There came a wild rush of anthropological lore into her brain, a flare
of indecorous humor. It was one of the secret troubles of her mind, this
grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as though they rebelled
and rioted. After all, she found herself reflecting, behind her aunt's
complacent visage there was a past as lurid as any one's—not, of
course, her aunt's own personal past, which was apparently just that
curate and almost incredibly jejune, but an ancestral past with all
sorts of scandalous things in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy,
marriage by capture, corroborees, cannibalism! Ancestresses with perhaps
dim anticipatory likenesses to her aunt, their hair less neatly done,
no doubt, their manners and gestures as yet undisciplined, but still
ancestresses in the direct line, must have danced through a brief and
stirring life in the woady buff. Was there no echo anywhere in Miss
Stanley's pacified brain? Those empty rooms, if they were empty, were
the equivalents of astoundingly decorated predecessors. Perhaps it was
just as well there was no inherited memory.
Ann Veronica was by this time quite shocked at her own thoughts, and yet
they would go on with their freaks. Great vistas of history opened, and
she and her aunt were near reverting to the primitive and passionate and
entirely indecorous arboreal—were swinging from branches by the
arms, and really going on quite dread-fy—when their arrival at
the Palsworthys' happily checked this play of fancy, and brought Ann
Veronica back to the exigencies of the wrappered life again.
Lady Palsworthy liked Ann Veronica because she was never awkward,
had steady eyes, and an almost invariable neatness and dignity in her
clothes. She seemed just as stiff and shy as a girl ought to be, Lady
Palsworthy thought, neither garrulous nor unready, and free from nearly
all the heavy aggressiveness, the overgrown, overblown quality, the
egotism and want of consideration of the typical modern girl. But then
Lady Palsworthy had never seen Ann Veronica running like the wind
at hockey. She had never seen her sitting on tables nor heard her
discussing theology, and had failed to observe that the graceful figure
was a natural one and not due to ably chosen stays. She took it for
granted Ann Veronica wore stays—mild stays, perhaps, but stays, and
thought no more of the matter. She had seen her really only at teas,
with the Stanley strain in her uppermost. There are so many girls
nowadays who are quite unpresentable at tea, with their untrimmed
laughs, their awful dispositions of their legs when they sit down, their
slangy disrespect; they no longer smoke, it is true, like the girls of
the eighties and nineties, nevertheless to a fine intelligence they have
the flavor of tobacco. They have no amenities, they scratch the
mellow surface of things almost as if they did it on purpose; and
Lady Palsworthy and Mrs. Pramlay lived for amenities and the mellowed
surfaces of things. Ann Veronica was one of the few young people—and
one must have young people just as one must have flowers—one could ask
to a little gathering without the risk of a painful discord. Then the
distant relationship to Miss Stanley gave them a slight but pleasant
sense of proprietorship in the girl. They had their little dreams about
her.
Mrs. Pramlay received them in the pretty chintz drawing-room, which
opened by French windows on the trim garden, with its croquet lawn, its
tennis-net in the middle distance, and its remote rose alley lined
with smart dahlias and flaming sunflowers. Her eye met Miss Stanley's
understandingly, and she was if anything a trifle more affectionate in
her greeting to Ann Veronica. Then Ann Veronica passed on toward the
tea in the garden, which was dotted with the elite of Morningside Park
society, and there she was pounced upon by Lady Palsworthy and given tea
and led about. Across the lawn and hovering indecisively, Ann Veronica
saw and immediately affected not to see Mr. Manning, Lady Palsworthy's
nephew, a tall young man of seven-and-thirty with a handsome,
thoughtful, impassive face, a full black mustache, and a certain heavy
luxuriousness of gesture. The party resolved itself for Ann Veronica
into a game in which she manoeuvred unostentatiously and finally
unsuccessfully to avoid talking alone with this gentleman.
