Septimus Part 37

This is the wild and unjust way in which women talk. For aught Cousin Jane knew the Chelsea Registrar might have been an Antinous for beauty.

Mrs. Oldrieve shook her head sadly. She had known how it would be. If only they had been married in church by their good vicar, this calamity could not have befallen them.

"All the churches and all the vicars and all the archbishops couldn't have made that man anything else than a doddering idiot! How Emmy could have borne with him for a day pa.s.ses my understanding. She has done well to get rid of him. She has made a mess of it, of course. People who marry in that way generally do. It serves her right."

So spoke Cousin Jane, whom Sypher found, in a sense, an unexpected ally.

She made his task easier. Mrs. Oldrieve remained unconvinced.

"And the baby just a month or so old. Poor little thing! What's to become of it?"

"Emmy will have to come here," said Cousin Jane firmly, "and I'll bring it up. Emmy isn't fit to educate a rabbit. You had better write and order her to come home at once."

"I'll write to-morrow," sighed Mrs. Oldrieve.

Sypher reflected on the impossibilities of the proposition and on the reasons Emmy still had for remaining in exile in Paris. He also pitied the child that was to be brought up by Cousin Jane. It had extravagant tastes.

He smiled.

"My friend Dix is already thinking of sending him to the University; so you see they have plans for his education."

Cousin Jane sniffed. She would make plans for them! As for the University--if it could turn out a doddering idiot like Septimus, it was criminal to send any young man to such a seat of unlearning. She would not allow him to have a voice in the matter. Emmy was to be summoned to Nunsmere.

Sypher was about to deprecate the idea when he reflected again, and thought of Hotspur and the spirits from the vasty deep. Cousin Jane could call, and so could Mrs. Oldrieve. But would Emmy come? As the answer to the question was in the negative he left Cousin Jane to her comfortable resolutions.

"You will no doubt discuss the matter with Dix," he said.

Cousin Jane threw up her hands. "Oh, for goodness' sake, don't let him come here! I couldn't bear the sight of him."

Sypher looked inquiringly at Mrs. Oldrieve.

"It has been a great shock to me," said the gentle lady. "It will take time to get over it. Perhaps he had better wait a little."

Sypher walked home in a wrathful mood. Ostracism was to be added to Septimus's crown of martyrdom.

Perhaps, on the other hand, the closing of "The Nook" doors was advantageous. He had dreaded the result of Cousin Jane's cross-examination, as lying was not one of his friend's conspicuous accomplishments. Soothed by this reflection he smoked a pipe, and took down Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" from his shelves.

While he was deriving spiritual entertainment from the great battle between Christian and Apollyon and consolation from the latter's discomfiture, Septimus was walking down the road to the post-office, a letter in his hand. The envelope was addressed to "Mrs. Middlemist, White Star Co.'s S.S.

_Cedric_, Ma.r.s.eilles." It contained a blank sheet of headed note-paper and the tail of a little china dog.

CHAPTER XVIII

As soon as a woman knows what she wants she generally gets it. Some philosophers a.s.sert that her methods are circuitous; others, on the other hand, maintain that she rides in a bee line toward the desired object, galloping ruthlessly over conventions, susceptibilities, hearts, and such like obstacles. All, however, agree that she is unscrupulous, that the wish of the woman is the politely insincere wish of the Deity, and that she pursues her course with a serene sureness unknown to man. It is when a woman does not know what she wants that she baffles the philosopher just as the ant in her aimless discursiveness baffles the entomologist. Of course, if the philosopher has guessed her unformulated desire, then things are easy for him, and he can discourse with cert.i.tude on feminine vagaries, as Rattenden did on the journeyings of Zora Middlemist. He has the word of the enigma. But to the woman herself her state of mind is an exasperating puzzle, and to her friends, philosophic or otherwise, her consequent actions are disconcerting.

Zora went to California, where she was hospitably entertained, and shown the sights of several vast neighborhoods. She peeped into the Chinese quarter at San Francisco, and visited the Yosemite Valley. Attentive young men strewed her path with flowers and candy. Young women vowed her eternal devotion. She came into touch with the intimate problems of the most wonderful social organism the world has ever seen, and was confronted with stupendous works of nature and illimitable solitudes wherein the soul stands appalled. She also ate a great quant.i.ty of peaches. When her visit to the Callenders had come to an end she armed herself with introductions and started off by herself to see America. She traveled across the Continent, beheld the majesty of Niagara and the bewildering life of New York. She went to Washington and Boston. In fact, she learned many things about a great country which were very good for her to know, receiving impressions with the alertness of a sympathetic intellect, and pigeonholing them with feminine conscientiousness for future reference.

It was all very pleasant, healthful, and instructive, but it no more helped her in her quest than gazing at the jewelers' windows in the Rue de la Paix. Snow-capped Sierras and crowded tram-cars were equally unsuggestive of a mission in life. In the rare moments which activity allowed her for depression she began to wonder whether she was not chasing the phantom of a wild goose. A damsel to whom in a moment of expansion she revealed the object of her journeying exclaimed: "What other mission in life has a woman than to spend money and look beautiful?"

