August 3d.
Etretat, Seine-Injerieure:—A young fellow on the Casino terrace this evening caught my eye, looked at me queerly, and passed on. His face, though unfamiliar, stirred some dormant association. What was it? The profitless question pestered me for hours. At last, during the performance at the theatre, I slapped my knee and said aloud,
“I’ve got it!”
“What?” asked Carlotta in alarm.
“A fly,” I answered. Whereat Carlotta laughed, and bent forward to get a view of the victim. I austerely directed her attention to the stage. It was a metaphorical fly whose buzzing I had stopped.
The young fellow was he who had pointed me out in Hyde Park to his companion, and lightly assured her that I was as mad as a dingo dog. From the moment after the phrase’s utterance to that of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my mind. Now it haunts me. It reiterates itself after the manner of a glib phrase. I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long. As it is, the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards away from my window. I keep asking myself: why a dingo dog? If I am mad it is in a gentle, Jaquesian, melancholy manner. I do not dash at life, rabid and foaming at the mouth.
I think the idiot simile must have been merely the misuse of language so common among the half-educated youth of Great Britain.
Yet when I come to consider my present condition, I have doubts as to my complete sanity. Here am I, in a little, semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the attention of a rational man. And I have been here a calendar month.
To please Carlotta I wear white duck trousers, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap. I wired for them to my London tailor and they arrived within a week. The first time I appeared in the maniacal costume I slunk from the stony stare of a gendarme, as I was about to ascend the Casino steps, and hid myself among the fishing-boats lower down on the beach. Carlotta, however, was delighted and said that I looked pretty. Now I have grown callous, seeing other fools similarly apparelled. But a year ago, should I have dreamed it possible for me to strut about a fashionableplagein white ducks, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap? I trow not. They are signs of some sort of madness—whether that of a Jaques or a dingo dog matters very little.
Pasquale was the main cause of my taking Carlotta away from London. He came far too frequently to the house, established far too great a familiarity with my little girl. She quoted him far too readily. She is at the impressionable age when young women fall easy victims to the allurements of a fascinating creature like Pasquale. If he showed himself in the light of a possible husband for Carlotta, I should have nothing to say. I should give the pair my paternal benediction. But I know my Renaissance and I know my Pasquale. Carlotta is merely a new sensation—that’s all he seems to live for, the delectable scoundrel. But I am not going to have her heart broken by any cinquecento wolf in Poole’s clothing. I assume that Carlotta has a heart, even if she is not possessed of a soul. As to the latter I am still in doubt. At all events I resolved to withdraw Carlotta from his influence, put her in fresh surroundings, and allow her to mix more freely among men and women, so as to divert and possibly improve her mind.
I perceive that Carlotta is becoming an occupation. Well, she is quite as profitable as collecting postage-stamps, or golf, or amateur photography.
I have spent a pleasant month in this little place. It is the mouth of a gorge in the midst of a cliff-bound coast. The bay, but a quarter of a mile in sweep, is shut in at each end by a projecting wall of cliff cut by a natural arch. Half the shingle beach is given up to fisherfolk and their boats and tarred Noah’s arks where they keep their nets. The other half suddenly rises into a digue or terrace on which is built a primitive casino, and below the terrace are the bathing-cabins. We are staying at the most spotlessly clean of all clean French hotels. There are no carpets on the stairs; but if one mounts them in muddy boots, an untiring chambermaid emerges from a lair below, with hot water and scrubbing-brush and smilingly removes the traces of one’s passage. Carlotta and Antoinette have adjoining rooms in the main building. I inhabit the annexe, sleeping in a quaint, clean, bare little chamber with a balconied window that looks over the Noah’s Arks and the fishing-smacks and fisherfolk, away out to sea. This morning as I lay in bed I saw our Channel fleet lie along the arc of the horizon.
