CHAPTER THE SECONDThe Calling of the Disciples
THEREare already wide differences of statement and opinion about the order and the details of the calling of the followers of Sargon. Happily we are in a position to give the circumstances with all the exactitude that may be necessary, and with an authority that will anticipate vexatious criticism. It was about half-past six that Sargon appeared in Cheapside, and the day’s traffic was already ebbing in that busy city thoroughfare. His countenance was transformed and shone with that kind of luminosity that only the most thorough and exhaustive shaving can give. A youthful smoothness had been restored to it. The facial mane, the vast moustache, that had veiled it for so many years from mankind was abandoned, a mess of clippings and lather now in a barber’s basin. Now the face was as bare as the young Alexander, a fresh-complexioned, sincere and innocent countenance speaking clearly with an unfiltered voice. It was flushed with a natural excitement as it went along Cheapside scrutinizing the faces of the foot passengers on a momentous and mystical search. The blue eyes beneath the brim of the distinguished-looking hat were alight. Was it to be this man? Was it to be this?
The first to be called was a young man of Leytonstone named Godley, a young man with a large and excessivelygrave grey face and a deliberation of utterance amounting to an impediment. He was carrying a microscope in a wooden box. He was a student of biology with a cytological bias; naturally very polite and temperamentally disposed to be precise and deliberate in all he said and did. He was making his way from Liverpool Street station to the Birkbeck Institute by a circuitous route because he had nearly an hour in hand before his class began. He stood poised on the pavement edge at a street-corner waiting for two vans to pass, when his call came to him.
He found a very earnest, barefaced little man beside him whose blue eyes searched his countenance swiftly, and who then gripped his arm.
“I think,” said Sargon, “that it is you.”
Mr. Godley, who was not without a sense of humour, attempted to reply that it certainly was him, but that impediment of his, partly natural but greatly developed by affectation, arrested him about the word “certainly,” and he was still sawing the air with his profile when Sargon spoke again.
“I have need of your help,” said Sargon. “The great task is beginning.”
Mr. Godley went through the preliminary convulsions of explaining that he had the better part of an hour to spare and that he was willing to give help in any reasonable matter provided it was first explained to him clearly just exactly what the matter was. But he could only give help for a limited time. His engagement with his class at the Birkbeck was imperative. Sargon paid little heed to the significance of the various sounds that Mr. Godley was biting off and swallowing. He led his captive by the arm and explained, with helpful gestures of his free hand, the full significance of this call. “You are, I perceive, a young man of scientific qualifications. They will be needed. I do not know if you recognize me—your memory may still beimperfect—but I recall your face, chief among the wise men of our ancient court. Yes, indeed, chief among our wise men.”
“N-no-no-not as-as-assure that I follow you aw-ow-ow quite,” said the young man. “My my—my aw-ow-ow-work issferr’ll aw-ow-ow-known as yet.”
“Iknow it,” said Sargon boldly. “Iknow it. I have been seeking you. Do not be deceived by my plain incognito. Believe me I have tremendous powers behind me. In a little while all men will understand. The age of confusion draws near its end; a new age begins. We are the first two particles, the very first, in a great crystallization——”
“Where aaare we g-g-g-oing agg-aggs-aggs-exactly?” asked the young man.
“Trust me,” said Sargon bravely. “Keep with me.”
The young man struggled with some complex question. But now three fresh individuals came under the magic attraction of the call and the young man’s question fell in unheeded chunks. These new adherents were a little group of men standing at the kerb, about a small, almost inaudible hurdy-gurdy on which was a placard stating: “We want Work not Charity; but there is no Work for Us in this So-called Civilized State.” They were clad in faded khaki, and were all youths of less than five-and-twenty.
“Now look at that!” said Sargon. “Is it not time the new age began?”
He addressed himself to the man on the right of the organ-grinder.
“All this is to be altered here and now,” he said. “I have work for you to do.”
“Oh!” said the ex-soldier in the accent of a fairly well-educated man. “What sort of work?”
“We’re straight,” said the organ-grinder. “We’ll take it. If it’s work we can do. We ain’t fakers. Wot work is it?”
“Shillin’ an hour?” said the third.
“More than that. Much more than that. And very great and responsible work. A harvest! A splendid harvest! You shall be leaders of men. Follow after me.”
“Far?” asked the man who had spoken first.
Sargon made a gesture that effectually concealed his own lack of a definite plan, and led the way.
“Lead on, Macbeth,” said the organ-grinder, and swung his hurdy-gurdy into its carrying position on his back. The two other ex-soldiers exchanged views that it was all right and that anyhow they’d see what was offered them. Mr. Godley, keeping abreast of his leader, began an immense and ultimately futile struggle with a fresh question.
The next disciple was not so much called as fell into the gathering body of Sargonites. He was a tall gentleman of a rich brown colour with frizzy black hair, and a vast disarming smile. He was dressed in an almost luminous grey frock-suit, a pink tie, buttoned shoes with bright yellow uppers, and a hat as distinguished as Sargon’s own. He carried a grey alpaca umbrella. He held out a sheet of paper in a big mahogany hand and emitted in a rich abundant voice the word “Escuse.” The paper had printed on it at the head the words, “Lean and Mackay, 329 Leadenhall Street, E.C.” and below written in ink, “Mr. Kama Mobamba.”
Sargon regarded his interlocutor for a moment and then recognized him. “The Elamite King!” he said.
“Non spik English,” said the black gentleman. “Portugaish.”
“No,” said Sargon with a gesture that explained his intention. “Providence. Follow after me.”
The coloured gentleman fell in trustfully.
“Look here!” protested one of the ex-soldiers. “There ain’t going to be coloured labor on this job?”
“Peace!” said Sargon. “Very soon everything will be shown to you.”
“I don’t think you have any ub-ub-business to mislead ap-ap-people,” said Mr. Godley, who was becoming more and more interested in, and perplexed by, Sargon’s proceedings.
Sargon quickened his pace.
“This—this gentleman s-s-s-simply wa-wa-wanted tu-tu-tu-tu-to go to that address,” said Mr. Godley.
In his eagerness to get the idea home to Sargon he became a little disregardful of his microscope box which inflicted a sudden sharp blow on the knee of a passing gentleman, a business man in a silk hat. The victim cursed aloud with extraordinary vehemence and stood hopping on the pavement with his hand to his knee. Then he succumbed to a passionate impulse to tell Mr. Godley exactly what he thought of his conduct, his upbringing, and his type of human being. He joined the followers of Sargon at a brisk limp, occasionally saying “Hi!” in a breathless voice. A rather intoxicated man in deep mourning had witnessed the incident. He came hurrying, with a certain margin of error, to the side of the angry gentleman in the silk hat.
“’Sgraceful salt,” he said. “’Sgraceful! F’want a witnessI’m your man!”
His general intention was to go forward at the side of the gentleman in the silk hat, but there were chemically emancipated factors in his being that drove him sideways. The resultant was a sinuous course that presently involved him with a display of oranges in a barrow at the pavement edge. It was not a serious nor a prolonged contact, but it involved a certain scattering of oranges in the gutter and added a new ingredient, a very angry costermonger’s assistant with a remonstrance and a claim for damages, to the gathering body of Sargon’s followers.
The moral of a proverb depends entirely upon the image chosen, and though a rolling stone gathers no moss, a rolling snowball grows by what it rolls upon. A small hurryinggroup of people in a London street is a moving body of the snowball type; its physical pull is considerable; it appeals to curiosity and the increasing gregariousness of mankind. Sargon, blue-eyed and exalted, with Mr. Godley intent and eloquent upon his left hand, and Mr. Kama Mobamba, tall, silent, smiling, with a shining confidence upon his ebony face that soon he would be led into the presence of Messrs. Lean and Mackay, formed the spearhead of the procession. Behind came the three out-of-work ex-soldiers, who were now involved in obscure protests and explanations with the gentleman in the silk hat, and a smart but rather incomprehensible young newspaper reporter, who had acquired his native tongue in Oldham, and had just come up to London to push his fortunes, and was anxious for something called a “scoop.” He seemed to think that Sargon might be the “scoop” he sought. Two ambiguous-looking individuals in caps and neck-wraps had also fallen in, possibly for nefarious purposes, a vague-faced young woman of the streets in a weather-worn magenta hat was asking what was “up” and the intoxicated man in mourning was explaining as wittily and obscurely as possible. There was also a fringe of skirmishing juveniles. And an Eton boy. He was very, very young and fresh-faced, a scion of one of the oldest and best families in England and a convinced and fierce Communist. He had been on his way with a bosom friend to the celebrated model engine shop in Holborn when Sargon had swept past him and the inscription on the organ had caught his eye.
