Ann Veronica (34 page)

"You couldn't."

"I ought to have—all the same.

"I wonder," he said, and went off at a tangent. "You know about my
scandalous past?"

"Very little. It doesn't seem to matter. Does it?"

"I think it does. Profoundly."

"How?"

"It prevents our marrying. It forbids—all sorts of things."

"It can't prevent our loving."

"I'm afraid it can't. But, by Jove! it's going to make our loving a
fiercely abstract thing."

"You are separated from your wife?"

"Yes, but do you know how?"

"Not exactly."

"Why on earth—? A man ought to be labelled. You see, I'm separated from
my wife. But she doesn't and won't divorce me. You don't understand
the fix I am in. And you don't know what led to our separation. And, in
fact, all round the problem you don't know and I don't see how I could
possibly have told you before. I wanted to, that day in the Zoo. But I
trusted to that ring of yours."

"Poor old ring!" said Ann Veronica.

"I ought never have gone to the Zoo, I suppose. I asked you to go. But
a man is a mixed creature.... I wanted the time with you. I wanted it
badly."

"Tell me about yourself," said Ann Veronica.

"To begin with, I was—I was in the divorce court. I was—I was a
co-respondent. You understand that term?"

Ann Veronica smiled faintly. "A modern girl does understand these terms.
She reads novels—and history—and all sorts of things. Did you really
doubt if I knew?"

"No. But I don't suppose you can understand."

"I don't see why I shouldn't."

"To know things by name is one thing; to know them by seeing them and
feeling them and being them quite another. That is where life takes
advantage of youth. You don't understand."

"Perhaps I don't."

"You don't. That's the difficulty. If I told you the facts, I expect,
since you are in love with me, you'd explain the whole business as being
very fine and honorable for me—the Higher Morality, or something of
that sort.... It wasn't."

"I don't deal very much," said Ann Veronica, "in the Higher Morality, or
the Higher Truth, or any of those things."

"Perhaps you don't. But a human being who is young and clean, as you
are, is apt to ennoble—or explain away."

"I've had a biological training. I'm a hard young woman."

"Nice clean hardness, anyhow. I think you are hard. There's
something—something ADULT about you. I'm talking to you now as though
you had all the wisdom and charity in the world. I'm going to tell you
things plainly. Plainly. It's best. And then you can go home and think
things over before we talk again. I want you to be clear what you're
really and truly up to, anyhow."

"I don't mind knowing," said Ann Veronica.

"It's precious unromantic."

"Well, tell me."

"I married pretty young," said Capes. "I've got—I have to tell you this
to make myself clear—a streak of ardent animal in my composition. I
married—I married a woman whom I still think one of the most beautiful
persons in the world. She is a year or so older than I am, and she is,
well, of a very serene and proud and dignified temperament. If you met
her you would, I am certain, think her as fine as I do. She has never
done a really ignoble thing that I know of—never. I met her when we
were both very young, as young as you are. I loved her and made love to
her, and I don't think she quite loved me back in the same way."

He paused for a time. Ann Veronica said nothing.

"These are the sort of things that aren't supposed to happen. They leave
them out of novels—these incompatibilities. Young people ignore them
until they find themselves up against them. My wife doesn't understand,
doesn't understand now. She despises me, I suppose.... We married,
and for a time we were happy. She was fine and tender. I worshipped her
and subdued myself."

He left off abruptly. "Do you understand what I am talking about? It's
no good if you don't."

"I think so," said Ann Veronica, and colored. "In fact, yes, I do."

"Do you think of these things—these matters—as belonging to our Higher
Nature or our Lower?"

"I don't deal in Higher Things, I tell you," said Ann Veronica, "or
Lower, for the matter of that. I don't classify." She hesitated. "Flesh
and flowers are all alike to me."

