'Isn't it fun here?' she remarked. 'I knew you'd like it. Can you make paper hats?'
'Oh, I suppose so. Beastly things. I hate them.'
'Oh! I was afraid you might, perhaps. I was going to ask you to show some one how; but never mind. We're going to dance now. You wouldn't care to join, I expect?'
Miranda would not.
'I hate dancing. I say.'
'Yes?'
'Do you really like this? And how much more is there?'
'Of course; don't you? About a quarter of an hour more. Then there's coffee.' Beastly stuff. You'll hate it. I must go and dance.'
'There is certainly,' Mrs. Venables remarked, watching, 'something refreshingly picturesque in the movements of the Southern peoples. The lithe use of their limbs——'
She took in this impression with satisfaction.
'Don't think any of them can dance a bit, if you ask me,' Miranda pronounced.
The unwary remark drew her mother's attention upon her. Mrs. Venables' serious, fine eyes always seemed to weigh her daughter and to find her wanting.
'Dear Miranda, I wish you would try to take more interest in people. Miss Crevequer, now; she is entirely in their confidence, quite one of them, so to speak.' She turned to Betty. 'You must help this foolish child to a larger interest, and me to a deeper understanding. I have been having some most interesting conversations. I have been trying to glean from some of the girls their real attitude towards life in its deeper issues; but they are naturally reserved with foreigners—and, no doubt, with heretics. If one could convince them of one's very real sympathy——You are very close to them, one can see. You and I must have some long talks. And I suppose your brother has immense influence with the men and boys?'
'Well, they're just f-friends of ours,' Betty said, stammering a good deal, because she was tired.
There were times when the artist in Mrs. Venables sank a little in the helper; but here she ran up against a very blank inapprehensiveness. She had perforce to grasp that her uses in this capacity were purely financial. It is not easy to give to those who will not receive, who do not even apprehend their own need of gifts. This inapprehensiveness was as a blank wall; there was no surmounting it. They looked at each other from either side of a spiritual and social gulf; and the ignoring of its existence on the one side made any attempts at throwing, as it were, a rope across from the other impossible. The rope would have dangled—did dangle when experimentally thrown—ludicrously futile in mid-air. The thrower stepped back again to the artist's standpoint, and absorbed impressions.
To give financial help came to assume an aspect of immorality. Loans were gratefully taken, and no talk of repayment even remotely rose. It was, as Warren had put it, 'very obvious'—so obvious as to be tiresome. Illumination was shed on the aspect which the payment of debts presented to the Crevequers on the night when they came to dinner, in their redeemed dress-clothes, after winning on the lottery.
'And it all went,' Tommy concluded his narrative, stammering querulously, 'to a silly fool we owed money to. Wasn't it a shame, Mrs. Venables? We owed it him for months; he needn't have been in such a tearing hurry all of a sudden. Waste, wasn't it? All kinds of things, you know, we might have done with it. If we'd hired a motor-car, would you all have come to Pompei with us? Or would you rather have taken a boat to Capri? You could have had your choice, anyhow. And all that money wasted; we might just as well have dropped it into the sea, you know—better; it would have been fun diving for it and bringing it up with our toes. Do you know how to do that, Venables? I did it once when a North German Lloyd was going out. You know how they swim round and dive for money and make such a horrid row? Well, I thought I'd do it, too, once, because it was such a nice warm day; and they threw me pennies, but another man always brought them up with his toes; I could never find them. Sell, wasn't it? but much funnier than paying all that money to Grollo. People are so grasping, aren't they.'
It was manifest that money lent to the Crevequers must be accounted a bad debt. Mrs. Venables lent no more; her moral sense rebelled against it.
But Warren proved himself admirably accommodating.
'I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day.'—R. L. Stevenson.
'I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day.'—R. L. Stevenson.
'Why should I care for the ages,Because they are old and grey?To me, like sudden laughter,The stars are fresh and gay.The world is a daring fancy,And finished yesterday.'—G. K. Chesterton.
'Why should I care for the ages,Because they are old and grey?To me, like sudden laughter,The stars are fresh and gay.The world is a daring fancy,And finished yesterday.'—G. K. Chesterton.
On a blue Sunday morning, not early enough to spoil their night—on principle they shunned always the dimmer hours of dawn—the Crevequers slipped the leash of the city and went to spend a happy day in the country. They often spent their Sundays thus; with their wonted inconsequent abruptness one would say to the other on Saturday evening, 'I'm tired of Naples. Let's go somewhere else by the next train,' and they would shovel a few things—usually those among their possessions which they were least likely to want—into a bag, and take tickets quite at random to any place, known or unknown, which occurred to them. Novelty was often a desirable qualification; but on this Sunday morning they went to Baja, because a strenuous week had blunted their imaginations; also, perhaps, a little because on the shores of Baja there lies much healing. Their affairs had not been going altogether smoothly of late, and the need rose in them, unworded, for stillness by blue water and the sun upon warm sand.
Having found these things, they entered into a contented peace, and built a sand castle. Then they lay on the sand ten yards from it, and took shots at it with bits of pumice-stone.
'Well,' Tommy observed at length, 'I've won that. And now it looks like a plum-pudding. Ducks and drakes? No; we'll go to sleep, because we got up too early for the time we went to bed. Pity; get up later next time. No, you can't talk yet, Betty, because I'm resting. You know, you don't need so much rest, because you're not a newspaper man. I'm sorry I'm a newspaper man; they're so untruthful, and when they try to be funny they're only rude. But I'm glad we're not a daily; if we were we should get into seven times as many rows as we do, shouldn't we. Our mortification might be greater than we could bear. Muzzi can bear a great deal, though; he's so brave. I'm not; I'm dreadfully sensitive. If I die a violent death at the hands of the Sindaco—I probably shall, you know, so will Muzzi—Mrs. Venables will have Masses said for me, because they're such an interesting medieval survival, obviously deeply rooted in human psychology. Why are heretics such goats? And why talk about heretics and newspapers on our happy Sunday in the country? Your turn, Betty; change the subject while I snatch a moment of sleep.'
Betty, her chin in her hands, was looking across the blue bay.
'I am thinking,' she said. 'No; I am absorbing impressions. They are illuminating and suggestive—quite striking. They really are, you know. Chiefly—Naples is there, and you and I are out here. To me at this moment that is very real and vivid—immensely significant. Perhaps I have expressed it badly, though.'
'Communicated myself inadequately,' Tommy lazily corrected.
