Rose Macaulay

'So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration, enters into life, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.'—R. W. Emerson.

Prudence, according to her promise, exerted herself to keep her family from going to say good-bye to the Crevequers. It was not a very easy task. She represented to her aunt that looking after Tommy took most of Betty's time.

'I doubt if they allow her at the hospital much,' said Mrs. Venables; 'and the child must be terribly anxious and lonely. I should like to do what I can for her.'

Mrs. Venables was very kind; late failures of intimacy had slipped from her memory since Tommy's disaster. She had been to see him at the hospital, and had met Betty there. Tommy, during her visit, had apparently been asleep. Betty had hardly spoken, for fear, she said, of waking him.

'It is a long time,' said Mrs. Venables, 'since I had a satisfactory talk with either of those interesting children. Yes, Prudence, they are interesting, owing to their very peculiar circumstances and ways of life, whatever may be their personal limitations. I grant that one does not come across great depths in them—or, anyhow, that the depths are as yet quite unstirred; but those childlike, seemingly almost soulless natures are a most interesting study to me. One wonders how far their climate and their faith contribute towards the result as we see it. There is certainly something in the beauty and gay paganism of this city, mingled as it is with the simple devoutness of a symbolic faith, that seems to develop such characters freely. I should like to watch those children's career—to see what they grow into. Who knows but that they may sometime find their souls? That would be a strange consummation, deeply impressive; I should much like to try to bring it about, but I am afraid the time is very far from ripe as yet. However, I should at all events wish to see them once again before we part. We have, after all, attained to some intimacy, they and I; we have shared so many vivid experiences, and had so much striking talk together.'

But Mrs. Venables was at last induced to put her parting words into a letter—four sheets, closely written. Betty took it to read to Tommy, and they composed an answer together, with immense pains, resisting manfully the temptations to 'strike' which assailed them.

'And so that's the end of Mrs. Venables,' said Betty, sighing as she signed her name. 'And I suppose no one will ever think us so interesting again.... I wonder, Tommy, if we made the most of our opportunities....'

They mournfully pondered over the unreturning past. Yet they had certainly made, if not the most, at any rate a good deal, of those regretted opportunities. They had, both purposely and accidentally, succeeded in being a real and profound impression. When they arrived at the age that in their opinion justified them in reading Mrs. Venables' works, they would probably get much pleasure out of their own portraits.

Miranda Venables came to see Betty the day before her family left Naples. She came in with a dejected air.

'I've come to say good-bye. We're going to-morrow. It'll be rather ripping getting home and getting some cricket and tennis, only I'm simply too awfully slack for anything after all this fooling round doing nothing. Feel.' She held out a plump arm for Betty to pinch. 'Horrid flabby, isn't it? And I say, I'm awfully sick at having to say good-bye, you know.'

The round face was tragically despondent. Miranda had scarcely realized till now how much she liked the Crevequers. She said so.

'You are rotters, you two, but you do make things go, you know,' she explained, a little embarrassed at her own frankness. 'And, I say, I hope we all meet again sometime—not in this beastly place, but at home. You might come and stay with us; you'd get some hockey. Oh, I forgot; you don't care about doing things. But it's beastly saying good-bye. I hate it.'

'So do I,' Betty said. 'So I never do it. Let's not. Let's come and have ices instead.'

They went and had ices at Caflisch's, and the pathos of the occasion was salient. Miranda, after the second ice, worked up at length to:

'It's all very well, but I like your sort of people, if it is different (like Warren said once, and mother says), a jolly sight better than ours—so there!'

'It's all a q-question of taste, of course,' Betty said. 'And now I must go; and as we aren't going to say good-bye, there's no more to be said. I hope we shall all of us have a j-jolly summer.'

'Please say good-bye for me,' said Miranda tearfully, referring to Tommy, who had a pedestal of his own. 'And I hope he'll soon be better, and ... oh dear!'

So that parting was effected. It should, after all, count for something that one's friends should weep to say good-bye.

Next day the Venables left Naples.

