BROKEN BARRIERS
'The barriers break; life opens all about us;
The faces grown so long familiar are become as words,
Each one with infinite meanings, a new world.'
HENRY BINNS.
It was hard to deny Mrs. Venables entrance; her intimacy was so
all-reaching. The Crevequers did not see how it was to be done. Betty
almost reached the conclusion that it could not be done, and echoed
Tommy's question, 'How much longer are they going to be in Naples?' In
ignorance of the answer to that, the Crevequers built meanwhile their
flimsy, pitiful wall, piling for bricks excuse upon excuse, lie upon
lie.
Over the wall Mrs. Venables swept like a wave of the sea. She saw
nothing; but, whatever she had seen, she would not have been deterred,
but the more impelled. When she did see--if ever she saw--it would be an
impression of the first order, most immensely striking.
What she at present saw was that the Crevequers had become unsociable;
three weeks had been enough to throw them so entirely back upon their
old friends and their old amusements that the new friends, with their
atmosphere so widely different, had slid to a great distance, and were
not welcomed.
'Atmosphere counts for a good deal. We have not, perhaps, made allowance
enough for the strain--for it is a strain--of stepping out of one
atmosphere into another. It takes time.'
Prudence Varley said:
'Only, when you don't step out at all, but carry your own atmosphere
about with you, the strain is less. The Crevequers have always seemed,
anyhow, to bear up under it.'
Since the Crevequers, finding the strain too great, refused to come to
the atmosphere, the atmosphere came to them. It was carried by Mrs.
Venables and Miranda; it spread itself over the sitting-room while Mrs.
Venables talked. Mrs. Venables wanted another social evening in the
Vicolo Fiori.
'Yes,' said Betty. 'I'll l-let people know.' (She was stammering
horribly to-day.) 'But--but I'm afraid I shall be busy myself.'
Since the evening had not been specified, this was rather too manifestly
a brick in the wall. Mrs. Venables pointed it out, with 'Every night, my
dear?' and a lift of the brows.
Betty held to it.
'And--and every day as well. We're very busy just now, Tommy and I.'
They had become bored with the new atmosphere; they wanted to throw it
wholly off, and be left in peace with their less reputable friends; this
Mrs. Venables deduced, with displeasure now rising.
'I think,' she said, 'that it is to be regretted--very much to be
regretted.'
Her tone dragged in to be regretted so very much more than the mere
fact--the only one offered her--of the Crevequers' excess of occupation,
that Betty's dark brows flickered nervously, resentfully, as if she
feared something.
Miranda's round eyes beamed with sympathy. The desire to avoid another
social evening with the very poor was wholly within the sphere of her
comprehension.
'It's a rotten game; I hate it,' she observed.
Mrs. Venables spoke to her quite sharply for once on the subject of
limitations of interest and ungracefulness of speech. Miranda, indeed,
was a little in the way at the moment; she made intimate approach
difficult.
Then Tommy came in, with Luli clinging to his arm. Both were so
dishevelled, so flushed, so hilarious, that only one supposition was
tenable. Mrs. Venables held it, and her eyes grew still more inclusive
in their regret. She did not realize that it took really very little to
excite the Crevequers and Luli.
Again Miranda was in the way. Betty realized it, looking, with the
acquirements of her three weeks' retrospect in her pondering eyes, from
one to another. It was not suitable that Miranda should be there. Betty,
with the realization, achieved a fuller comprehension of the suitable
than Mrs. Venables possessed; the thought amused her. Mrs. Venables
caught the half-smile flickering to her eyes.
'The gulf of mirth,' she observed afterwards, 'is wider than the gulf of
tears. One doubts if there is any bridge across it.'
The regret deepened in her eyes.
When Mrs. Venables had gone, and when Luli (much later) had gone also,
Tommy said:
'What rot, Betty. What can we do to stop it?'
'Very little,' said Betty.
'It's such a bore,' Tommy explained. (They had not accepted the fact
that their attitude towards the Venables could stand by itself,
unexplained by one to the other. Unnecessarily, absurdly, each for the
other's education piled bricks on the wall, with 'I'm busy,' or 'I'm
bored.')
Tommy jingled the coins in his pockets, and whistled sombrely through
his teeth.
'Venables been?' he said presently.
Betty's nod merely admitted the fact, without supplement or
amplification. Nor did she state the exact number of times that Venables
had 'been' during the past few days.
It seemed that they had now all been--all except Prudence Varley. The
inadequacy of the wall was manifest; it kept out nothing.
Tommy, catching as he looked up a certain pinched look about Betty's
lips, a strain of brows and forehead, a heaviness of lids, speculated
again as to the extent of her realization of the things which a girl
could not do; speculated also as to what, in the circumstances, would be
one's attitude towards Warren Venables. He deduced resentment, and a
desire for subsequent aloofness--a desire which might, perhaps, find
itself at combat with other things.... Such a combat would hardly be
pleasant; it would not conduce to restful nights. Betty did not look as
if her nights were restful.
