CHAPTER XVIII
As soon as a woman knows what she wants she generally gets it. Some philosophers assert that her methods are circuitous; others, on the other hand, maintain that she rides in a bee line toward the desired object, galloping ruthlessly over conventions, susceptibilities, hearts, and such like obstacles. All, however, agree that she is unscrupulous, that the wish of the woman is the politely insincere wish of the Deity, and that she pursues her course with a serene sureness unknown to man. It is when a woman does not know what she wants that she baffles the philosopher just as the ant in her aimless discursiveness baffles the entomologist. Of course, if the philosopher has guessed her unformulated desire, then things are easy for him, and he can discourse with certitude on feminine vagaries, as Rattenden did on the journeyings of Zora Middlemist. He has the word of the enigma. But to the woman herself her state of mind is an exasperating puzzle, and to her friends, philosophic or otherwise, her consequent actions are disconcerting.
Zora went to California, where she was hospitably entertained, and shown the sights of several vast neighborhoods. She peeped into the Chinese quarter at San Francisco, and visited the Yosemite Valley. Attentive young men strewed her path with flowers and candy. Young women vowed her eternal devotion. She came into touch with the intimate problems of the most wonderful social organism the world has ever seen, and was confronted with stupendous works of nature and illimitable solitudes wherein the soul stands appalled. She also ate a great quantity of peaches. When her visit to the Callenders had come to an end she armed herself with introductions and started off by herself to see America. She traveled across the Continent, beheld the majesty of Niagara and the bewildering life of New York. She went to Washington and Boston. In fact, she learned many things about a great country which were very good for her to know, receiving impressions with the alertness of a sympathetic intellect, and pigeonholing them with feminine conscientiousness for future reference.
It was all very pleasant, healthful, and instructive, but it no more helped her in her quest than gazing at the jewelers' windows in the Rue de la Paix. Snow-capped Sierras and crowded tram-cars were equally unsuggestive of a mission in life. In the rare moments which activity allowed her for depression she began to wonder whether she was not chasing the phantom of a wild goose. A damsel to whom in a moment of expansion she revealed the object of her journeying exclaimed: "What other mission in life has a woman than to spend money and look beautiful?"
Zora laughed incredulously.
"You've accomplished half already, for you do look beautiful," said the damsel. "The other half is easy."
"But if you haven't much money to spend?"
"Spend somebody else's. Lord! If I had your beauty I'd just walk down Wall Street and pick up a millionaire between my finger and thumb, and carry him off right away."
When Zora suggested that life perhaps might have some deeper significance, the maiden answered:
"Life is like the school child's idea of a parable—a heavenly story (if you've lots of money) with no earthly meaning."
"Don't you ever go down beneath the surface of things?" asked Zora.
"If you dig down far enough into the earth," replied the damsel, "you come to water. If you bore down deep enough into life you come to tears. My dear, I'm going to dance on the surface and have a good time as long as I can. And I guess you're doing the same."
"I suppose I am," said Zora. And she felt ashamed of herself.
At Washington fate gave her an opportunity of attaining the other half of the damsel's idea. An elderly senator of enormous wealth proposed marriage, and offered her half a dozen motor-cars, a few palaces and most of the two hemispheres. She declined.
"If I were young, would you marry me?"
Zora's beautiful shoulders gave the tiniest shrug of uncertainty. Perhaps her young friend was right, and the command of the earth was worth the slight penalty of a husband. She was tired and disheartened at finding herself no nearer to the heart of things than when she had left Nunsmere. Her attitude toward the once unspeakable sex had imperceptibly changed. She no longer blazed with indignation when a man made love to her. She even found it more agreeable than looking at cataracts or lunching with ambassadors. Sometimes she wondered why. The senator she treated very tenderly.
"I don't know. How can I tell?" she said a moment or two after the shrug.
"My heart is young," said he.
Zora met his eyes for the millionth part of a second and turned her head away, deeply sorry for him. The woman's instinctive look dealt instantaneous death to his hopes. It was one more enactment of the tragedy of the bald head and the gray beard. He spoke with pathetic bitterness. Like Don Ruy Gomez da Silva in "Hernani," he gave her to understand that now, when a young fellow passed him in the street, he would give up all his motor-cars and all his colossal canned-salmon business for the young fellow's raven hair and bright eyes.
"Then you would love me. I could make you."
"What is love, after all?" asked Zora.
The elderly senator looked wistfully through the years over an infinite welter of salmon-tins, seeing nothing else.
"It's the meaning of life," said he. "I've discovered it too late."
He went away sorrowful, and Zora saw the vanity of great possessions.
On the homeward steamer she had as a traveling companion a young Englishman whom she had met at Los Angeles, one Anthony Dasent, an engineer of some distinction. He was bronzed and healthy and lithe-limbed. She liked him because he had brains and looked her squarely in the face. On the first evening of the voyage a slight lurch of the vessel caused her to slip, and she would have fallen had he not caught her by the arms. For the first time she realized how strong a man could be. It was a new sensation, not unpleasurable, and in thanking him she blushed. He remained with her on deck, and talked of their California friends and the United States. The next day he established himself by her side, and discoursed on the sea and the sky, human aspirations, the discomforts of his cabin, and a belief in eternal punishment. The day after that he told her of his ambitions, and showed her photographs of his mother and sisters. After that they exchanged views on the discipline of loneliness. His profession, he observed, took him to the waste places of the earth, where there was never a woman to cheer him, and when he came back to England he returned to a hearth equally unconsoled. Zora began to pity his forlorn condition. To build strong bridges and lay down railroads was a glorious thing for a man to do; to do it without sweetheart or wife was nothing less than heroic.
