H G Wells Omnibus, page 28
“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.
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 16
IN THE MOUNTAINS
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 queer 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.”
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.”
