Ann Veronica (21 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."