In the course of time he told her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. He expressed his admiration of the gold flecks in her brown eyes and the gleams of gold in her hair when it was caught by the sun. He also wished that his sisters could have their skirts cut like hers and could learn the art of tying a veil over a hat. Then he took to scowling on inoffensive young men who fetched her wraps and lent her their binoculars. He declared one of them to be an unmitigated ass to throw whom overboard would be to insult the Atlantic. And then Zora recognized that he was stolidly in love with her after the manner of his stolid kind. She felt frightened, and accused herself of coquetry. Her sympathy with his barren existence had perhaps overstepped the boundaries of polite interest. She had raised false hopes in a young and ingenuous bosom. She worked herself up to a virtuous pitch of self-reprobation and flagellated herself soundly, taking the precaution, however, of wadding the knots of the scourge with cotton-wool. After all, was it her fault that a wholesome young Briton should fall in love with her? She remembered Rattenden's uncomfortable words on the eve of her first pilgrimage: "Beautiful women like yourself, radiating feminine magnetism, worry a man exceedingly. You don't let him go about in peace, so why should he let you?"
So Zora came face to face with the eternal battle of the sexes. She stamped her foot in the privacy of her cabin, and declared the principle to be horrid and primeval and everything that was most revolting to a woman who had earnestly set forth to discover the highest things of life. For the remainder of the voyage she avoided Anthony Dasent's company as much as possible, and, lest he should add jealousy to the gloom in which he enveloped himself, sought unexciting joys in the society of a one-eyed geologist who discoursed playfully on the foraminifera of the Pacific slope.
One day Dasent came on her alone, and burst out wrathfully:
"Why are you treating me like this?"
"Like what?"
"You are making a fool of me. I'm not going to stand it."
Then she realized that when the average man does not get what he wants exactly when he wants it he loses his temper. She soothed him according to the better instincts of her sex, but resolved to play no more with elementary young Britons. One-eyed geologists were safer companions. The former pitched their hearts into her lap; the latter, like Pawkins, the geologist of the Pacific slope, gave her boxes of fossils. She preferred the fossils. You could do what you liked with them: throw them overboard when the donor was not looking, or leave them behind in a railway carriage, or take them home and present them to the vicar who collected butterflies, beetles, ammonites, and tobacco stoppers. But an odd assortment of hearts to a woman who does not want them is really a confounded nuisance. Zora was very much relieved when Dasent, after eating an enormous breakfast, bade her a tragic farewell at Gibraltar.
It was a cloudless afternoon when she steamed into Marseilles. The barren rock islands on the east rose blue-gray from a blue sea. To the west lay the Isles of Frioul and the island of the Château d'If, with its prison lying grim and long on the crest; in front the busy port, the white noble city crowned by the church of Notre Dame de la Garde standing sentinel against the clear sky.
Zora stood on the crowded deck watching the scene, touched as she always was by natural beauty, but sad at heart. Marseilles, within four-and-twenty hours of London, meant home. Although she intended to continue her wanderings to Naples and Alexandria, she felt that she had come to the end of her journey. It had been as profitless as the last. Pawkins, by her side, pointed out the geological feature of the rocks. She listened vaguely, and wondered whether she was to bring him home tied to her chariot as she had brought Septimus Dix and Clem Sypher. The thought of Sypher drew her heart to Marseilles.
"I wish I were landing here like you, and going straight home," she said, interrupting the flow of scientific information. "I've already been to Naples, and I shall find nothing I want at Alexandria."
"Geologically, it's not very interesting," said Pawkins. "I'm afraid prehistoric antiquity doesn't make my pulses beat faster."
"That's the advantage of it."
"One might just as well be a fossil oneself."
"Much better," said Pawkins, who had read Schopenhauer.
"You are not exhilarating to a depressed woman," said Zora with a laugh.
"I am sorry," he replied stiffly. "I was trying to entertain you."
He regarded her severely out of his one eye and edged away, as if he repented having wasted his time over so futile an organism as a woman. But her feminine magnetism drew him back.
"I'm rather glad you are going on to Alexandria," he remarked in a tone of displeasure, and before she could reply he marched off to look after his luggage.
Zora's eyes followed him until he disappeared, then she shrugged her shoulders. Apparently one-eyed geologists were as unsafe as elementary young Britons and opulent senators. She felt unfairly treated by Providence. It was maddening to realize herself as of no use in the universe except to attract the attention of the opposite sex. She clenched her hands in impotent anger. There was no mission on earth which she could fulfil. She thought enviously of Cousin Jane.
The steamer entered the harbor; the passengers for Marseilles landed, and the mail was brought aboard. There was only one letter for Mrs. Middlemist. It bore the Nunsmere postmark. She opened it and found the tail of the little china dog.