Mr. Manning had shown on previous occasions that he found Ann Veronica
interesting and that he wished to interest her. He was a civil servant
of some standing, and after a previous conversation upon aesthetics of
a sententious, nebulous, and sympathetic character, he had sent her a
small volume, which he described as the fruits of his leisure and which
was as a matter of fact rather carefully finished verse. It dealt with
fine aspects of Mr. Manning's feelings, and as Ann Veronica's mind
was still largely engaged with fundamentals and found no pleasure in
metrical forms, she had not as yet cut its pages. So that as she saw him
she remarked to herself very faintly but definitely, "Oh, golly!" and
set up a campaign of avoidance that Mr. Manning at last broke down by
coming directly at her as she talked with the vicar's aunt about some of
the details of the alleged smell of the new church lamps. He did not so
much cut into this conversation as loom over it, for he was a tall, if
rather studiously stooping, man.
The face that looked down upon Ann Veronica was full of amiable
intention. "Splendid you are looking to-day, Miss Stanley," he said.
"How well and jolly you must be feeling."
He beamed over the effect of this and shook hands with effusion, and
Lady Palsworthy suddenly appeared as his confederate and disentangled
the vicar's aunt.
"I love this warm end of summer more than words can tell," he said.
"I've tried to make words tell it. It's no good. Mild, you know, and
boon. You want music."
Ann Veronica agreed, and tried to make the manner of her assent cover a
possible knowledge of a probable poem.
"Splendid it must be to be a composer. Glorious! The Pastoral.
Beethoven; he's the best of them. Don't you think? Tum, tay, tum, tay."
Ann Veronica did.
"What have you been doing since our last talk? Still cutting up
rabbits and probing into things? I've often thought of that talk of
ours—often."
He did not appear to require any answer to his question.
"Often," he repeated, a little heavily.
"Beautiful these autumn flowers are," said Ann Veronica, in a wide,
uncomfortable pause.
"Do come and see the Michaelmas daisies at the end of the garden," said
Mr. Manning, "they're a dream." And Ann Veronica found herself being
carried off to an isolation even remoter and more conspicuous than the
corner of the lawn, with the whole of the party aiding and abetting and
glancing at them. "Damn!" said Ann Veronica to herself, rousing herself
for a conflict.
Mr. Manning told her he loved beauty, and extorted a similar admission
from her; he then expatiated upon his own love of beauty. He said that
for him beauty justified life, that he could not imagine a good action
that was not a beautiful one nor any beautiful thing that could be
altogether bad. Ann Veronica hazarded an opinion that as a matter of
history some very beautiful people had, to a quite considerable extent,
been bad, but Mr. Manning questioned whether when they were bad they
were really beautiful or when they were beautiful bad. Ann Veronica
found her attention wandering a little as he told her that he was not
ashamed to feel almost slavish in the presence of really beautiful
people, and then they came to the Michaelmas daisies. They were really
very fine and abundant, with a blaze of perennial sunflowers behind
them.
"They make me want to shout," said Mr. Manning, with a sweep of the arm.
"They're very good this year," said Ann Veronica, avoiding controversial
matter.
"Either I want to shout," said Mr. Manning, "when I see beautiful
things, or else I want to weep." He paused and looked at her, and said,
with a sudden drop into a confidential undertone, "Or else I want to
pray."
"When is Michaelmas Day?" said Ann Veronica, a little abruptly.
"Heaven knows!" said Mr. Manning; and added, "the twenty-ninth."
"I thought it was earlier," said Ann Veronica. "Wasn't Parliament to
reassemble?"
He put out his hand and leaned against a tree and crossed his legs.
"You're not interested in politics?" he asked, almost with a note of
protest.
"Well, rather," said Ann Veronica. "It seems—It's interesting."
"Do you think so? I find my interest in that sort of thing decline and
decline."
"I'm curious. Perhaps because I don't know. I suppose an intelligent
person OUGHT to be interested in political affairs. They concern us
all."
"I wonder," said Mr. Manning, with a baffling smile.
"I think they do. After all, they're history in the making."
"A sort of history," said Mr. Manning; and repeated, "a sort of history.
But look at these glorious daisies!"
"But don't you think political questions ARE important?"
"I don't think they are this afternoon, and I don't think they are to
you."
Ann Veronica turned her back on the Michaelmas daisies, and faced toward
the house with an air of a duty completed.
"Just come to that seat now you are here, Miss Stanley, and look down
the other path; there's a vista of just the common sort. Better even
than these."
