Kitabı oku: «Ann Veronica», sayfa 18

Part 4

It was, perhaps, the natural consequence of a long and tiring and exciting day that Ann Veronica should pass a broken and distressful night, a night in which the noble and self-subduing resolutions of Canongate displayed themselves for the first time in an atmosphere of almost lurid dismay. Her father’s peculiar stiffness of soul presented itself now as something altogether left out of the calculations upon which her plans were based, and, in particular, she had not anticipated the difficulty she would find in borrowing the forty pounds she needed for Ramage. That had taken her by surprise, and her tired wits had failed her. She was to have fifteen pounds, and no more. She knew that to expect more now was like anticipating a gold-mine in the garden. The chance had gone. It became suddenly glaringly apparent to her that it was impossible to return fifteen pounds or any sum less than twenty pounds to Ramage – absolutely impossible. She realized that with a pang of disgust and horror.

Already she had sent him twenty pounds, and never written to explain to him why it was she had not sent it back sharply directly he returned it. She ought to have written at once and told him exactly what had happened. Now if she sent fifteen pounds the suggestion that she had spent a five-pound note in the meanwhile would be irresistible. No! That was impossible. She would have just to keep the fifteen pounds until she could make it twenty. That might happen on her birthday – in August.

She turned about, and was persecuted by visions, half memories, half dreams, of Ramage. He became ugly and monstrous, dunning her, threatening her, assailing her.

“Confound sex from first to last!” said Ann Veronica. “Why can’t we propagate by sexless spores, as the ferns do? We restrict each other, we badger each other, friendship is poisoned and buried under it!.. I MUST pay off that forty pounds. I MUST.”

For a time there seemed no comfort for her even in Capes. She was to see Capes to-morrow, but now, in this state of misery she had achieved, she felt assured he would turn his back upon her, take no notice of her at all. And if he didn’t, what was the good of seeing him?

“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.

Part 5

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.”

Part 6

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.

Part 7

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.”

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

THE SAPPHIRE RING

Part 1

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.

“I wonder which of us enjoys that most,” said Capes – “does he, or do we?”

“He seems to get a zest – ”

“He does it and forgets it. We remember it. These joyful bounds just lace into the stuff of my memories and stay there forever. Living’s just material.”

“It’s very good to be alive.”

“It’s better to know life than be life.”

“One may do both,” said Ann Veronica.

She was in a very uncritical state that afternoon. When he said, “Let’s go and see the wart-hog,” she thought no one ever had had so quick a flow of good ideas as he; and when he explained that sugar and not buns was the talisman of popularity among the animals, she marvelled at his practical omniscience.

Finally, at the exit into Regent’s Park, they ran against Miss Klegg. It was the expression of Miss Klegg’s face that put the idea into Ann Veronica’s head of showing Manning at the College one day, an idea which she didn’t for some reason or other carry out for a fortnight.

Part 2

When at last she did so, the sapphire ring took on a new quality in the imagination of Capes. It ceased to be the symbol of liberty and a remote and quite abstracted person, and became suddenly and very disagreeably the token of a large and portentous body visible and tangible.

Manning appeared just at the end of the afternoon’s work, and the biologist was going through some perplexities the Scotchman had created by a metaphysical treatment of the skulls of Hyrax and a young African elephant. He was clearing up these difficulties by tracing a partially obliterated suture the Scotchman had overlooked when the door from the passage opened, and Manning came into his universe.

Seen down the length of the laboratory, Manning looked a very handsome and shapely gentleman indeed, and, at the sight of his eager advance to his fiancee, Miss Klegg replaced one long-cherished romance about Ann Veronica by one more normal and simple. He carried a cane and a silk hat with a mourning-band in one gray-gloved hand; his frock-coat and trousers were admirable; his handsome face, his black mustache, his prominent brow conveyed an eager solicitude.

“I want,” he said, with a white hand outstretched, “to take you out to tea.”

“I’ve been clearing up,” said Ann Veronica, brightly.

“All your dreadful scientific things?” he said, with a smile that Miss Klegg thought extraordinarily kindly.

“All my dreadful scientific things,” said Ann Veronica.

He stood back, smiling with an air of proprietorship, and looking about him at the business-like equipment of the room. The low ceiling made him seem abnormally tall. Ann Veronica wiped a scalpel, put a card over a watch-glass containing thin shreds of embryonic guinea-pig swimming in mauve stain, and dismantled her microscope.

“I wish I understood more of biology,” said Manning.

“I’m ready,” said Ann Veronica, closing her microscope-box with a click, and looking for one brief instant up the laboratory. “We have no airs and graces here, and my hat hangs from a peg in the passage.”

She led the way to the door, and Manning passed behind her and round her and opened the door for her. When Capes glanced up at them for a moment, Manning seemed to be holding his arms all about her, and there was nothing but quiet acquiescence in her bearing.

After Capes had finished the Scotchman’s troubles he went back into the preparation-room. He sat down on the sill of the open window, folded his arms, and stared straight before him for a long time over the wilderness of tiles and chimney-pots into a sky that was blue and empty. He was not addicted to monologue, and the only audible comment he permitted himself at first upon a universe that was evidently anything but satisfactory to him that afternoon, was one compact and entirely unassigned “Damn!”

The word must have had some gratifying quality, because he repeated it. Then he stood up and repeated it again. “The fool I have been!” he cried; and now speech was coming to him. He tried this sentence with expletives. “Ass!” he went on, still warming. “Muck-headed moral ass! I ought to have done anything.

“I ought to have done anything!

“What’s a man for?

“Friendship!”

He doubled up his fist, and seemed to contemplate thrusting it through the window. He turned his back on that temptation. Then suddenly he seized a new preparation bottle that stood upon his table and contained the better part of a week’s work – a displayed dissection of a snail, beautifully done – and hurled it across the room, to smash resoundingly upon the cemented floor under the bookcase; then, without either haste or pause, he swept his arm along a shelf of re-agents and sent them to mingle with the debris on the floor. They fell in a diapason of smashes. “H’m!” he said, regarding the wreckage with a calmer visage. “Silly!” he remarked after a pause. “One hardly knows – all the time.”

He put his hands in his pockets, his mouth puckered to a whistle, and he went to the door of the outer preparation-room and stood there, looking, save for the faintest intensification of his natural ruddiness, the embodiment of blond serenity.

“Gellett,” he called, “just come and clear up a mess, will you? I’ve smashed some things.”