She looked at it for a moment wonderingly as it lay absurdly curled in the palm of her hand, and then she burst into tears. The thing was so grotesquely trivial. It meant so much. It was a sign and a token falling, as it were, from the sky into the midst of her despairing mood, rebuking her, summoning her, declaring an unknown mission which she was bound to execute. It lay in her hand like a bit of destiny, inexorable, unquestionable, silently compelling her forthwith to the human soul that stood in great need of her. Fate had granted the wish she had expressed to the one-eyed geologist. She landed at Marseilles, and sped homeward by the night train, her heart torn with anxiety for Septimus.
All night long the rhythmic clatter of the train shaped itself into the burden of her words to him: "If ever you want me badly, send me the tail, and I'll come to you from any distance." She had spoken then half jestingly, all tenderly. That evening she had loved him "in a sort of way," and now that he had sent for her, the love returned. The vivid experiences of the past months which had blinded her to the quieter light of home faded away into darkness. Septimus in urgent need, Emmy and Clem Sypher filled her thoughts. She felt thankful that Sypher, strong and self-reliant, was there to be her ally, should her course with Septimus be difficult. Between them they could surely rescue the ineffectual being from whatever dangers assailed him. But what could they be? The question racked her. Did it concern Emmy? A child, she knew, had just been born. A chill fear crept on her lest some tragedy had occurred through Septimus's folly. From him any outrageous senselessness might be expected, and Emmy herself was scarcely less irresponsible than her babe. She reproached herself for having suggested his marriage with Emmy. Perhaps in his vacant way he had acted entirely on her prompting. The marriage was wrong. Two helpless children should never have taken on themselves the graver duties of life toward each other and, future generations.
If it were a case in which a man's aid were necessary, there stood Sypher, a great pillar of comfort. Unconsciously she compared him with the man with whom she had come in contact during her travels—and she had met many of great charm and strength and knowledge. For some strange reason which she could not analyze, he towered above them all, though in each separate quality of character others whom she could name surpassed him far. She knew his faults, and in her lofty way smiled at them. Her character as goddess or guardian angel or fairy patroness of the Cure she had assumed with the graciousness of a grown-up lady playing charades at a children's party. His occasional lapses from the traditions of her class jarred on her fine susceptibilities. Yet there, in spite of all, he stood rooted in her life, a fact, a puzzle, a pride and a consolation. The other men paled into unimportant ghosts before him, and strayed shadowy through the limbo of her mind. Till now she had not realized it. Septimus, however, had always dwelt in her heart like a stray dog whom she had rescued from vagrancy. He did not count as a man. Sypher did. Thus during the long, tedious hours of the journey home the two were curiously mingled in her anxious conjectures, and she had no doubt that Sypher and herself, the strong and masterful, would come to the deliverance of the weak.
Septimus, who had received a telegram from Marseilles, waited for her train at Victoria. In order to insure being in time he had arrived a couple of hours too soon, and patiently wandered about the station. Now and then he stopped before the engines of trains at rest, fascinated, as he always was, by perfect mechanism. A driver, dismounting from the cab, and seeing him lost in admiration of the engine, passed him a civil word, to which Septimus, always courteous, replied. They talked further.
"I see you're an engineer, sir," said the driver, who found himself in conversation with an appreciative expert.
"My father was," said Septimus. "But I could never get up in time for my examinations. Examinations seem so silly. Why should you tell a set of men what they know already?"
The grimy driver expressed the opinion that examinations were necessary. He who spoke had passed them.
"I suppose you can get up at any time," Septimus remarked enviously. "Somebody ought to invent a machine for those who can't."
"You only want an alarm-clock," said the driver.
Septimus shook his head. "They're no good. I tried one once, but it made such a dreadful noise that I threw a boot at it."
"Did that stop it?"
"No," murmured Septimus. "The boot hit another clock on the mantelpiece, a Louis Quinze clock, and spoiled it. I did get up, but I found the method too expensive, so I never tried it again."
The engine of an outgoing train blew off steam, and the resounding din deafened the station. Septimus held his hands to his ears. The driver grinned.
"I can't stand that noise," Septimus explained when it was over. "Once I tried to work out an invention for modifying it. It was a kind of combination between a gramaphone and an orchestrion. You stuck it inside somewhere, and instead of the awful screech a piece of music would come out of the funnel. In fact, it might have gone on playing all the time the train was in motion. It would have been so cheery for the drivers, wouldn't it?"
The unimaginative mechanic whose wits were scattered by this fantastic proposition used his bit of cotton waste as a handkerchief, and remarked with vague politeness that it was a pity the gentleman was not an engineer. But Septimus deprecated the compliment. He looked wistfully up at the girders of the glass roof and spoke in his gentle, tired voice.
"You see," he concluded, "if I had been in practice as an engineer I should never have designed machinery in the orthodox way. I should have always put in little things of my own—and then God knows what would have happened."
He brought his eyes to earth with a wan smile, but his companion had vanished. A crowd had filled the suburban platform at the end of which he stood, and in a few moments the train clattered off. Then, remembering that he was hungry, he went to the refreshment-room, where, at the suggestion of the barmaid, he regaled himself on two hard-boiled eggs and a glass of sherry. The meal over, he loitered palely about the busy station, jostled by frantic gentlemen in silk hats rushing to catch suburban trains, and watched grimly by a policeman who suspected a pocket-picking soul beneath his guileless exterior.
