The Complete Novels of H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells

now," she said, splintering the surviving piece of coal into indignant flame-spurting fragments with one dexterous blow, "what am I to do?

      "I'm in a hole!—mess is a better word, expresses it better. I'm in a mess—a nasty mess! a filthy mess! Oh, no end of a mess!

      "Do you hear, Ann Veronica?—you're in a nasty, filthy, unforgivable mess!

      "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 the lodger below, sat down and wrenched off her boots.

      "This is what comes of being a young woman up to date. By Jove! I'm beginning to have my doubts about freedom!

      "You silly young woman, Ann Veronica! You silly young woman! The smeariness of the thing!

      "The smeariness of this sort of thing!… Mauled about!"

      She fell to rubbing her insulted lips savagely with the back of her hand. "Ugh!" she said.

      "The young women of Jane Austen's time didn't get into this sort of scrape! At least—one thinks so… . I wonder if some of them did—and it didn't get reported. Aunt Jane had her quiet moments. Most of them didn't, anyhow. They were properly brought up, and sat still and straight, and took the luck fate brought them as gentlewomen should. And they had an idea of what men were like behind all their nicety. They knew 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 restraints as though it was the one desirable thing. That world of fine printed cambrics and escorted maidens, of delicate secondary meanings and refined allusiveness, presented itself to her imagination with the brightness of a lost paradise, as indeed for many women it is a lost paradise.

      "I wonder if there is anything wrong with my manners," she said. "I wonder if I've been properly brought up. If I had been quite quiet and white and dignified, wouldn't it have been different? Would he have dared?… "

      For some creditable moments in her life Ann Veronica was utterly disgusted with herself; she was wrung with a passionate and belated desire to move gently, to speak softly and ambiguously—to be, in effect, prim.

      Horrible details recurred to her.

      "Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his neck—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!… Why aren't you folded up clean in lavender—as every young woman ought to be? 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 that money."

      That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever spent. She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she went to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered abuse of herself—usually until she hit against some article of furniture.

      Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, "Now look here! Let me think it all out!"

      For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman's position in the world—the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had flung away from her father's support with the finest assumption of personal independence. And here she was—in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had thought—What had she thought? That this dependence of women was but an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it with vigor, and here she was!

      She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again: "What am I to do?"

      She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage's face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of how such a sum could be made good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.

      She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithets for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window at a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going home? No alternative appeared 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, and for long hours she could think of no way of putting it that would not be in 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 a capitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and then with overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever happened she would never be able to tell her father about her debt. The completest capitulation would not wipe out that trouble. And she felt that if she went home it was imperative to pay. She would always be going to and fro up 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 have known better than that!

      "Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind—the worst of all conceivable combinations. 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 might arise out of Ramage's antagonism, for he had been so bitter and savage that 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 the world. It amounted to two-and-twenty pounds. She addressed an envelope to Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, "The rest shall follow." The money would be available in the afternoon, and she would send him four five-pound notes. The rest she meant to keep for her immediate necessities. A little relieved by this step toward reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College to forget her muddle of problems for a time, if she could, in the presence of Capes.

      7.

      For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue. Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an hour or so the work distracted her altogether from her troubles.

      Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it came to her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediate collapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps she would never set eyes on him again. After that consolations fled.

      The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became inattentive to the work before her, and it did not get on. She felt sleepy and unusually irritable. She lunched at a creamery in Great Portland Street, and as the day was full of wintry sunshine, spent the rest of the lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom, which she imagined to be thought upon the problems of her position, on a seat in Regent's Park. A girl of fifteen or sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until she saw "Votes for Women" at the top. That turned her mind to the more generalized aspects of her perplexities again. She had never been so disposed to agree