When she knew that they had gone, Betty seemed to lose suddenly the strength she had summoned to her for resistance; she had no more need of it; the long struggle was over. She shivered a little at that past bitterness, and buried her face in her two hands. When she looked up again, the past lay, as it were, slain; all the future waited.

The struggle, made so hard and bitter at the first, had at the last been easy. Warren Venables had let it rest in the end, realizing bitterly at last the ineffectualness of contest. Prudence had assisted him to that realization.

'We can't do anything for them now; we're no good to them; we only hurt them. We've got to leave them alone.'

It was strange to Warren to see how her eyes were wet.

'It's easy enough for you,' he said, his voice hard and level. 'You don't know how much I care.'

She said, very gently, 'I do,' and then was silent for a moment, thinking perhaps that what she did not know was rather how much she herself might possibly have cared, had many things been wholly different; had not the unconquerable 'there is nothing to say' finally summed up the situation as far as her part in it went. But of those vague might-have-beens Warren knew nothing.

Prudence said:

'I do know. And that's why you'll leave them alone—because you care. For if you don't, you'll hurt them—horribly. Don't you see? We've hurt them enough; this is the only amends possible—the only amends they will take.'

'Amends!' His face was set like a flint, his way when he was hurt. 'That's just it. I've been a brute all along; and when I came to know it, through their coming to know it, and through my coming to care so much, I wasn't allowed to make any amends. That's what I can't stand.'

(He had been shaken and stirred of late out of all his self-containment; Prudence had heard many things from him.)

'You've made your amends,' she said. 'First by the things you've said to her; and now you will be making them again by leaving her alone, as she wishes. There's no other you can make. Don't you see?'

'I see I've got to,' he said harshly. 'I've been made to see that clearly enough lately. Oh, I suppose I've got to accept it—sit down under it.'

Prudence mused over it.

'It's been rather strange all along,' she said, more to herself than to him. 'For we did our part to them, for good or evil, and they theirs to us, by accident, and now that it's done we can't be of any more use to each other, in the straits we're all, I suppose, in, through all we've come to see and know. They want nothing of us, and we had better want nothing of them; our uses for each other are over; there it is, you see. They must leave us to help ourselves, and we must leave them to help themselves and each other. And I hope we shall all do that; only it will have to be along our own lines, not along other people's. You can't step out of your own road into somebody else's; there are chasms between, too wide to jump. And if you do manage to jump them, you don't know the geography of the new road, and you only lose your way. I can't help being stiff and puritanical and disliking certain things. They can't help being—well, street-children of gregarious habits and wide tastes. Why should they? It's merely being themselves. But though I may be a prig, I can yet try to understand and not to keep aloof; and though they may be—well, they can improve their roads too. It's always open to us to improve our own roads—only not, I think, successfully to leave them.'

Thus Prudence, working it out for her own satisfaction, her considering brows puckered over the light that her thought had kindled in her far-seeing, discerning artist's eyes. This side of it—the moral side, the ultimate side, call it what you will—was of salient clearness to her; it predominated, rising vividly out of the tangle of issues. It was to her the thing that greatly mattered, that it was always open to us to improve our own roads.

To Warren (the discrimination was partly, perhaps, one of sex, a good deal between the idealist and one who was not, whatever he was, at all an idealist) what may be called the moral aspect was obscured. He had wanted something and had failed to get it; that for him summed up the matter. Later, he might come to realize many things, all the things that Prudence realized, that the Crevequers realized—how the fusion of two 'sorts' was at the best a rash experiment, at the worst a most tragical catastrophe; how the matter had been, no doubt, wisely decided. Now he knew but one thing: what he so greatly desired he might not have. Prudence's vision of it seemed of little relevance to him. They might all follow their improved roads anywhere they chose; they might climb heights, in that grey future wherein he at least must be (so it seemed to him at this time) a solitary pedestrian; how they might help themselves and each other concerned him not at all.

His clever face was very bitterly set as he stared at the ground, brooding over it. It was probable that he too had learned something, the insolence, as his cousin had termed it, of his past attitude having so recoiled upon himself.

