Ann Veronica Page 28

  "Oh! I wish," she said, "that people thought alike about these things."

  Capes watched the limpid water dripping from his oar. "I wish they did," he said, "but they don't."

  "I feel—All this is the rightest of all conceivable things. I want to tell every one. I want to boast myself."

  "I know."

  "I told them a lie. I told them lies. I wrote three letters yesterday and tore them up. It was so hopeless to put it to them. At last—I told a story."

  "You didn't tell them our position?"

  "I implied we had married."

  "They'll find out. They'll know."

  "Not yet."

  "Sooner or later."

  "Possibly—bit by bit.... But it was hopelessly hard to put. I said I knew he disliked and distrusted you and your work—that you shared all Russell's opinions: he hates Russell beyond measure—and that we couldn't possibly face a conventional marriage. What else could one say? I left him to suppose—a registry perhaps...."

  Capes let his oar smack on the water.

  "Do you mind very much?"

  He shook his head.

  "But it makes me feel inhuman," he added.

  "And me...."

  "It's the perpetual trouble," he said, "of parent and child. They can't help seeing things in the way they do. Nor can we. WE don't think they're right, but they don't think we are. A deadlock. In a very definite sense we are in the wrong—hopelessly in the wrong. But—It's just this: who was to be hurt?"

  "I wish no one had to be hurt," said Ann Veronica. "When one is happy—I don't like to think of them. Last time I left home I felt as hard as nails. But this is all different. It is different."

  "There's a sort of instinct of rebellion," said Capes. "It isn't anything to do with our times particularly. People think it is, but they are wrong. It's to do with adolescence. Long before religion and Society heard of Doubt, girls were all for midnight coaches and Gretna Green. It's a sort of home-leaving instinct."

  He followed up a line of thought.

  "There's another instinct, too," he went on, "in a state of suppression, unless I'm very much mistaken; a child-expelling instinct.... I wonder.... There's no family uniting instinct, anyhow; it's habit and sentiment and material convenience hold families together after adolescence. There's always friction, conflict, unwilling concessions. Always! I don't believe there is any strong natural affection at all between parents and growing-up children. There wasn't, I know, between myself and my father. I didn't allow myself to see things as they were in those days; now I do. I bored him. I hated him. I suppose that shocks one's ideas.... It's true.... There are sentimental and traditional deferences and reverences, I know, between father and son; but that's just exactly what prevents the development of an easy friendship. Father-worshipping sons are abnormal—and they're no good. No good at all. One's got to be a better man than one's father, or what is the good of successive generations? Life is rebellion, or nothing."

  He rowed a stroke and watched the swirl of water from his oar broaden and die away. At last he took up his thoughts again: "I wonder if, some day, one won't need to rebel against customs and laws? If this discord will have gone? Some day, perhaps—who knows?—the old won't coddle and hamper the young, and the young won't need to fly in the faces of the old. They'll face facts as facts, and understand. Oh, to face facts! Gods! what a world it might be if people faced facts! Understanding! Understanding! There is no other salvation. Some day older people, perhaps, will trouble to understand younger people, and there won't be these fierce disruptions; there won't be barriers one must defy or perish.... That's really our choice now, defy—or futility.... The world, perhaps, will be educated out of its idea of fixed standards.... I wonder, Ann Veronica, if, when our time comes, we shall be any wiser?"

  Ann Veronica watched a water-beetle fussing across the green depths. "One can't tell. I'm a female thing at bottom. I like high tone for a flourish and stars and ideas; but I want my things."

  Part 2

  Capes thought.

  "It's odd—I have no doubt in my mind that what we are doing is wrong," he said. "And yet I do it without compunction."

  "I never felt so absolutely right," said Ann Veronica.

  "You ARE a female thing at bottom," he admitted. "I'm not nearly so sure as you. As for me, I look twice at it.... Life is two things, that's how I see it; two things mixed and muddled up together. Life is morality—life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality—looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds—adventure.

