He pondered gravely over the conundrum for some time, and then replied that he must have lost control over it. The command went forth that he should visit a barber and learn how to control his hair. He obeyed, and returned with his shock parted in the middle and plastered down heavily with pomatum, a saint of more than methodistical meekness. On Zora declaring that he looked awful (he was indeed inconceivably hideous), and that she preferred Struwel Peter after all, he dutifully washed his head with soda (after grave consultation with the chambermaid), and sunned himself once more in the smiles of his mistress.
Now and then, however, as she was kind and not tyrannical, she felt a pin-prick of compunction.
"If you would rather do anything else, don't hesitate to say so."
But Septimus, after having contemplated the world's potentialities of action with lack-luster eye, would declare that there was nothing else that could be done. Then she could rate him soundly.
"If I proposed that we should sail up the Andes and eat fried moonbeams, you would say 'yes.' Why haven't you more initiative?"
"I'm like Mrs. Shandy," he replied. "Some people are born so. They are quiescent; other people can jump about like grasshoppers. Do you know grasshoppers are very interesting?" And he began to talk irrelevantly on insects.
Their intercourse encouraged confidential autobiography. Zora learned the whole of his barren history. Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, he was alone in the world. From his father, Sir Erasmus Dix, a well-known engineer, to whose early repression much of Septimus's timidity was due, he had inherited a modest fortune. After leaving Cambridge he had wandered aimlessly about Europe. Now he lived in a little house in Shepherd's Bush, with a studio or shed at the end of the garden which he used as a laboratory.
"Why Shepherd's Bush?" asked Zora.
"Wiggleswick likes it," said he.
"And now he has the whole house to himself? I suppose he makes himself comfortable in your quarters and drinks your wine and smokes your cigars with his friends. Did you lock things up?"
"Oh, yes, of course," said Septimus.
"And where are the keys?"
"Why Wiggleswick has them," he replied.
Zora drew in her breath. "You don't know how angry you make me. If ever I meet Wiggleswick—"
"Well?"
"I'll talk to him," said Zora with a fine air of menace.
She, on her side, gave him such of her confidences as were meet for masculine ears. Naturally she impressed upon him the fact that his sex was abhorrent to her in all its physical, moral, and spiritual manifestations. Septimus, on thinking the matter over, agreed with her. Memories came back to him of the men with whom he had been intimate. His father, the mechanical man who had cogs instead of corpuscles in his blood, Wiggleswick the undesirable, a few rowdy men on his staircase at Cambridge who had led shocking lives—once making a bonfire of his pyjamas and a brand-new umbrella in the middle of the court—and had since come to early and disastrous ends. His impressions of the sex were distinctly bad. Germs of unutterable depravity, he was sure, lurked somewhere in his own nature.
"You make me feel," said he, "as if I weren't fit to black the boots of Jezebel."
"That's a proper frame of mind," said Zora. "Would you be good and tie this vexatious shoestring?"
The poor fool bent over it in reverent ecstasy, but Zora was only conscious of the reddening of his gills as he stooped.
This, to her, was the charm of their intercourse: that he never presumed upon their intimacy. When she remembered the prophecy of the Literary Man from London, she laughed at it scornfully. Here was a man, at any rate, who regarded her beauty unconcerned, and from whose society she derived no emotional experiences. She felt she could travel safely with him to the end of the earth.
This reflection came to her one morning while Turner, her maid, was brushing her hair. The corollary followed: "why not?"
"Turner," she said, "I'll soon have seen enough of Monte Carlo. I must go to Paris. What do you think of my asking Mr. Dix to come with us?"
"I think it would be most improper, ma'am," said Turner.
"There's nothing at all improper about it," cried Zora, with a flush. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
CHAPTER IV
At Monte Carlo, as all the world knows, there is an Arcade devoted to the most humorously expensive lace, diamond and general vanity shops in the universe, the Hôtel Métropole and Ciro's Restaurant. And Ciro's has a terrace where there are little afternoon tea-tables covered with pink cloths.
It was late in the afternoon, and save for a burly Englishman in white flannels and a Panama hat, reading a magazine by the door, and Zora and Septimus, who sat near the public gangway, the terrace was deserted. Inside, some men lounged about the bar drinking cocktails. The red Tzigane orchestra were already filing into the restaurant and the electric lamps were lit. Zora and Septimus had just returned from a day's excursion to Cannes. They were pleasantly tired and lingered over their tea in a companionable silence. Septimus ruminated dreamily over the nauseous entanglement of a chocolate eclair and a cigarette while Zora idly watched the burly Englishman. Presently she saw him do an odd thing. He tore out the middle of the magazine,—it bore an American title on the outside,—handed it to the waiter and put the advertisement pages in his pocket. From another pocket he drew another magazine, and read the advertisement pages of that with concentrated interest.
Her attention was soon distracted by a young couple, man and woman, decently dressed, who passed along the terrace, glanced at her, repassed and looked at her more attentively, the woman wistfully, and then stopped out of earshot and spoke a few words together. They returned, seemed to hesitate, and at last the woman, taking courage, advanced and addressed her.
"Pardon, Madame—but Madame looks so kind. Perhaps will she pardon the liberty of my addressing her?"
Zora smiled graciously. The woman was young, fragile, careworn, and a piteous appeal lay in her eyes. The man drew near and raised his hat apologetically. The woman continued. They had seen Madame there—and Monsieur—both looked kind, like all English people. Although she was French she was forced to admit the superior generosity of the English. They had hesitated, but the kind look of Madame had made her confident. They were from Havre. They had come to Nice to look after a lawsuit. Nearly all their money had gone. They had a little baby who was ill. In desperation they had brought the remainder of their slender fortune to Monte Carlo. They had lost it. It was foolish, but yet the baby came out that day with nine red spots on its chest and it seemed as if it was a sign from the bon Dieu that they should back nine and red at the tables. Now she knew too late that it was measles and not a sign from the bon Dieu at all. But they were penniless. The baby wanted physic and a doctor and would die. As a last resource they resolved to sink their pride and appeal to the generosity of Monsieur and Madame. The woman's wistful eyes filled with tears and the corners of her mouth quivered. The man with a great effort choked a sob. Zora's generous heart melted at the tale. It rang so stupidly true. The fragile creature's air was so pathetic. She opened her purse.
"Will a hundred francs be of any use to you?" she asked in her schoolgirl French.
"Oh, Madame!"
"And I, too, will give a hundred to the baby," said Septimus. "I like babies and I've also had the measles." He opened his pocketbook.
"Oh, Monsieur," said the man. "How can I ever be sufficiently grateful?"
He held out his hand for the note, when something hit him violently in the back. It was the magazine hurled by the burly Englishman, who followed up the assault by a torrent of abuse.
"Allez-vous-ong! Cochons! Et plus vite que ça!" There was something terrific in his awful British accent.
The pair turned in obvious dismay. He waved them off.
"Don't give them anything. The baby hasn't any red spots. There isn't a baby. They daren't show their noses in the rooms. Oh je vous connais. Vous êtes George Polin et Celestine Macrou. Sales voleurs. Allez-vous-ong ou j'appelle la police."
But the last few words were shouted to the swiftly retiring backs of the pathetic couple.
"I've saved you two hundred francs," said the burly Englishman, picking up his magazine and tenderly smoothing it. "Those two are the most accomplished swindlers in this den of thieves."
"I can't believe it," said Zora, half hurt, half resentful. "The woman's eyes were full of tears."
"It's true," said her champion. "And the best of it is that the man is actually an accredited agent of Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy."
He stood, his hands on his broad hips, regarding her with the piercing eyes of a man who is imparting an incredible but all-important piece of information.
"Why the best of it?" asked Zora, puzzled.
"It only shows how unscrupulous they are in their business methods. A man like that could persuade a fishmonger or an undertaker to stock it. But he'll do them in the end. They'll suffer for it."
"Who will?"
"Why, Jebusa Jones, of course. Oh, I see," he continued, looking at the two perplexed faces, "you don't know who I am. I am Clem Sypher."
He looked from one to the other as if to see the impression made by his announcement.
"I am glad to make your acquaintance," said Septimus, "and I thank you for your services."
"Your name?"
"My name is Dix—Septimus Dix."
"Delighted to meet you. I have seen you before. Two years ago. You were sitting alone in the lounge of the Hôtel Continental, Paris. You were suffering from severe abrasions on your face."
"Dear me," said Septimus. "I remember. I had shaved myself with a safety razor. I invented it."
"I was going to speak to you, but I was prevented." He turned to Zora.
"I've met you too, on Vesuvius in January. You were with two elderly ladies. You were dreadfully sunburnt. I made their acquaintance next day in Naples. You had gone, but they told me your name. Let me see. I know everybody and never forget anything. My mind is pigeon-holed like my office. Don't tell me."
He held up his forefinger and fixed her with his eye.
"It's Middlemist," he cried triumphantly, "and you've an Oriental kind of Christian name—Zora! Am I right?"
"Perfectly," she laughed, the uncanniness of his memory mitigating the unconventionality of his demeanor.
"Now we all know one another," he said, swinging a chair round and sitting unasked at the table. "You're both very sunburnt and the water here is hard and will make the skin peel. You had better use some of the cure. I use it myself every day—see the results."
He passed his hand over his smooth, clean-shaven face, which indeed was as rosy as a baby's. His piercing eyes contrasted oddly with his chubby, full lips and rounded chin.
"What cure?" asked Zora, politely.
"What cure?" he echoed, taken aback, "why, my cure. What other cure is there?"
He turned to Septimus, who stared at him vacantly. Then the incredible truth began to dawn on him.
"I am Clem Sypher—Friend of Humanity—Sypher's Cure. Now do you know?"
"I'm afraid I'm shockingly ignorant," said Zora.
"So am I," said Septimus.
"Good heavens!" cried Sypher, bringing both hands down on the table, tragically. "Don't you ever read your advertisements?"
"I'm afraid not," said Zora.
"No," said Septimus.
Before his look of mingled amazement and reproach they felt like Sunday-school children taken to task for having skipped the Kings of Israel.
"Well," said Sypher, "this is the reward we get for spending millions of pounds and the shrewdest brains in the country for the benefit of the public! Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly bought experience go to the making of an advertisement? You'll go miles out of your way to see a picture or a piece of sculpture that hasn't cost a man half the trouble and money to produce, and you'll not look at an advertisement of a thing vital to your life, though it is put before your eyes a dozen times a day. Here's my card, and here are some leaflets for you to read at your leisure. They will repay perusal."
He drew an enormous pocketbook from his breast pocket and selected two cards and two pamphlets, which he laid on the table. Then he arose with an air of suave yet offended dignity. Zora, seeing that the man, in some strange way, was deeply hurt, looked up at him with a conciliatory smile.
"You mustn't bear me any malice, Mr. Sypher, because I'm so grateful to you for saving us from these swindling people."
When Zora smiled into a man's eyes, she was irresistible. Sypher's pink face relaxed.
"Never mind," he said. "I'll send you all the advertisements I can lay my hands on in the morning. Au revoir."
He raised his hat and went away. Zora laughed across the table.
"What an extraordinary person!"
"I feel as if I had been talking to a typhoon," said Septimus.
They went to the theater that evening, and during the first entr'acte strolled into the rooms. Except the theater the Casino administration provides nothing that can allure the visitor from the only purpose of the establishment. Even the bar at the end of the atrium could tempt nobody not seriously parched with thirst. It is the most comfortless pleasure-house in Europe. You are driven, deliberately, in desperation into the rooms.
Zora and Septimus were standing by the decorous hush of a trente et quarante table, when they were joined by Mr. Clem Sypher. He greeted them like old acquaintances.
"I reckoned I should meet you sometime to-night. Winning?"
"We never play," said Zora.
Which was true. A woman either plunges feverishly into the vice of gambling or she is kept away from it by her inborn economic sense of the uses of money. She cannot regard it like a man, as a mere amusement. Light loves are somewhat in the same category. Hence many misunderstandings between the sexes. Zora found the amusement profitless, the vice degraded. So, after her first evening, she played no more. Septimus did not count.
"We never play," said Zora.
"Neither do I," said Sypher.
"The real way to enjoy Monte Carlo is to regard these rooms as non-existent. I wish they were."
"Oh, don't say that," Sypher exclaimed quickly. "They are most useful. They have a wisely ordained purpose. They are the meeting-place of the world. I come here every year and make more acquaintances in a day than I do elsewhere in a month. Soon I shall know everybody and everybody will know me, and they'll take away with them to Edinburgh and Stockholm and Uruguay and Tunbridge Wells—to all corners of the earth—a personal knowledge of the cure."
"Oh—I see. From that point of view—" said Zora.
"Of course. What other could there be? You see the advantage? It makes the thing human. It surrounds it with personality. It shows that 'Friend of Humanity' isn't a cant phrase. They recommend the cure to their friends. 'Are you sure it's all right?' they are asked. 'Of course it is,' they can reply. 'I know the man, Clem Sypher himself.' And the friends are convinced and go about saying they know a man who knows Clem Sypher, and so the thing spreads like a snowball. Have you read the pamphlet?"
"It was most interesting," said Zora mendaciously.
"I thought you'd find it so. I've brought something in my pocket for you."
He searched and brought out a couple of little red celluloid boxes, which he handed to Septimus.
"There are two sample boxes of the cure—one for Mrs. Middlemist and one for yourself, Mr. Dix. You both have a touch of the sun. Put it on to-night. Let it stay there for five minutes; then rub off with a smooth, dry towel. In the morning you'll see the miracle." He looked at Septimus earnestly. "Quite sure you haven't anything in the nature of an eruption on you?"
"Good Lord, no. Of course not," said Septimus, startled out of a dreamy contemplation of the two little red boxes.
"That's a pity. It would have been so nice to cure you. Ah!" said he, with a keen glance up the room. "There's Lord Rebenham. I must enquire after his eczema. You won't forget me now. Clem Sypher. Friend of Humanity."
He bowed and withdrew, walking kindly and broad-shouldered trough the crowd, like a benevolent deity, the latest thing in Æsculapiuses, among his devotees.
"What am I to do with these?" asked Septimus, holding out the boxes.
"You had better give me mine, or heaven knows what will become of it," said Zora, and she put it in her little chain bag, with her handkerchief, purse, and powder-puff.
