Ann Veronica Page 16

  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.

  Part 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.

  Part 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.

  Part 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 the Ninth — Discords

  *

  Part 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 | 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.

  "Ah!" said Ramage, impressively.

  Ann Veronica looked up at him and found him regarding her with eyes that were almost woebegone, and into which, indeed, he was trying to throw much more expression than they could carry. There was a little pause between them, full for Ann Veronica of rapid elusive suspicions and intimations.

  "Perhaps one talks nonsense about a woman's instinct," she said. "It's a way of avoiding explanations. And girls and women, perhaps, are different. I don't know. I don't suppose a girl can tell if a man is in love with her or not in love with her." Her mind went off to Capes. Her thoughts took words for themselves. "She can't. I suppose it depends on her own state of mind. If one wants a thing very much, perhaps one is inclined to think one can't have it. I suppose if one were to love some one, one would feel doubtful. And if one were to love some one very much, it's just so that one would be blindest, just when one wanted most to see."

  She stopped abruptly, afraid that Ramage might be able to infer Capes from the things she had said, and indeed his face was very eager.

  "Yes?" he said.

  Ann Veronica blushed. "That's all," she said "I'm afraid I'm a little confused about these things."

  Ramage looked at her, and then fell into deep reflection as the waiter came to paragraph their talk again.

  "Have you ever been to the opera, Ann Veronica?" said Ramage.

  "Once or twice."

  "Shall we go now?"

  "I think I would like to listen to music. What is there?"

  "Tristan."

  "I've never heard Tristan and Isolde."

  "That settles it. We'll go. There's sure to be a place somewhere."

  "It's rather jolly of you," said Ann Veronica.

  "It's jolly of you to come," said Ramage.

  So presently they got into a hansom together, and Ann Veronica sat back feeling very luxurious and pleasant, and looked at the light and stir and misty glitter of the street traffic from under slightly drooping eyelids, while Ramage sat closer to her than he need have done, and glanced ever and again at her face, and made to speak and said nothing. And when they got to Covent Garden Ramage secured one of the little upper boxes, and they came into it as the overture began.

  Ann Veronica took off her jacket and sat down in the corner chair, and leaned forward to look into the great hazy warm brown cavity of the house, and Ramage placed his chair to sit beside her and near her, facing the stage. The music took hold of her slowly as her eyes wandered from the indistinct still ranks of the audience to the little busy orchestra with its quivering violins, its methodical movements of brown and silver instruments, its brightly lit scores and shaded lights. She had never been to the opera before except as one of a congested mass of people in the cheaper seats, and with backs and heads and women's hats for the frame of the spectacle; there was by contrast a fine large sense of space and ease in her present position. The curtain rose out of the concluding bars of the overture and revealed Isolde on the prow of the barbaric ship. The voice of the young seaman came floating down from the masthead, and the story of the immortal lovers had begun. She knew the story only imperfectly, and followed it now with a passionate and deepening interest. The splendid voices sang on from phase to phase of love's unfolding, the ship drove across the sea to the beating rhythm of the rowers. The lovers broke into passionate knowledge of themselves
and each other, and then, a jarring intervention, came King Mark amidst the shouts of the sailormen, and stood beside them.

  The curtain came festooning slowly down, the music ceased, the lights in the auditorium glowed out, and Ann Veronica woke out of her confused dream of involuntary and commanding love in a glory of sound and colors to discover that Ramage was sitting close beside her with one hand resting lightly on her waist. She made a quick movement, and the hand fell away.

  "By God! Ann Veronica," he said, sighing deeply. "This stirs one."

  She sat quite still looking at him.

  "I wish you and I had drunk that love potion," he said.

  She found no ready reply to that, and he went on: "This music is the food of love. It makes me desire life beyond measure. Life! Life and love! It makes me want to be always young, always strong, always devoting my life—and dying splendidly."

  "It is very beautiful," said Ann Veronica in a low tone.

  They said no more for a moment, and each was now acutely aware of the other. Ann Veronica was excited and puzzled, with a sense of a strange and disconcerting new light breaking over her relations with Ramage. She had never thought of him at all in that way before. It did not shock her; it amazed her, interested her beyond measure. But also this must not go on. She felt he was going to say something more—something still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind. "What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up again and again."

  She stopped with an air of interrogation.

  Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval without speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses of action. "I don't know much about the technique of music," he said at last, with his eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling with me."