Antoinette dwells in continuous rapture at being in France again. Carlotta assures me that the smile does not leave her great red face even as she sleeps of nights. It is a little jest between us. She peeped in once to see. The good soul has filled herself up with French conversation as a starving hen gorges herself with corn. She has scraped acquaintance with every washerwoman, fish-wife,marchande, bathing woman and domestic servant on the beach. She is on intimate terms with the whole male native population. When the three of us happen to walk together it is a triumphal progress of bows and grins and nods. At first I thought it was I for whom this homage was intended. I was soon undeceived. It was Antoinette. She loves to parade Carlotta before her friends. I came upon her once entertaining an admiring audience in Carlotta’s presence with a detailed description of that young woman’s physical perfections—a description which was marked by a singular lack of reticence. The time of her glory is the bathing hour, when she accompanies Carlotta from her cabin to the water’s edge, divests her ofpeignoirandespadrilles, but before revealing her to fashionable Etretat, casts a preliminary glance around, as who should say: “Prepare all men and women for the dazzling goddess I am about to unveil.” Carlotta is undoubtedly bewitching in her bathing costume, and enjoys a little triumph of beauty. People fall into a natural group in order to look at her, while I, sitting on a camp-stool in my white ducks and pink shirt and smoking a cigarette, cannot repress a complacent pride of ownership. I do not object to her flicking her wet fingers at me when she comes dripping out of the sea; and I do not even reproach her when she puts her foot upon my sartorially immaculate knee, to show me a pebble-cut on her glistening pink sole.
Her conduct has been exemplary. I have allowed her to make the acquaintance of two or three young fellows, her partners at the Casino dances, and she walks up and down the terrace with them before meals. I have forbidden her, under penalty of immediate return to London and of my eternal displeasure, to mention the harem at Alexandretta. Young fellows are gifted with a genius for misapprehension. She is an ordinary young English lady, an orphan (which is true), and I am her guardian. Of course she looks at them with imploring eyes, and pulls them by the sleeve, and handles the lappels of their coats, and admits them to terms of the frankest intimacy; but I can no more change these characteristics than I can alter the shape of her body. She is the born coquette. Her delighted conception of herself is that she is the object of every man’s admiration. I noticed her this morning playing a tune with her fingers on the old bathing-man’s arm, as he was preparing to take her into the water, and I saw his mahogany face soften. In her indescribable childish way she would coquet with a tax-collector or a rag-and-bone man or the Archbishop of Canterbury. But she has committed no grave indiscretion, and I am sufficiently her lord and master to exact obedience.
I pretend, however, to be at her beck and call, and it is a delight to minister to her radiant happiness—to feel her lean on my arm and hear her cooing voice say:
“You are so good. I should like to kiss you.”
But I do not allow her to kiss me. Never again.
“Seer Marcous, let us go to the little horses.”
She has a consuming passion forpetits chevaux. I speak sagely of the evils of gambling. She laughs. I weakly take lower ground.
“What is the good? You have no money.”
“Oh-h! But only two francs,” she says, holding out her hand.
“Not one. Yesterday you lost.”
“But to-day I shall win. I want to give you something I saw in a shop. Oh, a beautiful thing.” Then I feel a hand steal into the pocket of my dinner jacket where I carry loose silver for this very purpose, just as a lover of horses carries lumps of sugar for the nose of a favourite pony, and immediately it is withdrawn with a cry of joy and triumph, and she skips back out of my reach. Then she takes my arm and leads me from the sweet night-air into the hot little room with its crowd around the nine gyrating animals.
“I shall put it on 5. I always put on 5. He is a nice, clean, white, pretty horse.”
She stakes two francs, watches the turn in a tense agony of excitement; she wins, comes running to me with sixteen francs clutched tight in her hand.
“See. I said I should win.”
“Come away then and be happy.”
But she makes a protesting grimace, and before I can stop her, runs back to stake again on 5. In twenty minutes she is ruined and returns to me wearing an expression of abject misery. She is too desolate even to try the fortune of the dinner-jacket pocket. I take her outside and restore her to beatitude with grenadine syrup and soda-water. She rejects the straws. With her elbows on the marble table, the glass held in both hands, she drinks sensuously, in little sips.
And I, Marcus Ordeyne, sit by watching her, a most contented philosopher of forty. A dingo dog could not be so contented. That young fellow, I unhesitatingly assert, must be the most brainless of his type. I suffer fools gladly, as a general rule, but if I see much of this one I shall do him some injury.
After dejeuner we strolled to the top of the west cliff and lay on the thick dry grass. The earth has never known a more perfect afternoon. A day of turquoise and diamond.
