It never occurred to Septimus that he had done a quixotic thing in marrying
Emmy, any more than to pat himself on the back for a monstrously clever
fellow when he had completed a new invention. At the door of the Registry
Office he took off his hat, held out his hand, and said good-by.
"But where are you going?" Emmy asked in dismay.
Septimus didn't know. He waved his hand vaguely over London, and said,
"Anywhere."
Emmy began to cry. She had passed most of the morning in tears. She felt
doubly guilty now that she had accepted the sacrifice of his life; an awful
sense of loneliness also overwhelmed her.
"I didn't know that you hated me like that," she said.
"Good heavens!" he cried in horror. "I don't hate you. I only thought you
had no further use for me."
"And I'm to be left alone in the street?"
"I'll drive you anywhere you like," said he.
"And then get rid of me as soon as possible? Oh! I know what you must be
feeling."
Septimus put his hand under her arm, and led her away, in great distress.
"I thought you wouldn't be able to bear the sight of me."
"Oh, don't be silly!" said Emmy.
Her adjuration was on a higher plane of sentiment than expression. It
comforted Septimus.
"What would you like me to do?"
"Anything except leave me to myself--at any rate for the present. Don't
you see, I've only you in the world to look to."
"God bless my soul," said he, "I suppose that's so. It's very alarming. No
one has ever looked to me in all my life. I'd wander barefoot for you all
over the earth. But couldn't you find somebody else who's more used to
looking after people? It's for your own sake entirely," he hastened to
assure her.
"I know," she said. "But you see it's impossible for me to go to any of my
friends, especially after what has happened." She held out her ungloved
left hand. "How could I explain?"
"You must never explain," he agreed, sagely. "It would undo everything. I
suppose things are easy, after all, when you've set your mind on them--or
get some chap that knows everything to tell you how to do them--and there's
lots of fellows about that know everything--solicitors and so forth.
There's the man who told me about a Registrar. See how easy it was. Where
would you like to go?"
"Anywhere out of England." She shuddered. "Take me to Paris first. We can
go on from there anywhere we like."
"Certainly," said Septimus, and he hailed a hansom.
* * * * *
Thus it fell out that the strangely married pair kept together during the
long months that followed. Emmy's flat in London had been rented furnished.
The maid Edith had vanished, after the manner of many of her kind, into
ancillary space. The theater and all it signified to Emmy became a past
dream. Her inner world was tragical enough, poor child. Her outer world was
Septimus. In Paris, as she shrank from meeting possible acquaintances, he
found her a furnished _appartement_ in the Boulevard Raspail, while he
perched in a little hotel close by. The finding of the _appartement_ was an
illustration of his newly invented, optimistic theory of getting things
done.
He came back to the hotel where he had provisionally lodged her and
informed her of his discovery. She naturally asked him how he had found it.
"A soldier told me," he said.
"A soldier?"
"Yes. He had great baggy red trousers and a sash around his waist and a
short blue jacket braided with red and a fez with a tassel and a shaven
head. He saved me from being run over by a cab."
Emmy shivered. "Oh, don't talk of it in that calm way--suppose you had been
killed!"
"I suppose the Zouave would have buried me--he's such a helpful creature,
you know. He's been in Algiers. He says I ought to go there. His name is
Hégisippe Cruchot."
"But what about the flat?" asked Emmy.
"Oh, you see, I fell down in front of the cab and he dragged me away and
brushed me down with a waiter's napkin--there was a café within a yard or
two. And then I asked him to have a drink and gave him a cigarette. He
drank absinthe, without water, and then I began to explain to him an idea
for an invention which occurred to me to prevent people from being run over
by cabs, and he was quite interested. I'll show you--"
"You won't," said Emmy, with a laugh. She had her lighter moments. "You'll
do no such thing--not until you've told me about the flat."
"Oh! the flat," said Septimus in a disappointed tone, as if it were a
secondary matter altogether. "I gave him another absinthe and we became so
friendly that I told him that I wanted a flat and didn't in the least know
how to set about finding one. It turned out that there was an _appartement_
vacant in the house of which his mother is concierge. He took me along to
see it, and introduced me to Madame, his mother. He has also got an aunt
who can cook."
