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Septimus

<h2>[193]CHAPTER XV</h2> 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[194] 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?" "[195]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[196] 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[197] 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. Be[198]yond 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." "[199]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?[200] 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?" "[201]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[202] 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[203] 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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