The days that followed were darkened by overwhelming anxieties, so that he
speculated little as to the Ultimately Desired. A chartered accountant sat
in the office at Moorgate Street and shed around him the gloom of
statistics. Unless a miracle happened the Cure was doomed.
It is all very well to seat a little nigger on the safety-valve if the end
of the journey is in sight. The boiler may just last out the strain. But to
suppose that he will sit there in permanent security to himself and the
ship for an indefinite time is an optimism unwarranted by the general
experience of this low world. Sypher's Cure could not stand the strain of
the increased advertisement. Shuttleworth found a dismal pleasure in the
fulfilment of his prophecy. A reduction in price had not materially
affected the sales. The Jebusa Jones people had lowered the price of the
Cuticle Remedy and still undersold the Cure. During the year the Bermondsey
works had been heavily mortgaged. The money had all been wasted on a public
that had eyes and saw not, that had ears and heard not the simple gospel of
the Friend of Humanity--"Try Sypher's Cure." In the midst of the gloom
Shuttleworth took the opportunity of deprecating the unnecessary expense of
production, never having so greatly dared before. Only the best and purest
materials had been possible for the divine ointment. By using second
qualities, a great saving could be effected without impairing the efficacy
of the Cure. Thus Shuttleworth. Sypher blazed into holy anger, as if he
had been counseled to commit sacrilege.
Radical reforms were imperative, if the Cure was to be saved. He spent his
nights over vast schemes only to find the fatal flaw in the cold light of
the morning. This angered him. It seemed that the sureness of his vision
had gone. Something strange, uncanny had happened within him, he knew not
what. It had nothing to do with his intellectual force, his personal
energy. It had nothing to do with his determination to win through and
restore the Cure to its former position in the market. It was something
subtle, spiritual.
The memory of the blistered heel lived with him. The slight doubt cast by
Septimus on Zora's faith remained disturbingly at the back of his mind. Yet
he clung passionately to his belief. If it were not Heaven-sent, then was
he of men most miserable.
Never had he welcomed the sight of Nunsmere more than the next Saturday
afternoon when the trap turned off the highroad and the common came into
view. The pearls and faint blues of the sky, the tender mist softening the
russet of the autumn trees, the gray tower of the little church, the red
roofs of the cottages dreaming in their old-world gardens, the quiet green
of the common with the children far off at play and the lame donkey
watching them in philosophic content--all came like the gift of a very calm
and restful God to the tired man's eyes.
He thought to himself: "It only lacks one figure walking across the common
to meet me." Then the thought again: "If she were there would I see
anything else?"
At Penton Court the maid met him at the door.
"Mr. Dix is waiting to see you, sir."
"Mr. Dix! Where is he?"
"In the drawing-room. He has been waiting a couple of hours."
He threw off his hat and coat, delighted, and rushed in to welcome the
unexpected guest. He found Septimus sitting in the twilight by the French
window that opened on the lawn, and making elaborate calculations in a
note-book.
"My dear Dix!" He shook him warmly by the hand and clapped him on the
shoulder. "This is more than a pleasure. What have you been doing with
yourself?"
Septimus said, holding up the note-book:
"I was just trying to work out the problem whether a boy's expenses from
the time he begins feeding-bottles to the time he leaves the University
increases by arithmetical or geometrical progression."
Sypher laughed. "It depends, doesn't it, on his taste for luxuries?"
"This one is going to be extravagant, I'm afraid," said Septimus. "He cuts
his teeth on a fifteenth-century Italian ivory carving of St. John the
Baptist--I went into a shop to buy a purse and they gave it to me
instead--and turns up his nose at coral and bells. There isn't much of it
to turn up. I've never seen a child with so little nose. I invented a
machine for elongating it, but his mother won't let me use it."
Sypher expressed his sympathy with Mrs. Dix, and inquired after her health.
Septimus reported favorably. She had passed a few weeks at
Hottetôt-sur-Mer, which had done her good. She was now in Paris under the
mothering care of Madame Bolivard, where she would stay until she cared to
take up her residence in her flat in Chelsea, which was now free from
tenants.
"And you?" asked Sypher.
"I've just left the Hôtel Godet and come back to Nunsmere. Perhaps I'll
give up the house and take Wiggleswick to London when Emmy returns. She
promised to look for a flat for me. I believe women are rather good at
finding flats."
Sypher handed him a box of cigars. He lit one and held it awkwardly with
the tips of his long, nervous fingers. He passed the fingers of his other
hand, with the familiar gesture, up his hair.
"I thought I'd come and see you," he said hesitatingly, "before going to
'The Nook.' There are explanations to be made. My wife and I are good
friends, but we can't live together. It's all my fault. I make the house
intolerable. I--I have an ungovernable temper, you know, and I'm harsh and
unloving and disagreeable. And it's bad for the child. We quarrel
dreadfully--at least, she doesn't."
