Part 2
She found the younger generation of the Widgetts engaged in
languid reminiscences, and all, as they expressed it, a "bit
decayed." Every one became tremendously animated when they heard
that Ann Veronica had failed them because she had been, as she
expressed it, "locked in."
"My God!" said Teddy, more impressively than ever.
"But what are you going to do?" asked Hetty.
"What can one do?" asked Ann Veronica. "Would you stand it? I'm
going to clear out."
"Clear out?" cried Hetty.
"Go to London," said Ann Veronica.
She had expected sympathetic admiration, but instead the whole
Widgett family, except Teddy, expressed a common dismay. "But
how can you?" asked Constance. "Who will you stop with?"
"I shall go on my own. Take a room!"
"I say!" said Constance. "But who's going to pay for the room?"
"I've got money," said Ann Veronica. "Anything is better than
this--this stifled life down here." And seeing that Hetty and
Constance were obviously developing objections, she plunged at
once into a demand for help. "I've got nothing in the world to
pack with except a toy size portmanteau. Can you lend me some
stuff?"
"You ARE a chap!" said Constance, and warmed only slowly from the
idea of dissuasion to the idea of help. But they did what they
could for her. They agreed to lend her their hold-all and a
large, formless bag which they called the communal trunk. And
Teddy declared himself ready to go to the ends of the earth for
her, and carry her luggage all the way.
Hetty, looking out of the window--she always smoked her
after-breakfast cigarette at the window for the benefit of the
less advanced section of Morningside Park society--and trying not
to raise objections, saw Miss Stanley going down toward the
shops.
"If you must go on with it," said Hetty, "now's your time." And
Ann Veronica at once went back with the hold-all, trying not to
hurry indecently but to keep up her dignified air of being a
wronged person doing the right thing at a smart trot, to pack.
Teddy went round by the garden backs and dropped the bag over the
fence. All this was exciting and entertaining. Her aunt
returned before the packing was done, and Ann Veronica lunched
with an uneasy sense of bag and hold-all packed up-stairs and
inadequately hidden from chance intruders by the valance of the
bed. She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the Widgetts'
after lunch to make some final arrangements and then, as soon as
her aunt had retired to lie down for her usual digestive hour,
took the risk of the servants having the enterprise to report her
proceedings and carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate,
whence Teddy, in a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the
railway station. Then she went up-stairs again, dressed herself
carefully for town, put on her most businesslike-looking hat, and
with a wave of emotion she found it hard to control, walked down
to catch the 3.17 up-train.
Teddy handed her into the second-class compartment her
season-ticket warranted, and declared she was "simply splendid."
"If you want anything," he said, "or get into any trouble, wire
me. I'd come back from the ends of the earth. I'd do anything,
Vee. It's horrible to think of you!"
"You're an awful brick, Teddy!" she said.
"Who wouldn't be for you?"
The train began to move. "You're splendid!" said Teddy, with his
hair wild in the wind. "Good luck! Good luck!"
She waved from the window until the bend hid him.
She found herself alone in the train asking herself what she must
do next, and trying not to think of herself as cut off from home
or any refuge whatever from the world she had resolved to face.
She felt smaller and more adventurous even than she had expected
to feel. "Let me see," she said to herself, trying to control a
slight sinking of the heart, "I am going to take a room in a
lodging-house because that is cheaper. . . . But perhaps I had
better get a room in an hotel to-night and look round. . . .
"It's bound to be all right," she said.
But her heart kept on sinking. What hotel should she go to? If
she told a cabman to drive to an hotel, any hotel, what would he
do--or say? He might drive to something dreadfully expensive,
and not at all the quiet sort of thing she required. Finally she
decided that even for an hotel she must look round, and that
meanwhile she would "book" her luggage at Waterloo. She told the
porter to take it to the booking-office, and it was only after a
disconcerting moment or so that she found she ought to have
directed him to go to the cloak-room. But that was soon put
right, and she walked out into London with a peculiar exaltation
of mind, an exaltation that partook of panic and defiance, but
was chiefly a sense of vast unexampled release.
She inhaled a deep breath of air--London air.
