Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
CHAPTER THE FIFTEENTH THE LAST DAYS AT HOME
Part 1 They decided to go to Switzerland at the
session's end. "We'll clean up everything tidy," said
Capes....
For her pride's sake, and to save herself from long day-dreams and an unappeasable
longing for her lover, Ann Veronica worked hard at her biology during those closing
weeks.
She was, as Capes had said, a hard young woman.
She was keenly resolved to do well in the school examination, and not to be drowned
in the seas of emotion that threatened to submerge her intellectual being.
Nevertheless, she could not prevent a rising excitement as the dawn of the new
life drew near to her--a thrilling of the nerves, a secret and delicious exaltation
above the common circumstances of existence.
Sometimes her straying mind would become astonishingly active--embroidering bright
and decorative things that she could say to Capes; sometimes it passed into a state of
passive acquiescence, into a radiant, formless, golden joy.
She was aware of people--her aunt, her father, her fellow-students, friends, and
neighbors--moving about outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor is
aware of the dim audience beyond the barrier of the footlights.
They might applaud, or object, or interfere, but the drama was her very own.
She was going through with that, anyhow.
The feeling of last days grew stronger with her as their number diminished.
She went about the familiar home with a clearer and clearer sense of inevitable
conclusions.
She became exceptionally considerate and affectionate with her father and aunt, and
more and more concerned about the coming catastrophe that she was about to
precipitate upon them.
Her aunt had a once exasperating habit of interrupting her work with demands for
small household services, but now Ann Veronica rendered them with a ***
readiness of anticipatory propitiation.
She was greatly exercised by the problem of confiding in the Widgetts; they were dears,
and she talked away two evenings with Constance without broaching the topic; she
made some vague intimations in letters to
Miss Miniver that Miss Miniver failed to mark.
But she did not bother her head very much about her relations with these
sympathizers.
And at length her penultimate day in Morningside Park dawned for her.
She got up early, and walked about the garden in the dewy June sunshine and
revived her childhood.
She was saying good-bye to childhood and home, and her making; she was going out
into the great, multitudinous world; this time there would be no returning.
She was at the end of girlhood and on the eve of a woman's crowning experience.
She visited the corner that had been her own little garden--her forget-me-nots and
candytuft had long since been elbowed into insignificance by weeds; she visited the
raspberry-canes that had sheltered that
first love affair with the little boy in velvet, and the greenhouse where she had
been wont to read her secret letters.
Here was the place behind the shed where she had used to hide from Roddy's
persecutions, and here the border of herbaceous perennials under whose stems was
fairyland.
The back of the house had been the Alps for climbing, and the shrubs in front of it a
Terai.
The knots and broken pale that made the garden-fence scalable, and gave access to
the fields behind, were still to be traced. And here against a wall were the plum-
trees.
In spite of God and wasps and her father, she had stolen plums; and once because of
discovered misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother was dead, she
had lain on her face in the unmown grass,
beneath the elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her soul in
weeping. Remote little Ann Veronica!
She would never know the heart of that child again!
That child had loved fairy princes with velvet suits and golden locks, and she was
in love with a real man named Capes, with little gleams of gold on his cheek and a
pleasant voice and firm and shapely hands.
She was going to him soon and certainly, going to his strong, embracing arms.
She was going through a new world with him side by side.
She had been so busy with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it seemed, she had
given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of her childhood.
Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very distant, and she had come to say
farewell to them across one sundering year.
She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the eggs: and then she went
off to catch the train before her father's. She did this to please him.
He hated travelling second-class with her-- indeed, he never did--but he also disliked
travelling in the same train when his daughter was in an inferior class, because
of the look of the thing.
So he liked to go by a different train. And in the Avenue she had an encounter with
Ramage.
It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable impressions in her
mind.
She was aware of him--a silk-hatted, shiny- black figure on the opposite side of the
Avenue; and then, abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and spoke
to her.
"I MUST speak to you," he said. "I can't keep away from you."
She made some inane response. She was struck by a change in his
appearance.
His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost something of its ruddy
freshness.
He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they reached the station, and
left her puzzled at its drift and meaning. She quickened her pace, and so did he,
talking at her slightly averted ear.
She made lumpish and inadequate interruptions rather than replies.
At times he seemed to be claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her with
her check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible will, and how,
in the end, he always got what he wanted.
He said that his life was boring and stupid without her.
Something or other--she did not catch what- -he was damned if he could stand.
He was evidently nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his projecting eyes
sought to dominate.
The crowning aspect of the incident, for her mind, was the discovery that he and her
indiscretion with him no longer mattered very much.
Its importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise.
Even her debt to him was a triviality now. And of course!
She had a brilliant idea.
It surprised her she hadn't thought of it before!
She tried to explain that she was going to pay him forty pounds without fail next
week.
She said as much to him. She repeated this breathlessly.
"I was glad you did not send it back again," he said.
He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself vainly trying to
explain--the inexplicable. "It's because I mean to send it back
altogether," she said.
He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line of his own.
"Here we are, living in the same suburb," he began.
"We have to be--modern."
Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase.
That knot also would be cut. Modern, indeed!
She was going to be as primordial as chipped flint.
Part 2
In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering flowers for the dinner-table, her
father came strolling across the lawn toward her with an affectation of great
deliberation.
"I want to speak to you about a little thing, Vee," said Mr. Stanley.
Ann Veronica's tense nerves started, and she stood still with her eyes upon him,
wondering what it might be that impended.
"You were talking to that fellow Ramage to- day--in the Avenue.
