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“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
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 pussy-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.