Ann Veronica a Modern Love Story

by H. G. Wells

  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.”

  Part 3

  There was one serious flaw in Ann Veronica’s arrangements for self-rehabilitation, and that was Ramage. He hung over her—he and his loan to her and his connection with her and that terrible evening—a vague, disconcerting possibility of annoyance and exposure. She could not see any relief from this anxiety except repayment, and repayment seemed impossible. The raising of twenty-five pounds was a task altogether beyond her powers. Her birthday was four months away, and that, at its extremist point, might give her another five pounds.

  The thing rankled in her mind night and day. She would wake in the night to repeat her bitter cry: “Oh, why did I burn those notes?”

  It added greatly to the annoyance of the situation that she had twice seen Ramage in the Avenue since her return to the shelter of her father’s roof. He had saluted her with elaborate civility, his eyes distended with indecipherable meanings.

  She felt she was bound in honor to tell the whole affair to Manning sooner or later. Indeed, it seemed inevitable that she must clear it up with his assistance, or not at all. And when Manning was not about the thing seemed simple enough. She would compose extremely lucid and honorable explanations. But when it came to broaching them, it proved to be much more difficult than she had supposed.

  They went down the great staircase of the building, and, while she sought in her mind for a beginning, he broke into appreciation of her simple dress and self-congratulations upon their engagement.

  “It makes me feel,” he said, “that nothing is impossible—to have you here beside me. I said, that day at Surbiton, ‘There’s many good things in life, but there’s only one best, and that’s the wild-haired girl who’s pulling away at that oar. I will make her my Grail, and some day, perhaps, if God wills, she shall become my wife!’ ”

  He looked very hard before him as he said this, and his voice was full of deep feeling.

  “Grail!” said Ann Veronica, and then: “Oh, yes—of course! Anything but a holy one, I’m afraid.”

  “Altogether holy, Ann Veronica. Ah! but you can’t imagine what you are to me and what you mean to me! I suppose there is something mystical and wonderful about all women.”

  “There is something mystical and wonderful about all human beings. I don’t see that men need bank it with the women.”

  “A man does,” said Manning—“a true man, anyhow. And for me there is only one treasure-house. By Jove! When I think of it I want to leap and shout!”

  “It would astonish that man with the barrow.”

  “It astonishes me that I don’t,” said Manning, in a tone of intense self-enjoyment.

  “I think,” began Ann Veronica, “that you don’t realize—”

  He disregarded her entirely. He waved an arm and spoke with a peculiar resonance. “I feel like a giant! I believe now I shall do great things. Gods! what it must be to pour out strong, splendid verse—mighty lines! mighty lines! If I do, Ann Veronica, it will be you. It will be altogether you. I will dedicate my books to you. I will lay them all at your feet.”

  He beamed upon her.

  “I don’t think you realize,” Ann Veronica began again, “that I am rather a defective human being.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Manning. “They say there are spots on the sun. Not for me. It warms me, and lights me, and fills my world with flowers. Why should I peep at it through smoked glass to see things that don’t affect me?” He smiled his delight at his companion.

  “I’ve got bad faults.”

  He shook his head slowly, smiling mysteriously.

  “But perhaps I want to confess them.”

  “I grant you absolution.”

  “I don’t want absolution. I want to make myself visible to you.”

  “I wish I could make you visible to yourself. I don’t believe in the faults. They’re just a joyous softening of the outline—more beautiful than perfection. Like the flaws of an old marble. If you talk of your faults, I shall talk of your splendors.”

  “I do want to tell you things, nevertheless.”

  “We’ll have, thank God! ten myriad days to tell each other things. When I think of it—”

  “But these are things I want to tell you now!”

  “I made a little song of it. Let me say it to you. I’ve no name for it yet. Epithalamy might do.

  “Like him who stood on Darien I view uncharted sea Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights Before my Queen and me.

  “And that only brings me up to about sixty-five!

  “A glittering wilderness of time That to the sunset reaches No keel as yet its waves has ploughed Or gritted on its beaches.

  “And we will sail that splendor wide, From day to day together, From isle to isle of happiness Through year’s of God’s own weather.”

  “Yes,” said his prospective fellow-sailor, “that’s very pretty.” She stopped short, full of things un-said. Pretty! Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights!

  “You shall tell me your faults,” said Manning. “If they matter to you, they matter.”

  “It isn’t precisely faults,” said Ann Veronica. “It’s something that bothers me.” Ten thousand! Put that way it seemed so different.

  “Then assuredly!” said Manning.

  She found a little difficulty in beginning. She was glad when he went on: “I want to be your city of refuge from every sort of bother. I want to stand between you and all the force and vileness of the world. I want to make you feel that here is a place where the crowd does not clamor nor ill-winds blow.”

  “That is all very well,” said Ann Veronica, unheeded.

  “That is my dream of you,” said Manning, warming. “I want my life to be beaten gold just in order to make it a fitting setting for yours. There you will be, in an inner temple. I want to enrich it with hangings and gladden it with verses. I want to fill it with fine and precious things. And by degrees, perhaps, that maiden distrust of yours that makes you shrink from my kisses, will vanish… . Forgive me if a certain warmth creeps into my words! The Park is green and gray to-day, but I am glowing pink and gold… . It is difficult to express these things.”

  Part 4

  They sat with tea and strawberries and cream before them at a little table in front of the pavilion in Regent’s Park. Her confession was still unmade. Manning leaned forward on the table, talking discursively on the probable brilliance of their married life. Ann Veronica sat back in an attitude of inattention, her eyes on a distant game of cricket, her mind perplexed and busy. She was recalling the circumstances under which she had engaged herself to Manning, and trying to understand a c
urious development of the quality of this relationship.

  The particulars of her engagement were very clear in her memory. She had taken care he should have this momentous talk with her on a garden-seat commanded by the windows of the house. They had been playing tennis, with his manifest intention looming over her.

  “Let us sit down for a moment,” he had said. He made his speech a little elaborately. She plucked at the knots of her racket and heard him to the end, then spoke in a restrained undertone.

  “You ask me to be engaged to you, Mr. Manning,” she began.

  “I want to lay all my life at your feet.”

  “Mr. Manning, I do not think I love you… . I want to be very plain with you. I have nothing, nothing that can possibly be passion for you. I am sure. Nothing at all.”

  He was silent for some moments.

  “Perhaps that is only sleeping,” he said. “How can you know?”

  “I think—perhaps I am rather a cold-blooded person.”

  She stopped. He remained listening attentively.

  “You have been very kind to me,” she said.

  “I would give my life for you.”

  Her heart had warmed toward him. It had seemed to her that life might be very good indeed with his kindliness and sacrifice about her. She thought of him as always courteous and helpful, as realizing, indeed, his ideal of protection and service, as chivalrously leaving her free to live her own life, rejoicing with an infinite generosity in every detail of her irresponsive being. She twanged the catgut under her fingers.

  “It seems so unfair,” she said, “to take all you offer me and give so little in return.”

  “It is all the world to me. And we are not traders looking at equivalents.”

  “You know, Mr. Manning, I do not really want to marry.”

  “No.”

  “It seems so—so unworthy”—she picked among her phrases “of the noble love you give—”

  She stopped, through the difficulty she found in expressing herself.

  “But I am judge of that,” said Manning.

  “Would you wait for me?”

  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.

  Part 5

  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.