The Furnace Part 9

His stammer or his disgust choked the rest of his grievances from his lips.

Betty looked sympathetic.

'You'll feel better in the morning,' she said, 'if it's a fine day.'

She was standing by the open window, leaning out into the soft darkness.

From the narrow steep alley below, and from the wide lit thoroughfare into which it ran, the cheerful revel of Naples at night hummed up.

'Let's come out,' said Betty, 'into the streets.'

And the two seekers after a quiet life strolled through the city together. They returned home a little after midnight, having made a very heroic and quite successful fight against care.

CHAPTER VII

RETROSPECT WITH THE SEARCH-LIGHT

'D'autres jours ouvriront les portes, La foret garde les verrous, La foret brule autour de nous, C'est la clarte des feuilles mortes, Qui brulent sur le seuil des portes....'

MAETERLINCK.

At the end of the first week in March the Venables went to Sicily; they would stay there, probably, for the rest of the month.

'So for three weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at lunch,' Tommy remarked, on the evening after they had gone. 'Pity, isn't it? I loved those lunches.'

Betty nodded. She was feeling horribly flat. They both, that first evening, felt horribly flat. By the measure of their flatness they might have gauged the late immensity of their interest; there was revelation in it. To shake it off they went to their favourite gambling-place, and lost some money, and talked to some friends, and in general raised their spirits.

Something of this convivial nature they did every evening for a week.

Then they stopped. Inexplicably, it was becoming boring. On the first night it had cheered them; on the second and third they had shut their eyes to the fact that they were bored; the other nights had been, growingly, of the nature of a fight against something--they could not have said what. It was something which seemed to grow, slowly, vaguely, yet with an irresistible sureness.

It is not during constant intercourse and a.s.sociation that influence gives birth to new comprehension. These fill the foreground; they loom too large in present interest to allow of a penetrating vision. The vision, the perception, the discernment, growing from vague abstractions to poignancy, come later, growing very slowly from seeds sown unnoticed. From the carelessly received seeds the plant pushes its gradual, painful way upwards, breaking the earth to make a place for itself, growing, perhaps, to be a tree, striking and spreading roots all through the upheaved soil.

So it began to be with the Crevequers. Absence and time began now their inevitable work. Atmosphere, doubtless at the time absorbed, but unconsciously, now sent its message from system to brain. Retrospect meant the slow beginnings of perception; therefore they fought against retrospect. What at the time had pa.s.sed them serenely by, came back to memory in strange new lights. What at the time had been bewildering, put on, day by day, robes of increasingly translucent clearness. What at the time they had known, unheeding and uncaring, a.s.sumed a vividness quite new. With the accidentals of intercourse no longer overlaying, wrapping up and entangling the issues, these pushed a slow way out, and emerged at last, standing forth unconfused and unadorned, bald in their lucid simplicity.

Through the slow days and long nights retrospect gave birth thus to a glimmering perception; perception, its gropings not to be checked, to comprehension.

In the Crevequers' eyes the melancholy pondering grew more noticeable than before. Their brows sometimes drew together suddenly, as if, in the straying of their thoughts, they had lit upon something they did not like.

Of the Venables they spoke to each other less day by day. Each did not know how it fared with the other; each hardly knew how it fared with himself. It was well, perhaps, that during much of the day they had plenty to do. But there were the evenings. It was certainly a pity that they had begun to find convivial evenings so little amusing to them.

Except when their friends came to see them they sat alone together.

After a little while, when retrospect had taken them some way, they would often, by reading or talking, try to keep it at bay. But it was, at best, only a question of deferring; there remained always the nights.

It was in the nights, of course, that retrospect most tyrannically had its way. The masterless nights are escaped steeds run loose for anybody's annexing. Retrospect annexed them, and rode them hard. In the nights, at all events, there is no confusing of issues, no foreground to obscure the vision.

It took a succession of nights and days for perception to reach full stature. Each, lying awake, or sitting together through the evenings while Tommy drew pictures for _Marchese Peppino_, caught new aspects of the things which moved in progression through their memory.

It seemed that each of the Venables family, marching through memory, flung at the Crevequers something which retrospect could turn into a ball for its game.

