Carlotta

“ 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.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Not that Carlotta was exactly a viper, to transform this Eden into an inferno. MacAllister might qualify for such a rôle—not she. But wherever Carlotta went, she could, and did, manage to add a touch of burlesque. Very swiftly she could turn an exquisite idyll into a roaring farce. Had she herself realized to the full this faculty, Carlotta would have been highly delighted. Next to finding "a meal-ticket," she enjoyed nothing so much as "queering things," "crabbing anyone's act." ”

“ It was an awful dinner-party. I never could hear a word anybody said, except Carlotta. They all let their words die in their throats, as if the larynx were the coffin of sound.
Carlotta tried to keep her end up, the cheerful hostess sort of thing. But Lady Lathkill somehow, in silence and apparent humility, had stolen the authority that goes with the hostess, and she hung on to it grimly, like a white ermine sucking a rabbit. Carlotta kept glancing miserably at me, to see what I thought. I didn't think anything. I just felt frozen within the tomb. ”

“ A month ago, in similar circumstances, I should have railed at Fate and anathematised Carlotta from the tip of her pink toes to the gold and bronze glory of her hair. But I am growing more kindly disposed towards Carlotta, and taking a keen interest in her spiritual development.
An inner voice, an ironical, sardonic inner voice with which there is no arguing, tells me that I am a hypocrite; that an interest in Carlotta’s spiritual development is a nice, comforting, high-sounding phrase which has deluded philosophic guardians of female youth for many generations. ”

“ Carlotta, darling, help me keep the cloud away.”
”I will, mother,” said Carlotta, dampening a cloth and laying it on her forehead; but even as the cool moisture touched her skin the vacant look came again to her face, and she asked, looking at me with earnest inquiry: ”John, have you brought your father home; is the grave ready? Go have it made wider. I am coming to lie by his side. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To say that I love Carlotta is to express Niagara in terms of a fountain. I crave her with everything vital in heart and brain. She is an obsession. The scent of her hair is in my nostrils, the cooing dove-notes of her voice murmur in my ears, I shut my eyes and feel the rose-petals of her lips on my cheek, the witchery of her movements dances before my eyes. ”

“ In an instant the young girl sprang back and put the width of the room between them.
“If you dare to touch me I will kill you,” she cried sharply, at the same time snatching a small ivory handled revolver from Carlotta’s dressing table.
“I believe you would,” said the man, staring at her admiringly. “By gad! but you are a beauty! How I would like to tame you!”
“What does ail you, Ila?” said Carlotta, walking toward Marion and speaking very coldly. “Put up that thing, dear, and come and sit down. These gentlemen are my friends—they will not harm you.” ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I’ll be a poet even though you do scratch my wrist with your hind claws, Polyphemus.”
There! Empty your milk-jug and I will empty my bottle. The wine smells of hyacinth. It is a revelation. Her hair smells of violets, but it is the delicate odour of hyacinth that came from her bare young arms when she clasped them round my neck; et sa peau, on dirait du satin. Carlotta is in the wine, Carlotta with her sorcery and her laughter and her youth, and I drink Carlotta. ”

“ Here Carlotta closed her eyes dramatically, and in a somnambulist's voice intoned,—
"I see gold, dearie, showers of gold, an' you in the midst of it——"
"Well, Carlotta, if you're good, maybe you'll have your wish," said the gambler enigmatically.
"The gold lissens well—" she nodded, "but that long journey—I don't like it." ”

“ As the boat entered a great lagoon, and slowly made its way through the Canal della Giudecca to the landing-place, Carlotta grew more than ever vigilant. The children had hoped against hope that some way of escape might appear when they reached the dock, but Carlotta remained at their elbows every moment, and under her watchful eyes they could not even speak to each other, much less to any one else. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He took the flowers from his wife, and looking mournfully upon them, said, ‘When we cross the waters to visit my native land, we will take with us some of your precious roses, beloved, and beautify my mother’s silent home; and now,’ he continued, twining his arm round her waist, and leading her to the harp, ‘sing me that little song I wrote while yet a student in old Rome.’ Pressing her lips upon his brow, Carlotta seated herself, and sung the song, which she had set to music. The air was soft and melancholy, and the sweet tones of the singer were tremulous with emotion. ”

