THE ETERNAL ROADS
'We are the creatures of birth, of ancestry, of circumstance;
we are surrounded by law, physical and psychical.... The ways
are dark, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we
cannot see.'--J. H. SHORTHOUSE.
'The law of the past cannot be eluded,
The law of the present and future cannot be eluded,
The law of the living cannot be eluded--it is eternal.'
WALT WHITMAN.
There was peace in Naples, and sunshine breaking at last through
clouds--rest and brightness following days of fear. It remained to put
things together--all the broken things, human and otherwise. The city
was full of those who reached hopeless hands for prop and support,
having lost everything; full of those who gathered closely to them the
fragments that remained, fragments they had snatched from ruin and
clutched in their arms as they fled.
On the many dead, the many broken and dying, the many who grasped
fragments, the many who had lost all, the clear sun looked down, on this
13th of April, with its gay, lucid light. It seemed to hold a promise,
to mention a hope far off. It seemed to drag the world out of the dark
pit, to give the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction the air, not
of a far dream, but of a possibility--far too. It gave it also the air,
quite definitely, of a necessity. It was like the first youth of the
spring, with its forgetting of the black storms past, its promise of a
brave renewal.
Betty Crevequer walked home through the sunny streets from the hospital.
The gay sun had lit the long ward, sending dusty beams across the room
to the broken, bandaged figures in the beds. By the side of one of the
broken, bandaged figures Betty had sat and talked, and Tommy had talked
too, to-day for the first time--talked for the first time, that is, in
the Crevequers' generous sense of that elastic word.
Betty had for four days known that Tommy would not die, but live; now
the sunshine in the streets brought her to a more vivid realization of
it. The sunshine in the streets, the keen smell of the sea that caught
her breath as she turned down towards it, the fresh wind from the west,
blowing the ashes away from Naples, brought sudden tears to her eyes,
sudden, vague thoughts of far-off renewals, of the mending of all broken
things. In her weariness she could not stay the tears; they stood in her
eyes and quivered to her lashes. When she had climbed up to the little
room at the top of the steep stairs, they took her wholly; she leaned
her chin on her two hands and looked out over the city, not knowing
whether the tears dropping slowly were for the old things broken and
spilt, or for the slow mending that might yet be. Anyhow, the city lying
so in the afternoon sunshine had a most sad gaiety. It brought back to
Betty how Tommy's smile had to-day flickered out from the bandages,
lightening the sad eyes.
She was horribly tired; it seemed that she had been living at high
pressure, not only for these past few days--she could not count
them--but for days and weeks before that. The time comes when strung
nerves break like worn-out fiddle-strings; there is no more strength in
them.
So, in her hour of weakness, Betty wept, having fallen through the
broken floor of circumstance till she touched bottom, looking without
hope at some far, possible ascent, through the sad dimness of tears. The
west wind dried her tears on her face as she looked out; and Prudence
Varley came in.
Betty turned and faced her, as she paused for a moment to knock at the
open door, standing with chin a little raised to suit with the caught-up
lip, straight and tall, with the grey, artist's eyes that took in
everything and had been wont to give out nothing. Betty's mournful eyes
met the look with her new, sad comprehension of that restraint which had
always so held back everything. Yet now it seemed that it did not so
entirely hold back everything; its remoteness was less complete. Betty
hardly knew this; she knew chiefly how the room was tawdry and breathed
of stale smoke, how the table was littered with cards and _Marchese
Peppino_, how the other had come, perhaps, straight from a cool place,
smelling cleanly of paint, full of the April sunshine, spacious and pure
and bare.
Prudence Varley said:
'How do you do? May I come in? or----'
She paused, waiting. Betty was hardly used to such waiting on the part
of her visitors; as a rule they came in, deeming questions superfluous.
