Books: The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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William J. Locke >> The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
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"Oh!" said Carlotta, in a tone of disappointment.
Pasquale rose, brought his heels together, put his hand on his
heart and made her a low bow.
"Will you have me instead of this stray bit of Stonehenge?"
"Very well," said Carlotta.
I seized Pasquale by the arm. "For goodness sake, don't jest
with her! She has about as much sense of humour as a prehistoric
cave-dweller. She thinks you have made her a serious offer of
marriage."
He made her another bow.
"You hear what Sir Granite says? He forbids our union. If I
married you without his consent, he would flay me alive, dip me
in boiling oil and read me aloud his History of Renaissance
Morals. So I'm afraid it is no good."
"Then I mustn't marry him either?" asked Carlotta, looking at me.
"No!" I cried, "you are not going to marry anybody. You seem to
have hymenomania. People don't marry in this casual way in
England. They think over it for a couple of years and then they
come together in a sober, God-fearing, respectable manner."
"They marry at leisure and repent in haste," interposed Pasquale.
"Precisely," said I.
"What we call a marriage-bed repentance," said Pasquale.
"I told you this poor child had no sense of humour," I objected.
"You might as well kill yourself as marry without it."
"You are not going to marry anybody, Carlotta," said I, "until
you can see a joke."
"What is a joke?" inquired Carlotta.
"Mr. Pasquale asked you to marry him. He didn't mean it. That
was a joke. It was enormously funny, and you should have
laughed."
"Then I must laugh when any one asks me to marry him?"
"As loud as you can," said I.
"You are so strange in England," sighed Carlotta.
I smiled, for I did not want to make her unhappy, and I spoke to
her intelligibly.
"Well, well, when you have quite learned all the English ways,
I'll try and find you a nice husband. Now you had better go to
bed."
She retired, quite consoled. When the door closed behind her,
Pasquale shook his head at me.
"Wasted! Criminally wasted!"
"What?"
"That," he answered, pointing to the door. "That bundle of
bewildering fascination."
"That," said I, "is an horrible infliction which only my
cultivated sense of altruism enables me to tolerate."
"Her name ought to be Margarita."
"Why?" I asked.
"_Ante porcos_," said he.
Certainly Pasquale has a pretty wit and I admire it as I admire
most of his brilliant qualities, but I fail to see the aptness of
this last gibe. At the club this afternoon I picked up an
entertaining French novel called _En felons des Perles_. On the
illustrated cover was a row of undraped damsels sitting in
oyster-shells, and the text of the book went to show how it was
the hero's ambition to make a rosary of these pearls. Now I am a
dull pig. Why? Because I do not add Carlotta to my rosary. I
never heard such a monstrous thing in my life. To begin with, I
have no rosary.
I wish I had not read that French novel. I wish I had not gone
downstairs to hunt for its seventeenth century ancestor. I wish
I had given Pasquale dinner at the club.
It is all the fault of Antoinette. Why can't she cook in a
middle-class, unedifying way? All this comes from having in the
house a woman whose soul is in the stew-pot.
CHAPTER VII
July 1st.
She has been now over five weeks under my roof, and I have put
off the evil day of explaining her to Judith; and Judith returns
to-morrow.
I know it is odd for a philosophic bachelor to maintain in his
establishment a young and detached female of prepossessing
appearance. For the oddity I care not two pins. _Io son' io_.
But the question that exercises me occasionally is: In what
category are my relations with Carlotta to be classified? I do
not regard her as a daughter; still less as a sister: not even as
a deceased wife's sister. For a secretary she is too abysmally
ignorant, too grotesquely incapable. What she knows would be
made to kick the beam against the erudition of a guinea-pig. Yet
she must be classified somehow. I must allude to her as
something. At present she fills the place in the house of a
pretty (and expensive) Persian cat; and like a cat she has made
herself serenely at home.
