H. Wells - Ann Veronica

Part 2

Now, while Ann Veronica was taking these soundings in the

industrial sea, and measuring herself against the world as it is,

she was also making extensive explorations among the ideas and

attitudes of a number of human beings who seemed to be largely

concerned with the world as it ought to be. She was drawn first

by Miss Miniver, and then by her own natural interest, into a

curious stratum of people who are busied with dreams of world

progress, of great and fundamental changes, of a New Age that is

to replace all the stresses and disorders of contemporary life.

Miss Miniver learned of her flight and got her address from the

Widgetts. She arrived about nine o'clock the next evening in a

state of tremulous enthusiasm. She followed the landlady half way

up-stairs, and called up to Ann Veronica, "May I come up? It's

me! You know--Nettie Miniver!" She appeared before Ann Veronica

could clearly recall who Nettie Miniver might be.

There was a wild light in her eye, and her straight hair was out

demonstrating and suffragetting upon some independent notions of

its own. Her fingers were bursting through her gloves, as if to

get at once into touch with Ann Veronica. "You're Glorious!"

said Miss Miniver in tones of rapture, holding a hand in each of

hers and peering up into Ann Veronica's face. "Glorious! You're

so calm, dear, and so resolute, so serene!

"It's girls like you who will show them what We are," said Miss

Miniver; "girls whose spirits have not been broken!"

Ann Veronica sunned herself a little in this warmth.

"I was watching you at Morningside Park, dear," said Miss

Miniver. "I am getting to watch all women. I thought then

perhaps you didn't care, that you were like so many of them. NOW

it's just as though you had grown up suddenly."

She stopped, and then suggested: "I wonder--I should love--if it

was anything _I_ said."

She did not wait for Ann Veronica's reply. She seemed to assume

that it must certainly be something she had said. "They all

catch on," she said. "It spreads like wildfire. This is such a

grand time! Such a glorious time! There never was such a time

as this! Everything seems so close to fruition, so coming on and

leading on! The Insurrection of Women! They spring up

everywhere. Tell me all that happened, one sister-woman to

another."

She chilled Ann Veronica a little by that last phrase, and yet

the magnetism of her fellowship and enthusiasm was very strong;

and it was pleasant to be made out a heroine after so much

expostulation and so many secret doubts.

But she did not listen long; she wanted to talk. She sat,

crouched together, by the corner of the hearthrug under the

bookcase that supported the pig's skull, and looked into the fire

and up at Ann Veronica's face, and let herself go. "Let us put

the lamp out," she said; "the flames are ever so much better for

talking," and Ann Veronica agreed. "You are coming right out

into life--facing it all."

Ann Veronica sat with her chin on her hand, red-lit and saying

little, and Miss Miniver discoursed. As she talked, the drift

and significance of what she was saying shaped itself slowly to

Ann Veronica's apprehension. It presented itself in the likeness

of a great, gray, dull world--a brutal, superstitious, confused,

and wrong-headed world, that hurt people and limited people

unaccountably. In remote times and countries its evil tendencies

had expressed themselves in the form of tyrannies, massacres,

wars, and what not; but just at present in England they shaped as

commercialism and competition, silk hats, suburban morals, the

sweating system, and the subjection of women. So far the thing

was acceptable enough. But over against the world Miss Miniver

assembled a small but energetic minority, the Children of

Light--people she described as "being in the van," or "altogether

in the van," about whom Ann Veronica's mind was disposed to be

more sceptical.

Everything, Miss Miniver said, was "working up," everything was

"coming on"--the Higher Thought, the Simple Life, Socialism,

Humanitarianism, it was all the same really. She loved to be

there, taking part in it all, breathing it, being it. Hitherto

in the world's history there had been precursors of this Progress

at great intervals, voices that had spoken and ceased, but now it

was all coming on together in a rush. She mentioned, with

familiar respect, Christ and Buddha and Shelley and Nietzsche and

Plato. Pioneers all of them. Such names shone brightly in the

darkness, with black spaces of unilluminated emptiness about

them, as stars shine in the night; but now--now it was different;

now it was dawn--the real dawn.

"The women are taking it up," said Miss Miniver; "the women and

the common people, all pressing forward, all roused."

Ann Veronica listened with her eyes on the fire.

"Everybody is taking it up," said Miss Miniver. "YOU had to come

in. You couldn't help it. Something drew you. Something draws

everybody. From suburbs, from country towns--everywhere. I see

all the Movements. As far as I can, I belong to them all. I keep

my finger on the pulse of things."

Ann Veronica said nothing.

"The dawn!" said Miss Miniver, with her glasses reflecting the

fire like pools of blood-red flame.

"I came to London," said Ann Veronica, "rather because of my own

difficulty. I don't know that I understand altogether."

"Of course you don't," said Miss Miniver, gesticulating

triumphantly with her thin hand and thinner wrist, and patting

Ann Veronica's knee. "Of course you don't. That's the wonder of

it. But you will, you will. You must let me take you to

things--to meetings and things, to conferences and talks. Then

you will begin to see. You will begin to see it all opening out.

I am up to the ears in it all--every moment I can spare. I throw

up work--everything! I just teach in one school, one good

school, three days a week. All the rest--Movements! I can live

now on fourpence a day. Think how free that leaves me to follow

things up! I must take you everywhere. I must take you to the

Suffrage people, and the Tolstoyans, and the Fabians."

"I have heard of the Fabians," said Ann Veronica.

"It's THE Society!" said Miss Miniver. "It's the centre of the

intellectuals. Some of the meetings are wonderful! Such

earnest, beautiful women! Such deep-browed men! . . . And to

think that there they are making history! There they are putting

together the plans of a new world. Almos light-heartedly. There

is Shaw, and Webb, and Wilkins the author, and Toomer, and Doctor

Tumpany--the most wonderful people! There you see them

discussing, deciding, planning! Just think--THEY ARE MAKING A NEW

WORLD!"

"But ARE these people going to alter everything?" said Ann

Veronica.

"What else can happen?" asked Miss Miniver, with a little weak

gesture at the glow. "What else can possibly happen--as things

are going now?"

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