'Oh,' said Prudence, suddenly, following up her own talk of roads, 'I wish we could leave them—I wish we could; but walls shut us in. The walls of character, and circumstances, and old habit; we can't break through them. We only knock against them—and it hurts.' She stopped, because her voice shook strangely. After a moment she said quietly: 'We can't do that. We can only try to keep the gaps wide, and look through them.... But there are one or two things we can do besides that. Mr. Crevequer will want to get something to do afterwards; I told you, didn't I, that they are giving everything up.'

'Oh! That charming paper. About time, too, I should say. Well?'

'Well, I thought you might write to that Settimana Illustrata man you know at Genoa. They are going to their old home for the present; but eventually they would like work at Genoa. I should think the Settimana might give him something to start on; he's quite clever, of course; and he really can draw, can't he? Genoa's near their home. They'll have all their old friends to play with, and of course they'll make new ones, and of course their friends will be of all sorts; their road takes them there. What I don't know,' she added presently, 'is where else it is going to take them, and where ours are going to take us.'

Warren did not think it particularly mattered, and said so. Prudence, who did, proceeded to explain to herself, rather than to him, where their roads had, in the past, taken them. She liked to be quite sure, to arrive at sureness by thinking things thoroughly out.

'We've all been wrong, and all through different lacks in us—different failures of understanding. I've hated ugliness so much that I haven't tried—I haven't even wanted—to see the beauty that's always tangled into it. I've just looked the other way. That was through being a prig, and stupid. You've minded ugliness so little (though you've seen it all right) that you've accepted it, traded on it. That was through being lacking in some sense—I think, perhaps, the sense of beauty, and a little in the moral sense, too.' Prudence was being offensively frank, as she was apt to be when she thought things out aloud. 'And the Crevequers haven't known, really, what ugliness was. That was through never having learnt, chiefly. And,' she summed up after a moment, 'there we all stand.'

'So it seems,' Warren said. 'It must be a satisfaction to have it all so clearly arranged.'

Prudence went on, undisturbed.

'And what I should like to know is where we shall eventually stand. You say it doesn't matter; of course, as a matter of fact, it is the one thing which does. Where we go, and what we see by the way—oh, what else is there?'

'Where we mayn't go,' Warren answered her drearily, 'and what we miss by the way. It matters more, for it's better—more worth going to, better worth seeing.'

To that she said nothing. They both thought of it all, silently: of how four ways had come together for a little at the cross roads, how those who travelled along them had met and spoken and taken again the parted ways, where they ran beyond range of sight into a grey land, towards horizons blind with mist—blind and dark to one of the two who stood now and looked; but to the other limitless, luminous, soft with the shrouded brightness of the dawn.

'Oh,' said Prudence presently, her thought running on what we miss by the way, 'we—our sort of people—being so respectable and so honest and so refined, sit on our pedestals and look down and talk and analyse, because we've got a few things that they haven't; but, really, I am looking up all the time. For, whatever they haven't got and haven't done, they've at all events lived. They keep on doing that all the time; they always will, in whatever particular way they do it. It's such an immense thing, that. Living is like an art, that some people never learn at all; I suppose the Crevequers were born knowing it—they had no need to learn it. And if they haven't learnt quite all about it yet, well, that's only a question of time. They've got the genius of it all right. That's what I look up to in them. And,' she added, since the Crevequers were being so thoroughly thought out, 'they have another thing—the best thing they've got, the thing that will in the end matter, however much everything else fails—they have each other.'

At that Warren's face took a greater bitterness.

'So I was given to understand,' he said. 'I was told that they, being so much the same sort, wanted no other companionship. The combination of either with anyone else, it seemed, would not work—would be a disastrous fiasco, in fact.'

Prudence acknowledged his right to his bitterness, the hurt being still so new and sore, his anger with himself going so deep.

But she said, after a moment, pleading, 'Don't grudge them that. For, do you see, it's about all they've got left,' and so ended, with wet eyes.