He was a boy of swift initiatives and with a highly developed dramatic sense.
“Sorry, old Fellow,” he said to his friend. “But I feel the time has come. Unless I’m very much mistaken that little bunch is the beginning of the Social Revolution, and I must do my duty.”
“Oo Isay, Rabbit!” said the friend. “Come and buy that steam-launch first, anyhow.”
“What’sa model steam-launch?” said Rabbit scornfully, and turned to follow Sargon.
He would have liked to have had a swift strong hand-clasp first, but you can’t do that sort of thing with a chap who will always keep both hands in his trouser pockets. He darted off, and his friend followed discreetly in a state between amusement and dismay, and at such a distance as seemed to him to exonerate him from any personal complicity with the social revolution.
“Where are we going?” asked the young Etonian as he came up with the hindmost of the out-of-work ex-soldiers.
“Heknows,” said the out-of-work ex-soldier, indicating Sargon.
But that was exactly what our dear Sargon did not know. By this time he was no longer a convinced and complete Sargon. A scared and doubting and protesting Preemby was struggling back into his being.
Up to the beginning of the calling of the disciples Sargon had ruled in his own soul assured and unchallenged. But he had expected his disciples to respond to his call, to recognize and remember, to be immediately understanding and helpful. The calling was to have been like the lighting of a lamp in their minds and the world about them. He had expected not only his own clear and unquestioning conviction but accession and reinforcement for it. And so leaping from soul to soul the restoration of Humanity, the Empire of Sargon would have spread. For disciples who made conditions, for disciples who followed, gesticulating strangely and spluttering and bubbling and stammering injurious criticisms, for disciples who asked for a minimum wage, and for disciples who came limpingafter one calling “Hi!” as though one was a cab, Sargon was totally unprepared.
Had he called these disciples rashly? Had he been premature again? Had he made another mistake?
These were unpleasantly urgent questions for a Master to solve while he was going briskly to nowhere in particular about four miles an hour along Holborn with his following gathering at his heels. Perhaps all leadership is a kind of flight. In every leader of men perhaps the fugitive has been latent. In Sargon now it was more than latent; it was awake and stirring, and its name was Preemby.
Since first mankind in its slow ascent from mere animalism became susceptible to Prophets and Great Teachers and Leaders there must always have been something of this internal conflict between the greatness of the mission and something discreetly less, and there must also have been always something of this clash of the disciples’ quality and motive with the teacher’s expectations. The very calling of disciples seems to admit a sense of weakness on the prophet’s part. Their calling puts him in pledge. He puts himself in pledge to them. They will, he knows, hold him to it when he falters; deep gregarious instincts assure him he will not desert his declaration to them even when he might desert himself. They desert him—inevitably. In the whole record of the world there is only one unvarying, faithful disciple, Abu Bekr. All other disciples failed and crippled their Masters and misled them. They deserted or they drove the prophet whither he would not go. Great things and little things of the same kind follow the same laws. At the head of that small wedge of commotion driving along lamp-lit Holborn in the October twilight went Sargon the Lord and Protector of Mankind, the Restorer of Faith and Justice, the Magnificent One, and though he was already aware of an error made and dangers incurred, he was still resolved to pull a great occasion by some stupendous gesture out of the jaws ofdisaster. And closer than his shadow was Preemby, scared nearly out of his wits, ready for a desperate headlong bolt down any side turning, a bolt from explanation, a bolt from effort, a bolt back to Preembyism and infinite nothingness.
Suddenly there came to Sargon a reassuring voice, the voice of one who had at least seemed to believe and accept.
There had been a slight altercation with Billy before Bobby came hurrying across the road. “There he goes!” said Bobby.
“That isn’t him,” said Billy. “Where’s his moustache? He was pretty nearly all moustache.”
“Shaved,” said Bobby. “I’d swear to him anywhere. A sort of prance in his walk. It’s our prophet, Billy, and he’s heading for trouble.”
“Looks more like a welsher,” said Billy. “Where’d he get that ecstatic nigger? It’s too rummy for me altogether, Bobby. You keep out of it. There’s a policeman tacking on now.”
