Part 4

But presently, as she sat on the one antimacassared red silk chair

and surveyed her hold-all and bag in that tidy, rather vacant, and

dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe and desert toilet-table

and pictureless walls and stereotyped furnishings, a sudden blankness

came upon her as though she didn’t matter, and had been thrust away into

this impersonal corner, she and her gear....

She decided to go out into the London afternoon again and get something

to eat in an Aerated Bread shop or some such place, and perhaps find a

cheap room for herself. Of course that was what she had to do; she had

to find a cheap room for herself and work!

This Room No. 47 was no more than a sort of railway compartment on the

way to that.

How does one get work?

She walked along the Strand and across Trafalgar Square, and by the

Haymarket to Piccadilly, and so through dignified squares and palatial

alleys to Oxford Street; and her mind was divided between a speculative

treatment of employment on the one hand, and breezes--zephyr breezes--of

the keenest appreciation for London, on the other. The jolly part of it

was that for the first time in her life so far as London was concerned,

she was not going anywhere in particular; for the first time in her life

it seemed to her she was taking London in.

She tried to think how people get work. Ought she to walk into some

of these places and tell them what she could do? She hesitated at the

window of a shipping-office in Cockspur Street and at the Army and

Navy Stores, but decided that perhaps there would be some special and

customary hour, and that it would be better for her to find this out

before she made her attempt. And, besides, she didn’t just immediately

want to make her attempt.

She fell into a pleasant dream of positions and work. Behind every one

of these myriad fronts she passed there must be a career or careers. Her

ideas of women’s employment and a modern woman’s pose in life were based

largely on the figure of Vivie Warren in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. She

had seen Mrs. Warren’s Profession furtively with Hetty Widgett from the

gallery of a Stage Society performance one Monday afternoon. Most of

it had been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that

checked further curiosity, but the figure of Vivien, hard, capable,

successful, and bullying, and ordering about a veritable Teddy in the

person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She saw herself in very much

Vivie’s position--managing something.

Her thoughts were deflected from Vivie Warren by the peculiar behavior

of a middle-aged gentleman in Piccadilly. He appeared suddenly from

the infinite in the neighborhood of the Burlington Arcade, crossing

the pavement toward her and with his eyes upon her. He seemed to her

indistinguishably about her father’s age. He wore a silk hat a little

tilted, and a morning coat buttoned round a tight, contained figure;

and a white slip gave a finish to his costume and endorsed the quiet

distinction of his tie. His face was a little flushed perhaps, and his

small, brown eyes were bright. He stopped on the curb-stone, not facing

her but as if he was on his way to cross the road, and spoke to her

suddenly over his shoulder.

“Whither away?” he said, very distinctly in a curiously wheedling voice.

Ann Veronica stared at his foolish, propitiatory smile, his hungry gaze,

through one moment of amazement, then stepped aside and went on her way

with a quickened step. But her mind was ruffled, and its mirror-like

surface of satisfaction was not easily restored.

Queer old gentleman!

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred

girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own

thoughts and her own knowledge. Ann Veronica could at the same time ask

herself what this queer old gentleman could have meant by speaking to

her, and know--know in general terms, at least--what that accosting

signified. About her, as she had gone day by day to and from the

Tredgold College, she had seen and not seen many an incidental aspect

of those sides of life about which girls are expected to know nothing,

aspects that were extraordinarily relevant to her own position and

outlook on the world, and yet by convention ineffably remote. For all

that she was of exceptional intellectual enterprise, she had never

yet considered these things with unaverted eyes. She had viewed them

askance, and without exchanging ideas with any one else in the world

about them.

She went on her way now no longer dreaming and appreciative, but

disturbed and unwillingly observant behind her mask of serene

contentment.

That delightful sense of free, unembarrassed movement was gone.

As she neared the bottom of the dip in Piccadilly she saw a woman

approaching her from the opposite direction--a tall woman who at the

first glance seemed altogether beautiful and fine. She came along with

the fluttering assurance of some tall ship. Then as she drew nearer

paint showed upon her face, and a harsh purpose behind the quiet

expression of her open countenance, and a sort of unreality in her

splendor betrayed itself for which Ann Veronica could not recall the

right word--a word, half understood, that lurked and hid in her mind,

the word “meretricious.” Behind this woman and a little to the side

of her, walked a man smartly dressed, with desire and appraisal in his

eyes. Something insisted that those two were mysteriously linked--that

the woman knew the man was there.