From Miranda Betty collected guileless remarks in inverted commas (some of the inverted commas Miranda had supplied, some Betty filled in now) as to 'different sorts of people,' and how each sort had its own conventions and its own resorts. Plaints, also, about liberty of a.s.sociation tampered with--Miranda was a veritable garden for such flowers. There was also that day at the Trattoria Buonaventura, with Warren Venables standing at the door, impa.s.sive, observing, unable to linger because his mother was anxious....

Then, in the procession, marched Mrs. Venables. Mrs. Venables had one day sloughed a self. She had not liked doing so; it was a self she valued; her most natural self, also--the aesthetic self, so easily and so deeply struck. From this self she had reluctantly emerged temporarily to stand forth a reputable, conventional Philistine--more, a maternal Philistine, of all creatures the most _bornee_. Driven by circ.u.mstances, she had talked to Betty Crevequer on the subject of friendship, its uses and abuses. A certain impersonal detachment she had used, choosing her words with careful discretion, to throw as much veil as might be over the maternal Philistinism. She had not wanted to hurt Betty, nor had she at all wanted that Betty should in her mind call her _bornee_. She might have been relieved to know that this was a word only in the Crevequers' vocabulary as culled second-hand from herself, and stored in the same carefully treasured category with 'standpoint' and 'forceful.'

Not knowing this, she had really shown some self-sacrifice in taking her risks. To minimize them she had laid stress on the purely aesthetic protests that her taste made, leaving propriety aside. A certain refinement she herself exacted from those whom she selected for companionship--she began quite a long way off, in her anxiety for impersonal detachment; how should Betty have grasped it?--and she would have others exact it too. If youth is to lower the value of the precious jewel, its friendship, bringing it down to common--very common--earth, youth will inevitably be the poorer. There is, after all, something in the belief so widely current about touching pitch.... To lounge about the streets--to be exact, outside the doors of a theatre--at midnight, in company with people of the stamp of Betty's companions of last night----

'Gina?' Betty had wondered. 'And Luli? But----'

The mournful pondering of her eyes was rather inscrutable. It might possibly refer to the Achievement of Intimate Contact, which must Shun Nothing.

Mrs. Venables had suddenly at this point dropped the artist self to her feet, and risen out of it for a moment entirely, becoming purely the reputable, conventional, disapproving mother. She had said a most _borne_ thing.

'It looked very strange last night. The Essingtons--the friends I was with--did not know what to think.'

The allusion, with that, had seemed to her to have attained enough personality to be safely left. The kernel of the matter, which, wrapped up delicately in aesthetic abstractions, was, 'My son must not do that sort of thing,' had been, in the speaker's eyes, almost too manifestly reached. Mrs. Venables had meandered away among the wrappings. It might have been necessary, but the consciousness of having said that anything 'looked very strange' had oppressed her. It had really been uncharacteristic. The phrase, of such an immeasurable depth of crudeness, must have been somewhere innate in her, pa.s.sed down from a long line of reputable ancestors, and it had leaped out without her volition. She had endeavoured to retire from it, to wrap it up.

It was perhaps unfortunate for her that at the time she had quite succeeded. Or, rather, the kernel of the thing, so extremely plain to Mrs. Venables, had not been reached by Betty at all. She had been willing to admit that to lounge in the streets so late had, perhaps, looked strange. It was an admission very simple, and not at all galling.

Against the use of the word 'pitch' to describe Gina Lunelli and Luli (she had quite missed any ambiguity there might be in its use, and had accepted, naturally, the a.s.sumption, put forward on the surface, that Tommy and she were the touchers, who might be defiled) she had protested:

'You see, we're all quite the same sort of people--Tommy and I and they.

There's no difference. You can't--you can't separate us.'

Retrospect remarked that Mrs. Venables had not really, with any great determination, tried to do so.

Yet even then Betty's words had seemed to imply that she had begun, however vaguely, to discriminate between one 'sort of person' and another. Retrospect now completed that discrimination. Retrospect gave her, in plain language, the kernel, so carefully wrapped up, which Mrs.

Venables had thought she could scarcely have missed. It was laid now in her hands for her to look at; she looked at it, missing nothing.

