CHAPTER XV
If you travel on the highroad which skirts the cliff-bound coast of Normandy you may come to a board bearing the legend "Hottetôt-sur-Mer" and a hand pointing down a narrow gorge. If you follow the direction and descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble café, some fishermen's cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a débit de tabac, a view of a triangle of sea, and eventually to a patch of shingly beach between two great bastions of cliffs. The beach itself contains a diminutive jetty, a tiny fleet of fishing smacks, some nets, three bathing machines joined together by ropes on which hang a few towels and bathing costumes, a dog, a child or so with spade and bucket, two English maiden ladies writing picture post-cards, a Frenchman in black, reading a Rouen newspaper under a gray umbrella, his wife and daughter, and a stall of mussels presided over by an old woman with skin like seaweed. Just above the beach, on one side of the road leading up the gorge, is a miniature barn with a red cupola, which is the Casino, and, on the other, a long, narrow, blue-washed building with the words written in great black letters across the façade, "Hôtel de la Plage."
As soon as Emmy could travel, she implored Septimus to find her a quiet spot by the sea whither the fashionable do not resort. Septimus naturally consulted Hégisippe Cruchot. Hégisippe asked for time to consult his comrades. He returned with news of an ideal spot. It was a village in the Pyrenees about six thousand feet up in the air and forty miles from a railway station. They could shoot bears all day long. When Emmy explained that a village on the top of the Pyrenees was not by the seaside, and that neither she nor his aunt, Madame Bolivard, took any interest in the destruction of bears, he retired somewhat crestfallen and went with his difficulties to Angélique, the young lady in the wine shop in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers. Angélique informed him that a brave sailor on leave from his torpedo boat was in the habit of visiting the wine shop every evening. He ought to know something of the sea. A meeting was arranged by Angélique between Hégisippe, Septimus and the brave sailor, much to Emmy's skeptical amusement; and the brave sailor, after absorbing prodigious quantities of alcohol and reviewing all the places on the earth's coastline from Yokohama to Paris-Plage, declared that the veritable Eden by the Sea was none other than his native village of Hottetôt-sur-Mer. He made a plan of it on the table, two square packets of tobacco representing the cliffs, a pipe stem the road leading up the gorge, some tobacco dust the beach, and some coffee slops applied with the finger the English Channel.
Septimus came back to Emmy. "I have found the place. It is Hottetôt-sur-Mer. It has one hotel. You can catch shrimps, and its mussels are famous all over the world."
After consultation of a guide to Normandy, on which Emmy's prudence insisted, they found the brave sailor's facts mainly correct, and decided on Hottetôt-sur-Mer.
"I will take you there, see that you are comfortably settled, and then come back to Paris," said Septimus. "You'll be quite happy with Madame Bolivard, won't you?"
"Of course," said Emmy, looking away from him. "What are you going to do in Paris, all by yourself?"
"Guns," he replied. Then he added reflectively: "I also don't see how I can get out of the Hôtel Godet. I've been there some time, and I don't know how much to give the servants in tips. The only thing is to stay on."
Emmy sighed, just a bit wistfully, and made no attempt to prove the futility of his last argument. The wonderfully sweet of life had come to her of late mingled with the unutterably bitter. She was in the state of being when a woman accepts, without question. Septimus then went to the St. Lazare station to make arrangements and discovered an official who knew a surprising amount about railway traveling and the means of bringing a family from domicile to station. He entered Septimus's requirements in a book and assured him that at the appointed hour an omnibus would be waiting outside the house in the Boulevard Raspail. Septimus thought him a person of marvelous intellect and gave him five francs.
So the quaint quartette started in comfort: Septimus and Emmy and Madame Bolivard and the little lump of mortality which the Frenchwoman carried in her great motherly arms. Madame Bolivard, who had not been out of Paris for twenty years, needed all her maternal instincts to subdue her excitement at the prospect of seeing the open country and the sea. In the railway carriage she pointed out cattle to the unconscious infant with the tremulous quiver of the traveler who espies a herd of hippogriffin.
"Is it corn that, Monsieur? Mon Dieu, it is beautiful. Regard then the corn, my cherished one."
But the cherished one cared not for corn or cattle. He preferred to fix his cold eyes on Septimus, as if wondering what he was doing in that galley. Now and again Septimus would bend forward and, with a vague notion of the way to convey one's polite intentions to babies, would prod him gingerly in the cheek and utter an insane noise and then surreptitiously wipe his finger on his trousers. When his mother took him she had little spasms of tenderness during which she pressed him tightly to her bosom and looked frightened. The child was precious to her. She had paid a higher price than most women, and that perhaps enhanced its value.
At Fécamp a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage, together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions smelled abominably. Emmy, tired of the railway journey and suffocated by the heat, felt inclined to cry. This was her first step into her newly conditioned world, and her heart sank. She regretted her comfortable rooms in Paris and the conditions of existence there of which Septimus was an integral part. She had got used to them, to his forced association with the intimate details of her life, to his bending over the child like a grotesque fairy godfather and making astonishing suggestions for its upbringing. She had regarded him less as a stranger to be treated with feminine reserve than the doctor. Now it was different. She was about to take up her own life again, with new responsibilities, and the dearly loved creature whom she had bullied and laughed at and leaned on would go away to take up his own queer way of life, and the relations between them could not possibly be the same again. The diligence was taking her on the last stage of her journey towards the new conditions, and it jolted and bumped and smelled and took an interminable time.
"I'm sure," said she woefully, "there's no such place as Hottetôt-sur-Mer, and we are going on forever to find it."
Presently Septimus pointed triumphantly through the window.
"There it is!"
"Where?" cried Emmy, for not a house was in sight. Then she saw the board.
The old diligence turned and creaked and swung and pitched down the gorge. When they descended at the Hôtel de la Plage, the setting sun blazed on their faces across the sea and shed its golden enchantment over the little pebbly beach. At that hour the only living thing on it was the dog, and he was asleep. It was a spot certainly to which the fashionable did not resort.
"It will be good for baby."
"And for you."
She shrugged her shoulders. "What is good for one is not always—" She paused, feeling ungrateful. Then she added, "It's the best place you could have brought us to."
After dinner they sat on the beach and leaned against a fishing-boat. It was full moon. The northern cliff cast its huge shadow out to sea and half way across the beach. A knot of fisher folk sat full in the moonlight on the jetty and sang a song with a mournful refrain. Behind them in the square of yellow light of the salon window could be seen the figures of the two English maiden ladies apparently still addressing picture post-cards. The luminous picture stood out sharp against the dark mass of the hotel. Beyond the shadow of the cliff the sea lay like a silver mirror in the windless air. A tiny border of surf broke on the pebbles. Emmy drew a long breath and asked Septimus if he smelled the seaweed. The dog came and sniffed at their boots; then from the excellent leather judging them to be persons above his social station, he turned humbly away. Septimus called him, made friends with him—he was a smooth yellow dog of no account—and eventually he curled himself up between them and went to sleep. Septimus smoked his pipe. Emmy played with the ear of the dog and looked out to sea. It was very peaceful. After a while she sighed.