So much, in a moment snatched from egoism, the boy saw of the girl--saw
uncertainly, with doubting divination, then returned upon himself, and,
to flee from that, said:
'Come out. We'll get hold of somebody and come up to Vomero. I want a
lark.'
The girl saw on the whole, perhaps, more of the boy. She saw, with tired
compassion, a good deal of him. She saw how he shunned things (the
facing of them had been forced on her, but not on him), yet how he too
would probably face them eventually. When he had faced them, they would
stand at the same point again; now she stood a little ahead. For she had
faced things; there had been no shunning allowed to her. She faced them
every day; she wondered in how many days she would be allowed to step
on and turn her back upon them. If it was to be very many, what Mrs.
Venables called the 'strain' might become rather oppressive.
As it happened, Tommy caught up Betty the next day, suddenly, and wholly
unexpectedly to himself. He lunched with a friend on the Vomero;
afterwards, being left by himself, he strolled through San Martino and
came out on the belvedere. Prudence Varley was there, sketching. The
leisureliness of her greeting seemed to take him for granted, to
relegate him, almost, to part of the scenery. He speculated momentarily
on the change in his own attitude towards this abstraction; how it had
been to him once the absent remoteness of one interested mainly in
things; how it was to him now the remoteness, not absent, but very
deliberate, of one whose realization of and discrimination between
'sorts of people' was quite complete. It certainly might well have been
clear to him from the first; there seemed no obscurity in it.
And here again they were together, looking over the spread of Naples.
Before, he had swept his hand towards it and said, 'Do you like it?'
He had been pleased on that evening by what he had considered an
advance, however slight, in the achievement of intimacy. He had
flattered himself that she was slowly unbarring the gates. Once or
twice, after that evening, he had, he had thought, induced the removal
of a few more bars.
Now, standing outside the shut gates, having realized of what they were
built, he flushed slowly to his forehead.
And then, even as he turned away, the old desire swept over him,
ironically new in form. He would not batter at the gates again; that was
done with. But he must, it was borne in upon him, show that he moved no
more in the old mists of crass ignorance, show that he knew, even as she
did, of the gates, their nature and their inexorability. That she should
continue to think that he knew nothing was not to be borne.
So, turning, he checked himself, and stood still a little behind her,
and looked down over the great tinted city circling the blue bay--her
Naples, 'colour and light and shadow, and the way the streets go, cut
like deep gorges, and climbing up.'
Looking over it, Tommy said, with surprising abruptness:
'You said once--or I said--that your Naples was different from mine.'
She glanced round at him for a moment, with her usual unadorned 'Yes.'
'And I didn't know then,' he went on, 'how much it was true. I think you
perhaps knew I didn't know it. And now I should like you to know that I
have learnt that much; that I'm not quite--not quite a b-blind ass. I
know more or less how we stand--how we must always stand. That's all. I
wanted you to know that I see them--all the things ... the things you've
seen all along.... I wanted you to know.... Oh, there's nothing you can
say....'
Thus the melancholy, stammering flow, till it, as usual, choked itself
and died.
She heard it out in silence--as always. This silent hearing was the
carrying out of what had from the first constituted their intercourse.
For always he had talked and she had heard; Betty had once quite failed
to accept Tommy's assertion that it was ever 'the other way round.' But
the silence seemed now to hold a new element--the element of
receptiveness. She listened wholly, swerving from nothing. It seemed
that here was his triumph, long striven for; he had sounded the personal
note and she had accepted it; in a manner, he had broken through the
gates.
When the stammered flow broke, she continued the silence for a little.
Then she assented to his last phrase, saying, very gently:
'No--I can't say anything. There is nothing to say.'
The sad, judicial candour of it set the seal on the position. If he had
still wildly, faintly hoped that she had not, perhaps, seen so utterly
'how they stood, how they must always stand,' that hope died then. He
had divined so much correctly; there might even, perhaps, be more of
it, that it would take some years yet to divine.
The glow of the coloured city made his eyes ache as he looked.
He said again, what seemed to be the final expression of the situation
between them, this time altering the pronoun:
'There is nothing I can say.'
All he might have said, all he now knew that he would have said, had
they stood differently in each other's eyes, all that it would have
been, as they did stand, an insolence to say, seemed to lie in the
silence between them. Since she was (now) so receptive, she possibly
took it in, or a little of it. But 'there is nothing to say' finally
summed the situation.
Tommy stammered 'Good-bye,' and went.
The Crevequers had supper at home and alone together that evening. Over
it Tommy said nothing at all, and Betty talked without a break for the
edification of the two of them. After supper Tommy lit a pipe and began
to work at some sketches. Betty, in the other arm-chair, counted pence
in a money-box for the week's rent.
'It would be too much to expect that it should be right, of course,' she
murmured, 'But w-why it should be eighty centesimi out, I can't
understand.'
