by H. G. Wells
“Curious case,” said Ogilvy, buttering his bread and cutting it up in a way he had. “Curious case—and sets one thinking.”
He resumed, after a mouthful: “Here is a girl of sixteen or seventeen, seventeen and a half to be exact, running about, as one might say, in London. Schoolgirl. Her family are solid West End people, Kensington people. Father—dead. She goes out and comes home. Afterward goes on to Oxford. Twenty-one, twenty-two. Why doesn’t she marry? Plenty of money under her father’s will. Charming girl.”
He consumed Irish stew for some moments.
“Married already,” he said, with his mouth full. “Shopman.”
“Good God!” said Mr. Stanley.
“Good-looking rascal she met at Worthing. Very romantic and all that. He fixed it.”
“But—”
“He left her alone. Pure romantic nonsense on her part. Sheer calculation on his. Went up to Somerset House to examine the will before he did it. Yes. Nice position.”
“She doesn’t care for him now?”
“Not a bit. What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high color and moonlight and a tenor voice. I suppose most of our daughters would marry organ-grinders if they had a chance—at that age. My son wanted to marry a woman of thirty in a tobacconist’s shop. Only a son’s another story. We fixed that. Well, that’s the situation. My people don’t know what to do. Can’t face a scandal. Can’t ask the gent to go abroad and condone a bigamy. He misstated her age and address; but you can’t get home on him for a thing like that… . There you are! Girl spoilt for life. Makes one want to go back to the Oriental system!”
Mr. Stanley poured wine. “Damned Rascal!” he said. “Isn’t there a brother to kick him?”
“Mere satisfaction,” reflected Ogilvy. “Mere sensuality. I rather think they have kicked him, from the tone of some of the letters. Nice, of course. But it doesn’t alter the situation.”
“It’s these Rascals,” said Mr. Stanley, and paused.
“Always has been,” said Ogilvy. “Our interest lies in heading them off.”
“There was a time when girls didn’t get these extravagant ideas.”
“Lydia Languish, for example. Anyhow, they didn’t run about so much.”
“Yes. That’s about the beginning. It’s these damned novels. All this torrent of misleading, spurious stuff that pours from the press. These sham ideals and advanced notions. Women who Dids, and all that kind of thing… .”
Ogilvy reflected. “This girl—she’s really a very charming, frank person—had had her imagination fired, so she told me, by a school performance of Romeo and Juliet.”
Mr. Stanley decided to treat that as irrelevant. “There ought to be a Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time. Even WITH the Censorship of Plays there’s hardly a decent thing to which a man can take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere. What would it be without that safeguard?”
Ogilvy pursued his own topic. “I’m inclined to think, Stanley, myself that as a matter of fact it was the expurgated Romeo and Juliet did the mischief. If our young person hadn’t had the nurse part cut out, eh? She might have known more and done less. I was curious about that. All they left it was the moon and stars. And the balcony and ‘My Romeo!’ ”
“Shakespeare is altogether different from the modern stuff. Altogether different. I’m not discussing Shakespeare. I don’t want to Bowdlerize Shakespeare. I’m not that sort I quite agree.
But this modern miasma—”
Mr. Stanley took mustard savagely.
“Well, we won’t go into Shakespeare,” said Ogilvy “What interests me is that our young women nowadays are running about as free as air practically, with registry offices and all sorts of accommodation round the corner. Nothing to check their proceedings but a declining habit of telling the truth and the limitations of their imaginations. And in that respect they stir up one another. Not my affair, of course, but I think we ought to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other. They’re too free for their innocence or too innocent for their freedom. That’s my point. Are you going to have any apple-tart, Stanley? The apple-tart’s been very good lately—very good!”
Part 7
At the end of dinner that evening Ann Veronica began: “Father!”
Her father looked at her over his glasses and spoke with grave deliberation; “If there is anything you want to say to me,” he said, “you must say it in the study. I am going to smoke a little here, and then I shall go to the study. I don’t see what you can have to say. I should have thought my note cleared up everything. There are some papers I have to look through to-night—important papers.”
“I won’t keep you very long, daddy,” said Ann Veronica.
“I don’t see, Mollie,” he remarked, taking a cigar from the box on the table as his sister and daughter rose, “why you and Vee shouldn’t discuss this little affair—whatever it is—without bothering me.”
It was the first time this controversy had become triangular, for all three of them were shy by habit.
He stopped in mid-sentence, and Ann Veronica opened the door for her aunt. The air was thick with feelings. Her aunt went out of the room with dignity and a rustle, and up-stairs to the fastness of her own room. She agreed entirely with her brother. It distressed and confused her that the girl should not come to her.
It seemed to show a want of affection, to be a deliberate and unmerited disregard, to justify the reprisal of being hurt.
When Ann Veronica came into the study she found every evidence of a carefully foreseen grouping about the gas fire. Both arm-chairs had been moved a little so as to face each other on either side of the fender, and in the circular glow of the green-shaded lamp there lay, conspicuously waiting, a thick bundle of blue and white papers tied with pink tape. Her father held some printed document in his hand, and appeared not to observe her entry. “Sit down,” he said, and perused—“perused” is the word for it—for some moments. Then he put the paper by. “And what is it all about, Veronica?” he asked, with a deliberate note of irony, looking at her a little quizzically over his glasses.
Ann Veronica looked bright and a little elated, and she disregarded her father’s invitation to be seated. She stood on the mat instead, and looked down on him. “Look here, daddy,” she said, in a tone of great reasonableness, “I MUST go to that dance, you know.”
Her father’s irony deepened. “Why?” he asked, suavely.
Her answer was not quite ready. “Well, because I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t.”
“You see I do.”
“Why shouldn’t I go?”
“It isn’t a suitable place; it isn’t a suitable gathering.”
“But, daddy, what do you know of the place and the gathering?”
“And it’s entirely out of order; it isn’t right, it isn’t correct; it’s impossible for you to stay in an hotel in London—the idea is preposterous. I can’t imagine what possessed you, Veronica.”
He put his head on one side, pulled down the corners of his mouth, and looked at her over his glasses.
“But why is it preposterous?” asked Ann Veronica, and fiddled with a pipe on the mantel.
“Surely!” he remarked, with an expression of worried appeal.
“You see, daddy, I don’t think it IS preposterous. That’s really what I want to discuss. It comes to this—am I to be trusted to take care of myself, or am I not?”
“To judge from this proposal of yours, I should say not.”
“I think I am.”
“As long as you remain under my roof—” he began, and paused.
“You are going to treat me as though I wasn’t. Well, I don’t think that’s fair.”
“Your ideas of fairness—” he remarked, and discontinued that sentence. “My dear girl,” he said, in a tone of patient reasonableness, “you are a mere child. You know nothing of life, nothing of its dangers, nothing of its possibilities. You think everything is h
armless and simple, and so forth. It isn’t. It isn’t. That’s where you go wrong. In some things, in many things, you must trust to your elders, to those who know more of life than you do. Your aunt and I have discussed all this matter. There it is. You can’t go.”
The conversation hung for a moment. Ann Veronica tried to keep hold of a complicated situation and not lose her head. She had turned round sideways, so as to look down into the fire.
“You see, father,” she said, “it isn’t only this affair of the dance. I want to go to that because it’s a new experience, because I think it will be interesting and give me a view of things. You say I know nothing. That’s probably true. But how am I to know of things?”
“Some things I hope you may never know,” he said.
“I’m not so sure. I want to know—just as much as I can.”
“Tut!” he said, fuming, and put out his hand to the papers in the pink tape.
“Well, I do. It’s just that I want to say. I want to be a human being; I want to learn about things and know about things, and not to be protected as something too precious for life, cooped up in one narrow little corner.”