"I suppose this must be our last evening together."
"I suppose it must," said Septimus.
"Are you quite sure you can afford all the money you're leaving with me?"
"Of course. It comes out of the bank."
"I know that, you stupid," she laughed. "Where else could it come from unless you kept it in a stocking? But the bank isn't an unlimited gold-mine from which you can draw out as many handfuls as you want."
Septimus knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"People don't get sovereigns out of gold-mines. I wish they did. They extract a bit of gold about the size of this pebble out of a ton of quartz. I once bought shares in a gold-mine and there wasn't any gold in it at all. I always used to be buying things like that. People sold them to me. I was like Moses."
"Moses?"
"Oh, not that Moses. He could get anything out of anything. He got water out of a rock. I mean the son of the Vicar of Wakefield, who bought the green spectacles."
"Oh," said Emmy, who after the way of her generation had never heard of him.
"I don't do it—let people sell me things—any more, now," he said gravely. "I seem to have got wise. Perhaps it has come through having had to look after you. I see things much clearer."
He filled and lit another pipe and began to talk about Orion just visible over the shoulder of the cliff. Emmy, whose interests were for the moment terrestrial, interrupted him:
"There's one thing I want you to see clearly, my dear, and that is that I owe you a frightful lot of money. But I'm sure to get something to do when I'm back in London and then I can repay you by instalments. Remember, I'm not going to rest until I pay you back."
"I sha'n't rest if you do," said Septimus, nervously. "Please don't talk of it. It hurts me. I've done little enough in the world, God knows. Give me this chance of—the Buddhists call it 'acquiring merit.'"
This was not a new argument between them. Emmy had a small income under her father's will, and the prospect of earning a modest salary on the stage. She reckoned that she would have sufficient to provide for herself and the child. Hitherto Septimus had been her banker. Neither of them had any notion of the value of money, and Septimus had a child's faith in the magic of the drawn check. He would as soon have thought of measuring the portion of whisky he poured out for a guest as of counting the money he advanced to Emmy.
She took up his last words, and speaking in a low tone, as a woman does when her pride has gone from her, she said:
"Haven't you acquired enough merit already, my dear? Don't you see the impossibility of my going on accepting things from you? You seem to take it for granted that you're to provide for me and the child for the rest of our lives. I've been a bad, unprincipled fool of a girl, I know—yes, rotten bad; there are thousands like me in London—"
Septimus rose to his feet.
"Oh, don't, Emmy, don't! I can't stand it."
She rose too and put her hands on his shoulders.
"You must let me speak to-night—our last night before we part. It isn't generous of you not to listen."
The yellow dog, disturbed in his slumbers, shook himself, and regarding them with an air of humble sympathy turned and walked away discreetly into the shadow. The fisher folk on the jetty still sang their mournful chorus.
"Sit down again."
Septimus yielded. "But why give yourself pain?" he asked gently.
"To ease my heart. The knife does good. Yes, I know I've been worthless. But I'm not as bad as that. Don't you see how horrible the idea is to me? I must pay you back the money—and of course not come on you for any more. You've done too much for me already. It sometimes stuns me to think of it. It was only because I was in hell and mad—and grasped at the hand you held out to me. I suppose I've done you the biggest wrong a woman can do a man. Now I've come to my senses, I shudder at what I've done."
"Why? Why?" said Septimus, growing miserably unhappy.
"How can you ever marry, unless we go through the vulgarity of a collusive divorce?"
"My dear girl," said he, "what woman would ever marry a preposterous lunatic like me?"
"There's not a woman living who ought not to have gone down on her bended knees if she had married you."
"I should never have married," said he, laying his hand for a moment reassuringly on hers.
"Who knows?" She gave a slight laugh. "Zora is only a woman like the rest of us."
"Why talk of Zora?" he said quickly. "What has she to do with it?"
"Everything. You don't suppose I don't know," she replied in a low voice. "It was for her sake and not for mine."
He was about to speak when she put out her hand and covered his mouth.
"Let me talk for a little."
She took up her parable again and spoke very gently, very sensibly. The moonlight peacefulness was in her heart. It softened the tone of her voice and reflected itself in unfamiliar speech.
"I seem to have grown twenty years older," she said.
She desired on that night to make her gratitude clear to him, to ask his pardon for past offenses. She had been like a hunted animal; sometimes she had licked his hand and sometimes she had scratched it. She had not been quite responsible. Sometimes she had tried to send him away, for his own sake. For herself, she had been terrified at the thought of losing him.
"Another man might have done what you did, out of chivalry; but no other man but you would not have despised the woman. I deserved it; but I knew you didn't despise me. You have been just the same to me all through as you were in the early days. It braced me up and helped me to keep some sort of self-respect. That was the chief reason why I could not let you go. Now all is over. I am quite sane and as happy as I ever shall be. After to-night it stands to reason we must each lead our separate lives. You can't do anything more for me, and God knows, poor dear, I can't do anything for you. So I want to thank you."
She put her arm around his shoulder and kissed his cheek.
Septimus flushed. Her lips were soft and her breath was sweet. No woman save his mother had ever kissed him. He turned and took her hands.
"Let me accept that in full payment for everything. You want me to go away happy, don't you?"
"My dear," she said, with a little catch in her voice, "if there was anything in the world I could do to make you happy, short of throwing baby to a tiger, I would do it."
Septimus took off his cap and brought his hair to its normal perpendicularity. Emmy laughed.
"Dear me! What are you going to say?"
Septimus reflected for a moment.
"If I dine off a bloater in a soup-plate in the drawing-room, or if my bed isn't made at six o'clock in the evening, and my house is a cross between a pigsty and an ironmonger's shop, nobody minds. It is only Septimus Dix's extraordinary habits. But if the woman who is my wife in the eyes of the world—"
"Yes, yes, I see," she said hurriedly. "I hadn't looked at it in that light."
"The boy is going to Cambridge," he murmured. "Then I should like him to go into Parliament. There are deuced clever fellows in Parliament. I met one in Venice two or three years ago. He knew an awful lot of things. We spent an evening together on the Grand Canal and he talked all the time most interestingly on the drainage system of Barrow-in-Furness. I wonder how fellows get to know about drains."
Emmy said: "Would it make you happy?"
From her tone he gathered that she referred to the subject of contention between them and not to his thirst for sanitary information.
"Of course it would."
"But how shall I ever repay you?"
"Perhaps once a year," he said. "You can settle up in full, as you did just now."
