It is some two years since I stood for the second time in the Pinacoteca of Verona and sought to read my fate in the simpering countenance of Morone’sMiseratrix Virginum Regina. I met what might have been expected by a person of any sense—the self-same expression on the painted face as I had angrily found there two months before when I began to write the foregoing pages. But as I had no sense at all in those days I accepted the poor battered Madonna’s lack of sympathy for a sign and a token, went home, and prepared for dissolution.
Two years ago! It is only for the last few months that I have been able to look back on that nightmare of a time in Verona with philosophic equanimity. And this morning is the first occasion on which I have felt that dispassionate attitude towards a past self which enables a man to set down without the heartache the memories of days that are gone. I sit upon the flat roof of this house in Mogador on the Morocco coast, shaded by an awning from the bright African sun which glints in myriad sparkles on the sea visible beyond the house-tops. The atmosphere last night was somewhat heavy with the languorous, indescribable, and unforgettable smell of the East; but the morning is deliciously wind-swept by the Atlantic breeze, and the air tastes sweet. And it is clear, dazzlingly clear. The white square houses and the cupolas of the mosques stand out sharp against a sky of intense, ungradated blue. I am away from the centre of the busy sea-port and the noise of its streets thronged with grain-laden camels and shouting drivers and picturesque, quarrelling, squabbling, haggling Moors and Jews and desert Arabs, and I am enveloped in the peace of the infinite azure. Besides, yesterday afternoon, as I rode back to Mogador, across the tongue of desert which separates it from the Palm Tree House, and the town rose on the horizon, a dream city of pure snow set in the clear sunset amethyst against the still, pale lapis lazuli of the bay—something happened. And yesterday evening more happened still.
Two years ago, then, I faced in Verona the dissolution of my ineffectual existence. I could see no reason for living. My theory of myself in my relation to the cosmos had been upset by practical phenomena. No other theory based on surer grounds presented itself. But what about life, said I, without a theory? Already it was life without a purpose, without work, without friends, without Judith and without Carlotta. I could not endure it without even a theory to console me. Beings do exist devoid of loves or theories. But of such, I thought, are the beasts that perish. I reflected further. Supposing, on extended investigation, I found a new theory. How far would it profit me? How far could I trust it not to lead me through another series of fantastic emotions and futile endeavours to the sublime climax of murdering a one-eyed cat? Self-abomination and contempt smote me as I thought of poor Polyphemus stretched dead on the hearthrug, and myself standing over him, sane, stupid, and remorseful, with the poker in my hand.
I walked up and down the vast cold room of the marble palazzo, arraying before me in overwhelming numbers the arguments for selfdestruction. On a table in the middle of the room stood a phial of prussic acid which I had procured long before in London, it being a conviction of mine that every man ought to have ready to hand a sure means of exit from the world. I paused many times in front of the little blue phial. One lift of the hand, one toss of the head, and all would be over. At last I extracted the cork, and the faint smell of almonds reached my nostrils. I recorked the phial and lit a cigarette. This I threw away half smoked and again approached the table of death. I began to feel a strong natural disinclination to swallow the stuff. “This,” said I, “is sheer animal cowardice.” I again uncorked the phial. A new phase of the matter appeared to me. “It is the act of a craven to shirk the responsibilities of life. Can you be such a meanspirited creature as not even to have the courage to live?” “No,” said I, “I have a valiant spirit,” and I set down the bottle. “Bah,” whispered the familiar imp of suicide at my elbow. “You are just afraid to die.” I took up the bottle again. But the other taunter had an argument equally strong, and once more I put the phial uncorked on the table.
Thus between two cowardices, one of which I must choose, stood I, like the ass of Buridan. I lit another cigarette and excogitated the problem. I smoked two cigarettes, walking up and down that vast, chill apartment, while the air grew sickly sweet with the smell of almonds, which intensified the physical repugnance the first faint odour had occasioned. I began to shiver with cold. The stove had burned out before I entered, and I had not considered it worth while to have it filled for the few minutes that would remain to me to live. I had not reckoned on the ass’s bundles of cowardice.
“I may as well be warm,” thought I, “while I prove to my complete satisfaction that it is more cowardly to live than to die. There is no very great hurry.”
I caught up a travelling-rug with which I had tried to soften the asperities of an imitation Louis XV couch, and throwing it over my shoulders, resumed my pilgrimage. I soon lost myself in the problem and did not notice a corner of the rug gradually slipping down towards the floor.
“I’ll do it!” I cried at last, making a sudden dive towards the table. But the ironical corner of the rug had reached the ground. I stepped on it, tripped, and instinctively caught the table to steady myself. The table, a rickety gueridon, overbalanced, and away rolled my uncorked phial of prussic acid and fell into a hundred pieces on the tessellated floor.
“Solvitur,” said I, grimly, “ambulando.”