Betty considered it for a moment, her lower lip caught between her
teeth, her eyes pondering. She might, she knew, have said 'No.' Prudence
Varley neither offered nor demanded adornment of speech. It was an open
question she had asked, to be answered truly. 'No' would have sent her
simply away without comment or offence.
Betty considered 'No,' and rejected it, perhaps because the direct eyes
seemed no longer to hold everything back; perhaps because, like a child
hurt and bewildered, she wanted help; perhaps because, from the first to
the last, she had always so liked Prudence Varley.
She said 'Yes,' and came forward and cleared a space in her own chair,
and sat down herself on the arm of Tommy's. The clearing of Tommy's
would have been too arduous a task.
Prudence sat down simply, unembarrassed. But Betty's thin, childish
fingers, clasped round her knee, worked nervously in and out; she
clenched her teeth over her lower lip.
'How is your brother?' Prudence said.
'B-better. He talked to-day, quite a lot.'
That extremely probable fact, Prudence perhaps thought, could hardly be
taken as conclusive proof of the Crevequers' good health. But she said:
'I am very glad. Then he may be up before very long, perhaps?'
'I don't know how long; they c-can't tell me.' Betty stammered a good
deal over it. She paused for recovery. 'When he's well enough,' she
resumed, 'we want to go north for a rest.'
'To England?'
'No. Oh no; that w-wouldn't be a rest. To Santa Caterina. It's our home;
we used to live there.... Tommy won't be able to do much for some time.'
'No; of course. You won't come back till the autumn, when it's cooler, I
expect.'
The two looks met, the one faintly questioning and half asking pardon
for the question, the other with all its depth of sad bewilderment
stirred--a miserable gaze like a child's.
'I don't know,' said Betty, and bit her lip. Then quite suddenly the
depths surged up and broke through. Her sad eyes hung on the lucid grey
ones that looked with such gentleness at her. 'I don't know--oh, I don't
know.... I don't know what we can do ... how we're to do it.... Can't
you tell me?... Because it's been you, you know, who've spoilt
things.... And what next?'
Prudence accepted it, meeting the claim with puckered brows of thought.
She did not know what next. She was an idealist, of a continual and
never-failing hope; but, striving to see, she saw only roads running
eternally sundered, as Betty too had seen them from the first hour of
comprehension.
Betty said again, half to herself, how they were spoilt, the old things.
'And what new things can there be, ever, for us?' On Prudence, who had
done her share of the spoiling, she still made her stammering claim,
blind-eyed, without hope.
Prudence's response to it was a doubting question.
'If they're spoilt then ... you'll leave them?'
Betty's eyes hung on hers.
'You mean not come back here? Oh, we don't want to; I've told you that's
spoilt. But where else?... Tommy couldn't get anything to do at Santa
Caterina.'
Prudence said there were other places in Italy for a journalist. Or
perhaps even England.... But at that Betty shook her head. No spoilt
things should drive her to that place of damp half-lights.
'Not England. We couldn't live there; it's never, never warm.... Perhaps
Genoa; we know it so well. But Tommy may not find anything to do; he's
never been on a regular, proper paper....' Swiftly, at _Marchese
Peppino_, the colour surged over her face; the room was so full of it.
She said quickly, a sudden throbbing of helpless anger choking her
speech: 'That, too--that, too--everything--you've spoilt it--and w-what
can you give us instead?'
'What would you take?' Prudence said, with a very grave and very gentle
directness, turning the tables thus.
Betty's sad regard, emptied of anger, owned them turned. But she felt a
sudden desire to know.
'If we could take anything ... would you give it? You?'
The emphasis on the pronoun put it in the singular number, thus setting
Betty's own acceptance or refusal of offerings outside the range of
question and answer, as she had meant. For she was very tired of talking
about that. To the personal question Prudence, after a full minute of
thinking it over, returned a deliberating answer:
'I don't quite know.'