Bobby hesitated. “Can’t let him go like that,” he said, and dodged across the road just as four racing omnibuses blotted out the Sargonites from Billy’s eyes.
“Forgive me, but where are you going?” said Bobby, stooping to Sargon’s grateful ear in spite of a considerable push from Mr. Godley.
“I have declared myself,” said Sargon, and straightway reassurance came. This was the First of the Disciples, and he had found his way to his Master. Quite clearly now did Sargon see what he had to do. These first followers had to be instructed. The Teaching had to begin. To do that it was necessary to lead them apart out of the hurry and tumult of the street. A vision came to Sargon of a long brightly lit table, and an array of disciples asking questions, and of memorable answers and great sayings. And straight ahead, glowing, bursting with light, already a friend, there towered up the inviting mass ofthe Rubicon Restaurant, pioneer in the great enterprise of supplying dinners de luxe at popular prices.
“Yonder,” said Sargon with a sweeping gesture of the hand, “we will rest and sit at meat, and I will talk, and all things shall be explained.”
The bright vision of a discourse to a gathering of disciples at a table had so restored the gloriousness of Sargon that by the time he reached the entrance of the Rubicon Restaurant, which bulges invitingly at a corner, he had called two further disciples. One of these acquisitions was a matchbox-holding beggar of venerable appearance, and the other a highly intelligent-looking man of perhaps fifty, lean and thinly bearded, carrying a book on the Doukhobors and wearing mittens and a tall black felt hat—a hat of an unusual shape rather like the steam-dome of a railway engine. This last acquisition was made at the very door of the Restaurant.
“Come in here,” said Sargon, seizing his arm, “and take meat with me. I have things to tell you that will change your whole life.”
“This is verysuddan,” said the intelligent-looking man, speaking in the high neighing protesting accent of an English scholar and gentleman, as he yielded himself to Sargon’s grip.
The actual invasion of the Rubicon Restaurant was a confused and swift affair. Sargon’s mind was clear and simple now; he had to make that vision of a long white table with his disciples grouped about him a reality or incur a great defeat. His following was animated by a mixture of unequal and incompatible motives, as all followings are, and it was now swollen to something near thirty—the exact number is uncertain because it passed marginally into mere onlookers and passers-by—by the action of the least worthy of the three out-of-work ex-soldiers,who had been uttering these magic words, “A Free Feed!” ever since the Rubicon Restaurant had been in sight.
The attention of that challenging individual, the outside porter, had happened to be distracted by the arrival of guests in a motor car when the Sargonites came along. They therefore swept through the outer entrance without encountering any obstacle other than the rotating door, which chopped the little crowd into ones and twos before it reached the entrance hall. Perhaps twenty got into the entrance hall, that space of marble and mahogany and hovering cloak-room attendants, before the mechanical incompetence of the man in deep mourning and his subsequent extraction by the politely indignant outer porter, the costermonger’s assistant intervening unhelpfully, jammed the apparatus. The man with the bruised shin seems to have fallen out before the restaurant was reached, and the vague-faced young woman in the magenta had drifted away at some unnoted moment.
In the spacious, glittering and observant outer hall a tendency to dispersal manifested itself. The out-of-work ex-soldier with the organ, seized by a sudden shyness, made for the gentleman’s cloak-room to deposit his instrument and became involved in an argument with his colleagues. The two ambiguous young men in caps and neck-wraps seem to have hesitated about the correctness of their costume. But Sargon held the newly caught gentleman tight, and the venerable match-seller did not mean to be separated from his patron in this bright, luxurious, dangerous place. Mr. Kama Mobamba, tall and smiling and shining, handed hat and umbrella to an attendant and followed closely upon the Master, serene in his assurance that these were the lordly portals of the long sought firm of African traders, Lean and Mackay. And Mr. Godley, with his natural passion for explicitness, would not leave Sargon until he had made it perfectly clear to him why he did not feelbound to accompany him further. He came next after the others into the Large Restaurant, making noises like a cuckoo clock that has lost control of itself. The reporter from Oldham was also holding on, though in considerable doubt now what sort of story he would have to write. The Eton boy, more than half aware now of his error, and so disposed to be a little detached also, came into the restaurant after depositing hat and umbrella without.
