Part 15 (1/2)

Some scaffolding had fallen, tossed down by the storm or the earthquake, in a corner where no one pa.s.sed. Tommy lay with his face to the street, his sketch-book clutched in the hand of one flung-out arm, the other arm pinned to his side, with a twelve-foot plank across his back and two poles across his legs. Tommy and the scaffolding both wore a coat an inch deep of black dust.

Venables lifted away the plank: it took most of his strength; then he moved the poles. Then he turned Tommy over very gently, and the black dust drifted down on to the upturned face. Betty raised it on to her lap and s.h.i.+elded it with her two hands, saying always, and not knowing what she said:

'Tommy--Tommy--Tommy.'

Venables said:

'I will fetch help. I will be as quick as I can.'

She looked at him with unseeing eyes. He paused a moment, then turned and left her, slipping away into the shadows, one of a world of shadows, leaving those two alone together, as, for her, they had been alone together through all the long night.

She looked down into her lap, and made a s.h.i.+eld of her two hands, and muttered:

'Tommy--Tommy.'

CHAPTER XI

THE ETERNAL ROADS

'We are the creatures of birth, of ancestry, of circ.u.mstance; we are surrounded by law, physical and psychical.... The ways are dark, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we cannot see.'--J. H. SHORTHOUSE.

'The law of the past cannot be eluded, The law of the present and future cannot be eluded, The law of the living cannot be eluded--it is eternal.'

WALT WHITMAN.

There was peace in Naples, and suns.h.i.+ne breaking at last through clouds--rest and brightness following days of fear. It remained to put things together--all the broken things, human and otherwise. The city was full of those who reached hopeless hands for prop and support, having lost everything; full of those who gathered closely to them the fragments that remained, fragments they had s.n.a.t.c.hed from ruin and clutched in their arms as they fled.

On the many dead, the many broken and dying, the many who grasped fragments, the many who had lost all, the clear sun looked down, on this 13th of April, with its gay, lucid light. It seemed to hold a promise, to mention a hope far off. It seemed to drag the world out of the dark pit, to give the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction the air, not of a far dream, but of a possibility--far too. It gave it also the air, quite definitely, of a necessity. It was like the first youth of the spring, with its forgetting of the black storms past, its promise of a brave renewal.

Betty Crevequer walked home through the sunny streets from the hospital.

The gay sun had lit the long ward, sending dusty beams across the room to the broken, bandaged figures in the beds. By the side of one of the broken, bandaged figures Betty had sat and talked, and Tommy had talked too, to-day for the first time--talked for the first time, that is, in the Crevequers' generous sense of that elastic word.

Betty had for four days known that Tommy would not die, but live; now the suns.h.i.+ne in the streets brought her to a more vivid realization of it. The suns.h.i.+ne in the streets, the keen smell of the sea that caught her breath as she turned down towards it, the fresh wind from the west, blowing the ashes away from Naples, brought sudden tears to her eyes, sudden, vague thoughts of far-off renewals, of the mending of all broken things. In her weariness she could not stay the tears; they stood in her eyes and quivered to her lashes. When she had climbed up to the little room at the top of the steep stairs, they took her wholly; she leaned her chin on her two hands and looked out over the city, not knowing whether the tears dropping slowly were for the old things broken and spilt, or for the slow mending that might yet be. Anyhow, the city lying so in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne had a most sad gaiety. It brought back to Betty how Tommy's smile had to-day flickered out from the bandages, lightening the sad eyes.

She was horribly tired; it seemed that she had been living at high pressure, not only for these past few days--she could not count them--but for days and weeks before that. The time comes when strung nerves break like worn-out fiddle-strings; there is no more strength in them.

So, in her hour of weakness, Betty wept, having fallen through the broken floor of circ.u.mstance till she touched bottom, looking without hope at some far, possible ascent, through the sad dimness of tears. The west wind dried her tears on her face as she looked out; and Prudence Varley came in.

Betty turned and faced her, as she paused for a moment to knock at the open door, standing with chin a little raised to suit with the caught-up lip, straight and tall, with the grey, artist's eyes that took in everything and had been wont to give out nothing. Betty's mournful eyes met the look with her new, sad comprehension of that restraint which had always so held back everything. Yet now it seemed that it did not so entirely hold back everything; its remoteness was less complete. Betty hardly knew this; she knew chiefly how the room was tawdry and breathed of stale smoke, how the table was littered with cards and _Marchese Peppino_, how the other had come, perhaps, straight from a cool place, smelling cleanly of paint, full of the April suns.h.i.+ne, s.p.a.cious and pure and bare.

Prudence Varley said:

'How do you do? May I come in? or----'

She paused, waiting. Betty was hardly used to such waiting on the part of her visitors; as a rule they came in, deeming questions superfluous.

Betty considered it for a moment, her lower lip caught between her teeth, her eyes pondering. She might, she knew, have said 'No.' Prudence Varley neither offered nor demanded adornment of speech. It was an open question she had asked, to be answered truly. 'No' would have sent her simply away without comment or offence.

Betty considered 'No,' and rejected it, perhaps because the direct eyes seemed no longer to hold everything back; perhaps because, like a child hurt and bewildered, she wanted help; perhaps because, from the first to the last, she had always so liked Prudence Varley.