Looking back now, I am inclined to treat myself tenderly. Whether I should have drunk the poison, if the accident had not occurred, I cannot say. At the moment of my rush I intended to do so. After the catastrophe, which I attributed to the curse of ineffectuality that pursued me, I must confess that I was glad. Not that life looked more attractive than before, but that the decision had been taken out of my hands. I could not go about the shops of Verona buying prussic acid or revolvers or metres of stout rope. And my razors (without Stenson’s care) were benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces. I groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was to live, I resigned myself to a barren and theoryless existence.
After a day or two the vital instinct asserted itself more strongly. I became inspired by an illuminating revelation. I had a preliminary aim in life. I would go out into the world in search of a theory. When found I would apply it to the regulation of the score and a half years during which I might possibly expect to remain on this planet. I must take my chances of it leading me to the corpse of another Polyphemus.
As it struck me I should not find my theory in Italy, I packed up my belongings and hastened from Verona. At Naples I picked up a Messageries Maritimes steamer and began a circular tour in the Levant. At Alexandretta I went ashore, and inquired my way to the dwelling of the Prefect of Police. I did not call on Hamdi Effendi. But I wandered round the walls and wondered in a moody, heart-achey way where it was that Carlotta sat when Harry came along and whistled her like a tame falcon to his arm. It was a white palace of a house with a closed balcony supported on rude corbels and tightly shuttered. At the back spread a large garden surrounded by the famous wall. There was no doubt that Hamdi was a wealthy personage, and that Carlotta’s nurture had been as gentle as that of any lady in Syria. But the place wherein Carlotta’s childhood had been sheltered had an air of impenetrable mystery. I stood baffled before it, as I had stood so often before Carlotta’s soul. The result of this portion of my search was the discovery, not of a new theory, but of an old pain. I went back to the ship in a despondent mood, and caused deep distress to one of the gentlest creatures I have ever met. He was a lean, elderly German, who no matter what the occasion or what the temperature wore a long, tight-buttoned frock-coat, a narrow black tie, and a little bluish-grey felt hat adorned with a partridge’s feather which gave him an air of forlorn rakishness. His name was Doctor Anastasius Dose, and he spent a blameless life in travelling up and down the world, on behalf of a Leipsic firm of which he was a member, in search of rare and curious books. For there are copies of books which have a well-known pedigree like famous jewels, and whose acquisition, a matter of infinite tact, gives rise, I was told by Herr Dose, to the most exquisite thrill known to man. He brought me on that morose afternoon a copy of the “Synonima,” in Italian and French, of St. Fliscus, printed by Simon Magniagus of Milan in 1480, and opened the vellum covers with careful fingers.
“In all the assemblage of human atoms that inhabit this vessel,” said he, “there is but one who is imbued with reverence for the past and a sense of the preciousness of the unique. I need not tell you, Herr Baronet, who are a scholar, that of this book only two copies exist in this ink-sodden universe. One is in the University Library of Bologna; the other is before your eyes. It is also the only book known to have been printed by Magniagus. See the beautiful, small Roman type—a masterpiece. Ach, Herr Baronet! to have accomplished one such work in a lifetime, and then to sit among the blessed saints and look down on earth and know that the two sole copies in existence are cherished by the elect, what a reward, what eternal happiness!”
I turned over the pages. The faint perfume of mouldy lore ascended and I remembered the smell of the “Histoire des Uscoques” in the Embankment Gardens.
“Theodor di feminain the nostrils of the scholar,” said I.
“Famina?Woman?” he cried, scandalised.
“Yes, my friend,” said I. “All things sublunar can be translated into terms of woman. St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn’t a wife; Simon Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and devoted his existence to reproducing himself instead of St. Fliscus.”
“Ach, that is very interesting,” said he. “Could you tell me the date of Magniagus’s marriage?”
“I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But depend upon it, he was either married or was going to be married, and she ran away from him and left him without the heart to print for posterity, and when he took his seat among the saints she said she was so glad; he was a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!”
He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious volume to his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann’sTractate de Lamiis, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats’s poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old diplomatist towards a child’s woolly lamb. For him literature had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track of a Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and never more to be read by any of the sons of man. In the summer he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By chance I have learned since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For aught I could see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in the intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul contained that antidote—theodor di femina. Perhaps he met it at Reykjavic and he died of dismay.
I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible for the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes would banish Carlotta’s distracting image. But no, it was one of the many vain reflections on which I based a false philosophy. Whether in Beyrout, or the land of the “sweet singer of Persephone,” or Alexandria, or on the Cannebiere of Marseilles, or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither a restless pursuit of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the mountainous republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom and to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was ironically driven by fleas—whether on land or sea, in cities or in solitudes, the vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and the voice that was still (as far as I was concerned) cooed its dove-notes into my ears.
I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a pretty American girl of sixteen, as “a quaint gentle old guy who talks awful rot which no one can understand, and is all the time thinking about something else.” My sudden emergence from the companion-way, where I was lighting a cigarette, brought red confusion into the young person’s cheeks.
“How old do you think I am?” I asked.
“Oh, about sixty,” quoth the damsel.
“I’m glad I’m quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot,” said I.
With the resourcefulness of her nation she linked her arm in mine and started a confidential walk up and down the deck.
“You are just a dear,” she remarked.
She could not have said more to Anastasius Dose had he been there; as far as I can recollect he must just then have been dying of the Inevitable in Iceland. Perhaps the few months had brought me to resemble him. Instinctively I put my hand to my head to reassure myself that I was not wearing a rakish little soft felt hat with a partridge-feather, and I reflected with some complacency that my rimless pince-nez did not give me the owlish appearance produced by Anastasius Dose’s great round, iron-rimmed goggles. From such crumbs of vanity are we sometimes reduced to take comfort.
“I just want to know what you are,” said my young American friend.
Shall I confess my attraction? She brought a dim suggestion of Carlotta. She had Carlotta’s colouring and Carlotta’s candour. But there the resemblance stopped. The grey matter of her brain had been distilled from the air of Wall Street, and there were precious few things between earth and sky of which she hadn’t prescience.
“I’m a broken-down philosopher,” said I.
“Oh, that’s nothing. So is everybody as soon as they get sense. What did you make your money in?”
“I’ve not made any money,” I answered, meekly.
“I thought all people who were knighted in your country had made piles of money.”
“Knighted!” I exclaimed. “What on earth do you think a quaint old guy like myself could possibly have done to get knighted?”
“Then you’re a baronet,” she said, severely.
“I assure you it is not my fault.”
“I thought all baronets were wicked. They are in the novels. Somehow you don’t look like a baronet. You ought to have a black moustache and an eyeglass and smoke a cigar and sneer. But, say, how do you fill up the time if you do nothing to make money?”
“I am going through the world,” said I, “on an adventurous quest, like a knight—or a baronet, if you will—of the Round Table. I am in quest of a Theory of Life.”
“I guess I was born with it,” cried young New York.
“I guess I’ll die without finding it,” said I.
London again. My quiet house. Antoinette and Stenson. The well-ordered routine of comfort. My books. The dog’s-eared manuscript of the “History of Renaissance Morals,” unpacked by Stenson and hid in its usual place on the writing-table. Nothing changed, yet everything utterly different.
A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the Regent’s Park. I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic, irresistible. My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one else. Only my lawyers knew of my arrival. With them alone had I corresponded during the many months of my absence. Stay; I did write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona, in reply to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself. I answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period. But not even a letter from my lawyers awaited me. I thought somewhat wistfully that I would willingly have paid six and eight pence for it. But the feeling was momentary.
Then began a queer, untroubled life. Without definite resolve I became a recluse, living forlornly from day to day. Like a bat I avoided the outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night. I had a pride in cherishing the habit of solitude. Were it not that I entertained a real dislike of roots and water and the damp and manifold discomforts of a cave, with which form of habitat the ministrations of Stenson and Antoinette would have been inconsistent, I should have gone forth into the nearest approach to a Thebaid I could discover. I was, in fact, touched by the mild mania of the hermit. My club I never entered. A line drawn from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the Zoological Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings. Once I spied in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray, and rushed into a providential omnibus, so as to avoid recognition. My History remained untouched. The glamour of the Renaissance had vanished. For occupation I read the Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I seldom read the newspapers. I had an idea, like an eminent personage of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it failed to interest me greatly. I shrank from the noise of it.
“Monsieur,” said Antoinette, “will get ill if he does not go out into the sunshine.”
“Monsieur,” said I, “regards the sunshine as an impertinent intrusion into a soul that loves the twilight.”
If I had made the same remark to an Englishwoman, she would have pitied me for a poor, half-witted gentleman. But Antoinette has her nation’s instinctive appreciation of soul-states, and her sympathy was none the less comprehending when she shook her head mournfully and said that it was bad for the stomach.
“My good Antoinette,” I remarked, harking back in my mind to a speculation of other days, “if you go on worrying me in this manner about my stomach, I will build a tower forty feet high in the back garden, and live on top, and have my meals sent up by a lift, and never come down again.”
“Monsieur might as well be in Paradise,” said Antoinette.
“Ah,” said I. And I thought of the bottle of prussic acid with mingled sentiments.
All through these many months I had Judith dwelling, a pale ghost, in the back of my mind. We had parted so finally that correspondence between us had seemed impertinent. But although I had not written to her, no small part of the infinite sadness that had fallen upon my life was the shadow of her destiny. Sweet, wine-loving Judith! How many times did I picture her sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin mission church at Hoxton! Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that penitentiary? Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to decide?
At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our parting. She had found salvation in a strange thing which she called duty. “I am fulfilling an appointed task,” she wrote, “and the measure of my success is the measure of my happiness. I am bringing consolation to a wayward and tormented spirit. A year has swept aside the petty feminine vanities, the opera-glasses, so to speak, through which a woman complacently views her influence over a man, and it has cleared my vision. A year has proved beyond mortal question that without me this wayward and tormented spirit would fail. I hold in my hands the very soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? You see I use your metaphors still. Dearest of all dear friends, do not pity me. Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity.”