Walking to the station with him." So that was it!
"He came and talked to me."
"Ye--e--es." Mr. Stanley considered.
"Well, I don't want you to talk to him," he said, very firmly.
Ann Veronica paused before she answered.
"Don't you think I ought to?" she asked, very submissively.
"No." Mr. Stanley coughed and faced toward the
house.
"He is not--I don't like him. I think it inadvisable--I don't want an
intimacy to spring up between you and a man of that type."
Ann Veronica reflected.
"I HAVE--had one or two talks with him, daddy."
"Don't let there be any more. I--In fact, I dislike him extremely."
"Suppose he comes and talks to me?"
"A girl can always keep a man at a distance if she cares to do it.
She--She can snub him." Ann Veronica picked a cornflower.
"I wouldn't make this objection," Mr. Stanley went on, "but there are things--
there are stories about Ramage. He's--He lives in a world of possibilities
outside your imagination.
His treatment of his wife is most unsatisfactory.
Most unsatisfactory. A bad man, in fact.
A dissipated, loose-living man."
"I'll try not to see him again," said Ann Veronica.
"I didn't know you objected to him, daddy." "Strongly," said Mr. Stanley, "very
strongly."
The conversation hung. Ann Veronica wondered what her father would
do if she were to tell him the full story of her relations with Ramage.
"A man like that taints a girl by looking at her, by his mere conversation."
He adjusted his glasses on his nose. There was another little thing he had to
say.
"One has to be so careful of one's friends and acquaintances," he remarked, by way of
transition. "They mould one insensibly."
His voice assumed an easy detached tone.
"I suppose, Vee, you don't see much of those Widgetts now?"
"I go in and talk to Constance sometimes." "Do you?"
"We were great friends at school."
"No doubt.... Still--I don't know whether I quite like--
Something ramshackle about those people, Vee.
While I am talking about your friends, I feel--I think you ought to know how I look
at it." His voice conveyed studied moderation.
"I don't mind, of course, your seeing her sometimes, still there are differences--
differences in social atmospheres. One gets drawn into things.
Before you know where you are you find yourself in a complication.
I don't want to influence you unduly--But-- They're artistic people, Vee.
That's the fact about them.
We're different." "I suppose we are," said Vee, rearranging
the flowers in her hand.
"Friendships that are all very well between school-girls don't always go on into later
life. It's--it's a social difference."
"I like Constance very much."
"No doubt. Still, one has to be reasonable.
As you admitted to me--one has to square one's self with the world.
You don't know.
With people of that sort all sorts of things may happen.
We don't want things to happen." Ann Veronica made no answer.
A vague desire to justify himself ruffled her father.
"I may seem unduly--anxious. I can't forget about your sister.
It's that has always made me--SHE, you know, was drawn into a set--didn't
discriminate Private theatricals."
Ann Veronica remained anxious to hear more of her sister's story from her father's
point of view, but he did not go on.
Even so much allusion as this to that family shadow, she felt, was an immense
recognition of her ripening years. She glanced at him.
He stood a little anxious and fussy, bothered by the responsibility of her,
entirely careless of what her life was or was likely to be, ignoring her thoughts and
feelings, ignorant of every fact of
importance in her life, explaining everything he could not understand in her
as nonsense and perversity, concerned only with a terror of bothers and undesirable
situations.
"We don't want things to happen!"
Never had he shown his daughter so clearly that the womenkind he was persuaded he had
to protect and control could please him in one way, and in one way only, and that was
by doing nothing except the punctual
domestic duties and being nothing except restful appearances.
He had quite enough to see to and worry about in the City without their doing
things.
He had no use for Ann Veronica; he had never had a use for her since she had been
too old to sit upon his knee. Nothing but the constraint of social usage
now linked him to her.
And the less "anything" happened the better.
The less she lived, in fact, the better.
These realizations rushed into Ann Veronica's mind and hardened her heart
against him. She spoke slowly.
"I may not see the Widgetts for some little time, father," she said.
"I don't think I shall." "Some little tiff?"
"No; but I don't think I shall see them."
Suppose she were to add, "I am going away!" "I'm glad to hear you say it," said Mr.
Stanley, and was so evidently pleased that Ann Veronica's heart smote her.
"I am very glad to hear you say it," he repeated, and refrained from further
inquiry. "I think we are growing sensible," he said.
"I think you are getting to understand me better."
He hesitated, and walked away from her toward the house.
Her eyes followed him.
The curve of his shoulders, the very angle of his feet, expressed relief at her
apparent obedience. "Thank goodness!" said that retreating
aspect, "that's said and over.
Vee's all right. There's nothing happened at all!"
She didn't mean, he concluded, to give him any more trouble ever, and he was free to
begin a fresh chromatic novel--he had just finished the Blue Lagoon, which he thought
very beautiful and tender and absolutely
irrelevant to Morningside Park--or work in peace at his microtome without bothering
about her in the least. The immense disillusionment that awaited
him!
The devastating disillusionment! She had a vague desire to run after him, to
state her case to him, to wring some understanding from him of what life was to
her.
She felt a cheat and a sneak to his unsuspecting retreating back.
"But what can one do?" asked Ann Veronica.
Part 3 She dressed carefully for dinner in a black
dress that her father liked, and that made her look serious and responsible.
Dinner was quite uneventful.
Her father read a draft prospectus warily, and her aunt dropped fragments of her
projects for managing while the cook had a holiday.
After dinner Ann Veronica went into the drawing-room with Miss Stanley, and her
father went up to his den for his pipe and pensive petrography.