There was a long silence and then Emmy remarked that it was a heavenly night.
CHAPTER XVI
In the course of time Sypher returned to London to fight a losing battle against the Powers of Darkness and derive whatever inspiration he could from Zora's letters. He also called dutifully at "The Nook" during his week-end visits to Penton Court, where he found restfulness in the atmosphere of lavender. Mrs. Oldrieve continued to regard him as a most superior person. Cousin Jane, as became a gentlewoman of breeding, received him with courtesy—but a courtesy marked by that shade of reserve which is due from a lady of quality to the grandfatherless. If she had not striven against the unregeneracy of mortal flesh she would have disapproved of him offhand because she disapproved of Zora; but she was a conscientious woman, and took great pride in overcoming prejudices. She also collected pewter, the history of which Sypher, during his years of self-education, had once studied, in the confused notion that it was culture. All knowledge is good; from the theory of quaternions to the way to cut a ham-frill. It is sure to come in useful, somehow. An authority on Central African dialects has been known to find them invaluable in altercations with cabmen, and a converted burglar has, before now, become an admirable house-agent. What Sypher, therefore, had considered merely learned lumber in his head cemented his friendship with Cousin Jane—or rather, to speak by the book, soldered it with pewter. As for the Cure, however, she did not believe in it, and told him so, roundly. She had been brought up to believe in doctors, the Catechism, the House of Lords, the inequality of the sexes, and the Oldrieve family, and in that faith she would live and die. Sypher bore her no malice. She did not call the Cure pestilential quackery. He was beginning not to despise the day of small things.
"It may be very good in its way," she said, "just as Liberalism and Darwinism and eating in restaurants may be good things. But they are not for me."
Cousin Jane's conversation provided him with much innocent entertainment. Mrs. Oldrieve was content to talk about the weather, and what Zora and Emmy used to like to eat when they were little girls: subjects interesting in themselves but not conducive to discussion. Cousin Jane was nothing if not argumentative. She held views, expounded them, and maintained them. Nothing short of a declaration from Jehovah bursting in glory through the sky could have convinced her of error. Even then she would have been annoyed. She profoundly disapproved of Emmy's marriage to Septimus, whom she characterized as a doddering idiot. Sypher defended his friend warmly. He also defended Wiggleswick at whose ways and habits the good lady expressed unrestrained indignation. She could not have spoken more disrespectfully of Antichrist.
"You mark my words," she said, "he'll murder them both in their sleep."
Concerning Zora, too, she was emphatic.
"I am not one of those who think every woman ought to get married; but if she can't conduct herself decently without a husband, she ought to have one."
"But surely Mrs. Middlemist's conduct is irreproachable," said Sypher.
"Irreproachable? Do you think trapesing about alone all over the earth—mixing with all sorts of people she doesn't know from Adam, and going goodness knows where and doing goodness knows what, and idling her life away, never putting a darn in her stockings even—is irreproachable conduct on the part of a young woman of Zora's birth and appearance? The way she dresses must attract attention, wherever she goes. It's supposed to be 'stylish' nowadays. In my time it was immodest. When a young woman was forced to journey alone she made herself as inconspicuous as possible. Zora ought to have a husband to look after her. Then she could do as she liked—or as he liked, which would be much the best thing for her."
"I happen to be in Mrs. Middlemist's confidence," said Sypher. "She has told me many times that she would never marry again. Her marriage—"
"Stuff and rubbish!" cried Cousin Jane. "You wait until the man comes along who has made up his mind to marry her. It must be a big strong man who won't stand any nonsense and will take her by the shoulders and shake her. She'll marry him fast enough. We'll see what happens to her in California."
"I hope she won't marry one of those dreadful creatures with lassos," said Mrs. Oldrieve, whose hazy ideas of California were based on hazier memories of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show which she had seen many years ago in London.
"I hope Mrs. Middlemist won't marry at all," said Sypher, in a tone of alarm.
"Why?" asked Cousin Jane.
She shot the question at him with almost a snarl. Sypher paused for a moment or two before replying.
"I should lose a friend," said he.
"Humph!" said Cousin Jane.
If the late Rev. Laurence Sterne had known Cousin Jane, "Tristram Shandy" would have been the richer by a chapter on "Humphs." He would have analyzed this particular one with a minute delicacy beyond the powers of Clem Sypher through whose head rang the echo of the irritating vocable for some time afterwards. It meant something. It meant something uncomfortable. It was directly leveled at himself and yet it seemed to sum up her previous disparaging remarks about Zora. "What the dickens did she mean by it?" he asked himself.
He came down to Nunsmere every week now, having given up his establishment at Kilburn Priory and sold the house—"The Kurhaus," as he had named it in his pride. A set of bachelor's chambers in St. James's sheltered him during his working days in London. He had also sold his motor-car; for retrenchment in personal expenses had become necessary, and the purchase-money of house and car were needed for the war of advertising which he was waging against his rivals. These were days black with anxiety and haunting doubt, illuminated now and then by Zora, who wrote gracious letters of encouragement. He carried them about with him like talismans.
Sometimes he could not realize that the great business he had created could be on the brink of failure. The routine went on as usual. At the works at Bermondsey the same activity apparently prevailed as when the Cure had reached the hey-day of its fortune some five years before. In the sweet-smelling laboratory gleaming with white tiles and copper retorts, the white-aproned workmen sorted and weighed and treated according to the secret recipe the bundles of herbs that came in every day and were stacked in pigeon-holes along the walls. In the boiling-sheds, not so sweet-smelling, the great vats of fat bubbled and ran, giving out to the cooling-troughs the refined white cream of which the precious ointment was made. Beyond there was another laboratory vast and clean and busy, where the healing ichor of the herbs was mixed with the drugs and the cream. Then came the work-rooms where rows of girls filled the celluloid boxes, one dabbing in the well-judged quantity, another cutting it off clean to the level of the top with a swift stroke of the spatula, another fitting on the lid, and so on, in endless but fascinating monotony until the last girl placed on the trolley by her side, waiting to carry it to the packing-shed, the finished packet of Sypher's Cure as it would be delivered to the world. Then there were the packing-sheds full of deal cases for despatching the Cure to the four quarters of the globe, some empty, some being filled, others stacked in readiness for the carriers: a Babel of sounds, of hammering clamps, of creaking barrows, of horses by the open doors rattling their heavy harness and trampling the flagstones with their heavy hoofs; a ceaseless rushing of brawny men in sackcloth aprons, of dusty men with stumps of pencils and note-books and crumpled invoices, counting and checking and reporting to other men in narrow glass offices against the wall. Outside stood the great wagons laden with the white deal boxes bound with iron hoops and bearing in vermilion letters the inscription of Sypher's Cure.
