Читать книгу Septimus - William John Locke - Страница 5

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When they drove up to the Hôtel de Paris, she alighted and bade him a smiling farewell, and went to her room with the starlight in her eyes. The lift man asked if Madame had won. She dangled her empty purse and laughed. Then the lift man, who had seen that light in women's eyes before, made certain that she was in love, and opened the lift door for her with the confidential air of the Latin who knows sweet secrets. But the lift man was wrong. No man had a part in her soul's exultation. If Septimus Dix crossed her mind while she was undressing, it was as a grotesque, bearing the same relation to her emotional impression of the night as a gargoyle does to a cathedral. When she went to bed, she slept the sound sleep of youth.

Septimus, after dismissing the cab, wandered in his vague way over to the Café de Paris, instinct suggesting his belated breakfast, which, like his existence, Zora had forgotten. The waiter came.

"Monsieur désire?"

"Absinthe," murmured Septimus absent-mindedly, "and—er—poached eggs—and anything—a raspberry ice."

The waiter gazed at him in stupefaction; but nothing being too astounding in Monte Carlo, he wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead and executed the order.

The unholy meal being over, Septimus drifted into the square and spent most of the night on a bench gazing at the Hôtel de Paris and wondering which were her windows. When she mentioned casually, a day or two later, that her windows looked the other way over the sea, he felt that Destiny had fooled him once more; but for the time being he found a gentle happiness in his speculation. Chilled to the bone, at last, he sought his hotel bedroom and smoked a pipe, meditative, with his hat on until the morning. Then he went to bed.

Two mornings afterwards Zora came upon him on the Casino terrace. He sprawled idly on a bench between a fat German and his fat wife, who were talking across him. His straw hat was tilted over his eyes and his legs were crossed. In spite of the conversation (and a middle-class German does not whisper when he talks to his wife), and the going and coming of the crowd—in spite of the sunshine and the blue air, he slumbered peacefully. Zora passed him once or twice. Then by the station lift she paused and looked out at the bay of Mentone clasping the sea—a blue enamel in a setting of gold. She stood for some moments lost in the joy of it when a voice behind her brought her back to the commonplace.

"Very lovely, isn't it?"

A thin-faced Englishman of uncertain age and yellow, evil eyes met her glance as she turned instinctively.

"Yes, it's beautiful," she replied coldly; "but that is no reason why you should take the liberty of speaking to me."

"I couldn't help sharing my emotions with another, especially one so beautiful. You seem to be alone here?"

Now she remembered having seen him before—rather frequently. The previous evening he had somewhat ostentatiously selected a table near hers at dinner. He had watched her as she had left the theater and followed her to the lift door. He had been watching for his opportunity and now thought it had come. She shivered with sudden anger, and round her heart crept the chill of fright which all women know who have been followed in a lonely street.

"I certainly am not alone," she said wrathfully. "Good morning."

The man covered his defeat by raising his hat with ironic politeness, and Zora walked swiftly away, in appearance a majestic Amazon, but inwardly a quivering woman. She marched straight up to the recumbent Dix. The Literary Man from London would have been amused. She interposed herself between the conversing Teutons and awakened the sleeper. He looked at her for a moment with a dreamy smile, then leaped to his feet.

"A man has insulted me—he has been following me about and tried to get into conversation with me."

"Dear me," said Septimus. "What shall I do? Shall I shoot him?"

"Don't be silly," she said seriously. "It's serious. I'd be glad if you'd kindly walk up and down a little with me."

"With pleasure." They strolled away together. "But I am serious. If you wanted me to shoot him I'd do it. I'd do anything in the world for you. I've got a revolver in my room."

She laughed, disclaiming desire for supreme vengeance.

"I only want to show the wretch that I am not a helpless woman," she observed, with the bewildering illogic of the sex. And as she passed by the offender she smiled down at her companion with all the sweetness of intimacy and asked him why he carried a revolver. She did not point the offender out, be it remarked, to the bloodthirsty Septimus.

"It belongs to Wiggleswick," he replied in answer to her question. "I promised to take care of it for him."

"What does Wiggleswick do when you are away?"

"He reads the police reports. I take in Reynolds and the News of the World and the illustrated Police News for him, and he cuts them out and gums them in a scrap book. But I think I'm happier without Wiggleswick. He interferes with my guns."

"By the way," said Zora, "you talked about guns the other evening. What have you got to do with guns?"

He looked at her in a scared way out of the corner of his eye, child-fashion, as though to make sure she was loyal and worthy of confidence, and then he said:

"I invent 'em. I have written a treatise on guns of large caliber."

"Really?" cried Zora, taken by surprise. She had not credited him with so serious a vocation. "Do tell me something about it."

"Not now," he pleaded. "Some other time. I'd have to sit down with paper and pencil and draw diagrams. I'm afraid you wouldn't like it. Wiggleswick doesn't. It bores him. You must be born with machinery in your blood. Sometimes it's uncomfortable."

