GRADONI
'Les clefs des portes sont perdues,
Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,
Les clefs sont tombées de la tour,
Il faut attendre, il faut attendre,
Il faut attendre d'autres jours....'—Maeterlinck.
There are steep streets called gradoni, which climb up from the old town below to the new town above; their slope is assisted by shallow steps at intervals. So shallow are the steps that you hardly notice each as you take it. Not until you arrive at the top and look down on the ascending way do you perceive how its climbing was assisted. Of like nature is the ascending alley of human penetration. At the top is the daylight; in the analogy, perceptiveness quite achieved.
In her ascending alley Betty should, by the end of February, have got far enough not to have taken Miranda Venables to lunch at the Trattoria Buonaventura with her friends Gina Lunelli and Morello, the painter. She met Miranda on Santa Lucia. Miranda remarked:
'I say, I'm jolly glad I've met you. I've lost Prudence. Mother sent me out with her to look at churches and things, because my ignorance is a disgrace, and Prudence stayed so long looking at some rotten mosaic things that I had to come out. Then we somehow missed each other, and I've been playing about alone. I say, I should think it would do if you showed me things, if I must see them. But there's nothing to see, is there? Nothing but the Aquarium, and I've seen that. Well, anyhow, I'll come round a bit with you, shall I, and then I can say I've seen something. Mother goes about with Murray; rotten book; I hate it. You haven't got it about you, have you?' she added suspiciously.
'No. You see, I'm a mine of information in myself. It is so nice to be well informed, isn't it?'
Miranda observed, between compliment and irony:
'You know an awful lot, I suppose.'
Betty nodded.
'One picks things up—one likes to learn. We might have a really instructive morning, only it's time for lunch. You'd better come and have lunch too. The Trattoria Buonaventura, in the Toledo—do you know it? No, probably not. I'm going to meet some friends there.'
'Well, I'll come. But it's only half-past twelve; it's a funny time for lunch.'
Betty supposed that it might seem so, remembering the breakfast at Parker's.
They went towards the Trattoria Buonaventura, and Betty pointed out objects cursorily, and, as a rule, with creditable veracity, by the way.
'The English church. Perhaps you know it, though? Is it nice inside?'
'No, it's not. But I don't like any churches; they're all stuffy. Mother keeps going to them, though she's an agnostic, you know. She hasn't got a religion—oh, I wasn't to say that; I mean she rejects dogmatic formulas—I think that's what she says. She won't let me reject them, because she says I'm not old enough to have thought it out yet.... What a funny place! Do you often come here? I love meals in restaurants, don't you?'
Miranda was introduced to Morello, the painter, whose ugly flexible face and expressive gestures set her wondering, and whose extraordinary skill at rapidly absorbing immense lengths of macaroni fascinated her. He talked with some vehemence, and did not seem to like to be interrupted. Betty, who never left anyone out, talked to Miranda, and acted as interpreter. The Signorina Lunelli ate and drank a great deal, and smiled with immense cheerfulness; Miranda admired her large beauty and fine physique very much. All three, she perceived, were great friends, not only with each other, but with nearly every one in the room. It was a very sociable and merry meal.
'You don't smoke, I think?' Betty said, as the coffee arrived.
'I don't mind trying,' Miranda replied. 'I was ill last time, but that was three years ago. I was a kid then; besides, it was a cigar of Warren's. Dare say I could manage a cigarette now.'
'Oh, I wouldn't,' Betty counselled.
After about a minute and a half, Miranda wholly agreed with her. Her feeling when she looked up and saw her brother at the door was sheer relief.
'I expect Warren's come for me,' she said, coughing out a cloud of smoke.
Warren had come for her. It seemed that Mrs. Venables was anxious.
'I knew this was your lunch-place,' he explained to Betty, 'and we guessed she might be with you. I'm sorry to interrupt—but you have finished, haven't you? My mother will be anxious, you see.'
Miranda rose rather shakily and said good-bye. She had quite decided not to take to smoking.
The aspect which the episode bore of the rescue of a truant child from corrupting company was not assisted, certainly, by look or speech. It was perhaps an aspect obvious enough to be left to itself, unaccentuated and unadorned. Rather, indeed, it required, for courtesy's sake, modification. Venables possibly intended to give it this. He had greeted Betty and Gina and Morello (he had met these two before) with pleasantness. He always was pleasant to the Crevequers' friends, though the screen was sometimes rather flimsy. He was not, it seemed, shocked or annoyed to find his young sister smoking in such a restaurant among such company—merely his mother was anxious. His face, as his eyes had passed from one to the other of his sister's companions, had been quite impassive. What gave to Betty such realization as she at the time got—it was not much—was mainly Mrs. Venables' anxiety, which must so hurriedly be appeased. Betty had not known Mrs. Venables for an anxious person; to be a fussing mother was to be bornée. But the suggestion was not aggressive. Partly the green tints of Miranda's round face served as a screen for the other elements in the situation. No one likes his sister to look sick in a restaurant.
