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.
