October 27th
I do not like living. It is thoroughly disagreeable. Today Judith taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the justice of the taunt and regretted in poignant misery the change from my old conditions. If to live is to have one’s reason cast down and trampled under foot, one’s heart aflame with a besotted passion and one’s soul racked with remorse, then am I living in good sooth—and I would far rather be dead and suffering the milder pains of Purgatory. Men differently constituted get used to it, as the eels to skinning. They say“mea culpa,”“damn,” or“Kismet,”according to their various traditions, and go forth comforted to their workaday pursuits. I envy them. I enter this exquisite Torture Chamber, and I shriek at the first twinge of the thumbscrew and faint at the preliminary embraces of the scavenger’s daughter.
I envy a fellow like Caesar Borgia. He could murder a friend, seduce his widow, and rob the orphans all on a summer’s day, and go home contentedly to supper; and after a little music he could sleep like a man who has thoroughly earned his repose. What manner of creatures are other men? They area blank mystery to me; and I am writing—or have been writing—a sociological study of the most subtle generation of them that has ever existed! I am an empty fool. I know absolutely nothing. I can no more account for the peaceful slumbers of that marvellous young man of five-and-twenty than I can predicate the priority of the first hen or the first egg. I, with never a murder or a seduction or a robbery on my conscience, could not sleep last night. I doubt whether I shall sleep to-night. I feel as if I shall remain awake through the centuries with a rat gnawing my vitals.
So unhappy looking a woman as Judith, when I called on her early this forenoon, I have never beheld. Gone was the elaborate coquetry of yesterday; gone the quiet roguishness of yesteryear; gone was all the Judith that I knew, and in her place stood a hollow-eyed woman shaking at gates eternally barred.
“I—thought you would come this morning. I had that lingering faith in you.”
“Your face haunted me all night,” I said. “I was bound to come.”
“So, this is the end of it all,” she remarked, stonily.
“No,” said I. “It only marks the transition from a very ill-defined relationship to as loyal a friendship as ever man could offer woman.”
She gave a quivering little shrug of disgust and turned away.
“Oh, don’t talk like that ‘I can’t offer you bread, but I’ll give you a nice round polished stone.’ Friendship! What has a woman like me got to do with friendship?”
“Have I ever given you much more?”
“God knows what you have given me,” she cried, bitterly. She stared out of the window at the sodden street and murky air. I went to her side and touched her wrist.
“For heaven’s sake, Judith, tell me what I can do.”
“What’s done is done,” she said, between her teeth. “When did you marry her?”
I explained briefly the condition of affairs. She looked at me hard and long; then stared out of the window again, and scarce heeded what I said.
“It was to set myself right with you on this point,” I added, “that I have visited you at such an hour.”
She remained silent. I took a few turns about the familiar room that was filled with the associations of many years. The piano we chose together. The copy of the Botticelli Tondo—the crowned Madonna of the Uffizi—I gave her in Florence. We had ransacked London together to find the Chippendale bookcase; and on its shelves stood books that had formed a bond between us, and copies of old reviews containing my fugitive contributions. A spurious Japanese dragon in faence, an inartistic monstrosity dear to her heart, at which I had often railed, grinned forgivingly at me from the mantel-piece. I have never realised how closely bound up with my habits was this drawing-room of Judith’s. I stopped once more by her side.
“I can’t leave you altogether, dear,” I said, gently. “A bit of myself is in this room.”
Her bosom shook with unhappy laughter.
“A bit?” Then she turned suddenly on me. “Are you simply dull or sheerly cruel?”
“I am dull,” said I. “Why do you refuse my friendship? Our relation has been scarcely more. It has not touched the deep things in us. We agreed at the start that it should not. The words ‘I love you’ have never passed between us. We have been loyal to our compact. Now that love has come into my life—and Heaven knows I have striven against it—what would you have me do?”
“And what would you have me do?” said Judith, tonelessly.
“Forgive me for breaking off the old, and trust me to make the new pleasant to you.”
She made no answer, but stood still staring out of the window like a woman of stone. Presently she shivered and crossed to the fire, before which she crouched on a low chair. I remained by the window, anxious, puzzled, oppressed.
