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. WE don’t

think they’re right, but they don’t think we are. A deadlock. In a very

definite sense we are in the wrong--hopelessly in the wrong. But--It’s

just this: who was to be hurt?”

“I wish no one had to be hurt,” said Ann Veronica. “When one is happy--I

don’t like to think of them. Last time I left home I felt as hard as

nails. But this is all different. It is different.”

“There’s a sort of instinct of rebellion,” said Capes. “It isn’t

anything to do with our times particularly. People think it is, but they

are wrong. It’s to do with adolescence. Long before religion and Society

heard of Doubt, girls were all for midnight coaches and Gretna Green.

It’s a sort of home-leaving instinct.”

He followed up a line of thought.

“There’s another instinct, too,” he went on, “in a state of suppression,

unless I’m very much mistaken; a child-expelling instinct.... I

wonder.... There’s no family uniting instinct, anyhow; it’s habit

and sentiment and material convenience hold families together after

adolescence. There’s always friction, conflict, unwilling concessions.

Always! I don’t believe there is any strong natural affection at all

between parents and growing-up children. There wasn’t, I know, between

myself and my father. I didn’t allow myself to see things as they were

in those days; now I do. I bored him. I hated him. I suppose that

shocks one’s ideas.... It’s true.... There are sentimental and

traditional deferences and reverences, I know, between father and

son; but that’s just exactly what prevents the development of an easy

friendship. Father-worshipping sons are abnormal--and they’re no good.

No good at all. One’s got to be a better man than one’s father, or what

is the good of successive generations? Life is rebellion, or nothing.”

He rowed a stroke and watched the swirl of water from his oar broaden

and die away. At last he took up his thoughts again: “I wonder if, some

day, one won’t need to rebel against customs and laws? If this discord

will have gone? Some day, perhaps--who knows?--the old won’t coddle and

hamper the young, and the young won’t need to fly in the faces of the

old. They’ll face facts as facts, and understand. Oh, to face facts!

Gods! what a world it might be if people faced facts! Understanding!

Understanding! There is no other salvation. Some day older people,

perhaps, will trouble to understand younger people, and there won’t

be these fierce disruptions; there won’t be barriers one must defy or

perish.... That’s really our choice now, defy--or futility.... The

world, perhaps, will be educated out of its idea of fixed standards....

I wonder, Ann Veronica, if, when our time comes, we shall be any

wiser?”

Ann Veronica watched a water-beetle fussing across the green depths.

“One can’t tell. I’m a female thing at bottom. I like high tone for a

flourish and stars and ideas; but I want my things.”