The air itself was diaphanous blue. Below us the tiny place slumbered in the sunshine; scarcely a sign of life save specks of washer-women on the beach bending over white patches which we knew were linen spread out to dry. The ebb-tide lapped lazily on the shingle, where the sea changed suddenly from ultramarine to a fringe of feathery white. A white sail or two flecked the blue of the bay. A few white wisps of cirrus gleamed above our heads. Around us, on the cliff-tops, the green pastures and meadows and, farther inland, the cornfields stacked in harvest, and great masses of trees. Lying on our backs, between sea and sky, we seemed utterly alone. Carlotta and I were the sole inhabitants of the earth. I dreamily disintegrated caramels from their sticky tissue-paper wrappings for Carlotta’s consumption.
After a while unconquerable drowsiness crept over me; and a little later I had an odd sense of perfect quietude. I was lying amid moss and violets. In a languorous way I wondered how my surroundings had changed, and at last I awoke to find my head propped on Carlotta’s lap and shaded by her red parasol, while she sat happy in full sunshine. I was springing from this posture of impropriety when she laughed and laid restraining hands on my shoulders.
“No. You must not move. You look so pretty. And it is so nice. I put your head there so that it should be soft. You have been sound asleep.”
“I have also been abominably impolite,” said I. “I humbly beg your pardon, Carlotta.”
“Oh, I am not cross,” she laughed. Then still keeping her hands on me, she settled her limbs into a more comfortable position.
“There! Now I can play at being a good little Turkish wife.” She fashioned into a fan theMatinnewspaper, which I had bought for the luxurious purpose of not reading, and fanned me. “That is what Ayesha used to do to Hamdi. And Ayesha used to tell him stories. But my lord does not like his slave’s stories.”
“Decidedly not,” said I.
I have heard much of Ayesha, a pretty animal organism who appears to have turned her elderly husband into a doting fool. I am beginning to have a contempt for Hamdi Effendi.
“They are what you call improper, eh?” she laughed, referring to the tales. “I will sing you a Turkish song which you will not understand.”
“Is it a suitable song?”
“Kim bilir—who knows?” said Carlotta.
She began a melancholy, crooning, guttural ditty; but broke off suddenly.
“Oh! but it is stupid. Like the Turkish dancing. Oh, everything in Alexandretta was stupid! Sometimes I think I have never seen Alexandretta—or Ayesha—or Hamdi. I think I always am with you.”
This must be so, as of late she has spoken little of her harem life; she talks chiefly of the small daily happenings, and already we have a store of common interests. The present is her whole existence; the past but a confused dream. The odd part of the matter is that she regards her position with me as a perfectly natural one. No stray kitten adopted by a kind family could have less sense of obligation, or a greater faith in the serene ordering of the cosmos for its own private and peculiar comfort. When I asked her a while ago what she would have done had I left her on the bench in the Embankment Gardens, she shrugged her shoulders and answered, as she had done before, that either she would have died or some other nice gentleman would have taken care of her.
“Do you think nice gentlemen go about London looking for homeless little girls?” I asked on that occasion.
“All gentlemen like beautiful girls,” she replied, which brought us to an old argument.
This afternoon, however, we did not argue. The day forbade it. I lay with my head on Carlotta’s lap, looking up into the deep blue, and feeling a most curious sensation of positive happiness. My attitude towards life has hitherto been negative. I have avoided more than I have sought. I have not drunk deep of life because I have been unathirst. To me—
“To stand aloof and view the fightIs all the pleasure of the game.”
My interest even in Judith has been of a detached nature. I have been like Faust. I might have said:
“Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagenWerweile doch! Du bist so schon!
Then may the devil take me and do what he likes with me!”
I have never had the least inclination to apostrophise the moment in this fashion and request it to tarry on account of its exceeding charm. Never until this afternoon, when the deep summer enchantment of the turquoise day was itself ensorcelised by the witchery of a girl’s springtide.
“You have three, four, five—oh, such a lot of grey hairs,” said Carlotta, looking down on my reclining head.
“Many people have grey hair at twenty,” said I.
“But I have none.”
“You are not yet twenty, Carlotta.”
