'The beastly thing,' he said drearily, 'is how everything is such a bore, and how it will go on always, just like this.'

Betty did not need him to tell her that that was a bad thing--one of them, but not the chief. She said:

'I know.'

'No; but you can't quite know,' Tommy told her, 'because--because for you it's rather different.'

The quick movement of Betty's hand sent the pence scattering on to the floor, ringing on the bare stone.

'There'll be more than eighty out now,' she said. 'And it's not different; it's quite the same.'

Tommy turned and faced her, pondering, looking at her from under gloomy brows, seeing how she had sunk her chin on to one clenched hand, and was looking down at the pennies on the floor sombrely. He was speculating on her position, how it could be quite the same. She elucidated it a little with, 'It's what one can take that counts ... nothing else.... So it's quite the same.'

Tommy thought it over, and said, 'I see.'

Yet it seemed to him that what one had been offered might also, in the long run, count a little--anyhow, in the retrospect.

Such an amount seemed to have been now admitted between them that Betty could say, 'We're down on our luck, you and I.... Tommy, I'm horribly sorry.'

The last was pity, and he took it from her now without wincing; that it was 'quite the same' for both of them made it a simple thing to give and take. He gave his in return, gently, now that her position had thus emerged to him.

'I'm sorry, too,' he said.

So their affection for each other put out reaching, groping fingers through the glooming mists of pain that blinded each. As yet that touch could not heal: but it seemed to wait its hour.

Tommy returned to his drawing. Betty sought for and gathered up the coins from the stone floor. Their copper jingling seemed to ring in her soul dully. The beastly thing--to use Tommy's phrase--was that one must oneself throw one's bright metal away. Though it might burn to the touch, the flinging of it away was a wrenching that hurt more. Betty envied Tommy, with the bitterness of his down-bent face before her; her bitterness must of necessity be the deeper, because her bright metal had been laid in her hands, to keep if she would. Also, to throw it away had bruised and hurt not her alone....

Betty's thin, scarred hand covered her lips, steadying them.

'We shall be better soon,' she said to herself. 'We'll play in the streets and smell the sea ... and summer's coming.... We shall be better soon.'

Then she sought a narcotic in literature, and got from the shelf a book of poetry and began to read:

'When you are out alone I hope You will not meet the antelope....'

The Crevequers used often to cheer themselves with that book when they were in low spirits. But to-night it did not seem efficacious. Betty supposed she knew it too well; she could think as she read, which was not desirable. So she turned to fiction, and read 'Sea Urchins.'

The church clocks struck ten. Tommy, holding his sketch from him, said, 'How d.a.m.ned bad!' and tore it abruptly in two, muttering, 'Muzzi would if I didn't.' Then he got up and said, 'It's stifling in here. I shall go out.'

He went out.

Betty, her hand over her shaking lips, muttered, 'Poor Tommy--oh, poor Tommy! We've no luck at all, he and I.'

She was aware how he must have faced things, and how once more they stood at the same point.

CHAPTER IX

FURNACE FLAMES

'Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura Questa selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte, Che nel pensier rinnova la paura!

Tanto e amara, che poco e piu morte: Ma per trattar del ben ch' ivi trovai, Dir dell' altre cose, ch' io v' ho scorte.'

DANTE.

Beneath the hail of black dust and fiery ashes that blew in gusts from Vesuvius across the bay, Tommy Crevequer screwed his eyes and tilted his straw hat forwards and drew, getting an excellent view, if not of Vesuvius, which was blotted in brown mist, at any rate of the population who thronged the harbour, and of the way in which they received their impressions. Foreigners--never-failing game--were much in evidence, a North German Lloyd having recently arrived; there were also the Sindaco, and various other celebrities. The artist of _Marchese Peppino_ made them seem rather funny. It was the first morning after the breaking out of the eruption, and interest everywhere was vivid. Journalists recorded their impressions with smarting eyes.

A little way from Tommy, Warren Venables stood, a leaf torn from a sketch-book thrust beneath his hat to guard forehead and eyes. Tommy had seen him some time ago; he was rather bored when Venables looked round and saw him, and strolled towards him.

'Interesting,' said Venables concisely; and Tommy nodded.

Venables half looked over the artist's shoulder, with a careless 'May I see?'

Tommy shut his notebook with deliberation, and put his pencil into his pocket. Then, after a moment's interval, he flushed, slowly and with great completeness.

'You know it's a rotten rag,' he said, hurling down the other's screen with an angry blow that sent it crashing in pieces.

Venables, looking at his resentment for a moment in silence, said simply:

'I beg your pardon, Crevequer.'

He, too, had flushed. He was learning, it seemed, the 'insolent flimsiness' (as Prudence had it) of all his screens, this among the rest. He wondered for how long Crevequer had known that he 'knew it was a rotten rag'--or, rather, for how long he had cared.

The red, fine ash drifted before a push of wind into Tommy's eyes and mouth; his sullen anger surged in him, and broke stammeringly out.

Inconsequently, he was glad to see how the soft, drifting dust lay on Venables' coat and very clean collar.

'You thought--you thought I--we--didn't know a thing about it, or about anything else, all this time. Well, w-what business was it of yours?

and--and why couldn't you have let us alone?' Querulously he stuttered it out, and coughed out the dust as he ended.

Venables said again, 'I beg your pardon.'

Tommy glowered at him resentfully.

'That's no good. You--you had no business....'

His own outbreak had taken him by surprise. He was seeing the pinched look round Betty's lips, the strained heaviness of her eyes.

Venables, his quiet face very inexpressive beneath the paper guard, said, 'No, possibly not;' and that again took Tommy by surprise.

His flare of anger flickered down to a sullen smoulder; it seemed to lack fuel. Venables' silence, as they stood together, seemed to put him, as usual, in the right. After all, though 'what one can take' may be the only thing that counts on one side, what has been offered can hardly be left out of a sane vision of the other. Tommy, resentfully aware of this, was stirred to surprise, not for the first time, at the part latterly played by Venables in this matter. It seemed hardly characteristic; a certain reckless unwisdom it had, which was incongruous. Tommy wondered whether it was that play had at last grown suddenly to earnest, an irresistible tide swamping judgment, or whether this late development might perhaps be sheer amends.

Anyhow, now, since Venables, from whatever motive, had thus done the decent thing, they were again seas apart. Venables had, in a manner, by doing the things which retrospect had exhibited to the Crevequers as not quite decent, come down for a little to their level. It had only been for a little; he had now regained his own. His apology for his descent set him there with more entire security than before.

Tommy, as they stood together, wished--he had of late wished it a good deal--that he liked Venables less. It was that element in any relationship that made the difference of plane oppressive.