The Furnace Part 14

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 of _bianchetti_ at 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 Ma.s.s. During Ma.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e--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 Ma.s.s, 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 seash.o.r.e, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 the _farmacia_, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sed 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 bas.e.m.e.nt now and horribly needed caulking, and land on the beach below the little city, and go up to Ma.s.s in Sant' Ambrogio, and afterwards play games in the piazza and sit outside the _parrucchiere's_ in the sun.

They had left Santa Caterina ten years ago; a sudden p.r.i.c.king 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 cla.s.s. 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 f.e.c.kless, 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 pa.s.sing 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 sh.e.l.l--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. The _carabinieri_ and the _guardie munic.i.p.ali_ kept 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 G.o.d 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 climbing _vicoli_ and 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 a _carabiniere_ asked 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?'

The _carabiniere_ conveyed 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.