A governess, a fat-checked girl, who I am afraid takes too
humorous a view of the position, comes of mornings to instruct
Carlotta in the rudiments of education. When engaging Miss
Griggs, I told her she must be patient, firm and, above all,
strong-minded. She replied that she made a professional
specialty of these qualities, one of her present pupils being a
young lady of the Alhambra ballet who desires the particular
shade of cultivation that will match a new brougham. She teaches
Carlotta to spell, to hold a knife and fork, and corrects such
erroneous opinions as that the sky is an inverted bowl over a
nice flat earth, and that the sun, moon, and stars are a sort of
electric light installation, put into the cosmos to illuminate
Alexandretta and the Regent's Park. Her religious instruction I
myself shall attend to, when she is sufficiently advanced to
understand my teaching. At present she is a Mohammedan, if she
is anything, and believes firmly in Allah. I consider that a
working Theism is quite enough for a young woman in her position
to go on with. In the afternoon she walks out with Antoinette.
Once she stole forth by herself, enjoyed herself hugely for a
short time, got lost, and was brought back thoroughly frightened
by a policeman. I wonder what the policeman thought of her? The
rest of the day she looks at picture-books and works embroidery.
She is making an elaborate bed-spread which will give her
harmless occupation for a couple of years.
For an hour every evening, when I am at home, she comes into the
drawing-room and drinks coffee with me and listens to my
improving conversation. I take this opportunity to rebuke her
for faults committed during the day, or to commend her for
especial good behaviour. I also supplement the instruction in
things in general that is given her by the excellent Miss Griggs.
Oddly enough I am beginning to look forward to these evening
hours. She is so docile, so good-humoured, so spontaneous. If
she has a pain in her stomach, she says so with the most engaging
frankness. Sometimes I think of her only, in Pasquale's words,
as a bundle of fascination, and forget that she has no soul.
Nearly always, however, something happens to remind me. She
loves me to tell her stories. The other night I solemnly related
the history of Cinderella. She was enchanted. It gave me the
idea of setting her to read "Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare." I
was turning this over in my mind while she chewed the cud of her
enjoyment, when she suddenly asked whether I would like to hear a
Turkish story. She knew lots of nice, funny stories. I bade her
proceed. She curled herself up in her favourite attitude on the
sofa and began.
I did not allow her to finish that tale. Had I done so, I should
have been a monster of depravity. Compared with it the worst of
Scheherazade's, in Burton's translation, were milk and water for
a nunnery. She seemed nonplussed when I told her to stop.
"Are oriental ladies in the habit of telling such stories?" I
asked.
"Why, yes," she replied with a candid air of astonishment. "It
is a funny story."
"There is nothing funny whatever in it," said I. "A girl like
you oughtn't to know of the existence of such things."
"Why not?" asked Carlotta.
I am always being caught up by her questions. I tried to
explain; but it was difficult. If I had told her that a maiden's
mind ought to be as pure as the dewy rose she would not have
understood me. Probably she would have thought me a fool. And
indeed I am inclined to question whether it is an advantage to a
maiden's after career to be dewy-roselike in her
unsophistication. In order to play tunes indifferently well on
the piano she undergoes the weary training of many years; but she
is called upon to display the somewhat more important
accomplishment of bringing children into the world without an
hour's educational preparation. The difficulty is, where to draw
the line between this dewy, but often disastrous, ignorance and
Carlotta's knowledge. I find it a most delicate and embarrassing
problem. In fact, the problems connected with this young woman
seem endless. Yet they do not disturb me as much as I had
anticipated. I really believe I should miss my pretty Persian
cat. A man must be devoid of all aesthetic sense to deny that
she is delightful to look at.
And she has a thousand innocent coquetries and cajoling ways.
She has a manner of holding chocolate creams to her white teeth
and talking to you at the same time which is peculiarly
fascinating. And she must have some sense. To-night she asked
me what I was writing. I replied, "A History of the Morals of
the Renaissance."
"What are morals and what is the Renaissance?" asked Carlotta.
When you come to think of it, it is a profound question, which
philosophers and historians have wasted vain lives in trying to
answer. I perceive that I too must try to answer it with a
certain amount of definition. I have spent the evening
remodelling my Introduction, so as to define the two terms
axiomatically with my subsequent argument, and I find it greatly
improved. Now this is due to Carlotta.
The quantity of chocolate creams the child eats cannot be good
for her digestion. I must see to this.
July 2d.
A telegram from Judith to say she postpones her return to Monday.
