H G Wells Omnibus, page 16
“Oh! I know—”
“Well—” Her face was an unaccustomed pink.
Ann Veronica ignored her friend’s confusion.
“Don’t we all rather humbug about the coarseness? All we women, I mean,” said she. She decided to go on, after a momentary halt. “We pretend bodies are ugly. Really they are the most beautiful things in the world. We pretend we never think of everything that makes us what we are.”
“No,” cried Miss Miniver, almost vehemently. “You are wrong! I did not think you thought such things. Bodies! Bodies! Horrible things! We are souls. Love lives on a higher plane. We are not animals. If ever I did meet a man I could love, I should love him”—her voice dropped again—“platonically.”
She made her glasses glint. “Absolutely platonically,” she said.
“Soul to soul.”
She turned her face to the fire, gripped her hands upon her elbows, and drew her thin shoulders together in a shrug. “Ugh!” she said.
Ann Veronica watched her and wondered about her.
“We do not want the men,” said Miss Miniver; “we do not want them, with their sneers and loud laughter. Empty, silly, coarse brutes. Brutes! They are the brute still with us! Science some day may teach us a way to do without them. It is only the women matter. It is not every sort of creature needs—these males. Some have no males.”
“There’s green-fly,” admitted Ann Veronica. “And even then—”
The conversation hung for a thoughtful moment.
Ann Veronica readjusted her chin on her hand. “I wonder which of us is right,” she said. “I haven’t a scrap—of this sort of aversion.”
“Tolstoy is so good about this,” said Miss Miniver, regardless of her friend’s attitude. “He sees through it all. The Higher Life and the Lower. He sees men all defiled by coarse thoughts, coarse ways of living cruelties. Simply because they are hardened by—by bestiality, and poisoned by the juices of meat slain in anger and fermented drinks—fancy! drinks that have been swarmed in by thousands and thousands of horrible little bacteria!”
“It’s yeast,” said Ann Veronica—“a vegetable.”
“It’s all the same,” said Miss Miniver. “And then they are swollen up and inflamed and drunken with matter. They are blinded to all fine and subtle things—they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils. They are arbitrary and unjust and dogmatic and brutish and lustful.”
“But do you really think men’s minds are altered by the food they eat?”
“I know it,” said Miss Miniver. “Experte credo. When I am leading a true life, a pure and simple life free of all stimulants and excitements, I think—I think—oh! with pellucid clearness; but if I so much as take a mouthful of meat—or anything—the mirror is all blurred.”
6.
Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a craving in Ann Veronica for the sight and sound of beauty.
It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. Her mind turned and accused itself of having been cold and hard. She began to look for beauty and discover it in unexpected aspects and places. Hitherto she had seen it chiefly in pictures and other works of art, incidentally, and as a thing taken out of life. Now the sense of beauty was spreading to a multitude of hitherto unsuspected aspects of the world about her.
The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her biological work. She found herself asking more and more curiously, “Why, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of beauty at all?” That enabled her to go on thinking about beauty when it seemed to her right that she should be thinking about biology.
She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values—the two series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the one hand and her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She could not make up her mind which was the finer, more elemental thing, which gave its values to the other. Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? She went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully and clearly, and he talked well—he always talked at some length when she took a difficulty to him—and sent her to a various literature upon the markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds’ plumes, the patterning of tigers, and a leopard’s spots. He was interesting and inconclusive, and the original papers to which he referred her discursive were at best only suggestive. Afterward, one afternoon, he hovered about her, and came and sat beside her and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty for some time. He displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in the matter. He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were, so to speak, sceptically dogmatic. Their talk drifted to the beauty of music, and they took that up again at tea-time.
But as the students sat about Miss Garvice’s tea-pot and drank tea or smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The Scotchman informed Ann Veronica that your view of beauty necessarily depended on your metaphysical premises, and the young man with the Russell-like hair became anxious to distinguish himself by telling the Japanese student that Western art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that among the higher organisms the tendency was toward an external symmetry veiling an internal want of balance. Ann Veronica decided she would have to go on with Capes another day, and, looking up, discovered him sitting on a stool with his hands in his pockets and his head a little on one side, regarding her with a thoughtful expression. She met his eye for a moment in curious surprise.
He turned his eyes and stared at Miss Garvice like one who wakes from a reverie, and then got up and strolled down the laboratory toward his refuge, the preparation-room.
7.
Then one day a little thing happened that clothed itself in significance.