Later in the evening she heard him whistling, poor man!
She felt very restless and excited. She refused coffee, though she knew that
anyhow she was doomed to a sleepless night.
She took up one of her father's novels and put it down again, fretted up to her own
room for some work, sat on her bed and meditated upon the room that she was now
really abandoning forever, and returned at length with a stocking to darn.
Her aunt was making herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion under the newly
lit lamp.
Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm- chair and darned badly for a minute or so.
Then she looked at her aunt, and traced with a curious eye the careful arrangement
of her hair, her sharp nose, the little drooping lines of mouth and chin and cheek.
Her thought spoke aloud.
"Were you ever in love, aunt?" she asked. Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat
very still, with hands that had ceased to work.
"What makes you ask such a question, Vee?" she said.
"I wondered."
Her aunt answered in a low voice: "I was engaged to him, dear, for seven years, and
then he died." Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little
murmur.
"He was in holy orders, and we were to have been married when he got a living.
He was a Wiltshire Edmondshaw, a very old family."
She sat very still.
Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had leaped up in her mind, and that she
felt was cruel. "Are you sorry you waited, aunt?" she said.
Her aunt was a long time before she answered.
"His stipend forbade it," she said, and seemed to fall into a train of thought.
"It would have been rash and unwise," she said at the end of a meditation.
"What he had was altogether insufficient."
Ann Veronica looked at the mildly pensive gray eyes and the comfortable, rather
refined face with a penetrating curiosity. Presently her aunt sighed deeply and looked
at the clock.
"Time for my Patience," she said. She got up, put the neat cuffs she had made
into her work-basket, and went to the bureau for the little cards in the morocco
case.
Ann Veronica jumped up to get her the card- table.
"I haven't seen the new Patience, dear," she said.
"May I sit beside you?"
"It's a very difficult one," said her aunt. "Perhaps you will help me shuffle?"
Ann Veronica did, and also assisted nimbly with the arrangements of the rows of eight
with which the struggle began.
Then she sat watching the play, sometimes offering a helpful suggestion, sometimes
letting her attention wander to the smoothly shining arms she had folded across
her knees just below the edge of the table.
She was feeling extraordinarily well that night, so that the sense of her body was a
deep delight, a realization of a gentle warmth and strength and elastic firmness.
Then she glanced at the cards again, over which her aunt's many-ringed hand played,
and then at the rather weak, rather plump face that surveyed its operations.
It came to Ann Veronica that life was wonderful beyond measure.
It seemed incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the same blood,
only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that same broad interlacing stream
of human life that has invented the fauns
and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite, Freya, and all the twining beauty of the gods.
The love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood, the scent of night stock from
the garden filled the air, and the moths that beat upon the closed frames of the
window next the lamp set her mind dreaming of kisses in the dusk.
Yet her aunt, with a ringed hand flitting to her lips and a puzzled, worried look in
her eyes, deaf to all this riot of warmth and flitting desire, was playing Patience--
playing Patience, as if Dionysius and her curate had died together.
A faint buzz above the ceiling witnessed that petrography, too, was active.
Gray and tranquil world!
Amazing, passionless world!
A world in which days without meaning, days in which "we don't want things to happen"
followed days without meaning--until the last thing happened, the ultimate,
unavoidable, coarse, "disagreeable."
It was her last evening in that wrappered life against which she had rebelled.
Warm reality was now so near her she could hear it beating in her ears.
Away in London even now Capes was packing and preparing; Capes, the magic man whose
touch turned one to trembling fire. What was he doing?
What was he thinking?
It was less than a day now, less than twenty hours.
Seventeen hours, sixteen hours.
She glanced at the soft-ticking clock with the exposed brass pendulum upon the white
marble mantel, and made a rapid calculation.
To be exact, it was just sixteen hours and twenty minutes.
The slow stars circled on to the moment of their meeting.
The softly glittering summer stars!
She saw them shining over mountains of snow, over valleys of haze and warm
darkness.... There would be no moon.
"I believe after all it's coming out!" said Miss Stanley.
"The aces made it easy." Ann Veronica started from her reverie, sat
up in her chair, became attentive.
"Look, dear," she said presently, "you can put the ten on the Jack."
>
CHAPTER THE SIXTEENTH IN THE MOUNTAINS
Part 1 Next day Ann Veronica and Capes felt like
newborn things.
It seemed to them they could never have been really alive before, but only dimly
anticipating existence.
They sat face to face beneath an experienced-looking rucksack and a brand
new portmanteau and a leather handbag, in the afternoon-boat train that goes from
Charing Cross to Folkestone for Boulogne.
They tried to read illustrated papers in an unconcerned manner and with forced
attention, lest they should catch the leaping exultation in each other's eyes.
And they admired Kent sedulously from the windows.
They crossed the Channel in sunshine and a breeze that just ruffled the sea to
glittering scales of silver.
Some of the people who watched them standing side by side thought they must be
newly wedded because of their happy faces, and others that they were an old-
established couple because of their easy confidence in each other.
At Boulogne they took train to Basle; next morning they breakfasted together in the
buffet of that station, and thence they caught the Interlaken express, and so went
by way of Spies to Frutigen.
There was no railway beyond Frutigen in those days; they sent their baggage by post
to Kandersteg, and walked along the mule path to the left of the stream to that
*** hollow among the precipices, Blau
See, where the petrifying branches of trees lie in the blue deeps of an icy lake, and
pine-trees clamber among gigantic boulders.
