H. Wells - Ann Veronica

"I hope," said Miss Stanley, with dignity, and turned doorward

with features in civil warfare. "Better state of mind," she

gasped. . . .

Ann Veronica stood in the twilight room staring at the door that

had slammed upon her aunt, her pocket-handkerchief rolled tightly

in her hand. Her soul was full of the sense of disaster. She

had made her first fight for dignity and freedom as a grown-up

and independent Person, and this was how the universe had treated

her. It had neither succumbed to her nor wrathfully overwhelmed

her. It had thrust her back with an undignified scuffle, with

vulgar comedy, with an unendurable, scornful grin.

"By God!" said Ann Veronica for the first time in her life. "But

I will! I will!"

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE FLIGHT TO LONDON

Part 1

Ann Veronica had an impression that she did not sleep at all that

night, and at any rate she got through an immense amount of

feverish feeling and thinking.

What was she going to do?

One main idea possessed her: she must get away from home, she

must assert herself at once or perish. "Very well," she would

say, "then I must go." To remain, she felt, was to concede

everything. And she would have to go to-morrow. It was clear it

must be to-morrow. If she delayed a day she would delay two

days, if she delayed two days she would delay a week, and after a

week things would be adjusted to submission forever. "I'll go,"

she vowed to the night, "or I'll die!" She made plans and

estimated means and resources. These and her general

preparations had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold

watch, a very good gold watch that had been her mother's, a pearl

necklace that was also pretty good, some unpretending rings, some

silver bangles and a few other such inferior trinkets, three

pounds thirteen shillings unspent of her dress and book allowance

and a few good salable books. So equipped, she proposed to set

up a separate establishment in the world.

And then she would find work.

For most of a long and fluctuating night she was fairly confident

that she would find work; she knew herself to be strong,

intelligent, and capable by the standards of most of the girls

she knew. She was not quite clear how she should find it, but

she felt she would. Then she would write and tell her father

what she had done, and put their relationship on a new footing.

That was how she projected it, and in general terms it seemed

plausible and possible. But in between these wider phases of

comparative confidence were gaps of disconcerting doubt, when the

universe was presented as making sinister and threatening faces

at her, defying her to defy, preparing a humiliating and shameful

overthrow. "I don't care," said Ann Veronica to the darkness;

"I'll fight it."

She tried to plan her proceedings in detail. The only

difficulties that presented themselves clearly to her were the

difficulties of getting away from Morningside Park, and not the

difficulties at the other end of the journey. These were so

outside her experience that she found it possible to thrust them

almost out of sight by saying they would be "all right" in

confident tones to herself. But still she knew they were not

right, and at times they became a horrible obsession as of

something waiting for her round the corner. She tried to imagine

herself "getting something," to project herself as sitting down

at a desk and writing, or as returning after her work to some

pleasantly equipped and free and independent flat. For a time

she furnished the flat. But even with that furniture it remained

extremely vague, the possible good and the possible evil as well!

The possible evil! "I'll go," said Ann Veronica for the

hundredth time. "I'll go. I don't care WHAT happens."

She awoke out of a doze, as though she had never been sleeping.

It was time to get up.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked about her, at her room,

at the row of black-covered books and the pig's skull. "I must

take them," she said, to help herself over her own incredulity.

"How shall I get my luggage out of the house? . . ."

The figure of her aunt, a little distant, a little propitiatory,

behind the coffee things, filled her with a sense of almost

catastrophic adventure. Perhaps she might never come back to

that breakfast-room again. Never! Perhaps some day, quite soon,

she might regret that breakfast-room. She helped herself to the

remainder of the slightly congealed bacon, and reverted to the

problem of getting her luggage out of the house. She decided to

call in the help of Teddy Widgett, or, failing him, of one of his

sisters.

Part 2

She found the younger generation of the Widgetts engaged in

languid reminiscences, and all, as they expressed it, a "bit

decayed." Every one became tremendously animated when they heard

that Ann Veronica had failed them because she had been, as she

expressed it, "locked in."

"My God!" said Teddy, more impressively than ever.

"But what are you going to do?" asked Hetty.

"What can one do?" asked Ann Veronica. "Would you stand it? I'm

going to clear out."

"Clear out?" cried Hetty.

"Go to London," said Ann Veronica.

She had expected sympathetic admiration, but instead the whole

Widgett family, except Teddy, expressed a common dismay. "But

how can you?" asked Constance. "Who will you stop with?"

"I shall go on my own. Take a room!"

"I say!" said Constance. "But who's going to pay for the room?"

"I've got money," said Ann Veronica. "Anything is better than

this--this stifled life down here." And seeing that Hetty and

Constance were obviously developing objections, she plunged at

once into a demand for help. "I've got nothing in the world to

pack with except a toy size portmanteau. Can you lend me some

stuff?"

"You ARE a chap!" said Constance, and warmed only slowly from the

idea of dissuasion to the idea of help. But they did what they

could for her. They agreed to lend her their hold-all and a

large, formless bag which they called the communal trunk. And

Teddy declared himself ready to go to the ends of the earth for

her, and carry her luggage all the way.

Hetty, looking out of the window--she always smoked her

after-breakfast cigarette at the window for the benefit of the

less advanced section of Morningside Park society--and trying not

to raise objections, saw Miss Stanley going down toward the

shops.

"If you must go on with it," said Hetty, "now's your time." And

Ann Veronica at once went back with the hold-all, trying not to

hurry indecently but to keep up her dignified air of being a

wronged person doing the right thing at a smart trot, to pack.

Teddy went round by the garden backs and dropped the bag over the

fence. All this was exciting and entertaining. Her aunt

returned before the packing was done, and Ann Veronica lunched

with an uneasy sense of bag and hold-all packed up-stairs and

inadequately hidden from chance intruders by the valance of the

bed. She went down, flushed and light-hearted, to the Widgetts'

after lunch to make some final arrangements and then, as soon as

her aunt had retired to lie down for her usual digestive hour,

took the risk of the servants having the enterprise to report her

proceedings and carried her bag and hold-all to the garden gate,

whence Teddy, in a state of ecstatic service, bore them to the