'The law of the past cannot be eluded,The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,The law of the living cannot be eluded—it is eternal.'—Walt Whitman.
'The law of the past cannot be eluded,The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,The law of the living cannot be eluded—it is eternal.'—Walt Whitman.
There was peace in Naples, and sunshine breaking at last through clouds—rest and brightness following days of fear. It remained to put things together—all the broken things, human and otherwise. The city was full of those who reached hopeless hands for prop and support, having lost everything; full of those who gathered closely to them the fragments that remained, fragments they had snatched from ruin and clutched in their arms as they fled.
On the many dead, the many broken and dying, the many who grasped fragments, the many who had lost all, the clear sun looked down, on this 13th of April, with its gay, lucid light. It seemed to hold a promise, to mention a hope far off. It seemed to drag the world out of the dark pit, to give the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction the air, not of a far dream, but of a possibility—far too. It gave it also the air, quite definitely, of a necessity. It was like the first youth of the spring, with its forgetting of the black storms past, its promise of a brave renewal.
Betty Crevequer walked home through the sunny streets from the hospital. The gay sun had lit the long ward, sending dusty beams across the room to the broken, bandaged figures in the beds. By the side of one of the broken, bandaged figures Betty had sat and talked, and Tommy had talked too, to-day for the first time—talked for the first time, that is, in the Crevequers' generous sense of that elastic word.
Betty had for four days known that Tommy would not die, but live; now the sunshine in the streets brought her to a more vivid realization of it. The sunshine in the streets, the keen smell of the sea that caught her breath as she turned down towards it, the fresh wind from the west, blowing the ashes away from Naples, brought sudden tears to her eyes, sudden, vague thoughts of far-off renewals, of the mending of all broken things. In her weariness she could not stay the tears; they stood in her eyes and quivered to her lashes. When she had climbed up to the little room at the top of the steep stairs, they took her wholly; she leaned her chin on her two hands and looked out over the city, not knowing whether the tears dropping slowly were for the old things broken and spilt, or for the slow mending that might yet be. Anyhow, the city lying so in the afternoon sunshine had a most sad gaiety. It brought back to Betty how Tommy's smile had to-day flickered out from the bandages, lightening the sad eyes.
She was horribly tired; it seemed that she had been living at high pressure, not only for these past few days—she could not count them—but for days and weeks before that. The time comes when strung nerves break like worn-out fiddle-strings; there is no more strength in them.
So, in her hour of weakness, Betty wept, having fallen through the broken floor of circumstance till she touched bottom, looking without hope at some far, possible ascent, through the sad dimness of tears. The west wind dried her tears on her face as she looked out; and Prudence Varley came in.
Betty turned and faced her, as she paused for a moment to knock at the open door, standing with chin a little raised to suit with the caught-up lip, straight and tall, with the grey, artist's eyes that took in everything and had been wont to give out nothing. Betty's mournful eyes met the look with her new, sad comprehension of that restraint which had always so held back everything. Yet now it seemed that it did not so entirely hold back everything; its remoteness was less complete. Betty hardly knew this; she knew chiefly how the room was tawdry and breathed of stale smoke, how the table was littered with cards andMarchese Peppino, how the other had come, perhaps, straight from a cool place, smelling cleanly of paint, full of the April sunshine, spacious and pure and bare.
Prudence Varley said:
'How do you do? May I come in? or——'
She paused, waiting. Betty was hardly used to such waiting on the part of her visitors; as a rule they came in, deeming questions superfluous.
Betty considered it for a moment, her lower lip caught between her teeth, her eyes pondering. She might, she knew, have said 'No.' Prudence Varley neither offered nor demanded adornment of speech. It was an open question she had asked, to be answered truly. 'No' would have sent her simply away without comment or offence.
Betty considered 'No,' and rejected it, perhaps because the direct eyes seemed no longer to hold everything back; perhaps because, like a child hurt and bewildered, she wanted help; perhaps because, from the first to the last, she had always so liked Prudence Varley.
She said 'Yes,' and came forward and cleared a space in her own chair, and sat down herself on the arm of Tommy's. The clearing of Tommy's would have been too arduous a task.
Prudence sat down simply, unembarrassed. But Betty's thin, childish fingers, clasped round her knee, worked nervously in and out; she clenched her teeth over her lower lip.
'How is your brother?' Prudence said.
'B-better. He talked to-day, quite a lot.'
That extremely probable fact, Prudence perhaps thought, could hardly be taken as conclusive proof of the Crevequers' good health. But she said:
'I am very glad. Then he may be up before very long, perhaps?'
'I don't know how long; they c-can't tell me.' Betty stammered a good deal over it. She paused for recovery. 'When he's well enough,' she resumed, 'we want to go north for a rest.'
'To England?'
'No. Oh no; that w-wouldn't be a rest. To Santa Caterina. It's our home; we used to live there.... Tommy won't be able to do much for some time.'
'No; of course. You won't come back till the autumn, when it's cooler, I expect.'
The two looks met, the one faintly questioning and half asking pardon for the question, the other with all its depth of sad bewilderment stirred—a miserable gaze like a child's.