This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out from Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me. It was not very new, or subtle, or inspiring. But that is the way of things. No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.
I answered Judith’s letter. After the long silence it seemed, at first, strange to write to her; but soon I found myself opening my heart as I had never done before to man or woman. The fact that, accident aside, we were never to meet again, drew the spiritual elements in us nearer together, and the tone of her letter loosened the bonds of my natural reserve. I told her of my past year of life, of the locked memorial chamber upstairs, of the madness through which I had passed, of my weary pursuit of the Theory, and of my attitude towards her solution of the problem. Having written the letter I felt comforted, knowing that Judith would understand.
I finished it about six o’clock one afternoon, and shrinking from giving it to Stenson to post, as it was the first private letter I had written since my arrival in London, I took it myself to the pillar-box. The fresh air reproached me for the unreasonable indoor life I had been leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked along the decorous, residential roads of St. John’s Wood feeling less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the shaft of light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed the white-capped and aproned parlour-maid, and entering a waiting hansom, drove off into the darkness whither my speculative fancy followed them. Now and then silhouettes appeared upon the window-blinds, especially on the upper floors, for it was the dressing hour and the cares of the day were being thrown aside with the workaday garments. In one house, standing far back from the road, the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn. As I passed, I saw a man tossing up a delighted child in his arms, and the mother standing by.Ay de mi!A commonplace of ten thousand homes, when the man returns from his toil. Yet it moved me. To earn one’s bread; to perpetuate one’s species; to create duties and responsibilities; to meet them like a brave man; to put the new generation upon the right path; to look back upon it all and say, “I have fulfilled my functions,” and pass forth quietly into the eternal laboratory—is not that Life in its truth and its essence? And the reward? The commonplace. The welcome of wife and children—and the tossing of a crowing babe in one’s arms. And I had missed it all, lived outside it all. I had spoken blasphemously in my besotted ignorance of these sacred common things, and verily I had my recompense in a desolate home and a life of about as much use to humanity as that of St. Simeon Stylites on top of his pillar.
So I walked along the streets on the track of the wisdom which Judith had revealed to me, and I seemed to be on the point of reaching it when I arrived at my own door.
“But what the deuce shall I do with it when I get it?” I said, as I let myself in with my latch-key.
I had just put my stick in the stand and was taking off my overcoat, when the door of the room next the diningroom opened, and Antoinette rushed out upon me.
“Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Oh, Monsieur! How shall I tell you?”
The good soul broke into sobbing and weeping.
“What is the matter, Antoinette?” Z asked.
“Monsieur must not be angry. Monsieur is good like the Bon Dieu. But it will give pain to Monsieur.”
“But what is it?” I cried, mystified. “Have you spoiled the dinner?”
I was a million miles from any anticipation of her answer.
“Monsieur-she has come back!”
I grew faint for a moment as from a blow over the heart. Antoinette raised her great tear-stained face.
“Monsieur must not drive her away.”
I pushed her gently aside and entered the little room which I had furnished once as her boudoir.
On the couch sat Carlotta, white and pinched and poorly clad. At first I was only conscious of her great brown eyes fixed upon me, the dog-like appeal of our first meeting intensified to heart-breaking piteousness. On seeing me she did not rise, but cowered as if I would strike her. I looked at her, unable to speak. Antoinette stood sobbing in the doorway.
“Well?” said I, at last.
“I have come home,” said Carlotta.
“You have been away a long time,” said I.
“Ye-es,” said Carlotta.
“Why have you come?” I asked.
“I had no money,” said Carlotta, with her expressive gesture of upturned palms. “I had nothing but that.” She pointed to a tiny travelling bag. “Everything else was at the Mont de Piete—the pawnshop—and they would not keep me any longer at the pension. I owed them for three weeks, and then they lent me money to buy my ticket to London. I said Seer Marcous would pay them back. So I came home.”
“But where—where is Pasquale?” I asked.
“He went five, six months ago. He gave me some money and said he would send some more. But he did not send any. He went to South Africa. He said there was a war and he wanted to fight, and he said he was sick of me. Oh, he was very unkind,” she cried with the quiver of her baby lips. “I wish I had never seen him.”
“Are you married?”
“No,” said Carlotta.
“Damn him!” said I, between my teeth.
“He was going to marry me, but then he said it did not matter in Paris. At first he was so nice, but after a little—oh, Seer Marcous dear, he was so cruel.”
There was a short silence. Antoinette wept by the door, uttering little half-audible exclamations“la pauvre petite, le cher ange!”
Carlotta regarded me wistfully. I saw a new look of suffering in her eyes. For myself I felt numb with pain.
“What kind of a pension were you living in?” I asked, unutterable horrors coming into my head.
“It was a French family, an old lady and two old daughters, and one fat German professor. Pasquale put me there. It was very respectable,” she added, with a wan smile, “and so dull. Madame Champet would scarcely let me go into the street by myself.”
“Thank heaven you did not fall into worse hands,” said I.
