CHAPTER THE THIRDThe Last Phase
ITwas part of the general unsatisfactoriness of Bobby’s make-up that he was acutely responsive to meteorological conditions. That late Indian summer was over now, and the heavens and the earth and the air between began to push, hustle, wet, chill, darken, distress and bully him. Jumbled grey clouds came hurrying across Dymchurch from Dungeness and the Atlantic, torn, angular, outstretched clouds with malicious expressions like witches and warlocks, emitting fierce squirts of rain. Under their skirts came the waves in long rolling regiments, threatening from afar, breaking into premature handfuls of foam, gathering force at last, towering up for a last culminating thud against the sea-wall and spouting heavenward in white fountains of suddy water.
“Face it, man,” said Bobby. “Face it. It’s only Nature. Brace up to it. Think of this poor girl.”
He forced himself to do a morning’s walk along the top of the sea-wall, with his wet trousers flapping against his legs like flags against their staves.
“Glorious wind!” he told Sargon when he went in to see him. “But I wish there was a gleam of sun.”
“Have you any news from Christina Alberta?” asked Sargon.
“There’s hardly time yet for a reply to my wire. But she’ll surely come,” said Bobby, and went downstairs to dry his legs at the fire.
He did not expect a summons to Hythe to meet the young lady very much before half-past twelve. Meanwhile he went out to the shed and assured himself that the motor bicycle and side-car were in perfect order for a hasty journey. Half-past twelve came, one, half-past one. He had some lunch. He became very restless, and rose and looked out of the window frequently to see if the messenger girl was coming with Christina Alberta’s telegram. About two a large, silent, luxurious-looking, hired Daimler car appeared outside and stopped at Mrs. Plumer’s gate. A hatless bobbed head appeared at the window and exchanged remarks with the driver, who descended and opened the door. The car emitted a handsome and determined young woman of advanced appearance, hatless and short-skirted, and a lean, dark, prosperous-looking man of thirty-eight or forty in blue serge and a grey felt hat. The man opened the gate for the girl, and she surveyed the house as she advanced.
Bobby realized that Christina Alberta had not kept her promise to be blue-eyed and fragile. She had betrayed him. Yet for all her treachery he had built up a sense of personal relationship with her that gripped him still. He watched her approach with an excitement he found difficult to control. He wondered who the devil the dark man was. A cousin perhaps. She discovered Bobby watching her from the window and their eyes met.
Bobby, with an instinct that is given to young people for such occasions, perceived that he interested Christina Alberta extremely. He parleyed with her and Devizes in Mrs. Plumer’s little downstairs room. He spoke chiefly to her. Devizes he treated as a secondary figure, a voice at her elbow. “He’s got a nasty cold on his chest,” he said. “He’s been asking for Miss Preemby——”
“Christina Alberta,” said Christina Alberta.
“Christina Alberta a lot. But it was only last night I could get the address out of him. He’d forgotten it before. We’ve been here over a day. He caught the cold coming here.”
“How did you come here?” Devizes threw in.
“Motor bicycle,” said Bobby. “But there was a lot of waiting about before we could get away and it was a cold raw morning, and he had just his nightgown and dressing-gown and slippers. So hard to foresee everything.”
“But how did you come to be rescuing him?”
Bobby smiled at Devizes. “Somebody had to be rescuing him.”
He turned to Christina Alberta again. “Couldn’t bear the thought of his being under lock and key. He took a room, you see, in the place where I lodged, and there was something innocent and—delightful about him. I’ve a weakness, a sympathy perhaps, with absurdity.... You ought to go up to him and see him.”
“Yes, we’d better look at him,” said Devizes.
(Who the devil was this fellow?)
Bobby asserted himself. “Christina Alberta first, I think.”
He took Christina Alberta up to her daddy and closed the door on a warm embrace. “And now, Mr. de Vezes, or whatever you are,” he said to himself on the staircase, “where doyoucome in?” He descended and found Devizes standing very irritatingly upon his hearthrug before his fire. As he stood there a remote resemblance to Christina Alberta was perceptible. Bobby had an incoherent recognition of the fact that in some obscure way Devizes was responsible for Christina Alberta’s failure to produce blue eyes. He was a little slow in saying what he intended to say, and Devizes was able to take the initiative. “Forgive my blunt impertinence,” he said, “but may I ask who you are?”
“I’m a writer,” said Bobby, refraining from any glance at the accumulation of Aunt Suzannah material upon the side table.
