Lotta

“ The gardens lie below, and the tennis courts where I sometimes play with a very nice girl, the only person in the hotel with whom I have made friends. She is a year older than I, and has come to Cap Ferrino with her brother, a doctor—or a medical student, who is going to be a doctor. He passed his M.B. exam at Edinburgh just before they left home, Lotta told me. He came to Italy entirely on his sister's account. She had a troublesome chest attack last summer and was ordered to winter abroad. They are orphans, ordered to winter abroad quite alone in the world, and so fond of each other. ”

“ But then, you see, the worst of it is, a man seldom comes to vineries and pineries at Tulse-hill till he is on the shady side of forty; and as I am not in favour of mercenary marriages, I don't care to force any of my City connection upon poor Lotta. In the neighbourhood of the Stock Exchange there is no sharper man of business than your humble servant; but I don't care to bring business habits to Bayswater. Long before Lotta left school, I had made up my mind never to come between her and her own inclination in the matrimonial line ”

“ Look here, Marie, there is my hand upon it. I will never dance with him again—never—never—never. Why was he so hard upon Herr Crippel last night?”
“Was he hard upon Herr Crippel?”{35}
“He said that Herr Crippel was too old to play the zither; too old! Some people are too young to understand. I shall go home, I shall not stay to sup with you to-night.”
“Lotta, you must stay for supper.”
“I will not sup at his table. I have quarrelled with him. It is all over. Fritz Planken is as free as the air for me.”
“Lotta, do not say anything in a hurry. At any rate do not do anything in a hurry.” ”

“ Lotta has played successful engagements in England. She has always been accompanied by her mother, who has successfully managed her financial affairs. Lotta's earnings have been large, and her investments represent about a million dollars. ”

“ But she knew also that he would make the attempt.
“What! the zither?” said Fritz. “He will break down as sure as he is a living man.”
“Let us hope not,” said Carl Stobel.
“I love to hear him play the zither better than anything,” said Lotta.
“It used to be very good,” said Fritz; “but everybody says he has lost his touch. When a man has the slightest feeling of nervousness he is done for the zither.”
“H—sh; let him have his chance at any rate,” said Marie. ”

“ At eight o'clock, at nightfall, our maneuver being at an end, I embarked with Yves on board a sampan; this time it is he who is carrying me off and taking me back to my home.
On land, a delicious perfume of new-mown hay greets us, and the road across the mountains lies bathed in glorious moonlight. We go straight up to Diou-djen-dji to join Chrysanthème; I feel almost remorseful, although I hardly show it, for my neglect of her.
Looking up, I recognize from afar my little house, perched on high. It is wide open and lit up; I even hear the sound of guitar. ”

“ That I might remain hidden as long as possible I crouched lower and still lower, and I felt the joy a little Indian boy feels when he is in his beloved forest.
Suddenly I heard someone call: “Pierre! Pierre! Dear Pierre!” I did not reply, but instead lay as close as possible to the ground, and sought to hide under the weeds and the waving branches of the asparagus.
Still I heard: “Pierre, Pierre.” It was Lucette; I knew her voice, and from the mockery of her tone I felt sure that she had spied me. But I could not see her although I looked about me very carefully: no one was visible! ”

“ The two smugglers, immovable on their chairs, appear as silhouettes, of wide shoulders on all this white of the walls, and of their lost features one hardly sees the black more intense of the mustache and the eyes. The two nuns, whose outlines are unified by the veil, seem already to be two spectres all black—
“Wait, Sister Mary Angelique,” says the Mother Superior to the transformed young girl who was formerly named Gracieuse, “wait sister till I light the lamp in order that you may at least see your brother's face!” ”

“ Here is the well, surrounded by bamboos, where we are wont to make a nocturnal halt for Chrysantheme to take breath. Yves begs me to throw forward the red gleam of my lantern, in order to recognize the place, for it marks our halfway resting-place.
And at last, at last, here is our house! The door is closed, all is silent and dark. Our panels have been carefully shut by M. Sucre and Madame Prune; the rain streams down the wood of our old black walls. ”

