"You have the right of friendship," said Zora, "to claim my interest in your hopes and fears, and that I've given you and shall always give you. But beyond that, as you say, you have no right."
He rose, with a laugh. "I know. It's as logical as a proposition of Euclid. But all the same I feel I have a higher right, beyond any logic. There are all kinds of phenomena in life which have nothing whatsoever to do with reason. You have convinced my reason that I'm an egotistical dreamer. But nothing you can do or say will ever remove the craving for you that I have here "—and he thumped his big chest—"like hunger."
When he had gone Zora thought over the scene with more disturbance of mind than she appreciated. She laughed to herself at Sypher's fantastic claim. To give up the great things of the world, Life itself, for the sake of a quack ointment! It was preposterous. Sypher was as crazy as Septimus; perhaps crazier, for the latter did not thump his chest and inform her that his guns or his patent convertible bed-razor-strop had need of her "here." Decidedly, the results of her first excursion into the big world had not turned out satisfactorily. Her delicate nose sniffed at them in disdain. The sniff, however, was disappointingly unconvincing. The voices of contemptible people could not sound in a woman's ears like the drowsy murmuring of waters. The insane little devil that had visited her in Clem Sypher's garden whispered her to stay.
But had not Zora, in the magnificence of her strong womanhood, in the hunger of her great soul, to find somewhere in the world a Mission in Life, a fulness of existence which would accomplish her destiny? Down with the insane little devil and all his potential works! Zora laughed and recovered her serenity. Cousin Jane, who had had much to write concerning the elopement, was summoned, and Zora, with infinite baggage in the care of Turner, set sail for California.
The New World lay before her with its chances of real, quivering, human Life. Nunsmere, where nothing ever happened, lay behind her. She smiled graciously at Sypher, who saw her off at Waterloo, and said nice things to him about the Cure, but before her eyes danced a mirage in which Clem Sypher and his Cure were not visible. The train steamed out of the station. Sypher stood on the edge of the platform and watched the end buffers until they were out of sight; then he turned and strode away, and his face was that of a man stricken with great loneliness.
CHAPTER XII
It never occurred to Septimus that he had done a quixotic thing in marrying Emmy, any more than to pat himself on the back for a monstrously clever fellow when he had completed a new invention. At the door of the Registry Office he took off his hat, held out his hand, and said good-by.
"But where are you going?" Emmy asked in dismay.
Septimus didn't know. He waved his hand vaguely over London, and said, "Anywhere."
Emmy began to cry. She had passed most of the morning in tears. She felt doubly guilty now that she had accepted the sacrifice of his life; an awful sense of loneliness also overwhelmed her.
"I didn't know that you hated me like that," she said.
"Good heavens!" he cried in horror. "I don't hate you. I only thought you had no further use for me."
"And I'm to be left alone in the street?"
"I'll drive you anywhere you like," said he.
"And then get rid of me as soon as possible? Oh! I know what you must be feeling."
Septimus put his hand under her arm, and led her away, in great distress.
"I thought you wouldn't be able to bear the sight of me."
"Oh, don't be silly!" said Emmy.
Her adjuration was on a higher plane of sentiment than expression. It comforted Septimus.
"What would you like me to do?"
"Anything except leave me to myself—at any rate for the present. Don't you see, I've only you in the world to look to."
"God bless my soul," said he, "I suppose that's so. It's very alarming. No one has ever looked to me in all my life. I'd wander barefoot for you all over the earth. But couldn't you find somebody else who's more used to looking after people? It's for your own sake entirely," he hastened to assure her.
"I know," she said. "But you see it's impossible for me to go to any of my friends, especially after what has happened." She held out her ungloved left hand. "How could I explain?"
"You must never explain," he agreed, sagely. "It would undo everything. I suppose things are easy, after all, when you've set your mind on them—or get some chap that knows everything to tell you how to do them—and there's lots of fellows about that know everything—solicitors and so forth. There's the man who told me about a Registrar. See how easy it was. Where would you like to go?"
"Anywhere out of England." She shuddered. "Take me to Paris first. We can go on from there anywhere we like."
"Certainly," said Septimus, and he hailed a hansom.
Thus it fell out that the strangely married pair kept together during the long months that followed. Emmy's flat in London had been rented furnished. The maid Edith had vanished, after the manner of many of her kind, into ancillary space. The theater and all it signified to Emmy became a past dream. Her inner world was tragical enough, poor child. Her outer world was Septimus. In Paris, as she shrank from meeting possible acquaintances, he found her a furnished appartement in the Boulevard Raspail, while he perched in a little hotel close by. The finding of the appartement was an illustration of his newly invented, optimistic theory of getting things done.
He came back to the hotel where he had provisionally lodged her and informed her of his discovery. She naturally asked him how he had found it.
"A soldier told me," he said.
"A soldier?"
"Yes. He had great baggy red trousers and a sash around his waist and a short blue jacket braided with red and a fez with a tassel and a shaven head. He saved me from being run over by a cab."
Emmy shivered. "Oh, don't talk of it in that calm way—suppose you had been killed!"
"I suppose the Zouave would have buried me—he's such a helpful creature, you know. He's been in Algiers. He says I ought to go there. His name is Hégisippe Cruchot."
"But what about the flat?" asked Emmy.
"Oh, you see, I fell down in front of the cab and he dragged me away and brushed me down with a waiter's napkin—there was a café within a yard or two. And then I asked him to have a drink and gave him a cigarette. He drank absinthe, without water, and then I began to explain to him an idea for an invention which occurred to me to prevent people from being run over by cabs, and he was quite interested. I'll show you—"
"You won't," said Emmy, with a laugh. She had her lighter moments. "You'll do no such thing—not until you've told me about the flat."
"Oh! the flat," said Septimus in a disappointed tone, as if it were a secondary matter altogether. "I gave him another absinthe and we became so friendly that I told him that I wanted a flat and didn't in the least know how to set about finding one. It turned out that there was an appartement vacant in the house of which his mother is concierge. He took me along to see it, and introduced me to Madame, his mother. He has also got an aunt who can cook."
"I should like to have seen you talking to the Zouave," said Emmy. "It would have made a pretty picture—the two of you hobnobbing over a little marble table."
"It was iron, painted yellow," said Septimus. "It wasn't a resplendent café."
"I wonder what he thought of you."
"Well, he introduced me to his mother," replied Septimus gravely, whereat Emmy broke into merry laughter, for the first time for many days.
"I've taken the appartement for a month and the aunt who can cook," he remarked.
"What!" cried Emmy, who had not paid very serious regard to the narrative. "Without knowing anything at all about it?"
She put on her hat and insisted on driving there incontinently, full of misgivings. But she found a well-appointed house, a deep-bosomed, broad-beamed concierge, who looked as if she might be the mother of twenty helpful Zouaves, and an equally matronly and kindly-faced sister, a Madame Bolivard, the aunt aforesaid who could cook.
