Ann Veronica (37 page)

"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."

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.

Later they loitered along a winding 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...."

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.

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."