Books: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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William J. Locke >> The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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I knew she spoke rightly. When she is not swept away to
hysterical action by her temperament, she has a perception
exquisitely keen into the heart of truth.
"The parting of the ways?" said I. "Yes; but can't you rest at
the cross-roads? Can't you lead your present life--your husband
and myself, both, just your friends?"
"Rupert has need of me," she replied very quickly. "He is a man
in torment of soul. He has gone to this extreme of religious
fanaticism because he is still uncertain of himself. We had
another long talk to-day. I may help him."
"does he deserve the sacrifice of your life?"
She did not take up my question directly; but sat for a few
minutes with her chin on her hand looking into the fire.
"He is a man of evil passions," she resumed, at last. "Drink and
women mainly dragged him down. I knew the hell of it during the
short time of our married life. If he falls away now, he
believes he is damned to all eternity. He believes in the
material torture--flames and devils and pitchforks--of damned
souls. He says in me alone lies his salvation. I must go. If
the tin church gets too awful, I shall run over to Delphine
Carrere for a week to steady my nerves."
What could I say? The abomination of desolation lay around about
me. I might have prated to her of my needs, wrung her heart with
the piteousness of my appeal. _Cui bono?_ _I_ can't whine to
women--or to men either, for the matter of that. When I am by
myself I can curse and swear, play Termagant and rehearse an
extravaganza out-Heroding all the Herods that ever Heroded. But
before others--no. I believe my great-grandfather, before he
qualified for his baronetcy, was a gentleman.
"But on these occasions," said I, "you will avoid a sequestered
and meditative self."
Her laugh got choked by a sob.
"Do you remember that? It is not so long ago--and yet it seems
many, many years."
We moralised generally, after the way of humans, who desire to
postpone a moment of anguished speech. She made the tour of my
book-shelves. Many of the books she had borrowed, and she
recognised them as old friends.
"Is that where Benvenuto Cellini has always lived?"
"Yes," said I, running my hand along the row. "He is in his
century, among his companions. He would be unhappy anywhere
else."
"And the History--how far has it gone?"
I showed her the pile of finished manuscript, of which she
glanced at a few pages. She put it down hurriedly and turned
away.
"I can't see to read, just now, Marcus."
Then she paused in front of her own photograph, the only one now
on the mantel-piece.
"Will you give me that back?"
"Why should I?" I asked.
"I would rather--I should not like you to burn it."
"Burn it? All I have left of you?"
She turned swimming eyes on me.
"You are good, Marcus--after what I have told you--you do not
feel bitterly against me?"
"For what? For being quixotic? For going to martyrdom for an
ideal?"
"You did not listen when I spoke about Carlotta?"
"Oh, my dear!" said I.
And now she has gone. We kissed at parting--a kiss of
remembrance and renunciation. Shall we ever meet again?
Darkness gathers round me, and I am tired, tired, and I would
that I could sleep like Rip Van Winkle, and awake an old man,
with an old man's passionless resignation; or better, awake not
at all. Such poor fools as I are better dead.
I look back and see all my philosophy refuted, all my prim little
opinions lying prone like dolls with the sawdust knocked out of
them. All these years I have been judging Judith with an
ignorance as cruel as it has been complacent. Verily I have been
the fag end of wisdom. So I forbear to judge her now.
If I had loved Judith with the great passion of a man's love for
woman, not all the converted rascals in Christendom could have
come between us.
And her seeing Carlotta--poor woman--what does it matter? What
did she say about Carlotta? "She laughed and threw stones at a
little dog."
Oh, my God!
November 12th
This way madness lies. I will leave the house in charge of
Stenson and Antoinette and go abroad. Something has put Verona
into my head. One place is as good as another, so long as it is
not this house--this house of death and madness and crime--and
Verona is in Italy, where I have always found peace.
I will confess my madness. This book is a record of my morals
--the finished version of the farce the high gods have called on
meto play. I thought last night the curtain was rung down. I
was wrong. Listen, and laugh as I do--if you can.
I fixed myself to work to-day. After all, I am not an idler. I
earn my right to live. When I publish my History the world will
be the richer by _something_, poor though it may be. I vow I
have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I
was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to
children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-
cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their
insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of
thousands of their fellow-creatures--elementary mathematics.
There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be
acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of
Triangles--unless he is a professional scientist, when he can
begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer
begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy--than for
him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon.
I look back with feelings of shame and degradation to the days
when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my
intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable
childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful
and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman
subject. It trains the mind--it teaches boys to think, they say.
It doesn't. In reality it is a cut and dried subject easy to fit
into a school curriculum. Its sacrosanctity saves
educationalists an enormous amount of trouble, and its chief use
is to enable mindless young men from the universities to make a
dishonest living by teaching it to others, who in their turn may
teach it to a future generation.
I am mad to-night--why have I indulged in this diatribe against
mathematics? I must find some vent, I suppose. I see now. I
was saying that I earned my right to live, that I am not an
idler. I cling strenuously to the claim. A man cannot command
respect, even his own, by the mere reason of his _vie
sentimentale_. And, after what I have done to-day, I must force
my claim to the respect which on other grounds I have forfeited.
I spent, then, my day in unremitting toil. But this evening the
horrible craving for her came over me. Such a little thing
brought it about. Antoinette, who disapproves of the amorphous
British lumps of sugar, has found some emporium where she can buy
the regular parallelopiped of the Continent, and these she
provides for my afterdinner coffee. Absent-mindedly I dipped the
edge of the piece of sugar into the liquid, before dropping it,
and watched the brown moisture rise through the white crystals.