“Do you think I will have them then? Oh, it would be dreadful. No one would care to have me.”
“And I? Am I thus the object of every one’s disregard?”
“Oh, you—you are a man. It is right for a man. It makes him look wise. His wife says, ‘Behold, my husband has grey hair. He has wisdom. If I am not good he will beat me. So I must obey him.”’
“She wouldn’t run off with a good-for-nothing scamp of two-and-twenty?”
“Oh, no-o,” said Carlotta. “She would not be so wicked.”
“I am glad,” said I, “that you think a sense of conjugal duty is an ineradicable element of female nature. But suppose she fell in love with the young scamp?”
“Men fall in love,” she replied sagely. “Women only fall in love in stories—Turkish stories. They love their husbands.”
“You amaze me,” said I.
“Ye-es,” said Carlotta.
“But in England, a man wants a woman to love him before he marries her.”
“How can she?” asked Carlotta.
This was a staggering question.
“I don’t know,” said I, “but she dus.”
“Then before I marry a man in England I must love him? But I shall die without a husband!”
“I don’t think so,” said I.
“I must begin soon,” said Carlotta, with a laugh.
A sinuous motion of her serpentine young body enabled her to bend her face down to mine.
“Shall I love Seer Marcous? But how shall I know when I am in love?”
“When you appreciate the exceeding impropriety of discussing the matter with your humble servant,” I replied.
“When a girl is in love she does not speak about it?”
“No, my dear. She lets concealment like a worm i’ the bud feed on her damask cheek.”
“Then she gets ugly?”
“That’s it,” I answered. “You keep on looking in the glass, and when you perceive you are hideous then you’ll know you are in love.”
“But when I am so ugly you will not want me,” she objected. “So it is no use falling in love with you.”
“You have a more logical mind than I imagined,” said I.
“What is a logical mind?” asked Carlotta.
“It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified.”
“I do not understand,” she said.
“I should be vastly surprised if you did,” I laughed.
“Would you like me to marry and go away and leave you?” asked Carlotta, after a long pause.
“I suppose,” I said with a sigh, “that some tin-pot knight will drive up one of these days to the castle in a hansom-cab and carry off my princess.”
“Then you’ll be sorry?”
“My dear,” I answered, “do not let us discuss such gruesome things on an afternoon like this.”
“You would like better for me to go on playing at being your Turkish wife?”
“Infinitely,” said I.
Alas! The day is sped. I have asked the fleeting moment to tarry, and it laughed, and shook its gossamer wings at me, and flew by on its mad race into eternity.
As we lay, a cicada set up its shrilling quite close to us. I slipped my head from Carlotta’s lap and idly parted the rank grass in search of the noisy intruder, and by good luck I found him. I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest little love drama imaginable. Our cicada stood alert and spruce, waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now and then making his corslet vibrate passionately. On the top of a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet—a most reserved, discreet little Juliet, but evidently much interested in Romeo’s serenade. When he sang she put her head to one side and moved as if uncertain whether to descend from her balcony. When he stopped, which he did at frequent intervals, being as it were timorous and tongue-tied, she took her foot from the ladder and waited, at first patiently and then with an obvious air of boredom. Messer Romeo made a hop forward and vibrated; Juliet grew tremulous. Alarmed at his boldness he halted and made a hop back; Juliet looked disappointed. At last another cicada set up a louder note some yards away and, without a nod or a sign, Juliet skipped off into space, leaving the most disconsolate little Romeo of a grasshopper you ever beheld. He gave vent to a dismal failure of a vibration and hopped to the foot of the faithless lady’s bower.
Carlotta broke into a merry laugh and clapped her hands.
“I am so glad.”
“She is the most graceless hussy imaginable,” I cried. “There was he grinding his heart out for her, and just because a more brazen-throated scoundrel came upon the scene she must needs leave our poor friend in the lurch. She has no more heart than my boot, and she will come to a bad end.”
“But he was such a fool,” retorted my sage damsel, with a flash of laughter in her dark eyes. “If he wanted her, why didn’t he go up and take her?”
“Because he is a gentleman, a cicada of fine and delicate feeling.”
“Hou!” laughed Carlotta. “He was a fool. It served him right. She grew tired of waiting.”
