Part 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 soiree 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
facades, 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 freedom 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.
