Septimus Part 33

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, n.o.body 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 Ca.n.a.l 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.

CHAPTER XVI

In the course of time Sypher returned to London to fight a losing battle against the Powers of Darkness and derive whatever inspiration he could from Zora's letters. He also called dutifully at "The Nook" during his week-end visits to Penton Court, where he found restfulness in the atmosphere of lavender. Mrs. Oldrieve continued to regard him as a most superior person. Cousin Jane, as became a gentlewoman of breeding, received him with courtesy--but a courtesy marked by that shade of reserve which is due from a lady of quality to the grandfatherless. If she had not striven against the unregeneracy of mortal flesh she would have disapproved of him offhand because she disapproved of Zora; but she was a conscientious woman, and took great pride in overcoming prejudices. She also collected pewter, the history of which Sypher, during his years of self-education, had once studied, in the confused notion that it was culture. All knowledge is good; from the theory of quaternions to the way to cut a ham-frill. It is sure to come in useful, somehow. An authority on Central African dialects has been known to find them invaluable in altercations with cabmen, and a converted burglar has, before now, become an admirable house-agent. What Sypher, therefore, had considered merely learned lumber in his head cemented his friends.h.i.+p with Cousin Jane--or rather, to speak by the book, soldered it with pewter. As for the Cure, however, she did not believe in it, and told him so, roundly. She had been brought up to believe in doctors, the Catechism, the House of Lords, the inequality of the s.e.xes, and the Oldrieve family, and in that faith she would live and die. Sypher bore her no malice. She did not call the Cure pestilential quackery. He was beginning not to despise the day of small things.

"It may be very good in its way," she said, "just as Liberalism and Darwinism and eating in restaurants may be good things. But they are not for me."

Cousin Jane's conversation provided him with much innocent entertainment.

Mrs. Oldrieve was content to talk about the weather, and what Zora and Emmy used to like to eat when they were little girls: subjects interesting in themselves but not conducive to discussion. Cousin Jane was nothing if not argumentative. She held views, expounded them, and maintained them. Nothing short of a declaration from Jehovah bursting in glory through the sky could have convinced her of error. Even then she would have been annoyed. She profoundly disapproved of Emmy's marriage to Septimus, whom she characterized as a doddering idiot. Sypher defended his friend warmly. He also defended Wiggleswick at whose ways and habits the good lady expressed unrestrained indignation. She could not have spoken more disrespectfully of Antichrist.

"You mark my words," she said, "he'll murder them both in their sleep."

Concerning Zora, too, she was emphatic.

"I am not one of those who think every woman ought to get married; but if she can't conduct herself decently without a husband, she ought to have one."

"But surely Mrs. Middlemist's conduct is irreproachable," said Sypher.

"Irreproachable? Do you think trapesing about alone all over the earth--mixing with all sorts of people she doesn't know from Adam, and going goodness knows where and doing goodness knows what, and idling her life away, never putting a darn in her stockings even--is irreproachable conduct on the part of a young woman of Zora's birth and appearance? The way she dresses must attract attention, wherever she goes. It's supposed to be 'stylish' nowadays. In my time it was immodest. When a young woman was forced to journey alone she made herself as inconspicuous as possible. Zora ought to have a husband to look after her. Then she could do as she liked--or as he liked, which would be much the best thing for her."

"I happen to be in Mrs. Middlemist's confidence," said Sypher. "She has told me many times that she would never marry again. Her marriage--"

"Stuff and rubbis.h.!.+" cried Cousin Jane. "You wait until the man comes along who has made up his mind to marry her. It must be a big strong man who won't stand any nonsense and will take her by the shoulders and shake her.

She'll marry him fast enough. We'll see what happens to her in California."

"I hope she won't marry one of those dreadful creatures with la.s.sos," said Mrs. Oldrieve, whose hazy ideas of California were based on hazier memories of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show which she had seen many years ago in London.