Retrospect pushed Mrs. Venables aside, having quite elucidated her, and showed in turn Warren. It painted him outside the theatre, in a difficult position--the Essingtons and his mother on one side of the picture, Gina and Luli and Betty Crevequer on the other. The picture was not without its instructiveness. In an awkward position Warren had relied, with the careless confidence his cousin termed insolent, on the obtuseness which saw nothing. His confidence was justified; the obtuseness had still seen nothing. He had not, probably, taken retrospect into account, or he might have adopted another course; he might either have turned his back on the Essingtons and his mother, or even--but this would hardly have been feasible--have introduced his companions into their company. In the course he did take, the Essingtons thought he showed good taste and a proper sense of the fitness of things.

Gina and Luli and Betty were no authorities on taste or the fitness of things.

Warren was everywhere; retrospect, exploiting him, never came to an end.

It was strange, it was marvellous, how it was possible to miss things--things that so stared one in the face. Yet, how should one have known? There was no reason why one should know now; only the slow pervasion of atmosphere, that enabled one to look at things with such strangely new eyes, the eyes, doubtless, of others, with the added illumination of the subjective standpoint. This illumination shed its fiery light, growing from glimmer to flame through the masterless nights, upon the things Warren had said and done, the things they had done together, the things he would not have suggested, not contemplated even in thought, if he had regarded her as one of his own 'sort of people,' sharing his conventions. Who should blame him? He had been adequately justified; she had shown herself from the very outset--he had no doubt waited to be sure of it, so as not to risk insult--of a sort of people immeasurably different: so different that she had not even grasped the difference, had only not been surprised at hints of it because they had pa.s.sed her so serenely by. They had pa.s.sed clear over her head; dragged back through s.p.a.ce by retrospect, they struck her full in the face.

She saw, in the blinding light of an illuminative moment, Warren's att.i.tude towards a girl placed by him among his own 'sort of people'; she saw him brushing aside, lest they should touch and smirch her, the Ginas, the Morellos, the Lulis, who might have crossed her path; she saw his considerate respect, his equal comradeship.

She had given him no chance of respecting her, had he tried to do so.

The things crowded back.... On the evening after the first lunch-party he had met her in the street alone at midnight. He had walked home with her; she read into his manner now a touch of the protective regard that she imagined in him towards his own sort. But it had been tinged with uncertainty; even then he had probably known her. Not to risk misjudging her, however, he had walked with her to her home, a.s.suming, doubtfully, that she had lost her escort.

It had not taken many days to confirm the doubt, to obviate all necessity for such a.s.sumption.

And then--how they had played together! Each had been so contented with the other; they had had such fun. Retrospect with the search-light could not quite spoil that--not all of it. But it did its best; it dragged it through the mud till it was hidden, inches deep.

Prudence Varley would have seen a flimsy screen toppling over with a crash, revealing the lurker behind with his contemptuous smile. So Betty too very bitterly saw him: but she was aware also that the smile was not all contempt. Only the contempt, real or imagined, poisoned the rest.

The search-light flashed over the large, tolerant acceptance, so unsurprised, so unremonstrating, so uncriticizing, which had at the time missed its message. It did not miss now. She saw herself accepted, Tommy accepted, their friends accepted; all the things they did, their ways of life, taken easily, without surprise, with scorn lurking behind the screen. Their unpaid debts, and eluded duns; their disreputable haunts, their more disreputable friends, their street-loafing, their very dress.... Even at the outset Tommy had said: 'We don't dress well enough. I want a new hat; so do you.' So that obvious discrimination between 'sorts of people' their elementary perceptions had made at once; they had reached just up to that, and no higher.

The question of discrimination brought the quick question, What share of the gift had the Venables? For there were discriminations that might be made, between the things that the Crevequers had done, and other things that they had not done--things from which they had been kept, perhaps, less by any code, moral or conventional, than by the inherent force of inherited tendency, which, strike what new and individual roads we will, will not cease to follow us along them. The question of the discriminating powers of the Venables Betty left. She simply did not know.

All the time, while the search-light glared over the things that Warren had said and done, there remained, outlined lucidly against the background, the things that Prudence Varley had not said and not done.

She, with her tacit omissions, was the influence almost preponderating.