Thus, as the ravens fed Elijah, so did Zouaves and other casual fowl aid Septimus on his way. Madame Bolivard in particular took them both under her ample wing, to the girl's unspeakable comfort. A brav' femme, Madame Bolivard, who not only could cook, but could darn stockings and mend linen, which Emmy's frivolous fingers had never learned to accomplish. She could also prescribe miraculous tisanes for trivial ailments, could tell the cards, and could converse volubly on any subject under heaven; the less she knew about it, the more she had to say, which is a great gift. It spared the girl many desolate and despairing hours.
It was a lonely, monotonous life. Septimus she saw daily. Now and then, if Septimus were known to be upstairs, Hégisippe Cruchot, coming to pay his filial respects to his mother and his mother's bouillabaisse (she was from Marseilles) and her matelote of eels, luxuries which his halfpenny a day could not provide, would mount to inquire dutifully after his aunt and incidentally after the belle dame du troisième. He was their only visitor from the outside world, and as he found a welcome and an ambrosial form of alcohol compounded of Scotch whiskey and Maraschino (whose subtlety Emmy had learned from an eminent London actor-manager at a far-away supper party), he came as often as his respectful ideas of propriety allowed.
They were quaint gatherings, these, in the stiffly furnished little salon: Emmy, fluffy-haired, sea-shell-cheeked, and softly raimented, lying indolently on the sofa amid a pile of cushions—she had sent Septimus out to "La Samaritaine" to buy some (in French furnished rooms they stuff the cushions with cement), and he had brought back a dozen in a cab, so that the whole room heaved and swelled with them; Septimus, with his mild blue eyes and upstanding hair, looking like the conventional picture of one who sees a ghost; Hégisippe Cruchot, the outrageousness of whose piratical kit contrasted with his suavity of manner, sitting with military precision on a straight-backed chair; and Madame Bolivard standing in a far corner of the room; her bare arms crossed above her blue apron, and watching the scene with an air of kindly proprietorship. They spoke in French, for only one word of English had Hégisippe and his aunt between them, and that being "Howdodogoddam" was the exclusive possession of the former. Emmy gave utterance now and then to peculiar vocables which she had learned at school, and which Hégisippe declared to be the purest Parisian he had ever heard an Englishwoman use, while Septimus spoke very fair French indeed. Hégisippe would twirl his little brown mustache—he was all brown, skin and eyes and close-cropped hair, and even the skull under the hair—and tell of his military service and of the beautiful sunshine of Algiers and, when his aunt was out of the room, of his Arcadian love affairs. She served in a wine shop in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers. When was he going to get married? At Emmy's question he laughed, with a wave of his cigarette, and a clank of his bayonet against the leg of the chair. On a sou a day? Time enough for that when he had made his fortune. His mother then would doubtless find him a suitable wife with a dowry. When his military service was over he was going to be a waiter. When he volunteered this bit of information Emmy gave a cry of surprise. This dashing, swaggering desperado of a fellow a waiter!
"I shall never understand this country!" she cried.
"When one has good introductions and knows how to comport oneself, one makes much"—and he rubbed his thumb and fingers together, according to the national code of pantomime.
And then his hosts would tell him about England and the fogs, wherein he was greatly interested; or Septimus would discourse to him of inventions, the weak spot in which his shrewd intelligence generally managed to strike, and then Septimus would run his fingers through this hair and say, "God bless my soul, I never thought of that," and Emmy would laugh; or else they talked politics. Hégisippe, being a Radical, fiché'd himself absolutely of the Pope and the priests. To be kind to one's neighbors and act as a good citizen summed up his ethical code. He was as moral as any devout Catholic.
"What about the girl in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers?" asked Emmy.
"If I were a good Catholic, I would have two, for then I could get absolution," he cried gaily, and laughed immoderately at his jest.
The days of his visits were marked red in Emmy's calendar.
"I wish I were a funny beggar, and had lots of conversation like our friend Cruchot, and could make you laugh," said Septimus one day, when the tædium vitæ lay heavy on her.
"If you had a sense of humor you wouldn't be here," she replied, with some bitterness.
Septimus rubbed his thin hands together thoughtfully.
"I don't know why you should say that," said he. "I never heard a joke I didn't see the point of. I'm rather good at it."
"If you don't see the point of this joke, I can't explain it, my dear. It has a point the size of a pyramid."
He nodded and looked dreamily out of the window at the opposite houses. Sometimes her sharp sayings hurt him. But he understood all, in his dim way, and pardoned all. He never allowed her to see him wince. He stood so long silent that Emmy looked up anxiously at his face, dreading the effect of her words. His hand hung by his side—he was near the sofa where she lay. She took it gently, in a revulsion of feeling, kissed it, and, as he turned, flung it from her.
"Go, my dear; go. I'm not fit to talk to you. Yes, go. You oughtn't to be here; you ought to be in England in your comfortable home with Wiggleswick and your books and inventions. You're too good for me, and I'm hateful. I know it, and it drives me mad."
He took her hand in his turn and held it for a second or two in both of his and patted it kindly.
"I'll go out and buy something," he said.
When he returned she was penitent and glad to see him; and although he brought her as a present a hat—a thing of purple feathers and green velvet and roses, in which no self-respecting woman would be seen mummified a thousand years hence—she neither laughed at it nor upbraided him, but tried the horror on before the glass and smiled sweetly while the cold shivers ran down her back.
"I don't want you to say funny things, Septimus," she said, reverting to the starting point of the scene, "so long as you bring me such presents as this."
"It's a nice hat," he admitted modestly. "The woman in the shop said that very few people could wear it."
"I'm so glad you think I'm an exceptional woman," she said. "It's the first compliment you have ever paid me."
She shed tears, though, over the feathers of the hat, before she went to bed, good tears, such as bring great comfort and cleanse the heart. She slept happier that night; and afterwards, whenever the devils entered her soul and the pains of hell got hold upon her, she recalled the tears, and they became the holy water of an exorcism.
Septimus, unconscious of this landmark in their curious wedded life, passed tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hôtel Godet. A gleam of sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and the horse's ear, as he was coming home one day on the impériale, put him on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he had half invented some years before. The working out of this, and the superintendence of the making of the model at some works near Vincennes, occupied much of his time and thought. In matters appertaining to his passion he had practical notions of procedure; he would be at a loss to know where to buy a tooth-brush, and be dependent on the ministrations of a postman or an old woman in a charcoal shop, but to the place where delicate instruments could be made he went straight, as instinctively and surely as a buffalo heads for water. Many of his books and papers had been sent him from time to time by Wiggleswick, who began to dread the post, the labor of searching and packing and dispatching becoming too severe a tax on the old villain's leisure. These lay in promiscuous heaps about the floor of his bedroom, stepping-stones amid a river of minor objects, such as collars and bits of india rubber and the day before yesterday's Petit Journal. The femme de chambre and the dirty, indeterminate man in a green baize apron, who went about raising casual dust with a great feather broom, at first stowed the litter away daily, with jackdaw ingenuity of concealment, until Septimus gave them five francs each to desist; whereupon they desisted with alacrity, and the books became the stepping-stones aforesaid, stepping-stones to higher things. His only concern was the impossibility of repacking them when the time should come for him to leave the Hôtel Godet, and sometimes the more academic speculation as to what Zora would say should some miracle of levitation transport her to the untidy chamber. He could see her, radiant and commanding, dispelling chaos with the sweep of her parasol.