"To have cogwheels instead of corpuscles must be trying," said Zora flippantly.

"Very," said he. "The great thing is to keep them clear of the heart."

"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.

"Whatever one does or tries to do, one should insist on remaining human. It's good to be human, isn't it? I once knew a man who was just a complicated mechanism of brain encased in a body. His heart didn't beat; it clicked and whirred. It caused the death of the most perfect woman in the world."

He looked dreamily into the blue ether between sea and sky. Zora felt strangely drawn to him.

"Who was it?" she asked softly.

"My mother," said he.

They had paused in their stroll, and were leaning over the parapet above the railway line. After a few moments' silence he added, with a faint smile:—

"That's why I try hard to keep myself human—so that, if a woman should ever care for me, I shouldn't hurt her."

A green caterpillar was crawling on his sleeve. In his vague manner he picked it tenderly off and laid it on the leaf of an aloe that grew in the terrace vase near which he stood.

"You couldn't even hurt that crawling thing—let alone a woman," said Zora. This time very softly.

He blushed. "If you kill a caterpillar you kill a butterfly," he said apologetically.

"And if you kill a woman?"

"Is there anything higher?" said he.

She made no reply, her misanthropical philosophy prompting none. There was rather a long silence, which he broke by asking her if she read Persian. He excused his knowledge of it by saying that it kept him human. She laughed and suggested a continuance of their stroll. He talked disconnectedly as they walked up and down.

The crowd on the terrace thinned as the hour of déjeuner approached. Presently she proclaimed her hunger. He murmured that it must be near dinner time. She protested. He passed his hands across his eyes and confessed that he had got mixed up in his meals the last few days. Then an idea struck him.

"If I skip afternoon tea, and dinner, and supper, and petit déjeuner, and have two breakfasts running," he exclaimed brightly, "I shall begin fair again." And he laughed, not loud, but murmuringly, for the first time.

They went round the Casino to the front of the Hôtel de Paris, their natural parting place. But there, on the steps, with legs apart, stood the wretch with the evil eyes. He looked at her from afar, banteringly. Defiance rose in Zora's soul. She would again show him that she was not a lone and helpless woman at the mercy of the casual depredator.

"I'm taking you in to lunch with me, Mr. Dix. You can't refuse," she said; and without waiting for a reply she sailed majestically past the wretch, followed meekly by Septimus, as if she owned him body and soul.

As usual, many eyes were turned on her as she entered the restaurant—a radiant figure in white, with black hat and black chiffon boa, and a deep red rose in her bosom. The maître d'hôtel, in the pride of reflected glory, conducted her to a table near the window. Septimus trailed inconclusively behind. When he seated himself he stared at her silently in a mute surmise as the gentlemen in the poem did at the peak in Darien. It was even a wilder adventure than the memorable drive. That was but a caprice of the goddess; this was a sign of her friendship. The newness of their intimacy smote him dumb. He passed his hand through his Struwel Peter hair and wondered. Was it real? There sat the goddess, separated from him by the strip of damask, her gold-flecked eyes smiling frankly and trustfully into his, pulling off her gloves and disclosing, in almost disconcerting intimacy, her warm wrists and hands. Was he dreaming, as he sometimes did, in broad daylight, of a queer heaven in which he was strong like other men and felt the flutter of wings upon his cheek? Something soft was in his hand. Mechanically he began to stuff it up his sleeve. It was his napkin. Zora's laugh brought him to earth—to happy earth.

It is a pleasant thing to linger tête-à-tête over lunch on the terrace of the Hôtel de Paris. Outside is the shade of the square, the blazing sunshine beyond the shadow; the fountain and the palms and the doves; the white gaiety of pleasure houses; the blue-gray mountains cut sharp against the violet sky. Inside, a symphony of cool tones: the pearl of summer dresses; the snow, crystal, and silver of the tables; the tender green of lettuce, the yellows of fruit, the soft pink of salmon; here and there a bold note of color—the flowers in a woman's hat, the purples and topazes of wine. Nearer still to the sense is the charm of privacy. The one human being for you in the room is your companion. The space round your chairs is a magic circle, cutting you off from the others, who are mere decorations, beautiful or grotesque. Between you are substances which it were gross to call food: dainty mysteries of coolness and sudden flavors; a fish salad in which the essences of sea and land are blended in cold, celestial harmony; innermost kernels of the lamb of the salted meadows where must grow the Asphodel on which it fed, in amorous union with what men call a sauce, but really oil and cream and herbs stirred by a god in a dream; peaches in purple ichor chastely clad in snow, melting on the palate as the voice of the divine singer after whom they are named melts in the soul.

It is a pleasant thing—hedonistic? yes; but why live on lentils when lotus is to your hand? and, really, at Monte Carlo lentils are quite as expensive—it is a pleasant thing, even for the food-worn wanderer of many restaurants, to lunch tête-à-tête at the Hôtel de Paris; but for the young and fresh-hearted to whom it is new, it is enchantment.