Bobby never came through. He was overtaken and held up in the entrance hall by Billy. “This isn’t your affair, Bobby,” said Billy. “This really isn’t your affair.”
“I can’t make out what he’s up to,” said Bobby. “He’s bound to get into trouble.”
“Never mind.”
“But I do mind.”
“The management’s scared,” said Billy. “They’re sending for the police. There’s a crowd gathered outside. Look at the faces looking in. See that chap peering through the hole in the glass? Nice thing for Tessy and Susan if we get into some police-court scrape.”
“But we can’t leave him to get into a mess here.”
“But how can we help him?”
Within the restaurant Sargon made his supreme and final effort and encountered swift and overwhelming defeat. But at any rate he did not run away. He made a frontal attack on the world he had set out to subdue—as Sargon. As Sargon, invincibly Sargon, he met disaster.
Things had not begun to be very brisk yet in the Rubicon Restaurant. But indeed it is never so brisk in the Rubicon of an evening as it is at lunch time; it is too far from the west; pre-eminently a luncheon place. And the hour even for such briskness as is customary had not yet come. The neat lines of the little white tables, each with its lamp andflowers, were only broken here and there by occupants. A family group going to a circus; a little knot of people going to a meeting in the Kingsway Hall; three or four couples of theatre-goers in evening dress; three or four of those odd couples of a rather inexperienced looking middle-aged business man and an extremely inexperienced looking young woman in imperfectly conceived dinner dress who are to be seen everywhere in London, and a group of three business men from the north dressed in a canny grey and dining with a resolute completeness from cocktail to liqueur, was all the company yet assembled in the body of the restaurant. There were one or two occupants in the lower gallery, dimly seen; the upper gallery was unlit. The atmosphere was still timorous and chilly; even the three men from the north exacted their tale of London luxury in a subdued and even furtive manner.
The staff was still largely unemployed. The head-waiters, wine-waiters and table-waiters fidgeted serviettes and glasses, or stood about with that expression of self-astonishment and melancholy upon their faces habitual to waiters. A slight hubbub in the entrance hall and the sound of the smashing of the glass in the rotating door by the last effort of the man in mourning preceded the entry of Sargon.
Every one looked up. The guests forgot their food and their company manners; the waiters forgot their secret sorrows. Sargon appeared, an inconspicuous figure, a little white, almost luminous face, round bright eyes. With one hand he still gripped his last disciple. With the other he waved aside the gobbets of speech which Mr. Godley proffered him. A tall expectant negro face rose like a shield of ebony and ivory above him. Behind were the match-seller and other followers, less clearly apprehended.
A head-waiter faced him. Behind hovered a manager and a little further off an assistant manager fiddled with the fruit on the buffet.
Sargon released his latest catch and stood forward.
“Set a table here,” he said with a fine gesture. “Set a table here for a great company. I have called a following and must needs discourse with them.”
“Table, sir,” said the head-waiter. “For ’ow many, sir?”
“A great company.”
“Well, sir,” said the head-waiter with an appealing glance at the manager, “we’d like to ’ave an idea ’ow many.”
The manager came up to take control and the assistant manager deserted his piles of fruit and came up behind helpfully. Sargon perceived he was against opposition and gathered all the forces within him. “It is a great company,” he said. “It must sit at meat with me here and I must discourse to it. These people yonder may join. Set all the tables one to another. The day of separate tables and separate lives is at an end. Let even the tables manifest the Brotherhood of Man. Under Our Rule. Set them together.”
At the words “Brotherhood of Man” one of the three business men from the north was smitten with understanding. “It’s a blood-stained Bolshevik,” he said, or words to that effect. “Shovin’ in here! Of all places!”
“Oughtn’t to be allowed,” said his friend. “Aren’t we to havenopeace from them?”
The first business man expressed a general antipathy for incarmined Bolsheviks and went on eating bread in a hurried, fussed, irritated manner. “When’s that Fricassee of Chicken coming?” he said. “They must have dropped it or something.”
But the manager’s intelligence had been even quicker than the business man’s. A swift signal had been given at the very beginning of Sargon’s speech. The waiter sent to summon the police had already sped past Billy and Bobby and the rest of the uncertain crowd in the entrance hall, draughty now and uneasy because of the brokenglass in the rotating door that the man in mourning had broken.
But Sargon heeded nothing of this byplay. He held on to the only course that he could see before him, which was to overwhelm the opposition that gathered against him.
“We don’t have banquets in this room, sir,” said the manager, playing for time. “Banquets you can have in the Syrian Hall or in the Elysian Chamber or in the Great Masonic or Little Masonic Hall—given due notice and after proper arrangements, but this is the general public restaurant. You can’tsuddenlygive a banquet to an unknown company or society or something here. We don’t cater for that. It isn’t done.”
“It will be done to-night,” said Sargon, with a glance and intonation and gesture that would have bent all dream Sumeria to its knees.
But the managers of European restaurants are made of sterner stuff, it seems, than were the old Sumerians. “I’m afraidnot, sir,” he said, and stood blandly obstructive.
“Do you know,” cried Sargon, “who it is with whom you have to deal?”
“Not one of our regular customers, sir,” said the manager, with the apologetic air of one who scores a point perforce.
“Listen,” said Sargon. “This day is an Epoch. This is the End and the Beginning of an Age. Men will count this banquet I shall hold here the sunrise moment of a new world. I am Sargon, Sargon the Great, Sargon the Restorer, come to proclaim myself. This multitude of my followers must be fed and instructed here, fed bodily and fed spiritually. See to it that your share is done.”
He made a gesture behind him when he spoke of his followers, but indeed there was no following behind him now save that one faithful but deluded African, and that perplexed but persistent Oldham reporter. The Eton boy had detached himself completely now. He was sitting at a table afar off, where he had been joined by his friend, andthey conversed in undertones and watched. Even Mr. Godley with his microscope, and the gentleman with the book about the Doukhobors, had faded out of this story by this time, and were going along Holborn exchanging and interrupting each other’s explanations and surmises about this singular affair that had so unexpectedly deflected their high and reasonable progress through life.
“I can only sus-sas-sas-suppose that-the-fellow-was-mad,” said Mr. Godley.
While Sargon’s retinue had melted the manager’s had gathered. Behind him now stood an array of waiters of every description, three dozen perhaps of various and yet uniform waiters, tall waiters and short ones, fat and thin, hairy and bald, young and old, waiters in aprons and one in shirt sleeves.
“I’m afraid you’re creating a disturbance here,” said the manager. “I’m afraid I must ask you to go, sir.”
Should he go? Never!
“Oh, generation of blind and deaf!” he cried, lifting his voice in an attempt to reach the scattered diners beyond this lowering crowd of waiting men, “do you not recognize me? Have you neither memories nor vision? Do you not see the light that offers itself to you? Can you not hear the call that thrills throughout the world? The hour for awakening has come. It is to-day; it is now. You may cease to be things of habit and servitude, and you may become masters of a world reborn. Now! This moment.Willthe change with me and the change is upon you! Sargon calls you, Sargon the Ancient and the Eternal, the Wise Ruler and the Bold One, calls you to light, to nobility, to freedom——”
“’Fraid we can’t let you make speeches here,” said the manager with hand extended.
“Let’s chuck ’im outnow,” said a short, thick-set waiter.
“Chuck him out!” said the anti-Bolshevik business man, standing up and speaking in a voice replete with indignationand gathering volume as he went on. “And then bring us our Fricassee of Chicken. We have been waiting Ten Minutes forTHAT FRICASSEE OF CHICKEN!”
And then a voice could be heard saying: “Wot’s it allabout?” and suddenly a policeman stood beside Sargon and overshadowed him.
A wave of horror went through his soul, a wave of horror that was entirely Preemby. Throughout his whole virtuous life he had never once been in antagonism to the Police. “Oh, Lord! oh, Lord!” cried this horror in his soul. “What have I done now? I’m going to be run in!” The blue eyes grew rounder and he gasped for air, but no one there perceived how close he came to ignominious collapse. Preemby shivered and passed. Sargon choked and then spoke stoutly. “What is this, Officer?” he said. “Would you lay hands on the Master of the World?”
“My duty, sir, if he makes a disturbance,” said the policeman. “Master or no Master.”
Very rapidly did Sargon adjust himself to this new phase in his affairs. He was defeated. He was to be led away. Yes, but he was still Sargon. The Power that ruled him had thrust him into defeat, but that could only be to try him. He had not expected this of the Power, but since the Power willed it, so it had to be.
“You understand, Officer, what it is you are doing?” he said, magnificently and gently.
