider it open." He dabbed with his paper-weight again,
and spoke in an entirely indifferent tone. "And now tell me, please, how
you eloped from Morningside Park. How did you get your luggage out of
the house? Wasn't it—wasn't it rather in some respects—rather a lark?
It's one of my regrets for my lost youth. I never ran away from anywhere
with anybody anywhen. And now—I suppose I should be considered too
old. I don't feel it.... Didn't you feel rather EVENTFUL—in the
train—coming up to Waterloo?"
Before Christmas Ann Veronica had gone to Ramage again and accepted this
offer she had at first declined.
Many little things had contributed to that decision. The chief influence
was her awakening sense of the need of money. She had been forced to buy
herself that pair of boots and a walking-skirt, and the pearl necklace
at the pawnbrokers' had yielded very disappointingly. And, also, she
wanted to borrow that money. It did seem in so many ways exactly what
Ramage said it was—the sensible thing to do. There it was—to be
borrowed. It would put the whole adventure on a broader and better
footing; it seemed, indeed, almost the only possible way in which she
might emerge from her rebellion with anything like success. If only for
the sake of her argument with her home, she wanted success. And why,
after all, should she not borrow money from Ramage?
It was so true what he said; middle-class people WERE ridiculously
squeamish about money. Why should they be?
She and Ramage were friends, very good friends. If she was in a position
to help him she would help him; only it happened to be the other way
round. He was in a position to help her. What was the objection?
She found it impossible to look her own diffidence in the face. So she
went to Ramage and came to the point almost at once.
"Can you spare me forty pounds?" she said.
Mr. Ramage controlled his expression and thought very quickly.
"Agreed," he said, "certainly," and drew a checkbook toward him.
"It's best," he said, "to make it a good round sum.
"I won't give you a check though—Yes, I will. I'll give you an
uncrossed check, and then you can get it at the bank here, quite close
by.... You'd better not have all the money on you; you had better
open a small account in the post-office and draw it out a fiver at a
time. That won't involve references, as a bank account would—and all
that sort of thing. The money will last longer, and—it won't bother
you."
He stood up rather close to her and looked into her eyes. He seemed to
be trying to understand something very perplexing and elusive. "It's
jolly," he said, "to feel you have come to me. It's a sort of guarantee
of confidence. Last time—you made me feel snubbed."
He hesitated, and went off at a tangent. "There's no end of things I'd
like to talk over with you. It's just upon my lunch-time. Come and have
lunch with me."
Ann Veronica fenced for a moment. "I don't want to take up your time."
"We won't go to any of these City places. They're just all men, and no
one is safe from scandal. But I know a little place where we'll get a
little quiet talk."
Ann Veronica for some indefinable reason did not want to lunch with him,
a reason indeed so indefinable that she dismissed it, and Ramage went
through the outer office with her, alert and attentive, to the vivid
interest of the three clerks. The three clerks fought for the only
window, and saw her whisked into a hansom. Their subsequent conversation
is outside the scope of our story.
"Ritter's!" said Ramage to the driver, "Dean Street."
It was rare that Ann Veronica used hansoms, and to be in one was itself
eventful and exhilarating. She liked the high, easy swing of the thing
over its big wheels, the quick clatter-patter of the horse, the passage
of the teeming streets. She admitted her pleasure to Ramage.
And Ritter's, too, was very amusing and foreign and discreet; a little
rambling room with a number of small tables, with red electric light
shades and flowers. It was an overcast day, albeit not foggy, and
the electric light shades glowed warmly, and an Italian waiter with
insufficient English took Ramage's orders, and waited with an appearance
of affection. Ann Veronica thought the whole affair rather jolly. Ritter
sold better food than most of his compatriots, and cooked it better, and
Ramage, with a fine perception of a feminine palate, ordered Vero Capri.
It was, Ann Veronica felt, as a sip or so of that remarkable blend
warmed her blood, just the sort of thing that her aunt would not
approve, to be lunching thus, tete-a-tete with a man; and yet at the
same time it was a perfectly innocent as well as agreeable proceeding.
They talked across their meal in an easy and friendly manner about Ann
Veronica's affairs. He was really very bright and clever, with a sort of
conversational boldness that was just within the limits of permissible
daring. She described the Goopes and the Fabians to him, and gave him
a sketch of her landlady; and he talked in the most liberal and
entertaining way of a modern young woman's outlook. He seemed to know
a great deal about life. He gave glimpses of possibilities. He roused
curiosities. He contrasted wonderfully with the empty showing-off of
Teddy. His friendship seemed a thing worth having....
But when she was thinking it over in her room that evening vague and
baffling doubts came drifting across this conviction. She doubted how
she stood toward him and what the restrained gleam of his face might
signify. She felt that perhaps, in her desire to play an adequate part
in the conversation, she had talked rather more freely than she ought to
have done, and given him a wrong impression of herself.
That was two days before Christmas Eve. The next morning came a compact
letter from her father.
