Part 39 (1/2)
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 dest.i.tute 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 disa.s.sociated 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 carca.s.s 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 pa.s.sionately 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--G.o.d 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 dest.i.tute 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+vered 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.