2
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.
