Capes was an exceptionally fair man of two or three-and-thirty, so
ruddily blond that it was a mercy he had escaped light eyelashes, and
with a minor but by no means contemptible reputation of his own. He
talked at the blackboard in a pleasant, very slightly lisping voice with
a curious spontaneity, and was sometimes very clumsy in his exposition,
and sometimes very vivid. He dissected rather awkwardly and hurriedly,
but, on the whole, effectively, and drew with an impatient directness
that made up in significance what it lacked in precision. Across the
blackboard the colored chalks flew like flights of variously tinted
rockets as diagram after diagram flickered into being.
There happened that year to be an unusual proportion of girls and women
in the advanced laboratory, perhaps because the class as a whole was an
exceptionally small one. It numbered nine, and four of these were women
students. As a consequence of its small size, it was possible to get
along with the work on a much easier and more colloquial footing than
a larger class would have permitted. And a custom had grown up of a
general tea at four o'clock, under the auspices of a Miss Garvice, a
tall and graceful girl of distinguished intellectual incompetence, in
whom the hostess instinct seemed to be abnormally developed.
Capes would come to these teas; he evidently liked to come, and he
would appear in the doorway of the preparation-room, a pleasing note of
shyness in his manner, hovering for an invitation.
From the first, Ann Veronica found him an exceptionally interesting man.
To begin with, he struck her as being the most variable person she had
ever encountered. At times he was brilliant and masterful, talked round
and over every one, and would have been domineering if he had not
been extraordinarily kindly; at times he was almost monosyllabic, and
defeated Miss Garvice's most skilful attempts to draw him out. Sometimes
he was obviously irritable and uncomfortable and unfortunate in his
efforts to seem at ease. And sometimes he overflowed with a peculiarly
malignant wit that played, with devastating effect, upon any topics that
had the courage to face it. Ann Veronica's experiences of men had been
among more stable types—Teddy, who was always absurd; her father,
who was always authoritative and sentimental; Manning, who was always
Manning. And most of the others she had met had, she felt, the same
steadfastness. Goopes, she was sure was always high-browed and slow and
Socratic. And Ramage too—about Ramage there would always be that air of
avidity, that air of knowledge and inquiry, the mixture of things in his
talk that were rather good with things that were rather poor. But one
could not count with any confidence upon Capes.
The five men students were a mixed company. There was a very white-faced
youngster of eighteen who brushed back his hair exactly in Russell's
manner, and was disposed to be uncomfortably silent when he was
near her, and to whom she felt it was only Christian kindness to be
consistently pleasant; and a lax young man of five-and-twenty in navy
blue, who mingled Marx and Bebel with the more orthodox gods of the
biological pantheon. There was a short, red-faced, resolute youth who
inherited an authoritative attitude upon bacteriology from his father;
a Japanese student of unassuming manners who drew beautifully and had
an imperfect knowledge of English; and a dark, unwashed Scotchman
with complicated spectacles, who would come every morning as a sort of
volunteer supplementary demonstrator, look very closely at her work
and her, tell her that her dissections were "fairish," or "very fairish
indeed," or "high above the normal female standard," hover as if for
some outbreak of passionate gratitude and with admiring retrospects
that made the facetted spectacles gleam like diamonds, return to his own
place.
The women, Ann Veronica thought, were not quite so interesting as the
men. There were two school-mistresses, one of whom—Miss Klegg—might
have been a first cousin to Miss Miniver, she had so many Miniver
traits; there was a preoccupied girl whose name Ann Veronica never
learned, but who worked remarkably well; and Miss Garvice, who began
by attracting her very greatly—she moved so beautifully—and ended by
giving her the impression that moving beautifully was the beginning and
end of her being.
The next few weeks were a time of the very liveliest thought and growth
for Ann Veronica. The crowding impressions of the previous weeks seemed
to run together directly her mind left the chaotic search for employment
and came into touch again with a coherent and systematic development
of ideas. The advanced work at the Central Imperial College was in the
closest touch with living interests and current controversies; it drew
its illustrations and material from Russell's two great researches—upon
the relation of the brachiopods to the echinodermata, and upon the
secondary and tertiary mammalian and pseudo-mammalian factors in the
free larval forms of various marine organisms. Moreover, a vigorous fire
of mutual criticism was going on now between the Imperial College and
the Cambridge Mendelians and echoed in the lectures. From beginning to
end it was first-hand stuff.
But the influence of the science radiated far beyond its own special
field—beyond those beautiful but highly technical problems with which
we do not propose for a moment to trouble the naturally terrified
reader. Biology is an extraordinarily digestive science. It throws out a
number of broad experimental generalizations, and then sets out to
bring into harmony or relation with these an infinitely multifarious
collection of phenomena. The little streaks upon the germinating area
of an egg, the nervous movements of an impatient horse, the trick of
a calculating boy, the senses of a fish, the fungus at the root of a
garden flower, and the slime upon a sea-wet rock—ten thousand such
things bear their witness and are illuminated. And not only did these
tentacular generalizations gather all the facts of natural history and
comparative anatomy together, but they seemed always stretching out
further and further into a world of interests that lay altogether
outside their legitimate bounds.
