Ann Veronica (11 page)

Ann Veronica found herself in the presence of the most disconcerting
fact in human experience, the kindliness of people you believe to be
thoroughly wrong. She took the tray with both hands, gulped, and gave
way to tears.

Her aunt leaped unhappily to the thought of penitence.

"My dear," she began, with an affectionate hand on Ann Veronica's
shoulder, "I do SO wish you would realize how it grieves your father."

Ann Veronica flung away from her hand, and the pepper-pot on the tray
upset, sending a puff of pepper into the air and instantly filling them
both with an intense desire to sneeze.

"I don't think you see," she replied, with tears on her cheeks, and her
brows knitting, "how it shames and, ah!—disgraces me—AH TISHU!"

She put down the tray with a concussion on her toilet-table.

"But, dear, think! He is your father. SHOOH!"

"That's no reason," said Ann Veronica, speaking through her handkerchief
and stopping abruptly.

Niece and aunt regarded each other for a moment over their
pocket-handkerchiefs with watery but antagonistic eyes, each far too
profoundly moved to see the absurdity of the position.

"I hope," said Miss Stanley, with dignity, and turned doorward with
features in civil warfare. "Better state of mind," she gasped....

Ann Veronica stood in the twilight room staring at the door that had
slammed upon her aunt, her pocket-handkerchief rolled tightly in her
hand. Her soul was full of the sense of disaster. She had made her first
fight for dignity and freedom as a grown-up and independent Person, and
this was how the universe had treated her. It had neither succumbed
to her nor wrathfully overwhelmed her. It had thrust her back with an
undignified scuffle, with vulgar comedy, with an unendurable, scornful
grin.

"By God!" said Ann Veronica for the first time in her life. "But I will!
I will!"

Ann Veronica had an impression that she did not sleep at all that night,
and at any rate she got through an immense amount of feverish feeling
and thinking.

What was she going to do?

One main idea possessed her: she must get away from home, she must
assert herself at once or perish. "Very well," she would say, "then I
must go." To remain, she felt, was to concede everything. And she would
have to go to-morrow. It was clear it must be to-morrow. If she delayed
a day she would delay two days, if she delayed two days she would delay
a week, and after a week things would be adjusted to submission forever.
"I'll go," she vowed to the night, "or I'll die!" She made plans and
estimated means and resources. These and her general preparations had
perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold watch, a very good gold
watch that had been her mother's, a pearl necklace that was also pretty
good, some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few other such
inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen shillings unspent of her
dress and book allowance and a few good salable books. So equipped, she
proposed to set up a separate establishment in the world.

And then she would find work.

For most of a long and fluctuating night she was fairly confident that
she would find work; she knew herself to be strong, intelligent, and
capable by the standards of most of the girls she knew. She was not
quite clear how she should find it, but she felt she would. Then
she would write and tell her father what she had done, and put their
relationship on a new footing.

That was how she projected it, and in general terms it seemed plausible
and possible. But in between these wider phases of comparative
confidence were gaps of disconcerting doubt, when the universe was
presented as making sinister and threatening faces at her, defying her
to defy, preparing a humiliating and shameful overthrow. "I don't care,"
said Ann Veronica to the darkness; "I'll fight it."

She tried to plan her proceedings in detail. The only difficulties that
presented themselves clearly to her were the difficulties of getting
away from Morningside Park, and not the difficulties at the other end
of the journey. These were so outside her experience that she found it
possible to thrust them almost out of sight by saying they would be "all
right" in confident tones to herself. But still she knew they were not
right, and at times they became a horrible obsession as of something
waiting for her round the corner. She tried to imagine herself "getting
something," to project herself as sitting down at a desk and writing,
or as returning after her work to some pleasantly equipped and free and
independent flat. For a time she furnished the flat. But even with
that furniture it remained extremely vague, the possible good and the
possible evil as well!

The possible evil! "I'll go," said Ann Veronica for the hundredth time.
"I'll go. I don't care WHAT happens."

She awoke out of a doze, as though she had never been sleeping. It was
time to get up.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked about her, at her room, at the
row of black-covered books and the pig's skull. "I must take them,"
she said, to help herself over her own incredulity. "How shall I get my
luggage out of the house?..."

The figure of her aunt, a little distant, a little propitiatory, behind
the coffee things, filled her with a sense of almost catastrophic
adventure. Perhaps she might never come back to that breakfast-room
again. Never! Perhaps some day, quite soon, she might regret that
breakfast-room. She helped herself to the remainder of the slightly
congealed bacon, and reverted to the problem of getting her luggage
out of the house. She decided to call in the help of Teddy Widgett, or,
failing him, of one of his sisters.

She found the younger generation of the Widgetts engaged in languid
reminiscences, and all, as they expressed it, a "bit decayed." Every
one became tremendously animated when they heard that Ann Veronica had
failed them because she had been, as she expressed it, "locked in."

"My God!" said Teddy, more impressively than ever.

"But what are you going to do?" asked Hetty.

"What can one do?" asked Ann Veronica. "Would you stand it? I'm going to
clear out."

"Clear out?" cried Hetty.

"Go to London," said Ann Veronica.

She had expected sympathetic admiration, but instead the whole Widgett
family, except Teddy, expressed a common dismay. "But how can you?"
asked Constance. "Who will you stop with?"

"I shall go on my own. Take a room!"

"I say!" said Constance. "But who's going to pay for the room?"

"I've got money," said Ann Veronica. "Anything is better than this—this
stifled life down here." And seeing that Hetty and Constance were
obviously developing objections, she plunged at once into a demand for
help. "I've got nothing in the world to pack with except a toy size
portmanteau. Can you lend me some stuff?"

