Ann Veronica

H >> H. G. Wells >> Ann Veronica


Two secretarial posts did indeed seem to offer themselves in which, at
least, there was no specific exclusion of womanhood; one was under
a Radical Member of Parliament, and the other under a Harley Street
doctor, and both men declined her proffered services with the utmost
civility and admiration and terror. There was also a curious interview
at a big hotel with a middle-aged, white-powdered woman, all covered
with jewels and reeking of scent, who wanted a Companion. She did not
think Ann Veronica would do as her companion.

And nearly all these things were fearfully ill-paid. They carried no
more than bare subsistence wages; and they demanded all her time and
energy. She had heard of women journalists, women writers, and so
forth; but she was not even admitted to the presence of the editors she
demanded to see, and by no means sure that if she had been she could
have done any work they might have given her. One day she desisted from
her search and went unexpectedly to the Tredgold College. Her place
was not filled; she had been simply noted as absent, and she did a
comforting day of admirable dissection upon the tortoise. She was so
interested, and this was such a relief from the trudging anxiety of her
search for work, that she went on for a whole week as if she was still
living at home. Then a third secretarial opening occurred and renewed
her hopes again: a position as amanuensis--with which some of the
lighter duties of a nurse were combined--to an infirm gentleman of means
living at Twickenham, and engaged upon a great literary research to
prove that the "Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular
chemistry written in a peculiar and picturesquely handled cipher.



Part 2


Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings in the industrial
sea, and measuring herself against the world as it is, she was also
making extensive explorations among the ideas and attitudes of a number
of human beings who seemed to be largely concerned with the world as it
ought to be. She was drawn first by Miss Miniver, and then by her own
natural interest, into a curious stratum of people who are busied with
dreams of world progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a New Age
that is to replace all the stresses and disorders of contemporary life.

Miss Miniver learned of her flight and got her address from the
Widgetts. She arrived about nine o'clock the next evening in a state of
tremulous enthusiasm. She followed the landlady half way up-stairs, and
called up to Ann Veronica, "May I come up? It's me! You know--Nettie
Miniver!" She appeared before Ann Veronica could clearly recall who
Nettie Miniver might be.

There was a wild light in her eye, and her straight hair was out
demonstrating and suffragetting upon some independent notions of its
own. Her fingers were bursting through her gloves, as if to get at once
into touch with Ann Veronica. "You're Glorious!" said Miss Miniver in
tones of rapture, holding a hand in each of hers and peering up into Ann
Veronica's face. "Glorious! You're so calm, dear, and so resolute, so
serene!

"It's girls like you who will show them what We are," said Miss Miniver;
"girls whose spirits have not been broken!"

Ann Veronica sunned herself a little in this warmth.

"I was watching you at Morningside Park, dear," said Miss Miniver. "I am
getting to watch all women. I thought then perhaps you didn't care, that
you were like so many of them. NOW it's just as though you had grown up
suddenly."

She stopped, and then suggested: "I wonder--I should love--if it was
anything _I_ said."

She did not wait for Ann Veronica's reply. She seemed to assume that it
must certainly be something she had said. "They all catch on," she said.
"It spreads like wildfire. This is such a grand time! Such a glorious
time! There never was such a time as this! Everything seems so close to
fruition, so coming on and leading on! The Insurrection of Women! They
spring up everywhere. Tell me all that happened, one sister-woman to
another."

She chilled Ann Veronica a little by that last phrase, and yet the
magnetism of her fellowship and enthusiasm was very strong; and it was
pleasant to be made out a heroine after so much expostulation and so
many secret doubts.

But she did not listen long; she wanted to talk. She sat, crouched
together, by the corner of the hearthrug under the bookcase that
supported the pig's skull, and looked into the fire and up at Ann
Veronica's face, and let herself go. "Let us put the lamp out," she
said; "the flames are ever so much better for talking," and Ann Veronica
agreed. "You are coming right out into life--facing it all."