'I don't know,' said Betty, and bit her lip. Then quite suddenly the depths surged up and broke through. Her sad eyes hung on the lucid grey ones that looked with such gentleness at her. 'I don't know—oh, I don't know.... I don't know what we can do ... how we're to do it.... Can't you tell me?... Because it's been you, you know, who've spoilt things.... And what next?'
Prudence accepted it, meeting the claim with puckered brows of thought. She did not know what next. She was an idealist, of a continual and never-failing hope; but, striving to see, she saw only roads running eternally sundered, as Betty too had seen them from the first hour of comprehension.
Betty said again, half to herself, how they were spoilt, the old things. 'And what new things can there be, ever, for us?' On Prudence, who had done her share of the spoiling, she still made her stammering claim, blind-eyed, without hope.
Prudence's response to it was a doubting question.
'If they're spoilt then ... you'll leave them?'
Betty's eyes hung on hers.
'You mean not come back here? Oh, we don't want to; I've told you that's spoilt. But where else?... Tommy couldn't get anything to do at Santa Caterina.'
Prudence said there were other places in Italy for a journalist. Or perhaps even England.... But at that Betty shook her head. No spoilt things should drive her to that place of damp half-lights.
'Not England. We couldn't live there; it's never, never warm.... Perhaps Genoa; we know it so well. But Tommy may not find anything to do; he's never been on a regular, proper paper....' Swiftly, atMarchese Peppino, the colour surged over her face; the room was so full of it. She said quickly, a sudden throbbing of helpless anger choking her speech: 'That, too—that, too—everything—you've spoilt it—and w-what can you give us instead?'
'What would you take?' Prudence said, with a very grave and very gentle directness, turning the tables thus.
Betty's sad regard, emptied of anger, owned them turned. But she felt a sudden desire to know.
'If we could take anything ... would you give it? You?'
The emphasis on the pronoun put it in the singular number, thus setting Betty's own acceptance or refusal of offerings outside the range of question and answer, as she had meant. For she was very tired of talking about that. To the personal question Prudence, after a full minute of thinking it over, returned a deliberating answer:
'I don't quite know.'
It was indeed what she had been for some time wondering. But the spoken words seemed to strike her with a sense of incompleteness, of a gap somewhere between themselves and the thought they should have accurately fitted. Prudence, who did not very often clothe her thoughts, was fastidious, when she did, about the garments' fit. She tried something else—a dubious 'I can't be sure, but I suppose ... in the end ... I probably should.'
Betty watched the doubtful pondering. She said:
'You mean because you would think we had a claim? Yes, I know.'
And Prudence returned slowly:
'A little that. But that shouldn't count much.... There would be other things, and they would all have to be weighed.... It wouldn't be easy.'
'No,' Betty said; 'I suppose not. So it's just as well, really, that it can't come to that, that we can't take anything—not either of us, not ever, because of all the things between.'
Then, all the things between growing with the words to insistence, Betty mentioned some of them, impelled, now the barriers were so breaking, to have everything clear.
'There are so many things.... There's all the money we owe. We must pay it back.'
Prudence silently assented. She wondered how much the Crevequers owed Warren Venables.
'There are c-crowds of other things,' the sad voice stammered on—'everything, almost.... But you know it all. You have known it all the time.'
Their eyes met and looked away. Prudence did not at all deny that she had known it all the time.
'You've all of you known it all the time,' went on the dreary voice, without anger, without hope. Anger had been spent before, on another of those who had 'known it all the time.' (The passionate fires of the days of reparation had burned resentment to ashes, and on these had dropped the tears of pity and pain.) Hope there was none. 'But Tommy and I—we've only got to know it lately, you see. We—we didn't understand before. But we understand now. We understand why—why you wouldn't be friends with us.'
Prudence looked away sadly. It was terrible to have to accept it all so, denying nothing. She wanted to heal, but knew no way.
In the pause Betty took up a cigarette-case from Tommy's chair, mechanically fingering it. Then abruptly she dropped it, and looked defiantly up.
'But lots of people do that—the other sort—your sort!' she cried.
Imagination, in these days so morbidly alive, continually invented for her attacks unthought of, and called out defence to meet what needed none. For discrimination was of so new a growth.
Prudence said quickly, 'But I know—oh, I know! Please don't!'—protesting, apologizing for the existence of this gulf, which had so yawned to exaggeration. Such an over-recognition of it as that last had implied hurt her more than what had gone before; it showed so vividly how the Crevequers staggered under their new knowledge, pitifully unsteady as yet on the fresh ground. She said presently, having thought things over: 'If I have been horrid, and hurt you, I beg your pardon. I am very sorry.'
'It's just you,' said Betty, 'out of all of you, you know, who oughtn't to say that. Because you pretended nothing. You kept everything back, all along, instead of—instead of giving everything but just one thing—oh, well.' She could not speak of that. She ended with half a laugh. 'Nobody, you know, could have thought for a moment that you liked us.'
'I suppose not,' said Prudence simply. She went on, with something between explanation and apology: 'You see, I'm not like Aunt Ida; I don't write.' Betty was grateful to her for making the comparison solely with her Aunt Ida. 'People to me are simply people....'
Betty nodded.
'I know. Not—not copy.'