  "Will you be moral and your species, or immoral and yourself? We've decided to be immoral. We needn't try and give ourselves airs. We've deserted the posts in which we found ourselves, cut our duties, exposed ourselves to risks that may destroy any sort of social usefulness in us.... I don't know. One keeps rules in order to be one's self. One studies Nature in order not to be blindly ruled by her. There's no sense in morality, I suppose, unless you are fundamentally immoral."

  She watched his face as he traced his way through these speculative thickets.

  "Look at our affair," he went on, looking up at her. "No power on earth will persuade me we're not two rather disreputable persons. You desert your home; I throw up useful teaching, risk every hope in your career. Here we are absconding, pretending to be what we are not; shady, to say the least of it. It's not a bit of good pretending there's any Higher Truth or wonderful principle in this business. There isn't. We never started out in any high-browed manner to scandalize and Shelleyfy. When first you left your home you had no idea that I was the hidden impulse. I wasn't. You came out like an ant for your nuptial flight. It was just a chance that we in particular hit against each other—nothing predestined about it. We just hit against each other, and here we are flying off at a tangent, a little surprised at what we are doing, all our principles abandoned, and tremendously and quite unreasonably proud of ourselves. Out of all this we have struck a sort of harmony.... And it's gorgeous!"

  "Glorious!" said Ann Veronica.

  "Would YOU like us—if some one told you the bare outline of our story?—and what we are doing?"

  "I shouldn't mind," said Ann Veronica.

  "But if some one else asked your advice? If some one else said, 'Here is my teacher, a jaded married man on the verge of middle age, and he and I have a violent passion for one another. We propose to disregard all our ties, all our obligations, all the established prohibitions of society, and begin life together afresh.' What would you tell her?"

  "If she asked advice, I should say she wasn't fit to do anything of the sort. I should say that having a doubt was enough to condemn it."

  "But waive that point."

  "It would be different all the same. It wouldn't be you."

  "It wouldn't be you either. I suppose that's the gist of the whole thing." He stared at a little eddy. "The rule's all right, so long as there isn't a case. Rules are for established things, like the pieces and positions of a game. Men and women are not established things; they're experiments, all of them. Every human being is a new thing, exists to do new things. Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that's it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good; if you die, well and good. Your purpose is done.... Well, this is OUR thing."

  He woke the glassy water to swirling activity again, and made the deep-blue shapes below writhe and shiver.

  "This is MY thing," said Ann Veronica, softly, with thoughtful eyes upon him.

  Then she looked up the sweep of pine-trees to the towering sunlit cliffs and the high heaven above and then back to his face. She drew in a deep breath of the sweet mountain air. Her eyes were soft and grave, and there was the faintest of smiles upon her resolute lips.

  Part 3

  Later they loitered along a win
ding path above the inn, and made love to one another. Their journey had made them indolent, the afternoon was warm, and it seemed impossible to breathe a sweeter air. The flowers and turf, a wild strawberry, a rare butterfly, and suchlike little intimate things had become more interesting than mountains. Their flitting hands were always touching. Deep silences came between them....

  "I had thought to go on to Kandersteg," said Capes, "but this is a pleasant place. There is not a soul in the inn but ourselves. Let us stay the night here. Then we can loiter and gossip to our heart's content."

  "Agreed," said Ann Veronica.

  "After all, it's our honeymoon."

  "All we shall get," said Ann Veronica.

  "This place is very beautiful."

  "Any place would be beautiful," said Ann Veronica, in a low voice.

  For a time they walked in silence.

  "I wonder," she began, presently, "why I love you—and love you so much?... I know now what it is to be an abandoned female. I AM an abandoned female. I'm not ashamed—of the things I'm doing. I want to put myself into your hands. You know—I wish I could roll my little body up small and squeeze it into your hand and grip your fingers upon it. Tight. I want you to hold me and have me SO.... Everything. Everything. It's a pure joy of giving—giving to YOU. I have never spoken of these things to any human being. Just dreamed—and ran away even from my dreams. It is as if my lips had been sealed about them. And now I break the seals—for you. Only I wish—I wish to-day I was a thousand times, ten thousand times more beautiful."