It came to Ann Veronica one night after a long talk with Miss Miniver,
as a sudden remarkable thing, as a grotesque, novel aspect, that this
slowly elaborating biological scheme had something more than an academic
interest for herself. And not only so, but that it was after all, a more
systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions
that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the talk of the
West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the deep, the
bottomless discussions of the simple-life homes. It was the same Bios
whose nature and drift and ways and methods and aspects engaged
them all. And she, she in her own person too, was this eternal Bios,
beginning again its recurrent journey to selection and multiplication
and failure or survival.
But this was but a momentary gleam of personal application, and at this
time she followed it up no further.
And now Ann Veronica's evenings were also becoming very busy. She
pursued her interest in the Socialist movement and in the Suffragist
agitation in the company of Miss Miniver. They went to various central
and local Fabian gatherings, and to a number of suffrage meetings. Teddy
Widgett hovered on the fringe of all these gatherings, blinking at Ann
Veronica and occasionally making a wildly friendly dash at her, and
carrying her and Miss Miniver off to drink cocoa with a choice diversity
of other youthful and congenial Fabians after the meetings. Then Mr.
Manning loomed up ever and again into her world, full of a futile
solicitude, and almost always declaring she was splendid, splendid, and
wishing he could talk things out with her. Teas he contributed to the
commissariat of Ann Veronica's campaign—quite a number of teas. He
would get her to come to tea with him, usually in a pleasant tea-room
over a fruit-shop in Tottenham Court Road, and he would discuss his own
point of view and hint at a thousand devotions were she but to command
him. And he would express various artistic sensibilities and aesthetic
appreciations in carefully punctuated sentences and a large, clear
voice. At Christmas he gave her a set of a small edition of Meredith's
novels, very prettily bound in flexible leather, being guided in the
choice of an author, as he intimated, rather by her preferences than his
own.
There was something markedly and deliberately liberal-minded in his
manner in all their encounters. He conveyed not only his sense of the
extreme want of correctitude in their unsanctioned meetings, but also
that, so far as he was concerned, this irregularity mattered not at
all, that he had flung—and kept on flinging—such considerations to the
wind.
And, in addition, she was now seeing and talking to Ramage almost
weekly, on a theory which she took very gravely, that they were
exceptionally friends. He would ask her to come to dinner with him in
some little Italian or semi-Bohemian restaurant in the district toward
Soho, or in one of the more stylish and magnificent establishments about
Piccadilly Circus, and for the most part she did not care to refuse.
Nor, indeed, did she want to refuse. These dinners, from their lavish
display of ambiguous hors d'oeuvre to their skimpy ices in dishes of
frilled paper, with their Chianti flasks and Parmesan dishes and their
polyglot waiters and polyglot clientele, were very funny and bright;
and she really liked Ramage, and valued his help and advice. It was
interesting to see how different and characteristic his mode of approach
was to all sorts of questions that interested her, and it was amusing to
discover this other side to the life of a Morningside Park inhabitant.
She had thought that all Morningside Park householders came home before
seven at the latest, as her father usually did. Ramage talked always
about women or some woman's concern, and very much about Ann Veronica's
own outlook upon life. He was always drawing contrasts between a woman's
lot and a man's, and treating her as a wonderful new departure in this
comparison. Ann Veronica liked their relationship all the more because
it was an unusual one.
After these dinners they would have a walk, usually to the Thames
Embankment to see the two sweeps of river on either side of Waterloo
Bridge; and then they would part at Westminster Bridge, perhaps, and
he would go on to Waterloo. Once he suggested they should go to a
music-hall and see a wonderful new dancer, but Ann Veronica did not feel
she cared to see a new dancer. So, instead, they talked of dancing
and what it might mean in a human life. Ann Veronica thought it was
a spontaneous release of energy expressive of well-being, but Ramage
thought that by dancing, men, and such birds and animals as dance, come
to feel and think of their bodies.
This intercourse, which had been planned to warm Ann Veronica to a
familiar affection with Ramage, was certainly warming Ramage to a
constantly deepening interest in Ann Veronica. He felt that he was
getting on with her very slowly indeed, but he did not see how he could
get on faster. He had, he felt, to create certain ideas and vivify
certain curiosities and feelings in her. Until that was done a certain
experience of life assured him that a girl is a locked coldness against
a man's approach. She had all the fascination of being absolutely
perplexing in this respect. On the one hand, she seemed to think plainly
and simply, and would talk serenely and freely about topics that most
women have been trained either to avoid or conceal; and on the other she
was unconscious, or else she had an air of being unconscious—that was
the riddle—to all sorts of personal applications that almost any girl
or woman, one might have thought, would have made. He was always doing
his best to call her attention to the fact that he was a man of spirit
and quality and experience, and she a young and beautiful woman, and
that all sorts of constructions upon their relationship were possible,
trusting her to go on from that to the idea that all sorts of
relationships were possible. She responded with an unfaltering
appearance of insensibility, and never as a young and beautiful woman
conscious of sex; always in the character of an intelligent girl
student.
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.
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."