'What's your paper?'

'That.' Tommy indicated _Marchese Peppino_ on the table; it came out that day.

'Oh.'

Venables just glanced at it; he showed no desire to inspect it more closely; possibly he knew enough about it already. His clever face was scrupulously devoid of expression.

'I chiefly do sketches,' Tommy elaborated. 'You know the sort of thing?

They aren't funny, not a bit; but they sell. Oh, I write for it, too, of course; and that's funnier, rather. _Novelle in corto_, you know; we have the news in, as much as if we were anybody; combine instruction with amus.e.m.e.nt, don't you know.'

Venables knew quite well.

'I wonder,' he thought afterwards, '_why_ he shoved it down my throat like that. Mere cheek, perhaps, or to show he didn't mind, or to warn me off at once in case I didn't like his style. Or doesn't he really, perhaps, realize....'

Not really to realize, Crevequer must have pushed very far from the sh.o.r.es of decency.

Venables let the topic of _Marchese Peppino_ lie where Tommy had dropped it. He delivered his mother's message, not stiffly, but with voice and face a little vacant of expression, lacking interest. He asked the Crevequers to come to lunch to-morrow at Parker's Hotel. Mrs. Venables had not been aware of Betty, but Warren supposed that her existence would add a further element of picturesque interest to the 'impression.'

The invitation was accepted. Venables stayed a little longer, and examined the ceiling, and discovered incidentally that the Crevequers--probably by the sheer insane futility of their stammering flow--had the power of p.r.i.c.king him at all points to sudden laughter.

He considered it walking home. In his search for Tommy Crevequer he had happened upon a man--he kept a billiard saloon--who knew him rather well. His remarks, entirely friendly (he was really fond of Tommy), conveyed to Venables several items of information about him; among others, that Venables would at no time have any difficulty in finding him, as a good many people thought it prudent to keep him under view. At the same time, Tommy's acquaintances seemed to a.s.sume as a matter of course that he might find an occasional plunge into obscurity a convenience. These casually conveyed impressions Venables had a.s.similated without surprise. As he would have said, one knew the sort.

And Venables liked people who amused him.

But _Marchese Peppino_ stuck in his throat.

Betty observed to Tommy:

'What fun. We shall probably forget to go. But if we don't, we shall have to eat so much that we shan't need any more for a week. How economical! Lunch in England--do you remember, Tommy?'

Tommy was thinking.

'Betty, we don't dress well enough. I want a new hat; so do you.

Venables is better dressed than we are. We must be tidy, and cut a dash at lunch. It's a mistake not to be well dressed; people are so prejudiced. I shall wear a collar to-morrow--a quite clean one, like Venables. And we won't have any supper to-night, because we shall have to eat too much at lunch. And I suppose Mrs. Venables will talk about father's books, as she's so interested; so let's read them.'

'Perhaps,' said Betty, 'we'd better read her own works too; only I don't feel sure they'd be quite nice, so I think we'll wait till we're older--thirty-two and thirty-three. We can tell her if she asks that we read so little that we have to be very careful about what we read. It would be so disappointing to read a book we didn't like; she'll understand that.'

CHAPTER III

OF MENTAL STANDPOINTS

'E parea posta lor diversa legge.'

DANTE.

The Crevequers, as they had antic.i.p.ated, did eat too much at lunch--a good deal too much. They cast, occasionally, wondering and interested glances round the dining-room, and took in the fact that every one at all the little tables was also eating too much. It was borne upon them that this exorbitance, a strange incident in their own lives, was to these others a daily occurrence. Every day at one o'clock the dining-room at Parker's, the dining-rooms at all the hotels of its genus, were filled with Anglo-Saxons and a few others, all sitting round little tables, and all eating too much. Then again at dinner-time....

The impressiveness of the thought widened their eyes, filling them with an awestruck solemnity. To eat too much, a good deal too much, twice--nay, thrice--a day (for visions of the Anglo-Saxon breakfast haunted them: one had honey, one ordered omelette) during a period of weeks and months--it required thinking over quietly afterwards. At present, face to face with the amazing succession of the courses, the contemplation of all it meant made one a little dizzy. The Crevequers took all the courses; they would not have missed one; they intended to see this thing through. As they ate they talked stammeringly. Mrs.

