He paused, deeply moved.
“If my own mother was alive,” sobbed Ann Veronica, “she would understand.”
The talk became more and more inconclusive and exhausting. Ann Veronica found herself incompetent, undignified, and detestable, holding on desperately to a hardening antagonism to her father, quarrelling with him, wrangling with him, thinking of repartees—almost as if he was a brother. It was horrible, but what could she do? She meant to live her own life, and he meant, with contempt and insults, to prevent her. Anything else that was said she now regarded only as an aspect of or diversion from that.
In the retrospect she was amazed to think how things had gone to pieces, for at the outset she had been quite prepared to go home again upon terms. While waiting for his coming she had stated her present and future relations with him with what had seemed to her the most satisfactory lucidity and completeness. She had looked forward to an explanation. Instead had come this storm, this shouting, this weeping, this confusion of threats and irrelevant appeals. It was not only that her father had said all sorts of inconsistent and unreasonable things, but that by some incomprehensible infection she herself had replied in the same vein. He had assumed that her leaving home was the point at issue, that everything turned on that, and that the sole alternative was obedience, and she had fallen in with that assumption until rebellion seemed a sacred principle. Moreover, atrociously and inexorably, he allowed it to appear ever and again in horrible gleams that he suspected there was some man in the case… . Some man!
And to conclude it all was the figure of her father in the doorway, giving her a last chance, his hat in one hand, his umbrella in the other, shaken at her to emphasize his point.
“You understand, then,” he was saying, “you understand?”
“I understand,” said Ann Veronica, tear-wet and flushed with a reciprocal passion, but standing up to him with an equality that amazed even herself, “I understand.” She controlled a sob. “Not a penny—not one penny—and never darken your doors again!”
Part 4
The next day her aunt came again and expostulated, and was just saying it was “an unheard-of thing” for a girl to leave her home as Ann Veronica had done, when her father arrived, and was shown in by the pleasant-faced landlady.
Her father had determined on a new line. He put down his hat and umbrella, rested his hands on his hips, and regarded Ann Veronica firmly.
“Now,” he said, quietly, “it’s time we stopped this nonsense.”
Ann Veronica was about to reply, when he went on, with a still more deadly quiet: “I am not here to bandy words with you. Let us have no more of this humbug. You are to come home.”
“I thought I explained—”
“I don’t think you can have heard me,” said her father; “I have told you to come home.”
“I thought I explained—”
“Come home!”
Ann Veronica shrugged her shoulders.
“Very well,” said her father.
“I think this ends the business,” he said, turning to his sister.
“It’s not for us to supplicate any more. She must learn wisdom—as God pleases.”
“But, my dear Peter!” said Miss Stanley.
“No,” said her brother, conclusively, “it’s not for a parent to go on persuading a child.”
Miss Stanley rose and regarded Ann Veronica fixedly. The girl stood with her hands behind her back, sulky, resolute, and intelligent, a strand of her black hair over one eye and looking more than usually delicate-featured, and more than ever like an obdurate child.
“She doesn’t know.”
“She does.”
“I can’t imagine what makes you fly out against everything like this,” said Miss Stanley to her niece.
“What is the good of talking?” said her brother. “She must go her own way. A man’s children nowadays are not his own. That’s the fact of the matter. Their minds are turned against him… . Rubbishy novels and pernicious rascals. We can’t even protect them from themselves.”
An immense gulf seemed to open between father and daughter as he said these words.
“I don’t see,” gasped Ann Veronica, “why parents and children … shouldn’t be friends.”
“Friends!” said her father. “When we see you going through disobedience to the devil! Come, Molly, she must go her own way.
I’ve tried to use my authority. And she defies me. What more is there to be said? She defies me!”
It was extraordinary. Ann Veronica felt suddenly an effect of tremendous pathos; she would have given anything to have been able to frame and make some appeal, some utterance that should bridge this bottomless chasm that had opened between her and her father, and she could find nothing whatever to say that was in the least sincere and appealing.
“Father,” she cried, “I have to live!”
He misunderstood her. “That,” he said, grimly, with his hand on the door-handle, “must be your own affair, unless you choose to live at Morningside Park.”
Miss Stanley turned to her. “Vee,” she said, “come home. Before it is too late.”
“Come, Molly,” said Mr. Stanley, at the door.
“Vee!” said Miss Stanley, “you hear what your father says!”
Miss Stanley struggled with emotion. She made a curious movement toward her niece, then suddenly, convulsively, she dabbed down something lumpy on the table and turned to follow her brother. Ann Veronica stared for a moment in amazement at this dark-green object that clashed as it was put down. It was a purse. She made a step forward. “Aunt!” she said, “I can’t—”
Then she caught a wild appeal in her aunt’s blue eye, halted, and the door clicked upon them.
There was a pause, and then the front door slammed… .
Ann Veronica realized that she was alone with the world. And this time the departure had a tremendous effect of finality. She had to resist an impulse of sheer terror, to run out after them and give in.
“Gods,” she said, at last, “I’ve done it this time!”
“Well!” She took up the neat morocco purse, opened it, and examined the contents.
It contained three sovereigns, six and fourpence, two postage stamps, a small key, and her aunt’s return half ticket to Morningside Park.
Part 5
After the interview Ann Veronica considered herself formally cut off from home. If nothing else had clinched that, the purse had.
Nevertheless there came a residuum of expostulations. Her brother Roddy, who was in the motor line, came to expostulate; her sister Alice wrote. And Mr. Manning called.
Her sister Alice seemed to have developed a religious sense away there in Yorkshire, and made appeals that had no meaning for Ann Veronica’s mind. She exhorted Ann Veronica not to become one of “those unsexed intellectuals, neither man nor woman.”
Ann Veronica meditated over that phrase. “That’s HIM,” said Ann Veronica, in sound, idiomatic English. “Poor old Alice!”
Her brother Roddy came to her and demanded tea, and asked her to state a case. “Bit thick on the old man, isn’t it?” said Roddy, who had developed a bluff, straightforward style in the motor shop.
“Mind my smoking?” said Roddy. “I don’t see quite what your game is, Vee, but I suppose you’ve got a game on somewhere.
“Rummy lot we are!” said Roddy. “Alice—Alice gone dotty, and all over kids. Gwen—I saw Gwen the other day, and the paint’s thicker than ever. Jim is up to the neck in Mahatmas and Theosophy and Higher Thought and rot—writes letters worse than Alice. And now YOU’RE on the war-path. I believe I’m the only sane member of the family left. The G.V.‘s as mad as any of you, in spite of all his respectability; not a bit of him straight anywhere, not one bit.”
“Straight?”
“Not a bit of it! He’s been out after eight per cent. since the beginning. Eight per cent.! He’ll come a cropper one of these days, if you ask me. He’s been near it once or twice already. That’s got his nerves to rags. I suppose we’re all human beings really, but what price the sacred Institution of the Family! Us as a bundle! Eh? … I don’t half disagree with you, Vee, really; only thing is, I don’t see how you’re going to pull it off. A home MAY be a sort of cage, but still—it’s a home. Gives you a right to hang on to the old man until he busts—practically. Jolly hard life for a girl, getting a living. Not MY affair.”