Every detail of this complicated hive was as familiar to him as his kitchen was to his cook. He had planned it all, organized it all. Every action of every human creature in the place from the skilled pharmaceutist responsible for the preparation of the ointment to the grimy boy who did odd jobs about the sheds had been pre-conceived by him, had had its mainspring in his brain. Apart from idealistic aspirations concerned with the Cure itself, the perfecting of this machinery of human activity had been a matter of absorbing interest, its perfection a subject of honorable pride.
He walked through the works day after day, noting the familiar sights and sounds, pausing here and there lovingly, as a man does in his garden to touch some cherished plant or to fill himself with the beauty of some rare flower. The place was inexpressibly dear to him. That those furnaces should ever grow cold, that those vats should ever be empty, that those two magic words should cease to blaze on the wooden boxes, should fade from the sight of man, that those gates should ever be shut, seemed to transcend imagination. The factory had taken its rank with eternal, unchanging things, like the solar system and the Bank of England. Yet he knew only too well that there had been change in the unchanging and in his soul dwelt a sickening certainty that the eternal would be the transient. Gradually the staff had been reduced, the output lessened. Already two of the long tables once filled with girls stood forlornly empty.
His comfortably appointed office in Moorgate Street told the same story. Week after week the orders slackened and gradually the number of the clerks had shrunk. Gloom settled permanently on the manager's brow. He almost walked on tiptoe into Sypher's room and spoke to him in a hushed whisper, until rebuked for dismalness.
"If you look like that, Shuttleworth, I shall cry."
On another occasion Shuttleworth said:
"We are throwing money away on advertisements. The concern can't stand it."
Sypher turned, blue pencil in hand, from the wall where draft proofs of advertisements were pinned for his correction and master's touch. This was a part of the business that he loved. It appealed to the flamboyant in his nature. It particularly pleased him to see omnibuses pass by bearing the famous "Sypher's Cure," an enlargement of his own handwriting, in streaming letters of blood.
"We're going to double them," said he; and his air was that of the racing Mississippi captains of old days who in response to the expostulation of their engineers sent a little nigger boy to sit on the safety-valve.
The dismal manager turned up his eyes to heaven with the air of the family steward in Hogarth's "Mariage à la Mode." He had not his chief's Napoleonic mind; but he had a wife and a large family. Clem Sypher also thought of that—not only of Shuttleworth's wife and family, but also of the wives and families of the many men in his employ. It kept him awake at nights.
In the soothing air of Nunsmere, however, he slept, in long dead stretches, as a tired man sleeps, in spite of trains which screeched past the bottom of his lawn. Their furious unrest enhanced the peace of village things. He began to love the little backwater of the earth whose stillness calmed the fever of life. As soon as he stepped out on to the platform at Ripstead a cool hand seemed to touch his forehead, and charm away the cares that made his temples throb. At Nunsmere he gave himself up to the simplicities of the place. He took to strolling, like Septimus, about the common and made friends with the lame donkey. On Sunday mornings he went to church. He had first found himself there out of curiosity, for, though not an irreligious man, he was not given to pious practices; but afterwards he had gone on account of the restfulness of the rural service. His mind essentially reverend took it very seriously, just as it took seriously the works of a great poet which he could not understand or any alien form of human aspiration; even the parish notices and the publication of banns he received with earnest attention. His intensity of interest as he listened to the sermon sometimes flattered the mild vicar, and at other times—when thinness of argument pricked his conscience—alarmed him considerably. But Sypher would not have dared enter into theological disputation. He took the sermon as he took the hymns, in which he joined lustily. Cousin Jane, whom he invariably met with Mrs. Oldrieve after the service and escorted home, had no such scruples. She tore the vicar's theology into fragments and scattered them behind her as she walked, like a hare in a paper chase.
Said the Literary Man from London, who had strolled with them on one of these occasions:
"The good lady's one of those women who speak as if they had a relation who had married a high official in the Kingdom of Heaven and now and then gave them confidential information."
Sypher liked Rattenden because he could often put into a phrase his own unformulated ideas. He also belonged to a world to which he himself was a stranger, the world of books and plays and personalities and theories of art. Sypher thought that its denizens lived on a lofty plane.
"The atmosphere," said Rattenden, "is so rarified that the kettle refuses to boil properly. That is why we always have cold tea at literary gatherings. My dear fellow, it's a damned world. It talks all day and does nothing all night. The ragged Italian in front of the fresco in his village church or at the back of the gallery at the opera of his town knows more essentials of painting and music than any of us. It's a hollow sham of a world filled with empty words. I love it."
"Then why abuse it?" laughed Sypher.
"Because it's a wanton and the wanton angers you and fascinates you at the same time. You never know how to take her. You are aware she hasn't got a heart, but her lips are red. She is unreal. She holds views in defiance of common sense. Which is the nobler thing to do—to dig potatoes or paint a man digging potatoes? She swears to you that the digger is a clod of earth and the painter a handful of heaven. She is talking rot. You know it. Yet you believe her."
Sypher was not convinced by the airy paradoxician. He had a childish idea that painters and novelists and actors were superior beings. Rattenden found this Arcadian and cultivated Sypher's society. They took long walks together on Sunday afternoons.
"After all," said Rattenden, "I can speak freely. I am a pariah among my kind."
Sypher asked why.
"Because I don't play golf. In London it is impossible to be seriously regarded as a literary man unless you play golf."
He found Sypher a good listener. He loved to catch a theory of life, hold it in his hand like a struggling bird while he discoursed about it, and let it go free into the sunshine again. Sypher admired his nimbleness of mind.
"You juggle with ideas as the fellows on the stage do with gilt balls."
"It's a game I learned," said Rattenden. "It's very useful. It takes one's mind off the dull question of earning bread and butter for a wife and five children."
"I wish you'd teach it to me," said Sypher. "I've many wives and many children dependent on me for bread and butter!"
Rattenden was quick to note the tone of depression. He laughed kindly.
"Looking on is just as good. When you're worried in London why don't you look me up? My wife and I will play the game for you. She's an amusing body. Heaven knows how I should have got through without her. She also swears by Sypher's Cure."
So they became friends. Sypher, since the blistered heel episode, had lost his fearless way of trumpeting the Cure far and wide, having a nervous dread of seeing the p and q of the hateful words form themselves on the lips of a companion. He became subdued, and spoke only of travel and men and things, of anything but the Cure. He preferred to listen and, as Rattenden preferred to talk, he found conversation a simple matter. Rattenden was an amusing anecdotist and had amassed a prodigious amount of raw material for his craft. To the collector, by some unknown law of attraction, come the objects which he collects. Everywhere he goes he finds them to his hand, as Septimus's friend found the Toby jugs. Wherever Rattenden turned, a bit of gossip met his ear. Very few things, therefore, happened in literary and theatrical London which did not come inevitably to his knowledge. He could have wrecked many homes and pricked many reputations. As a man of the world, however, he used his knowledge with discretion, and as an artist in anecdote he selected fastidiously. He seldom retailed a bit of gossip for its own sake; when he did so he had a purpose.
