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 new-born
dragon-fly that spread its wings in the morning has felt as glad as I!”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTEENTH
IN PERSPECTIVE
Part 1
About four years and a quarter later--to be exact, it was four years and
four months--Mr. and Mrs. Capes stood side by side upon an old Persian
carpet that did duty as a hearthrug in the dining-room of their flat
and surveyed a shining dinner-table set for four people, lit by
skilfully-shaded electric lights, brightened by frequent gleams of
silver, and carefully and simply adorned with sweet-pea blossom. Capes
had altered scarcely at all during the interval, except for a new
quality of smartness in the cut of his clothes, but Ann Veronica was
nearly half an inch taller; her face was at once stronger and softer,
her neck firmer and rounder, and her carriage definitely more womanly
than it had been in the days of her rebellion. She was a woman now to
the tips of her fingers; she had said good-bye to her girlhood in the
old garden four years and a quarter ago. She was dressed in a simple
evening gown of soft creamy silk, with a yoke of dark old embroidery
that enhanced the gentle gravity of her style, and her black hair flowed
off her open forehead to pass under the control of a simple ribbon of
silver. A silver necklace enhanced the dusky beauty of her neck. Both
husband and wife affected an unnatural ease of manner for the benefit of
the efficient parlor-maid, who was putting the finishing touches to the
sideboard arrangements.
“It looks all right,” said Capes.
“I think everything’s right,” said Ann Veronica, with the roaming eye of
a capable but not devoted house-mistress.
“I wonder if they will seem altered,” she remarked for the third time.
“There I can’t help,” said Capes.
He walked through a wide open archway, curtained with deep-blue
curtains, into the apartment that served as a reception-room. Ann
Veronica, after a last survey of the dinner appointments, followed him,
rustling, came to his side by the high brass fender, and touched two or
three ornaments on the mantel above the cheerful fireplace.
“It’s still a marvel to me that we are to be forgiven,” she said,
turning.
“My charm of manner, I suppose. But, indeed, he’s very human.”
“Did you tell him of the registry office?”
“No--o--certainly not so emphatically as I did about the play.”
“It was an inspiration--your speaking to him?”
“I felt impudent. I believe I am getting impudent. I had not been near
the Royal Society since--since you disgraced me. What’s that?”
They both stood listening. It was not the arrival of the guests, but
merely the maid moving about in the hall.
“Wonderful man!” said Ann Veronica, reassured, and stroking his cheek
with her finger.
Capes made a quick movement as if to bite that aggressive digit, but it
withdrew to Ann Veronica’s side.
“I was really interested in his stuff. I WAS talking to him before I saw
his name on the card beside the row of microscopes. Then, naturally, I
went on talking. He--he has rather a poor opinion of his contemporaries.
Of course, he had no idea who I was.”
“But how did you tell him? You’ve never told me. Wasn’t it--a little bit
of a scene?”
“Oh! let me see. I said I hadn’t been at the Royal Society soiree for
four years, and got him to tell me about some of the fresh Mendelian
work. He loves the Mendelians because he hates all the big names of
the eighties and nineties. Then I think I remarked that science was
disgracefully under-endowed, and confessed I’d had to take to
more profitable courses. ‘The fact of it is,’ I said, ‘I’m the new
playwright, Thomas More. Perhaps you’ve heard--?’ Well, you know, he
had.”
“Fame!”
“Isn’t it? ‘I’ve not seen your play, Mr. More,’ he said, ‘but I’m told
it’s the most amusing thing in London at the present time. A friend
of mine, Ogilvy’--I suppose that’s Ogilvy & Ogilvy, who do so many
divorces, Vee?--‘was speaking very highly of it--very highly!’” He
smiled into her eyes.
“You are developing far too retentive a memory for praises,” said Ann
Veronica.
“I’m still new to them. But after that it was easy. I told him instantly
and shamelessly that the play was going to be worth ten thousand pounds.
He agreed it was disgraceful. Then I assumed a rather portentous manner
to prepare him.”
“How? Show me.”
