Septimus Part 40

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 a.n.a.lyze 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 a.s.severations of loyalty.

t.i.the 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 circ.u.mstances--"

"_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 pa.s.sed 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 grace_. 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 att.i.tude. 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 grace_. 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 h.o.a.rding 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 s...o...b..ack, 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 h.o.a.rdings 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 sh.o.r.es of Lake Tchad; photographs of the busy factory, now worked by a dwindling staff; proofs of full-page advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.ds, 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.