Zora laughed incredulously.

"You've accomplished half already, for you do look beautiful," said the damsel. "The other half is easy."

"But if you haven't much money to spend?"

"Spend somebody else's. Lord! If I had your beauty I'd just walk down Wall Street and pick up a millionaire between my finger and thumb, and carry him off right away."

When Zora suggested that life perhaps might have some deeper significance, the maiden answered:

"Life is like the school child's idea of a parable--a heavenly story (if you've lots of money) with no earthly meaning."

"Don't you ever go down beneath the surface of things?" asked Zora.

"If you dig down far enough into the earth," replied the damsel, "you come to water. If you bore down deep enough into life you come to tears. My dear, I'm going to dance on the surface and have a good time as long as I can. And I guess you're doing the same."

"I suppose I am," said Zora. And she felt ashamed of herself.

At Washington fate gave her an opportunity of attaining the other half of the damsel's idea. An elderly senator of enormous wealth proposed marriage, and offered her half a dozen motor-cars, a few palaces and most of the two hemispheres. She declined.

"If I were young, would you marry me?"

Zora's beautiful shoulders gave the tiniest shrug of uncertainty. Perhaps her young friend was right, and the command of the earth was worth the slight penalty of a husband. She was tired and disheartened at finding herself no nearer to the heart of things than when she had left Nunsmere.

Her att.i.tude toward the once unspeakable s.e.x had imperceptibly changed. She no longer blazed with indignation when a man made love to her. She even found it more agreeable than looking at cataracts or lunching with amba.s.sadors. Sometimes she wondered why. The senator she treated very tenderly.

"I don't know. How can I tell?" she said a moment or two after the shrug.

"My heart is young," said he.

Zora met his eyes for the millionth part of a second and turned her head away, deeply sorry for him. The woman's instinctive look dealt instantaneous death to his hopes. It was one more enactment of the tragedy of the bald head and the gray beard. He spoke with pathetic bitterness.

Like Don Ruy Gomez da Silva in "Hernani," he gave her to understand that now, when a young fellow pa.s.sed him in the street, he would give up all his motor-cars and all his colossal canned-salmon business for the young fellow's raven hair and bright eyes.

"Then you would love me. I could make you."

"What is love, after all?" asked Zora.

The elderly senator looked wistfully through the years over an infinite welter of salmon-tins, seeing nothing else.

"It's the meaning of life," said he. "I've discovered it too late."

He went away sorrowful, and Zora saw the vanity of great possessions.

On the homeward steamer she had as a traveling companion a young Englishman whom she had met at Los Angeles, one Anthony Dasent, an engineer of some distinction. He was bronzed and healthy and lithe-limbed. She liked him because he had brains and looked her squarely in the face. On the first evening of the voyage a slight lurch of the vessel caused her to slip, and she would have fallen had he not caught her by the arms. For the first time she realized how strong a man could be. It was a new sensation, not unpleasurable, and in thanking him she blushed. He remained with her on deck, and talked of their California friends and the United States. The next day he established himself by her side, and discoursed on the sea and the sky, human aspirations, the discomforts of his cabin, and a belief in eternal punishment. The day after that he told her of his ambitions, and showed her photographs of his mother and sisters. After that they exchanged views on the discipline of loneliness. His profession, he observed, took him to the waste places of the earth, where there was never a woman to cheer him, and when he came back to England he returned to a hearth equally unconsoled. Zora began to pity his forlorn condition. To build strong bridges and lay down railroads was a glorious thing for a man to do; to do it without sweetheart or wife was nothing less than heroic.

In the course of time he told her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. He expressed his admiration of the gold flecks in her brown eyes and the gleams of gold in her hair when it was caught by the sun. He also wished that his sisters could have their skirts cut like hers and could learn the art of tying a veil over a hat. Then he took to scowling on inoffensive young men who fetched her wraps and lent her their binoculars.

He declared one of them to be an unmitigated a.s.s to throw whom overboard would be to insult the Atlantic. And then Zora recognized that he was stolidly in love with her after the manner of his stolid kind. She felt frightened, and accused herself of coquetry. Her sympathy with his barren existence had perhaps overstepped the boundaries of polite interest. She had raised false hopes in a young and ingenuous bosom. She worked herself up to a virtuous pitch of self-reprobation and flagellated herself soundly, taking the precaution, however, of wadding the knots of the scourge with cotton-wool. After all, was it her fault that a wholesome young Briton should fall in love with her? She remembered Rattenden's uncomfortable words on the eve of her first pilgrimage: "Beautiful women like yourself, radiating feminine magnetism, worry a man exceedingly. You don't let him go about in peace, so why should he let you?"

So Zora came face to face with the eternal battle of the s.e.xes. She stamped her foot in the privacy of her cabin, and declared the principle to be horrid and primeval and everything that was most revolting to a woman who had earnestly set forth to discover the highest things of life. For the remainder of the voyage she avoided Anthony Dasent's company as much as possible, and, lest he should add jealousy to the gloom in which he enveloped himself, sought unexciting joys in the society of a one-eyed geologist who discoursed playfully on the foraminifera of the Pacific slope.