H. Wells - Ann Veronica

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."