BAIÆ'S BAY
'I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day.'—R. L. Stevenson.
'Why should I care for the ages,
Because they are old and grey?
To me, like sudden laughter,
The stars are fresh and gay.
The world is a daring fancy,
And finished yesterday.'—G. K. Chesterton.
On a blue Sunday morning, not early enough to spoil their night—on principle they shunned always the dimmer hours of dawn—the Crevequers slipped the leash of the city and went to spend a happy day in the country. They often spent their Sundays thus; with their wonted inconsequent abruptness one would say to the other on Saturday evening, 'I'm tired of Naples. Let's go somewhere else by the next train,' and they would shovel a few things—usually those among their possessions which they were least likely to want—into a bag, and take tickets quite at random to any place, known or unknown, which occurred to them. Novelty was often a desirable qualification; but on this Sunday morning they went to Baja, because a strenuous week had blunted their imaginations; also, perhaps, a little because on the shores of Baja there lies much healing. Their affairs had not been going altogether smoothly of late, and the need rose in them, unworded, for stillness by blue water and the sun upon warm sand.
Having found these things, they entered into a contented peace, and built a sand castle. Then they lay on the sand ten yards from it, and took shots at it with bits of pumice-stone.
'Well,' Tommy observed at length, 'I've won that. And now it looks like a plum-pudding. Ducks and drakes? No; we'll go to sleep, because we got up too early for the time we went to bed. Pity; get up later next time. No, you can't talk yet, Betty, because I'm resting. You know, you don't need so much rest, because you're not a newspaper man. I'm sorry I'm a newspaper man; they're so untruthful, and when they try to be funny they're only rude. But I'm glad we're not a daily; if we were we should get into seven times as many rows as we do, shouldn't we. Our mortification might be greater than we could bear. Muzzi can bear a great deal, though; he's so brave. I'm not; I'm dreadfully sensitive. If I die a violent death at the hands of the Sindaco—I probably shall, you know, so will Muzzi—Mrs. Venables will have Masses said for me, because they're such an interesting medieval survival, obviously deeply rooted in human psychology. Why are heretics such goats? And why talk about heretics and newspapers on our happy Sunday in the country? Your turn, Betty; change the subject while I snatch a moment of sleep.'
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 ass.'
'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 pass 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 borné mind. I've been trying not to be bornée; I don't believe you ever do. Never mind; now we'll go to sleep till it's time for Mass.'
It was very still on the beach and very warm, with the winter morning sunshine 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 splashing and the little hushing draw, the church bells sounded from Baja, calling the bay to Mass. 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 shores, 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 shores. 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 passed, 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 friendship, their close comradeship, 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 Mass in the little church. That illuminated moment of insight seemed to walk between them to the doors.
After Mass 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 pronouns. Tommy frowned stubbornly, holding to it, and drank a glass 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 fishing-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 shell 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!'
They stayed on the shore till the sky behind the castle glowed to a soft daffodil colour. Venables was a good companion; his limericks and his riddles and his anecdotes were nearly as silly, nearly as devoid of all point or relevance, as the Crevequers' own. He might have been capable, on occasion, of exercising a more grown-up and polished wit; but when he played with the Crevequers he admirably adapted himself to their young comprehension. He was a person of tact, when he chose to use it. He did not always choose. He had a habit—an insolent habit, his cousin called it—of wearing in his manner, plain to be read by the initiated, the shades of feeling which he merely did not think it worth while to hide better, because he relied, with careless, supercilious confidence, on the inapprehensiveness, the unreceptive blindness, of those with whom he came in contact. The world was, after all, in the main stupid; his own cleverness possibly sometimes overrated this stupidity; the swift enlightenment of a glance, the flash of some phrase, would occasionally rend his veil across and reveal him—even to the stupid—sitting, amused, contemptuous, discerning, behind his flimsy screen. This attitude, of lurking in careless concealment, his cousin characterized as insolent.
'One should try not to insult people's intelligence more than one can help, I suppose,' she would observe.
'Well, but when they haven't got any——Anyhow, we all do it; one's got to in polite life,' he would aver, defending himself.
'They've mostly got some; and if one's real self sits despising and criticizing, one's outer self has no business to be a decoy. Even if the real self keeps quite behind the screen, it's unfair; and if it keeps looking out, as yours does, it's insolent as well. You insult them by as good as saying, "It's not much of a screen, but it will do for you. If you do see behind it sometimes, it doesn't matter very much; and if the people looking on, who know me better, see behind all the time, it doesn't matter in the least." A screen, to be at all courteous, should be impenetrable both to the people concerned and to the lookers-on; and even then it's not honest—one should quite withdraw.'
'You know, if one quite withdrew from all the people one doesn't quite like, one's world would get very limited.'
'Well, yes'—she wrinkled her forehead in doubt—'only they should know the terms, that's all.'
It was probable that Miss Varley might have disapproved of the manner of the homeward journey in the motor, for the Crevequers, who were slightly inexperienced, drove, as they had suggested, by turns; and behind Venables' screen of serenity his real self undoubtedly watched anxiously, and occasionally looked out, betraying itself by the nervous tension of the hands waiting in readiness to seize the wheel; the screen was, indeed, rather insultingly flimsy. They ran along the white coast road, with the gold of the west behind them, and the pale blue winter sea beside them, and the bright city of many hues growing larger in front of them as they circled the bay. They went much too fast, and it was very amusing.
'You must show Baja to my mother sometime,' Venables said. 'She has only visited it with the native guides so far; and you will be able to tell her so much that's interesting and new—very new.'
Betty sighed after that renounced game.
'I'm afraid not, do you know.... Tommy, you awfully nearly slew that goat. And I'm sure it's my turn now.'
She had swerved from the subject with a laudable impulse of shame, her first in this matter. At the same time, she knew very well that Venables minded nothing; also, that if she had looked at him his amused eyes would have twinkled into hers. That she did not might have been taken to imply in her the rudiments of a growing conscience; or possibly of a feeling that, though she and Tommy might laugh at a person's mother, the person might well keep out of it. His not resenting it—but this she did not word to herself at all, for she would not for some time know it—showed that he accepted so much, easily and without surprise. Why resent that, of all things? it seemed to imply. It was, indeed, hardly worth a comment; it was so wholly in keeping; as he would have said, so obvious.
This easy, unsurprised acceptance of things as they were, in which Prudence Varley might have discovered insult, bore to the Crevequers no message, no implication. Their attitude towards such tolerance was the measure of their inapprehensiveness.
But, as Betty had had her moment of half-realization, so Tommy had his. Perhaps such moments came to the one whose turn to drive it was not, and who had therefore leisure to perceive. Tommy's moment came through Marchese Peppino. Betty observed, abstractedly, between fluctuating swerves and recoveries:
'Tommy's paper, you know ... has been getting into rows ... being sued for libel....'
Venables, his eyes on the road, his hand waiting in nervous readiness for emergency, said:
'Yes?... Mind that flock of goats.' It was, possibly, the distance of the flock of goats—quite two hundred yards—which partly gave Tommy his moment of enlightenment. Perhaps he had half known it before; anyhow, he took in freshly now that the large acceptance did not quite include Marchese Peppino. Even the tolerance of contempt has got, after all, to draw its line somewhere. Tommy almost took in, too, the slight lift of the brows, which might be taken to convey 'Does anyone really think it worth the sueing—that rag?' Venables himself had certainly the air of not thinking it, under any circumstances, in the least worth the sueing.
Tommy, his melancholy eyes on Venables' profile, faintly flushed.