If you travel on the highroad which skirts the cliff-bound coast of
Normandy you may come to a board bearing the legend "Hottetôt-sur-Mer" and
a hand pointing down a narrow gorge. If you follow the direction and
descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble café, some
fishermen's cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a _débit de
tabac_, a view of a triangle of sea, and eventually to a patch of shingly
beach between two great bastions of cliffs. The beach itself contains a
diminutive jetty, a tiny fleet of fishing smacks, some nets, three bathing
machines joined together by ropes on which hang a few towels and bathing
costumes, a dog, a child or so with spade and bucket, two English maiden
ladies writing picture post-cards, a Frenchman in black, reading a Rouen
newspaper under a gray umbrella, his wife and daughter, and a stall of
mussels presided over by an old woman with skin like seaweed. Just above
the beach, on one side of the road leading up the gorge, is a miniature
barn with a red cupola, which is the Casino, and, on the other, a long,
narrow, blue-washed building with the words written in great black letters
across the façade, "Hôtel de la Plage."
As soon as Emmy could travel, she implored Septimus to find her a quiet
spot by the sea whither the fashionable do not resort. Septimus naturally
consulted Hégisippe Cruchot. Hégisippe asked for time to consult his
comrades. He returned with news of an ideal spot. It was a village in the
Pyrenees about six thousand feet up in the air and forty miles from a
railway station. They could shoot bears all day long. When Emmy explained
that a village on the top of the Pyrenees was not by the seaside, and that
neither she nor his aunt, Madame Bolivard, took any interest in the
destruction of bears, he retired somewhat crestfallen and went with his
difficulties to Angélique, the young lady in the wine shop in the Rue des
Francs-Bouchers. Angélique informed him that a brave sailor on leave from
his torpedo boat was in the habit of visiting the wine shop every evening.
He ought to know something of the sea. A meeting was arranged by Angélique
between Hégisippe, Septimus and the brave sailor, much to Emmy's skeptical
amusement; and the brave sailor, after absorbing prodigious quantities of
alcohol and reviewing all the places on the earth's coastline from Yokohama
to Paris-Plage, declared that the veritable Eden by the Sea was none other
than his native village of Hottetôt-sur-Mer. He made a plan of it on the
table, two square packets of tobacco representing the cliffs, a pipe stem
the road leading up the gorge, some tobacco dust the beach, and some coffee
slops applied with the finger the English Channel.
Septimus came back to Emmy. "I have found the place. It is
Hottetôt-sur-Mer. It has one hotel. You can catch shrimps, and its mussels
are famous all over the world."
After consultation of a guide to Normandy, on which Emmy's prudence
insisted, they found the brave sailor's facts mainly correct, and decided
on Hottetôt-sur-Mer.
"I will take you there, see that you are comfortably settled, and then come
back to Paris," said Septimus. "You'll be quite happy with Madame Bolivard,
won't you?"
"Of course," said Emmy, looking away from him. "What are you going to do in
Paris, all by yourself?"
"Guns," he replied. Then he added reflectively: "I also don't see how I
can get out of the Hôtel Godet. I've been there some time, and I don't know
how much to give the servants in tips. The only thing is to stay on."
Emmy sighed, just a bit wistfully, and made no attempt to prove the
futility of his last argument. The wonderfully sweet of life had come to
her of late mingled with the unutterably bitter. She was in the state of
being when a woman accepts, without question. Septimus then went to the St.
Lazare station to make arrangements and discovered an official who knew a
surprising amount about railway traveling and the means of bringing a
family from domicile to station. He entered Septimus's requirements in a
book and assured him that at the appointed hour an omnibus would be waiting
outside the house in the Boulevard Raspail. Septimus thought him a person
of marvelous intellect and gave him five francs.
So the quaint quartette started in comfort: Septimus and Emmy and Madame
Bolivard and the little lump of mortality which the Frenchwoman carried in
her great motherly arms. Madame Bolivard, who had not been out of Paris for
twenty years, needed all her maternal instincts to subdue her excitement at
the prospect of seeing the open country and the sea. In the railway
carriage she pointed out cattle to the unconscious infant with the
tremulous quiver of the traveler who espies a herd of hippogriffin.
"Is it corn that, Monsieur? _Mon Dieu_, it is beautiful. Regard then the
corn, my cherished one."
But the cherished one cared not for corn or cattle. He preferred to fix his
cold eyes on Septimus, as if wondering what he was doing in that galley.
Now and again Septimus would bend forward and, with a vague notion of the
way to convey one's polite intentions to babies, would prod him gingerly in
the cheek and utter an insane noise and then surreptitiously wipe his
finger on his trousers. When his mother took him she had little spasms of
tenderness during which she pressed him tightly to her bosom and looked
frightened. The child was precious to her. She had paid a higher price than
most women, and that perhaps enhanced its value.
