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, begin-
ning 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
æsthetic 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'œuvre to their skimpy ices in dishes
of frilled paper, with their Chianti flasks and Parmesan
dishes and their polyglot waiters and polyglot clientèle,
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.