Carlotta unpinned her old straw hat, quite a different garment from the dainty head-wear she delighted in a year before, and threw it on the couch beside her. A tress of her glorious bronze hair fell loose across her forehead, adding to the woebegone expression of her face. She rose, and as she did so I seemed to notice a curious change in her. She came to me with extended hands.
“Seer Marcous—” she whispered.
I took her hands in mine.
“Oh, my dear,” said I, “why did you leave me?”
“I was wicked. And I was a little fool,” said Carlotta.
I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart. There was a blubber from the egregious old woman in the threshold.
“Oh, Monsieur is not going to drive her away.”
I turned upon her.
“Instead of standing there weeping like a fountain and doing nothing, why aren’t you getting Mademoiselle’s room ready for her?”
“Because Monsieur has the key,” wailed Antoinette.
“That’s true,” said I.
Then I reflected on the futility of converting bedchambers into mausoleums for the living. The room shut up for a year would not be habitable. It would be damp and inch-deep in dust.
“Mademoiselle shall sleep in my room to-night,” I said, “and Stenson can make me up a bed and put what I want here. Go and arrange it with him.”
Antoinette departed. I turned to Carlotta.
“Are you very tired, my child?”
“Oh, yes—so tired.”
“Why didn’t you write, so that things could have been got ready for you?”
“I don’t know. I was too unhappy. Seer Marcous—” she said after a little pause and then stopped.
“Yes?”
“I am going to have a baby.”
She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of sex; with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants. I glanced hurriedly at her. The fact was obvious. She stood with her hands helplessly outspread. The pathos of her would have wrung the heart of a devil.
“Thank God, you’ve come home,” said I, huskily.
She began to cry softly. I put my arm round her shoulders, and comforted her. She sobbed out incoherent things. She wished she had never seen Pasquale. I was good. She would stay with me always. She would never run away again.
I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key that I had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the electric light.
“See what are still usable of your old things,” said I, “and I will send Antoinette up to you.”
She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.
“Why should I sleep in your room when this one is ready for me—my night dress—even the hot water?”
“My dear,” said I, “that hot water was put for you a year ago. It must be cold now.”
“And my red slippers—and my dressing-gown!” she cried, quaveringly.
Then sinking in a heap on the floor beside the dusty bed, she burst into a passion of tears.
I stole away and sent Antoinette to minister to her.
A year before I had raved and ranted, deeming life intolerable and cursing the high gods; I suffered then, it is true; but I hope I may never again go through the suffering of that first night of Carlotta’s return. Even now I can close my eyes and feel the icy grip on my heart.
She came down to dinner about an hour later, dressed in a pink wrapper, one of the last things she had bought, which Antoinette (as she explained to excuse her delay) had been airing before the fire. She sat opposite me, in her old place, penitent, subdued, yet not shy or ill at ease. Stenson waited on us, grave and imperturbable as if we had put back the clock of time a twelvemonth. The only covert reference he made to the event was to murmur discreetly in my ear:
“I have brought up a bottle of the Pommery, Sir Marcus, in the hope you would drink some.”
I was touched, for the good fellow had no other way of showing his solicitude.
Carlotta allowed him to fill her glass. She sipped the wine, and declared that it did her good. She was no longer a teetotaller, she explained. Once she drank too much, and the next day had a headache.
“Why should one have a headache?”
“Nemesis,” said I.
“What is Nemesis?”
I found myself answering her question in the old half-jesting way. And in her old way she replied:
“I do not understand.”
How vividly familiar it was, and yet how agonisingly strange!
“Where is Polyphemus?” she asked.
“Dead,” said I.
“Oh-h! How did poor Polyphemus die?”
“He was smitten by Destiny at the end of the last act of a farcical tragedy.”
The ghost of a “hou!” came from Carlotta. She composed herself immediately.
“I often used to think of Polyphemus and Seer Marcous and Antoinette,” she said, musingly. “And then I wished I was back. I have been very wicked.”
She put her elbows on the table, and framing her face with her hands looked at me, and shook her head.
“Oh, you are good! Oh, you are good!”
“Go on with your dinner, my child,” said I, “and wonder at the genius of Antoinette who has managed to cook it and look after you at the same time.”
She obeyed meekly. I watched her eat. She was famished. I learned that she had had nothing since the early morning coffee and roll. In spite of pain, I was curiously flattered by her return. I representedsomethingto her, after all—even though the instinct of the prodigal cat had driven her hither. I am sure it had never crossed her mind that my doors might be shut against her. Her first words were, “I have come home.” The first thing she did when we went into the drawing-room after dinner was to fondle my hand and lay it against her cheek and say, with a deep sigh:
“I am so happy.”
However shallow her butterfly nature was, these things came from its depths. No man can help feeling pleased at a child’s or an animal’s implicit trust in him. And the pleasure is of the purest. He feels that unreasoning intuition has penetrated to some latent germ of good in his nature, and for the moment he is disarmed of evil. Carlotta, then, came blindly to what was best in me. In her thoughts she sandwiched me between the cat and the cook: well, in most sandwiches the mid-ingredient is the most essential.
