CHAPTER VIII

'The barriers break; life opens all about us;The faces grown so long familiar are become as words,Each one with infinite meanings, a new world.'—Henry Binns.

It was hard to deny Mrs. Venables entrance; her intimacy was so all-reaching. The Crevequers did not see how it was to be done. Betty almost reached the conclusion that it could not be done, and echoed Tommy's question, 'How much longer are they going to be in Naples?' In ignorance of the answer to that, the Crevequers built meanwhile their flimsy, pitiful wall, piling for bricks excuse upon excuse, lie upon lie.

Over the wall Mrs. Venables swept like a wave of the sea. She saw nothing; but, whatever she had seen, she would not have been deterred, but the more impelled. When she did see—if ever she saw—it would be an impression of the first order, most immensely striking.

What she at present saw was that the Crevequers had become unsociable; three weeks had been enough to throw them so entirely back upon their old friends and their old amusements that the new friends, with their atmosphere so widely different, had slid to a great distance, and were not welcomed.

'Atmosphere counts for a good deal. We have not, perhaps, made allowance enough for the strain—for it is a strain—of stepping out of one atmosphere into another. It takes time.'

Prudence Varley said:

'Only, when you don't step out at all, but carry your own atmosphere about with you, the strain is less. The Crevequers have always seemed, anyhow, to bear up under it.'

Since the Crevequers, finding the strain too great, refused to come to the atmosphere, the atmosphere came to them. It was carried by Mrs. Venables and Miranda; it spread itself over the sitting-room while Mrs. Venables talked. Mrs. Venables wanted another social evening in the Vicolo Fiori.

'Yes,' said Betty. 'I'll l-let people know.' (She was stammering horribly to-day.) 'But—but I'm afraid I shall be busy myself.'

Since the evening had not been specified, this was rather too manifestly a brick in the wall. Mrs. Venables pointed it out, with 'Every night, my dear?' and a lift of the brows.

Betty held to it.

'And—and every day as well. We're very busy just now, Tommy and I.'

They had become bored with the new atmosphere; they wanted to throw it wholly off, and be left in peace with their less reputable friends; this Mrs. Venables deduced, with displeasure now rising.

'I think,' she said, 'that it is to be regretted—very much to be regretted.'

Her tone dragged in to be regretted so very much more than the mere fact—the only one offered her—of the Crevequers' excess of occupation, that Betty's dark brows flickered nervously, resentfully, as if she feared something.

Miranda's round eyes beamed with sympathy. The desire to avoid another social evening with the very poor was wholly within the sphere of her comprehension.

'It's a rotten game; I hate it,' she observed.

Mrs. Venables spoke to her quite sharply for once on the subject of limitations of interest and ungracefulness of speech. Miranda, indeed, was a little in the way at the moment; she made intimate approach difficult.

Then Tommy came in, with Luli clinging to his arm. Both were so dishevelled, so flushed, so hilarious, that only one supposition was tenable. Mrs. Venables held it, and her eyes grew still more inclusive in their regret. She did not realize that it took really very little to excite the Crevequers and Luli.

Again Miranda was in the way. Betty realized it, looking, with the acquirements of her three weeks' retrospect in her pondering eyes, from one to another. It was not suitable that Miranda should be there. Betty, with the realization, achieved a fuller comprehension of the suitable than Mrs. Venables possessed; the thought amused her. Mrs. Venables caught the half-smile flickering to her eyes.

'The gulf of mirth,' she observed afterwards, 'is wider than the gulf of tears. One doubts if there is any bridge across it.'

The regret deepened in her eyes.

When Mrs. Venables had gone, and when Luli (much later) had gone also, Tommy said:

'What rot, Betty. What can we do to stop it?'

'Very little,' said Betty.

'It's such a bore,' Tommy explained. (They had not accepted the fact that their attitude towards the Venables could stand by itself, unexplained by one to the other. Unnecessarily, absurdly, each for the other's education piled bricks on the wall, with 'I'm busy,' or 'I'm bored.')

Tommy jingled the coins in his pockets, and whistled sombrely through his teeth.

'Venables been?' he said presently.

Betty's nod merely admitted the fact, without supplement or amplification. Nor did she state the exact number of times that Venables had 'been' during the past few days.

It seemed that they had now all been—all except Prudence Varley. The inadequacy of the wall was manifest; it kept out nothing.

Tommy, catching as he looked up a certain pinched look about Betty's lips, a strain of brows and forehead, a heaviness of lids, speculated again as to the extent of her realization of the things which a girl could not do; speculated also as to what, in the circumstances, would be one's attitude towards Warren Venables. He deduced resentment, and a desire for subsequent aloofness—a desire which might, perhaps, find itself at combat with other things.... Such a combat would hardly be pleasant; it would not conduce to restful nights. Betty did not look as if her nights were restful.

