OF MENTAL STANDPOINTS
'E parea posta lor diversa legge.'
DANTE.
The Crevequers, as they had anticipated, did eat too much at lunch--a
good deal too much. They cast, occasionally, wondering and interested
glances round the dining-room, and took in the fact that every one at
all the little tables was also eating too much. It was borne upon them
that this exorbitance, a strange incident in their own lives, was to
these others a daily occurrence. Every day at one o'clock the
dining-room at Parker's, the dining-rooms at all the hotels of its
genus, were filled with Anglo-Saxons and a few others, all sitting round
little tables, and all eating too much. Then again at dinner-time....
The impressiveness of the thought widened their eyes, filling them with
an awestruck solemnity. To eat too much, a good deal too much,
twice--nay, thrice--a day (for visions of the Anglo-Saxon breakfast
haunted them: one had honey, one ordered omelette) during a period of
weeks and months--it required thinking over quietly afterwards. At
present, face to face with the amazing succession of the courses, the
contemplation of all it meant made one a little dizzy. The Crevequers
took all the courses; they would not have missed one; they intended to
see this thing through. As they ate they talked stammeringly. Mrs.
Venables was struck by the melancholy of their pondering eyes. Her
interest--she had an immense fund of it--was gathering itself together
to pour itself unstintedly forth on Maddan Crevequer's children. Her son
and her daughter and her niece watched the gathering; it was a familiar
process to them. The son watched it with languid amusement; the daughter
with stolid unconcern (she was a bored child of eighteen); the niece
with eyes inscrutably remote. The Crevequers were copy; they came to be
studied, to be drawn out; they responded to the process with their usual
affability. They answered questions as to their way of life, their
friends, the customs of the Neapolitan poor, their religion. Mrs.
Venables, as she said, found the Roman Catholic standpoint quite
immensely interesting. The Crevequers groped uncomprehendingly after the
reason of such interest, and gave it up. They were, however, quite ready
to answer the questions put to them; it seemed a harmless craze enough.
Mrs. Venables had been to Mass the day before, and had, she affirmed,
been much struck by the impressive contrast of the ordered stateliness
of the service and the spontaneous gaiety of the people as they trooped
out into the piazza afterwards. It had occurred to her, watching the
devout worshippers, that Catholicism was in some of its aspects a
strange medium for the spiritual interpretation of the blithe Italian
genius. What did Mr. Crevequer think?
Mr. Crevequer thought, but did not say, that she might have been more
profitably employed in attending to the service than in watching the
devout worshippers.
Mrs. Venables' niece, Prudence Varley, talked about Naples, with a
certain careful accentuation of the purely ordinary point of view of the
cultivated seer of sights. Her cousin Warren, watching her, smiled
inwardly at the accentuation. He understood it perfectly well. There was
in it a certain quality of externality that gained edge from the
contrast with Mrs. Venables' all-reaching intimacy. It revealed, anyhow,
how the Crevequers wallowed in ignorance--how they knew nothing.
Museums, mosaics, pictures, sculpture, were to them less than names.
Churches they knew only in so far as they went to church in them; and it
was not from the point of view of one interested in worship, but in
architecture, that Miss Varley seemed to approach the subject, differing
herein from her aunt. When she discovered that the Crevequers knew
nothing, she did not follow the subject; she gently fell again into her
non-conversational attitude, which seemed almost a little abstracted.
(She had often that air.) The Crevequers had indeed their own knowledge
of Naples--none more so; but it was the intimacy of streets and corners,
that close acquaintance with the face of a city which belongs to those
who, as Warren Venables had said, 'drift about the bottom.' How should
they know of mosaics? They knew every little narrow _gradone_, shut in
with leaning houses, that led steeply up out of all the length of the
Toledo, from Piazza San Carlo to the doors of the museum. (Beyond the
doors their ignorance began.) They knew at what hour on Friday mornings
it was most amusing to be playing round Porta Nolana; they knew the
price at which you can get a plate of macaroni and a mezzo-litro of wine
at all the _trattorie_ (of any economy) in Naples, and at which you were
most likely to meet amusing acquaintances, and at what hours. But it was
possible that Miss Varley felt no more curiosity as to these things than
the Crevequers as to the Angevin tombs in Santa Chiara. In Naples there
seemed to be no meeting-ground, or none which Miss Varley cared to seek.
It was Mrs. Venables who talked of Pompei--of the unique, almost
oppressive, so she said, interest of it. The Crevequers knew Pompei as a
place with nice hot, bright streets, scampered over by lizards, where it
was agreeable to spend an afternoon among the gaily-hued, roofless
houses, and go to sleep. But, they said, Christian Pompei was a better
place--it had more variety. Here the gulf yawned aggressively; Mrs.
Venables strove to throw a bridge by remarking that to some mental
standpoints the present teemed with an eternal interest that quite
obscured the past. The Crevequers supposed that this might be so.
Young Miranda Venables said that she thought the past was an awful bore.
