RETROSPECT WITH THE SEARCH-LIGHT
'D'autres jours ouvriront les portes,
La foret garde les verrous,
La foret brule autour de nous,
C'est la clarte des feuilles mortes,
Qui brulent sur le seuil des portes....'
MAETERLINCK.
At the end of the first week in March the Venables went to Sicily; they
would stay there, probably, for the rest of the month.
'So for three weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at
lunch,' Tommy remarked, on the evening after they had gone. 'Pity, isn't
it? I loved those lunches.'
Betty nodded. She was feeling horribly flat. They both, that first
evening, felt horribly flat. By the measure of their flatness they might
have gauged the late immensity of their interest; there was revelation
in it. To shake it off they went to their favourite gambling-place, and
lost some money, and talked to some friends, and in general raised their
spirits.
Something of this convivial nature they did every evening for a week.
Then they stopped. Inexplicably, it was becoming boring. On the first
night it had cheered them; on the second and third they had shut their
eyes to the fact that they were bored; the other nights had been,
growingly, of the nature of a fight against something--they could not
have said what. It was something which seemed to grow, slowly, vaguely,
yet with an irresistible sureness.
It is not during constant intercourse and association that influence
gives birth to new comprehension. These fill the foreground; they loom
too large in present interest to allow of a penetrating vision. The
vision, the perception, the discernment, growing from vague abstractions
to poignancy, come later, growing very slowly from seeds sown
unnoticed. From the carelessly received seeds the plant pushes its
gradual, painful way upwards, breaking the earth to make a place for
itself, growing, perhaps, to be a tree, striking and spreading roots all
through the upheaved soil.
So it began to be with the Crevequers. Absence and time began now their
inevitable work. Atmosphere, doubtless at the time absorbed, but
unconsciously, now sent its message from system to brain. Retrospect
meant the slow beginnings of perception; therefore they fought against
retrospect. What at the time had passed them serenely by, came back to
memory in strange new lights. What at the time had been bewildering, put
on, day by day, robes of increasingly translucent clearness. What at the
time they had known, unheeding and uncaring, assumed a vividness quite
new. With the accidentals of intercourse no longer overlaying, wrapping
up and entangling the issues, these pushed a slow way out, and emerged
at last, standing forth unconfused and unadorned, bald in their lucid
simplicity.
Through the slow days and long nights retrospect gave birth thus to a
glimmering perception; perception, its gropings not to be checked, to
comprehension.
In the Crevequers' eyes the melancholy pondering grew more noticeable
than before. Their brows sometimes drew together suddenly, as if, in the
straying of their thoughts, they had lit upon something they did not
like.
Of the Venables they spoke to each other less day by day. Each did not
know how it fared with the other; each hardly knew how it fared with
himself. It was well, perhaps, that during much of the day they had
plenty to do. But there were the evenings. It was certainly a pity that
they had begun to find convivial evenings so little amusing to them.
Except when their friends came to see them they sat alone together.
After a little while, when retrospect had taken them some way, they
would often, by reading or talking, try to keep it at bay. But it was,
at best, only a question of deferring; there remained always the nights.
It was in the nights, of course, that retrospect most tyrannically had
its way. The masterless nights are escaped steeds run loose for
anybody's annexing. Retrospect annexed them, and rode them hard. In the
nights, at all events, there is no confusing of issues, no foreground to
obscure the vision.
It took a succession of nights and days for perception to reach full
stature. Each, lying awake, or sitting together through the evenings
while Tommy drew pictures for _Marchese Peppino_, caught new aspects of
the things which moved in progression through their memory.
It seemed that each of the Venables family, marching through memory,
flung at the Crevequers something which retrospect could turn into a
ball for its game.
From Miranda Betty collected guileless remarks in inverted commas (some
of the inverted commas Miranda had supplied, some Betty filled in now)
as to 'different sorts of people,' and how each sort had its own
conventions and its own resorts. Plaints, also, about liberty of
association tampered with--Miranda was a veritable garden for such
flowers. There was also that day at the Trattoria Buonaventura, with
Warren Venables standing at the door, impassive, observing, unable to
linger because his mother was anxious....
