E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page
images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries
(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)
Note: Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
http://www.archive.org/details/thefurnace00maca
THE FURNACE
by
R. MACAULAY
Author of 'Abbots Verney'
London
John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.
1907
TO THE
OTHER CITIZENS OF SANTA CATERINA,
VARAZZE,
WHO, AT PRESENT SCATTERED LABORIOUSLY OVER
THREE CONTINENTS,
INTEND, IN THE SPACIOUS DAYS OF LEISURE
THAT AGE SHALL BRING,
TO INHABIT AGAIN THE RED HOUSE BEYOND THE TOWN
AND NAVIGATE THE WHITE CANOE.
'Le metal precieux qu'on trouvera un jour au fond des cendres....'
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
CONTENTS
I. YOUTH IN THE CITY
II. THE IMPRESSION-SEEKER
III. OF MENTAL STANDPOINTS
IV. BLIND WALLS
V. BALAE'S BAY
VI. GRADONI
VII. RETROSPECT WITH THE SEARCH-LIGHT
VIII. BROKEN BARRIERS
IX. FURNACE FLAMES
X. BETTY AND TOMMY
XI. THE ETERNAL ROADS
XII. THE ROADS DIVIDE
XIII. PINE-BARK BOATS
THE FURNACE
CHAPTER I
YOUTH IN THE CITY
'Val piu aver amici in piazza
Che denari nella cassa.'
_Proverb._
Royalty was arriving in the harbour in a steam-yacht. It had, that is,
already arrived in the harbour; it was now disembarking on the pier. It
was an interesting event. An edified crowd watched it; representatives
of the Press jotted down their impressions; some took photographs. A few
drew pictures instead. The representative of the _Marchese Peppino_, an
illustrated paper widely perused in certain circles, drew pictures; one
might gather that it was his intention to be funny, later, when he had
leisure to amplify. _Marchese Peppino_ always had that intention, and
its readers, whose judgment of humour was possibly, however, not of the
most delicate or polished type, considered that it usually fulfilled it.
The drawings now in process of production were, before they were
amplified at leisure, really quite like life; later they would become
less so, but no doubt more entertaining. They seemed to be a little
funny even now. A man looking over the artist's shoulder giggled and dug
him in the ribs. The artist was a nonchalant young man, who did not seem
to be amusing himself particularly, but to be working in a wholly
professional and business-like spirit. He had quick eyes and clever
fingers, and presumably, since he did his job really well, a suitably
developed sense of the ludicrous.
Royalty left the pier. It was, presumably, going to have lunch before it
admired Naples. That was certainly as well; it gave the representatives
of the Press a respite, during which they, too, if they had the
inclination and the wherewithal, might have lunch.
The representative of the _Marchese Peppino_ sat down on an inverted
basket and continued to record impressions, while the crowd thinned
slowly.
A facetious young man, passing the artist, made a show of being doubled
up with helpless laughter--a mirth presumably anticipatory in nature and
complimentary of intent. When he wearied of the compliment he clapped
the journalist on the shoulder and observed:
'We shall split our sides on Thursday, ne?'
He cherished an immense admiration for the pictorial staff of the
_Marchese Peppino_. The staff gave him his usual melancholy look from
under quick brows, and said:
'Have you seen my sister?'
'Just now, talking over there with La Corrini.'
From the group indicated by the jerked thumb the staff's sister emerged.
She strolled up to her brother. There did not seem to be any particular
difference between them, externally. The boy might have been
twenty-three and the girl twenty-two; or it was quite equally likely to
be the other way about. At first glance there seemed to be a certain
resemblance between them in dress as well as in face; analysis, however,
reduced this to the suggestion in each of an untidiness--one might all
but say a disreputability--that made their worldly status a matter for
speculation. The girl's hat was of broken straw, pulled over her eyes;
one of her shoes lacked a lace; her blue cotton dress was sun-bleached
and discoloured. The boy wore a ragged blazer, frayed flannel trousers,
and a very limp Panama hat, which he kept turning up, with
sweet-tempered patience, when it flopped over his eyes.
The girl sat down beside her brother. She had--they both had--a serene
air of being admirably content to do nothing during prolonged periods.
