Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has passed quickly since that day.
I said then that on the previous afternoon something had happened. It was something which I might have foreseen, which, in fact, with my habit of putting the telescope to my blind eye, I obstinately had refused to foresee. During our wanderings I had watched the flowering of her splendid beauty as she drank in health from the glow of her own Orient. I had noted the widening of her intellect, the quickening of her sympathies. I had been conscious of the expansion of her soul in the great silences when the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand. But a growing wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of grief for the child that had gone—into this, if I did remark it, I did not choose to inquire. Instead, I continued my study of Arabic and cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose conversation afforded—and still affords—me peculiar pleasure. One of these days I shall make a book of his Table-talk. But now I have to tell of Carlotta.
She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over to the Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times before. To please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her natural indolence. So much so that she had come to love the nomad life of steamers and caravans, and had grown restless, eager for fresh scenes, craving new impressions. It was I who had cried a halt at Mogador where this furnished house to let, belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe, tempted me to rest awhile. I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened to the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I have grown slumberous. Carlotta, if left to herself, would have gone on riding camels through Africa to the end of time. She had changed in many essentials. Instead of regarding me as an amiable purveyor of sweetmeats and other necessaries of life to which by the grace of her being Carlotta she was entitled, she treated me with human affection and sympathy, keeping her own wants in the background, anxious only to anticipate mine. But she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible Moorish messes with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance. She was still the same Carlotta. On the other hand again, she had of late abandoned her caressing habits. If she laid her hand on my arm, she did it timorously—whereat I would laugh and she would grow confused. Once she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling. Those days had passed. I told myself that I was as old as the sphinx we had moralised over in Egypt.
We lunched, then, at the Palm Tree House and rode back in the cool of the afternoon to Mogador. We were alone, as we knew the path across the tongue of desert, and had no need of a guide and the rabble of sore-eyed urchins who, like their attendant flies, infest the tourist on his journeyings. On our right the desert rose to meet a near horizon; on our left sandhills and boulders cut off the view; ahead the shimmering line beyond which the sea and city lay. We were enveloped by solitude and stillness. In the clear African air objects detached themselves against the sky with startling definition.
I had unconsciously ridden a bit ahead of Carlotta, thinking my own thoughts, and sighing as a man often does sigh, for the vague unattainable which is happiness. Suddenly I missed her by my side, and turning round saw a sight that made my heart beat with its sheer beauty. It was only Carlotta on her barbarically betrapped and besaddled mule. But it was Carlotta glorified in colour. She held above her head a cotton parasol, which she had bought to her delight and my disgust in Mogador; an impossible thing, all deep cherry reds and yellows; a hateful thing made for a pantomime—or for this African afternoon. Outspread and luminous in the white sunlight its cherry reds and yellows floated like translucences of wine above Carlotta’s bronze hair crowned by a white sun hat, her warm flesh-tints, and the dazzling white of her surah silk blouse; the whole picture cut out vivid against the indigo of the sky. It was a radiant vision. I stared openmouthed, smitten with the pang that sudden and transient loveliness can sometimes deal, as Carlotta approached, her figure swaying with the jog of her barbaric beast. Her eyes were fixed on mine. She halted, and for a moment we looked at one another; and in those wonderful eyes I saw for the first time a beautiful sadness, a spiritual appeal. The moment passed. We started again, side by side, neither speaking. I did not look at her, conscious of a vague trouble. Things that I had thought dead stirred in my heart.
Presently like a dawn of infinite delicacy rose the city before us. Its fairy minarets and towers gleamed first white in an atmosphere of pale amethyst toning through shades of green to the blue of the zenith. And the lazy sea lay at the city’s foot a pavement of lapis lazuli. But all was faint, unreal. Far, far away a group of palms caught opalescent reflections. A slight breeze had sprung up, raising minute particles of sand which caused the elfland on the horizon to quiver like a mirage.
“It is a dream-city,” said I, in admiration.
Carlotta did not reply. I thought she had not heard. We jogged on a little in silence. At last she drew very close to me.
“Shall we ever get there?” she asked, pointing ahead with the hand that held the reins.
“To Mogador? Yes, I hope so,” I answered with a laugh. I thought she was tired.
“No, not Mogador. The dream-city—where every one wants to get.”
“You have travelled far, my dear,” said I, “to hanker now after dream-cities and the unattainable. I knew a little girl once who would have asked: ‘What is a dream-city?”
“She doesn’t ask now because she knows,” replied Carlotta. “No. We shall never get there. It looks as if we were riding straight into it—but when we get close, it will just be Mogador.”
“Aren’t you happy, Carlotta?” I asked.
“Are you, Seer Marcous?”
“I? I am a philosopher, my child, and a happy philosopher would be a lusus naturae, a freak, a subject for a Barnum & Bailey Show. If they caught him they would put him between the hairy man and the living skeleton.”
“I suppose I’m getting to be a philosopher, too,” said Carlotta, “and I hate it! Sometimes I think I hate everything and everybody—save you, Seer Marcous, darling. It’s wicked of me. I must have been born wicked. But I used to be happy. I never wanted to go to dream-cities. I was just like a cat. Like Polyphemus. Do you remember Polyphemus?”
“Yes,” said I. And then set off my balance by this strange conversation with Carlotta, I added: “I killed him.”
She turned a startled face to me.
“You killed him? Why?”
“He laughed at me because I was unhappy,” said I.
“Through me?”
“Yes; through you. But that’s neither here nor there. We were not discussing the death of Polyphemus. We were talking about being philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated everything and everybody except me. Why do you exclude me, Carlotta?”
We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-girth. I looked hard at her. She turned away her head and put the pantomime parasol between us. I heard a little choking sob.
“Let us get off—and sit down a little—I want to cry.