She had been working upon a ribbon of microtome sections of the developing salamander, and he came to see what she had made of them. She stood up and he sat down at the microscope, and for a time he was busy scrutinizing one section after another. She looked down at him and saw that the sunlight was gleaming from his cheeks, and that all over his cheeks was a fine golden down of delicate hairs. And at the sight something leaped within her.
Something changed for her.
She became aware of his presence as she had never been aware of any human being in her life before. She became aware of the modelling of his ear, of the muscles of his neck and the textures of the hair that came off his brow, the soft minute curve of eyelid that she could just see beyond his brow; she perceived all these familiar objects as though they were acutely beautiful things. They WERE, she realized, acutely beautiful things. Her sense followed the shoulders under his coat, down to where his flexible, sensitive-looking hand rested lightly upon the table. She felt him as something solid and strong and trustworthy beyond measure. The perception of him flooded her being.
He got up. “Here’s something rather good,” he said, and with a start and an effort she took his place at the microscope, while he stood beside her and almost leaning over her.
She found she was trembling at his nearness and full of a thrilling dread that he might touch her. She pulled herself together and put her eye to the eye-piece.
“You see the pointer?” he asked.
“I see the pointer,” she said.
“It’s like this,” he said, and dragged a stool beside her and sat down with his elbow four inches from hers and made a sketch. Then he got up and left her.
She had a feeling at his departure as of an immense cavity, of something enormously gone; she could not tell whether it was infinite regret or infinite relief… .
But now Ann Veronica knew what was the matter with her.
8.
And as she sat on her bed that night, musing and half-undressed, she began to run one hand down her arm and scrutinize the soft flow of muscle under her skin. She thought of the marvellous beauty of skin, and all the delightfulness of living texture. Oh the back of her arm she found the faintest down of hair in the world. “Etherialized monkey,” she said. She held out her arm straight before her, and turned her hand this way and that.
“Why should one pretend?” she whispered. “Why should one pretend?
“Think of all the beauty in the world that is covered up and overlaid.”
She glanced shyly at the mirror above her dressing-table, and then about her at the furniture, as though it might penetrate to the thoughts that peeped in her mind.
“I wonder,” said Ann Veronica at last, “if I am beautiful? I wonder if I shall ever shine like a light, like a translucent goddess?—
“I wonder—
“I suppose girls and women have prayed for this, have come to this—In Babylon, in Nineveh.
“Why shouldn’t one face the facts of one’s self?”
She stood up. She posed herself before her mirror and surveyed herself with gravely thoughtful, gravely critical, and yet admiring eyes. “And, after all, I am just one common person!”
She watched the throb of the arteries in the stem of her neck, and put her hand at last gently and almost timidly to where her heart beat beneath her breast.
9.
The realization that she was in love flooded Ann Veronica’s mind, and altered the quality of all its topics.
She began to think persistently of Capes, and it seemed to her now that for some weeks at least she must have been thinking persistently of him unawares. She was surprised to find how stored her mind was with impressions and memories of him, how vividly she remembered his gestures and little things that he had said. It occurred to her that it was absurd and wrong to be so continuously thinking of one engrossing topic, and she made a strenuous effort to force her mind to other questions.
But it was extraordinary what seemingly irrelevant things could restore her to the thought of Capes again. And when she went to sleep, then always Capes became the novel and wonderful guest of her dreams.
For a time it really seemed all-sufficient to her that she should love. That Capes should love her seemed beyond the compass of her imagination. Indeed, she did not want to think of him as loving her. She wanted to think of him as her beloved person, to be near him and watch him, to have him going about, doing this and that, saying this and that, unconscious of her, while she too remained unconscious of herself. To think of him as loving her would make all that different. Then he would turn his face to her, and she would have to think of herself in his eyes. She would become defensive—what she did would be the thing that mattered. He would require things of her, and she would be passionately concerned to meet his requirements. Loving was better than that. Loving was self-forgetfulness, pure delighting in another human being. She felt that with Capes near to her she would be content always to go on loving.
She went next day to the schools, and her world seemed all made of happiness just worked up roughly into shapes and occasions and duties. She found she could do her microscope work all the better for being in love. She winced when first she heard the preparation-room door open and Capes came down the laboratory; but when at last he reached her she was self-possessed. She put a stool for him at a little distance from her own, and after he had seen the day’s work he hesitated, and then plunged into a resumption of their discussion about beauty.
“I think,” he said, “I was a little too mystical about beauty the other day.”
“I like the mystical way,” she said.
“Our business here is the right way. I’ve been thinking, you know—I’m not sure that primarily the perception of beauty isn’t just intensity of feeling free from pain; intensity of perception without any tissue destruction.”