“I can’t be portentous, dear, when you’re about. It’s my other side of
the moon. But I was portentous, I can assure you. ‘My name’s NOT More,
Mr. Stanley,’ I said. ‘That’s my pet name.’”
“Yes?”
“I think--yes, I went on in a pleasing blend of the casual and sotto
voce, ‘The fact of it is, sir, I happen to be your son-in-law, Capes. I
do wish you could come and dine with us some evening. It would make my
wife very happy.’”
“What did he say?”
“What does any one say to an invitation to dinner point-blank? One tries
to collect one’s wits. ‘She is constantly thinking of you,’ I said.”
“And he accepted meekly?”
“Practically. What else could he do? You can’t kick up a scene on the
spur of the moment in the face of such conflicting values as he
had before him. With me behaving as if everything was infinitely
matter-of-fact, what could he do? And just then Heaven sent old
Manningtree--I didn’t tell you before of the fortunate intervention of
Manningtree, did I? He was looking quite infernally distinguished, with
a wide crimson ribbon across him--what IS a wide crimson ribbon? Some
sort of knight, I suppose. He is a knight. ‘Well, young man,’ he said,
‘we haven’t seen you lately,’ and something about ‘Bateson & Co.’--he’s
frightfully anti-Mendelian--having it all their own way. So I introduced
him to my father-in-law like a shot. I think that WAS decision. Yes, it
was Manningtree really secured your father. He--”
“Here they are!” said Ann Veronica as the bell sounded.
Part 2
They received the guests in their pretty little hall with genuine
effusion. Miss Stanley threw aside a black cloak to reveal a discreet
and dignified arrangement of brown silk, and then embraced Ann Veronica
with warmth. “So very clear and cold,” she said. “I feared we might
have a fog.” The housemaid’s presence acted as a useful restraint. Ann
Veronica passed from her aunt to her father, and put her arms about him
and kissed his cheek. “Dear old daddy!” she said, and was amazed to
find herself shedding tears. She veiled her emotion by taking off his
overcoat. “And this is Mr. Capes?” she heard her aunt saying.
All four people moved a little nervously into the drawing-room,
maintaining a sort of fluttered amiability of sound and movement.
Mr. Stanley professed a great solicitude to warm his hands. “Quite
unusually cold for the time of year,” he said. “Everything very nice,
I am sure,” Miss Stanley murmured to Capes as he steered her to a place
upon the little sofa before the fire. Also she made little pussy-like
sounds of a reassuring nature.
“And let’s have a look at you, Vee!” said Mr. Stanley, standing up with
a sudden geniality and rubbing his hands together.
Ann Veronica, who knew her dress became her, dropped a curtsy to her
father’s regard.
Happily they had no one else to wait for, and it heartened her mightily
to think that she had ordered the promptest possible service of the
dinner. Capes stood beside Miss Stanley, who was beaming unnaturally,
and Mr. Stanley, in his effort to seem at ease, took entire possession
of the hearthrug.
“You found the flat easily?” said Capes in the pause. “The numbers are a
little difficult to see in the archway. They ought to put a lamp.”
Her father declared there had been no difficulty.
“Dinner is served, m’m,” said the efficient parlor-maid in the archway,
and the worst was over.
“Come, daddy,” said Ann Veronica, following her husband and Miss
Stanley; and in the fulness of her heart she gave a friendly squeeze to
the parental arm.
“Excellent fellow!” he answered a little irrelevantly. “I didn’t
understand, Vee.”
“Quite charming apartments,” Miss Stanley admired; “charming! Everything
is so pretty and convenient.”
The dinner was admirable as a dinner; nothing went wrong, from the
golden and excellent clear soup to the delightful iced marrons
and cream; and Miss Stanley’s praises died away to an appreciative
acquiescence. A brisk talk sprang up between Capes and Mr. Stanley, to
which the two ladies subordinated themselves intelligently. The
burning topic of the Mendelian controversy was approached on one or two
occasions, but avoided dexterously; and they talked chiefly of letters
and art and the censorship of the English stage. Mr. Stanley was
inclined to think the censorship should be extended to the supply of
what he styled latter-day fiction; good wholesome stories were being
ousted, he said, by “vicious, corrupting stuff” that “left a bad taste
in the mouth.” He declared that no book could be satisfactory that left
a bad taste in the mouth, however much it seized and interested the
reader at the time. He did not like it, he said, with a significant
look, to be reminded of either his books or his dinners after he had
done with them. Capes agreed with the utmost cordiality.
