The Furnace Part 6

Betty, her chin in her hands, was looking across the blue bay.

'I am thinking,' she said. 'No; I am absorbing impressions. They are illuminating and suggestive--quite striking. They really are, you know.

Chiefly--Naples is there, and you and I are out here. To me at this moment that is very real and vivid--immensely significant. Perhaps I have expressed it badly, though.'

'Communicated myself inadequately,' Tommy lazily corrected.

Betty acknowledged his greater accuracy.

'But,' she added, after a moment, 'it was a real impression, all the same.'

She thought it over, looking across the bay towards Naples.

'Life in a populous city,' she murmured, after a moment, 'has its problems, its trials, its disappointments.... Mrs. Venables told me a story at tea the other day; I'll tell it to you if you like. There was a man once who had a lot of gold; at least, he supposed it was gold. It wasn't really; it was a base metal, most of it. Do you know what a base metal is? Well, anyhow, it's something that melts very easily when you put it into a fire. So he put it into the fire----'

'What an a.s.s.'

'Yes; but don't interrupt. And he couldn't help putting it into the fire, because the fire is Life--it's an allegory, did I tell you?--and everything has to pa.s.s through it. Well, all his metal melted, and ran away, and he saw it had been nothing but a base metal after all. But one little bit he found which was pure gold; and that he kept, you see, always. But it was horribly disappointing for him that there wasn't more. When he was young he thought he had such a lot; that was where he was wrong. That's all that story. And Mrs. Venables says if we are lucky we may all end with a little piece of gold. Life, you see, is a smelting-furnace, a crucible for the testing of ultimate values.... Don't, Tommy, I can't bear it; I'll stop, really I will----'

She warded off with her arm an irritated shower of sand.

'That story didn't amuse me,' Tommy remarked resentfully. 'If that was the funniest thing Mrs. Venables said at tea yesterday, I'm sorry for you.'

'How shallow you are, Tommy. It wasn't meant to amuse you. And Mrs.

Venables didn't make it up; she'd read it somewhere. Personally, I was wondering if there was anything in it. I told Mrs. Venables I thought it very striking. But you've got such a--such a _borne_ mind. I've been trying not to be _bornee_; I don't believe you ever do. Never mind; now we'll go to sleep till it's time for Ma.s.s.'

It was very still on the beach and very warm, with the winter morning suns.h.i.+ne on the sand. Beneath the wide blue sky the pure blue sea stretched, with a little stir and glitter from the ruffling breeze that just rumpled the broad blue basin's edge, crisping and whitening it, making it tumble over with spurtling laughter, like a tiny child at play, and draw back lisping to comfort itself for its fall. Above the splas.h.i.+ng and the little hus.h.i.+ng draw, the church bells sounded from Baja, calling the bay to Ma.s.s. There was half an hour still for absorbing contentment on the warm sand.

To the right the castle blocked the blue sky, shutting the little bay.

Across the wide waters to the east Pozzuoli loomed, transparent, jutting into the sea. Further, more transparent, delicately purple, Nisida seemed moored like a barge, with the point of Coroglio behind it.

Coroglio shut the gulf, so that one could not see how behind it the bay swept down and ran to Naples. Naples was beyond the picture; the picture held only the blue January morning, with its glittering waters and brown sails and purple points and islands, and little waves that spurtled on warm sand, and behind the bells of Baja calling. There was also the salt smell of the sea, and the Crevequers, and their sand castle. These things, to Betty Crevequer, became suddenly, as Mrs. Venables would have said, very real, very vivid--in a manner all of life. She lay dreamily, her eyes narrowed to slits blue as the sea, absorbing the impression.

Worded--but she did not word it now--it was, as she had put it, 'Naples is there, and you and I are out here.' Naples, set pink and white upon her sh.o.r.es, beyond the point, out of the picture, was life; and life, some one had said, was a smelting-furnace, a testing of ultimate values.

Betty seemed to dream a dream--a dream of the testing of values by fire.

She saw how it might be that metal ran away, melting in the flames ...

how one might be cast up out of the fiery pit, taking with one the knowledge of pure gold, for what that wisdom might be worth. But perhaps also a little piece of it to keep--if one was fortunate.

And Betty shuddered at this vision of purging by fire, and at the 'mental standpoint' of the man who had conceived life so. One should be allowed to keep one's bright metal--gold or dross, it mattered little; one should be allowed to keep it to play with, not looking into its quality avariciously. There should be a ring set round it to guard it from the flames which might melt it away in one's hands. The melting of it would so horribly burn one's hands; and then there would be a blankness, and nothing left to play with any more.

It was at this moment that the 'impression' became of a great vividness.