She curled herself up in the familiar sofa-corner, and as it was a chilly night I sent for a wrap which I threw over her limbs.
“See, I have the dear red slippers,” she remarked, arching her instep.
“And I have my dear Carlotta,” said I.
I drew my chair near her, and gradually I learned all the unhappy story.
Pasquale had made love to her from the very first minute of their acquaintance—even while I was hunting for theL’Histoire Comique de Francion. He had met her many times unknown to me. They had corresponded, her letters being addressed to a little stationer’s shop close by. She did not love him. Of that I have an absolute conviction. But he was young, he was handsome, he had the libertine’s air and manner. She was docile. And she was ever positively truthful. If I had questioned her she would have confessed frankly. But I never questioned, as I never suspected. I wondered sometimes at her readiness in quoting him. I noticed odd coincidences; but I was too ineffectual to draw inferences from phenomena. His appearance on the Paddington platform was prearranged; his duchessa at Ealing a myth.
Apparently he had dallied with his fancy. The fruit was his any day for the plucking. Perhaps a rudimentary sentiment of loyalty towards me restrained him. Who can tell? The night of our meeting with Hamdi brought the crisis. The Turk’s threats had alarmed both Carlotta and myself. It was necessary for him to strike at once. He saw her the next day—would to heaven I had remained at home!—told her I was marrying her to save her from Hamdi. I loved the other woman. He would save her equally well from Hamdi. The other woman met her soon after parting from Pasquale and besought her to give me up. She did not know what to do. Poor child, how should she have known? On the previous evening I had told her she was to marry me. She was ready to obey. She went to bed thinking that she was to marry me. In the morning she went for her music lesson. Pasquale was waiting for her. They walked for some distance down the road. He hailed a cab and drove away with her.
“He said he loved me,” said Carlotta, “and he kissed me, and he told me I must go away with him to Paris and marry him. And I felt all weak, like that—” she dropped her arms helplessly in an expressive gesture, “and so what could I do?”
“Didn’t you think, Carlotta, that I might be sorry—perhaps unhappy?” I asked as gently as I could.
“He said you would be quite happy with the other woman.”
“Did you believe him?”
“That’s why I said I have been very wicked,” Carlotta answered, simply.
She went on with her story—an old, miserable, detestable, execrable story. At first all went merrily. Then she fell ill in Paris. It was her first acquaintance with the northern winter. Her throat proved to be delicate and she was laid up with bronchitis. To men of Pasquale’s type, a woman ill is of no more use than a spavined horse or a broken-down motor-car. More than that, she becomes an infernal nuisance. It was in his temperament to perform sporadic acts of fantastic chivalry. It appealed to something romantic, theatrical, in his facile nature. But to devote himself to a woman in sickness—that was different. The fifteenth century Italian hated like the devil continued association with pain. He would have thrown his boots to a beggar, but he would have danced in his palace over the dungeons where his brother rotted in obscurity.
So poor Carlotta was neglected, and began to eat the bread of disillusion. When she got well, there was a faint recrudescence of affection. Has not this story been written a million miserable times? Why should I rend my heart again by retelling it? Wild rages, jealousies, quarrels, tears—
“And then one day he said, ‘You damned little fool, I am sick to death of you,’ and he went away, and I never saw him again. He wrote and he sent his valet to put me in the pension.”
“And yet, Carlotta,” said I bitterly, “you would go back to him if he sent for you?”
She sprang forward and gripped me by the arm—I was sitting quite close to her—and her face wore the terror-stricken expression of a child frightened with bogies.
“Go back? After what he has done to me? You would not send me back? Seer Marcous, darling, you will keep me with you? I will be good, good, good. But go back to Pasquale? Oh, no-o-o!”
She fell back in her sofa-corner, and fixed her great, deep imploring eyes on me.
“My dear,” said I, “you know this is your home as long as ever you choose to stay in it—but—” and I stroked her hair gently—“if he comes back when your child is born—his child—”
She drew herself up superbly.
“It is my child—my very, very own,” cried Carlotta. “It is mine, mine—and I shall not allow any one to touch it—” and then her face softened—“except Seer Marcous.”
Behold Carlotta again installed in my house which she regarded as her home. Heaven forbid that I should sow any doubt thereof in her mind.
I had learned perhaps one lesson: the meaning of love. The love that is desire alone, though sung in all romance of all the ages, is of the brute nature and is doomed to perish. The love that pardons, endures through wrong, contents itself in abnegation, is of the imperishable things that draw weak man a little nearer to the angels. When Carlotta wept upon my shoulder during those few first moments of her return I knew that all resentment was gone from my heart, that it would have been a poor, ignoble thing. Had she come back to me leprous of body and abominable of spirit, it would not have mattered. I would have forgiven her, loved her, cherished her just the same. It was a question, not of reason, not of human pity, not of quixotism; not of any argument or sentiment for which I could be responsible. I was helpless, obeying a reflex action of the soul.
