Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
you come into it to take your chances. It’s too valiant, Miss Stanley,
too valiant altogether!”
Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days of employment-seeking now.
“I wonder if it is.”
“It isn’t,” said Mr. Manning, “that I mind Courage in a Woman--I love
and admire Courage. What could be more splendid than a beautiful girl
facing a great, glorious tiger? Una and the Lion again, and all that!
But this isn’t that sort of thing; this is just a great, ugly, endless
wilderness of selfish, sweating, vulgar competition!”
“That you want to keep me out of?”
“Exactly!” said Mr. Manning.
“In a sort of beautiful garden-close--wearing lovely dresses and picking
beautiful flowers?”
“Ah! If one could!”
“While those other girls trudge to business and those other women let
lodgings. And in reality even that magic garden-close resolves itself
into a villa at Morningside Park and my father being more and more
cross and overbearing at meals--and a general feeling of insecurity and
futility.”
Mr. Manning relinquished his cup, and looked meaningly at Ann Veronica.
“There,” he said, “you don’t treat me fairly, Miss Stanley. My
garden-close would be a better thing than that.”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
IDEALS AND A REALITY
Part 1
And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her market value in the
world. She went about in a negligent November London that had become
very dark and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed, and tried to find
that modest but independent employment she had so rashly assumed. She
went about, intent-looking and self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing
her emotions whatever they were, as the realities of her position opened
out before her. Her little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she
went out from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray houses,
its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets of homes, its orange-lit
windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray or black, much as an
animal goes out to seek food. She would come back and write letters,
carefully planned and written letters, or read some book she had fetched
from Mudie’s--she had invested a half-guinea with Mudie’s--or sit over
her fire and think.
Slowly and reluctantly she came to realize that Vivie Warren was what
is called an “ideal.” There were no such girls and no such positions. No
work that offered was at all of the quality she had vaguely postulated
for herself. With such qualifications as she possessed, two chief
channels of employment lay open, and neither attracted her, neither
seemed really to offer a conclusive escape from that subjection to
mankind against which, in the person of her father, she was rebelling.
One main avenue was for her to become a sort of salaried accessory wife
or mother, to be a governess or an assistant schoolmistress, or a very
high type of governess-nurse. The other was to go into business--into a
photographer’s reception-room, for example, or a costumer’s or hat-shop.
The first set of occupations seemed to her to be altogether too domestic
and restricted; for the latter she was dreadfully handicapped by her
want of experience. And also she didn’t like them. She didn’t like the
shops, she didn’t like the other women’s faces; she thought the
smirking men in frock-coats who dominated these establishments the
most intolerable persons she had ever had to face. One called her very
distinctly “My dear!”
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. Almost 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!”