To sit by the harbour and talk, if the day were fine and the company
agreeable, was an excellent afternoon's occupation. The streets were
always entertaining, and the harbour particularly so, with the thronging
of those who go down to the sea in ships, and the gay greetings of
friends, and the cheerful shouting of mariners. Neapolitan loafers (and
really to loaf, in the highest sense of that agreeable word, one should
go to Naples) always like the harbour. The smell of the sea, too, is
pleasant on a hot September afternoon, especially to the unfastidious,
who do not cavil at its dilution with various other odours.
The talk between the brother and sister and the cheerful youth who was
giving himself a holiday from his shop was leisurely, of an easy
familiarity, seasoned with allusions and anecdotes that showed them to
share in common a 'set.' The girl's talk was partly professional, of the
music-hall stage, on which she made casual and irregular appearances. La
Corrini had been saying something to her.... In the report this was very
funny. The stout youth, whose name, one gathered, was Luli, roared with
laughter and spat many times. It was noticeable that the drawer of
pictures, though he, too, talked a great deal, did not spit at all: he
only stammered.
Presently they decided to have lunch, and went off, the three of them
together, Luli affectionately clinging to the journalist's arm. They
turned into a _trattoria_ in the Toledo. At one of the marble-topped and
not very elaborately cleaned tables a finely developed young woman ate
_spaghetti_ with admirable speed and dexterity, and drank red Posilipo.
The three, seeing her, hailed her with some effusion, and joined her at
her table. There ensued a very sociable and conversational repast, and
there was a great deal of noise, with the full-bodied and rather
strident tones of the young woman of the _spaghetti_, the resonant
laughter of Luli, and the stuttering, melancholy-toned and unceasing
flow of singularly futile and inane babbling that emanated from the
journalist and his sister. These two appeared to have a somewhat
extensive circle in Naples; they exchanged greetings with most of their
fellow-eaters. Some of these were really comparatively reputable; quite
a number were very gaily attired, and most seemed light of heart.
The journalist, after finishing his wine and his inexpensive cigar,
announced himself obliged to depart in pursuit of business.
'I must catch them driving out. They are sure to drive out, you know.'
His sister said she too would come, and catch them driving out.
So they went out into the street and sauntered leisurely along it. Its
screaming, gay business was a little hushed at this hour of the hot
September day; behind closed green shutters people shunned the
vertically striking sun; the heavy noon brooded over what was almost,
for Naples, stillness. It was not, had the representative of _Marchese
Peppino_ considered the question, in the least likely that he would at
this hour 'catch them driving out.' He very likely did not particularly
care whether he so caught them or not; he liked to walk about the
streets; neither he nor his sister minded the glare and the hot, baked
smell that beat up into their faces. They had an air of very leisurely
sweet temper and content with life as it was lived as they sauntered
along the Toledo together. There were two things it was manifest that
they would not in any circumstances do: they would quarrel with no one,
and they would take no thought for the morrow.
'I wonder,' the journalist was saying, 'if Luli would lend us twenty
francs. Think he would, Betty?'
He spoke in English now; they always spoke English to each other when
they were alone together, though they seemed quite equally at their ease
in both languages; they also stammered equally in both. They stammered
when they were at all excited, or earnest, or tired, and very often when
they were not. When they were talking, these hiatuses were often the
only opportunities their companions had of getting in a word edgeways.
Betty thought it improbable that Luli would lend any such sum.
'You know, Tommy, we had ten from him last month. He won't miss it if
we don't remind him, but it would be silly to bother him again just
yet.'
'Oh, all right. But I'm afraid we've rather got to get some somehow.
We've spent an awful lot lately. Why did we have lunch to-day? We didn't
want it.'
'Who's been bothering?'
From long experience Betty caught the issue.
'The chap I get paints from. I--I told him he'd got to wait; he c-cut up
rough; said he'd waited long enough.'
The stutter, becoming pronounced, showed Tommy a little stirred.
'Well----' Betty's tone was depressed. There was an intonation of
melancholy, however, in general in the Crevequers' stammering speech--a
melancholy that was on the borderland of laughter, and stuttered into it
as a man stumbles unawares into puddles, walking along a wet path. Miss
Crevequer, quite suddenly, stumbled into one now, for no apparent
reason, and dragged Tommy after her. 'Well'--Betty regained, as it were,
dry ground--'let's give him this week's rent; and by next week something
will have turned up. You can win some at cards, can't you? It's a pity
I've got no job just now. At least, it's rather fun really, and we'll go
to the theatre to-night.'