So Venables informed Miranda as they drove to their hotel.
'It's not considered particularly good form, you know, to smoke in restaurants till you can do it fairly well. And, anyhow, that's not an especially elegant place to select for the purpose—or, for that matter, for any other purpose.'
'She always goes there,' Miranda returned limply.
Warren's eyebrows went up.
'Oh—she.... That's got nothing to do with you. Each lot of people's got its own resorts.'
'But, Warren, you like her, don't you?'
'Who is "her"? Miss Crevequer? What's that got to do with it? I only said she wasn't your sort. And if you want to know whether I like Signor Morello and Signorina Gina Lunelli, I can tell you I certainly don't. And your doing this sort of thing puts mother in a very awkward position; she won't know whether she can logically scold you or not. She sent you out to see things, didn't she? Well, you've seen them now, that's one thing—quite enough for one morning.'
Tommy, it seemed, had got his enjoyment out of the business. He had, he informed Betty, 'been helping Miss Varley to look for her cousin all over the place.' Miss Varley's version was, 'Mr. Crevequer came about with me; I don't know what use he thought he was, except to suggest quite impossible places, and to talk till I felt quite giddy with it. The way those absurd infants babble! And it's mostly such nonsense, when one listens to it; they always make me feel as if I was Alice and they were Tweedledum and Tweedledee; or perhaps the White Knight, because of the sort of gentle melancholy they've got. When they come to a meal it's exactly like the Mad Tea-Party. And it's so ridiculous the way, when one of them stops to stammer, the other finishes the remark, or goes on with it till the first one is ready again.'
Tommy's relations with Miss Varley had, during the past months, greatly interested him. As she so pleased him externally, it was natural that he should desire to make friends; and as this was an enterprise in which he was not used to fail, he embarked on it with some audacity. There was a certain detachment, lack of human interest, about Prudence Varley, as he saw her, which were to him merely walls to be knocked down. He set about razing them with cheerful serenity. It had certainly never occurred to him that, if he wished to make friends with anyone, he would have any difficulty in doing so. But the walls were rather solid, he found. Against the battering-rams of his light-hearted sociability and friendliness they seemed to stand firm; he was only occasionally cheered by 'her eyes when she's going to smile.'
He one evening came to dinner in a mood of reckless resolution; however uninterested, she should this one night be interested, more or less, in him; he would break through the guard somehow and 'achieve intimacy.' He skilfully arranged contiguity with her when they sat on the balcony after dinner and listened to the mandolins in the road below. To tune the scene to the note of seriousness he regarded as desirable—nonsense having failed—he was silent for an unusual minute, to let the night sink in: the broad stillness of the sea below the high road, with the moon cutting its silver lane across it; Naples curving round the water's edge, a great cluster of sparkling jewels; far off across the bay the red glowing column above Vesuvius, that flared and darkened and flared again. To the persistent tinkle of the mandolins below a tenor voice sang 'Addio, bella Napoli!'
Tommy, having given the impression its chance of absorption, inquired:
'Do you like it?'
She turned to him a little absently, and the glow across the water seemed to strike high-lights in her eyes.
'What?'
He swept his hand towards it.
'Naples—all that.'
'Yes.' She had a faculty of conveying all she meant by a simple affirmative or negative; it is, if one comes to think of it, a habit rather rare; most people supplement or qualify or explain. She added: 'The little of it I see. It's not much.'
Tommy enlarged; he would force personality into it.
'It's not my Naples. Mine is different.'
She assented, 'I know,' and he realized with triumph that she had accepted the personal element; she had hitherto always passed it blankly by.
'My Naples,' she said, 'isn't human; it's colour, and light and shadow, and the way the streets go—cut like deep gorges and climbing up—you know? I'm getting to know that a little. But that's Naples in one sense only—one meaning. The people who live in it I don't know.'
'You don't want to know them, do you?'
Having found the personal tack for once, Tommy adhered to it.
'Well——'
Her considering silence seemed to discriminate delicately between the various types of 'the people who live in it.' It seemed that one might want to know some and not others.
'You don't care about knowing people, only things,' Tommy told her.
She accepted it in silence. Discrimination between 'people' would hardly, in the circumstances, have been courteous. Her next remark was a swerve, as usual, to 'things.'
'Oh, look there!... Some one told me it hadn't been so excited for years. I wonder if it means anything by it.'
Tommy left the achievement of further intimacy for another occasion. He meant to carry it through. That was a few days before he had 'helped her to look for her cousin all over the place.' During that search he had found her a little abstracted; she had not appeared to be listening to him much. Her habit of attending to him with a small portion of her mind only, if that, did not baulk him; it pricked him to renewed effort. The element of deliberateness in it passed, as so much passed, over his head.
