BETTY AND TOMMY
'So flesh
Conjures tempest-flails to thresh
Good from worthless. Some clear lamps
Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.'
GEORGE MEREDITH.
Through the black, slow hours Betty stared with wide unswerving eyes at
the other arm-chair. On one of its arms lay a pipe, on the other a
half-finished drawing. Between them, it was strange how Tommy sat,
drawing, with face bent down, saying nothing. His presence grew, till
the loneliness of the room was conquered. How should it be lonely? It
held, as always, a companionship of two. As always, one had only to look
up to see the other. So had all the past been; so would all the future
be. No other state was within the bounds of imagination. As Betty once,
at Baja by the sea, had looked up swiftly and seen, for life and all it
meant, all it contained, herself and Tommy on warm sand, and a
sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding, and had then
been lit by a flash of vivid insight, of great certainty; so now she
came, by slower steps, through the black night to the same realization.
For it was after all a thing always known, if unexpressed, this
companionship of two which should endure, stronger than death, surer
than the thing called love, failing nowhere. It had been from the dawn
of the days.
To the further north there lay, in sunshine, a little warm bay of blue
sea, and a Ligurian fishing-city, pink and yellow and white and green,
was set curving round it--Santa Caterina, of deep stone-paved streets,
where odours dwelt of roasting coffee, and drying fish, and cheese, and
drains, and tar, and the breath of the brown seaweed, and of the nets
that had drawn in shoals of _bianchetti_ at daybreak, and lay through
the day drying on the hot sands.
A town of people most companionable, who played a kind of croquet (it is
more amusing than ordinary croquet; you kneel in the road, and use
boards for mallets) in the piazzas, and along the dusty roads where the
white walls shaded them; who sat and talked outside the church on Sunday
mornings, while their women tied their handkerchiefs over their heads
and went in to Mass. During Mass the sweetness of the church smothered
the saltness of the sea, but when the church-goers came out again into
the hot piazza the sea's breath caught theirs, stealing up to meet them,
calling most insistently, through deep little arches, that framed blue
glimpses like pictures in a row. Going down on to the shore--it lay just
outside the stone streets--one saw how, from the point of Savona in the
west, across to the white gleaming of Genoa, the city of ships, all the
blue bay stretched. Down by the tideless still edge of it a white canoe
with a red stripe waited--a canoe for two (but it held five quite
nicely, if some one sat astride on each end, so that its owners, being
sociably inclined, sometimes took parties of friends).
In the canoe the owners came to Mass, from their house at the very end
of the long town, well outside the stone streets, with a stretch of
white dusty road to be traversed, unless they took the sea-way. Paddling
back across the bay, the canoe landed beneath a little square, dark red
house, with green shutters and a wide veranda and a small sweet-smelling
garden of close-crowded flowers--roses and tall lilies and evening
primroses; and for the trees, oranges and lemons, pomegranates, and
fragrant eucalyptus, and fluttering bamboos, with vine trellises
overhead. The house stood literally on the seashore, so that when the
waves were high they came in through the green iron bars of the gate and
washed the growing things with brine. On one memorable occasion they
flowed in through the basement windows; the exultant household then went
downstairs and floated about on tubs.
Inside, the house was artistic, in an unconventional way of its own; its
owner had been called an eccentric of genius. He had been a lovable
person, wrapped in his own thoughts and his own work, giving his
children most of the things it occurred to them to demand, spoiling them
entirely, and leaving them for the rest to shift for themselves, which
they did, with infinite enjoyment, on the sea and on the hills, and
chiefly in the companionable streets of the town, where they played in
the piazza and talked in the _farmacia_, and loved many friends, and
learnt the art of how to be happy though doing nothing.
No one inquired after their movements, except on occasional mornings
when it occurred to the master of the house that he would teach them
something. Even then they had all the hot afternoons and long, still
evenings for their own, with a warm, happy, gay world to play in, with
rocks half a mile up the shore, where the white canoe paddled about and
turned over suddenly in the warm water (one then navigated it upside
down, which was quite as agreeable), with the cheerful town waiting
always; and just behind the house steep hills of silver olive-gardens,
walling the bay from the trans-Apennine winds.
Climbing the stony paths that led straight up from the stone streets of
the town, one passed through gardens of oranges and sweet-smelling
lemons and long vineyards, and above the grey olive terraces and
chestnut woods, to the place of rocks and dark cypresses and green
stone-pines. Up there was a little lake of deep green water, with red
pine-bark lying in heaps by the edge, so that one made boats and raced
them across.
Thus, however much the Crevequers enjoyed the kind, gay and amusing
world--and they enjoyed it, as a rule, tremendously--they were always
aware that there was a better place waiting for them. Some day they
meant to go back there for good, in the days of repose that age should
bring them, and live together in the house beyond the long town (it
belonged to them; they had little other heritage), and cross the bay in
the canoe with the red stripe, that lay in the basement now and horribly
needed caulking, and land on the beach below the little city, and go up
to Mass in Sant' Ambrogio, and afterwards play games in the piazza and
sit outside the _parrucchiere's_ in the sun.
