Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story
against himself, and citing a recent paper in the Nineteenth Century, in
which, following Atkinson, he had made a vigorous and damaging attack
on Lester Ward’s case for the primitive matriarchate and the predominant
importance of the female throughout the animal kingdom.
Ann Veronica was not aware of this literary side of her teacher; she had
a little tinge of annoyance at Miss Garvice’s advantage. Afterwards
she hunted up the article in question, and it seemed to her quite
delightfully written and argued. Capes had the gift of easy, unaffected
writing, coupled with very clear and logical thinking, and to follow
his written thought gave her the sensation of cutting things with a
perfectly new, perfectly sharp knife. She found herself anxious to read
more of him, and the next Wednesday she went to the British Museum and
hunted first among the half-crown magazines for his essays and then
through various scientific quarterlies for his research papers. The
ordinary research paper, when it is not extravagant theorizing, is apt
to be rather sawdusty in texture, and Ann Veronica was delighted to find
the same easy and confident luminosity that distinguished his work for
the general reader. She returned to these latter, and at the back of
her mind, as she looked them over again, was a very distinct resolve
to quote them after the manner of Miss Garvice at the very first
opportunity.
When she got home to her lodgings that evening she reflected with
something like surprise upon her half-day’s employment, and decided
that it showed nothing more nor less than that Capes was a really very
interesting person indeed.
And then she fell into a musing about Capes. She wondered why he was so
distinctive, so unlike other men, and it never occurred to her for some
time that this might be because she was falling in love with him.
Part 5
Yet Ann Veronica was thinking a very great deal about love. A dozen
shynesses and intellectual barriers were being outflanked or broken
down in her mind. All the influences about her worked with her own
predisposition and against all the traditions of her home and upbringing
to deal with the facts of life in an unabashed manner. Ramage, by a
hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own
life was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one special case
of, the problems of any woman’s life, and that the problem of a woman’s
life is love.
“A young man comes into life asking how best he may place himself,”
Ramage had said; “a woman comes into life thinking instinctively how
best she may give herself.”
She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated and spread tentacles
of explanation through her brain. The biological laboratory, perpetually
viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing
and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion.
And all the talk of the Miniver people and the Widgett people seemed
always to be like a ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love.
“For seven years,” said Ann Veronica, “I have been trying to keep myself
from thinking about love....
“I have been training myself to look askance at beautiful things.”
She gave herself permission now to look at this squarely. She made
herself a private declaration of liberty. “This is mere nonsense, mere
tongue-tied fear!” she said. “This is the slavery of the veiled life.
I might as well be at Morningside Park. This business of love is the
supreme affair in life, it is the woman’s one event and crisis that
makes up for all her other restrictions, and I cower--as we all
cower--with a blushing and paralyzed mind until it overtakes me!...
“I’ll be hanged if I do.”
But she could not talk freely about love, she found, for all that
manumission.
Ramage seemed always fencing about the forbidden topic, probing for
openings, and she wondered why she did not give him them. But something
instinctive prevented that, and with the finest resolve not to be
“silly” and prudish she found that whenever he became at all bold
in this matter she became severely scientific and impersonal, almost
entomological indeed, in her method; she killed every remark as he made
it and pinned it out for examination. In the biological laboratory that
was their invincible tone. But she disapproved more and more of her own
mental austerity. Here was an experienced man of the world, her friend,
who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic and was
willing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why should not she
be at her ease with him? Why should not she know things? It is hard
enough anyhow for a human being to learn, she decided, but it is a dozen
times more difficult than it need be because of all this locking of the
lips and thoughts.
She contrived to break down the barriers of shyness at last in one
direction, and talked one night of love and the facts of love with Miss
Miniver.
But Miss Miniver was highly unsatisfactory. She repeated phrases of Mrs.
Goopes’s: “Advanced people,” she said, with an air of great elucidation,
“tend to GENERALIZE love. ‘He prayeth best who loveth best--all things
both great and small.’ For my own part I go about loving.”
“Yes, but men;” said Ann Veronica, plunging; “don’t you want the love of
men?”
For some seconds they remained silent, both shocked by this question.
Miss Miniver looked over her glasses at her friend almost balefully.
“NO!” she said, at last, with something in her voice that reminded Ann
Veronica of a sprung tennis-racket.
“I’ve been through all that,” she went on, after a pause.
She spoke slowly. “I have never yet met a man whose intellect I could
respect.”
Ann Veronica looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and decided to
persist on principle.
“But if you had?” she said.
“I can’t imagine it,” said Miss Miniver. “And think, think”--her voice
sank--“of the horrible coarseness!”
“What coarseness?” said Ann Veronica.
“My dear Vee!” Her voice became very low. “Don’t you know?”
“Oh! I know--”
“Well--” Her face was an unaccustomed pink.
Ann Veronica ignored her friend’s confusion.
“Don’t we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I mean,”
said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt. “We pretend
bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the world.
We pretend we never think of everything that makes us what we are.”
“No,” cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. “You are wrong! I did not
think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are
souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I
did meet a man I could love, I should love him”--her voice dropped
again--“platonically.”
She made her glasses glint. “Absolutely platonically,” she said.
“Soul to soul.”
She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her elbows, and
drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. “Ugh!” she said.
Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.
“We do not want the men,” said Miss Miniver; “we do not want them, with
their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes!
They are the brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a way
to do without them. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of
creature needs--these males. Some have no males.”
“There’s green-fly,” admitted Ann Veronica. “And even then--”
The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.
Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. “I wonder which of us is
right,” she said. “I haven’t a scrap--of this sort of aversion.”
“Tolstoy is so good about this,” said Miss Miniver, regardless of her
friend’s attitude. “He sees through it all. The Higher Life and the
Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living
cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by--by bestiality,
and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in anger and fermented
drinks--fancy! drinks that have been swarmed in by thousands and
thousands of horrible little bacteria!”
“It’s yeast,” said Ann Veronica--“a vegetable.”
“It’s all the same,” said Miss Miniver. “And then they are swollen up
and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine
and subtle things--they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated
nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish and
lustful.”
“But do you really think men’s minds are altered by the food they eat?”
“I know it,” said Miss Miniver. “Experte credo. When I am leading a true
life, a pure and simple life free of all stimulants and excitements, I
think--I think--oh! with pellucid clearness; but if I so much as take a
mouthful of meat--or anything--the mirror is all blurred.”
Part 6
Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a craving
in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty.
It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. Her mind turned
and accused itself of having been cold and hard. She began to look for
beauty and discover it in unexpected aspects and places. Hitherto she
had seen it chiefly in pictures and other works of art, incidentally,
and as a thing taken out of life. Now the sense of beauty was spreading
to a multitude of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the world about her.
The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her
biological work. She found herself asking more and more curiously, “Why,
on the principle of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of
beauty at all?” That enabled her to go on thinking about beauty when it
seemed to her right that she should be thinking about biology.
She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values--the two
series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the one hand and
her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She could
not make up her mind which was the finer, more elemental thing, which
gave its values to the other. Was it that the struggle of things
to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense
preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing,
some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency,
regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life?
She went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully and
clearly, and he talked well--he always talked at some length when she
took a difficulty to him--and sent her to a various literature upon the
markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible elaboration and splendor
of birds of Paradise and humming-birds’ plumes, the patterning of
tigers, and a leopard’s spots. He was interesting and inconclusive, and
the original papers to which he referred her discursive were at best
only suggestive. Afterward, one afternoon, he hovered about her, and
came and sat beside her and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty
for some time. He displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in
the matter. He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were,
so to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their talk drifted to the beauty of
music, and they took that up again at tea-time.
But as the students sat about Miss Garvice’s tea-pot and drank tea or
smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The Scotchman informed
Ann Veronica that your view of beauty necessarily depended on your
metaphysical premises, and the young man with the Russell-like hair
became anxious to distinguish himself by telling the Japanese student
that Western art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that
among the higher organisms the tendency was toward an external symmetry
veiling an internal want of balance. Ann Veronica decided she would have
to go on with Capes another day, and, looking up, discovered him sitting