Capes thought.
“It’s odd--I have no doubt in my mind that what we are doing is wrong,”
he said. “And yet I do it without compunction.”
“I never felt so absolutely right,” said Ann Veronica.
“You ARE a female thing at bottom,” he admitted. “I’m not nearly so sure
as you. As for me, I look twice at it.... Life is two things,
that’s how I see it; two things mixed and muddled up together. Life is
morality--life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and
morality--looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what
is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means
keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If
individuality means anything it means breaking bounds--adventure.
“Will you be moral and your species, or immoral and yourself? We’ve
decided to be immoral. We needn’t try and give ourselves airs. We’ve
deserted the posts in which we found ourselves, cut our duties, exposed
ourselves to risks that may destroy any sort of social usefulness in
us.... I don’t know. One keeps rules in order to be one’s self. One
studies Nature in order not to be blindly ruled by her. There’s no sense
in morality, I suppose, unless you are fundamentally immoral.”
She watched his face as he traced his way through these speculative
thickets.
“Look at our affair,” he went on, looking up at her. “No power on earth
will persuade me we’re not two rather disreputable persons. You desert
your home; I throw up useful teaching, risk every hope in your career.
Here we are absconding, pretending to be what we are not; shady, to say
the least of it. It’s not a bit of good pretending there’s any Higher
Truth or wonderful principle in this business. There isn’t. We never
started out in any high-browed manner to scandalize and Shelleyfy.
When first you left your home you had no idea that _I_ was the hidden
impulse. I wasn’t. You came out like an ant for your nuptial flight. It
was just a chance that we in particular hit against each other--nothing
predestined about it. We just hit against each other, and here we are
flying off at a tangent, a little surprised at what we are doing, all
our principles abandoned, and tremendously and quite unreasonably proud
of ourselves. Out of all this we have struck a sort of harmony....
And it’s gorgeous!”
“Glorious!” said Ann Veronica.
“Would YOU like us--if some one told you the bare outline of our
story?--and what we are doing?”
“I shouldn’t mind,” said Ann Veronica.
“But if some one else asked your advice? If some one else said, ‘Here is
my teacher, a jaded married man on the verge of middle age, and he and I
have a violent passion for one another. We propose to disregard all our
ties, all our obligations, all the established prohibitions of society,
and begin life together afresh.’ What would you tell her?”
“If she asked advice, I should say she wasn’t fit to do anything of the
sort. I should say that having a doubt was enough to condemn it.”
“But waive that point.”
“It would be different all the same. It wouldn’t be you.”
“It wouldn’t be you either. I suppose that’s the gist of the whole
thing.” He stared at a little eddy. “The rule’s all right, so long as
there isn’t a case. Rules are for established things, like the pieces
and positions of a game. Men and women are not established things;
they’re experiments, all of them. Every human being is a new thing,
exists to do new things. Find the thing you want to do most intensely,
make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well
and good; if you die, well and good. Your purpose is done.... Well,
this is OUR thing.”
He woke the glassy water to swirling activity again, and made the
deep-blue shapes below writhe and shiver.
“This is MY thing,” said Ann Veronica, softly, with thoughtful eyes upon
him.
Then she looked up the sweep of pine-trees to the towering sunlit cliffs
and the high heaven above and then back to his face. She drew in a deep
breath of the sweet mountain air. Her eyes were soft and grave, and
there was the faintest of smiles upon her resolute lips.