by H. G. Wells
“And what was that dreadful confession you had to make?” he was saying. His quiet, kindly smile implied his serene disbelief in any confessible thing. Ann Veronica pushed aside a tea-cup and the vestiges of her strawberries and cream, and put her elbows before her on the table. “Mr. Manning,” she said, “I HAVE a confession to make.”
“I wish you would use my Christian name,” he said.
She attended to that, and then dismissed it as unimportant.
Something in her voice and manner conveyed an effect of unwonted gravity to him. For the first time he seemed to wonder what it might be that she had to confess. His smile faded.
“I don’t think our engagement can go on,” she plunged, and felt exactly that loss of breath that comes with a dive into icy water.
“But, how,” he said, sitting up astonished beyond measure, “not go on?”
“I have been thinking while you have been talking. You see—I didn’t understand.”
She stared hard at her finger-nails. “It is hard to express one’s self, but I do want to be honest with you. When I promised to marry you I thought I could; I thought it was a possible arrangement. I did think it could be done. I admired your chivalry. I was grateful.”
She paused.
“Go on,” he said.
She moved her elbow nearer to him and spoke in a still lower tone. “I told you I did not love you.”
“I know,” said Manning, nodding gravely. “It was fine and brave of you.”
“But there is something more.”
She paused again.
“I—I am sorry— I didn’t explain. These things are difficult. It wasn’t clear to me that I had to explain… . I love some one else.”
They remained looking at each other for three or four seconds. Then Manning flopped back in his chair and dropped his chin like a man shot. There was a long silence between them.
“My God!” he said at last, with tremendous feeling, and then again, “My God!”
Now that this thing was said her mind was clear and calm. She heard this standard expression of a strong soul wrung with a critical coldness that astonished herself. She realized dimly that there was no personal thing behind his cry, that countless myriads of Mannings had “My God!”-ed with an equal gusto at situations as flatly apprehended. This mitigated her remorse enormously. He rested his brow on his hand and conveyed magnificent tragedy by his pose.
“But why,” he said in the gasping voice of one subduing an agony, and looked at her from under a pain-wrinkled brow, “why did you not tell me this before?”
“I didn’t know— I thought I might be able to control myself.”
“And you can’t?”
“I don’t think I ought to control myself.”
“And I have been dreaming and thinking—”
“I am frightfully sorry… .”
“But— This bolt from the blue! My God! Ann Veronica, you don’t understand. This—this shatters a world!”
She tried to feel sorry, but her sense of his immense egotism was strong and clear.
He went on with intense urgency.
“Why did you ever let me love you? Why did you ever let me peep through the gates of Paradise? Oh! my God! I don’t begin to feel and realize this yet. It seems to me just talk; it seems to me like the fancy of a dream. Tell me I haven’t heard. This is a joke of yours.” He made his voice very low and full, and looked closely into her face.
She twisted her fingers tightly. “It isn’t a joke,” she said. “I feel shabby and disgraced… . I ought never to have thought of it. Of you, I mean… .”
He fell back in his chair with an expression of tremendous desolation. “My God!” he said again… .
They became aware of the waitress standing over them with book and pencil ready for their bill. “Never mind the bill,” said Manning tragically, standing up and thrusting a four-shilling piece into her hand, and turning a broad back on her astonishment. “Let us walk across the Park at least,” he said to Ann Veronica. “Just at present my mind simply won’t take hold of this at all… . I tell you—never mind the bill. Keep it! Keep it!”
Part 6
They walked a long way that afternoon. They crossed the Park to the westward, and then turned back and walked round the circle about the Royal Botanical Gardens and then southwardly toward Waterloo. They trudged and talked, and Manning struggled, as he said, to “get the hang of it all.”
It was a long, meandering talk, stupid, shameful, and unavoidable. Ann Veronica was apologetic to the bottom of her soul. At the same time she was wildly exultant at the resolution she had taken, the end she had made to her blunder. She had only to get through this, to solace Manning as much as she could, to put such clumsy plasterings on his wounds as were possible, and then, anyhow, she would be free—free to put her fate to the test. She made a few protests, a few excuses for her action in accepting him, a few lame explanations, but he did not heed them or care for them. Then she realized that it was her business to let Manning talk and impose his own interpretations upon the situation so far as he was concerned. She did her best to do this. But about his unknown rival he was acutely curious.
He made her tell him the core of the difficulty.
“I cannot say who he is,” said Ann Veronica, “but he is a married man… . No! I do not even know that he cares for me. It is no good going into that. Only I just want him. I just want him, and no one else will do. It is no good arguing about a thing like that.”
“But you thought you could forget him.”
“I suppose I must have thought so. I didn’t understand. Now I do.”
“By God!” said Manning, making the most of the word, “I suppose it’s fate. Fate! You are so frank so splendid!
“I’m taking this calmly now,” he said, almost as if he apologized, “because I’m a little stunned.”
Then he asked, “Tell me! has this man, has he DARED to make love to you?”
Ann Veronica had a vicious moment. “I wish he had,” she said.