Ann Veronica sat with her chin on her hand, red-lit and saying little,
and Miss Miniver discoursed. As she talked, the drift and significance
of what she was saying shaped itself slowly to Ann Veronica's
apprehension. It presented itself in the likeness of a great, gray, dull
world--a brutal, superstitious, confused, and wrong-headed world,
that hurt people and limited people unaccountably. In remote times and
countries its evil tendencies had expressed themselves in the form of
tyrannies, massacres, wars, and what not; but just at present in England
they shaped as commercialism and competition, silk hats, suburban
morals, the sweating system, and the subjection of women. So far the
thing was acceptable enough. But over against the world Miss Miniver
assembled a small but energetic minority, the Children of Light--people
she described as "being in the van," or "altogether in the van," about
whom Ann Veronica's mind was disposed to be more sceptical.

Everything, Miss Miniver said, was "working up," everything was "coming
on"--the Higher Thought, the Simple Life, Socialism, Humanitarianism, it
was all the same really. She loved to be there, taking part in it all,
breathing it, being it. Hitherto in the world's history there had been
precursors of this Progress at great intervals, voices that had spoken
and ceased, but now it was all coming on together in a rush. She
mentioned, with familiar respect, Christ and Buddha and Shelley and
Nietzsche and Plato. Pioneers all of them. Such names shone brightly in
the darkness, with black spaces of unilluminated emptiness about them,
as stars shine in the night; but now--now it was different; now it was
dawn--the real dawn.

"The women are taking it up," said Miss Miniver; "the women and the
common people, all pressing forward, all roused."

Ann Veronica listened with her eyes on the fire.

"Everybody is taking it up," said Miss Miniver. "YOU had to come in. You
couldn't help it. Something drew you. Something draws everybody. From
suburbs, from country towns--everywhere. I see all the Movements. As
far as I can, I belong to them all. I keep my finger on the pulse of
things."

Ann Veronica said nothing.

"The dawn!" said Miss Miniver, with her glasses reflecting the fire like
pools of blood-red flame.

"I came to London," said Ann Veronica, "rather because of my own
difficulty. I don't know that I understand altogether."

"Of course you don't," said Miss Miniver, gesticulating triumphantly
with her thin hand and thinner wrist, and patting Ann Veronica's knee.
"Of course you don't. That's the wonder of it. But you will, you
will. You must let me take you to things--to meetings and things, to
conferences and talks. Then you will begin to see. You will begin to see
it all opening out. I am up to the ears in it all--every moment I can
spare. I throw up work--everything! I just teach in one school, one good
school, three days a week. All the rest--Movements! I can live now on
fourpence a day. Think how free that leaves me to follow things up! I
must take you everywhere. I must take you to the Suffrage people, and
the Tolstoyans, and the Fabians."

"I have heard of the Fabians," said Ann Veronica.

"It's THE Society!" said Miss Miniver. "It's the centre of the
intellectuals. Some of the meetings are wonderful! Such earnest,
beautiful women! Such deep-browed men!... And to think that there
they are making history! There they are putting together the plans of a
new world. Almos light-heartedly. There is Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins
the author, and Toomer, and Doctor Tumpany--the most wonderful people!
There you see them discussing, deciding, planning! Just think--THEY ARE
MAKING A NEW WORLD!"

"But ARE these people going to alter everything?" said Ann Veronica.

"What else can happen?" asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak gesture
at the glow. "What else can possibly happen--as things are going now?"



Part 3


Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar levels of the world
with so enthusiastic a generosity that it seemed ingratitude to remain
critical. Indeed, almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to
the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of the people "in the
van." The shock of their intellectual attitude was over, usage robbed
it of the first quaint effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many
respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the
paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct
relation to that rightness, absurd.

Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the Goopes. The Goopes were
the oddest little couple conceivable, following a fruitarian career upon
an upper floor in Theobald's Road. They were childless and servantless,
and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr.
Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited
schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian
cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis,
and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of
a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had
mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed
simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas sacking tied with brown
ribbons, while his wife wore a purple djibbah with a richly
embroidered yoke. He was a small, dark, reserved man, with a large
inflexible-looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink and
high-spirited, with one of those chins that pass insensibly into a full,
strong neck. Once a week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering
from nine till the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and
fruitarian refreshments--chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut tose,
and so forth--and lemonade and unfermented wine; and to one of these
symposia Miss Miniver after a good deal of preliminary solicitude,
conducted Ann Veronica.

She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously for her taste, as
a girl who was standing out against her people, to a gathering that
consisted of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep
voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's inexperienced
eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy, blond young man with a
narrow forehead and glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts
and blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr.
and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone.
These were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned
fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood inscription:

"DO IT NOW."

And to them were presently added a roguish-looking young man, with
reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy tweed suit, and others who,
in Ann Veronica's memory, in spite of her efforts to recall details,
remained obstinately just "others."

The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant in form even when
it ceased to be brilliant in substance. There were moments when Ann
Veronica rather more than suspected the chief speakers to be, as
school-boys say, showing off at her.

They talked of a new substitute for dripping in vegetarian cookery that
Mrs. Goopes was convinced exercised an exceptionally purifying influence
on the mind. And then they talked of Anarchism and Socialism, and
whether the former was the exact opposite of the latter or only a higher
form. The reddish-haired young man contributed allusions to the Hegelian
philosophy that momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alderman
Dunstable, who had hitherto been silent, broke out into speech and went
off at a tangent, and gave his personal impressions of quite a number
of his fellow-councillors. He continued to do this for the rest of the
evening intermittently, in and out, among other topics. He addressed
himself chiefly to Goopes, and spoke as if in reply to long-sustained
inquiries on the part of Goopes into the personnel of the Marylebone
Borough Council. "If you were to ask me," he would say, "I should say
Blinders is straight. An ordinary type, of course--"

Mrs. Dunstable's contributions to the conversation were entirely in the
form of nods; whenever Alderman Dunstable praised or blamed she nodded
twice or thrice, according to the requirements of his emphasis. And
she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann Veronica's dress. Mrs.
Goopes disconcerted the Alderman a little by abruptly challenging the
roguish-looking young man in the orange tie (who, it seemed, was the
assistant editor of New Ideas) upon a critique of Nietzsche and Tolstoy
that had appeared in his paper, in which doubts had been cast upon the
perfect sincerity of the latter. Everybody seemed greatly concerned
about the sincerity of Tolstoy.

Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in Tolstoy's
sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter much any more, and she
appealed to Ann Veronica whether she did not feel the same; and Mr.
Goopes said that we must distinguish between sincerity and irony, which
was often indeed no more than sincerity at the sublimated level.

Alderman Dunstable said that sincerity was often a matter of
opportunity, and illustrated the point to the fair young man with an
anecdote about Blinders on the Dust Destructor Committee, during which
the young man in the orange tie succeeded in giving the whole discussion
a daring and erotic flavor by questioning whether any one could be
perfectly sincere in love.

Miss Miniver thought that there was no true sincerity except in love,
and appealed to Ann Veronica, but the young man in the orange tie went
on to declare that it was quite possible to be sincerely in love with
two people at the same time, although perhaps on different planes with
each individual, and deceiving them both. But that brought Mrs. Goopes
down on him with the lesson Titian teaches so beautifully in his "Sacred
and Profane Love," and became quite eloquent upon the impossibility of
any deception in the former.

Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alderman Dunstable, turning
back to the shy, blond young man and speaking in undertones of the
utmost clearness, gave a brief and confidential account of an unfounded
rumor of the bifurcation of the affections of Blinders that had led to a
situation of some unpleasantness upon the Borough Council.

The very old lady in the antimacassar touched Ann Veronica's arm
suddenly, and said, in a deep, arch voice:

"Talking of love again; spring again, love again. Oh! you young people!"