“I like the mystical way better,” said Ann Veronica, and thought.
“A number of beautiful things are not intense.”
“But delicacy, for example, may be intensely perceived.”
“But why is one face beautiful and another not?” objected Ann Veronica; “on your theory any two faces side by side in the sunlight ought to be equally beautiful. One must get them with exactly the same intensity.”
He did not agree with that. “I don’t mean simply intensity of sensation. I said intensity of perception. You may perceive harmony, proportion, rhythm, intensely. They are things faint and slight in themselves, as physical facts, but they are like the detonator of a bomb: they let loose the explosive. There’s the internal factor as well as the external… . I don’t know if I express myself clearly. I mean that the point is that vividness of perception is the essential factor of beauty; but, of course, vividness may be created by a whisper.”
“That brings us back,” said Ann Veronica, “to the mystery. Why should some things and not others open the deeps?”
“Well, that might, after all, be an outcome of selection—like the preference for blue flowers, which are not nearly so bright as yellow, of some insects.”
“That doesn’t explain sunsets.”
“Not quite so easily as it explains an insect alighting on colored paper. But perhaps if people didn’t like clear, bright, healthy eyes—which is biologically understandable—they couldn’t like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and go on with life.”
“H’m!” said Ann Veronica, and shook her head.
Capes smiled cheerfully with his eyes meeting hers. “I throw it out in passing,” he said. “What I am after is that beauty isn’t a special inserted sort of thing; that’s my idea. It’s just life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong.”
He stood up to go on to the next student.
“There’s morbid beauty,” said Ann Veronica.
“I wonder if there is!” said Capes, and paused, and then bent down over the boy who wore his hair like Russell.
Ann Veronica surveyed his sloping back for a moment, and then drew her microscope toward her. Then for a time she sat very still. She felt that she had passed a difficult corner, and that now she could go on talking with him again, just as she had been used to do before she understood what was the matter with her… .
She had one idea, she found, very clear in her mind—that she would get a Research Scholarship, and so contrive another year in the laboratory.
“Now I see what everything means,” said Ann Veronica to herself; and it really felt for some days as though the secret of the universe, that had been wrapped and hidden from her so obstinately, was at last altogether displayed.
Chapter 9
DISCORDS
1.
One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica’s great discovery, a telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran:
Bored and nothing to do
will you dine with me to-night somewhere and talk
I shall be grateful
Ramage
Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had not seen Ramage for ten or eleven days, and she was quite ready for a gossip with him. And now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in love—in love!—that marvellous state! that I really believe she had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any rate, it would be good to hear him saying the sort of things he did—perhaps now she would grasp them better—with this world—shaking secret brandishing itself about inside her head within a yard of him.
She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.
“I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week,” he said.
“That’s exhilarating,” said Ann Veronica.
“Not a bit of it,” he said; “it’s only a score in a game.”
“It’s a score you can buy all sorts of things with.”
“Nothing that one wants.”
He turned to the waiter, who held a wine-card. “Nothing can cheer me,” he said, “except champagne.” He meditated. “This,” he said, and then: “No! Is this sweeter? Very well.”
“Everything goes well with me,” he said, folding his arms under him and regarding Ann Veronica with the slightly projecting eyes wide open. “And I’m not happy. I believe I’m in love.”
He leaned back for his soup.
Presently he resumed: “I believe I must be in love.”
“You can’t be that,” said Ann Veronica, wisely.
“How do you know?”
“Well, it isn’t exactly a depressing state, is it?”
“YOU don’t know.”
“One has theories,” said Ann Veronica, radiantly.
“Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact.”
“It ought to make one happy.”
“It’s an unrest—a longing—What’s that?” The waiter had intervened. “Parmesan—take it away!”
He glanced at Ann Veronica’s face, and it seemed to him that she really was exceptionally radiant. He wondered why she thought love made people happy, and began to talk of the smilax and pinks that adorned the table. He filled her glass with champagne. “You MUST,” he said, “because of my depression.”
They were eating quails when they returned to the topic of love. “What made you think” he said, abruptly, with the gleam of avidity in his face, “that love makes people happy?”
“I know it must.”
“But how?”
He was, she thought, a little too insistent. “Women know these things by instinct,” she answered.
“I wonder,” he said, “if women do know things by instinct? I have my doubts about feminine instinct. It’s one of our conventional superstitions. A woman is supposed to know when a man is in love with her. Do you think she does?”
Ann Veronica picked among her salad with a judicial expression of face. “I think she would,” she decided.