The next morning she received an enormous basket of roses and a bundle of newspapers; also a card, bearing the inscription "Mr. Clem Sypher. The Kurhaus. Kilburn Priory, N.W." She frowned ever so little at the flowers. To accept them would be to accept Mr. Sypher's acquaintance in his private and Kilburn Priory capacity. To send them back would be ungracious, seeing that he had saved her a hundred francs and had cured her imaginary sunburn. She took up the card and laughed. It was like him to name his residence "The Kurhaus." She would never know him in his private capacity, for the simple reason that he hadn't one. The roses were an advertisement. So Turner unpacked the basket, and while Zora was putting the roses into water she wondered whether Mr. Sypher's house was decorated with pictorial advertisements of the cure instead of pictures. Her woman's instinct, however, caused the reflection that the roses must have cost more than all the boxes of the cure she could buy in a lifetime.
Septimus was dutifully waiting for her in the hall. She noted that he was more spruce than usual, in a new gray cashmere suit, and that his brown boots shone dazzlingly, like agates. They went out together, and the first person who met their eyes was the Friend of Humanity sunning himself in the square and feeding the pigeons with bread crumbs from a paper bag. As soon as he saw Zora he emptied his bag and crossed over.
"Good morning, Mrs. Middlemist. Good morning, Mr. Dix. Used the cure? I see you have, Mrs. Middlemist. Isn't it wonderful? If you'd only go about Monte Carlo with an inscription 'Try Sypher's Cure!' What an advertisement! I'd have you one done in diamonds! And how did you find it, Mr. Dix?"
"I—oh!" murmured Septimus. "I forgot about it last night—and this morning I found I hadn't any brown boot polish—I—"
"Used the cure?" cried Zora, aghast.
"Yes," said Septimus, timidly. "It's rather good," and he regarded his dazzling boots.
Clem Sypher burst into a roar of laughter and clapped Septimus on the shoulder.
"Didn't I tell you?" he cried delightedly. "Didn't I tell you it's good for everything? What cream could give you such a polish? By Jove! You deserve to be on the free list for life. You've given me a line for an ad. 'If your skin is all right, try it on your boots.' By George! I'll use it. This is a man with ideas, Mrs. Middlemist. We must encourage him."
"Mr. Dix is an inventor," said Zora. She liked Sypher for laughing. It made him human. It was therefore with a touch of kindly feeling that she thanked him for the roses.
"I wanted to make them blush at the sight of your complexion after the cure," said he.
It was a compliment, and Zora frowned; but it was a professional compliment—so she smiled. Besides, the day was perfect, and Zora not only had not a care in the wide world, but was conscious of a becoming hat. She could not help smiling pleasantly on the world.
An empty motor car entered the square, and drew up near by. The chauffeur touched his cap.
"I'll run you both over to Nice," said Clem Sypher. "I have to meet my agent there and put the fear of God into him. I shan't be long. My methods are quick. And I'll run you back again. Don't say no."
There was the car—a luxurious 40 h.p. machine, upholstered in green; there was Clem Sypher, pink and strong, appealing to her with his quick eyes; there was the sunshine and the breathless blue of the sky; and there was Septimus Dix, a faithful bodyguard. She wavered and turned to Septimus.
"What do you say?"
She was lost. Septimus murmured something inconclusive. Sypher triumphed. She went indoors to get her coat and veil. Sypher admiringly watched her retreating figure—a poem of subtle curves—and shrugging himself into his motor coat, which the chauffeur brought him from the car, he turned to Septimus.
"Look here, Mr. Dix, I'm a straight man, and go straight to a point. Don't be offended. Am I in the way?"
"Not in the least," said Septimus, reddening.
"As for me, I don't care a hang for anything in the universe save Sypher's Cure. That's enough for one man to deal with. But I like having such a glorious creature as Mrs. Middlemist in my car. She attracts attention; and I can't say but what I'm not proud at being seen with her, both as a man and a manufacturer. But that's all. Now, tell me, what's in your mind?"
"I don't think I quite like you—er—to look on Mrs. Middlemist as an advertisement," said Septimus. To speak so directly cost him considerable effort.
"Don't you? Then I won't. I love a man to speak straight to me. I respect him. Here's my hand." He wrung Septimus's hand warmly. "I feel that we are going to be friends. I'm never wrong. I hope Mrs. Middlemist will allow me to be a friend. Tell me about her."
Septimus again reddened uncomfortably. He belonged to a class which does not discuss its women with a stranger even though he be a newly sworn brother.
"She mightn't care for it," he said.
Sypher once more clapped him on the shoulder. "Good again!" he cried, admiringly. "I shouldn't like you half so much if you had told me. I've got to know, for I know everything, so I'll ask her myself."
