Ann Veronica (32 page)

Manning was silent for a space. "As my lady wills."

"Would you let me go on studying for a time?"

"If you order patience."

"I think, Mr. Manning... I do not know. It is so difficult. When I
think of the love you give me—One ought to give you back love."

"You like me?"

"Yes. And I am grateful to you...."

Manning tapped with his racket on the turf through some moments of
silence. "You are the most perfect, the most glorious of created
things—tender, frank intellectual, brave, beautiful. I am your
servitor. I am ready to wait for you, to wait your pleasure, to give all
my life to winning it. Let me only wear your livery. Give me but leave
to try. You want to think for a time, to be free for a time. That is so
like you, Diana—Pallas Athene! (Pallas Athene is better.) You are all
the slender goddesses. I understand. Let me engage myself. That is all I
ask."

She looked at him; his face, downcast and in profile, was handsome and
strong. Her gratitude swelled within her.

"You are too good for me," she said in a low voice.

"Then you—you will?"

A long pause.

"It isn't fair...."

"But will you?"

"YES."

For some seconds he had remained quite still.

"If I sit here," he said, standing up before her abruptly, "I shall
have to shout. Let us walk about. Tum, tum, tirray, tum, tum, tum,
te-tum—that thing of Mendelssohn's! If making one human being
absolutely happy is any satisfaction to you—"

He held out his hands, and she also stood up.

He drew her close up to him with a strong, steady pull. Then suddenly,
in front of all those windows, he folded her in his arms and pressed her
to him, and kissed her unresisting face.

"Don't!" cried Ann Veronica, struggling faintly, and he released her.

"Forgive me," he said. "But I am at singing-pitch."

She had a moment of sheer panic at the thing she had done. "Mr.
Manning," she said, "for a time—Will you tell no one? Will you keep
this—our secret? I'm doubtful—Will you please not even tell my aunt?"

"As you will," he said. "But if my manner tells! I cannot help it if
that shows. You only mean a secret for a little time?"

"Just for a little time," she said; "yes...."

But the ring, and her aunt's triumphant eye, and a note of approval in
her father's manner, and a novel disposition in him to praise Manning
in a just, impartial voice had soon placed very definite qualifications
upon that covenanted secrecy.

At first the quality of her relationship to Manning seemed moving and
beautiful to Ann Veronica. She admired and rather pitied him, and she
was unfeignedly grateful to him. She even thought that perhaps she might
come to love him, in spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurdity
that pervaded his courtly bearing. She would never love him as she
loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love.
For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much more
temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant,
condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with
him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which
distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the wrappered world
almost at its best. She saw herself building up a life upon that—a
life restrained, kindly, beautiful, a little pathetic and altogether
dignified; a life of great disciplines and suppressions and extensive
reserves...

But the Ramage affair needed clearing up, of course; it was a flaw upon
that project. She had to explain about and pay off that forty pounds....

Then, quite insensibly, her queenliness had declined. She was never able
to trace the changes her attitude had undergone, from the time when she
believed herself to be the pampered Queen of Fortune, the crown of a
good man's love (and secretly, but nobly, worshipping some one else),
to the time when she realized she was in fact just a mannequin for her
lover's imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of her
being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreams
that might move her, than a child cares for the sawdust in its doll. She
was the actress his whim had chosen to play a passive part....

It was one of the most educational disillusionments in Ann Veronica's
career.

But did many women get anything better?

This afternoon, when she was urgent to explain her hampering and
tainting complication with Ramage, the realization of this alien quality
in her relationship with Manning became acute. Hitherto it had been
qualified by her conception of all life as a compromise, by her new
effort to be unexacting of life. But she perceived that to tell Manning
of her Ramage adventures as they had happened would be like tarring
figures upon a water-color. They were in different key, they had a
different timbre. How could she tell him what indeed already began to
puzzle herself, why she had borrowed that money at all? The plain fact
was that she had grabbed a bait. She had grabbed! She became less and
less attentive to his meditative, self-complacent fragments of talk as
she told herself this. Her secret thoughts made some hasty, half-hearted
excursions into the possibility of telling the thing in romantic
tones—Ramage was as a black villain, she as a white, fantastically
white, maiden.... She doubted if Manning would even listen to that.
He would refuse to listen and absolve her unshriven.

Then it came to her with a shock, as an extraordinary oversight, that
she could never tell Manning about Ramage—never.

She dismissed the idea of doing so. But that still left the forty
pounds!...

Her mind went on generalizing. So it would always be between herself and
Manning. She saw her life before her robbed of all generous illusions,
the wrappered life unwrappered forever, vistas of dull responses, crises
of make-believe, years of exacting mutual disregard in a misty garden of
fine sentiments.

But did any woman get anything better from a man? Perhaps every woman
conceals herself from a man perforce!...

She thought of Capes. She could not help thinking of Capes. Surely
Capes was different. Capes looked at one and not over one, spoke to one,
treated one as a visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her,
cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not
sentimentalize her. And she had been doubting since that walk in the
Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her. Little
things, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that doubt; something
in his manner had belied his words. Did he not look for her in the
morning when she entered—come very quickly to her? She thought of him
as she had last seen him looking down the length of the laboratory to
see her go. Why had he glanced up—quite in that way?...

The thought of Capes flooded her being like long-veiled sunlight
breaking again through clouds. It came to her like a dear thing
rediscovered, that she loved Capes. It came to her that to marry any
one but Capes was impossible. If she could not marry him, she would not
marry any one. She would end this sham with Manning. It ought never
to have begun. It was cheating, pitiful cheating. And then if some day
Capes wanted her—saw fit to alter his views upon friendship....