There were few moments in the day when he did not crave her presence. It had been warmth and sunshine and color to him for so long that now the sun seemed to have disappeared from the sky, leaving the earth a chill monochrome. Life was very difficult without her. She had even withdrawn from him the love "in a sort of way" to which she had confessed. The goddess was angry at the slight cast on her by his secret marriage. And she was in California, a myriad of miles away. She could not have been more remote had she been in Saturn. When Emmy asked him whether he did not long for Wiggleswick and the studious calm of Nunsmere, he said, "No." And he spoke truly; for wherein lay the advantage of one spot on the earth's surface over another, if Zora were not the light thereof? But he kept his reason in his heart. They rarely spoke of Zora.
Of the things that concerned Emmy herself so deeply, they never spoke at all. Of her hopes and fears for the future he knew nothing. For all that was said between them, Mordaunt Prince might have been the figure of a dream that had vanished into the impenetrable mists of dreamland. To the girl he was a ghastly memory which she strove to hide in the depths of her soul. Septimus saw that she suffered, and went many quaint and irrelevant ways to alleviate her misery. Sometimes they got on her nerves; more often they made the good tears come. Once she was reading a tattered volume of George Eliot which she had picked up during a stroll on the quays, and calling him over to her side pointed out a sentence: "Dogs are the best friends, they are always ready with their sympathy and they ask no questions."
"That's like you," she said; "but George Eliot had never met a man like you, poor thing, so she had to stick the real thing down to dogs."
Septimus reddened. "Dogs bark and keep one from sleeping," he said. "My next-door neighbor at the Hôtel Godet has two. An ugly man with a beard comes and takes them out in a motor car. Do you know, I'm thinking of growing a beard. I wonder how I should look in it?"
Emmy laughed and caught his sleeve. "Why won't you even let me tell you what I think of you?"
"Wait till I've grown the beard, and then you can," said Septimus.
"That will be never," she retorted; "for if you grow a beard, you'll look a horror, like a Prehistoric Man—and I sha'n't have anything to do with you. So I'll never be able to tell you."
"It would be better so," said he.
They made many plans for settling down in some part of rural France or Switzerland—they had the map of Europe to choose from—but Septimus's vagueness and a disinclination for further adventure on the part of Emmy kept them in Paris. The winter brightened into spring, and Paris, gay in lilac and sunshine, held them in her charm. There were days when they almost forgot, and became the light-hearted companions of the lame donkey on Nunsmere Common.
A day on the Seine, for instance, in a steamboat, when the water was miraculously turned to sparkling wine and the great masses of buildings were bathed in amber and the domes of the Pantheon and the Invalides and the cartouches and bosses of the Pont Alexandre III shone burnished gold. There was Auteuil, with its little open-air restaurants, rustic trellis and creepers, and its friture of gudgeon and dusty salt and cutlery and great yards of bread, which Emmy loved to break with Septimus, like Christmas crackers. Then, afterwards, there was the winding Seine again, Robinson Crusoe's Island in all its greenery, and St. Cloud with its terrace looking over the valley to Paris wrapped in an amethyst haze, with here and there a triumphant point of glory.
A day also in the woods of Bas Meudon, alone beneath the trees, when they talked like children, and laughed over the luncheon basket which Madame Bolivard had stuffed full of electrifying edibles; when they lay on their backs and looked dreamily at the sky through the leaves, and listened to the chirrup of insects awakening from winter and the strange cracklings and tiny voices of springtide, and gave themselves up to the general vibration of life which accompanies the working of the sap in the trees.
Days, too, in mid-Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens, among the nursery maids and working folk; at cafés on the remoter boulevards, where the kindly life of Paris, still untouched by touristdom, passes up and down, and the spring gets into the step of youth and sparkles in a girl's eyes. At the window even of the appartement in the Boulevard Raspail, when the air was startlingly clear and scented and brought the message of spring from far lands, from the golden shores of the Mediterranean, from the windy mountain tops of Auvergne, from the broad, tender green fields of Central France, from every heart and tree and flower, from Paris itself, quivering with life. At such times they would not talk, both interpreting the message in their own ways, yet both drawn together into a common mood in which they vaguely felt that the earth was still a Land of Romance, that the mystery of rebirth was repeating itself according to unchanging and perpetual law; that inconsiderable, forlorn human atoms though they were, the law would inevitably affect them too, and cause new hopes, new desires, and new happiness to bud and flower in their hearts.
During these spring days there began to dawn in the girl's soul a knowledge of the deeper meaning of things. When she first met Septimus and delightedly regarded him as a new toy, she was the fluffy, frivolous little animal of excellent breeding and half education, so common in English country residential towns, with the little refinements somewhat coarsened, the little animalism somewhat developed, the little brain somewhat sharpened, by her career on the musical-comedy stage. Now there were signs of change. A glimmering notion of the duty of sacrifice entered her head. She carried it out by appearing one day, when Septimus was taking her for a drive, in the monstrous nightmare of a hat. It is not given to breathing male to appreciate the effort it cost her. She said nothing; neither did he. She sat for two hours in the victoria, enduring the tortures of the uglified, watching him out of the tail of her eye and waiting for a sign of recognition. At last she could endure it no longer.
"I put this thing on to please you," she said.
"The hat you gave me."
"Oh! Is that it?" he murmured in his absent way. "I'm so glad you like it."
He had never noticed it. He had scarcely recognized it. It had given him no pleasure. She had made of herself a sight for gods and men to no earthly purpose. All her sacrifice had been in vain. It was then that she really experienced the disciplinary irony of existence. She never wore the hat again; wherein she was blameless.
The spring deepened into summer, and they stayed on in the Boulevard Raspail until they gave up making plans. Paris baked in the sun, and theaters perished, and riders disappeared from the Acacias, and Cook's brakes replaced the flashing carriages in the grand Avenue des Champs Elysées, and the great Anglo-Saxon language resounded from the Place de la Bastille to the Bon Marché. The cab horses drooped as if drugged by the vapor of the melting asphalt beneath their noses. Men and women sat by doorways, in front of little shops, on the benches in wide thoroughfares. The Latin Quarter blazed in silence and the gates of the great schools were shut. The merchants of lemonade wheeled their tin vessels through the streets and the bottles crowned with lemons looked pleasant to hot eyes. For the dust lay thick upon the leaves of trees and the lips of men, and the air was heavy with the over-fulfilment of spring's promise.