“ At about ten o'clock, on our return from one of the fashionable tea-houses we constantly frequent, we arrived,—Yves, Chrysanthème and myself,—at the certain familiar angle of the principal street, the certain turn where we must take leave of the lights and noises of the town, to clamber up the black steps and steep lanes which lead to our home at Diou-djen-dji.
There, before beginning our ascension, we must first buy lanterns from an old trades-woman called Madame Très-Propre, [E] whose faithful customers we are. It is amazing what a quantity of these paper lanterns we consume. ”

“ Roving, restless, concerned solely with the misery of his own soul and the beauty of the world, Loti carries his dreams with him to the remotest shores, and in order to distract his thoughts from life which bores him, he has gathered together extraordinary colours, the brilliant dust of picturesque ruins, and has created for himself a capricious and sensual world, in which nothing, perhaps, is real excepting his own melancholy, yet which amuses and enchants him with its prodigious fund of poetry. ”

“ Arthur were in England,” sighed Lottie.
“You earns wages,” said her brother abruptly, as if he had suddenly lighted on some fountain of wealth.
“My quarter’s wages won’t be due till next June,” replied Lottie.
“Could your master do anything?” suggested Deborah; “it is said about here that he’s rich.”
Lottie shook her head with a very significant expression. “He may have plenty of money,” she said slowly, “but I’m sure he don’t like to part with it; there’s nothing to be got out of he.”
“Here’s the baker’s cart come for you, Lottie,” cried her brother, who had sauntered up to the window. ”

“ Lot, the nephew of Abraham, receives in his house two angels disguised as pilgrims; the inhabitants of Sodom entertain impure desires of these angels; Lot, who had two daughters promised in marriage, offers to abandon them to the people instead of the two strangers. These young women must have been strangely familiar with evil ways, since the first thing they do after the destruction of their town by a rain of fire, and after their mother has been changed into a pillar of salt, is to intoxicate their father on two consecutive nights, in order to sleep with him in succession. ”

“ Suddenly from below, clac! clac! two dry hands are clapped together; it is Madame Prune’s warning to the Great Spirit. And immediately after her prayer breaks forth, soars upward in a shrill nasal falsetto, like a morning alarum when the hour for waking has come, the mechanical noise of a spring let go and running down.
“... The richest woman in the world! Cleansed from all my sins, O Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami! in the river of Kamo.”
And this extraordinary bleating, hardly human, scatters and changes my ideas, which were very nearly clear at the moment I awoke. ”

“ The Lotos (Lotus) is held in the highest veneration in India, inclusive of Thibet and Nepaul. Amongst the Brahmans and enthusiastic Hindoos, no object in nature is looked on with more superstition; and their books abound in mystical allusions to this lovely aquatic. Being esteemed the most beautiful of vegetables, it not unappropriately furnishes a name for the Hindoo queen of beauty, and Kamal or Kamala is a name of Lakshmi: as is Padma or Pedma, another Sanscrit appellation for both. ”

“ At last my vehicle stops, and my djin, with many smiles and precautions lest any fresh rivers should stream down my back, lowers the hood of the cart; there is a break in the storm, and the rain has ceased. I had not yet seen his face; by exception to the general rule, he is good-looking;—a young man of about thirty years of age, of intelligent and strong appearance, and an open countenance. Who could have foreseen that a few days later this very djin.—But no, I will not anticipate, and run the risk of throwing beforehand any discredit on Chrysanthème. ”

“ Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He [Pg 126] moved in the upper layers of feeling—feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for woman—and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover. His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found him fresh, tender, elemental—and as sincere as the temporary lover can be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed sea he felt a vast concern. ”

“ We thought of you first” (with a look at Fatou) , “because it is well known that you are fond of this country. On your return from Gadiangué, you would be sent to complete your service at St Louis; that has been arranged with the Governor. I swear to you that it would be so.”
... “In any case, we shall never have time,” interrupted Jean, who felt that he was lost, and was clutching at a straw.
“Oh yes,” ... said Pierre Boyer, with a ray of joy already brightening his eyes. “We shall have plenty of time; there is all the afternoon before us. You will have nothing to bother about. ”

“ Many of my friends, on their return home from that country, had told me about it, and I knew a great deal; the Garden of Flowers is a tea-house, an elegant rendezvous. There I should inquire for a certain Kangourou-San, who is at the same time interpreter, laundryman, and confidential agent for the intercourse of races. Perhaps this very evening, if all went well, I should be introduced to the bride destined for me by mysterious fate. This thought kept my mind on the alert during the panting journey we made, the djin and I, one dragging the other, under the merciless downpour. ”

“ From the depths of their two young hearts ascended, little by little, a similar distress, poisoning the happiness offered over there, in that America from which they would never return.—And the little, nocturnal censers of jessamine, of honeysuckle, of linden, continued to throw into the air exquisite puffs to intoxicate them; the darkness that enveloped them seemed more and more caressing and soft; in the silence of the village and of the country, the tree-toads gave, from moment to moment, their little flute-note, which seemed a very discreet love call, under the velvet of the moss ”

“ My good old parents live at Blidah, and they are waiting for me. They have no [126] one but me. You, Peyral, will understand what it means to return to one’s home.”
“Very well, then, yes!” said Jean, pushing his red cap to the back of his head, and stamping on the ground, “Yes! I agree. I will exchange with you and stay.”
The spahi Boyer clasped him in his arms and embraced him. Fatou, still grovelling on the ground, uttered a cry of triumph, then hid her face against Jean’s knees, with a kind of wild animal’s roar, ending in a burst of hysterical laughter, followed by sobs. ”

“ I can recall passages in etchings of those dim, night-palaces of Venice, up which the sad-lighted sea sends faint, equivocating shivers, that give me the exact sensation of lines of Loti. They rise to mind from depths of consciousness. And without volition. Now that Loti is traveling and writing of what he sees no more, and Whistler’s etching needle is stilled, there are two joys fewer in the world for me. ”

“ Lotte spoke hopefully and cheerfully of the future, even though she extracted not a sound, not even a monosyllable, in reply; but she was not disconcerted at this, for she knew, by sad experience, the heart of the young mourner upon her arm was too full for speech. The increasing darkness spreading over the wide, treeless expanse, contrasted by the distant lights, made the surrounding place seem drear, and caused Lotte—who was not much more courageous, when in the midst of a wide moor-like space, in the dark, than most of her sex—to increase her speed. ”

“ Above the assembled heads, above the woolen caps and the hair ornamented with kerchiefs, was accentuated that stormy sky which the southern winds, when they are about to finish, bring always. The air had assumed an absolute limpidity, as if it had become rarified, rarified unto emptiness. The mountains seemed to have advanced extraordinarily; the Pyrenees were crushing the village; the Spanish summits or the French summits were there, all equally near, as if pasted on one another, exaggerating their burned, brown colors, their intense and sombre, violet tints. ”

“ To wrong Lotys by so much as a thought, is to wrong the truest woman God ever made!”
A wild shout answered him,—and moved by one impulse, the whole body of men rose to their feet and drank “to the health and honour of Lotys!” with acclamation, many of them afterwards coming round to where she sat, and kneeling to kiss her hand and ask her pardon for their momentary doubt of her, in the excitement and enthusiasm of their souls. But Lotys herself sat very silent,—almost as silent as Sergius Thord, who, though he drank the toast, remained moody and abstracted. ”

“ Lott, a timber-merchant of this town, was in every sense of the word a more flourishing man than the asthmatic tailor; his six-feet-something of sound flesh and muscle, his ripe sunburnt complexion, his attitude of eupeptic and broad-chested ease, left the other, by contrast, scarce his proverbial fraction of manhood. At a year or two short of fifty, Mr. Daffy began to be old; he was shoulder-bent, knee-shaky, and had a pallid, wrinkled visage, with watery, pathetic eye. At fifty turned, Mr. Lott showed a vigour and a toughness such as few men of any age could rival. ”