"What about?" Sypher asked gravely.
"All sorts of things. You see, if I want breakfast an hour before
dinner-time, it upsets the household. Then there was the nose machine--and
other inventions for the baby, which perhaps might kill it. You can explain
all this and tell them that the marriage has been a dreadful mistake on
poor Emmy's side, and that we've decided to live apart. You will do this
for me, won't you?"
"I can't say I'll do it with pleasure," said Sypher, "for I'm more than
sorry to hear your news. I suspected as much when I met you in Paris. But
I'll see Mrs. Oldrieve as soon as possible and explain."
"Thank you," said Septimus; "you don't know what a service you would be
rendering me."
He uttered a sigh of relief and relit his cigar which had gone out during
his appeal. Then there was a silence. Septimus looked dreamily out at the
row of trees that marked the famous lawn reaching down to the railway line.
The mist had thickened with the fall of the day and hung heavy on the
branches, and the sky was gray. Sypher watched him, greatly moved; tempted
to cry out that he knew all, that he was not taken in by the simple legend
of his ungovernable temper and unlovely disposition. His heart went out to
him, as to a man who dwelt alone on lofty heights, inaccessible to common
humanity. He was filled with pity and reverence for him. Perhaps he
exaggerated. But Sypher was an idealist. Had he not set Sypher's Cure as
the sun in his heaven and Zora as one of the fixed stars?
It grew dark. Sypher rang for the lamp and tea.
"Or would you like breakfast?" he asked laughingly.
"I've just had supper," said Septimus. "Wiggleswick found some cheese in a
cupboard. I buried it in the front garden." A vague smile passed on his
face like a pale gleam of light over water on a cloudy day. "Wiggleswick is
deaf. He couldn't hear it."
"He's a lazy scoundrel," said Sypher. "I wonder you don't sack him."
Septimus licked a hanging strip of cigar-end into position--he could never
smoke a cigar properly--and lit it for the third time.
"Wiggleswick is good for me," said he. "He keeps me human. I am apt to
become a machine. I live so much among them. I've been working hard on a
new gun--or rather an old gun. It's field artillery, quick-firing. I got on
to the idea again from a sighting apparatus I invented. I have the
specification in my pocket. The model is at home. I brought it from Paris."
He fetched a parcel of manuscript from his pocket and unrolled it into
flatness.
"I should like to show it to you. Do you mind?"
"It would interest me enormously," said Sypher.
"I invent all sorts of things. I can't help it. But I always come back to
guns--I don't know why. I hope you've done nothing further with the guns of
large caliber. I've been thinking about them seriously, and I find they're
all moonshine."
He smiled with wan cheerfulness at the waste of the labor of years. Sypher,
on whose conscience the guns had laid their two hundred ton weight, felt
greatly relieved. Their colossal scale had originally caught his
imagination which loved big conceptions. Their working had seemed plausible
to his inexpert eye. He had gone with confidence to his friend, the expert
on naval gunnery, who had reported on them in breezy, sea-going terms of
disrespect. Since then he had shrunk from destroying his poor friend's
illusions.
"Yes, they're all unmanageable. I see what's wrong with them--but I've lost
my interest in naval affairs." He paused and added dreamily: "I was
horribly seasick crossing the Channel this time.
"Let us have a look at the field-gun," said Sypher encouragingly.
Remembering the naval man's language, he had little hope that Septimus
would be more successful by land than by sea; but his love and pity for the
inventor compelled interest. Septimus's face brightened.
"This," said he, "is quite a different thing. You see I know more about
it."
"That's where the bombardier comes in," laughed Sypher.
"I shouldn't wonder," replied Septimus.
He spread the diagram on a table, and expounded the gun. Absorbed in his
explanation he lost the drowsy incertitude of his speech and the dreaminess
of his eyes. He spoke with rapidity, sureness, and a note of enthusiasm
rang oddly in his voice. On the margins he sketched illustrations of the
Gatling, the Maxim, and the Hotchkiss and other guns, and demonstrated the
superior delicate deadliness of his own. It could fire more rounds per
minute than any other piece of artillery known to man. It could feed itself
automatically from a magazine. The new sighting apparatus made it as
accurate as a match rifle. Its power of massacre was unparalleled in the
history of wholesale slaughter. A child might work it.
Septimus's explanation was too lucid for a man of Sypher's intelligence not
to grasp the essentials of his invention. To all his questions Septimus
returned satisfactory answers. He could find no flaw in the gun. Yet in his
heart he felt that the expert would put his finger on the weak spot and
consign the machine to the limbo of phantasmagoric artillery.
