May 25th.
Shall I be accused of harbouring a bevy of odalisques at No. 20 Lingfield Terrace? Calumny and Exaggeration walk abroad, arm in arm, even on the north side of Regent’s Park. If they had spied Carlotta at my window this morning, they would have looked in for afternoon tea at my Aunt Jessica’s and have waylaid Mrs. Ralph Ordeyne outside the Oratory. The question is: Shall Truth anticipate them? I think not. Every family has its irrepressible, impossible, unpractical member, its enfant terrible, who is forever doing the wrong thing with the best intentions. Truth is the enfant terrible of the Virtues. Some times it puts them to the blush and throws them into confusion; at others it blusters like a blatant liar; at others, again, it stutters and stammers like a detected thief. There is no knowing how Truth may behave, so I shall not let it visit my relations.
I must confess, however, that I feared the possible passing by of the two decrepit cronies, when Carlotta stood at my open French window this morning. She is really indecently beautiful. She was wearing a deep red silk peignoir, open at the throat, unashamedly Parisian, which clung to every salient curve of her figure. I wondered where, in the name of morality, she had procured the garment. I learned later that it was the joy and pride of Antoinette’s existence; for once, in the days long ago, when she was femme de chambre to a luminary of the cafes concerts, it had met around her waist. She had treasured the cast-off finery of this burned-out star—she beamed in the seventies—for all these years, and now its immortal devilry transfigured Carlotta. She was also washed specklessly clean. An aroma that no soap or artificial perfume could give disengaged itself from her as she moved. Her gold-bronze hair was superbly ordered. I noticed her arms which the sleeves of the gay garment left bare to the elbows; the skin was like satin. “Et sa peau! On dirait du satin.” Confound Antoinette! She had the audacity, too, to come down with bare feet. It was a revelation of pink, undreamed-of loveliness in tus.
I repeat she is indecently beautiful. A chit of a girl of eighteen (for that I learn is her age) has no right to flaunt the beauty that should be the appanage of the woman of seven and twenty. She should be modestly well-favoured, as becomes her childish stage of development. She looked incongruous among my sober books, and I regarded her with some resentment. I dislike the exotic. I prefer geraniums to orchids. I have a row of pots of the former on my balcony, and the united efforts of Stenson, Antoinette, and myself have not yet succeeded in making them bloom; but I love the unassuming velvety leaves. Carlotta is a flaring orchid and produces on my retina a sensation of disquiet.
I broke the tidings of the tragedy as gently as I could. I had news of Harry, I said, gravely. She merely looked interested and asked me when he was coming.
“I’m afraid he will never come,” said I.
“If he does not come, then I can stay here with you?”
Her eyes betrayed a quiver of anxiety. For the life of me I could not avoid the ironical.
“If you will condescend to dwell as a member of my family beneath my humble roof.”
The irony was lost on her. She uttered a joyous little cry and held out both her hands to me. Her eyes danced.
“Oh, I am glad he is not coming. I don’t like him any more. I love to stay here with you.”
I took both the hands in mine. Mortal man could not have done otherwise.
“Have you thought why it is that you will never see Harry again?”
She shook her beautiful head and held it to one side and puckered up her brows, like a wistful terrier.
“Is he dead?”
“Would it grieve you, if he were?”
“No-o,” she replied, thoughtfully.
“Then,” said I, dropping her hands and turning away, “Harry is dead.”
She stood silent for a couple of minutes, regarding the row of pink toes that protruded beneath the peignoir. At last her bosom shook with a sigh. She glanced up at me sweetly.
“I am so glad,” she said.
That is all she has vouchsafed to say with regard to the unhappy young man. “She was so glad!” She has not even asked how he met his death. She has simply accepted my statement. Harry is dead. He has gone out of her life like yesterday’s sunshine or yesterday’s frippery. If I had told her that yesterday’s cab-horse had broken his neck, she could not be more unconcerned. Nay, she is glad. Harry had not treated her nicely. He had boxed her up in a cabin where she had been sick, and had subjected her to various other discomforts. I, on the contrary, had surrounded her with luxuries and dressed her in red silk. She rather dreaded Harry’s coming. When she learned that this was improbable she was relieved. His death had turned the improbable into the impossible. It was the end of the matter. She was so glad!
Yet there must have been some tender passage in their brief intercourse. He must have kissed her during their flight from home to steamer. Her young pulses must have throbbed a little faster at the sight of his comely face.
What kind of a mythological being am I housing? Did she come at all out of Hamdi Effendi’s harem? Is she not rather some strange sea-creature that clambered on board the vessel and bewitched the miserable boy, sucked the soul out of him, and drove him to destruction? Or is she a Vampire? Or a Succubus? Or a Hamadryad? Or a Salamander?
One thing, I vow she is not human.
If only Judith were here to advise me! And yet I have an uneasy feeling that Judith will suggest, with a certain violence that is characteristic of her, the one course which I cannot follow: to send Carlotta back to Hamdi Effendi. But I cannot break my word. I would rather, far rather, break Carlotta’s beautiful neck. I have not written to Judith. Nor, by the way, have I received a letter from her. Delphine has been whirling her off her legs, and she is ashamed to confess the delusion of the sequestered life. I wish I were enjoying myself half as much as Judith.
