BLIND WALLS
'The internal nature of each being is surrounded by a circle, not to be
surmounted by his fellows; and it is this repulsion which constitutes
the misfortune of the condition of life.'--SHELLEY.
'Our eyes are hidden that we cannot see things that stare us in the
face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened.'--EMERSON.
'Forty-six--ninety-eight--fifteen--sixty-three--twenty-seven,' little
Silvio Sardi announced at the door of the Trattoria Buonaventura, at the
top of his strident young voice.
When he had repeated it three times, every one understood. The expectant
stir gave place, in general, to flat disappointment. It is unfortunate
to be so sanguine that the weekly disappointment loses none of its force
with repetition.
But Tommy Crevequer stood up suddenly.
'Ninety-eight and sixty-three. I say, Betty----'
Betty nodded.
'They're ours all right. The ambo; that's how much--seventy-five
francs.'
The Crevequers were rapid and accurate at mental arithmetic.
Congratulation buzzed round them.
Some one raised a voice of anguish.
'Madre Dio, I should have won the terno if I'd staked the numbers my
husband had from the parocco, and I forgot all about it!'
The general opinion, conveyed by shrugs and expressive pursings of the
lips, seemed to be that this was a great pity for Maddalena. They all
knew her husband, who was a Guardian of the Public Security and a hard
man. A friend of his remarked, in a confidential undertone, with no
uncertainty on the subject, 'He'll cut her throat for her.'
'It won't be the first time if he does,' returned his neighbour. 'Dio!
what a fool!'
A man from a table in a corner got up and came over to the Crevequers,
and sat down beside them, with an aspect of resolution, good-humoured
but adamant.
'I shall come with you when you fetch it,' he observed, nodding
cheerfully.
Tommy looked at him, his eyebrows a little aggrieved.
'Oh, Grollo, you----I tell you, I've any amount to do with it; it will
go no way.'
'On the contrary, it will go nearly all the way. For the remaining five
francs I'll wait.'
'I've got to get my evening clothes out of pawn; I'm going out to dinner
on Monday.'
'Well, you must go as you are, then.'
Tommy looked at him resentfully.
'Well, half, then--forty?'
'I shall come with you when you fetch it,' the creditor repeated,
good-temperedly stubborn.
'Oh, well----' Tommy shrugged his shoulders resignedly. 'Come, then; I
shall fetch it now. Coming, Betty?'
'No.'
Betty was talking to Gina Lunelli. Gina was a fine young woman, rather
beautiful, with black curly hair, and an immense amount of experience,
on and off the music-hall stage, for her twenty-seven years. She was a
great friend of the Crevequers; it rather entertained her that anyone
should be so silly and so young. All the men she knew made love to her
as a matter of course--or possibly she made love to them; it, anyhow,
between the two, was invariably made. Tommy Crevequer's love-making was
to both an excellent joke; to Betty also, for they were nearly always a
three-cornered party. Gina and Betty went out now and stood in the
street and talked; or rather Gina talked, and Betty listened and rather
often laughed; it took very little to amuse the Crevequers. Soon Tommy
came back; he carried a parcel; his face was rather gloomy.
'Grollo's got it all,' he remarked resentfully. 'But I've got my
dress-clothes; I met Venables.'
'He who walks home from the theatre with you?' Gina said to Betty.
'Yes. He's always so kind about lending us money,' Betty explained.
Gina nodded. She had once been introduced to Venables in the Crevequers'
room; she had been a little embarrassed with him; it was a type outside
her fairly wide sphere of experience.
'Well, good-bye till to-night; I must go.'
The Crevequers walked home through the darkening December afternoon.
'Venables is really decent,' Tommy observed, with some enthusiasm.
Betty nodded. They had seen a good deal of Venables lately. Yesterday he
and Betty had been to Baja in a motor-car; it had amused them both very
much. He was a good companion, being quite ready and able to enter into
the game of being hopelessly silly, which, the Crevequers had long since
found, very many people, otherwise pleasant, quite failed to understand.
Nobody, it seemed to them, understood it quite as well as they did
themselves; it was fortunate, therefore, as they sometimes remarked,
that they had each other to go about with.
In the evolution of relations with the Venables, that with Warren seemed
now to be, on the whole, the most satisfactory. The relation with Mrs.
