It is some two years since I stood for the second time in the Pinacoteca of Verona and sought to read my fate in the simpering countenance of Morone’s Miseratrix Virginum Regina. I met what might have been expected by a person of any sense—the self-same expression on the painted face as I had angrily found there two months before when I began to write the foregoing pages. But as I had no sense at all in those days I accepted the poor battered Madonna’s lack of sympathy for a sign and a token, went home, and prepared for dissolution.
Two years ago! It is only for the last few months that I have been able to look back on that nightmare of a time in Verona with philosophic equanimity. And this morning is the first occasion on which I have felt that dispassionate attitude towards a past self which enables a man to set down without the heartache the memories of days that are gone. I sit upon the flat roof of this house in Mogador on the Morocco coast, shaded by an awning from the bright African sun which glints in myriad sparkles on the sea visible beyond the house-tops. The atmosphere last night was somewhat heavy with the languorous, indescribable, and unforgettable smell of the East; but the morning is deliciously wind-swept by the Atlantic breeze, and the air tastes sweet. And it is clear, dazzlingly clear. The white square houses and the cupolas of the mosques stand out sharp against a sky of intense, ungradated blue. I am away from the centre of the busy sea-port and the noise of its streets thronged with grain-laden camels and shouting drivers and picturesque, quarrelling, squabbling, haggling Moors and Jews and desert Arabs, and I am enveloped in the peace of the infinite azure. Besides, yesterday afternoon, as I rode back to Mogador, across the tongue of desert which separates it from the Palm Tree House, and the town rose on the horizon, a dream city of pure snow set in the clear sunset amethyst against the still, pale lapis lazuli of the bay—something happened. And yesterday evening more happened still.
Two years ago, then, I faced in Verona the dissolution of my ineffectual existence. I could see no reason for living. My theory of myself in my relation to the cosmos had been upset by practical phenomena. No other theory based on surer grounds presented itself. But what about life, said I, without a theory? Already it was life without a purpose, without work, without friends, without Judith and without Carlotta. I could not endure it without even a theory to console me. Beings do exist devoid of loves or theories. But of such, I thought, are the beasts that perish. I reflected further. Supposing, on extended investigation, I found a new theory. How far would it profit me? How far could I trust it not to lead me through another series of fantastic emotions and futile endeavours to the sublime climax of murdering a one-eyed cat? Self-abomination and contempt smote me as I thought of poor Polyphemus stretched dead on the hearthrug, and myself standing over him, sane, stupid, and remorseful, with the poker in my hand.
I walked up and down the vast cold room of the marble palazzo, arraying before me in overwhelming numbers the arguments for selfdestruction. On a table in the middle of the room stood a phial of prussic acid which I had procured long before in London, it being a conviction of mine that every man ought to have ready to hand a sure means of exit from the world. I paused many times in front of the little blue phial. One lift of the hand, one toss of the head, and all would be over. At last I extracted the cork, and the faint smell of almonds reached my nostrils. I recorked the phial and lit a cigarette. This I threw away half smoked and again approached the table of death. I began to feel a strong natural disinclination to swallow the stuff. “This,” said I, “is sheer animal cowardice.” I again uncorked the phial. A new phase of the matter appeared to me. “It is the act of a craven to shirk the responsibilities of life. Can you be such a meanspirited creature as not even to have the courage to live?” “No,” said I, “I have a valiant spirit,” and I set down the bottle. “Bah,” whispered the familiar imp of suicide at my elbow. “You are just afraid to die.” I took up the bottle again. But the other taunter had an argument equally strong, and once more I put the phial uncorked on the table.
Thus between two cowardices, one of which I must choose, stood I, like the ass of Buridan. I lit another cigarette and excogitated the problem. I smoked two cigarettes, walking up and down that vast, chill apartment, while the air grew sickly sweet with the smell of almonds, which intensified the physical repugnance the first faint odour had occasioned. I began to shiver with cold. The stove had burned out before I entered, and I had not considered it worth while to have it filled for the few minutes that would remain to me to live. I had not reckoned on the ass’s bundles of cowardice.