Venables was struck by the melancholy of their pondering eyes. Her interest--she had an immense fund of it--was gathering itself together to pour itself unstintedly forth on Maddan Crevequer's children. Her son and her daughter and her niece watched the gathering; it was a familiar process to them. The son watched it with languid amus.e.m.e.nt; the daughter with stolid unconcern (she was a bored child of eighteen); the niece with eyes inscrutably remote. The Crevequers were copy; they came to be studied, to be drawn out; they responded to the process with their usual affability. They answered questions as to their way of life, their friends, the customs of the Neapolitan poor, their religion. Mrs.

Venables, as she said, found the Roman Catholic standpoint quite immensely interesting. The Crevequers groped uncomprehendingly after the reason of such interest, and gave it up. They were, however, quite ready to answer the questions put to them; it seemed a harmless craze enough.

Mrs. Venables had been to Ma.s.s the day before, and had, she affirmed, been much struck by the impressive contrast of the ordered stateliness of the service and the spontaneous gaiety of the people as they trooped out into the piazza afterwards. It had occurred to her, watching the devout worshippers, that Catholicism was in some of its aspects a strange medium for the spiritual interpretation of the blithe Italian genius. What did Mr. Crevequer think?

Mr. Crevequer thought, but did not say, that she might have been more profitably employed in attending to the service than in watching the devout worshippers.

Mrs. Venables' niece, Prudence Varley, talked about Naples, with a certain careful accentuation of the purely ordinary point of view of the cultivated seer of sights. Her cousin Warren, watching her, smiled inwardly at the accentuation. He understood it perfectly well. There was in it a certain quality of externality that gained edge from the contrast with Mrs. Venables' all-reaching intimacy. It revealed, anyhow, how the Crevequers wallowed in ignorance--how they knew nothing.

Museums, mosaics, pictures, sculpture, were to them less than names.

Churches they knew only in so far as they went to church in them; and it was not from the point of view of one interested in worship, but in architecture, that Miss Varley seemed to approach the subject, differing herein from her aunt. When she discovered that the Crevequers knew nothing, she did not follow the subject; she gently fell again into her non-conversational att.i.tude, which seemed almost a little abstracted.

(She had often that air.) The Crevequers had indeed their own knowledge of Naples--none more so; but it was the intimacy of streets and corners, that close acquaintance with the face of a city which belongs to those who, as Warren Venables had said, 'drift about the bottom.' How should they know of mosaics? They knew every little narrow _gradone_, shut in with leaning houses, that led steeply up out of all the length of the Toledo, from Piazza San Carlo to the doors of the museum. (Beyond the doors their ignorance began.) They knew at what hour on Friday mornings it was most amusing to be playing round Porta Nolana; they knew the price at which you can get a plate of macaroni and a mezzo-litro of wine at all the _trattorie_ (of any economy) in Naples, and at which you were most likely to meet amusing acquaintances, and at what hours. But it was possible that Miss Varley felt no more curiosity as to these things than the Crevequers as to the Angevin tombs in Santa Chiara. In Naples there seemed to be no meeting-ground, or none which Miss Varley cared to seek.

It was Mrs. Venables who talked of Pompei--of the unique, almost oppressive, so she said, interest of it. The Crevequers knew Pompei as a place with nice hot, bright streets, scampered over by lizards, where it was agreeable to spend an afternoon among the gaily-hued, roofless houses, and go to sleep. But, they said, Christian Pompei was a better place--it had more variety. Here the gulf yawned aggressively; Mrs.

Venables strove to throw a bridge by remarking that to some mental standpoints the present teemed with an eternal interest that quite obscured the past. The Crevequers supposed that this might be so.

Young Miranda Venables said that she thought the past was an awful bore.

