The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne : a Novel

by William John Locke

I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that makes a man curse God and wish that he could die. The fire was black, and I mechanically took up the poker to stir it. A tempest of impotent anger shook my soul. I saw things red before my eyes. I had an execrable lust to kill. I was alone amid a multitude of gibbering fiends. As I stooped before the grate I felt something scrabble my shoulders. I leapt back with a shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice. Before I knew what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my force, upon its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.

Finis coronat opus.

November 22d.

Verona:—I have abandoned the “History of Renaissance Morals.” The dog’s-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into a lumber heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by a little stove. It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless, suggestive of “the vasty halls of death.” I have been here a week to-day. I thought I should find rest. I should breathe the atmosphere of Italy again. I should ease my heart among the masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in the presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint, my spirit would even be as theirs. In this old-world city, I fondly imagined, I should forget the Regent’s Park, and attune my mind to the life that once filled its narrow streets.

But nothing have I found save solitude. I stood to-day before the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported inscription above her head, “Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere,” and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was insulting. It drove me out of the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home, and for the fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my “History of Renaissance Morals.” I threw it, with a final curse, into the corner.

I loathe it. I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals. I count its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers, cutthroats, and courtesans. Their hubris has lost its glamour of beauty and has coarsened into vulgar insolence. They offend me by their riotous swagger, their insistence on the animal joy of living; chiefly by their perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.

Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with colour the grey void of my life. Whence has come the change?

In myself. To myself I have become a subject of excruciating interest. To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage than any debonair hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded into the dullest (and most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only exist. This sounds like the colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven knows it is not. If you are racked with toothache from ear to ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball to cerebellum, is not the whole universe concentrated in that head of yours? Are you not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally important of created beings? And no one blames you for it. Let me therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.

In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination. I flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not summoned to play his part in the comedy of Life. I sat alone in the great auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with little zest what seemed but a sorry spectacle. I thought myself secure in my solitary stall. But I had not counted on the high gods who crowd shadowy into the silent seats and are jealous of a mortal in their midst. Without warning was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real. Amid the laughter of the silent shadowy gods I thought to flee from the stage. I came to Verona and find I am still acting my part. I have always been acting. I have been acting since I was born. The reason of our being is to amuse the high gods with our histrionics. The earth itself is the stage, and the starry ether the infinite auditorium.

The high gods have granted to their troupe of mimes one boon. Each has it in his power to make the final exit at any moment. For myself I feel that moment is at hand. One last soliloquy, and then like the pagliacco I can say with a sigh, “La commedia e finita—the play is played out,” and the rest will be silence. At all events I will tell my own story. My “History of Renaissance Morals” can lie in its corner and rot, whilst I shall concern myself with a far more vital theme—The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne. The rough entries in my diary have been a habit of many futile years; but they have never sufficed for self-expression. I have not needed it till now. But now, with Judith and Carlotta gone from me, my one friend, Pasquale, cut for ever from my life, even the sympathetic Polyphemus driven into eternity by my murderous hand, I feel the irresistible craving to express myself fully and finally for the first and last time of my life. It will be my swan song. What becomes of it afterwards I care not.