The Furnace.

by Rose Macaulay.

CHAPTER I

YOUTH IN THE CITY

'Val piu aver amici in piazza Che denari nella ca.s.sa.'

_Proverb._

Royalty was arriving in the harbour in a steam-yacht. It had, that is, already arrived in the harbour; it was now disembarking on the pier. It was an interesting event. An edified crowd watched it; representatives of the Press jotted down their impressions; some took photographs. A few drew pictures instead. The representative of the _Marchese Peppino_, an ill.u.s.trated paper widely perused in certain circles, drew pictures; one might gather that it was his intention to be funny, later, when he had leisure to amplify. _Marchese Peppino_ always had that intention, and its readers, whose judgment of humour was possibly, however, not of the most delicate or polished type, considered that it usually fulfilled it.

The drawings now in process of production were, before they were amplified at leisure, really quite like life; later they would become less so, but no doubt more entertaining. They seemed to be a little funny even now. A man looking over the artist's shoulder giggled and dug him in the ribs. The artist was a nonchalant young man, who did not seem to be amusing himself particularly, but to be working in a wholly professional and business-like spirit. He had quick eyes and clever fingers, and presumably, since he did his job really well, a suitably developed sense of the ludicrous.

Royalty left the pier. It was, presumably, going to have lunch before it admired Naples. That was certainly as well; it gave the representatives of the Press a respite, during which they, too, if they had the inclination and the wherewithal, might have lunch.

The representative of the _Marchese Peppino_ sat down on an inverted basket and continued to record impressions, while the crowd thinned slowly.

A facetious young man, pa.s.sing the artist, made a show of being doubled up with helpless laughter--a mirth presumably antic.i.p.atory in nature and complimentary of intent. When he wearied of the compliment he clapped the journalist on the shoulder and observed:

'We shall split our sides on Thursday, ne?'

He cherished an immense admiration for the pictorial staff of the _Marchese Peppino_. The staff gave him his usual melancholy look from under quick brows, and said:

'Have you seen my sister?'

'Just now, talking over there with La Corrini.'

From the group indicated by the jerked thumb the staff's sister emerged.

She strolled up to her brother. There did not seem to be any particular difference between them, externally. The boy might have been twenty-three and the girl twenty-two; or it was quite equally likely to be the other way about. At first glance there seemed to be a certain resemblance between them in dress as well as in face; a.n.a.lysis, however, reduced this to the suggestion in each of an untidiness--one might all but say a disreputability--that made their worldly status a matter for speculation. The girl's hat was of broken straw, pulled over her eyes; one of her shoes lacked a lace; her blue cotton dress was sun-bleached and discoloured. The boy wore a ragged blazer, frayed flannel trousers, and a very limp Panama hat, which he kept turning up, with sweet-tempered patience, when it flopped over his eyes.

The girl sat down beside her brother. She had--they both had--a serene air of being admirably content to do nothing during prolonged periods.

To sit by the harbour and talk, if the day were fine and the company agreeable, was an excellent afternoon's occupation. The streets were always entertaining, and the harbour particularly so, with the thronging of those who go down to the sea in ships, and the gay greetings of friends, and the cheerful shouting of mariners. Neapolitan loafers (and really to loaf, in the highest sense of that agreeable word, one should go to Naples) always like the harbour. The smell of the sea, too, is pleasant on a hot September afternoon, especially to the unfastidious, who do not cavil at its dilution with various other odours.

The talk between the brother and sister and the cheerful youth who was giving himself a holiday from his shop was leisurely, of an easy familiarity, seasoned with allusions and anecdotes that showed them to share in common a 'set.' The girl's talk was partly professional, of the music-hall stage, on which she made casual and irregular appearances. La Corrini had been saying something to her.... In the report this was very funny. The stout youth, whose name, one gathered, was Luli, roared with laughter and spat many times. It was noticeable that the drawer of pictures, though he, too, talked a great deal, did not spit at all: he only stammered.

Presently they decided to have lunch, and went off, the three of them together, Luli affectionately clinging to the journalist's arm. They turned into a _trattoria_ in the Toledo. At one of the marble-topped and not very elaborately cleaned tables a finely developed young woman ate _spaghetti_ with admirable speed and dexterity, and drank red Posilipo.

