November 1st.
Five days ago the blow fell, and I am only now recovering; only now
awakening to the horrible pain of it.
I have gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with
far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print
which my eyes have scanned have been destitute of meaning. I have forced
myself to the mechanical task of copying piles of rough notes for my
History; I have been able to bring thereto not an atom of intelligence;
popes, princes, painters are a category of disassociated names, less
evocative of ideas than the columns in the Post Office London Directory.
I have stared stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the
trees opposite my windows. I have walked the streets in dull misery. I
have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.
There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her I have
fed into a sort of friendship. I stand vacantly in front of the cage
finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy. She turns her head
on one side, regards me with melting brown eyes, and squatting on her
haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly through the bars. Just so did
Carlotta beseech and plead. I have bemused myself with gnostic and
metempsychosic speculations. Carlotta as an ordinary human being with
an immortal soul did not exist, and what I had known and loved was but
a simulacrum of female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to
be ever seeking a fresh habitat. It was but the lingering ghost of the
humanised shell of air that was seen at Victoria station. The fateful
spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and actuated by destinies
unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed the carcass of this
little brown bear, which looks at me so strangely, so coaxingly, with
Carlotta’s eyes and Carlotta’s gestures. I asked her yesterday to come
back to me. I said that the house was empty; that the rooms ached for
the want of her. I pleaded so passionately and the eyes before me so
melted that I thought her heart was touched. But in the midst of it all
another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint and
put out her paw for buns--by which token I felt indeed that it was
Carlotta.
I have accepted the blow silently. As yet I have told no one. I have
made no inquiries. When a man is betrayed by his best friend and
deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are the only
comforters. Besides, to whom should I go for comfort? I have lived too
remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.
Not a line has reached me from Carlotta. She has gone out of my life as
lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi Effendi’s; as she
went, for aught she knew, out of that of the unhappy boy who lured her
from Alexandretta. If she heard I was dead, I wonder whether she would
say: “I am so glad!”
Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale waylaid
her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there proposed that she
should accompany him, I do not know. It matters very little. She is
gone. That is the one awful fact that signifies. No explanations, pleas
for forgiveness could make me suffer less. Were she different I might
find it in my heart to hate her. This I cannot do. How can one hate
a thing devoid of heart and soul? But one can love it--God knows how
blindly. So I have locked the door of Carlotta’s room and the key is in
my possession. It shall not be touched. It shall remain just as she left
it--and I shall mourn for her as for one dead.
For Pasquale--if I were of his own reversionary type, I should follow
him half across Europe till we met, and then one of us would kill the
other. In one respect he resembles Carlotta. He is destitute of the
moral sense. How else to solve the enigma? How else to reconcile his
flamboyant chivalry towards the consumptive washer-woman with the black
treachery towards me, in which even at that very moment his mind must
have been steeped? I knew that he had betrayed many, that where women
were concerned no considerations of honour or friendship had stood
between him and his desires; but I believed--for what reason save my own
egregious vanity, I know not--that for me he had a peculiar regard.
I believed that it was an idiosyncrasy of this wolf to look upon my
sheepfold as sacred from his depredations. I was ashamed of any doubts
that crossed my mind as to his loyalty, and did not hesitate to thrust
my lamb between his jaws. And while he was giving the lie direct to my
faith, I, poor fool, in my despair was seeking madly for his aid in the
deliverance of my darling from the power of the dog.
I have felt I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the
midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe
occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he
not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt
while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I
am conscious of writhing under lacerated vanity when I think of that
grotesque and humiliating blunder in the Hotel Metropole.
November 2d.
I have received news of the death of old Simon McQuhatty. In my
few lucid moments of late I had been thinking of seeking his kindly
presence. Now Gossip Death has taken him out across the moor. Now, dear
old pagan, he is
“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.”
November 3d.
Antoinette came up this morning with a large cardboard box addressed to
Carlotta. The messenger who brought it was waiting downstairs.
“I came to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back,” said
Antoinette, on the verge of tears.
“No,” said I, “leave it here.”
From the furrier’s label, I saw that the box contained some furs I had
ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago--she shivered so, poor child, in
this wintry climate.
“But, Monsieur,” began Antoinette, “the poor angel--”
“May want it in heaven,” said I.
The good woman stared.
