Books: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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William J. Locke >> The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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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 ArchDevil 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 going _piano, piano_ with 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 an _ignoratio 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 of _her_ terror. 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 actual pages,
afterwards, at Verona, amplifying the rough notes in my 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."
CHAPTER XVIII
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
"Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees."
November 3d.
Antoinette came up this morning with a large cardboard box
addressed to Carlotta. The messenger who brought it was waiting
downstairs.
"I came to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back," said
Antoinette, on the verge of tears.
"No," said I, "leave it here."
From the furrier's label, I saw that the box contained some furs
I had ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago--she shivered so, poor
child, in this wintry climate.
"But, Monsieur," began Antoinette, "the poor angel--"
"May want it in heaven," said I.
The good woman stared.
"We'll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette," I explained,
"who placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the
tombs of the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy
them for all eternity. We'll have to make believe, Antoinette,
that this is a tomb, for one can't rear a pyramid in London,
though it is a desert sufficiently vast; and the little second
floor room is the inner sanctuary where the body lies in silence
embalmed with sweet spices and swathed in endless bands of
linen."
"But Mademoiselle is not dead?" cried Antoinette, with a shiver.
"How can Monsieur talk of such things? It makes me fear, the way
Monsieur speaks."
"It makes me fear, too, Antoinette," said I, gravely.
When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it
unopened on Carlotta's bed and came away, relocking the door
behind me.
November 9th.
I have formed a great resolution. I have devoted the week to the
envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the
solution came to me as something final and irrevocable.
Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly
excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of a day's
cold reason.
I have broken a woman's heart. I have spurned the passionate
love of a woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of
great nature; a woman of subtle brain who has been my chosen
companion, my equal partner in any intellectual path I chose to
tread; a sensitive lady, with all the graciousness of soul that
term conveys. Heaven knows what a woman can see in me to love.
I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on which the
stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a
prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and
unworthy has been given that thing without price, a woman's love.
I remember Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation. He said
the love of women was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it
was to make mud pies. The damned cynical villain! "Always
reflect," said he, on another occasion, "that although a man may
be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he is just as
pleasant. Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities in
Beasts till the end of time." But I am such a poor and sorry
Beast, without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace
Beast, dull and didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast!
Yet Judith loved me. Instead of thanking on my knees the high
gods for the boon conferred, I rejected it, and went mad for
craving of the infinitely lesser glory of Carlotta's baby lips
and gold-bronze hair. I have broken Judith's heart. I will
expiate the crime I have committed.
Expiate the crime! The realisation of the meaning of the words
covers me with shame. As if what I propose will be a sorry
penance! That is the danger of a man thinking, as I have always
done, in metaphors. It has given me my loose, indirect views of
life, of myself, of those around me. If I had advice to offer to
a young man, I should say: "Learn to think straight." Expiate,
indeed! I will go to her and make confession. I will tell her
that awful loneliness is crushing my soul. I will kneel before
her and beseech her of her great woman's goodness to give me her
love again, and to be my helpmeet and my companion who will be
cherished with all that there is of loyalty in me to her life's
end. She will pity me a little, for I have suffered, and I will
pity her tenderly, in deep sincerity, and our life together will
be based on that all-understanding which signifies all-
forgiveness. And it shall be a real life together. I used to
smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude. Heaven
forgive me. I did not then know its terrors. It comforted for
the first few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me
like a mysterious and appalling force. I crave the human
presence in my home. I need the woman's presence in my heart.
We shall live together then as man and wife, in defiance of the
world. Let the moralists blame us. We shall not care. It will
make little social difference to Judith, and as for myself, have
I not already inflicted public outrage on society? does not my
Aunt Jessica regard me as a wringer of the public conscience, and
does not my Cousin Rosalie mention me with a shudder of horror in
her tepid prayers? If I really give them cause for reprobation
they will be neither wiser, nor better, nor sorrier. And if the
baronetcy flickers out in unseemly odour, I for one shall know
that the odour is sweeter than that wherein it was lighted, when
my great-grandfather earned the radiance by services rendered at
Brighton to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent. This is the
only way in which I can make Judith reparation, the only way in
which I can find comfort. We shall travel. Italy, beloved of
Judith, is calling me. Probably Florence will be our settled
home. I shall give up this house of madness. The clean sweet
love of Judith will purify my heart of this poisonous passion,
and in the end there will be peace.
I have taken Carlotta's photograph from its frame and cast it
into the fire, thus burning her for her witchcraft. I watched
the flames leap and curl. The last look she gave me before they
licked away her face had its infinite allurement, its devilish
sorcery so intensified in the fierce yellow light, that the
yearning for her clutched me by the throat and shook me through
all my being.
But it is over now. I have done with Carlotta. If she thinks I
am going to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill
drive me mad like Gastibelza, _l'homme a la carabine_, in Victor
Hugo's poem, she is vastly mistaken. From this hour henceforth I
swear she is nothing to me; I will eat and sleep and laugh as if
she had never existed. Polyphemus, curled up in Carlotta's old
place on the sofa, regards me with his sardonic eye. He is an
evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few centuries ago would
have been burned with his late mistress
I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable
determination.
To-morrow I go to Judith.
CHAPTER XIX
November 10th.
I had to ring twice before Judith's servant opened the flat door.
"Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus."
"Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of
importance to say to her."
She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never
before occurred to me in Judith's establishment, and presently
returned with her answer. Would I mind waiting in the dining-
room? I entered. The table was littered with sheets of her
statistical work and odd bits of silk' and lining. A type-writer
stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other. On the
writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and
account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms
of white and yellow chrysanthemums. A volume of Dante lay open
face downwards on the corner. It did my heart good to see this
untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so
intimate. She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected. The
ordinary daily task had not been left undone. Through all she
had preserved her valiant sanity. I felt rebuked for my own loss
of self-control.
I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye
caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed
in Pasquale's unmistakable handwriting. As there seemed to be a
letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely.
The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale.
Why should he be corresponding with Judith? I walked away
puzzled. Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as
my friend to obtain my forgiveness? If there is one thing more
irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a
mystery affecting oneself in a friend's correspondence. One can
no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend's
spoons. It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an
unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture. In spite
of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping,
flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.
Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of
my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her
eyes.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, extending a
lifeless hand.
I raised it to my lips.
"I would have gladly waited all day to see you, Judith," I said.
"Really?"
She laughed in an odd way.
"And idle speech from me to you at the present time would be an
outrage," I answered. "I have passed through much since I saw
you last."
"So have I," said Judith. "More than you imagine. Well," she
continued as I bowed my head accepting the rebuke, "what have you
got so important to tell me?"
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