THE ROADS DIVIDE
'So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament
and unknown inspiration, enters into life, that we doubt we can
say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each
other.'--R. W. EMERSON.
Prudence, according to her promise, exerted herself to keep her family
from going to say good-bye to the Crevequers. It was not a very easy
task. She represented to her aunt that looking after Tommy took most of
Betty's time.
'I doubt if they allow her at the hospital much,' said Mrs. Venables;
'and the child must be terribly anxious and lonely. I should like to do
what I can for her.'
Mrs. Venables was very kind; late failures of intimacy had slipped from
her memory since Tommy's disaster. She had been to see him at the
hospital, and had met Betty there. Tommy, during her visit, had
apparently been asleep. Betty had hardly spoken, for fear, she said, of
waking him.
'It is a long time,' said Mrs. Venables, 'since I had a satisfactory
talk with either of those interesting children. Yes, Prudence, they
_are_ interesting, owing to their very peculiar circumstances and ways
of life, whatever may be their personal limitations. I grant that one
does not come across great depths in them--or, anyhow, that the depths
are as yet quite unstirred; but those childlike, seemingly almost
soulless natures are a most interesting study to me. One wonders how far
their climate and their faith contribute towards the result as we see
it. There is certainly something in the beauty and gay paganism of this
city, mingled as it is with the simple devoutness of a symbolic faith,
that seems to develop such characters freely. I should like to watch
those children's career--to see what they grow into. Who knows but that
they may sometime find their souls? That would be a strange
consummation, deeply impressive; I should much like to try to bring it
about, but I am afraid the time is very far from ripe as yet. However, I
should at all events wish to see them once again before we part. We
have, after all, attained to some intimacy, they and I; we have shared
so many vivid experiences, and had so much striking talk together.'
But Mrs. Venables was at last induced to put her parting words into a
letter--four sheets, closely written. Betty took it to read to Tommy,
and they composed an answer together, with immense pains, resisting
manfully the temptations to 'strike' which assailed them.
'And so that's the end of Mrs. Venables,' said Betty, sighing as she
signed her name. 'And I suppose no one will ever think us so interesting
again.... I wonder, Tommy, if we made the most of our opportunities....'
They mournfully pondered over the unreturning past. Yet they had
certainly made, if not the most, at any rate a good deal, of those
regretted opportunities. They had, both purposely and accidentally,
succeeded in being a real and profound impression. When they arrived at
the age that in their opinion justified them in reading Mrs. Venables'
works, they would probably get much pleasure out of their own portraits.
Miranda Venables came to see Betty the day before her family left
Naples. She came in with a dejected air.
'I've come to say good-bye. We're going to-morrow. It'll be rather
ripping getting home and getting some cricket and tennis, only I'm
simply too awfully slack for anything after all this fooling round doing
nothing. Feel.' She held out a plump arm for Betty to pinch. 'Horrid
flabby, isn't it? And I say, I'm awfully sick at having to say good-bye,
you know.'
The round face was tragically despondent. Miranda had scarcely realized
till now how much she liked the Crevequers. She said so.
'You are rotters, you two, but you do make things go, you know,' she
explained, a little embarrassed at her own frankness. 'And, I say, I
hope we all meet again sometime--not in this beastly place, but at home.
You might come and stay with us; you'd get some hockey. Oh, I forgot;
you don't care about doing things. But it's beastly saying good-bye. I
hate it.'
'So do I,' Betty said. 'So I never do it. Let's not. Let's come and have
ices instead.'
They went and had ices at Caflisch's, and the pathos of the occasion was
salient. Miranda, after the second ice, worked up at length to:
'It's all very well, but I like your sort of people, if it _is_
different (like Warren said once, and mother says), a jolly sight better
than ours--so there!'
'It's all a q-question of taste, of course,' Betty said. 'And now I must
go; and as we aren't going to say good-bye, there's no more to be said.
I hope we shall all of us have a j-jolly summer.'
'Please say good-bye for me,' said Miranda tearfully, referring to
Tommy, who had a pedestal of his own. 'And I hope he'll soon be better,
and ... oh dear!'
So that parting was effected. It should, after all, count for something
that one's friends should weep to say good-bye.
Next day the Venables left Naples.
When she knew that they had gone, Betty seemed to lose suddenly the
strength she had summoned to her for resistance; she had no more need of
it; the long struggle was over. She shivered a little at that past
bitterness, and buried her face in her two hands. When she looked up
again, the past lay, as it were, slain; all the future waited.
The struggle, made so hard and bitter at the first, had at the last been
easy. Warren Venables had let it rest in the end, realizing bitterly at
last the ineffectualness of contest. Prudence had assisted him to that
realization.
'We can't do anything for them now; we're no good to them; we only hurt
them. We've got to leave them alone.'
It was strange to Warren to see how her eyes were wet.
'It's easy enough for you,' he said, his voice hard and level. 'You
don't know how much I care.'
She said, very gently, 'I do,' and then was silent for a moment,
thinking perhaps that what she did not know was rather how much she
herself might possibly have cared, had many things been wholly
different; had not the unconquerable 'there is nothing to say' finally
summed up the situation as far as her part in it went. But of those
vague might-have-beens Warren knew nothing.
Prudence said:
'I do know. And that's why you'll leave them alone--because you care.
For if you don't, you'll hurt them--horribly. Don't you see? We've hurt
them enough; this is the only amends possible--the only amends they will
take.'
'Amends!' His face was set like a flint, his way when he was hurt.
'That's just it. I've been a brute all along; and when I came to know
it, through _their_ coming to know it, and through my coming to care so
much, I wasn't allowed to make any amends. That's what I can't stand.'
(He had been shaken and stirred of late out of all his self-containment;
Prudence had heard many things from him.)
'You've made your amends,' she said. 'First by the things you've said to
her; and now you will be making them again by leaving her alone, as she
wishes. There's no other you can make. Don't you see?'
'I see I've got to,' he said harshly. 'I've been made to see that
clearly enough lately. Oh, I suppose I've got to accept it--sit down
under it.'
Prudence mused over it.
'It's been rather strange all along,' she said, more to herself than to
him. 'For we did our part to them, for good or evil, and they theirs to
us, by accident, and now that it's done we can't be of any more use to
each other, in the straits we're all, I suppose, in, through all we've
come to see and know. They want nothing of us, and we had better want
nothing of them; our uses for each other are over; there it is, you
see. They must leave us to help ourselves, and we must leave them to
help themselves and each other. And I hope we shall all do that; only it
will have to be along our own lines, not along other people's. You can't
step out of your own road into somebody else's; there are chasms
between, too wide to jump. And if you do manage to jump them, you don't
know the geography of the new road, and you only lose your way. I can't
help being stiff and puritanical and disliking certain things. They
can't help being--well, street-children of gregarious habits and wide
tastes. Why should they? It's merely being themselves. But though I may
be a prig, I can yet try to understand and not to keep aloof; and though
they may be--well, they can improve their roads too. It's always open to
us to improve our own roads--only not, I think, successfully to leave
them.'
Thus Prudence, working it out for her own satisfaction, her considering
brows puckered over the light that her thought had kindled in her
far-seeing, discerning artist's eyes. This side of it--the moral side,
the ultimate side, call it what you will--was of salient clearness to
her; it predominated, rising vividly out of the tangle of issues. It was
to her the thing that greatly mattered, that it was always open to us to
improve our own roads.
To Warren (the discrimination was partly, perhaps, one of sex, a good
deal between the idealist and one who was not, whatever he was, at all
an idealist) what may be called the moral aspect was obscured. He had
wanted something and had failed to get it; that for him summed up the
matter. Later, he might come to realize many things, all the things that
Prudence realized, that the Crevequers realized--how the fusion of two
'sorts' was at the best a rash experiment, at the worst a most tragical
catastrophe; how the matter had been, no doubt, wisely decided. Now he
knew but one thing: what he so greatly desired he might not have.
Prudence's vision of it seemed of little relevance to him. They might
all follow their improved roads anywhere they chose; they might climb
heights, in that grey future wherein he at least must be (so it seemed
to him at this time) a solitary pedestrian; how they might help
themselves and each other concerned him not at all.
His clever face was very bitterly set as he stared at the ground,
brooding over it. It was probable that he too had learned something, the
insolence, as his cousin had termed it, of his past attitude having so
recoiled upon himself.
'Oh,' said Prudence, suddenly, following up her own talk of roads, 'I
wish we _could_ leave them--I wish we could; but walls shut us in. The
walls of character, and circumstances, and old habit; we can't break
through them. We only knock against them--and it hurts.' She stopped,
because her voice shook strangely. After a moment she said quietly: 'We
can't do that. We can only try to keep the gaps wide, and look through
them.... But there are one or two things we can do besides that. Mr.
Crevequer will want to get something to do afterwards; I told you,
didn't I, that they are giving everything up.'
'Oh! That charming paper. About time, too, I should say. Well?'
'Well, I thought you might write to that _Settimana Illustrata_ man you
know at Genoa. They are going to their old home for the present; but
eventually they would like work at Genoa. I should think the _Settimana_
might give him something to start on; he's quite clever, of course; and
he really can draw, can't he? Genoa's near their home. They'll have all
their old friends to play with, and of course they'll make new ones, and
of course their friends will be of all sorts; their road takes them
there. What I don't know,' she added presently, 'is where else it is
going to take them, and where ours are going to take us.'
Warren did not think it particularly mattered, and said so. Prudence,
who did, proceeded to explain to herself, rather than to him, where
their roads had, in the past, taken them. She liked to be quite sure,
to arrive at sureness by thinking things thoroughly out.
'We've all been wrong, and all through different lacks in us--different
failures of understanding. I've hated ugliness so much that I haven't
tried--I haven't even wanted--to see the beauty that's always tangled
into it. I've just looked the other way. That was through being a prig,
and stupid. You've minded ugliness so little (though you've seen it all
right) that you've accepted it, traded on it. That was through being
lacking in some sense--I think, perhaps, the sense of beauty, and a
little in the moral sense, too.' Prudence was being offensively frank,
as she was apt to be when she thought things out aloud. 'And the
Crevequers haven't known, really, what ugliness was. That was through
never having learnt, chiefly. And,' she summed up after a moment, 'there
we all stand.'
'So it seems,' Warren said. 'It must be a satisfaction to have it all so
clearly arranged.'
Prudence went on, undisturbed.
'And what I should like to know is where we shall eventually stand. You
say it doesn't matter; of course, as a matter of fact, it is the one
thing which does. Where we go, and what we see by the way--oh, what else
is there?'
'Where we mayn't go,' Warren answered her drearily, 'and what we miss by
the way. It matters more, for it's better--more worth going to, better
worth seeing.'
To that she said nothing. They both thought of it all, silently: of how
four ways had come together for a little at the cross roads, how those
who travelled along them had met and spoken and taken again the parted
ways, where they ran beyond range of sight into a grey land, towards
horizons blind with mist--blind and dark to one of the two who stood now
and looked; but to the other limitless, luminous, soft with the shrouded
brightness of the dawn.
'Oh,' said Prudence presently, her thought running on what we miss by
the way, 'we--our sort of people--being so respectable and so honest and
so refined, sit on our pedestals and look down and talk and analyse,
because we've got a few things that they haven't; but, really, I am
looking up all the time. For, whatever they haven't got and haven't
done, they've at all events lived. They keep on doing that all the time;
they always will, in whatever particular way they do it. It's such an
immense thing, that. Living is like an art, that some people never learn
at all; I suppose the Crevequers were born knowing it--they had no need
to learn it. And if they haven't learnt quite all about it yet, well,
that's only a question of time. They've got the genius of it all right.
That's what I look up to in them. And,' she added, since the Crevequers
were being so thoroughly thought out, 'they have another thing--the best
thing they've got, the thing that will in the end matter, however much
everything else fails--they have each other.'
At that Warren's face took a greater bitterness.
'So I was given to understand,' he said. 'I was told that they, being so
much the same sort, wanted no other companionship. The combination of
either with anyone else, it seemed, would not work--would be a
disastrous fiasco, in fact.'
Prudence acknowledged his right to his bitterness, the hurt being still
so new and sore, his anger with himself going so deep.
But she said, after a moment, pleading, 'Don't grudge them that. For, do
you see, it's about all they've got left,' and so ended, with wet eyes.