Septimus was sitting with Hégisippe Cruchot outside the little café of the iron tables painted yellow where first they had consorted.
"Mon ami," said he, "you are one of the phenomena that make me believe in the bon Dieu. If you hadn't dragged me from under the wheels of the cab, I should have been killed, and if I had been killed you wouldn't have introduced me to your aunt who can cook, and what I should have done without your aunt heaven only knows. I owe you much."
"Bah, mon vieux," said Hégisippe, "what are you talking about? You owe me nothing."
"I owe you three lives," said Septimus.
CHAPTER XIII
Hégisippe Cruchot laughed and twirled his little brows mustache.
"If you think so much of it," said he, "you can acquit your debt in full by offering me another absinthe to drink the health of the three."
"Why, of course," said Septimus.
Hégisippe, who was sitting next the door, twisted his head round and shouted his order to those within. It was a very modest little café; in fact it was not a café at all, but a Marchand des vins with a zinc counter inside, and a couple of iron tables outside on the pavement to convey the air of a terrasse. Septimus, with his genius for the inharmonious, drank tea; not as the elegant nowadays drink at Colombin's or Rumpelmayer's, but a dirty, gray liquid served with rum, according to the old French fashion, before five-o'cloquer became a verb in the language. When people ask for tea at a Marchand des vins, the teapot has to be hunted up from goodness knows where; and as for the tea...! Septimus, however, sipped the decoction of the dust of ages with his usual placidity. He had poured himself out a second cup and was emptying into it the remainder of the carafe of rum, so as to be ready for the toast as soon as Hégisippe had prepared his absinthe, when a familiar voice behind him caused him to start and drop the carafe itself into the teacup.
"Well, I'm blessed!" said the voice.
It was Clem Sypher, large, commanding, pink, and smiling. The sight of Septimus hobnobbing with a Zouave outside a humble wine merchant's had drawn from him the exclamation of surprise. Septimus jumped to his feet.
"My dear fellow, how glad I am to see you. Won't you sit down and join us? Have a drink."
Sypher took off his gray Homburg hat for a moment, and wiped a damp forehead.
"Whew! How anybody can stay in Paris this weather unless they are obliged to is a mystery."
"Why do you stay?" asked Septimus.
"I'm not staying. I'm passing through on my way to Switzerland to look after the Cure there. But I thought I'd look you up. I was on my way to you. I was in Nunsmere last week and took Wiggleswick by the throat and choked your address out of him. The Hôtel Godet. It's somewhere about here, isn't it?"
"Over there," said Septimus, with a wave of the hand. He brought a chair from the other table. "Do sit down."
Sypher obeyed. "How's the wife?"
"The—what?" asked Septimus.
"The wife—Mrs. Dix."
"Oh, very well, thank you," he said hurriedly. "Let me introduce you to my good friend Monsieur Hégisippe Cruchot of the Zouaves—Monsieur Cruchot—Monsieur Clem Sypher."
Hégisippe saluted and declared his enchantment according to the manners of his country. Sypher raised his hat politely.
"Of Sypher's Cure—Friend of Humanity. Don't forget that," he said laughingly in French.
"Qu'est ce que c'est que ça?" asked Hégisippe, turning to Septimus. Septimus explained.
"Ah-h!" cried Hégisippe, open-mouthed, the light of recognition in his eyes. "La Cure Sypher!" He made it rhyme with "prayer." "But I know that well. And it is Monsieur who fabricates ce machin-là?"
"Yes; the Friend of Humanity. What have you used it for?"
"For my heels when they had blisters after a long day's march."
The effect of these words on Sypher was electrical. He brought both hands down on the table, leaned back in his chair, and looked at Septimus.
"Good heavens!" he cried, changing color, "it never occurred to me."
"What?"
"Why—blistered heels—marching. Don't you see? It will cure the sore feet of the Armies of the World. It's a revelation! It will be in the knapsack of every soldier who goes to manœuvers or to war! It will be a jolly sight more useful than a marshal's baton! It will bring soothing comfort to millions of brave men! Why did I never think of it? I must go round to all the War Offices of the civilized globe. It's colossal. It makes your brain reel. Friend of Humanity? I shall be the Benefactor of the Human Race."
"What will you have to drink?" asked Septimus.
"Anything. Donnez-moi un bock," he said impatiently, obsessed by his new idea. "Tell me, Monsieur Cruchot, you who have used the Cure Sypher. It is well known in the French army is it not? You had it served out from the regimental medical stores?"
"Ah, no, Monsieur. It is my mother who rubbed it on my heels."
Sypher's face expressed disappointment, but he cheered up again immediately.
"Never mind. It is the idea that you have given me. I am very grateful to you, Monsieur Cruchot."
Hégisippe laughed. "It is to my mother you should be grateful, Monsieur."
"I should like to present her with a free order for the Cure for life—if I knew where she lived."
"That is easy," said Hégisippe, "seeing that she is concierge in the house where the belle dame of Monsieur has her appartement."
"Her appartement?" Sypher turned sharply to Septimus. "What's that? I thought you lived at the Hôtel Godet."
"Of course," said Septimus, feeling very uncomfortable. "I live in the hotel, and Emmy lives in a flat. She couldn't very well stay in the Hôtel Godet, because it isn't a nice place for ladies. There's a dog in the courtyard that howls. I tried to throw him some cold ham the other morning about six o'clock to stop him; but it hit a sort of dustman, who ate it and looked up for more. It was very good ham, and I was going to have it for supper."
"But, my dear man," said Sypher, laying his hand on his friend's shoulder, and paying no heed to the dog, ham, and dustman story, "aren't you two living together?"
"Oh, dear, not" said Septimus, in alarm, and then, catching at the first explanation—"you see, our hours are different."
Sypher shook his head uncomprehendingly. The proprietor of the establishment, in dingy shirt-sleeves, set down the beer before him. Hégisippe, who had mixed his absinthe and was waiting politely until their new friend should be served, raised his glass.
"Just before you came, Monsieur," said he, "I was about to drink to the health—"
"Of L'Armée-Française," interrupted Septimus, reaching out his glass.
"But no," laughed Hégisippe. "It was to Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé."
"Bébé?" cried Sypher, and Septimus felt his clear, swift glance read his soul.
They clinked glasses. Hégisippe, defying the laws governing the absorption of alcohols, tossed off his absinthe in swashbuckler fashion, and rose.
"Now I leave you. You have many things to talk about. My respectful compliments to Madame. Messieurs, au revoir."
He shook hands, saluted and swaggered off, his chechia at the very back of his head, leaving half his shaven crown uncovered in front.
"A fine fellow, your friend, an intelligent fellow—" said Sypher, watching him.
