CHAPTER XVIII

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!”