4
Then one evening Ann Veronica went with Miss
Miniver into the back seats of the gallery at Essex Hall,
and heard and saw the giant leaders of the Fabian Society
who are re-making the world: Bernard Shaw and
Toomer and Doctor Tumpany and Wilkins the author,
all displayed upon a platform. The place was crowded,
and the people about her were almost equally made up
of very good-looking and enthusiastic young people and
a great variety of Goopes-like types. In the discussion
there was the oddest mixture of things that were personal
and petty with an idealist devotion that was fine
beyond dispute. In nearly every speech she heard
was the same implication of great and necessary changes
in the world —changes to be won by effort and sacrifice
indeed, but surely to be won. And afterward she saw
a very much larger and more enthusiastic gathering, a
meeting of the advanced section of the woman movement
in Caxton Hall, where the same note of vast
changes in progress sounded; and she went to a soirée
of the Dress Reform Association and visited a Food
Reform Exhibition, where imminent change was made
even alarmingly visible. The women's meeting was
much more charged with emotional force than the
Socialists'. Ann Veronica was carried off her intellectual
and critical feet by it altogether, and applauded and
uttered cries that subsequent reflection failed to
endorse. “I knew you would feel it,” said Miss Miniver,
as they came away flushed and heated. “I knew you
would begin to see how it all falls into place together.”
It did begin to fall into place together. She became
more and more alive, not so much to a system of ideas
as to a big diffused impulse toward change, to a great
discontent with and criticism of life as it is lived, to a
clamorous confusion of ideas for reconstruction —
reconstruction of the methods of business, of economic
development, of the rules of property, of the status of
children, of the clothing and feeding and teaching of
every one; she developed a quite exaggerated consciousness
of a multitude of people going about the swarming
spaces of London with their minds full, their talk and
gestures full, their very clothing charged with the
suggestion of the urgency of this pervasive project of
alteration. Some indeed carried themselves, dressed
themselves even, rather as foreign visitors from the land of
“Looking Backward” and “News from Nowhere” than
as the indigenous Londoners they were. For the most
part these were detached people: men practising the
plastic arts, young writers, young men in employment,
a very large proportion of girls and women —self-supporting women or girls of the student class. They made
a stratum into which Ann Veronica was now plunged up
to her neck; it had become her stratum.
None of the things they said and did were altogether
new to Ann Veronica, but now she got them massed
and alive, instead of by glimpses or in books —alive
and articulate and insistent. The London backgrounds,
in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, against which these
people went to and fro, took on, by reason of their
gray façades, their implacably respectable windows and
window-blinds, their reiterated unmeaning iron railings,
a stronger and stronger suggestion of the flavor of her
father at his most obdurate phase, and of all that she
felt herself fighting against.
She was already a little prepared by her discursive
reading and discussion under the Widgett influence for
ideas and “movements,” though temperamentally perhaps
she was rather disposed to resist and criticise than
embrace them. But the people among whom she was
now thrown through the social exertions of Miss Miniver
and the Widgetts —for Teddy and Hetty came up from
Morningside Park and took her to an eighteen-penny
dinner in Soho and introduced her to some art students,
who were also Socialists, and so opened the way to an
evening of meandering talk in a studio —carried with
them like an atmosphere this implication, not only that
the world was in some stupid and even obvious way
wrong, with which indeed she was quite
prepared to
agree, but that it needed only a few pioneers to behave
as such and be thoroughly and indiscriminately
“advanced,” for the new order to achieve itself. When
ninety per cent. out of the ten or twelve people one
meets in a month not only say but feel and assume a
thing, it is very hard not to fall into the belief that the
thing is so. Imperceptibly almost Ann Veronica began
to acquire the new attitude, even while her mind still
resisted the felted ideas that went with it. And Miss
Miniver began to sway her.
The very facts that Miss Miniver never stated an
argument clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense
of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for
consistency of statement than a washerwoman has for
wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and
hostile at their first encounter in Morningside Park,
became at last with constant association the secret of
Miss Miniver's growing influence. The brain tires of
resistance, and when it meets again and again, incoherently
active, the same phrases, the same ideas that it
has already slain, exposed and dissected and buried, it
becomes less and less energetic to repeat the operation.
There must be something, one feels, in ideas that achieve
persistently a successful resurrection. What Miss Miniver
would have called the Higher Truth supervenes.
Yet through these talks, these meetings and
conferences, these movements and efforts, Ann Veronica, for
all that she went with her friend, and at times
applauded with her enthusiastically, yet went nevertheless
with eyes that grew more and more puzzled, and fine
eyebrows more and more disposed to knit. She was
with these movements —akin to them, she felt it at
times intensely —and yet something eluded her. Morningside
Park had been passive and defective; all this
rushed about and was active, but it was still defective.
It still failed in something. It did seem germane to the
matter that so many of the people “in the van” were
plain people, or faded people, or tired-looking people.
It did affect the business that they all argued badly and
were egotistical in their manners and inconsistent in
their phrases. There were moments when she doubted
whether the whole mass of movements and societies and
gatherings and talks was not simply one coherent spectacle
of failure protecting itself from abjection by the
glamour of its own assertions. It happened that at the
extremest point of Ann Veronica's social circle from the
Widgetts was the family of the Morningside Park horse-dealer, a company of extremely dressy and hilarious
young women, with one equestrian brother addicted to
fancy waistcoats, cigars, and facial spots. These girls
wore hats at remarkable angles and bows to startle and
kill; they liked to be right on the spot every time and
up to everything that was it from the very beginning
and they rendered their conception of Socialists and all
reformers by the words “positively frightening” and
“weird.” Well, it was beyond dispute that these words
did convey a certain quality of the Movements in general
amid which Miss Miniver disported herself. They
were weird. And yet for all that —
It got into Ann Veronica's nights at last and kept her
awake, the perplexing contrast between the advanced
thought and the advanced thinker. The general propositions
of Socialism, for example, struck her as admirable,
but she certainly did not extend her admiration to
any of its exponents. She was still more stirred by the
idea of the equal citizenship of men and women, by the
realization that a big and growing organization of women
were giving form and a generalized expression to just
that personal pride, that aspiration for personal free-
dom and respect which had brought her to London; but
when she heard Miss Miniver discoursing on the next
step in the suffrage campaign, or read of women badgering
Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or getting
up in a public meeting to pipe out a demand for votes
and be carried out kicking and screaming, her soul
revolted. She could not part with dignity. Something
as yet unformulated within her kept her estranged from
all these practical aspects of her beliefs.
“Not for these things, O Ann Veronica, have you
revolted,” it said; “and this is not your appropriate
purpose.”
It was as if she faced a darkness in which was
something very beautiful and wonderful as yet unimagined.
The little pucker in her brows became more perceptible.
