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