"He's going to be a waiter," said Septimus.
"Now that he has had his heels rubbed with the cure he may be more ambitious. A valuable fellow, for having given me a stupendous idea—but a bit indiscreet, eh? Never mind," he added, seeing the piteous look on Septimus's face. "I'll have discretion for the two of us. I'll not breathe a word of it to anybody."
"Thank you," said Septimus.
There was an awkward silence. Septimus traced a diagram on the table with the spilled tea. Sypher lighted a cigar, which he smoked in the corner of his mouth, American fashion.
"Well, I'm damned!" he muttered below his breath.
He looked hard at Septimus, intent on his tea drawing. Then he shifted his cigar impatiently to the other side of his mouth. "No, I'm damned if I am. I can't be."
"You can't be what?" asked Septimus, catching his last words.
"Damned."
"Why should you be?"
"Look here," said Sypher, "I've rushed in rather unceremoniously into your private affairs. I'm sorry. But I couldn't help taking an interest in the two of you, both for your own sake and that of Zora Middlemist."
"I suppose you would do anything for her."
"Yes."
"So would I," said Septimus, in a low voice. "There are some women one lives for and others one dies for."
"She is one of the women for whom one would live."
Septimus shook his head. "No, she's the other kind. It's much higher. I've had a lot of time to think the last few months," he continued after a pause. "I've had no one but Emmy and Hégisippe Cruchot to talk to—and I've thought a great deal about women. They usedn't to come my way, and I didn't know anything at all about them."
"Do you now?" asked Sypher, with a smile.
"Oh, a great deal," replied Septimus seriously. "It's astonishing what a lot of difference there is between them and between the ways men approach different types. One woman a man wants to take by the hand and lead, and another—he's quite content if she makes a carpet of his body and walks over it to save her feet from sharp stones. It's odd, isn't it?"
"Not very," said Sypher, who took a more direct view of things than Septimus. "It's merely because he has got a kindly feeling for one woman and is desperately in love with the other."
"Perhaps that's it," said Septimus.
Sypher again looked at him sharply, as a man does who thinks he has caught another man's soul secret. It was only under considerable stress of feeling that such coherence of ideas could have been expressed by his irrelevant friend. What he had learned the last few minutes had been a surprise, a pain, and a puzzle to him. The runaway marriage held more elements than he had imagined. He bent forward confidentially.
"You would make a carpet of your body for Zora Middlemist?"
"Why, of course," replied the other in perfect simplicity.
"Then, my friend, you're desperately in love with her."
There was kindness, help, sympathy in the big man's voice, and Septimus, though the challenge caused him agonies of shyness, did not find it in his heart to resent Sypher's logic.
"I suppose every man whom she befriends must feel the same towards her. Don't you?"
"I? I'm different. I've got a great work to carry through. I couldn't lie down for anybody to walk over me. My work would suffer—but in this mission of mine Zora Middlemist is intimately involved. I said it when I first saw her, and I said it just before she left for California. She is to stand by my side and help me. How, God knows." He laughed, seeing the bewildered face of Septimus, who had never heard of this transcendental connection of Zora with the spread of Sypher's Cure. "You seem to think I'm crazy. I'm not. I work everything on the most hard and fast common-sense lines. But when a voice inside you tells you a thing day and night, you must believe it."
Said Septimus: "If you had not met her, you wouldn't have met Hégisippe Cruchot, and so you wouldn't have got the idea of Army blisters."
Sypher clapped him on the shoulder and extolled him as a miracle of lucidity. He explained magniloquently. It was Zora's unseen influence working magnetically from the other side of the world that had led his footsteps towards the Hôtel Godet on that particular afternoon. She had triumphantly vindicated her assertion that geographical location of her bodily presence could make no difference.
"I asked her to stay in England, you know," he remarked more simply, seeing that Septimus lagged behind him in his flight.
"What for?"
"Why, to help me. For what other reason?"
Septimus took off his hat and laid it on the chair vacated by Hégisippe, and ran his fingers reflectively up his hair. Sypher lit another cigar. Their side of the little street was deep in shade, but on half the road and on the other side of the way the fierce afternoon sunlight blazed. The merchant of wine, who had been lounging in his dingy shirt-sleeves against the door-post, removed the glasses and wiped the table clear of the spilled tea. Sypher ordered two more bocks for the good of the house, while Septimus, still lost in thought, brought his hair to its highest pitch of Struwel Peterdom. Passers-by turned round to look at them, for well-dressed Englishmen do not often sit outside a Marchand des vins, especially one with such hair. But passers-by are polite in France and do not salute the unfamiliar with ribaldry.
"We've been speaking intimately," said Septimus. He paused, then proceeded with his usual diffidence. "I've never spoken intimately to a man before, and I don't quite know how to do it—it must be just like asking a woman to marry you—but don't you think you were selfish?"
"Selfish? How?"
"In asking Zora Middlemist to give up her trip to California, just for the sake of the Cure."
"It's worth the sacrifice," Sypher maintained.
"To you, yes; but it mayn't be so to her."
"But she believes in the thing as I do myself!" cried Sypher.
"Why should she, any more than I, or Hégisippe Cruchot? If she did, she would have stayed. It would have been her duty. You couldn't expect a woman like Zora Middlemist to fail in her duty, could you?"
Sypher rubbed his eyes, as if he saw things mistily. But they were quite clear. It was really Septimus Dix who sat opposite, concentrating his discursive mind on Sypher's Cure and implicitly denying Zora's faith. A simple-minded man in many respects, he would not have scorned to learn wisdom out of the mouths of babes and sucklings; but out of the mouth of Septimus what wisdom could possibly proceed? He laughed his suggestion away somewhat blusteringly and launched out again on his panegyric of the Cure. But his faith felt a quiver all through its structure, just as a great building does at the first faint shock of earthquake.
"What made you say that about Zora Middlemist?" he asked when he had finished.
"I don't know," replied Septimus. "It seemed to be right to say it. I know when I get things into my head there appears to be room for nothing else in the world. One takes things for granted. When I was a child my father took it for granted that I believed in predestination. I couldn't; but I did not dare tell him so. So I went about with a load of somebody else's faith on my shoulders. It became intolerable; and when my father found out he beat me. He had a bit of rope tied up with twine at the end for the purpose. I shouldn't like this to happen to Zora."
This ended the discussion. The landlord at his door-post drew them into talk about the heat, the emptiness of Paris and the happy lot of those who could go into villeggiatura in the country. The arrival of a perspiring cabman in a red waistcoat and glazed hat caused him to retire within and administer to the newcomer's needs.
"One of my reasons for looking you up," said Sypher, "was to make my apologies."
"Apologies?"
"Yes. Haven't you thought about the book on guns and wondered at not hearing from me?"
"No," said Septimus. "When I've invented a thing the interest has gone. I've just invented a new sighting apparatus. I'll show you the model if you'll come to the hotel."