Venables, though her own 'achievement of intimacy' suffered no flagging,
had been to the Crevequers a little spoiled by a renunciation on their
side. For sometime they co-operated readily and cheerfully in the
process of eduction; knowing it their business to 'strike,' they did
their best to do so, laying on effects sometimes a little over lurid.
They instituted competitions as to which of them could call forth most
often during an interview the comment 'very striking.' Tommy usually
won, because, as Betty complained, Mrs. Venables was more easily struck
by boys than by girls. It was Tommy who appropriated Betty's idea of the
worship of Pan that lingered in country districts about Naples.
'That's why goats are so common, all about the streets--don't you
know?'
He turned to Miranda, who nodded.
'I know. Beasts. I hate them.'
Mrs. Venables was stirred.
'So vestiges of paganism really do linger. That is extremely striking.'
Tommy, pluming himself, happened to look across and meet Miss Varley's
eyes fastened consideringly upon him. He returned the regard with his
melancholy gaze.
'Not only Pan, either--Venus, Jupiter, Mars----'
'Don't!' Miranda interrupted. 'You're going on just like my astronomy
mistress. She was a beast. I hated her. And I hate stars. And you do
talk rot, you two. You both tell the most awful----'
But Tommy was looking at Miss Varley with his sad regard from under
quick black brows.
She turned to her aunt and started a new subject.
Tommy remarked to her as he said good-bye:
'I'm sorry you thought I was so rude.'
She looked at him for a moment.
'I shouldn't have thought you were particularly sorry, you know.
Good-bye.'
The leisurely considering tone, that quite lacked interest, seemed to
add an edge to the words.
Tommy, going home with Betty, observed:
'I'm not going to be striking any more. Miss Varley looks at me, and it
makes me so shy, and when one's shy one isn't convincing.... I suppose
it's really rather a rotten game, you know.'
Betty admitted that it might be so. So that renunciation was made, and
their relation with Mrs. Venables became less amusing to themselves and,
presumably, less edifying to her. It was quite wearying having to be so
comparatively literal.
The Crevequers wondered if Miss Varley appreciated the sacrifice. Betty
did not imagine her likely to notice it; she was a person of
abstraction. She took an interest, it seemed, in nothing but her work.
To be in her presence--in her studio, for instance--was a little like
being in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a mountain-top. It was
curious, always, to plunge suddenly into it. To get back afterwards into
the warm valleys was also rather curious. Her conversation, when she had
any, was a little obvious in its conventionality. It seemed to Betty,
when she looked at her, surprising that this should be so. She was
pleasant to look at, slim and tall, with head poised a little high, a
little backwards; her short upper lip was caught up a little from her
lower, seeming to carry out the character of the round, lifted chin and
backward-poised head. Over her far-seeing grey eyes her fair brows often
puckered thoughtfully, as if they strove to discern. The winter
sunshine, striking in through the window, made of her light hair a
fluffy aureole. There was, perhaps, a Puritan touch somewhere about her,
emphasized by the simple lines of her green painting-smock. There was
also something remote, inaccessible. Her grey eyes, dwelling on Betty,
were artist's eyes; they seemed to take in every line, carefully noting,
and to give out nothing. There was in their regard a certain quality of
reserve, an implication of something held back.
Betty, returning the look with her own melancholy child's gaze, took it
in without interpretation or analysis. It happens sometimes that for the
interpretation of a look we have to wait for spaces of years.
Apprehension is a thing of gradual growth; sudden lightening is rare.
Betty felt it a pity that Miss Varley was not a more conversational
person, or at least that her conversation should be so very unexciting,
so obvious. In the unquiet condition of Vesuvius, in the fact that a
great number of visitors were staying in Naples, Betty felt not the
least interest. But Miss Varley seemed disinclined to talk of other
things; when the conversation tended to become at all autobiographical
she became inattentive and absorbed. Betty, lest she should become bored
(an unthinkable calamity), started a game, something of the nature of
that which she and Tommy played with Mrs. Venables; the object in this
case was to produce the sudden curve of the lifted upper lip, the quick
twinkle in the grey eyes, which seemed to come irrepressibly, and half
against the owner's will. When Betty scored a point--it really happened
fairly often--it cheered her very much.
