GRADONI
'Les clefs des portes sont perdues,
Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,
Les clefs sont tombees de la tour,
Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,
Il faut attendre d'autres jours....'
MAETERLINCK.
There are steep streets called _gradoni_, which climb up from the old
town below to the new town above; their slope is assisted by shallow
steps at intervals. So shallow are the steps that you hardly notice each
as you take it. Not until you arrive at the top and look down on the
ascending way do you perceive how its climbing was assisted. Of like
nature is the ascending alley of human penetration. At the top is the
daylight; in the analogy, perceptiveness quite achieved.
In her ascending alley Betty should, by the end of February, have got
far enough not to have taken Miranda Venables to lunch at the Trattoria
Buonaventura with her friends Gina Lunelli and Morello, the painter. She
met Miranda on Santa Lucia. Miranda remarked:
'I say, I'm jolly glad I've met you. I've lost Prudence. Mother sent me
out with her to look at churches and things, because my ignorance is a
disgrace, and Prudence stayed so long looking at some rotten mosaic
things that I had to come out. Then we somehow missed each other, and
I've been playing about alone. I say, I should think it would do if you
showed me things, if I must see them. But there's nothing to see, is
there? Nothing but the Aquarium, and I've seen that. Well, anyhow, I'll
come round a bit with you, shall I, and then I can say I've seen
something. Mother goes about with Murray; rotten book; I hate it. You
haven't got it about you, have you?' she added suspiciously.
'No. You see, I'm a mine of information in myself. It is so nice to be
well informed, isn't it?'
Miranda observed, between compliment and irony:
'You know an awful lot, I suppose.'
Betty nodded.
'One picks things up--one likes to learn. We might have a really
instructive morning, only it's time for lunch. You'd better come and
have lunch too. The Trattoria Buonaventura, in the Toledo--do you know
it? No, probably not. I'm going to meet some friends there.'
'Well, I'll come. But it's only half-past twelve; it's a funny time for
lunch.'
Betty supposed that it might seem so, remembering the breakfast at
Parker's.
They went towards the Trattoria Buonaventura, and Betty pointed out
objects cursorily, and, as a rule, with creditable veracity, by the way.
'The English church. Perhaps you know it, though? Is it nice inside?'
'No, it's not. But I don't like any churches; they're all stuffy. Mother
keeps going to them, though she's an agnostic, you know. She hasn't got
a religion--oh, I wasn't to say that; I mean she rejects dogmatic
formulas--I think that's what she says. She won't let me reject them,
because she says I'm not old enough to have thought it out yet.... What
a funny place! Do you often come here? I love meals in restaurants,
don't you?'
Miranda was introduced to Morello, the painter, whose ugly flexible face
and expressive gestures set her wondering, and whose extraordinary skill
at rapidly absorbing immense lengths of macaroni fascinated her. He
talked with some vehemence, and did not seem to like to be interrupted.
Betty, who never left anyone out, talked to Miranda, and acted as
interpreter. The Signorina Lunelli ate and drank a great deal, and
smiled with immense cheerfulness; Miranda admired her large beauty and
fine physique very much. All three, she perceived, were great friends,
not only with each other, but with nearly every one in the room. It was
a very sociable and merry meal.
'You don't smoke, I think?' Betty said, as the coffee arrived.
'I don't mind trying,' Miranda replied. 'I was ill last time, but that
was three years ago. I was a kid then; besides, it was a cigar of
Warren's. Dare say I could manage a cigarette now.'
'Oh, I wouldn't,' Betty counselled.
After about a minute and a half, Miranda wholly agreed with her. Her
feeling when she looked up and saw her brother at the door was sheer
relief.
'I expect Warren's come for me,' she said, coughing out a cloud of
smoke.
Warren had come for her. It seemed that Mrs. Venables was anxious.
'I knew this was your lunch-place,' he explained to Betty, 'and we
guessed she might be with you. I'm sorry to interrupt--but you have
finished, haven't you? My mother will be anxious, you see.'
Miranda rose rather shakily and said good-bye. She had quite decided not
to take to smoking.
The aspect which the episode bore of the rescue of a truant child from
corrupting company was not assisted, certainly, by look or speech. It
was perhaps an aspect obvious enough to be left to itself, unaccentuated
and unadorned. Rather, indeed, it required, for courtesy's sake,
modification. Venables possibly intended to give it this. He had greeted
Betty and Gina and Morello (he had met these two before) with
pleasantness. He always was pleasant to the Crevequers' friends, though
the screen was sometimes rather flimsy. He was not, it seemed, shocked
or annoyed to find his young sister smoking in such a restaurant among
such company--merely his mother was anxious. His face, as his eyes had
passed from one to the other of his sister's companions, had been quite
impassive. What gave to Betty such realization as she at the time
got--it was not much--was mainly Mrs. Venables' anxiety, which must so
hurriedly be appeased. Betty had not known Mrs. Venables for an anxious
person; to be a fussing mother was to be _bornee_. But the suggestion
was not aggressive. Partly the green tints of Miranda's round face
served as a screen for the other elements in the situation. No one likes
his sister to look sick in a restaurant.