“I may as well be warm,” thought I, “while I prove to my complete satisfaction that it is more cowardly to live than to die. There is no very great hurry.”
I caught up a travelling-rug with which I had tried to soften the asperities of an imitation Louis XV couch, and throwing it over my shoulders, resumed my pilgrimage. I soon lost myself in the problem and did not notice a corner of the rug gradually slipping down towards the floor.
“I’ll do it!” I cried at last, making a sudden dive towards the table. But the ironical corner of the rug had reached the ground. I stepped on it, tripped, and instinctively caught the table to steady myself. The table, a rickety gueridon, overbalanced, and away rolled my uncorked phial of prussic acid and fell into a hundred pieces on the tessellated floor.
“Solvitur,” said I, grimly, “ambulando.”
Looking back now, I am inclined to treat myself tenderly. Whether I should have drunk the poison, if the accident had not occurred, I cannot say. At the moment of my rush I intended to do so. After the catastrophe, which I attributed to the curse of ineffectuality that pursued me, I must confess that I was glad. Not that life looked more attractive than before, but that the decision had been taken out of my hands. I could not go about the shops of Verona buying prussic acid or revolvers or metres of stout rope. And my razors (without Stenson’s care) were benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces. I groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was to live, I resigned myself to a barren and theoryless existence.
After a day or two the vital instinct asserted itself more strongly. I became inspired by an illuminating revelation. I had a preliminary aim in life. I would go out into the world in search of a theory. When found I would apply it to the regulation of the score and a half years during which I might possibly expect to remain on this planet. I must take my chances of it leading me to the corpse of another Polyphemus.
As it struck me I should not find my theory in Italy, I packed up my belongings and hastened from Verona. At Naples I picked up a Messageries Maritimes steamer and began a circular tour in the Levant. At Alexandretta I went ashore, and inquired my way to the dwelling of the Prefect of Police. I did not call on Hamdi Effendi. But I wandered round the walls and wondered in a moody, heart-achey way where it was that Carlotta sat when Harry came along and whistled her like a tame falcon to his arm. It was a white palace of a house with a closed balcony supported on rude corbels and tightly shuttered. At the back spread a large garden surrounded by the famous wall. There was no doubt that Hamdi was a wealthy personage, and that Carlotta’s nurture had been as gentle as that of any lady in Syria. But the place wherein Carlotta’s childhood had been sheltered had an air of impenetrable mystery. I stood baffled before it, as I had stood so often before Carlotta’s soul. The result of this portion of my search was the discovery, not of a new theory, but of an old pain. I went back to the ship in a despondent mood, and caused deep distress to one of the gentlest creatures I have ever met. He was a lean, elderly German, who no matter what the occasion or what the temperature wore a long, tight-buttoned frock-coat, a narrow black tie, and a little bluish-grey felt hat adorned with a partridge’s feather which gave him an air of forlorn rakishness. His name was Doctor Anastasius Dose, and he spent a blameless life in travelling up and down the world, on behalf of a Leipsic firm of which he was a member, in search of rare and curious books. For there are copies of books which have a well-known pedigree like famous jewels, and whose acquisition, a matter of infinite tact, gives rise, I was told by Herr Dose, to the most exquisite thrill known to man. He brought me on that morose afternoon a copy of the “Synonima,” in Italian and French, of St. Fliscus, printed by Simon Magniagus of Milan in 1480, and opened the vellum covers with careful fingers.