“You believe, then,” said I, “in marriage by capture?”
I explained and discoursed to her of the matrimonial habits of the Tartar tribes.
“Yes,” said Carlotta. “That is sense. And it must be such fun for the girl. All that, what you call it?—wooing?—is waste of time. I like things to happen, quick, quick, one after the other—or else—”
“Or else what?”
“To do nothing, nothing but lie in the sun, like this afternoon.”
“Yes,” said I dreamily, after I had again thrown myself by her side. “Like this afternoon.”
I sit at my window and look out upon the strip of beach, the hauled-up fishing boats and the nets hung out to dry looming vague in the starlight, and I hear the surf’s rhythmical moan a few yards beyond; and it beats into my ears the idiot phrase that has recurred all the evening.
But why should I be mad? For filling my soul with God’s utmost glory of earth and sea and sky? For filling my heart with purest pleasure in the intimate companionship of fresh and fragrant maidenhood? For giving myself up for once to a dream of sense clouded by never a thought that was not serenely fair?
For feeling young again?
I shall read myself to sleep withLa Dame de Monsoreau, which I have procured from the circulating library in the Rue Alphonse Karr—(the literary horticulturist is the genius loci and the godfather of my landlady)—and I will empty flagons with Pere Gorenflot and ride on errands of life and death with Chicot, prince of jesters, and walk lovingly between the valiant Bussy and Henri Quatre. By this, if by nothing else, I recognise the beneficence of the high gods—they have given us tired men Dumas.
September 30th.
Something is wrong with Antoinette. The dinner she served up this evening was all but uneatable. Something is wrong with Stenson, who has taken to playing his lugubrious hymn-tunes on the concertina while I am in the house; I won’t have it. Something is wrong with the cat. He wanders round the house like a lost soul, sniffing at everything. This evening he actually jumped onto the dinner-table, looked at me out of his one eye, in which all the desolation of two was concentrated, and miaowed heart-rendingly in my face. Something is wrong with the house, with my pens which will not write, with my books which have the air of dry bones in a charnel-house, with the MS. of my History of Renaissance Morals, which stands on the writing-table like a dusty monument to the futility of human endeavour. Something is wrong with me.
Something, too, is wrong with Judith, who has just returned from her stay with the Willoughbys. I have been to see her this evening and found her of uncertain temper, and inclined to be contradictious. She accused me of being dull. I answered that the autumn world outside was drenched with miserable rain. How could man be sprightly under such conditions?
“In this room,” said Judith, “with its bright fire and drawn curtains there is no miserable rain, and no autumn save in our hearts.”
“Why in our hearts?” I asked.
“How you peg one down to precision,” said Judith, testily. “I wish I were a Roman Catholic.”
“Why?”
“I could go into a convent.”
“You had much better go to Delphine Carrere,” said I.
“I have only been back a day, and you want to get rid of me already?” she cried, using her woman’s swift logic of unreason.
“I want you to be happy and contented, my dear Judith.”
“H’m,” she said.
Her slipper dangling as usual from the tip of her foot fell to the ground. I declare I was only half conscious of the accident as my mind was deep in other things.
“You don’t even pick up my slipper,” she said.
“Ten thousand pardons,” I exclaimed, springing forward. But she had anticipated my intention. We remained staring into the fire and saying nothing. As she professed to be tired I went away early.
At the front door of the mansions, finding I had left my umbrella behind, I remounted the stairs, and rang Judith’s bell. After a while I saw her figure through the ground-glass panel approach the door, but before she opened it, she turned out the light in the passage.
“Marcus!” she cried, rather excitedly; and in the dimness of the threshold her eyes looked strangely accusative of tears. “You have come back!”
“Yes,” said I, “for my umbrella.”
She looked at me for a moment, laughed, clapped her hands to her throat, turned away sharply, caught up my umbrella, and putting it into my hands and thrusting me back shut the door in my face. In great astonishment I went downstairs again. What is wrong with Judith? She said this evening that all men are cruel. Now, I am a man. Therefore I am cruel. A perfect syllogism. But how have I been cruel?
