The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 25

This was exceedingly pretty of Judith. But really woman is the Eternal Philistine, as Matthew Arnold has defined the term. Her supreme characteristic is inconvincibility. I had simply wasted my breath.

CHAPTER XII

August 3d.

_Etretat, Seine-Injerieure_:--A young fellow on the Casino terrace this evening caught my eye, looked at me queerly, and pa.s.sed on. His face, though unfamiliar, stirred some dormant a.s.sociation. What was it?

The profitless question pestered me for hours. At last, during the performance at the theatre, I slapped my knee and said aloud,

"I've got it!"

"What?" asked Carlotta in alarm.

"A fly," I answered. Whereat Carlotta laughed, and bent forward to get a view of the victim. I austerely directed her attention to the stage. It was a metaphorical fly whose buzzing I had stopped.

The young fellow was he who had pointed me out in Hyde Park to his companion, and lightly a.s.sured her that I was as mad as a dingo dog.

From the moment after the phrase's utterance to that of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my mind. Now it haunts me.

It reiterates itself after the manner of a glib phrase. I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long. As it is, the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards away from my window. I keep asking myself: why a dingo dog? If I am mad it is in a gentle, Jaquesian, melancholy manner. I do not dash at life, rabid and foaming at the mouth.

I think the idiot simile must have been merely the misuse of language so common among the half-educated youth of Great Britain.

Yet when I come to consider my present condition, I have doubts as to my complete sanity. Here am I, in a little, semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the attention of a rational man. And I have been here a calendar month.

To please Carlotta I wear white duck trousers, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap. I wired for them to my London tailor and they arrived within a week. The first time I appeared in the maniacal costume I slunk from the stony stare of a gendarme, as I was about to ascend the Casino steps, and hid myself among the fishing-boats lower down on the beach.

Carlotta, however, was delighted and said that I looked pretty. Now I have grown callous, seeing other fools similarly apparelled. But a year ago, should I have dreamed it possible for me to strut about a fashionable _plage_ in white ducks, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap?

I trow not. They are signs of some sort of madness--whether that of a Jaques or a dingo dog matters very little.

Pasquale was the main cause of my taking Carlotta away from London.

He came far too frequently to the house, established far too great a familiarity with my little girl. She quoted him far too readily. She is at the impressionable age when young women fall easy victims to the allurements of a fascinating creature like Pasquale. If he showed himself in the light of a possible husband for Carlotta, I should have nothing to say. I should give the pair my paternal benediction. But I know my Renaissance and I know my Pasquale. Carlotta is merely a new sensation--that's all he seems to live for, the delectable scoundrel.

But I am not going to have her heart broken by any cinquecento wolf in Poole's clothing. I a.s.sume that Carlotta has a heart, even if she is not possessed of a soul. As to the latter I am still in doubt. At all events I resolved to withdraw Carlotta from his influence, put her in fresh surroundings, and allow her to mix more freely among men and women, so as to divert and possibly improve her mind.

I perceive that Carlotta is becoming an occupation. Well, she is quite as profitable as collecting postage-stamps, or golf, or amateur photography.

I have spent a pleasant month in this little place. It is the mouth of a gorge in the midst of a cliff-bound coast. The bay, but a quarter of a mile in sweep, is shut in at each end by a projecting wall of cliff cut by a natural arch. Half the shingle beach is given up to fisherfolk and their boats and tarred Noah's arks where they keep their nets. The other half suddenly rises into a digue or terrace on which is built a primitive casino, and below the terrace are the bathing-cabins. We are staying at the most spotlessly clean of all clean French hotels. There are no carpets on the stairs; but if one mounts them in muddy boots, an untiring chambermaid emerges from a lair below, with hot water and scrubbing-brush and smilingly removes the traces of one's pa.s.sage.

Carlotta and Antoinette have adjoining rooms in the main building. I inhabit the annexe, sleeping in a quaint, clean, bare little chamber with a balconied window that looks over the Noah's Arks and the fishing-smacks and fisherfolk, away out to sea. This morning as I lay in bed I saw our Channel fleet lie along the arc of the horizon.

Antoinette dwells in continuous rapture at being in France again.

Carlotta a.s.sures me that the smile does not leave her great red face even as she sleeps of nights. It is a little jest between us. She peeped in once to see. The good soul has filled herself up with French conversation as a starving hen gorges herself with corn. She has sc.r.a.ped acquaintance with every washerwoman, fish-wife, _marchande_, bathing woman and domestic servant on the beach. She is on intimate terms with the whole male native population. When the three of us happen to walk together it is a triumphal progress of bows and grins and nods. At first I thought it was I for whom this homage was intended. I was soon undeceived. It was Antoinette. She loves to parade Carlotta before her friends. I came upon her once entertaining an admiring audience in Carlotta's presence with a detailed description of that young woman's physical perfections--a description which was marked by a singular lack of reticence. The time of her glory is the bathing hour, when she accompanies Carlotta from her cabin to the water's edge, divests her of _peignoir_ and _espadrilles_, but before revealing her to fashionable Etretat, casts a preliminary glance around, as who should say: "Prepare all men and women for the dazzling G.o.ddess I am about to unveil."