Betty acknowledged his greater accuracy.
'But,' she added, after a moment, 'it was a real impression, all the same.'
She thought it over, looking across the bay towards Naples.
'Life in a populous city,' she murmured, after a moment, 'has its problems, its trials, its disappointments.... Mrs. Venables told me a story at tea the other day; I'll tell it to you if you like. There was a man once who had a lot of gold; at least, he supposed it was gold. It wasn't really; it was a base metal, most of it. Do you know what a base metal is? Well, anyhow, it's something that melts very easily when you put it into a fire. So he put it into the fire——'
'What an ass.'
'Yes; but don't interrupt. And he couldn't help putting it into the fire, because the fire is Life—it's an allegory, did I tell you?—and everything has to pass through it. Well, all his metal melted, and ran away, and he saw it had been nothing but a base metal after all. But one little bit he found which was pure gold; and that he kept, you see, always. But it was horribly disappointing for him that there wasn't more. When he was young he thought he had such a lot; that was where he was wrong. That's all that story. And Mrs. Venables says if we are lucky we may all end with a little piece of gold. Life, you see, is a smelting-furnace, a crucible for the testing of ultimate values.... Don't, Tommy, I can't bear it; I'll stop, really I will——'
She warded off with her arm an irritated shower of sand.
'That story didn't amuse me,' Tommy remarked resentfully. 'If that was the funniest thing Mrs. Venables said at tea yesterday, I'm sorry for you.'
'How shallow you are, Tommy. It wasn't meant to amuse you. And Mrs. Venables didn't make it up; she'd read it somewhere. Personally, I was wondering if there was anything in it. I told Mrs. Venables I thought it very striking. But you've got such a—such abornémind. I've been trying not to bebornée; I don't believe you ever do. Never mind; now we'll go to sleep till it's time for Mass.'
It was very still on the beach and very warm, with the winter morning sunshine on the sand. Beneath the wide blue sky the pure blue sea stretched, with a little stir and glitter from the ruffling breeze that just rumpled the broad blue basin's edge, crisping and whitening it, making it tumble over with spurtling laughter, like a tiny child at play, and draw back lisping to comfort itself for its fall. Above the splashing and the little hushing draw, the church bells sounded from Baja, calling the bay to Mass. There was half an hour still for absorbing contentment on the warm sand.
To the right the castle blocked the blue sky, shutting the little bay. Across the wide waters to the east Pozzuoli loomed, transparent, jutting into the sea. Further, more transparent, delicately purple, Nisida seemed moored like a barge, with the point of Coroglio behind it. Coroglio shut the gulf, so that one could not see how behind it the bay swept down and ran to Naples. Naples was beyond the picture; the picture held only the blue January morning, with its glittering waters and brown sails and purple points and islands, and little waves that spurtled on warm sand, and behind the bells of Baja calling. There was also the salt smell of the sea, and the Crevequers, and their sand castle. These things, to Betty Crevequer, became suddenly, as Mrs. Venables would have said, very real, very vivid—in a manner all of life. She lay dreamily, her eyes narrowed to slits blue as the sea, absorbing the impression. Worded—but she did not word it now—it was, as she had put it, 'Naples is there, and you and I are out here.' Naples, set pink and white upon her shores, beyond the point, out of the picture, was life; and life, some one had said, was a smelting-furnace, a testing of ultimate values. Betty seemed to dream a dream—a dream of the testing of values by fire. She saw how it might be that metal ran away, melting in the flames ... how one might be cast up out of the fiery pit, taking with one the knowledge of pure gold, for what that wisdom might be worth. But perhaps also a little piece of it to keep—if one was fortunate.
And Betty shuddered at this vision of purging by fire, and at the 'mental standpoint' of the man who had conceived life so. One should be allowed to keep one's bright metal—gold or dross, it mattered little; one should be allowed to keep it to play with, not looking into its quality avariciously. There should be a ring set round it to guard it from the flames which might melt it away in one's hands. The melting of it would so horribly burn one's hands; and then there would be a blankness, and nothing left to play with any more.
It was at this moment that the 'impression' became of a great vividness. Life might be a furnace, but here were things untouched by its flame, cast up—so Betty saw them, with prospective eyes—out of the sea of fire on to the high shores. Here, by the edge of the sea, were she and Tommy and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding.... A swift moment of vivid intuition came to her, illuminating her vision of life, as she looked at Tommy, lying on his back, with his straw hat tilted over his eyes. She was lit by a flash of great certainty, of strange discernment.
The flash passed, and left her as one who wakes from a trance. She lay and looked at Tommy, and, looking, felt a desire for speech.
'I'm thinking, Tommy, that you're very lucky to have me to play with you, and that I'm rather lucky to have you to play with me.'
Tommy pushed his hat a little up from one eye, and turned a meditative and mildly surprised regard upon his sister. Her remark had had a flavour of unusualness. But he did not comment upon it; it was as if, in the momentary pause that followed his glance, something between them, very definite, very permanent in its existence, entirely unquestioned, because it had always been there, and hardly ever alluded to in words, because they were too close to each other and too unsentimental, took more definite and visible shape. Their friendship, their close comradeship, their affection, stood in that moment between them, recognized mutely of both. The kingdoms might fall, but that stood. Thus they did not word it to themselves; but, unformed, the knowledge illumined the consciousness of both.
But after that moment's pause Tommy returned to normalities.
'I grant you your luck; in fact, I might envy it you if I was less sweet-natured. Mine, of course, is less vividly striking, as Mrs. Venables would put it. But no matter; never be ungenerous on Sunday, and I'm glad you should have a happy life.'
Betty dragged him up forcibly by the hands, and they went up the beach to Mass in the little church. That illuminated moment of insight seemed to walk between them to the doors.
After Mass they went to the Albergo Vittoria, and had lunch on the terrace.
They talked then of the Venables. Betty said she had had her last sitting.
'I should like her to sit to me,' Tommy said; 'the way she stands, don't you know, with her head back'—the gesture of his own caught it not unsuccessfully—'and her eyes when she's going to smile. And the way her upper lip's so like her chin.'
Betty nodded. She, too, had gathered all that in the rarefied mountain air of the studio.
'I wish she'd come and see us, as the others do. Why doesn't she like us more?'
It was a simple question, thrown out casually and without much wondering; after all, every one cannot like everybody else.
But it was curious how Tommy grew abruptly red.
'How do you mean like us? I should think she does, doesn't she? Why—why shouldn't she?'