Sypher looked at his watch and excused himself on the ground of business engagements. Then he had to dine and start by the nine o'clock train.
"Anyhow," said he, "I'm ashamed at not having done anything with the guns. I did show the proofs to a naval expert, but he made all sorts of criticisms which didn't help. Experts know everything that is known and don't want to know anything that isn't. So I laid it aside."
"It doesn't matter in the least," said Septimus eagerly, "and if you want to break the contract you sent me, I can pay you back the two hundred pounds." But Sypher assured him that he had never broken a contract in his life, and they shook hands and went their respective ways, Septimus to the appartement in the Boulevard Raspail, and Sypher thoughtfully in the direction of the Luxembourg.
He was sorry, very sorry for Septimus Dix. His kindness of heart had not allowed him to tell the brutal truth about the guns. The naval expert had scoffed in the free manner of those who follow the sea and declared the great guns a mad inventor's dream. The Admiralty was overwhelmed with such things. The proofs were so much waste paper. Sypher had come prepared to break the news as gently as he could; but after all their talk it was not in his heart to do so. And the two hundred pounds—he regarded it as money given to a child to play with. He would never claim it. He was sorry, very sorry for Septimus. He looked back along the past year and saw the man's dog-like devotion to Zora Middlemist. But why did he marry Emmy, loving the sister as he did? Why live apart from her, having married her? And the child? It was all a mystery in which he did not see clear. He pitied the ineffectuality of Septimus with the kind yet half-contemptuous pity of the strong man with a fine nature. But as for his denial of Zora's faith, he laughed it away. Egotistical, yes. Zora had posed the same question as Septimus and he had answered it. But her faith in the Cure itself, his mission to spread it far and wide over the earth, and to save the nations from vulgar competitors who thought of nothing but sordid gain—that, he felt sure, remained unshaken.
Yet as he walked along, in the alien though familiar city, he was smitten, as with physical pain, by a craving for her presence, for the gleam of her eyes, for the greatness of sympathy and comprehension that inhabited her generous and beautiful frame. The need of her was imperious. He stopped at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, called for the wherewithal to write, and like a poet in the fine frenzy of inspiration, poured out his soul to her over the heels of the armies of the world.
He had walked a great deal during the day. When he stepped out of the cab that evening at the Gare de Lyon, he felt an unfamiliar stinging in his heel. During the process of looking after his luggage and seeking his train he limped about the platform. When he undressed for the night in his sleeping compartment, he found that a ruck in his sock had caused a large blister. He regarded it with superstitious eyes, and thought of the armies of the world. In hoc signo vinces! The message had come from heaven.
He took a sample box of Sypher's Cure from his handbag, and, almost with reverence, anointed his heel.
CHAPTER XIV
Clem Sypher slept the sleep of the warrior preparing for battle. When he awoke at Lyons he had all the sensations of a wounded Achilles. His heel smarted and tingled and ached, and every time he turned over determined on a continuation of slumber, his foot seemed to occupy the whole width of the berth. He reanointed himself and settled down again. But wakefulness had gripped him. He pulled up the blinds of the compartment and let the dawn stream in, and, lying on his back, gave himself up to the plans of his new campaign. The more he thought out the scheme the simpler it became. He had made it his business to know personages of high influence in every capital in Europe. Much of his success had already been gained that way. The methods of introduction had concerned him but little. For social purposes they could have been employed only by a pushing upstart; but in the furtherance of a divine mission the apostle does not bind his inspired feet with the shackles of ordinary convention. Sypher rushed in, therefore, where the pachyderms of Park Lane would have feared to tread. Just as the fanatical evangelist has no compunction in putting to an entire stranger embarrassing questions as to his possession of the Peace of God, so had Sypher no scruple in approaching any foreigner of distinguished mien in an hotel lounge and converting him to the religion of Sypher's Cure. In most cosmopolitan resorts his burly figure and pink face were well known. Newspapers paragraphed his arrival and departure. People pointed him out to one another in promenades. Distinguished personages to whom he had casually introduced himself introduced him to other distinguished personages. When he threw off the apostle and became the man, his simple directness and charm of manner caused him to be accepted pleasurably for his own sake. Had he chosen to take advantage of his opportunities he might have consorted with very grand folks indeed; at a price, be it said, which his pride refused to pay. But he had no social ambitions. The grand folks therefore respected him and held out a cordial hand as he passed by. That very train was carrying to Switzerland a Russian Grand Duke who had greeted him with a large smile and a "Ah! ce bon Sypher!" on the platform of the Gare de Lyon, and had presented him as the Friend of Humanity to the Grand Duchess.
To Sypher, lying on his back and dreaming of the days when through him the forced marches of weary troops would become light-hearted strolls along the road, the jealously guarded portals of the War Offices of the world presented no terrors. He ticked off the countries in his mind until he came to Turkey. Whom did he know in Turkey? He had once given a certain Musurus Bey a light for his cigarette in the atrium of the Casino at Monte Carlo; but that could scarcely be called an introduction. No matter; his star was now in the ascendant. The Lord would surely provide a Turk for him in Geneva. He shifted his position in the berth, and a twinge of pain passed through his foot, hurting horribly.
When he rose to dress, he found some difficulty in putting on his boot. On leaving the train at Geneva he could scarcely walk. In his room at the hotel he anointed his heel again with the Cure, and, glad to rest, sat by the window looking at the blue lake and Mont Blanc white-capped in the quivering distance, his leg supported on a chair. Then his traveler, who had arranged to meet him by appointment, was shown into the room. They were to lunch together. To ease his foot Sypher put on an evening slipper and hobbled downstairs.
The traveler told a depressing tale. Jebusa Jones had got in everywhere and was underselling the Cure. A new German skin remedy had insidiously crept on to the market. Wholesale houses wanted impossible discounts, and retail chemists could not be inveigled into placing any but the most insignificant orders. He gave dismaying details, terribly anxious all the while lest his chief should attribute to his incompetence the growing unpopularity of the Cure. But to his amazement Sypher listened smilingly to his story of disaster, and ordered a bottle of champagne.
"All that is nothing!" he cried. "A flea bite in the ocean. It will right itself as the public realize how they are being taken in by these American and German impostors. The Cure can't fail. And let me tell you, Dennymede, my son, the Cure is going to flourish as it has never flourished before. I've got a scheme that will take your breath away."
The glow of inspiration in Sypher's blue eyes and the triumph written on his resolute face brought the features of the worried traveler for the first time into an expression of normal satisfaction with the world.
"I will stagger you to your commercial depths, my boy," Sypher continued. "Have a drink first before I tell you."
He raised his champagne glass. "To Sypher's Cure!" They drank the toast solemnly.
And then Sypher unfolded to his awe-stricken subordinate the scheme for deblistering the heels of the armies of the world. Dennymede, fired by his enthusiasm, again lifted his brimming glass.