It was indeed what she had been for some time wondering. But the spoken
words seemed to strike her with a sense of incompleteness, of a gap
somewhere between themselves and the thought they should have accurately
fitted. Prudence, who did not very often clothe her thoughts, was
fastidious, when she did, about the garments' fit. She tried something
else--a dubious 'I can't be sure, but I suppose ... in the end ... I
probably should.'
Betty watched the doubtful pondering. She said:
'You mean because you would think we had a claim? Yes, I know.'
And Prudence returned slowly:
'A little that. But that shouldn't count much.... There would be other
things, and they would all have to be weighed.... It wouldn't be easy.'
'No,' Betty said; 'I suppose not. So it's just as well, really, that it
can't come to that, that we can't take anything--not either of us, not
ever, because of all the things between.'
Then, all the things between growing with the words to insistence, Betty
mentioned some of them, impelled, now the barriers were so breaking, to
have everything clear.
'There are so many things.... There's all the money we owe. We must pay
it back.'
Prudence silently assented. She wondered how much the Crevequers owed
Warren Venables.
'There are c-crowds of other things,' the sad voice stammered
on--'everything, almost.... But you know it all. You have known it all
the time.'
Their eyes met and looked away. Prudence did not at all deny that she
had known it all the time.
'You've all of you known it all the time,' went on the dreary voice,
without anger, without hope. Anger had been spent before, on another of
those who had 'known it all the time.' (The passionate fires of the days
of reparation had burned resentment to ashes, and on these had dropped
the tears of pity and pain.) Hope there was none. 'But Tommy and
I--we've only got to know it lately, you see. We--we didn't understand
before. But we understand now. We understand why--why you wouldn't be
friends with us.'
Prudence looked away sadly. It was terrible to have to accept it all so,
denying nothing. She wanted to heal, but knew no way.
In the pause Betty took up a cigarette-case from Tommy's chair,
mechanically fingering it. Then abruptly she dropped it, and looked
defiantly up.
'But lots of people do that--the other sort--your sort!' she cried.
Imagination, in these days so morbidly alive, continually invented for
her attacks unthought of, and called out defence to meet what needed
none. For discrimination was of so new a growth.
Prudence said quickly, 'But I know--oh, I know! Please
don't!'--protesting, apologizing for the existence of this gulf, which
had so yawned to exaggeration. Such an over-recognition of it as that
last had implied hurt her more than what had gone before; it showed so
vividly how the Crevequers staggered under their new knowledge,
pitifully unsteady as yet on the fresh ground. She said presently,
having thought things over: 'If I have been horrid, and hurt you, I beg
your pardon. I am very sorry.'
'It's just you,' said Betty, 'out of all of you, you know, who oughtn't
to say that. Because you pretended nothing. You kept everything back,
all along, instead of--instead of giving everything but just one
thing--oh, well.' She could not speak of that. She ended with half a
laugh. 'Nobody, you know, could have thought for a moment that you liked
us.'
'I suppose not,' said Prudence simply. She went on, with something
between explanation and apology: 'You see, I'm not like Aunt Ida; I
don't write.' Betty was grateful to her for making the comparison solely
with her Aunt Ida. 'People to me are simply people....'
Betty nodded.
'I know. Not--not copy.'
'And, you see, friendship isn't a name to me. It's something rather real
and serious. I make friends slowly, I suppose.'
'And you didn't want to make friends with us. Oh, I know.'
'As I saw it, it wouldn't have been fair, you see,' Prudence explained
very gently, looking away, asking forgiveness with her voice.
Betty assented.
'No; it wouldn't have been very fair.'
So their past intercourse was defined in few words. That done, Prudence
turned to the present.
'But now--now it would be fair--if you will.'
Betty shook her head. Prudence had supposed that she would.
'No, not now. That wouldn't at all do.'
They rested on that for a minute before Betty went on.
'Tommy and I have got each other; and that is the way it must be, the
way we've got to do it--don't you see?'
Her eyes seemed to entreat Prudence to see, to make, if she could,
others see.
