Ann Veronica

by H. G. Wells

  His perception of her personal beauty deepened and quickened with each encounter. Every now and then her general presence became radiantly dazzling in his eyes; she would appear in the street coming toward him, a surprise, so fine and smiling and welcoming was she, so expanded and illuminated and living, in contrast with his mere expectation. Or he would find something—a wave in her hair, a little line in the contour of her brow or neck, that made an exquisite discovery.

  He was beginning to think about her inordinately. He would sit in his inner office and compose conversations with her, penetrating, illuminating, and nearly conclusive—conversations that never proved to be of the slightest use at all with her when he met her face to face. And he began also at times to wake at night and think about her.

  He thought of her and himself, and no longer in that vein of incidental adventure in which he had begun. He thought, too, of the fretful invalid who lay in the next room to his, whose money had created his business and made his position in the world.

  "I've had most of the things I wanted," said Ramage, in the stillness of the night.

  Part 3

  For a time Ann Veronica's family had desisted from direct offers of a free pardon; they were evidently waiting for her resources to come to an end. Neither father, aunt, nor brothers made a sign, and then one afternoon in early February her aunt came up in a state between expostulation and dignified resentment, but obviously very anxious for Ann Veronica's welfare. "I had a dream in the night," she said. "I saw you in a sort of sloping, slippery place, holding on by your hands and slipping. You seemed to me to be slipping and slipping, and your face was white. It was really most vivid, most vivid! You seemed to be slipping and just going to tumble and holding on. It made me wake up, and there I lay thinking of you, spending your nights up here all alone, and no one to look after you. I wondered what you could be doing and what might be happening to you. I said to myself at once, 'Either this is a coincidence or the caper sauce.' But I made sure it was you. I felt I MUST do something anyhow, and up I came just as soon as I could to see you."

  She had spoken rather rapidly. "I can't help saying it," she said, with the quality of her voice altering, "but I do NOT think it is right for an unprotected girl to be in London alone as you are."

  "But I'm quite equal to taking care of myself, aunt."

  "It must be most uncomfortable here. It is most uncomfortable for every one concerned."

  She spoke with a certain asperity. She felt that Ann Veronica had duped her in that dream, and now that she had come up to London she might as well speak her mind.

  "No Christmas dinner," she said, "or anything nice! One doesn't even know what you are doing."

  "I'm going on working for my degree."

  "Why couldn't you do that at home?"

  "I'm working at the Imperial College. You see, aunt, it's the only possible way for me to get a good degree in my subjects, and father won't hear of it. There'd only be endless rows if I was at home. And how could I come home—when he locks me in rooms and all that?"

  "I do wish this wasn't going on," said Miss Stanley, after a pause. "I do wish you and your father could come to some agreement."

  Ann Veronica responded with conviction: "I wish so, too."

  "Can't we arrange something? Can't we make a sort of treaty?"

  "He wouldn't keep it. He would get very cross one evening and no one would dare to remind him of it."

  "How can you say such things?"

  "But he would!"

  "Still, it isn't your place to say so."

  "It prevents a treaty."

  "Couldn't I make a treaty?"

  Ann Veronica thought, and could not see any possible treaty that would leave it open for her to have quasi-surreptitious dinners with Ramage or go on walking round the London squares discussing Socialism with Miss Miniver toward the small hours. She had tasted freedom now, and so far she had not felt the need of protection. Still, there certainly was something in the idea of a treaty.

  "I don't see at all how you can be managing," said Miss Stanley, and Ann Veronica hastened to reply, "I do on very little." Her mind went back to that treaty.

  "And aren't there fees to pay at the Imperial College?" her aunt was saying—a disagreeable question.

  "There are a few fees."

  "Then how have you managed?"

  "Bother!" said Ann Veronica to herself, and tried not to look guilty. "I was able to borrow the money."

  "Borrow the money! But who lent you the money?"

  "A friend," said Ann Veronica.

  She felt herself getting into a corner. She sought hastily in her mind for a plausible answer to an obvious question that didn't come. Her aunt went off at a tangent. "But my dear Ann Veronica, you will be getting into debt!"