She did not approve of Naples; she was vexed at missing the hockey and
beagling season at home, and she thought towns were beastly, especially
Italian towns. She hated them. She looked towards the Crevequers with a
rising of hope; here, it seemed, were two people who lacked intelligent
interest even as she did. Miranda was, from her mother's point of view,
a failure. She was in no way aesthetic, except sartorially. The Liberty
frocks and flopping hats that her soul loathed seemed to give an edged
incongruity to her pleasant round face, with its rosy cheeks and blue
eyes, and mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. She did not
rebel against the bitter yoke of the picturesque: it was not worth
while; she was merely used to remark, with her customary forcible
elegance of phrase, that if her mother chose to spend money on making
her look a guy, it was her look out, though Miranda considered it a pity
that she could not get better value than that for her outlay. But her
soul was not at all in her clothes; it was in quite different
things--chiefly in hockey.
She raised that theme.
'I say, couldn't we get up a sort of a club? There must be a ground
somewhere.'
But the Crevequers, it seemed, did not play hockey. It was sad how
everywhere gulfs yawned. Miranda sighed, and fell back upon her lunch.
That remains, even in Naples.
The Crevequers, on their side of the gulf, talked; they were really
quite entertaining; their acquaintance included such various types of
persons, their experience such interesting incidents. Some of the
incidents revealed them, personally, in a light rather unusual--a light
not apt, as a rule, to illumine a lunch-party. Of this they were
sublimely unconscious; at their ignoring of it Warren Venables smiled a
little. They were wholly innocent of the half-humorous, half-boastful
posturing of the conscious rake; these things, assumed as the basis of
their stories rather than narrated, were to them entirely natural--a
matter of course. From the same outer darkness--Venables came to believe
it was that--Tommy had discoursed of _Marchese Peppino_. It was not that
they considered themselves reputable people, but simply that
reputability (and the word includes in this case common honesty) was a
thing wholly ignored by them, outside their sphere of knowledge.
Certainly, such ignoring obviated embarrassment. Meanwhile, to entertain
a tableful of strangers at lunch is an admirable gift. Mrs. Venables,
possibly, did not sufficiently appreciate it; being amused came very
much lower down on her scale of pleasures than being interested; it was
perhaps fortunate, therefore, that it was a pleasure much rarer of
attainment. She did not desire it of the Crevequers; she desired, as she
phrased it, to draw them out, to achieve a near and serious intimacy.
When every one had finished eating too much (the Crevequers wondered to
each other afterwards why it had come to an end just at that point, no
sooner and no later; they themselves, once wound up to eat continuously,
could have carried it on indefinitely), Mrs. Venables found a divan for
herself and Betty in a secluded corner of the large hall, and continued
the process of eduction. She had formed a plan; she wished of all things
to come into contact with the real life of the people; she wanted Tommy
and Betty to help her.
'You must be so delightfully intimate with them. With me they may be
suspicious and reserved at first. And I am not at all completely
mistress of the language. But I can at all events give them a very
genuine sympathy and interest; and it would please me to try the
experiment. I know something of our girls in London who work at the
great factories. If we could form a sort of club here--social evenings,
and so on--your help would be of immense value to me. You have achieved
a real intimacy--you and your brother. To share the same faith must be a
tremendous bond; there is no more tenacious or more beautiful tie, as
Tolstoy says.... You remember the passage, perhaps?'
Betty shook her head.
'We don't read much, Tommy and I don't. There seems always something
else to be done, out in the streets or somewhere.'
'The true pagan joy in mere living,' reflected Mrs. Venables, and
continued: 'If one could call oneself, definitely, a member of any
faith.... But one cannot, after all, sacrifice truth to beauty--even to
the beauty of sympathy and close community with others.... You are happy
in having found a firm foothold.'
Mrs. Venables was not crude enough to ask questions on these subjects;
she drew confidence gently towards her. Doubt found in her always a
ready hearer. But Betty, it seemed, was not in doubt.
A further step in intimacy Mrs. Venables achieved.
'If there is anything I can do to help you.... I should be glad, you
know, to be of any service to your father's children.... We must see a
great deal of each other.'
'Thank you very much,' said Betty, considering.
Mrs. Venables perceived the pondering glance of the melancholy eyes, and
leaned forward, laying a gentle hand on the thin childish one, waiting
confidence.
'Well ... if you would be so awfully kind as to l-lend us twenty
francs,' the sad tones stammered.
'Lend you....'
Mrs. Venables drew back; her surprise startled Betty. It was, surely, a
very usual and natural request.
'Of course,' Mrs. Venables said gently, after a moment. 'I will give it
to you now.... I am so sorry....'
'Thank you tremendously.'
Betty put the notes in her purse. Mrs. Venables became aware that the
Crevequer smile, with the single dimple, was rather engaging. Then Tommy
came up with Venables, and said it was time to go away.
Miss Varley, as she said good-bye, referred to Betty's statement that
she sometimes posed.
'Will you for me? I am painting a picture, and I should be very grateful
if you would.'
The unsmiling directness of the tone made the request very much a matter
of business. Betty said she would.
