Venables, who had been standing in considering silence, seemed to remember that there was very little left to say between them. He nodded good-bye, and turned away.

Tommy slowly opened his notebook, and stared at his half-completed sketch beneath drawn-down brows.

'What rot; what sickening rot,' he murmured, and finished the drawing with quick, skilful strokes.

This was a great time for newspaper men. Leaving the harbour, Tommy strolled into the town, to seek impressions. The most vivid, coming to him unsought, was one of cinders and black dust falling like intermittent rain into his eyes. To protect them he followed Venables'

example, and thrust a page from his sketch-book under his hat. In the street outside Santa Chiara he encountered Mrs. Venables and Miranda; they were coming out of the church. Beneath her swathing motor veil, Mrs. Venables' face was alight with exaltation. She also, manifestly, was seeking--and finding--impressions. She accosted Tommy.

'Immensely striking.... But too pitiful'--she indicated the church--'the prayers, the unreasoning, childlike terror. In the streets, too, the poor terrified refugees, clasping their household G.o.ds and lighting candles to the saints as they walk ... infinitely pathetic ... if one could tell them how futile!'

She paused, remembering, perhaps, that Tommy, as belonging to the same childlike faith, might also, on occasion, light a candle to the saints.

'It seems a natural thing to try, under the circ.u.mstances,' he remarked, confirming her suspicion.

'Poor souls,' she murmured. 'I must get over to Bosco Trecase to-morrow.... Human nature in the raw ... deeply impressive. One's heart bleeds for all the broken-up homes. And the way they take it--children hurt without knowing why. That seems to me to be infinitely pathetic; don't you think so, Mr. Crevequer?'

Mr. Crevequer tapped his sketch-book with his pencil. The difference of plane did not oppress him particularly in Mrs. Venables' presence; he still almost enjoyed it.

'It's got, you know, to seem f-funny to me,' he explained. 'But I admit it's a little forced, some of the humour.'

'Oh yes--your paper.'

Mrs. Venables became vague; her eyes greedily took in impressions from the pa.s.sers-by.

Miranda said, 'Oh, I say, do let's see!'

Tommy did not open his book. He changed the subject.

'Rather pretty, the way the cinders fall, don't you think?'

Miranda said that the atmosphere was beastly, and that she hated it.

'It gets right inside my clothes--all gritty.' She wriggled distressfully. 'And my shoes are quite full of it. I want to go home to lunch, but mother won't. Mother likes it, I believe.'

'The worst, I am afraid, may be still to come,' Mrs. Venables murmured.

'They say we may expect a terrible night. There are sinister omens....'

'Oh, it is a rotten place,' said Miranda, disgusted.

It grew to be so, more and more, through the day. Tommy met Betty for lunch, then continued his impression-seeking, coated from head to foot in black dust. They arranged to be in for supper at eight. Betty was not surprised when Tommy failed to appear; there was so much of increasing interest going on. Instead, Gina Lunelli came in, seeking cheerful society because she was horribly afraid, with the abandoned physical terror of large, full-blooded people. The Crevequers always cheered one, made one laugh; she sought them, therefore, and found Betty alone, waiting for supper.

Supper restored Gina a little; she became more cheerful, though still observing that there seemed every probability of the world coming to an end in the course of the night.

'The way it blazes--Madre Dio! And the ashes that choke one! And this horrible storm! And Tommy--he's out in it!'

'Oh, Tommy's all right.'

Gina shrugged her broad shoulders.

'What with the storm, and the ashes they're shovelling in great heaps off the roofs, and the wild people there are about, and no one to keep order, and the convulsion of the earth.... But who knows? We must hope for the best, and the saints are good.'

Later on in the evening there actually was a slight convulsion of the earth. It shook the furniture and made a rattling, and caused Gina to have a fit of hysteria, and sent her running out into the street, notwithstanding the storm, averring that she would on the whole prefer to be slain by lightning than by a collapsing roof.

Betty curled herself up in her chair and listened to the voices of the night. It was about eleven o'clock then--a black, wild night, full of the storm. The earth growled back strange mutterings in answer to the rumblings of the sky. It was as if all h.e.l.l was loose, and playing about Naples that night. The thunder-peals and the answering earth-growls grew in reverberance, in sullen rage.

Betty wanted Tommy.

There might be many reasons, but there seemed on the face of it to be no reason, why he should not have come in. He had probably been asked to supper by some one. But he had said, for certain, that he would come home.... Betty did not think that Tommy had lately been in a mood to seek sociable evenings with friends.

Gina's terror, the wild night, the storm in the air, caught hold of Betty with an insistent grip. The voice of the travailing earth played on her strung nerves as if they had been banjo-strings. She smoked cigarettes to still them; she tried to read, to ignore them.

A little after midnight the city shook with great definiteness. The room quivered and rattled from floor to ceiling. Betty, after that, went out into the streets, to see how things were, to meet other people, to find Tommy, to escape her own society. The Crevequers were gregarious; they on all occasions sought other people's society in preference to their own.

Betty was in the fashion; every one seemed, upon that upheaval, to have sought the open, more or less regardless of whether or not they were clad suitably to face it. Some of them were not at all clad suitably; they gave an impression of extreme haste. Close to Betty a stout lady in a nightdress shivered, and clasped a whimpering pug in her arms.

There was an influx into the churches; there was crying and moaning and telling of beads. An impromptu procession pa.s.sed, bearing lighted candles, and a wax San Gennaro lent from his altar by his _parocco_.

Meanwhile the mountain across the bay flung into the black night its glowing ma.s.ses. Above it hung an immense fiery pillar, blazing across the dark, restless sea.

Vesuvius had not done yet.

Betty looked for Tommy.

She did not find him; she found instead Mrs. Venables, and thought, with a vague, detached part of her mind, what an orgie this must be.

Mrs. Venables was not pleased with Betty, but the strikingness of the present occasion seemed to unite them.

'Deeply impressive.... I suppose few of us have ever experienced such a night.... I am going into the church.'

'I'm l-looking for Tommy,' Betty said mechanically, staring down the street.

Mrs. Venables did not hear; she was borne away by the crowd, murmuring, 'The city of dreadful night,' the light of exaltation kindling her fine plain face.

'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.