H. Wells - Ann Veronica

whole place and everything in it aimed at one thing--to

illustrate, to elaborate, to criticise and illuminate, and make

ever plainer and plainer the significance of animal and vegetable

structure. It dealt from floor to ceiling and end to end with

the Theory of the Forms of Life; the very duster by the

blackboard was there to do its share in that work, the very

washers in the taps; the room was more simply concentrated in aim

even than a church. To that, perhaps, a large part of its

satisfyingness was due. Contrasted with the confused movement

and presences of a Fabian meeting, or the inexplicable enthusiasm

behind the suffrage demand, with the speeches that were partly

egotistical displays, partly artful manoeuvres, and partly

incoherent cries for unsoundly formulated ends, compared with the

comings and goings of audiences and supporters that were like the

eddy-driven drift of paper in the street, this long, quiet,

methodical chamber shone like a star seen through clouds.

Day after day for a measured hour in the lecture-theatre, with

elaborate power and patience, Russell pieced together difficulty

and suggestion, instance and counter-instance, in the elaborate

construction of the family tree of life. And then the students

went into the long laboratory and followed out these facts in

almost living tissue with microscope and scalpel, probe and

microtome, and the utmost of their skill and care, making now and

then a raid into the compact museum of illustration next door, in

which specimens and models and directions stood in disciplined

ranks, under the direction of the demonstrator Capes. There was

a couple of blackboards at each end of the aisle of tables, and

at these Capes, with quick and nervous speech that contrasted

vividly with Russell's slow, definitive articulation, directed

the dissection and made illuminating comments on the structures

under examination. Then he would come along the laboratory,

sitting down by each student in turn, checking the work and

discussing its difficulties, and answering questions arising out

of Russell's lecture.

Ann Veronica had come to the Imperial College obsessed by the

great figure of Russell, by the part he had played in the

Darwinian controversies, and by the resolute effect of the

grim-lipped, yellow, leonine face beneath the mane of silvery

hair. Capes was rather a discovery. Capes was something

superadded. Russell burned like a beacon, but Capes illuminated

by darting flashes and threw light, even if it was but momentary

light, into a hundred corners that Russell left steadfastly in

the shade.

Capes was an exceptionally fair man of two or three-and-thirty,

so ruddily blond that it was a mercy he had escaped light

eyelashes, and with a minor but by no means contemptible

reputation of his own. He talked at the blackboard in a

pleasant, very slightly lisping voice with a curious spontaneity,

and was sometimes very clumsy in his exposition, and sometimes

very vivid. He dissected rather awkwardly and hurriedly, but, on

the whole, effectively, and drew with an impatient directness

that made up in significance what it lacked in precision. Across

the blackboard the colored chalks flew like flights of variously

tinted rockets as diagram after diagram flickered into being.

There happened that year to be an unusual proportion of girls and

women in the advanced laboratory, perhaps because the class as a

whole was an exceptionally small one. It numbered nine, and four

of these were women students. As a consequence of its small

size, it was possible to get along with the work on a much easier

and more colloquial footing than a larger class would have

permitted. And a custom had grown up of a general tea at four

o'clock, under the auspices of a Miss Garvice, a tall and

graceful girl of distinguished intellectual incompetence, in whom

the hostess instinct seemed to be abnormally developed.

Capes would come to these teas; he evidently liked to come, and

he would appear in the doorway of the preparation-room, a

pleasing note of shyness in his manner, hovering for an

invitation.

From the first, Ann Veronica found him an exceptionally

interesting man. To begin with, he struck her as being the most

variable person she had ever encountered. At times he was

brilliant and masterful, talked round and over every one, and

would have been domineering if he had not been extraordinarily

kindly; at times he was almost monosyllabic, and defeated Miss

Garvice's most skilful attempts to draw him out. Sometimes he was

obviously irritable and uncomfortable and unfortunate in his

efforts to seem at ease. And sometimes he overflowed with a

peculiarly malignant wit that played, with devastating effect,

upon any topics that had the courage to face it. Ann Veronica's

experiences of men had been among more stable types--Teddy, who

was always absurd; her father, who was always authoritative and

sentimental; Manning, who was always Manning. And most of the

others she had met had, she felt, the same steadfastness.

Goopes, she was sure was always high-browed and slow and

Socratic. And Ramage too--about Ramage there would always be

that air of avidity, that air of knowledge and inquiry, the

mixture of things in his talk that were rather good with things

that were rather poor. But one could not count with any

confidence upon Capes.

The five men students were a mixed company. There was a very

white-faced youngster of eighteen who brushed back his hair

exactly in Russell's manner, and was disposed to be uncomfortably

silent when he was near her, and to whom she felt it was only

Christian kindness to be consistently pleasant; and a lax young

man of five-and-twenty in navy blue, who mingled Marx and Bebel

with the more orthodox gods of the biological pantheon. There

was a short, red-faced, resolute youth who inherited an

authoritative attitude upon bacteriology from his father; a

Japanese student of unassuming manners who drew beautifully and

had an imperfect knowledge of English; and a dark, unwashed

Scotchman with complicated spectacles, who would come every

morning as a sort of volunteer supplementary demonstrator, look

very closely at her work and her, tell her that her dissections

were "fairish," or "very fairish indeed," or "high above the

normal female standard," hover as if for some outbreak of

passionate gratitude and with admiring retrospects that made the

facetted spectacles gleam like diamonds, return to his own place.

The women, Ann Veronica thought, were not quite so interesting as

the men. There were two school-mistresses, one of whom--Miss

Klegg--might have been a first cousin to Miss Miniver, she had so

many Miniver traits; there was a preoccupied girl whose name Ann

Veronica never learned, but who worked remarkably well; and Miss

Garvice, who began by attracting her very greatly--she moved so

beautifully--and ended by giving her the impression that moving

beautifully was the beginning and end of her being.

Part 2

The next few weeks were a time of the very liveliest thought and

growth for Ann Veronica. The crowding impressions of the

previous weeks seemed to run together directly her mind left the

chaotic search for employment and came into touch again with a

coherent and systematic development of ideas. The advanced work

at the Central Imperial College was in the closest touch with