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—
It got into Ann Veronica's nights at last and kept her awake, the
perplexing contrast between the advanced thought and the advanced
thinker. The general propositions of Socialism, for example, struck her
as admirable, but she certainly did not extend her admiration to any
of its exponents. She was still more stirred by the idea of the equal
citizenship of men and women, by the realization that a big and growing
organization of women were giving form and a generalized expression
to just that personal pride, that aspiration for personal freedom and
respect which had brought her to London; but when she heard Miss Miniver
discoursing on the next step in the suffrage campaign, or read of women
badgering Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or getting up in a
public meeting to pipe out a demand for votes and be carried out kicking
and screaming, her soul revolted. She could not part with dignity.
Something as yet unformulated within her kept her estranged from all
these practical aspects of her beliefs.
"Not for these things, O Ann Veronica, have you revolted," it said; "and
this is not your appropriate purpose."
It was as if she faced a darkness in which was something very beautiful
and wonderful as yet unimagined. The little pucker in her brows became
more perceptible.
In the beginning of December Ann Veronica began to speculate privately
upon the procedure of pawning. She had decided that she would begin
with her pearl necklace. She spent a very disagreeable afternoon and
evening—it was raining fast outside, and she had very unwisely left
her soundest pair of boots in the boothole of her father's house in
Morningside Park—thinking over the economic situation and planning a
course of action. Her aunt had secretly sent on to Ann Veronica some new
warm underclothing, a dozen pairs of stockings, and her last winter's
jacket, but the dear lady had overlooked those boots.
These things illuminated her situation extremely. Finally she decided
upon a step that had always seemed reasonable to her, but that hitherto
she had, from motives too faint for her to formulate, refrained from
taking. She resolved to go into the City to Ramage and ask for his
advice. And next morning she attired herself with especial care and
neatness, found his address in the Directory at a post-office, and went
to him.
She had to wait some minutes in an outer office, wherein three young
men of spirited costume and appearance regarded her with ill-concealed
curiosity and admiration. Then Ramage appeared with effusion, and
ushered her into his inner apartment. The three young men exchanged
expressive glances.
The inner apartment was rather gracefully furnished with a thick, fine
Turkish carpet, a good brass fender, a fine old bureau, and on the walls
were engravings of two young girls' heads by Greuze, and of some modern
picture of boys bathing in a sunlit pool.
"But this is a surprise!" said Ramage. "This is wonderful! I've been
feeling that you had vanished from my world. Have you been away from
Morningside Park?"
"I'm not interrupting you?"
"You are. Splendidly. Business exists for such interruptions. There you
are, the best client's chair."
Ann Veronica sat down, and Ramage's eager eyes feasted on her.
"I've been looking out for you," he said. "I confess it."
She had not, she reflected, remembered how prominent his eyes were.
"I want some advice," said Ann Veronica.
"Yes?"
"You remember once, how we talked—at a gate on the Downs? We talked
about how a girl might get an independent living."
"Yes, yes."
"Well, you see, something has happened at home."
She paused.
"Nothing has happened to Mr. Stanley?"
"I've fallen out with my father. It was about—a question of what I
might do or might not do. He—In fact, he—he locked me in my room.
Practically."
Her breath left her for a moment.
"I SAY!" said Mr. Ramage.
"I wanted to go to an art-student ball of which he disapproved."
"And why shouldn't you?"
"I felt that sort of thing couldn't go on. So I packed up and came to
London next day."
"To a friend?"
"To lodgings—alone."
"I say, you know, you have some pluck. You did it on your own?"
Ann Veronica smiled. "Quite on my own," she said.
"It's magnificent!" He leaned back and regarded her with his head a
little on one side. "By Jove!" he said, "there is something direct about
you. I wonder if I should have locked you up if I'd been your father.
Luckily I'm not. And you started out forthwith to fight the world and be
a citizen on your own basis?" He came forward again and folded his hands
under him on his desk.
"How has the world taken it?" he asked. "If I was the world I think I
should have put down a crimson carpet, and asked you to say what you
wanted, and generally walk over me. But the world didn't do that."
"Not exactly."
"It presented a large impenetrable back, and went on thinking about
something else."
"It offered from fifteen to two-and-twenty shillings a week—for
drudgery."
"The world has no sense of what is due to youth and courage. It never
has had."
"Yes," said Ann Veronica. "But the thing is, I want a job."
"Exactly! And so you came along to me. And you see, I don't turn my
back, and I am looking at you and thinking about you from top to toe."
"And what do you think I ought to do?"
"Exactly!" He lifted a paper-weight and dabbed it gently down again.
"What ought you to do?"
"I've hunted up all sorts of things."
"The point to note is that fundamentally you don't want particularly to
do it."
"I don't understand."
"You want to be free and so forth, yes. But you don't particularly
want to do the job that sets you free—for its own sake. I mean that it
doesn't interest you in itself."
"I suppose not."
"That's one of our differences. We men are like children. We can get
absorbed in play, in games, in the business we do. That's really why
we do them sometimes rather well and get on. But women—women as a rule
don't throw themselves into things like that. As a matter of fact it
isn't their affair. And as a natural consequence, they don't do so well,
and they don't get on—and so the world doesn't pay them. They don't
catch on to discursive interests, you see, because they are more
serious, they are concentrated on the central reality of life, and a
little impatient of its—its outer aspects. At least that, I think, is
what makes a clever woman's independent career so much more difficult
than a clever man's."
"She doesn't develop a specialty." Ann Veronica was doing her best to
follow him.
"She has one, that's why. Her specialty is the central thing in life, it
is life itself, the warmth of life, sex—and love."
He pronounced this with an air of profound conviction and with his
eyes on Ann Veronica's face. He had an air of having told her a deep,
personal secret. She winced as he thrust the fact at her, was about to
answer, and checked herself. She colored faintly.
"That doesn't touch the question I asked you," she said. "It may be
true, but it isn't quite what I have in mind."
"Of course not," said Ramage, as one who rouses himself from deep
preoccupations And he began to question her in a business-like way upon
the steps she had taken and the inquiries she had made. He displayed
none of the airy optimism of their previous talk over the downland gate.
He was helpful, but gravely dubious. "You see," he said, "from my point
of view you're grown up—you're as old as all the goddesses and the
contemporary of any man alive. But from the—the economic point of view
you're a very young and altogether inexperienced person."
He returned to and developed that idea. "You're still," he said, "in the
educational years. From the point of view of most things in the world
of employment which a woman can do reasonably well and earn a living
by, you're unripe and half-educated. If you had taken your degree, for
example."
He spoke of secretarial work, but even there she would need to be able
to do typing and shorthand. He made it more and more evident to her that
her proper course was not to earn a salary but to accumulate equipment.
"You see," he said, "you are like an inaccessible gold-mine in all this
sort of matter. You're splendid stuff, you know, but you've got nothing
ready to sell. That's the flat business situation."