So Venables informed Miranda as they drove to their hotel.
'It's not considered particularly good form, you know, to smoke in
restaurants till you can do it fairly well. And, anyhow, that's not an
especially elegant place to select for the purpose--or, for that matter,
for any other purpose.'
'She always goes there,' Miranda returned limply.
Warren's eyebrows went up.
'Oh--she.... That's got nothing to do with you. Each lot of people's got
its own resorts.'
'But, Warren, you like her, don't you?'
'Who is "her"? Miss Crevequer? What's that got to do with it? I only
said she wasn't your sort. And if you want to know whether I like Signor
Morello and Signorina Gina Lunelli, I can tell you I certainly don't.
And your doing this sort of thing puts mother in a very awkward
position; she won't know whether she can logically scold you or not. She
sent you out to see things, didn't she? Well, you've seen them now,
that's one thing--quite enough for one morning.'
Tommy, it seemed, had got his enjoyment out of the business. He had, he
informed Betty, 'been helping Miss Varley to look for her cousin all
over the place.' Miss Varley's version was, 'Mr. Crevequer came about
with me; I don't know what use he thought he was, except to suggest
quite impossible places, and to talk till I felt quite giddy with it.
The way those absurd infants babble! And it's mostly such nonsense, when
one listens to it; they always make me feel as if I was Alice and they
were Tweedledum and Tweedledee; or perhaps the White Knight, because of
the sort of gentle melancholy they've got. When they come to a meal it's
exactly like the Mad Tea-Party. And it's so ridiculous the way, when one
of them stops to stammer, the other finishes the remark, or goes on with
it till the first one is ready again.'
Tommy's relations with Miss Varley had, during the past months, greatly
interested him. As she so pleased him externally, it was natural that he
should desire to make friends; and as this was an enterprise in which he
was not used to fail, he embarked on it with some audacity. There was a
certain detachment, lack of human interest, about Prudence Varley, as he
saw her, which were to him merely walls to be knocked down. He set about
razing them with cheerful serenity. It had certainly never occurred to
him that, if he wished to make friends with anyone, he would have any
difficulty in doing so. But the walls were rather solid, he found.
Against the battering-rams of his light-hearted sociability and
friendliness they seemed to stand firm; he was only occasionally cheered
by 'her eyes when she's going to smile.'
He one evening came to dinner in a mood of reckless resolution; however
uninterested, she should this one night be interested, more or less, in
him; he would break through the guard somehow and 'achieve intimacy.'
He skilfully arranged contiguity with her when they sat on the balcony
after dinner and listened to the mandolins in the road below. To tune
the scene to the note of seriousness he regarded as desirable--nonsense
having failed--he was silent for an unusual minute, to let the night
sink in: the broad stillness of the sea below the high road, with the
moon cutting its silver lane across it; Naples curving round the water's
edge, a great cluster of sparkling jewels; far off across the bay the
red glowing column above Vesuvius, that flared and darkened and flared
again. To the persistent tinkle of the mandolins below a tenor voice
sang 'Addio, bella Napoli!'
Tommy, having given the impression its chance of absorption, inquired:
'Do you like it?'
She turned to him a little absently, and the glow across the water
seemed to strike high-lights in her eyes.
'What?'
He swept his hand towards it.
'Naples--all that.'
'Yes.' She had a faculty of conveying all she meant by a simple
affirmative or negative; it is, if one comes to think of it, a habit
rather rare; most people supplement or qualify or explain. She added:
'The little of it I see. It's not much.'
Tommy enlarged; he would force personality into it.
'It's not my Naples. Mine is different.'
She assented, 'I know,' and he realized with triumph that she had
accepted the personal element; she had hitherto always passed it blankly
by.
'My Naples,' she said, 'isn't human; it's colour, and light and shadow,
and the way the streets go--cut like deep gorges and climbing up--you
know? I'm getting to know that a little. But that's Naples in one sense
only--one meaning. The people who live in it I don't know.'
'You don't want to know them, do you?'
Having found the personal tack for once, Tommy adhered to it.
'Well----'
Her considering silence seemed to discriminate delicately between the
various types of 'the people who live in it.' It seemed that one might
want to know some and not others.
'You don't care about knowing people, only things,' Tommy told her.
She accepted it in silence. Discrimination between 'people' would
hardly, in the circumstances, have been courteous. Her next remark was a
swerve, as usual, to 'things.'
'Oh, look there!... Some one told me it hadn't been so excited for
years. I wonder if it means anything by it.'
Tommy left the achievement of further intimacy for another occasion. He
meant to carry it through. That was a few days before he had 'helped her
to look for her cousin all over the place.' During that search he had
found her a little abstracted; she had not appeared to be listening to
him much. Her habit of attending to him with a small portion of her mind
only, if that, did not baulk him; it pricked him to renewed effort. The
element of deliberateness in it passed, as so much passed, over his
head.