Betty's eyes consideringly took him in. He seemed, from his stammer grown aggressive, to feel an interest. Obviously he had been moved—moved a good deal—by 'the way she stands, don't you know, and her eyes when she's going to smile.'
'Well, you see,' Betty amended, 'she's too keen on her work, I expect, to want to see much of anyone. I dare say that's all.'
Tommy was a little appeased.
'She always talks a lot to me when I meet her.'
Betty's doubting eyebrows became a mark of interrogation. She demurred, not to the 'lot of talk,' but to the apportionment of it—the order, in fact, of the personal pronouns. Tommy frowned stubbornly, holding to it, and drank a glass of wine with a defiant regard over the brim. Betty, looking at him with puzzled eyes, at last shook a despairing head.
'No, Tommy, I can't; I can't imagine it. If you don't put it the other way round quickly, my brain will break with the effort.'
Tommy, between a frown and a reluctant laugh, lit a cigarette.
'Oh, don't rot.... And what's the odds, anyhow, as long as we're both interested?'
'I'm glad she's interested,' Betty said, reflectively striking a match. 'Then, they're all interested, which is nice. Mrs. Venables and Mr. Venables, and the baby Venables, (she loves us very much, did you know? Only she doesn't really think we're up to much, because we're rotters and we don't play hockey), and Miss Varley too. I'm glad we're so interesting, Tommy—aren't you? And now we've had lunch. We'll go in a boat next, I think. What a nice expensive lunch we've had! Let's pay for it.'
Then they took a fishing-boat with a large triangular sail, and turned and twisted about the bay, with erratic deviations of course and sudden heeling and recoveries. Then they landed, and lay again on the beach to dry in the afternoon sun, and played ducks and drakes, and composed limericks and wrote them on the sand with pieces of shell till it was time to go home.
But before this time Warren Venables had joined them. He had motored over from Naples to find them and bring them back with him.
'Of course we will,' Betty said; 'the road's much nicer, and it will take longer and save us our fares. We never get returns, in case anything should turn up, or we shouldn't be coming back or something. And we'll drive by turns; what fun!'
They stayed on the shore till the sky behind the castle glowed to a soft daffodil colour. Venables was a good companion; his limericks and his riddles and his anecdotes were nearly as silly, nearly as devoid of all point or relevance, as the Crevequers' own. He might have been capable, on occasion, of exercising a more grown-up and polished wit; but when he played with the Crevequers he admirably adapted himself to their young comprehension. He was a person of tact, when he chose to use it. He did not always choose. He had a habit—an insolent habit, his cousin called it—of wearing in his manner, plain to be read by the initiated, the shades of feeling which he merely did not think it worth while to hide better, because he relied, with careless, supercilious confidence, on the inapprehensiveness, the unreceptive blindness, of those with whom he came in contact. The world was, after all, in the main stupid; his own cleverness possibly sometimes overrated this stupidity; the swift enlightenment of a glance, the flash of some phrase, would occasionally rend his veil across and reveal him—even to the stupid—sitting, amused, contemptuous, discerning, behind his flimsy screen. This attitude, of lurking in careless concealment, his cousin characterized as insolent.
'One should try not to insult people's intelligence more than one can help, I suppose,' she would observe.
'Well, but when they haven't got any——Anyhow, we all do it; one's got to in polite life,' he would aver, defending himself.
'They've mostly got some; and if one's real self sits despising and criticizing, one's outer self has no business to be a decoy. Even if the real self keeps quite behind the screen, it's unfair; and if it keeps looking out, as yours does, it's insolent as well. You insult them by as good as saying, "It's not much of a screen, but it will do for you. If you do see behind it sometimes, it doesn't matter very much; and if the people looking on, who know me better, see behind all the time, it doesn't matter in the least." A screen, to be at all courteous, should be impenetrable both to the people concerned and to the lookers-on; and even then it's not honest—one should quite withdraw.'
'You know, if one quite withdrew from all the people one doesn't quite like, one's world would get very limited.'
'Well, yes'—she wrinkled her forehead in doubt—'only they should know the terms, that's all.'
It was probable that Miss Varley might have disapproved of the manner of the homeward journey in the motor, for the Crevequers, who were slightly inexperienced, drove, as they had suggested, by turns; and behind Venables' screen of serenity his real self undoubtedly watched anxiously, and occasionally looked out, betraying itself by the nervous tension of the hands waiting in readiness to seize the wheel; the screen was, indeed, rather insultingly flimsy. They ran along the white coast road, with the gold of the west behind them, and the pale blue winter sea beside them, and the bright city of many hues growing larger in front of them as they circled the bay. They went much too fast, and it was very amusing.
'You must show Baja to my mother sometime,' Venables said. 'She has only visited it with the native guides so far; and you will be able to tell her so much that's interesting and new—very new.'
Betty sighed after that renounced game.
'I'm afraid not, do you know.... Tommy, you awfully nearly slew that goat. And I'm sure it's my turn now.'
She had swerved from the subject with a laudable impulse of shame, her first in this matter. At the same time, she knew very well that Venables minded nothing; also, that if she had looked at him his amused eyes would have twinkled into hers. That she did not might have been taken to imply in her the rudiments of a growing conscience; or possibly of a feeling that, though she and Tommy might laugh at a person's mother, the person might well keep out of it. His not resenting it—but this she did not word to herself at all, for she would not for some time know it—showed that he accepted so much, easily and without surprise. Why resent that, of all things? it seemed to imply. It was, indeed, hardly worth a comment; it was so wholly in keeping; as he would have said, so obvious.
This easy, unsurprised acceptance of things as they were, in which Prudence Varley might have discovered insult, bore to the Crevequers no message, no implication. Their attitude towards such tolerance was the measure of their inapprehensiveness.
But, as Betty had had her moment of half-realization, so Tommy had his. Perhaps such moments came to the one whose turn to drive it was not, and who had therefore leisure to perceive. Tommy's moment came throughMarchese Peppino. Betty observed, abstractedly, between fluctuating swerves and recoveries:
'Tommy's paper, you know ... has been getting into rows ... being sued for libel....'
Venables, his eyes on the road, his hand waiting in nervous readiness for emergency, said:
'Yes?... Mind that flock of goats.' It was, possibly, the distance of the flock of goats—quite two hundred yards—which partly gave Tommy his moment of enlightenment. Perhaps he had half known it before; anyhow, he took in freshly now that the large acceptance did not quite includeMarchese Peppino. Even the tolerance of contempt has got, after all, to draw its line somewhere. Tommy almost took in, too, the slight lift of the brows, which might be taken to convey 'Does anyone really think it worth the sueing—that rag?' Venables himself had certainly the air of not thinking it, under any circumstances, in the least worth the sueing.