“The end of all feminine philosophy,” I said, somewhat brutally. “No. It’s getting late. That’s only Mogador in front of us. Let us go to it.”
Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.
“What has happened to you, Seer Marcous? You have never spoken to me like that before.”
“The very deuce seems to have happened,” said I, angrily—though why I should have felt angry, heaven only knows. “First you turn yourself into a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable umbrella of yours and the trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and make my sentimental soul ache; and then you—”
“It’s a very pretty umbrella,” said Carlotta, looking upwards at it demurely.
“Give it to me,” I said.
She yielded it with her usual docility. I cast it upon the desert. Being open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay still. Carlotta reined up her mule.
“Oh-h!” she said, in her old way.
I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm through the two bridles.
“My dear child,” said I, “what is the meaning of all this? Here we have been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled existence, and now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities and the impossibility of getting there, and I turn angry and heave parasols about Africa. What is the meaning of it?”
The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating Carlotta as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a modern French novel. Perhaps I was younger than I thought.
She kept her eyes fixed downward.
“Why are you angry with me?” she asked in a low voice.
“I haven’t the remotest idea,” said I.
She lifted her eyelids slowly—oh, very, very slowly, glanced quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round her lips. I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine heart. I turned away, leading the two animals, and picked up the parasol which I closed and restored to her.
“I thought you wanted to cry,” I remarked.
“I can’t,” said Carlotta, plaintively.
“And you won’t tell me why you exclude me from your universal hatred?”
Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot. The sight of it recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my eyes on the second day of her arrival in London. An old hope, an old fear, an old struggle renewed themselves. She was more adorably beautiful even than the Carlotta of the pink tus, and spiritually she was reborn. I heard her whisper:
“I can’t.”
Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that I should be Carlotta’s grandfather to the end of time. Hitherto I had felt the part. Now suddenly grey beard and slippered pantaloons are cast aside and I am young again with a glow in my heart which beats fast at her beauty. I shut my teeth.
“No,” said I to myself. “The curtain shall not rise on that farcical tragedy again.”
I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta’s mule, which with its companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.
“I think we had better ride on, Carlotta,” I said. “Mount.”
She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the saddle.
We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador. But each of us felt that something had happened.
At dinner we met as usual. Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of our travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an unprecedented thirst for information. I never gave her historical instruction with less zest.
After the meal we went onto the flat roof. Carlotta poured out my coffee at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair which was my accustomed seat. The starlit night was blue and languorous. From some cafe came the monotonous strains of Moorish music, the harsh strings and harsh men’s voices softened by the distance. Carlotta took my coffee-cup when I had finished and set it down in her granddaughterly way. Then she stood in front of me.
“Won’t you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous, darling?”
I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down. I may observe that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one and only chair on the housetop.
“Tell me about the stars,” she said.
I knew what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination. She was passing through an exquisite phase of development.
I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades. And I told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who herself was the daughter of the Sea, and how they were all pure maidens, save one, and were the companions of Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was afterwards slain by Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up there in the sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the gods for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and, lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal, shrank away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to the eye of man.
“She was ashamed,” said Carlotta in a low voice, “because she loved some one afterwards, one of the gods, who would not look at her because she had given herself to a mortal. A woman then has a fire here”—she clasped her hands to her bosom—“and wishes she could burn away to nothing, nothing, just to air, and become invisible.”
She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands down on her shoulders.
“Carlotta, my child,” said I, “what do you mean?”
She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in desperation:
“You are one of the gods, and I wish I were changed into an invisible star.”
“I don’t,” said I, huskily.
By main force I drew her to me and our lips met. She yielded, and this time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.
“It’s beautiful to snuggle up against you again,” said my ever direct Carlotta, after a while. “I haven’t done it—oh, for such a long time.” She sighed contentedly. “Seer Marcous—”
“You must call me Marcus now,” said I, somewhat fatuously.
She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder. “No. You are Marcus—or Sir Marcus—to everybody. To me you are always Seer Marcous. Seer Marcous, darling,” she half whispered after a pause. “Once I did not know the difference between a god and a mortal. It was only that morning when I woke up—”
“You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown,” said I.
“It’s the same thing,” she retorted. And then taking up her parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred. Also, a man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a god when a woman relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.
Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.
“It seems, my dear,” said I, “that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all.”
“What is Nephelococcygia?” asked Carlotta.
I relented. “It’s a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city,” said I.
Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love. Many a man will say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly. Well, I pretend not unto wisdom. Wisdom would have married me to five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal destruction. I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly. Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life, that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved nothing. I once thought so. I boasted of it in my diary when I complacently styled myself a waster in Earth’s factory. Oh, that diary! Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic record! I regard myself not as a waster—I remember a passage in Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:
“For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God? If then I were a nightingale I would do the part of a nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature and I ought to praise God; this is my work, I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song.”
No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they do, to the beauty of the earth. The lame old man has his limitations; but within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and praising God, fulfil his destiny.
Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks over my shoulder as I write these words.
“But you are not a lame old man!” she cries in indignation. “You are the youngest and strongest and cleverest man in the world!”
“What am I to do with these miraculous gifts?” I ask, laughing.
“You are to become famous,” she says, with conviction.
“Very well, my dear. We will have to go to some new land where attaining fame is easier for a beginner than in London; and we’ll send for Antoinette and Stenson to help us.”
“That will be very nice,” she observes.
So I am to become famous. Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut. And Carlotta has got a soul of her own now and means to make the most of it. It will lead me upward somewhere. But whether I am to be king of New Babylon or Prime Minister of New Zealand or lawgiver to a Polynesian tribe is a secret as yet hidden in the lap of the gods, whence Carlotta doubtless will snatch it in her own good time.
“You are writing a lot of rubbish,” says Carlotta.
“And a little truth. The mixture is Life,” I answer.
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