by H. G. Wells
“You vixen!” said Mr. Ramage, speaking the simplest first thought of his heart.
“You had no right—” panted Ann Veronica.
“Why on earth,” he asked, “did you hurt me like that?”
Ann Veronica did her best to think she had not deliberately attempted to cause him pain. She ignored his question.
“I never dreamt!” she said.
“What on earth did you expect me to do, then?” he asked.
Part 4
Interpretation came pouring down upon her almost blindingly; she understood now the room, the waiter, the whole situation. She understood. She leaped to a world of shabby knowledge, of furtive base realizations. She wanted to cry out upon herself for the uttermost fool in existence.
“I thought you wanted to have a talk to me,” she said.
“I wanted to make love to you.
“You knew it,” he added, in her momentary silence.
“You said you were in love with me,” said Ann Veronica; “I wanted to explain—”
“I said I loved and wanted you.” The brutality of his first astonishment was evaporating. “I am in love with you. You know I am in love with you. And then you go—and half throttle me… . I believe you’ve crushed a gland or something. It feels like it.”
“I am sorry,” said Ann Veronica. “What else was I to do?”
For some seconds she stood watching him. and both were thinking very quickly. Her state of mind would have seemed altogether discreditable to her grandmother. She ought to have been disposed to faint and scream at all these happenings; she ought to have maintained a front of outraged dignity to veil the sinking of her heart. I would like to have to tell it so. But indeed that is not at all a good description of her attitude. She was an indignant queen, no doubt she was alarmed and disgusted within limits; but she was highly excited, and there was something, some low adventurous strain in her being, some element, subtle at least if base, going about the rioting ways and crowded insurgent meeting-places of her mind declaring that the whole affair was after all—they are the only words that express it—a very great lark indeed. At the bottom of her heart she was not a bit afraid of Ramage. She had unaccountable gleams of sympathy with and liking for him. And the grotesquest fact was that she did not so much loathe, as experience with a quite critical condemnation this strange sensation of being kissed. Never before had any human being kissed her lips… .
It was only some hours after that these ambiguous elements evaporated and vanished and loathing came, and she really began to be thoroughly sick and ashamed of the whole disgraceful quarrel and scuffle.
He, for his part, was trying to grasp the series of unexpected reactions that had so wrecked their tete-a-tete. He had meant to be master of his fate that evening and it had escaped him altogether. It had, as it were, blown up at the concussion of his first step. It dawned upon him that he had been abominably used by Ann Veronica.
“Look here,” he said, “I brought you here to make love to you.”
“I didn’t understand—your idea of making love. You had better let me go again.”
“Not yet,” he said. “I do love you. I love you all the more for the streak of sheer devil in you… . You are the most beautiful, the most desirable thing I have ever met in this world. It was good to kiss you, even at the price. But, by Jove! you are fierce! You are like those Roman women who carry stilettos in their hair.”
“I came here to talk reasonably, Mr. Ramage. It is abominable—”
“What is the use of keeping up this note of indignation, Ann Veronica? Here I am! I am your lover, burning for you. I mean to have you! Don’t frown me off now. Don’t go back into Victorian respectability and pretend you don’t know and you can’t think and all the rest of it. One comes at last to the step from dreams to reality. This is your moment. No one will ever love you as I love you now. I have been dreaming of your body and you night after night. I have been imaging—”
“Mr. Ramage, I came here— I didn’t suppose for one moment you would dare—”
“Nonsense! That is your mistake! You are too intellectual. You want to do everything with your mind. You are afraid of kisses. You are afraid of the warmth in your blood. It’s just because all that side of your life hasn’t fairly begun.”
He made a step toward her.
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, sharply, “I have to make it plain to you. I don’t think you understand. I don’t love you. I don’t. I can’t love you. I love some one else. It is repulsive. It disgusts me that you should touch me.”
He stared in amazement at this new aspect of the situation. “You love some one else?” he repeated.
“I love some one else. I could not dream of loving you.”
And then he flashed his whole conception of the relations of men and women upon her in one astonishing question. His hand went with an almost instinctive inquiry to his jawbone again. “Then why the devil,” he demanded, “do you let me stand you dinners and the opera—and why do you come to a cabinet particulier with me?”
He became radiant with anger. “You mean to tell me” he said, “that you have a lover? While I have been keeping you! Yes—keeping you!”
This view of life he hurled at her as if it were an offensive missile. It stunned her. She felt she must fly before it and could no longer do so. She did not think for one moment what interpretation he might put upon the word “lover.”
“Mr. Ramage,” she said, clinging to her one point, “I want to get out of this horrible little room. It has all been a mistake. I have been stupid and foolish. Will you unlock that door?”
“Never!” he said. “Confound your lover! Look here! Do you really think I am going to run you while he makes love to you? No fear! I never heard of anything so cool. If he wants you, let him get you. You’re mine. I’ve paid for you and helped you, and I’m going to conquer you somehow—if I have to break you to do it. Hitherto you’ve seen only my easy, kindly side. But now confound it! how can you prevent it? I will kiss you.”
“You won’t!” said Ann Veronica; with the clearest note of determination.
He seemed to be about to move toward her. She stepped back quickly, and her hand knocked a wine-glass from the table to smash noisily on the floor. She caught at the idea. “If you come a step nearer to me,” she said, “I will smash every glass on this table.”
“Then, by God!” he said, “you’ll be locked up!”
Ann Veronica was disconcerted for a moment. She had a vision of policemen, reproving magistrates, a crowded court, public disgrace. She saw her aunt in tears, her father white-faced and hard hit. “Don’t come nearer!” she said.
There was a discreet knocking at the door, and Ramage’s face changed.
“No,” she said, under her breath, “you can’t face it.” And she knew that she was safe.
He went to the door. “It’s all right,” he said, reassuringly to the inquirer without.
Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover a flushed and dishevelled disorder. She began at once a hasty readjustment of her hair, while Ramage parleyed with inaudible interrogations. “A glass slipped from the table,” he explained… . “Non. Fas du tout. Non… . Niente… . Bitte! … Oui, dans la note… . Presently. Presently.” That conversation ended and he turned to her again.
“I am going,” she said grimly, with three hairpins in her mouth.
She took her hat from the peg in the corner and began to put it on. He regarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful eyes.
“Look here, Ann Veronica,” he began. “I want a plain word with you about all this. Do you mean to tell me you didn’t understand why I wanted you to come here?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Ann Veronica stoutly.
“You didn’t expect that I should kiss you?”
“How was I to know that a man would—would think it was possible—when there was nothing—no love?”
“How did I know there wasn’t love?”
That silen
ced her for a moment. “And what on earth,” he said, “do you think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been doing things for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you one of the members of that great white sisterhood that takes and does not give? The good accepting woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to live at free quarters on any man she meets without giving any return?”
“I thought,” said Ann Veronica, “you were my friend.”
“Friend! What have a man and a girl in common to make them friends? Ask that lover of yours! And even with friends, would you have it all Give on one side and all Take on the other? … Does HE know I keep you? … You won’t have a man’s lips near you, but you’ll eat out of his hand fast enough.”
Ann Veronica was stung to helpless anger.
“Mr. Ramage,” she cried, “you are outrageous! You understand nothing. You are—horrible. Will you let me go out of this room?”
“No,” cried Ramage; “hear me out! I’ll have that satisfaction, anyhow. You women, with your tricks of evasion, you’re a sex of swindlers. You have all the instinctive dexterity of parasites. You make yourself charming for help. You climb by disappointing men. This lover of yours—”
“He doesn’t know!” cried Ann Veronica.
“Well, you know.”
Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of weeping broke her voice for a moment as she burst out, “You know as well as I do that money was a loan!”
“Loan!”
“You yourself called it a loan!”