Tommy, his melancholy eyes on Venables' profile, faintly flushed.
'Les clefs des portes sont perdues,Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,Les clefs sont tombées de la tour,Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,Il faut attendre d'autres jours....'—Maeterlinck.
'Les clefs des portes sont perdues,Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,Les clefs sont tombées de la tour,Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,Il faut attendre d'autres jours....'—Maeterlinck.
There are steep streets calledgradoni, which climb up from the old town below to the new town above; their slope is assisted by shallow steps at intervals. So shallow are the steps that you hardly notice each as you take it. Not until you arrive at the top and look down on the ascending way do you perceive how its climbing was assisted. Of like nature is the ascending alley of human penetration. At the top is the daylight; in the analogy, perceptiveness quite achieved.
In her ascending alley Betty should, by the end of February, have got far enough not to have taken Miranda Venables to lunch at the Trattoria Buonaventura with her friends Gina Lunelli and Morello, the painter. She met Miranda on Santa Lucia. Miranda remarked:
'I say, I'm jolly glad I've met you. I've lost Prudence. Mother sent me out with her to look at churches and things, because my ignorance is a disgrace, and Prudence stayed so long looking at some rotten mosaic things that I had to come out. Then we somehow missed each other, and I've been playing about alone. I say, I should think it would do if you showed me things, if I must see them. But there's nothing to see, is there? Nothing but the Aquarium, and I've seen that. Well, anyhow, I'll come round a bit with you, shall I, and then I can say I've seen something. Mother goes about with Murray; rotten book; I hate it. You haven't got it about you, have you?' she added suspiciously.
'No. You see, I'm a mine of information in myself. It is so nice to be well informed, isn't it?'
Miranda observed, between compliment and irony:
'You know an awful lot, I suppose.'
Betty nodded.
'One picks things up—one likes to learn. We might have a really instructive morning, only it's time for lunch. You'd better come and have lunch too. The Trattoria Buonaventura, in the Toledo—do you know it? No, probably not. I'm going to meet some friends there.'
'Well, I'll come. But it's only half-past twelve; it's a funny time for lunch.'
Betty supposed that it might seem so, remembering the breakfast at Parker's.
They went towards the Trattoria Buonaventura, and Betty pointed out objects cursorily, and, as a rule, with creditable veracity, by the way.
'The English church. Perhaps you know it, though? Is it nice inside?'
'No, it's not. But I don't like any churches; they're all stuffy. Mother keeps going to them, though she's an agnostic, you know. She hasn't got a religion—oh, I wasn't to say that; I mean she rejects dogmatic formulas—I think that's what she says. She won't let me reject them, because she says I'm not old enough to have thought it out yet.... What a funny place! Do you often come here? I love meals in restaurants, don't you?'
Miranda was introduced to Morello, the painter, whose ugly flexible face and expressive gestures set her wondering, and whose extraordinary skill at rapidly absorbing immense lengths of macaroni fascinated her. He talked with some vehemence, and did not seem to like to be interrupted. Betty, who never left anyone out, talked to Miranda, and acted as interpreter. The Signorina Lunelli ate and drank a great deal, and smiled with immense cheerfulness; Miranda admired her large beauty and fine physique very much. All three, she perceived, were great friends, not only with each other, but with nearly every one in the room. It was a very sociable and merry meal.
'You don't smoke, I think?' Betty said, as the coffee arrived.
'I don't mind trying,' Miranda replied. 'I was ill last time, but that was three years ago. I was a kid then; besides, it was a cigar of Warren's. Dare say I could manage a cigarette now.'
'Oh, I wouldn't,' Betty counselled.
After about a minute and a half, Miranda wholly agreed with her. Her feeling when she looked up and saw her brother at the door was sheer relief.
'I expect Warren's come for me,' she said, coughing out a cloud of smoke.
Warren had come for her. It seemed that Mrs. Venables was anxious.
'I knew this was your lunch-place,' he explained to Betty, 'and we guessed she might be with you. I'm sorry to interrupt—but you have finished, haven't you? My mother will be anxious, you see.'
Miranda rose rather shakily and said good-bye. She had quite decided not to take to smoking.
The aspect which the episode bore of the rescue of a truant child from corrupting company was not assisted, certainly, by look or speech. It was perhaps an aspect obvious enough to be left to itself, unaccentuated and unadorned. Rather, indeed, it required, for courtesy's sake, modification. Venables possibly intended to give it this. He had greeted Betty and Gina and Morello (he had met these two before) with pleasantness. He always was pleasant to the Crevequers' friends, though the screen was sometimes rather flimsy. He was not, it seemed, shocked or annoyed to find his young sister smoking in such a restaurant among such company—merely his mother was anxious. His face, as his eyes had passed from one to the other of his sister's companions, had been quite impassive. What gave to Betty such realization as she at the time got—it was not much—was mainly Mrs. Venables' anxiety, which must so hurriedly be appeased. Betty had not known Mrs. Venables for an anxious person; to be a fussing mother was to bebornée. But the suggestion was not aggressive. Partly the green tints of Miranda's round face served as a screen for the other elements in the situation. No one likes his sister to look sick in a restaurant.
So Venables informed Miranda as they drove to their hotel.
'It's not considered particularly good form, you know, to smoke in restaurants till you can do it fairly well. And, anyhow, that's not an especially elegant place to select for the purpose—or, for that matter, for any other purpose.'
'She always goes there,' Miranda returned limply.
Warren's eyebrows went up.
'Oh—she.... That's got nothing to do with you. Each lot of people's got its own resorts.'
'But, Warren, you like her, don't you?'
'Who is "her"? Miss Crevequer? What's that got to do with it? I only said she wasn't your sort. And if you want to know whether I like Signor Morello and Signorina Gina Lunelli, I can tell you I certainly don't. And your doing this sort of thing puts mother in a very awkward position; she won't know whether she can logically scold you or not. She sent you out to see things, didn't she? Well, you've seen them now, that's one thing—quite enough for one morning.'
