Septimus Part 21

"No, I don't want you," said Emmy absently. "Why should I?"

And she gazed stonily at the suburban murk of the great city until they reached Victoria. There, a dejected four-wheeled cab with a drooping horse stood solitary on the rank--a depressing object. Emmy shivered at the sight.

"I can't stand it. Drive me to my door. I know I'm a beast, Septimus dear, but I am grateful. I am, really."

The cab received them into its musty interior and drove them through the foggy brown of a London winter dawn. Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped them. The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a morning. The atmosphere for thirty yards around them was clear enough, with the clearness of yellow consomme, but ahead it stood thick, like a puree of bad vegetables. They pa.s.sed through Belgravia, and the white-blinded houses gave an impression of universal death, and the empty streets seemed waiting for the doors to open and the mourners to issue forth. The cab, too, had something of the sinister, in that it was haunted by the ghosts of a fourpenny cigar and a sixpenny bottle of scent which continued a lugubrious flirtation; and the windows rattled a _danse macabre_. At last it pulled up at the door of Emmy's Mansions in Chelsea.

She looked at him very piteously, like a frightened child. Her pretty mouth was never strong, but when the corners drooped it was babyish. She slipped her hand in his.

"Don't leave me just yet. It's silly, I know--but this awful journey has taken everything out of me. Every bit of it has been worse than the last.

Edith--that's my maid--will light a fire--you must get warm before you start--and she'll make some coffee. Oh, do come. You can keep the cab."

"But what will your maid think?" asked Septimus, who for all his vagueness had definite traditions as to the proprieties of life.

"What does it matter? What does anything in this ghastly world matter? I'm frightened, Septimus, horribly frightened. I daren't go up by myself. Oh!

Come!"

Her voice broke on the last word. Saint Anthony would have yielded; also his pig. Septimus handed her out of the cab, and telling the cabman to wait, followed her through the already opened front door of the Mansions up to her flat. She let herself in with her latchkey and showed him into the drawing-room, turning on the electric light as he entered.

"I'll go and wake Edith," she said. "Then we can have some breakfast. The fire's laid. Do you mind putting a match to it?"

She disappeared and Septimus knelt down before the grate and lit the paper.

In a second or two the flame caught the wood, and, the blower being down, it blazed fiercely. He spread his ice-cold hands out before it, incurious of the futile little room whose draperies and fripperies and inconsiderable flimsiness of furniture proclaimed its owner, intent only on the elemental need of warmth. He was disturbed by the tornadic entrance of Emmy.

"She's not here!" she exclaimed tragically. Her baby face was white and there were dark shadows under the eyes which stared at him with a touch of madness. "She's not here!"

"Perhaps she has gone out for a walk," Septimus suggested, as if London serving-maids were in the habit of taking the air at eight o'clock on a foggy morning.

But Emmy heard him not. The dismaying sense of utter loneliness smote her down. It was the last straw. Edith, on whom she had staked all her hopes of physical comfort, was not there. Overstrained in body, nerves, and mind, she sank helplessly in the chair which Septimus set out for her before the fire, too exhausted to cry. She began to speak in a queer, toneless voice:

"I don't know what to do. Edith could have helped me. I want to get away and hide. I can't stay here. It's the first place Zora will come to. She mustn't find me. Edith has been through it herself. She would have taken me somewhere abroad or in the country where I could have stayed in hiding till it was over. It was all so sudden--the news of his marriage. I was half crazy, I couldn't make plans. I thought Edith would help me. Now she has gone, goodness knows where. My G.o.d, what shall I do?"

She went on, looking at him haggardly, a creature driven beyond the reticence of s.e.x, telling her inmost secret to a man as if it were a commonplace of trouble. It did not occur to her distraught mind that he was a man. She spoke to herself, without thought, uttering the cry for help that had been pent within her all that awful night.

The puzzledom of Septimus grew unbearable in its intensity; then suddenly it burst like a skyrocket and a blinding rain of fire enveloped him. He stood paralyzed with pain and horror.

The sullen morning light diffused itself through the room, mingling ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes, while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each other's grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough gray coat unb.u.t.toned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere behind his ear. And the tragedy of tragedies of a young girl's life was unfolded.

"My G.o.d, what am I to do?"

Septimus stared at her, his hands in his trousers pockets. In one of them his fingers grasped a folded bit of paper. He drew it out unthinkingly--a very dirty bit of paper. In his absent-minded way he threw it towards the fire, but it fell on the tiled hearth. In moments of great strain the mind seizes with pitiful eagerness on the trivial. Emmy looked at the paper.

Something familiar about its shape struck her. She leaned forward, picked it up and unfolded it.

"This is a check," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Did you mean to throw it away?"

He took it from her and, looking at it, realized that It was Clem Sypher's check for two hundred pounds.

"Thanks," said he, thrusting it into his overcoat pocket.

Then his queerly working brain focused a.s.sociations.

"I know what we can do," said he. "We can go to Naples."

"What good would that be?" she asked, treating the preposterous question seriously.

He was taken aback by her directness, and pa.s.sed his fingers through his hair.

"I don't know," said he.

"The first thing we must do," said Emmy--and her voice sounded in her own ears like someone else's--"is to get away from here. Zora will be down by the first train after my absence is discovered. You quite see that Zora mustn't find me, don't you?"

"Of course," said Septimus, blankly. Then he brightened. "You can go to an hotel. A Temperance Hotel in Bloomsbury. Wiggleswick was telling me about one the other day. A friend of his burgled it and got six years. A man called Barkus."

"But what was the name of the hotel?"

"Ah! that I forget," said Septimus. "It had something to do with Sir Walter Scott. Let me see. Lockhart--no, Lockhart's is a different place. It was either the Bride of Lammermoor or--yes," he cried triumphantly, "it was the Ravenswood, in Southampton Row."

Emmy rose. The switch off onto the trivial piece of paper had braced her unstrung nerves for a final effort: that, and the terror of meeting Zora.

"You'll take me there. I'll just put some things together."

He opened the door for her to pa.s.s out. On the threshold she turned.

"I believe G.o.d sent you to Nunsmere Common last night."

She left him, and he went back to the fire and filled and lit his pipe. Her words touched him. They also struck a chord of memory. His ever-wandering mind went back to a scene in undergraduate days. It was the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, where the most famous of all American evangelists was holding one of a series of revivalist meetings. The great bare hall was packed with youths, who came, some to scoff and others to pray. The coa.r.s.e-figured, bald-headed, brown-bearded man in black on the platform, with his homely phrase and (to polite undergraduate ears) terrible Yankee tw.a.n.g, was talking vehemently of the trivial instruments the Almighty used to effect His purposes. Moses's rod, for instance. "You can imagine Pharaoh," said he--and the echo of the great voice came to Septimus through the years--"you can imagine Pharaoh walking down the street one day and seeing Moses with a great big stick in his hand. 'Hallo, Moses,' says he, 'where are you going?' 'Where am I going?' says Moses. 'I guess I'm going to deliver the Children of Israel out of the House of Bondage and conduct them to a land flowing with milk and honey.' 'And how are you going to do it, Moses?' '_With this rod, sir, with this rod!_'"

Septimus remembered how this bit of unauthenticated history was greeted with derision by the general, and with a shocked sense of propriety by the cultivated--and young men at the university can be very cultivated indeed on occasion. But the truth the great preacher intended to convey had lingered at the back of his own mind and now came out into the light.

Perhaps Emmy had spoken more truly than she thought. In his simple heart he realized himself to be the least effectual of men, apparently as unhelpful towards a great deliverance as the walking stick used by Moses. But if G.o.d had sent him to Nunsmere Common and destined him to be the mean instrument of Emmy's deliverance? He rubbed the warm pipe bowl against his cheek and excogitated the matter in deep humility. Yes, perhaps G.o.d had sent him. His religious belief was nebulous, but up to its degree of clarity it was sincere.

A few minutes later they were again in the cab jogging wearily across London to Southampton Row; and the little empty drawing-room with all its vanities looked somewhat ghostly, lit as it was by the day and by the frivolously shaded electric light which they had forgotten to switch off.

CHAPTER X

When Septimus had seen Emmy admitted to the Ravenswood Hotel, he stood on the gloomy pavement outside wondering what he should do. Then it occurred to him that he belonged to a club--a grave, decorous place where the gay pop of a champagne cork had been known to produce a scandalized silence in the luncheon-room, and where serious-minded members congregated to scowl at one another's unworthiness from behind newspapers. A hansom conveyed him thither. In the hall he struggled over two telegrams which had caused him most complicated thought during his drive. The problem was to ease Zora's mind and to obtain a change of raiment without disclosing the whereabouts of either Emmy or himself. This he had found no easy matter, diplomacy being the art of speaking the truth with intent to deceive, and so finely separated from sheer lying as to cause grave distress to Septimus's candid soul. At last, after much wasting of telegraph forms, he decided on the following:

To Zora: "Emmy safe in London. So am I. Don't worry. Devotedly, Septimus."

To Wiggleswick: "Bring clothes and railway carriage diagrams secretly to Club."

Having dispatched these, he went into the coffee-room and ordered breakfast. The waiters served him in horrified silence. A gaunt member, breakfasting a few tables off, asked for the name of the debauchee, and resolved to write to the Committee. Never in the club's history had a member breakfasted in dress clothes--and in such disreputably disheveled dress clothes! Such dissolute mohocks were a stumbling-block and an offense, and the gaunt member, who had prided himself on going by clockwork all his life, felt his machinery in some way dislocated by the spectacle.

But Septimus ate his food unconcernedly, and afterwards, mounting to the library, threw himself into a chair before the fire and slept the sleep of the depraved till Wiggleswick arrived with his clothes. Then, having effected an outward semblance of decency, he went to the Ravenswood Hotel.

Wiggleswick he sent back to Nunsmere.

Emmy entered the prim drawing-room where he had been waiting for her, the picture of pretty flower-like misery, her delicate cheeks white, a hunted look in her baby eyes. A great pang of pity went through the man, hurting him physically. She gave him a limp hand, and sat down on a saddle-bag sofa, while he stood hesitatingly before her, balancing himself first on one leg and then on the other.