Part 4
But presently, as she sat on the one antimacassared red silk
chair and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that tidy, rather
vacant, and dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe and
desert toilet-table and pictureless walls and stereotyped
furnishings, a sudden blankness came upon her as though she
didn't matter, and had been thrust away into this impersonal
corner, she and her gear. . . .
She decided to go out into the London afternoon again and get
something to eat in an Aerated Bread shop or some such place, and
perhaps find a cheap room for herself. Of course that was what
she had to do; she had to find a cheap room for herself and work!
This Room No. 47 was no more than a sort of railway compartment
on the way to that.
How does one get work?
She walked along the Strand and across Trafalgar Square, and by
the Haymarket to Piccadilly, and so through dignified squares and
palatial alleys to Oxford Street; and her mind was divided
between a speculative treatment of employment on the one hand,
and breezes --zephyr breezes--of the keenest appreciation for
London, on the other. The jolly part of it was that for the
first time in her life so far as London was concerned, she was
not going anywhere in particular; for the first time in her life
it seemed to her she was taking London in.
She tried to think how people get work. Ought she to walk into
some of these places and tell them what she could do? She
hesitated at the window of a shipping-office in Cockspur Street
and at the Army and Navy Stores, but decided that perhaps there
would be some special and customary hour, and that it would be
better for her to find this out before she made her attempt. And,
besides, she didn't just immediately want to make her attempt.
She fell into a pleasant dream of positions and work. Behind
every one of these myriad fronts she passed there must be a
career or careers. Her ideas of women's employment and a modern
woman's pose in life were based largely on the figure of Vivie
Warren in Mrs. Warren's Profession. She had seen Mrs. Warren's
Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the gallery of a
Stage Society performance one Monday afternoon. Most of it had
been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that
checked further curiosity, but the figure of Vivien, hard,
capable, successful, and bullying, and ordering about a veritable
Teddy in the person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She saw
herself in very much Vivie's position--managing something.
Her thoughts were deflected from Vivie Warren by the peculiar
behavior of a middle-aged gentleman in Piccadilly. He appeared
suddenly from the infinite in the neighborhood of the Burlington
Arcade, crossing the pavement toward her and with his eyes upon
her. He seemed to her indistinguishably about her father's age.
He wore a silk hat a little tilted, and a morning coat buttoned
round a tight, contained figure; and a white slip gave a finish
to his costume and endorsed the quiet distinction of his tie.
His face was a little flushed perhaps, and his small, brown eyes
were bright. He stopped on the curb-stone, not facing her but as
if he was on his way to cross the road, and spoke to her suddenly
over his shoulder.
"Whither away?" he said, very distinctly in a curiously wheedling
voice. Ann Veronica stared at his foolish, propitiatory smile,
his hungry gaze, through one moment of amazement, then stepped
aside and went on her way with a quickened step. But her mind
was ruffled, and its mirror-like surface of satisfaction was not
easily restored.
Queer old gentleman!
The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every
well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even
ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge. Ann Veronica
could at the same time ask herself what this queer old gentleman
could have meant by speaking to her, and know--know in general
terms, at least--what that accosting signified. About her, as
she had gone day by day to and from the Tredgold College, she had
seen and not seen many an incidental aspect of those sides of
life about which girls are expected to know nothing, aspects that
were extraordinarily relevant to her own position and outlook on
the world, and yet by convention ineffably remote. For all that
she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise, she had never yet
considered these things with unaverted eyes. She had viewed them
askance, and without exchanging ideas with any one else in the
world about them.
She went on her way now no longer dreaming and appreciative, but
disturbed and unwillingly observant behind her mask of serene
contentment.
That delightful sense of free, unembarrassed movement was gone.
As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she saw a woman
approaching her from the opposite direction--a tall woman who at
the first glance seemed altogether beautiful and fine. She came
along with the fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as
she drew nearer paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose
behind the quiet expression of her open countenance, and a sort
of unreality in her splendor betrayed itself for which Ann
Veronica could not recall the right word --a word, half
understood, that lurked and hid in her mind, the word
"meretricious." Behind this woman and a little to the side of
her, walked a man smartly dressed, with desire and appraisal in
his eyes. Something insisted that those two were mysteriously
linked--that the woman knew the man was there.
It was a second reminder that against her claim to go free and
untrammelled there was a case to be made, that after all it was
true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor
ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad
and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers,
lurk.