Carlotta is undoubtedly bewitching in her bathing costume, and enjoys a little triumph of beauty. People fall into a natural group in order to look at her, while I, sitting on a camp-stool in my white ducks and pink shirt and smoking a cigarette, cannot repress a complacent pride of ownership. I do not object to her flicking her wet fingers at me when she comes dripping out of the sea; and I do not even reproach her when she puts her foot upon my sartorially immaculate knee, to show me a pebble-cut on her glistening pink sole.

Her conduct has been exemplary. I have allowed her to make the acquaintance of two or three young fellows, her partners at the Casino dances, and she walks up and down the terrace with them before meals. I have forbidden her, under penalty of immediate return to London and of my eternal displeasure, to mention the harem at Alexandretta. Young fellows are gifted with a genius for misapprehension. She is an ordinary young English lady, an orphan (which is true), and I am her guardian.

Of course she looks at them with imploring eyes, and pulls them by the sleeve, and handles the lappels of their coats, and admits them to terms of the frankest intimacy; but I can no more change these characteristics than I can alter the shape of her body. She is the born coquette. Her delighted conception of herself is that she is the object of every man's admiration. I noticed her this morning playing a tune with her fingers on the old bathing-man's arm, as he was preparing to take her into the water, and I saw his mahogany face soften. In her indescribable childish way she would coquet with a tax-collector or a rag-and-bone man or the Archbishop of Canterbury. But she has committed no grave indiscretion, and I am sufficiently her lord and master to exact obedience.

I pretend, however, to be at her beck and call, and it is a delight to minister to her radiant happiness--to feel her lean on my arm and hear her cooing voice say:

"You are so good. I should like to kiss you."

But I do not allow her to kiss me. Never again.

"Seer Marcous, let us go to the little horses."

She has a consuming pa.s.sion for _pet.i.ts chevaux_. I speak sagely of the evils of gambling. She laughs. I weakly take lower ground.

"What is the good? You have no money."

"Oh-h! But only two francs," she says, holding out her hand.

"Not one. Yesterday you lost."

"But to-day I shall win. I want to give you something I saw in a shop.

Oh, a beautiful thing." Then I feel a hand steal into the pocket of my dinner jacket where I carry loose silver for this very purpose, just as a lover of horses carries lumps of sugar for the nose of a favourite pony, and immediately it is withdrawn with a cry of joy and triumph, and she skips back out of my reach. Then she takes my arm and leads me from the sweet night-air into the hot little room with its crowd around the nine gyrating animals.

"I shall put it on 5. I always put on 5. He is a nice, clean, white, pretty horse."

She stakes two francs, watches the turn in a tense agony of excitement; she wins, comes running to me with sixteen francs clutched tight in her hand.

"See. I said I should win."

"Come away then and be happy."

But she makes a protesting grimace, and before I can stop her, runs back to stake again on 5. In twenty minutes she is ruined and returns to me wearing an expression of abject misery. She is too desolate even to try the fortune of the dinner-jacket pocket. I take her outside and restore her to beat.i.tude with grenadine syrup and soda-water. She rejects the straws. With her elbows on the marble table, the gla.s.s held in both hands, she drinks sensuously, in little sips.

And I, Marcus Ordeyne, sit by watching her, a most contented philosopher of forty. A dingo dog could not be so contented. That young fellow, I unhesitatingly a.s.sert, must be the most brainless of his type. I suffer fools gladly, as a general rule, but if I see much of this one I shall do him some injury.

After dejeuner we strolled to the top of the west cliff and lay on the thick dry gra.s.s. The earth has never known a more perfect afternoon. A day of turquoise and diamond.

The air itself was diaphanous blue. Below us the tiny place slumbered in the sunshine; scarcely a sign of life save specks of washer-women on the beach bending over white patches which we knew were linen spread out to dry. The ebb-tide lapped lazily on the shingle, where the sea changed suddenly from ultramarine to a fringe of feathery white. A white sail or two flecked the blue of the bay. A few white wisps of cirrus gleamed above our heads. Around us, on the cliff-tops, the green pastures and meadows and, farther inland, the cornfields stacked in harvest, and great ma.s.ses of trees. Lying on our backs, between sea and sky, we seemed utterly alone. Carlotta and I were the sole inhabitants of the earth. I dreamily disintegrated caramels from their sticky tissue-paper wrappings for Carlotta's consumption.

After a while unconquerable drowsiness crept over me; and a little later I had an odd sense of perfect quietude. I was lying amid moss and violets. In a languorous way I wondered how my surroundings had changed, and at last I awoke to find my head propped on Carlotta's lap and shaded by her red parasol, while she sat happy in full sunshine. I was springing from this posture of impropriety when she laughed and laid restraining hands on my shoulders.

"No. You must not move. You look so pretty. And it is so nice. I put your head there so that it should be soft. You have been sound asleep."

"I have also been abominably impolite," said I. "I humbly beg your pardon, Carlotta."

"Oh, I am not cross," she laughed. Then still keeping her hands on me, she settled her limbs into a more comfortable position.

"There! Now I can play at being a good little Turkish wife." She fashioned into a fan the _Matin_ newspaper, which I had bought for the luxurious purpose of not reading, and fanned me. "That is what Ayesha used to do to Hamdi. And Ayesha used to tell him stories. But my lord does not like his slave's stories."

"Decidedly not," said I.

I have heard much of Ayesha, a pretty animal organism who appears to have turned her elderly husband into a doting fool. I am beginning to have a contempt for Hamdi Effendi.

"They are what you call improper, eh?" she laughed, referring to the tales. "I will sing you a Turkish song which you will not understand."