Part 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 aluminum 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.