“Cooped up!” he cried. “Did I stand in the way of your going to college? Have I ever prevented you going about at any reasonable hour? You’ve got a bicycle!”
“H’m!” said Ann Veronica, and then went on “I want to be taken seriously. A girl—at my age—is grownup. I want to go on with my University work under proper conditions, now that I’ve done the Intermediate. It isn’t as though I haven’t done well. I’ve never muffed an exam. yet. Roddy muffed two… .”
Her father interrupted. “Now look here, Veronica, let us be plain with each other. You are not going to that infidel Russell’s classes. You are not going anywhere but to the Tredgold College. I’ve thought that out, and you must make up your mind to it. All sorts of considerations come in. While you live in my house you must follow my ideas. You are wrong even about that man’s scientific position and his standard of work. There are men in the Lowndean who laugh at him—simply laugh at him. And I have seen work by his pupils myself that struck me as being—well, next door to shameful. There’s stories, too, about his demonstrator, Capes Something or other. The kind of man who isn’t content with his science, and writes articles in the monthly reviews. Anyhow, there it is: YOU ARE NOT GOING THERE.”
The girl received this intimation in silence. but the face that looked down upon the gas fire took an expression of obstinacy that brought out a hitherto latent resemblance between parent and child. When she spoke, her lips twitched.
“Then I suppose when I have graduated I am to come home?”
“It seems the natural course ”
“And do nothing?”
“There are plenty of things a girl can find to do at home.”
“Until some one takes pity on me and marries me?”
He raised his eyebrows in mild appeal. His foot tapped impatiently, and he took up the papers.
“Look here, father,” she said, with a change in her voice, “suppose I won’t stand it?”
He regarded her as though this was a new idea.
“Suppose, for example, I go to this dance?”
“You won’t.”
“Well”—her breath failed her for a moment. “How would you prevent it?” she asked.
“But I have forbidden it!” he said, raising his voice.
“Yes, I know. But suppose I go?”
“Now, Veronica! No, no. This won’t do. Understand me! I forbid it. I do not want to hear from you even the threat of disobedience.” He spoke loudly. “The thing is forbidden!”
“I am ready to give up anything that you show to be wrong.”
“You will give up anything I wish you to give up.”
They stared at each other through a pause, and both faces were flushed and obstinate.
She was trying by some wonderful, secret, and motionless gymnastics to restrain her tears. But when she spoke her lips quivered, and they came. “I mean to go to that dance!” she blubbered. “I mean to go to that dance! I meant to reason with you, but you won’t reason. You’re dogmatic.”
At the sight of her tears his expression changed to a mingling of triumph and concern. He stood up, apparently intending to put an arm about her, but she stepped back from him quickly. She produced a handkerchief, and with one sweep of this and a simultaneous gulp had abolished her fit of weeping. His voice now had lost its ironies.
“Now, Veronica,” he pleaded, “Veronica, this is most unreasonable. All we do is for your good. Neither your aunt nor I have any other thought but what is best for you.”
“Only you won’t let me live. Only you won’t let me exist!”
Mr. Stanley lost patience. He bullied frankly.
“What nonsense is this? What raving! My dear child, you DO live, you DO exist! You have this home. You have friends, acquaintances, social standing, brothers and sisters, every advantage! Instead of which, you want to go to some mixed classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance about at nights in wild costumes with casual art student friends and God knows who. That—that isn’t living! You are beside yourself. You don’t know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor logic. I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your good. You MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I put my foot down like—like adamant. And a time will come, Veronica, mark my words, a time will come when you will bless me for my firmness to-night. It goes to my heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be.”
He sidled toward her, but she recoiled from him, leaving him in possession of the hearthrug.
“Well,” she said, “good-night, father.”
“What!” he asked; “not a kiss?”
She affected not to hear.
The door closed softly upon her. For a long time he remained standing before the fire, staring at the situation. Then he sat down and filled his pipe slowly and thoughtfully… .