“I have adopted Mademoiselle,” said I to Antoinette this morning. “If she returned to Asia Minor they would put a string round her neck, tie her up in a sack, and throw her into the sea.”
“That would be a pity,” said Antoinette, warmly.
“Cela depend,” said I. “Anyhow she is here, and here she remains.”
“In that case,” said Antoinette, “has Monsieur considered that the poor angel will need clothes and articles of toilette—and this and that and the other?”
“And shoes to hide her shameless tus,” I said.
“They are the most beautiful toes I have ever seen!” cried Antoinette in imbecile admiration. She has bewitched that old woman already.
I put on my hat and went to Wellington Road to consult Mrs. McMurray. Heaven be thanked, thought I, for letting me take her little boy the day before yesterday to see the other animals, and thus winning a mother’s heart. She will help me out of my dilemma. Unfortunately she was not alone. Her husband, who is on the staff of a morning newspaper, was breakfasting when I arrived. He is a great ruddy bearded giant with a rumbling thunder of a laugh like the bass notes of an organ. His assertion of the masculine principle in brawn and beard and bass somewhat overpowers a non-muscular, clean-shaven, and tenor person like myself. Mrs. McMurray, on the contrary, is a small, bright bird of a woman.
I told my amazing story from beginning to end, interrupted by many Hoo-oo-oo-oo’s from McMurray.
“You may laugh,” said I, “but to have a mythical being out of Olympiodorus quartered on you for life is no jesting matter.”
“Olymp—?” began McMurray.
“Yes,” I snapped.
“Bring her this afternoon, Sir Marcus, when this unsympathetic wretch has gone to his club,” said his wife, “and I’ll take her out shopping.”
“But, dear lady,” I cried in despair, “she has but one garment—and that a silk dressing-gown of horrible depravity that belonged to a dancer of the second Empire! She is also barefoot.”
“Then I’ll come round myself and see what can be done.”
“And by Jove, so will I!” cried McMurray.
“You’ll do such thing,” said his wife
“If I gave you a cheque for 100,” said I, “do you think you could get her what she wants, to go on with?”
“A hundred pounds!” The little lady uttered a delighted gasp and I thought she would have kissed me. McMurray brought his sledgehammer of a hand down on my shoulder.
“Man!” he roared. “Do you know what you are doing—casting a respectable wife and mother of a family loose among London drapery shops with a hundred pounds in her pocket? Do you think she will henceforward give a thought to her home or husband? Do you want to ruin my domestic peace, drive me to drink, and wreck my household?”
“If you do that again,” said I, rubbing my shoulder, “I’ll give her two hundred.”
When I returned Carlotta was sitting, Turkish fashion, on a sofa, smoking a cigarette (to which she had helped herself out of my box) and turning over the pages of a book. This sign of literary taste surprised me. But I soon found it was the second volume of my edition de luxe of Louandre’s Les Arts Somptuaires, to whose place on the shelves sheer feminine instinct must have guided her. I announced Mrs. McMurray’s proposed visit. She jumped to her feet, ravished at the prospect, and sent my beautiful book (it is bound in tree-calf and contains a couple of hundred exquisitely coloured plates) flying onto the floor. I picked it up tenderly, and laid it on my writing-table.
“Carlotta,” said I, “the first thing you have to learn here is that books in England are more precious than babies in Alexandretta. If you pitch them about in this fashion you will murder them and I shall have you hanged.”
This checked her sumptuary excitement. It gave her food for reflection, and she stood humbly penitent, while I went further into the subject of clothes.
“In fact,” I concluded, “you will be dressed like a lady.” She opened the book at a gaudy picture, “France, XVI(ieme) Siecle—Saltimbanque et Bohemmienne,” and pointed to the female mountebank. This young person wore a bright green tunic, bordered with gold and finished off at the elbows and waist with red, over an undergown of flaring pink, the sleeves of which reached her wrist; she was crowned with red and white carnations stuck in ivy.
“I will get a dress like that,” said Carlotta.
I wondered how far Mrs. McMurray possessed the colour-sense, and I trembled. I tried to explain gently to Carlotta the undesirability of such a costume for outdoor wear in London; but with tastes there is no disputing, and I saw that she was but half-convinced. She will require training in aesthetics.
She is very submissive. I said, “Run away now to Antoinette,” and she went with the cheerfulness of a child. I must rig up a sitting-room for her, as I cannot have her in here. Also for the present she must take her meals in her own apartments. I cannot shock the admirable Stenson by sitting down at table with her in that improper peignoir. Besides, as Antoinette informs me, the poor lamb eats meat with her fingers, after the fashion of the East. I know what that is, having once been present at an Egyptian dinner-party in Cairo, and pulled reeking lumps of flesh out of the leg of mutton. Ugh! But as she has probably not sat down to a meal with a man in her life, her banishment from my table will not hurt her feelings. She must, however, be trained in Christian table-manners, as well as in aesthetics; also in a great many other things.
Mrs. McMurray arrived with a tape-measure, a pencil, and a notebook.