A little inn flying a Swiss flag nestles under a great rock, and there they put
aside their knapsacks and lunched and rested in the mid-day shadow of the gorge
and the scent of resin.
And later they paddled in a boat above the mysterious deeps of the See, and peered
down into the green-blues and the blue- greens together.
By that time it seemed to them they had lived together twenty years.
Except for one memorable school excursion to Paris, Ann Veronica had never yet been
outside England.
So that it seemed to her the whole world had changed--the very light of it had
changed.
Instead of English villas and cottages there were chalets and Italian-built houses
shining white; there were lakes of emerald and sapphire and clustering castles, and
such sweeps of hill and mountain, such
shining uplands of snow, as she had never seen before.
Everything was fresh and bright, from the kindly manners of the Frutigen cobbler, who
hammered mountain nails into her boots, to the unfamiliar wild flowers that spangled
the wayside.
And Capes had changed into the easiest and jolliest companion in the world.
The mere fact that he was there in the train alongside her, helping her, sitting
opposite to her in the dining-car, presently sleeping on a seat within a yard
of her, made her heart sing until she was
afraid their fellow passengers would hear it.
It was too good to be true. She would not sleep for fear of losing a
moment of that sense of his proximity.
To walk beside him, dressed akin to him, rucksacked and companionable, was bliss in
itself; each step she took was like stepping once more across the threshold of
heaven.
One trouble, however, shot its slanting bolts athwart the shining warmth of that
opening day and marred its perfection, and that was the thought of her father.
She had treated him badly; she had hurt him and her aunt; she had done wrong by their
standards, and she would never persuade them that she had done right.
She thought of her father in the garden, and of her aunt with her Patience, as she
had seen them--how many ages was it ago? Just one day intervened.
She felt as if she had struck them unawares.
The thought of them distressed her without subtracting at all from the oceans of
happiness in which she swam.
But she wished she could put the thing she had done in some way to them so that it
would not hurt them so much as the truth would certainly do.
The thought of their faces, and particularly of her aunt's, as it would
meet the fact--disconcerted, unfriendly, condemning, pained--occurred to her again
and again.
"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 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...."
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-headed 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.
"Why don't they wait?" he added. Ann Veronica had one of her flashes of
insight.
"One doesn't wait," said Ann Veronica. She expanded that.
"I shouldn't have waited," she said. "I might have muddled for a time.
But it's as you say.
I've had the rarest luck and fallen on my feet."
"We've both fallen on our feet! We're the rarest of mortals!
The real thing!
There's not a compromise nor a sham nor a concession between us.
We aren't afraid; we don't bother. We don't consider each other; we needn't.
That wrappered life, as you call it--we've burned the confounded rags!
Danced out of it! We're stark!"
"Stark!" echoed Ann Veronica.
Part 7 As they came back from that day's climb--it
was up the Mittaghorn--they had to cross a shining space of wet, steep rocks between
two grass slopes that needed a little care.
There were a few loose, broken fragments of rock to reckon with upon the ledges, and
one place where hands did as much work as toes.
They used the rope--not that a rope was at all necessary, but because Ann Veronica's
exalted state of mind made the fact of the rope agreeably symbolical; and, anyhow, it
did insure a joint death in the event of some remotely possibly mischance.
Capes went first, finding footholds and, where the drops in the strata-edges came
like long, awkward steps, placing Ann Veronica's feet.
About half-way across this interval, when everything seemed going well, Capes had a
shock. "Heavens!" exclaimed Ann Veronica, with
extraordinary passion.
"My God!" and ceased to move. Capes became rigid and adhesive.
Nothing ensued. "All right?" he asked.
"I'll have to pay it."
"Eh?" "I've forgotten something.
Oh, cuss it!" "Eh?"
"He said I would."
"What?" "That's the devil of it!"
"Devil of what?... You DO use vile language!"
"Forget about it like this."
"Forget WHAT?" "And I said I wouldn't.
I said I'd do anything. I said I'd make shirts."
"Shirts?"
"Shirts at one--and--something a dozen. Oh, goodness!
Bilking! Ann Veronica, you're a bilker!"
Pause.
"Will you tell me what all this is about?" said Capes.
"It's about forty pounds." Capes waited patiently.
"G. I'm sorry....
But you've got to lend me forty pounds." "It's some sort of delirium," said Capes.
"The rarefied air? I thought you had a better head."
"No! I'll explain lower.
It's all right. Let's go on climbing now.
It's a thing I've unaccountably overlooked. All right really.
It can wait a bit longer.
I borrowed forty pounds from Mr. Ramage. Thank goodness you'll understand.
That's why I chucked Manning.... All right, I'm coming.
But all this business has driven it clean out of my head....
That's why he was so annoyed, you know." "Who was annoyed?"
"Mr. Ramage--about the forty pounds."
She took a step. "My dear," she added, by way of
afterthought, "you DO obliterate things!"
Part 8
They found themselves next day talking love to one another high up on some rocks above
a steep bank of snow that overhung a precipice on the eastern side of the Fee
glacier.
By this time Capes' hair had bleached nearly white, and his skin had become a
skin of red copper shot with gold. They were now both in a state of
unprecedented physical fitness.
And such skirts as Ann Veronica had had when she entered the valley of Saas were
safely packed away in the hotel, and she wore a leather belt and loose
knickerbockers and puttees--a costume that
suited the fine, long lines of her limbs far better than any feminine walking-dress
could do.
Her complexion had resisted the snow-glare wonderfully; her skin had only deepened its
natural warmth a little under the Alpine sun.
