"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.
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. "Veronique!" 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."
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.
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."
For a time that ring set with sapphires seemed to be, after all, the
satisfactory solution of Ann Veronica's difficulties. It was like
pouring a strong acid over dulled metal. A tarnish of constraint that
had recently spread over her intercourse with Capes vanished again. They
embarked upon an open and declared friendship. They even talked about
friendship. They went to the Zoological Gardens together one Saturday to
see for themselves a point of morphological interest about the toucan's
bill—that friendly and entertaining bird—and they spent the rest of
the afternoon walking about and elaborating in general terms this theme
and the superiority of intellectual fellowship to all merely passionate
relationships. Upon this topic Capes was heavy and conscientious, but
that seemed to her to be just exactly what he ought to be. He was also,
had she known it, more than a little insincere. "We are only in the dawn
of the Age of Friendship," he said, "when interest, I suppose, will
take the place of passions. Either you have had to love people or hate
them—which is a sort of love, too, in its way—to get anything out of
them. Now, more and more, we're going to be interested in them, to be
curious about them and—quite mildly-experimental with them." He seemed
to be elaborating ideas as he talked. They watched the chimpanzees in
the new apes' house, and admired the gentle humanity of their eyes—"so
much more human than human beings"—and they watched the Agile Gibbon in
the next apartment doing wonderful leaps and aerial somersaults.