“I don’t see what else I could have said,” he remarked.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
ANN VERONICA GATHERS POINTS OF VIEW
Part 1
“Are you coming to the Fadden Dance, Ann Veronica?” asked Constance Widgett.
Ann Veronica considered her answer. “I mean to,” she replied.
“You are making your dress?”
“Such as it is.”
They were in the elder Widgett girl’s bedroom; Hetty was laid up, she said, with a sprained ankle, and a miscellaneous party was gossiping away her tedium. It was a large, littered, self-forgetful apartment, decorated with unframed charcoal sketches by various incipient masters; and an open bookcase, surmounted by plaster casts and the half of a human skull, displayed an odd miscellany of books—Shaw and Swinburne, Tom Jones, Fabian Essays, Pope and Dumas, cheek by jowl. Constance Widgett’s abundant copper-red hair was bent down over some dimly remunerative work—stencilling in colors upon rough, white material—at a kitchen table she had dragged up-stairs for the purpose, while on her bed there was seated a slender lady of thirty or so in a dingy green dress, whom Constance had introduced with a wave of her hand as Miss Miniver. Miss Miniver looked out on the world through large emotional blue eyes that were further magnified by the glasses she wore, and her nose was pinched and pink, and her mouth was whimsically petulant. Her glasses moved quickly as her glance travelled from face to face. She seemed bursting with the desire to talk, and watching for her opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words “Votes for Women.” Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the sufferer’s bed, while Teddy Widgett, being something of an athlete, occupied the only bedroom chair—a decadent piece, essentially a tripod and largely a formality—and smoked cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that he was looking all the time at Ann Veronica’s eyebrows. Teddy was the hatless young man who had turned Ann Veronica aside from the Avenue two days before. He was the junior of both his sisters, co-educated and much broken in to feminine society. A bowl of
roses, just brought by Ann Veronica, adorned the communal dressing-table, and Ann Veronica was particularly trim in preparation for a call she was to make with her aunt later in the afternoon.
Ann Veronica decided to be more explicit. “I’ve been,” she said, “forbidden to come.”
“Hul-LO!” said Hetty, turning her head on the pillow; and Teddy remarked with profound emotion, “My God!”
“Yes,” said Ann Veronica, “and that complicates the situation.”
“Auntie?” asked Constance, who was conversant with Ann Veronica’s affairs.
“No! My father. It’s—it’s a serious prohibition.”
“Why?” asked Hetty.
“That’s the point. I asked him why, and he hadn’t a reason.”
“YOU ASKED YOUR FATHER FOR A REASON!” said Miss Miniver, with great intensity.
“Yes. I tried to have it out with him, but he wouldn’t have it out. “Ann Veronica reflected for an instant “That’s why I think I ought to come.”
“You asked your father for a reason!” Miss Miniver repeated.
“We always have things out with OUR father, poor dear!” said Hetty. “He’s got almost to like it.”
“Men,” said Miss Miniver, “NEVER have a reason. Never! And they don’t know it! They have no idea of it. It’s one of their worst traits, one of their very worst.”
“But I say, Vee,” said Constance, “if you come and you are forbidden to come there’ll be the deuce of a row.”
Ann Veronica was deciding for further confidences. Her situation was perplexing her very much, and the Widgett atmosphere was lax and sympathetic, and provocative of discussion. “It isn’t only the dance,” she said.
“There’s the classes,” said Constance, the well-informed.
“There’s the whole situation. Apparently I’m not to exist yet. I’m not to study, I’m not to grow. I’ve got to stay at home and remain in a state of suspended animation.”
“DUSTING!” said Miss Miniver, in a sepulchral voice.
“Until you marry, Vee,” said Hetty.
“Well, I don’t feel like standing it.”
“Thousands of women have married merely for freedom,” said Miss Miniver. “Thousands! Ugh! And found it a worse slavery.”