"I should like to have seen you talking to the Zouave," said Emmy. "It
would have made a pretty picture--the two of you hobnobbing over a little
marble table."
"It was iron, painted yellow," said Septimus. "It wasn't a resplendent
café."
"I wonder what he thought of you."
"Well, he introduced me to his mother," replied Septimus gravely, whereat
Emmy broke into merry laughter, for the first time for many days.
"I've taken the _appartement_ for a month and the aunt who can cook," he
remarked.
"What!" cried Emmy, who had not paid very serious regard to the narrative.
"Without knowing anything at all about it?"
She put on her hat and insisted on driving there incontinently, full of
misgivings. But she found a well-appointed house, a deep-bosomed,
broad-beamed concierge, who looked as if she might be the mother of twenty
helpful Zouaves, and an equally matronly and kindly-faced sister, a Madame
Bolivard, the aunt aforesaid who could cook.
Thus, as the ravens fed Elijah, so did Zouaves and other casual fowl aid
Septimus on his way. Madame Bolivard in particular took them both under her
ample wing, to the girl's unspeakable comfort. A _brav' femme_, Madame
Bolivard, who not only could cook, but could darn stockings and mend
linen, which Emmy's frivolous fingers had never learned to accomplish. She
could also prescribe miraculous _tisanes_ for trivial ailments, could tell
the cards, and could converse volubly on any subject under heaven; the less
she knew about it, the more she had to say, which is a great gift. It
spared the girl many desolate and despairing hours.
It was a lonely, monotonous life. Septimus she saw daily. Now and then, if
Septimus were known to be upstairs, Hégisippe Cruchot, coming to pay his
filial respects to his mother and his mother's _bouillabaisse_ (she was
from Marseilles) and her _matelote_ of eels, luxuries which his halfpenny a
day could not provide, would mount to inquire dutifully after his aunt and
incidentally after the _belle dame du troisième_. He was their only visitor
from the outside world, and as he found a welcome and an ambrosial form of
alcohol compounded of Scotch whiskey and Maraschino (whose subtlety Emmy
had learned from an eminent London actor-manager at a far-away supper
party), he came as often as his respectful ideas of propriety allowed.
They were quaint gatherings, these, in the stiffly furnished little salon:
Emmy, fluffy-haired, sea-shell-cheeked, and softly raimented, lying
indolently on the sofa amid a pile of cushions--she had sent Septimus out
to "La Samaritaine" to buy some (in French furnished rooms they stuff the
cushions with cement), and he had brought back a dozen in a cab, so that
the whole room heaved and swelled with them; Septimus, with his mild blue
eyes and upstanding hair, looking like the conventional picture of one who
sees a ghost; Hégisippe Cruchot, the outrageousness of whose piratical kit
contrasted with his suavity of manner, sitting with military precision on
a straight-backed chair; and Madame Bolivard standing in a far corner of
the room; her bare arms crossed above her blue apron, and watching the
scene with an air of kindly proprietorship. They spoke in French, for only
one word of English had Hégisippe and his aunt between them, and that being
"Howdodogoddam" was the exclusive possession of the former. Emmy gave
utterance now and then to peculiar vocables which she had learned at
school, and which Hégisippe declared to be the purest Parisian he had ever
heard an Englishwoman use, while Septimus spoke very fair French indeed.
Hégisippe would twirl his little brown mustache--he was all brown, skin and
eyes and close-cropped hair, and even the skull under the hair--and tell of
his military service and of the beautiful sunshine of Algiers and, when his
aunt was out of the room, of his Arcadian love affairs. She served in a
wine shop in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers. When was he going to get married?
At Emmy's question he laughed, with a wave of his cigarette, and a clank of
his bayonet against the leg of the chair. On a sou a day? Time enough for
that when he had made his fortune. His mother then would doubtless find him
a suitable wife with a dowry. When his military service was over he was
going to be a waiter. When he volunteered this bit of information Emmy gave
a cry of surprise. This dashing, swaggering desperado of a fellow a waiter!
