"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. NOWit'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 NEWWORLD!"
"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 so right; she clung to that, and shirked more and more the paradoxical conviction that they were also somehow, and even in direct relation to that rightness, absurd.