“ In vain poor old Ugolone growled and slapped at her with his clumsy paws. He was always too slow to catch her.
The children were so absorbed in watching this drama that they did not notice what Carlotta was doing meanwhile, but later, when they looked for their own clothes again, they had mysteriously disappeared, and were not seen again.
When they had finished breakfast, Carlotta called to Beppina, “Come here, poverina! Your hair is full of straw. I will fix it for you.” ”

“ Carlotta sneered as she came a little nearer.
“I thought your goodness was all put on,” she said, coldly. “So you prefer a ‘property man’ to a gentleman, do you?”
The beautiful young girl turned on her heel with a disdainful glance. She had had quite enough of this sort of thing for one evening.
As she walked deliberately to her dressing-room, both Carlotta and Green stared after her, and in spite of their anger they could not conceal their admiration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She would frequently rise with a sudden start, walk hurriedly to the window, and stand for a long time in an attitude of fixed attention, then mournfully shaking her head to and fro, would slowly resume her accustomed seat, and in a low voice repeat ‘not yet—not yet—Paul still lingers in Rome.’ Carlotta remained in this melancholy state during the time I was in Florence, but a letter received since my return home informs me that after a short interval, in which reason resumed her sway, the sufferer calmly departed, coupling the name of her beloved with the rest and the bliss of Paradise. ”

“ The ladies of the party have asked her to go to see them. She must have some society, I suppose, and I must go with her. They belong to the half smart set, eager to conceal beneath a show of raffishness their plentiful lack of intellect and their fundamental bourgeois respectability. In spite of Pasquale’s brilliance and Carlotta’s rapturous enjoyment I sat mumchance and depressed, out of my element.
My work is at a standstill, and Carlotta is my life. I fear I am deteriorating.
On Judith, whom I have seen once or twice since Carlotta’s return, I called this afternoon. She is unhappy. ”

“ They were born of our will and our disembodiment. Oh, I feel like the Bible. Clothe me with flesh again, and wrap my bones with sinew, and let the fountain of blood cover me. My spirit is like a naked nerve on the air."
Carlotta has ceased to weep. She sat with her head dropped, as if asleep. The rise and fall of her small, slack breasts was still heavy, but they were lifting on a heaving sea of rest. It was as if a slow, restful dawn were rising in her body, while she slept. ”

“ Still, as she flung herself like a full-fed panther on the bed in her hotel room, Carlotta was rather pleased with herself, that is as long as she could shut out that warning prophecy which sometimes threatened to become an obsession. Her heartache was lost in the sense of the dramatic, in her delighted approval of the makeup of the loungers in the hotel, small-part people in the production she was staging. The situation held sufficient of both tragedy and farce to satisfy the most jaded appetite, and there was promised a most astonishing denouement and curtain, that night. ”

“ They love their husbands.”
“You amaze me,” said I.
“Ye-es,” said Carlotta.
“But in England, a man wants a woman to love him before he marries her.”
“How can she?” asked Carlotta.
This was a staggering question.
“I don’t know,” said I, “but she dus.”
“Then before I marry a man in England I must love him? But I shall die without a husband!”
“I don’t think so,” said I.
“I must begin soon,” said Carlotta, with a laugh.
A sinuous motion of her serpentine young body enabled her to bend her face down to mine.
“Shall I love Seer Marcous? But how shall I know when I am in love?” ”

“ McMurray told me the reason of her distress. She had found Carlotta in tears. Never could she face me in that low cut evening bodice. It outraged her modesty. It could not be the practice of European women to bare themselves so immodestly before men. It was only the evidence of her visitor’s own plump neck and shoulders that convinced her, and she suffered herself to be led downstairs in an agony of self-consciousness.
When we entered the box at the Empire, a troupe of female acrobats were doing their turn. Carlotta uttered a gasp of dismay, blushed burning red, and shrank back to the door. ”

“ We went into the dining room, where early summer tea was already laid. Carlotta did not wish anything, and mother withdrew in a short time with her. After the silence that succeeded, for a few seconds, [94] their retirement, father said (and I knew by the twinkle in his eye he was enjoying the thorns on which I sat) :
“Lulie,” sighting at her with one eye through his iced tea, “I am afraid you will have a powerful rival in Carlotta. You must secure all your beaux with double chains or she will steal them away. ”