That was Clem Sypher's Dragon--Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy. He drew so
vivid a picture of its foul iniquity that Zora was convinced that the earth
had never harbored so scaly a horror. Of all Powers of Evil in the universe
it was the most devastating.
She was swept up by his eloquence to his point of view, and saw things with
his eyes. When she came to examine the poor dragon in the cool light of her
own reason it appeared at the worst to be but a pushful patent medicine of
an inferior order which, on account of its cheapness and the superior
American skill in distributing it, was threatening to drive Sypher's Cure
off the market.
"I'll strangle it as Hercules strangled the dog-headed thing," cried
Sypher.
He meant the Hydra, which wasn't dog-headed and which Hercules didn't
strangle. But a man can be at once unmythological and sincere. Clem Sypher
was in earnest.
"You talk as if your cure had something of a divine sanction," said Zora.
This was before her conversion.
"Mrs. Middlemist, if I didn't believe that," said Sypher solemnly, "do you
think I would have devoted my life to it?"
"I thought people ran these things to make money," said Zora.
It was then that Sypher entered on the exordium of the speech which
convinced her of the diabolical noisomeness of the Jebusa Jones unguent.
His peroration summed up the contest as that between Mithra and Ahriman.
Yet Zora, though she took a woman's personal interest in the battle
between Sypher's Cure and Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy, siding loyally and
whole-heartedly with her astonishing host, failed to pierce to the
spirituality of the man--to divine him as a Poet with an Ideal.
"After all," said Sypher on the way back--Septimus, with his coat-collar
turned up over his ears, still sat on guard by the chauffeur, consoled by a
happy hour he had spent alone with his mistress after lunch, while Sypher
was away putting the fear of God into his agent, during which hour he had
unfolded to her his scientific philosophy of perambulators--"after all,"
said Sypher, "the great thing is to have a Purpose in Life. Everyone can't
have my Purpose "--he apologized for humanity--"but they can have some
guiding principle. What's yours?"
Zora was startled by the unexpected question. What was her Purpose in Life?
To get to the heart of the color of the world? That was rather vague. Also
nonsensical when so formulated. She took refuge in jest.
"I thought you had decided that my mission was to help you slay the
dragon?"
"We have to decide on our missions for ourselves," said he.
"Don't you think it sufficient Purpose for a woman who has been in a gray
prison all her life--when she finds herself free--to go out and see all
that is wonderful in scenery like this, in paintings, architecture,
manners, and customs of other nations, in people who have other ideas and
feelings from those she knew in prison? You speak as if you're finding
fault with me for not doing anything useful. Isn't what I do enough? What
else can I do?"
"I don't know," said Sypher, looking at the back of his gloves; then he
turned his head and met her eyes in one of his quick glances. "But you,
with your color and your build and your voice, seem somehow to me to stand
for Force--there's something big about you--just as there's something big
about me--Napoleonic--and I can't understand why it doesn't act in some
particular direction."
"Oh, you must give me time," cried Zora. "Time to expand, to find out what
kind of creature I really am. I tell you I've been in prison. Then I
thought I was free and found a purpose, as you call it. Then I had a
knock-down blow. I am a widow--I supposed you've guessed. Oh, now, don't
speak. It wasn't grief. My married life was a six-weeks' misery. I forget
it. I went away from home free five months ago--to see all this"--she waved
her hand--"for the first time. Whatever force I have has been devoted to
seeing it all, to taking it all in."
She spoke earnestly, just a bit passionately. In the silence that followed
she realized with sudden amazement that she had opened her heart to this
prime apostle of quackery. As he made no immediate reply, the silence grew
tense and she clasped her hands tight, and wondered, as her sex has done
from time immemorial, why on earth she had spoken. When he answered it was
kindly.
"You've done me a great honor in telling me this. I understand. You want
the earth, or as much of it as you can get, and when you've got it and
found out what it means, you'll make a great use of it. Have you many
friends?"
"No," said Zora. He had an uncanny way of throwing her back on to
essentials. "None stronger than myself."
"Will you take me as a friend? I'm strong enough," said Sypher.
"Willingly," she said, dominated by his earnestness.
"That's good. I may be able to help you when you've found your vocation. I
can tell you, at any rate, how to get to what you want. You've just got to
keep a thing in view and go for it and never let your eyes wander to right
or left or up or down. And looking back is fatal--the truest thing in
Scripture is about Lot's wife. She looked back and was turned into a pillar
of salt."
He paused, his face assumed an air of profound reflection, and he added
with gravity:
"And the Clem Sypher of the period when he came by, made use of her, and
plastered her over with posters of his cure."
