It was only some hours after that these ambiguous elements evaporatedand vanished and loathing came, and she really began to be thoroughlysick and ashamed of the whole disgraceful quarrel and scuffle.
He, for his part, was trying to grasp the series of unexpected reactionsthat had so wrecked their tete-a-tete. He had meant to be master of hisfate 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 hehad 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 goagain."
"Not yet," he said. "I do love you. I love you all the more for thestreak of sheer devil in you.... You are the most beautiful, the mostdesirable 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 thoseRoman 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'tfrown me off now. Don't go back into Victorian respectability andpretend you don't know and you can't think and all the rest of it. Onecomes 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 ofyour body and you night after night. I have been imaging--"
"Mr. Ramage, I came here--I didn't suppose for one moment you woulddare--"
"Nonsense! That is your mistake! You are too intellectual. You want todo everything with your mind. You are afraid of kisses. You are afraidof the warmth in your blood. It's just because all that side of yourlife hasn't fairly begun."
He made a step toward her.
"Mr. Ramage," she said, sharply, "I have to make it plain to you. Idon'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 shouldtouch me."
He stared in amazement at this new aspect of the situation. "You lovesome 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 andwomen upon her in one astonishing question. His hand went with an almostinstinctive inquiry to his jawbone again. "Then why the devil," hedemanded, "do you let me stand you dinners and the opera--and why do youcome to a cabinet particuliar with me?"
He became radiant with anger. "You mean to tell me" he said, "that youhave 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 doso. She did not think for one moment what interpretation he might putupon the word "lover."
"Mr. Ramage," she said, clinging to her one point, "I want to get out ofthis horrible little room. It has all been a mistake. I have been stupidand foolish. Will you unlock that door?"
"Never!" he said. "Confound your lover! Look here! Do you really thinkI am going to run you while he makes love to you? No fear! I never heardof anything so cool. If he wants you, let him get you. You're mine. I'vepaid for you and helped you, and I'm going to conquer you somehow--ifI have to break you to do it. Hitherto you've seen only my easy, kindlyside. 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, andher hand knocked a wine-glass from the table to smash noisily on thefloor. She caught at the idea. "If you come a step nearer to me," shesaid, "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 ofpolicemen, reproving magistrates, a crowded court, public disgrace. Shesaw her aunt in tears, her father white-faced and hard hit. "Don't comenearer!" 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 thatshe was safe.
He went to the door. "It's all right," he said, reassuringly to theinquirer without.
Ann Veronica glanced at the mirror to discover a flushed and dishevelleddisorder. She began at once a hasty readjustment of her hair, whileRamage parleyed with inaudible interrogations. "A glass slipped from thetable," he explained.... "Non. Fas du tout. Non.... Niente.... Bitte!...Oui, dans la note.... Presently. Presently." That conversation ended andhe 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. Heregarded that perennial miracle of pinning with wrathful eyes.
"Look here, Ann Veronica," he began. "I want a plain word with you aboutall this. Do you mean to tell me you didn't understand why I wanted youto 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--whenthere was nothing--no love?"
"How did I know there wasn't love?"
That silenced her for a moment. "And what on earth," he said, "do youthink the world is made of? Why do you think I have been doing thingsfor you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you one of the membersof that great white sisterhood that takes and does not give? The goodaccepting woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to live atfree 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? Askthat lover of yours! And even with friends, would you have it all Giveon 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 handfast 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 yourselfcharming for help. You climb by disappointing men. This lover ofyours--"
"He doesn't know!" cried Ann Veronica.
"Well, you know."
Ann Veronica could have wept with vexation. Indeed, a note of weepingbroke her voice for a moment as she burst out, "You know as well as I dothat 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 overthe ethical position. It's the sort of way a woman always does glossover her ethical positions. You're all dependents--all of you. Byinstinct. Only you good ones--shirk. You shirk a straightforward anddecent return for what you get from us--taking refuge in purity anddelicacy and such-like 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'tunderstand. You can't possibly understand!"
He began a confused explanation, a perplexing contradictory apology forhis urgency and wrath. He loved Ann Veronica, he said; he was so madto have her that he defeated himself, and did crude and alarming andsenseless things. His vicious abusiveness vanished. He suddenly becameeloquent and plausible. He did make her perceive som
ething 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 everymovement, listening to him, repelled by him and yet dimly understanding.
At any rate he made it very clear that night that there was anineradicable discord in life, a jarring something that must shatter allher dreams of a way of living for women that would enable them to befree and spacious and friendly with men, and that was the passionatepredisposition of men to believe that the love of women can be earnedand won and controlled and compelled.
