3
Miss Miniver let Ann Veronica into her peculiar
levels of the world with so enthusiastic a generosity
that it seemed ingratitude to remain critical. Indeed,
almost insensibly Ann Veronica became habituated to
the peculiar appearance and the peculiar manners of
the people “in the van.” The shock of their intellectual
attitude was over, usage robbed it of the first quaint
effect of deliberate unreason. They were in many
respects so right; she clung to that, and shirked more
and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also
somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness,
absurd.
Very central in Miss Miniver's universe were the
Goopes. The Goopes were the oddest little couple
conceivable, following a fruitarian career upon an upper
floor in Theobald's Road. They were childless and
servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the
finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered,
was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his
wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian
cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion,
appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and
assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham
Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously
a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home
dressed simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas
sacking tied with brown ribbons, while his wife wore a
purple
djibbah with a richly embroidered yoke. He
was a small, dark, reserved man, with a large inflexible-looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink
and high-spirited, with one of those chins that pass
insensibly into a full, strong neck. Once a week, every
Saturday, they had a little gathering from nine till the
small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and
fruitarian refreshments —chestnut sandwiches buttered
with nut tose, and so forth —and lemonade and unfermented
wine; and to one of these symposia Miss Miniver
after a good deal of preliminary solicitude, conducted
Ann Veronica.
She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously
for her taste, as a girl who was standing out against
her people, to a gathering that consisted of a very old
lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep voice
who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's
inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head,
a shy, blond young man with a narrow forehead and
glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts and
blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike
in black, Mr. and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the
Borough Council of Marylebone. These were seated in
an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned
fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood inscription:
“DO IT NOW.”
And to them were presently added a roguish-looking
young man, with reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy
tweed suit, and others who, in Ann Veronica's memory,
in spite of her efforts to recall details, remained
obstinately just “others.”
The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant
in form even when it ceased to be brilliant in substance.
There were moments when Ann Veronica rather more
than suspected the chief speakers to be, as school-boys
say, showing off at her.
They talked of a new substitute for dripping in
vegetarian cookery that Mrs. Goopes was convinced
exercised an exceptionally purifying influence on the
mind. And then they talked of Anarchism and Socialism,
and whether the former was the exact opposite of the
latter or only a higher form. The reddish-haired young
man contributed allusions to the Hegelian philosophy
that momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alderman
Dunstable, who had hitherto been silent, broke out
into speech and went off at a tangent, and gave his
personal impressions of quite a number of his fellow-councillors. He continued to do this for the rest of the
evening intermittently, in and out, among other topics.
He addressed himself chiefly to Goopes, and spoke as
if in reply to long-sustained inquiries on the part of
Goopes into the personnel of the Marylebone Borough
Council. “If you were to ask me,” he would say, “I
should say Blinders is straight. An ordinary type, of
course —”
Mrs. Dunstable's contributions to the conversation
were entirely in the form of nods; whenever Alderman
Dunstable praised or blamed she nodded twice or thrice,
according to the requirements of his emphasis. And
she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann Veronica's
dress. Mrs. Goopes disconcerted the Alderman a little
by abruptly challenging the roguish-looking young man
in the orange tie (who, it seemed, was the assistant
editor of
New Ideas) upon a critique of Nietzsche and
Tolstoy that had appeared in his paper, in which doubts
had been cast upon the perfect sincerity of the latter.
Everybody seemed greatly concerned about the sincerity
of Tolstoy.
Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in
Tolstoy's sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter
much any more, and she appealed to Ann Veronica
whether she did not feel the same; and Mr. Goopes
said that we must distinguish between sincerity and
irony, which was often indeed no more than sincerity
at the sublimated level.
Alderman Dunstable said that sincerity was often a
matter of opportunity, and illustrated the point to the
fair young man with an anecdote about Blinders on the
Dust Destructor Committee, during which the young
man in the orange tie succeeded in giving the whole
discussion a daring and erotic flavor by questioning
whether any one could be perfectly sincere in love.
Miss Miniver thought that there was no true sincerity
except in love, and appealed to Ann Veronica, but the
young man in the orange tie went on to declare that it
was quite possible to be sincerely in love with two people
at the same time, although perhaps on different planes
with each individual, and deceiving them both. But
that brought Mrs. Goopes down on him with the lesson
Titian teaches so beautifully in his “Sacred and Profane
Love,” and became quite eloquent upon the impossibility
of any deception in the former.
Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alderman
Dunstable, turning back to the shy, blond young
man and speaking in undertones of the utmost clearness,
gave a brief and confidential account of an unfounded
rumor of the bifurcation of the affections of Blinders
that had led to a situation of some unpleasantness upon
the Borough Council.
The very old lady in the antimacassar touched Ann
Veronica's arm suddenly, and said, in a deep, arch voice:
“Talking of love again; spring again, love again.
Oh! you young people!”
The young man with the orange tie, in spite of Sisyphus-like efforts on the part of Goopes to get the topic
on to a higher plane, displayed great persistence in
speculating upon the possible distribution of the affections
of highly developed modern types.
The old lady in the antimacassar said, abruptly,
“Ah! you young people, you young people, if you only
knew!” and then laughed and then mused in a marked
manner; and the young man with the narrow forehead
and glasses cleared his throat and asked the young man
in the orange tie whether he believed that Platonic love
was possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed in nothing
else, and with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a
little abruptly, and directed Goopes and the shy young
man in the handing of refreshments.
But the young man with the orange tie remained in
his place, disputing whether the body had not something
or other which he called its legitimate claims.
And from that they came back by way of the Kreutzer
Sonata and Resurrection to Tolstoy again.
So the talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been
a little reserved, resorted presently to the Socratic
method to restrain the young man with the orange tie, and
bent his forehead over him, and brought out at last very
clearly from him that the body was only illusion and
everything nothing but just spirit and molecules of
thought. It became a sort of duel at last between
them, and all the others sat and listened —every one,
that is, except the Alderman, who had got the blond
young man into a corner by the green-stained dresser
with the aluminium things, and was sitting with his
back to every one else, holding one hand over his mouth
for greater privacy, and telling him, with an accent of
confidential admission, in whispers of the chronic struggle
between the natural modesty and general inoffensiveness
of the Borough Council and the social evil in
Marylebone.
So the talk went on, and presently they were criticising
novelists, and certain daring essays of Wilkins got
their due share of attention, and then they were discussing
the future of the theatre. Ann Veronica intervened
a little in the novelist discussion with a defence
of Esmond and a denial that the Egoist was obscure, and
when she spoke every one else stopped talking and
listened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard Shaw
ought to go into Parliament. And that brought them
to vegetarianism and teetotalism, and the young man
in the orange tie and Mrs. Goopes had a great set-to
about the sincerity of Chesterton and Belloc that was
ended by Goopes showing signs of resuming the Socratic
method.
And at last Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver came down
the dark staircase and out into the foggy spaces of the
London squares, and crossed Russell Square, Woburn
Square, Gordon Square, making an oblique route to
Ann Veronica's lodging. They trudged along a little
hungry, because of the fruitarian refreshments, and
mentally very active. And Miss Miniver fell discussing
whether Goopes or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Doctor
Tumpany or Wilkins the author had the more powerful
and perfect mind in existence at the present time.
She was clear there were no other minds like them in
all the world.