She had pushed aside her azure veil, taken off her snow-glasses, and sat smiling under
her hand at the shining glories--the lit cornices, the blue shadows, the softly
rounded, enormous snow masses, the deep
places full of quivering luminosity--of the Taschhorn and Dom.
The sky was cloudless, effulgent blue.
Capes sat watching and admiring her, and then he fell praising the day and fortune
and their love for each other.
"Here we are," he said, "shining through each other like light through a stained-
glass window. With this air in our blood, this sunlight
soaking us....
Life is so good. Can it ever be so good again?"
Ann Veronica put out a firm hand and squeezed his arm.
"It's very good," she said.
"It's glorious good!" "Suppose now--look at this long snow-slope
and then that blue deep beyond--do you see that round pool of color in the ice--a
thousand feet or more below?
Yes? Well, think--we've got to go but ten steps
and lie down and put our arms about each other.
See?
Down we should rush in a foam--in a cloud of snow--to flight and a dream.
All the rest of our lives would be together then, Ann Veronica.
Every moment.
And no ill-chances." "If you tempt me too much," she said, after
a silence, "I shall do it. I need only just jump up and throw myself
upon you.
I'm a desperate young woman. And then as we went down you'd try to
explain. And that would spoil it....
You know you don't mean it."
"No, I don't. But I liked to say it."
"Rather! But I wonder why you don't mean it?"
"Because, I suppose, the other thing is better.
What other reason could there be? It's more complex, but it's better.
THIS, this glissade, would be damned scoundrelism.
You know that, and I know that, though we might be put to it to find a reason why.
It would be swindling.
Drawing the pay of life and then not living.
And besides--We're going to live, Ann Veronica!
Oh, the things we'll do, the life we'll lead!
There'll be trouble in it at times--you and I aren't going to run without friction.
But we've got the brains to get over that, and tongues in our heads to talk to each
other. We sha'n't hang up on any misunderstanding.
Not us.
And we're going to fight that old world down there.
That old world that had shoved up that silly old hotel, and all the rest of it....
If we don't live it will think we are afraid of it....
Die, indeed!
We're going to do work; we're going to unfold about each other; we're going to
have children." "Girls!" cried Ann Veronica.
"Boys!" said Capes.
"Both!" said Ann Veronica. "Lots of 'em!"
Capes chuckled. "You delicate female!"
"Who cares," said Ann Veronica, "seeing it's you?
Warm, soft little wonders! Of course I want them."
Part 9 "All sorts of things we're going to do,"
said Capes; "all sorts of times we're going to have.
Sooner or later we'll certainly do something to clean those prisons you told
me about--limewash the underside of life. You and I.
We can love on a snow cornice, we can love over a pail of whitewash.
Love anywhere. Anywhere!
Moonlight and music--pleasing, you know, but quite unnecessary.
We met dissecting dogfish.... Do you remember your first day with me?...
Do you indeed remember?
The smell of decay and cheap methylated spirit!...
My dear! we've had so many moments!
I used to go over the times we'd had together, the things we'd said--like a
rosary of beads. But now it's beads by the cask--like the
hold of a West African trader.
It feels like too much gold-dust clutched in one's hand.
One doesn't want to lose a grain. And one must--some of it must slip through
one's fingers."
"I don't care if it does," said Ann Veronica.
"I don't care a rap for remembering. I care for you.
This moment couldn't be better until the next moment comes.
That's how it takes me. Why should WE hoard?
We aren't going out presently, like Japanese lanterns in a gale.
It's the poor dears who do, who know they will, know they can't keep it up, who need
to clutch at way-side flowers.
And put 'em in little books for remembrance.
Flattened flowers aren't for the likes of us.
Moments, indeed!
We like each other fresh and fresh. It isn't illusions--for us.
We two just love each other--the real, identical other--all the time."
"The real, identical other," said Capes, and took and bit the tip of her little
finger. "There's no delusions, so far as I know,"
said Ann Veronica.
"I don't believe there is one. If there is, it's a mere wrapping--there's
better underneath. It's only as if I'd begun to know you the
day before yesterday or there-abouts.
You keep on coming truer, after you have seemed to come altogether true.
You... brick!"
Part 10 "To think," he cried, "you are ten years
younger than I!...
There are times when you make me feel a little thing at your feet--a young, silly,
protected thing.
Do you know, Ann Veronica, it is all a lie about your birth certificate; a forgery--
and fooling at that. You are one of the Immortals.
Immortal!
You were in the beginning, and all the men in the world who have known what love is
have worshipped at your feet. You have converted me to--Lester Ward!
You are my dear friend, you are a slip of a girl, but there are moments when my head
has been on your breast, when your heart has been beating close to my ears, when I
have known you for the goddess, when I have
wished myself your slave, when I have wished that you could kill me for the joy
of being killed by you. You are the High Priestess of Life...."
"Your priestess," whispered Ann Veronica, softly.
"A silly little priestess who knew nothing of life at all until she came to you."
Part 11 They sat for a time without speaking a
word, in an enormous shining globe of mutual satisfaction.
"Well," said Capes, at length, "we've to go down, Ann Veronica.
Life waits for us." He stood up and waited for her to move.
"Gods!" cried Ann Veronica, and kept him standing.
"And to think that it's not a full year ago since I was a black-hearted rebel school-
girl, distressed, puzzled, perplexed, not understanding that this great force of love
was bursting its way through me!
All those nameless discontents--they were no more than love's birth-pangs.