"I've often looked at people eating like this and I've often wondered how it felt," said Septimus.

"But you must have lunched hundreds of times in such places."

"Yes—but by myself. I've never had a—" he paused. "A what?"

"A—a gracious lady," he said, reddening, "to sit opposite me."

"Why not?"

"No one has ever wanted me. It has always puzzled me how men get to know women and go about with them. I think it must be a gift," he asserted with the profound gravity of a man who has solved a psychological problem. "Some fellows have a gift for collecting Toby jugs. Everywhere they go they discover a Toby jug. I couldn't find one if I tried for a year. It's the same thing. At Cambridge they used to call me the Owl."

"An owl catches mice, at any rate," said Zora.

"So do I. Do you like mice?"

"No. I want to catch lions and tigers and all the bright and burning things of life," cried Zora, in a burst of confidence.

He regarded her with wistful admiration.

"Your whole life must be full of such things."

"I wonder," she said, looking at him over the spoonful of pêche Melba which she was going to put in her mouth, "I wonder whether you have the faintest idea who I am and what I am and what I'm doing here all by myself, and why you and I are lunching together in this delightful fashion. You have told me all about yourself—but you seem to take me for granted."

She was ever so little piqued at his apparent indifference. But if men like Septimus Dix did not take women for granted, where would be the chivalry and faith of the children of the world? He accepted her unquestioningly as the simple Trojan accepted the Olympian lady who appeared to him clad in grace (but otherwise scantily) from a rosy cloud.

"You are yourself," he said, "and that has been enough for me."

"How do you know I'm not an adventuress? There are heaps of them, people say, in this place. I might be a designing thief of a woman."

"I offered you the charge of my money the other night."

"Was that why you did it? To test me?" she asked.

He reddened and started as if stung. She saw the hurt instantly, and with a gush of remorse begged for forgiveness.

"No. I didn't mean it. It was horrid of me. It is not in your nature to think such a thing. Forgive me."

Frankly, impulsively, she stretched her hand across the table. He touched it timidly with his ineffectual fingers, not knowing what to do with it, vaguely wondering whether he should raise it to his lips, and so kept touching it, until she pressed his fingers in a little grip of friendliness, and withdrew it with a laugh.

"Do you know, I still have that money," he said, pulling a handful of great five-louis pieces from his pocket. "I can't spend it. I've tried to. I bought a dog yesterday but he wanted to bite me and I had to give him to the hotel porter. All this gold makes such a bulge in my pocket."

When Zora explained that the coins were only used as counters and could be changed for notes at the rooms, he was astonished at her sapience. He had never thought of it. Thus Zora regained her sense of superiority.

This lunch was the first of many meals they had together; and meals led to drives and excursions, and to evenings at the theater. If she desired still further to convince the wretch with the evil eyes of her befriended state, she succeeded; but the wretch and his friends speculated evilly on the relations between her and Septimus Dix. They credited her with pots of money. Zora, however, walked serene, unconscious of slander, enjoying herself prodigiously. Secure in her scorn and hatred of men she saw no harm in her actions. Nor was there any, from the point of view of her young egotism and inexperience. It scarcely occurred to her that Septimus was a man. In some aspects he appealed to her instinctive motherhood like a child. When she met him one day coming out of one of the shops in the arcade, wearing a newly bought Homburg hat too small for him, she marched him back with a delicious sense of responsibility and stood over him till he was adequately fitted. In other aspects he was like a woman in whose shy delicacy she could confide. She awoke also to a new realization—that of power. Now, to use power with propriety needs wisdom, and the woman who is wise at five-and-twenty cannot make out at sixty why she has remained an old maid. The delightful way to use it is that of a babe when he first discovers that a stick hits. That is the way that Zora, who was not wise, used it over Septimus. For the first time in her life she owned a human being. A former joy in the possession of a devoted dog who did tricks was as nothing to this rapture. It was splendid. She owned him. Whenever she had a desire for his company—which was often, as solitude at Monte Carlo is more depressing than Zora had realized—she sent a page boy, in the true quality of his name of chasseur, to hunt down the quarry and bring him back. He would, therefore, be awakened at unearthly hours, at three o'clock in the afternoon, for instance, when, as he said, all rational beings should be asleep, it being their own unreason if they were not; or he would be tracked down at ten in the morning to some obscure little café in the town where he would be discovered eating ices and looking the worse for wear in his clothes of the night before. As this meant delay in the execution of her wishes, Zora prescribed habits less irregular. By means of bribery of chambermaids and porters, and the sacrifice of food and sleep, he contrived to find himself dressed in decent time in the mornings. He would then patiently await her orders or call modestly for them at her residence, like the butcher or the greengrocer.

"Why does your hair stand up on end, in that queer fashion?" she asked him one day. The hat episode had led to a general regulation of his personal appearance.

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?"