One evening they dined together at Sypher's club, a great semi-political institution with many thousand members. He had secured, however, a quiet table in a corner of the dining-room which was adorned with full-length portraits of self-conscious statesmen. Sypher unfolded his napkin with an air of satisfaction.
"I've had good news to-day. Mrs. Middlemist is on her way home."
"You have the privilege of her friendship," said Rattenden. "You're to be envied. O fortunate nimium."
He preserved some of the Oxford tradition in tone and manner. He had brown hair turning gray, a drooping mustache and wore pince-nez secured by a broad black cord. Being very short-sighted his eyes seen through the thick lenses were almost expressionless.
"Zora Middlemist," said he, squeezing lemon over his oysters, "is a grand and splendid creature whom I admire vastly. As I never lose an opportunity of telling her that she is doing nothing with her grand and splendid qualities, I suffer under the ban of her displeasure."
"What do you think she ought to do with them?" asked Sypher.
"It's a difficult and delicate matter to discuss a woman with another man; especially—" he waved a significant hand. "But I, in my little way, have written a novel or two—studies of women. I speak therefore as an expert. Now, just as a painter can't correctly draw the draped figure unless he has an anatomical knowledge of the limbs beneath, so is a novelist unable to present the character of a woman with sincerity and verisimilitude unless he has taken into account all the hidden physiological workings of that woman's nature. He must be familiar with the workings of the sex principle within her, although he need not show them in his work, any more than the painter shows the anatomy. Analyzing thus the imaginary woman, one forms a habit of analyzing the real woman in whom one takes an interest—or rather one does it unconsciously." He paused. "I told you it was rather delicate. You see what I'm trying to get at? Zora Middlemist is driven round the earth like Io by the gadfly of her temperament. She's seeking the Beauty or Meaning or Fulfilment, or whatever she chooses to call it, of Life. What she's really looking for is Love."
"I don't believe it," said Sypher.
Rattenden shrugged his shoulders. "It's true all the same. But in her case it's the great love—the big thing for the big man—the gorgeous tropical sunshine in which all the splendor of her can develop. No little man will move her. She draws them all round her—that type has an irresistible atmosphere—but she passes them by with her magnificent head in the air. She is looking all the time for the big man. The pathetic comedy of it is that she is as innocent and as unconscious of the object of her search as the flower that opens its heart to the bee bearing the pollen on its wings. I'm not infallible as a general rule. In this case I am."
He hastened to consume his soup which had got cold during his harangue.
"You've mixed much with women and studied them," said Sypher. "I haven't. I was engaged to a girl once, but it was a tepid affair. She broke it off because it was much more vital to me to work in my laboratory than to hold her hand in her mother's parlor. No doubt she was right. This was in the early days when I was experimenting with the Cure. Since then I've been a man of one idea. It has absorbed all my soul and energies, so that I've had none to spare for women. Here and there, of course—"
"I know. The trifling things. They are part of the banquet of life. One eats and forgets."
Sypher glanced at him and nodded his appreciation of the Literary Man's neat way of putting things. But he did not reply. He ate his fish in silence, hardly tasting it, his mind far away following Zora Middlemist across the seas. A horrible, jealous hatred of the big man for whom she sought sprang up in his heart. His pink face flushed red.
"This sole bonne femme is excellent," said Rattenden.
Sypher started in confusion, and praised the chef, and talked gastronomy while his thoughts were with Zora. He remembered the confession of Septimus Dix in Paris. Septimus had been caught in the irresistible atmosphere. He loved her, but he was one of the little men and she had passed him by with her magnificent head in the air. The gastronomic talk languished. Presently Rattenden said:
"One of the feminine phenomena that has puzzled me most of late has been the marriage of her sister to Septimus Dix."
Sypher laid down his knife and fork.
"How extraordinary that you should mention it! He was in my mind as you spoke."
"I was thinking of the sister," said Rattenden. "She has Mrs. Middlemist's temperament without her force of character—the sex without the splendor. I heard a very curious thing about her only yesterday."
"What was it?"
"It was one of those things that are not told."
"Tell me," said Sypher, earnestly. "I have reasons for asking. I am convinced there are circumstances of which neither Mrs. Dix's mother nor sister know anything. I'm a loyal man. You may trust me."
"Very well," said Rattenden. "Have you ever heard of a man called Mordaunt Prince? Yes—a well-known actor—about the biggest blackguard that disgraces the stage. He was leading man at the theater where she last played. They were doing 'The Widow of Ware.' They were about a great deal together. It was common gossip at the time."
"Gossip is notoriously uncharitable," said Sypher.
"If charity covers a multitude of sins, uncharitableness has the advantage of uncovering them. The pudor britannicus, however, is responsible for uncovering the one I am going to tell you of. About two or three months before the marriage, Emmy Oldrieve and Mordaunt Prince were staying together at an hotel in Tunbridge Wells. There was no mistake about it. There they were. They had a motor with them. A week before the Dix marriage was announced Mordaunt Prince married a Mrs. Morris—old Sol Morris, the money-lender's widow."
Sypher stared at him.
"It's one of the least amazing of human phenomena," said Rattenden, cynically. "I'm only puzzled at Calypso being so soon able to console herself for the departure of Ulysses, and taking up with such a dreamy-headed shadow of a man as our friend Dix. The end of the Mordaunt Prince story is that he soon grew too much for the widow, who has pensioned him off, and now he is drinking himself to death in Naples."
"Emmy Oldrieve! Good God, is it possible?" cried Sypher, absently pushing aside the dish the waiter handed him.
Rattenden carefully helped himself to partridge and orange salad.
"It's not only possible, but unquestionable fact. You see," he added complacently, "nothing can happen without its coming sooner or later to me. My informant was staying at the hotel all the time. You will allow me to vouch absolutely for her veracity."
Sypher did not speak for some moments. The large dining-room with its portraits of self-conscious statesmen faded away and became a little street in Paris, one side in shade and the other baking in the sun; and at a little iron table sat a brown and indiscreet Zouave and Septimus Dix, pale, indecisive, with a wistful appeal in his washed-out blue eyes. Suddenly he regained consciousness, and, more for the sake of covering his loss of self-possession than for that of eating, he recalled the waiter and put some partridge on his plate. Then he looked across the table at his guest and said very sternly:
"I look to you to prevent this story going any further."
"I've already made it my duty to do so," said Rattenden.
Sypher helped his guest to wine.