“First,” she announced, “I will measure her all over. Then I will go out and procure her a set of out-door garments, and tomorrow we will spend the whole livelong day in the shops. Do you mind if I use part of the 100 for the hire of a private brougham?”
“Have a coach and six, my dear Mrs. McMurray,” I said. “It will doubtless please Carlotta better.”
I summoned Carlotta and performed the ceremony of introduction. To my surprise she was perfectly at her ease and with the greatest courtesy of manner invited the visitor to accompany her to her own apartments.
When Mrs. McMurray returned to the drawing-room she wore an expression that can only be described as indescribable.
“What, my dear Sir Marcus, do you think is to be the ultimate destiny of that young person?”
“She shall learn type-writing,” said I, suddenly inspired, “and make a fair copy of my Renaissance Morals.”
“She would make a very fair copy indeed of Renaissance Morals,” returned the lady, dryly.
“Is she so very dreadful?” I asked in alarm. “The peignoir, I know—”
“Perhaps that has something to do with it.”
“Then, for heaven’s sake,” said I, “dress her in drabs and greys and subfusc browns. Cut off her hair and give her a row of buttons down the back.”
My friend’s eyes sparkled.
“I am going,” said she, “to have the day of my life tomorrow.”
Carlotta had already gone to sleep, so Antoinette informed me, when the results of Mrs. McMurray’s shopping came home. I am glad she has early habits. It appears she has spent a happy and fully occupied afternoon over a pile of French illustrated comic papers in the possession of my excellent housekeeper.
I wonder whether it is quite judicious to make French comic papers her initiation into the ideas of Western civilisation. Into this I must inquire. I must also talk seriously to her with a view to her ultimate destiny. But as my view would be distorted by the red dressing-gown, I shall wait until she is decently clad. I think I shall have to set apart certain hours of the day for instructive conversation with Carlotta. I shall have to develop her mind, of which she distinctly has the rudiments. For the rest of the day she must provide entertainment out of her own resources. This her oriental habits of seclusion will render an easy task, for I will wager that Hamdi Effendi did not concern himself greatly as to the way in which the ladies of his harem filled up their time. And now I come to think of it, he certainly did not allow Carlotta to sprawl about his own private and particular drawing-room. I will not westernise her too rapidly. The Turkish educational system has its merits.
This, in its way is comforting. If only I could accept her as a human creature. But when I think of her callous reception of the tidings of the unhappy boy’s death, my spirit fails me. Such a being would run a carving-knife into you, as you slept, without any compunction, and when you squeaked, she would laugh. Look at her base ingratitude to the good Hamdi Effendi, who took her in before she was born and has treated her as a daughter all her life. No: her spiritual attitude all through has been that of the ladies who used to visit St. Anthony—in the leisure moments when they were not actively engaged in temptation. I don’t believe her father was an English vice-consul. He was Satan.
I wonder what she told Mrs. McMurray.
I have been thinking over the matter to-night. The good lady was wrong. Whatever were the morals of the Renaissance, personalities were essentially positive. They were devilishly wicked or angelically good. There was nothing rosse, non-moral about the Renaissance Italian. The women were strongly tempered. I love to believe the story told by Machiavelli and Muratori of Catherine Sforza in the citadel of Forli. “Surrender or we slay your children which we hold as hostages,” cried the besiegers. “Kill them if you like. I can breed more to avenge them.” It is the speech of a giant nature. It awakens something enthusiastic within me; although such a lady would be an undesirable helpmeet for a mild mannered man like myself.
And then again there is Bonna, the woman for whose career I desired to consult the prime authority Cristoforo da Costa. I have been sketching her into my chapter tonight. Here is a peasant girl caught up to his saddle-bow by a condottiere, Brunoro, during some village raid. She fights like a soldier by his side. He is imprisoned in Valencia by Alfonso of Naples, languishes in a dungeon for ten years. And for ten years Bonna goes from court to court in Europe and from prince to prince, across seas and mountains, unwearying, unyielding, with the passion of heaven in her heart and the courage of hell in her soul, urging and soliciting her man’s release. After ten long years she succeeds. And then they are married. What were her tumultuous feelings as she stood by that altar? The old historian does not say; but the very glory of God must have flooded her being when, in the silence of the bare church, the little bell tinkled to tell her that the Host was raised, and her love was made blessed for all eternity. And then she goes away with him and fights in the old way by his side for fifteen years. When he is killed, she languishes and dies within the year. Porcelli sees them in 1455. Brunoro, an old, squinting, paralysed man. Bonna, a little shrivelled, yellow old woman, with a quiver on her shoulder, a bow in her hand; her grey hair is covered by a helmet and she wears great military boots. The picture is magical. There is infinite pathos in the sight of the two withered, crippled, grotesque forms from which all the glamour of manhood and beauty have departed, and infinite awe in the thought of the holy communion of the unconquerable and passionate souls. I wonder it has not come down to us as one of the great love-stories of the world.
Elements such as these sway the Morals of the Renaissance.
But I am taking Mrs. McMurray too seriously; and it is really not a bad idea to have Carlotta taught type-writing.
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