So much, in a moment snatched from egoism, the boy saw of the girl—saw uncertainly, with doubting divination, then returned upon himself, and, to flee from that, said:

'Come out. We'll get hold of somebody and come up to Vomero. I want a lark.'

The girl saw on the whole, perhaps, more of the boy. She saw, with tired compassion, a good deal of him. She saw how he shunned things (the facing of them had been forced on her, but not on him), yet how he too would probably face them eventually. When he had faced them, they would stand at the same point again; now she stood a little ahead. For she had faced things; there had been no shunning allowed to her. She faced them every day; she wondered in how many days she would be allowed to step on and turn her back upon them. If it was to be very many, what Mrs. Venables called the 'strain' might become rather oppressive.

As it happened, Tommy caught up Betty the next day, suddenly, and wholly unexpectedly to himself. He lunched with a friend on the Vomero; afterwards, being left by himself, he strolled through San Martino and came out on the belvedere. Prudence Varley was there, sketching. The leisureliness of her greeting seemed to take him for granted, to relegate him, almost, to part of the scenery. He speculated momentarily on the change in his own attitude towards this abstraction; how it had been to him once the absent remoteness of one interested mainly in things; how it was to him now the remoteness, not absent, but very deliberate, of one whose realization of and discrimination between 'sorts of people' was quite complete. It certainly might well have been clear to him from the first; there seemed no obscurity in it.

And here again they were together, looking over the spread of Naples. Before, he had swept his hand towards it and said, 'Do you like it?'

He had been pleased on that evening by what he had considered an advance, however slight, in the achievement of intimacy. He had flattered himself that she was slowly unbarring the gates. Once or twice, after that evening, he had, he had thought, induced the removal of a few more bars.

Now, standing outside the shut gates, having realized of what they were built, he flushed slowly to his forehead.

And then, even as he turned away, the old desire swept over him, ironically new in form. He would not batter at the gates again; that was done with. But he must, it was borne in upon him, show that he moved no more in the old mists of crass ignorance, show that he knew, even as she did, of the gates, their nature and their inexorability. That she should continue to think that he knew nothing was not to be borne.

So, turning, he checked himself, and stood still a little behind her, and looked down over the great tinted city circling the blue bay—her Naples, 'colour and light and shadow, and the way the streets go, cut like deep gorges, and climbing up.'

Looking over it, Tommy said, with surprising abruptness:

'You said once—or I said—that your Naples was different from mine.'

She glanced round at him for a moment, with her usual unadorned 'Yes.'

'And I didn't know then,' he went on, 'how much it was true. I think you perhaps knew I didn't know it. And now I should like you to know that I have learnt that much; that I'm not quite—not quite a b-blind ass. I know more or less how we stand—how we must always stand. That's all. I wanted you to know that I see them—all the things ... the things you've seen all along.... I wanted you to know.... Oh, there's nothing you can say....'

Thus the melancholy, stammering flow, till it, as usual, choked itself and died.

She heard it out in silence—as always. This silent hearing was the carrying out of what had from the first constituted their intercourse. For always he had talked and she had heard; Betty had once quite failed to accept Tommy's assertion that it was ever 'the other way round.' But the silence seemed now to hold a new element—the element of receptiveness. She listened wholly, swerving from nothing. It seemed that here was his triumph, long striven for; he had sounded the personal note and she had accepted it; in a manner, he had broken through the gates.

When the stammered flow broke, she continued the silence for a little. Then she assented to his last phrase, saying, very gently:

'No—I can't say anything. There is nothing to say.'

The sad, judicial candour of it set the seal on the position. If he had still wildly, faintly hoped that she had not, perhaps, seen so utterly 'how they stood, how they must always stand,' that hope died then. He had divined so much correctly; there might even, perhaps, be more of it, that it would take some years yet to divine.

The glow of the coloured city made his eyes ache as he looked.

He said again, what seemed to be the final expression of the situation between them, this time altering the pronoun:

'There is nothing I can say.'

All he might have said, all he now knew that he would have said, had they stood differently in each other's eyes, all that it would have been, as they did stand, an insolence to say, seemed to lie in the silence between them. Since she was (now) so receptive, she possibly took it in, or a little of it. But 'there is nothing to say' finally summed the situation.

Tommy stammered 'Good-bye,' and went.

The Crevequers had supper at home and alone together that evening. Over it Tommy said nothing at all, and Betty talked without a break for the edification of the two of them. After supper Tommy lit a pipe and began to work at some sketches. Betty, in the other arm-chair, counted pence in a money-box for the week's rent.

'It would be too much to expect that it should be right, of course,' she murmured, 'But w-why it should be eighty centesimi out, I can't understand.'

Then she looked up and met Tommy's eyes. All his sharp hurt was in them; they were heavy with a bitter, dumb hopelessness. If she had known it, her own eyes looked with the same heaviness, the same sharp hurt. The Crevequers were absurdly like each other just now.