Ann Veronica walked as he indicated.
"You know I'm old-fashioned, Miss Stanley. I don't think women need to
trouble about political questions."
"I want a vote," said Ann Veronica.
"Really!" said Mr. Manning, in an earnest voice, and waved his hand to
the alley of mauve and purple. "I wish you didn't."
"Why not?" She turned on him.
"It jars. It jars with all my ideas. Women to me are something so
serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid,
so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's duty to be
beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics
are by their very nature ugly. You see, I—I am a woman worshipper.
I worshipped women long before I found any woman I might ever hope
to worship. Long ago. And—the idea of committees, of hustings, of
agenda-papers!"
"I don't see why the responsibility of beauty should all be shifted on
to the women," said Ann Veronica, suddenly remembering a part of Miss
Miniver's discourse.
"It rests with them by the nature of things. Why should you who are
queens come down from your thrones? If you can afford it, WE can't. We
can't afford to turn our women, our Madonnas, our Saint Catherines, our
Mona Lisas, our goddesses and angels and fairy princesses, into a sort
of man. Womanhood is sacred to me. My politics in that matter wouldn't
be to give women votes. I'm a Socialist, Miss Stanley."
"WHAT?" said Ann Veronica, startled.
"A Socialist of the order of John Ruskin. Indeed I am! I would make this
country a collective monarchy, and all the girls and women in it should
be the Queen. They should never come into contact with politics or
economics—or any of those things. And we men would work for them and
serve them in loyal fealty."
"That's rather the theory now," said Ann Veronica. "Only so many men
neglect their duties."
"Yes," said Mr. Manning, with an air of emerging from an elaborate
demonstration, "and so each of us must, under existing conditions, being
chivalrous indeed to all women, choose for himself his own particular
and worshipful queen."
"So far as one can judge from the system in practice," said Ann
Veronica, speaking in a loud, common-sense, detached tone, and beginning
to walk slowly but resolutely toward the lawn, "it doesn't work."
"Every one must be experimental," said Mr. Manning, and glanced round
hastily for further horticultural points of interest in secluded
corners. None presented themselves to save him from that return.
"That's all very well when one isn't the material experimented upon,"
Ann Veronica had remarked.
"Women would—they DO have far more power than they think, as
influences, as inspirations."
Ann Veronica said nothing in answer to that.
"You say you want a vote," said Mr. Manning, abruptly.
"I think I ought to have one."
"Well, I have two," said Mr. Manning—"one in Oxford University and one
in Kensington." He caught up and went on with a sort of clumsiness: "Let
me present you with them and be your voter."
There followed an instant's pause, and then Ann Veronica had decided to
misunderstand.
"I want a vote for myself," she said. "I don't see why I should take it
second-hand. Though it's very kind of you. And rather unscrupulous. Have
you ever voted, Mr. Manning? I suppose there's a sort of place like a
ticket-office. And a ballot-box—" Her face assumed an expression of
intellectual conflict. "What is a ballot-box like, exactly?" she asked,
as though it was very important to her.
Mr. Manning regarded her thoughtfully for a moment and stroked his
mustache. "A ballot-box, you know," he said, "is very largely just a
box." He made quite a long pause, and went on, with a sigh: "You have a
voting paper given you—"
They emerged into the publicity of the lawn.
"Yes," said Ann Veronica, "yes," to his explanation, and saw across
the lawn Lady Palsworthy talking to her aunt, and both of them staring
frankly across at her and Mr. Manning as they talked.
Two days after came the day of the Crisis, the day of the Fadden Dance.
It would have been a crisis anyhow, but it was complicated in Ann
Veronica's mind by the fact that a letter lay on the breakfast-table
from Mr. Manning, and that her aunt focussed a brightly tactful
disregard upon this throughout the meal. Ann Veronica had come down
thinking of nothing in the world but her inflexible resolution to go to
the dance in the teeth of all opposition. She did not know Mr. Manning's
handwriting, and opened his letter and read some lines before its import
appeared. Then for a time she forgot the Fadden affair altogether.
With a well-simulated unconcern and a heightened color she finished her
breakfast.