The Furnace Part 19

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 trans.m.u.ted 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 seash.o.r.e 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 a.n.a.lyse, as Prudence a.n.a.lysed 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 circ.u.mstance as circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.s, 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 trans.m.u.te. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e.

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.

THE END

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ABBOTS VERNEY

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