Septimus Part 6

Presently she proclaimed her hunger. He murmured that it must be near dinner time. She protested. He pa.s.sed 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 pet.i.t dejeuner, 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 Hotel 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 matre d'hotel, 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 G.o.ddess; this was a sign of her friendship. The newness of their intimacy smote him dumb. He pa.s.sed his hand through his Struwel Peter hair and wondered. Was it real? There sat the G.o.ddess, 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 _tete-a-tete_ over lunch on the terrace of the Hotel 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d 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 _tete-a-tete_ at the Hotel 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 a.s.serted 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 peche 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 _cha.s.seur_, 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 cafe 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-p.r.i.c.k 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-l.u.s.ter 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 gra.s.shoppers. Do you know gra.s.shoppers 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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."