"I do hope you will see how things are, and not be offended with me or
frightfully shocked and distressed by what I have done.
"Very sincerely yours,
"ANN VERONICA STANLEY."
In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The intoxicating
sense of novelty had given place to a more business-like mood. She
drifted northward from the Strand, and came on some queer and dingy
quarters.
She had never imagined life was half so sinister as it looked to her in
the beginning of these investigations. She found herself again in the
presence of some element in life about which she had been trained not
to think, about which she was perhaps instinctively indisposed to think;
something which jarred, in spite of all her mental resistance, with
all her preconceptions of a clean and courageous girl walking out from
Morningside Park as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious
world. One or two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue
that she found hard to explain. "We don't let to ladies," they said.
She drifted, via Theobald's Road, obliquely toward the region about
Titchfield Street. Such apartments as she saw were either scandalously
dirty or unaccountably dear, or both. And some were adorned with
engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and undesirable than
anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann Veronica loved beautiful
things, and the beauty of undraped loveliness not least among them; but
these were pictures that did but insist coarsely upon the roundness of
women's bodies. The windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies,
their floors a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels
were of a class apart. After the first onset several of the women who
had apartments to let said she would not do for them, and in effect
dismissed her. This also struck her as odd.
About many of these houses hung a mysterious taint as of something
weakly and commonly and dustily evil; the women who negotiated the rooms
looked out through a friendly manner as though it was a mask, with hard,
defiant eyes. Then one old crone, short-sighted and shaky-handed, called
Ann Veronica "dearie," and made some remark, obscure and slangy, of
which the spirit rather than the words penetrated to her understanding.
For a time she looked at no more apartments, and walked through
gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through the sordid under side of life,
perplexed and troubled, ashamed of her previous obtuseness.
She had something of the feeling a Hindoo must experience who has been
into surroundings or touched something that offends his caste. She
passed people in the streets and regarded them with a quickening
apprehension, once or twice came girls dressed in slatternly finery,
going toward Regent Street from out these places. It did not occur to
her that they at least had found a way of earning a living, and had that
much economic superiority to herself. It did not occur to her that save
for some accidents of education and character they had souls like her
own.
For a time Ann Veronica went on her way gauging the quality of sordid
streets. At last, a little way to the northward of Euston Road, the
moral cloud seemed to lift, the moral atmosphere to change; clean blinds
appeared in the windows, clean doorsteps before the doors, a different
appeal in the neatly placed cards bearing the word
APARTMENTS
in the clear bright windows. At last in a street near the Hampstead Road
she hit upon a room that had an exceptional quality of space and order,
and a tall woman with a kindly face to show it. "You're a student,
perhaps?" said the tall woman. "At the Tredgold Women's College," said
Ann Veronica. She felt it would save explanations if she did not state
she had left her home and was looking for employment. The room was
papered with green, large-patterned paper that was at worst a trifle
dingy, and the arm-chair and the seats of the other chairs were covered
with the unusual brightness of a large-patterned chintz, which also
supplied the window-curtain. There was a round table covered, not with
the usual "tapestry" cover, but with a plain green cloth that went
passably with the wall-paper. In the recess beside the fireplace
were some open bookshelves. The carpet was a quiet drugget and not
excessively worn, and the bed in the corner was covered by a white
quilt. There were neither texts nor rubbish on the walls, but only a
stirring version of Belshazzar's feast, a steel engraving in the early
Victorian manner that had some satisfactory blacks. And the woman who
showed this room was tall, with an understanding eye and the quiet
manner of the well-trained servant.
Ann Veronica brought her luggage in a cab from the hotel; she tipped the
hotel porter sixpence and overpaid the cabman eighteenpence, unpacked
some of her books and possessions, and so made the room a little
homelike, and then sat down in a by no means uncomfortable arm-chair
before the fire. She had arranged for a supper of tea, a boiled egg, and
some tinned peaches. She had discussed the general question of supplies
with the helpful landlady. "And now," said Ann Veronica surveying her
apartment with an unprecedented sense of proprietorship, "what is the
next step?"
She spent the evening in writing—it was a little difficult—to her
father and—which was easier—to the Widgetts. She was greatly heartened
by doing this. The necessity of defending herself and assuming a
confident and secure tone did much to dispell the sense of being
exposed and indefensible in a huge dingy world that abounded in sinister
possibilities. She addressed her letters, meditated on them for a time,
and then took them out and posted them. Afterward she wanted to get her
letter to her father back in order to read it over again, and, if it
tallied with her general impression of it, re-write it.
He would know her address to-morrow. She reflected upon that with a
thrill of terror that was also, somehow, in some faint remote way,
gleeful.
"Dear old Daddy," she said, "he'll make a fearful fuss. Well, it had to
happen somewhen.... Somehow. I wonder what he'll say?"
The next morning opened calmly, and Ann Veronica sat in her own room,
her very own room, and consumed an egg and marmalade, and read the
advertisements in the Daily Telegraph. Then began expostulations,
preluded by a telegram and headed by her aunt. The telegram reminded
Ann Veronica that she had no place for interviews except her
bed-sitting-room, and she sought her landlady and negotiated hastily for
the use of the ground floor parlor, which very fortunately was vacant.
She explained she was expecting an important interview, and asked that
her visitor should be duly shown in. Her aunt arrived about half-past
ten, in black and with an unusually thick spotted veil. She raised this
with the air of a conspirator unmasking, and displayed a tear-flushed
face. For a moment she remained silent.
"My dear," she said, when she could get her breath, "you must come home
at once."
Ann Veronica closed the door quite softly and stood still.
"This has almost killed your father.... After Gwen!"
"I sent a telegram."
"He cares so much for you. He did so care for you."
"I sent a telegram to say I was all right."