"By God, sir, you are a conqueror, an Alexander, a Hannibal, a Napoleon! There's a colossal fortune in it."
"And it will give me enough money," said Sypher, "to advertise Jebusa Jones and the others off the face of the earth."
"You needn't worry about them, sir, when you've got the army contracts," said the traveler.
He could not follow the spirituality underlying his chief's remark. Sypher laid down the peach he was peeling and looked pityingly at Dennymede as at one of little faith, one born to the day of small things.
"It will be all the more my duty to do so," said he, "when the instruments are placed in my hands. What, after all, is the healing of a few blistered feet, compared with the scourge of leprosy, eczema, itch, psoriasis, and what not? And, as for the money itself, what is it?"
He preached his sermon. The securing of the world's army contracts was only a means towards the shimmering ideal. It would clear the path of obstacles and leave the Cure free to pursue its universal way as consolatrix afflictorum.
The traveler finished his peach, and accepted another which his host hospitably selected for him.
"All the same, sir," said he, "this is the biggest thing you've struck. May I ask how you came to strike it?"
"Like all great schemes, it had humble beginnings," said Sypher, in comfortable postprandial mood, unconsciously flattered by the admiration of his subordinate. "Newton saw an apple drop to the ground: hence the theory of gravitation. The glory of Tyre and Sidon arose from the purple droppings of a little dog's mouth who had been eating shell fish. The great Cunarders came out of the lid of Stephenson's family kettle. A soldier happened to tell me that his mother had applied Sypher's Cure to his blistered heels—and that was the origin of the scheme."
He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs and put one foot over the other. He immediately started back with a cry of pain.
"I was forgetting my own infernal blister," said he. "About a square inch of skin is off and all the flesh round, it is as red as a tomato."
"You'll have to be careful," advised the traveler. "What are you using for it?"
"Using for it? Why, good heavens, man, the Cure! What else?"
He regarded Dennymede as if he were insane,' and Dennymede in his confusion blushed as red as the blistered heel.
They spent the afternoon over the reports and figures which had so greatly depressed the traveler. He left his chief with hopes throbbing in his breast. He had been promised a high position in the new Army Contract Department. As soon as he had gone Sypher rubbed in more of the Cure.
He passed a restless night. In the morning he found the ankle considerably swollen. He could scarcely put his foot to the ground. He got into bed again and rang the bell for the valet de chambre. The valet entered. Sypher explained. He had a bad foot and wanted to see a doctor. Did the valet know of a good doctor? The valet not only knew of a good doctor, but an English doctor resident in Geneva who was always summoned to attend English and American visitors at the hotel; furthermore, he was in the hotel at that very moment.
"Ask him if he would kindly step up," said Sypher.
He looked ruefully at his ankle, which was about the size of his calf, wondering why the Cure had not effected its advertised magic. The inflammation, however, clearly required medical advice. In the midst of his ruefulness the doctor, a capable-looking man of five and thirty, entered the room. He examined the heel and ankle with professional scrutiny. Then he raised his head.
"Have you been treating it in any way?"
"Yes," said Sypher, "with the Cure."
"What Cure?"
"Why, Sypher's Cure."
The doctor brought his hand down on the edge of the footboard of the bed, with a gesture of impatience.
"Why on earth do people treat themselves with quack remedies they know nothing about?"
"Quack remedies!" cried Sypher.
"Of course. They're all pestilential, and if I had my way I'd have them stacked in the market place and burned by the common hangman. But the most pestilential of the lot is Sypher's Cure. You ought never to have used it."
Sypher had the sensation of the hotel walls crashing down upon his head, falling across his throat and weighing upon his chest. For a few instants he suffered a nightmare paralysis. Then he gasped for breath. At last he said very quietly:
"Do you know who I am?"
"I have not the pleasure," said the doctor. "They only gave me your room number."
"I am Clem Sypher, the proprietor of Sypher's Cure."
The two men stared at one another, Sypher in a blue-striped pyjama jacket, supporting himself by one elbow on the bed, the doctor at the foot. The doctor spread out his hands.
"It's the most horrible moment of my life. I am at your mercy. I only gave you my honest opinion, the result of my experience. If I had known your name—naturally—"
"You had better go," said Sypher in a queer voice, digging the nails into the palms of his hands. "Your fee—?"
"There is no question of it. I am only grieved to the heart at having wounded you. Good morning."
The door closed behind him, and Sypher gave himself up to his furious indignation.
This soothed the soul but further inflamed the ankle. He called up the manager of the hotel and sent for the leading medical man in Geneva. When he arrived he took care to acquaint him with his name and quality. Dr. Bourdillot, professor of dermatology in the University of Geneva, made his examination, and shook a tactful head. With all consideration for the many admirable virtues of la cure Sypher, yet there were certain maladies of the skin for which he personally would not prescribe it. For this, for that—he rattled off half a dozen of learned diseases—it might very well be efficacious. Its effect would probably be benign in a case of elephantiasis. But in a case of abrasion of the cuticle, where there was a large surface of raw flesh laid bare, perhaps a simpler treatment might be more desirable.
His tone was exquisite, and he chose his language so that not a word could wound. Sypher listened to him with a sinking heart.
"In your opinion then, doctor," said he, "it isn't a good thing for blistered heels?"
"You ask for my opinion," replied the professor of dermatology at the University of Geneva. "I give it you. No."
Sypher threw out a hand, desperately argumentative.
"But I know of a case in which it has proved efficacious. A Zouave of my acquaintance—"
Dr. Bourdillot smiled. "A Zouave? Just as nothing is sacred to a sapper, so is nothing hurtful to a Zouave. They have hides like hippopotamuses, those fellows. You could dip them in vitriol and they wouldn't feel it."
"So his heels recovered in spite of the Cure?" said Sypher, grimly.
"Evidently," said Dr. Bourdillot.
Sypher sat in his room for a couple of days, his leg on a chair, and looked at Mont Blanc, exquisite in its fairy splendor against the far, pale sky. It brought him no consolation. On the contrary it reminded him of Hannibal and other conquerors leading their footsore armies over the Alps. When he allowed a despondent fancy to wander uncontrolled, he saw great multitudes of men staggering shoeless along with feet and ankles inflamed to the color of tomatoes. Then he pulled himself together and set his teeth. Dennymede came to visit him and heard with dismay the verdict of science, which crushed his hope of a high position in the new Army Contract Department. But Sypher reassured him as to his material welfare by increasing his commission on foreign sales; whereupon he began to take a practical view of the situation.
"We can't expect a patent medicine, sir, to do everything."
"I quite agree with you," said Sypher. "It can't make two legs grow where one grew before, but it ought to cure blisters on the heel. Apparently it won't. So we are where we were before I met Monsieur Hégisippe Cruchot. The only thing is that we mustn't now lead people to suppose that it's good for blisters."