She did not approve of Naples; she was vexed at missing the hockey and beagling season at home, and she thought towns were beastly, especially Italian towns. She hated them. She looked towards the Crevequers with a rising of hope; here, it seemed, were two people who lacked intelligent interest even as she did. Miranda was, from her mother's point of view, a failure. She was in no way aesthetic, except sartorially. The Liberty frocks and flopping hats that her soul loathed seemed to give an edged incongruity to her pleasant round face, with its rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. She did not rebel against the bitter yoke of the picturesque: it was not worth while; she was merely used to remark, with her customary forcible elegance of phrase, that if her mother chose to spend money on making her look a guy, it was her look out, though Miranda considered it a pity that she could not get better value than that for her outlay. But her soul was not at all in her clothes; it was in quite different things--chiefly in hockey.

She raised that theme.

'I say, couldn't we get up a sort of a club? There must be a ground somewhere.'

But the Crevequers, it seemed, did not play hockey. It was sad how everywhere gulfs yawned. Miranda sighed, and fell back upon her lunch.

That remains, even in Naples.

The Crevequers, on their side of the gulf, talked; they were really quite entertaining; their acquaintance included such various types of persons, their experience such interesting incidents. Some of the incidents revealed them, personally, in a light rather unusual--a light not apt, as a rule, to illumine a lunch-party. Of this they were sublimely unconscious; at their ignoring of it Warren Venables smiled a little. They were wholly innocent of the half-humorous, half-boastful posturing of the conscious rake; these things, a.s.sumed as the basis of their stories rather than narrated, were to them entirely natural--a matter of course. From the same outer darkness--Venables came to believe it was that--Tommy had discoursed of _Marchese Peppino_. It was not that they considered themselves reputable people, but simply that reputability (and the word includes in this case common honesty) was a thing wholly ignored by them, outside their sphere of knowledge.

Certainly, such ignoring obviated embarra.s.sment. Meanwhile, to entertain a tableful of strangers at lunch is an admirable gift. Mrs. Venables, possibly, did not sufficiently appreciate it; being amused came very much lower down on her scale of pleasures than being interested; it was perhaps fortunate, therefore, that it was a pleasure much rarer of attainment. She did not desire it of the Crevequers; she desired, as she phrased it, to draw them out, to achieve a near and serious intimacy.

When every one had finished eating too much (the Crevequers wondered to each other afterwards why it had come to an end just at that point, no sooner and no later; they themselves, once wound up to eat continuously, could have carried it on indefinitely), Mrs. Venables found a divan for herself and Betty in a secluded corner of the large hall, and continued the process of eduction. She had formed a plan; she wished of all things to come into contact with the real life of the people; she wanted Tommy and Betty to help her.

'You must be so delightfully intimate with them. With me they may be suspicious and reserved at first. And I am not at all completely mistress of the language. But I can at all events give them a very genuine sympathy and interest; and it would please me to try the experiment. I know something of our girls in London who work at the great factories. If we could form a sort of club here--social evenings, and so on--your help would be of immense value to me. You have achieved a real intimacy--you and your brother. To share the same faith must be a tremendous bond; there is no more tenacious or more beautiful tie, as Tolstoy says.... You remember the pa.s.sage, perhaps?'

Betty shook her head.

'We don't read much, Tommy and I don't. There seems always something else to be done, out in the streets or somewhere.'

'The true pagan joy in mere living,' reflected Mrs. Venables, and continued: 'If one could call oneself, definitely, a member of any faith.... But one cannot, after all, sacrifice truth to beauty--even to the beauty of sympathy and close community with others.... You are happy in having found a firm foothold.'

Mrs. Venables was not crude enough to ask questions on these subjects; she drew confidence gently towards her. Doubt found in her always a ready hearer. But Betty, it seemed, was not in doubt.

A further step in intimacy Mrs. Venables achieved.

'If there is anything I can do to help you.... I should be glad, you know, to be of any service to your father's children.... We must see a great deal of each other.'

'Thank you very much,' said Betty, considering.

Mrs. Venables perceived the pondering glance of the melancholy eyes, and leaned forward, laying a gentle hand on the thin childish one, waiting confidence.

'Well ... if you would be so awfully kind as to l-lend us twenty francs,' the sad tones stammered.

'Lend you....'