"That's the comfort of you. Well, after a time there came a fever in
my blood. Don't think it was anything better than fever—or a bit
beautiful. It wasn't. Quite soon, after we were married—it was just
within a year—I formed a friendship with the wife of a friend, a woman
eight years older than myself.... It wasn't anything splendid, you
know. It was just a shabby, stupid, furtive business that began between
us. Like stealing. We dressed it in a little music.... I want you to
understand clearly that I was indebted to the man in many small ways. I
was mean to him.... It was the gratification of an immense necessity.
We were two people with a craving. We felt like thieves. We WERE
thieves.... We LIKED each other well enough. Well, my friend found
us out, and would give no quarter. He divorced her. How do you like the
story?"

"Go on," said Ann Veronica, a little hoarsely, "tell me all of it."

"My wife was astounded—wounded beyond measure. She thought me—filthy.
All her pride raged at me. One particularly humiliating thing came
out—humiliating for me. There was a second co-respondent. I hadn't
heard of him before the trial. I don't know why that should be so
acutely humiliating. There's no logic in these things. It was."

"Poor you!" said Ann Veronica.

"My wife refused absolutely to have anything more to do with me. She
could hardly speak to me; she insisted relentlessly upon a separation.
She had money of her own—much more than I have—and there was no need
to squabble about that. She has given herself up to social work."

"Well—"

"That's all. Practically all. And yet—Wait a little, you'd better have
every bit of it. One doesn't go about with these passions allayed simply
because they have made wreckage and a scandal. There one is! The same
stuff still! One has a craving in one's blood, a craving roused, cut off
from its redeeming and guiding emotional side. A man has more freedom to
do evil than a woman. Irregularly, in a quite inglorious and unromantic
way, you know, I am a vicious man. That's—that's my private life. Until
the last few months. It isn't what I have been but what I am. I haven't
taken much account of it until now. My honor has been in my scientific
work and public discussion and the things I write. Lots of us are like
that. But, you see, I'm smirched. For the sort of love-making you think
about. I've muddled all this business. I've had my time and lost my
chances. I'm damaged goods. And you're as clean as fire. You come with
those clear eyes of yours, as valiant as an angel...."

He stopped abruptly.

"Well?" she said.

"That's all."

"It's so strange to think of you—troubled by such things. I didn't
think—I don't know what I thought. Suddenly all this makes you human.
Makes you real."

"But don't you see how I must stand to you? Don't you see how it bars us
from being lovers—You can't—at first. You must think it over. It's all
outside the world of your experience."

"I don't think it makes a rap of difference, except for one thing. I
love you more. I've wanted you—always. I didn't dream, not even in my
wildest dreaming, that—you might have any need of me."

He made a little noise in his throat as if something had cried out
within him, and for a time they were both too full for speech.

They were going up the slope into Waterloo Station.

"You go home and think of all this," he said, "and talk about it
to-morrow. Don't, don't say anything now, not anything. As for loving
you, I do. I do—with all my heart. It's no good hiding it any more.
I could never have talked to you like this, forgetting everything that
parts us, forgetting even your age, if I did not love you utterly. If
I were a clean, free man—We'll have to talk of all these things. Thank
goodness there's plenty of opportunity! And we two can talk. Anyhow, now
you've begun it, there's nothing to keep us in all this from being the
best friends in the world. And talking of every conceivable thing. Is
there?"

"Nothing," said Ann Veronica, with a radiant face.

"Before this there was a sort of restraint—a make-believe. It's gone."

"It's gone."

"Friendship and love being separate things. And that confounded
engagement!"

"Gone!"

They came upon a platform, and stood before her compartment.

He took her hand and looked into her eyes and spoke, divided against
himself, in a voice that was forced and insincere.

"I shall be very glad to have you for a friend," he said, "loving
friend. I had never dreamed of such a friend as you."

She smiled, sure of herself beyond any pretending, into his troubled
eyes. Hadn't they settled that already?

"I want you as a friend," he persisted, almost as if he disputed
something.

The next morning she waited in the laboratory at the lunch-hour in the
reasonable certainty that he would come to her.

"Well, you have thought it over?" he said, sitting down beside her.

