Books: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne

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"Because when I found you in the Embankment Gardens nearly two
years ago you were about as helpless as your little baby," I
replied, somewhat disingenuously.

Carlotta gave me a quick glance.

"You thought me then what you call an infernal nuisance. Oh, I
know now. I have grown wise. But you were always good. You
looked good when you sat on the seat. You were reading a dirty
little book."

"_L'Histoire des Uscoques,_" I murmured. How far away it seemed.

There was a pause. I regarded her for a moment or two. She was
sunk again in serious reflection. I sighed--at the general
dismalness of life, I suppose--and resumed my Arabic.

"Seer Marcous."

"Yes?"

"Why didn't you drive me away when I came back?"

I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the
fenderstool.

"My dear little girl--what a question! How could I drive you
away from your own home?"

She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at
me again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her
knees.

I muttered a man's words of awkward comfort, saying something
about the baby.

"It isn't baby I'm crying about," sobbed Carlotta. "It's me!
And it's you! And it's all the things I'm beginning to
understand."

I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the
room, rather puzzled by Carlotta's psychological development, and
yet stirred by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection.
At the same time the sad "too late, too late," was knelled in my
ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-
go-round of regret's banalities. I had grown old. Passion had
died. Hope--the hope of hearing the patter of a child's feet
about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of
handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life--hope
was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a
great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta
was to me an infinitely loved sister--or daughter--or
granddaughter even--so old did I feel. And when I raised her
from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was
as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world.

The same old problem again. What the deuce to do with Carlotta?
Yet not quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with
Carlotta and myself? In our strange relationship we were
inextricably bound together.

First, she needed sunshine--instead of the forlorn bleakness of
an English spring--and a change from this house of pain and
death. And then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons. London
had grown to be a nightmare city which I never entered. Its
restless ambitions were not mine. Its pleasures pleased me not.
With not five of its five million inhabitants dared I speak heart
to heart. Judith had gone out of my life. My aunts and cousins
regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs. McMurray was still
unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby treatment
of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta
in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta?
Reasoning now I am convinced that she would: in those days I did
not reason. I shrank like a snail into its shell. The simile is
commonplace; but so was I--the most commonplace human snail that
ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell. And now the house
and its useless books and its million-fold more useless
manuscript "History of Renaissance Morals," all its sombre
memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an
unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble
existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure
Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the
wilderness and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the
high gods should decree.

CHAPTER XXV

Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast,
where a month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has
passed quickly since that day.

I said then that on the previous afternoon something had
happened. It was something which I might have foreseen, which,
in fact, with my habit of putting the telescope to my blind eye,
I obstinately had refused to foresee. During our wanderings I
had watched the flowering of her splendid beauty as she drank in
health from the glow of her own Orient. I had noted the widening
of her intellect, the quickening of her sympathies. I had been
conscious of the expansion of her soul in the great silences when
the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand. But a growing
wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her
glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of
grief for the child that had gone--into this, if I did remark it,
I did not choose to inquire. Instead, I continued my study of
Arabic and cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose
conversation afforded--and still affords--me peculiar pleasure.
One of these days I shall make a book of his Table-talk. But now
I have to tell of Carlotta.

She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over
to the Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times
before. To please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her
natural indolence. So much so that she had come to love the
nomad life of steamers and caravans, and had grown restless,
eager for fresh scenes, craving new impressions. It was I who
had cried a halt at Mogador where this furnished house to let,
belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe, tempted me to
rest awhile. I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened to
the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I
have grown slumberous. Carlotta, if left to herself, would have
gone on riding camels through Africa to the end of time. She had
changed in many essentials. Instead of regarding me as an
amiable purveyor of sweetmeats and other necessaries of life to
which by the grace of her being Carlotta she was entitled, she
treated me with human affection and sympathy, keeping her own
wants in the background, anxious only to anticipate mine. But
she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible Moorish messes
with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance. She was still
the same Carlotta. On the other hand again, she had of late
abandoned her caressing habits. If she laid her hand on my arm,
she did it timorously--whereat I would laugh and she would grow
confused. Once she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling.
Those days had passed. I told myself that I was as old as the
sphinx we had moralised over in Egypt.

We lunched, then, at the Palm Tree House and rode back in the
cool of the afternoon to Mogador. We were alone, as we knew the
path across the tongue of desert, and had no need of a guide and
the rabble of sore-eyed urchins who, like their attendant flies,
infest the tourist on his journeyings. On our right the desert
rose to meet a near horizon; on our left sandhills and boulders
cut off the view; ahead the shimmering line beyond which the sea
and city lay. We were enveloped by solitude and stillness. In
the clear African air objects detached themselves against the sky
with startling definition.