“Marcus,” she said at last, in a low voice. I obeyed her summons. She motioned me to a chair, and without looking at me began to speak.
“You said there was a bit of you in this room. There is everything of you. Your whole being is for me in this room. You are with me wherever I go. You are the beginning and end of life to me. I love you with a passion that is killing me. I am an emotional woman. I made shipwreck of myself because I thought I loved a man. But, as God hears me, you are the only man I have loved. You came to me like a breath of Heaven while I was in Purgatory—and you have been Heaven to me ever since. It has been play to you—but to me—”
I fell on my knees beside her. Each of the low half-whispered words was a red hot iron. I had received last night the message of her white face with incredulity. I had reviewed our past life together and had found little warrant in it for that message. It could not come from the depths. It was staggeringly impossible. And now the impossible was the flaming fact.
I fell on my knees beside her.
“Not play, Judith—”
She put out her hand to check me, and the words died on my lips. What could I say?
“For you it was a detached pleasant sentiment, if you like; for me the deadliest earnest. I was a fool too. You never said you loved me, but I thought you did. You were not as other men, you knew nothing of the ways of the world or of women or of passion—you were reserved, intellectual—you viewed things in a queer light of your own. I felt that the touch of a chain would fret you. I gave you absolute freedom—often when I craved for you. I made no demands. I assented to your philosophic analysis of the situation—it is your way to moralise whimsically on everything, as if you were a disconnected intelligence outside the universe—and I paid no attention to it. I used to laugh at you—oh, not unkindly, but lovingly, happily, victoriously. Oh, yes, I was a fool—what woman in love isn’t? I thought I gave you all you needed. I was content, secure. I magnified every little demonstration. When you touched my ear it was more to me than the embrace of another man might have been. I have lived on one kiss of yours for a week. To you the kiss was of no more value than a cigarette. I wish,” she added in a whisper, “I wish I were dead!”
She had spoken in a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at the fire, while I knelt by her side. I murmured some banal apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as another when one has broken a woman’s heart.
“You never knew I loved you?” she went on in the same bitter undertone. “What kind of woman did you take me for? I have accepted help from you to enable me to live in this flat—do you imagine I could have done such a thing without loving you? I should have thought it was obvious in a thousand ways.”
The fire getting low, she took up the scoop for coals. Mechanically I relieved her of the thing and fulfilled the familiar task. Neither spoke for a long time. She remained there and I went to the window. It had begun to rain. A barrel-organ below was playing some horrible music-hall air, and every vibrant note was like a hammer on one’s nerves. The grinder’s bedraggled Italian wife perceiving me at the window grinned up at me with the national curve of the palm. She had a black eye which the cacophonous fiend had probably given her, and she grinned like a happy child of nature. Men in my position do not blacken women’s eyes; but it is only a question of manners. Was I, for that, less of a brute male than the scowling beast at the organ?
The sudden sound of a sob made me turn to Judith, who had broken down and was crying bitterly, her face hidden in her hands. I bent and touched her shoulder.
“Judith—”
She flung her arms around my neck.
“I can’t give you up, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she cried, wildly.
For the first time in my life I heard a woman give abandoned, incoherent utterance to an agony of passion; and it sounded horrible, like the cry of an animal wounded to death.
A guilt-stricken creature, scarce daring to meet her eyes, I bade her farewell. She had recovered her composure.
“Make me one little promise, Marcus, do me one little favour,” she said, with quivering lip, and letting her cold hand remain in mine. “Stay away from her to-day. I couldn’t bear to think of you and her together, happy, love-making, after what I’ve said this morning. I should writhe with the shame and the torture of it. Give me your thoughts to-day. Wear a little mourning for the dead. It is all I ask of you.”
“I should have done what you ask without the asking,” I replied.
I kissed her hand, and went out into the street.
I had walked but a few blind steps when I became aware of the presence and voice of Pasquale.
“Coming from Mrs. Mainwaring’s? I am just on my way there to restore her opera-glasses which I ran away with last night. What’s her number? I forget. I dropped in at Lingfield Terrace to inquire, but found you had already started.”