'And, you see, friendship isn't a name to me. It's something rather real and serious. I make friends slowly, I suppose.'
'And you didn't want to make friends with us. Oh, I know.'
'As I saw it, it wouldn't have been fair, you see,' Prudence explained very gently, looking away, asking forgiveness with her voice.
Betty assented.
'No; it wouldn't have been very fair.'
So their past intercourse was defined in few words. That done, Prudence turned to the present.
'But now—now it would be fair—if you will.'
Betty shook her head. Prudence had supposed that she would.
'No, not now. That wouldn't at all do.'
They rested on that for a minute before Betty went on.
'Tommy and I have got each other; and that is the way it must be, the way we've got to do it—don't you see?'
Her eyes seemed to entreat Prudence to see, to make, if she could, others see.
'It's like this,' the sad tones stammeringly explained. 'We're in a mess, Tommy and I; and we've got to get out of it somehow, if we can—find, you know, things we don't hate, things to go on with. That's all we want: to go on somehow and be happy, as we used to be happy. You know, you can't be happy if you're wishing all the time to have things you can't have, and to be things you can't be. So, either we must stop wishing—and we may do that in time—or we must find new things that we like. But that's bound to be a long job.' No movement of Prudence's demurred to that; its truth stared one in the face. 'And perhaps we can't do that; perhaps things stick always.'
And to that, too, no denial came from the idealist of continual hope, who yet saw the eternal roads running.
Betty, because she, too, saw their running, said finally:
'I suppose, really, one stays pretty much the same sort of person to the end.... And that's all right, as long as one doesn't run up against other sorts; it hurts to do that'—at the pain of that clash of codes her brows knit—'and that's why we won't try m-mixing the sorts; it wouldn't be what you call fair, on either sort.'
Prudence heard the finality in that: it found its echo in her soul; but still she pleaded Warren's cause (he cared so much) with:
'But if both cared to.... Oh, that isn't quite all there is to it, I know—I'm not a fool who can only see one thing—but it's a thing that should count a great deal. Of all the many, many things, I believe that's the one that, perhaps, in the end counts most.'
Betty admitted it.
'More than any one other; but not more than all the others together. You see, there are rather many, and it wouldn't do. It wouldn't w-work, you know it wouldn't; and—and it would hurt rather.... Oh, it wouldn't do.'
She clenched her lip again between her teeth, perhaps to steady it.
Prudence thought it all over, admitting it true, before saying, with a quick tremor in her own voice:
'But, perhaps, sometime—afterwards....'
Betty unclasped her hands from her knee and leaned her chin on them, and looked straight in front of her.
'No,' she said; 'I think never. Then she gave it a turn, swerving as usual from her own part, with 'You know it—you yourself.'
Prudence said nothing. That she knew it hardly needed affirmation; she knew it with such a sad, hopeless certainty. For the eternal roads run straitly, and their running is between gateless walls. The grey, artist's eyes were suddenly wet and blind, with a swift surging of many feelings. Seeing them, Betty said again:
'It wouldn't work—for any of us,' with a new gentle cadence in her tone. Then she went on: 'Tommy and I have got each other. We can help each other, and no one else in the world can help us. Don't you see? Because we know each other so awfully well; we mean a good deal to each other, you know. There's always been just us two. There always will be, and that's the one thing that really matters—the one thing that always will matter. In the end no one else c-counts.'
In that was the ring of certainty; it had not needed to be thought out; it was as if it had always been there, waiting to be defined.
After a moment Betty went on, with this time a little tremor in the tired monotony of her voice.
'I think I should like you to understand—how it's been, you know, always. We've had each other, but we've had no one else much, ever. We rather brought ourselves up; we weren't taught anything about—well, all the things that I suppose you were taught. We came to England when we were about thirteen and fourteen; we hated it, the awful w-weather and all our relations. Directly Tommy left school we came back to Italy, and—well, Tommy got work here. And we knew nobody but—but—well, you probably know the sort our friends are; I expect the others have told you,' she added in parenthesis, with a passing glint of laughter, remembering how Prudence had not sought the close acquaintance which should enable her to know. 'We're very fond of them,' she added, and affection submerged the laughter; 'we've had g-good times together. Well, we hadn't much to live on, and the people round us gambled and ran up debts, and never paid them till they had to; and we did, too. We didn't think—or care—whether the things we did were decent, or honest, or anything of that sort. We just went on from day to day, playing round with each other and our friends, and we were very happy.... I don't think, somehow, that we've ever had a proper chance.... And when you j-judge us, you might, perhaps, remember that.'
Prudence, who had listened gravely in silence, as always, said now:
'How should I judge you, or you me? I have not done that, ever.'
Betty said, smiling a little sadly:
'No; you only—you only kept away. I know.... But all the same, I should like you to understand a little.'
'I do understand,' said Prudence.
'Well, when we met all of you last winter, we didn't know the difference—or didn't care, anyhow. We thought it was funny; and it was, rather—Mrs. Venables, you know, and being s-studied, and—and all that——' Laughter flickered again to the sad eyes, but died swiftly. 'And then, after some time, we got to understand.' The stammering monotone was expressionless and hard. 'And ... well, that's all.... We've both of us rather minded.... I have been angry, I suppose, about some things; but that's all done now.... And now we've kind of come to see that the old things are no good any more—all spoilt, anyhow for now—and we've got to go and look for new things, and perhaps we shan't find them; but anyhow no one else can help.'
