Septimus Part 5

CHAPTER III

When they drove up to the Hotel de Paris, she alighted and bade him a smiling farewell, and went to her room with the starlight in her eyes. The lift man asked if Madame had won. She dangled her empty purse and laughed.

Then the lift man, who had seen that light in women's eyes before, made certain that she was in love, and opened the lift door for her with the confidential air of the Latin who knows sweet secrets. But the lift man was wrong. No man had a part in her soul's exultation. If Septimus Dix crossed her mind while she was undressing, it was as a grotesque, bearing the same relation to her emotional impression of the night as a gargoyle does to a cathedral. When she went to bed, she slept the sound sleep of youth.

Septimus, after dismissing the cab, wandered in his vague way over to the Cafe de Paris, instinct suggesting his belated breakfast, which, like his existence, Zora had forgotten. The waiter came.

"_Monsieur desire?_"

"Absinthe," murmured Septimus absent-mindedly, "and--er--poached eggs--and anything--a raspberry ice."

The waiter gazed at him in stupefaction; but nothing being too astounding in Monte Carlo, he wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead and executed the order.

The unholy meal being over, Septimus drifted into the square and spent most of the night on a bench gazing at the Hotel de Paris and wondering which were her windows. When she mentioned casually, a day or two later, that her windows looked the other way over the sea, he felt that Destiny had fooled him once more; but for the time being he found a gentle happiness in his speculation. Chilled to the bone, at last, he sought his hotel bedroom and smoked a pipe, meditative, with his hat on until the morning. Then he went to bed.

Two mornings afterwards Zora came upon him on the Casino terrace. He sprawled idly on a bench between a fat German and his fat wife, who were talking across him. His straw hat was tilted over his eyes and his legs were crossed. In spite of the conversation (and a middle-cla.s.s German does not whisper when he talks to his wife), and the going and coming of the crowd--in spite of the suns.h.i.+ne and the blue air, he slumbered peacefully.

Zora pa.s.sed him once or twice. Then by the station lift she paused and looked out at the bay of Mentone clasping the sea--a blue enamel in a setting of gold. She stood for some moments lost in the joy of it when a voice behind her brought her back to the commonplace.

"Very lovely, isn't it?"

A thin-faced Englishman of uncertain age and yellow, evil eyes met her glance as she turned instinctively.

"Yes, it's beautiful," she replied coldly; "but that is no reason why you should take the liberty of speaking to me."

"I couldn't help sharing my emotions with another, especially one so beautiful. You seem to be alone here?"

Now she remembered having seen him before--rather frequently. The previous evening he had somewhat ostentatiously selected a table near hers at dinner. He had watched her as she had left the theater and followed her to the lift door. He had been watching for his opportunity and now thought it had come. She s.h.i.+vered with sudden anger, and round her heart crept the chill of fright which all women know who have been followed in a lonely street.

"I certainly am not alone," she said wrathfully. "Good morning."

The man covered his defeat by raising his hat with ironic politeness, and Zora walked swiftly away, in appearance a majestic Amazon, but inwardly a quivering woman. She marched straight up to the rec.u.mbent Dix. The Literary Man from London would have been amused. She interposed herself between the conversing Teutons and awakened the sleeper. He looked at her for a moment with a dreamy smile, then leaped to his feet.

"A man has insulted me--he has been following me about and tried to get into conversation with me."

"Dear me," said Septimus. "What shall I do? Shall I shoot him?"

"Don't be silly," she said seriously. "It's serious. I'd be glad if you'd kindly walk up and down a little with me."

"With pleasure." They strolled away together. "But I _am_ serious. If you wanted me to shoot him I'd do it. I'd do anything in the world for you.

I've got a revolver in my room."

She laughed, disclaiming desire for supreme vengeance.

"I only want to show the wretch that I am not a helpless woman," she observed, with the bewildering illogic of the s.e.x. And as she pa.s.sed by the offender she smiled down at her companion with all the sweetness of intimacy and asked him why he carried a revolver. She did not point the offender out, be it remarked, to the bloodthirsty Septimus.

"It belongs to Wiggleswick," he replied in answer to her question. "I promised to take care of it for him."

"What does Wiggleswick do when you are away?"

"He reads the police reports. I take in _Reynolds_ and the _News of the World_ and the ill.u.s.trated _Police News_ for him, and he cuts them out and gums them in a sc.r.a.p book. But I think I'm happier without Wiggleswick. He interferes with my guns."

"By the way," said Zora, "you talked about guns the other evening. What have you got to do with guns?"

He looked at her in a scared way out of the corner of his eye, child-fas.h.i.+on, as though to make sure she was loyal and worthy of confidence, and then he said:

"I invent 'em. I have written a treatise on guns of large caliber."

"Really?" cried Zora, taken by surprise. She had not credited him with so serious a vocation. "Do tell me something about it."

"Not now," he pleaded. "Some other time. I'd have to sit down with paper and pencil and draw diagrams. I'm afraid you wouldn't like it. Wiggleswick doesn't. It bores him. You must be born with machinery in your blood.

Sometimes it's uncomfortable."

"To have cogwheels instead of corpuscles must be trying," said Zora flippantly.

"Very," said he. "The great thing is to keep them clear of the heart."

"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.

"Whatever one does or tries to do, one should insist on remaining human.

It's good to be human, isn't it? I once knew a man who was just a complicated mechanism of brain encased in a body. His heart didn't beat; it clicked and whirred. It caused the death of the most perfect woman in the world."

He looked dreamily into the blue ether between sea and sky. Zora felt strangely drawn to him.

"Who was it?" she asked softly.

"My mother," said he.

They had paused in their stroll, and were leaning over the parapet above the railway line. After a few moments' silence he added, with a faint smile:--

"That's why I try hard to keep myself human--so that, if a woman should ever care for me, I shouldn't hurt her."

A green caterpillar was crawling on his sleeve. In his vague manner he picked it tenderly off and laid it on the leaf of an aloe that grew in the terrace vase near which he stood.

"You couldn't even hurt that crawling thing--let alone a woman," said Zora.

This time very softly.

He blushed. "If you kill a caterpillar you kill a b.u.t.terfly," he said apologetically.

"And if you kill a woman?"

"Is there anything higher?" said he.

She made no reply, her misanthropical philosophy prompting none. There was rather a long silence, which he broke by asking her if she read Persian. He excused his knowledge of it by saying that it kept him human. She laughed and suggested a continuance of their stroll. He talked disconnectedly as they walked up and down.

The crowd on the terrace thinned as the hour of dejeuner approached.