They had left Santa Caterina ten years ago; a sudden pricking of duty
had come to the hermit of the red house; his obedience to it had, as
Mrs. Venables said, cost him his life shortly afterwards.
Three most forlorn things Betty had in her memory, following on each
other: the leaving of Santa Caterina, Tommy's going away to school, and
the death, a year later, of the careless, indulgent eccentric. At the
first and last she and Tommy had wept together pitifully; at the middle
tragedy of the three the iron had entered into her soul, too deep for
tears. It had mattered infinitely most.
But there had been, through those four years, the holidays--holidays
mostly spent in an untrammelled and lawless liberty in London, with a
light-hearted and irresponsible old Irish gentleman, their grandfather.
It was in those days that they learnt to love the glamour of a great
city. London they had known, as they now knew Naples, with a vagabond
intimacy for the most part denied to the children of their class. The
gamin strain that seemed innate in their blood was developed and
strengthened thus.
Part of these years had been spent with a family of cousins in a country
vicarage. The memory of this portion of their career still lay like a
heavy load on the Crevequers' consciousness. The atmosphere--an
atmosphere, one would think, of fairly ordinary respectability--had not
till then come their way. They stifled under it. No one in the household
but themselves was in the least degree foolish, and they, being frankly
babyish, and quite disreputable in their tastes, were more than ever
driven to one another, facing the rest of the world hand-in-hand,
hopelessly recognizing the impossibility of explanations, hopelessly
failing to arrive at any perception of the civilized and usual code. It
was to them merely an oppression, but from the oppression each had the
other to fall back upon, and they were content. But, notwithstanding
the smothering weight of civilization, they had always, even in those
days, got on extremely amicably with the world in general. The failure
to achieve friendship had not entered into their view of life as it was
lived by them. That was a thing they had had to learn later, and at
first with blank non-comprehension.
The little of decency that had in these days penetrated into them--no
one can quite escape the impress of the educative years--had during
their life in Naples slipped quite out of sight. In Naples they had
entered into a feckless, laughing world, where they had lived from hand
to mouth, and made friends in every street, and 'drifted about the
bottom.' So drifting, they had been still together. For that reason
everything had so greatly amused them; jests coming their way had, in
passing from the eyes of one to the eyes of the other, acquired an
overpowering humour; the world had been a merry playroom for two. Any
friend made by one of them had been introduced, as a matter of course,
into a three-cornered party; no other way could ever have occurred to
either.
And now, out of life the crucible, immutable values seemed to evolve
themselves. That story which Tommy had found so tedious on the beach at
Baja had been fulfilling itself of late. Life had truly proved a
furnace, whose pitiless flames melted one's bright metal and horribly
burnt one's hands.
Those who in the end emerged from that furnace would certainly know
their metal for what it was. Betty, still in the flames, could look
ahead: she saw with increasing clearness the result of that testing and
the gold that would remain--gold that could not, by any alchemy of newly
acquired knowledge, be proved base.
But if one lost that gold, then life--the essential interpretation of
it--would end there. It were better that the name of it--the poor
kernelless shell--should be swiftly crushed too. It would, no doubt,
find itself crushed somehow before long, because no continuance of it
was in the least degree imaginable. One cannot separate two lives so
tied together.
So, through the slow hours, life resolved itself into certainties, that
rose like sharp rocks out of the mists of doubt. With their increasing
clearness of outline, the emptiness of the other arm-chair became a
jarring outrage; it was as if, to one who has learnt to say, 'This one
thing matters, this one thing I must have,' the curt reply is flung,
'This one thing for the present you must go lacking.' The solitude
became an offence, insupportable, oppressive.
Betty horribly wanted Tommy; it seemed that she had never wanted
anything else, so the slow hours had stretched.
Between two and three the city shook with a stronger motion, more
violent and prolonged. In the streets buildings must surely be
falling.... Betty went out to see.
Others, too, had gone out, fleeing from the danger of roofs and walls,
or merely seeking companionship in blind fear. The streets were
thronged; the churches were full of praying and crying. The
_carabinieri_ and the _guardie municipali_ kept order as best they could
among a crowd on the verge of hysteria. Here and there trooped in file
homeless peasants from the ruined villages, their possessions bound on
their backs or the backs of their beasts. From the comments tossed about
one might infer this disaster to be probably the work of the good God or
of the Evil One, or merely the spontaneous freakish rage of the
eternally cursed mountain. Each view had its adherents.
Betty, at a street corner, ran into Luli. Like all the others, he was a
shadow to her, a shadow to whom she said:
'Have you seen Tommy?'
