Читать книгу Septimus - William John Locke - Страница 7

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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.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"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.