'It's like this,' the sad tones stammeringly explained. 'We're in a
mess, Tommy and I; and we've got to get out of it somehow, if we
can--find, you know, things we don't hate, things to go on with. That's
all we want: to go on somehow and be happy, as we used to be happy. You
know, you can't be happy if you're wishing all the time to have things
you can't have, and to be things you can't be. So, either we must stop
wishing--and we may do that in time--or we must find new things that we
like. But that's bound to be a long job.' No movement of Prudence's
demurred to that; its truth stared one in the face. 'And perhaps we
can't do that; perhaps things stick always.'
And to that, too, no denial came from the idealist of continual hope,
who yet saw the eternal roads running.
Betty, because she, too, saw their running, said finally:
'I suppose, really, one stays pretty much the same sort of person to the
end.... And that's all right, as long as one doesn't run up against
other sorts; it hurts to do that'--at the pain of that clash of codes
her brows knit--'and that's why we won't try m-mixing the sorts; it
wouldn't be what you call fair, on either sort.'
Prudence heard the finality in that: it found its echo in her soul; but
still she pleaded Warren's cause (he cared so much) with:
'But if both cared to.... Oh, that isn't quite all there is to it, I
know--I'm not a fool who can only see one thing--but it's a thing that
should count a great deal. Of all the many, many things, I believe
that's the one that, perhaps, in the end counts most.'
Betty admitted it.
'More than any one other; but not more than all the others together. You
see, there are rather many, and it wouldn't do. It wouldn't w-work, you
know it wouldn't; and--and it would hurt rather.... Oh, it wouldn't do.'
She clenched her lip again between her teeth, perhaps to steady it.
Prudence thought it all over, admitting it true, before saying, with a
quick tremor in her own voice:
'But, perhaps, sometime--afterwards....'
Betty unclasped her hands from her knee and leaned her chin on them, and
looked straight in front of her.
'No,' she said; 'I think never. Then she gave it a turn, swerving as
usual from her own part, with 'You know it--you yourself.'
Prudence said nothing. That she knew it hardly needed affirmation; she
knew it with such a sad, hopeless certainty. For the eternal roads run
straitly, and their running is between gateless walls. The grey,
artist's eyes were suddenly wet and blind, with a swift surging of many
feelings. Seeing them, Betty said again:
'It wouldn't work--for any of us,' with a new gentle cadence in her
tone. Then she went on: 'Tommy and I have got each other. We can help
each other, and no one else in the world can help us. Don't you see?
Because we know each other so awfully well; we mean a good deal to each
other, you know. There's always been just us two. There always will be,
and that's the one thing that really matters--the one thing that always
will matter. In the end no one else c-counts.'
In that was the ring of certainty; it had not needed to be thought out;
it was as if it had always been there, waiting to be defined.
After a moment Betty went on, with this time a little tremor in the
tired monotony of her voice.
'I think I should like you to understand--how it's been, you know,
always. We've had each other, but we've had no one else much, ever. We
rather brought ourselves up; we weren't taught anything about--well, all
the things that I suppose you were taught. We came to England when we
were about thirteen and fourteen; we hated it, the awful w-weather and
all our relations. Directly Tommy left school we came back to Italy,
and--well, Tommy got work here. And we knew nobody but--but--well, you
probably know the sort our friends are; I expect the others have told
you,' she added in parenthesis, with a passing glint of laughter,
remembering how Prudence had not sought the close acquaintance which
should enable her to know. 'We're very fond of them,' she added, and
affection submerged the laughter; 'we've had g-good times together.
Well, we hadn't much to live on, and the people round us gambled and ran
up debts, and never paid them till they had to; and we did, too. We
didn't think--or care--whether the things we did were decent, or honest,
or anything of that sort. We just went on from day to day, playing
round with each other and our friends, and we were very happy.... I
don't think, somehow, that we've ever had a proper chance.... And when
you j-judge us, you might, perhaps, remember that.'