"I hope you like this Roederer," said he. "It's the only exquisite wine in the club, and unfortunately there are not more than a few bottles left. I had seven dozen of the same cuvée in my cellar at Priory Park—if anything, in better condition. I had to sell it with the rest of the things when I gave up the house. It went to my heart. Champagne is the only wine I understand. There was a time when it stood as a symbol to me of the unattainable. Now that I can drink it when I will, I know that all the laws of philosophy forbid its having any attraction for me. Thank heaven I'm not dyspeptic enough in soul to be a philosopher and I'm grateful for my aspirations. I cultivated my taste for champagne out of sheer gratitude."
"Any wise man," said Rattenden, "can realize his dreams. It takes something much higher than wisdom to enjoy the realization."
"What is that?"
"The heart of a child," said Rattenden. He smiled in his inscrutable way behind his thick lenses, and sipped his champagne. "Truly a delicious wine," said he.
Sypher said good-by to his guest on the steps of the club, and walked home to his new chambers in St. James's deep in thought. For the first time since his acquaintance with Rattenden, he was glad to part from him. He had a great need of solitude. It came to him almost as a shock to realize that things were happening in the world round about him quite as heroic, in the eyes of the High Gods, as the battle between Sypher's Cure and Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy. The curtain of life had been lifted, and a flash of its inner mysteries had been revealed. His eyes still were dazed. But he had received the gift of vision. He had seen beyond doubt or question the heart of Septimus Dix. He knew what he had done, why he had done it.
Zora Middlemist had passed Septimus by with her magnificent head in the air. But he was not one of the little men.
"By God, he is not!" he cried aloud, and the cry came from his depths.
Zora Middlemist had passed him, Clem Sypher, by with her magnificent head in the air.
He let himself into his chambers; they struck him as being chill and lonely, the casual, uncared-for hiding-place of one of the little men. He stirred the fire, almost afraid to disturb the cold silence by the rattle of the poker against the bars of the grate. His slippers were set in readiness on the hearth-rug, and the machine who valeted him had fitted them with boot-trees. He put them on, and unlocking his desk, took out the letter which he had received that morning from Zora.
"For you," she wrote, "I want victory all along the line—the apotheosis of Sypher's Cure on Earth. For myself, I don't know what I want. I wish you would tell me."
Clem Sypher sat in an arm-chair and looked into the fire until it went out. For the first time in his life he did not know what he wanted.
CHAPTER XVII
The days that followed were darkened by overwhelming anxieties, so that he speculated little as to the Ultimately Desired. A chartered accountant sat in the office at Moorgate Street and shed around him the gloom of statistics. Unless a miracle happened the Cure was doomed.
It is all very well to seat a little nigger on the safety-valve if the end of the journey is in sight. The boiler may just last out the strain. But to suppose that he will sit there in permanent security to himself and the ship for an indefinite time is an optimism unwarranted by the general experience of this low world. Sypher's Cure could not stand the strain of the increased advertisement. Shuttleworth found a dismal pleasure in the fulfilment of his prophecy. A reduction in price had not materially affected the sales. The Jebusa Jones people had lowered the price of the Cuticle Remedy and still undersold the Cure. During the year the Bermondsey works had been heavily mortgaged. The money had all been wasted on a public that had eyes and saw not, that had ears and heard not the simple gospel of the Friend of Humanity—"Try Sypher's Cure." In the midst of the gloom Shuttleworth took the opportunity of deprecating the unnecessary expense of production, never having so greatly dared before. Only the best and purest materials had been possible for the divine ointment. By using second qualities, a great saving could be effected without impairing the efficacy of the Cure. Thus Shuttleworth. Sypher blazed into holy anger, as if he had been counseled to commit sacrilege.
Radical reforms were imperative, if the Cure was to be saved. He spent his nights over vast schemes only to find the fatal flaw in the cold light of the morning. This angered him. It seemed that the sureness of his vision had gone. Something strange, uncanny had happened within him, he knew not what. It had nothing to do with his intellectual force, his personal energy. It had nothing to do with his determination to win through and restore the Cure to its former position in the market. It was something subtle, spiritual.
The memory of the blistered heel lived with him. The slight doubt cast by Septimus on Zora's faith remained disturbingly at the back of his mind. Yet he clung passionately to his belief. If it were not Heaven-sent, then was he of men most miserable.
Never had he welcomed the sight of Nunsmere more than the next Saturday afternoon when the trap turned off the highroad and the common came into view. The pearls and faint blues of the sky, the tender mist softening the russet of the autumn trees, the gray tower of the little church, the red roofs of the cottages dreaming in their old-world gardens, the quiet green of the common with the children far off at play and the lame donkey watching them in philosophic content—all came like the gift of a very calm and restful God to the tired man's eyes.
He thought to himself: "It only lacks one figure walking across the common to meet me." Then the thought again: "If she were there would I see anything else?"
At Penton Court the maid met him at the door.
"Mr. Dix is waiting to see you, sir."
"In the drawing-room. He has been waiting a couple of hours."
He threw off his hat and coat, delighted, and rushed in to welcome the unexpected guest. He found Septimus sitting in the twilight by the French window that opened on the lawn, and making elaborate calculations in a note-book.
"My dear Dix!" He shook him warmly by the hand and clapped him on the shoulder. "This is more than a pleasure. What have you been doing with yourself?"
Septimus said, holding up the note-book:
"I was just trying to work out the problem whether a boy's expenses from the time he begins feeding-bottles to the time he leaves the University increases by arithmetical or geometrical progression."
Sypher laughed. "It depends, doesn't it, on his taste for luxuries?"
"This one is going to be extravagant, I'm afraid," said Septimus. "He cuts his teeth on a fifteenth-century Italian ivory carving of St. John the Baptist—I went into a shop to buy a purse and they gave it to me instead—and turns up his nose at coral and bells. There isn't much of it to turn up. I've never seen a child with so little nose. I invented a machine for elongating it, but his mother won't let me use it."
Sypher expressed his sympathy with Mrs. Dix, and inquired after her health. Septimus reported favorably. She had passed a few weeks at Hottetôt-sur-Mer, which had done her good. She was now in Paris under the mothering care of Madame Bolivard, where she would stay until she cared to take up her residence in her flat in Chelsea, which was now free from tenants.
"I've just left the Hôtel Godet and come back to Nunsmere. Perhaps I'll give up the house and take Wiggleswick to London when Emmy returns. She promised to look for a flat for me. I believe women are rather good at finding flats."
Sypher handed him a box of cigars. He lit one and held it awkwardly with the tips of his long, nervous fingers. He passed the fingers of his other hand, with the familiar gesture, up his hair.
"I thought I'd come and see you," he said hesitatingly, "before going to 'The Nook.' There are explanations to be made. My wife and I are good friends, but we can't live together. It's all my fault. I make the house intolerable. I—I have an ungovernable temper, you know, and I'm harsh and unloving and disagreeable. And it's bad for the child. We quarrel dreadfully—at least, she doesn't."
