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.

Very central in Miss Miniver’s universe were the Goopes. The Goopes were

the oddest little couple conceivable, following a fruitarian career upon

an upper floor in Theobald’s Road. They were childless and servantless,

and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr.

Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited

schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian

cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis,

and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of

a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had

mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed

simply in a pajama-shaped suit of canvas sacking tied with brown

ribbons, while his wife wore a purple djibbah with a richly

embroidered yoke. He was a small, dark, reserved man, with a large

inflexible-looking convex forehead, and his wife was very pink and

high-spirited, with one of those chins that pass insensibly into a full,

strong neck. Once a week, every Saturday, they had a little gathering

from nine till the small hours, just talk and perhaps reading aloud and

fruitarian refreshments--chestnut sandwiches buttered with nut tose,

and so forth--and lemonade and unfermented wine; and to one of these

symposia Miss Miniver after a good deal of preliminary solicitude,

conducted Ann Veronica.

She was introduced, perhaps a little too obviously for her taste, as

a girl who was standing out against her people, to a gathering that

consisted of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep

voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica’s inexperienced

eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy, blond young man with a

narrow forehead and glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts

and blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr.

and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone.

These were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned

fireplace, surmounted by a carved wood inscription:

“DO IT NOW.”

And to them were presently added a roguish-looking young man, with

reddish hair, an orange tie, and a fluffy tweed suit, and others who,

in Ann Veronica’s memory, in spite of her efforts to recall details,

remained obstinately just “others.”

The talk was animated, and remained always brilliant in form even when

it ceased to be brilliant in substance. There were moments when Ann

Veronica rather more than suspected the chief speakers to be, as

school-boys say, showing off at her.

They talked of a new substitute for dripping in vegetarian cookery that

Mrs. Goopes was convinced exercised an exceptionally purifying influence

on the mind. And then they talked of Anarchism and Socialism, and

whether the former was the exact opposite of the latter or only a higher

form. The reddish-haired young man contributed allusions to the Hegelian

philosophy that momentarily confused the discussion. Then Alderman

Dunstable, who had hitherto been silent, broke out into speech and went

off at a tangent, and gave his personal impressions of quite a number

of his fellow-councillors. He continued to do this for the rest of the

evening intermittently, in and out, among other topics. He addressed

himself chiefly to Goopes, and spoke as if in reply to long-sustained

inquiries on the part of Goopes into the personnel of the Marylebone

Borough Council. “If you were to ask me,” he would say, “I should say

Blinders is straight. An ordinary type, of course--”

Mrs. Dunstable’s contributions to the conversation were entirely in the

form of nods; whenever Alderman Dunstable praised or blamed she nodded

twice or thrice, according to the requirements of his emphasis. And

she seemed always to keep one eye on Ann Veronica’s dress. Mrs.

Goopes disconcerted the Alderman a little by abruptly challenging the

roguish-looking young man in the orange tie (who, it seemed, was the

assistant editor of New Ideas) upon a critique of Nietzsche and Tolstoy

that had appeared in his paper, in which doubts had been cast upon the

perfect sincerity of the latter. Everybody seemed greatly concerned

about the sincerity of Tolstoy.

Miss Miniver said that if once she lost her faith in Tolstoy’s

sincerity, nothing she felt would really matter much any more, and she

appealed to Ann Veronica whether she did not feel the same; and Mr.

Goopes said that we must distinguish between sincerity and irony, which

was often indeed no more than sincerity at the sublimated level.

Alderman Dunstable said that sincerity was often a matter of

opportunity, and illustrated the point to the fair young man with an

anecdote about Blinders on the Dust Destructor Committee, during which

the young man in the orange tie succeeded in giving the whole discussion

a daring and erotic flavor by questioning whether any one could be

perfectly sincere in love.

Miss Miniver thought that there was no true sincerity except in love,

and appealed to Ann Veronica, but the young man in the orange tie went

on to declare that it was quite possible to be sincerely in love with

two people at the same time, although perhaps on different planes with

each individual, and deceiving them both. But that brought Mrs. Goopes

down on him with the lesson Titian teaches so beautifully in his “Sacred

and Profane Love,” and became quite eloquent upon the impossibility of

any deception in the former.

Then they discoursed on love for a time, and Alderman Dunstable, turning

back to the shy, blond young man and speaking in undertones of the

utmost clearness, gave a brief and confidential account of an unfounded

rumor of the bifurcation of the affections of Blinders that had led to a

situation of some unpleasantness upon the Borough Council.

The very old lady in the antimacassar touched Ann Veronica’s arm

suddenly, and said, in a deep, arch voice:

“Talking of love again; spring again, love again. Oh! you young people!”

The young man with the orange tie, in spite of Sisyphus-like efforts

on the part of Goopes to get the topic on to a higher plane, displayed

great persistence in speculating upon the possible distribution of the

affections of highly developed modern types.

The old lady in the antimacassar said, abruptly, “Ah! you young people,

you young people, if you only knew!” and then laughed and then mused in

a marked manner; and the young man with the narrow forehead and glasses

cleared his throat and asked the young man in the orange tie whether he

believed that Platonic love was possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed

in nothing else, and with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a

little abruptly, and directed Goopes and the shy young man in the

handing of refreshments.

But the young man with the orange tie remained in his place, disputing

whether the body had not something or other which he called its

legitimate claims. And from that they came back by way of the Kreutzer

Sonata and Resurrection to Tolstoy again.

So the talk went on. Goopes, who had at first been a little reserved,

resorted presently to the Socratic method to restrain the young man with

the orange tie, and bent his forehead over him, and brought out at last

very clearly from him that the body was only illusion and everything

nothing but just spirit and molecules of thought. It became a sort of

duel at last between them, and all the others sat and listened--every

one, that is, except the Alderman, who had got the blond young man into

a corner by the green-stained dresser with the aluminum things, and was

sitting with his back to every one else, holding one hand over his mouth

for greater privacy, and telling him, with an accent of confidential

admission, in whispers of the chronic struggle between the natural

modesty and general inoffensiveness of the Borough Council and the

social evil in Marylebone.

So the talk went on, and presently they were criticising novelists, and

certain daring essays of Wilkins got their due share of attention,

and then they were discussing the future of the theatre. Ann Veronica

intervened a little in the novelist discussion with a defence of Esmond

and a denial that the Egoist was obscure, and when she spoke every one

else stopped talking and listened. Then they deliberated whether Bernard

Shaw ought to go into Parliament. And that brought them to vegetarianism

and teetotalism, and the young man in the orange tie and Mrs. Goopes

had a great set-to about the sincerity of Chesterton and Belloc that was

ended by Goopes showing signs of resuming the Socratic method.

And at last Ann Veronica and Miss Miniver came down the dark staircase

and out into the foggy spaces of the London squares, and crossed Russell

Square, Woburn Square, Gordon Square, making an oblique route to Ann

Veronica’s lodging. They trudged along a little hungry, because of the

fruitarian refreshments, and mentally very active. And Miss Miniver fell

discussing whether Goopes or Bernard Shaw or Tolstoy or Doctor Tumpany

or Wilkins the author had the more powerful and perfect mind in

existence at the present time. She was clear there were no other minds

like them in all the world.