I felt--I felt living in a masked world. I felt as though I had bandaged eyes.
I felt--wrapped in thick cobwebs.
They blinded me. They got in my mouth.
And now--Dear! Dear!
The dayspring from on high hath visited me.
I love. I am loved.
I want to shout! I want to sing!
I am glad!
I am glad to be alive because you are alive!
I am glad to be a woman because you are a man!
I am glad!
I am glad! I am glad!
I thank God for life and you. I thank God for His sunlight on your face.
I thank God for the beauty you love and the faults you love.
I thank God for the very skin that is peeling from your nose, for all things
great and small that make us what we are.
This is grace I am saying! Oh! my dear! all the joy and weeping of
life are mixed in me now and all the gratitude.
Never a new-born dragon-fly that spread its wings in the morning has felt as glad as
I!"
>
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH IN PERSPECTIVE
Part 1
About four years and a quarter later--to be exact, it was four years and four months--
Mr. and Mrs. Capes stood side by side upon an old Persian carpet that did duty as a
hearthrug in the dining-room of their flat
and surveyed a shining dinner-table set for four people, lit by skilfully-shaded
electric lights, brightened by frequent gleams of silver, and carefully and simply
adorned with sweet-pea blossom.
Capes had altered scarcely at all during the interval, except for a new quality of
smartness in the cut of his clothes, but Ann Veronica was nearly half an inch
taller; her face was at once stronger and
softer, her neck firmer and rounder, and her carriage definitely more womanly than
it had been in the days of her rebellion.
She was a woman now to the tips of her fingers; she had said good-bye to her
girlhood in the old garden four years and a quarter ago.
She was dressed in a simple evening gown of soft creamy silk, with a yoke of dark old
embroidery that enhanced the gentle gravity of her style, and her black hair flowed off
her open forehead to pass under the control of a simple ribbon of silver.
A silver necklace enhanced the dusky beauty of her neck.
Both husband and wife affected an unnatural ease of manner for the benefit of the
efficient parlor-maid, who was putting the finishing touches to the sideboard
arrangements.
"It looks all right," said Capes. "I think everything's right," said Ann
Veronica, with the roaming eye of a capable but not devoted house-mistress.
"I wonder if they will seem altered," she remarked for the third time.
"There I can't help," said Capes.
He walked through a wide open archway, curtained with deep-blue curtains, into the
apartment that served as a reception-room.
Ann Veronica, after a last survey of the dinner appointments, followed him,
rustling, came to his side by the high brass fender, and touched two or three
ornaments on the mantel above the cheerful fireplace.
"It's still a marvel to me that we are to be forgiven," she said, turning.
"My charm of manner, I suppose.
But, indeed, he's very human." "Did you tell him of the registry office?"
"No--o--certainly not so emphatically as I did about the play."
"It was an inspiration--your speaking to him?"
"I felt impudent. I believe I am getting impudent.
I had not been near the Royal Society since--since you disgraced me.
What's that?" They both stood listening.
It was not the arrival of the guests, but merely the maid moving about in the hall.
"Wonderful man!" said Ann Veronica, reassured, and stroking his cheek with her
finger.
Capes made a quick movement as if to bite that aggressive digit, but it withdrew to
Ann Veronica's side. "I was really interested in his stuff.
I WAS talking to him before I saw his name on the card beside the row of microscopes.
Then, naturally, I went on talking. He--he has rather a poor opinion of his
contemporaries.
Of course, he had no idea who I was." "But how did you tell him?
You've never told me. Wasn't it--a little bit of a scene?"
"Oh! let me see.
I said I hadn't been at the Royal Society soiree for four years, and got him to tell
me about some of the fresh Mendelian work.
He loves the Mendelians because he hates all the big names of the eighties and
nineties.
Then I think I remarked that science was disgracefully under-endowed, and confessed
I'd had to take to more profitable courses. 'The fact of it is,' I said, 'I'm the new
playwright, Thomas More.
Perhaps you've heard--?' Well, you know, he had."
"Fame!" "Isn't it?
'I've not seen your play, Mr. More,' he said, 'but I'm told it's the most amusing
thing in London at the present time.
A friend of mine, Ogilvy'--I suppose that's Ogilvy & Ogilvy, who do so many divorces,
Vee?--'was speaking very highly of it--very highly!'"
He smiled into her eyes.
"You are developing far too retentive a memory for praises," said Ann Veronica.
"I'm still new to them. But after that it was easy.
I told him instantly and shamelessly that the play was going to be worth ten thousand
pounds. He agreed it was disgraceful.
Then I assumed a rather portentous manner to prepare him."
"How? Show me." "I can't be portentous, dear, when you're
about.
It's my other side of the moon. But I was portentous, I can assure you.
'My name's NOT More, Mr. Stanley,' I said. 'That's my pet name.'"
"Yes?"
"I think--yes, I went on in a pleasing blend of the casual and sotto voce, 'The
fact of it is, sir, I happen to be your son-in-law, Capes.
I do wish you could come and dine with us some evening.
It would make my wife very happy.'" "What did he say?"
"What does any one say to an invitation to dinner point-blank?
One tries to collect one's wits. 'She is constantly thinking of you,' I
said."
"And he accepted meekly?" "Practically.
What else could he do?
You can't kick up a scene on the spur of the moment in the face of such conflicting
values as he had before him.
With me behaving as if everything was infinitely matter-of-fact, what could he
do?
And just then Heaven sent old Manningtree-- I didn't tell you before of the fortunate
intervention of Manningtree, did I?