Tommy, it seemed, had got his enjoyment out of the business. He had, he informed Betty, 'been helping Miss Varley to look for her cousin all over the place.' Miss Varley's version was, 'Mr. Crevequer came about with me; I don't know what use he thought he was, except to suggest quite impossible places, and to talk till I felt quite giddy with it. The way those absurd infants babble! And it's mostly such nonsense, when one listens to it; they always make me feel as if I was Alice and they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee; or perhaps the White Knight, because of the sort of gentle melancholy they've got. When they come to a meal it's exactly like the Mad Tea-Party. And it's so ridiculous the way, when one of them stops to stammer, the other finishes the remark, or goes on with it till the first one is ready again.'
Tommy's relations with Miss Varley had, during the past months, greatly interested him. As she so pleased him externally, it was natural that he should desire to make friends; and as this was an enterprise in which he was not used to fail, he embarked on it with some audacity. There was a certain detachment, lack of human interest, about Prudence Varley, as he saw her, which were to him merely walls to be knocked down. He set about razing them with cheerful serenity. It had certainly never occurred to him that, if he wished to make friends with anyone, he would have any difficulty in doing so. But the walls were rather solid, he found. Against the battering-rams of his light-hearted sociability and friendliness they seemed to stand firm; he was only occasionally cheered by 'her eyes when she's going to smile.'
He one evening came to dinner in a mood of reckless resolution; however uninterested, she should this one night be interested, more or less, in him; he would break through the guard somehow and 'achieve intimacy.' He skilfully arranged contiguity with her when they sat on the balcony after dinner and listened to the mandolins in the road below. To tune the scene to the note of seriousness he regarded as desirable—nonsense having failed—he was silent for an unusual minute, to let the night sink in: the broad stillness of the sea below the high road, with the moon cutting its silver lane across it; Naples curving round the water's edge, a great cluster of sparkling jewels; far off across the bay the red glowing column above Vesuvius, that flared and darkened and flared again. To the persistent tinkle of the mandolins below a tenor voice sang 'Addio, bella Napoli!'
Tommy, having given the impression its chance of absorption, inquired:
'Do you like it?'
She turned to him a little absently, and the glow across the water seemed to strike high-lights in her eyes.
'What?'
He swept his hand towards it.
'Naples—all that.'
'Yes.' She had a faculty of conveying all she meant by a simple affirmative or negative; it is, if one comes to think of it, a habit rather rare; most people supplement or qualify or explain. She added: 'The little of it I see. It's not much.'
Tommy enlarged; he would force personality into it.
'It's not my Naples. Mine is different.'
She assented, 'I know,' and he realized with triumph that she had accepted the personal element; she had hitherto always passed it blankly by.
'My Naples,' she said, 'isn't human; it's colour, and light and shadow, and the way the streets go—cut like deep gorges and climbing up—you know? I'm getting to know that a little. But that's Naples in one sense only—one meaning. The people who live in it I don't know.'
'You don't want to know them, do you?'
Having found the personal tack for once, Tommy adhered to it.
'Well——'
Her considering silence seemed to discriminate delicately between the various types of 'the people who live in it.' It seemed that one might want to know some and not others.
'You don't care about knowing people, only things,' Tommy told her.
She accepted it in silence. Discrimination between 'people' would hardly, in the circumstances, have been courteous. Her next remark was a swerve, as usual, to 'things.'
'Oh, look there!... Some one told me it hadn't been so excited for years. I wonder if it means anything by it.'
Tommy left the achievement of further intimacy for another occasion. He meant to carry it through. That was a few days before he had 'helped her to look for her cousin all over the place.' During that search he had found her a little abstracted; she had not appeared to be listening to him much. Her habit of attending to him with a small portion of her mind only, if that, did not baulk him; it pricked him to renewed effort. The element of deliberateness in it passed, as so much passed, over his head.
But he partially caught it—he hardly could have missed it—on one occasion. That was on the first day of March. The steady strokes of the rain lashed the city, beginning with swift unexpectedness; the Crevequers, coming home from lunch, found Prudence Varley and Miranda at their door, delivering a note. They both looked very wet. The Crevequers, mournfully looking from under their large and disreputable umbrella—of all things they hated rain—felt an immense pity, a pity that would have seemed to Prudence disproportionate; she was used to present to the elements a tranquil inattention, and rather liked rain than not. Miranda, too, was of hard fibre; both, anyhow, were used to England. The Crevequers, from under the umbrella (they more than ever resembled Tweedledum and Tweedledee) said (in turns):
'Come up with us till it stops'—'You mustn't get any wetter just now'—'Or you'll be too wet'—'The only safe way is to get dry'—'In between'—'At the stove'—'We're so dull'—'We've no one to talk to; do come'—'Oh, but do'—'Well, anyhow, take the umbrella'—'We shan't want it; we never go out in the wet'—'We should hate to.'
The entirety of the failure of it all had pathos. Significance seemed to be suddenly brought by that failure into the fact that while three members of the Venables family had long been familiar with the room at the top of the pinkish house, the fourth had never set foot on the lowest of the stone stairs.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee went up to their room in silence.
It was then that the room seemed newly to become an impression to them; it was as if it had broken through barriers and suddenly pierced their senses. Their melancholy eyes took it in—a certain tawdriness it had, the litter of things incongruous: on the table a scattered pack of dingy cards; bottles and glasses, unwashed from last night, making red sticky circles onMarchese Peppino; everywhere wasMarchese Peppino: one could not escape from it. From the half-painted, absurd ceiling to the stone floor stale air brooded, breathing of smoke and wine.
Betty thought suddenly of cold, rarefied air, with a faint smell of paint, and winter sunshine striking in through open windows.
Tommy said an odd thing, a thing it is possible he had never said before.
'W-what a beastly mess!'
Then he shoved a space for himself on the table, among glasses and papers, and began to make pictures forMarchese Peppino.
It was about this time, early in March, that the Crevequers took to quarrelling. It was a thing not usual with them, because they liked, of all things, a pleasant harmony. Rows, as they observed, made them feel ill. But at this time they developed a new touchiness; possibly Lent was partly accountable. Tommy wrangled with his editor, disputed truculently with the good-tempered Luli, assumed a mien of impertinent defiance towards his more urgent creditors, and snapped at Betty, who snapped back, and then they would stammer rude and unpleasant comments on each other for a minute or two—it took them longer to quarrel than it takes people who can fling their remarks unhaltingly straight from the lips—until one or other was ashamed and said:
'D-dry up.'
They quarrelled once aboutMarchese Peppino. Betty referred to it to Warren Venables, who, as usual, did not pursue the subject with enthusiasm. When Venables had left them, Tommy, sitting on the table with his hands in his pockets, looked down at his sister rather moodily.
