Part 12 (1/2)

”It was Harry's father.”

”Oh!” she said, with a grimace. ”I am sorry I was so nice to him.”

What the deuce am I to do with her?

I lectured her for a quarter of an hour on the ethics of the situation.

I think I only succeeded in giving her the impression that I was in a bad temper. So much did I sympathise with Harry that I forbore to acquaint her with the fact that he was a married man when he enticed her away from Alexandretta.

CHAPTER VI

June 1st

Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening. Antoinette, forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of her being to the mysteries of her true religion. The excellence of the result affected Pasquale so strongly that with his customary disregard of convention he insisted on Antoinette being summoned to receive his congratulations.

He rose, made her a bow as if she were a Marquise of pre-revolutionary days.

”It is a meal,” said he, bunching up his fingers to his mouth and kissing them open, ”that one should have taken not sitting, but kneeling.”

”You stole that from Heine,” said I, when the enraptured creature had gone, ”and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your own.”

”My good Ordeyne,” said he, ”did you ever hear of a man giving anything authentic to a woman?”

”You know much more about the matter than I do,” I replied, and Pasquale laughed.

It has been a pleasure to see him again--a creature of abounding vitality whom time cannot alter. He is as lithe-limbed as when he was a boy, and as lithe-witted. I don't know how his consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette's cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account of his mirific adventures in foreign cities. Among other things, he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera of Bulgarian politics. I also heard of the Viennese dancer. My own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared with his was that of a caged canary compared with a sparrowhawk's. Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and on certain matters I am silent. He also gesticulates freely, a thing which is totally foreign to my nature. As Judith would say, he has a temperament. His moustaches curl fiercely upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flas.h.i.+ng dark eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable freak of outer circ.u.mstance could I have the adventures of Pasquale.

And yet he thinks them tame! Lord! If I found myself hatching conspiracies in Sofia on a nest made of loaded revolvers, I should feel that the wild whirl of Bedlam had broken loose around me.

”But man alive!” I cried. ”What in the name of tornadoes do you want?”

”I want to fight,” said he. ”The earth has grown too grey and peaceful.

Life is anaemic. We need colour--good red splashes of it--good wholesome bloodshed.”

Said I, ”All you have to do is to go into a Berlin cafe and pull the noses of all the lieutenants you see there. In that way you'll get as much gore as your heart could desire.”

”By Jove!” said he, springing to his feet. ”What a cause for a man to devote his life to--the extermination of Prussian lieutenants!”

I leaned back in my arm-chair--it was after dinner--and smiled at his vehemence. The ordinary man does not leap about like that during digestion.

”You would have been happy as an Uscoque,” said I. (I have just finished the prim narrative.)

”What's that?” he asked. I told him.

”The interesting thing about the Uscoques,” I added, ”is that they were a Co-operative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century, in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and children--the general public, in fact, of Senga--took shares and were paid dividends. They were also a religious people, and the setting out of the pirate fleet at the festivals of Easter and Christmas was attended by ecclesiastical ceremony. Then they scoured the high seas, captured argosies, murdered the crews--their only weapons were hatchets and daggers and arquebuses--landed on undefended sh.o.r.es, ravaged villages and carried off comely maidens to replenish their stock of womenkind at home. They must have been a live lot of people.”

”What a second-hand old brigand you are,” cried Pasquale, who during my speech had been examining the carpet by the side of his chair.

I laughed. ”Hasn't a phase of the duality of our nature ever struck you? We have a primary or everyday nature--a thing of habit, tradition, circ.u.mstance; and we also have a secondary nature which clamours for various sensations and is quite contented with vicarious gratification.

There are delicately fibred novelists who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by writing books whose pages reek with bloodshed. The most placid, benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious pa.s.sion for crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a _musee maccabre_ of murderers'