“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… .
“I suppose I should let go if I had.
“You know,” he went on, “this doesn’t seem to me to end anything.
I’m rather a persistent person. I’m the sort of dog, if you turn it out of the room it lies down on the mat at the door. I’m not a lovesick boy. I’m a man, and I know what I mean. It’s a tremendous blow, of course—but it doesn’t kill me. And the situation it makes!—the situation!”
Thus Manning, egotistical, inconsecutive, unreal. And Ann Veronica walked beside him, trying in vain to soften her heart to him by the thought of how she had illused him, and all the time, as her feet and mind grew weary together, rejoicing more and more that at the cost of this one interminable walk she escaped the prospect of—what was it?—“Ten thousand days, ten thousand nights” in his company. Whatever happened she need never return to that possibility.
“For me,” Manning went on, “this isn’t final. In a sense it alters nothing. I shall still wear your favor—even if it is a stolen and forbidden favor—in my casque… . I shall still believe in you. Trust you.”
He repeated several times that he would trust her, though it remained obscure just exactly where the trust came in.
“Look here,” he cried out of a silence, with a sudden flash of understanding, “did you mean to throw me over when you came out with me this afternoon?”
