BAIAE'S BAY
'I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day.'
R. L. STEVENSON.
'Why should I care for the ages,
Because they are old and grey?
To me, like sudden laughter,
The stars are fresh and gay.
The world is a daring fancy,
And finished yesterday.'
G. K. CHESTERTON.
On a blue Sunday morning, not early enough to spoil their night--on
principle they shunned always the dimmer hours of dawn--the Crevequers
slipped the leash of the city and went to spend a happy day in the
country. They often spent their Sundays thus; with their wonted
inconsequent abruptness one would say to the other on Saturday evening,
'I'm tired of Naples. Let's go somewhere else by the next train,' and
they would shovel a few things--usually those among their possessions
which they were least likely to want--into a bag, and take tickets quite
at random to any place, known or unknown, which occurred to them.
Novelty was often a desirable qualification; but on this Sunday morning
they went to Baja, because a strenuous week had blunted their
imaginations; also, perhaps, a little because on the shores of Baja
there lies much healing. Their affairs had not been going altogether
smoothly of late, and the need rose in them, unworded, for stillness by
blue water and the sun upon warm sand.
Having found these things, they entered into a contented peace, and
built a sand castle. Then they lay on the sand ten yards from it, and
took shots at it with bits of pumice-stone.
'Well,' Tommy observed at length, 'I've won that. And now it looks like
a plum-pudding. Ducks and drakes? No; we'll go to sleep, because we got
up too early for the time we went to bed. Pity; get up later next time.
No, you can't talk yet, Betty, because I'm resting. You know, you don't
need so much rest, because you're not a newspaper man. I'm sorry I'm a
newspaper man; they're so untruthful, and when they try to be funny
they're only rude. But I'm glad we're not a daily; if we were we should
get into seven times as many rows as we do, shouldn't we. Our
mortification might be greater than we could bear. Muzzi can bear a
great deal, though; he's so brave. I'm not; I'm dreadfully sensitive. If
I die a violent death at the hands of the Sindaco--I probably shall, you
know, so will Muzzi--Mrs. Venables will have Masses said for me, because
they're such an interesting medieval survival, obviously deeply rooted
in human psychology. Why are heretics such goats? And why talk about
heretics and newspapers on our happy Sunday in the country? Your turn,
Betty; change the subject while I snatch a moment of sleep.'
Betty, her chin in her hands, was looking across the blue bay.
'I am thinking,' she said. 'No; I am absorbing impressions. They are
illuminating and suggestive--quite striking. They really are, you know.
Chiefly--Naples is there, and you and I are out here. To me at this
moment that is very real and vivid--immensely significant. Perhaps I
have expressed it badly, though.'
'Communicated myself inadequately,' Tommy lazily corrected.
Betty acknowledged his greater accuracy.
'But,' she added, after a moment, 'it was a real impression, all the
same.'
She thought it over, looking across the bay towards Naples.
'Life in a populous city,' she murmured, after a moment, 'has its
problems, its trials, its disappointments.... Mrs. Venables told me a
story at tea the other day; I'll tell it to you if you like. There was a
man once who had a lot of gold; at least, he supposed it was gold. It
wasn't really; it was a base metal, most of it. Do you know what a base
metal is? Well, anyhow, it's something that melts very easily when you
put it into a fire. So he put it into the fire----'
'What an ass.'
'Yes; but don't interrupt. And he couldn't help putting it into the
fire, because the fire is Life--it's an allegory, did I tell you?--and
everything has to pass through it. Well, all his metal melted, and ran
away, and he saw it had been nothing but a base metal after all. But one
little bit he found which was pure gold; and that he kept, you see,
always. But it was horribly disappointing for him that there wasn't
more. When he was young he thought he had such a lot; that was where he
was wrong. That's all that story. And Mrs. Venables says if we are lucky
we may all end with a little piece of gold. Life, you see, is
a smelting-furnace, a crucible for the testing of ultimate
values.... Don't, Tommy, I can't bear it; I'll stop, really I will----'
She warded off with her arm an irritated shower of sand.
'That story didn't amuse me,' Tommy remarked resentfully. 'If that was
the funniest thing Mrs. Venables said at tea yesterday, I'm sorry for
you.'
