Ann Veronica a Modern Love Story

by H. G. Wells

  “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.”

  “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 wayside 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 newborn dragon-fly that spread its wings in the morning has felt as glad as I!”