It was in the quiet streets and squares toward Oxford Street that
it first came into her head disagreeably that she herself was
being followed. She observed a man walking on the opposite side
of the way and looking toward her.
"Bother it all!" she swore. "Bother!" and decided that this was
not so, and would not look to right or left again.
Beyond the Circus Ann Veronica went into a British Tea-Table
Company shop to get some tea. And as she was yet waiting for her
tea to come she saw this man again. Either it was an unfortunate
recovery of a trail, or he had followed her from Mayfair. There
was no mistaking his intentions this time. He came down the shop
looking for her quite obviously, and took up a position on the
other side against a mirror in which he was able to regard her
steadfastly.
Beneath the serene unconcern of Ann Veronica's face was a boiling
tumult. She was furiously angry. She gazed with a quiet
detachment toward the window and the Oxford Street traffic, and
in her heart she was busy kicking this man to death. He HAD
followed her! What had he followed her for? He must have
followed her all the way from beyond Grosvenor Square.
He was a tall man and fair, with bluish eyes that were rather
protuberant, and long white hands of which he made a display. He
had removed his silk hat, and now sat looking at Ann Veronica
over an untouched cup of tea; he sat gloating upon her, trying to
catch her eye. Once, when he thought he had done so, he smiled an
ingratiating smile. He moved, after quiet intervals, with a
quick little movement, and ever and again stroked his small
mustache and coughed a self-conscious cough.
"That he should be in the same world with me!" said Ann Veronica,
reduced to reading the list of good things the British Tea-Table
Company had priced for its patrons.
Heaven knows what dim and tawdry conceptions of passion and
desire were in that blond cranium, what romance-begotten dreams
of intrigue and adventure! but they sufficed, when presently Ann
Veronica went out into the darkling street again, to inspire a
flitting, dogged pursuit, idiotic, exasperating, indecent.
She had no idea what she should do. If she spoke to a policeman
she did not know what would ensue. Perhaps she would have to
charge this man and appear in a police-court next day.
She became angry with herself. She would not be driven in by
this persistent, sneaking aggression. She would ignore him.
Surely she could ignore him. She stopped abruptly, and looked in
a flower-shop window. He passed, and came loitering back and
stood beside her, silently looking into her face.
The afternoon had passed now into twilight. The shops were
lighting up into gigantic lanterns of color, the street lamps
were glowing into existence, and she had lost her way. She had
lost her sense of direction, and was among unfamiliar streets.
She went on from street to street, and all the glory of London
had departed. Against the sinister, the threatening, monstrous
inhumanity of the limitless city, there was nothing now but this
supreme, ugly fact of a pursuit--the pursuit of the undesired,
persistent male.
For a second time Ann Veronica wanted to swear at the universe.
There were moments when she thought of turning upon this man and
talking to him. But there was something in his face at once
stupid and invincible that told her he would go on forcing
himself upon her, that he would esteem speech with her a great
point gained. In the twilight he had ceased to be a person one
could tackle and shame; he had become something more general, a
something that crawled and sneaked toward her and would not let
her alone. . . .
Then, when the tension was getting unendurable, and she was on
the verge of speaking to some casual passer-by and demanding
help, her follower vanished. For a time she could scarcely
believe he was gone. He had. The night had swallowed him up,
but his work on her was done. She had lost her nerve, and there
was no more freedom in London for her that night. She was glad to
join in the stream of hurrying homeward workers that was now
welling out of a thousand places of employment, and to imitate
their driven, preoccupied haste. She had followed a bobbing
white hat and gray jacket until she reached the Euston Road
corner of Tottenham Court Road, and there, by the name on a bus
and the cries of a conductor, she made a guess of her way. And
she did not merely affect to be driven--she felt driven. She was
afraid people would follow her, she was afraid of the dark, open
doorways she passed, and afraid of the blazes of light; she was
afraid to be alone, and she knew not what it was she feared.
It was past seven when she got back to her hotel. She thought
then that she had shaken off the man of the bulging blue eyes
forever, but that night she found he followed her into her
dreams. He stalked her, he stared at her, he craved her, he
sidled slinking and propitiatory and yet relentlessly toward her,
until at last she awoke from the suffocating nightmare nearness
of his approach, and lay awake in fear and horror listening to
the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.
She came very near that night to resolving that she would return
to her home next morning. But the morning brought courage again,
and those first intimations of horror vanished completely from
her mind.