He was looking quite infernally distinguished, with a wide crimson ribbon
across him--what IS a wide crimson ribbon? Some sort of knight, I suppose.
He is a knight.
'Well, young man,' he said, 'we haven't seen you lately,' and something about
'Bateson & Co.'--he's frightfully anti- Mendelian--having it all their own way.
So I introduced him to my father-in-law like a shot.
I think that WAS decision. Yes, it was Manningtree really secured your
father.
He--" "Here they are!" said Ann Veronica as the
bell sounded.
Part 2 They received the guests in their pretty
little hall with genuine effusion.
Miss Stanley threw aside a black cloak to reveal a discreet and dignified arrangement
of brown silk, and then embraced Ann Veronica with warmth.
"So very clear and cold," she said.
"I feared we might have a fog." The housemaid's presence acted as a useful
restraint.
Ann Veronica passed from her aunt to her father, and put her arms about him and
kissed his cheek. "Dear old daddy!" she said, and was amazed
to find herself shedding tears.
She veiled her emotion by taking off his overcoat.
"And this is Mr. Capes?" she heard her aunt saying.
All four people moved a little nervously into the drawing-room, maintaining a sort
of fluttered amiability of sound and movement.
Mr. Stanley professed a great solicitude to warm his hands.
"Quite unusually cold for the time of year," he said.
"Everything very nice, I am sure," Miss Stanley murmured to Capes as he steered her
to a place upon the little sofa before the fire.
Also she made little ***-like sounds of a reassuring nature.
"And let's have a look at you, Vee!" said Mr. Stanley, standing up with a sudden
geniality and rubbing his hands together.
Ann Veronica, who knew her dress became her, dropped a curtsy to her father's
regard.
Happily they had no one else to wait for, and it heartened her mightily to think that
she had ordered the promptest possible service of the dinner.
Capes stood beside Miss Stanley, who was beaming unnaturally, and Mr. Stanley, in
his effort to seem at ease, took entire possession of the hearthrug.
"You found the flat easily?" said Capes in the pause.
"The numbers are a little difficult to see in the archway.
They ought to put a lamp."
Her father declared there had been no difficulty.
"Dinner is served, m'm," said the efficient parlor-maid in the archway, and the worst
was over.
"Come, daddy," said Ann Veronica, following her husband and Miss Stanley; and in the
fulness of her heart she gave a friendly squeeze to the parental arm.
"Excellent fellow!" he answered a little irrelevantly.
"I didn't understand, Vee." "Quite charming apartments," Miss Stanley
admired; "charming!
Everything is so pretty and convenient."
The dinner was admirable as a dinner; nothing went wrong, from the golden and
excellent clear soup to the delightful iced marrons and cream; and Miss Stanley's
praises died away to an appreciative acquiescence.
A brisk talk sprang up between Capes and Mr. Stanley, to which the two ladies
subordinated themselves intelligently.
The burning topic of the Mendelian controversy was approached on one or two
occasions, but avoided dexterously; and they talked chiefly of letters and art and
the censorship of the English stage.
Mr. Stanley was inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply
of what he styled latter-day fiction; good wholesome stories were being ousted, he
said, by "vicious, corrupting stuff" that "left a bad taste in the mouth."
He declared that no book could be satisfactory that left a bad taste in the
mouth, however much it seized and interested the reader at the time.
He did not like it, he said, with a significant look, to be reminded of either
his books or his dinners after he had done with them.
Capes agreed with the utmost cordiality.
"Life is upsetting enough, without the novels taking a share," said Mr. Stanley.
For a time Ann Veronica's attention was diverted by her aunt's interest in the
salted almonds.
"Quite particularly nice," said her aunt. "Exceptionally so."
When Ann Veronica could attend again she found the men were discussing the ethics of
the depreciation of house property through the increasing tumult of traffic in the
West End, and agreeing with each other to a devastating extent.
It came into her head with real emotional force that this must be some particularly
fantastic sort of dream.
It seemed to her that her father was in some inexplicable way meaner-looking than
she had supposed, and yet also, as unaccountably, appealing.
His tie had demanded a struggle; he ought to have taken a clean one after his first
failure. Why was she noting things like this?
Capes seemed self-possessed and elaborately genial and commonplace, but she knew him to
be nervous by a little occasional clumsiness, by the faintest shadow of
vulgarity in the urgency of his hospitality.
She wished he could smoke and dull his nerves a little.
A gust of irrational impatience blew through her being.
Well, they'd got to the pheasants, and in a little while he would smoke.
What was it she had expected?
Surely her moods were getting a little out of hand.
She wished her father and aunt would not enjoy their dinner with such quiet
determination.
Her father and her husband, who had both been a little pale at their first
encounter, were growing now just faintly flushed.
It was a pity people had to eat food.
"I suppose," said her father, "I have read at least half the novels that have been at
all successful during the last twenty years.
Three a week is my allowance, and, if I get short ones, four.
I change them in the morning at Cannon Street, and take my book as I come down."
It occurred to her that she had never seen her father dining out before, never watched
him critically as an equal.
To Capes he was almost deferential, and she had never seen him deferential in the old
time, never. The dinner was stranger than she had ever
anticipated.
It was as if she had grown right past her father into something older and of
infinitely wider outlook, as if he had always been unsuspectedly a flattened
figure, and now she had discovered him from the other side.
It was a great relief to arrive at last at that pause when she could say to her aunt,
"Now, dear?" and rise and hold back the curtain through the archway.
Capes and her father stood up, and her father made a belated movement toward the
curtain. She realized that he was the sort of man
one does not think much about at dinners.