At last, by especial grace of heaven, he found himself on the platform where the custom-house barrier and the long line of waiting porters heralded the approach of the continental train. Now that only a few moments separated him from Zora, his heart grew cold with suspense. He had not seen her since the night of Emmy's fainting fit. Her letters, though kind, had made clear to him her royal displeasure at his unceremonious marriage. For the first time he would look into her gold-flecked eyes out of a disingenuous soul. Would she surprise his guilty secret? It was the only thing he feared in a bewildering world.
The train came in, and as her carriage flashed by Zora saw him on the platform with his hat off, passing his fingers nervously through his Struwel Peter hair. The touch of the familiar welcoming her brought moisture to her eyes. As soon as the train stopped she alighted, and leaving Turner (who had accompanied her on the pilgrimage, and from Dover had breathed fervent thanks to Heaven that at last she was back in the land of her fathers) to look after her luggage, she walked down the platform to meet him.
He was just asking a porter at frantic grapple with the hand baggage of a large family whether he had seen a tall and extraordinarily beautiful lady in the train, when she came up to him with outstretched hands and beaming eyes. He took the hands and looked long at her, unable to speak. Never had she appeared to him more beautiful, more gracious. The royal waves of her hair beneath a fur traveling-toque invested her with queenliness. The full youth of her figure not hidden by a fur jacket brought to him the generous woman. A bunch of violets at her bosom suggested the fragrant essence of her.
"Oh, it's good to see you, Septimus. It's good!" she cried. "The sight of you makes me feel as if nothing mattered in the world except the people one cares for. How are you?"
"I'm very well indeed," said Septimus. "Full of inventions."
She laughed and guided him up the platform through the cross-traffic of porters carrying luggage from train to cabs.
"Is mother all right?" she asked anxiously.
"Oh, yes," said Septimus.
"And Emmy and the baby?"
"Remarkably well. Emmy has had him christened. I wanted him to be called after you. Zoroaster was the only man's name I could think of, but she did not like it, and so she called it Octavius after me. Also Oldrieve after the family, and William."
"Why William?"
"After Pitt," said Septimus in the tone of a man who gives the obvious answer.
She halted for a moment, perplexed.
"Pitt?"
"Yes; the great statesman. He's going to be a member of Parliament, you know."
"Oh," said Zora, moving slowly on.
"His mother says it's after the lame donkey on the common. We used to call it William. He hasn't changed a bit since you left."
"So the baby's full name is—" said Zora, ignoring the donkey.
"William Octavius Oldrieve Dix. It's so helpful to a child to have a good name."
"I long to see him," said Zora.
"He's in Paris just now."
"Paris?" she echoed.
"Oh, he's not by himself, you know," Septimus hastened to reassure her, lest she might think that the babe was alone among the temptations and dissipations of the gay city. "His mother's there, too."
She shook him by the coat-sleeve.
"What an exasperating thing you are! Why didn't you tell me? I could have broken my journey or at least asked them to meet me at the Gare du Nord. But why aren't they in England?"
"I didn't bring them with me."
She laughed again at his tone, suspecting nothing.
"You speak as if you had accidentally left them behind, like umbrellas. Did you?"
Turner came up, attended by a porter with the hand baggage.
"Are you going on to Nunsmere to-night, ma'am?"
"Why should you?" asked Septimus.
"I had intended to do so. But if mother is quite well, and Emmy and the baby are in Paris, and you yourself are here, I don't quite see the necessity."
"It would be much nicer if you remained in London," said he.
"Very well," said Zora, "we shall. We can put up at the Grosvenor Hotel here for the night. Where are you staying?"
Septimus murmured the name of his sedate club, where his dissolute morning appearance was still remembered against him.
"Go and change and come back and dine with me in an hour's time."
He obeyed the command with his usual meekness, and Zora followed the porter through the subway to the hotel.
"We haven't dined together like this," she said, unfolding her napkin an hour afterwards, "since Monte Carlo. Then it was hopelessly unconventional. Now we can dine in the strictest propriety. Do you understand that you're my brother-in-law?"
She laughed, radiant, curiously happy at being with him. She realized, with a little shock of discovery, the restfulness that was the essential quality of his companionship. He was a quiet haven after stormy seas; he represented something intimate and tender in her life.
They spoke for a while of common things: her train journey, the crossing, the wonders she had seen. He murmured incoherent sketches of his life in Paris, the new gun, and Hégisippe Cruchot. But of the reason for his summons he said nothing. At last she leaned across the table and said gently:
"Why am I here, Septimus? You haven't told me."
"Haven't I?"
"No. You see, the little dog's tail brought me post-haste to you, but it gave me no inkling why you wanted me so badly."
He looked at her in his scared manner.
"Oh, I don't want you at all; at least, I do—most tremendously—but not for myself."
"For whom, then?"
"Clem Sypher," said Septimus.
She paled slightly, and looked down at her plate and crumbled bread. For a long time she did not speak. The announcement did not surprise her. In an inexplicable way it seemed natural. Septimus and Sypher had shared her thoughts so oddly during her journey. An unaccountable shyness had checked her impulse to inquire after his welfare. Indeed, now that the name was spoken she could scarcely believe that she had not expected to hear it.
"What is the matter?" she asked at length.
"Failed?"
She looked up at him half incredulously. The very last letter she had received from Sypher had been full of the lust of battle. Septimus nodded gloomily.