“Life is upsetting enough, without the novels taking a share,” said Mr.
Stanley.
For a time Ann Veronica’s attention was diverted by her aunt’s interest
in the salted almonds.
“Quite particularly nice,” said her aunt. “Exceptionally so.”
When Ann Veronica could attend again she found the men were discussing
the ethics of the depreciation of house property through the increasing
tumult of traffic in the West End, and agreeing with each other to a
devastating extent. It came into her head with real emotional force that
this must be some particularly fantastic sort of dream. It seemed to her
that her father was in some inexplicable way meaner-looking than she
had supposed, and yet also, as unaccountably, appealing. His tie had
demanded a struggle; he ought to have taken a clean one after his
first failure. Why was she noting things like this? Capes seemed
self-possessed and elaborately genial and commonplace, but she knew him
to be nervous by a little occasional clumsiness, by the faintest shadow
of vulgarity in the urgency of his hospitality. She wished he could
smoke and dull his nerves a little. A gust of irrational impatience blew
through her being. Well, they’d got to the pheasants, and in a little
while he would smoke. What was it she had expected? Surely her moods
were getting a little out of hand.
She wished her father and aunt would not enjoy their dinner with such
quiet determination. Her father and her husband, who had both been a
little pale at their first encounter, were growing now just faintly
flushed. It was a pity people had to eat food.
“I suppose,” said her father, “I have read at least half the novels that
have been at all successful during the last twenty years. Three a week
is my allowance, and, if I get short ones, four. I change them in the
morning at Cannon Street, and take my book as I come down.”
It occurred to her that she had never seen her father dining out
before, never watched him critically as an equal. To Capes he was almost
deferential, and she had never seen him deferential in the old time,
never. The dinner was stranger than she had ever anticipated. It was
as if she had grown right past her father into something older and
of infinitely wider outlook, as if he had always been unsuspectedly a
flattened figure, and now she had discovered him from the other side.
It was a great relief to arrive at last at that pause when she could say
to her aunt, “Now, dear?” and rise and hold back the curtain through the
archway. Capes and her father stood up, and her father made a belated
movement toward the curtain. She realized that he was the sort of man
one does not think much about at dinners. And Capes was thinking that
his wife was a supremely beautiful woman. He reached a silver cigar and
cigarette box from the sideboard and put it before his father-in-law,
and for a time the preliminaries of smoking occupied them both. Then
Capes flittered to the hearthrug and poked the fire, stood up, and
turned about. “Ann Veronica is looking very well, don’t you think?” he
said, a little awkwardly.
“Very,” said Mr. Stanley. “Very,” and cracked a walnut appreciatively.
“Life--things--I don’t think her prospects now--Hopeful outlook.”
“You were in a difficult position,” Mr. Stanley pronounced, and seemed
to hesitate whether he had not gone too far. He looked at his port wine
as though that tawny ruby contained the solution of the matter. “All’s
well that ends well,” he said; “and the less one says about things the
better.”
“Of course,” said Capes, and threw a newly lit cigar into the fire
through sheer nervousness. “Have some more port wine, sir?”
“It’s a very sound wine,” said Mr. Stanley, consenting with dignity.
“Ann Veronica has never looked quite so well, I think,” said Capes,
clinging, because of a preconceived plan, to the suppressed topic.
Part 3
At last the evening was over, and Capes and his wife had gone down to
see Mr. Stanley and his sister into a taxicab, and had waved an amiable
farewell from the pavement steps.
“Great dears!” said Capes, as the vehicle passed out of sight.
“Yes, aren’t they?” said Ann Veronica, after a thoughtful pause. And
then, “They seem changed.”
“Come in out of the cold,” said Capes, and took her arm.
“They seem smaller, you know, even physically smaller,” she said.