I had unconsciously ridden a bit ahead of Carlotta, thinking my
own thoughts, and sighing as a man often does sigh, for the vague
unattainable which is happiness. Suddenly I missed her by my
side, and turning round saw a sight that made my heart beat with
its sheer beauty. It was only Carlotta on her barbarically
betrapped and besaddled mule. But it was Carlotta glorified in
colour. She held above her head a cotton parasol, which she had
bought to her delight and my disgust in Mogador; an impossible
thing, all deep cherry reds and yellows; a hateful thing made for
a pantomime--or for this African afternoon. Outspread and
luminous in the white sunlight its cherry reds and yellows
floated like translucences of wine above Carlotta's bronze hair
crowned by a white sun hat, her warm
flesh-tints, and the dazzling white of her surah silk blouse; the
whole picture cut out vivid against the indigo of the sky. It
was a radiant vision. I stared openmouthed, smitten with the
pang that sudden and transient loveliness can sometimes deal, as
Carlotta approached, her figure swaying with the jog of her
barbaric beast. Her eyes were fixed on mine. She halted, and
for a moment we looked at one another; and in those wonderful
eyes I saw for the first time a beautiful sadness, a spiritual
appeal. The moment passed. We started again, side by side,
neither speaking. I did not look at her, conscious of a vague
trouble. Things that I had thought dead stirred in my heart.

Presently like a dawn of infinite delicacy rose the city before
us. Its fairy minarets and towers gleamed first white in an
atmosphere of pale amethyst toning through shades of green to the
blue of the zenith. And the lazy sea lay at the city's foot a
pavement of lapis lazuli. But all was faint, unreal. Far, far
away a group of palms caught opalescent reflections. A slight
breeze had sprung up, raising minute particles of sand which
caused the elfland on the horizon to quiver like a mirage.

"It is a dream-city," said I, in admiration.

Carlotta did not reply. I thought she had not heard. We jogged
on a little in silence. At last she drew very close to me.

"Shall we ever get there?" she asked, pointing ahead with the
hand that held the reins.

"To Mogador? Yes, I hope so," I answered with a laugh. I
thought she was tired.

"No, not Mogador. The dream-city--where every one wants to get."

"You have travelled far, my dear," said I, "to hanker now after
dream-cities and the unattainable. I knew a little girl once who
would have asked: 'What is a dream-city?"

"She doesn't ask now because she knows," replied Carlotta. "No.
We shall never get there. It looks as if we were riding straight
into it--but when we get close, it will just be Mogador."

"Aren't you happy, Carlotta?" I asked.

"Are you, Seer Marcous?"

"I? I am a philosopher, my child, and a happy philosopher would
be a _lusus naturae_, a freak, a subject for a Barnum & Bailey
Show. If they caught him they would put him between the hairy
man and the living skeleton."

"I suppose I'm getting to be a philosopher, too," said Carlotta,
"and I hate it! Sometimes I think I hate everything and
everybody
--save you, Seer Marcous, darling. It's wicked of me. I must
have been born wicked. But I used to be happy. I never wanted
to go to dream-cities. I was just like a cat. Like Polyphemus.
Do you remember Polyphemus?"

"Yes," said I. And then set off my balance by this strange
conversation with Carlotta, I added: "I killed him."

She turned a startled face to me.

"You killed him? Why?"

"He laughed at me because I was unhappy," said I.

"Through me?"

"Yes; through you. But that's neither here nor there. We were
not discussing the death of Polyphemus. We were talking about
being philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated
everything and everybodyexcept me. Why do you exclude me,
Carlotta?"

We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-
girth. I looked hard at her. She turned away her head and put
the pantomime parasol between us. I heard a little choking sob.

"Let us get off--and sit down a little--I want to cry.

"The end of all feminine philosophy," I said, somewhat brutally.
"No. It's getting late. That's only Mogador in front of us.
Let us go to it."

Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.

"What has happened to you, Seer Marcous? You have never spoken
to me like that before."

"The very deuce seems to have happened," said I, angrily--though
why I should have felt angry, heaven only knows. "First you turn
yourself into a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable
umbrella of yours and the trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and
make my sentimental soul ache; and then you--"

"It's a very pretty umbrella," said Carlotta, looking upwards at
it demurely.

"Give it to me," I said.

She yielded it with her usual docility. I cast it upon the
desert. Being open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay
still. Carlotta reined up her mule.

"Oh-h!" she said, in her old way.

I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm
through the two bridles.

"My dear child," said I, "what is the meaning of all this? Here
we have been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled
existence, and now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities
and the impossibility of getting there, and I turn angry and
heave parasols about Africa. What is the meaning of it?"

The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating
Carlotta as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a
modern French novel. Perhaps I was younger than I thought.

She kept her eyes fixed downward.

"Why are you angry with me?" she asked in a low voice.

"I haven't the remotest idea," said I.

She lifted her eyelids slowly--oh, very, very slowly, glanced
quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round
her lips. I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine
heart. I turned away, leading the two animals, and picked up the
parasol which I closed and restored to her.

"I thought you wanted to cry," I remarked.

"I can't," said Carlotta, plaintively.

"And you won't tell me why you exclude me from your universal
hatred?"

Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot. The sight
of it recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my
eyes on the second day of her arrival in London. An old hope, an
old fear, an old struggle renewed themselves. She was more
adorably beautiful even than the Carlotta of the pink tus, and
spiritually she was reborn. I heard her whisper:

"I can't."

Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that
I should be Carlotta's grandfather to the end of time. Hitherto
I had felt the part. Now suddenly grey beard and slippered
pantaloons are cast aside and I am young again with a glow in my
heart which beats fast at her beauty. I shut my teeth.

"No," said I to myself. "The curtain shall not rise on that
farcical tragedy again."

I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta's mule, which with its
companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.

"I think we had better ride on, Carlotta," I said. "Mount."

She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the
saddle.

We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador. But each of
us felt that something had happened.

At dinner we met as usual. Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of
our travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an
unprecedented thirst for information. I never gave her
historical instruction with less zest.

After the meal we went onto the flat roof. Carlotta poured out
my coffee at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair
which was my accustomed seat. The starlit night was blue and
languorous. From some cafe came the monotonous strains of
Moorish music, the harsh strings and harsh men's voices softened
by the distance. Carlotta took my coffee-cup when I had finished
and set it down in her granddaughterly way. Then she stood in
front of me.

"Won't you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous,
darling?"

I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down. I may
observe that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one
and only chair on the housetop.

"Tell me about the stars," she said.

I knew what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their
poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose,
appealed to her young imagination. She was passing through an
exquisite phase of development.

I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades.
And I told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and
Pleione who herself was the daughter of the Sea, and how they
were all pure maidens, save one, and were the companions of
Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was afterwards slain by
Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up there in the
sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the gods
for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and,
lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal,
shrank away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to
the eye of man.

"She was ashamed," said Carlotta in a low voice, "because she
loved some one afterwards, one of the gods, who would not look at
her because she had given herself to a mortal. A woman then has
a fire here"--she clasped her hands to her bosom--"and wishes she
could burn away to nothing, nothing, just to air, and become
invisible."

She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands
down on her shoulders.

"Carlotta, my child," said I, "what do you mean?"

She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in
desperation:

"You are one of the gods, and I wish I were changed into an
invisible star."

"I don't," said I, huskily.

By main force I drew her to me and our lips met. She yielded,
and this time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.

"It's beautiful to snuggle up against you again," said my ever
direct Carlotta, after a while. "I haven't done it--oh, for such
a long time." She sighed contentedly. "Seer Marcous--"

" You must call me Marcus now," said I, somewhat fatuously.

She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder. "No. You are
Marcus
--or Sir Marcus--to everybody. To me you are always Seer
Marcous. Seer Marcous, darling," she half whispered after a
pause. "Once I did not know the difference between a god and a
mortal. It was only that morning when I woke up--"

"You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown," said I.

"It's the same thing," she retorted. And then taking up her
parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her
heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred. Also, a
man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a god when a woman
relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.

Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the
enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.

"It seems, my dear," said I, "that we have got to Nephelococcygia
after all."

"What is Nephelococcygia?" asked Carlotta.

I relented. "It's a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city,"
said I.

Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness;
out of horror has sprung an everlasting love. Many a man will
say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported
myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly.
Well, I pretend not unto wisdom. Wisdom would have married me to
five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my
Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal
destruction. I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly.
Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life,
that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved
nothing. I once thought so. I boasted of it in my diary when I
complacently styled myself a waster in Earth's factory. Oh, that
diary! Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and
idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic
record! I regard myself not as a waster--I remember a passage in
Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:

"For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God?
If then I were a nightingale I would do the part of a
nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I
am a rational creature and I ought to praise God; this is my
work, I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am
allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song."

No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they
do, to the beauty of the earth. The lame old man has his
limitations; but within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and
praising God, fulfil his destiny.

Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks
over my shoulder as I write these words.

"But you are not a lame old man!" she cries in indignation. "You
are the youngest and strongest and cleverest man in the world!"

"What am I to do with these miraculous gifts?" I ask, laughing.

"You are to become famous," she says, with conviction.

"Very well, my dear. We will have to go to some new land where
attaining fame is easier for a beginner than in London; and we'll
send for Antoinette and Stenson to help us."

"That will be very nice," she observes.

So I am to become famous. _Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_. And
Carlotta has got a soul of her own now and means to make the most
of it. It will lead me upward somewhere. But whether I am to be
king of New Babylon or Prime Minister of New Zealand or lawgiver
to a Polynesian tribe is a secret as yet hidden in the lap of the
gods, whence Carlotta doubtless will snatch it in her own good
time.

"You are writing a lot of rubbish," says Carlotta.

"And a little truth. The mixture is Life," I answer.

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