"They must take their chance," said Dennymede. He was a sharp, black-haired young man, with a worried brow and a bilious complexion. The soothing of the human race with Sypher's Balm of Gilead mattered nothing to him. His atrabiliar temperament rendered his attitude towards humanity rather misanthropic than otherwise. "Indeed," he continued, "I don't see why you shouldn't try for the army contracts without referring specifically to sore feet."
"Caveat emptor," said Sypher.
"I beg your pardon?" said Dennymede, who had no Latinity.
"It means, let the buyer beware; it's up to the buyer to see what stuff he's buying."
"Naturally. It's the first principle of business."
Sypher turned his swift clear glance on him and banged the window-ledge with his hand.
"It's the first principle of damned knavery and thieving," he cried, "and if I thought anyone ran my business on it, they'd go out of my employ at once! It's at the root of all the corruption that exists in modern trade. It salves the conscience of the psalm-singing grocer who puts ground beans into his coffee. It's a damnable principle."
He thumped the window-ledge again, very angry. The traveler hedged.
"Of course it's immoral to tell lies and say a thing is what it isn't. But on the other hand no one could run a patent medicine on the lines of warning the public as to what it isn't good for. You say on the wrapper it will cure gout and rheumatism. If a woman buys a bottle and gives it to her child who has got scarlet fever, and the child dies from it, it's her lookout and not yours. When a firm does issue a warning such as 'Won't Wash Clothes,' it's a business proceeding for the firm's own protection."
"Well, we'll issue a warning, 'Won't Cure Blisters,'" said Sypher. "I advertise myself as the Friend of Humanity. I am, according to my lights. If I let poor fellows on the march reduce their feet to this condition I should be the scourge of mankind like"—he snapped his fingers trying to recall the name—"like Atlas—no it wasn't Atlas, but no matter. Not a box of the Cure has been sold without the guarantee stamp of my soul's conviction on it."
"The Jebusa Jones people aren't so conscientious," said Dennymede. "I bought a pot of their stuff this morning. They've got a new wrapper. See." He unfolded a piece of paper and pointed out the place to his chief. "They have a special paragraph in large print: 'Gives instant relief to blistered feet. Every mountaineer should carry it in his gripsack.'"
"They're the enemies of God and man," said Sypher, "and sooner than copy their methods I would close down the factory and never sell another box as long as I lived."
"It's a thousand pities, sir, anyhow," said Dennymede, trying to work back diplomatically, "that the army contract scheme has to be thrown overboard."
"Yes, it's a nuisance," said Sypher.
When he had dismissed the traveler he laughed grimly. "A nuisance!"
The word was a grotesque anticlimax.
He sat for a long while with his hands blinding his eyes, trying to realize what the abandonment of the scheme meant to him. He was a man who faced his responsibilities squarely. For the first time in his life he had tried the Cure seriously on himself—chance never having given him cause before—and it had failed. He had heard the Cure which he regarded as a divine unction termed a pestilential quackery; the words burned red-hot in his brain. He had heard it depreciated, with charming tact and courtesy, by a great authority on diseases of the skin. One short word, "no," had wiped out of existence his Napoleonic scheme for the Armies of the World—for putting them on a sound footing. He smiled bitterly as the incongruous jest passed through his mind.
He had been fighting for months, and losing ground; but this was the first absolute check that his faith had received. He staggered under it, half wonderingly, like a man who has been hit by an unseen hand and looks around to see whence the blow came. Why should it come now? He looked back along the years. Not a breath of disparagement had touched the Cure's fair repute. His files in London were full of testimonials honorably acquired. Some of these, from lowly folk, were touching in their simple gratitude. It is true that his manager suggested that the authors had sent them in the hope of gain and of seeing their photographs in the halfpenny papers. But his manager, Shuttleworth, was a notorious and dismal cynic who believed in nothing save the commercial value of the Cure. Letters had come with coroneted flaps to the envelopes. The writers certainly hoped neither for gain nor for odd notoriety. He had never paid a fee for a testimonial throughout his career; every one that he printed was genuine and unsolicited. He had been hailed as the Friend of Humanity by all sorts and conditions of men. Why suddenly should he be branded as a dealer in pestilence?
His thought wandered back to the beginning of things. He saw himself in the chemist's shop in Bury Saint Edmunds— a little shop in a little town, too small, he felt, for the great unknown something within him that was craving for expansion. The dull making up of prescriptions, the selling of tooth powder and babies' feeding bottles—the deadly mechanical routine—he remembered the daily revolt against it all. He remembered his discovery of the old herbalists; his delight in their quaint language; the remedies so extraordinary and yet so simple; his first idea of combining these with the orthodox drugs of the British Pharmacopoeia; his experiments; his talks with an aged man who kept a dingy little shop of herbs on the outskirts of the town, also called a pestilential fellow by the medical faculty of the district, but a learned ancient all the same, who knew the qualities of every herb that grew, and with some reeking mess of pulp was said to have cured an old woman's malignant ulcer given up as incurable by the faculty. He remembered the night when the old man, grateful for the lad's interest in his learning, gave him under vows of secrecy the recipe of this healing emulsion, which was to become the basis of Sypher's Cure. In those days his loneliness was cheered by a bulldog, an ugly, faithful beast whom he called Barabbas—he sighed to think how many Barabbases had lived and died since then—and who, contracting mange, became the corpus vile of many experiments— first with the old man's emulsion, then with the emulsion mixed with other drugs, all bound together in pure animal fat, until at last he found a mixture which to his joy made the sores heal and the skin harden and the hair sprout and Barabbas grow sleek as a swell mobsman in affluent circumstances. Then one day came His Grace of Suffolk into the shop with a story of a pet of the Duchess's stricken with the same disease. Sypher modestly narrated his own experience and gave the mighty man a box of the new ointment. A fortnight afterwards he returned. Not only had it cured the dog, but it must have charmed away the eczema on his ducal hands. Full of a wild surmise he tried it next on his landlady's child, who had a sore on its legs, and lo! the sore healed. It was then that the Divine Revelation came to him; it was then that he passed his vigil, as he had told Zora, and consecrated himself and his Cure to the service of humanity.
The steps, the struggles, the purchase of the chemist's business, the early exploitation of the Cure, its gradual renown in the district, the first whisperings of its fame abroad, thanks to His Grace of Suffolk, the early advertising, the gradual growth, the sale of the chemist's business, the establishment of "Sypher's Cure" as a special business in the town, the transference to London, the burst into world-wide fame—all the memories came back to him, as he sat by the window of the Hôtel de l'Europe and blinded his face with his hands.
He dashed them away, at last, with a passionate gesture.
"It can't be! It can't be!" he cried aloud, as many another man has cried in the righteous rebellion of his heart against the ironical decrees of the high gods whom his simple nature has never suspected of their eternal and inscrutable irony.