It was her birth stone—an odd bit of sentimental superstition for Roger to have cherished—and his own as well, for they were both born in September. Her father had told her of this on one of the few occasions when he seemed to have talked with her at any length, and like all his remarks it had made a great impression upon her. Anything more violently at odds with the theory of planetary influence it would be hard to find, for two people more fundamentally unlike each other than Roger and his wife, I never met.
And yet ... and yet (for I am not so sure as to what is "absurd" now that my half-century milestone is well behind, and those months in Egypt taught me that much of the inexplicable is terribly true) shall I leave out of this rambling tale the moment of attention due the old horoscopist of Paris? I think not.
He was withered and heavily spectacled and absent-minded to a degree I have never seen equalled. Shall I ever forget the day he made a soapy mixture in a great tin pan in his little garret in the Rue Serpente, produced a long, clean clay pipe, delivered to me a neat if extraordinary little lecture on the experiment he was about to make and the inferences I must draw from it if it succeeded—and then, with his prismatic bubbles all unblown, gravely sat down in the pan! He gazed stupefied at me when I pointed out his error.
"Il ne manquerait que ça!" he snapped at length, and as he had no other suit of clothes, he went resignedly to bed and discoursed there most learnedly. He was seventy-five then and his great treatise was but one-third done: the concierge told me long after his death that his last living act was to burn it, with the tears streaming down his old face, poor old fellow! And yet he was one of the happiest people I have ever known. The concierge was terribly afraid of him, because he had once in his dry, detached way presented that official with a complete chart of his life, temperament and just deserts, neatly done in coloured inks and mounted on cardboard. It was so devilishly accurate that the concierge trembled whenever he passed it, which was frequently, as his wife had it framed and hung it in their bedroom.
To old Papa Morel, then, I propounded the problem of accounting for Margarita's birth-month having been Roger's, and even within the same week. Pressed for the year of her birth, I made her twenty-two, at which the old man scowled and muttered and traced with his cracked yellow nail devious courses through his great map of the heavens. To tease him I enumerated a few of her qualities and habits, all to be thoroughly accounted for in my estimation, by her strange environment and bringing up; but far from exasperating him further, as I had supposed it would, this recital appeared to please him mightily. Shaking his finger reprovingly, he advised me no longer to mock myself of him, for unknown to myself I had exposed my own deceit: was I so utterly unversed in the heavenly politics as not to know that this person described herself fully as having been born four years previous to the date I had given him, in the year of the eclipse, which was moreover a comet-year and one in which Uranus usurped the throne of reigning planets, and breaking all bounds, shadowed that fateful season? That Aquarius, drawn by him, had imposed himself, too, and affected the very Moon in her courses? Indeed she would be an unbelievable person, that one! But assuredly she was born in the year 186—. And when we finally found the year of Margarita's birth, it was precisely the year stated by Papa Morel! He told me, moreover, that she would be a great artist, at which I laughed, for her future life was fairly well mapped out for her, I fancied, knowing Roger as I did. He told me that she would be in grave danger of death within three years, and then, turning to a horoscope of my own which he had insisted upon drawing, he ran his yellow finger down to a point and raising his mild, fanatic eyes to mine, remarked that at precisely that time it was written that I should save life! At which I smiled politely and said that I hoped I should save Margarita's and he replied politely that as to that he did not know.
PERSONS BORN IN THAT MONTH OF THAT YEAR WILL NEVER BE OTHERWISE THAN FAR OUT OF THE ORDINARY
"You will remark," he added, "that persons born in that month of that year will never be otherwise than far out of the ordinary. No. And mostly artists: dramatic, musical—how should I know? You will remark, also, that they will indubitably possess great influence over the lives of others—and why not, with Uranus in that House as he is, opposing the Moon? Ah, yes, her life is not yet lived, that one!"
But on the Saturday that found us waving from the pier I had not met the good old Morel, and I was not thinking of the planets at all. It had just come over me with dreadful distinctness that from now on my life could never, never be the same. When I had first parted from Roger and Margarita, the poetic strangeness of their surroundings, the shock of all the discoveries I had just made, the relief of finding our friendship secured on a new footing, nay, the very darkness of the mild evening through which I was rowed away from them after that exciting day, all combined to blunt my sense of loneliness, to invest it with a gentle, dreamy pathos that made philosophy not too hard. It was like leaving Ferdinand and Miranda on their Isle of Dreams, with my blessing. But here were no Ferdinand and Miranda; only a handsome, well-dressed bride and her handsome, well-dressed husband-lover, sailing off for a brilliantly happy honeymoon and leaving me behind! The excitement was gone, the past was over, the future seemed dreadfully dull. My English blood, the blood of the small land-owner, with occasional military generations, forbade my plunging into the routine of business, in the traditional American fashion, even had the need of it been more pressing. It may as well be admitted here and now that I was not ambitious; I never (fortunately!) felt the need of glory or high places and my simple fortune was to me wealth and to spare—Margarita's pearl was the greatest extravagance of my life. Up to this point I had never seriously realised that all the little, comfortable details of that little, comfortable bachelor life of ours were over and done, the rooms into which we had fitted so snugly, rented, perhaps, at that moment, the table at the club no longer ours by every precedent, the vacations no more to be planned together and enjoyed together.