Septimus

"_Caveat emptor_," said Sypher.

"I beg your pardon?" said Dennymede, who had no Latinity.

"It means, let the buyer beware; it"s up to the buyer to see what stuff he"s buying."

"Naturally. It"s the first principle of business."

Sypher turned his swift clear glance on him and banged the window-ledge with his hand.

"It"s the first principle of d.a.m.ned knavery and thieving," he cried, "and if I thought anyone ran my business on it, they"d go out of my employ at once! It"s at the root of all the corruption that exists in modern trade.

It salves the conscience of the psalm-singing grocer who puts ground beans into his coffee. It"s a d.a.m.nable principle."

He thumped the window-ledge again, very angry. The traveler hedged.

"Of course it"s immoral to tell lies and say a thing is what it isn"t. But on the other hand no one could run a patent medicine on the lines of warning the public as to what it isn"t good for. You say on the wrapper it will cure gout and rheumatism. If a woman buys a bottle and gives it to her child who has got scarlet fever, and the child dies from it, it"s her lookout and not yours. When a firm does issue a warning such as "Won"t Wash Clothes," it"s a business proceeding for the firm"s own protection."

"Well, we"ll issue a warning, "Won"t Cure Blisters,"" said Sypher. "I advertise myself as the Friend of Humanity. I am, according to my lights.

If I let poor fellows on the march reduce their feet to this condition I should be the scourge of mankind like"--he snapped his fingers trying to recall the name--"like Atlas--no it wasn"t Atlas, but no matter. Not a box of the Cure has been sold without the guarantee stamp of my soul"s conviction on it."

"The Jebusa Jones people aren"t so conscientious," said Dennymede. "I bought a pot of their stuff this morning. They"ve got a new wrapper. See."

He unfolded a piece of paper and pointed out the place to his chief. "They have a special paragraph in large print: "Gives instant relief to blistered feet. Every mountaineer should carry it in his gripsack.""

"They"re the enemies of G.o.d and man," said Sypher, "and sooner than copy their methods I would close down the factory and never sell another box as long as I lived."

"It"s a thousand pities, sir, anyhow," said Dennymede, trying to work back diplomatically, "that the army contract scheme has to be thrown overboard."

"Yes, it"s a nuisance," said Sypher.

When he had dismissed the traveler he laughed grimly. "A nuisance!"

The word was a grotesque anticlimax.

He sat for a long while with his hands blinding his eyes, trying to realize what the abandonment of the scheme meant to him. He was a man who faced his responsibilities squarely. For the first time in his life he had tried the Cure seriously on himself--chance never having given him cause before--and it had failed. He had heard the Cure which he regarded as a divine unction termed a pestilential quackery; the words burned red-hot in his brain. He had heard it depreciated, with charming tact and courtesy, by a great authority on diseases of the skin. One short word, "no," had wiped out of existence his Napoleonic scheme for the Armies of the World--for putting them on a sound footing. He smiled bitterly as the incongruous jest pa.s.sed through his mind.

He had been fighting for months, and losing ground; but this was the first absolute check that his faith had received. He staggered under it, half wonderingly, like a man who has been hit by an unseen hand and looks around to see whence the blow came. Why should it come now? He looked back along the years. Not a breath of disparagement had touched the Cure"s fair repute. His files in London were full of testimonials honorably acquired.

Some of these, from lowly folk, were touching in their simple grat.i.tude. It is true that his manager suggested that the authors had sent them in the hope of gain and of seeing their photographs in the halfpenny papers. But his manager, Shuttleworth, was a notorious and dismal cynic who believed in nothing save the commercial value of the Cure. Letters had come with coroneted flaps to the envelopes. The writers certainly hoped neither for gain nor for odd notoriety. He had never paid a fee for a testimonial throughout his career; every one that he printed was genuine and unsolicited. He had been hailed as the Friend of Humanity by all sorts and conditions of men. Why suddenly should he be branded as a dealer in pestilence?

His thought wandered back to the beginning of things. He saw himself in the chemist"s shop in Bury Saint Edmunds--a little shop in a little town, too small, he felt, for the great unknown something within him that was craving for expansion. The dull making up of prescriptions, the selling of tooth powder and babies" feeding bottles--the deadly mechanical routine--he remembered the daily revolt against it all. He remembered his discovery of the old herbalists; his delight in their quaint language; the remedies so extraordinary and yet so simple; his first idea of combining these with the orthodox drugs of the British Pharmacopoeia; his experiments; his talks with an aged man who kept a dingy little shop of herbs on the outskirts of the town, also called a pestilential fellow by the medical faculty of the district, but a learned ancient all the same, who knew the qualities of every herb that grew, and with some reeking mess of pulp was said to have cured an old woman"s malignant ulcer given up as incurable by the faculty.