The young man with the orange tie, in spite of Sisyphus-like efforts
on the part of Goopes to get the topic on to a higher plane, displayed
great persistence in speculating upon the possible distribution of the
affections of highly developed modern types.

The old lady in the antimacassar said, abruptly, "Ah! you young people,
you young people, if you only knew!" and then laughed and then mused in
a marked manner; and the young man with the narrow forehead and glasses
cleared his throat and asked the young man in the orange tie whether he
believed that Platonic love was possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed
in nothing else, and with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a
little abruptly, and directed Goopes and the shy young man in the
handing of refreshments.

But the young man with the orange tie remained in his place, disputing
whether the body had not something or other which he called its
legitimate claims. And from that they came back by way of the Kreutzer
Sonata and Resurrection to Tolstoy again.

So the talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been a little reserved,
resorted presently to the Socratic method to restrain the young man with
the orange tie, and bent his forehead over him, and brought out at last
very clearly from him that the body was only illusion and everything
nothing but just spirit and molecules of thought. It became a sort of
duel at last between them, and all the others sat and listened--every
one, that is, except the Alderman, who had got the blond young man into
a corner by the green-stained dresser with the aluminum things, and was
sitting with his back to every one else, holding one hand over his mouth
for greater privacy, and telling him, with an accent of confidential
admission, in whispers of the chronic struggle between the natural
modesty and general inoffensiveness of the Borough Council and the
social evil in Marylebone.

So the talk went on, and presently they were criticising novelists, and
certain daring essays of Wilkins got their due share of attention,
and then they were discussing the future of the theatre. Ann Veronica
intervened a little in the novelist discussion with a defence of Esmond
and a denial that the Egoist was obscure, and when she spoke every one
else stopped talking and listened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard
Shaw ought to go into Parliament. And that brought them to vegetarianism
and teetotalism, and the young man in the orange tie and Mrs. Goopes
had a great set-to about the sincerity of Chesterton and Belloc that was
ended by Goopes showing signs of resuming the Socratic method.

And at last Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver came down the dark staircase
and out into the foggy spaces of the London squares, and crossed Russell
Square, Woburn Square, Gordon Square, making an oblique route to Ann
Veronica's lodging. They trudged along a little hungry, because of the
fruitarian refreshments, and mentally very active. And Miss Miniver fell
discussing whether Goopes or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Doctor Tumpany
or Wilkins the author had the more powerful and perfect mind in
existence at the present time. She was clear there were no other minds
like them in all the world.



Part 4


Then one evening Ann Veronica went with Miss Miniver into the back seats
of the gallery at Essex Hall, and heard and saw the giant leaders of the
Fabian Society who are re-making the world: Bernard Shaw and Toomer and
Doctor Tumpany and Wilkins the author, all displayed upon a platform.
The place was crowded, and the people about her were almost equally
made up of very good-looking and enthusiastic young people and a great
variety of Goopes-like types. In the discussion there was the oddest
mixture of things that were personal and petty with an idealist devotion
that was fine beyond dispute. In nearly every speech she heard was the
same implication of great and necessary changes in the world--changes
to be won by effort and sacrifice indeed, but surely to be won. And
afterward she saw a very much larger and more enthusiastic gathering,
a meeting of the advanced section of the woman movement in Caxton Hall,
where the same note of vast changes in progress sounded; and she went
to a soiree of the Dress Reform Association and visited a Food Reform
Exhibition, where imminent change was made even alarmingly visible.
The women's meeting was much more charged with emotional force than the
Socialists'. Ann Veronica was carried off her intellectual and critical
feet by it altogether, and applauded and uttered cries that subsequent
reflection failed to endorse. "I knew you would feel it," said Miss
Miniver, as they came away flushed and heated. "I knew you would begin
to see how it all falls into place together."