But he partially caught it--he hardly could have missed it--on one
occasion. That was on the first day of March. The steady strokes of the
rain lashed the city, beginning with swift unexpectedness; the
Crevequers, coming home from lunch, found Prudence Varley and Miranda at
their door, delivering a note. They both looked very wet. The
Crevequers, mournfully looking from under their large and disreputable
umbrella--of all things they hated rain--felt an immense pity, a pity
that would have seemed to Prudence disproportionate; she was used to
present to the elements a tranquil inattention, and rather liked rain
than not. Miranda, too, was of hard fibre; both, anyhow, were used to
England. The Crevequers, from under the umbrella (they more than ever
resembled Tweedledum and Tweedledee) said (in turns):
'Come up with us till it stops'--'You mustn't get any wetter just
now'--'Or you'll be too wet'--'The only safe way is to get dry'--'In
between'--'At the stove'--'We're so dull'--'We've no one to talk to; do
come'--'Oh, but do'--'Well, anyhow, take the umbrella'--'We shan't want
it; we never go out in the wet'--'We should hate to.'
The entirety of the failure of it all had pathos. Significance seemed to
be suddenly brought by that failure into the fact that while three
members of the Venables family had long been familiar with the room at
the top of the pinkish house, the fourth had never set foot on the
lowest of the stone stairs.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee went up to their room in silence.
It was then that the room seemed newly to become an impression to them;
it was as if it had broken through barriers and suddenly pierced their
senses. Their melancholy eyes took it in--a certain tawdriness it had,
the litter of things incongruous: on the table a scattered pack of dingy
cards; bottles and glasses, unwashed from last night, making red sticky
circles on _Marchese Peppino_; everywhere was _Marchese Peppino_: one
could not escape from it. From the half-painted, absurd ceiling to the
stone floor stale air brooded, breathing of smoke and wine.
Betty thought suddenly of cold, rarefied air, with a faint smell of
paint, and winter sunshine striking in through open windows.
Tommy said an odd thing, a thing it is possible he had never said
before.
'W-what a beastly mess!'
Then he shoved a space for himself on the table, among glasses and
papers, and began to make pictures for _Marchese Peppino_.
It was about this time, early in March, that the Crevequers took to
quarrelling. It was a thing not usual with them, because they liked, of
all things, a pleasant harmony. Rows, as they observed, made them feel
ill. But at this time they developed a new touchiness; possibly Lent was
partly accountable. Tommy wrangled with his editor, disputed truculently
with the good-tempered Luli, assumed a mien of impertinent defiance
towards his more urgent creditors, and snapped at Betty, who snapped
back, and then they would stammer rude and unpleasant comments on each
other for a minute or two--it took them longer to quarrel than it takes
people who can fling their remarks unhaltingly straight from the
lips--until one or other was ashamed and said:
'D-dry up.'
They quarrelled once about _Marchese Peppino_. Betty referred to it to
Warren Venables, who, as usual, did not pursue the subject with
enthusiasm. When Venables had left them, Tommy, sitting on the table
with his hands in his pockets, looked down at his sister rather moodily.
'Wish you'd let my shop alone, Betty. Venables doesn't care a hang about
it--can't you see?'
The surprise in Betty's melancholy eyes testified to the rarity of the
ill-tempered tone; particularly it was rare from one of them to the
other.
'Well--what does it matter, though?'
Tommy was frowning.
'It does. It bores him to hear about it. It doesn't amuse him; he
doesn't think it's funny--and it's not particularly--and w-what's the
good of making bores of ourselves?'
Betty regarded him thoughtfully.
'I don't think he's so easily bored as all that, you know.'
Tommy remained gloomy.
A curious element had come, just of late, into his relations with
Venables--the element of embarrassment. How it began he could not have
said, nor whence it sprang. It was unfortunate, as they saw so extremely
much of Venables. More and more Tommy left him to Betty, refusing to
make a third in their expeditions and amusements. Yet he liked Venables;
he liked him as much as he had liked him at first, when the meeting face
to face had carried him back curiously to the old days of school
hero-worship. Now, for the last few weeks, he had become growingly
silent in his presence; the difficulty of conversation made him rather
angry; it was a difficulty he was unused to, and he could not account
for it. It oppressed him, too, now, in Miss Varley's presence; the
achievement of intimacy did not progress. Tommy supposed it might have
something to do with Lent; Lent often affected one's spirits
unfavourably. Life in general, in fact, was rather a bore. Tommy told
Betty so.
'I'm tired of being overworked,' he remarked. 'I wish I wasn't a
newspaper man. I wish I wrote novels, like Mrs. Venables. Let's write a
novel, Betty. I wish I had a motor-car to play with, like Venables. I
wish we were older, Betty--old enough to go home to Santa Caterina and
live in peace on our hard-won earnings. Let's chuck it and go. We've got
enough, if we leave our debts behind us, and eat like moderate
Christians, and are out of reach of shops. What's the good of fooling
here, and never having enough to live on, and--and----'
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.