William John Locke

“ I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me. The cat regarded us for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if he had quitted Carlotta of his own accord, and walked away in a state of dignified boredom.
“Hamdi is like a pig and an elephant and a great fat turkey,” said Carlotta.
“If all the world were beautiful,” I exclaimed, “such a thing as our appreciation of beauty would not exist. I should not even be aware that my Carlotta was beautiful.” ”

“ A miserable business is civilisation!
“Did you ever hear of a woman getting youth out of such a bargain?” she retorted with some vehemence.
“As women systematically underpay cabmen,” said I, “so do they try to underpay the devil; and he is one too many for them.”
“I am afraid,” said Pasquale, “that the old days of shrewd bargains are over. There is a glut in the soul-market and they only fetch the price of old bones.”
“He is talking foolish things that I do not understand,” said Carlotta, putting her hand on my arm. ”

“ Passion had died. Hope—the hope of hearing the patter of a child’s feet about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life—hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to me an infinitely loved sister—or daughter—or granddaughter even—so old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world. ”

“ I had prejudiced Judith against Carlotta. I had aroused the Ishmaelite—her hand against every woman and every woman’s hand against her—that survives in all her sex.
“My dear Judith,” said I, “if a wicked fairy godmother had decreed that a healthy rhinoceros should be my housemate you would have extended me your sympathy. But because Fate has inflicted on me an equally embarrassing guest in the shape of a young woman—”
“My dear Marcus,” interrupted Judith, “the healthy rhinoceros would know twenty times as much about women as you do.” ”

“ Pasquale must be right. A hundred remembered incidents go to prove it. I recollect now that Judith has rallied me on my obtuseness.
The sole end of all my Aunt Jessica’s manoeuvring is to marry me to Dora, and Dora, like Barkis, is willing. Marry Dora! The thought is a febrifuge, a sudorific! She would be thumping discords on my wornout strings all day long. In a month I should be a writhing madman. I would sooner, infinitely sooner, marry Carlotta. Carlotta is nature; Dora isn’t even art. Why, in the name of men and angels, should I marry Dora? ”

“ She was my appointed task, even as her husband was Judith’s. I recognised in myself the man with the one talent. The deep wisdom of the parable can be taken to inmost heart for comfort only by men of little destinies. With infinite love and patience to mould Carlotta into a sweet, good woman, a wise mother of the child that was to be—that was the inglorious task which Providence had set me to accomplish. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Has the human soul ever so poignantly expressed its craving for quietude? I fancy I should have been a heart’s friend of that dead man, who, like myself, loved the cool and quiet shadow, and was not allowed to enjoy it in this world. I may not get the calm I desire, but at any rate my existence shall not be turned upside down by mad passion for a woman. As for the social-contract aspect of marriage, I want no better housekeeper than Antoinette; and my dining-table having no guests does not need a lady to grace its foot; I have no a priori craving to add to the population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll, upon which she had fitted all the finery she could lay her hands on. Apparently the atmosphere of the great shops had acted on Carlotta like an anaesthetic. She had moved in a sensuous dream of drapery, wherein the choice-impulse was paralysed. The only articles upon which, in an unclouded moment, she had set her heart—and that with a sudden passion of covetousness—were a pair of red, high-heeled shoes and a cheap red parasol.
“You have no idea what it means,” said Mrs. McMurray, “to buy everything that a woman needs.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Until I saw her perched in the corner of the sofa, with her legs tucked up under her, and the light playing a game of magic amid the reds and golds and browns of her hair, while she cheerily discoursed to us of Hamdi’s villainy, I never noticed the dull decorum of this room. I was struck with the decorative value of mere woman.
I must break myself of the habit of wandering off on a meditative tangent to the circle of conversation. I was brought back by hearing Pasquale say:
“So you’re going to marry an Englishman. It’s all fixed and settled, eh?”
“Of course,” laughed Carlotta. ”

“ Why, oh, why has Judith gone to Paris? Had she been in town I could have shot Carlotta into Tottenham Mansions, and gone home to my dinner and Cristoforo da Costa with a light heart. Judith would have found Carlotta vastly entertaining. She would have washed her body and analysed her temperament. But Judith was in retreat with Delphine Carrere, and has left me alone to bear the responsibilities of life—and Carlotta. ”

“ But to-day there has been no trace of “temperament.” She has shown herself the pleasant, witty Judith she knows I like her to be, with a touch of coquetry thrown in on her own account. She even spoke amiably of Carlotta. I have not had so thoroughly enjoyable a day with Judith for a long time.
I don’t think she set herself deliberately to please me. That I should resent. I know that women in order to please an unsuspecting male will walk weary miles by his side with blisters on their feet and a beatific smile on their faces. But Judith has far too much commonsense. ”

“ This was too hard a nut for Carlotta to crack. She was silent for a moment. She reverted, ruefully, to the intelligible.
“I thought I was beautiful,” she said.
“Who told you so?”
“Pasquale.”
“Pasquale has no sense,” said I. “There are men to whom all women who are not seventy and toothless and rheumy at the eyes are beautiful. Pasquale has said the same to every woman he has met. He is a Lothario and a Don Juan and a Caligula and a Faublas and a Casanova.” ”

“ Let it be remembered that “women are of no great account” is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.
To write much of Carlotta’s happiness would be to treat of sacred things at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay on her bosom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ I could commit an immortal folly for no woman who ever made this planet more lustrous to its Bruderspharen.
I don’t understand Judith. It doesn’t very greatly matter. Many things I don’t understand, the spiritual attitude towards himself, for example, of the intelligent juggler who expends his life’s energies in balancing a cue and three billiard-balls on the tip of his nose. But I know that Judith understands me, and therein lies the advantage I gain from our intimacy. She gauges, to an absurdly subtle degree, the depth of my affection. She is really an incomparable woman. ”

“ I have lived like an automaton for forty years, and I suddenly awake to find myself a man. I don’t care whether I sleep or not. I feel gloriously, exultingly young. I am but twenty. As I have never lived, I have never grown old. Life translates itself into music—a wild “Invitation to the Waltz” by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta’s corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. ”