Tommy nodded. The proposition seemed a matter of course; no incongruity
struck either. There was, in fact, no incongruity; it was very simple:
the payment of debts would have been an indulgence quite beyond their
means; going to the theatre was one within them. The Crevequers could
only afford cheap pleasures.
They settled themselves for the afternoon under an awning outside a cafe
by which royalty, it was supposed, would eventually pass. There they
conversed with friends, and Tommy drew pictures, and time, as usual,
passed agreeably and sociably. At about six o'clock there came by an
informant, who remarked that royalty had gone for a drive in the
opposite direction. Tommy started in pursuit, and did not join Betty
again till it was too late for the theatre. So they asked some friends
and had a supper-party at a restaurant instead, because the theatre
money must be somehow spent. Its spending, and a good deal more besides,
proved beautifully easy. Then they came home through the lit streets;
the flare of them and the noise of them and the gay people who lounged
and talked in them always made the Crevequers feel cheerily at home, and
flowing over with the milk of human kindness.
Beyond the flaring, screaming world there was a soft summer moon, nearly
at the full, and spaces of silver light on the land and the dark, still
sea. But these children of the gay streets had no concern with the moon;
the lamps were for them, and the flare of lights that lit the coster's
barrow and the pedlar's awning. They loafed along with the true
vagrant's air of irresponsible well-being to their home, which was in a
narrow street sloping upwards out of the Toledo--sloping up steeply, and
laid out in shallow steps.
The Crevequers lived in a flat at the top of a tall pink house. None of
the occupants of the house seemed to have yet retired; most of them were
in the street outside. The Crevequers stayed for a little to talk to
them, then went in and climbed many flights of dark stone stairs, and
came at last into the room where they lived. The room had an inexpensive
air. It had, however, no lack of contents, and these were, without
exception, in unexpected places; the books, for instance, lay on the
floor in a corner--a battered selection from the light literature of two
languages. There were papers, half-finished drawings, writing and
painting materials, littered over the table among half-emptied bottles,
cigarettes, and unwashed glasses. The ceiling was interesting; it was
partially covered with a design in bold colours, unfinished; it gave the
impression of being worked at, spasmodically, at irregular intervals, by
more than one artist; it had an interesting air of awaiting the next
inspiration. It was an untrammelled composite, so far, of the beauties
of nature, imaginative and highly exciting dramatic incident, and
scenes from pagan lore, with, whenever imagination or space required
padding, a cherub plunging through a festoon of flowers. Some of the
designs bore a vaguely familiar air; the visitor to Pompei might have
recognized, for instance, the lady on her knees with a bird's-nest full
of infants. The most note-worthy point about this ceiling was that it
was really not badly painted.
The most comfortable features of the room were two large arm-chairs, one
on each side of the stove. Tommy cleared a space in one of them and
subsided into it. Betty dragged a spirit-lamp and a saucepan of milk
from under the table and knelt over it, whistling a soft, tired little
tune the while. Tommy, lying in his chair, whistled too, feeling in his
pockets for matches.
'Cocoa, Tommy?' Betty broke her tune to say.
'No.' He had found a match, and was scraping it perseveringly on his
knee. 'It's going to boil over,' he remarked.
She caught it off with a deft hand and poured it into a cup, and,
carrying it to the other arm-chair, in which she did not trouble to
clear a space, she lay back with a sigh of contented languor.
'Cigarette, please. Thank you.'
There was a battering at the door, and an influx of three youths and two
young women. It seemed that they had been having supper together--enough
supper to raise their spirits and to make them very sociable and
amiable. The Crevequers, having also had supper, were sociable and
amiable too, and Tommy got out more wine, and the room became blue with
smoke and full of laughter; and Tommy played his banjo, and Betty sang a
song which amused them all very much, and the three young men and the
two young women shouted the chorus. None of the other occupants of the
house seemed to be disturbed--they were probably used to it. The company
stayed late. These pleasant gatherings are hard to break up, and the
Crevequers' friends seemed attached to them. With the young man who had
drunk most wine Tommy made a bet and won it; it was a five-franc note,
and it was satisfactory as it changed hands to feel that the loser, in
his then state of warm generosity, did not at all miss it. Tommy did a
further stroke of business by arranging an evening of cards with this
gentleman for the following week. At last, with hilarious leave-taking,
the visitors departed, some to their rooms in the same house, some
elsewhere, all very merry and affectionate.
'It hasn't been a really busy day--not so very,' Betty remarked
presently. 'Why are we tired?'
'There seems to have been plenty to do, one way and another,' Tommy
said, still gently fingering the banjo-strings.
They spoke languidly. The tiredness of their faces seemed to slur over
the delicate discriminations that really existed between them. They
were, as a matter of fact, not quite exactly alike at ordinary times.
For example, Betty had a dimple, when she laughed, in her left cheek;
Tommy's indentation, rather fainter, was in his right. Both had blue
eyes glinting to grey, but the longer sweep of Betty's lashes made hers
oftener approach to black. When their eyes flickered from melancholy to
sudden laughter, as they did rather often, and usually on quite
unexpected and incongruous occasions, they had a trick of narrowing to
blue slits. The slant of the black brows of both was up, slightly, from
left to right; they were quick brows, that flickered a little with their
speech.
'Let's get on our dressing-gowns and brush our hairs,' Betty suggested.
She went into one of the two adjoining rooms, and returned with a red
dressing-gown and a hair-brush, and curled herself up in her chair.
'Tommy, you really have done that faun's right leg so very badly--it's
getting a bad dream to me.'
Her voice died away drowsily. The brush slipped from her hand down among
the piled contents of the chair; she yawned softly and fell asleep, her
hair hanging in two dark, unbrushed strands over either shoulder, her
cheek pillowed on one thin, scarred, childish hand. It was a curious
scar, crossing the back of her left hand, a white diagonal, drawn from
the knuckle of the fore-finger nearly to the wrist-bone.
Tommy, his face turned complacently ceilingwards, fell asleep too. He
was very tired. They were both very tired. Betty's assertion that it had
not been a particularly busy day was doubtless correct, using the word
busy in its accepted sense. But, as Tommy had said, there seemed anyhow
to have been a good deal to do. There was usually for the Crevequers a
good deal to do, because, though they only at times and reluctantly
conformed to the law that those who would eat must work, they did
homage, thorough and without reservation, to the much more insistent
command of their being, that those who would live life as it should be
lived must make of it an exciting game, the object being to cram into
the space of each twenty-four hours as many amusements as could by
straining be confined therein. The number of points thus possible to
score each day they had discovered to be large; the chances they did
not devise for themselves by the ingenuity of their wits were devised
for them by affectionate acquaintances (the Crevequers were very
popular). They might be said, in fact, thoroughly to understand the art
of living; to understand, rather, one aspect of it--that which is
concerned with the receipt of pleasure. Their lack of means, though
deplored by them, did not very seriously incommode them. It only meant,
after all, that one had to practise a certain selection, and one could
select the right things, meaning thereby life's pleasing superfluities,
and leave the necessities to take care of themselves. The necessities
did not invariably take care of themselves; the Crevequers were
sometimes in winter cold (they liked immensely and above most things to
be warm), and sometimes remained hungry during a longer period than
seemed good to them, and were very often weary of foot, and usually
without the clothes they would have liked (mildly) to have been wearing.
But these times balanced themselves by occasional periods of luxury and
riotous living, particularly at the beginning of the year, when their
income figured before their ever-sanguine eyes, untouched, infinite and
inexhaustible in its possibilities. For they had a little besides
professional earnings; only it happened somehow that they spent always
rather more than they had, superfluities being so essential to their
existence. Lent, of course, came in opportunely, just when the first
riotous flush of the year was subsiding; in Lent one could not live in
luxury and go to theatres, even if one could afford it. The iron hand of
necessity clasped the more pliable fingers of duty, forcing them to an
unrelaxing hold. The Crevequers' confessor would, no doubt, have
approved of youth thus constrained.
But, with all its inconveniences, life was a charmingly entertaining
game. In the faces of the children asleep, there was, besides sheer
weariness, a youthfulness almost ridiculous. They might have been
fourteen and fifteen. They were always young--very young--but when they
slept they were as two twin babes. Their youth, their childhood, seemed
somehow to obscure an aspect of them; there might have been also in it,
to the sentimentalist, a touch of pity, and to the moralist a vague
rising of dubious hope.
Tommy, waking at a quarter-past two, stretched himself, yawned, and
threw an empty cigarette-box into Betty's lap.
'Come to bed,' he said.