* * * * *
The day she had appointed as the end of her Monte Carlo visit arrived. She
would first go to Paris, where some Americans whom she had met in Florence
and with whom she had exchanged occasional postcards pressed her to join
them. Then London; and then a spell of rest in the lavender of Nunsmere.
That was her programme. Septimus Dix was to escort her as far as Paris, in
defiance of the proprieties as interpreted by Turner. What was to become of
him afterwards neither conjectured; least of all Septimus himself. He said
nothing about getting back to Shepherd's Bush. Many brilliant ideas had
occurred to him during his absence which needed careful working out.
Wherefore Zora concluded that he proposed to accompany her to London.
A couple of hours before the train started she dispatched Turner to
Septimus's hotel to remind him of the journey. Turner, a strong-minded
woman of forty--like the oyster she had been crossed in love and like her
mistress she held men in high contempt--returned with an indignant tale.
After a series of parleyings with Mr. Dix through the medium of the hotel
_chasseur_, who had a confused comprehension of voluble English, she had
mounted at Mr. Dix's entreaty to his room. There she found him, half clad
and in his dressing-gown, staring helplessly at a wilderness of clothing
and toilet articles for which there was no space in his suit cases and bag,
already piled mountain high.
"I can never do it, Turner," he said as she entered. "What's to be done?"
Turner replied that she did not know; her mistress's instructions were that
he should catch the train.
"I'll have to leave behind what I can't get in," he said despondently. "I
generally have to do so. I tell the hotel people to give it to widows and
orphans. But that's one of the things that make traveling so expensive."
"But you brought everything, sir, in this luggage?"
"I suppose so. Wiggleswick packed. It's his professional training, Turner.
I think they call it 'stowing the swag.'"
As Turner had not heard of Wiggleswick's profession, she did not catch the
allusion. Nor did Zora enlighten her when she reported the conversation.
"If they went in once they'll go in again," said Turner.
"They won't. They never do," said Septimus.
His plight was so hopeless, he seemed so immeasurably her sex's inferior,
that he awoke her contemptuous pity. Besides, her trained woman's hands
itched to restore order out of masculine chaos.
"Turn everything out and I'll pack for you," she said resolutely,
regardless of the proprieties. On further investigation she held out
horrified hands.
He had mixed up shirts with shoes. His clothes were rolled in bundles, his
collars embraced his sponge, his trees, divorced from boots, lay on the top
of an unprotected bottle of hair-wash; he had tried to fit his brushes
against a box of tooth-powder and the top had already come off. Turner
shook out his dress suit and discovered a couple of hotel towels which had
got mysteriously hidden in the folds. She held them up severely.
"No wonder you can't get your things in if you take away half the hotel
linen," and she threw them to the other side of the room.
In twenty minutes she had worked the magic of Wiggleswick. Septimus was
humbly grateful.
"If I were you, sir," she said, "I'd go to the station at once and sit on
my boxes till my mistress arrives."
"I think I'll do it, Turner," said Septimus.
Turner went back to Zora flushed, triumphant, and indignant.
"If you think, ma'am," said she, "that Mr. Dix is going to help us on our
journey, you're very much mistaken. He'll lose his ticket and he'll lose
his luggage and he'll lose himself, and we'll have to go and find them."
"You must take Mr. Dix humorously," said Zora.
"I've no desire to take him at all, ma'am." And Turner snorted virtuously,
as became her station.
Zora found him humbly awaiting her on the platform in company with Clem
Sypher, who presented her with a great bunch of roses and a bundle of
illustrated papers. Septimus had received as a parting guerdon an enormous
package of the cure, which he embraced somewhat dejectedly. It was Sypher
who looked after the luggage of the party. His terrific accent filled the
station. Septimus regarded him with envy. He wondered how a man dared
order foreign railway officials about like that.
"If I tried to do it they would lock me up. I once interfered in a street
row."
Zora did not hear the dire results of the interference. Sypher claimed her
attention until the train was on the point of starting.
"Your address in England? You haven't given it."
"The Nook, Nunsmere, Surrey, will always find me."
"Nunsmere?" He paused, pencil in hand, and looked up at her as she stood
framed in the railway carriage window. "I nearly bought a house there last
year. I was looking out for one with a lawn reaching down to a main railway
track. This one had it."
"Penton Court?"
"Yes. That was the name."
"It's still unsold," laughed Zora idly.
"I'll buy it at once," said he.
_"En voiture_," cried the guard.
Sypher put out his masterful hand.
"Au revoir. Remember. We are friends. I never say what I don't mean."
