He asked questions and listened to her views for a time.
“I’d chuck this lark right off if I were you, Vee,” he said. “I’m five years older than you, and no end wiser, being a man. What you’re after is too risky. It’s a damned hard thing to do. It’s all very handsome starting out on your own, but it’s too damned hard. That’s my opinion, if you ask me. There’s nothing a girl can do that isn’t sweated to the bone. You square the G.V., and go home before you have to. That’s my advice. If you don’t eat humble-pie now you may live to fare worse later. I can’t help you a cent. Life’s hard enough nowadays for an unprotected male. Let alone a girl. You got to take the world as it is, and the only possible trade for a girl that isn’t sweated is to get hold of a man and make him do it for her. It’s no good flying out at that, Vee; I didn’t arrange it. It’s Providence. That’s how things are; that’s the order of the world. Like appendicitis. It isn’t pretty, but we’re made so. Rot, no doubt; but we can’t alter it. You go home and live on the G.V., and get some other man to live on as soon as possible. It isn’t sentiment but it’s horse sense. All this Woman-who-Diddery—no damn good. After all, old P.—Providence, I mean—HAS arranged it so that men will keep you, more or less. He made the universe on those lines. You’ve got to take what you can get.”
That was the quintessence of her brother Roddy.
He played variations on this theme for the better part of an hour.
“You go home,” he said, at parting; “you go home. It’s all very fine and all that, Vee, this freedom, but it isn’t going to work.
The world isn’t ready for girls to start out on their own yet; that’s the plain fact of the case. Babies and females have got to keep hold of somebody or go under—anyhow, for the next few generations. You go home and wait a century, Vee, and then try again. Then you may have a bit of a chance. Now you haven’t the ghost of one—not if you play the game fair.”
Part 6
It was remarkable to Ann Veronica how completely Mr. Manning, in his entirely different dialect, indorsed her brother Roddy’s view of things. He came along, he said, just to call, with large, loud apologies, radiantly kind and good. Miss Stanley, it was manifest, had given him Ann Veronica’s address. The kindly faced landlady had failed to catch his name, and said he was a tall, handsome gentleman with a great black mustache. Ann Veronica, with a sigh at the cost of hospitality, made a hasty negotiation for an extra tea and for a fire in the ground-floor apartment, and preened herself carefully for the interview. In the little apartment, under the gas chandelier, his inches and his stoop were certainly very effective. In the bad light he looked at once military and sentimental and studious, like one of Ouida’s guardsmen revised by Mr. Haldane and the London School of Economics and finished in the Keltic school.
“It’s unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley,” he said, shaking hands in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; “but you know you said we might be friends.”
“It’s dreadful for you to be here,” he said, indicating the yellow presence of the first fog of the year without, “but your aunt told me something of what had happened. It’s just like your Splendid Pride to do it. Quite!”
He sat in the arm-chair and took tea, and consumed several of the extra cakes which she had sent out for and talked to her and expressed himself, looking very earnestly at her with his deep-set eyes, and carefully avoiding any crumbs on his mustache the while. Ann Veronica sat firelit by her tea-tray with, quite unconsciously, the air of an expert hostess.
“But how is it all going to end?” said Mr. Manning.
“Your father, of course,” he said, “must come to realize just how Splendid you are! He doesn’t understand. I’ve seen him, and he doesn’t a bit understand. I didn’t understand before that letter. It makes me want to be just everything I CAN be to you. You’re like some splendid Princess in Exile in these Dreadful Dingy apartments!”
“I’m afraid I’m anything but a Princess when it comes to earning a salary,” said Ann Veronica. “But frankly, I mean to fight this through if I possibly can.”
“My God!” said Manning, in a stage-aside. “Earning a salary!”
“You’re like a Princess in Exile!” he repeated, overruling her. “You come into these sordid surroundings—you mustn’t mind my calling them sordid—and it makes them seem as though they didn’t matter… . I don’t think they do matter. I don’t think any surroundings could throw a shadow on you.”
Ann Veronica felt a slight embarrassment. “Won’t you have some more tea, Mr. Manning?” she asked.
“You know—,” said Mr. Manning, relinquishing his cup without answering her question, “when I hear you talk of earning a living, it’s as if I heard of an archangel going on the Stock Exchange—or Christ selling doves… . Forgive my daring. I couldn’t help the thought.”
“It’s a very good image,” said Ann Veronica.
“I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“But does it correspond with the facts of the case? You know, Mr. Manning, all this sort of thing is very well as sentiment, but does it correspond with the realities? Are women truly such angelic things and men so chivalrous? You men have, I know, meant to make us Queens and Goddesses, but in practice—well, look, for example, at the stream of girls one meets going to work of a morning, round-shouldered, cheap, and underfed! They aren’t queens, and no one is treating them as queens. And look, again, at the women one finds letting lodgings… . I was looking for rooms last week. It got on my nerves—the women I saw. Worse than any man. Everywhere I went and rapped at a door I found behind it another dreadful dingy woman—another fallen queen, I suppose—dingier than the last, dirty, you know, in grain. Their poor hands!”
“I know,” said Mr. Manning, with entirely suitable emotion.
“And think of the ordinary wives and mothers, with their anxiety, their limitations, their swarms of children!”
Mr. Manning displayed distress. He fended these things off from him with the rump of his fourth piece of cake. “I know that our social order is dreadful enough,” he said, “and sacrifices all that is best and most beautiful in life. I don’t defend it.”
“And besides, when it comes to the idea of queens,” Ann Veronica went on, “there’s twenty-one and a half million women to twenty million men. Suppose our proper place is a shrine. Still, that leaves over a million shrines short, not reckoning widows who re-marry. And more boys die than girls, so that the real disproportion among adults is even greater.”
“I know,” said Mr Manning, “I know these Dreadful Statistics. I know there’s a sort of right in your impatience at the slowness of Progress. But tell me one thing I don’t understand—tell me one thing: How can you help it by coming down into the battle and the mire? That’s the thing that concerns me.”
“Oh, I’m not trying to help it,” said Ann Veronica. “I’m only arguing against your position of what a woman should be, and trying to get it clear in my own mind. I’m in this apartment and looking for work because— Well, what else can I do, when my father practically locks me up?”
“I know,” said Mr. Manning, “I know. Don’t think I can’t sympathize and understand. Still, here we are in this dingy, foggy city. Ye gods! what a wilderness it is! Every one trying to get the better of every one, every one regardless of every one—it’s one of those days when every one bumps against you—every one pouring coal smoke into the air and making confusion worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and smelling, a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman at the corner coughing dreadfully—all the painful sights of a great city, and here you come into it to take your chances. It’s too valiant, Miss Stanley, too valiant altogether!”