Then I remembered. It was an invariable practice of Carlotta's.
She would keep the lump in the coffee to saturation-point between
her fingers, and then hastily put it into her mouth, so that it
should not crumble to pieces on the way. If it did, there would
be much laughter and wiping of skirts; and there would be a
search through my dinner-jacket pockets for a handkerchief to dry
the pink tips of her fingers. She called the dripping lump a
canard, like the French children. It was such a trivial thing;
but it brought back with a rush all the thousand dainty, foolish,
captivating intimacies that made up the maddening charm of
Carlotta.
Yes, I am aware that there is no language spoken under heaven
that can fitly express the doting folly of a man who can be
driven mad by a piece of sugar soaked in coffee. There is a
ghastly French phrase not to be found in Lamartine,
Chateaubriand, or any of the polite sentimentalists _avoir les
sangs tournes de quelqu'un_. It is so with me. _J'ai les sangs
tournes d'elle_. Somebody has said something somewhere about the
passion of a man of forty. It must have to do with the French
phrase.
I pushed my coffee aside untasted, and buried my head in my
hands, longing, longing; eating my heart out for her. The hours
passed. When the servants were abed, I stole upstairs to her
room, left as it was on the night when Antoinette, hoping against
hope, had prepared it for her reception. I broke down. Heaven
knows what I did.
I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that
makes a man curse God and wish that he could die. The fire was
black, and I mechanically took up the poker to stir it. A
tempest of impotent anger shook my soul. I saw things red before
my eyes. I had an execrable lust to kill. I was alone amid a
multitude of gibbering fiends. As I stooped before the grate I
felt something scrabble my shoulders. I leapt back with a
shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed
thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice. Before
I knew what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my
force, upon its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.
_Finis coronat opus._
November 22d.
Verona:--I have abandoned the"History of Renaissance Morals."
The dog's-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into
a lumber heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by
a little stove. It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless,
suggestive of "the vasty halls of death." I have been here a
week to-day. I thought I should find rest. I should breathe the
atmosphere of Italy again. I should ease my heart among the
masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in the
presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint,
my spirit would even be as theirs. In this old-world city, I
fondly imagined, I should forget the Regent's Park, and attune my
mind to the life that once filled its narrow streets.
But nothing have I found save solitude. I stood to-day before
the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago,
and hated it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the
wreath-supported inscription above her head, _"Miseratrix virginum
Regina nostri miserere,"_ and greeted me with a pitiless simper.
The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of
him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly
plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was
worse than meaningless. It was insulting. It drove me out of
the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a
fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home, and for the
fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my "History of
Renaissance Morals." I threw it, with a final curse, into the
corner.
I loathe it. I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals.
I count its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers,
cutthroats, and courtesans. Their _hubris_ has lost its glamour
of beauty and has coarsened into vulgar insolence. They offend
me by their riotous swagger, their insistence on the animal joy
of living; chiefly by their perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.
Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with
colour the grey void of my life. Whence has come the change?
In myself. To myself I have become a subject of excruciating
interest. To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage
than any debonair hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded
into the dullest (and most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only
exist. This sounds like the colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven
knows it is not. If you are racked with toothache from ear to
ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball to cerebellum, is not
the whole universe concentrated in that head of yours? Are you
not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally
important of created beings? And no one blames you for it. Let
me therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.
In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination.
I flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not
summoned to play his part in the comedy of Life. I sat alone in
the great auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with
little zest what seemed but a sorry spectacle. I thought myself
secure in my solitary stall. But I had not counted on the high
gods who crowd shadowy into the silent seats and are jealous of a
mortal in their midst. Without warning was I wrested from my
place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could
accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed
in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part
imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting
self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was
intensely real. Amid the laughter of the silent shadowy gods I
thought to flee from the stage. I came to Verona and find I am
still acting my part. I have always been acting. I have been
acting since I was born. The reason of our being is to amuse the
high gods with our histrionics. The earth itself is the stage,
and the starry ether the infinite auditorium.
The high gods have granted to their troupe of mimes one boon.
Each has it in his power to make the final exit at any moment.
For myself I feel that moment is at hand. One last soliloquy,
and then like the pagliacco I can say with a sigh, _"La commedia
e finita_--the play is played out," and the rest will be silence.
At all events I will tell my own story. My "History of
Renaissance Morals" can lie in its corner and rot, whilst I shall
concern myself with a far more vital theme--The Morals of Marcus
Ordeyne. The rough entries in my diary have been a habit of many
futile years; but they have never sufficed for self-expression.
I have not needed it till now. But now, with Judith and Carlotta
gone from me, my one friend, Pasquale, cut for ever from my life,
even the sympathetic Polyphemus driven into eternity by my
murderous hand, I feel the irresistible craving to express myself
fully and finally for the first and last time of my life. It
will be my swan song. What becomes of it afterwards I care not.
And when the last word is written, I shall go to the Pinacoteca
and stand again before the Morone fresco, and if the _Miseratrix
Virginum Regina_ still simpers at me, I shall take it as a sign
and a token. I shall return to this marble cavern and make my
final exit. It will be theatrically artistic--that I vow and
declare--which no doubt will afford immense pleasure to the high
gods in their gallery.
PART II
CHAPTER XXI
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's _Miseratrix 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.
"The _odor di femina_ in 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."
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