The Furnace Part 18

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 a.s.sisted 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, through _their_ coming 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 s.e.x, 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 att.i.tude having so recoiled upon himself.

'Oh,' said Prudence, suddenly, following up her own talk of roads, 'I wish we _could_ leave them--I wish we could; but walls shut us in. The walls of character, and circ.u.mstances, 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 that _Settimana Ill.u.s.trata_ man 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 the _Settimana_ might 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 a.n.a.lyse, 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.

CHAPTER XIII

PINE-BARK BOATS

'I thenke forto touche also The 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 the _Konig 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ces 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.