"I shall never understand this country!" she cried.
"When one has good introductions and knows how to comport oneself, one
makes much"--and he rubbed his thumb and fingers together, according to the
national code of pantomime.
And then his hosts would tell him about England and the fogs, wherein he
was greatly interested; or Septimus would discourse to him of inventions,
the weak spot in which his shrewd intelligence generally managed to strike,
and then Septimus would run his fingers through this hair and say, "God
bless my soul, I never thought of that," and Emmy would laugh; or else they
talked politics. Hégisippe, being a Radical, _fiché_'d himself absolutely
of the Pope and the priests. To be kind to one's neighbors and act as a
good citizen summed up his ethical code. He was as moral as any devout
Catholic.
"What about the girl in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers?" asked Emmy.
"If I were a good Catholic, I would have two, for then I could get
absolution," he cried gaily, and laughed immoderately at his jest.
The days of his visits were marked red in Emmy's calendar.
"I wish I were a funny beggar, and had lots of conversation like our friend
Cruchot, and could make you laugh," said Septimus one day, when the _tædium
vitæ_ lay heavy on her.
"If you had a sense of humor you wouldn't be here," she replied, with some
bitterness.
Septimus rubbed his thin hands together thoughtfully.
"I don't know why you should say that," said he. "I never heard a joke I
didn't see the point of. I'm rather good at it."
"If you don't see the point of this joke, I can't explain it, my dear. It
has a point the size of a pyramid."
He nodded and looked dreamily out of the window at the opposite houses.
Sometimes her sharp sayings hurt him. But he understood all, in his dim
way, and pardoned all. He never allowed her to see him wince. He stood so
long silent that Emmy looked up anxiously at his face, dreading the effect
of her words. His hand hung by his side--he was near the sofa where she
lay. She took it gently, in a revulsion of feeling, kissed it, and, as he
turned, flung it from her.
"Go, my dear; go. I'm not fit to talk to you. Yes, go. You oughtn't to be
here; you ought to be in England in your comfortable home with Wiggleswick
and your books and inventions. You're too good for me, and I'm hateful. I
know it, and it drives me mad."
He took her hand in his turn and held it for a second or two in both of his
and patted it kindly.
"I'll go out and buy something," he said.
When he returned she was penitent and glad to see him; and although he
brought her as a present a hat--a thing of purple feathers and green velvet
and roses, in which no self-respecting woman would be seen mummified a
thousand years hence--she neither laughed at it nor upbraided him, but
tried the horror on before the glass and smiled sweetly while the cold
shivers ran down her back.
"I don't want you to say funny things, Septimus," she said, reverting to
the starting point of the scene, "so long as you bring me such presents as
this."
"It's a nice hat," he admitted modestly. "The woman in the shop said that
very few people could wear it."
"I'm so glad you think I'm an exceptional woman," she said. "It's the first
compliment you have ever paid me."
She shed tears, though, over the feathers of the hat, before she went to
bed, good tears, such as bring great comfort and cleanse the heart. She
slept happier that night; and afterwards, whenever the devils entered her
soul and the pains of hell got hold upon her, she recalled the tears, and
they became the holy water of an exorcism.
