H. Wells: Ann Veronica

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 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.