“Quite, sir. I ’ope you don’t intend to give us any trouble.”
A captive! Not thus had he foreseen the revelation of the Master. He gave one last look at the rich decorations of the great restaurant in which the opening banquet was to have taken place. Not here then but in some squalid police-court it was that the New Empire of Justice and Brotherhood had to be proclaimed.
He turned in silence and went out at the policeman’s side quietly, deep in thought.
So ended Sargon’s first effort to enter into his Empire. Unless we count the visit to Buckingham Palace as his first attempt.
But before we go on to tell of the unexpected and dreadful experience that now came upon him, we must record one or two minor incidents of his capture.
One is the behaviour of Mr. Kama Mobamba. He watched the closing incidents in the restaurant with a growing amazement upon his great bronze face. Had this little blue-eyed man been, after all, leading him wrong? When at last Sargon was led away, Mr. Mobamba moved at first as though still half inclined to follow him. Then he stood still, frowned reflectingly and fumbled at his ticket-pocket. With some effort he produced the sheet of paper that seemed to be his one intelligible link with London; it was now in a rather crumpled condition. Smoothing it out with his great hands, he advanced upon the manager with it extended.
“What’s this?” said the manager.
The black gentleman bowed with infinite suavity, still tending his paper. “Non spik English,” said the black gentleman. “Portugaish. Lean-a-Kay. Lemonallstree.”
He was difficult to direct.
Meanwhile in the entrance hall Bobby tacitly denied all knowledge of Sargon. He was still hovering there with Billy, held by a curious half-maternal solicitude. The ex-soldiers had “mizzled,” to use the expressive word of the man with the organ, at the appearance of policemen; the man in mourning and his troubles had been cleared up; but there were still quite a number of people hanging about in a state of vague anticipation, and the young reporter was trying to find some one who understood the rare and obscure language of Oldham in order to verify his facts. And there were several policemen; one evidently asuperior officer, a very good-looking man in a peaked cap and a frogged coat.
“Here he comes!” said Billy, and Sargon was led out.
There was a silence as he passed through the hall to the rotating door. And upon Sargon, it seemed to Bobby, there rested a hitherto unnoted dignity. He looked neither to the right nor the left, and his eyes were exceedingly mournful.
“But what will they do with him?” asked Bobby.
“You don’t happen to know him, sir?” asked the superior officer abruptly.
“Not a bit!” said Billy, taking the answer out of Bobby’s mouth. “Never seen him before. We just came in here to see what was up.”
And by his silence Bobby acquiesced.
“I’ve got no power to move you on here,” said the police officer, and smiled a suggestion of inopportuneness to Billy, and motioned to his satellites that the business there was at an end.
“We’d better go home,” said Billy, interpreting the smile.
The three friends sat round a fire in the white room with the purple curtains, and Bobby poured out his regret that he had denied Sargon. “They’ve taken him off, Tessy,” he said for the third time, “and I do not know what they will do with him.”
“Discharge him with a caution,” said Billy with a drawing-board on his knee. “He hadn’t committed very much of an offence that I can see.”
“And then?” said Bobby, and meditated on the fire.
“I shall go round to the police-court and try to pick him up again afterwards if they let him go,” he said presently.
“Better leave it all alone,” said Billy.
But Tessy sat in her arm-chair between Billy and the fireand looked at Bobby’s preoccupied profile rather sweetly out of the warm shadow. And nobody in the world saw her.
“They’ll warn him and he’ll come back here of his own accord, Bobby,” said Tessy comfortingly.
“Of course he’ll come back,” said Billy.
“Very likely, Tessy,” said Bobby. “But suppose they don’t.”
He got up and stood by the fire. “I suppose I ought to go upstairs and do some work.”
“I suppose you had,” said Billy.
“How is the novel getting on?” asked Tessy.
“Not much done yet,” said Bobby. “The Prophet has disorganized the actual writing. But I’ve learnt a lot of things that will tell some day. And of course I have to do all my Aunt Suzannah stuff. Aunt Suzannah gets more and more popular. You can’t imagine the things they ask me. It’s all material in the long run. Still—it takes time.... I suppose they’ve locked him in a beastly little cell somewhere. And he’s wondering why they don’t see that he’s truly the great Sargon, come again to this world.... Billy, the world’s a dangerous place, a dangerous, unkind place. Why couldn’t they let him rip a bit? And his poor little map of the Whole World upstairs—he always called it the Whole World—and his little paper star-machine, and his poor little empty room and his poor little empty bed.”
“I protest,” said Billy, putting his drawing-board aside. “Bobby, you are a case of morbid overgrowth of the sympathies. You are a new disease. You are the type case of Bobbyism. It’s bad enough that you should sympathize openly with that little devil Susan when I have spanked her, and so undo all my teaching. It’s bad enough that you should do about a third of Mrs. Richman’s work because she needs light and air. I can even understand something of your emotional relationships with variousstray cats and pigeons. But when it comes to your being sorry for a poor little empty lodging-house bed, I draw the line. Absolutely, Bobby; I draw the line. Poor little empty bed! It’s—it’smorbid, Bobby.”
“But of course he was thinking of Sargon,” said Tessy. “You’ll go to the police-court to-morrow, Bobby?”
“I’ll go—in spite of Billy. I don’t care if it is a disease. I’m worried about that little man. I’m afraid. He’s too round-eyed for this cruel world.”
And next morning Bobby went. He went to Lemon Square Court and sat through a frowsty morning and waited for Sargon who never appeared. He heard all the morning “drunks” and suchlike come up for judgment, a case about stolen soda-water syphons, two matrimonial differences, and all about the wilful smashing of a plate-glass window with intent to rob, but nothing about Sargon. The magistrate vanished and the court began to disperse. He asked questions of a policeman who had never heard of Sargon and the little trouble at the Rubicon Restaurant. Had he come to the right court? the policeman asked. Bobby hurried headlong to Minton Street. Minton Street, too, it seemed, had never heard of Sargon. It did not occur to Bobby to ask in either police station. He retired baffled. He tried to find something about Sargon in the evening newspapers; there was not a line about the Rubicon or him. Perhaps he had not been charged! He hurried back and rushed upstairs full of a vain surmise; the room was desolate, the window open, the map of the world on the floor. Had Sargon been spirited out of existence?
Next day brought neither Sargon nor news of Sargon. Bobby lay awake of nights.
After three full days Billy, who had been watching his friend furtively, remarked in a casual manner: “Why don’t you go and see the Head Panjandrum at the Lemon Square Police Station about it? He’d be sure to know if anyone does.”
Shown in to Inspector Mullins, Bobby found himself confronted by the same good-looking officer he had seen in the entrance hall of the Rubicon Restaurant. “You’re the young man who didn’t happen to know anything about him, three nights ago,” said Inspector Mullins, not answering Bobby’s questions.
Bobby explained the situation candidly.
“Doesn’t help much now,” said the Inspector. “Still it’s all in order. We took him, in the exercise of our discretion, to the Workhouse Infirmary—for observation as to his mental state. Three clear days they keep them there. Then they’re either certified or let go. Or charged.”
“Certified?” asked Bobby.
“As a lunatic,” said Inspector Mullins.
“And what happened to him?”
“Usual thing, I suppose. He was a pretty clear case. By this time he’s a certified lunatic, I suppose, and either at Cummerdown Hill or on his way there. Or if that’s full—somewhere else.”
“Phew!” said Bobby. “Pretty quick.”
He sat disconcerted. “Can I go and see him at Cummerdown Hill?” he asked.
“Probably not,” said Inspector Mullins. “Seeing you’re not a relation.”
“I’m interested in him.”
“It isn’t your business.”
“Exactly. But I like him. And I don’t think he’s exactly mad.... Seems odd of his people—Do you know anything about his people? I might go and talk to them about him.”
“That’s possible,” said the Inspector. “I don’t know who they are. You might find out at the Workhouse Infirmary or they might tell you from Cummerdown. I don’t know. Very likelytheydon’t know who his relations are. There’s all sorts of such stragglers in the world. Possibly he hasn’t any relations—the sort of relations, I mean, who wouldwant to bother about him. My impression is that once a man or woman is certified and put away it’s rather hard for an outsider to get through. But, as you say, you can but try. Sorry I can’t tell you any more. I never saw him myself at all—except as he went past me. Not my affair.... Yes, our usual procedure in such a case.... Oh! no trouble. Good morning.”
Left sitting squarely, an embodiment of implacable and indifferent law and rule.