  Capes lifted her hand and kissed it.

  "You are a thousand times more beautiful," he said, "than anything else could be.... You are you. You are all the beauty in the world. Beauty doesn't mean, never has meant, anything—anything at all but you. It heralded you, promised you...."

  Part 4

  They lay side by side in a shallow nest of turf and mosses among bowlders and stunted bushes on a high rock, and watched the day sky deepen to evening between the vast precipices overhead and looked over the tree-tops down the widening gorge. A distant suggestion of chalets and a glimpse of the road set them talking for a time of the world they had left behind.

  Capes spoke casually of their plans for work. "It's a flabby, loose-willed world we have to face. It won't even know whether to be scandalized at us or forgiving. It will hold aloof, a little undecided whether to pelt or not—"

  "That depends whether we carry ourselves as though we expected pelting," said Ann Veronica.

  "We won't."

  "No fear!"

  "Then, as we succeed, it will begin to sidle back to us. It will do its best to overlook things—"

  "If we let it, poor dear."

  "That's if we succeed. If we fail," said Capes, "then—"

  "We aren't going to fail," said Ann Veronica.

  Life seemed a very brave and glorious enterprise to Ann Veronica that day. She was quivering with the sense of Capes at her side and glowing with heroic love; it seemed to her that if they put their hands jointly against the Alps and pushed they would be able to push them aside. She lay and nibbled at a sprig of dwarf rhododendron.

  "FAIL!" she said.

  Part 5

  Presently it occurred to Ann Veronica to ask about the journey he had planned. He had his sections of the Siegfried map folded in his pocket, and he squatted up with his legs crossed like an Indian idol while she lay prone beside him and followed every movement of his indicatory finger.

  "Here," he said, "is this Blau See, and here we rest until to-morrow. I think we rest here until to-morrow?"

  There was a brief silence.

  "It is a very pleasant place," said Ann Veronica, biting a rhododendron stalk through, and with that faint shadow of a smile returning to her lips....

  "And then?" said Ann Veronica.

  "Then we go on to this place, the Oeschinensee. It's a lake among precipices, and there is a little inn where we can stay, and sit and eat our dinner at a pleasant table that looks upon the lake. For some days we shall be very idle there among the trees and rocks. There are boats on the lake and shady depths and wildernesses of pine-wood. After a day or so, perhaps, we will go on one or two little excursions and see how good your head is—a mild scramble or so; and then up to a hut on a pass just here, and out upon the Blumlis-alp glacier that spreads out so and so."

  She roused herself from some dream at the word. "Glaciers?" she said.

  "Under the Wilde Frau—which was named after you."

  He bent and kissed her hair and paused, and then forced his attention back to the map. "One day," he resumed, "we will start off early and come down into Kandersteg and up these zigzags and here and here, and so past this Daubensee to a tiny inn—it won't be busy yet, though; we may get it all to ourselves—on the brim of the steepest zigzag you can imagine, thousands of feet of zigzag; and you will sit and eat lunch with me and look out across the Rhone Valley and over blue distances beyond blue distances to the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa and a long regiment of sunny, snowy mountains. And when we see them we shall at once want to go to them—that's the way with beautiful things—and down we shall go, like flies down a wall, to Leukerbad, and so to Leuk Station, here, and then by train up the Rhone Valley and this little side valley to Stalden; and there, in the cool of the afternoon, we shall start off up a gorge, torrents and cliffs below us and above us, to sleep in a half-way inn, and go on next day to Saas Fee, Saas of the Magic, Saas of the Pagan People. And there, about Saas, are ice and snows again, and sometimes we will loiter among the rocks and trees about Saas or peep into Samuel Butler's chapels, and sometimes we will climb up out of the way of the other people on to the glaciers and snow. And, for one expedition at least, we will go up this desolate valley here to Mattmark, and so on to Monte Moro. There indeed you see Monte Rosa. Almost the best of all."