At Fécamp a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage,
together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top
in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old
priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed
snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows
of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions
smelled abominably. Emmy, tired of the railway journey and suffocated by
the heat, felt inclined to cry. This was her first step into her newly
conditioned world, and her heart sank. She regretted her comfortable rooms
in Paris and the conditions of existence there of which Septimus was an
integral part. She had got used to them, to his forced association with the
intimate details of her life, to his bending over the child like a
grotesque fairy godfather and making astonishing suggestions for its
upbringing. She had regarded him less as a stranger to be treated with
feminine reserve than the doctor. Now it was different. She was about to
take up her own life again, with new responsibilities, and the dearly loved
creature whom she had bullied and laughed at and leaned on would go away to
take up his own queer way of life, and the relations between them could not
possibly be the same again. The diligence was taking her on the last stage
of her journey towards the new conditions, and it jolted and bumped and
smelled and took an interminable time.
"I'm sure," said she woefully, "there's no such place as Hottetôt-sur-Mer,
and we are going on forever to find it."
Presently Septimus pointed triumphantly through the window.
"There it is!"
"Where?" cried Emmy, for not a house was in sight. Then she saw the board.
The old diligence turned and creaked and swung and pitched down the gorge.
When they descended at the Hôtel de la Plage, the setting sun blazed on
their faces across the sea and shed its golden enchantment over the little
pebbly beach. At that hour the only living thing on it was the dog, and he
was asleep. It was a spot certainly to which the fashionable did not
resort.
"It will be good for baby."
"And for you."
She shrugged her shoulders. "What is good for one is not always--" She
paused, feeling ungrateful. Then she added, "It's the best place you could
have brought us to."
After dinner they sat on the beach and leaned against a fishing-boat. It
was full moon. The northern cliff cast its huge shadow out to sea and half
way across the beach. A knot of fisher folk sat full in the moonlight on
the jetty and sang a song with a mournful refrain. Behind them in the
square of yellow light of the salon window could be seen the figures of the
two English maiden ladies apparently still addressing picture post-cards.
The luminous picture stood out sharp against the dark mass of the hotel.
Beyond the shadow of the cliff the sea lay like a silver mirror in the
windless air. A tiny border of surf broke on the pebbles. Emmy drew a long
breath and asked Septimus if he smelled the seaweed. The dog came and
sniffed at their boots; then from the excellent leather judging them to be
persons above his social station, he turned humbly away. Septimus called
him, made friends with him--he was a smooth yellow dog of no account--and
eventually he curled himself up between them and went to sleep. Septimus
smoked his pipe. Emmy played with the ear of the dog and looked out to sea.
It was very peaceful. After a while she sighed.
"I suppose this must be our last evening together."
"I suppose it must," said Septimus.
"Are you quite sure you can afford all the money you're leaving with me?"
"Of course. It comes out of the bank."
"I know that, you stupid," she laughed. "Where else could it come from
unless you kept it in a stocking? But the bank isn't an unlimited gold-mine
from which you can draw out as many handfuls as you want."
Septimus knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"People don't get sovereigns out of gold-mines. I wish they did. They
extract a bit of gold about the size of this pebble out of a ton of quartz.
I once bought shares in a gold-mine and there wasn't any gold in it at all.
I always used to be buying things like that. People sold them to me. I was
like Moses."
"Moses?"
"Oh, not _that_ Moses. He could get anything out of anything. He got water
out of a rock. I mean the son of the Vicar of Wakefield, who bought the
green spectacles."
"Oh," said Emmy, who after the way of her generation had never heard of
him.
"I don't do it--let people sell me things--any more, now," he said gravely.
"I seem to have got wise. Perhaps it has come through having had to look
after you. I see things much clearer."
He filled and lit another pipe and began to talk about Orion just visible
over the shoulder of the cliff. Emmy, whose interests were for the moment
terrestrial, interrupted him:
"There's one thing I want you to see clearly, my dear, and that is that I
owe you a frightful lot of money. But I'm sure to get something to do when
I'm back in London and then I can repay you by instalments. Remember, I'm
not going to rest until I pay you back."
"I sha'n't rest if you do," said Septimus, nervously. "Please don't talk of
it. It hurts me. I've done little enough in the world, God knows. Give me
this chance of--the Buddhists call it 'acquiring merit.'"
This was not a new argument between them. Emmy had a small income under her
father's will, and the prospect of earning a modest salary on the stage.
She reckoned that she would have sufficient to provide for herself and the
child. Hitherto Septimus had been her banker. Neither of them had any
notion of the value of money, and Septimus had a child's faith in the magic
of the drawn check. He would as soon have thought of measuring the portion
of whisky he poured out for a guest as of counting the money he advanced to
Emmy.
She took up his last words, and speaking in a low tone, as a woman does
when her pride has gone from her, she said:
"Haven't you acquired enough merit already, my dear? Don't you see the
impossibility of my going on accepting things from you? You seem to take it
for granted that you're to provide for me and the child for the rest of our
lives. I've been a bad, unprincipled fool of a girl, I know--yes, rotten
bad; there are thousands like me in London--"
Septimus rose to his feet.
"Oh, don't, Emmy, don't! I can't stand it."
She rose too and put her hands on his shoulders.
"You must let me speak to-night--our last night before we part. It isn't
generous of you not to listen."
The yellow dog, disturbed in his slumbers, shook himself, and regarding
them with an air of humble sympathy turned and walked away discreetly into
the shadow. The fisher folk on the jetty still sang their mournful chorus.
"Sit down again."
Septimus yielded. "But why give yourself pain?" he asked gently.
"To ease my heart. The knife does good. Yes, I know I've been worthless.
But I'm not as bad as that. Don't you see how horrible the idea is to me? I
must pay you back the money--and of course not come on you for any more.
You've done too much for me already. It sometimes stuns me to think of it.
It was only because I was in hell and mad--and grasped at the hand you held
out to me. I suppose I've done you the biggest wrong a woman can do a man.
Now I've come to my senses, I shudder at what I've done."
"Why? Why?" said Septimus, growing miserably unhappy.
"How can you ever marry, unless we go through the vulgarity of a collusive
divorce?"
"My dear girl," said he, "what woman would ever marry a preposterous
lunatic like me?"
"There's not a woman living who ought not to have gone down on her bended
knees if she had married you."
"I should never have married," said he, laying his hand for a moment
reassuringly on hers.
"Who knows?" She gave a slight laugh. "Zora is only a woman like the rest
of us."
"Why talk of Zora?" he said quickly. "What has she to do with it?"
"Everything. You don't suppose I don't know," she replied in a low voice.
"It was for her sake and not for mine."
He was about to speak when she put out her hand and covered his mouth.
"Let me talk for a little."
She took up her parable again and spoke very gently, very sensibly. The
moonlight peacefulness was in her heart. It softened the tone of her voice
and reflected itself in unfamiliar speech.
"I seem to have grown twenty years older," she said.
She desired on that night to make her gratitude clear to him, to ask his
pardon for past offenses. She had been like a hunted animal; sometimes she
had licked his hand and sometimes she had scratched it. She had not been
quite responsible. Sometimes she had tried to send him away, for his own
sake. For herself, she had been terrified at the thought of losing him.
"Another man might have done what you did, out of chivalry; but no other
man but you would not have despised the woman. I deserved it; but I knew
you didn't despise me. You have been just the same to me all through as
you were in the early days. It braced me up and helped me to keep some sort
of self-respect. That was the chief reason why I could not let you go. Now
all is over. I am quite sane and as happy as I ever shall be. After
to-night it stands to reason we must each lead our separate lives. You
can't do anything more for me, and God knows, poor dear, I can't do
anything for you. So I want to thank you."
She put her arm around his shoulder and kissed his cheek.
Septimus flushed. Her lips were soft and her breath was sweet. No woman
save his mother had ever kissed him. He turned and took her hands.
"Let me accept that in full payment for everything. You want me to go away
happy, don't you?"
"My dear," she said, with a little catch in her voice, "if there was
anything in the world I could do to make you happy, short of throwing baby
to a tiger, I would do it."
Septimus took off his cap and brought his hair to its normal
perpendicularity. Emmy laughed.
"Dear me! What are you going to say?"
Septimus reflected for a moment.
"If I dine off a bloater in a soup-plate in the drawing-room, or if my bed
isn't made at six o'clock in the evening, and my house is a cross between a
pigsty and an ironmonger's shop, nobody minds. It is only Septimus Dix's
extraordinary habits. But if the woman who is my wife in the eyes of the
world--"
"Yes, yes, I see," she said hurriedly. "I hadn't looked at it in that
light."
"The boy is going to Cambridge," he murmured. "Then I should like him to go
into Parliament. There are deuced clever fellows in Parliament. I met one
in Venice two or three years ago. He knew an awful lot of things. We spent
an evening together on the Grand Canal and he talked all the time most
interestingly on the drainage system of Barrow-in-Furness. I wonder how
fellows get to know about drains."
Emmy said: "Would it make you happy?"
From her tone he gathered that she referred to the subject of contention
between them and not to his thirst for sanitary information.
"Of course it would."
"But how shall I ever repay you?"
"Perhaps once a year," he said. "You can settle up in full, as you did just
now."
There was a long silence and then Emmy remarked that it was a heavenly
night.