H G Wells Omnibus, page 7
Later Gwen’s trouble weighed so heavily on Mrs. Stanley in her illness that her husband consented to receive Mr. Fortescue in the drawing-room, and actually shake hands with him in an entirely hopeless manner and hope everything would turn out for the best.
The forgiveness and reconciliation was a cold and formal affair, and afterwards her father went off gloomily to his study, and Mr. Fortescue rambled round the garden with soft, propitiatory steps, the Corinthian nose upraised and his hands behind his back, pausing to look long and hard at the fruit-trees against the wall.
Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after some moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden in a reverse direction to Mr. Fortescue’s steps, and encountered him with an air of artless surprise.
“Hello!” said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless, breathless manner. “You Mr. Fortescue?”
“At your service. You Ann Veronica?”
“Rather! I say—did you marry Gwen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy expression. “I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica.”
“Rum,” said Ann Veronica. “Have you got to keep her now?”
“To the best of my ability,” said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.
“Have you much ability?” asked Ann Veronica.
Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions about acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she beautiful enough for it, and who would make her dresses, and so on.
As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep her sister, and a little while after her mother’s death Ann Veronica met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her father’s study, shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful and resentful, and after that Gwen receded from the Morningside Park world, and not even the begging letters and distressful communications that her father and aunt received, but only a vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of incidental comment, flashes of paternal anger at “that blackguard,” came to Ann Veronica’s ears.
6.
These were Ann Veronica’s leading cases in the question of marriage. They were the only real marriages she had seen clearly. For the rest, she derived her ideas of the married state from the observed behavior of married women, which impressed her in Morningside Park as being tied and dull and inelastic in comparison with the life of the young, and from a remarkably various reading among books. As a net result she had come to think of all married people much as one thinks of insects that have lost their wings, and of her sisters as new hatched creatures who had scarcely for a moment had wings. She evolved a dim image of herself cooped up in a house under the benevolent shadow of Mr. Manning. Who knows?—on the analogy of “Squiggles” she might come to call him “Mangles!”
“I don’t think I can ever marry any one,” she said, and fell suddenly into another set of considerations that perplexed her for a time. Had romance to be banished from life?…
It was hard to part with romance, but she had never thirsted so keenly to go on with her University work in her life as she did that day. She had never felt so acutely the desire for free initiative, for a life unhampered by others. At any cost! Her brothers had it practically—at least they had it far more than it seemed likely she would unless she exerted herself with quite exceptional vigor. Between her and the fair, far prospect of freedom and self-development manoeuvred Mr. Manning, her aunt and father, neighbors, customs, traditions, forces. They seemed to her that morning to be all armed with nets and prepared to throw them over her directly her movements became in any manner truly free.
She had a feeling as though something had dropped from her eyes, as though she had just discovered herself for the first time—discovered herself as a sleep-walker might do, abruptly among dangers, hindrances, and perplexities, on the verge of a cardinal crisis.
The life of a girl presented itself to her as something happy and heedless and unthinking, yet really guided and controlled by others, and going on amidst unsuspected screens and concealments.
And in its way it was very well. Then suddenly with a rush came reality, came “growing up”; a hasty imperative appeal for seriousness, for supreme seriousness. The Ralphs and Mannings and Fortescues came down upon the raw inexperience, upon the blinking ignorance of the newcomer; and before her eyes were fairly open, before she knew what had happened, a new set of guides and controls, a new set of obligations and responsibilities and limitations, had replaced the old. “I want to be a Person,” said Ann Veronica to the downs and the open sky; “I will not have this happen to me, whatever else may happen in its place.”
Ann Veronica had three things very definitely settled by the time when, a little after mid-day, she found herself perched up on a gate between a bridle-path and a field that commanded the whole wide stretch of country between Chalking and Waldersham. Firstly, she did not intend to marry at all, and particularly she did not mean to marry Mr. Manning; secondly, by some measure or other, she meant to go on with her studies, not at the Tredgold Schools but at the Imperial College; and, thirdly, she was, as an immediate and decisive act, a symbol of just exactly where she stood, a declaration of free and adult initiative, going that night to the Fadden Ball.
But the possible attitude of her father she had still to face. So far she had the utmost difficulty in getting on to that vitally important matter. The whole of that relationship persisted in remaining obscure. What would happen when next morning she returned to Morningside Park?
He couldn’t turn her out of doors. But what he could do or might do she could not imagine. She was not afraid of violence, but she was afraid of something mean, some secondary kind of force. Suppose he stopped all her allowance, made it imperative that she should either stay ineffectually resentful at home or earn a living for herself at once… . It appeared highly probable to her that he would stop her allowance.
What can a girl do?
Somewhere at this point Ann Veronica’s speculations were interrupted and turned aside by the approach of a horse and rider. Mr. Ramage, that iron-gray man of the world, appeared dressed in a bowler hat and a suit of hard gray, astride of a black horse. He pulled rein at the sight of her, saluted, and regarded her with his rather too protuberant eyes. The girl’s gaze met his in interested inquiry.
“You’ve got my view,” he said, after a pensive second. “I always get off here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so to-day?”
“It’s your gate,” she said, amiably; “you got it first. It’s for you to say if I may sit on it.”
He slipped off the horse. “Let me introduce you to Caesar,” he said; and she patted Caesar’s neck, and remarked how soft his nose was, and secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth. Ramage tethered the horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar blew heavily and began to investigate the hedge.
Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica’s side, and for a moment there was silence.
He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and village, below.
“It’s as broad as life,” said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and putting a well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.
7.
“And what are you doing here, young lady,” he said, looking up at her face, “wandering alone so far from home?”
“I like long walks,” said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.
“Solitary walks?”
“That’s the point of them. I think over all sorts of things.”
“Problems?”
“Sometimes quite difficult problems.”
“You’re lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother, for instance, couldn’t. She had to do her thinking at home—under inspection.”
She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her free young poise show in his face.
“I suppose things have changed?” she said.
“Never was such an age of transition.”
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. “Sufficient unto me is the change thereof,” he said, with all the effect of an epigram.
“I must confess,” he said, “the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else. I don’t conceal it. And the change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing. And all the old—the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to understand.”
“There’s quite enough still,” said Ann Veronica, smiling, “that one doesn’t understand.”
“Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, ‘I beg your pardon’ in a reproving tone to things you understood quite well in your heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she’s vanished. Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person!… I hope we may never find her again.”
He rejoiced over this emancipation. “While that lamb was about every man of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate, and {}Honi soit qui mal y pense. The change has given man one good thing he never had before,” he said. “Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best as well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends.”
He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:
“I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man alive.”
“I suppose we ARE more free than we were?” said Ann Veronica, keeping the question general.
“Oh, there’s no doubt of it! Since the girls of the eighties broke bounds and sailed away on bicycles—my young days go back to the very beginnings of that—it’s been one triumphant relaxation.”
“Relaxation, perhaps. But are we any more free?”
“Well?”
“I mean we’ve long strings to tether us, but we are bound all the same. A woman isn’t much freer—in reality.”
Mr. Ramage demurred.
“One runs about,” said Ann Veronica.
“Yes.”
“But it’s on condition one doesn’t do anything.”
“Do what?”
“Oh!—anything.”
He looked interrogation with a faint smile.
“It seems to me it comes to earning one’s living in the long run,” said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. “Until a girl can go away as a son does and earn her independent income, she’s still on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must go. That’s what I mean.”
Mr. Ramage admitted the force of that. He was a little impressed by Ann Veronica’s metaphor of the string, which, indeed, she owed to Hetty Widgett. “YOU wouldn’t like to be independent?” he asked, abruptly. “I mean REALLY independent. On your own. It isn’t such fun as it seems.”
“Every one wants to be independent,” said Ann Veronica. “Every one. Man or woman.”
“And you?”
“Rather!”
“I wonder why?”
“There’s no why. It’s just to feel—one owns one’s self.”
“Nobody does that,” said Ramage, and kept silence for a moment.
“But a boy—a boy goes out into the world and presently stands on his own feet. He buys his own clothes, chooses his own company, makes his own way of living.”
“You’d like to do that?”
“Exactly.”
“Would you like to be a boy?”
“I wonder! It’s out of the question, any way.”
Ramage reflected. “Why don’t you?”
“Well, it might mean rather a row.”
“I know—” said Ramage, with sympathy.
“And besides,” said Ann Veronica, sweeping that aspect aside, “what could I do? A boy sails out into a trade or profession. But—it’s one of the things I’ve just been thinking over. Suppose—suppose a girl did want to start in life, start in life for herself—” She looked him frankly in the eyes. “What ought she to do?”
“Suppose you—”
“Yes, suppose I—”
He felt that his advice was being asked. He became a little more personal and intimate. “I wonder what you could do?” he said. “I should think YOU could do all sorts of things… .
“What ought you to do?” He began to produce his knowledge of the world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor of “savoir faire.” He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized her face, ran his eyes over her careless, gracious poise, wondered hard about her. He described her privately to himself as a splendid girl. It was clear she wanted to get away from home, that she was impatient to get away from home. Why? While the front of his mind was busy warning her not to fall into the hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching, and explaining his idea that for women of initiative, quite as much as for men, the world of business had by far the best chances, the back chambers of his brain were busy with the problem of that “Why?”
His first idea as a man of the world was to explain her unrest by a lover, some secret or forbidden or impossible lover. But he dismissed that because then she would ask her lover and not him all these things. Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home bored her. He could quite understand the daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young lady impatient for experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more than a mask. Warm life was behind that always, even if it slept. If it was not an actual personal lover, it still might be the lover not yet incarnate, not yet perhaps suspected… .
He had diverged only a little from the truth when he said that his chief interest in life was women. It wasn’t so much women as Woman that engaged his mind. His was the Latin turn of thinking; he had fallen in love at thirteen, and he was still capable—he prided himself—of falling in love. His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.
So while he talked to this girl of work and freedom, his slightly protuberant eyes were noting the gracious balance of her limbs and body across the gate, the fine lines of her chin and neck. Her grave fine face, her warm clear complexion, had already aroused his curiosity as he had gone to and fro in Morningside Park, and here suddenly he was near to her and talking freely and intimately. He had found her in a communicative mood, and he used the accumulated skill of years in turning that to account.
She was pleased and a little flattered by his interest and sympathy. She became eager to explain herself, to show herself in the right light. He was manifestly exerting his mind for her, and she found herself fully disposed to justify his interest.
She, perhaps, displayed herself rather consciously as a fine person unduly limited. She even touched lightly on her father’s unreasonableness.
“I wonder,” said Ramage, “that more girls don’t think as you do and want to strike out in the world.”
And then he speculated. “I wonder if you will?”
“Let me say one thing,” he said. “If ever you do and I can help you in any way, by advice or inquiry or recommendation—You see, I’m no believer in feminine incapacity, but I do perceive there is such a thing as feminine inexperience. As a sex you’re a little under-trained—in affairs. I’d take it—forgive me if I seem a little urgent—as a sort of proof of friendliness. I can imagine nothing more pleasant in life than to help you, because I know it would pay to help you. There’s something about you, a little flavor of Will, I suppose, that makes one feel—good luck about you and success… .”
And while he talked and watched her as he talked, she answered, and behind her listening watched and thought about him. She liked the animated eagerness of his manner.
His mind seemed to be a remarkably full one; his knowledge of detailed reality came in just where her own mind was most weakly equipped. Through all he said ran one quality that pleased her—the quality of a man who feels that things can be done, that one need not wait for the world to push one before one moved. Compared with her father and Mr. Manning and the men in “fixed” positions generally that she knew, Ramage, presented by himself, had a fine suggestion of freedom, of power, of deliberate and sustained adventure… .
She was particularly charmed by his theory of friendship. It was really very jolly to talk to a man in this way—who saw the woman in her and did not treat her as a child. She was inclined to think that perhaps for a girl the converse of his method was the case; an older man, a man beyond the range of anything “nonsensical,” was, perhaps, the most interesting sort of friend one could meet. But in that reservation it may be she went a little beyond the converse of his view… .