'Warren and Prudence are always painting,' Miranda explained mournfully.
'Their pictures are rotten, I think; I hate them.'
The Crevequers went.
'Very picturesque; very striking; very sad,' Mrs. Venables observed.
'Very obvious,' Warren commented. 'I would have betted a guinea that
Crevequer would borrow from me; he did. I call that so obvious as to be
tiresome.'
To his cousin, a little later, he remarked:
'You're standing on a quite false pedestal of superiority, you know.
Because you're going to paint her yourself. Where's the difference?'
'Ah, well, there is some. To me she's frankly copy, you see; I shall
pretend nothing else; I shan't call it making friends--don't you see?
There's where it comes in.'
'All the same, you'll be doing what you repudiate; you'll be making use
for your own ends of what you wouldn't otherwise have anything to do
with. You're in a false position; you can't escape that by
sophistries.'
'If I am, I shall have to be more than ever careful not to make it
falser by throwing veils over it,' said Prudence Varley consideringly.
She had the air of a person of a very delicate sense of
justice--delicate almost to exaggeration. One detected it in her
farsighted grey eyes, with the twinkle that lurked just within call.
Warren chuckled.
'Poor model! You needn't make it so hard as all that for her; let her
have a veil or two--it's so much more comfortable.'
Prudence shook her head with decision.
'It wouldn't be fair; it would be ugly.'
Warren smiled again--at her characteristic habit of arriving, with great
deliberation, at her own position in a matter, and remaining in it
unshaken. If to her perception an immense difference stretched between
the frankness of taking copy as such, and ending there, and the course
of tact and sympathy and 'achievement of intimacy' which his mother
pursued, no accusations of sophistry or overniceness would bridge that
gulf to her.
'Well,' Venables said, half defensively, 'Mother really is interested,
you know--very much so.'
Prudence frowned over it, half abstractedly.
'As I see it, you either like people or you don't. If you don't, and yet
make use of them, they've got to know how the thing stands and all about
it.'
'The Crevequers, you know,' Venables said, 'are quite clever enough to
know "all about it," even if you do use a veil or two.'
'Are they?' Prudence's eyes mused. 'Oh, I dare say they're clever enough
to know. But, Warren, I have a feeling about them--it came to me in the
middle of lunch, quite suddenly--that they _don't_ know; that, somehow,
either because they are made so, or because they've missed their
chances, they know--well, really very little indeed about themselves and
how they stand. And that--if that's so--makes it worse; because, do you
see, if we accepted them, they would take it naturally, and be content
to be accepted; and all the time there would be all kinds of things
between us, that we knew of and that they didn't. That would be ugly.
Don't you see? But if we don't accept them, the things between don't
matter; it's all right and fair.'
'Well, it may be. Anyhow, if that's what mother would call your "mental
standpoint," I'm a little sorry for Miss Crevequer. It will be an
embarrassing sitting--except that I can't quite imagine either of you
embarrassed.... Personally, you know, they amuse me quite a lot.'
'Oh, well, as to that----' The twinkle came to the front of the grey
eyes.
* * * * *
The Crevequers, lounging about Santa Lucia that evening, had their own
comments to make. They were a little puzzled.
'Why _not_ be a Catholic?' Tommy pondered, with knitted forehead. 'What
else should a man be? Why is it funnier than to be a heretic, or a Jew,
or a Buddhist? Perhaps those things _are_ interesting, though, if once
one begins thinking about them. We aren't interested in enough things,
Betty. Let's study agnostics, and begin with Mrs. Venables. We'll ask
her how she feels in church, and say "this is most impressive," as she
does. Do agnostics go to church, at least?'
'She does. She watches the devout worshippers. We must think of some
nice striking things to tell her, Tommy. She likes that, and we ought to
do it, as they've been so kind to us--about how the contadini round Baja
still pray to Pan, and things of that sort, that foreigners always like
to hear. Would she take that, do you think? No, not quite,
perhaps--rather risky. It was very nice of them to lend us both money;
and they won't be in a hurry, I should think. I shall rather like to sit
to Miss Varley; she's nice to look at, don't you think? She doesn't say
very much, but then I can do that.'
'Well, I call them all rather decent,' Tommy said.
They stood for a little and listened to the soft sound of the little
night waves scraping the shingle, and looked over the still, dark bay,
cut across by the golden road of the three-quarter moon, to where the
pine-shaped column above Vesuvius hung and blazed intermittently.
'Something ominous in that sign that the sleeping monster still lives,'
murmured Betty. Then, in answer to a questioning stare, 'Not my
own--Mrs. Venables. Tommy, I'm sleepy; let's go to bed.'
'No,' said Tommy--'supper at Brunati's. We'll find some one to have it
with us.'
Betty looked dubious.
'To-morrow, don't you think? We really did have such a splendid
lunch....'
'To-night,' said Tommy recklessly. 'They must have had tea just after we
left them, and dinner after that, and I expect they eat more at it than
they did at lunch. We're as good as they are, I should think.'