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 passed 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 gratitude. 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 circumstances. Then one day came His Grace of Suffolk into the shop with a story of a pet of the Duchess'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 passed 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 Hôtel de l'Europe and blinded his face with his hands.
He dashed them away, at last, with a passionate 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 gods 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 "Hottetôt-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 café, some fishermen's cottages, one of which is also a general shop and a débit 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 façade, "Hôtel de la Plage."