Then, in the procession, marched Mrs. Venables. Mrs. Venables had one
day sloughed a self. She had not liked doing so; it was a self she
valued; her most natural self, also--the aesthetic self, so easily and so
deeply struck. From this self she had reluctantly emerged temporarily to
stand forth a reputable, conventional Philistine--more, a maternal
Philistine, of all creatures the most _bornee_. Driven by circumstances,
she had talked to Betty Crevequer on the subject of friendship, its uses
and abuses. A certain impersonal detachment she had used, choosing her
words with careful discretion, to throw as much veil as might be over
the maternal Philistinism. She had not wanted to hurt Betty, nor had she
at all wanted that Betty should in her mind call her _bornee_. She
might have been relieved to know that this was a word only in the
Crevequers' vocabulary as culled second-hand from herself, and stored in
the same carefully treasured category with 'standpoint' and 'forceful.'
Not knowing this, she had really shown some self-sacrifice in taking her
risks. To minimize them she had laid stress on the purely aesthetic
protests that her taste made, leaving propriety aside. A certain
refinement she herself exacted from those whom she selected for
companionship--she began quite a long way off, in her anxiety for
impersonal detachment; how should Betty have grasped it?--and she would
have others exact it too. If youth is to lower the value of the precious
jewel, its friendship, bringing it down to common--very common--earth,
youth will inevitably be the poorer. There is, after all, something in
the belief so widely current about touching pitch.... To lounge about
the streets--to be exact, outside the doors of a theatre--at midnight,
in company with people of the stamp of Betty's companions of last
night----
'Gina?' Betty had wondered. 'And Luli? But----'
The mournful pondering of her eyes was rather inscrutable. It might
possibly refer to the Achievement of Intimate Contact, which must Shun
Nothing.
Mrs. Venables had suddenly at this point dropped the artist self to her
feet, and risen out of it for a moment entirely, becoming purely the
reputable, conventional, disapproving mother. She had said a most
_borne_ thing.
'It looked very strange last night. The Essingtons--the friends I was
with--did not know what to think.'
The allusion, with that, had seemed to her to have attained enough
personality to be safely left. The kernel of the matter, which, wrapped
up delicately in aesthetic abstractions, was, 'My son must not do that
sort of thing,' had been, in the speaker's eyes, almost too manifestly
reached. Mrs. Venables had meandered away among the wrappings. It might
have been necessary, but the consciousness of having said that anything
'looked very strange' had oppressed her. It had really been
uncharacteristic. The phrase, of such an immeasurable depth of
crudeness, must have been somewhere innate in her, passed down from a
long line of reputable ancestors, and it had leaped out without her
volition. She had endeavoured to retire from it, to wrap it up.
It was perhaps unfortunate for her that at the time she had quite
succeeded. Or, rather, the kernel of the thing, so extremely plain to
Mrs. Venables, had not been reached by Betty at all. She had been
willing to admit that to lounge in the streets so late had, perhaps,
looked strange. It was an admission very simple, and not at all galling.
Against the use of the word 'pitch' to describe Gina Lunelli and Luli
(she had quite missed any ambiguity there might be in its use, and had
accepted, naturally, the assumption, put forward on the surface, that
Tommy and she were the touchers, who might be defiled) she had
protested:
'You see, we're all quite the same sort of people--Tommy and I and they.
There's no difference. You can't--you can't separate us.'
Retrospect remarked that Mrs. Venables had not really, with any great
determination, tried to do so.
Yet even then Betty's words had seemed to imply that she had begun,
however vaguely, to discriminate between one 'sort of person' and
another. Retrospect now completed that discrimination. Retrospect gave
her, in plain language, the kernel, so carefully wrapped up, which Mrs.
Venables had thought she could scarcely have missed. It was laid now in
her hands for her to look at; she looked at it, missing nothing.
Retrospect pushed Mrs. Venables aside, having quite elucidated her, and
showed in turn Warren. It painted him outside the theatre, in a
difficult position--the Essingtons and his mother on one side of the
picture, Gina and Luli and Betty Crevequer on the other. The picture was
not without its instructiveness. In an awkward position Warren had
relied, with the careless confidence his cousin termed insolent, on the
obtuseness which saw nothing. His confidence was justified; the
obtuseness had still seen nothing. He had not, probably, taken
retrospect into account, or he might have adopted another course; he
might either have turned his back on the Essingtons and his mother, or
even--but this would hardly have been feasible--have introduced his
companions into their company. In the course he did take, the Essingtons
thought he showed good taste and a proper sense of the fitness of
things.
Gina and Luli and Betty were no authorities on taste or the fitness of
things.
Warren was everywhere; retrospect, exploiting him, never came to an end.
It was strange, it was marvellous, how it was possible to miss
things--things that so stared one in the face. Yet, how should one have
known? There was no reason why one should know now; only the slow
pervasion of atmosphere, that enabled one to look at things with such
strangely new eyes, the eyes, doubtless, of others, with the added
illumination of the subjective standpoint. This illumination shed its
fiery light, growing from glimmer to flame through the masterless
nights, upon the things Warren had said and done, the things they had
done together, the things he would not have suggested, not contemplated
even in thought, if he had regarded her as one of his own 'sort of
people,' sharing his conventions. Who should blame him? He had been
adequately justified; she had shown herself from the very outset--he had
no doubt waited to be sure of it, so as not to risk insult--of a sort of
people immeasurably different: so different that she had not even
grasped the difference, had only not been surprised at hints of it
because they had passed her so serenely by. They had passed clear over
her head; dragged back through space by retrospect, they struck her full
in the face.
She saw, in the blinding light of an illuminative moment, Warren's
attitude towards a girl placed by him among his own 'sort of people';
she saw him brushing aside, lest they should touch and smirch her, the
Ginas, the Morellos, the Lulis, who might have crossed her path; she saw
his considerate respect, his equal comradeship.
She had given him no chance of respecting her, had he tried to do so.
The things crowded back.... On the evening after the first lunch-party
he had met her in the street alone at midnight. He had walked home with
her; she read into his manner now a touch of the protective regard that
she imagined in him towards his own sort. But it had been tinged with
uncertainty; even then he had probably known her. Not to risk misjudging
her, however, he had walked with her to her home, assuming, doubtfully,
that she had lost her escort.
It had not taken many days to confirm the doubt, to obviate all
necessity for such assumption.
And then--how they had played together! Each had been so contented with
the other; they had had such fun. Retrospect with the search-light could
not quite spoil that--not all of it. But it did its best; it dragged it
through the mud till it was hidden, inches deep.
Prudence Varley would have seen a flimsy screen toppling over with a
crash, revealing the lurker behind with his contemptuous smile. So Betty
too very bitterly saw him: but she was aware also that the smile was not
all contempt. Only the contempt, real or imagined, poisoned the rest.
The search-light flashed over the large, tolerant acceptance, so
unsurprised, so unremonstrating, so uncriticizing, which had at the time
missed its message. It did not miss now. She saw herself accepted, Tommy
accepted, their friends accepted; all the things they did, their ways of
life, taken easily, without surprise, with scorn lurking behind the
screen. Their unpaid debts, and eluded duns; their disreputable haunts,
their more disreputable friends, their street-loafing, their very
dress.... Even at the outset Tommy had said: 'We don't dress well
enough. I want a new hat; so do you.' So that obvious discrimination
between 'sorts of people' their elementary perceptions had made at once;
they had reached just up to that, and no higher.
The question of discrimination brought the quick question, What share of
the gift had the Venables? For there were discriminations that might be
made, between the things that the Crevequers had done, and other things
that they had not done--things from which they had been kept, perhaps,
less by any code, moral or conventional, than by the inherent force of
inherited tendency, which, strike what new and individual roads we will,
will not cease to follow us along them. The question of the
discriminating powers of the Venables Betty left. She simply did not
know.
All the time, while the search-light glared over the things that Warren
had said and done, there remained, outlined lucidly against the
background, the things that Prudence Varley had not said and not done.
She, with her tacit omissions, was the influence almost preponderating.
Her atmosphere was the most deeply absorbed--the rarefied atmosphere of
the studio. Across the gulf of months Betty met the direct, far-seeing
look, which took in all and gave out nothing. It had waited for its
interpretation till now.
With the interpretation--which was that of things held back,
reserved--Betty came to evolve a discrimination. The discrimination was
between two attitudes. Both had held back something; neither had given
unreservedly. One had held back all of friendship, offering nothing; the
other had given friendship, withholding from it an element--the element
of respect.
Retrospect made the most of both. It would have been hard to say which
it found the more effectual weapon. There were moments when Betty could
have caught at the sharp blade of one to escape the other, each was
driven in alternately. Finally, in spite of all which she would have
during these months foregone had she been taken at her word, in spite of
all that retrospect with the search-light could not wholly spoil, she
attained at times to endorsing the working principle of the entire
withholder, as it had been once phrased by her--'One should quite
withdraw.' Retrospect, on the whole, made it out a principle more
honest, more kind.
Tommy, who was every day being shown a little more how Prudence Varley
had from the beginning 'quite withdrawn,' concerned himself, not with
the honesty or the kindness of the principle, but merely with its
immediate basis.
So, coming to an understanding of its basis, he saw vividly his own
hopelessly unachieved intimacy, his attempts so driven back upon
themselves, yet gaily denying defeat, his battering at walls which had
been built--not at all, as he had supposed, of abstraction, but of
entire perception. He saw now more and more each day the impenetrability
of those walls; retrospect illumined for him the unheeding detachment,
the abrupt swerves from persons to things, so frequent because he had
been so indomitable in his return to persons, perceiving them for gates
in the impenetrable walls.
There had been times, there had been moments, when the gates had
yielded a very little; one had, as it were, got sudden glimpses through.
After all, the Crevequers had never failed, till now, to achieve any
intimacy....
The half-conscious, vague knowledge of this made the shut gates the more
significant; their barred faces were written over, large, with words.
The Crevequers, having begun to learn to read, spelt them out.
Tommy's reading was perhaps attained to with greater slowness, greater
difficulty--the fault of sex--than Betty's; but in the end the
attainment was equally complete.
To Tommy one element in the business was all-important; before it the
other elements shrivelled into nothing. But there were other elements
which at times had their turn. There was the attitude of Venables, now
realized as the basis of the embarrassment which had for some time been
oddly, inexplicably, growing into their intercourse with each other.
Wholly to absorb that attitude Tommy had to go back some years, to an
old atmosphere--an atmosphere of discriminations between the things a
man could do and the other things which he could not do. It is curious
how environment can choke an atmosphere. This, of a certain social and
moral decency, as evolved by youth in community, had been brought back
to Tommy by Venables. Venables and the atmosphere reacted on each other;
each explained the other. This was rather a question of the renewal of
old things than of new acquirements. Four years--those four years--do
not easily slip out of life. They had not slipped out of Tommy's; but it
had needed Venables to make them stand and deliver their message. They
delivered it, with whispers growing to clamour--a sordid recital of the
things which a man cannot do. From the friendly inexpressiveness of
Venables' eyes, Tommy gathered the classification 'just scum.' With a
side glance at Betty's part in the business, he admitted that there were
also, beyond doubt, the things which a girl cannot do--beyond doubt,
too, Betty had done them; but here old atmosphere did not come to his
help: his ignorance was as outer darkness. Those things were Betty's
concern. He wondered a little what she made of them, if anything. He
wondered a little also if he was angry with Venables; on the whole, it
hardly seemed logical enough to be worth while. (Betty in this matter
cut herself adrift from logic.)
Still nothing was said between them; still neither knew how it fared
with the other. They, who shared all their thoughts, kept these thoughts
locked from each other's sight.
Then, on the twenty-sixth of March, a letter was brought in to them as
they sat over supper. They knew what it would say. The Venables had
returned to Parker's--they would like to see the Crevequers at lunch the
next day. Mrs. Venables was eager to resume the Intimate Contact with
the People; she must have a talk with Betty about it.
Betty handed the note to Tommy, who was hunting in his pocket for
matches to light his pipe. He glanced at it, then tore it neatly and
with careful deliberation into strips, and folded them into lighters.
Betty watched him; when he had done, he held one over the lamp and lit
his pipe with it.
Having successfully carried out this operation, he turned to her.
'You didn't want it, did you?'
Betty shook her head. She had not wanted it at all.
Tommy got up and leaned out of the open window, his back to the room.
'I shall be busy to-morrow,' he remarked.
'So shall I,' Betty said slowly.
Tommy said presently:
'How much longer are they going to be in Naples?'
'Don't know,' said Betty, her chin in her hands. She was thinking it
over.
Tommy said suddenly, 'Oh, confound!' and explained, after a moment, 'My
pipe's gone out.'
They came thus to a perception of each other's position in the matter.
By whatever steps this position had been attained, it stood clearly
defined. Both were too busy to go to lunch at Parker's Hotel; that
emerged saliently. With no words uttered on the subject, their points of
view had marched together, side by side, immeasurable miles from the
evening, three weeks ago, when one had said to the other, 'So for three
weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at lunch. Pity, isn't
it? I loved those lunches.'
The march of the other's point of view each accepted, silently, without
surprise. The only matter for surprise would have been the march of one
without the other. For, backwards or forwards, they had always moved
side by side.