He remembered the night when the old man, grateful for the lad"s interest in his learning, gave him under vows of secrecy the recipe of this healing emulsion, which was to become the basis of Sypher"s Cure. In those days his loneliness was cheered by a bulldog, an ugly, faithful beast whom he called Barabbas--he sighed to think how many Barabbases had lived and died since then--and who, contracting mange, became the _corpus vile_ of many experiments--first with the old man"s emulsion, then with the emulsion mixed with other drugs, all bound together in pure animal fat, until at last he found a mixture which to his joy made the sores heal and the skin harden and the hair sprout and Barabbas grow sleek as a swell mobsman in affluent circ.u.mstances. Then one day came His Grace of Suffolk into the shop with a story of a pet of the d.u.c.h.ess"s stricken with the same disease.

Sypher modestly narrated his own experience and gave the mighty man a box of the new ointment. A fortnight afterwards he returned. Not only had it cured the dog, but it must have charmed away the eczema on his ducal hands.

Full of a wild surmise he tried it next on his landlady"s child, who had a sore on its legs, and lo! the sore healed. It was then that the Divine Revelation came to him; it was then that he pa.s.sed his vigil, as he had told Zora, and consecrated himself and his Cure to the service of humanity.

The steps, the struggles, the purchase of the chemist"s business, the early exploitation of the Cure, its gradual renown in the district, the first whisperings of its fame abroad, thanks to His Grace of Suffolk, the early advertising, the gradual growth, the sale of the chemist"s business, the establishment of "Sypher"s Cure" as a special business in the town, the transference to London, the burst into world-wide fame--all the memories came back to him, as he sat by the window of the Hotel de l"Europe and blinded his face with his hands.

He dashed them away, at last, with a pa.s.sionate gesture.

"It can"t be! It can"t be!" he cried aloud, as many another man has cried in the righteous rebellion of his heart against the ironical decrees of the high G.o.ds whom his simple nature has never suspected of their eternal and inscrutable irony.

CHAPTER XV

If you travel on the highroad which skirts the cliff-bound coast of Normandy you may come to a board bearing the legend "Hottetot-sur-Mer" and a hand pointing down a narrow gorge. If you follow the direction and descend for half a mile you come to a couple of villas, a humble cafe, some fishermen"s cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a _debit de tabac_, a view of a triangle of sea, and eventually to a patch of shingly beach between two great bastions of cliffs. The beach itself contains a diminutive jetty, a tiny fleet of fishing smacks, some nets, three bathing machines joined together by ropes on which hang a few towels and bathing costumes, a dog, a child or so with spade and bucket, two English maiden ladies writing picture post-cards, a Frenchman in black, reading a Rouen newspaper under a gray umbrella, his wife and daughter, and a stall of mussels presided over by an old woman with skin like seaweed. Just above the beach, on one side of the road leading up the gorge, is a miniature barn with a red cupola, which is the Casino, and, on the other, a long, narrow, blue-washed building with the words written in great black letters across the facade, "Hotel de la Plage."

As soon as Emmy could travel, she implored Septimus to find her a quiet spot by the sea whither the fashionable do not resort. Septimus naturally consulted Hegisippe Cruchot. Hegisippe asked for time to consult his comrades. He returned with news of an ideal spot. It was a village in the Pyrenees about six thousand feet up in the air and forty miles from a railway station. They could shoot bears all day long. When Emmy explained that a village on the top of the Pyrenees was not by the seaside, and that neither she nor his aunt, Madame Bolivard, took any interest in the destruction of bears, he retired somewhat crestfallen and went with his difficulties to Angelique, the young lady in the wine shop in the Rue des Francs-Bouchers. Angelique informed him that a brave sailor on leave from his torpedo boat was in the habit of visiting the wine shop every evening.