The three, seeing her, hailed her with some effusion, and joined her at her table. There ensued a very sociable and conversational repast, and there was a great deal of noise, with the full-bodied and rather strident tones of the young woman of the _spaghetti_, the resonant laughter of Luli, and the stuttering, melancholy-toned and unceasing flow of singularly futile and inane babbling that emanated from the journalist and his sister. These two appeared to have a somewhat extensive circle in Naples; they exchanged greetings with most of their fellow-eaters. Some of these were really comparatively reputable; quite a number were very gaily attired, and most seemed light of heart.

The journalist, after finishing his wine and his inexpensive cigar, announced himself obliged to depart in pursuit of business.

'I must catch them driving out. They are sure to drive out, you know.'

His sister said she too would come, and catch them driving out.

So they went out into the street and sauntered leisurely along it. Its screaming, gay business was a little hushed at this hour of the hot September day; behind closed green shutters people shunned the vertically striking sun; the heavy noon brooded over what was almost, for Naples, stillness. It was not, had the representative of _Marchese Peppino_ considered the question, in the least likely that he would at this hour 'catch them driving out.' He very likely did not particularly care whether he so caught them or not; he liked to walk about the streets; neither he nor his sister minded the glare and the hot, baked smell that beat up into their faces. They had an air of very leisurely sweet temper and content with life as it was lived as they sauntered along the Toledo together. There were two things it was manifest that they would not in any circ.u.mstances do: they would quarrel with no one, and they would take no thought for the morrow.

'I wonder,' the journalist was saying, 'if Luli would lend us twenty francs. Think he would, Betty?'

He spoke in English now; they always spoke English to each other when they were alone together, though they seemed quite equally at their ease in both languages; they also stammered equally in both. They stammered when they were at all excited, or earnest, or tired, and very often when they were not. When they were talking, these hiatuses were often the only opportunities their companions had of getting in a word edgeways.

Betty thought it improbable that Luli would lend any such sum.

'You know, Tommy, we had ten from him last month. He won't miss it if we don't remind him, but it would be silly to bother him again just yet.'

'Oh, all right. But I'm afraid we've rather got to get some somehow.

We've spent an awful lot lately. Why did we have lunch to-day? We didn't want it.'

'Who's been bothering?'

From long experience Betty caught the issue.

'The chap I get paints from. I--I told him he'd got to wait; he c-cut up rough; said he'd waited long enough.'

The stutter, becoming p.r.o.nounced, showed Tommy a little stirred.

'Well----' Betty's tone was depressed. There was an intonation of melancholy, however, in general in the Crevequers' stammering speech--a melancholy that was on the borderland of laughter, and stuttered into it as a man stumbles unawares into puddles, walking along a wet path. Miss Crevequer, quite suddenly, stumbled into one now, for no apparent reason, and dragged Tommy after her. 'Well'--Betty regained, as it were, dry ground--'let's give him this week's rent; and by next week something will have turned up. You can win some at cards, can't you? It's a pity I've got no job just now. At least, it's rather fun really, and we'll go to the theatre to-night.'

Tommy nodded. The proposition seemed a matter of course; no incongruity struck either. There was, in fact, no incongruity; it was very simple: the payment of debts would have been an indulgence quite beyond their means; going to the theatre was one within them. The Crevequers could only afford cheap pleasures.

They settled themselves for the afternoon under an awning outside a cafe by which royalty, it was supposed, would eventually pa.s.s. There they conversed with friends, and Tommy drew pictures, and time, as usual, pa.s.sed agreeably and sociably. At about six o'clock there came by an informant, who remarked that royalty had gone for a drive in the opposite direction. Tommy started in pursuit, and did not join Betty again till it was too late for the theatre. So they asked some friends and had a supper-party at a restaurant instead, because the theatre money must be somehow spent. Its spending, and a good deal more besides, proved beautifully easy. Then they came home through the lit streets; the flare of them and the noise of them and the gay people who lounged and talked in them always made the Crevequers feel cheerily at home, and flowing over with the milk of human kindness.