“But—”
The long inconsecutive conversation by that time was getting on her nerves. “When one wants a thing more than anything else in the world,” she said with outrageous frankness, “one naturally wishes one had it.”
She shocked him by that. She shattered the edifice he was building up of himself as a devoted lover, waiting only his chance to win her from a hopeless and consuming passion.
“Mr. Manning,” she said, “I warned you not to idealize me. Men ought not to idealize any woman. We aren’t worth it. We’ve done nothing to deserve it. And it hampers us. You don’t know the thoughts we have; the things we can do and say. You are a sisterless man; you have never heard the ordinary talk that goes on at a girls’ boarding-school.”
“Oh! but you ARE splendid and open and fearless! As if I couldn’t allow! What are all these little things? Nothing! Nothing! You can’t sully yourself. You can’t! I tell you frankly you may break off your engagement to me—I shall hold myself still engaged to you, yours just the same. As for this infatuation—it’s like some obsession, some magic thing laid upon you. It’s not you—not a bit. It’s a thing that’s happened to you. It is like some accident. I don’t care. In a sense I don’t care. It makes no difference… . All the same, I wish I had that fellow by the throat! Just the virile, unregenerate man in me wishes that… .
“I suppose I should let go if I had.
“You know,” he went on, “this doesn’t seem to me to end anything.
I’m rather a persistent person. I’m the sort of dog, if you turn it out of the room it lies down on the mat at the door. I’m not a lovesick boy. I’m a man, and I know what I mean. It’s a tremendous blow, of course—but it doesn’t kill me. And the situation it makes!—the situation!”
Thus Manning, egotistical, inconsecutive, unreal. And Ann Veronica walked beside him, trying in vain to soften her heart to him by the thought of how she had illused him, and all the time, as her feet and mind grew weary
together, rejoicing more and more that at the cost of this one interminable walk she escaped the prospect of—what was it?—“Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights” in his company. Whatever happened she need never return to that possibility.
“For me,” Manning went on, “this isn’t final. In a sense it alters nothing. I shall still wear your favor—even if it is a stolen and forbidden favor—in my casque… . I shall still believe in you. Trust you.”
He repeated several times that he would trust her, though it remained obscure just exactly where the trust came in.
“Look here,” he cried out of a silence, with a sudden flash of understanding, “did you mean to throw me over when you came out with me this afternoon?”
Ann Veronica hesitated, and with a startled mind realized the truth. “No,” she answered, reluctantly.
“Very well,” said Manning. “Then I don’t take this as final. That’s all. I’ve bored you or something… . You think you love this other man! No doubt you do love him. Before you have lived—”
He became darkly prophetic. He thrust out a rhetorical hand.
“I will MAKE you love me! Until he has faded—faded into a memory…”
He saw her into the train at Waterloo, and stood, a tall, grave figure, with hat upraised, as the carriage moved forward slowly and hid him. Ann Veronica sat back with a sigh of relief. Manning might go on now idealizing her as much as he liked. She was no longer a confederate in that. He might go on as the devoted lover until he tired. She had done forever with the Age of Chivalry, and her own base adaptations of its traditions to the compromising life. She was honest again.
But when she turned her thoughts to Morningside Park she perceived the tangled skein of life was now to be further complicated by his romantic importunity.
CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH
THE COLLAPSE OF THE PENITENT
Part 1
Spring had held back that year until the dawn of May, and then spring and summer came with a rush together. Two days after this conversation between Manning and Ann Veronica, Capes came into the laboratory at lunch-time and found her alone there standing by the open window, and not even pretending to be doing anything.
He came in with his hands in his trousers pockets and a general air of depression in his bearing. He was engaged in detesting Manning and himself in almost equal measure. His face brightened at the sight of her, and he came toward her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Ann Veronica, and stared over her shoulder out of the window.
“So am I… . Lassitude?”
“I suppose so.”
“I can’t work.”
“Nor I,” said Ann Veronica.
Pause.
“It’s the spring,” he said. “It’s the warming up of the year, the coming of the light mornings, the way in which everything begins to run about and begin new things. Work becomes distasteful; one thinks of holidays. This year—I’ve got it badly. I want to get away. I’ve never wanted to get away so much.”
“Where do you go?”
“Oh!—Alps.”
“Climbing?”
“Yes.”
“That’s rather a fine sort of holiday!”
He made no answer for three or four seconds.
“Yes,” he said, “I want to get away. I feel at moments as though I could bolt for it… . Silly, isn’t it? Undisciplined.”
He went to the window and fidgeted with the blind, looking out to where the tree-tops of Regent’s Park showed distantly over the houses. He turned round toward her and found her looking at him and standing very still.
“It’s the stir of spring,” he said.
“I believe it is.”
She glanced out of the window, and the distant trees were a froth of hard spring green and almond blossom. She formed a wild resolution, and, lest she should waver from it, she set about at once to realize it. “I’ve broken off my engagement,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and found her heart thumping in her neck. He moved slightly, and she went on, with a slight catching of her breath: “It’s a bother and disturbance, but you see—” She had to go through with it now, because she could think of nothing but her preconceived words. Her voice was weak and flat.