Septimus, unconscious of this landmark in their curious wedded life, passed
tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hôtel Godet. A gleam of
sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and
the horse's ear, as he was coming home one day on the _impériale_, put him
on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he had half
invented some years before. The working out of this, and the
superintendence of the making of the model at some works near Vincennes,
occupied much of his time and thought. In matters appertaining to his
passion he had practical notions of procedure; he would be at a loss to
know where to buy a tooth-brush, and be dependent on the ministrations of a
postman or an old woman in a charcoal shop, but to the place where delicate
instruments could be made he went straight, as instinctively and surely as
a buffalo heads for water. Many of his books and papers had been sent him
from time to time by Wiggleswick, who began to dread the post, the labor of
searching and packing and dispatching becoming too severe a tax on the old
villain's leisure. These lay in promiscuous heaps about the floor of his
bedroom, stepping-stones amid a river of minor objects, such as collars and
bits of india rubber and the day before yesterday's _Petit Journal_. The
_femme de chambre_ and the dirty, indeterminate man in a green baize apron,
who went about raising casual dust with a great feather broom, at first
stowed the litter away daily, with jackdaw ingenuity of concealment, until
Septimus gave them five francs each to desist; whereupon they desisted with
alacrity, and the books became the stepping-stones aforesaid,
stepping-stones to higher things. His only concern was the impossibility of
repacking them when the time should come for him to leave the Hôtel Godet,
and sometimes the more academic speculation as to what Zora would say
should some miracle of levitation transport her to the untidy chamber. He
could see her, radiant and commanding, dispelling chaos with the sweep of
her parasol.
There were few moments in the day when he did not crave her presence. It
had been warmth and sunshine and color to him for so long that now the sun
seemed to have disappeared from the sky, leaving the earth a chill
monochrome. Life was very difficult without her. She had even withdrawn
from him the love "in a sort of way" to which she had confessed. The
goddess was angry at the slight cast on her by his secret marriage. And she
was in California, a myriad of miles away. She could not have been more
remote had she been in Saturn. When Emmy asked him whether he did not long
for Wiggleswick and the studious calm of Nunsmere, he said, "No." And he
spoke truly; for wherein lay the advantage of one spot on the earth's
surface over another, if Zora were not the light thereof? But he kept his
reason in his heart. They rarely spoke of Zora.
Of the things that concerned Emmy herself so deeply, they never spoke at
all. Of her hopes and fears for the future he knew nothing. For all that
was said between them, Mordaunt Prince might have been the figure of a
dream that had vanished into the impenetrable mists of dreamland. To the
girl he was a ghastly memory which she strove to hide in the depths of her
soul. Septimus saw that she suffered, and went many quaint and irrelevant
ways to alleviate her misery. Sometimes they got on her nerves; more often
they made the good tears come. Once she was reading a tattered volume of
George Eliot which she had picked up during a stroll on the quays, and
calling him over to her side pointed out a sentence: "Dogs are the best
friends, they are always ready with their sympathy and they ask no
questions."
"That's like you," she said; "but George Eliot had never met a man like
you, poor thing, so she had to stick the real thing down to dogs."
Septimus reddened. "Dogs bark and keep one from sleeping," he said. "My
next-door neighbor at the Hôtel Godet has two. An ugly man with a beard
comes and takes them out in a motor car. Do you know, I'm thinking of
growing a beard. I wonder how I should look in it?"
Emmy laughed and caught his sleeve. "Why won't you even let me tell you
what I think of you?"
"Wait till I've grown the beard, and then you can," said Septimus.
"That will be never," she retorted; "for if you grow a beard, you'll look a
horror, like a Prehistoric Man--and I sha'n't have anything to do with you.
So I'll never be able to tell you."
"It would be better so," said he.
They made many plans for settling down in some part of rural France or
Switzerland--they had the map of Europe to choose from--but Septimus's
vagueness and a disinclination for further adventure on the part of Emmy
kept them in Paris. The winter brightened into spring, and Paris, gay in
lilac and sunshine, held them in her charm. There were days when they
almost forgot, and became the light-hearted companions of the lame donkey
on Nunsmere Common.
A day on the Seine, for instance, in a steamboat, when the water was
miraculously turned to sparkling wine and the great masses of buildings
were bathed in amber and the domes of the Pantheon and the Invalides and
the cartouches and bosses of the Pont Alexandre III shone burnished gold.
There was Auteuil, with its little open-air restaurants, rustic trellis and
creepers, and its _friture_ of gudgeon and dusty salt and cutlery and great
yards of bread, which Emmy loved to break with Septimus, like Christmas
crackers. Then, afterwards, there was the winding Seine again, Robinson
Crusoe's Island in all its greenery, and St. Cloud with its terrace looking
over the valley to Paris wrapped in an amethyst haze, with here and there a
triumphant point of glory.
A day also in the woods of Bas Meudon, alone beneath the trees, when they
talked like children, and laughed over the luncheon basket which Madame
Bolivard had stuffed full of electrifying edibles; when they lay on their
backs and looked dreamily at the sky through the leaves, and listened to
the chirrup of insects awakening from winter and the strange cracklings and
tiny voices of springtide, and gave themselves up to the general vibration
of life which accompanies the working of the sap in the trees.
Days, too, in mid-Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens, among the nursery maids
and working folk; at cafés on the remoter boulevards, where the kindly life
of Paris, still untouched by touristdom, passes up and down, and the spring
gets into the step of youth and sparkles in a girl's eyes. At the window
even of the _appartement_ in the Boulevard Raspail, when the air was
startlingly clear and scented and brought the message of spring from far
lands, from the golden shores of the Mediterranean, from the windy mountain
tops of Auvergne, from the broad, tender green fields of Central France,
from every heart and tree and flower, from Paris itself, quivering with
life. At such times they would not talk, both interpreting the message in
their own ways, yet both drawn together into a common mood in which they
vaguely felt that the earth was still a Land of Romance, that the mystery
of rebirth was repeating itself according to unchanging and perpetual law;
that inconsiderable, forlorn human atoms though they were, the law would
inevitably affect them too, and cause new hopes, new desires, and new
happiness to bud and flower in their hearts.
During these spring days there began to dawn in the girl's soul a knowledge
of the deeper meaning of things. When she first met Septimus and
delightedly regarded him as a new toy, she was the fluffy, frivolous little
animal of excellent breeding and half education, so common in English
country residential towns, with the little refinements somewhat coarsened,
the little animalism somewhat developed, the little brain somewhat
sharpened, by her career on the musical-comedy stage. Now there were signs
of change. A glimmering notion of the duty of sacrifice entered her head.
She carried it out by appearing one day, when Septimus was taking her for a
drive, in the monstrous nightmare of a hat. It is not given to breathing
male to appreciate the effort it cost her. She said nothing; neither did
he. She sat for two hours in the victoria, enduring the tortures of the
uglified, watching him out of the tail of her eye and waiting for a sign of
recognition. At last she could endure it no longer.
"I put this thing on to please you," she said.
"What thing?"
"The hat you gave me."
"Oh! Is that it?" he murmured in his absent way. "I'm so glad you like it."
He had never noticed it. He had scarcely recognized it. It had given him no
pleasure. She had made of herself a sight for gods and men to no earthly
purpose. All her sacrifice had been in vain. It was then that she really
experienced the disciplinary irony of existence. She never wore the hat
again; wherein she was blameless.
The spring deepened into summer, and they stayed on in the Boulevard
Raspail until they gave up making plans. Paris baked in the sun, and
theaters perished, and riders disappeared from the Acacias, and Cook's
brakes replaced the flashing carriages in the grand Avenue des Champs
Elysées, and the great Anglo-Saxon language resounded from the Place de la
Bastille to the Bon Marché. The cab horses drooped as if drugged by the
vapor of the melting asphalt beneath their noses. Men and women sat by
doorways, in front of little shops, on the benches in wide thoroughfares.
The Latin Quarter blazed in silence and the gates of the great schools were
shut. The merchants of lemonade wheeled their tin vessels through the
streets and the bottles crowned with lemons looked pleasant to hot eyes.
For the dust lay thick upon the leaves of trees and the lips of men, and
the air was heavy with the over-fulfilment of spring's promise.
Septimus was sitting with Hégisippe Cruchot outside the little café of the
iron tables painted yellow where first they had consorted.
"_Mon ami_," said he, "you are one of the phenomena that make me believe in
the _bon Dieu_. If you hadn't dragged me from under the wheels of the cab,
I should have been killed, and if I had been killed you wouldn't have
introduced me to your aunt who can cook, and what I should have done
without your aunt heaven only knows. I owe you much."
"_Bah, mon vieux_," said Hégisippe, "what are you talking about? You owe me
nothing."
"I owe you three lives," said Septimus.