Dim possibilities that she would not seem to look at even to herself gesticulated in the twilight background of her mind.
She leaped suddenly at a desperate resolution, and in one moment had made it into a new self. She flung aside every plan she had in life, every discretion. Of course, why not? She would be honest, anyhow!
She turned her eyes to Manning.
He was sitting back from the table now, with one arm over the back of his green chair and the other resting on the little table. He was smiling under his heavy mustache, and his head was a little on one side as he looked at her.
"And what was that dreadful confession you had to make?" he was saying. His quiet, kindly smile implied his serene disbelief in any confessible thing. Ann Veronica pushed aside a tea-cup and the vestiges of her strawberries and cream, and put her elbows before her on the table. "Mr. Manning," she said, "I HAVE a confession to make."
"I wish you would use my Christian name," he said.
She attended to that, and then dismissed it as unimportant.
Something in her voice and manner conveyed an effect of unwonted gravity to him. For the first time he seemed to wonder what it might be that she had to confess. His smile faded.
"I don't think our engagement can go on," she plunged, and felt exactly that loss of breath that comes with a dive into icy water.
"But, how," he said, sitting up astonished beyond measure, "not go on?"
"I have been thinking while you have been talking. You see—I didn't understand."
She stared hard at her finger-nails. "It is hard to express one's self, but I do want to be honest with you. When I promised to marry you I thought I could; I thought it was a possible arrangement. I did think it could be done. I admired your chivalry. I was grateful."
She paused.
"Go on," he said.
She moved her elbow nearer to him and spoke in a still lower tone. "I told you I did not love you."
"I know," said Manning, nodding gravely. "It was fine and brave of you."
"But there is something more."
She paused again.
"I—I am sorry—I didn't explain. These things are difficult. It wasn't clear to me that I had to explain.... I love some one else."
They remained looking at each other for three or four seconds. Then Manning flopped back in his chair and dropped his chin like a man shot. There was a long silence between them.
"My God!" he said at last, with tremendous feeling, and then again, "My God!"
Now that this thing was said her mind was clear and calm. She heard this standard expression of a strong soul wrung with a critical coldness that astonished herself. She realized dimly that there was no personal thing behind his cry, that countless myriads of Mannings had "My God!"-ed with an equal gusto at situations as flatly apprehended. This mitigated her remorse enormously. He rested his brow on his hand and conveyed magnificent tragedy by his pose.
"But why," he said in the gasping voice of one subduing an agony, and looked at her from under a pain-wrinkled brow, "why did you not tell me this before?"
"I didn't know—I thought I might be able to control myself."
"And you can't?"
"I don't think I ought to control myself."
"And I have been dreaming and thinking—"
"I am frightfully sorry...."
"But—This bolt from the blue! My God! Ann Veronica, you don't understand. This—this shatters a world!"
She tried to feel sorry, but her sense of his immense egotism was strong and clear.
He went on with intense urgency.
"Why did you ever let me love you? Why did you ever let me peep through the gates of Paradise? Oh! my God! I don't begin to feel and realize this yet. It seems to me just talk; it seems to me like the fancy of a dream. Tell me I haven't heard. This is a joke of yours." He made his voice very low and full, and looked closely into her face.
She twisted her fingers tightly. "It isn't a joke," she said. "I feel shabby and disgraced.... I ought never to have thought of it. Of you, I mean...."
He fell back in his chair with an expression of tremendous desolation. "My God!" he said again....
They became aware of the waitress standing over them with book and pencil ready for their bill. "Never mind the bill," said Manning tragically, standing up and thrusting a four-shilling piece into her hand, and turning a broad back on her astonishment. "Let us walk across the Park at least," he said to Ann Veronica. "Just at present my mind simply won't take hold of this at all.... I tell you—never mind the bill. Keep it! Keep it!"
Part 6
They walked a long way that afternoon. They crossed the Park to the westward, and then turned back and walked round the circle about the Royal Botanical Gardens and then southwardly toward Waterloo. They trudged and talked, and Manning struggled, as he said, to "get the hang of it all."
It was a long, meandering talk, stupid, shameful, and unavoidable. Ann Veronica was apologetic to the bottom of her soul. At the same time she was wildly exultant at the resolution she had taken, the end she had made to her blunder. She had only to get through this, to solace Manning as much as she could, to put such clumsy plasterings on his wounds as were possible, and then, anyhow, she would be free—free to put her fate to the test. She made a few protests, a few excuses for her action in accepting him, a few lame explanations, but he did not heed them or care for them. Then she realized that it was her business to let Manning talk and impose his own interpretations upon the situation so far as he was concerned. She did her best to do this. But about his unknown rival he was acutely curious.
He made her tell him the core of the difficulty.
"I cannot say who he is," said Ann Veronica, "but he is a married man.... No! I do not even know that he cares for me. It is no good going into that. Only I just want him. I just want him, and no one else will do. It is no good arguing about a thing like that."
"But you thought you could forget him."
"I suppose I must have thought so. I didn't understand. Now I do."
"By God!" said Manning, making the most of the word, "I suppose it's fate. Fate! You are so frank so splendid!
"I'm taking this calmly now," he said, almost as if he apologized, "because I'm a little stunned."
Then he asked, "Tell me! has this man, has he DARED to make love to you?"
Ann Veronica had a vicious moment. "I wish he had," she said.
"But—"
The long inconsecutive conversation by that time was getting on her nerves. "When one wants a thing more than anything else in the world," she said with outrageous frankness, "one naturally wishes one had it."
She shocked him by that. She shattered the edifice he was building up of himself as a devoted lover, waiting only his chance to win her from a hopeless and consuming passion.
"Mr. Manning," she said, "I warned you not to idealize me. Men ought not to idealize any woman. We aren't worth it. We've done nothing to deserve it. And it hampers us. You don't know the thoughts we have; the things we can do and say. You are a sisterless man; you have never heard the ordinary talk that goes on at a girls' boarding-school."
"Oh! but you ARE splendid and open and fearless! As if I couldn't allow! What are all these little things? Nothing! Nothing! You can't sully yourself. You can't! I tell you frankly you may break off your engagement to me—I shall hold myself still engaged to you, yours just the same. As for this infatuation—it's like some obsession, some magic thing laid upon you. It's not you—not a bit. It's a thing that's happened to you. It is like some accident. I don't care. In a sense I don't care. It makes no difference.... All the same, I wish I had that fellow by the throat! Just the virile, unregenerate man in me wishes that....