’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 piú morte:
Ma per trattar del ben ch’ ivi trovai,
Dirò 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.

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 gods 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 circumstances,’ 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 passers-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 hell 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 passed, 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 masses. 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.