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?"
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.
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."