Prudence, who had listened gravely in silence, as always, said now:
'How should I judge you, or you me? I have not done that, ever.'
Betty said, smiling a little sadly:
'No; you only--you only kept away. I know.... But all the same, I should
like you to understand a little.'
'I do understand,' said Prudence.
'Well, when we met all of you last winter, we didn't know the
difference--or didn't care, anyhow. We thought it was funny; and it was,
rather--Mrs. Venables, you know, and being s-studied, and--and all
that----' Laughter flickered again to the sad eyes, but died swiftly.
'And then, after some time, we got to understand.' The stammering
monotone was expressionless and hard. 'And ... well, that's all....
We've both of us rather minded.... I have been angry, I suppose, about
some things; but that's all done now.... And now we've kind of come to
see that the old things are no good any more--all spoilt, anyhow for
now--and we've got to go and look for new things, and perhaps we shan't
find them; but anyhow no one else can help.'
'I am sorry,' said Prudence Varley, after a moment, being able to offer,
it seemed, no help but that. Her eyes asked forgiveness, because, having
helped to break, she could have no share in the mending. She knew it was
true that 'we can help each other, and no one else in the world can help
us.'
To her sorrow, Betty returned, 'We've got each other, you know,' and
even smiled a little. They had so nearly lost that possession.
Prudence got up, and stood close to the small figure on the chair-arm,
her hands clasped behind her. She was not demonstrative; where some
people might kiss, she merely stood and spoke.
'You've thought, I dare say,' she said gently, 'that I've been standing
on a pedestal and looking down--a horrid prig. Well, I suppose I have
been a prig; I am made so, and I am sorry. But--please believe this--I
haven't been on a pedestal; I've only been shut in between walls. Oh,
you know as well as I do that we each have walls all round us, and it's
not easy to knock them down; they shut us in.... But sometimes gaps come
in them, so that we can see through--see the landscape outside, and all
the other roads running. I suppose, perhaps, there have come lately gaps
in all our walls. Anyhow, I should like to thank you for the gaps in
mine. I hope very much they will not get bricked up again.... Being shut
into dark, narrow paths prevents one from seeing anything outside--the
daylight and all the other roads. But of course when a gap is made, one
looks out through it. And looking out means looking up.' She paused a
moment, and added softly, looking over the dark head out of the window:
'I think, you know, we're all trying to make what amends we can by
looking up now, if we ever looked at all down. I hope you entirely
believe that; and I hope you'll remember it, and not too much hate us,
when you think about us at all.'
The silence that followed was broken by a sudden sob. The dark head was
bowed; Betty broke down utterly into crying for the second time that
day. Her tears shook her; she could say no word.
A hand was on the bowed shoulder.
'Don't--oh, don't'
The sobs died at last chokingly away to long, shaken breaths.
'Please go now,' said Betty. 'Thank you for--for everything, and for
saying that just now. And I don't know why I cried--only I'm so t-tired.
And you can't do anything more. And please go now, if you don't mind.'
'I suppose,' said Prudence, 'it's good-bye. We're leaving Naples next
week.... But sometime later we may meet again, all of us.... And
meanwhile, if there's anything we can do--ever----'
'Only leave us your address, please. We'll send what we borrowed; we've
not got it just now. And will you please say good-bye for us to--to Mrs.
Venables and your cousins?'
'Keep them away,' the sad eyes entreated; and Prudence promised, 'Yes; I
will.'
She stood for a moment longer by the small crouched figure with its
bent, dark head; her eyes were full of her powerless, ineffectual
desires to heal, to help. Having the gift of comprehension, she wholly
knew their ineffectualness. She could only go, for all had been said
between them, and there remained the doing, wherein she had no part nor
lot.
She turned and went down into the city, and saw with wet eyes how it was
full of the sunshine, with the sea-wind blowing through it like hope.