Beyond the flaring, screaming world there was a soft summer moon, nearly at the full, and s.p.a.ces of silver light on the land and the dark, still sea. But these children of the gay streets had no concern with the moon; the lamps were for them, and the flare of lights that lit the coster's barrow and the pedlar's awning. They loafed along with the true vagrant's air of irresponsible well-being to their home, which was in a narrow street sloping upwards out of the Toledo--sloping up steeply, and laid out in shallow steps.

The Crevequers lived in a flat at the top of a tall pink house. None of the occupants of the house seemed to have yet retired; most of them were in the street outside. The Crevequers stayed for a little to talk to them, then went in and climbed many flights of dark stone stairs, and came at last into the room where they lived. The room had an inexpensive air. It had, however, no lack of contents, and these were, without exception, in unexpected places; the books, for instance, lay on the floor in a corner--a battered selection from the light literature of two languages. There were papers, half-finished drawings, writing and painting materials, littered over the table among half-emptied bottles, cigarettes, and unwashed gla.s.ses. The ceiling was interesting; it was partially covered with a design in bold colours, unfinished; it gave the impression of being worked at, spasmodically, at irregular intervals, by more than one artist; it had an interesting air of awaiting the next inspiration. It was an untrammelled composite, so far, of the beauties of nature, imaginative and highly exciting dramatic incident, and scenes from pagan lore, with, whenever imagination or s.p.a.ce required padding, a cherub plunging through a festoon of flowers. Some of the designs bore a vaguely familiar air; the visitor to Pompei might have recognized, for instance, the lady on her knees with a bird's-nest full of infants. The most note-worthy point about this ceiling was that it was really not badly painted.

The most comfortable features of the room were two large arm-chairs, one on each side of the stove. Tommy cleared a s.p.a.ce in one of them and subsided into it. Betty dragged a spirit-lamp and a saucepan of milk from under the table and knelt over it, whistling a soft, tired little tune the while. Tommy, lying in his chair, whistled too, feeling in his pockets for matches.

'Cocoa, Tommy?' Betty broke her tune to say.

'No.' He had found a match, and was sc.r.a.ping it perseveringly on his knee. 'It's going to boil over,' he remarked.

She caught it off with a deft hand and poured it into a cup, and, carrying it to the other arm-chair, in which she did not trouble to clear a s.p.a.ce, she lay back with a sigh of contented languor.

'Cigarette, please. Thank you.'

There was a battering at the door, and an influx of three youths and two young women. It seemed that they had been having supper together--enough supper to raise their spirits and to make them very sociable and amiable. The Crevequers, having also had supper, were sociable and amiable too, and Tommy got out more wine, and the room became blue with smoke and full of laughter; and Tommy played his banjo, and Betty sang a song which amused them all very much, and the three young men and the two young women shouted the chorus. None of the other occupants of the house seemed to be disturbed--they were probably used to it. The company stayed late. These pleasant gatherings are hard to break up, and the Crevequers' friends seemed attached to them. With the young man who had drunk most wine Tommy made a bet and won it; it was a five-franc note, and it was satisfactory as it changed hands to feel that the loser, in his then state of warm generosity, did not at all miss it. Tommy did a further stroke of business by arranging an evening of cards with this gentleman for the following week. At last, with hilarious leave-taking, the visitors departed, some to their rooms in the same house, some elsewhere, all very merry and affectionate.

'It hasn't been a really busy day--not so very,' Betty remarked presently. 'Why are we tired?'

'There seems to have been plenty to do, one way and another,' Tommy said, still gently fingering the banjo-strings.

They spoke languidly. The tiredness of their faces seemed to slur over the delicate discriminations that really existed between them. They were, as a matter of fact, not quite exactly alike at ordinary times.

For example, Betty had a dimple, when she laughed, in her left cheek; Tommy's indentation, rather fainter, was in his right. Both had blue eyes glinting to grey, but the longer sweep of Betty's lashes made hers oftener approach to black. When their eyes flickered from melancholy to sudden laughter, as they did rather often, and usually on quite unexpected and incongruous occasions, they had a trick of narrowing to blue slits. The slant of the black brows of both was up, slightly, from left to right; they were quick brows, that flickered a little with their speech.

'Let's get on our dressing-gowns and brush our hairs,' Betty suggested.