'Eighty out,' Betty repeated, looking away from that other hurt. 'I can't—I can't understand——'

Unexpectedly, her voice broke on the words. Tears took her; she leaned her forehead on her hand. She was horribly tired of talking; she had talked all day—talked nonsense, stammering over it. She could not talk any more; the end of a tether often comes quite suddenly so.

Tommy looked at her gloomily, under his brows. Betty never cried; tears no more belonged to her than to him. When they had been children, one had hardly ever cried without the other. Tommy looked at Betty's tears now, speculating on her 'mental standpoint,' and on how far she divined his.

'What's wrong?' he asked. 'Anything ... I can do...?'

If it was merely the mental standpoint, he knew that she would not word it; so he exposed himself to her answer, unafraid. They had never failed each other by betraying such trust. The completeness of his trust enabled one to watch the other's tears without wincing.

'N-nothing,' said Betty, and her voice, in its weariness, caught upon a laugh, while her eyes were still wet. 'Only—only I think I've been talking too much to-day—and that's so tiring.' (It would seem that the Crevequers must lead an exhausting life.) 'And I met the baby Venables sitting outside a church, and it talked about beagling; you run after a hare till you catch it—did you know? It's so jolly. Thinking of that made me feel tired, I expect. And have you been stealing eighty out of the rent? Because I haven't.'

She was counting the pence again, laying them in precarious piles on the arm of her chair.

Tommy had gone to the window, and stood looking out into the soft darkness and the noisy street below, his hands in his pockets.

Those tears had somehow a little loosed his speech.

'The beastly thing,' he said drearily, 'is how everything is such a bore, and how it will go on always, just like this.'

Betty did not need him to tell her that that was a bad thing—one of them, but not the chief. She said:

'I know.'

'No; but you can't quite know,' Tommy told her, 'because—because for you it's rather different.'

The quick movement of Betty's hand sent the pence scattering on to the floor, ringing on the bare stone.

'There'll be more than eighty out now,' she said. 'And it's not different; it's quite the same.'

Tommy turned and faced her, pondering, looking at her from under gloomy brows, seeing how she had sunk her chin on to one clenched hand, and was looking down at the pennies on the floor sombrely. He was speculating on her position, how it could be quite the same. She elucidated it a little with, 'It's what one can take that counts ... nothing else.... So it's quite the same.'

Tommy thought it over, and said, 'I see.'

Yet it seemed to him that what one had been offered might also, in the long run, count a little—anyhow, in the retrospect.

Such an amount seemed to have been now admitted between them that Betty could say, 'We're down on our luck, you and I.... Tommy, I'm horribly sorry.'

The last was pity, and he took it from her now without wincing; that it was 'quite the same' for both of them made it a simple thing to give and take. He gave his in return, gently, now that her position had thus emerged to him.

'I'm sorry, too,' he said.

So their affection for each other put out reaching, groping fingers through the glooming mists of pain that blinded each. As yet that touch could not heal: but it seemed to wait its hour.

Tommy returned to his drawing. Betty sought for and gathered up the coins from the stone floor. Their copper jingling seemed to ring in her soul dully. The beastly thing—to use Tommy's phrase—was that one must oneself throw one's bright metal away. Though it might burn to the touch, the flinging of it away was a wrenching that hurt more. Betty envied Tommy, with the bitterness of his down-bent face before her; her bitterness must of necessity be the deeper, because her bright metal had been laid in her hands, to keep if she would. Also, to throw it away had bruised and hurt not her alone....

Betty's thin, scarred hand covered her lips, steadying them.

'We shall be better soon,' she said to herself. 'We'll play in the streets and smell the sea ... and summer's coming.... We shall be better soon.'

Then she sought a narcotic in literature, and got from the shelf a book of poetry and began to read:

'When you are out alone I hopeYou will not meet the antelope....'

The Crevequers used often to cheer themselves with that book when they were in low spirits. But to-night it did not seem efficacious. Betty supposed she knew it too well; she could think as she read, which was not desirable. So she turned to fiction, and read 'Sea Urchins.'

The church clocks struck ten. Tommy, holding his sketch from him, said, 'How damned bad!' and tore it abruptly in two, muttering, 'Muzzi would if I didn't.' Then he got up and said, 'It's stifling in here. I shall go out.'

He went out.

Betty, her hand over her shaking lips, muttered, 'Poor Tommy—oh, poor Tommy! We've no luck at all, he and I.'

She was aware how he must have faced things, and how once more they stood at the same point.

'Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa duraQuesta selva selvaggia ed aspra è forte,Che nel pensier rinnova la paura!Tanto è amara, che poco è più morte:Ma per trattar del ben ch' ivi trovai,Dirò dell' altre cose, ch' io v' ho scorte.'—Dante.