"What about?" Sypher asked gravely.
"All sorts of things. You see, if I want breakfast an hour before dinner-time, it upsets the household. Then there was the nose machine—and other inventions for the baby, which perhaps might kill it. You can explain all this and tell them that the marriage has been a dreadful mistake on poor Emmy's side, and that we've decided to live apart. You will do this for me, won't you?"
"I can't say I'll do it with pleasure," said Sypher, "for I'm more than sorry to hear your news. I suspected as much when I met you in Paris. But I'll see Mrs. Oldrieve as soon as possible and explain."
"Thank you," said Septimus; "you don't know what a service you would be rendering me."
He uttered a sigh of relief and relit his cigar which had gone out during his appeal. Then there was a silence. Septimus looked dreamily out at the row of trees that marked the famous lawn reaching down to the railway line. The mist had thickened with the fall of the day and hung heavy on the branches, and the sky was gray. Sypher watched him, greatly moved; tempted to cry out that he knew all, that he was not taken in by the simple legend of his ungovernable temper and unlovely disposition. His heart went out to him, as to a man who dwelt alone on lofty heights, inaccessible to common humanity. He was filled with pity and reverence for him. Perhaps he exaggerated. But Sypher was an idealist. Had he not set Sypher's Cure as the sun in his heaven and Zora as one of the fixed stars?
It grew dark. Sypher rang for the lamp and tea.
"Or would you like breakfast?" he asked laughingly.
"I've just had supper," said Septimus. "Wiggleswick found some cheese in a cupboard. I buried it in the front garden." A vague smile passed on his face like a pale gleam of light over water on a cloudy day. "Wiggleswick is deaf. He couldn't hear it."
"He's a lazy scoundrel," said Sypher. "I wonder you don't sack him."
Septimus licked a hanging strip of cigar-end into position—he could never smoke a cigar properly—and lit it for the third time.
"Wiggleswick is good for me," said he. "He keeps me human. I am apt to become a machine. I live so much among them. I've been working hard on a new gun—or rather an old gun. It's field artillery, quick-firing. I got on to the idea again from a sighting apparatus I invented. I have the specification in my pocket. The model is at home. I brought it from Paris."
He fetched a parcel of manuscript from his pocket and unrolled it into flatness.
"I should like to show it to you. Do you mind?"
"It would interest me enormously," said Sypher.
"I invent all sorts of things. I can't help it. But I always come back to guns—I don't know why. I hope you've done nothing further with the guns of large caliber. I've been thinking about them seriously, and I find they're all moonshine."
He smiled with wan cheerfulness at the waste of the labor of years. Sypher, on whose conscience the guns had laid their two hundred ton weight, felt greatly relieved. Their colossal scale had originally caught his imagination which loved big conceptions. Their working had seemed plausible to his inexpert eye. He had gone with confidence to his friend, the expert on naval gunnery, who had reported on them in breezy, sea-going terms of disrespect. Since then he had shrunk from destroying his poor friend's illusions.
"Yes, they're all unmanageable. I see what's wrong with them—but I've lost my interest in naval affairs." He paused and added dreamily: "I was horribly seasick crossing the Channel this time.
"Let us have a look at the field-gun," said Sypher encouragingly. Remembering the naval man's language, he had little hope that Septimus would be more successful by land than by sea; but his love and pity for the inventor compelled interest. Septimus's face brightened.
"This," said he, "is quite a different thing. You see I know more about it."
"That's where the bombardier comes in," laughed Sypher.
"I shouldn't wonder," replied Septimus.
He spread the diagram on a table, and expounded the gun. Absorbed in his explanation he lost the drowsy incertitude of his speech and the dreaminess of his eyes. He spoke with rapidity, sureness, and a note of enthusiasm rang oddly in his voice. On the margins he sketched illustrations of the Gatling, the Maxim, and the Hotchkiss and other guns, and demonstrated the superior delicate deadliness of his own. It could fire more rounds per minute than any other piece of artillery known to man. It could feed itself automatically from a magazine. The new sighting apparatus made it as accurate as a match rifle. Its power of massacre was unparalleled in the history of wholesale slaughter. A child might work it.
Septimus's explanation was too lucid for a man of Sypher's intelligence not to grasp the essentials of his invention. To all his questions Septimus returned satisfactory answers. He could find no flaw in the gun. Yet in his heart he felt that the expert would put his finger on the weak spot and consign the machine to the limbo of phantasmagoric artillery.
"If it is all you say, there's a fortune in it," said he.
"There's no shadow of doubt about it," replied Septimus. "I'll send Wiggleswick over with the model to-morrow, and you can see for yourself."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I don't know," said Septimus, in his usual manner. "I never know what to do with things when I invent them. I once knew a man in the Patent Office who patented things for me. But he's married now and gone to live in Balham."
"But he's still at the Patent Office?"
"Perhaps he is," said Septimus. "It never occurred to me. But it has never done me any good to have things patented. One has to get them taken up. Some of them are drunk and disorderly enough for them to be taken up at once," he added with his pale smile. He continued: "I thought perhaps you would replace the big-caliber guns in our contract by this one."
Sypher agreed with pleasure to the proposal. He knew a high military official in the Ordnance Department of the War Office who would see that the thing was properly considered. "If he's in town I'll go and see him at once."
"There's no hurry," said Septimus. "I shouldn't like you to put yourself out. I know you're a very busy man. Go in any time you happen to be passing. You are there pretty often: now, I suppose."
"Why?"
"My friend Hégisippe Cruchot gave you an idea in Paris—about soldiers' feet. How is it developing?"
Sypher made a wry face. "I found, my dear Dix, it was like your guns of large caliber." He rose and walked impatiently about the room. "Don't let us talk about the Cure, there's a dear fellow. I come down here to forget it."
"Forget it?"
Septimus stared at him in amazement.
"Yes. To clear my mind and brain of it. To get a couple of nights' sleep after the rest of the week's nightmare. The concern is going to hell as fast as it can, and"—he stopped in front of Septimus and brought down his hands in a passionate gesture—"I can't believe it. I can't believe it! What I'm going through God only knows."
"I at least had no notion," said Septimus. "And I've been worrying you with my silly twaddle about babies and guns."
"It's a godsend for me to hear of anything save ruin and the breaking up of all that was dear to me in life. It's not like failure in an ordinary business. It has been infinitely more than a business to me. It has been a religion. It is still. That's why my soul refuses to grasp facts and figures."