The train moved out of the station. Zora took her seat opposite Septimus.
"I really believe he'll do it," she said.
"What?"
"Oh, something crazy," said Zora. "Tell me about the street row."
* * * * *
In Paris Zora was caught in the arms of the normal and the uneventful. An
American family consisting of a father, mother, son and two daughters
touring the continent do not generate an atmosphere of adventure. Their
name was Callender, they were wealthy, and the track beaten by the golden
feet of their predecessors was good enough for them. They were generous and
kindly. There was no subtle complexity in their tastes. They liked the
best, they paid for it, and they got it. The women were charming,
cultivated and eager for new sensations. They found Zora a new sensation,
because she had that range of half tones which is the heritage of a child
of an older, grayer civilization. Father and son delighted in her. Most men
did. Besides, she relieved the family tedium. The family knew the Paris of
the rich Anglo-Saxon and other rich Anglo-Saxons in Paris. Zora accompanied
them on their rounds. They lunched and dined in the latest expensive
restaurants in the Champs Elysées and the Bois; they went to races; they
walked up and down the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue de l'Opéra and visited
many establishments where the female person is adorned. After the theater
they drove to the Cabarets of Montmartre, where they met other Americans
and English, and felt comfortably certain that they were seeing the
naughty, shocking underside of Paris. They also went to the Louvre and to
the Tomb of Napoleon. They stayed at the Grand Hotel.
Zora saw little of Septimus. He knew Paris in a queer, dim way of his own,
and lived in an obscure hotel, whose name Zora could not remember, on the
other side of the river. She introduced him to the Callenders, and they
were quite prepared to receive him into their corporation. But he shrank
from so vast a concourse as six human beings; he seemed to be overawed by
the multitude of voices, unnerved by the multiplicity of personalities. The
unfeathered owl blinked dazedly in general society as the feathered one
does in daylight. At first he tried to stand the glare for Zora's sake.
"Come out and mix with people and enjoy yourself," cried Zora, when he was
arguing against a proposal to join the party on a Versailles excursion. "I
want you to enjoy yourself for once in your life. Besides--you're always so
anxious to be human. This will make you human."
"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."
But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no
more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge
acquaintance--one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated
his disastrous career--ran across him in the Boulevard Sévastopol.
"Why--if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"
"Oh--hooting," said Septimus.
Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give
Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally.
When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand
eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had
no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly
changing the conversation to the price of hams.
"But what are you going to do with hams?"
"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I
always want to buy them. They look so shiny."
Zora's delicate nostrils sniffed the faintest perfume of a mystery; but a
moment afterwards the Callenders carried her off to Ledoyen's and
Longchamps and other indubitable actualities in which she forgot things
less tangible. Long afterwards she discovered that the friend was an old
woman, a _marchande des quatre saisons_ who sold vegetables in the Place de
la République. He had known her many years, and as she was at the point of
death he comforted her with blood-puddings and flowers and hams and the
ministrations of an indignant physician. But at the time Septimus hid his
Good Samaritanism under a cloud of vagueness.
Then came a period during which Zora lost him altogether. Days passed. She
missed him. Life with the Callenders was a continuous shooting of rapids. A
quiet talk with Septimus was an hour in a backwater, curiously restful. She
began to worry. Had he been run over by an omnibus? Only an ever-recurring
miracle could bring him safely across the streets of a great city. When the
Callenders took her to the Morgue she dreaded to look at the corpses.
"I do wish I knew what has become of him," she said to Turner.
"Why not write to him, ma'am?" Turner suggested.
"I've forgotten the name of his hotel," said Zora, wrinkling her forehead.
The name of the Hôtel Quincamboeuf, where he lodged, eluded her memory.
"I do wish I knew," she repeated.
Then she caught an involuntary but illuminating gleam in Turner's eye, and
she bade her look for hairpins. Inwardly she gasped from the shock of
revelation; then she laughed to herself, half amused, half indignant. The
preposterous absurdity of the suggestion! But in her heart she realized
that, in some undefined human fashion, Septimus Dix counted for something
in her life. What had become of him?
At last she found him one morning sitting by a table in the courtyard of
the Grand Hotel, patiently awaiting her descent. By mere chance she was
un-Callendered.
"Why, what--?"
The intended reproval died on her lips as she saw his face. His cheeks were
hollow and white, his eyes sunken The man was ill. His hand burned through
her glove. Feelings warm and new gushed forth.
"Oh, my _dear_ friend, what is the matter?"
"I must go back to England. I came to say good-bye. I've had this from
Wiggleswick."
He handed her an open letter. She waved it away.
"That's of no consequence. Sit down. You're ill. You have a high
temperature. You should be in bed."
"I've been," said Septimus. "Four days."
"And you've got up in this state? You must go back at once. Have you seen a
doctor? No, of course you haven't. Oh, dear!" She wrung her hands. "You are
not fit to be trusted alone. I'll drive you to your hotel and see that
you're comfortable and send for a doctor."
"I've left the hotel," said Septimus. "I'm going to catch the eleven train.
My luggage is on that cab."
"But it's five minutes past eleven now. You have lost the train--thank
goodness."
"I'll be in good time for the four o'clock," said Septimus. "This is the
way I generally travel. I told you." He rose, swayed a bit, and put his
hand on the table to steady himself. "I'll go and wait at the station. Then
I'll be sure to catch it. You see I must go."
"But why?" cried Zora.
"Wiggleswick's letter. The house has been burnt down and everything in it.
The only thing he saved was a large portrait of Queen Victoria."
Then he fainted.
* * * * *
Zora had him carried to a room in the hotel and sent for a doctor, who kept
him in bed for a fortnight. Zora and Turner nursed him, much to his
apologetic content. The Callenders in the meanwhile went to Berlin.
When Septimus got up, gaunt and staring, he appealed to the beholder as the
most helpless thing which the Creator had clothed in the semblance of a
man.
"He must take very great care of himself for the next few weeks," said the
doctor. "If he gets a relapse I won't answer for the consequences. Can't
you take him somewhere?"
"Take him somewhere?" The idea had been worrying her for some days past. If
she left him to his own initiative he would probably go and camp with
Wiggleswick amid the ruins of his house in Shepherd's Bush, where he would
fall ill again and die. She would be responsible.
"We can't leave him here, at any rate," she remarked to Turner.
Turner agreed. As well abandon a month-old baby on a doorstep and expect it
to earn its livelihood. She also had come to take a proprietary interest in
Septimus.
"He might stay with us in Nunsmere. What do you think, Turner?"
"I think, ma'am," said Turner, "that would be the least improper
arrangement."
"He can have Cousin Jane's room," mused Zora, knowing that Cousin Jane
would fly at her approach.
"And I'll see, ma'am, that he comes down to his meals regular," said
Turner.
"Then it's settled," said Zora.
She went forthwith to the invalid and acquainted him with his immediate
destiny. At first he resisted. He would be a nuisance. Since his boyhood he
had never lived in a lady's house. Even landladies in lodgings had found
him impossible. He could not think of accepting more favors from her all
too gracious hands.
"You've got to do what you're told," said Zora, conclusively. She noticed a
shade of anxiety cross his face. "Is there anything else?"
"Wiggleswick. I don't know what's to become of him."
"He can come to Nunsmere and lodge with the local policeman," said Zora.
On the evening before they started from Paris she received a letter
addressed in a curiously feminine hand. It ran:
"DEAR MRS. MIDDLEMIST:
"I don't let the grass grow under my feet. I have bought Penton Court. I
have also started a campaign which will wipe the Jebusa Jones people off
the face of the earth they blacken. I hope you are finding a vocation.
When I am settled at Nunsmere we must talk further of this. I take a
greater interest in you than in any other woman I have ever known, and
that I believe you take an interest in me is the proud privilege of
"Yours very faithfully,
"CLEM SYPHER."
"Here are the three railway tickets, ma'am," said Turner, who had brought
up the letter. "I think we had better take charge of them."
Zora laughed, and when Turner had left the room she laughed again. Clem
Sypher's letter and Septimus's ticket lay side by side on her
dressing-table, and they appealed to her sense of humor. They represented
the net result of her misanthropic travels.
What would her mother say? What would Emmy say? What would be the superior
remark of the Literary Man from London?
She, Zora Middlemist, who had announced in the market place, with such a
flourish of trumpets, that she was starting on her glorious pilgrimage to
the Heart of Life, abjuring all conversation with the execrated male sex,
to have this ironical adventure! It was deliciously funny. Not only had she
found two men in the Heart of Life, but she was bringing them back with her
to Nunsmere. She could not hide them from the world in the secrecy of her
own memory: there they were in actual, bodily presence, the sole trophies
of her quest.
Yet she put a postscript to a letter to her mother.
"I know, in your dear romantic way, you will declare that these two men
have fallen in love with me. You'll be wrong. If they had, _I shouldn't
have anything to do with them. It would have made them quite impossible_."
The energy with which she licked and closed the envelope was remarkable but
unnecessary.