PINE-BARK BOATS
'I thenke forto touche also
The world which neweth every dai,
So as I can, so as I mai.'
JOHN GOWER.
'Earth loves her young: a preference manifest.'
GEORGE MEREDITH.
A dozen or so of the Crevequers' friends came down to the harbour to see
them off to Santa Caterina. The Crevequers leaned over the rail of the
crowded launch, which was bearing them out to the _Koenig Albrecht_, and
waved their hands and stammered good-bye to every one. Tommy was very
weak and wan, and carried one arm in a sling; he had been out of
hospital for just a week. That week they had spent in selling most of
their effects, wringing out of their various debtors, with much
exertion, some of the money owed them, and raising in the end quite a
creditable sum, with which they paid their extensive debts and booked
their passage by sea, and finally, having a little over, asked about a
dozen of their most intimate friends to a supper-party at the Trattoria
Pallino, on the Vomero. There, last night, they had said good-bye.
Last night had been full of regrets--the sadness of parting, the pathos
of a merry company broken--a pathos hidden in jests, yet oppressive,
nevertheless, in the blue May twilight. They had sat beneath the hanging
purple veil of the wistaria, and the sweetness of the May roses had
mingled with the blue fragrance of the Tuscan cigars to which Tommy had
recklessly risen, and through the sweetness and the fragrance the salt
keenness of the sea had pierced, and its washing edge had whispered a
soft undertone to the city sounds that rang up through the still evening
air. They had looked down and seen how the spreading city far below
bloomed like a great rose of many colours in the soft falling twilight;
how the sky and the sea were still delicately flushed with the
afterglow; how, above the flattened cone of Vesuvius, a great yellow
moon swung up into the blue still east. It had looked upon the city with
a large, mellow charity, softly touching its many colours, deepening the
steep shadows of the streets that ran through it like gorges. It had
laid a broad yellow path for itself across the blue spaces of the
evening sea, and so twilight had deepened tenderly to night.
They had all drunk to each other in red Posilipo, and wished themselves
and each other good luck, and Gina Lunelli had said, for the twentieth
time, 'You won't find any place so good to live in as Naples,' and Tommy
had said, 'You must come and stay with us some time at Santa
Caterina--all of you,' with a comprehensive sweep of his arm, generous
with the large hospitality of red Posilipo. Betty had said how Genoa,
too, was a gay place, with plenty doing, only the winds that blew down
its streets in winter were certainly evil and bitter, and one had to
wear all one's clothes at once. But Santa Caterina was different; Italy
certainly held no such other place, and they must, of course, one day
all come and see.
Thus they talked, and laughed, and sang songs, and looked away from the
city which held in its deep shadows so much of their life. It would have
been quite easy then to slip down among the shadows and the colours and
take that life again, broken as it was, in time perhaps forgetting
everything. New beginnings were so hard, the call of the old things so
insistent. The old things that they had of late so hated, as spoilers of
their lives, they knew that they would not always hate--if now they went
down into the shadowed streets and took them again, striving to forget,
in the end all but forgetting, this cleavage which so lay across life.
For all cleavages may be bridged with time.
So, sick-hearted, the Crevequers had looked at the old ways which so
clogged them, which would possibly (why not?) always clog them, clinging
heavily like mire; and at the new ways which they were seeking wearily,
with no heart, with 'too late' echoing in their souls like a knell.
But this May morning, blown by a light wind that set the blue sea
dancing and would soon make them very ill, astir with the thronging of
ships in the harbour, and the hooting of voyages begun, was full of
unquenchable hopes and unvanquished youth and gay beginnings.
Some one on the launch was playing 'Addio, bella Napoli' on a mandolin;
the Crevequers called again 'Good-bye,' and leaned over the rail and
watched the sea-face of the city, crowned by Castel St. Elmo on the
hill, growing smaller in the distance. So much of life lay there....
They left it there, gold and dross, in that crucible which had so
transmuted it. Gold or dross, it seemed to matter little; it had melted
from them, burning their hands.
They looked at it once more, saw it dwindle far away, then turned
together to the wide, blue newness of the sea.
* * * * *
Betty had to make both the boats, because Tommy could not yet use his
right hand. She made them out of the pieces of red bark which flaked off
the pine-trunks and lay in heaps by the edge of the pool. Each boat was
about six inches long and two inches wide, square about the stern and
pointed in the bows, with a pine-needle mast and an envelope sail. To
prevent bitterness and evil speaking, Tommy had his choice of them when
they were finished. Then they were launched, and the Crevequers lay and
watched them, knowing that not for a long time need they go across to
the other side to welcome them to port. They made a slow voyage in the
windless afternoon. There was never much wind up here, though it was up
among the hills, because the pines stood close and thick about the
water, shutting it in to a deep green gloom.
The Crevequers lay by the water, upon the slippery brown needles, and
drank in the warm resinous fragrance. It was always pleasant to step
from the winding stone path, where the afternoon sun lay hot, where
mule-carts climbed up and jingled their bells lazily, into this deep
green shadowed place, where in the water the images of the pines nearly
met from side to side, leaving a little circle of blue between. It had
always been a favourite place; the Crevequers had spent much of their
youth here, sailing pine-bark boats from side to side, hanging head
downwards over the water with jars to catch water-beetles, bathing, or
dangling an ineffectual line for fish.
They had spent the morning paddling about the seashore and among the
rocks in the white canoe, which leaked horribly. Now they had come up
here to get dry.
It was note-worthy how these weeks in Santa Caterina had left their
healing touch upon both. They had been weeks of playing in the warm
sunshine (there is nowhere else such sunshine, so bright and yet so
gentle), of renewals of many friendships, with laughter and embraces, of
rest and healing after strain of mind and body. Recuperation had begun
its slow work. Tommy looked less ill, Betty less nervous and weary;
laughter flickered from eyes sad and pondering, but not now, as a rule,
unhappy.
With broken ways behind them, new roads in front of them as yet untried,
they seemed thus to be waiting a little, putting fragments together,
finding, as it were, their foothold, or perhaps seeking it, as yet
blindly. Prudence Varley's optimism would doubtless have averred that
the finding was only a matter of time. The Crevequers averred nothing;
it was not in them to analyse, as Prudence analysed and thought out. But
deep in their pondering eyes lay unsolved questions--questions they did
not consciously put to themselves; questions as to the happy road they
so blindly sought--whether it ran through new places or through old;
whether, if through new, it could be reached, seeing that temperament,
which had at least as much moulded circumstance as circumstance had
forced temperament, was probably in the end master of all the roads,
insisting that every one remained, as Betty had said, pretty much the
same sort of person as he began.
If one was so to remain, it would perhaps be wiser to seek no more. For
the basis of these new desires was, after all, so irremediably
shattered. What the Crevequers did not know was whether the desires had
any independent standing. For they would never be self-tormentors; they
would seek always, and have a considerable gift for finding, the
happiest way; they understood, as Prudence had said, the art of living
well enough for that. But where that quest would lead them it was not
given to them, not given to anyone, to know.
So, among all the confusion and the chaos of things broken and problems
unsolved, two facts alone stood out, stable and unquestioned, inevitably
sure. One was the complete breakage of the basis of their new
desires--its scattering into fragments, never, whatever else might come
to pass, to be pieced together. That destruction they had accepted; it
was too inevitable for rebellion. They had left that behind them; and
time would heal the memory, as time heals all hurts.
The other thing that emerged unquestionably out of the chaos was how
they were together; how they had been together through everything; how
they were together now, sailing pine-bark boats and seeking fresh roads;
how, along any roads they might chance to find, they would journey
together, knowing themselves admirable travelling-companions, knowing
that to be well amused on the road is three-parts of the journey's hope.
As Betty had said, 'We can help each other, and no one else in the world
can help us. Because we know each other so awfully well. Don't you see?'
Prudence had seen--seen, too, that it was the best thing they had--the
thing that would in the end matter, however much everything else failed.
She had seen the Crevequers cast up, as it were, out of fire, holding
this gold to them, when all else--the old and the new things alike--had
melted from their hands.
And to all their questioning life could give them as yet this answer
alone. The other answers would work themselves out through the veiled
years, slowly, painfully perhaps. It was, then, a triumphant thing to
have one possession safe for all time--one thing that the inscrutable
years, and failure and joy and tears, could not touch; one thing, in a
world of uncertain values, that the flames of the crucible would not at
all transmute. It was, in fine, an admirable thing that they had one
another to sail boats with.
Tommy was throwing stones, with his left hand, after his boat, with
intent to hasten it. In the long run, even taking into account undoubted
occasional successes, experience goes to show that this is not really a
very useful thing to do, even when the right hand is used. Tommy's boat
presently was struck and capsized.
'All right,' Tommy observed. 'Yours isn't going to come in to shore by
itself--you needn't think it. We'll have a bombardment.... Mine was a
rotten boat.... If I couldn't make a better boat than that.... There,
that's got it. Now they can race in upside down. C-come round and get
them.'
The race in upside down was a leisurely process. The owners got bored at
last, and decided to abandon the crafts, which remained bobbing together
upside down, twin derelicts far from the shore.
Out of the shadowed green pine-gloom the Crevequers came up again on to
the steep, climbing hill-path, whose stones were hot with the evening
sunshine. The warm still air was sweet with the pines, salt with the
breath of the sea below. From up here, looking down through the
silver-grey screen of the olives, one saw all the little bay lying,
golden with the sunset, the sea stretching level and limpid, blue as
evening, between jutting points, the fishing-city, pink and yellow and
white, curving round it, set close on the still, clear, tideless edge,
that was as a lake's margin, lifted by no ripple, but having for waves a
soft soundless sway to and fro.
The Crevequers loved this waveless evening sea. Betty gave a little sigh
of content, and slipped her hand into Tommy's.
'Come on,' she said, 'l-let's run down, and get r-really hot, then we'll
go and upset ourselves out of the canoe. What fun.'
They did so.
THE END
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ABBOTS VERNEY
'A fine novel.'--_Review of Reviews._
'A novel of great promise.'--_Sheffield Telegraph._
'A clever book--unusually so; a thoughtful, judicious, well-developed
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'"Abbots Verney" has charm and distinction ... an unusually capable
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'Far above the common run of novels.'--_Literary World._
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Post._
'The characters are realized vividly and with insight; the story, which
is carefully written and full of interest, is unfolded with no little
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'A remarkable novel.... It is finely written. The style is crisp,
brilliant, and pointed. There is not a superfluous paragraph, line, or
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* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
In the Table of Contents, the title of Chapter V is "Balae's Bay,"
but in the text the title of Chapter V is "Baiae's Bay." This
difference was present in the original text.