Zora came down coated and veiled, her face radiant as a Romney in its frame of gauze. She looked so big and beautiful, and Sypher looked so big and strong, and both seemed so full of vitality, that Septimus felt criminally insignificant. His voice was of too low a pitch to make itself carry when these two spoke in their full tones. He shrank into his shell. Had he not realized, in his sensitive way, that without him as a watchdog—ineffectual spaniel that he was—Zora would not accept Clem Sypher's invitation, he would have excused himself from the drive. He differentiated, not conceitedly, between Clem Sypher and himself. She had driven alone with him on her first night at Monte Carlo. But then she had carried him off between her finger and thumb, so to speak, as the Brobdingnagian ladies carried off Gulliver. He knew that he did not count as a danger in the eyes of high-spirited young women. A man like Sypher did. He knew that Zora would not have driven alone with Sypher any more than with the wretch of the evil eyes. He did not analyze this out himself, as his habit of mind was too vague and dreamy. But he knew it instinctively, as a dog knows whom he can trust with his mistress and whom he cannot. So when Sypher and Zora, with a great bustle of life, were discussing seating arrangements in the car, he climbed modestly into the front seat next to the chauffeur, and would not be dislodged by Sypher's entreaties. He was just there, on guard, having no place in the vigorous atmosphere of their personalities. He sat aloof, smoking his pipe, and wondering whether he could invent a motor perambulator which could run on rails round a small garden, fill the baby's lungs with air, and save the British Army from the temptation of nursery-maids. His sporadic discourse on the subject perplexed the chauffeur.
It was a day of vivid glory. Rain had fallen heavily during the night, laying the dust on the road and washing to gay freshness the leaves of palms and gold-spotted orange trees and the purple bourgainvillea and other flowers that rioted on wayside walls. All the deep, strong color of the South was there, making things unreal: the gray mountains, fragile masses against the solid cobalt of the sky. The Mediterranean met the horizon in a blue so intense that the soul ached to see it. The heart of spring throbbed in the deep bosom of summer. The air as they sped through it was like cool spiced wine.
Zora listened to Clem Sypher's dithyrambics. The wine of the air had got into his head. He spoke as she had heard no man speak before. The turns of the road brought into sight view after magic view, causing her to catch her breath: purple rock laughing in the sea, far-off townlets flashing white against the mountain flank, gardens of paradise. Yet Clem Sypher sang of his cure.
First it was a salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's assistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, hit on this world-upheaving remedy.
"When I found what it was that I had done, Mrs. Middlemist," said he solemnly, "I passed my vigil, like a knight of old, in my dispensary, with a pot of the cure in front of me, and I took a great oath to devote my life to spread it far and wide among the nations of the earth. It should bring comfort, I swore, to the king in his palace and the peasant in his hut. It should be a household word in the London slum and on the Tartar steppe. Sypher's Cure could go with the Red Cross into battle, and should be in the clerk's wife's cupboard in Peckham Rye. The human chamois that climbs the Alps, the gentle lunatic that plays golf, the idiot that goes and gets scalped by Red Indians, the missionary that gets half roasted by cannibals—if he gets quite roasted the cure's no good; it can't do impossibilities—all should carry Sypher's Cure in their waistcoat pockets. All mankind should know it, from China to Peru, from Cape Horn to Nova Zembla. It would free the tortured world from plague. I would be the Friend of Humanity. I took that for my device. It was something to live for. I was twenty then. I am forty now. I have had twenty years of the fiercest battle that ever man fought."
"And surely you've come off victorious, Mr. Sypher," said Zora.
"I shall never be victorious until it has overspread the earth!" he declared. And he passed one hand over the other in a gesture which symbolized the terrestrial globe with a coating of Sypher's Cure.
"It shall. Somehow, I believe that with you on my side it will."
"I?" Zora started away to the corner of the car, and gazed on him in blank amazement. "I? What in the world have I to do with it?"
"I don't know yet," said Sypher. "I have an intuition. I'm a believer in intuitions. I've followed them all my life, and they've never played me false. The moment I learned that you had never heard of me, I felt it."
Zora breathed comfortably again. It was not an implied declaration.
"I'm fighting against the Powers of Darkness," he continued. "I once read a bit of Spenser's 'Faërie Queene.' There was a Red Cross Knight who slew a Dragon—but he had a fabulous kind of woman behind him. When I saw you, you seemed that fabulous kind of woman."
At a sharp wall corner a clump of tall poinsettias flamed against the sky. Zora laughed full-heartedly.
"Here we are in the middle of a Fairy Tale. What are the Powers of Darkness in your case, Sir Red Cross Knight?"
"Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy," said Sypher savagely.
CHAPTER V
That was Clem Sypher's Dragon—Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy. He drew so vivid a picture of its foul iniquity that Zora was convinced that the earth had never harbored so scaly a horror. Of all Powers of Evil in the universe it was the most devastating.
She was swept up by his eloquence to his point of view, and saw things with his eyes. When she came to examine the poor dragon in the cool light of her own reason it appeared at the worst to be but a pushful patent medicine of an inferior order which, on account of its cheapness and the superior American skill in distributing it, was threatening to drive Sypher's Cure off the market.
"I'll strangle it as Hercules strangled the dog-headed thing," cried Sypher.
He meant the Hydra, which wasn't dog-headed and which Hercules didn't strangle. But a man can be at once unmythological and sincere. Clem Sypher was in earnest.
"You talk as if your cure had something of a divine sanction," said Zora. This was before her conversion.
"Mrs. Middlemist, if I didn't believe that," said Sypher solemnly, "do you think I would have devoted my life to it?"