'Wish you'd let my shop alone, Betty. Venables doesn't care a hang about it—can't you see?'
The surprise in Betty's melancholy eyes testified to the rarity of the ill-tempered tone; particularly it was rare from one of them to the other.
'Well—what does it matter, though?'
Tommy was frowning.
'It does. It bores him to hear about it. It doesn't amuse him; he doesn't think it's funny—and it's not particularly—and w-what's the good of making bores of ourselves?'
Betty regarded him thoughtfully.
'I don't think he's so easily bored as all that, you know.'
Tommy remained gloomy.
A curious element had come, just of late, into his relations with Venables—the element of embarrassment. How it began he could not have said, nor whence it sprang. It was unfortunate, as they saw so extremely much of Venables. More and more Tommy left him to Betty, refusing to make a third in their expeditions and amusements. Yet he liked Venables; he liked him as much as he had liked him at first, when the meeting face to face had carried him back curiously to the old days of school hero-worship. Now, for the last few weeks, he had become growingly silent in his presence; the difficulty of conversation made him rather angry; it was a difficulty he was unused to, and he could not account for it. It oppressed him, too, now, in Miss Varley's presence; the achievement of intimacy did not progress. Tommy supposed it might have something to do with Lent; Lent often affected one's spirits unfavourably. Life in general, in fact, was rather a bore. Tommy told Betty so.
'I'm tired of being overworked,' he remarked. 'I wish I wasn't a newspaper man. I wish I wrote novels, like Mrs. Venables. Let's write a novel, Betty. I wish I had a motor-car to play with, like Venables. I wish we were older, Betty—old enough to go home to Santa Caterina and live in peace on our hard-won earnings. Let's chuck it and go. We've got enough, if we leave our debts behind us, and eat like moderate Christians, and are out of reach of shops. What's the good of fooling here, and never having enough to live on, and—and——'
His stammer or his disgust choked the rest of his grievances from his lips.
Betty looked sympathetic.
'You'll feel better in the morning,' she said, 'if it's a fine day.'
She was standing by the open window, leaning out into the soft darkness. From the narrow steep alley below, and from the wide lit thoroughfare into which it ran, the cheerful revel of Naples at night hummed up.
'Let's come out,' said Betty, 'into the streets.'
And the two seekers after a quiet life strolled through the city together. They returned home a little after midnight, having made a very heroic and quite successful fight against care.
'D'autres jours ouvriront les portes,La forêt garde les verrous,La forêt brûle autour de nous,C'est la clarté des feuilles mortes,Qui brûlent sur le seuil des portes....'—Maeterlinck.
'D'autres jours ouvriront les portes,La forêt garde les verrous,La forêt brûle autour de nous,C'est la clarté des feuilles mortes,Qui brûlent sur le seuil des portes....'—Maeterlinck.
At the end of the first week in March the Venables went to Sicily; they would stay there, probably, for the rest of the month.
'So for three weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at lunch,' Tommy remarked, on the evening after they had gone. 'Pity, isn't it? I loved those lunches.'
Betty nodded. She was feeling horribly flat. They both, that first evening, felt horribly flat. By the measure of their flatness they might have gauged the late immensity of their interest; there was revelation in it. To shake it off they went to their favourite gambling-place, and lost some money, and talked to some friends, and in general raised their spirits.
Something of this convivial nature they did every evening for a week. Then they stopped. Inexplicably, it was becoming boring. On the first night it had cheered them; on the second and third they had shut their eyes to the fact that they were bored; the other nights had been, growingly, of the nature of a fight against something—they could not have said what. It was something which seemed to grow, slowly, vaguely, yet with an irresistible sureness.
It is not during constant intercourse and association that influence gives birth to new comprehension. These fill the foreground; they loom too large in present interest to allow of a penetrating vision. The vision, the perception, the discernment, growing from vague abstractions to poignancy, come later, growing very slowly from seeds sown unnoticed. From the carelessly received seeds the plant pushes its gradual, painful way upwards, breaking the earth to make a place for itself, growing, perhaps, to be a tree, striking and spreading roots all through the upheaved soil.
So it began to be with the Crevequers. Absence and time began now their inevitable work. Atmosphere, doubtless at the time absorbed, but unconsciously, now sent its message from system to brain. Retrospect meant the slow beginnings of perception; therefore they fought against retrospect. What at the time had passed them serenely by, came back to memory in strange new lights. What at the time had been bewildering, put on, day by day, robes of increasingly translucent clearness. What at the time they had known, unheeding and uncaring, assumed a vividness quite new. With the accidentals of intercourse no longer overlaying, wrapping up and entangling the issues, these pushed a slow way out, and emerged at last, standing forth unconfused and unadorned, bald in their lucid simplicity.
Through the slow days and long nights retrospect gave birth thus to a glimmering perception; perception, its gropings not to be checked, to comprehension.
In the Crevequers' eyes the melancholy pondering grew more noticeable than before. Their brows sometimes drew together suddenly, as if, in the straying of their thoughts, they had lit upon something they did not like.
Of the Venables they spoke to each other less day by day. Each did not know how it fared with the other; each hardly knew how it fared with himself. It was well, perhaps, that during much of the day they had plenty to do. But there were the evenings. It was certainly a pity that they had begun to find convivial evenings so little amusing to them. Except when their friends came to see them they sat alone together. After a little while, when retrospect had taken them some way, they would often, by reading or talking, try to keep it at bay. But it was, at best, only a question of deferring; there remained always the nights. It was in the nights, of course, that retrospect most tyrannically had its way. The masterless nights are escaped steeds run loose for anybody's annexing. Retrospect annexed them, and rode them hard. In the nights, at all events, there is no confusing of issues, no foreground to obscure the vision.
It took a succession of nights and days for perception to reach full stature. Each, lying awake, or sitting together through the evenings while Tommy drew pictures forMarchese Peppino, caught new aspects of the things which moved in progression through their memory.
It seemed that each of the Venables family, marching through memory, flung at the Crevequers something which retrospect could turn into a ball for its game.
From Miranda Betty collected guileless remarks in inverted commas (some of the inverted commas Miranda had supplied, some Betty filled in now) as to 'different sorts of people,' and how each sort had its own conventions and its own resorts. Plaints, also, about liberty of association tampered with—Miranda was a veritable garden for such flowers. There was also that day at the Trattoria Buonaventura, with Warren Venables standing at the door, impassive, observing, unable to linger because his mother was anxious....