The days passed tranquilly. In spite of pain I felt an odd happiness. I had nothing selfishly to hope for. Perhaps I had aged five years in one, and I viewed life differently. It was enough for me that she had come home, to the haven where no harm could befall her. She was my appointed task, even as her husband was Judith’s. I recognised in myself the man with the one talent. The deep wisdom of the parable can be taken to inmost heart for comfort only by men of little destinies. With infinite love and patience to mould Carlotta into a sweet, good woman, a wise mother of the child that was to be—that was the inglorious task which Providence had set me to accomplish. In its proportion to the aggregate of human effort it was infinitesimal. But who shall say that it was not worth the doing? Save writing a useless book, in what other sphere of sublunar energy could I have been effectual? I did not thus analyse my attitude at the time; the man who does so is a poser, a mime to his own audience; but looking back, I think I was guided by some such unformulated considerations.
Although my hermit mania was in itself radically cured, yet I altered nothing in my relations with the outside world. I wrote to Judith a brief account of what had occurred and received from her a sympathetic answer. My reading among the Mystics and Thaumaturgists put me on the track of Arabic. I found that Carlotta knew enough of the language to give me elementary instruction, and thus the whirligig of time brought in its revenge by constituting me her pupil, to our joint edification.
After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded from her mind. She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull pension, and never of Pasquale. She bore towards him an animal’s silent animosity against a human being who has done it an unforgettable injury. On the other hand, as I have since discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to realise that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she had paid a heavy penalty: a sentiment, however, which did not mitigate her resentment against him. Often I saw her sitting with knitted brows, her needlework idle on her lap, evidently unravelling some complicated problem; presently she would either shake her head sadly as if the intellectual process were too hard for her and resume her needle, or if she happened to catch my glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at me, and apply herself with exaggerated zeal to her work. These fits of abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of the near future. Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were easy to recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint smile flickering about her lips. The moods of knitted brows were periods of soul-travail, and I wondered what they would bring forth.
One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book. When I bent down to see what she was reading—she had acquired a taste for novels during the dull pension time in Paris—she caught my head with both hands.
“Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make me wear a great ‘A’?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Like Hester Prynne—see.”
She showed me Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.”
“What made you take this out of the shelves?”
“The title,” she replied, simply. “I am so fond of red things; but I should not like that great red ‘A’.”
“Those were days,” said I, “when people thought they could only be good by being very cruel.”
“They would have been more cruel if Hester had not loved the minister,” said Carlotta, looking at me wistfully.
“My dear little girl,” said I, seeing whither her thoughts were tending, “do not bother your brain with psychological problems.”
“What are—?” began Carlotta.
I pinched the question, as it were, out of her cheek and smiled and took away the book.
“They are a dreadful disease my little girl has been afflicted with for some time. When you sit and wrinkle your forehead like this,” and I scowled forbiddingly, whereat Carlotta laughed, “you are suffering from acute psychological problem.”
“Then I am thinking,” said Carlotta, reflectively.
“Don’t think too much, dear, just now,” said I. “It is best for you to be happy and calm and contented. Otherwise I’ll have to tell the doctor, and he’ll give you the blackest and nastiest physic you have ever tasted.”
“To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?”
“Yes,” said I, emphatically.
“Hou!” laughed Carlotta in a superior way, “physic can’t cure that.”
“You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a hackneyed Shakespearian quotation,” I remarked.
“Go on,” said Carlotta, encouragingly.
“What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.
“Oh, you darling Seer Marcous,” cried Carlotta. “It is so lovely to hear you talk!”
So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the “Scarlet Letter” was forgotten.
I have mentioned Carlotta’s needlework. This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these preparations. She was never happier than when curled up on the sofa, a box of chocolates by her side, her work-basket frothing over, like a great dish ofoeufs a la neige, with lawn or mull or what-not, and (I verily believe to complete her content) my ungainly figure and hatchet-face within her purview. She would eat and sew industriously. Sometimes she would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry would hold up a sticky finger and thumb.
“Look,” she would say, puckering up her face.
And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would coo out the sweetest “thank you,” in the world, and perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.
“Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes, my dear,” I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to bear.
At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die. The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of the stairs. When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.
I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.
“And to think, Monsieur,” she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, “to think that it is a boy!”
“You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl,” said I.
She shook her wise, fat head. “Womenca ne vaut pas grand’ chose.”
Let it be remembered that “women are of no great account” is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.
To write much of Carlotta’s happiness would be to treat of sacred things at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay on her bosom. I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of him. He was a thing of infinite perfections. He had such a lot of hair.
“She won’t believe, sir,” said the nurse, “that it will all drop off and a new crop come.”
“Oh-h!” said Carlotta. “It can’t be so cruel. For it is my hair—see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn’t it just my hair?”
It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.
“I don’t know about his nose,” she remarked critically. “There is so little of it yet and it is so soft—feel how soft it is. But his eyes are brown like mine, and his mouth—now look, aren’t they just the same?”