It did begin to fall into place together. She became more and more
alive, not so much to a system of ideas as to a big diffused
impulse toward change, to a great discontent with and criticism of
life as it is lived, to a clamorous confusion of ideas for
reconstruction--reconstruction of the methods of business, of economic
development, of the rules of property, of the status of children, of the
clothing and feeding and teaching of every one; she developed a quite
exaggerated consciousness of a multitude of people going about the
swarming spaces of London with their minds full, their talk and gestures
full, their very clothing charged with the suggestion of the urgency of
this pervasive project of alteration. Some indeed carried themselves,
dressed themselves even, rather as foreign visitors from the land
of "Looking Backward" and "News from Nowhere" than as the indigenous
Londoners they were. For the most part these were detached people: men
practising the plastic arts, young writers, young men in employment, a
very large proportion of girls and women--self-supporting women or girls
of the student class. They made a stratum into which Ann Veronica was
now plunged up to her neck; it had become her stratum.

None of the things they said and did were altogether new to Ann
Veronica, but now she got them massed and alive, instead of by glimpses
or in books--alive and articulate and insistent. The London backgrounds,
in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, against which these people went to
and fro, took on, by reason of their gray facades, their implacably
respectable windows and window-blinds, their reiterated unmeaning iron
railings, a stronger and stronger suggestion of the flavor of her father
at his most obdurate phase, and of all that she felt herself fighting
against.

She was already a little prepared by her discursive reading and
discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements," though
temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist and criticise
than embrace them. But the people among whom she was now thrown through
the social exertions of Miss Miniver and the Widgetts--for Teddy and
Hetty came up from Morningside Park and took her to an eighteen-penny
dinner in Soho and introduced her to some art students, who were also
Socialists, and so opened the way to an evening of meandering talk in a
studio--carried with them like an atmosphere this implication, not only
that the world was in some stupid and even obvious way WRONG, with which
indeed she was quite prepared to agree, but that it needed only a
few pioneers to behave as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately
"advanced," for the new order to achieve itself.

When ninety per cent. out of the ten or twelve people one meets in a
month not only say but feel and assume a thing, it is very hard not
to fall into the belief that the thing is so. Imperceptibly almost Ann
Veronica began to acquire the new attitude, even while her mind still
resisted the felted ideas that went with it. And Miss Miniver began to
sway her.

The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly, that
she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had
little more respect for consistency of statement than a washerwoman
has for wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at
their first encounter in Morningside Park, became at last with constant
association the secret of Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain
tires of resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently
active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it has already slain,
exposed and dissected and buried, it becomes less and less energetic to
repeat the operation. There must be something, one feels, in ideas that
achieve persistently a successful resurrection. What Miss Miniver would
have called the Higher Truth supervenes.

Yet through these talks, these meetings and conferences, these movements
and efforts, Ann Veronica, for all that she went with her friend, and
at times applauded with her enthusiastically, yet went nevertheless with
eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and fine eyebrows more and more
disposed to knit. She was with these movements--akin to them, she felt
it at times intensely--and yet something eluded her. Morningside Park
had been passive and defective; all this rushed about and was active,
but it was still defective. It still failed in something. It did seem
germane to the matter that so many of the people "in the van" were plain
people, or faded people, or tired-looking people. It did affect the
business that they all argued badly and were egotistical in their
manners and inconsistent in their phrases. There were moments when she
doubted whether the whole mass of movements and societies and gatherings
and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle of failure protecting
itself from abjection by the glamour of its own assertions. It happened
that at the extremest point of Ann Veronica's social circle from the
Widgetts was the family of the Morningside Park horse-dealer, a company
of extremely dressy and hilarious young women, with one equestrian
brother addicted to fancy waistcoats, cigars, and facial spots. These
girls wore hats at remarkable angles and bows to startle and kill; they
liked to be right on the spot every time and up to everything that
was it from the very beginning and they rendered their conception of
Socialists and all reformers by the words "positively frightening"
and "weird." Well, it was beyond dispute that these words did convey
a certain quality of the Movements in general amid which Miss Miniver
disported herself. They WERE weird. And yet for all that--