The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair, and
afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr. Fortescue
rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps, the Corinthian
nose upraised and his hands behind his back, pausing to look long and
hard at the fruit-trees against the wall.
Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after some
moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden in a reverse
direction to Mr. Fortescue's steps, and encountered him with an air of
artless surprise.
"Hello!" said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless, breathless
manner. "You Mr. Fortescue?"
"At your service. You Ann Veronica?"
"Rather! I say—did you marry Gwen?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy expression.
"I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica."
"Rum," said Ann Veronica. "Have you got to keep her now?"
"To the best of my ability," said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.
"Have you much ability?" asked Ann Veronica.
Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its
reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions about
acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she beautiful enough
for it, and who would make her dresses, and so on.
As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep her
sister, and a little while after her mother's death Ann Veronica
met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her father's study,
shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful and resentful, and after
that Gwen receded from the Morningside Park world, and not even the
begging letters and distressful communications that her father and aunt
received, but only a vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of
incidental comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that blackguard," came
to Ann Veronica's ears.
These were Ann Veronica's leading cases in the question of marriage.
They were the only real marriages she had seen clearly. For the rest,
she derived her ideas of the married state from the observed behavior of
married women, which impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and
dull and inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a
remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had come to
think of all married people much as one thinks of insects that have
lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched creatures who had
scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a dim image of herself
cooped up in a house under the benevolent shadow of Mr. Manning.
Who knows?—on the analogy of "Squiggles" she might come to call him
"Mangles!"
"I don't think I can ever marry any one," she said, and fell suddenly
into another set of considerations that perplexed her for a time. Had
romance to be banished from life?...
It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so keenly
to go on with her University work in her life as she did that day. She
had never felt so acutely the desire for free initiative, for a life
unhampered by others. At any cost! Her brothers had it practically—at
least they had it far more than it seemed likely she would unless she
exerted herself with quite exceptional vigor. Between her and the fair,
far prospect of freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her
aunt and father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to
her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw them
over her directly her movements became in any manner truly free.
She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes, as
though she had just discovered herself for the first time—discovered
herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly among dangers, hindrances,
and perplexities, on the verge of a cardinal crisis.
The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and
heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by others, and
going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.
And in its way it was very well. Then suddenly with a rush came reality,
came "growing up"; a hasty imperative appeal for seriousness, for
supreme seriousness. The Ralphs and Mannings and Fortescues came down
upon the raw inexperience, upon the blinking ignorance of the newcomer;
and before her eyes were fairly open, before she knew what had
happened, a new set of guides and controls, a new set of obligations and
responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old. "I want to be
a Person," said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky; "I will not
have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place."
Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time when,
a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a gate between a
bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole wide stretch of country
between Chalking and Waldersham. Firstly, she did not intend to marry at
all, and particularly she did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly,
by some measure or other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at
the Tredgold Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was,
as an immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she
stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that night to
the Fadden Ball.
But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face. So far
she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that vitally important
matter. The whole of that relationship persisted in remaining obscure.
What would happen when next morning she returned to Morningside Park?
He couldn't turn her out of doors. But what he could do or might do she
could not imagine. She was not afraid of violence, but she was afraid of
something mean, some secondary kind of force. Suppose he stopped all her
allowance, made it imperative that she should either stay ineffectually
resentful at home or earn a living for herself at once.... It
appeared highly probable to her that he would stop her allowance.
What can a girl do?
Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica's speculations were interrupted
and turned aside by the approach of a horse and rider. Mr. Ramage, that
iron-gray man of the world, appeared dressed in a bowler hat and a suit
of hard gray, astride of a black horse. He pulled rein at the sight of
her, saluted, and regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes. The
girl's gaze met his in interested inquiry.
"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second. "I always get off
here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so to-day?"
"It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first. It's for you to
say if I may sit on it."
He slipped off the horse. "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he said;
and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his nose was, and
secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth. Ramage tethered the
horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar blew heavily and began to
investigate the hedge.
Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a moment
there was silence.
He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its
autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and village,
below.
"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and putting a
well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.
"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at her
face, "wandering alone so far from home?"
"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.
"Solitary walks?"
"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."
"Problems?"
"Sometimes quite difficult problems."
"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,
for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at home—under
inspection."
She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her
free young poise show in his face.
"I suppose things have changed?" she said.
"Never was such an age of transition."
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto me is
the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an epigram.
"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me
profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more
interested than I am in anything else. I don't conceal it. And the
change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness
has been thrown aside is amazing. And all the old—the old trick of
shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago
you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your
chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to
understand."
"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that one
doesn't understand."
"Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg your
pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite well in your
heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she's vanished.
Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person!... I hope we may never
find her again."
He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about every man
of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains
and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate, and {}Honi
soit qui mal y pense. The change has given man one good thing he never
had before," he said. "Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best
as well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."
He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man
alive."
"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica, keeping
the question general.
"Oh, there's no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties broke
bounds and sailed away on bicycles—my young days go back to the very
beginnings of that—it's been one triumphant relaxation."
"Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?"
"Well?"
"I mean we've long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the same.
A woman isn't much freer—in reality."
Mr. Ramage demurred.
"One runs about," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes."
"But it's on condition one doesn't do anything."
"Do what?"
"Oh!—anything."
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
"It seems to me it comes to earning one's living in the long run," said
Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go away as a son does
and earn her independent income, she's still on a string. It may be a
long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people;
but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must go. That's what I
mean."
Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed by
Ann Veronica's metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty
Widgett. "YOU wouldn't like to be independent?" he asked, abruptly. "I
mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn't such fun as it seems."
"Every one wants to be independent," said Ann Veronica. "Every one. Man
or woman."
"And you?"
"Rather!"
"I wonder why?"
"There's no why. It's just to feel—one owns one's self."
"Nobody does that," said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.
"But a boy—a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on his
own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company, makes his
own way of living."
"You'd like to do that?"
"Exactly."
"Would you like to be a boy?"
"I wonder! It's out of the question, any way."
Ramage reflected. "Why don't you?"
"Well, it might mean rather a row."
"I know—" said Ramage, with sympathy.
"And besides," said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside, "what
could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession. But—it's one
of the things I've just been thinking over. Suppose—suppose a girl
did want to start in life, start in life for herself—" She looked him
frankly in the eyes. "What ought she to do?"
"Suppose you—"
"Yes, suppose I—"
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more
personal and intimate. "I wonder what you could do?" he said. "I should
think YOU could do all sorts of things....
"What ought you to do?" He began to produce his knowledge of the world
for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor
of "savoir faire." He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann Veronica
listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the turf, and now and then she
asked a question or looked up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile,
as he talked, he scrutinized her face, ran his eyes over her careless,
gracious poise, wondered hard about her. He described her privately to
himself as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from
home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While the front
of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the hopeless miseries
of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea that for women of
initiative, quite as much as for men, the world of business had by far
the best chances, the back chambers of his brain were busy with the
problem of that "Why?"
His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by a
lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he dismissed
that because then she would ask her lover and not him all these things.
Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home bored
her. He could quite understand the daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored
and feeling limited. But was that enough? Dim, formless suspicions
of something more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young lady
impatient for experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he
did not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more than
a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept. If it
was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the lover not yet
incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected....