It was only when the door closed behind the manager that Sypher relaxed his attitude. 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 grâce. 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 hoarding 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 shoeblack, 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 hoardings 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 advertisements 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 shores of Lake Tchad; photographs of the busy factory, now worked by a dwindling staff; proofs of full-page advertisements 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 gods, 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.
"You? You?"
"They wouldn't let me in. I forced my way. I said I must see you."