  Ann Veronica at once, and with a feeling of immense relief, took refuge in her dignity. "I think, aunt," she said, "you might trust to my self-respect to keep me out of that."

  For the moment her aunt could not think of any reply to this counterstroke, and Ann Veronica followed up her advantage by a sudden inquiry about her abandoned boots.

  But in the train going home her aunt reasoned it out.

  "If she is borrowing money," said Miss Stanley, "she MUST be getting into debt. It's all nonsense...."

  Part 4

  It was by imperceptible degrees that Capes became important in Ann Veronica's thoughts. But then he began to take steps, and, at last, strides to something more and more like predominance. She began by being interested in his demonstrations and his biological theory, then she was attracted by his character, and then, in a manner, she fell in love with his mind.

  One day they were at tea in the laboratory and a discussion sprang up about the question of women's suffrage. The movement was then in its earlier militant phases, and one of the women only, Miss Garvice, opposed it, though Ann Veronica was disposed to be lukewarm. But a man's opposition always inclined her to the suffrage side; she had a curious feeling of loyalty in seeing the more aggressive women through. Capes was irritatingly judicial in the matter, neither absurdly against, in which case one might have smashed him, or hopelessly undecided, but tepidly sceptical. Miss Klegg and the youngest girl made a vigorous attack on Miss Garvice, who had said she thought women lost something infinitely precious by mingling in the conflicts of life. The discussion wandered, and was punctuated with bread and butter. Capes was inclined to support Miss Klegg until Miss Garvice cornered him by quoting him against himself, and citing a recent paper in the Nineteenth Century, in which, following Atkinson, he had made a vigorous and damaging attack on Lester Ward's case for the primitive matriarchate and the predominant importance of the female throughout the animal kingdom.

  Ann Veronica was not aware of this literary side of her teacher; she had a little tinge of annoyance at Miss Garvice's advantage. Afterwards she hunted up the article in question, and it seemed to her quite delightfully written and argued. Capes had the gift of easy, unaffected writing, coupled with very clear and logical thinking, and to follow his written thought gave her the sensation of cutting things with a perfectly new, perfectly sharp knife. She found herself anxious to read more of him, and the next Wednesday she went to the British Museum and hunted first among the half-crown magazines for his essays and then through various scientific quarterlies for his research papers. The ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing, is apt to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was delighted to find the same easy and confident luminosity that distinguished his work for the general reader. She returned to these latter, and at the back of her mind, as she looked them over again, was a very distinct resolve to quote them after the manner of Miss Garvice at the very first opportunity.

  When she got home to her lodgings that evening she reflected with something like surprise upon her half-day's employment, and decided that it showed nothing more nor less than that Capes was a really very interesting person indeed.

  And then she fell into a musing
about Capes. She wondered why he was so distinctive, so unlike other men, and it never occurred to her for some time that this might be because she was falling in love with him.

  Part 5

  Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken down in her mind. All the influences about her worked with her own predisposition and against all the traditions of her home and upbringing to deal with the facts of life in an unabashed manner. Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own life was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one special case of, the problems of any woman's life, and that the problem of a woman's life is love.

  "A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself," Ramage had said; "a woman comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may give herself."

  She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated and spread tentacles of explanation through her brain. The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion. And all the talk of the Miniver people and the Widgett people seemed always to be like a ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love. "For seven years," said Ann Veronica, "I have been trying to keep myself from thinking about love....

  "I have been training myself to look askance at beautiful things."

  She gave herself permission now to look at this squarely. She made herself a private declaration of liberty. "This is mere nonsense, mere tongue-tied fear!" she said. "This is the slavery of the veiled life. I might as well be at Morningside Park. This business of love is the supreme affair in life, it is the woman's one event and crisis that makes up for all her other restrictions, and I cower—as we all cower—with a blushing and paralyzed mind until it overtakes me!...

  "I'll be hanged if I do."

  But she could not talk freely about love, she found, for all that manumission.