He ought to know something of the sea. A meeting was arranged by Angelique between Hegisippe, Septimus and the brave sailor, much to Emmy"s skeptical amus.e.m.e.nt; and the brave sailor, after absorbing prodigious quant.i.ties of alcohol and reviewing all the places on the earth"s coastline from Yokohama to Paris-Plage, declared that the veritable Eden by the Sea was none other than his native village of Hottetot-sur-Mer. He made a plan of it on the table, two square packets of tobacco representing the cliffs, a pipe stem the road leading up the gorge, some tobacco dust the beach, and some coffee slops applied with the finger the English Channel.

Septimus came back to Emmy. "I have found the place. It is Hottetot-sur-Mer. It has one hotel. You can catch shrimps, and its mussels are famous all over the world."

After consultation of a guide to Normandy, on which Emmy"s prudence insisted, they found the brave sailor"s facts mainly correct, and decided on Hottetot-sur-Mer.

"I will take you there, see that you are comfortably settled, and then come back to Paris," said Septimus. "You"ll be quite happy with Madame Bolivard, won"t you?"

"Of course," said Emmy, looking away from him. "What are you going to do in Paris, all by yourself?"

"Guns," he replied. Then he added reflectively: "I also don"t see how I can get out of the Hotel G.o.det. I"ve been there some time, and I don"t know how much to give the servants in tips. The only thing is to stay on."

Emmy sighed, just a bit wistfully, and made no attempt to prove the futility of his last argument. The wonderfully sweet of life had come to her of late mingled with the unutterably bitter. She was in the state of being when a woman accepts, without question. Septimus then went to the St.

Lazare station to make arrangements and discovered an official who knew a surprising amount about railway traveling and the means of bringing a family from domicile to station. He entered Septimus"s requirements in a book and a.s.sured him that at the appointed hour an omnibus would be waiting outside the house in the Boulevard Raspail. Septimus thought him a person of marvelous intellect and gave him five francs.

So the quaint quartette started in comfort: Septimus and Emmy and Madame Bolivard and the little lump of mortality which the Frenchwoman carried in her great motherly arms. Madame Bolivard, who had not been out of Paris for twenty years, needed all her maternal instincts to subdue her excitement at the prospect of seeing the open country and the sea. In the railway carriage she pointed out cattle to the unconscious infant with the tremulous quiver of the traveler who espies a herd of hippogriffin.

"Is it corn that, Monsieur? _Mon Dieu_, it is beautiful. Regard then the corn, my cherished one."

But the cherished one cared not for corn or cattle. He preferred to fix his cold eyes on Septimus, as if wondering what he was doing in that galley.

Now and again Septimus would bend forward and, with a vague notion of the way to convey one"s polite intentions to babies, would prod him gingerly in the cheek and utter an insane noise and then surrept.i.tiously wipe his finger on his trousers. When his mother took him she had little spasms of tenderness during which she pressed him tightly to her bosom and looked frightened. The child was precious to her. She had paid a higher price than most women, and that perhaps enhanced its value.

At Fecamp a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage, together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed snuff in great quant.i.ties and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions smelled abominably. Emmy, tired of the railway journey and suffocated by the heat, felt inclined to cry. This was her first step into her newly conditioned world, and her heart sank. She regretted her comfortable rooms in Paris and the conditions of existence there of which Septimus was an integral part. She had got used to them, to his forced a.s.sociation with the intimate details of her life, to his bending over the child like a grotesque fairy G.o.dfather and making astonishing suggestions for its upbringing. She had regarded him less as a stranger to be treated with feminine reserve than the doctor. Now it was different. She was about to take up her own life again, with new responsibilities, and the dearly loved creature whom she had bullied and laughed at and leaned on would go away to take up his own queer way of life, and the relations between them could not possibly be the same again. The diligence was taking her on the last stage of her journey towards the new conditions, and it jolted and b.u.mped and smelled and took an interminable time.

"I"m sure," said she woefully, "there"s no such place as Hottetot-sur-Mer, and we are going on forever to find it."

Presently Septimus pointed triumphantly through the window.

"There it is!"

"Where?" cried Emmy, for not a house was in sight. Then she saw the board.

The old diligence turned and creaked and swung and pitched down the gorge.

When they descended at the Hotel de la Plage, the setting sun blazed on their faces across the sea and shed its golden enchantment over the little pebbly beach. At that hour the only living thing on it was the dog, and he was asleep. It was a spot certainly to which the fashionable did not resort.

"It will be good for baby."

"And for you."

She shrugged her shoulders. "What is good for one is not always--" She paused, feeling ungrateful. Then she added, "It"s the best place you could have brought us to."