"You ARE a chap!" said Constance, and warmed only slowly from the idea
of dissuasion to the idea of help. But they did what they could for her.
They agreed to lend her their hold-all and a large, formless bag which
they called the communal trunk. And Teddy declared himself ready to go
to the ends of the earth for her, and carry her luggage all the way.

Hetty, looking out of the window—she always smoked her after-breakfast
cigarette at the window for the benefit of the less advanced section of
Morningside Park society—and trying not to raise objections, saw Miss
Stanley going down toward the shops.

"If you must go on with it," said Hetty, "now's your time." And Ann
Veronica at once went back with the hold-all, trying not to hurry
indecently but to keep up her dignified air of being a wronged person
doing the right thing at a smart trot, to pack. Teddy went round by the
garden backs and dropped the bag over the fence. All this was exciting
and entertaining. Her aunt returned before the packing was done, and
Ann Veronica lunched with an uneasy sense of bag and hold-all packed
up-stairs and inadequately hidden from chance intruders by the valance
of the bed. She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the Widgetts'
after lunch to make some final arrangements and then, as soon as her
aunt had retired to lie down for her usual digestive hour, took the
risk of the servants having the enterprise to report her proceedings
and carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate, whence Teddy, in
a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the railway station. Then she
went up-stairs again, dressed herself carefully for town, put on her
most businesslike-looking hat, and with a wave of emotion she found it
hard to control, walked down to catch the 3.17 up-train.

Teddy handed her into the second-class compartment her season-ticket
warranted, and declared she was "simply splendid." "If you want
anything," he said, "or get into any trouble, wire me. I'd come back
from the ends of the earth. I'd do anything, Vee. It's horrible to think
of you!"

"You're an awful brick, Teddy!" she said.

"Who wouldn't be for you?"

The train began to move. "You're splendid!" said Teddy, with his hair
wild in the wind. "Good luck! Good luck!"

She waved from the window until the bend hid him.

She found herself alone in the train asking herself what she must do
next, and trying not to think of herself as cut off from home or any
refuge whatever from the world she had resolved to face. She felt
smaller and more adventurous even than she had expected to feel. "Let
me see," she said to herself, trying to control a slight sinking of the
heart, "I am going to take a room in a lodging-house because that is
cheaper.... But perhaps I had better get a room in an hotel to-night
and look round....

"It's bound to be all right," she said.

But her heart kept on sinking. What hotel should she go to? If she told
a cabman to drive to an hotel, any hotel, what would he do—or say? He
might drive to something dreadfully expensive, and not at all the quiet
sort of thing she required. Finally she decided that even for an hotel
she must look round, and that meanwhile she would "book" her luggage at
Waterloo. She told the porter to take it to the booking-office, and it
was only after a disconcerting moment or so that she found she ought to
have directed him to go to the cloak-room. But that was soon put right,
and she walked out into London with a peculiar exaltation of mind, an
exaltation that partook of panic and defiance, but was chiefly a sense
of vast unexampled release.

She inhaled a deep breath of air—London air.

She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why, mainly
perhaps from the mere dread of entering them, and crossed Waterloo
Bridge at a leisurely pace. It was high afternoon, there was no great
throng of foot-passengers, and many an eye from omnibus and pavement
rested gratefully on her fresh, trim presence as she passed young
and erect, with the light of determination shining through the quiet
self-possession of her face. She was dressed as English girls do dress
for town, without either coquetry or harshness: her collarless blouse
confessed a pretty neck, her eyes were bright and steady, and her dark
hair waved loosely and graciously over her ears....

It seemed at first the most beautiful afternoon of all time to her,
and perhaps the thrill of her excitement did add a distinctive and
culminating keenness to the day. The river, the big buildings on the
north bank, Westminster, and St. Paul's, were rich and wonderful with
the soft sunshine of London, the softest, the finest grained, the most
penetrating and least emphatic sunshine in the world. The very carts
and vans and cabs that Wellington Street poured out incessantly upon
the bridge seemed ripe and good in her eyes. A traffic of copious barges
slumbered over the face of the river-barges either altogether stagnant
or dreaming along in the wake of fussy tugs; and above circled, urbanely
voracious, the London seagulls. She had never been there before at that
hour, in that light, and it seemed to her as if she came to it all for
the first time. And this great mellow place, this London, now was hers,
to struggle with, to go where she pleased in, to overcome and live in.
"I am glad," she told herself, "I came."

She marked an hotel that seemed neither opulent nor odd in a little side
street opening on the Embankment, made up her mind with an effort, and,
returning by Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo, took a cab to this chosen
refuge with her two pieces of luggage. There was just a minute's
hesitation before they gave her a room.

The young lady in the bureau said she would inquire, and Ann Veronica,
while she affected to read the appeal on a hospital collecting-box upon
the bureau counter, had a disagreeable sense of being surveyed from
behind by a small, whiskered gentleman in a frock-coat, who came out of
the inner office and into the hall among a number of equally observant
green porters to look at her and her bags. But the survey was
satisfactory, and she found herself presently in Room No. 47,
straightening her hat and waiting for her luggage to appear.

"All right so far," she said to herself....

But presently, as she sat on the one antimacassared red silk chair
and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that tidy, rather vacant, and
dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe and desert toilet-table
and pictureless walls and stereotyped furnishings, a sudden blankness
came upon her as though she didn't matter, and had been thrust away into
this impersonal corner, she and her gear....

She decided to go out into the London afternoon again and get something
to eat in an Aerated Bread shop or some such place, and perhaps find a
cheap room for herself. Of course that was what she had to do; she had
to find a cheap room for herself and work!