"I thought people ran these things to make money," said Zora.
It was then that Sypher entered on the exordium of the speech which convinced her of the diabolical noisomeness of the Jebusa Jones unguent. His peroration summed up the contest as that between Mithra and Ahriman.
Yet Zora, though she took a woman's personal interest in the battle between Sypher's Cure and Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy, siding loyally and whole-heartedly with her astonishing host, failed to pierce to the spirituality of the man—to divine him as a Poet with an Ideal.
"After all," said Sypher on the way back—Septimus, with his coat-collar turned up over his ears, still sat on guard by the chauffeur, consoled by a happy hour he had spent alone with his mistress after lunch, while Sypher was away putting the fear of God into his agent, during which hour he had unfolded to her his scientific philosophy of perambulators—"after all," said Sypher, "the great thing is to have a Purpose in Life. Everyone can't have my Purpose "—he apologized for humanity—"but they can have some guiding principle. What's yours?"
Zora was startled by the unexpected question. What was her Purpose in Life? To get to the heart of the color of the world? That was rather vague. Also nonsensical when so formulated. She took refuge in jest.
"I thought you had decided that my mission was to help you slay the dragon?"
"We have to decide on our missions for ourselves," said he.
"Don't you think it sufficient Purpose for a woman who has been in a gray prison all her life—when she finds herself free—to go out and see all that is wonderful in scenery like this, in paintings, architecture, manners, and customs of other nations, in people who have other ideas and feelings from those she knew in prison? You speak as if you're finding fault with me for not doing anything useful. Isn't what I do enough? What else can I do?"
"I don't know," said Sypher, looking at the back of his gloves; then he turned his head and met her eyes in one of his quick glances. "But you, with your color and your build and your voice, seem somehow to me to stand for Force—there's something big about you—just as there's something big about me—Napoleonic—and I can't understand why it doesn't act in some particular direction."
"Oh, you must give me time," cried Zora. "Time to expand, to find out what kind of creature I really am. I tell you I've been in prison. Then I thought I was free and found a purpose, as you call it. Then I had a knock-down blow. I am a widow—I supposed you've guessed. Oh, now, don't speak. It wasn't grief. My married life was a six-weeks' misery. I forget it. I went away from home free five months ago—to see all this"—she waved her hand—"for the first time. Whatever force I have has been devoted to seeing it all, to taking it all in."
She spoke earnestly, just a bit passionately. In the silence that followed she realized with sudden amazement that she had opened her heart to this prime apostle of quackery. As he made no immediate reply, the silence grew tense and she clasped her hands tight, and wondered, as her sex has done from time immemorial, why on earth she had spoken. When he answered it was kindly.
"You've done me a great honor in telling me this. I understand. You want the earth, or as much of it as you can get, and when you've got it and found out what it means, you'll make a great use of it. Have you many friends?"
"No," said Zora. He had an uncanny way of throwing her back on to essentials. "None stronger than myself."
"Will you take me as a friend? I'm strong enough," said Sypher.
"Willingly," she said, dominated by his earnestness.
"That's good. I may be able to help you when you've found your vocation. I can tell you, at any rate, how to get to what you want. You've just got to keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eyes wander to right or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal—the truest thing in Scripture is about Lot's wife. She looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt."
He paused, his face assumed an air of profound reflection, and he added with gravity:
"And the Clem Sypher of the period when he came by, made use of her, and plastered her over with posters of his cure."
The day she had appointed as the end of her Monte Carlo visit arrived. She would first go to Paris, where some Americans whom she had met in Florence and with whom she had exchanged occasional postcards pressed her to join them. Then London; and then a spell of rest in the lavender of Nunsmere. That was her programme. Septimus Dix was to escort her as far as Paris, in defiance of the proprieties as interpreted by Turner. What was to become of him afterwards neither conjectured; least of all Septimus himself. He said nothing about getting back to Shepherd's Bush. Many brilliant ideas had occurred to him during his absence which needed careful working out. Wherefore Zora concluded that he proposed to accompany her to London.
A couple of hours before the train started she dispatched Turner to Septimus's hotel to remind him of the journey. Turner, a strong-minded woman of forty—like the oyster she had been crossed in love and like her mistress she held men in high contempt—returned with an indignant tale. After a series of parleyings with Mr. Dix through the medium of the hotel chasseur, who had a confused comprehension of voluble English, she had mounted at Mr. Dix's entreaty to his room. There she found him, half clad and in his dressing-gown, staring helplessly at a wilderness of clothing and toilet articles for which there was no space in his suit cases and bag, already piled mountain high.
"I can never do it, Turner," he said as she entered. "What's to be done?"
Turner replied that she did not know; her mistress's instructions were that he should catch the train.
"I'll have to leave behind what I can't get in," he said despondently. "I generally have to do so. I tell the hotel people to give it to widows and orphans. But that's one of the things that make traveling so expensive."
"But you brought everything, sir, in this luggage?"
