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Septimus

<h2>[253]CHAPTER XIX</h2> "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[254] 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. [255]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.[256] 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[257] 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,[258] 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[259] 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[260] 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?" [261]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. "[262]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-man&oelig;uvered me at every turn. Now every bit of capital is gone, and I can't raise any more. I must go under." [263]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[264] 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[265] 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[266] 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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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