'I am sorry,' said Prudence Varley, after a moment, being able to offer, it seemed, no help but that. Her eyes asked forgiveness, because, having helped to break, she could have no share in the mending. She knew it was true that 'we can help each other, and no one else in the world can help us.'
To her sorrow, Betty returned, 'We've got each other, you know,' and even smiled a little. They had so nearly lost that possession.
Prudence got up, and stood close to the small figure on the chair-arm, her hands clasped behind her. She was not demonstrative; where some people might kiss, she merely stood and spoke.
'You've thought, I dare say,' she said gently, 'that I've been standing on a pedestal and looking down—a horrid prig. Well, I suppose I have been a prig; I am made so, and I am sorry. But—please believe this—I haven't been on a pedestal; I've only been shut in between walls. Oh, you know as well as I do that we each have walls all round us, and it's not easy to knock them down; they shut us in.... But sometimes gaps come in them, so that we can see through—see the landscape outside, and all the other roads running. I suppose, perhaps, there have come lately gaps in all our walls. Anyhow, I should like to thank you for the gaps in mine. I hope very much they will not get bricked up again.... Being shut into dark, narrow paths prevents one from seeing anything outside—the daylight and all the other roads. But of course when a gap is made, one looks out through it. And looking out means looking up.' She paused a moment, and added softly, looking over the dark head out of the window: 'I think, you know, we're all trying to make what amends we can by looking up now, if we ever looked at all down. I hope you entirely believe that; and I hope you'll remember it, and not too much hate us, when you think about us at all.'
The silence that followed was broken by a sudden sob. The dark head was bowed; Betty broke down utterly into crying for the second time that day. Her tears shook her; she could say no word.
A hand was on the bowed shoulder.
'Don't—oh, don't'
The sobs died at last chokingly away to long, shaken breaths.
'Please go now,' said Betty. 'Thank you for—for everything, and for saying that just now. And I don't know why I cried—only I'm so t-tired. And you can't do anything more. And please go now, if you don't mind.'
'I suppose,' said Prudence, 'it's good-bye. We're leaving Naples next week.... But sometime later we may meet again, all of us.... And meanwhile, if there's anything we can do—ever——'
'Only leave us your address, please. We'll send what we borrowed; we've not got it just now. And will you please say good-bye for us to—to Mrs. Venables and your cousins?'
'Keep them away,' the sad eyes entreated; and Prudence promised, 'Yes; I will.'
She stood for a moment longer by the small crouched figure with its bent, dark head; her eyes were full of her powerless, ineffectual desires to heal, to help. Having the gift of comprehension, she wholly knew their ineffectualness. She could only go, for all had been said between them, and there remained the doing, wherein she had no part nor lot.
She turned and went down into the city, and saw with wet eyes how it was full of the sunshine, with the sea-wind blowing through it like hope.
'So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration, enters into life, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.'—R. W. Emerson.
'So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration, enters into life, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.'—R. W. Emerson.
Prudence, according to her promise, exerted herself to keep her family from going to say good-bye to the Crevequers. It was not a very easy task. She represented to her aunt that looking after Tommy took most of Betty's time.
'I doubt if they allow her at the hospital much,' said Mrs. Venables; 'and the child must be terribly anxious and lonely. I should like to do what I can for her.'
Mrs. Venables was very kind; late failures of intimacy had slipped from her memory since Tommy's disaster. She had been to see him at the hospital, and had met Betty there. Tommy, during her visit, had apparently been asleep. Betty had hardly spoken, for fear, she said, of waking him.
'It is a long time,' said Mrs. Venables, 'since I had a satisfactory talk with either of those interesting children. Yes, Prudence, theyareinteresting, owing to their very peculiar circumstances and ways of life, whatever may be their personal limitations. I grant that one does not come across great depths in them—or, anyhow, that the depths are as yet quite unstirred; but those childlike, seemingly almost soulless natures are a most interesting study to me. One wonders how far their climate and their faith contribute towards the result as we see it. There is certainly something in the beauty and gay paganism of this city, mingled as it is with the simple devoutness of a symbolic faith, that seems to develop such characters freely. I should like to watch those children's career—to see what they grow into. Who knows but that they may sometime find their souls? That would be a strange consummation, deeply impressive; I should much like to try to bring it about, but I am afraid the time is very far from ripe as yet. However, I should at all events wish to see them once again before we part. We have, after all, attained to some intimacy, they and I; we have shared so many vivid experiences, and had so much striking talk together.'
But Mrs. Venables was at last induced to put her parting words into a letter—four sheets, closely written. Betty took it to read to Tommy, and they composed an answer together, with immense pains, resisting manfully the temptations to 'strike' which assailed them.
'And so that's the end of Mrs. Venables,' said Betty, sighing as she signed her name. 'And I suppose no one will ever think us so interesting again.... I wonder, Tommy, if we made the most of our opportunities....'