'How shallow you are, Tommy. It wasn't meant to amuse you. And Mrs.
Venables didn't make it up; she'd read it somewhere. Personally, I was
wondering if there was anything in it. I told Mrs. Venables I thought it
very striking. But you've got such a--such a _borne_ mind. I've been
trying not to be _bornee_; I don't believe you ever do. Never mind; now
we'll go to sleep till it's time for Mass.'
It was very still on the beach and very warm, with the winter morning
sunshine on the sand. Beneath the wide blue sky the pure blue sea
stretched, with a little stir and glitter from the ruffling breeze that
just rumpled the broad blue basin's edge, crisping and whitening it,
making it tumble over with spurtling laughter, like a tiny child at
play, and draw back lisping to comfort itself for its fall. Above the
splashing and the little hushing draw, the church bells sounded from
Baja, calling the bay to Mass. There was half an hour still for
absorbing contentment on the warm sand.
To the right the castle blocked the blue sky, shutting the little bay.
Across the wide waters to the east Pozzuoli loomed, transparent, jutting
into the sea. Further, more transparent, delicately purple, Nisida
seemed moored like a barge, with the point of Coroglio behind it.
Coroglio shut the gulf, so that one could not see how behind it the bay
swept down and ran to Naples. Naples was beyond the picture; the picture
held only the blue January morning, with its glittering waters and brown
sails and purple points and islands, and little waves that spurtled on
warm sand, and behind the bells of Baja calling. There was also the salt
smell of the sea, and the Crevequers, and their sand castle. These
things, to Betty Crevequer, became suddenly, as Mrs. Venables would have
said, very real, very vivid--in a manner all of life. She lay dreamily,
her eyes narrowed to slits blue as the sea, absorbing the impression.
Worded--but she did not word it now--it was, as she had put it, 'Naples
is there, and you and I are out here.' Naples, set pink and white upon
her shores, beyond the point, out of the picture, was life; and life,
some one had said, was a smelting-furnace, a testing of ultimate values.
Betty seemed to dream a dream--a dream of the testing of values by fire.
She saw how it might be that metal ran away, melting in the flames ...
how one might be cast up out of the fiery pit, taking with one the
knowledge of pure gold, for what that wisdom might be worth. But perhaps
also a little piece of it to keep--if one was fortunate.
And Betty shuddered at this vision of purging by fire, and at the
'mental standpoint' of the man who had conceived life so. One should be
allowed to keep one's bright metal--gold or dross, it mattered little;
one should be allowed to keep it to play with, not looking into its
quality avariciously. There should be a ring set round it to guard it
from the flames which might melt it away in one's hands. The melting of
it would so horribly burn one's hands; and then there would be a
blankness, and nothing left to play with any more.
It was at this moment that the 'impression' became of a great vividness.
Life might be a furnace, but here were things untouched by its flame,
cast up--so Betty saw them, with prospective eyes--out of the sea of
fire on to the high shores. Here, by the edge of the sea, were she and
Tommy and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding....
A swift moment of vivid intuition came to her, illuminating her vision
of life, as she looked at Tommy, lying on his back, with his straw hat
tilted over his eyes. She was lit by a flash of great certainty, of
strange discernment.
The flash passed, and left her as one who wakes from a trance. She lay
and looked at Tommy, and, looking, felt a desire for speech.
'I'm thinking, Tommy, that you're very lucky to have me to play with
you, and that I'm rather lucky to have you to play with me.'
Tommy pushed his hat a little up from one eye, and turned a meditative
and mildly surprised regard upon his sister. Her remark had had a
flavour of unusualness. But he did not comment upon it; it was as if, in
the momentary pause that followed his glance, something between them,
very definite, very permanent in its existence, entirely unquestioned,
because it had always been there, and hardly ever alluded to in words,
because they were too close to each other and too unsentimental, took
more definite and visible shape. Their friendship, their close
comradeship, their affection, stood in that moment between them,
recognized mutely of both. The kingdoms might fall, but that stood. Thus
they did not word it to themselves; but, unformed, the knowledge
illumined the consciousness of both.
But after that moment's pause Tommy returned to normalities.
'I grant you your luck; in fact, I might envy it you if I was less
sweet-natured. Mine, of course, is less vividly striking, as Mrs.
Venables would put it. But no matter; never be ungenerous on Sunday,
and I'm glad you should have a happy life.'
Betty dragged him up forcibly by the hands, and they went up the beach
to Mass in the little church. That illuminated moment of insight seemed
to walk between them to the doors.
After Mass they went to the Albergo Vittoria, and had lunch on the
terrace.
They talked then of the Venables. Betty said she had had her last
sitting.
'I should like her to sit to me,' Tommy said; 'the way she stands, don't
you know, with her head back'--the gesture of his own caught it not
unsuccessfully--'and her eyes when she's going to smile. And the way her
upper lip's so like her chin.'
Betty nodded. She, too, had gathered all that in the rarefied mountain
air of the studio.
'I wish she'd come and see us, as the others do. Why doesn't she like us
more?'
It was a simple question, thrown out casually and without much
wondering; after all, every one cannot like everybody else.
But it was curious how Tommy grew abruptly red.
'How do you mean like us? I should think she does, doesn't she? Why--why
shouldn't she?'
Betty's eyes consideringly took him in. He seemed, from his stammer
grown aggressive, to feel an interest. Obviously he had been
moved--moved a good deal--by 'the way she stands, don't you know, and
her eyes when she's going to smile.'
'Well, you see,' Betty amended, 'she's too keen on her work, I expect,
to want to see much of anyone. I dare say that's all.'
Tommy was a little appeased.
'She always talks a lot to me when I meet her.'
Betty's doubting eyebrows became a mark of interrogation. She demurred,
not to the 'lot of talk,' but to the apportionment of it--the order, in
fact, of the personal pronouns. Tommy frowned stubbornly, holding to it,
and drank a glass of wine with a defiant regard over the brim. Betty,
looking at him with puzzled eyes, at last shook a despairing head.
'No, Tommy, I can't; I can't imagine it. If you don't put it the other
way round quickly, my brain will break with the effort.'
Tommy, between a frown and a reluctant laugh, lit a cigarette.
'Oh, don't rot.... And what's the odds, anyhow, as long as we're both
interested?'
'I'm glad she's interested,' Betty said, reflectively striking a match.
'Then, they're all interested, which is nice. Mrs. Venables and Mr.
Venables, and the baby Venables, (she loves us very much, did you know?
Only she doesn't really think we're up to much, because we're rotters
and we don't play hockey), and Miss Varley too. I'm glad we're so
interesting, Tommy--aren't you? And now we've had lunch. We'll go in a
boat next, I think. What a nice expensive lunch we've had! Let's pay for
it.'
Then they took a fishing-boat with a large triangular sail, and turned
and twisted about the bay, with erratic deviations of course and sudden
heeling and recoveries. Then they landed, and lay again on the beach to
dry in the afternoon sun, and played ducks and drakes, and composed
limericks and wrote them on the sand with pieces of shell till it was
time to go home.
But before this time Warren Venables had joined them. He had motored
over from Naples to find them and bring them back with him.
'Of course we will,' Betty said; 'the road's much nicer, and it will
take longer and save us our fares. We never get returns, in case
anything should turn up, or we shouldn't be coming back or something.
And we'll drive by turns; what fun!'
They stayed on the shore till the sky behind the castle glowed to a soft
daffodil colour. Venables was a good companion; his limericks and his
riddles and his anecdotes were nearly as silly, nearly as devoid of all
point or relevance, as the Crevequers' own. He might have been capable,
on occasion, of exercising a more grown-up and polished wit; but when he
played with the Crevequers he admirably adapted himself to their young
comprehension. He was a person of tact, when he chose to use it. He did
not always choose. He had a habit--an insolent habit, his cousin called
it--of wearing in his manner, plain to be read by the initiated, the
shades of feeling which he merely did not think it worth while to hide
better, because he relied, with careless, supercilious confidence, on
the inapprehensiveness, the unreceptive blindness, of those with whom he
came in contact. The world was, after all, in the main stupid; his own
cleverness possibly sometimes overrated this stupidity; the swift
enlightenment of a glance, the flash of some phrase, would occasionally
rend his veil across and reveal him--even to the stupid--sitting,
amused, contemptuous, discerning, behind his flimsy screen. This
attitude, of lurking in careless concealment, his cousin characterized
as insolent.
'One should try not to insult people's intelligence more than one can
help, I suppose,' she would observe.
'Well, but when they haven't got any----Anyhow, we all do it; one's got
to in polite life,' he would aver, defending himself.
'They've mostly got some; and if one's real self sits despising and
criticizing, one's outer self has no business to be a decoy. Even if the
real self keeps quite behind the screen, it's unfair; and if it keeps
looking out, as yours does, it's insolent as well. You insult them by as
good as saying, "It's not much of a screen, but it will do for you. If
you do see behind it sometimes, it doesn't matter very much; and if the
people looking on, who know me better, see behind all the time, it
doesn't matter in the least." A screen, to be at all courteous, should
be impenetrable both to the people concerned and to the lookers-on; and
even then it's not honest--one should quite withdraw.'
'You know, if one quite withdrew from all the people one doesn't quite
like, one's world would get very limited.'
'Well, yes'--she wrinkled her forehead in doubt--'only they should know
the terms, that's all.'
It was probable that Miss Varley might have disapproved of the manner of
the homeward journey in the motor, for the Crevequers, who were slightly
inexperienced, drove, as they had suggested, by turns; and behind
Venables' screen of serenity his real self undoubtedly watched
anxiously, and occasionally looked out, betraying itself by the nervous
tension of the hands waiting in readiness to seize the wheel; the screen
was, indeed, rather insultingly flimsy. They ran along the white coast
road, with the gold of the west behind them, and the pale blue winter
sea beside them, and the bright city of many hues growing larger in
front of them as they circled the bay. They went much too fast, and it
was very amusing.
'You must show Baja to my mother sometime,' Venables said. 'She has only
visited it with the native guides so far; and you will be able to tell
her so much that's interesting and new--very new.'
Betty sighed after that renounced game.
'I'm afraid not, do you know.... Tommy, you awfully nearly slew that
goat. And I'm sure it's my turn now.'
She had swerved from the subject with a laudable impulse of shame, her
first in this matter. At the same time, she knew very well that
Venables minded nothing; also, that if she had looked at him his amused
eyes would have twinkled into hers. That she did not might have been
taken to imply in her the rudiments of a growing conscience; or possibly
of a feeling that, though she and Tommy might laugh at a person's
mother, the person might well keep out of it. His not resenting it--but
this she did not word to herself at all, for she would not for some time
know it--showed that he accepted so much, easily and without surprise.
Why resent that, of all things? it seemed to imply. It was, indeed,
hardly worth a comment; it was so wholly in keeping; as he would have
said, so obvious.
This easy, unsurprised acceptance of things as they were, in which
Prudence Varley might have discovered insult, bore to the Crevequers no
message, no implication. Their attitude towards such tolerance was the
measure of their inapprehensiveness.
But, as Betty had had her moment of half-realization, so Tommy had his.
Perhaps such moments came to the one whose turn to drive it was not,
and who had therefore leisure to perceive. Tommy's moment came through
_Marchese Peppino_. Betty observed, abstractedly, between fluctuating
swerves and recoveries:
'Tommy's paper, you know ... has been getting into rows ... being sued
for libel....'
Venables, his eyes on the road, his hand waiting in nervous readiness
for emergency, said:
'Yes?... Mind that flock of goats.' It was, possibly, the distance of
the flock of goats--quite two hundred yards--which partly gave Tommy his
moment of enlightenment. Perhaps he had half known it before; anyhow, he
took in freshly now that the large acceptance did not quite include
_Marchese Peppino_. Even the tolerance of contempt has got, after all,
to draw its line somewhere. Tommy almost took in, too, the slight lift
of the brows, which might be taken to convey 'Does anyone really think
it worth the sueing--that rag?' Venables himself had certainly the air
of not thinking it, under any circumstances, in the least worth the
sueing.
Tommy, his melancholy eyes on Venables' profile, faintly flushed.