“You’ve grown out of them.... Your aunt liked the pheasant.”
“She liked everything. Did you hear us through the archway, talking
cookery?”
They went up by the lift in silence.
“It’s odd,” said Ann Veronica, re-entering the flat.
“What’s odd?”
“Oh, everything!”
She shivered, and went to the fire and poked it. Capes sat down in the
arm-chair beside her.
“Life’s so queer,” she said, kneeling and looking into the flames. “I
wonder--I wonder if we shall ever get like that.”
She turned a firelit face to her husband. “Did you tell him?”
Capes smiled faintly. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Well--a little clumsily.”
“But how?”
“I poured him out some port wine, and I said--let me see--oh, ‘You are
going to be a grandfather!’”
“Yes. Was he pleased?”
“Calmly! He said--you won’t mind my telling you?”
“Not a bit.”
“He said, ‘Poor Alice has got no end!’”
“Alice’s are different,” said Ann Veronica, after an interval. “Quite
different. She didn’t choose her man.... Well, I told aunt....
Husband of mine, I think we have rather overrated the emotional capacity
of those--those dears.”
“What did your aunt say?”
“She didn’t even kiss me. She said”--Ann Veronica shivered again--“‘I
hope it won’t make you uncomfortable, my dear’--like that--‘and
whatever you do, do be careful of your hair!’ I think--I judge from
her manner--that she thought it was just a little indelicate of
us--considering everything; but she tried to be practical and
sympathetic and live down to our standards.”
Capes looked at his wife’s unsmiling face.
“Your father,” he said, “remarked that all’s well that ends well, and
that he was disposed to let bygones be bygones. He then spoke with a
certain fatherly kindliness of the past....”
“And my heart has ached for him!”
“Oh, no doubt it cut him at the time. It must have cut him.”
“We might even have--given it up for them!”
“I wonder if we could.”
“I suppose all IS well that ends well. Somehow to-night--I don’t know.”
“I suppose so. I’m glad the old sore is assuaged. Very glad. But if we
had gone under--!”
They regarded one another silently, and Ann Veronica had one of her
penetrating flashes.
“We are not the sort that goes under,” said Ann Veronica, holding her
hands so that the red reflections vanished from her eyes. “We settled
long ago--we’re hard stuff. We’re hard stuff!”
Then she went on: “To think that is my father! Oh, my dear! He stood
over me like a cliff; the thought of him nearly turned me aside from
everything we have done. He was the social order; he was law and wisdom.
And they come here, and they look at our furniture to see if it is good;
and they are not glad, it does not stir them, that at last, at last we
can dare to have children.”
She dropped back into a crouching attitude and began to weep. “Oh,
my dear!” she cried, and suddenly flung herself, kneeling, into her
husband’s arms.
“Do you remember the mountains? Do you remember how we loved one
another? How intensely we loved one another! Do you remember the light
on things and the glory of things? I’m greedy, I’m greedy! I want
children like the mountains and life like the sky. Oh! and love--love!
We’ve had so splendid a time, and fought our fight and won. And it’s
like the petals falling from a flower. Oh, I’ve loved love, dear! I’ve
loved love and you, and the glory of you; and the great time is over,
and I have to go carefully and bear children, and--take care of my
hair--and when I am done with that I shall be an old woman. The petals
have fallen--the red petals we loved so. We’re hedged about with
discretions--and all this furniture--and successes! We are successful
at last! Successful! But the mountains, dear! We won’t forget the
mountains, dear, ever. That shining slope of snow, and how we talked of
death! We might have died! Even when we are old, when we are rich as we
may be, we won’t forget the tune when we cared nothing for anything but
the joy of one another, when we risked everything for one another, when
all the wrappings and coverings seemed to have fallen from life and left
it light and fire. Stark and stark! Do you remember it all?... Say
you will never forget! That these common things and secondary things
sha’n’t overwhelm us. These petals! I’ve been wanting to cry all the
evening, cry here on your shoulder for my petals. Petals!... Silly
woman!... I’ve never had these crying fits before....”
“Blood of my heart!” whispered Capes, holding her close to him. “I know.
I understand.”