"I've been thinking of you all night," she answered.

"Well?"

"I don't care a rap for all these things."

He said nothing for a space.

"I don't see there's any getting away from the fact that you and I love
each other," he said, slowly. "So far you've got me and I you....
You've got me. I'm like a creature just wakened up. My eyes are open to
you. I keep on thinking of you. I keep on thinking of little details and
aspects of your voice, your eyes, the way you walk, the way your hair
goes back from the side of your forehead. I believe I have always been
in love with you. Always. Before ever I knew you."

She sat motionless, with her hand tightening over the edge of the table,
and he, too, said no more. She began to tremble violently.

He stood up abruptly and went to the window.

"We have," he said, "to be the utmost friends."

She stood up and held her arms toward him. "I want you to kiss me," she
said.

He gripped the window-sill behind him.

"If I do," he said.... "No! I want to do without that. I want to
do without that for a time. I want to give you time to think. I am a
man—of a sort of experience. You are a girl with very little. Just sit
down on that stool again and let's talk of this in cold blood. People of
your sort—I don't want the instincts to—to rush our situation. Are you
sure what it is you want of me?"

"I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want to give myself to you.
I want to be whatever I can to you." She paused for a moment. "Is that
plain?" she asked.

"If I didn't love you better than myself," said Capes, "I wouldn't fence
like this with you.

"I am convinced you haven't thought this out," he went on. "You do not
know what such a relation means. We are in love. Our heads swim with
the thought of being together. But what can we do? Here am I, fixed to
respectability and this laboratory; you're living at home. It means...
just furtive meetings."

"I don't care how we meet," she said.

"It will spoil your life."

"It will make it. I want you. I am clear I want you. You are different
from all the world for me. You can think all round me. You are the one
person I can understand and feel—feel right with. I don't idealize you.
Don't imagine that. It isn't because you're good, but because I may be
rotten bad; and there's something—something living and understanding
in you. Something that is born anew each time we meet, and pines when
we are separated. You see, I'm selfish. I'm rather scornful. I think
too much about myself. You're the only person I've really given good,
straight, unselfish thought to. I'm making a mess of my life—unless
you come in and take it. I am. In you—if you can love me—there
is salvation. Salvation. I know what I am doing better than you do.
Think—think of that engagement!"

Their talk had come to eloquent silences that contradicted all he had to
say.

She stood up before him, smiling faintly.

"I think we've exhausted this discussion," she said.

"I think we have," he answered, gravely, and took her in his arms, and
smoothed her hair from her forehead, and very tenderly kissed her lips.

They spent the next Sunday in Richmond Park, and mingled the happy
sensation of being together uninterruptedly through the long sunshine
of a summer's day with the ample discussion of their position. "This has
all the clean freshness of spring and youth," said Capes; "it is love
with the down on; it is like the glitter of dew in the sunlight to be
lovers such as we are, with no more than one warm kiss between us. I
love everything to-day, and all of you, but I love this, this—this
innocence upon us most of all.

"You can't imagine," he said, "what a beastly thing a furtive love
affair can be.

"This isn't furtive," said Ann Veronica.

"Not a bit of it. And we won't make it so.... We mustn't make it so."

They loitered under trees, they sat on mossy banks they gossiped on
friendly benches, they came back to lunch at the "Star and Garter,"
and talked their afternoon away in the garden that looks out upon the
crescent of the river. They had a universe to talk about—two universes.

"What are we going to do?" said Capes, with his eyes on the broad
distances beyond the ribbon of the river.

"I will do whatever you want," said Ann Veronica.

"My first love was all blundering," said Capes.

He thought for a moment, and went on: "Love is something that has to be
taken care of. One has to be so careful.... It's a beautiful plant,
but a tender one.... I didn't know. I've a dread of love dropping its
petals, becoming mean and ugly. How can I tell you all I feel? I love
you beyond measure. And I'm afraid.... I'm anxious, joyfully anxious,
like a man when he has found a treasure."