  Ramage seemed always fencing about the forbidden topic, probing for openings, and she wondered why she did not give him them. But something instinctive prevented that, and with the finest resolve not to be "silly" and prudish she found that whenever he became at all bold in this matter she became severely scientific and impersonal, almost entomological indeed, in her method; she killed every remark as he made it and pinned it out for examination. In the biological laboratory that was their invincible tone. But she disapproved more and more of her own mental austerity. Here was an experienced man of the world, her friend, who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic and was willing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why should not she be at her ease with him? Why should not she know things? It is hard enough anyhow for a human being to learn, she decided, but it is a dozen times more difficult than it need be because of all this locking of the lips and thoughts.

  She contrived to break down the barriers of shyness at last in one direction, and talked one night of love and the facts of love with Miss Miniver.

  But Miss Miniver was highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs. Goopes's: "Advanced people," she said, with an air of great elucidation, "tend to GENERALIZE love. 'He prayeth best who loveth best—all things both great and small.' For my own part I go about loving."

  "Yes, but men;" said Ann Veronica, plunging; "don't you want the love of men?"

  For some seconds they remained silent, both shocked by this question.

  Miss Miniver looked over her glasses at her friend almost balefully. "NO!" she said, at last, with something in her voice that reminded Ann Veronica of a sprung tennis-racket.

  "I've been through all that," she went on, after a pause.

  She spoke slowly. "I have never yet met a man whose intellect I could respect."

  Ann Veronica looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and decided to persist on principle.

  "But if you had?" she said.

  "I can't imagine it," said Miss Miniver. "And think, think"—her voice sank—"of the horrible coarseness!"

  "What coarseness?" said Ann Veronica.

  "My dear Vee!" Her voice became very low. "Don't you know?"

  "Oh! I know—"

  "Well—" Her face was an unaccustomed pink.

  Ann Veronica ignored her friend's confusion.

  "Don't we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I mean," said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt. "We pretend bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the world. We pretend we never think of everything that makes us what we are."

  "No," cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. "You are wrong! I did not think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him"—her voice dropped again—"platonically."

  She made her glasses glint. "Absolutely platonically," she said.

  "Soul to soul."

  She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her elbows, and drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. "Ugh!" she said.

  Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.

  "We do not want the men," said Miss Miniver; "we do not want them, with their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes! They are the brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a way to do without them. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of creature needs—these males. Some have no males."

  "There's green-fly," admitted Ann Veronica. "And even then—"

  The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.

  Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. "I wonder which of us is right," she said. "I haven't a scrap—of this sort of aversion."

  "Tolstoy is so good about this," said Miss Miniver, regardless of her friend's attitude. "He sees through it all. The Higher Life and the Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by—by bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in anger and fermented drinks—fancy! drinks that have been swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horrible little bacteria!"

  "It's yeast," said Ann Veronica—"a vegetable."

  "It's all the same," said Miss Miniver. "And then they are swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine and subtle things—they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish and lustful."

  "But do you really think men's minds are altered by the food they eat?"

  "I know it," said Miss Miniver. "Experte credo. When I am leading a true life, a pure and simple life free of all stimulants and excitements, I think—I think—oh! with pellucid clearness; but if I so much as take a mouthful of meat—or anything—the mirror is all blurred."

  Part 6

  Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a craving in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty.

  It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. Her mind turned and accused itself of having been cold and hard. She began to look for beauty and discover it in unexpected aspects and places. Hitherto she had seen it chiefly in pictures and other works of art, incidentally, and as a thing taken out of life. Now the sense of beauty was spreading to a multitude of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the world about her.

  The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her biological work. She found herself asking more and more curiously, "Why, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on thinking about beauty when it seemed to her right that she should be thinking about biology.

  She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values—the two series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the one hand and her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She could not make up her mind which was the finer, more elemental thing, which g
ave its values to the other. Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? She went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully and clearly, and he talked well—he always talked at some length when she took a difficulty to him—and sent her to a various literature upon the markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds' plumes, the patterning of tigers, and a leopard's spots. He was interesting and inconclusive, and the original papers to which he referred her discursive were at best only suggestive. Afterward, one afternoon, he hovered about her, and came and sat beside her and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty for some time. He displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in the matter. He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were, so to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their talk drifted to the beauty of music, and they took that up again at tea-time.