'But probably he's home by now,' Betty suddenly thought, and pressed a way through the people to her own street, and climbed the black stairs to the small room, where the lamp flickered dimly and nothing else moved.
Betty huddled again into her own arm-chair, and rested her chin on her drawn-up knees, and stared across at the empty chair opposite her. She wanted Tommy; Tommy who would so have talked if he had been there—the last more silent weeks had slipped from memory; Tommy, who was so often late in returning, who might be occupied in so many ways during this strange night, yet whose absence, nevertheless, grew with the hours to have a sinister meaning, as well as an infinite solitary sadness.
The storm rolled over Naples.
CHAPTER X
BETTY AND TOMMY
'So flesh
Conjures tempest-flails to thresh
Good from worthless. Some clear lamps
Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.'—George Meredith.
Through the black, slow hours Betty stared with wide unswerving eyes at the other arm-chair. On one of its arms lay a pipe, on the other a half-finished drawing. Between them, it was strange how Tommy sat, drawing, with face bent down, saying nothing. His presence grew, till the loneliness of the room was conquered. How should it be lonely? It held, as always, a companionship of two. As always, one had only to look up to see the other. So had all the past been; so would all the future be. No other state was within the bounds of imagination. As Betty once, at Baja by the sea, had looked up swiftly and seen, for life and all it meant, all it contained, herself and Tommy on warm sand, and a sand-castle dotted with pumice-stone like a plum-pudding, and had then been lit by a flash of vivid insight, of great certainty; so now she came, by slower steps, through the black night to the same realization. For it was after all a thing always known, if unexpressed, this companionship of two which should endure, stronger than death, surer than the thing called love, failing nowhere. It had been from the dawn of the days.
To the further north there lay, in sunshine, a little warm bay of blue sea, and a Ligurian fishing-city, pink and yellow and white and green, was set curving round it—Santa Caterina, of deep stone-paved streets, where odours dwelt of roasting coffee, and drying fish, and cheese, and drains, and tar, and the breath of the brown seaweed, and of the nets that had drawn in shoals of bianchetti at daybreak, and lay through the day drying on the hot sands.