Life might be a furnace, but here were things untouched by its flame, cast up--so Betty saw them, with prospective eyes--out of the sea of fire on to the high sh.o.r.es. Here, by the edge of the sea, were she and Tommy and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding....

A swift moment of vivid intuition came to her, illuminating her vision of life, as she looked at Tommy, lying on his back, with his straw hat tilted over his eyes. She was lit by a flash of great certainty, of strange discernment.

The flash pa.s.sed, and left her as one who wakes from a trance. She lay and looked at Tommy, and, looking, felt a desire for speech.

'I'm thinking, Tommy, that you're very lucky to have me to play with you, and that I'm rather lucky to have you to play with me.'

Tommy pushed his hat a little up from one eye, and turned a meditative and mildly surprised regard upon his sister. Her remark had had a flavour of unusualness. But he did not comment upon it; it was as if, in the momentary pause that followed his glance, something between them, very definite, very permanent in its existence, entirely unquestioned, because it had always been there, and hardly ever alluded to in words, because they were too close to each other and too unsentimental, took more definite and visible shape. Their friends.h.i.+p, their close comrades.h.i.+p, their affection, stood in that moment between them, recognized mutely of both. The kingdoms might fall, but that stood. Thus they did not word it to themselves; but, unformed, the knowledge illumined the consciousness of both.

But after that moment's pause Tommy returned to normalities.

'I grant you your luck; in fact, I might envy it you if I was less sweet-natured. Mine, of course, is less vividly striking, as Mrs.

Venables would put it. But no matter; never be ungenerous on Sunday, and I'm glad you should have a happy life.'

Betty dragged him up forcibly by the hands, and they went up the beach to Ma.s.s in the little church. That illuminated moment of insight seemed to walk between them to the doors.

After Ma.s.s they went to the Albergo Vittoria, and had lunch on the terrace.

They talked then of the Venables. Betty said she had had her last sitting.

'I should like her to sit to me,' Tommy said; 'the way she stands, don't you know, with her head back'--the gesture of his own caught it not unsuccessfully--'and her eyes when she's going to smile. And the way her upper lip's so like her chin.'

Betty nodded. She, too, had gathered all that in the rarefied mountain air of the studio.

'I wish she'd come and see us, as the others do. Why doesn't she like us more?'

It was a simple question, thrown out casually and without much wondering; after all, every one cannot like everybody else.

But it was curious how Tommy grew abruptly red.

'How do you mean like us? I should think she does, doesn't she? Why--why shouldn't she?'

Betty's eyes consideringly took him in. He seemed, from his stammer grown aggressive, to feel an interest. Obviously he had been moved--moved a good deal--by 'the way she stands, don't you know, and her eyes when she's going to smile.'

'Well, you see,' Betty amended, 'she's too keen on her work, I expect, to want to see much of anyone. I dare say that's all.'

Tommy was a little appeased.

'She always talks a lot to me when I meet her.'

Betty's doubting eyebrows became a mark of interrogation. She demurred, not to the 'lot of talk,' but to the apportionment of it--the order, in fact, of the personal p.r.o.nouns. Tommy frowned stubbornly, holding to it, and drank a gla.s.s of wine with a defiant regard over the brim. Betty, looking at him with puzzled eyes, at last shook a despairing head.

'No, Tommy, I can't; I can't imagine it. If you don't put it the other way round quickly, my brain will break with the effort.'

Tommy, between a frown and a reluctant laugh, lit a cigarette.

'Oh, don't rot.... And what's the odds, anyhow, as long as we're both interested?'

'I'm glad she's interested,' Betty said, reflectively striking a match.

'Then, they're all interested, which is nice. Mrs. Venables and Mr.

Venables, and the baby Venables, (she loves us very much, did you know?

Only she doesn't really think we're up to much, because we're rotters and we don't play hockey), and Miss Varley too. I'm glad we're so interesting, Tommy--aren't you? And now we've had lunch. We'll go in a boat next, I think. What a nice expensive lunch we've had! Let's pay for it.'

Then they took a fis.h.i.+ng-boat with a large triangular sail, and turned and twisted about the bay, with erratic deviations of course and sudden heeling and recoveries. Then they landed, and lay again on the beach to dry in the afternoon sun, and played ducks and drakes, and composed limericks and wrote them on the sand with pieces of sh.e.l.l till it was time to go home.

But before this time Warren Venables had joined them. He had motored over from Naples to find them and bring them back with him.

'Of course we will,' Betty said; 'the road's much nicer, and it will take longer and save us our fares. We never get returns, in case anything should turn up, or we shouldn't be coming back or something.

And we'll drive by turns; what fun!'