It was curious how much she liked Prudence Varley. She would have liked
to see a great deal of her, not in the rarefied altitude of the studio,
but in a more human and convivial atmosphere. She would very much have
liked to ask her to tea (the Crevequers hated tea as a drink, but the
function amused them, especially when they were the entertainers). She
did suggest it one day, but Miss Varley, it seemed, had other
engagements. Mrs. Venables came, with Miranda. Miranda was being
educated; she was being introduced to the life of the people. The people
did not interest her at all, but she liked the Crevequers, whose
function was that of go-between. She would have liked to make a friend
of Betty. She and Tommy were, of course, 'rotters'; they both talked
much too much, and usually the most awful rubbish, and their absurd
stammer made it sound sillier still, and you never knew when they meant
a thing and when they didn't; and they neither knew nor cared anything
about games or sport.
But, all this said, Miranda was left in an attitude of half-puzzled
admiration, of which she could not have quite explained the reason. Her
frequent 'I say, you are rotters, you two!' conveyed a little
bewilderment, a touch of contempt, and an immense attraction. This
attraction put Mrs. Venables into a position of rather annoying
inconsistency. She was not strait-laced; she would have been beyond
measure distressed had prudery, or any conventional limitations, been
attributed to her--had she, in anyone's mind, been termed _bornee_.
Nevertheless, below her aesthetic self--the self which was struck, which
designed Liberty dresses and wrote novels (those novels which the
Crevequers had decided to put off reading till they were thirty-two and
thirty-three)--there lurked a self more ordinary, to whom the artistic
issues were obscured, who could become, on occasion, purely the
disapproving, very reputable censor of conduct. It was the existence of
this self, side by side with the other, which made Prudence Varley sit
in judgment on her attitude towards the Crevequers and their kind; it
was the existence of this self which made the position of Miranda
something of a problem.
Theoretically, it was right and desirable that Miranda should see life
as it was lived; practically, Mrs. Venables hesitated a little when
confronted by the atmosphere so corrupt and so disreputable--she could
not phrase it otherwise--in which Maddan Crevequer's children moved--an
atmosphere that seemed to hang about them, jarring so incongruously, and
at times (but not to Mrs. Venables) so laughably, with their great sad
eyes and their flow of childlike nonsense.
So, half ashamed, Mrs. Venables held Miranda back from personal
friendship, knowing herself false to her principles, and morbidly
nervous of seeing the word _bornee_ lurking behind her son's observing
eyes. Seeing that it was expected of him, he occasionally made use of
it; in protest against it she threw herself, and threw Miranda, with
increased fervour, into the Intimate Contact with the People. In the
Intimate Contact the Crevequers were links. To the club-room in the
Vicolo de' Fiori (the steep alley next to that of the Crevequers) they
induced their friends to come; on Tuesday evenings, from half-past six
to half-past seven, girls and women (really a very creditable number)
sat and made paper hats, and Mrs. Venables achieved intimacy with them.
Then they danced; finally they paid a penny and had coffee and a bun,
over which further intimacy was achieved. On Saturday nights men and
boys came, and played bagatelle and spoof and quit, at Mrs. Venables'
suggestion, and mora and _zecchinetto_ on their own. The intimacy here
was chiefly achieved by the Crevequers, who joined in the games. But
every one was very agreeable to Mrs. Venables, though, as she said,
difference of language (and of faith) made confidential relations a
matter of slow growth. She envied the Crevequers their closer intimacy.
Miranda on these occasions usually sat in a chair by herself, looking
about her with slightly aggrieved blue eyes. The faint disgust in the
droop of her lips implied, 'Beastly place, I hate it.' She did not wish
to achieve intimacy. She wished that Betty would come and talk to her,
instead of playing with the People. Sometimes Mrs. Venables would
command her to go and talk to someone; then she would rise reluctantly,
feeling exceedingly conscious of her movements and quite over-large. The
People, she thought, seemed mostly rather undersized.
'What's the good, Mother? You _know_ I can't say a single thing.' Her
voice dragged plaintively.
'It will be so good for you to try. Go to that nice-looking girl over
there, making a petticoat. She is smiling at you.'
She certainly appeared to be doing so. The fact did not lessen Miranda's
embarrassment. She waited till her mother turned away, then turned her
back without ceremony on the nice-looking girl who smiled, and made for
her retreat in the corner. There she sat, yawning dejectedly, till Betty
Crevequer came to her. Betty stood in front of her, regarding her with a
whimsical scrutiny, her head at an angle of contemplation, her lips
twitching a little.
'Isn't it fun here?' she remarked. 'I knew you'd like it. Can you make
paper hats?'
'Oh, I suppose so. Beastly things. I hate them.'
'Oh! I was afraid you might, perhaps. I was going to ask you to show
some one how; but never mind. We're going to dance now. You wouldn't
care to join, I expect?'
Miranda would not.
'I hate dancing. I say.'
'Yes?'
'Do you really like this? And how much more is there?'
'Of course; don't you? About a quarter of an hour more. Then there's
coffee.' Beastly stuff. You'll hate it. I must go and dance.'
'There is certainly,' Mrs. Venables remarked, watching, 'something
refreshingly picturesque in the movements of the Southern peoples. The
lithe use of their limbs----'
She took in this impression with satisfaction.
'Don't think any of them can dance a bit, if you ask me,' Miranda
pronounced.
The unwary remark drew her mother's attention upon her. Mrs. Venables'
serious, fine eyes always seemed to weigh her daughter and to find her
wanting.
'Dear Miranda, I wish you would try to take more interest in people.
Miss Crevequer, now; she is entirely in their confidence, quite one of
them, so to speak.' She turned to Betty. 'You must help this foolish
child to a larger interest, and me to a deeper understanding. I have
been having some most interesting conversations. I have been trying to
glean from some of the girls their real attitude towards life in its
deeper issues; but they are naturally reserved with foreigners--and, no
doubt, with heretics. If one could convince them of one's very real
sympathy----You are very close to them, one can see. You and I must
have some long talks. And I suppose your brother has immense influence
with the men and boys?'
'Well, they're just f-friends of ours,' Betty said, stammering a good
deal, because she was tired.
There were times when the artist in Mrs. Venables sank a little in the
helper; but here she ran up against a very blank inapprehensiveness. She
had perforce to grasp that her uses in this capacity were purely
financial. It is not easy to give to those who will not receive, who do
not even apprehend their own need of gifts. This inapprehensiveness was
as a blank wall; there was no surmounting it. They looked at each other
from either side of a spiritual and social gulf; and the ignoring of its
existence on the one side made any attempts at throwing, as it were, a
rope across from the other impossible. The rope would have dangled--did
dangle when experimentally thrown--ludicrously futile in mid-air. The
thrower stepped back again to the artist's standpoint, and absorbed
impressions.
To give financial help came to assume an aspect of immorality. Loans
were gratefully taken, and no talk of repayment even remotely rose. It
was, as Warren had put it, 'very obvious'--so obvious as to be tiresome.
Illumination was shed on the aspect which the payment of debts presented
to the Crevequers on the night when they came to dinner, in their
redeemed dress-clothes, after winning on the lottery.
'And it all went,' Tommy concluded his narrative, stammering
querulously, 'to a silly fool we owed money to. Wasn't it a shame, Mrs.
Venables? We owed it him for months; he needn't have been in such a
tearing hurry all of a sudden. Waste, wasn't it? All kinds of things,
you know, we might have done with it. If we'd hired a motor-car, would
you all have come to Pompei with us? Or would you rather have taken a
boat to Capri? You could have had your choice, anyhow. And all that
money wasted; we might just as well have dropped it into the sea, you
know--better; it would have been fun diving for it and bringing it up
with our toes. Do you know how to do that, Venables? I did it once when
a North German Lloyd was going out. You know how they swim round and
dive for money and make such a horrid row? Well, I thought I'd do it,
too, once, because it was such a nice warm day; and they threw me
pennies, but another man always brought them up with his toes; I could
never find them. Sell, wasn't it? but much funnier than paying all that
money to Grollo. People are so grasping, aren't they.'
It was manifest that money lent to the Crevequers must be accounted a
bad debt. Mrs. Venables lent no more; her moral sense rebelled against
it.
But Warren proved himself admirably accommodating.