“Seventeen,” I answered, mechanically.
“You are not looking well, my good friend,” said he. “I hope last night has not upset you. It’s all bluff, you know, on the part of the precious Hamdi.”
“I dare say it was,” I assented.
“And bluff on your part, too. I have never given your imaginative faculties sufficient credit. It bowled Hamdi out clean.”
“Yes,” said I. “It bowled him out clean.”
“Serve him right,” said Pasquale. “He’s the wickedest old thief unhung.”
“Quite so,” said I, “the wickedest old thief unhung.”
Pasquale shook me by the arm.
“Are you a man or a phonograph? What on earth has happened to you?”
I think I envied the laughter in his handsome, dark face, and the careless grace of the fellow as he stood beneath the dripping umbrella debonair as a young prince, in perfectly fitting blue serge-he wore no overcoat; mine was buttoned up to the chin, and immaculate suede gloves.
“What is it?” he repeated, gaily.
“I didn’t sleep last night,” said I, “my breakfast disagreed with me, and it’s raining in the most unpleasant manner.”
Even while I was speaking he left my side and darted across the road. In some astonishment I watched him for a moment from the kerb, and then made my way slowly to the other side. I found him in conversation with an emaciated, bedraggled woman standing by an enormous bundle, about three times her own cubic bulk, which she had rested on the slimy pavement. One hand pressed a panting bosom.
“You are going to carry that in your arms all the way to South Kensington?” I heard him cry as I approached.
“Yes, sir,” said the woman.
“Then you shan’t. I’m not going to allow it. Catch hold of this.”
The umbrella which he thrust out at her she clutched automatically, to prevent it falling about her ears. The veto she received with a wonderment which deepened into stupefaction when she saw him lift the huge bundle in his arms and stalk away with it down the street. She turned a scared face at me.
“It’s washing,” she said.
Pasquale paused, looked round and motioned her onward. She followed without a word, holding the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. Pasquale put down his bundle.
“Do you want to be sent to hell by lightning?” he asked, with the evil snarl of the lips.
“No,” said the man, sheering off.
“I’m glad,” remarked Pasquale, picking up the bundle. And we resumed our progress.
Luckily a four-wheeled cab overtook us. Pasquale stopped it, squeezed the bundle inside, and held the door open for the faltering and bewildered woman, as if she had been the authentic duchessa at Ealing.
“You were saying, Ordeyne,” he observed, as the cabman drove off with three shillings and his incoherent fare, “you were saying that your breakfast disagreed with you.”
In spite of my heaviness of heart, I laughed and loved the man. There was something fantastically chivalrous in the action; something superb in the contempt of convention; something whimsical, adventurous, unexpected; and something divine in the wrathful pity; and something irresistible in his impudent apostrophe to myself. It has been the one flash of comfort during this long and desolate day.
I have kept my promise to Judith. I have lunched and dined at the club, and in the library of the club I have tried to while away the hours. I intended this morning to make the necessary arrangements for the marriage. After my interview with Judith I had not the heart. I put it off till to-morrow. I have observed the day as a day of mourning. I have worn sackcloth and ashes. I have done such penance as I could for the grievous fault I have committed. Carlotta is in bed and asleep. She went early, says Antoinette, having a bad headache. No wonder, poor child.
A few moments ago I was tempted to peep into her room and satisfy myself that she was not ailing. A headache is the common precursor to many maladies. But I remembered my promise and refrained. The cooing notes of the voice would have called me to her side, and her arms would have been around my neck and I should have forgotten Judith.
October 28th.
I rose late this morning. When I went down to breakfast I found that Carlotta had already gone for her music lesson.
I drove at once to the Temple to see my lawyers and to make arrangements for a marriage by special license.
I returned at one o’clock. Stenson met me in the hall.
“I beg your pardon, Sir Marcus, but Mademoiselle hasn’t come back yet.”
I waited an uneasy hour. Such a lengthy absence from home was unprecedented. At two o’clock I went round to Herr Stuer in the Avenue Road—a five minutes’ walk.
He entered the sitting-room into which I had been ushered, wiping his lips.