Beneath the hail of black dust and fiery ashes that blew in gusts from Vesuvius across the bay, Tommy Crevequer screwed his eyes and tilted his straw hat forwards and drew, getting an excellent view, if not of Vesuvius, which was blotted in brown mist, at any rate of the population who thronged the harbour, and of the way in which they received their impressions. Foreigners—never-failing game—were much in evidence, a North German Lloyd having recently arrived; there were also the Sindaco, and various other celebrities. The artist ofMarchese Peppinomade them seem rather funny. It was the first morning after the breaking out of the eruption, and interest everywhere was vivid. Journalists recorded their impressions with smarting eyes.

A little way from Tommy, Warren Venables stood, a leaf torn from a sketch-book thrust beneath his hat to guard forehead and eyes. Tommy had seen him some time ago; he was rather bored when Venables looked round and saw him, and strolled towards him.

'Interesting,' said Venables concisely; and Tommy nodded.

Venables half looked over the artist's shoulder, with a careless 'May I see?'

Tommy shut his notebook with deliberation, and put his pencil into his pocket. Then, after a moment's interval, he flushed, slowly and with great completeness.

'You know it's a rotten rag,' he said, hurling down the other's screen with an angry blow that sent it crashing in pieces.

Venables, looking at his resentment for a moment in silence, said simply:

'I beg your pardon, Crevequer.'

He, too, had flushed. He was learning, it seemed, the 'insolent flimsiness' (as Prudence had it) of all his screens, this among the rest. He wondered for how long Crevequer had known that he 'knew it was a rotten rag'—or, rather, for how long he had cared.

The red, fine ash drifted before a push of wind into Tommy's eyes and mouth; his sullen anger surged in him, and broke stammeringly out. Inconsequently, he was glad to see how the soft, drifting dust lay on Venables' coat and very clean collar.

'You thought—you thought I—we—didn't know a thing about it, or about anything else, all this time. Well, w-what business was it of yours? and—and why couldn't you have let us alone?' Querulously he stuttered it out, and coughed out the dust as he ended.

Venables said again, 'I beg your pardon.'

Tommy glowered at him resentfully.

'That's no good. You—you had no business....'

His own outbreak had taken him by surprise. He was seeing the pinched look round Betty's lips, the strained heaviness of her eyes.

Venables, his quiet face very inexpressive beneath the paper guard, said, 'No, possibly not;' and that again took Tommy by surprise.

His flare of anger flickered down to a sullen smoulder; it seemed to lack fuel. Venables' silence, as they stood together, seemed to put him, as usual, in the right. After all, though 'what one can take' may be the only thing that counts on one side, what has been offered can hardly be left out of a sane vision of the other. Tommy, resentfully aware of this, was stirred to surprise, not for the first time, at the part latterly played by Venables in this matter. It seemed hardly characteristic; a certain reckless unwisdom it had, which was incongruous. Tommy wondered whether it was that play had at last grown suddenly to earnest, an irresistible tide swamping judgment, or whether this late development might perhaps be sheer amends.

Anyhow, now, since Venables, from whatever motive, had thus done the decent thing, they were again seas apart. Venables had, in a manner, by doing the things which retrospect had exhibited to the Crevequers as not quite decent, come down for a little to their level. It had only been for a little; he had now regained his own. His apology for his descent set him there with more entire security than before.

Tommy, as they stood together, wished—he had of late wished it a good deal—that he liked Venables less. It was that element in any relationship that made the difference of plane oppressive.

Venables, who had been standing in considering silence, seemed to remember that there was very little left to say between them. He nodded good-bye, and turned away.

Tommy slowly opened his notebook, and stared at his half-completed sketch beneath drawn-down brows.

'What rot; what sickening rot,' he murmured, and finished the drawing with quick, skilful strokes.

This was a great time for newspaper men. Leaving the harbour, Tommy strolled into the town, to seek impressions. The most vivid, coming to him unsought, was one of cinders and black dust falling like intermittent rain into his eyes. To protect them he followed Venables' example, and thrust a page from his sketch-book under his hat. In the street outside Santa Chiara he encountered Mrs. Venables and Miranda; they were coming out of the church. Beneath her swathing motor veil, Mrs. Venables' face was alight with exaltation. She also, manifestly, was seeking—and finding—impressions. She accosted Tommy.

'Immensely striking.... But too pitiful'—she indicated the church—'the prayers, the unreasoning, childlike terror. In the streets, too, the poor terrified refugees, clasping their household gods and lighting candles to the saints as they walk ... infinitely pathetic ... if one could tell them how futile!'

She paused, remembering, perhaps, that Tommy, as belonging to the same childlike faith, might also, on occasion, light a candle to the saints.

'It seems a natural thing to try, under the circumstances,' he remarked, confirming her suspicion.

'Poor souls,' she murmured. 'I must get over to Bosco Trecase to-morrow.... Human nature in the raw ... deeply impressive. One's heart bleeds for all the broken-up homes. And the way they take it—children hurt without knowing why. That seems to me to be infinitely pathetic; don't you think so, Mr. Crevequer?'

Mr. Crevequer tapped his sketch-book with his pencil. The difference of plane did not oppress him particularly in Mrs. Venables' presence; he still almost enjoyed it.

'It's got, you know, to seem f-funny to me,' he explained. 'But I admit it's a little forced, some of the humour.'

'Oh yes—your paper.'

Mrs. Venables became vague; her eyes greedily took in impressions from the passers-by.

Miranda said, 'Oh, I say, do let's see!'

Tommy did not open his book. He changed the subject.

'Rather pretty, the way the cinders fall, don't you think?'

Miranda said that the atmosphere was beastly, and that she hated it.

'It gets right inside my clothes—all gritty.' She wriggled distressfully. 'And my shoes are quite full of it. I want to go home to lunch, but mother won't. Mother likes it, I believe.'

'The worst, I am afraid, may be still to come,' Mrs. Venables murmured. 'They say we may expect a terrible night. There are sinister omens....'

'Oh, it is a rotten place,' said Miranda, disgusted.

It grew to be so, more and more, through the day. Tommy met Betty for lunch, then continued his impression-seeking, coated from head to foot in black dust. They arranged to be in for supper at eight. Betty was not surprised when Tommy failed to appear; there was so much of increasing interest going on. Instead, Gina Lunelli came in, seeking cheerful society because she was horribly afraid, with the abandoned physical terror of large, full-blooded people. The Crevequers always cheered one, made one laugh; she sought them, therefore, and found Betty alone, waiting for supper.

Supper restored Gina a little; she became more cheerful, though still observing that there seemed every probability of the world coming to an end in the course of the night.

'The way it blazes—Madre Dio! And the ashes that choke one! And this horrible storm! And Tommy—he's out in it!'

'Oh, Tommy's all right.'

Gina shrugged her broad shoulders.

'What with the storm, and the ashes they're shovelling in great heaps off the roofs, and the wild people there are about, and no one to keep order, and the convulsion of the earth.... But who knows? We must hope for the best, and the saints are good.'

Later on in the evening there actually was a slight convulsion of the earth. It shook the furniture and made a rattling, and caused Gina to have a fit of hysteria, and sent her running out into the street, notwithstanding the storm, averring that she would on the whole prefer to be slain by lightning than by a collapsing roof.

Betty curled herself up in her chair and listened to the voices of the night. It was about eleven o'clock then—a black, wild night, full of the storm. The earth growled back strange mutterings in answer to the rumblings of the sky. It was as if all hell was loose, and playing about Naples that night. The thunder-peals and the answering earth-growls grew in reverberance, in sullen rage.

Betty wanted Tommy.

There might be many reasons, but there seemed on the face of it to be no reason, why he should not have come in. He had probably been asked to supper by some one. But he had said, for certain, that he would come home.... Betty did not think that Tommy had lately been in a mood to seek sociable evenings with friends.

Gina's terror, the wild night, the storm in the air, caught hold of Betty with an insistent grip. The voice of the travailing earth played on her strung nerves as if they had been banjo-strings. She smoked cigarettes to still them; she tried to read, to ignore them.

A little after midnight the city shook with great definiteness. The room quivered and rattled from floor to ceiling. Betty, after that, went out into the streets, to see how things were, to meet other people, to find Tommy, to escape her own society. The Crevequers were gregarious; they on all occasions sought other people's society in preference to their own.

Betty was in the fashion; every one seemed, upon that upheaval, to have sought the open, more or less regardless of whether or not they were clad suitably to face it. Some of them were not at all clad suitably; they gave an impression of extreme haste. Close to Betty a stout lady in a nightdress shivered, and clasped a whimpering pug in her arms.

There was an influx into the churches; there was crying and moaning and telling of beads. An impromptu procession passed, bearing lighted candles, and a wax San Gennaro lent from his altar by hisparocco.

Meanwhile the mountain across the bay flung into the black night its glowing masses. Above it hung an immense fiery pillar, blazing across the dark, restless sea.

Vesuvius had not done yet.

Betty looked for Tommy.

She did not find him; she found instead Mrs. Venables, and thought, with a vague, detached part of her mind, what an orgie this must be.

Mrs. Venables was not pleased with Betty, but the strikingness of the present occasion seemed to unite them.

'Deeply impressive.... I suppose few of us have ever experienced such a night.... I am going into the church.'

'I'm l-looking for Tommy,' Betty said mechanically, staring down the street.

Mrs. Venables did not hear; she was borne away by the crowd, murmuring, 'The city of dreadful night,' the light of exaltation kindling her fine plain face.

'But probably he's home by now,' Betty suddenly thought, and pressed a way through the people to her own street, and climbed the black stairs to the small room, where the lamp flickered dimly and nothing else moved.

