Ann Veronica (38 page)

"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....

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.

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!"

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."

"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!"

"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."

They sat for a time without speaking a word, in an enormous shining
globe of mutual satisfaction.