And Capes was thinking that his wife was a supremely beautiful woman.
He reached a silver cigar and cigarette box from the sideboard and put it before his
father-in-law, and for a time the preliminaries of smoking occupied them
both.
Then Capes flittered to the hearthrug and poked the fire, stood up, and turned about.
"Ann Veronica is looking very well, don't you think?" he said, a little awkwardly.
"Very," said Mr. Stanley.
"Very," and cracked a walnut appreciatively.
"Life--things--I don't think her prospects now--Hopeful outlook."
"You were in a difficult position," Mr. Stanley pronounced, and seemed to hesitate
whether he had not gone too far.
He looked at his port wine as though that tawny ruby contained the solution of the
matter. "All's well that ends well," he said; "and
the less one says about things the better."
"Of course," said Capes, and threw a newly lit cigar into the fire through sheer
nervousness. "Have some more port wine, sir?"
"It's a very sound wine," said Mr. Stanley, consenting with dignity.
"Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think," said Capes, clinging,
because of a preconceived plan, to the suppressed topic.
Part 3
At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife had gone down to see Mr. Stanley
and his sister into a taxicab, and had waved an amiable farewell from the pavement
steps.
"Great dears!" said Capes, as the vehicle passed out of sight.
"Yes, aren't they?" said Ann Veronica, after a thoughtful pause.
And then, "They seem changed."
"Come in out of the cold," said Capes, and took her arm.
"They seem smaller, you know, even physically smaller," she said.
"You've grown out of them....
Your aunt liked the pheasant." "She liked everything.
Did you hear us through the archway, talking cookery?"
They went up by the lift in silence.
"It's odd," said Ann Veronica, re-entering the flat.
"What's odd?" "Oh, everything!"
She shivered, and went to the fire and poked it.
Capes sat down in the arm-chair beside her. "Life's so ***," she said, kneeling and
looking into the flames.
"I wonder--I wonder if we shall ever get like that."
She turned a firelit face to her husband. "Did you tell him?"
Capes smiled faintly.
"Yes." "How?"
"Well--a little clumsily." "But how?"
"I poured him out some port wine, and I said--let me see--oh, 'You are going to be
a grandfather!'" "Yes.
Was he pleased?"
"Calmly! He said--you won't mind my telling you?"
"Not a bit." "He said, 'Poor Alice has got no end!'"
"Alice's are different," said Ann Veronica, after an interval.
"Quite different. She didn't choose her man....
Well, I told aunt....
Husband of mine, I think we have rather overrated the emotional capacity of those--
those dears." "What did your aunt say?"
"She didn't even kiss me.
She said"--Ann Veronica shivered again--"'I hope it won't make you uncomfortable, my
dear'--like that--'and whatever you do, do be careful of your hair!'
I think--I judge from her manner--that she thought it was just a little indelicate of
us--considering everything; but she tried to be practical and sympathetic and live
down to our standards."
Capes looked at his wife's unsmiling face. "Your father," he said, "remarked that
all's well that ends well, and that he was disposed to let bygones be bygones.
He then spoke with a certain fatherly kindliness of the past...."
"And my heart has ached for him!" "Oh, no doubt it cut him at the time.
It must have cut him."
"We might even have--given it up for them!" "I wonder if we could."
"I suppose all IS well that ends well. Somehow to-night--I don't know."
"I suppose so.
I'm glad the old sore is assuaged. Very glad.
But if we had gone under--!"
They regarded one another silently, and Ann Veronica had one of her penetrating
flashes.
"We are not the sort that goes under," said Ann Veronica, holding her hands so that the
red reflections vanished from her eyes. "We settled long ago--we're hard stuff.
We're hard stuff!"
Then she went on: "To think that is my father!
Oh, my dear!
He stood over me like a cliff; the thought of him nearly turned me aside from
everything we have done. He was the social order; he was law and
And they come here, and they look at our furniture to see if it is good; and they
are not glad, it does not stir them, that at last, at last we can dare to have
children."
She dropped back into a crouching attitude and began to weep.
"Oh, my dear!" she cried, and suddenly flung herself, kneeling, into her husband's
arms.
"Do you remember the mountains? Do you remember how we loved one another?
How intensely we loved one another! Do you remember the light on things and the
glory of things?
I'm greedy, I'm greedy! I want children like the mountains and life
like the sky. Oh! and love--love!
We've had so splendid a time, and fought our fight and won.
And it's like the petals falling from a flower.
Oh, I've loved love, dear!
I've loved love and you, and the glory of you; and the great time is over, and I have
to go carefully and bear children, and-- take care of my hair--and when I am done
with that I shall be an old woman.
The petals have fallen--the red petals we loved so.
We're hedged about with discretions--and all this furniture--and successes!
We are successful at last!
Successful! But the mountains, dear!
We won't forget the mountains, dear, ever. That shining slope of snow, and how we
talked of death!
We might have died!
Even when we are old, when we are rich as we may be, we won't forget the tune when we
cared nothing for anything but the joy of one another, when we risked everything for
one another, when all the wrappings and
coverings seemed to have fallen from life and left it light and fire.
Stark and stark! Do you remember it all?...
Say you will never forget!
That these common things and secondary things sha'n't overwhelm us.
These petals! I've been wanting to cry all the evening,
cry here on your shoulder for my petals.
Petals!... Silly woman!...
I've never had these crying fits before...."
"Blood of my heart!" whispered Capes, holding her close to him.
"I know. I understand."
>