Betty huddled again into her own arm-chair, and rested her chin on her drawn-up knees, and stared across at the empty chair opposite her. She wanted Tommy; Tommy who would so have talked if he had been there—the last more silent weeks had slipped from memory; Tommy, who was so often late in returning, who might be occupied in so many ways during this strange night, yet whose absence, nevertheless, grew with the hours to have a sinister meaning, as well as an infinite solitary sadness.

The storm rolled over Naples.

'So fleshConjures tempest-flails to threshGood from worthless. Some clear lampsLight it; more of dead marsh-damps.'—George Meredith.

Through the black, slow hours Betty stared with wide unswerving eyes at the other arm-chair. On one of its arms lay a pipe, on the other a half-finished drawing. Between them, it was strange how Tommy sat, drawing, with face bent down, saying nothing. His presence grew, till the loneliness of the room was conquered. How should it be lonely? It held, as always, a companionship of two. As always, one had only to look up to see the other. So had all the past been; so would all the future be. No other state was within the bounds of imagination. As Betty once, at Baja by the sea, had looked up swiftly and seen, for life and all it meant, all it contained, herself and Tommy on warm sand, and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding, and had then been lit by a flash of vivid insight, of great certainty; so now she came, by slower steps, through the black night to the same realization. For it was after all a thing always known, if unexpressed, this companionship of two which should endure, stronger than death, surer than the thing called love, failing nowhere. It had been from the dawn of the days.

To the further north there lay, in sunshine, a little warm bay of blue sea, and a Ligurian fishing-city, pink and yellow and white and green, was set curving round it—Santa Caterina, of deep stone-paved streets, where odours dwelt of roasting coffee, and drying fish, and cheese, and drains, and tar, and the breath of the brown seaweed, and of the nets that had drawn in shoals ofbianchettiat daybreak, and lay through the day drying on the hot sands.

A town of people most companionable, who played a kind of croquet (it is more amusing than ordinary croquet; you kneel in the road, and use boards for mallets) in the piazzas, and along the dusty roads where the white walls shaded them; who sat and talked outside the church on Sunday mornings, while their women tied their handkerchiefs over their heads and went in to Mass. During Mass the sweetness of the church smothered the saltness of the sea, but when the church-goers came out again into the hot piazza the sea's breath caught theirs, stealing up to meet them, calling most insistently, through deep little arches, that framed blue glimpses like pictures in a row. Going down on to the shore—it lay just outside the stone streets—one saw how, from the point of Savona in the west, across to the white gleaming of Genoa, the city of ships, all the blue bay stretched. Down by the tideless still edge of it a white canoe with a red stripe waited—a canoe for two (but it held five quite nicely, if some one sat astride on each end, so that its owners, being sociably inclined, sometimes took parties of friends).

In the canoe the owners came to Mass, from their house at the very end of the long town, well outside the stone streets, with a stretch of white dusty road to be traversed, unless they took the sea-way. Paddling back across the bay, the canoe landed beneath a little square, dark red house, with green shutters and a wide veranda and a small sweet-smelling garden of close-crowded flowers—roses and tall lilies and evening primroses; and for the trees, oranges and lemons, pomegranates, and fragrant eucalyptus, and fluttering bamboos, with vine trellises overhead. The house stood literally on the seashore, so that when the waves were high they came in through the green iron bars of the gate and washed the growing things with brine. On one memorable occasion they flowed in through the basement windows; the exultant household then went downstairs and floated about on tubs.

Inside, the house was artistic, in an unconventional way of its own; its owner had been called an eccentric of genius. He had been a lovable person, wrapped in his own thoughts and his own work, giving his children most of the things it occurred to them to demand, spoiling them entirely, and leaving them for the rest to shift for themselves, which they did, with infinite enjoyment, on the sea and on the hills, and chiefly in the companionable streets of the town, where they played in the piazza and talked in thefarmacia, and loved many friends, and learnt the art of how to be happy though doing nothing.

No one inquired after their movements, except on occasional mornings when it occurred to the master of the house that he would teach them something. Even then they had all the hot afternoons and long, still evenings for their own, with a warm, happy, gay world to play in, with rocks half a mile up the shore, where the white canoe paddled about and turned over suddenly in the warm water (one then navigated it upside down, which was quite as agreeable), with the cheerful town waiting always; and just behind the house steep hills of silver olive-gardens, walling the bay from the trans-Apennine winds.

Climbing the stony paths that led straight up from the stone streets of the town, one passed through gardens of oranges and sweet-smelling lemons and long vineyards, and above the grey olive terraces and chestnut woods, to the place of rocks and dark cypresses and green stone-pines. Up there was a little lake of deep green water, with red pine-bark lying in heaps by the edge, so that one made boats and raced them across.