They mournfully pondered over the unreturning past. Yet they had certainly made, if not the most, at any rate a good deal, of those regretted opportunities. They had, both purposely and accidentally, succeeded in being a real and profound impression. When they arrived at the age that in their opinion justified them in reading Mrs. Venables' works, they would probably get much pleasure out of their own portraits.
Miranda Venables came to see Betty the day before her family left Naples. She came in with a dejected air.
'I've come to say good-bye. We're going to-morrow. It'll be rather ripping getting home and getting some cricket and tennis, only I'm simply too awfully slack for anything after all this fooling round doing nothing. Feel.' She held out a plump arm for Betty to pinch. 'Horrid flabby, isn't it? And I say, I'm awfully sick at having to say good-bye, you know.'
The round face was tragically despondent. Miranda had scarcely realized till now how much she liked the Crevequers. She said so.
'You are rotters, you two, but you do make things go, you know,' she explained, a little embarrassed at her own frankness. 'And, I say, I hope we all meet again sometime—not in this beastly place, but at home. You might come and stay with us; you'd get some hockey. Oh, I forgot; you don't care about doing things. But it's beastly saying good-bye. I hate it.'
'So do I,' Betty said. 'So I never do it. Let's not. Let's come and have ices instead.'
They went and had ices at Caflisch's, and the pathos of the occasion was salient. Miranda, after the second ice, worked up at length to:
'It's all very well, but I like your sort of people, if itisdifferent (like Warren said once, and mother says), a jolly sight better than ours—so there!'
'It's all a q-question of taste, of course,' Betty said. 'And now I must go; and as we aren't going to say good-bye, there's no more to be said. I hope we shall all of us have a j-jolly summer.'
'Please say good-bye for me,' said Miranda tearfully, referring to Tommy, who had a pedestal of his own. 'And I hope he'll soon be better, and ... oh dear!'
So that parting was effected. It should, after all, count for something that one's friends should weep to say good-bye.
Next day the Venables left Naples.
When she knew that they had gone, Betty seemed to lose suddenly the strength she had summoned to her for resistance; she had no more need of it; the long struggle was over. She shivered a little at that past bitterness, and buried her face in her two hands. When she looked up again, the past lay, as it were, slain; all the future waited.
The struggle, made so hard and bitter at the first, had at the last been easy. Warren Venables had let it rest in the end, realizing bitterly at last the ineffectualness of contest. Prudence had assisted him to that realization.
'We can't do anything for them now; we're no good to them; we only hurt them. We've got to leave them alone.'
It was strange to Warren to see how her eyes were wet.
'It's easy enough for you,' he said, his voice hard and level. 'You don't know how much I care.'
She said, very gently, 'I do,' and then was silent for a moment, thinking perhaps that what she did not know was rather how much she herself might possibly have cared, had many things been wholly different; had not the unconquerable 'there is nothing to say' finally summed up the situation as far as her part in it went. But of those vague might-have-beens Warren knew nothing.
Prudence said:
'I do know. And that's why you'll leave them alone—because you care. For if you don't, you'll hurt them—horribly. Don't you see? We've hurt them enough; this is the only amends possible—the only amends they will take.'
'Amends!' His face was set like a flint, his way when he was hurt. 'That's just it. I've been a brute all along; and when I came to know it, throughtheircoming to know it, and through my coming to care so much, I wasn't allowed to make any amends. That's what I can't stand.'
(He had been shaken and stirred of late out of all his self-containment; Prudence had heard many things from him.)
'You've made your amends,' she said. 'First by the things you've said to her; and now you will be making them again by leaving her alone, as she wishes. There's no other you can make. Don't you see?'
'I see I've got to,' he said harshly. 'I've been made to see that clearly enough lately. Oh, I suppose I've got to accept it—sit down under it.'
Prudence mused over it.
'It's been rather strange all along,' she said, more to herself than to him. 'For we did our part to them, for good or evil, and they theirs to us, by accident, and now that it's done we can't be of any more use to each other, in the straits we're all, I suppose, in, through all we've come to see and know. They want nothing of us, and we had better want nothing of them; our uses for each other are over; there it is, you see. They must leave us to help ourselves, and we must leave them to help themselves and each other. And I hope we shall all do that; only it will have to be along our own lines, not along other people's. You can't step out of your own road into somebody else's; there are chasms between, too wide to jump. And if you do manage to jump them, you don't know the geography of the new road, and you only lose your way. I can't help being stiff and puritanical and disliking certain things. They can't help being—well, street-children of gregarious habits and wide tastes. Why should they? It's merely being themselves. But though I may be a prig, I can yet try to understand and not to keep aloof; and though they may be—well, they can improve their roads too. It's always open to us to improve our own roads—only not, I think, successfully to leave them.'
Thus Prudence, working it out for her own satisfaction, her considering brows puckered over the light that her thought had kindled in her far-seeing, discerning artist's eyes. This side of it—the moral side, the ultimate side, call it what you will—was of salient clearness to her; it predominated, rising vividly out of the tangle of issues. It was to her the thing that greatly mattered, that it was always open to us to improve our own roads.
To Warren (the discrimination was partly, perhaps, one of sex, a good deal between the idealist and one who was not, whatever he was, at all an idealist) what may be called the moral aspect was obscured. He had wanted something and had failed to get it; that for him summed up the matter. Later, he might come to realize many things, all the things that Prudence realized, that the Crevequers realized—how the fusion of two 'sorts' was at the best a rash experiment, at the worst a most tragical catastrophe; how the matter had been, no doubt, wisely decided. Now he knew but one thing: what he so greatly desired he might not have. Prudence's vision of it seemed of little relevance to him. They might all follow their improved roads anywhere they chose; they might climb heights, in that grey future wherein he at least must be (so it seemed to him at this time) a solitary pedestrian; how they might help themselves and each other concerned him not at all.
His clever face was very bitterly set as he stared at the ground, brooding over it. It was probable that he too had learned something, the insolence, as his cousin had termed it, of his past attitude having so recoiled upon himself.
'Oh,' said Prudence, suddenly, following up her own talk of roads, 'I wish wecouldleave them—I wish we could; but walls shut us in. The walls of character, and circumstances, and old habit; we can't break through them. We only knock against them—and it hurts.' She stopped, because her voice shook strangely. After a moment she said quietly: 'We can't do that. We can only try to keep the gaps wide, and look through them.... But there are one or two things we can do besides that. Mr. Crevequer will want to get something to do afterwards; I told you, didn't I, that they are giving everything up.'
'Oh! That charming paper. About time, too, I should say. Well?'
'Well, I thought you might write to thatSettimana Illustrataman you know at Genoa. They are going to their old home for the present; but eventually they would like work at Genoa. I should think theSettimanamight give him something to start on; he's quite clever, of course; and he really can draw, can't he? Genoa's near their home. They'll have all their old friends to play with, and of course they'll make new ones, and of course their friends will be of all sorts; their road takes them there. What I don't know,' she added presently, 'is where else it is going to take them, and where ours are going to take us.'
Warren did not think it particularly mattered, and said so. Prudence, who did, proceeded to explain to herself, rather than to him, where their roads had, in the past, taken them. She liked to be quite sure, to arrive at sureness by thinking things thoroughly out.
'We've all been wrong, and all through different lacks in us—different failures of understanding. I've hated ugliness so much that I haven't tried—I haven't even wanted—to see the beauty that's always tangled into it. I've just looked the other way. That was through being a prig, and stupid. You've minded ugliness so little (though you've seen it all right) that you've accepted it, traded on it. That was through being lacking in some sense—I think, perhaps, the sense of beauty, and a little in the moral sense, too.' Prudence was being offensively frank, as she was apt to be when she thought things out aloud. 'And the Crevequers haven't known, really, what ugliness was. That was through never having learnt, chiefly. And,' she summed up after a moment, 'there we all stand.'
'So it seems,' Warren said. 'It must be a satisfaction to have it all so clearly arranged.'
Prudence went on, undisturbed.
'And what I should like to know is where we shall eventually stand. You say it doesn't matter; of course, as a matter of fact, it is the one thing which does. Where we go, and what we see by the way—oh, what else is there?'
'Where we mayn't go,' Warren answered her drearily, 'and what we miss by the way. It matters more, for it's better—more worth going to, better worth seeing.'
To that she said nothing. They both thought of it all, silently: of how four ways had come together for a little at the cross roads, how those who travelled along them had met and spoken and taken again the parted ways, where they ran beyond range of sight into a grey land, towards horizons blind with mist—blind and dark to one of the two who stood now and looked; but to the other limitless, luminous, soft with the shrouded brightness of the dawn.
'Oh,' said Prudence presently, her thought running on what we miss by the way, 'we—our sort of people—being so respectable and so honest and so refined, sit on our pedestals and look down and talk and analyse, because we've got a few things that they haven't; but, really, I am looking up all the time. For, whatever they haven't got and haven't done, they've at all events lived. They keep on doing that all the time; they always will, in whatever particular way they do it. It's such an immense thing, that. Living is like an art, that some people never learn at all; I suppose the Crevequers were born knowing it—they had no need to learn it. And if they haven't learnt quite all about it yet, well, that's only a question of time. They've got the genius of it all right. That's what I look up to in them. And,' she added, since the Crevequers were being so thoroughly thought out, 'they have another thing—the best thing they've got, the thing that will in the end matter, however much everything else fails—they have each other.'
At that Warren's face took a greater bitterness.
'So I was given to understand,' he said. 'I was told that they, being so much the same sort, wanted no other companionship. The combination of either with anyone else, it seemed, would not work—would be a disastrous fiasco, in fact.'
Prudence acknowledged his right to his bitterness, the hurt being still so new and sore, his anger with himself going so deep.
But she said, after a moment, pleading, 'Don't grudge them that. For, do you see, it's about all they've got left,' and so ended, with wet eyes.
'I thenke forto touche alsoThe world which neweth every dai,So as I can, so as I mai.'—John Gower.'Earth loves her young: a preference manifest.'—George Meredith.
'I thenke forto touche alsoThe world which neweth every dai,So as I can, so as I mai.'—John Gower.
'Earth loves her young: a preference manifest.'—George Meredith.