“In all the assemblage of human atoms that inhabit this vessel,” said he, “there is but one who is imbued with reverence for the past and a sense of the preciousness of the unique. I need not tell you, Herr Baronet, who are a scholar, that of this book only two copies exist in this ink-sodden universe. One is in the University Library of Bologna; the other is before your eyes. It is also the only book known to have been printed by Magniagus. See the beautiful, small Roman type—a masterpiece. Ach, Herr Baronet! to have accomplished one such work in a lifetime, and then to sit among the blessed saints and look down on earth and know that the two sole copies in existence are cherished by the elect, what a reward, what eternal happiness!”
I turned over the pages. The faint perfume of mouldy lore ascended and I remembered the smell of the “Histoire des Uscoques” in the Embankment Gardens.
“The odor di femina in the nostrils of the scholar,” said I.
“Famina? Woman?” he cried, scandalised.
“Yes, my friend,” said I. “All things sublunar can be translated into terms of woman. St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn’t a wife; Simon Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and devoted his existence to reproducing himself instead of St. Fliscus.”
“Ach, that is very interesting,” said he. “Could you tell me the date of Magniagus’s marriage?”
“I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But depend upon it, he was either married or was going to be married, and she ran away from him and left him without the heart to print for posterity, and when he took his seat among the saints she said she was so glad; he was a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!”
He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious volume to his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann’s Tractate de Lamiis, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats’s poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old diplomatist towards a child’s woolly lamb. For him literature had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track of a Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and never more to be read by any of the sons of man. In the summer he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By chance I have learned since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For aught I could see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in the intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul contained that antidote—the odor di femina. Perhaps he met it at Reykjavic and he died of dismay.
I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible for the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes would banish Carlotta’s distracting image. But no, it was one of the many vain reflections on which I based a false philosophy. Whether in Beyrout, or the land of the “sweet singer of Persephone,” or Alexandria, or on the Cannebiere of Marseilles, or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither a restless pursuit of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the mountainous republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom and to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was ironically driven by fleas—whether on land or sea, in cities or in solitudes, the vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and the voice that was still (as far as I was concerned) cooed its dove-notes into my ears.
I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a pretty American girl of sixteen, as “a quaint gentle old guy who talks awful rot which no one can understand, and is all the time thinking about something else.” My sudden emergence from the companion-way, where I was lighting a cigarette, brought red confusion into the young person’s cheeks.
“How old do you think I am?” I asked.
“Oh, about sixty,” quoth the damsel.
“I’m glad I’m quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot,” said I.
With the resourcefulness of her nation she linked her arm in mine and started a confidential walk up and down the deck.
“You are just a dear,” she remarked.
She could not have said more to Anastasius Dose had he been there; as far as I can recollect he must just then have been dying of the Inevitable in Iceland. Perhaps the few months had brought me to resemble him. Instinctively I put my hand to my head to reassure myself that I was not wearing a rakish little soft felt hat with a partridge-feather, and I reflected with some complacency that my rimless pince-nez did not give me the owlish appearance produced by Anastasius Dose’s great round, iron-rimmed goggles. From such crumbs of vanity are we sometimes reduced to take comfort.
“I just want to know what you are,” said my young American friend.
Shall I confess my attraction? She brought a dim suggestion of Carlotta. She had Carlotta’s colouring and Carlotta’s candour. But there the resemblance stopped. The grey matter of her brain had been distilled from the air of Wall Street, and there were precious few things between earth and sky of which she hadn’t prescience.
“I’m a broken-down philosopher,” said I.
“Oh, that’s nothing. So is everybody as soon as they get sense. What did you make your money in?”
“I’ve not made any money,” I answered, meekly.
“I thought all people who were knighted in your country had made piles of money.”
“Knighted!” I exclaimed. “What on earth do you think a quaint old guy like myself could possibly have done to get knighted?”
“Then you’re a baronet,” she said, severely.
“I assure you it is not my fault.”
“I thought all baronets were wicked. They are in the novels. Somehow you don’t look like a baronet. You ought to have a black moustache and an eyeglass and smoke a cigar and sneer. But, say, how do you fill up the time if you do nothing to make money?”