“I am sorry to disturb you, Herr Stuer,” said I, “but will you kindly tell me when Miss Carlotta left you, this morning?”
“Miss Carlotta came not at all this morning,” he replied.
“But it was her regular day?”
“At ten o’clock. She did not come. At eleven I have another pupil. She has not before missed one lesson.”
I flew back home, in an agony of hope that her laughing face would meet me there and dispel a dread that chilled me like an icy wind.
There was no Carlotta.
There has been no Carlotta all this awful day.
There will never be a Carlotta again.
I drove to the police station.
“What do you think has happened?” asked the Inspector.
It was only too horribly obvious. Any man but myself would have kept her under lock and key and established a guard round the house. Any man but myself would have never let her out of his sight until he had married her, until he had tracked Hamdi and his myrmidons back to Alexandretta.
“Abduction has happened,” I cried wildly. “Between Lingfield Terrace and Avenue Road she has been caught, thrust into a closed carriage, gagged and carried God knows where by the wiliest old thief in Asia. He is the Prefect of Police in Aleppo. His name is Hamdi Effendi and he is staying at the Hotel Metropole.”
The Inspector questioned me. Heaven knows how I answered. I saw the scene. The waiting carriage. The unfrequented bit of road. My heart’s darling, her face a radiant flower in the grey morning, tripping lightheartedly along. The sudden dash, the struggle, the swiftly closed door. It was a matter of a few seconds. My brain grew dizzy with the vision.
“You say that he threatened to abduct her?” asked the Inspector.
“Yes,” said I, “and a friend of mine promised to kill him. Heaven grant he keep his promise!”
“Be careful, Sir Marcus,” smiled the Inspector. “Or if there is a murder committed you will be an accessory before the fact.”
I intimated my disregard of the contingency. What did it matter? Nothing in the world mattered save the recovery of the light and meaning of my existence. My friend’s name? Sebastian Pasquale, He lived near by in the St. John’s Wood Road.
“The best thing you can do, Sir Marcus,” said the Inspector, “is to get hold of Mr. Pasquale and take him with you to Scotland Yard. Perhaps two heads will be better than one. In the meanwhile we shall communicate with headquarters and make the necessary inquiries in the neighbourhood.”
I drove to St. John’s Wood Road, and learned to my dismay that Pasquale had given up his rooms there a week ago. All his letters were addressed to his club in Piccadilly. I drove thither. How has mankind contented itself for these thousands of years with a horse as its chief means of locomotion? Oh, the exasperation I suffered behind that magnified snail! I dashed into the club. Mr. Pasquale had not been there all day. No, he was not staying there. It was against the rules to give members’ private addresses.
“But it’s a matter of life and death!” I cried.
“To tell you the truth, sir,” said the hall porter, “Mr. Pasquale’s only permanent address is his banker’s, and we really don’t know where he is staying at present.”
I wrote a hurried line:
“Hamdi has abducted Carlotta. I am half crazed. As you love me give me your help. Oh, God! man, why aren’t you here?”
I left it with the porter, and crawled to Scotland Yard. The cabman at my invectives against his sauntering beast waxed indignant; it was a three-quarter blood mare and one of the fastest trotters in London.
“She passes everything,” said he.
“It is because everything is standing still or going backward or turned upside down,” said I.
No doubt he thought me mad. Mad as a dingo dog. The thought of the words, the summer and the sun sent a spasm of hunger through my heart. Then I murmured to myself: “‘Save my soul from hell and my darling from the power of the dog.’ Which dog? Not the dingo dog.” I verily believe my brain worked wrong to-day.
Great Scotland Yard at last. I went through passages. I found myself in a nondescript room where a courteous official seated at a desk held me on the rack for half an hour. I had to describe Carlotta: not in the imagery wherein only one could create an impression of her sweetness, but in the objective terms of the police report. What was she wearing? A hat, and jacket, a skirt, shoes; of course she wore gloves; possibly she carried a muff. Impatient of such commonplace details, I described her fully. But the glory of her bronze hair, her great dark brown eyes, the quivering sensitiveness of her lips; her intoxicating compound of Botticelli and the Venusberg; the dove-notes of her voice; all was a matter of boredom to Scotland Yard. They clamoured for the colour of her feathers and the material of which her dress was made; her height in vulgar figures and the sizes of her gloves and shoes.
