Part 6
In the afternoon she resumed her search for apartments. The intoxicating
sense of novelty had given place to a more business-like mood. She
drifted northward from the Strand, and came on some queer and dingy
quarters.
She had never imagined life was half so sinister as it looked to her in
the beginning of these investigations. She found herself again in the
presence of some element in life about which she had been trained not
to think, about which she was perhaps instinctively indisposed to think;
something which jarred, in spite of all her mental resistance, with
all her preconceptions of a clean and courageous girl walking out from
Morningside Park as one walks out of a cell into a free and spacious
world. One or two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue
that she found hard to explain. “We don’t let to ladies,” they said.
She drifted, via Theobald’s Road, obliquely toward the region about
Titchfield Street. Such apartments as she saw were either scandalously
dirty or unaccountably dear, or both. And some were adorned with
engravings that struck her as being more vulgar and undesirable than
anything she had ever seen in her life. Ann Veronica loved beautiful
things, and the beauty of undraped loveliness not least among them; but
these were pictures that did but insist coarsely upon the roundness of
women’s bodies. The windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies,
their floors a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels
were of a class apart. After the first onset several of the women who
had apartments to let said she would not do for them, and in effect
dismissed her. This also struck her as odd.
About many of these houses hung a mysterious taint as of something
weakly and commonly and dustily evil; the women who negotiated the rooms
looked out through a friendly manner as though it was a mask, with hard,
defiant eyes. Then one old crone, short-sighted and shaky-handed, called
Ann Veronica “dearie,” and made some remark, obscure and slangy, of
which the spirit rather than the words penetrated to her understanding.
For a time she looked at no more apartments, and walked through
gaunt and ill-cleaned streets, through the sordid under side of life,
perplexed and troubled, ashamed of her previous obtuseness.
She had something of the feeling a Hindoo must experience who has been
into surroundings or touched something that offends his caste. She
passed people in the streets and regarded them with a quickening
apprehension, once or twice came girls dressed in slatternly finery,
going toward Regent Street from out these places. It did not occur to
her that they at least had found a way of earning a living, and had that
much economic superiority to herself. It did not occur to her that save
for some accidents of education and character they had souls like her
own.
For a time Ann Veronica went on her way gauging the quality of sordid
streets. At last, a little way to the northward of Euston Road, the
moral cloud seemed to lift, the moral atmosphere to change; clean blinds
appeared in the windows, clean doorsteps before the doors, a different
appeal in the neatly placed cards bearing the word
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| APARTMENTS |
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in the clear bright windows. At last in a street near the Hampstead Road
she hit upon a room that had an exceptional quality of space and order,
and a tall woman with a kindly face to show it. “You’re a student,
perhaps?” said the tall woman. “At the Tredgold Women’s College,” said
Ann Veronica. She felt it would save explanations if she did not state
she had left her home and was looking for employment. The room was
papered with green, large-patterned paper that was at worst a trifle
dingy, and the arm-chair and the seats of the other chairs were covered
with the unusual brightness of a large-patterned chintz, which also
supplied the window-curtain. There was a round table covered, not with
the usual “tapestry” cover, but with a plain green cloth that went
passably with the wall-paper. In the recess beside the fireplace
were some open bookshelves. The carpet was a quiet drugget and not
excessively worn, and the bed in the corner was covered by a white
quilt. There were neither texts nor rubbish on the walls, but only a
stirring version of Belshazzar’s feast, a steel engraving in the early
Victorian manner that had some satisfactory blacks. And the woman who
showed this room was tall, with an understanding eye and the quiet
manner of the well-trained servant.
Ann Veronica brought her luggage in a cab from the hotel; she tipped the
hotel porter sixpence and overpaid the cabman eighteenpence, unpacked
some of her books and possessions, and so made the room a little
homelike, and then sat down in a by no means uncomfortable arm-chair
before the fire. She had arranged for a supper of tea, a boiled egg, and
some tinned peaches. She had discussed the general question of supplies
with the helpful landlady. “And now,” said Ann Veronica surveying her
apartment with an unprecedented sense of proprietorship, “what is the
next step?”
She spent the evening in writing--it was a little difficult--to her
father and--which was easier--to the Widgetts. She was greatly heartened
by doing this. The necessity of defending herself and assuming a
confident and secure tone did much to dispell the sense of being
exposed and indefensible in a huge dingy world that abounded in sinister
possibilities. She addressed her letters, meditated on them for a time,
and then took them out and posted them. Afterward she wanted to get her
letter to her father back in order to read it over again, and, if it
tallied with her general impression of it, re-write it.
He would know her address to-morrow. She reflected upon that with a
thrill of terror that was also, somehow, in some faint remote way,
gleeful.
“Dear old Daddy,” she said, “he’ll make a fearful fuss. Well, it had to
happen somewhen.... Somehow. I wonder what he’ll say?”
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
EXPOSTULATIONS