Part 1

January found Ann Veronica a student in the biological laboratory of the

Central Imperial College that towers up from among the back streets in

the angle between Euston Road and Great Portland Street. She was working

very steadily at the Advanced Course in Comparative Anatomy, wonderfully

relieved to have her mind engaged upon one methodically developing theme

in the place of the discursive uncertainties of the previous two months,

and doing her utmost to keep right in the back of her mind and out

of sight the facts, firstly, that she had achieved this haven of

satisfactory activity by incurring a debt to Ramage of forty pounds,

and, secondly, that her present position was necessarily temporary and

her outlook quite uncertain.

The biological laboratory had an atmosphere that was all its own.

It was at the top of the building, and looked clear over a clustering

mass of inferior buildings toward Regent’s Park. It was long and narrow,

a well-lit, well-ventilated, quiet gallery of small tables and sinks,

pervaded by a thin smell of methylated spirit and of a mitigated

and sterilized organic decay. Along the inner side was a wonderfully

arranged series of displayed specimens that Russell himself had

prepared. The supreme effect for Ann Veronica was its surpassing

relevance; it made every other atmosphere she knew seem discursive and

confused. The 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.