He had not seen Tommy; he walked with her, helping her to look for
Tommy; he was to her a shadow moving at her side, who spoke and was
answered nothing. His speaking was:
'How should we find him to-night? It's hopeless. He'll turn up all right
in the morning; there's nothing to be frightened about.'
It was irrelevant; Betty heard it as from a great distance; she was
looking for Tommy--looking for him at street corners, going up steep
climbing _vicoli_ and down again, searching all the faces in the crowd.
The shadow kept patiently at her side, with a shrug for the folly of it.
The storm and the earthquake had certainly dazed her, set her wits
wandering; he advised her many times to go home and sleep, since the
shocks were now over and would very likely not recur.
'Tommy may be home by now,' the shadow said.
Betty shook her head; she knew that in the dim room nothing stirred but
the flickering lamp. She looked for Tommy.
Out of the Toledo they came into the Piazza del Plebiscito, and so down
the Strada del Gigante to Santa Lucia by the sea, where Tommy was so
often, but was not now. Looking from Santa Lucia across the black bay,
they saw the blazing game that the fiery cone was still playing untired;
the earth's groaning sounded above the sweeping of the shaken sea.
Into the town they plunged again, Betty and the protesting shadow, who
wanted to go to bed. The storm had dropped; upon the wind of dawn came
the red rain of the cinders, the black clouds of the dust, blinding and
choking. Behind these the grey morning grew; a dim day broke slowly on
the tired, shaken city.
Since he could not prevail on Betty to go home, Luli went home himself;
he could not walk the streets all night looking for Tommy, who was, no
doubt, well amused somewhere.
'It isn't a fit night for you to be out,' he told Betty, 'but I am
falling asleep: I must have rest. What would you have? You'd much better
go home too.'
So they parted.
Betty took to going into all the churches she came to, to see if Tommy
was there. She would sit down by the door and look at the praying
people--the churches were thronged to-night--and dreamily wander into
hazy speculations, soothed by the chanting voices and the sweet, heavy
air, till she woke with a start, and so out again into the dim city,
where the ashes came riding on the east wind like rain.
Once a _carabiniere_ asked her where she was going, why she walked alone
so in the disturbed city. She said:
'I am looking for my brother. Have you seen him? He is like me, only he
carries a sketch-book and a pencil; and what do you suppose is likely to
have happened to him?'
The _carabiniere_ conveyed by a shrug that he could not say.
'But something is more likely to happen to you. It's a bad night to be
walking in the town. All kinds of ruffians are about.'
That, being irrelevant, Betty did not hear.
It was strange how every one was abroad in Naples to-night. In the
Piazza Sant' Angelo, a little after five o'clock, Betty met Warren
Venables. She said to him:
'Help me, please, to find Tommy.'
He looked gently at her--they had hurt one another so badly that nothing
but gentleness seemed possible between them now--and divined (it was a
fresh hurt to him) how entirely he was a shadow to her; how the world
was a crowded shadow-land, through which she moved alone, seeking the
one reality, her other self. His discernment let him realize how all
things but one must have slipped away through the wild hours of the
night. He knew it by her wide, unseeing eyes, her strained, sallow face,
the mechanic words, which were her only greeting. He was glad to be able
to do her at least this service; he was glad to be at her side, taking
care of her, though it might be only as an unnoticed shadow. It was in
his mind, but not in hers, how she had not long since begged him not to
see her any more.
He said gently:
'You're tired; you must go home. Tommy is all right.'
She said:
'I want Tommy. Help me, please, to find Tommy.'
He walked at her side, through the rain of the dust, which lay thick on
the streets and gritted underfoot as they walked. Neither ever forgot
that harsh gritting, or the sulphurous breath of that dim dawn. It hurt
them both in memory for always.
There is a narrow alley which leads up out of the Strada San Biagio,
climbing a little. They went up it--Betty neglected no street--and there
they found Tommy.
Some scaffolding had fallen, tossed down by the storm or the earthquake,
in a corner where no one passed. Tommy lay with his face to the street,
his sketch-book clutched in the hand of one flung-out arm, the other arm
pinned to his side, with a twelve-foot plank across his back and two
poles across his legs. Tommy and the scaffolding both wore a coat an
inch deep of black dust.
Venables lifted away the plank: it took most of his strength; then he
moved the poles. Then he turned Tommy over very gently, and the black
dust drifted down on to the upturned face. Betty raised it on to her lap
and shielded it with her two hands, saying always, and not knowing what
she said:
'Tommy--Tommy--Tommy.'
Venables said:
'I will fetch help. I will be as quick as I can.'
She looked at him with unseeing eyes. He paused a moment, then turned
and left her, slipping away into the shadows, one of a world of shadows,
leaving those two alone together, as, for her, they had been alone
together through all the long night.
She looked down into her lap, and made a shield of her two hands, and
muttered:
'Tommy--Tommy.'