“Euphuism. We both understood that.”
“You shall have every penny of it back.”
“I’ll frame it—when I get it.”
“I’ll pay you if I have to work at shirt-making at threepence an hour.”
“You’ll never pay me. You think you will. It’s your way of glossing over the ethical position. It’s the sort of way a woman always does gloss over her ethical positions. You’re all dependents—all of you. By instinct. Only you good ones—shirk. You shirk a straightforward and decent return for what you get from us—taking refuge in purity and delicacy and suchlike when it comes to payment.”
“Mr. Ramage,” said Ann Veronica, “I want to go—NOW!”
Part 5
But she did not get away just then.
Ramage’s bitterness passed as abruptly as his aggression. “Oh, Ann Veronica!” he cried, “I cannot let you go like this! You don’t understand. You can’t possibly understand!”
He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory apology for his urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so mad to have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming and senseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly became eloquent and plausible. He did make her perceive something of the acute, tormenting desire for her that had arisen in him and possessed him. She stood, as it were, directed doorward, with her eyes watching every movement, listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.
At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was an ineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter all her dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to be free and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionate predisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earned and won and controlled and compelled.
He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship as though it had never been even a disguise between them, as though from the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quite understandingly upon their relationship. He had set out to win her, and she had let him start. And at the thought of that other lover—he was convinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herself unable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, the person she loved, did not even know of her love—Ramage grew angry and savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men do services for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Such was the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He left that arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.
That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred another man was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that made her denial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And this though he was evidently passionately in love with her.
For a while he threatened her. “You have put all your life in my hands,” he declared. “Think of that check you endorsed. There it is—against you. I defy you to explain it away. What do you think people will make of that? What will this lover of yours make of that?”
At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying resolve to repay him at any cost, and made short movements doorward.
But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door. She emerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-lit landing. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiously preoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of the Hotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, past a tall porter in blue and crimson, into a cool, clear night.
Part 6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nerve in her body was quivering with shame and self-disgust.
She threw hat and coat on the bed and sat down before the fire.
“And now,” she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, “what am I to do?
“I’m in a hole!—mess is a better word, expresses it better . I’m in a mess—a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!
Do you hear, Ann Veronica?—you’re in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable mess!
“Haven’t I just made a silly mess of things?
“Forty pounds! I haven’t got twenty!”
She got up, stamped with her foot, and then, suddenly remembering the lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.
“This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I’m beginning to have my doubts about freedom!
“You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! The smeariness of the thing!
“The smeariness of this sort of thing! … Mauled about!”
She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her hand. “Ugh!” she said.
“The young women of Jane Austen’s time didn’t get into this sort of scrape! At least—one thinks so… . I wonder if some of them did—and it didn’t get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of them didn’t, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still and straight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. They knew they were all Bogey in disguise. I didn’t! I didn’t! After all—”
For a time her mind ran on daintiness and its defensive restraints as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost paradise.
“I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners,” she said. “I wonder if I’ve been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and white and dignified, wouldn’t it have been different? Would he have dared? …”
For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously—to be, in effect, prim.
Horrible details recurred to her.
“Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his neck—deliberately to hurt him?”
She tried to sound the humorous note.
“Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that gentleman?”
Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.
“You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica! You female cad! Cad! Ca
d! … Why aren’t you folded up clean in lavender—as every young woman ought to be? What have you been doing with yourself? . .
.”
She raked into the fire with the poker.
“All of which doesn’t help me in the slightest degree to pay back that money.”
That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she went to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered abuse of herself—usually until she hit against some article of furniture.
Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, “Now look here! Let me think it all out!”
For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman’s position in the world—the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father’s support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And here she was—in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had thought—What had she thought? That this dependence of women was but an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with vigor, and here she was!
She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again: “What am I to do?”
She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage’s face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of how such a sum could be made good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.
She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithets for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window at a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going home? No alternative appeared in that darkness.