"If it is all you say, there's a fortune in it," said he.
"There's no shadow of doubt about it," replied Septimus. "I'll send
Wiggleswick over with the model to-morrow, and you can see for yourself."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I don't know," said Septimus, in his usual manner. "I never know what to
do with things when I invent them. I once knew a man in the Patent Office
who patented things for me. But he's married now and gone to live in
Balham."
"But he's still at the Patent Office?"
"Perhaps he is," said Septimus. "It never occurred to me. But it has never
done me any good to have things patented. One has to get them taken up.
Some of them are drunk and disorderly enough for them to be taken up at
once," he added with his pale smile. He continued: "I thought perhaps you
would replace the big-caliber guns in our contract by this one."
Sypher agreed with pleasure to the proposal. He knew a high military
official in the Ordnance Department of the War Office who would see that
the thing was properly considered. "If he's in town I'll go and see him at
once."
"There's no hurry," said Septimus. "I shouldn't like you to put yourself
out. I know you're a very busy man. Go in any time you happen to be
passing. You are there pretty often: now, I suppose."
"Why?"
"My friend Hégisippe Cruchot gave you an idea in Paris--about soldiers'
feet. How is it developing?"
Sypher made a wry face. "I found, my dear Dix, it was like your guns of
large caliber." He rose and walked impatiently about the room. "Don't let
us talk about the Cure, there's a dear fellow. I come down here to forget
it."
"Forget it?"
Septimus stared at him in amazement.
"Yes. To clear my mind and brain of it. To get a couple of nights' sleep
after the rest of the week's nightmare. The concern is going to hell as
fast as it can, and"--he stopped in front of Septimus and brought down his
hands in a passionate gesture--"I can't believe it. I can't believe it!
What I'm going through God only knows."
"I at least had no notion," said Septimus. "And I've been worrying you
with my silly twaddle about babies and guns."
"It's a godsend for me to hear of anything save ruin and the breaking up of
all that was dear to me in life. It's not like failure in an ordinary
business. It has been infinitely more than a business to me. It has been a
religion. It is still. That's why my soul refuses to grasp facts and
figures."
He went on, feeling a relief in pouring out his heart to one who could
understand. To no one had he thus spoken. With an expansive nature he had
the strong man's pride. To the world in general he turned the conquering
face of Clem Sypher, the Friend of Humanity, of Sypher's Cure. To Septimus
alone had he shown the man in his desperate revolt against defeat. The
lines around his mouth deepened into lines of pain, and pain lay behind his
clear eyes and in the knitting of his brows.
"I believed the Almighty had put an instrument for the relief of human
suffering into my hands. I dreamed great dreams. I saw all the nations of
the earth blessing me. I know I was a damned fool. So are you. So is every
visionary. So are the apostles, the missionaries, the explorers--all who
dream great dreams--all damned fools, but a glorious company all the same.
I'm not ashamed to belong to it. But there comes a time when the apostle
finds himself preaching to the empty winds, and the explorer discovers his
El Dorado to be a barren island, and he either goes mad or breaks his
heart, and which of the two I'm going to do I don't know. Perhaps both."
"Zora Middlemist will be back soon," said Septimus. "She is coming by the
White Star line, and she ought to be in Marseilles by the end of next
week."
"She writes me that she may winter in Egypt. That is why she chose the
White Star line," said Sypher.
"Have you told her what you've told me?"
"No," said Sypher, "and I never shall while there's a hope left. She knows
it's a fight. But I tell her--as I have told my damned fool of a soul--that
I shall conquer. Would you like to go to her and say, 'I'm done--I'm
beaten'? Besides, I'm not."
He turned and poked the fire, smashing a great lump of coal with a stroke
of his muscular arm as if it had been the skull of the Jebusa Jones dragon.
Septimus twirled his small mustache and his hand inevitably went to his
hair. He had the scared look he always wore at moments when he was coming
to a decision.
"But you would like to see Zora, wouldn't you?" he asked.
Sypher wheeled round, and the expression on his face was that of a prisoner
in the Bastille who had been asked whether he would like a summer banquet
beneath the trees of Fontainebleau.
"You know that very well," said he.
He laid down the poker and crossed the room to a chair.
"I've often thought of what you said in Paris about her going away. You
were quite right. You have a genius for saying and doing the simple right
thing. We almost began our friendship by your saying it. Do you remember?
It was in Monte Carlo. You remember that you didn't like my looking on Mrs.
Middlemist as an advertisement. Oh, you needn't look uncomfortable, my dear
fellow. I loved you for it. In Paris you practically told me that I
oughtn't to regard her as a kind of fetich for the Cure, and claim her
bodily presence. You also put before me the fact that there was no more
reason for her to believe in the Cure than yourself or Hégisippe Cruchot.