"It was only a silly patent ointment like a hundred others, but it was Sypher's religion. Now his gods have gone, and he's lost. It's not good for a man to have no gods. I didn't have any once, and the devils came in. They drove me to try haschisch. But it must have been very bad haschisch, for it made me sick, and so I was saved."
"What made you send for me so urgently? The dog's tail—you knew I had to come."
"Sypher wanted you—to give him some new gods."
"He could have sent for me himself. Why did he ask you?"
"He didn't," cried Septimus. "He doesn't know anything about it. He hasn't the faintest idea that you're in London to-night. Was I wrong in bringing you back?"
To Zora the incomprehensible aspect of the situation was her own attitude. She did not know whether Septimus was wrong or not. She told herself that she ought to resent the summons which had caused her such needless anxiety as to his welfare, but she could feel no resentment. Sypher had failed. The mighty had fallen. She pictured a broken-hearted man, and her own heart ached for him.
"You did right, Septimus," she said very gently. "But of what use can I be to him?"
Septimus said: "He's the one to tell you that."
"But do you think he knows? He didn't before. He wanted me to stay as a kind of Mascotte for the Cure—simply sit still while he drew influence out of me or something. It was absurd."
It was on this occasion that Septimus made his one contribution to pessimistic philosophy.
"When you analyze anything in life," said he, "don't you think that you always come down to a reductio ad absurdum?"
CHAPTER XIX
"I'm very sorry to leave you, Mr. Sypher," said Shuttleworth, "but my first duty is to my wife and family."
Clem Sypher leaned back in his chair behind his great office desk and looked at his melancholy manager with the eyes of a general whose officers refuse the madness of a forlorn hope.
"Quite so," he said tonelessly. "When do you want to go?"
"You engaged me on a three-months' notice, but—"
"But you want to go now?"
"I have a very brilliant position offered me if I can take it up in a fortnight."
"Very well," said Sypher.
"You won't say it's a case of rats deserting a sinking ship, will you, sir? As I say, my wife and family—"
"The ship's sinking. You're quite right to leave it. Is the position offered you in the same line of business?"
"Yes," said Shuttleworth, unable to meet his chief's clear, unsmiling eyes.
"One of the rival firms?"
Shuttleworth nodded, then broke out into mournful asseverations of loyalty. Tithe Cure had flourished he would have stayed with Mr. Sypher till the day of his death. He would have refused the brilliant offer. But in the circumstances—"
"Sauve qui peut," said Sypher. "Another month or two and Sypher's Cure becomes a thing of the past. Nothing can pull it through. I was too sanguine. I wish I had taken your advice oftener, Shuttleworth."
Shuttleworth thanked him for the compliment.
"One learns by experience," said he modestly. "I was born and bred in the patent-medicine business. It's very risky. You start a thing. It catches on for a while. Then something else more attractive comes on the market. There's a war of advertising, and the bigger capital wins. The wise man gets out of it just before the rival comes. If you had taken my advice five years ago, and turned it into a company, you'd have been a rich man now, without a care in the world. Next time you will."
"There'll be no next time," said Sypher gravely.
"Why not? There's always money in patent medicines. For instance, in a new cure for obesity if properly worked. A man like you can always get the money together."
"And the cure for obesity?"
Shuttleworth's dismal face contracted into the grimace which passed with him for a smile.
"Any old thing will do, so long as it doesn't poison people."
Uncomfortable under his chief's silent scrutiny, he took off his spectacles, breathed on them, and wiped them with his handkerchief.
"The public will buy anything, if you advertise it enough."
"I suppose they will," said Sypher. "Even Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy."
Shuttleworth started and put on his spectacles.
"Why shouldn't they buy the Remedy, after all?"
"You ask me that?" said Sypher. All through the interview he had not shifted his position. He sat fixed like a florid ghost.
The manager shuffled uneasily in his chair beside the desk, and cleared his throat nervously.
"I'm bound to," said he, "in self-defense. I know what you think of the Cure—but that's a matter of sentiment. I've been into the thing pretty thoroughly, and I know that there's scarcely any difference in the composition of the Remedy and the Cure. After all, any protecting grease that keeps the microbes in the air out of the sore place does just as well—sometimes better. There's nothing in patent ointment that really cures. Now is there?"
"Are you going to the Jebusa Jones people?" asked Sypher.
"I have my wife and family," the manager pleaded. "I couldn't refuse. They've offered me the position of their London agent. I know it must pain you," he added hurriedly, "but what could I do?"
"Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. So you will give me what they used to call my coup de grâce. You'll just stab me dead as I lie dying. Well, in a fortnight's time you can go."
The other rose. "Thank you very much, Mr. Sypher. You have always treated me generously, and I'm more than sorry to leave you. You bear me no ill will?"
"For going from one quack remedy to another? Certainly not."
It was only when the door closed behind the manager that Sypher relaxed his attitude. He put both hands up to his face, and then fell forward on to the desk, his head on his arms.
The end had come. To that which mattered in the man, the lingering faith yet struggling in the throes of dissolution, Shuttleworth had indeed given the coup de grâce. That he had joined the arch-enemy who in a short time would achieve his material destruction signified little. When something spiritual is being done to death, the body and mind are torpid. Even a month ago, had Shuttleworth uttered such blasphemy within those walls Clem Sypher would have arisen in his wrath like a mad crusader and have cloven the blasphemer from skull to chine. To-day, he had sat motionless, petrified, scarcely able to feel. He knew that the man spoke truth. As well put any noxious concoction of drugs on the market and call it a specific against obesity or gravel or deafness as Sypher's Cure. Between the heaven-sent panacea which was to cleanse the skin of the nations and send his name ringing down the centuries as the Friend of Humanity and the shiveringly vulgar Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy there was not an atom of important difference. One was as useful or as useless as the other. The Cure was pale green; the Remedy rose pink. Women liked the latter best on account of its color. Both were quack medicaments.
He raised a drawn and agonized face and looked around the familiar room, where so many gigantic schemes had been laid, where so many hopes had shone radiant, and saw for the first time its blatant self-complacency, its piteous vulgarity. Facing him was the artist's original cartoon for the great poster which once had been famous all over the world, and now, for lack of money, only lingered in shreds on a forgotten hoarding in some Back of Beyond. It represented the Friend of Humanity, in gesture, white beard, and general appearance resembling a benevolent minor prophet, distributing the Cure to a scrofulous universe. In those glorified days, he had striven to have his own lineaments depicted above the robe of the central figure, but the artist had declared them to be unpictorial, and clung to the majesty of the gentleman in the white beard. Around the latter's feet were gathered a motley crew—the fine lady in her ball dress, the shoeblack, the crowned king, the red Indian in Fenimore Cooper feathers, the half-naked negro, the wasted, ragged mother with her babe, the jockey, the Syrian leper, and a score of other types of humans, including in the background a hairy-faced creature, the "dog-faced man" of Barnum's show. They were well grouped, effective, making the direct appeal to an Anglo-Saxon populace, which in its art must have something to catch hold of, like the tannin in its overdrawn tea. It loved to stand before this poster and pick out the easily recognized characters and argue (as Sypher, whose genius had suggested the inclusion of the freak had intended) what the hairy creature could represent, and, as it stood and picked and argued, the great fact of Sypher's Cure sank deep into their souls. He remembered the glowing pride with which he had regarded this achievement, the triumphal progress he made in a motor-car around the London hoardings the day after the poster had been pasted abroad. And now he knew it in his heart to be nothing but a tawdry, commercial lie.
Framed in oak on his walls hung kindly notes relating to the Cure from great personages or their secretaries. At the bottom of one ran the sprawling signature of the Grand Duke who had hailed him as "ce bon Sypher" at the Gare de Lyon when he started on the disastrous adventure of the blistered heel. There was the neatly docketed set of pigeonholes containing the proofs of all the advertisements he had issued. Lying before him on his desk was a copy, resplendently bound in morocco for his own gratification, of the forty-page, thin-paper pamphlet which was wrapped, a miracle of fine folding, about each packet of the Cure. On each page the directions for use were given in a separate language. French, Fijian, Syrian, Basque were there—forty languages—so that all the sons of men could read the good tidings and amuse themselves at the same time by trying to decipher the message in alien tongues.
Wherever he looked, some mockery of vain triumph met his eye: an enlargement of a snapshot photograph of the arrival of the first case of the Cure on the shores of Lake Tchad; photographs of the busy factory, now worked by a dwindling staff; proofs of full-page advertisements in which "Sypher's Cure" and "Friend of Humanity" figured in large capitals; the model of Edinburgh Castle, built by a grateful inmate of a lunatic asylum out of the red celluloid boxes of the Cure.
He shuddered at all these symbols and images of false gods, and bowed his head again on his arms. The abyss swallowed him. The waters closed over his head.
How long he remained like this he did not know. He had forbidden his door. The busy life of the office stood still. The dull roar of Moorgate Street was faintly heard, and now and then the windows vibrated faintly. The sprawling, gilt, mid-Victorian clock on the mantelpiece had stopped.
Presently an unusual rustle in the room caused him to raise his head with a start. Zora Middlemist stood before him. He sprang to his feet.
"You? You?"
"They wouldn't let me in. I forced my way. I said I must see you."
He stared at her, open-mouthed. A shivering thrill passed through him, such as shakes a man on the verge of a great discovery.
"You, Zora? You have come to me at this moment?"
He looked so strange and staring, so haggard and disheveled, that she moved quickly to him and laid both her hands on his.
"My dear friend, my dearest friend, is it as bad as that?"
A throb of pain underlay the commonplace words. The anguish on his face stirred the best and most womanly in her. She yearned to comfort him. But he drew a pace or two away, and held up both hands as if warding her off, and stared at her still, but with a new light in his clear eyes that drank in her beauty and the sorcery of her presence.
"My God!" he cried, in a strained voice. "My God! What a fool I've been!"
He swerved as if he had received a blow and sank into his office chair, and turned his eyes from her to the ground, and sat stunned with joy and wonder and misery. He put out a hand blindly, and she took it, standing by his side. He knew now what he wanted. He wanted her, the woman. He wanted her voice in his ears, her kiss on his lips, her dear self in his arms. He wanted her welcome as he entered his house, her heart, her soul, her mind, her body, everything that was hers. He loved her for herself, passionately, overwhelmingly, after the simple way of men. He had raised his eyes from the deeps of hell, and in a flash she was revealed to him—incarnate heaven.
He felt the touch of her gloved hand on his, and it sent a thrill through his veins which almost hurt, as the newly coursing blood hurts the man that has been revived from torpor. The mistiness that serves a strong man for tears clouded his sight. He had longed for her; she had come. From their first meeting he had recognized, with the visionary's glimpse of the spiritual, that she was the woman of women appointed unto him for help and comfort. But then the visionary had eclipsed the man. Destiny had naught to do with him but as the instrument for the universal spreading of the Cure. The Cure was his life. The woman appointed unto him was appointed unto the Cure equally with himself. He had violently credited her with his insane faith. He had craved her presence as a mystical influence that in some way would paralyze the Jebusa Jones Dragon and give him supernatural strength to fight. He had striven with all his power to keep her radiant like a star, while his own faith lay dying.
He had been a fool. All the time it was the sheer woman that had held him, the sheer man. And yet had not destiny fulfilled itself with a splendid irony in sending her to him then, in that moment of his utter anguish, of the utter annihilation of the fantastic faith whereby he had lived for years? From the first he had been right, though with a magnificent lunacy. It was she, in very truth, who had been destined to slay his dragon. It was dead now, a vulgar, slimy monster, incapable of hurt, slain by the lightning flash of love, when his eyes met hers, a moment or two ago. In a confused way he realized this. He repeated mechanically:
"What a fool I've been! What a fool I've been!"
"Why?" asked Zora, who did not understand.
"Because—" he began, and then he stopped, finding no words. "I wonder whether God sent you?"
"I'm afraid it was only Septimus," she said with a smile.
"Septimus?"
He was startled. What could Septimus have to do with her coming? He rose again, and focusing his whirling senses on conventional things, wheeled an armchair to the fire, and led her to it, and took his seat near her in his office chair.
"Forgive me," he said, "but your coming seemed supernatural. I was dazed by the wonderful sight of you. Perhaps it's not you, after all. I may be going mad and have hallucinations. Tell me that it's really you."
"It's me, in flesh and blood—you can touch for yourself—and my sudden appearance is the simplest thing in the world."
"But I thought you were going to winter in Egypt?"
"So did I, until I reached Marseilles. This is how it was."
She told him of the tail of the little china dog, and of her talk with Septimus the night before.
"So I came to you," she concluded, "as soon as I decently could, this morning."
"And I owe you to Septimus," he said.
"Ah, I know! You ought to have owed me to yourself," she cried, misunderstanding him. "If I had known things were so terrible with you I would have come. I would, really. But I was misled by your letters. They were so hopeful. Don't reproach me."
"Reproach you! You who have given this crazy fellow so much! You who come to me all sweetness and graciousness, with heaven in your eyes, after having been dragged across Europe and made to sacrifice your winter of sunshine, just for my sake! Ah, no! It's myself that I reproach."
"For what?" she asked.
"For being a fool, a crazy, blatant, self-centered fool My God!" he exclaimed, smiting the arm of his chair as a new view of things suddenly occurred to him. "How can you sit there—how have you suffered me these two years—without despising me? How is it that I haven't been the mock and byword of Europe? I must have been!"
He rose and walked about the room in great agitation.
"These things have all come crowding up together. One can't realize everything at once. 'Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity!' How they must have jeered behind my back if they thought me sincere! How they must have despised me if they thought me nothing but an advertising quack! Zora Middlemist, for heaven's sake tell me what you have thought of me. What have you taken me for—a madman or a charlatan?"
"It is you that must tell me what has happened," said Zora earnestly. "I don't know. Septimus gave me to understand that the Cure had failed. He's never clear about anything in his own mind, and he's worse when he tries to explain it to others."
"Septimus," said Sypher, "is one of the children of God."
"But he's a little bit incoherent on earth," she rejoined, with a smile. "What has really happened?"
Sypher drew a long breath and pulled himself up.
"I'm on the verge of a collapse. The Cure hasn't paid for the last two years. I hoped against hope. I flung thousands and thousands into the concern. The Jebusa Jones people and others out-advertised me, out-manœuvered me at every turn. Now every bit of capital is gone, and I can't raise any more. I must go under."
Zora began, "I have a fairly large fortune—"
He checked her with a gesture, and looked at her clear and full.
"God bless you," he said. "My heart didn't lie to me at Monte Carlo when it told me that you were a great-souled woman. Tell me. Have you ever believed in the Cure in the sense that I believed in it?"
Zora returned his gaze. Here was no rhodomontading. The man was grappling with realities.
"No," she replied simply.
"Neither do I any longer," said Sypher. "There is no difference between it and any quack ointment you can buy at the first chemist's shop. That is why, even if I saw a chance of putting the concern on its legs again, I couldn't use your money. That is why I asked you, just now, what you have thought of me—a madman or a quack?"
"Doesn't the mere fact of my being here show you what I thought of you?"
"Forgive me," he said. "It's wrong to ask you such questions."
"It's worse than wrong. It's unnecessary."
He passed his hands over his eyes, and sat down.
"I've gone through a lot to-day. I'm not quite myself, so you must forgive me if I say unnecessary things. God sent you to me this morning. Septimus was His messenger. If you hadn't appeared just now I think I should have gone into black madness."