Then she looked up and met Tommy's eyes. All his sharp hurt was in them;
they were heavy with a bitter, dumb hopelessness. If she had known it,
her own eyes looked with the same heaviness, the same sharp hurt. The
Crevequers were absurdly like each other just now.
'Eighty out,' Betty repeated, looking away from that other hurt. 'I
can't--I can't understand----'
Unexpectedly, her voice broke on the words. Tears took her; she leaned
her forehead on her hand. She was horribly tired of talking; she had
talked all day--talked nonsense, stammering over it. She could not talk
any more; the end of a tether often comes quite suddenly so.
Tommy looked at her gloomily, under his brows. Betty never cried; tears
no more belonged to her than to him. When they had been children, one
had hardly ever cried without the other. Tommy looked at Betty's tears
now, speculating on her 'mental standpoint,' and on how far she divined
his.
'What's wrong?' he asked. 'Anything ... I can do...?'
If it was merely the mental standpoint, he knew that she would not word
it; so he exposed himself to her answer, unafraid. They had never failed
each other by betraying such trust. The completeness of his trust
enabled one to watch the other's tears without wincing.
'N-nothing,' said Betty, and her voice, in its weariness, caught upon a
laugh, while her eyes were still wet. 'Only--only I think I've been
talking too much to-day--and that's so tiring.' (It would seem that the
Crevequers must lead an exhausting life.) 'And I met the baby Venables
sitting outside a church, and it talked about beagling; you run after a
hare till you catch it--did you know? It's so jolly. Thinking of that
made me feel tired, I expect. And have you been stealing eighty out of
the rent? Because I haven't.'
She was counting the pence again, laying them in precarious piles on the
arm of her chair.
Tommy had gone to the window, and stood looking out into the soft
darkness and the noisy street below, his hands in his pockets.
Those tears had somehow a little loosed his speech.
'The beastly thing,' he said drearily, 'is how everything is such a
bore, and how it will go on always, just like this.'
Betty did not need him to tell her that that was a bad thing--one of
them, but not the chief. She said:
'I know.'
'No; but you can't quite know,' Tommy told her, 'because--because for
you it's rather different.'
The quick movement of Betty's hand sent the pence scattering on to the
floor, ringing on the bare stone.
'There'll be more than eighty out now,' she said. 'And it's not
different; it's quite the same.'
Tommy turned and faced her, pondering, looking at her from under gloomy
brows, seeing how she had sunk her chin on to one clenched hand, and was
looking down at the pennies on the floor sombrely. He was speculating on
her position, how it could be quite the same. She elucidated it a little
with, 'It's what one can take that counts ... nothing else.... So it's
quite the same.'
Tommy thought it over, and said, 'I see.'
Yet it seemed to him that what one had been offered might also, in the
long run, count a little--anyhow, in the retrospect.
Such an amount seemed to have been now admitted between them that Betty
could say, 'We're down on our luck, you and I.... Tommy, I'm horribly
sorry.'
The last was pity, and he took it from her now without wincing; that it
was 'quite the same' for both of them made it a simple thing to give
and take. He gave his in return, gently, now that her position had thus
emerged to him.
'I'm sorry, too,' he said.
So their affection for each other put out reaching, groping fingers
through the glooming mists of pain that blinded each. As yet that touch
could not heal: but it seemed to wait its hour.
Tommy returned to his drawing. Betty sought for and gathered up the
coins from the stone floor. Their copper jingling seemed to ring in her
soul dully. The beastly thing--to use Tommy's phrase--was that one must
oneself throw one's bright metal away. Though it might burn to the
touch, the flinging of it away was a wrenching that hurt more. Betty
envied Tommy, with the bitterness of his down-bent face before her; her
bitterness must of necessity be the deeper, because her bright metal had
been laid in her hands, to keep if she would. Also, to throw it away had
bruised and hurt not her alone....
Betty's thin, scarred hand covered her lips, steadying them.
'We shall be better soon,' she said to herself. 'We'll play in the
streets and smell the sea ... and summer's coming.... We shall be better
soon.'
Then she sought a narcotic in literature, and got from the shelf a book
of poetry and began to read:
'When you are out alone I hope
You will not meet the antelope....'
The Crevequers used often to cheer themselves with that book when they
were in low spirits. But to-night it did not seem efficacious. Betty
supposed she knew it too well; she could think as she read, which was
not desirable. So she turned to fiction, and read 'Sea Urchins.'
The church clocks struck ten. Tommy, holding his sketch from him, said,
'How damned bad!' and tore it abruptly in two, muttering, 'Muzzi would
if I didn't.' Then he got up and said, 'It's stifling in here. I shall
go out.'
He went out.
Betty, her hand over her shaking lips, muttered, 'Poor Tommy--oh, poor
Tommy! We've no luck at all, he and I.'
She was aware how he must have faced things, and how once more they
stood at the same point.