Then, in the procession, marched Mrs. Venables. Mrs. Venables had one day sloughed a self. She had not liked doing so; it was a self she valued; her most natural self, also—the æsthetic self, so easily and so deeply struck. From this self she had reluctantly emerged temporarily to stand forth a reputable, conventional Philistine—more, a maternal Philistine, of all creatures the mostbornée. Driven by circumstances, she had talked to Betty Crevequer on the subject of friendship, its uses and abuses. A certain impersonal detachment she had used, choosing her words with careful discretion, to throw as much veil as might be over the maternal Philistinism. She had not wanted to hurt Betty, nor had she at all wanted that Betty should in her mind call herbornée. She might have been relieved to know that this was a word only in the Crevequers' vocabulary as culled second-hand from herself, and stored in the same carefully treasured category with 'standpoint' and 'forceful.' Not knowing this, she had really shown some self-sacrifice in taking her risks. To minimize them she had laid stress on the purely æsthetic protests that her taste made, leaving propriety aside. A certain refinement she herself exacted from those whom she selected for companionship—she began quite a long way off, in her anxiety for impersonal detachment; how should Betty have grasped it?—and she would have others exact it too. If youth is to lower the value of the precious jewel, its friendship, bringing it down to common—very common—earth, youth will inevitably be the poorer. There is, after all, something in the belief so widely current about touching pitch.... To lounge about the streets—to be exact, outside the doors of a theatre—at midnight, in company with people of the stamp of Betty's companions of last night——
'Gina?' Betty had wondered. 'And Luli? But——'
The mournful pondering of her eyes was rather inscrutable. It might possibly refer to the Achievement of Intimate Contact, which must Shun Nothing.
Mrs. Venables had suddenly at this point dropped the artist self to her feet, and risen out of it for a moment entirely, becoming purely the reputable, conventional, disapproving mother. She had said a mostbornéthing.
'It looked very strange last night. The Essingtons—the friends I was with—did not know what to think.'
The allusion, with that, had seemed to her to have attained enough personality to be safely left. The kernel of the matter, which, wrapped up delicately in æsthetic abstractions, was, 'My son must not do that sort of thing,' had been, in the speaker's eyes, almost too manifestly reached. Mrs. Venables had meandered away among the wrappings. It might have been necessary, but the consciousness of having said that anything 'looked very strange' had oppressed her. It had really been uncharacteristic. The phrase, of such an immeasurable depth of crudeness, must have been somewhere innate in her, passed down from a long line of reputable ancestors, and it had leaped out without her volition. She had endeavoured to retire from it, to wrap it up.
It was perhaps unfortunate for her that at the time she had quite succeeded. Or, rather, the kernel of the thing, so extremely plain to Mrs. Venables, had not been reached by Betty at all. She had been willing to admit that to lounge in the streets so late had, perhaps, looked strange. It was an admission very simple, and not at all galling. Against the use of the word 'pitch' to describe Gina Lunelli and Luli (she had quite missed any ambiguity there might be in its use, and had accepted, naturally, the assumption, put forward on the surface, that Tommy and she were the touchers, who might be defiled) she had protested:
'You see, we're all quite the same sort of people—Tommy and I and they. There's no difference. You can't—you can't separate us.'
Retrospect remarked that Mrs. Venables had not really, with any great determination, tried to do so.
Yet even then Betty's words had seemed to imply that she had begun, however vaguely, to discriminate between one 'sort of person' and another. Retrospect now completed that discrimination. Retrospect gave her, in plain language, the kernel, so carefully wrapped up, which Mrs. Venables had thought she could scarcely have missed. It was laid now in her hands for her to look at; she looked at it, missing nothing.
Retrospect pushed Mrs. Venables aside, having quite elucidated her, and showed in turn Warren. It painted him outside the theatre, in a difficult position—the Essingtons and his mother on one side of the picture, Gina and Luli and Betty Crevequer on the other. The picture was not without its instructiveness. In an awkward position Warren had relied, with the careless confidence his cousin termed insolent, on the obtuseness which saw nothing. His confidence was justified; the obtuseness had still seen nothing. He had not, probably, taken retrospect into account, or he might have adopted another course; he might either have turned his back on the Essingtons and his mother, or even—but this would hardly have been feasible—have introduced his companions into their company. In the course he did take, the Essingtons thought he showed good taste and a proper sense of the fitness of things.
Gina and Luli and Betty were no authorities on taste or the fitness of things.
Warren was everywhere; retrospect, exploiting him, never came to an end. It was strange, it was marvellous, how it was possible to miss things—things that so stared one in the face. Yet, how should one have known? There was no reason why one should know now; only the slow pervasion of atmosphere, that enabled one to look at things with such strangely new eyes, the eyes, doubtless, of others, with the added illumination of the subjective standpoint. This illumination shed its fiery light, growing from glimmer to flame through the masterless nights, upon the things Warren had said and done, the things they had done together, the things he would not have suggested, not contemplated even in thought, if he had regarded her as one of his own 'sort of people,' sharing his conventions. Who should blame him? He had been adequately justified; she had shown herself from the very outset—he had no doubt waited to be sure of it, so as not to risk insult—of a sort of people immeasurably different: so different that she had not even grasped the difference, had only not been surprised at hints of it because they had passed her so serenely by. They had passed clear over her head; dragged back through space by retrospect, they struck her full in the face.
She saw, in the blinding light of an illuminative moment, Warren's attitude towards a girl placed by him among his own 'sort of people'; she saw him brushing aside, lest they should touch and smirch her, the Ginas, the Morellos, the Lulis, who might have crossed her path; she saw his considerate respect, his equal comradeship.
She had given him no chance of respecting her, had he tried to do so. The things crowded back.... On the evening after the first lunch-party he had met her in the street alone at midnight. He had walked home with her; she read into his manner now a touch of the protective regard that she imagined in him towards his own sort. But it had been tinged with uncertainty; even then he had probably known her. Not to risk misjudging her, however, he had walked with her to her home, assuming, doubtfully, that she had lost her escort.
It had not taken many days to confirm the doubt, to obviate all necessity for such assumption.
And then—how they had played together! Each had been so contented with the other; they had had such fun. Retrospect with the search-light could not quite spoil that—not all of it. But it did its best; it dragged it through the mud till it was hidden, inches deep.
Prudence Varley would have seen a flimsy screen toppling over with a crash, revealing the lurker behind with his contemptuous smile. So Betty too very bitterly saw him: but she was aware also that the smile was not all contempt. Only the contempt, real or imagined, poisoned the rest.
