August 3d.
Etretat, Seine-Injerieure:—A young fellow on the Casino terrace this evening caught my eye, looked at me queerly, and passed on. His face, though unfamiliar, stirred some dormant association. 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 assured 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 assume 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 passage. 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 assures 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 scraped 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 goddess 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 passion for petits 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 beatitude with grenadine syrup and soda-water. She rejects the straws. With her elbows on the marble table, the glass 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 assert, 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 grass. 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 masses 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.”
“Is it a suitable song?”
“Kim bilir—who knows?” said Carlotta.
She began a melancholy, crooning, guttural ditty; but broke off suddenly.
“Oh! but it is stupid. Like the Turkish dancing. Oh, everything in Alexandretta was stupid! Sometimes I think I have never seen Alexandretta—or Ayesha—or Hamdi. I think I always am with you.”
This must be so, as of late she has spoken little of her harem life; she talks chiefly of the small daily happenings, and already we have a store of common interests. The present is her whole existence; the past but a confused dream. The odd part of the matter is that she regards her position with me as a perfectly natural one. No stray kitten adopted by a kind family could have less sense of obligation, or a greater faith in the serene ordering of the cosmos for its own private and peculiar comfort. When I asked her a while ago what she would have done had I left her on the bench in the Embankment Gardens, she shrugged her shoulders and answered, as she had done before, that either she would have died or some other nice gentleman would have taken care of her.
“Do you think nice gentlemen go about London looking for homeless little girls?” I asked on that occasion.
“All gentlemen like beautiful girls,” she replied, which brought us to an old argument.
This afternoon, however, we did not argue. The day forbade it. I lay with my head on Carlotta’s lap, looking up into the deep blue, and feeling a most curious sensation of positive happiness. My attitude towards life has hitherto been negative. I have avoided more than I have sought. I have not drunk deep of life because I have been unathirst. To me—
“To stand aloof and view the fight
Is all the pleasure of the game.”
My interest even in Judith has been of a detached nature. I have been like Faust. I might have said:
“Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen
Werweile doch! Du bist so schon!
Then may the devil take me and do what he likes with me!”
I have never had the least inclination to apostrophise the moment in this fashion and request it to tarry on account of its exceeding charm. Never until this afternoon, when the deep summer enchantment of the turquoise day was itself ensorcelised by the witchery of a girl’s springtide.
“You have three, four, five—oh, such a lot of grey hairs,” said Carlotta, looking down on my reclining head.
“Many people have grey hair at twenty,” said I.
“But I have none.”
“You are not yet twenty, Carlotta.”
“Do you think I will have them then? Oh, it would be dreadful. No one would care to have me.”
“And I? Am I thus the object of every one’s disregard?”
“Oh, you—you are a man. It is right for a man. It makes him look wise. His wife says, ‘Behold, my husband has grey hair. He has wisdom. If I am not good he will beat me. So I must obey him.”’
“She wouldn’t run off with a good-for-nothing scamp of two-and-twenty?”
“Oh, no-o,” said Carlotta. “She would not be so wicked.”
“I am glad,” said I, “that you think a sense of conjugal duty is an ineradicable element of female nature. But suppose she fell in love with the young scamp?”
“Men fall in love,” she replied sagely. “Women only fall in love in stories—Turkish stories. They love their husbands.”
“You amaze me,” said I.
“Ye-es,” said Carlotta.
“But in England, a man wants a woman to love him before he marries her.”
“How can she?” asked Carlotta.
This was a staggering question.
“I don’t know,” said I, “but she dus.”
“Then before I marry a man in England I must love him? But I shall die without a husband!”
“I don’t think so,” said I.
“I must begin soon,” said Carlotta, with a laugh.
A sinuous motion of her serpentine young body enabled her to bend her face down to mine.
“Shall I love Seer Marcous? But how shall I know when I am in love?”
“When you appreciate the exceeding impropriety of discussing the matter with your humble servant,” I replied.
“When a girl is in love she does not speak about it?”
“No, my dear. She lets concealment like a worm i’ the bud feed on her damask cheek.”
“Then she gets ugly?”