"MY DEAR DAUGHTER," it ran,—"Here, on the verge of the season
of forgiveness I hold out a last hand to you in the hope of a
reconciliation. I ask you, although it is not my place to ask you, to
return home. This roof is still open to you. You will not be taunted
if you return and everything that can be done will be done to make you
happy.
"Indeed, I must implore you to return. This adventure of yours has gone
on altogether too long; it has become a serious distress to both your
aunt and myself. We fail altogether to understand your motives in doing
what you are doing, or, indeed, how you are managing to do it, or what
you are managing on. If you will think only of one trifling aspect—the
inconvenience it must be to us to explain your absence—I think you may
begin to realize what it all means for us. I need hardly say that your
aunt joins with me very heartily in this request.
"Please come home. You will not find me unreasonable with you.
"Your affectionate
"FATHER."
Ann Veronica sat over her fire with her father's note in her hand.
"Queer letters he writes," she said. "I suppose most people's letters
are queer. Roof open—like a Noah's Ark. I wonder if he really wants me
to go home. It's odd how little I know of him, and of how he feels and
what he feels."
"I wonder how he treated Gwen."
Her mind drifted into a speculation about her sister. "I ought to look
up Gwen," she said. "I wonder what happened."
Then she fell to thinking about her aunt. "I would like to go home," she
cried, "to please her. She has been a dear. Considering how little he
lets her have."
The truth prevailed. "The unaccountable thing is that I wouldn't go home
to please her. She is, in her way, a dear. One OUGHT to want to please
her. And I don't. I don't care. I can't even make myself care."
Presently, as if for comparison with her father's letter, she got out
Ramage's check from the box that contained her papers. For so far she
had kept it uncashed. She had not even endorsed it.
"Suppose I chuck it," she remarked, standing with the mauve slip in her
hand—"suppose I chuck it, and surrender and go home! Perhaps, after
all, Roddy was right!
"Father keeps opening the door and shutting it, but a time will come—
"I could still go home!"
She held Ramage's check as if to tear it across. "No," she said at last;
"I'm a human being—not a timid female. What could I do at home? The
other's a crumple-up—just surrender. Funk! I'll see it out."
January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory of the
Central Imperial College that towers up from among the back streets in
the angle between Euston Road and Great Portland Street. She was working
very steadily at the Advanced Course in Comparative Anatomy, wonderfully
relieved to have her mind engaged upon one methodically developing theme
in the place of the discursive uncertainties of the previous two months,
and doing her utmost to keep right in the back of her mind and out
of sight the facts, firstly, that she had achieved this haven of
satisfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of forty pounds,
and, secondly, that her present position was necessarily temporary and
her outlook quite uncertain.
The biological laboratory had an atmosphere that was all its own.
It was at the top of the building, and looked clear over a clustering
mass of inferior buildings toward Regent's Park. It was long and narrow,
a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and sinks,
pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit and of a mitigated
and sterilized organic decay. Along the inner side was a wonderfully
arranged series of displayed specimens that Russell himself had
prepared. The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing
relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and
confused. The whole place and everything in it aimed at one thing—to
illustrate, to elaborate, to criticise and illuminate, and make ever
plainer and plainer the significance of animal and vegetable structure.
It dealt from floor to ceiling and end to end with the Theory of the
Forms of Life; the very duster by the blackboard was there to do its
share in that work, the very washers in the taps; the room was more
simply concentrated in aim even than a church. To that, perhaps, a
large part of its satisfyingness was due. Contrasted with the confused
movement and presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable
enthusiasm behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were
partly egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly
incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends, compared with the
comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the
eddy-driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet, methodical
chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.
Day after day for a measured hour in the lecture-theatre, with elaborate
power and patience, Russell pieced together difficulty and suggestion,
instance and counter-instance, in the elaborate construction of the
family tree of life. And then the students went into the long laboratory
and followed out these facts in almost living tissue with microscope and
scalpel, probe and microtome, and the utmost of their skill and care,
making now and then a raid into the compact museum of illustration next
door, in which specimens and models and directions stood in disciplined
ranks, under the direction of the demonstrator Capes. There was a couple
of blackboards at each end of the aisle of tables, and at these Capes,
with quick and nervous speech that contrasted vividly with Russell's
slow, definitive articulation, directed the dissection and made
illuminating comments on the structures under examination. Then he
would come along the laboratory, sitting down by each student in
turn, checking the work and discussing its difficulties, and answering
questions arising out of Russell's lecture.
Ann Veronica had come to the Imperial College obsessed by the
great figure of Russell, by the part he had played in the Darwinian
controversies, and by the resolute effect of the grim-lipped, yellow,
leonine face beneath the mane of silvery hair. Capes was rather a
discovery. Capes was something superadded. Russell burned like a beacon,
but Capes illuminated by darting flashes and threw light, even if it
was but momentary light, into a hundred corners that Russell left
steadfastly in the shade.