The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 16

"You are developing nerves," said Judith. "Is it a guilty conscience?"

She laughed. "You are hiding something from me. I've been aware of it all the time."

"Indeed? How?"

"By the sixth sense of woman!"

Confound the sixth sense of woman! I suppose it has been developed like a cat's whiskers to supply the deficiency of a natural scent. Also, like the whiskers, it is obtrusive, and a matter for much irritatingly complacent pride. Judith regarded me with a mock magisterial air, and I was put into the dock at once.

"Something has happened," I said, desperately. "A female woman has come and taken up her residence at 26 Lingfield Terrace. A few weeks ago she ate with her fingers and believed the earth was flat. I found her in the Victoria Embankment Gardens beneath the terrace of the National Liberal Club, and now she lives on chocolate creams and the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge.' She is eighteen and her name is Carlotta. There!"

As my cigarette had gone out, I threw it with some peevishness into the grate. Judith's expression had changed from mock to real gravity. She sat bolt upright and looked at me somewhat stonily.

"What in the world do you mean, Marcus?"

"What I say. I'm saddled with the responsibility of a child of nature as unsophisticated and perplexing as Voltaire's Huron. She's English and she came from a harem in Syria, and she is as beautiful as the houris she believes in and is unfortunately precluded from joining. One of these days I shall be teaching her her catechism. I have already washed her face. Kindly pity me as the innocent victim of fantastic circ.u.mstances."

"I don't see why I should pity you," said Judith.

I felt I had not explained Carlotta tactfully. If there are ten ways of doing a thing I have noticed that I invariably select the one way that is wrong. I perceived that somehow or other the very contingency I had feared had come to pa.s.s. 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 s.e.x.

"My dear Judith," said I, "if a wicked fairy G.o.dmother 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 embarra.s.sing 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." This I consider one of the silliest remarks Judith has ever made. "Do," she continued, "tell me something coherent about this young person you call Carlotta."

I told the story from beginning to end.

"But why in the world did you keep it from me?" she asked.

"I mistrusted the sixth sense of woman," said I.

"The most elementary sense of woman or any one else would have told you that you were doing a very foolish thing."

"How would you have acted?"

"I should have handed her over at once to the Turkish consulate."

"Not if you had seen her eyes."

Judith tossed her head. "Men are all alike," she observed.

"On the contrary," said I, "that which characterises men as a s.e.x is their greater variation from type than women. It is a scientific fact.

You will find it stated by Darwin and more authoritatively still by later writers. The highest common factor of a hundred women is far greater than that of a hundred men. The abnormal is more frequent in the male s.e.x. There are more male monsters."

"That I can quite believe," snapped Judith.

"Then you agree with me that men are not all alike?"

"I certainly don't. Put any one of you before a pretty face and a pair of silly girl's eyes and he is a perfect idiot."

"My dear Judith," said I, "I don't care a hang for a pretty face--except yours."

"Do you really care about mine?" she asked wistfully.

"My dear," said I, dropping on one knee by the sofa, and taking her hand, "I've been longing for it for six weeks." And I counted the weeks on her fingers.

This put her in a good humour. Now that I come to think of it, there is something adorably infantile in grown up women. Shall man ever understand them? I have seen babies (not many, I am glad to say) crow with delight at having their toes pulled, with a "this little pig went to market," and so forth; Judith almost crowed at having the weeks told off on her fingers. Queer!

An hour was taken up with the account of her doings in Paris. She had met all the nicest and naughtiest people. She had been courted and flattered. An artist in a slouch hat, baggy corduroy breeches, floppy tie and general 1830 misfit had made love to her on the top of the Eiffel Tower.

"And he said," laughed Judith, "'_Partons ensemble. Comme on dit en Anglais_--fly with me!' I remarked that our state when we got to the Champs de Mars would be an effective disguise. He didn't understand, and it was delicious!"

I laughed. "All the same," I observed, "I can't see the fun of making jokes which the person to whom you make them doesn't see the point of."

"Why, that's your own peculiar form of humour," she retorted. "I caught the trick from you."

Perhaps she is right. I have noticed that people are slow in their appreciation of my witticisms. I must really be a very dull dog. If she were not fond of me I don't see how a bright woman like Judith could tolerate my society for half an hour.

I don't think I contribute to the world's humour; but the world's humour contributes much to my own entertainment, and things which appear amusing to me do not appeal, when I point them out, to the risible faculties of another. Every individual, I suppose, like every civilisation, must have his own standard of humour. If I were a Roman (instead of an English) Epicurean, I should have died with laughter at the sight of a fat Christian martyr scudding round the arena while chased by a hungry lion. At present I should faint with horror. Indeed, I always feel tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious l.u.s.t, when I smile at the oft-repeated tale of the poor tiger in Dore's picture that hadn't got a Christian. On the other hand, it tickles me immensely to behold a plethoric commonplace Briton roar himself purple with impa.s.sioned plat.i.tude at a political meeting; but I perceive that all my neighbours take him with the utmost seriousness. Again, your literary journalist professes to wriggle in his chair over the humour of Jane Austen; to me she is the dullest lady that ever faithfully photographed the trivial. Years ago I happened to be crossing Putney Bridge, in a frock-coat and silk hat, when a pa.s.sing member of the proletariat dug his elbows in his comrade's ribs and, quoting a music-hall tag of the period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the futility of jesting to unpercipient ears.

I did not take up her retort.

"And what was the end of the romance?" I asked.

"He borrowed twenty francs of me to pay for the _dejeuner_, and his _l'annee trente_ delicacy of soul compelled him to blot my existence forever from his mind."

"He never repaid you?" I asked.

"For a humouristic philosopher," cried Judith, "you are delicious!"

Judith is too fond of that word "delicious." She uses it in season and out of season.

We have the richest language that ever a people has accreted, and we use it as if it were the poorest. We h.o.a.rd up our infinite wealth of words between the boards of dictionaries and in speech dole out the worn bronze coinage of our vocabulary. We are the misers of philological history. And when we can save our pennies and pa.s.s the counterfeit coin of slang, we are as happy as if we heard a blind beggar thank us for putting a pewter sixpence into his hat.

I said something of the sort to Judith, after she had resumed her seat and I had opened the window, the minstrel having wandered to the next hostelry, where the process of converting "Love's Sweet Dream" into a nightmare was still faintly audible. Judith looked at me whimsically, as I stood breathing the comparatively fresh air and enjoying the relative silence.

"You are still the same, I am glad to see. Conversation with the young savage from Syria hasn't altered you in the least."

"In the first place," said I, "savages do not grow in Syria; and in the second, how could she have altered me?"

"If the heavens were to open and the New Jerusalem to appear this moment before you," retorted Judith, with the relevant irrelevance of her s.e.x, "you would begin an unconcerned disquisition on the iconography of angels."

I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears. She has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman pension--they and the ma.s.s of silken flax that is her hair, and her violet eyes.

"Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?" I asked.

She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it was a very good imitation indeed.