“That’s it,” I answered. “You keep on looking in the glass, and when you perceive you are hideous then you’ll know you are in love.”
“But when I am so ugly you will not want me,” she objected. “So it is no use falling in love with you.”
“You have a more logical mind than I imagined,” said I.
“What is a logical mind?” asked Carlotta.
“It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified.”
“I do not understand,” she said.
“I should be vastly surprised if you did,” I laughed.
“Would you like me to marry and go away and leave you?” asked Carlotta, after a long pause.
“I suppose,” I said with a sigh, “that some tin-pot knight will drive up one of these days to the castle in a hansom-cab and carry off my princess.”
“Then you’ll be sorry?”
“My dear,” I answered, “do not let us discuss such gruesome things on an afternoon like this.”
“You would like better for me to go on playing at being your Turkish wife?”
“Infinitely,” said I.
Alas! The day is sped. I have asked the fleeting moment to tarry, and it laughed, and shook its gossamer wings at me, and flew by on its mad race into eternity.
As we lay, a cicada set up its shrilling quite close to us. I slipped my head from Carlotta’s lap and idly parted the rank grass in search of the noisy intruder, and by good luck I found him. I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest little love drama imaginable. Our cicada stood alert and spruce, waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now and then making his corslet vibrate passionately. On the top of a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet—a most reserved, discreet little Juliet, but evidently much interested in Romeo’s serenade. When he sang she put her head to one side and moved as if uncertain whether to descend from her balcony. When he stopped, which he did at frequent intervals, being as it were timorous and tongue-tied, she took her foot from the ladder and waited, at first patiently and then with an obvious air of boredom. Messer Romeo made a hop forward and vibrated; Juliet grew tremulous. Alarmed at his boldness he halted and made a hop back; Juliet looked disappointed. At last another cicada set up a louder note some yards away and, without a nod or a sign, Juliet skipped off into space, leaving the most disconsolate little Romeo of a grasshopper you ever beheld. He gave vent to a dismal failure of a vibration and hopped to the foot of the faithless lady’s bower.
Carlotta broke into a merry laugh and clapped her hands.
“I am so glad.”
“She is the most graceless hussy imaginable,” I cried. “There was he grinding his heart out for her, and just because a more brazen-throated scoundrel came upon the scene she must needs leave our poor friend in the lurch. She has no more heart than my boot, and she will come to a bad end.”
“But he was such a fool,” retorted my sage damsel, with a flash of laughter in her dark eyes. “If he wanted her, why didn’t he go up and take her?”
“Because he is a gentleman, a cicada of fine and delicate feeling.”
“Hou!” laughed Carlotta. “He was a fool. It served him right. She grew tired of waiting.”
“You believe, then,” said I, “in marriage by capture?”
I explained and discoursed to her of the matrimonial habits of the Tartar tribes.
“Yes,” said Carlotta. “That is sense. And it must be such fun for the girl. All that, what you call it?—wooing?—is waste of time. I like things to happen, quick, quick, one after the other—or else—”
“Or else what?”
“To do nothing, nothing but lie in the sun, like this afternoon.”
“Yes,” said I dreamily, after I had again thrown myself by her side. “Like this afternoon.”
I sit at my window and look out upon the strip of beach, the hauled-up fishing boats and the nets hung out to dry looming vague in the starlight, and I hear the surf’s rhythmical moan a few yards beyond; and it beats into my ears the idiot phrase that has recurred all the evening.
But why should I be mad? For filling my soul with God’s utmost glory of earth and sea and sky? For filling my heart with purest pleasure in the intimate companionship of fresh and fragrant maidenhood? For giving myself up for once to a dream of sense clouded by never a thought that was not serenely fair?
For feeling young again?
I shall read myself to sleep with La Dame de Monsoreau, which I have procured from the circulating library in the Rue Alphonse Karr—(the literary horticulturist is the genius loci and the godfather of my landlady)—and I will empty flagons with Pere Gorenflot and ride on errands of life and death with Chicot, prince of jesters, and walk lovingly between the valiant Bussy and Henri Quatre. By this, if by nothing else, I recognise the beneficence of the high gods—they have given us tired men Dumas.
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