"I hope Mrs. Middlemist won't marry at all," said Sypher, in a tone of alarm.

"Why?" asked Cousin Jane.

She shot the question at him with almost a snarl. Sypher paused for a moment or two before replying.

"I should lose a friend," said he.

"Humph!" said Cousin Jane.

If the late Rev. Laurence Sterne had known Cousin Jane, "Tristram Shandy"

would have been the richer by a chapter on "Humphs." He would have a.n.a.lyzed this particular one with a minute delicacy beyond the powers of Clem Sypher through whose head rang the echo of the irritating vocable for some time afterwards. It meant something. It meant something uncomfortable. It was directly leveled at himself and yet it seemed to sum up her previous disparaging remarks about Zora. "What the d.i.c.kens _did_ she mean by it?" he asked himself.

He came down to Nunsmere every week now, having given up his establishment at Kilburn Priory and sold the house--"The Kurhaus," as he had named it in his pride. A set of bachelor's chambers in St. James's sheltered him during his working days in London. He had also sold his motor-car; for retrenchment in personal expenses had become necessary, and the purchase-money of house and car were needed for the war of advertising which he was waging against his rivals. These were days black with anxiety and haunting doubt, illuminated now and then by Zora, who wrote gracious letters of encouragement. He carried them about with him like talismans.

Sometimes he could not realize that the great business he had created could be on the brink of failure. The routine went on as usual. At the works at Bermondsey the same activity apparently prevailed as when the Cure had reached the hey-day of its fortune some five years before. In the sweet-smelling laboratory gleaming with white tiles and copper retorts, the white-ap.r.o.ned workmen sorted and weighed and treated according to the secret recipe the bundles of herbs that came in every day and were stacked in pigeon-holes along the walls. In the boiling-sheds, not so sweet-smelling, the great vats of fat bubbled and ran, giving out to the cooling-troughs the refined white cream of which the precious ointment was made. Beyond there was another laboratory vast and clean and busy, where the healing ichor of the herbs was mixed with the drugs and the cream. Then came the work-rooms where rows of girls filled the celluloid boxes, one dabbing in the well-judged quant.i.ty, another cutting it off clean to the level of the top with a swift stroke of the spatula, another fitting on the lid, and so on, in endless but fascinating monotony until the last girl placed on the trolley by her side, waiting to carry it to the packing-shed, the finished packet of Sypher's Cure as it would be delivered to the world.

Then there were the packing-sheds full of deal cases for despatching the Cure to the four quarters of the globe, some empty, some being filled, others stacked in readiness for the carriers: a Babel of sounds, of hammering clamps, of creaking barrows, of horses by the open doors rattling their heavy harness and trampling the flagstones with their heavy hoofs; a ceaseless rus.h.i.+ng of brawny men in sackcloth ap.r.o.ns, of dusty men with stumps of pencils and note-books and crumpled invoices, counting and checking and reporting to other men in narrow gla.s.s offices against the wall. Outside stood the great wagons laden with the white deal boxes bound with iron hoops and bearing in vermilion letters the inscription of Sypher's Cure.

Every detail of this complicated hive was as familiar to him as his kitchen was to his cook. He had planned it all, organized it all. Every action of every human creature in the place from the skilled pharmaceutist responsible for the preparation of the ointment to the grimy boy who did odd jobs about the sheds had been pre-conceived by him, had had its mainspring in his brain. Apart from idealistic aspirations concerned with the Cure itself, the perfecting of this machinery of human activity had been a matter of absorbing interest, its perfection a subject of honorable pride.