“We’ll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette,” I explained, “who
placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the tombs of
the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy them for all
eternity. We’ll have to make believe, Antoinette, that this is a
tomb, for one can’t rear a pyramid in London, though it is a desert
sufficiently vast; and the little second floor room is the inner
sanctuary where the body lies in silence embalmed with sweet spices and
swathed in endless bands of linen.”
“But Mademoiselle is not dead?” cried Antoinette, with a shiver. “How
can Monsieur talk of such things? It makes me fear, the way Monsieur
speaks.”
“It makes me fear, too, Antoinette,” said I, gravely.
When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it unopened
on Carlotta’s bed and came away, relocking the door behind me.
November 9th.
I have formed a great resolution. I have devoted the week to the
envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution
came to me as something final and irrevocable. Mistrusting the counsels
of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I
have applied the test of a day’s cold reason.
I have broken a woman’s heart. I have spurned the passionate love of a
woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of great nature; a woman
of subtle brain who has been my chosen companion, my equal partner in
any intellectual path I chose to tread; a sensitive lady, with all the
graciousness of soul that term conveys. Heaven knows what a woman can
see in me to love. I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on
which the stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a
prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and unworthy
has been given that thing without price, a woman’s love. I remember
Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation. He said the love of women
was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it was to make mud pies. The
damned cynical villain! “Always reflect,” said he, on another occasion,
“that although a man may be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he
is just as pleasant. Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities
in Beasts till the end of time.” But I am such a poor and sorry Beast,
without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace Beast, dull and
didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast! Yet Judith loved me.
Instead of thanking on my knees the high gods for the boon conferred, I
rejected it, and went mad for craving of the infinitely lesser glory of
Carlotta’s baby lips and gold-bronze hair. I have broken Judith’s heart.
I will expiate the crime I have committed.
Expiate the crime! The realisation of the meaning of the words covers
me with shame. As if what I propose will be a sorry penance! That is the
danger of a man thinking, as I have always done, in metaphors. It has
given me my loose, indirect views of life, of myself, of those around
me. If I had advice to offer to a young man, I should say: “Learn to
think straight.” Expiate, indeed! I will go to her and make confession.
I will tell her that awful loneliness is crushing my soul. I will kneel
before her and beseech her of her great woman’s goodness to give me her
love again, and to be my helpmeet and my companion who will be cherished
with all that there is of loyalty in me to her life’s end. She will pity
me a little, for I have suffered, and I will pity her tenderly, in deep
sincerity, and our life together will be based on that all-understanding
which signifies all-forgiveness. And it shall be a real life together.
I used to smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude. Heaven
forgive me. I did not then know its terrors. It comforted for the first
few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me like a mysterious
and appalling force. I crave the human presence in my home. I need the
woman’s presence in my heart.
We shall live together then as man and wife, in defiance of the world.
Let the moralists blame us. We shall not care. It will make little
social difference to Judith, and as for myself, have I not already
inflicted public outrage on society? does not my Aunt Jessica regard me
as a wringer of the public conscience, and does not my Cousin Rosalie
mention me with a shudder of horror in her tepid prayers? If I really
give them cause for reprobation they will be neither wiser, nor better,
nor sorrier. And if the baronetcy flickers out in unseemly odour, I
for one shall know that the odour is sweeter than that wherein it was
lighted, when my great-grandfather earned the radiance by services
rendered at Brighton to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent. This is
the only way in which I can make Judith reparation, the only way in
which I can find comfort. We shall travel. Italy, beloved of Judith, is
calling me. Probably Florence will be our settled home. I shall give
up this house of madness. The clean sweet love of Judith will purify my
heart of this poisonous passion, and in the end there will be peace.
I have taken Carlotta’s photograph from its frame and cast it into the
fire, thus burning her for her witchcraft. I watched the flames leap and
curl. The last look she gave me before they licked away her face had its
infinite allurement, its devilish sorcery so intensified in the fierce
yellow light, that the yearning for her clutched me by the throat and
shook me through all my being.
But it is over now. I have done with Carlotta. If she thinks I am going
to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill drive me mad
like Gastibelza, _l’homme a la carabine_, in Victor Hugo’s poem, she is
vastly mistaken. From this hour henceforth I swear she is nothing to me;
I will eat and sleep and laugh as if she had never existed. Polyphemus,
curled up in Carlotta’s old place on the sofa, regards me with his
sardonic eye. He is an evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few
centuries ago would have been burned with his late mistress.
I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable
determination.
To-morrow I go to Judith.