“I am going through the world,” said I, “on an adventurous quest, like a knight—or a baronet, if you will—of the Round Table. I am in quest of a Theory of Life.”
“I guess I was born with it,” cried young New York.
“I guess I’ll die without finding it,” said I.
London again. My quiet house. Antoinette and Stenson. The well-ordered routine of comfort. My books. The dog’s-eared manuscript of the “History of Renaissance Morals,” unpacked by Stenson and hid in its usual place on the writing-table. Nothing changed, yet everything utterly different.
A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the Regent’s Park. I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic, irresistible. My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one else. Only my lawyers knew of my arrival. With them alone had I corresponded during the many months of my absence. Stay; I did write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona, in reply to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself. I answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period. But not even a letter from my lawyers awaited me. I thought somewhat wistfully that I would willingly have paid six and eight pence for it. But the feeling was momentary.
Then began a queer, untroubled life. Without definite resolve I became a recluse, living forlornly from day to day. Like a bat I avoided the outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night. I had a pride in cherishing the habit of solitude. Were it not that I entertained a real dislike of roots and water and the damp and manifold discomforts of a cave, with which form of habitat the ministrations of Stenson and Antoinette would have been inconsistent, I should have gone forth into the nearest approach to a Thebaid I could discover. I was, in fact, touched by the mild mania of the hermit. My club I never entered. A line drawn from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the Zoological Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings. Once I spied in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray, and rushed into a providential omnibus, so as to avoid recognition. My History remained untouched. The glamour of the Renaissance had vanished. For occupation I read the Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I seldom read the newspapers. I had an idea, like an eminent personage of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it failed to interest me greatly. I shrank from the noise of it.
“Monsieur,” said Antoinette, “will get ill if he does not go out into the sunshine.”
“Monsieur,” said I, “regards the sunshine as an impertinent intrusion into a soul that loves the twilight.”
If I had made the same remark to an Englishwoman, she would have pitied me for a poor, half-witted gentleman. But Antoinette has her nation’s instinctive appreciation of soul-states, and her sympathy was none the less comprehending when she shook her head mournfully and said that it was bad for the stomach.
“My good Antoinette,” I remarked, harking back in my mind to a speculation of other days, “if you go on worrying me in this manner about my stomach, I will build a tower forty feet high in the back garden, and live on top, and have my meals sent up by a lift, and never come down again.”
“Monsieur might as well be in Paradise,” said Antoinette.
“Ah,” said I. And I thought of the bottle of prussic acid with mingled sentiments.
All through these many months I had Judith dwelling, a pale ghost, in the back of my mind. We had parted so finally that correspondence between us had seemed impertinent. But although I had not written to her, no small part of the infinite sadness that had fallen upon my life was the shadow of her destiny. Sweet, wine-loving Judith! How many times did I picture her sitting pinched and wistful in the little tin mission church at Hoxton! Had I, Marcus Ordeyne, condemned her to that penitentiary? Who can hold the balance of morals so truly as to decide?
At last I received a letter from her on the anniversary of our parting. She had found salvation in a strange thing which she called duty. “I am fulfilling an appointed task,” she wrote, “and the measure of my success is the measure of my happiness. I am bringing consolation to a wayward and tormented spirit. A year has swept aside the petty feminine vanities, the opera-glasses, so to speak, through which a woman complacently views her influence over a man, and it has cleared my vision. A year has proved beyond mortal question that without me this wayward and tormented spirit would fail. I hold in my hands the very soul of a man. What more dare a woman ask of the high gods? You see I use your metaphors still. Dearest of all dear friends, do not pity me. Beyond all the fires of love through which one passes there is the star of Duty, and happy the individual who can live in its serenity.”
This was astonishingly like the Theory of Life which I set out from Verona to seek, and which had hitherto eluded me. It was not very new, or subtle, or inspiring. But that is the way of things. No matter through what realms of the fantastic you may travel, you arrive inevitably at the commonplace.
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