It was a second reminder that against her claim to go free and

untrammelled there was a case to be made, that after all it was true

that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has

gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and

petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.

It was in the quiet streets and squares toward Oxford Street that

it first came into her head disagreeably that she herself was being

followed. She observed a man walking on the opposite side of the way and

looking toward her.

“Bother it all!” she swore. “Bother!” and decided that this was not so,

and would not look to right or left again.

Beyond the Circus Ann Veronica went into a British Tea-Table Company

shop to get some tea. And as she was yet waiting for her tea to come she

saw this man again. Either it was an unfortunate recovery of a trail, or

he had followed her from Mayfair. There was no mistaking his intentions

this time. He came down the shop looking for her quite obviously, and

took up a position on the other side against a mirror in which he was

able to regard her steadfastly.

Beneath the serene unconcern of Ann Veronica’s face was a boiling

tumult. She was furiously angry. She gazed with a quiet detachment

toward the window and the Oxford Street traffic, and in her heart she

was busy kicking this man to death. He HAD followed her! What had he

followed her for? He must have followed her all the way from beyond

Grosvenor Square.

He was a tall man and fair, with bluish eyes that were rather

protuberant, and long white hands of which he made a display. He had

removed his silk hat, and now sat looking at Ann Veronica over an

untouched cup of tea; he sat gloating upon her, trying to catch her eye.

Once, when he thought he had done so, he smiled an ingratiating smile.

He moved, after quiet intervals, with a quick little movement, and ever

and again stroked his small mustache and coughed a self-conscious cough.

“That he should be in the same world with me!” said Ann Veronica,

reduced to reading the list of good things the British Tea-Table Company

had priced for its patrons.

Heaven knows what dim and tawdry conceptions of passion and desire were

in that blond cranium, what romance-begotten dreams of intrigue and

adventure! but they sufficed, when presently Ann Veronica went out

into the darkling street again, to inspire a flitting, dogged pursuit,

idiotic, exasperating, indecent.

She had no idea what she should do. If she spoke to a policeman she did

not know what would ensue. Perhaps she would have to charge this man and

appear in a police-court next day.

She became angry with herself. She would not be driven in by this

persistent, sneaking aggression. She would ignore him. Surely she could

ignore him. She stopped abruptly, and looked in a flower-shop window. He

passed, and came loitering back and stood beside her, silently looking

into her face.

The afternoon had passed now into twilight. The shops were lighting

up into gigantic lanterns of color, the street lamps were glowing

into existence, and she had lost her way. She had lost her sense of

direction, and was among unfamiliar streets. She went on from street to

street, and all the glory of London had departed. Against the sinister,

the threatening, monstrous inhumanity of the limitless city, there was

nothing now but this supreme, ugly fact of a pursuit--the pursuit of the

undesired, persistent male.

For a second time Ann Veronica wanted to swear at the universe.

There were moments when she thought of turning upon this man and

talking to him. But there was something in his face at once stupid and

invincible that told her he would go on forcing himself upon her, that

he would esteem speech with her a great point gained. In the twilight

he had ceased to be a person one could tackle and shame; he had become

something more general, a something that crawled and sneaked toward her

and would not let her alone....

Then, when the tension was getting unendurable, and she was on the verge

of speaking to some casual passer-by and demanding help, her follower

vanished. For a time she could scarcely believe he was gone. He had. The

night had swallowed him up, but his work on her was done. She had lost

her nerve, and there was no more freedom in London for her that night.

She was glad to join in the stream of hurrying homeward workers that was

now welling out of a thousand places of employment, and to imitate their

driven, preoccupied haste. She had followed a bobbing white hat and gray

jacket until she reached the Euston Road corner of Tottenham Court Road,

and there, by the name on a bus and the cries of a conductor, she made

a guess of her way. And she did not merely affect to be driven--she felt

driven. She was afraid people would follow her, she was afraid of the

dark, open doorways she passed, and afraid of the blazes of light; she

was afraid to be alone, and she knew not what it was she feared.

It was past seven when she got back to her hotel. She thought then that

she had shaken off the man of the bulging blue eyes forever, but that

night she found he followed her into her dreams. He stalked her, he

stared at her, he craved her, he sidled slinking and propitiatory

and yet relentlessly toward her, until at last she awoke from the

suffocating nightmare nearness of his approach, and lay awake in fear

and horror listening to the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.

She came very near that night to resolving that she would return to

her home next morning. But the morning brought courage again, and those

first intimations of horror vanished completely from her mind.