Septimus Part 36

"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 incert.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ma.s.sacre 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 pa.s.sing. You are there pretty often: now, I suppose."

"Why?"

"My friend Hegisippe 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 h.e.l.l as fast as it can, and"--he stopped in front of Septimus and brought down his hands in a pa.s.sionate gesture--"I can't believe it. I can't believe it!

What I'm going through G.o.d 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 G.o.dsend 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 d.a.m.ned fool. So are you. So is every visionary. So are the apostles, the missionaries, the explorers--all who dream great dreams--all d.a.m.ned 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 d.a.m.ned 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 Hegisippe 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 G.o.d had joined together--"

"He didn't," snapped Cousin Jane. "They were joined together by a scrubby man in a registry office."