"I suppose so. Wiggleswick packed. It's his professional training, Turner. I think they call it 'stowing the swag.'"
As Turner had not heard of Wiggleswick's profession, she did not catch the allusion. Nor did Zora enlighten her when she reported the conversation.
"If they went in once they'll go in again," said Turner.
"They won't. They never do," said Septimus.
His plight was so hopeless, he seemed so immeasurably her sex's inferior, that he awoke her contemptuous pity. Besides, her trained woman's hands itched to restore order out of masculine chaos.
"Turn everything out and I'll pack for you," she said resolutely, regardless of the proprieties. On further investigation she held out horrified hands.
He had mixed up shirts with shoes. His clothes were rolled in bundles, his collars embraced his sponge, his trees, divorced from boots, lay on the top of an unprotected bottle of hair-wash; he had tried to fit his brushes against a box of tooth-powder and the top had already come off. Turner shook out his dress suit and discovered a couple of hotel towels which had got mysteriously hidden in the folds. She held them up severely.
"No wonder you can't get your things in if you take away half the hotel linen," and she threw them to the other side of the room.
In twenty minutes she had worked the magic of Wiggleswick. Septimus was humbly grateful.
"If I were you, sir," she said, "I'd go to the station at once and sit on my boxes till my mistress arrives."
"I think I'll do it, Turner," said Septimus.
Turner went back to Zora flushed, triumphant, and indignant.
"If you think, ma'am," said she, "that Mr. Dix is going to help us on our journey, you're very much mistaken. He'll lose his ticket and he'll lose his luggage and he'll lose himself, and we'll have to go and find them."
"You must take Mr. Dix humorously," said Zora.
"I've no desire to take him at all, ma'am." And Turner snorted virtuously, as became her station.
Zora found him humbly awaiting her on the platform in company with Clem Sypher, who presented her with a great bunch of roses and a bundle of illustrated papers. Septimus had received as a parting guerdon an enormous package of the cure, which he embraced somewhat dejectedly. It was Sypher who looked after the luggage of the party. His terrific accent filled the station. Septimus regarded him with envy. He wondered how a man dared order foreign railway officials about like that.
"If I tried to do it they would lock me up. I once interfered in a street row."
Zora did not hear the dire results of the interference. Sypher claimed her attention until the train was on the point of starting.
"Your address in England? You haven't given it."
"The Nook, Nunsmere, Surrey, will always find me."
"Nunsmere?" He paused, pencil in hand, and looked up at her as she stood framed in the railway carriage window. "I nearly bought a house there last year. I was looking out for one with a lawn reaching down to a main railway track. This one had it."
"Penton Court?"
"Yes. That was the name."
"It's still unsold," laughed Zora idly.
"I'll buy it at once," said he.
"En voiture," cried the guard.
Sypher put out his masterful hand.
"Au revoir. Remember. We are friends. I never say what I don't mean."
The train moved out of the station. Zora took her seat opposite Septimus.
"I really believe he'll do it," she said.
"What?"
"Oh, something crazy," said Zora. "Tell me about the street row."
In Paris Zora was caught in the arms of the normal and the uneventful. An American family consisting of a father, mother, son and two daughters touring the continent do not generate an atmosphere of adventure. Their name was Callender, they were wealthy, and the track beaten by the golden feet of their predecessors was good enough for them. They were generous and kindly. There was no subtle complexity in their tastes. They liked the best, they paid for it, and they got it. The women were charming, cultivated and eager for new sensations. They found Zora a new sensation, because she had that range of half tones which is the heritage of a child of an older, grayer civilization. Father and son delighted in her. Most men did. Besides, she relieved the family tedium. The family knew the Paris of the rich Anglo-Saxon and other rich Anglo-Saxons in Paris. Zora accompanied them on their rounds. They lunched and dined in the latest expensive restaurants in the Champs Elysées and the Bois; they went to races; they walked up and down the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue de l'Opéra and visited many establishments where the female person is adorned. After the theater they drove to the Cabarets of Montmartre, where they met other Americans and English, and felt comfortably certain that they were seeing the naughty, shocking underside of Paris. They also went to the Louvre and to the Tomb of Napoleon. They stayed at the Grand Hotel.
Zora saw little of Septimus. He knew Paris in a queer, dim way of his own, and lived in an obscure hotel, whose name Zora could not remember, on the other side of the river. She introduced him to the Callenders, and they were quite prepared to receive him into their corporation. But he shrank from so vast a concourse as six human beings; he seemed to be overawed by the multitude of voices, unnerved by the multiplicity of personalities. The unfeathered owl blinked dazedly in general society as the feathered one does in daylight. At first he tried to stand the glare for Zora's sake.
"Come out and mix with people and enjoy yourself," cried Zora, when he was arguing against a proposal to join the party on a Versailles excursion. "I want you to enjoy yourself for once in your life. Besides—you're always so anxious to be human. This will make you human."
"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."
But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge acquaintance—one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated his disastrous career—ran across him in the Boulevard Sévastopol.