A dozen or so of the Crevequers' friends came down to the harbour to see them off to Santa Caterina. The Crevequers leaned over the rail of the crowded launch, which was bearing them out to theKönig Albrecht, and waved their hands and stammered good-bye to every one. Tommy was very weak and wan, and carried one arm in a sling; he had been out of hospital for just a week. That week they had spent in selling most of their effects, wringing out of their various debtors, with much exertion, some of the money owed them, and raising in the end quite a creditable sum, with which they paid their extensive debts and booked their passage by sea, and finally, having a little over, asked about a dozen of their most intimate friends to a supper-party at the Trattoria Pallino, on the Vomero. There, last night, they had said good-bye.
Last night had been full of regrets—the sadness of parting, the pathos of a merry company broken—a pathos hidden in jests, yet oppressive, nevertheless, in the blue May twilight. They had sat beneath the hanging purple veil of the wistaria, and the sweetness of the May roses had mingled with the blue fragrance of the Tuscan cigars to which Tommy had recklessly risen, and through the sweetness and the fragrance the salt keenness of the sea had pierced, and its washing edge had whispered a soft undertone to the city sounds that rang up through the still evening air. They had looked down and seen how the spreading city far below bloomed like a great rose of many colours in the soft falling twilight; how the sky and the sea were still delicately flushed with the afterglow; how, above the flattened cone of Vesuvius, a great yellow moon swung up into the blue still east. It had looked upon the city with a large, mellow charity, softly touching its many colours, deepening the steep shadows of the streets that ran through it like gorges. It had laid a broad yellow path for itself across the blue spaces of the evening sea, and so twilight had deepened tenderly to night.
They had all drunk to each other in red Posilipo, and wished themselves and each other good luck, and Gina Lunelli had said, for the twentieth time, 'You won't find any place so good to live in as Naples,' and Tommy had said, 'You must come and stay with us some time at Santa Caterina—all of you,' with a comprehensive sweep of his arm, generous with the large hospitality of red Posilipo. Betty had said how Genoa, too, was a gay place, with plenty doing, only the winds that blew down its streets in winter were certainly evil and bitter, and one had to wear all one's clothes at once. But Santa Caterina was different; Italy certainly held no such other place, and they must, of course, one day all come and see.
Thus they talked, and laughed, and sang songs, and looked away from the city which held in its deep shadows so much of their life. It would have been quite easy then to slip down among the shadows and the colours and take that life again, broken as it was, in time perhaps forgetting everything. New beginnings were so hard, the call of the old things so insistent. The old things that they had of late so hated, as spoilers of their lives, they knew that they would not always hate—if now they went down into the shadowed streets and took them again, striving to forget, in the end all but forgetting, this cleavage which so lay across life. For all cleavages may be bridged with time.
So, sick-hearted, the Crevequers had looked at the old ways which so clogged them, which would possibly (why not?) always clog them, clinging heavily like mire; and at the new ways which they were seeking wearily, with no heart, with 'too late' echoing in their souls like a knell.
But this May morning, blown by a light wind that set the blue sea dancing and would soon make them very ill, astir with the thronging of ships in the harbour, and the hooting of voyages begun, was full of unquenchable hopes and unvanquished youth and gay beginnings.
Some one on the launch was playing 'Addio, bella Napoli' on a mandolin; the Crevequers called again 'Good-bye,' and leaned over the rail and watched the sea-face of the city, crowned by Castel St. Elmo on the hill, growing smaller in the distance. So much of life lay there....
They left it there, gold and dross, in that crucible which had so transmuted it. Gold or dross, it seemed to matter little; it had melted from them, burning their hands.
They looked at it once more, saw it dwindle far away, then turned together to the wide, blue newness of the sea.
Betty had to make both the boats, because Tommy could not yet use his right hand. She made them out of the pieces of red bark which flaked off the pine-trunks and lay in heaps by the edge of the pool. Each boat was about six inches long and two inches wide, square about the stern and pointed in the bows, with a pine-needle mast and an envelope sail. To prevent bitterness and evil speaking, Tommy had his choice of them when they were finished. Then they were launched, and the Crevequers lay and watched them, knowing that not for a long time need they go across to the other side to welcome them to port. They made a slow voyage in the windless afternoon. There was never much wind up here, though it was up among the hills, because the pines stood close and thick about the water, shutting it in to a deep green gloom.
The Crevequers lay by the water, upon the slippery brown needles, and drank in the warm resinous fragrance. It was always pleasant to step from the winding stone path, where the afternoon sun lay hot, where mule-carts climbed up and jingled their bells lazily, into this deep green shadowed place, where in the water the images of the pines nearly met from side to side, leaving a little circle of blue between. It had always been a favourite place; the Crevequers had spent much of their youth here, sailing pine-bark boats from side to side, hanging head downwards over the water with jars to catch water-beetles, bathing, or dangling an ineffectual line for fish.
They had spent the morning paddling about the seashore and among the rocks in the white canoe, which leaked horribly. Now they had come up here to get dry.
It was note-worthy how these weeks in Santa Caterina had left their healing touch upon both. They had been weeks of playing in the warm sunshine (there is nowhere else such sunshine, so bright and yet so gentle), of renewals of many friendships, with laughter and embraces, of rest and healing after strain of mind and body. Recuperation had begun its slow work. Tommy looked less ill, Betty less nervous and weary; laughter flickered from eyes sad and pondering, but not now, as a rule, unhappy.
With broken ways behind them, new roads in front of them as yet untried, they seemed thus to be waiting a little, putting fragments together, finding, as it were, their foothold, or perhaps seeking it, as yet blindly. Prudence Varley's optimism would doubtless have averred that the finding was only a matter of time. The Crevequers averred nothing; it was not in them to analyse, as Prudence analysed and thought out. But deep in their pondering eyes lay unsolved questions—questions they did not consciously put to themselves; questions as to the happy road they so blindly sought—whether it ran through new places or through old; whether, if through new, it could be reached, seeing that temperament, which had at least as much moulded circumstance as circumstance had forced temperament, was probably in the end master of all the roads, insisting that every one remained, as Betty had said, pretty much the same sort of person as he began.
If one was so to remain, it would perhaps be wiser to seek no more. For the basis of these new desires was, after all, so irremediably shattered. What the Crevequers did not know was whether the desires had any independent standing. For they would never be self-tormentors; they would seek always, and have a considerable gift for finding, the happiest way; they understood, as Prudence had said, the art of living well enough for that. But where that quest would lead them it was not given to them, not given to anyone, to know.
So, among all the confusion and the chaos of things broken and problems unsolved, two facts alone stood out, stable and unquestioned, inevitably sure. One was the complete breakage of the basis of their new desires—its scattering into fragments, never, whatever else might come to pass, to be pieced together. That destruction they had accepted; it was too inevitable for rebellion. They had left that behind them; and time would heal the memory, as time heals all hurts.
The other thing that emerged unquestionably out of the chaos was how they were together; how they had been together through everything; how they were together now, sailing pine-bark boats and seeking fresh roads; how, along any roads they might chance to find, they would journey together, knowing themselves admirable travelling-companions, knowing that to be well amused on the road is three-parts of the journey's hope. As Betty had said, 'We can help each other, and no one else in the world can help us. Because we know each other so awfully well. Don't you see?'
Prudence had seen—seen, too, that it was the best thing they had—the thing that would in the end matter, however much everything else failed. She had seen the Crevequers cast up, as it were, out of fire, holding this gold to them, when all else—the old and the new things alike—had melted from their hands.
And to all their questioning life could give them as yet this answer alone. The other answers would work themselves out through the veiled years, slowly, painfully perhaps. It was, then, a triumphant thing to have one possession safe for all time—one thing that the inscrutable years, and failure and joy and tears, could not touch; one thing, in a world of uncertain values, that the flames of the crucible would not at all transmute. It was, in fine, an admirable thing that they had one another to sail boats with.
Tommy was throwing stones, with his left hand, after his boat, with intent to hasten it. In the long run, even taking into account undoubted occasional successes, experience goes to show that this is not really a very useful thing to do, even when the right hand is used. Tommy's boat presently was struck and capsized.
'All right,' Tommy observed. 'Yours isn't going to come in to shore by itself—you needn't think it. We'll have a bombardment.... Mine was a rotten boat.... If I couldn't make a better boat than that.... There, that's got it. Now they can race in upside down. C-come round and get them.'
The race in upside down was a leisurely process. The owners got bored at last, and decided to abandon the crafts, which remained bobbing together upside down, twin derelicts far from the shore.
Out of the shadowed green pine-gloom the Crevequers came up again on to the steep, climbing hill-path, whose stones were hot with the evening sunshine. The warm still air was sweet with the pines, salt with the breath of the sea below. From up here, looking down through the silver-grey screen of the olives, one saw all the little bay lying, golden with the sunset, the sea stretching level and limpid, blue as evening, between jutting points, the fishing-city, pink and yellow and white, curving round it, set close on the still, clear, tideless edge, that was as a lake's margin, lifted by no ripple, but having for waves a soft soundless sway to and fro.
The Crevequers loved this waveless evening sea. Betty gave a little sigh of content, and slipped her hand into Tommy's.
'Come on,' she said, 'l-let's run down, and get r-really hot, then we'll go and upset ourselves out of the canoe. What fun.'
They did so.
'A fine novel.'—Review of Reviews.
'A novel of great promise.'—Sheffield Telegraph.
'A clever book—unusually so; a thoughtful, judicious, well-developed book, full of interesting people.'—Daily Chronicle.
'A singularly clever novel.'—Truth.
'"Abbots Verney" has charm and distinction ... an unusually capable book.'—Morning Post.
'Far above the common run of novels.'—Literary World.
'A notably sound, original, and well-constructed story.'—Birmingham Post.
'The characters are realized vividly and with insight; the story, which is carefully written and full of interest, is unfolded with no little skill.'—Bookman.
'A remarkable novel.... It is finely written. The style is crisp, brilliant, and pointed. There is not a superfluous paragraph, line, or phrase. The book will make its mark.'—Scotsman.
Transcriber's note:
In the Table of Contents, the title of Chapter V is "Balæ's Bay," but in the text the title of Chapter V is "Baiæ's Bay." This difference was present in the original text.