“I’ve fallen in love.”
He never helped her by a sound.
“I—I didn’t love the man I was engaged to,” she said. She met his eyes for a moment, and could not interpret their expression. They struck her as cold and indifferent.
Her heart failed her and her resolution became water. She remained standing stiffly, unable even to move. She could not look at him through an interval that seemed to her a vast gulf of time. But she felt his lax figure become rigid.
At last his voice came to release her tension.
“I thought you weren’t keeping up to the mark. You— It’s jolly of you to confide in me. Still—” Then, with incredible and obviously deliberate stupidity, and a voice as flat as her own, he asked, “Who is the man?”
Her spirit raged within her at the dumbness, the paralysis that had fallen upon her. Grace, confidence, the power of movement even, seemed gone from her. A fever of shame ran through her being. Horrible doubts assailed her. She sat down awkwardly and helplessly on one of the little stools by her table and covered her face with her hands.
“Can’t you SEE how things are?” she said.
Part 2
Before Capes could answer her in any way the door at the end of the laboratory opened noisily and Miss Klegg appeared. She went to her own table and sat down. At the sound of the door Ann Veronica uncovered a tearless face, and with one swift movement assumed a conversational attitude. Things hung for a moment in an awkward silence.
“You see,” said Ann Veronica, staring before her at the window-sash, “that’s the form my question takes at the present time.”
Capes had not quite the same power of recovery. He stood with his hands in his pockets looking at Miss Klegg’s back. His face was white. “It’s—it’s a difficult question.” He appeared to be paralyzed by abstruse acoustic calculations. Then, very awkwardly, he took a stool and placed it at the end of Ann Veronica’s table, and sat down. He glanced at Miss Klegg again, and spoke quickly and furtively, with eager eyes on Ann Veronica’s face.
“I had a faint idea once that things were as you say they are, but the affair of the ring—of the unexpected ring—puzzled me. Wish SHE”—he indicated Miss Klegg’s back with a nod—“was at the bottom of the sea… . I would like to talk to you about this—soon. If you don’t think it would be a social outrage, perhaps I might walk with you to your railway station.”
“I will wait,” said Ann Veronica, still not looking at him, “and we will go into Regent’s Park. No—you shall come with me to Waterloo.”
“Right!” he said, and hesitated, and then got up and went into the preparation-room.
Part 3
For a time they walked in silence through the back streets that lead southward from the College. Capes bore a face of infinite perplexity.
“The thing I feel most disposed to say, Miss Stanley,” he began at last, “is that this is very sudden.”
“It’s been coming on since first I came into the laboratory.”
“What do you want?” he asked, bluntly.
“You!” said Ann Veronica.
The sense of publicity, of people coming and going about them, kept them both unemotional. And neither had any of that theatricality which demands gestures and facial expression.
“I suppose you know I like you tremendously?” he pursued.
“You told me that in the Zoological Gardens.”
She found her muscles a-tremble. But there was nothing in her bearing that a passer-by would have noted, to tell of the excitement that possessed her.
“I”—he seemed to have a difficulty with the word—“I love you. I’ve told you that practically already. But I can give it its name now. You needn’t be in any doubt about it.
I tell you that because it puts us on a footing… .”
They went on for a time without another word.
“But don’t you know about me?” he said at last.
“Something. Not much.”
“I’m a married man. And my wife won’t live with me for reasons that I think most women would consider sound… . Or I should have made love to you long ago.”
There came a silence again.
“I don’t care,” said Ann Veronica.
“But if you knew anything of that—”
“I did. It doesn’t matter.”
“Why did you tell me? I thought—I thought we were going to be friends.”
He was suddenly resentful. He seemed to charge her with the ruin of their situation. “Why on earth did you TELL me?” he cried.
“I couldn’t help it. It was an impulse. I HAD to.”
“But it changes things. I thought you understood.”
“I had to,” she repeated. “I was sick of the make-believe. I don’t care! I’m glad I did. I’m glad I did.”
“Look here!” said Capes, “what on earth do you want? What do you think we can do? Don’t you know what men are, and what life is?—to come to me and talk to me like this!”
“I know—something, anyhow. But I don’t care; I haven’t a spark of shame. I don’t see any good in life if it hasn’t got you in it. I wanted you to know. And now you know. And the fences are down for good. You can’t look me in the eyes and say you don’t care for me.”
“I’ve told you,” he said.
“Very well,” said Ann Veronica, with an air of concluding the discussion.
They walked side by side for a time.
“In that laboratory one gets to disregard these passions,” began Capes. “Men are curious animals, with a trick of falling in love readily with girls about your age. One has to train one’s self not to. I’ve accustomed myself to think of you—as if you were like every other girl who works at the schools—as something quite outside these possibilities. If only out of loyalty to co-education one has to do that. Apart from everything else, this meeting of ours is a breach of a good rule.”
“Rules are for every day,” said Ann Veronica. “This is not every day. This is something above all rules.”