Dim possibilities that she would not seem to look at even to herself
gesticulated in the twilight background of her mind.

She leaped suddenly at a desperate resolution, and in one moment had
made it into a new self. She flung aside every plan she had in life,
every discretion. Of course, why not? She would be honest, anyhow!

She turned her eyes to Manning.

He was sitting back from the table now, with one arm over the back
of his green chair and the other resting on the little table. He was
smiling under his heavy mustache, and his head was a little on one side
as he looked at her.

"And what was that dreadful confession you had to make?" he was saying.
His quiet, kindly smile implied his serene disbelief in any confessible
thing. Ann Veronica pushed aside a tea-cup and the vestiges of her
strawberries and cream, and put her elbows before her on the table. "Mr.
Manning," she said, "I HAVE a confession to make."

"I wish you would use my Christian name," he said.

She attended to that, and then dismissed it as unimportant.

Something in her voice and manner conveyed an effect of unwonted gravity
to him. For the first time he seemed to wonder what it might be that she
had to confess. His smile faded.

"I don't think our engagement can go on," she plunged, and felt exactly
that loss of breath that comes with a dive into icy water.

"But, how," he said, sitting up astonished beyond measure, "not go on?"

"I have been thinking while you have been talking. You see—I didn't
understand."

She stared hard at her finger-nails. "It is hard to express one's self,
but I do want to be honest with you. When I promised to marry you I
thought I could; I thought it was a possible arrangement. I did think it
could be done. I admired your chivalry. I was grateful."

She paused.

"Go on," he said.

She moved her elbow nearer to him and spoke in a still lower tone. "I
told you I did not love you."

"I know," said Manning, nodding gravely. "It was fine and brave of you."

"But there is something more."

She paused again.

"I—I am sorry—I didn't explain. These things are difficult. It wasn't
clear to me that I had to explain.... I love some one else."

They remained looking at each other for three or four seconds. Then
Manning flopped back in his chair and dropped his chin like a man shot.
There was a long silence between them.

"My God!" he said at last, with tremendous feeling, and then again, "My
God!"

Now that this thing was said her mind was clear and calm. She heard this
standard expression of a strong soul wrung with a critical coldness that
astonished herself. She realized dimly that there was no personal thing
behind his cry, that countless myriads of Mannings had "My God!"-ed with
an equal gusto at situations as flatly apprehended. This mitigated
her remorse enormously. He rested his brow on his hand and conveyed
magnificent tragedy by his pose.

"But why," he said in the gasping voice of one subduing an agony, and
looked at her from under a pain-wrinkled brow, "why did you not tell me
this before?"

"I didn't know—I thought I might be able to control myself."

"And you can't?"

"I don't think I ought to control myself."

"And I have been dreaming and thinking—"

"I am frightfully sorry...."

"But—This bolt from the blue! My God! Ann Veronica, you don't
understand. This—this shatters a world!"

She tried to feel sorry, but her sense of his immense egotism was strong
and clear.

He went on with intense urgency.

"Why did you ever let me love you? Why did you ever let me peep through
the gates of Paradise? Oh! my God! I don't begin to feel and realize
this yet. It seems to me just talk; it seems to me like the fancy of a
dream. Tell me I haven't heard. This is a joke of yours." He made his
voice very low and full, and looked closely into her face.

She twisted her fingers tightly. "It isn't a joke," she said. "I feel
shabby and disgraced.... I ought never to have thought of it. Of you,
I mean...."

He fell back in his chair with an expression of tremendous desolation.
"My God!" he said again....

They became aware of the waitress standing over them with book and
pencil ready for their bill. "Never mind the bill," said Manning
tragically, standing up and thrusting a four-shilling piece into her
hand, and turning a broad back on her astonishment. "Let us walk across
the Park at least," he said to Ann Veronica. "Just at present my mind
simply won't take hold of this at all.... I tell you—never mind the
bill. Keep it! Keep it!"

They walked a long way that afternoon. They crossed the Park to the
westward, and then turned back and walked round the circle about the
Royal Botanical Gardens and then southwardly toward Waterloo. They
trudged and talked, and Manning struggled, as he said, to "get the hang
of it all."

It was a long, meandering talk, stupid, shameful, and unavoidable. Ann
Veronica was apologetic to the bottom of her soul. At the same time she
was wildly exultant at the resolution she had taken, the end she had
made to her blunder. She had only to get through this, to solace Manning
as much as she could, to put such clumsy plasterings on his wounds as
were possible, and then, anyhow, she would be free—free to put her fate
to the test. She made a few protests, a few excuses for her action in
accepting him, a few lame explanations, but he did not heed them or care
for them. Then she realized that it was her business to let Manning talk
and impose his own interpretations upon the situation so far as he was
concerned. She did her best to do this. But about his unknown rival he
was acutely curious.

He made her tell him the core of the difficulty.

"I cannot say who he is," said Ann Veronica, "but he is a married
man.... No! I do not even know that he cares for me. It is no good going
into that. Only I just want him. I just want him, and no one else will
do. It is no good arguing about a thing like that."

"But you thought you could forget him."

"I suppose I must have thought so. I didn't understand. Now I do."

"By God!" said Manning, making the most of the word, "I suppose it's
fate. Fate! You are so frank so splendid!

"I'm taking this calmly now," he said, almost as if he apologized,
"because I'm a little stunned."

Then he asked, "Tell me! has this man, has he DARED to make love to
you?"

Ann Veronica had a vicious moment. "I wish he had," she said.