He walked through the works day after day, noting the familiar sights and sounds, pausing here and there lovingly, as a man does in his garden to touch some cherished plant or to fill himself with the beauty of some rare flower. The place was inexpressibly dear to him. That those furnaces should ever grow cold, that those vats should ever be empty, that those two magic words should cease to blaze on the wooden boxes, should fade from the sight of man, that those gates should ever be shut, seemed to transcend imagination. The factory had taken its rank with eternal, unchanging things, like the solar system and the Bank of England. Yet he knew only too well that there had been change in the unchanging and in his soul dwelt a sickening certainty that the eternal would be the transient. Gradually the staff had been reduced, the output lessened. Already two of the long tables once filled with girls stood forlornly empty.

His comfortably appointed office in Moorgate Street told the same story.

Week after week the orders slackened and gradually the number of the clerks had shrunk. Gloom settled permanently on the manager's brow. He almost walked on tiptoe into Sypher's room and spoke to him in a hushed whisper, until rebuked for dismalness.

"If you look like that, Shuttleworth, I shall cry."

On another occasion Shuttleworth said:

"We are throwing money away on advertis.e.m.e.nts. The concern can't stand it."

Sypher turned, blue pencil in hand, from the wall where draft proofs of advertis.e.m.e.nts were pinned for his correction and master's touch. This was a part of the business that he loved. It appealed to the flamboyant in his nature. It particularly pleased him to see omnibuses pa.s.s by bearing the famous "Sypher's Cure," an enlargement of his own handwriting, in streaming letters of blood.

"We're going to double them," said he; and his air was that of the racing Mississippi captains of old days who in response to the expostulation of their engineers sent a little n.i.g.g.e.r boy to sit on the safety-valve.

The dismal manager turned up his eyes to heaven with the air of the family steward in Hogarth's "Mariage a la Mode." He had not his chief's Napoleonic mind; but he had a wife and a large family. Clem Sypher also thought of that--not only of Shuttleworth's wife and family, but also of the wives and families of the many men in his employ. It kept him awake at nights.

In the soothing air of Nunsmere, however, he slept, in long dead stretches, as a tired man sleeps, in spite of trains which screeched past the bottom of his lawn. Their furious unrest enhanced the peace of village things. He began to love the little backwater of the earth whose stillness calmed the fever of life. As soon as he stepped out on to the platform at Ripstead a cool hand seemed to touch his forehead, and charm away the cares that made his temples throb. At Nunsmere he gave himself up to the simplicities of the place. He took to strolling, like Septimus, about the common and made friends with the lame donkey. On Sunday mornings he went to church. He had first found himself there out of curiosity, for, though not an irreligious man, he was not given to pious practices; but afterwards he had gone on account of the restfulness of the rural service. His mind essentially reverend took it very seriously, just as it took seriously the works of a great poet which he could not understand or any alien form of human aspiration; even the parish notices and the publication of banns he received with earnest attention. His intensity of interest as he listened to the sermon sometimes flattered the mild vicar, and at other times--when thinness of argument p.r.i.c.ked his conscience--alarmed him considerably. But Sypher would not have dared enter into theological disputation. He took the sermon as he took the hymns, in which he joined l.u.s.tily. Cousin Jane, whom he invariably met with Mrs. Oldrieve after the service and escorted home, had no such scruples. She tore the vicar's theology into fragments and scattered them behind her as she walked, like a hare in a paper chase.

Said the Literary Man from London, who had strolled with them on one of these occasions:

"The good lady's one of those women who speak as if they had a relation who had married a high official in the Kingdom of Heaven and now and then gave them confidential information."

Sypher liked Rattenden because he could often put into a phrase his own unformulated ideas. He also belonged to a world to which he himself was a stranger, the world of books and plays and personalities and theories of art. Sypher thought that its denizens lived on a lofty plane.

"The atmosphere," said Rattenden, "is so rarified that the kettle refuses to boil properly. That is why we always have cold tea at literary gatherings. My dear fellow, it's a d.a.m.ned world. It talks all day and does nothing all night. The ragged Italian in front of the fresco in his village church or at the back of the gallery at the opera of his town knows more essentials of painting and music than any of us. It's a hollow sham of a world filled with empty words. I love it."