He went on, feeling a relief in pouring out his heart to one who could understand. To no one had he thus spoken. With an expansive nature he had the strong man's pride. To the world in general he turned the conquering face of Clem Sypher, the Friend of Humanity, of Sypher's Cure. To Septimus alone had he shown the man in his desperate revolt against defeat. The lines around his mouth deepened into lines of pain, and pain lay behind his clear eyes and in the knitting of his brows.
"I believed the Almighty had put an instrument for the relief of human suffering into my hands. I dreamed great dreams. I saw all the nations of the earth blessing me. I know I was a damned fool. So are you. So is every visionary. So are the apostles, the missionaries, the explorers—all who dream great dreams—all damned fools, but a glorious company all the same. I'm not ashamed to belong to it. But there comes a time when the apostle finds himself preaching to the empty winds, and the explorer discovers his El Dorado to be a barren island, and he either goes mad or breaks his heart, and which of the two I'm going to do I don't know. Perhaps both."
"Zora Middlemist will be back soon," said Septimus. "She is coming by the White Star line, and she ought to be in Marseilles by the end of next week."
"She writes me that she may winter in Egypt. That is why she chose the White Star line," said Sypher.
"Have you told her what you've told me?"
"No," said Sypher, "and I never shall while there's a hope left. She knows it's a fight. But I tell her—as I have told my damned fool of a soul—that I shall conquer. Would you like to go to her and say, 'I'm done—I'm beaten'? Besides, I'm not."
He turned and poked the fire, smashing a great lump of coal with a stroke of his muscular arm as if it had been the skull of the Jebusa Jones dragon. Septimus twirled his small mustache and his hand inevitably went to his hair. He had the scared look he always wore at moments when he was coming to a decision.
"But you would like to see Zora, wouldn't you?" he asked.
Sypher wheeled round, and the expression on his face was that of a prisoner in the Bastille who had been asked whether he would like a summer banquet beneath the trees of Fontainebleau.
"You know that very well," said he.
He laid down the poker and crossed the room to a chair.
"I've often thought of what you said in Paris about her going away. You were quite right. You have a genius for saying and doing the simple right thing. We almost began our friendship by your saying it. Do you remember? It was in Monte Carlo. You remember that you didn't like my looking on Mrs. Middlemist as an advertisement. Oh, you needn't look uncomfortable, my dear fellow. I loved you for it. In Paris you practically told me that I oughtn't to regard her as a kind of fetich for the Cure, and claim her bodily presence. You also put before me the fact that there was no more reason for her to believe in the Cure than yourself or Hégisippe Cruchot. If you could tell me anything more," said he earnestly, "I should value it."
What he expected to learn from Septimus he did not know. But once having exalted him to inaccessible heights, the indomitable idealist was convinced that from his lips would fall words of gentle Olympian wisdom. Septimus, blushing at his temerity in having pointed out the way to the man whom he regarded as the incarnation of force and energy, curled himself up awkwardly in his chair, clasping his ankles between his locked fingers. At last the oracle spoke.
"If I were you," he said, "before going mad or breaking my heart, I should wait until I saw Zora."
"Very well. It will be a long time. Perhaps so much the better. I shall remain sane and heart-whole all the longer."
After dinner Sypher went round to "The Nook," and executed his difficult mission as best he could. To carry out Septimus's wishes, which involved the vilification of the innocent and the beatification of the guilty, went against his conscience. He omitted, therefore, reference to the demoniac rages which turned the home into an inferno, and to the quarrels over the machine for elongating the baby's nose. Their tempers were incompatible; they found a common life impossible; so, according to the wise modern view of things, they had decided to live apart while maintaining cordial relations.
Mrs. Oldrieve was greatly distressed. Tears rolled down her cheeks on to her knitting. The old order was changing too rapidly for her and the new to which it was giving place seemed anarchy to her bewildered eyes. She held up tremulous hands in protest. Husband and wife living apart so cheerfully, for such trivial reasons! Even if one had suffered great wrong at the hands of the other it was their duty to remain side by side. "Those whom God had joined together—"
"He didn't," snapped Cousin Jane. "They were joined together by a scrubby man in a registry office."
This is the wild and unjust way in which women talk. For aught Cousin Jane knew the Chelsea Registrar might have been an Antinous for beauty.
Mrs. Oldrieve shook her head sadly. She had known how it would be. If only they had been married in church by their good vicar, this calamity could not have befallen them.
"All the churches and all the vicars and all the archbishops couldn't have made that man anything else than a doddering idiot! How Emmy could have borne with him for a day passes my understanding. She has done well to get rid of him. She has made a mess of it, of course. People who marry in that way generally do. It serves her right."
So spoke Cousin Jane, whom Sypher found, in a sense, an unexpected ally. She made his task easier. Mrs. Oldrieve remained unconvinced.
"And the baby just a month or so old. Poor little thing! What's to become of it?"
"Emmy will have to come here," said Cousin Jane firmly, "and I'll bring it up. Emmy isn't fit to educate a rabbit. You had better write and order her to come home at once."
"I'll write to-morrow," sighed Mrs. Oldrieve.
Sypher reflected on the impossibilities of the proposition and on the reasons Emmy still had for remaining in exile in Paris. He also pitied the child that was to be brought up by Cousin Jane. It had extravagant tastes. He smiled.
"My friend Dix is already thinking of sending him to the University; so you see they have plans for his education."
Cousin Jane sniffed. She would make plans for them! As for the University—if it could turn out a doddering idiot like Septimus, it was criminal to send any young man to such a seat of unlearning. She would not allow him to have a voice in the matter. Emmy was to be summoned to Nunsmere.
Sypher was about to deprecate the idea when he reflected again, and thought of Hotspur and the spirits from the vasty deep. Cousin Jane could call, and so could Mrs. Oldrieve. But would Emmy come? As the answer to the question was in the negative he left Cousin Jane to her comfortable resolutions.
"You will no doubt discuss the matter with Dix," he said.
Cousin Jane threw up her hands. "Oh, for goodness' sake, don't let him come here! I couldn't bear the sight of him."
Sypher looked inquiringly at Mrs. Oldrieve.
"It has been a great shock to me," said the gentle lady. "It will take time to get over it. Perhaps he had better wait a little."
Sypher walked home in a wrathful mood. Ostracism was to be added to Septimus's crown of martyrdom.
Perhaps, on the other hand, the closing of "The Nook" doors was advantageous. He had dreaded the result of Cousin Jane's cross-examination, as lying was not one of his friend's conspicuous accomplishments. Soothed by this reflection he smoked a pipe, and took down Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" from his shelves.
While he was deriving spiritual entertainment from the great battle between Christian and Apollyon and consolation from the latter's discomfiture, Septimus was walking down the road to the post-office, a letter in his hand. The envelope was addressed to "Mrs. Middlemist, White Star Co.'s S.S. Cedric, Marseilles." It contained a blank sheet of headed note-paper and the tail of a little china dog.