I have been longing to see the dear woman again, and I am greatly
disappointed. At the same time it is a respite from an
explanation that grows more difficult every day. I hate myself
for the sense of relief.
This morning came an evening dress for Carlotta which has taken a
month in the making. This, I am given to understand, is
delirious speed for a London dress-maker. To celebrate the
occasion I engaged a box at the Empire for this evening and
invited her to dine with me. I sent a note of invitation round
to Mrs. McMurray.
Carlotta did not come down at half-past seven. We waited. At
last Mrs. McMurray went up to the room and presently returned
shepherding a shy, blushing, awkward, piteous young person who
had evidently been crying. My friend signed to me to take no
notice. I attributed the child's lack of gaiety to the ordeal
of sitting for the first time in her life at a civilised
dinner-table. She scarcely spoke and scarcely ate. I complimented
her on her appearance and she looked beseechingly at me, as if I
were scolding her. After dinner Mrs. McMurray told me the reason
of her distress. She had found Carlotta in tears. Never could she
face me in that low cut evening bodice. It outraged her modesty.
It could not be the practice of European women to bare themselves
so immodestly before men. It was only the evidence of her
visitor's own plump neck and shoulders that convinced her, and
she suffered herself to be led downstairs in an agony of self-
consciousness.
When we entered the box at the Empire, a troupe of female
acrobats were doing their turn. Carlotta uttered a gasp of
dismay, blushed burning red, and shrank back to the door. There
is no pretence about Carlotta. She was shocked to the roots of
her being.
"They are naked!" she said, quiveringly.
"For heaven's sake, explain," said I to Mrs. McMurray, and I beat
a hasty retreat to the promenade.
When I returned, Carlotta had been soothed down. She was
watching some performing dogs with intense wonderment and
delight. For the rest of the evening she sat spell-bound. The
exiguity of costume in the ballet caused her indeed to glance in
a frightened sort of way at Mrs. McMurray, who reassured her with
a friendly smile, but the music and the maze of motion and the
dazzle of colour soon held her senses captive, and when the
curtain came down she sighed like one awaking from a dream.
As we drove home, she asked me:
"Is it like that all day long? Oh, please to let me live there!"
A nice English girl of eighteen would not flaunt unconcerned
about my drawing-room in a shameless dressing-gown, and crinkle
up her toes in front of me; still less would she tell me
outrageous stories; but she will wear low-necked dresses and gaze
at ladies in tights without the ghost of an immodest thought. I
was right when I told Carlotta England was Alexandretta upside-
down. What is immoral here is moral there, and vice-versa.
There is no such thing as absolute morality. I am very glad this
has happened. It shows me that Carlotta is not devoid of the
better kind of feminine instincts.
CHAPTER VIII
July 4th.
Judith has come back. I have seen her and I have explained
Carlotta.
All day long I felt like a respectable person about to be brought
before a magistrate for being drunk and disorderly. Now I have
the uneasy satisfaction of having been let off with a caution. I
am innocent, but I mustn't do it again.
As soon as I entered the room Judith embraced me, and said a
number of foolish things. I responded to the best of my ability.
It is not usual for our quiet lake of affection to be visited by
such tornadoes.
"Oh, I am glad, I am glad to be back with you again. I have
longed for you. I couldn't write it. I did not know I could
long for any one so much."
"I have missed you immensely, my dear Judith," said I.
She looked at me queerly for a moment; then with a radiant smile:
"I love you for not going into transports like a Frenchman. Oh,
I am tired of Frenchmen. You are my good English Marcus, and
worth all masculine Paris put together."
"I thank you, my dear, for the compliment," said I, "but surely
you must exaggerate."
"To me you are worth the masculine universe," said Judith, and
she seated me by her side on the sofa, held my hands, and said
more foolish things.
When the tempest had abated, I laughed.
"It is you that have acquired the art of transports in Paris,"
said I.
"Perhaps I have. Shall I teach you?"
"You will have to learn moderation, my dear Judith," I remarked.
"You have been living too rapidly of late and are looking tired."
"It is only the journey," she replied.