I walked home. There is nothing so consoling to the depressed man as the unmitigated misery of a walk through the London rain. One is not mocked by any factitious gaiety. The mind is in harmony with the sodden universe. It is well to have everything in the world wrong at one and the same time.
I have changed my drenched garments for dressing-gown and slippers. I find on my writing-table a letter addressed in a round childish hand. It is from Carlotta, who for the last fortnight has been staying in Cornwall with the McMurrays. I have known few fortnights so long. In a ridiculous schoolboy way I have been counting the days to her return—the day after to-morrow.
The letter begins: “Seer Marcous dear.” The spelling is a little jest between us. The inversion is a quaint invention of her own. “Mrs. McMurray says, can you spare me for one more week? She wants to teach me manners. She says I have shocked the top priest here—oh, you call him a vikker—now I do remember—because I went out for a walk with a little young pretty priest without a hat, and because it rained I put on his hat and the vikker met us. But I did not flirt with the little priest. Oh, no! I told him he must not make love to me like the young man from the grocer’s. And I told him that if he wrote poetry you would beat him. So I have been very good. And darling Seer Marcous, I want to come back very much, but Mrs. McMurray says I must stay, and she is going to have a baby and I am very happy and good, and Mr. McMurray says funny things and makes me laugh. But I love my darling Seer Marcous best. Give Antoinette and Polifemus (the one-eyed cat) two very nice kisses for me. And here is one for Seer Marcous from his
“CARLOTTA.”
How can I refuse? But I wish she were here.
31st October.
I did not sleep last night. I have done no work to-day. The Renaissance has receded into a Glacial Epoch wherein, as far as its humanity is concerned, I have not a tittle of interest. I sought refuge in the club. Why should an old sober University club be such a haven of unrest? Ponting, an opinionated don of Corpus, seated himself at my luncheon table, and discoursed on political economy and golf. I manifested a polite ignorance of these high matters. He assured me that if I studied the one and played at the other, I should be physically and mentally more robust; whereupon he thumped his narrow chest, and put on a scowl of intellectuality. I fear that Ponting, like most of the men here, studies golf and plays at political economy. In serener moments I suffer Ponting gladly. But to-day his boast that he had done the course at Westward Ho! in seven, or seventeen, or seventy—how on earth should I remember?—left me cold, and his crude economics interfered with my digestion.
Strolling forlornly down Piccadilly I, came face to face with my sad-coloured Cousin Rosalie in a sad-coloured gown. She gave me a hasty nod and would have passed on, but I arrested her. Her white face was turned piteously upward and from her expressionless eyes flashed a glance of fear. I felt myself in a brutal mood.
“Why,” I asked, “are you avoiding me as if I were a pestilence?”
She murmured that she was not avoiding me, but was in a hurry.
“I don’t believe it,” said I. “People have been telling you that I am a vile, wicked man who does unspeakable things, and like a good little girl you are afraid to talk to me. Tell people, the next time you see them, with my compliments, that they are malevolent geese.”
I lifted my hat and relieving Rosalie of my terrifying presence, walked away in dudgeon. I felt abominably and unreasonably angry. I bethought me of my Aunt Jessica, whom I held responsible for her niece’s behaviour. A militant mood prompted a call. After twenty minutes in a hansom I found myself in her drawing-room. She was alone, the girls being away on country-house visits. Her reception was glacial. I expressed the hope that the yachting cruise had been a pleasant one.
“Exceedingly pleasant,” snapped my aunt.
“I trust Dora is well,” said I, keeping from my lips a smile that might have hinted at the broken heart.
“Very well, thank you.”
As I do not enjoy a staccato conversation, I remained politely silent, inviting her by my attitude to speak.
“I rather wonder, Marcus,” she said at last, “at your referring to Dora.”
“Indeed? May I ask why?”
“May I speak plainly?”
“I beseech you.”
“I have heard of you at Etretat with your ward.”
“Well?” I asked.
“Verbum sap,” said my aunt.
“And you have let Mrs. Ralph and Rosalie know of my summer holiday and given them to understand that I am a monster of depravity. I am exceedingly obliged to you. I have just met Rosalie in the street, and she shrank from me as if I were the reincarnation of original sin.”
“I have no doubt that in her innocent mind you are,” replied my Aunt Jessica.