  "Is it very beautiful?"

  "When I saw it there it was very beautiful. It was wonderful. It was the crowned queen of mountains in her robes of shining white. It towered up high above the level of the pass, thousands of feet, still, shining, and white, and below, thousands of feet below, was a floor of little woolly clouds. And then presently these clouds began to wear thin and expose steep, deep slopes, going down and down, with grass and pine-trees, down and down, and at last, through a great rent in the clouds, bare roofs, shining like very minute pin-heads, and a road like a fibre of white silk-Macugnana, in Italy. That will be a fine day—it will have to be, when first you set eyes on Italy.... That's as far as we go."

  "Can't we go down into Italy?"

  "No," he said; "it won't run to that now. We must wave our hands at the blue hills far away there and go back to London and work."

  "But Italy—"

  "Italy's for a good girl," he said, and laid his hand for a moment on her shoulder. "She must look forward to Italy."

  "I say," she reflected, "you ARE rather the master, you know."

  The idea struck him as novel. "Of course I'm manager for this expedition," he said, after an interval of self-examination.

  She slid her cheek down the tweed sleeve of his coat. "Nice sleeve," she said, and came to his hand and kissed it.

  "I say!" he cried. "Look here! Aren't you going a little too far? This—this is degradation—making a fuss with sleeves. You mustn't do things like that."

  "Why not?"

  "Free woman—and equal."

  "I do it—of my own free will," said Ann Veronica, kissing his hand again. "It's nothing to what I WILL do."

  "Oh, well!" he said, a little doubtfully, "it's just a phase," and bent down and rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment, with his heart beating and his nerves a-quiver. Then as she lay very still, with her hands clinched and her black hair tumbled about her face, he came still closer and softly kissed the nape of her neck....

  Part 6

  Most of the things that he had planned they did. But they climbed more than he had intended because Ann Veronica proved rather a good climber, steady-heade
d and plucky, rather daring, but quite willing to be cautious at his command.

  One of the things that most surprised him in her was her capacity for blind obedience. She loved to be told to do things.

  He knew the circle of mountains about Saas Fee fairly well: he had been there twice before, and it was fine to get away from the straggling pedestrians into the high, lonely places, and sit and munch sandwiches and talk together and do things together that were just a little difficult and dangerous. And they could talk, they found; and never once, it seemed, did their meaning and intention hitch. They were enormously pleased with one another; they found each other beyond measure better than they had expected, if only because of the want of substance in mere expectation. Their conversation degenerated again and again into a strain of self-congratulation that would have irked an eavesdropper.

  "You're—I don't know," said Ann Veronica. "You're splendid."

  "It isn't that you're splendid or I," said Capes. "But we satisfy one another. Heaven alone knows why. So completely! The oddest fitness! What is it made of? Texture of skin and texture of mind? Complexion and voice. I don't think I've got illusions, nor you.... If I had never met anything of you at all but a scrap of your skin binding a book, Ann Veronica, I know I would have kept that somewhere near to me.... All your faults are just jolly modelling to make you real and solid."

  "The faults are the best part of it," said Ann Veronica; "why, even our little vicious strains run the same way. Even our coarseness."

  "Coarse?" said Capes, "We're not coarse."

  "But if we were?" said Ann Veronica.

  "I can talk to you and you to me without a scrap of effort," said Capes; "that's the essence of it. It's made up of things as small as the diameter of hairs and big as life and death.... One always dreamed of this and never believed it. It's the rarest luck, the wildest, most impossible accident. Most people, every one I know else, seem to have mated with foreigners and to talk uneasily in unfamiliar tongues, to be afraid of the knowledge the other one has, of the other one's perpetual misjudgment and misunderstandings.