He flung aside all his talk of help and disinterested friendship asthough it had never been even a disguise between them, as thoughfrom the first it was no more than a fancy dress they had put quiteunderstandingly upon their relationship. He had set out to win her, andshe had let him start. And at the thought of that other lover--he wasconvinced that that beloved person was a lover, and she found herselfunable to say a word to explain to him that this other person, theperson she loved, did not even know of her love--Ramage grew angryand savage once more, and returned suddenly to gibe and insult. Men doservices for the love of women, and the woman who takes must pay. Suchwas the simple code that displayed itself in all his thoughts. He leftthat arid rule clear of the least mist of refinement or delicacy.
That he should pay forty pounds to help this girl who preferred anotherman was no less in his eyes than a fraud and mockery that made herdenial a maddening and outrageous disgrace to him. And this though hewas 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--againstyou. I defy you to explain it away. What do you think people will makeof that? What will this lover of yours make of that?"
At intervals Ann Veronica demanded to go, declaring her undying resolveto repay him at any cost, and made short movements doorward.
But at last this ordeal was over, and Ramage opened the door. Sheemerged with a white face and wide-open eyes upon a little, red-litlanding. She went past three keenly observant and ostentatiouslypreoccupied waiters down the thick-carpeted staircase and out of theHotel Rococo, that remarkable laboratory of relationships, past a tallporter in blue and crimson, into a cool, clear night.
Part 6
When Ann Veronica reached her little bed-sitting-room again, every nervein 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 intoindignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what am Ito do?
"I'm in a hole!--mess is a better word, expresses it better. I'm in amess--a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!
"Do you hear, Ann Veronica?--you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivablemess!
"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 thelodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.
"This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I'mbeginning to have my doubts about freedom!
"You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! Thesmeariness of the thing!
"The smeariness of this sort of thing!... Mauled about!"
She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of herhand. "Ugh!" she said.
"The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort ofscrape! At least--one thinks so.... I wonder if some of them did--andit didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most ofthem didn't, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still andstraight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should.And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. Theyknew 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 restraintsas though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printedcambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings andrefined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with thebrightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lostparadise.
"I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said. "Iwonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet andwhite and dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he havedared?..."
For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterlydisgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belateddesire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously--to be, ineffect, prim.
Horrible details recurred to her.
"Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in hisneck--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! Cad!... Whyaren't you folded up clean in lavender--as every young woman ought tobe? 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 thatmoney."
That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had everspent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she wentto bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The moreshe disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew herself-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed becameunendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whisperedabuse of herself--usually until she hit against some article offurniture.
Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, "Nowlook here! Let me think it all out!"
For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman'sposition in the world--the meagre realities of such freedom as itpermitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual manunder which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She hadflung away from her father's support with the finest assumption ofpersonal independence. And here she was--in a mess because it hadbeen impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She hadthought--What had she thought? That this dependence of women was butan illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied itwith vigor, and here she was!
She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to herinsoluble individual problem again: "What am I to do?"
She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage'sface. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of howsuch a sum could be made good again. She thought of all sorts of odd anddesperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.
She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithetsfor herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window ata dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on theedge of her bed. What was the alternative to going home? No alternativeappeared in that darkness.
It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself beaten.She did most urgently desire to save her face in Morningside Park, andfor long hours she could think of no way of putting it that would not bein the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.
"I'd rather go as a chorus-girl," she said.
She was not very clear about the position and duties of a chorus-girl,but it certainly had the air of being a last desperate resort.There sprang from that a vague hope that perhaps she might extort acapitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and thenwith overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever happened shewould never be able to tell her father about her debt. The completestcapitulation would not wipe out that trouble. And she felt that if shewent home it was imperative to pay. She would always be going to and froup the Avenue, getting glimpses of Ramage, seeing him in trains.
...
For a time she promenaded the room.
"Why did I ever take that loan? An idiot girl in an asylum would haveknown better than that!
"Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind--the worst of all conceivablecombinations. I wish some one would kill Ramage by accident!...
"But then they would find that check endorsed in his bureau....
"I wonder what he will do?" She tried to imagine situations that mightarise out of Ramage's antagonism, for he had been so bitter and savagethat she could not believe that he would leave things as they were.
The next morning she went out with her post-office savings bank-book,and telegraphed for a warrant to draw out all the money she had in theworld. It amounted to two-and-twenty pounds. She addressed an envelopeto Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, "The rest shallfollow." The money would be available in the afternoon, and she wouldsend him four five-pound notes. The rest she meant to keep forher immediate necessities. A little relieved by this step towardreinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College to forget her muddleof problems for a time, if she could, in the presence of Capes.