"All right! And I never dreamed anything of the sort was going on. I
had no idea!" She sat down abruptly and threw her wrists limply upon the
table. "Oh, Veronica!" she said, "to leave your home!"
She had been weeping. She was weeping now. Ann Veronica was overcome by
this amount of emotion.
"Why did you do it?" her aunt urged. "Why could you not confide in us?"
"Do what?" said Ann Veronica.
"What you have done."
"But what have I done?"
"Elope! Go off in this way. We had no idea. We had such a pride in
you, such hope in you. I had no idea you were not the happiest girl.
Everything I could do! Your father sat up all night. Until at last I
persuaded him to go to bed. He wanted to put on his overcoat and come
after you and look for you—in London. We made sure it was just like
Gwen. Only Gwen left a letter on the pincushion. You didn't even do that
Vee; not even that."
"I sent a telegram, aunt," said Ann Veronica.
"Like a stab. You didn't even put the twelve words."
"I said I was all right."
"Gwen said she was happy. Before that came your father didn't even
know you were gone. He was just getting cross about your being late for
dinner—you know his way—when it came. He opened it—just off-hand, and
then when he saw what it was he hit at the table and sent his soup spoon
flying and splashing on to the tablecloth. 'My God!' he said, 'I'll go
after them and kill him. I'll go after them and kill him.' For the
moment I thought it was a telegram from Gwen."
"But what did father imagine?"
"Of course he imagined! Any one would! 'What has happened, Peter?' I
asked. He was standing up with the telegram crumpled in his hand. He
used a most awful word! Then he said, 'It's Ann Veronica gone to join
her sister!' 'Gone!' I said. 'Gone!' he said. 'Read that,' and threw the
telegram at me, so that it went into the tureen. He swore when I tried
to get it out with the ladle, and told me what it said. Then he sat
down again in a chair and said that people who wrote novels ought to be
strung up. It was as much as I could do to prevent him flying out of the
house there and then and coming after you. Never since I was a girl have
I seen your father so moved. 'Oh! little Vee!' he cried, 'little Vee!'
and put his face between his hands and sat still for a long time before
he broke out again."
Ann Veronica had remained standing while her aunt spoke.
"Do you mean, aunt," she asked, "that my father thought I had gone
off—with some man?"
"What else COULD he think? Would any one DREAM you would be so mad as to
go off alone?"
"After—after what had happened the night before?"
"Oh, why raise up old scores? If you could see him this morning, his
poor face as white as a sheet and all cut about with shaving! He was
for coming up by the very first train and looking for you, but I said to
him, 'Wait for the letters,' and there, sure enough, was yours. He could
hardly open the envelope, he trembled so. Then he threw the letter at
me. 'Go and fetch her home,' he said; 'it isn't what we thought! It's
just a practical joke of hers.' And with that he went off to the City,
stern and silent, leaving his bacon on his plate—a great slice of bacon
hardly touched. No breakfast, he's had no dinner, hardly a mouthful of
soup—since yesterday at tea."
She stopped. Aunt and niece regarded each other silently.
"You must come home to him at once," said Miss Stanley.
Ann Veronica looked down at her fingers on the claret-colored
table-cloth. Her aunt had summoned up an altogether too vivid picture
of her father as the masterful man, overbearing, emphatic, sentimental,
noisy, aimless. Why on earth couldn't he leave her to grow in her own
way? Her pride rose at the bare thought of return.
"I don't think I CAN do that," she said. She looked up and said, a
little breathlessly, "I'm sorry, aunt, but I don't think I can."
Then it was the expostulations really began.
From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt expostulated for about
two hours. "But, my dear," she began, "it is Impossible! It is quite out
of the Question. You simply can't." And to that, through vast rhetorical
meanderings, she clung. It reached her only slowly that Ann Veronica was
standing to her resolution. "How will you live?" she appealed. "Think
of what people will say!" That became a refrain. "Think of what Lady
Palsworthy will say! Think of what"—So-and-so—"will say! What are we
to tell people?
"Besides, what am I to tell your father?"
At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica that she would
refuse to return home; she had had some dream of a capitulation that
should leave her an enlarged and defined freedom, but as her aunt put
this aspect and that of her flight to her, as she wandered illogically
and inconsistently from one urgent consideration to another, as she
mingled assurances and aspects and emotions, it became clearer and
clearer to the girl that there could be little or no change in the
position of things if she returned. "And what will Mr. Manning think?"
said her aunt.
"I don't care what any one thinks," said Ann Veronica.
"I can't imagine what has come over you," said her aunt. "I can't
conceive what you want. You foolish girl!"
Ann Veronica took that in silence. At the back of her mind, dim and yet
disconcerting, was the perception that she herself did not know what she
wanted. And yet she knew it was not fair to call her a foolish girl.
"Don't you care for Mr. Manning?" said her aunt.
"I don't see what he has to do with my coming to London?"
"He—he worships the ground you tread on. You don't deserve it, but he
does. Or at least he did the day before yesterday. And here you are!"
Her aunt opened all the fingers of her gloved hand in a rhetorical
gesture. "It seems to me all madness—madness! Just because your
father—wouldn't let you disobey him!"
In the afternoon the task of expostulation was taken up by Mr. Stanley
in person. Her father's ideas of expostulation were a little harsh and
forcible, and over the claret-colored table-cloth and under the gas
chandelier, with his hat and umbrella between them like the mace in
Parliament, he and his daughter contrived to have a violent quarrel. She
had intended to be quietly dignified, but he was in a smouldering rage
from the beginning, and began by assuming, which alone was more than
flesh and blood could stand, that the insurrection was over and that she
was coming home submissively. In his desire to be emphatic and to avenge
himself for his over-night distresses, he speedily became brutal, more
brutal than she had ever known him before.