The search-light flashed over the large, tolerant acceptance, so unsurprised, so unremonstrating, so uncriticizing, which had at the time missed its message. It did not miss now. She saw herself accepted, Tommy accepted, their friends accepted; all the things they did, their ways of life, taken easily, without surprise, with scorn lurking behind the screen. Their unpaid debts, and eluded duns; their disreputable haunts, their more disreputable friends, their street-loafing, their very dress.... Even at the outset Tommy had said: 'We don't dress well enough. I want a new hat; so do you.' So that obvious discrimination between 'sorts of people' their elementary perceptions had made at once; they had reached just up to that, and no higher.
The question of discrimination brought the quick question, What share of the gift had the Venables? For there were discriminations that might be made, between the things that the Crevequers had done, and other things that they had not done—things from which they had been kept, perhaps, less by any code, moral or conventional, than by the inherent force of inherited tendency, which, strike what new and individual roads we will, will not cease to follow us along them. The question of the discriminating powers of the Venables Betty left. She simply did not know.
All the time, while the search-light glared over the things that Warren had said and done, there remained, outlined lucidly against the background, the things that Prudence Varley had not said and not done. She, with her tacit omissions, was the influence almost preponderating. Her atmosphere was the most deeply absorbed—the rarefied atmosphere of the studio. Across the gulf of months Betty met the direct, far-seeing look, which took in all and gave out nothing. It had waited for its interpretation till now.
With the interpretation—which was that of things held back, reserved—Betty came to evolve a discrimination. The discrimination was between two attitudes. Both had held back something; neither had given unreservedly. One had held back all of friendship, offering nothing; the other had given friendship, withholding from it an element—the element of respect.
Retrospect made the most of both. It would have been hard to say which it found the more effectual weapon. There were moments when Betty could have caught at the sharp blade of one to escape the other, each was driven in alternately. Finally, in spite of all which she would have during these months foregone had she been taken at her word, in spite of all that retrospect with the search-light could not wholly spoil, she attained at times to endorsing the working principle of the entire withholder, as it had been once phrased by her—'One should quite withdraw.' Retrospect, on the whole, made it out a principle more honest, more kind.
Tommy, who was every day being shown a little more how Prudence Varley had from the beginning 'quite withdrawn,' concerned himself, not with the honesty or the kindness of the principle, but merely with its immediate basis.
So, coming to an understanding of its basis, he saw vividly his own hopelessly unachieved intimacy, his attempts so driven back upon themselves, yet gaily denying defeat, his battering at walls which had been built—not at all, as he had supposed, of abstraction, but of entire perception. He saw now more and more each day the impenetrability of those walls; retrospect illumined for him the unheeding detachment, the abrupt swerves from persons to things, so frequent because he had been so indomitable in his return to persons, perceiving them for gates in the impenetrable walls.
There had been times, there had been moments, when the gates had yielded a very little; one had, as it were, got sudden glimpses through. After all, the Crevequers had never failed, till now, to achieve any intimacy....
The half-conscious, vague knowledge of this made the shut gates the more significant; their barred faces were written over, large, with words. The Crevequers, having begun to learn to read, spelt them out.
Tommy's reading was perhaps attained to with greater slowness, greater difficulty—the fault of sex—than Betty's; but in the end the attainment was equally complete.
To Tommy one element in the business was all-important; before it the other elements shrivelled into nothing. But there were other elements which at times had their turn. There was the attitude of Venables, now realized as the basis of the embarrassment which had for some time been oddly, inexplicably, growing into their intercourse with each other. Wholly to absorb that attitude Tommy had to go back some years, to an old atmosphere—an atmosphere of discriminations between the things a man could do and the other things which he could not do. It is curious how environment can choke an atmosphere. This, of a certain social and moral decency, as evolved by youth in community, had been brought back to Tommy by Venables. Venables and the atmosphere reacted on each other; each explained the other. This was rather a question of the renewal of old things than of new acquirements. Four years—those four years—do not easily slip out of life. They had not slipped out of Tommy's; but it had needed Venables to make them stand and deliver their message. They delivered it, with whispers growing to clamour—a sordid recital of the things which a man cannot do. From the friendly inexpressiveness of Venables' eyes, Tommy gathered the classification 'just scum.' With a side glance at Betty's part in the business, he admitted that there were also, beyond doubt, the things which a girl cannot do—beyond doubt, too, Betty had done them; but here old atmosphere did not come to his help: his ignorance was as outer darkness. Those things were Betty's concern. He wondered a little what she made of them, if anything. He wondered a little also if he was angry with Venables; on the whole, it hardly seemed logical enough to be worth while. (Betty in this matter cut herself adrift from logic.)
Still nothing was said between them; still neither knew how it fared with the other. They, who shared all their thoughts, kept these thoughts locked from each other's sight.
Then, on the twenty-sixth of March, a letter was brought in to them as they sat over supper. They knew what it would say. The Venables had returned to Parker's—they would like to see the Crevequers at lunch the next day. Mrs. Venables was eager to resume the Intimate Contact with the People; she must have a talk with Betty about it.
Betty handed the note to Tommy, who was hunting in his pocket for matches to light his pipe. He glanced at it, then tore it neatly and with careful deliberation into strips, and folded them into lighters. Betty watched him; when he had done, he held one over the lamp and lit his pipe with it.
Having successfully carried out this operation, he turned to her.
'You didn't want it, did you?'
Betty shook her head. She had not wanted it at all.
Tommy got up and leaned out of the open window, his back to the room.
'I shall be busy to-morrow,' he remarked.
'So shall I,' Betty said slowly.
Tommy said presently:
'How much longer are they going to be in Naples?'
'Don't know,' said Betty, her chin in her hands. She was thinking it over.
Tommy said suddenly, 'Oh, confound!' and explained, after a moment, 'My pipe's gone out.'
They came thus to a perception of each other's position in the matter. By whatever steps this position had been attained, it stood clearly defined. Both were too busy to go to lunch at Parker's Hotel; that emerged saliently. With no words uttered on the subject, their points of view had marched together, side by side, immeasurable miles from the evening, three weeks ago, when one had said to the other, 'So for three weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at lunch. Pity, isn't it? I loved those lunches.'
The march of the other's point of view each accepted, silently, without surprise. The only matter for surprise would have been the march of one without the other. For, backwards or forwards, they had always moved side by side.