If you could tell me anything more," said he earnestly, "I should value
it."
What he expected to learn from Septimus he did not know. But once having
exalted him to inaccessible heights, the indomitable idealist was convinced
that from his lips would fall words of gentle Olympian wisdom. Septimus,
blushing at his temerity in having pointed out the way to the man whom he
regarded as the incarnation of force and energy, curled himself up
awkwardly in his chair, clasping his ankles between his locked fingers. At
last the oracle spoke.
"If I were you," he said, "before going mad or breaking my heart, I should
wait until I saw Zora."
"Very well. It will be a long time. Perhaps so much the better. I shall
remain sane and heart-whole all the longer."
* * * * *
After dinner Sypher went round to "The Nook," and executed his difficult
mission as best he could. To carry out Septimus's wishes, which involved
the vilification of the innocent and the beatification of the guilty, went
against his conscience. He omitted, therefore, reference to the demoniac
rages which turned the home into an inferno, and to the quarrels over the
machine for elongating the baby's nose. Their tempers were incompatible;
they found a common life impossible; so, according to the wise modern view
of things, they had decided to live apart while maintaining cordial
relations.
Mrs. Oldrieve was greatly distressed. Tears rolled down her cheeks on to
her knitting. The old order was changing too rapidly for her and the new
to which it was giving place seemed anarchy to her bewildered eyes. She
held up tremulous hands in protest. Husband and wife living apart so
cheerfully, for such trivial reasons! Even if one had suffered great wrong
at the hands of the other it was their duty to remain side by side. "Those
whom God had joined together--"
"He didn't," snapped Cousin Jane. "They were joined together by a scrubby
man in a registry office."
This is the wild and unjust way in which women talk. For aught Cousin Jane
knew the Chelsea Registrar might have been an Antinous for beauty.
Mrs. Oldrieve shook her head sadly. She had known how it would be. If only
they had been married in church by their good vicar, this calamity could
not have befallen them.
"All the churches and all the vicars and all the archbishops couldn't have
made that man anything else than a doddering idiot! How Emmy could have
borne with him for a day passes my understanding. She has done well to get
rid of him. She has made a mess of it, of course. People who marry in that
way generally do. It serves her right."
So spoke Cousin Jane, whom Sypher found, in a sense, an unexpected ally.
She made his task easier. Mrs. Oldrieve remained unconvinced.
"And the baby just a month or so old. Poor little thing! What's to become
of it?"
"Emmy will have to come here," said Cousin Jane firmly, "and I'll bring it
up. Emmy isn't fit to educate a rabbit. You had better write and order her
to come home at once."
"I'll write to-morrow," sighed Mrs. Oldrieve.
Sypher reflected on the impossibilities of the proposition and on the
reasons Emmy still had for remaining in exile in Paris. He also pitied the
child that was to be brought up by Cousin Jane. It had extravagant tastes.
He smiled.
"My friend Dix is already thinking of sending him to the University; so you
see they have plans for his education."
Cousin Jane sniffed. She would make plans for them! As for the
University--if it could turn out a doddering idiot like Septimus, it was
criminal to send any young man to such a seat of unlearning. She would not
allow him to have a voice in the matter. Emmy was to be summoned to
Nunsmere.
Sypher was about to deprecate the idea when he reflected again, and thought
of Hotspur and the spirits from the vasty deep. Cousin Jane could call, and
so could Mrs. Oldrieve. But would Emmy come? As the answer to the question
was in the negative he left Cousin Jane to her comfortable resolutions.
"You will no doubt discuss the matter with Dix," he said.
Cousin Jane threw up her hands. "Oh, for goodness' sake, don't let him come
here! I couldn't bear the sight of him."
Sypher looked inquiringly at Mrs. Oldrieve.
"It has been a great shock to me," said the gentle lady. "It will take time
to get over it. Perhaps he had better wait a little."
Sypher walked home in a wrathful mood. Ostracism was to be added to
Septimus's crown of martyrdom.
Perhaps, on the other hand, the closing of "The Nook" doors was
advantageous. He had dreaded the result of Cousin Jane's
cross-examination, as lying was not one of his friend's conspicuous
accomplishments. Soothed by this reflection he smoked a pipe, and took down
Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" from his shelves.
While he was deriving spiritual entertainment from the great battle between
Christian and Apollyon and consolation from the latter's discomfiture,
Septimus was walking down the road to the post-office, a letter in his
hand. The envelope was addressed to "Mrs. Middlemist, White Star Co.'s S.S.
_Cedric_, Marseilles." It contained a blank sheet of headed note-paper and
the tail of a little china dog.