“How on earth can I tell you?” I cried in desperation.
“Perhaps one of your servants can give the necessary information,” replied the urbane official. If I had lost an umbrella he could not have viewed my plight with more inhuman blandness!
A miracle happened. As I was writing a summons to Stenson to obtain these details from Antoinette and attend at once, a policeman entered and I learned that my confidential man was at the door. My heart leapt within me. He had tracked me hither and had come to tell me that Carlotta was safe. But the first glance at his face killed the wild hope. He had tracked me hither, it is true; but only apologetically to offer what information might be useful. “It is a very great liberty, Sir Marcus, and I will retire at once if I have overstepped my duties, but there are important details, sir, in catastrophes of this nature with which my experience has taught me only servants can be acquainted.”
There must be a book of ten thousand pages entitled “The Perfect Valet,” dealing with every contingency of domestic life which this admirable fellow has by heart. He uttered his Ciceronian sentence with the gravity of a pasteboard figure in the toy theatre of one’s childhood.
“Can you describe the young lady’s dress?” asked the official.
“I have made it my business,” said Stenson, “to obtain accurate information as to every detail of Mademoiselle Carlotta’s attire when she left the house this morning.”
I faded into insignificance. Stenson was a man after the Inspector’s heart. A few eager questions brought the desired result. A dark red toque with a grey bird’s wing; a wine-coloured zouave jacket and skirt, black braided; a dark blue bodice; a plain gold brooch (the first trinket I had given her—the occasion of her first clasp of arms around my neck) fastening her collar; a silver fox necklet and muff; patent leather shoes and brown suede gloves.
“Any special mark or characteristics?”
“A white scar above the left temple,” said Stenson.
Lord have mercy! The man has lived day by day for five months with Carlotta’s magical beauty, and all he has noticed as characteristic is the little white scar—she fell on marble steps as a child—the only flaw, if flaw can be in a thing so imperceptible, in her perfect loveliness.
“Mademoiselle has also a tiny mole behind her right ear,” said Stenson.
The Inspector’s conception of Stenson expanded into an apotheosis. He paid him deference. His pen wrote greedily every syllable the inspired creature uttered. When the fount of inspiration ran dry, Stenson turned to me with his imperturbable, profoundly respectful air.
“Shall I return home, Sir Marcus, or have you any further need of my service?”
I bade him go home. He withdrew. The Inspector smiled cheerfully. “Now we can get along,” said he. “It’s a pity Mr.—Mr. Pasquale” (he consulted his notes) “is out of touch with us for the moment. He might have given us great assistance.”
He rose from his chair. “I think we shall very soon trace the young lady. An accurate personal description like this, you see, is invaluable.”
He handed me the printed form which he had filled in. In spite of my misery I almost laughed at the fatuity of the man in thinking that those mere unimaginative statistics applicable to five hundred thousand young females in London, could in any way express Carlotta.
“This is all very well,” said I; “but the first thing to do is to lay that Turkish devil by the heels.”
“You can count on our making the most prompt and thorough investigation,” said he.
“And in the mean time what can I do?”
“Your best course, Sir Marcus,” he answered, “is to go home and leave things in our hands. As soon as ever we have the slightest clue, we shall communicate with you.”
He bowed me out politely. In a few moments I found myself in the greyness of the autumn afternoon wandering on the Thames Embankment like a lost soul on the banks of Phlegethon. It seemed as if I had never seen the sun, should never see the sun again. I was drifting sans purpose into eternity.
I passed by some railings. A colossal figure looming through the misty air struck me with a sense of familiarity. It was the statue of Sir Bartle Frere, and these were the gardens beneath the terrace of the National Liberal Club. It was here that I had first met her. The dripping trees seemed to hold the echo of the words spoken when their leaves were green: “Will you please to tell me what I shall do?” I strained my eyes to see the bench on which I had sat, and my eyes tricked me into translating a blurr at the end of the seat into the ghostly form of Carlotta. My misery overwhelmed me; and through my misery shot a swift pang of remorse at having treated her harshly on that sweet and memorable afternoon in May.
I turned the corner at Whitehall Place and looked down the desolate gardens. The benches were empty, the trees were bare, “and no birds sang.” I crossed the road.
The Hotel Metropole. The great doors stood invitingly open, and from the pavement one could see the warmth and colour of the vestibule. Here was staying the Arch-Devil who had robbed me of my life. I stood for a moment under the portico shaking with rage. I must have lost consciousness for a few seconds for I do not remember entering or mounting the stairs. I found myself at the bureau asking for Hamdi Effendi. No, he had not left. They thought he was in the hotel. A page despatched in search of him departed with my card, bawling a number. I hate these big caravanserais where one is a mere number, as in a gaol. “Would to heaven it were a gaol,” I muttered to myself, “and this were the number of Hamdi Effendi!”
A lean man rose from a chair and, holding out his hand, effusively saluted me by name. I stared at him. He recalled our acquaintance at Etretat. I fished him up from the deeps of a previous incarnation and vaguely remembered him as a young American floral decorator who used to preach to me the eternal doctrine of hustle. I shook hands with him and hoped that he was well.
“Going very strong. Never stronger. Never so well as when I’m full up with work. But you don’t hurry around enough in this dear, sleepy old country. Men lunch. In New York all the lunch one has time for is to swallow a plasmon lozenge in a street-car.”
His high pitched voice shrieked bombastic platitude into my ears for an illimitable time. I answered occasionally with the fringe of my mind. Could my agonised state of being have remained unperceived by any human creature save this young, hustling, dollar-centred New York floral decorator?
“Since we met, guess how many times I’ve crossed the Atlantic. Four times!”
Long-suffering Atlantic!
“And about yourself. Still goingpiano, pianowith books and things?”
“Yes, books and things,” I echud.
The page came up and announced Hamdi’s intention of immediate appearance.
“And how is that charming young lady, your ward, Miss Carlotta?” continued my tormentor.
“Yes,” I answered hurriedly. “A charming young lady. You used to give her sweets. Have you noticed that a fondness for sugar plums induces an equanimity of character? It also spoils the teeth. That is why the front teeth of all American women are so bad.”
I must be endowed with the low cunning of the fox, who, I am told, by a swift turn puts his pursuers off the scent. The learned term the rhetorical device anignoratio elenchi. My young friend’s patriotism rose in furious defence of his countrywomen’s beauty. I looked round the luxuriously furnished vestibule, wondering from which of the many doors the object of my hatred would emerge, and my young friend’s talk continued to ruffle the fringe of my mind.
“I’m afraid you’re expecting some one rather badly,” he remarked with piercing perceptiveness.
“A dull acquaintance,” said I. “I shall be sorry when his arrival puts an end to our engaging conversation.”
Then the lift door opened and Hamdi stepped out like the Devil in an Alhambra ballet.
He looked at my card and looked at me. He bowed politely.
“I did not know whom I should have the pleasure of seeing,” said he in his execrable French. “In what way can I be of service to Sir Marcus Ordeyne?”
“What have you done with Carlotta?” I asked, glaring at him.
His ignoble small-pox pitted face assumed an expression of bland inquiry.
“Carlotta?”
“Yes,” said I. “Where have you taken her to?”
“Explain yourself, Monsieur,” said Hamdi. “Do I understand that Lady Ordeyne has disappeared?”
“Tell me what you have done with her.”
His crafty features grew satanic; his long fleshy nose squirmed like the proboscis of one of Orcagna’s fiends.
“Really, Monsieur,” said he, with a hideous leer—oh, words are impotent to express the ugliness of that face! “Really, Monsieur, supposing I had stolen Miladi, you would be the last person I should inform of her whereabouts. You are simple, Monsieur. I had always heard that England was a country of arcadian innocence, so unlike my own black, wicked country, and now—” he shrugged his shoulders blandly, “j’en suis convaincu.”
“You may jeer, Hamdi Effendi,” said I in a white passion of anger. “But the English police you will not find so arcadian.”
“Ah, so you have been to the police?” said the suave villain. “You have gone to Scotland—Scotland Place Scotland—n’importe. They are investigating the affair? I thank you for the friendly warning.”
“Warning!” I cried, choked with indignation. He held up a soft, fat palm.
“Ah—it is not a warning? Then, Monsieur, I am afraid you have committed an indiscretion which your friends in Scotland Place will not pardon you. You would not make a good police agent. I am of the profession, so I know.”
I advanced a step. He recoiled, casting a quick look backward at the lift just then standing idle with open doors.
“Hamdi Effendi,” I cried, “by the living God, if you do not restore me my wife—”
But then I stopped short. Hamdi had stepped quickly backward into the lift, and given a sign to the attendant. The door slammed and all I could do was to shake my fist at Hamdi’s boots as they disappeared upwards.
I remember once in Italy seeing a cat playing with a partially stunned bat which, flying low, she had brought to the ground. She crouched, patted it, made it move a little, patted it again and retired on her haunches preparing for a spring. Suddenly the bat shot vertically into the air.
I stared at the ascending lift with the cat’s expression of impotent dismay and stupefaction. It was inconceivably grotesque. It brought into my tragedy an element of infernal farce. I became conscious of peals of laughter, and looking round beheld the American doubled up in a saddlebag chair. I fled from the vestibule of the hotel clothed from head to foot in derision.
I am at home, sitting at my work-table, walking restlessly about the room, stepping out into the raw air on the balcony and looking for a sign down the dark and silent road. I curse myself for my folly in entering the Hotel Metropole. The damned Turk held me in the palm of his hand. He made mock of me to his heart’s content.... And Carlotta is in his power. I grow white with terror when I think ofherterror. She is somewhere, locked up in a room, in this great city. My God! Where can she be?
The police must find her. London is not mediaeval Italy for women to be gagged and carried off to inaccessible strongholds in defiance of laws and government. I repeat to myself that she must come back, that the sober working of English institutions will restore her to my arms, that my agony is a matter of a day or two at most, that the special license obtained this morning and now lying before me is not the document of irony it seems, and that in a week’s time we shall look back on this nightmare of a day with a smile, and look forward to the future with laughter in our hearts.
But to-night I am very lonely. “Loneliness,” says Epictetus, “is a certain condition of the helpless man.” And I am helpless. All my aid lies in the learning in those books; and all the learning in all those books on all sides from floor to ceiling cannot render me one infinitesimal grain of practical assistance. If only Pasquale, man of action, swift intelligence, were here! I can only trust to the trained methods of the unimaginative machine who has set out to trace Carlotta by means of the scar on her forehead and the mole behind her ear. And meanwhile I am very lonely. My sole friend, to whom I could have turned, Mrs. McMurray, is still at Bude. She is to have a child, I understand, in the near future, and will stay in Cornwall till the confinement is over. Her husband, even were he not amid the midnight stress of his newspaper office, I should shrink from seeking. He is a Niagara of a man. Judith—I can go to her no more. And though Antoinette has wept her heart out all day long, poor soul, and Stenson has conveyed by his manner his respectful sympathy, I cannot take counsel of my own servants. I have gathered into my arms the one-eyed cat, and buried my face in his fur—where Carlotta’s face has been buried. “That’s the way I should like to be kissed!” Oh, my dear, my dear, were you here now, that is the way I should kiss you!
I have gone upstairs and wandered about her room. Antoinette has prepared it for her reception to-night, as usual. The corner of the bedclothes is turned down, and her night-dress, a gossamer thing with cherry ribbons, laid out across the bed. At the foot lie the familiar red slippers with the audacious heels; her dressing-gown is thrown in readiness over the back of a chair; even the brass hot water can stands in the basin—and it is still hot. And I know that the foolish woman is wide-awake overhead waiting for her darling. I kissed the pillow still fragrant of her where her head rested last night, and I went downstairs with a lump in my throat.
Again I sit at my work-table and, to save myself from going mad with suspense, jot down in my diary* the things that have happened. Put in bald words they scarcely seem credible.
* It will be borne in mind that I am writing these actualpages, afterwards, at Verona, amplifying the rough notes inmy diary. M. O.
A sudden clattering, nerve-shaking, strident peal at the front-door bell.
I flew down the stairs. It was news of Carlotta. It was Carlotta herself brought back to me. My heart swelled with joy as if it would burst. I knew that as I opened the door Carlotta would fall laughing, weeping, sobbing into my arms.
I opened the door. It was only a police officer in plain clothes.
“Sir Marcus Ordeyne?”
“Yes.”
“We have traced the young lady all right. She left London by the two-twenty Continental express from Victoria with Mr. Sebastian Pasquale.”
November 1st.
Five days ago the blow fell, and I am only now recovering; only now awakening to the horrible pain of it.
I have gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print which my eyes have scanned have been destitute of meaning. I have forced myself to the mechanical task of copying piles of rough notes for my History; I have been able to bring thereto not an atom of intelligence; popes, princes, painters are a category of disassociated names, less evocative of ideas than the columns in the Post Office London Directory. I have stared stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the trees opposite my windows. I have walked the streets in dull misery. I have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.
There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her I have fed into a sort of friendship. I stand vacantly in front of the cage finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy. She turns her head on one side, regards me with melting brown eyes, and squatting on her haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly through the bars. Just so did Carlotta beseech and plead. I have bemused myself with gnostic and metempsychosic speculations. Carlotta as an ordinary human being with an immortal soul did not exist, and what I had known and loved was but a simulacrum of female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to be ever seeking a fresh habitat. It was but the lingering ghost of the humanised shell of air that was seen at Victoria station. The fateful spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and actuated by destinies unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed the carcass of this little brown bear, which looks at me so strangely, so coaxingly, with Carlotta’s eyes and Carlotta’s gestures. I asked her yesterday to come back to me. I said that the house was empty; that the rooms ached for the want of her. I pleaded so passionately and the eyes before me so melted that I thought her heart was touched. But in the midst of it all another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint and put out her paw for buns—by which token I felt indeed that it was Carlotta.
I have accepted the blow silently. As yet I have told no one. I have made no inquiries. When a man is betrayed by his best friend and deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are the only comforters. Besides, to whom should I go for comfort? I have lived too remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.
Not a line has reached me from Carlotta. She has gone out of my life as lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi Effendi’s; as she went, for aught she knew, out of that of the unhappy boy who lured her from Alexandretta. If she heard I was dead, I wonder whether she would say: “I am so glad!”
Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale waylaid her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there proposed that she should accompany him, I do not know. It matters very little. She is gone. That is the one awful fact that signifies. No explanations, pleas for forgiveness could make me suffer less. Were she different I might find it in my heart to hate her. This I cannot do. How can one hate a thing devoid of heart and soul? But one can love it—God knows how blindly. So I have locked the door of Carlotta’s room and the key is in my possession. It shall not be touched. It shall remain just as she left it—and I shall mourn for her as for one dead.
For Pasquale—if I were of his own reversionary type, I should follow him half across Europe till we met, and then one of us would kill the other. In one respect he resembles Carlotta. He is destitute of the moral sense. How else to solve the enigma? How else to reconcile his flamboyant chivalry towards the consumptive washer-woman with the black treachery towards me, in which even at that very moment his mind must have been steeped? I knew that he had betrayed many, that where women were concerned no considerations of honour or friendship had stood between him and his desires; but I believed—for what reason save my own egregious vanity, I know not—that for me he had a peculiar regard. I believed that it was an idiosyncrasy of this wolf to look upon my sheepfold as sacred from his depredations. I was ashamed of any doubts that crossed my mind as to his loyalty, and did not hesitate to thrust my lamb between his jaws. And while he was giving the lie direct to my faith, I, poor fool, in my despair was seeking madly for his aid in the deliverance of my darling from the power of the dog.
I have felt I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing under lacerated vanity when I think of that grotesque and humiliating blunder in the Hotel Metropole.
November 2d.
I have received news of the death of old Simon McQuhatty. In my few lucid moments of late I had been thinking of seeking his kindly presence. Now Gossip Death has taken him out across the moor. Now, dear old pagan, he is