Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
“Suppose I chuck it,” she remarked, standing with the mauve slip in her
hand--“suppose I chuck it, and surrender and go home! Perhaps, after
all, Roddy was right!
“Father keeps opening the door and shutting it, but a time will come--
“I could still go home!”
She held Ramage’s check as if to tear it across. “No,” she said at last;
“I’m a human being--not a timid female. What could I do at home? The
other’s a crumple-up--just surrender. Funk! I’ll see it out.”
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
BIOLOGY
Part 1
January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory of the
Central Imperial College that towers up from among the back streets in
the angle between Euston Road and Great Portland Street. She was working
very steadily at the Advanced Course in Comparative Anatomy, wonderfully
relieved to have her mind engaged upon one methodically developing theme
in the place of the discursive uncertainties of the previous two months,
and doing her utmost to keep right in the back of her mind and out
of sight the facts, firstly, that she had achieved this haven of
satisfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of forty pounds,
and, secondly, that her present position was necessarily temporary and
her outlook quite uncertain.
The biological laboratory had an atmosphere that was all its own.
It was at the top of the building, and looked clear over a clustering
mass of inferior buildings toward Regent’s Park. It was long and narrow,
a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and sinks,
pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit and of a mitigated
and sterilized organic decay. Along the inner side was a wonderfully
arranged series of displayed specimens that Russell himself had
prepared. The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing
relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and
confused. The whole place and everything in it aimed at one thing--to
illustrate, to elaborate, to criticise and illuminate, and make ever
plainer and plainer the significance of animal and vegetable structure.
It dealt from floor to ceiling and end to end with the Theory of the
Forms of Life; the very duster by the blackboard was there to do its
share in that work, the very washers in the taps; the room was more
simply concentrated in aim even than a church. To that, perhaps, a
large part of its satisfyingness was due. Contrasted with the confused
movement and presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable
enthusiasm behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were
partly egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly
incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends, compared with the
comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the
eddy-driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet, methodical
chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.
Day after day for a measured hour in the lecture-theatre, with elaborate
power and patience, Russell pieced together difficulty and suggestion,
instance and counter-instance, in the elaborate construction of the
family tree of life. And then the students went into the long laboratory
and followed out these facts in almost living tissue with microscope and
scalpel, probe and microtome, and the utmost of their skill and care,
making now and then a raid into the compact museum of illustration next
door, in which specimens and models and directions stood in disciplined
ranks, under the direction of the demonstrator Capes. There was a couple
of blackboards at each end of the aisle of tables, and at these Capes,
with quick and nervous speech that contrasted vividly with Russell’s
slow, definitive articulation, directed the dissection and made
illuminating comments on the structures under examination. Then he
would come along the laboratory, sitting down by each student in
turn, checking the work and discussing its difficulties, and answering
questions arising out of Russell’s lecture.
Ann Veronica had come to the Imperial College obsessed by the
great figure of Russell, by the part he had played in the Darwinian
controversies, and by the resolute effect of the grim-lipped, yellow,
leonine face beneath the mane of silvery hair. Capes was rather a
discovery. Capes was something superadded. Russell burned like a beacon,
but Capes illuminated by darting flashes and threw light, even if it
was but momentary light, into a hundred corners that Russell left
steadfastly in the shade.
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.
Part 2
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