Thus, however much the Crevequers enjoyed the kind, gay and amusing world—and they enjoyed it, as a rule, tremendously—they were always aware that there was a better place waiting for them. Some day they meant to go back there for good, in the days of repose that age should bring them, and live together in the house beyond the long town (it belonged to them; they had little other heritage), and cross the bay in the canoe with the red stripe, that lay in the basement now and horribly needed caulking, and land on the beach below the little city, and go up to Mass in Sant' Ambrogio, and afterwards play games in the piazza and sit outside theparrucchiere'sin the sun.

They had left Santa Caterina ten years ago; a sudden pricking of duty had come to the hermit of the red house; his obedience to it had, as Mrs. Venables said, cost him his life shortly afterwards.

Three most forlorn things Betty had in her memory, following on each other: the leaving of Santa Caterina, Tommy's going away to school, and the death, a year later, of the careless, indulgent eccentric. At the first and last she and Tommy had wept together pitifully; at the middle tragedy of the three the iron had entered into her soul, too deep for tears. It had mattered infinitely most.

But there had been, through those four years, the holidays—holidays mostly spent in an untrammelled and lawless liberty in London, with a light-hearted and irresponsible old Irish gentleman, their grandfather. It was in those days that they learnt to love the glamour of a great city. London they had known, as they now knew Naples, with a vagabond intimacy for the most part denied to the children of their class. The gamin strain that seemed innate in their blood was developed and strengthened thus.

Part of these years had been spent with a family of cousins in a country vicarage. The memory of this portion of their career still lay like a heavy load on the Crevequers' consciousness. The atmosphere—an atmosphere, one would think, of fairly ordinary respectability—had not till then come their way. They stifled under it. No one in the household but themselves was in the least degree foolish, and they, being frankly babyish, and quite disreputable in their tastes, were more than ever driven to one another, facing the rest of the world hand-in-hand, hopelessly recognizing the impossibility of explanations, hopelessly failing to arrive at any perception of the civilized and usual code. It was to them merely an oppression, but from the oppression each had the other to fall back upon, and they were content. But, notwithstanding the smothering weight of civilization, they had always, even in those days, got on extremely amicably with the world in general. The failure to achieve friendship had not entered into their view of life as it was lived by them. That was a thing they had had to learn later, and at first with blank non-comprehension.

The little of decency that had in these days penetrated into them—no one can quite escape the impress of the educative years—had during their life in Naples slipped quite out of sight. In Naples they had entered into a feckless, laughing world, where they had lived from hand to mouth, and made friends in every street, and 'drifted about the bottom.' So drifting, they had been still together. For that reason everything had so greatly amused them; jests coming their way had, in passing from the eyes of one to the eyes of the other, acquired an overpowering humour; the world had been a merry playroom for two. Any friend made by one of them had been introduced, as a matter of course, into a three-cornered party; no other way could ever have occurred to either.

And now, out of life the crucible, immutable values seemed to evolve themselves. That story which Tommy had found so tedious on the beach at Baja had been fulfilling itself of late. Life had truly proved a furnace, whose pitiless flames melted one's bright metal and horribly burnt one's hands.

Those who in the end emerged from that furnace would certainly know their metal for what it was. Betty, still in the flames, could look ahead: she saw with increasing clearness the result of that testing and the gold that would remain—gold that could not, by any alchemy of newly acquired knowledge, be proved base.

But if one lost that gold, then life—the essential interpretation of it—would end there. It were better that the name of it—the poor kernelless shell—should be swiftly crushed too. It would, no doubt, find itself crushed somehow before long, because no continuance of it was in the least degree imaginable. One cannot separate two lives so tied together.

So, through the slow hours, life resolved itself into certainties, that rose like sharp rocks out of the mists of doubt. With their increasing clearness of outline, the emptiness of the other arm-chair became a jarring outrage; it was as if, to one who has learnt to say, 'This one thing matters, this one thing I must have,' the curt reply is flung, 'This one thing for the present you must go lacking.' The solitude became an offence, insupportable, oppressive.

Betty horribly wanted Tommy; it seemed that she had never wanted anything else, so the slow hours had stretched.

Between two and three the city shook with a stronger motion, more violent and prolonged. In the streets buildings must surely be falling.... Betty went out to see.

Others, too, had gone out, fleeing from the danger of roofs and walls, or merely seeking companionship in blind fear. The streets were thronged; the churches were full of praying and crying. Thecarabinieriand theguardie municipalikept order as best they could among a crowd on the verge of hysteria. Here and there trooped in file homeless peasants from the ruined villages, their possessions bound on their backs or the backs of their beasts. From the comments tossed about one might infer this disaster to be probably the work of the good God or of the Evil One, or merely the spontaneous freakish rage of the eternally cursed mountain. Each view had its adherents.

Betty, at a street corner, ran into Luli. Like all the others, he was a shadow to her, a shadow to whom she said:

'Have you seen Tommy?'

He had not seen Tommy; he walked with her, helping her to look for Tommy; he was to her a shadow moving at her side, who spoke and was answered nothing. His speaking was:

'How should we find him to-night? It's hopeless. He'll turn up all right in the morning; there's nothing to be frightened about.'

It was irrelevant; Betty heard it as from a great distance; she was looking for Tommy—looking for him at street corners, going up steep climbingvicoliand down again, searching all the faces in the crowd. The shadow kept patiently at her side, with a shrug for the folly of it. The storm and the earthquake had certainly dazed her, set her wits wandering; he advised her many times to go home and sleep, since the shocks were now over and would very likely not recur.

'Tommy may be home by now,' the shadow said.

Betty shook her head; she knew that in the dim room nothing stirred but the flickering lamp. She looked for Tommy.

Out of the Toledo they came into the Piazza del Plebiscito, and so down the Strada del Gigante to Santa Lucia by the sea, where Tommy was so often, but was not now. Looking from Santa Lucia across the black bay, they saw the blazing game that the fiery cone was still playing untired; the earth's groaning sounded above the sweeping of the shaken sea.

Into the town they plunged again, Betty and the protesting shadow, who wanted to go to bed. The storm had dropped; upon the wind of dawn came the red rain of the cinders, the black clouds of the dust, blinding and choking. Behind these the grey morning grew; a dim day broke slowly on the tired, shaken city.

Since he could not prevail on Betty to go home, Luli went home himself; he could not walk the streets all night looking for Tommy, who was, no doubt, well amused somewhere.

'It isn't a fit night for you to be out,' he told Betty, 'but I am falling asleep: I must have rest. What would you have? You'd much better go home too.'

So they parted.

Betty took to going into all the churches she came to, to see if Tommy was there. She would sit down by the door and look at the praying people—the churches were thronged to-night—and dreamily wander into hazy speculations, soothed by the chanting voices and the sweet, heavy air, till she woke with a start, and so out again into the dim city, where the ashes came riding on the east wind like rain.

Once acarabiniereasked her where she was going, why she walked alone so in the disturbed city. She said:

'I am looking for my brother. Have you seen him? He is like me, only he carries a sketch-book and a pencil; and what do you suppose is likely to have happened to him?'

Thecarabiniereconveyed by a shrug that he could not say.

'But something is more likely to happen to you. It's a bad night to be walking in the town. All kinds of ruffians are about.'

That, being irrelevant, Betty did not hear.

It was strange how every one was abroad in Naples to-night. In the Piazza Sant' Angelo, a little after five o'clock, Betty met Warren Venables. She said to him:

'Help me, please, to find Tommy.'

He looked gently at her—they had hurt one another so badly that nothing but gentleness seemed possible between them now—and divined (it was a fresh hurt to him) how entirely he was a shadow to her; how the world was a crowded shadow-land, through which she moved alone, seeking the one reality, her other self. His discernment let him realize how all things but one must have slipped away through the wild hours of the night. He knew it by her wide, unseeing eyes, her strained, sallow face, the mechanic words, which were her only greeting. He was glad to be able to do her at least this service; he was glad to be at her side, taking care of her, though it might be only as an unnoticed shadow. It was in his mind, but not in hers, how she had not long since begged him not to see her any more.

He said gently:

'You're tired; you must go home. Tommy is all right.'

She said:

'I want Tommy. Help me, please, to find Tommy.'

He walked at her side, through the rain of the dust, which lay thick on the streets and gritted underfoot as they walked. Neither ever forgot that harsh gritting, or the sulphurous breath of that dim dawn. It hurt them both in memory for always.

There is a narrow alley which leads up out of the Strada San Biagio, climbing a little. They went up it—Betty neglected no street—and there they found Tommy.

Some scaffolding had fallen, tossed down by the storm or the earthquake, in a corner where no one passed. Tommy lay with his face to the street, his sketch-book clutched in the hand of one flung-out arm, the other arm pinned to his side, with a twelve-foot plank across his back and two poles across his legs. Tommy and the scaffolding both wore a coat an inch deep of black dust.

Venables lifted away the plank: it took most of his strength; then he moved the poles. Then he turned Tommy over very gently, and the black dust drifted down on to the upturned face. Betty raised it on to her lap and shielded it with her two hands, saying always, and not knowing what she said:

'Tommy—Tommy—Tommy.'

Venables said:

'I will fetch help. I will be as quick as I can.'

She looked at him with unseeing eyes. He paused a moment, then turned and left her, slipping away into the shadows, one of a world of shadows, leaving those two alone together, as, for her, they had been alone together through all the long night.

She looked down into her lap, and made a shield of her two hands, and muttered:

'Tommy—Tommy.'

'We are the creatures of birth, of ancestry, of circumstance; we are surrounded by law, physical and psychical.... The ways are dark, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we cannot see.'—J. H. Shorthouse.

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