The indulgent smile wherewith she used to humour my eccentricities had gone, and her face was hard and unpitying.
“I am glad I have such charitable-minded relations,” said I.
“I am a woman of the world,” my aunt retorted, “but I think that when such things are flaunted in the face of society they become immoral.”
I rose. “Do evil by stealth—as much as you like,” said I, “but blush to find it fame.”
With a gesture my aunt assented to the proposition.
“On the other hand,” said I, heatedly, “I have been doing a certain amount of good both by stealth and openly, and I naturally blush with indignation to find it accounted infamous.”
I looked narrowly into my aunt’s eyes and I read in them entire disbelief in my protest. I swear, if I had proved my innocence beyond the shadow of doubt, that woman would have been grievously disappointed.
“Good-bye,” said I.
She shook hands frigidly and turned to ring the bell. A moment later—I really believe she was moved by a kindly impulse—she intercepted me at the door.
“I know you are odd and quixotic, Marcus,” she said in a softer tone. “I hope you will do nothing rash.”
“What do you mean?” I asked in a white heat of unreasonable rage.
“I hope you won’t try to repair things by marrying this—young person.”
“To make an honest woman of her, do you mean?” I asked grimly.
“Yes,” said my aunt.
Then suddenly the Devil leaped into me and stirred all the elements of unrest, anger, and longing together in a cauldron which I suppose was my heart. The result was explosion. I made a step forward with raised hands and my aunt recoiled in alarm.
“By heaven!” I cried, “I would give the soul out of my body to marry her!”
And I stumbled out of the house like a blind man.
From that moment of dazzling revelation till now I have nursed this infinite desire. To say that I love Carlotta is to express Niagara in terms of a fountain. I crave her with everything vital in heart and brain. She is an obsession. The scent of her hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances before my eyes.
I cannot live without her. Until to-day the house was desolate enough—a ghostly shell of a habitation. Henceforward, without her my very life will be void. My heart has been crying for her these two weeks and I knew it not. Now I know. I could stand on my balcony and lift up my hands toward the south where she abides, and lift up my voice, and cry for her passionately aloud. There is no infernal foolishness in the world that I could not commit tonight. The maddest dingo dog, if he could appreciate my state of being, would learn points in insanity.
It is two o’clock. I must go to sleep. I take from my shelves Epictetus, who might be expected to throw cold water on the most burning fever of the mind. I have not read far before I come across this consolatory apophthegm: “The contest is unequal between a charming girl and a beginner in philosophy.” He is mocking me, the cold-blooded pedagogue! I throw his book across the room. But he is right. I am but a beginner in philosophy. No armour wherein my reason can invest me is of avail against Carlotta. I have no strength to smite. I am helpless.
But by heaven! Am I mad? Is not this on the contrary the sanest hour of my existence? I have lived like an automaton for forty years, and I suddenly awake to find myself a man. I don’t care whether I sleep or not. I feel gloriously, exultingly young. I am but twenty. As I have never lived, I have never grown old. Life translates itself into music—a wild “Invitation to the Waltz” by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta’s corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? Come along and let us make a night of it. To the Devil with sleep. We’ll go together down to the cellar and find a bottle of Pommery, and we will drink to Life and Youth and Love and the Splendour and the Joy thereof.
He utters a little cry of delight and frisks around me. In the blackness of the cellar his one eye gleams like a star and he purrs unutterable rapture. My hand passed over his back produces a shower of sparks. We return up the silent stairs, I carry a bottle of Pommery and a milkjug—for you shall revel, too, Polyphemus; and as I have forgotten to bring a saucer, you shall drink, as no cat has drunk before, from an old precious platter bearing the arms of the Estes of Ferrara—over which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young. It is a pity cats don’t drink champagne. I would have made you to-night as drunk as Bacchus. We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his tongue forms a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery in the soda-water tumbler.
Ha! Twin purveyors of the milk of paradise, I wonder like Omar what you buy one-half so precious as the stuff you sell. Motor-cars for Mrs. Pommery and cakes for the little Grenos? I do not like to regard you as common humans addicted to silk hats and umbrellas and the other vices of respectability. Ye are rather beneficent demigods, Castor and Pollux of the vine, dream entities who pour from the sunset lands of Nowhere the liquid gold of life’s joyousness.
