Books: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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William J. Locke >> The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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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 of
_peignoir_ and _espadrilles_, 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 for _petits 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 the _Matin_ newspaper, 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 fight
Is 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 sagen
Werweile 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 with _La 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.
CHAPTER XIII
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.
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