CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH
THE LAST DAYS AT HOME
Part 1
They decided to go to Switzerland at the session's end. "We'll
clean up everything tidy," said Capes. . . .
For her pride's sake, and to save herself from long day-dreams
and an unappeasable longing for her lover, Ann Veronica worked
hard at her biology during those closing weeks. She was, as
Capes had said, a hard young woman. She was keenly resolved to
do well in the school examination, and not to be drowned in the
seas of emotion that threatened to submerge her intellectual
being.
Nevertheless, she could not prevent a rising excitement as the
dawn of the new life drew near to her--a thrilling of the nerves,
a secret and delicious exaltation above the common circumstances
of existence. Sometimes her straying mind would become
astonishingly active--embroidering bright and decorative things
that she could say to Capes; sometimes it passed into a state of
passive acquiescence, into a radiant, formless, golden joy. She
was aware of people--her aunt, her father, her fellow-students,
friends, and neighbors--moving about outside this glowing secret,
very much as an actor is aware of the dim audience beyond the
barrier of the footlights. They might applaud, or object, or
interfere, but the drama was her very own. She was going through
with that, anyhow.
The feeling of last days grew stronger with her as their number
diminished. She went about the familiar home with a clearer and
clearer sense of inevitable conclusions. She became exceptionally
considerate and affectionate with her father and aunt, and more
and more concerned about the coming catastrophe that she was
about to precipitate upon them. Her aunt had a once exasperating
habit of interrupting her work with demands for small household
services, but now Ann Veronica rendered them with a queer
readiness of anticipatory propitiation. She was greatly exercised
by the problem of confiding in the Widgetts; they were dears, and
she talked away two evenings with Constance without broaching the
topic; she made some vague intimations in letters to Miss Miniver
that Miss Miniver failed to mark. But she did not bother her
head very much about her relations with these sympathizers.
And at length her penultimate day in Morningside Park dawned for
her. She got up early, and walked about the garden in the dewy
June sunshine and revived her childhood. She was saying good-bye
to childhood and home, and her making; she was going out into the
great, multitudinous world; this time there would be no
returning. She was at the end of girlhood and on the eve of a
woman's crowning experience. She visited the corner that had
been her own little garden--her forget-me-nots and candytuft had
long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she visited
the raspberry-canes that had sheltered that first love affair
with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had
been wont to read her secret letters. Here was the place behind
the shed where she had used to hide from Roddy's persecutions,
and here the border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems
was fairyland. The back of the house had been the Alps for
climbing, and the shrubs in front of it a Terai. The knots and
broken pale that made the garden-fence scalable, and gave access
to the fields behind, were still to be traced. And here against
a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of God and wasps and her
father, she had stolen plums; and once because of discovered
misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother was
dead, she had lain on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the
elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her
soul in weeping.
Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know the heart of
that child again! That child had loved fairy princes with velvet
suits and golden locks, and she was in love with a real man named
Capes, with little gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant
voice and firm and shapely hands. She was going to him soon and
certainly, going to his strong, embracing arms. She was going
through a new world with him side by side. She had been so busy
with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it seemed, she had
given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of her
childhood. Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very
distant, and she had come to say farewell to them across one
sundering year.
She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the
eggs: and then she went off to catch the train before her
father's. She did this to please him. He hated travelling
second-class with her--indeed, he never did--but he also disliked
travelling in the same train when his daughter was in an inferior
class, because of the look of the thing. So he liked to go by a
different train. And in the Avenue she had an encounter with
Ramage.
It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable
impressions in her mind. She was aware of him--a silk-hatted,
shiny-black figure on the opposite side of the Avenue; and then,
abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and
spoke to her.
"I MUST speak to you," he said. "I can't keep away from you."
She made some inane response. She was struck by a change in his
appearance. His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face
had lost something of its ruddy freshness.
He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they
reached the station, and left her puzzled at its drift and
meaning. She quickened her pace, and so did he, talking at her
slightly averted ear. She made lumpish and inadequate
interruptions rather than replies. At times he seemed to be
claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her with her
check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible
will, and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted. He said
that his life was boring and stupid without her. Something or
other--she did not catch what--he was damned if he could stand.
He was evidently nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his
projecting eyes sought to dominate. The crowning aspect of the
incident, for her mind, was the discovery that he and her
indiscretion with him no longer mattered very much. Its
importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise. Even
her debt to him was a triviality now.
And of course! She had a brilliant idea. It surprised her she
hadn't thought of it before! She tried to explain that she was
going to pay him forty pounds without fail next week. She said
as much to him. She repeated this breathlessly.
"I was glad you did not send it back again," he said.
He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself
vainly trying to explain--the inexplicable. "It's because I mean
to send it back altogether," she said.
He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line
of his own.
"Here we are, living in the same suburb," he began. "We have to
be--modern."
Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase. That knot
also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as
primordial as chipped flint.