A few words scribbled on this telegraph form would bring her here tomorrow night. But no. What is a week? Leaden-footed, it is an eternity; but winged with the dove’s iris it is a mere moment. Besides, I must accustom myself to my youth. I must investigate its follies, I must learn the grammar of its wisdom. We’ll take counsel together, Polyphemus, how to turn these chambers, fusty with decayed thought, into a bridal bower radiant and fragrant with innumerable loves. Let us drink again to her witchery. It is her breath itself distilled by the Heavenly Twins that foams against my lips. I would give the soul out of my body to marry her, did I say? It were like buying her for a farthing. I would pledge the soul of the universe for a kiss.
I catch up Polyphemus under the arm-pits, and his hind legs dangle. He continues to lick his chops and looks at me sardonically. He is stolid over his cups—which is somewhat disappointing. No matter; he can be shaken into enthusiasm.
“I care not,” I cry, “for man or devil, Polyphemus.
‘Que je suis grand ici! mon amour de feuVa de pair cette nuit avec celui de Dieu!’’
You may say that it’s wrong, that the first line is a syllable short, and that Triboulet said‘colere’’instead ofamour. You always were a dry-as-dust, pedantic prig. But I sayamour-love, do you hear? I’ll translate, if you like:
‘Now am I mighty, and my love of fireTo-night goes even with a god’s desire.’
Yes; I’ll be a poet even though you do scratch my wrist with your hind claws, Polyphemus.”
There! Empty your milk-jug and I will empty my bottle. The wine smells of hyacinth. It is a revelation. Her hair smells of violets, but it is the delicate odour of hyacinth that came from her bare young arms when she clasped them round my neck;et sa peau, on dirait du satin. Carlotta is in the wine, Carlotta with her sorcery and her laughter and her youth, and I drink Carlotta.
“Quo me rapis Bacche pienum tui?”
To such a land of dreams, my one-eyed friend, as never before have I visited. You yawn? You are bored? I shoot the dregs of my glass into his distended jaws. He springs away spitting and coughing, and I lie back in my chair convulsed with inextinguishable laughter.
October 2d.
I have suffered all day from a racking headache, having awakened at six o’clock and crept shivering to bed. I realise that Pommery and Greno are not demi-gods at all, but mere commercial purveyors of a form of alcohol, a quart of which it is injudicious to imbibe, with a one-eyed tom-cat as boon companion, at two o’clock in the morning:
But I am unrepentant. If I committed follies last night, so much the better. I struggle no longer against the inevitable, when the inevitable is the crown and joy of earthly things. For in sober truth I love her infinitely.
October 6th.
She comes back to-morrow. Antoinette and I have been devising a welcome. The good soul has filled the house with flowers, and, usurping Stenson’s functions, has polished furniture and book backs and silver and has hung fresh blinds and scrubbed and scoured until I am afraid to walk about or sit down lest I should tarnish the spotless brightness of my surroundings.
“You have forgotten one thing, Antoinette,” I remarked, satirically. “You have omitted to strew the front steps with rose-leaves.”
“I would cover them with my body for the dear angel to walk upon as she entered,” said Antoinette.
“That would scarcely be rose-leaves,” I murmured.
Antoinette laughed. “And Monsieur then! He is just as bad. Has he not put new curtains in the room of Mademoiselle, and a new toilette table, and a set of silver brushes and combs and I know not what, as for the toilette of a princess? And the eiderdown in pink satin?Regardez-moi ca!Monsieur can no longer say that it is I alone who spoil the dear angel.”
“Monsieur,” said I, at a loss for a better retort, “will say whatever Monsieur pleases.”
“It is indeed the right of Monsieur,” said Antoinette, respectfully, but with a twinkle in her eye not devoid of significance.
Does the crafty old woman suspect? Perhaps my preparations for Carlotta’s return have been inordinate, for they have extended to the transformation of the sitting-room downstairs into a lady’s boudoir. I have been busy this happy week. But what care I? It will not be long before I have to say to her, “Antoinette, there is going to be a wedding.”
I must be on my guard lest, in the transports of her joy, she clasp me to her capacious bosom!