"Why—if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"
"Oh—hooting," said Septimus.
Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally. When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly changing the conversation to the price of hams.
"But what are you going to do with hams?"
"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I always want to buy them. They look so shiny."
Zora's delicate nostrils sniffed the faintest perfume of a mystery; but a moment afterwards the Callenders carried her off to Ledoyen's and Longchamps and other indubitable actualities in which she forgot things less tangible. Long afterwards she discovered that the friend was an old woman, a marchande des quatre saisons who sold vegetables in the Place de la République. He had known her many years, and as she was at the point of death he comforted her with blood-puddings and flowers and hams and the ministrations of an indignant physician. But at the time Septimus hid his Good Samaritanism under a cloud of vagueness.
Then came a period during which Zora lost him altogether. Days passed. She missed him. Life with the Callenders was a continuous shooting of rapids. A quiet talk with Septimus was an hour in a backwater, curiously restful. She began to worry. Had he been run over by an omnibus? Only an ever-recurring miracle could bring him safely across the streets of a great city. When the Callenders took her to the Morgue she dreaded to look at the corpses.
"I do wish I knew what has become of him," she said to Turner.
"Why not write to him, ma'am?" Turner suggested.
"I've forgotten the name of his hotel," said Zora, wrinkling her forehead.
The name of the Hôtel Quincamboeuf, where he lodged, eluded her memory.
"I do wish I knew," she repeated.
Then she caught an involuntary but illuminating gleam in Turner's eye, and she bade her look for hairpins. Inwardly she gasped from the shock of revelation; then she laughed to herself, half amused, half indignant. The preposterous absurdity of the suggestion! But in her heart she realized that, in some undefined human fashion, Septimus Dix counted for something in her life. What had become of him?
At last she found him one morning sitting by a table in the courtyard of the Grand Hotel, patiently awaiting her descent. By mere chance she was un-Callendered.
"Why, what—?"
The intended reproval died on her lips as she saw his face. His cheeks were hollow and white, his eyes sunken The man was ill. His hand burned through her glove. Feelings warm and new gushed forth.
"Oh, my dear friend, what is the matter?"
"I must go back to England. I came to say good-bye. I've had this from Wiggleswick."
He handed her an open letter. She waved it away.
"That's of no consequence. Sit down. You're ill. You have a high temperature. You should be in bed."
"I've been," said Septimus. "Four days."
"And you've got up in this state? You must go back at once. Have you seen a doctor? No, of course you haven't. Oh, dear!" She wrung her hands. "You are not fit to be trusted alone. I'll drive you to your hotel and see that you're comfortable and send for a doctor."
"I've left the hotel," said Septimus. "I'm going to catch the eleven train. My luggage is on that cab."
"But it's five minutes past eleven now. You have lost the train—thank goodness."
"I'll be in good time for the four o'clock," said Septimus. "This is the way I generally travel. I told you." He rose, swayed a bit, and put his hand on the table to steady himself. "I'll go and wait at the station. Then I'll be sure to catch it. You see I must go."
"But why?" cried Zora.
"Wiggleswick's letter. The house has been burnt down and everything in it. The only thing he saved was a large portrait of Queen Victoria."
Then he fainted.
Zora had him carried to a room in the hotel and sent for a doctor, who kept him in bed for a fortnight. Zora and Turner nursed him, much to his apologetic content. The Callenders in the meanwhile went to Berlin.
When Septimus got up, gaunt and staring, he appealed to the beholder as the most helpless thing which the Creator had clothed in the semblance of a man.
"He must take very great care of himself for the next few weeks," said the doctor. "If he gets a relapse I won't answer for the consequences. Can't you take him somewhere?"
"Take him somewhere?" The idea had been worrying her for some days past. If she left him to his own initiative he would probably go and camp with Wiggleswick amid the ruins of his house in Shepherd's Bush, where he would fall ill again and die. She would be responsible.
"We can't leave him here, at any rate," she remarked to Turner.
Turner agreed. As well abandon a month-old baby on a doorstep and expect it to earn its livelihood. She also had come to take a proprietary interest in Septimus.
"He might stay with us in Nunsmere. What do you think, Turner?"
"I think, ma'am," said Turner, "that would be the least improper arrangement."
"He can have Cousin Jane's room," mused Zora, knowing that Cousin Jane would fly at her approach.
"And I'll see, ma'am, that he comes down to his meals regular," said Turner.
"Then it's settled," said Zora.
She went forthwith to the invalid and acquainted him with his immediate destiny. At first he resisted. He would be a nuisance. Since his boyhood he had never lived in a lady's house. Even landladies in lodgings had found him impossible. He could not think of accepting more favors from her all too gracious hands.
"You've got to do what you're told," said Zora, conclusively. She noticed a shade of anxiety cross his face. "Is there anything else?"
"Wiggleswick. I don't know what's to become of him."
"He can come to Nunsmere and lodge with the local policeman," said Zora.
On the evening before they started from Paris she received a letter addressed in a curiously feminine hand. It ran: