The young fellow was he who had pointed me out in Hyde Park to his companion, and lightly assured her that I was as mad as a dingo dog. From the moment after the phrase’s utterance to that of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my mind. Now it haunts me. It reiterates itself after the manner of a glib phrase. I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long. As it is, the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards away from my window. I keep asking myself: why a dingo dog? If I am mad it is in a gentle, Jaquesian, melancholy manner. I do not dash at life, rabid and foaming at the mouth.
I think the idiot simile must have been merely the misuse of language so common among the half-educated youth of Great Britain.
Yet when I come to consider my present condition, I have doubts as to my complete sanity. Here am I, in a little, semi-fashionable French seaside place, away from my books and my comforts and my habits, as much interested in its vapid distractions as if the universe held no other pursuits worth the attention of a rational man. And I have been here a calendar month.
To please Carlotta I wear white duck trousers, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap. I wired for them to my London tailor and they arrived within a week. The first time I appeared in the maniacal costume I slunk from the stony stare of a gendarme, as I was about to ascend the Casino steps, and hid myself among the fishing-boats lower down on the beach. Carlotta, however, was delighted and said that I looked pretty. Now I have grown callous, seeing other fools similarly apparelled. But a year ago, should I have dreamed it possible for me to strut about a fashionable plage in white ducks, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap? I trow not. They are signs of some sort of madness—whether that of a Jaques or a dingo dog matters very little.
Pasquale was the main cause of my taking Carlotta away from London. He came far too frequently to the house, established far too great a familiarity with my little girl. She quoted him far too readily. She is at the impressionable age when young women fall easy victims to the allurements of a fascinating creature like Pasquale. If he showed himself in the light of a possible husband for Carlotta, I should have nothing to say. I should give the pair my paternal benediction. But I know my Renaissance and I know my Pasquale. Carlotta is merely a new sensation—that’s all he seems to live for, the delectable scoundrel. But I am not going to have her heart broken by any cinquecento wolf in Poole’s clothing. I assume that Carlotta has a heart, even if she is not possessed of a soul. As to the latter I am still in doubt. At all events I resolved to withdraw Carlotta from his influence, put her in fresh surroundings, and allow her to mix more freely among men and women, so as to divert and possibly improve her mind.
I perceive that Carlotta is becoming an occupation. Well, she is quite as profitable as collecting postage-stamps, or golf, or amateur photography.
I have spent a pleasant month in this little place. It is the mouth of a gorge in the midst of a cliff-bound coast. The bay, but a quarter of a mile in sweep, is shut in at each end by a projecting wall of cliff cut by a natural arch. Half the shingle beach is given up to fisherfolk and their boats and tarred Noah’s arks where they keep their nets. The other half suddenly rises into a digue or terrace on which is built a primitive casino, and below the terrace are the bathing-cabins. We are staying at the most spotlessly clean of all clean French hotels. There are no carpets on the stairs; but if one mounts them in muddy boots, an untiring chambermaid emerges from a lair below, with hot water and scrubbing-brush and smilingly removes the traces of one’s passage. Carlotta and Antoinette have adjoining rooms in the main building. I inhabit the annexe, sleeping in a quaint, clean, bare little chamber with a balconied window that looks over the Noah’s Arks and the fishing-smacks and fisherfolk, away out to sea. This morning as I lay in bed I saw our Channel fleet lie along the arc of the horizon.
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. When the three of us happen to walk together it is a triumphal progress of bows and grins and nods. At first I thought it was I for whom this homage was intended. I was soon undeceived. It was Antoinette. 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.” Carlotta is undoubtedly bewitching in her bathing costume, and enjoys a little triumph of beauty. People fall into a natural group in order to look at her, while I, sitting on a camp-stool in my white ducks and pink shirt and smoking a cigarette, cannot repress a complacent pride of ownership. I do not object to her flicking her wet fingers at me when she comes dripping out of the sea; and I do not even reproach her when she puts her foot upon my sartorially immaculate knee, to show me a pebble-cut on her glistening pink sole.
Her conduct has been exemplary. I have allowed her to make the acquaintance of two or three young fellows, her partners at the Casino dances, and she walks up and down the terrace with them before meals. I have forbidden her, under penalty of immediate return to London and of my eternal displeasure, to mention the harem at Alexandretta. Young fellows are gifted with a genius for misapprehension. She is an ordinary young English lady, an orphan (which is true), and I am her guardian. Of course she looks at them with imploring eyes, and pulls them by the sleeve, and handles the lappels of their coats, and admits them to terms of the frankest intimacy; but I can no more change these characteristics than I can alter the shape of her body. She is the born coquette. Her delighted conception of herself is that she is the object of every man’s admiration. I noticed her this morning playing a tune with her fingers on the old bathing-man’s arm, as he was preparing to take her into the water, and I saw his mahogany face soften. In her indescribable childish way she would coquet with a tax-collector or a rag-and-bone man or the Archbishop of Canterbury. But she has committed no grave indiscretion, and I am sufficiently her lord and master to exact obedience.
I pretend, however, to be at her beck and call, and it is a delight to minister to her radiant happiness—to feel her lean on my arm and hear her cooing voice say: