Septimus Part 9

There was the car--a luxurious 40 h.p. machine, upholstered in green; there was Clem Sypher, pink and strong, appealing to her with his quick eyes; there was the suns.h.i.+ne and the breathless blue of the sky; and there was Septimus Dix, a faithful bodyguard. She wavered and turned to Septimus.

"What do you say?"

She was lost. Septimus murmured something inconclusive. Sypher triumphed.

She went indoors to get her coat and veil. Sypher admiringly watched her retreating figure--a poem of subtle curves--and shrugging himself into his motor coat, which the chauffeur brought him from the car, he turned to Septimus.

"Look here, Mr. Dix, I'm a straight man, and go straight to a point. Don't be offended. Am I in the way?"

"Not in the least," said Septimus, reddening.

"As for me, I don't care a hang for anything in the universe save Sypher's Cure. That's enough for one man to deal with. But I like having such a glorious creature as Mrs. Middlemist in my car. She attracts attention; and I can't say but what I'm not proud at being seen with her, both as a man and a manufacturer. But that's all. Now, tell me, what's in your mind?"

"I don't think I quite like you--er--to look on Mrs. Middlemist as an advertis.e.m.e.nt," said Septimus. To speak so directly cost him considerable effort.

"Don't you? Then I won't. I love a man to speak straight to me. I respect him. Here's my hand." He wrung Septimus's hand warmly. "I feel that we are going to be friends. I'm never wrong. I hope Mrs. Middlemist will allow me to be a friend. Tell me about her."

Septimus again reddened uncomfortably. He belonged to a cla.s.s which does not discuss its women with a stranger even though he be a newly sworn brother.

"She mightn't care for it," he said.

Sypher once more clapped him on the shoulder. "Good again!" he cried, admiringly. "I shouldn't like you half so much if you had told me. I've got to know, for I know everything, so I'll ask her myself."

Zora came down coated and veiled, her face radiant as a Romney in its frame of gauze. She looked so big and beautiful, and Sypher looked so big and strong, and both seemed so full of vitality, that Septimus felt criminally insignificant. His voice was of too low a pitch to make itself carry when these two spoke in their full tones. He shrank into his sh.e.l.l. Had he not realized, in his sensitive way, that without him as a watchdog--ineffectual spaniel that he was--Zora would not accept Clem Sypher's invitation, he would have excused himself from the drive. He differentiated, not conceitedly, between Clem Sypher and himself. She had driven alone with him on her first night at Monte Carlo. But then she had carried him off between her finger and thumb, so to speak, as the Brobdingnagian ladies carried off Gulliver. He knew that he did not count as a danger in the eyes of high-spirited young women. A man like Sypher did. He knew that Zora would not have driven alone with Sypher any more than with the wretch of the evil eyes. He did not a.n.a.lyze this out himself, as his habit of mind was too vague and dreamy. But he knew it instinctively, as a dog knows whom he can trust with his mistress and whom he cannot. So when Sypher and Zora, with a great bustle of life, were discussing seating arrangements in the car, he climbed modestly into the front seat next to the chauffeur, and would not be dislodged by Sypher's entreaties. He was just there, on guard, having no place in the vigorous atmosphere of their personalities. He sat aloof, smoking his pipe, and wondering whether he could invent a motor perambulator which could run on rails round a small garden, fill the baby's lungs with air, and save the British Army from the temptation of nursery-maids. His sporadic discourse on the subject perplexed the chauffeur.

It was a day of vivid glory. Rain had fallen heavily during the night, laying the dust on the road and was.h.i.+ng to gay freshness the leaves of palms and gold-spotted orange trees and the purple bourgainvillea and other flowers that rioted on wayside walls. All the deep, strong color of the South was there, making things unreal: the gray mountains, fragile ma.s.ses against the solid cobalt of the sky. The Mediterranean met the horizon in a blue so intense that the soul ached to see it. The heart of spring throbbed in the deep bosom of summer. The air as they sped through it was like cool spiced wine.

Zora listened to Clem Sypher's dithyrambics. The wine of the air had got into his head. He spoke as she had heard no man speak before. The turns of the road brought into sight view after magic view, causing her to catch her breath: purple rock laughing in the sea, far-off townlets flas.h.i.+ng white against the mountain flank, gardens of paradise. Yet Clem Sypher sang of his cure.

First it was a salve for all external ills that flesh is heir to. It spared humanity its heritage of epidermatous suffering. It could not fail. He reeled off the string of hideous diseases with a lyrical lilt. It was his own discovery. An obscure chemist's a.s.sistant in Bury St. Edmunds, he had, by dint of experiments, hit on this world-upheaving remedy.

"When I found what it was that I had done, Mrs. Middlemist," said he solemnly, "I pa.s.sed my vigil, like a knight of old, in my dispensary, with a pot of the cure in front of me, and I took a great oath to devote my life to spread it far and wide among the nations of the earth. It should bring comfort, I swore, to the king in his palace and the peasant in his hut. It should be a household word in the London slum and on the Tartar steppe.

Sypher's Cure could go with the Red Cross into battle, and should be in the clerk's wife's cupboard in Peckham Rye. The human chamois that climbs the Alps, the gentle lunatic that plays golf, the idiot that goes and gets scalped by Red Indians, the missionary that gets half roasted by cannibals--if he gets quite roasted the cure's no good; it can't do impossibilities--all should carry Sypher's Cure in their waistcoat pockets.

All mankind should know it, from China to Peru, from Cape Horn to Nova Zembla. It would free the tortured world from plague. I would be the Friend of Humanity. I took that for my device. It was something to live for. I was twenty then. I am forty now. I have had twenty years of the fiercest battle that ever man fought."

"And surely you've come off victorious, Mr. Sypher," said Zora.

"I shall never be victorious until it has overspread the earth!" he declared. And he pa.s.sed one hand over the other in a gesture which symbolized the terrestrial globe with a coating of Sypher's Cure.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"It shall. Somehow, I believe that with you on my side it will."

"I?" Zora started away to the corner of the car, and gazed on him in blank amazement. "I? What in the world have I to do with it?"

"I don't know yet," said Sypher. "I have an intuition. I'm a believer in intuitions. I've followed them all my life, and they've never played me false. The moment I learned that you had never heard of me, I felt it."

Zora breathed comfortably again. It was not an implied declaration.

"I'm fighting against the Powers of Darkness," he continued. "I once read a bit of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene.' There was a Red Cross Knight who slew a Dragon--but he had a fabulous kind of woman behind him. When I saw you, you seemed that fabulous kind of woman."

At a sharp wall corner a clump of tall poinsettias flamed against the sky.

Zora laughed full-heartedly.

"Here we are in the middle of a Fairy Tale. What are the Powers of Darkness in your case, Sir Red Cross Knight?"

"Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy," said Sypher savagely.

CHAPTER V

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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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."