"Tell me all about it," she said softly. "All that you care to tell. I am your nearest friend—I think."
"And dearest."
"And you are mine. You and Septimus. I've seen hundreds of people since I've been away, and some seem to have cared for me—but there's no one really in my life but you two."
Sypher thought: "And we both love you with all there is in us, and you don't know it." He also thought jealously: "Who are the people that have cared for you?"
He said: "No one?"
A smile parted her lips as she looked him frankly in the eyes and repeated the negative. He breathed a sigh of relief, for he had remembered Rattenden's prophecy of the big man whom she was seeking, of the love for the big man, the gorgeous tropical sunshine in which all the splendor in her could develop. She had not found him. From the depths of his man's egotism he uttered a prayer of thanksgiving.
"Tell me," she said again.
"Do you remember my letter from Paris in the summer?"
"Yes. You had a great scheme for the armies of the world."
"That was the beginning," said he, and then he told her all the grotesque story to the end, from the episode of the blistered heel. He told her things that he had never told himself; things that startled him when he found them expressed in words.
"In Russia," said he, "every house has its sacred pictures, even the poorest peasant's hut. They call them ikons. These," waving to the walls, "were my ikons. What do you think of them?"
For the first time Zora became aware of the furniture and decoration of the room. The cartoon, the advertisement proofs, the model of Edinburgh Castle, produced on her the same effect as the famous board in the garden at Fenton Court. Then, however, she could argue with him on the question of taste, and lay down laws as the arbiter of the elegancies of conduct. Now he viewed the sorry images with her own eyes, and he had gone through fire to attain this clearness of vision. What could be said? Zora the magnificent and self-reliant found not a word, though her heart was filled with pity. She was brought face to face with a ridiculous soul-tragedy, remote from her poor little experience of life. It was no time to act the beneficent goddess. She became self-conscious, fearful to speak lest she might strike a wrong note of sympathy. She wanted to give the man so much, and she could give him so little.
"I'm dying to help you," she said, rather piteously. "But how can I?"
"Zora," he said huskily.
She glanced up at him and he held her eyes with his, and she saw how she could help him.
"No, don't—don't. I can't bear it."
She rose and turned away. "Don't let us change things. They were so sweet before. They were so strange—your wanting me as a sort of priestess—I used to laugh—but I loved it all the time."
"That's why I said I've been a fool, Zora."
The bell of the telephone connected with his manager's office rang jarringly. He seized the transmitter in anger.
"How dare you ring me up when I gave orders I was to be undisturbed? I don't care who wants to see me. I'll see nobody."
He threw down the transmitter. "I'm very sorry," he began. Then he stopped. The commonplace summons from the outer world brought with dismaying suddenness to his mind the practical affairs of life. He was a ruined man. The thought staggered him. How could he say to Zora Middlemist: "I am a beggar. I want to marry you"?
She came to him with both hands outstretched, her instinctive gesture when her heart went out, and used his Christian name for the first time.
"Clem, let us be friends—good friends—true, dear friends, but don't spoil it all for me."
When a woman, infinitely desired, pleads like that with glorious eyes, and her fragrance and her dearness are within arm's length, a man has but to catch her to him and silence her pleadings with a man's strength, and carry her off in triumph. It has been the way of man with woman since the world began, and Sypher knew it by his man's instinct. It was a temptation such as he had never dreamed was in the world. He passed through a flaming, blazing torment of battle.
"Forget what I have said, Zora. We'll be friends, if you so wish it."
He pressed her hands and turned away. Zora felt that she had gained an empty victory.
"I ought to be going," she said.
"Not yet. Let us sit down and talk like friends. It's many weary months since I have seen you."
She remained a little longer and they talked quietly of many things. On bidding her good-by he said half playfully:
"I've often wondered why you have taken up with a fellow like me."
"I suppose it's because you're a big man," said Zora.
CHAPTER XX
Septimus walked back to his club after his dinner with Zora, blessing his stars for two reasons: first, because a gracious providence had restored him to favor in his goddess's sight, and, secondly, because he had escaped without telling her of the sundered lives of Emmy and himself. By the time he went to bed, however, having pondered for some hours over the interdependent relations between Zora, Sypher, Emmy, and himself, he had entangled his mind into a condition of intricate complication. He longed to continue to sun himself in the presence of his divinity. But being a married man (no matter how nominally), too much sunning appeared reprehensible. He had also arranged for the sunning of Clem Sypher, and was aware of the indelicacy of two going through this delicious process at the same time. He also dreaded the possible incredulity of Zora when he should urge the ferociousness of his domestic demeanor as the reason for his living apart from his wife. The consequence was that after a sleepless night he bolted like a rabbit to his burrow at Nunsmere. At any rate, the mission of the dog's tail was accomplished.
His bolt took place on Friday. On Saturday morning he was awakened by Wiggleswick.
The latter's attire was not that of the perfect valet. He wore an old, colored shirt open at the throat, a pair of trousers hitched up to his shoulder blades by means of a pair of red braces, and a pair of dilapidated carpet slippers.
"Here's a letter."
"Oh, post it," said Septimus sleepily.
"You haven't written it. The missus has written it. It has a French stamp and the Paris postmark. You'd better read it."
He put it on his master's pillow, and went to the window to admire the view. Septimus aroused, read the letter. It was from Emmy. It ran: