Part 31 (1/2)

”_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.