But he partially caught it—he hardly could have missed it—on one occasion. That was on the first day of March. The steady strokes of the rain lashed the city, beginning with swift unexpectedness; the Crevequers, coming home from lunch, found Prudence Varley and Miranda at their door, delivering a note. They both looked very wet. The Crevequers, mournfully looking from under their large and disreputable umbrella—of all things they hated rain—felt an immense pity, a pity that would have seemed to Prudence disproportionate; she was used to present to the elements a tranquil inattention, and rather liked rain than not. Miranda, too, was of hard fibre; both, anyhow, were used to England. The Crevequers, from under the umbrella (they more than ever resembled Tweedledum and Tweedledee) said (in turns):
'Come up with us till it stops'—'You mustn't get any wetter just now'—'Or you'll be too wet'—'The only safe way is to get dry'—'In between'—'At the stove'—'We're so dull'—'We've no one to talk to; do come'—'Oh, but do'—'Well, anyhow, take the umbrella'—'We shan't want it; we never go out in the wet'—'We should hate to.'
The entirety of the failure of it all had pathos. Significance seemed to be suddenly brought by that failure into the fact that while three members of the Venables family had long been familiar with the room at the top of the pinkish house, the fourth had never set foot on the lowest of the stone stairs.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee went up to their room in silence.
It was then that the room seemed newly to become an impression to them; it was as if it had broken through barriers and suddenly pierced their senses. Their melancholy eyes took it in—a certain tawdriness it had, the litter of things incongruous: on the table a scattered pack of dingy cards; bottles and glasses, unwashed from last night, making red sticky circles on Marchese Peppino; everywhere was Marchese Peppino: one could not escape from it. From the half-painted, absurd ceiling to the stone floor stale air brooded, breathing of smoke and wine.
Betty thought suddenly of cold, rarefied air, with a faint smell of paint, and winter sunshine striking in through open windows.
Tommy said an odd thing, a thing it is possible he had never said before.
'W-what a beastly mess!'
Then he shoved a space for himself on the table, among glasses and papers, and began to make pictures for Marchese Peppino.
It was about this time, early in March, that the Crevequers took to quarrelling. It was a thing not usual with them, because they liked, of all things, a pleasant harmony. Rows, as they observed, made them feel ill. But at this time they developed a new touchiness; possibly Lent was partly accountable. Tommy wrangled with his editor, disputed truculently with the good-tempered Luli, assumed a mien of impertinent defiance towards his more urgent creditors, and snapped at Betty, who snapped back, and then they would stammer rude and unpleasant comments on each other for a minute or two—it took them longer to quarrel than it takes people who can fling their remarks unhaltingly straight from the lips—until one or other was ashamed and said:
'D-dry up.'
They quarrelled once about Marchese Peppino. Betty referred to it to Warren Venables, who, as usual, did not pursue the subject with enthusiasm. When Venables had left them, Tommy, sitting on the table with his hands in his pockets, looked down at his sister rather moodily.
'Wish you'd let my shop alone, Betty. Venables doesn't care a hang about it—can't you see?'
The surprise in Betty's melancholy eyes testified to the rarity of the ill-tempered tone; particularly it was rare from one of them to the other.
'Well—what does it matter, though?'
Tommy was frowning.
'It does. It bores him to hear about it. It doesn't amuse him; he doesn't think it's funny—and it's not particularly—and w-what's the good of making bores of ourselves?'
Betty regarded him thoughtfully.
'I don't think he's so easily bored as all that, you know.'
Tommy remained gloomy.
A curious element had come, just of late, into his relations with Venables—the element of embarrassment. How it began he could not have said, nor whence it sprang. It was unfortunate, as they saw so extremely much of Venables. More and more Tommy left him to Betty, refusing to make a third in their expeditions and amusements. Yet he liked Venables; he liked him as much as he had liked him at first, when the meeting face to face had carried him back curiously to the old days of school hero-worship. Now, for the last few weeks, he had become growingly silent in his presence; the difficulty of conversation made him rather angry; it was a difficulty he was unused to, and he could not account for it. It oppressed him, too, now, in Miss Varley's presence; the achievement of intimacy did not progress. Tommy supposed it might have something to do with Lent; Lent often affected one's spirits unfavourably. Life in general, in fact, was rather a bore. Tommy told Betty so.
'I'm tired of being overworked,' he remarked. 'I wish I wasn't a newspaper man. I wish I wrote novels, like Mrs. Venables. Let's write a novel, Betty. I wish I had a motor-car to play with, like Venables. I wish we were older, Betty—old enough to go home to Santa Caterina and live in peace on our hard-won earnings. Let's chuck it and go. We've got enough, if we leave our debts behind us, and eat like moderate Christians, and are out of reach of shops. What's the good of fooling here, and never having enough to live on, and—and——'
His stammer or his disgust choked the rest of his grievances from his lips.
Betty looked sympathetic.
'You'll feel better in the morning,' she said, 'if it's a fine day.'
She was standing by the open window, leaning out into the soft darkness. From the narrow steep alley below, and from the wide lit thoroughfare into which it ran, the cheerful revel of Naples at night hummed up.
'Let's come out,' said Betty, 'into the streets.'
And the two seekers after a quiet life strolled through the city together. They returned home a little after midnight, having made a very heroic and quite successful fight against care.