She put her cheek next to the child’s and invited me to compare the two adjacent baby mouths. They were, of a truth, very much alike.
She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with her to tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette. It was a thing so intensely hers that she resented other hands touching it. Oddly enough, of me she made an exception. Nothing delighted her more than to put the little creature into my awkward and nervous arms, and watch me carry it about the room. I think she wanted to give me something, and this share in the babe was the most precious gift she could devise.
Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing. In her intense joy of motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream. I had registered the birth without consulting her—in the legal names of the parents.
“What are you going to call him, Carlotta?” I asked one day.
“Mon petit chou.That’s what Antoinette says. It’s a beautiful name.”
“There are many points in calling an infant one’s little cabbage,” I admitted, “but soon he’ll grow up to be as old as I am, and—” I sighed, “who would call me theirpetit chow?”
Carlotta laughed.
“That is true. We shall have to find a name.” She reflected for a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her reflections.
“He shall be Marcus—another Marcus Ordeyne. Then perhaps some day he will be ‘Seer Marcous’ like you.”
“Do you mean when I die?” I asked.
“Oh, not for years and years and years!” she cried, tightening her clasp in alarm. “But the child lives longer than the father. It is fate. He will live longer than I.”
“Let us hope so, dear,” I answered. “But it is just because I am not his father that he can’t be Sir Marcus when I die. He can have my name; but my title—”
“Who will have it?”
“No one.”
“It will die too?”
“It will be quite dead.”
“You are his father, you know,really,” she whispered.
“The law of England takes no count, unfortunately, of things of the spirit,” said I.
“What are things of the spirit?”
“The things, my dear,” said I, “that you are beginning to understand.” I bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her lap. “Poor little Marcus Ordeyne,” I said. “My poor quaintly fathered little son, I’m afraid there is much trouble ahead of you, but I’ll do my best to help you through it.”
“Bless you, dear,” said Carlotta, softly.
I looked at her in wonder. She had spoken for the first time like a grown woman—like a woman with a soul.
A few weeks later.
We were sitting at breakfast. The morning newspaper contained the account of a battle and the lists of British officers killed. I scanned as usual the melancholy columns, when a name among the dead caught my eye—and I stared at it stupidly. Pasquale was dead, killed outright by a Boer bullet. The wild, bright life was ended. It seemed a horrible thing, and, much as he had wronged me, my first sentiment was one of dismay. He was too gallant and beautiful a creature for death.
Carlotta poured out my tea and came round with the cup which she deposited by my side. To prevent her peeping over my shoulder at the paper, as she usually did, I laid it on the table; but her quick eye had already read the great headlines.
“Great Battle. British officers killed. Oh, let me see, Seer Marcous.”
“No, dear,” said I. “Go and eat your breakfast.”
She looked at me strangely. I tried to smile; but as I am an incompetent actor my grimace was a proclamation of disingenuousness.
“Why shouldn’t I read it?” she asked, quickly.
“Because I say you mustn’t, Carlotta.”
She continued to look at me. She had suddenly grown pale. I stirred my tea and made a pretence of sipping it.
“Go on with your breakfast, my child,” I repeated.
“There is something—something about him in the paper,” said Carlotta. “He is a British officer.”
In the face of her intuition further concealment appeared useless. Besides, sooner or later she would have to know.
“He is a British officer no longer, dear,” said I.
“Is he dead?”
My mind flew back to an evening long ago—long, long ago it seemed—when another newspaper had told of another death, and my ears caught the echo of the identical question that had then fallen from her lips. I dreaded lest she should say again, “I am so glad.”
I beckoned her to my side, and pointing with my finger to the name watched her face anxiously. She read, stared for a bit in front of her and turned to me with a piteous look. I drew her to me, and she laid her face against my shoulder.
“I don’t know why I’m crying, Seer Marcous, dear,” she said, after a while.
I made her drink some of my tea, but she would eat nothing, and presently she went upstairs. She had not said that she was glad. She had wept and not known the reason for her tears. I railed at myself for my doubts of her.
She was subdued and thoughtful all the day. In the evening, instead of curling herself up in the sofa-corner among the cushions, she sat on a stool by my feet as I read, one hand supporting her chin, the other resting on my knee.
“I am glad he was a brave man,” she said at last, alluding to Pasquale for the first time since the morning. “I like brave men.”
“Dulce et decorum est.He died for his country,” said I.
“It does not hurt me now so much to think of him,” said Carlotta.
I could not help feeling a miserable pang of jealousy at Pasquale’s posthumous rehabilitation as a hero in Carlotta’s heart. Yet, was it not natural? Was it not the way of women? I saw myself far remote from her, and though she never spoke of him again I divined that her thoughts dwelt not untenderly on his memory. I was absurd, I know. But I had begun almost to believe in my make-believe paternity, and I was jealous of the rightful claims of the dead man.
And yet had he lived he might have come back one day with his conquering air and his irresistible laugh, and carried them both away from me. In sparing me this crowning humiliation I thanked the high gods.
But never to this day has she mentioned his name again.