The Furnace Part 11

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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances, would be one's att.i.tude 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 compa.s.sion, 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 att.i.tude 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 cra.s.s 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 a.s.s. 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 const.i.tuted their intercourse.

For always he had talked and she had heard; Betty had once quite failed to accept Tommy's a.s.sertion 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 a.s.sented 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 p.r.o.noun:

'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.