I am sure it is the unaccustomed dissipation. Judith is not a
strong woman, and late hours and eternal gadding about do not
suit her constitution. She has lost weight and there are faint
circles under her eyes. There are lines, too, on her face which
only show in hours of physical strain. I was proceeding to
expound this to her at some length, for I consider it well for
women to have some one to counsel them frankly in such matters,
when she interrupted me with a gesture of impatience.
"There, there! Tell me what you have been doing with yourself.
Your letters gave me very little information."
"I am afraid," said I, "I am a poor letter writer."
"I read each ten times over," she said.
I kissed her hand in acknowledgment. Then I rose, lit a
cigarette and walked about the room. Judith shook out her skirts
and settled herself comfortably among the sofa-cushions.
"Well, what crimes have you been committing the past few weeks?"
A wandering minstrel was harping "Love's Sweet Dream" outside the
public-house below. I shut the window, hastily.
"Nothing so bad as that," said I. "He ought to be hung and his
wild harp hung behind him."
"You are developing nerves," said Judith. "Is it a guilty
conscience?" She laughed. "You are hiding something from me.
I've been aware of it all the time."
"Indeed? How?"
"By the sixth sense of woman!"
Confound the sixth sense of woman! I suppose it has been
developed like a cat's whiskers to supply the deficiency of a
natural scent. Also, like the whiskers, it is obtrusive, and a
matter for much irritatingly complacent pride. Judith regarded
me with a mock magisterial air, and I was put into the dock at
once.
"Something has happened," I said, desperately. "A female woman
has come and taken up her residence at 26 Lingfield Terrace. A
few weeks ago she ate with her fingers and believed the earth was
flat. I found her in the Victoria Embankment Gardens beneath the
terrace of the National Liberal Club, and now she lives on
chocolate creams and the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge.' She is
eighteen and her name is Carlotta. There!"
As my cigarette had gone out, I threw it with some peevishness
into the grate. Judith's expression had changed from mock to
real gravity. She sat bolt upright and looked at me somewhat
stonily.
"What in the world do you mean, Marcus?"
"What I say. I'm saddled with the responsibility of a child of
nature as unsophisticated and perplexing as Voltaire's Huron.
She's English and she came from a harem in Syria, and she is as
beautiful as the houris she believes in and is unfortunately
precluded from joining. One of these days I shall be teaching
her her catechism. I have already washed her face. Kindly pity
me as the innocent victim of fantastic circumstances."
"I don't see why I should pity you," said Judith.
I felt I had not explained Carlotta tactfully. If there are ten
ways of doing a thing I have noticed that I invariably select the
one way that is wrong. I perceived that somehow or other the
very contingency I had feared had come to pass. I had prejudiced
Judith against Carlotta. I had aroused the Ishmaelite--her hand
against every woman and every woman's hand against her--that
survives in all her sex.
"My dear Judith," said I, "if a wicked fairy godmother had
decreed that a healthy rhinoceros should be my housemate you
would have extended me your sympathy. But because Fate has
inflicted on me an equally embarrassing guest in the shape of a
young woman--"
"My dear Marcus," interrupted Judith, "the healthy rhinoceros
would know twenty times as much about women as you do." This I
consider one of the silliest remarks Judith has ever made. "
Do," she continued, "tell me something coherent about this young
person you call Carlotta."
I told the story from beginning to end.
"But why in the world did you keep it from me?" she asked.
"I mistrusted the sixth sense of woman," said I.
"The most elementary sense of woman or any one else would have
told you that you were doing a very foolish thing."
"How would you have acted?"
"I should have handed her over at once to the Turkish consulate."
"Not if you had seen her eyes."
Judith tossed her head. "Men are all alike," she observed.
"On the contrary," said I, "that which characterises men as a sex
is their greater variation from type than women. It is a
scientific fact. You will find it stated by Darwin and more
authoritatively still by later writers. The highest common
factor of a hundred women is far greater than that of a hundred
men. The abnormal is more frequent in the male sex. There are
more male monsters."
"That I can quite believe," snapped Judith.
"Then you agree with me that men are not all alike?"
"I certainly don't. Put any one of you before a pretty face and
a pair of silly girl's eyes and he is a perfect idiot."
"My dear Judith," said I, "I don't care a hang for a pretty face-
-except yours."
"Do you really care about mine?" she asked wistfully.
"My dear," said I, dropping on one knee by the sofa, and taking
her hand, "I've been longing for it for six weeks." And I
counted the weeks on her fingers.
This put her in a good humour. Now that I come to think of it,
there is something adorably infantile in grown up women. Shall
man ever understand them? I have seen babies (not many, I am
glad to say) crow with delight at having their toes pulled, with a
"this little pig went to market," and so forth; Judith almost
crowed at having the weeks told off on her fingers. Queer!
An hour was taken up with the account of her doings in Paris.
She had met all the nicest and naughtiest people. She had been
courted and flattered. An artist in a slouch hat, baggy corduroy
breeches, floppy tie and general 1830 misfit had made love to her
on the top of the Eiffel Tower.
"And he said," laughed Judith, "'_Partons ensemble. Comme on dit
en Anglais_--fly with me!' I remarked that our state when we got
to the Champs de Mars would be an effective disguise. He didn't
understand, and it was delicious!"
I laughed. "All the same," I observed, "I can't see the fun of
making jokes which the person to whom you make them doesn't see
the point of."
"Why, that's your own peculiar form of humour," she retorted. "I
caught the trick from you."
Perhaps she is right. I have noticed that people are slow in
their appreciation of my witticisms. I must really be a very
dull dog. If she were not fond of me I don't see how a bright
woman like Judith could tolerate my society for half an hour.
I don't think I contribute to the world's humour; but the world's
humour contributes much to my own entertainment, and things which
appear amusing to me do not appeal, when I point them out, to the
risible faculties of another. Every individual, I suppose, like
every civilisation, must have his own standard of humour. If I
were a Roman (instead of an English) Epicurean, I should have
died with laughter at the sight of a fat Christian martyr
scudding round the arena while chased by a hungry lion. At
present I should faint with horror. Indeed, I always feel
tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, when I smile
at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that
hadn't got a Christian. On the other hand, it tickles me
immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself
purple with impassioned platitude at a political meeting; but I
perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost
seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to
wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is
the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial.
Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-
coat and silk hat, when a passing member of the proletariat dug
his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of
the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into
peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to
them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and
paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a
nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under
the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which
brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the
futility of jesting to unpercipient ears.
I did not take up her retort.
"And what was the end of the romance?" I asked.
"He borrowed twenty francs of me to pay for the _dejeuner_, and
his _l'annee trente_ delicacy of soul compelled him to blot my
existence forever from his mind."
"He never repaid you?" I asked.
"For a humouristic philosopher," cried Judith, "you are
delicious!"
Judith is too fond of that word "delicious." She uses it in
season and out of season.
We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and
we use it as if it were the poorest. We hoard up our infinite
wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech
dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the
misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies
and pass the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we
heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into
his hat.
I said something of the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her
seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to
the next hostelry, where the process of converting "Love's Sweet
Dream" into a nightmare was still faintly audible. Judith looked
at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh
air and enjoying the relative silence.
"You are still the same, I am glad to see. Conversation with the
young savage from Syria hasn't altered you in the least."
"In the first place," said I, "savages do not grow in Syria; and
in the second, how could she have altered me?"
"If the heavens were to open and the New Jerusalem to appear this
moment before you," retorted Judith, with the relevant
irrelevance of her sex, "you would begin an unconcerned
disquisition on the iconography of angels."
I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears.
She has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical
about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman
pension--they and the mass of silken flax that is her hair, and
her violet eyes.
"Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?" I asked.
She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it
was a very good imitation indeed.
We talked about the book. I touched upon the great problem that
requires solution--the harmonising and justifying of the
contradictory opposites in Renaissance character: Fra Lippo Lippi
breaking his own vows and breaking a nun's for her; Perugino
leading his money-grubbing, morose life and painting ethereal
saints and madonnas in his _bottega_, while the Baglioni filled
the streets outside with slaughter; Lorenzo de' Medici bleeding
literally and figuratively his fellow-citizens, going from that
occupation to his Platonic Academy and disputing on the
immortality of the soul, winding up with orgies of sensual
depravity with his boon companion Pulci, and all the time making
himself an historic name for statecraft; Pope Sixtus IV, at the
very heart of the Pazzi conspiracy to murder the Medici--
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