“You’ve finished lunch?” asked Devizes in a disregarded parenthesis.
“May I ask the same question of you?” said Bobby, “and how it is you come to be connected with the Preembys?”
“I’m a blood relation,” said Devizes, considering it. “On the mother’s side. A sort of cousin. And I happen to be a nervous and mental specialist. That’s why I’ve been brought in to-day.”
“I see,” said Bobby. “You’ve got no intention of—putting him back?”
“None at all. We’re not antagonists, Mr——”
“Roothing.”
“We’re on the same side. You did well to get him out. We were trying to do the same thing by less original methods. We’re very grateful to you. The lunacy laws are rather a clumsy and indiscriminating machine. But, as you probably know, if he keeps clear of them for fourteen days, they’ll have to begin with him all over again. He renews his sanity. We’re allies in that. We’ve got to know each other better. Your intervention—most surprising—strikes me as being at once eccentric and courageous. I wish you’d tell me more about it, how you met him, how they got hold of him, and what set you thinking of an escape.”
“H’m,” said Bobby, and came and asserted his right to half the hearthrug. He had thought of the way in which he could tell this story—to Christina Alberta—the original Christina Alberta with the blue eyes. He felt that that version needed considerable revision, indeed, possibly even a complete rearrangement, for the present hearer. He was by no means sure he wanted to tell it to the present hearer. The man was a doctor and a mental specialist and a distantrelation, and he was for keeping Sargon out of an asylum, and that was all to the good, but it still lingered in Bobby’s mind that he was an interloper. Nevertheless, he made way for Bobby quite civilly on the hearthrug, and his manner was attentive and respectful. Bobby embarked upon a description of Sargon’s first appearance in Midgard Street.
Devizes showed himself alert and intelligent. He grasped the significance of Sargon’s projected visit to the dome of Saint Paul’s at once. “I’ve no doubt he did it,” said Devizes. “Neither have I,” said Bobby, “though I’ve not asked him about it yet.” They pieced together the probable story of the calling of the disciples before Billy and Bobby had come upon the procession. “It’s touching,” said Devizes, “and immense.” Bobby approved these words.
“You see how he got me,” said Bobby.
A distinct flavour of friendliness for Devizes crept by imperceptible degrees into Bobby’s mind. Difficulties that had seemed to threaten his explanation vanished; this man, he perceived, could understand anything a fellow did. Devizes made him feel that the extraction of Sargon from Cummerdown by a perfect stranger was the most simple and natural thing to do imaginable. Bobby warmed to his story; his sense of humour took heart of grace, and he became frank and amusing about his difficulties on the visiting day. As he was telling of the foxy-faced deaf mute, Christina Alberta came back again into the downstairs room.
“He takes me as a matter of course,” she said. “He seems weak and drowsy and his chest is bad.” She spoke more definitely to Devizes. “I think you ought to overhaul him.”
“There is a doctor in attendance?” he asked Bobby.
Bobby explained. Devizes considered. Was Sargon dozing? Yes. Then let him doze for a bit. Bobby, workingnow a little more consciously for effect, went on with his story. Christina Alberta regarded him with manifest approval.
By tea-time Bobby had adjusted his mind to the existence of Devizes and the unexpectedness of Christina Alberta. All that carried over from his state of expectation was the idea that his relations with Christina Alberta were to be very profound and intimate. He still believed that, hidden away in her somewhere, there must be a blue-eyed, yielding, really feminine person, but it was very deeply hidden. Meanwhile the superimposed disguise struck him as agreeable, alert, humorous, and friendly. Devizes too he saw more and more as a strong, capable, understanding personality. He had seen Devizes examining Sargon, and it was clever, confidence-provoking doctoring. Sargon’s lungs, he said, were badly congested, especially on the left side; he was on the edge of pneumonia and without much vitality to fight it. He ought to be kept in a warmer, less draughty room with a night-nurse available. Mrs. Plumer had no room for a nurse, and not an hour away by automobile was Paul Lambone’s excessively comfortable week-end cottage at Udimore. A little masterly telephoning and telegraphing and the cottage was available, fires were alight in the best bedroom, a trained nurse was on her way to it, and it was all settled for Sargon, warmly wrapped up and fortified with hot-water bottles, to go thither. Bobby found himself a mere accessory in this new system of things; he was to follow next day to Udimore on his motor bicycle, for there would be room for all of them in Paul Lambone’s cottage. Apparently Paul Lambone’s conception of a simple cottage in the wilderness involved a housekeeper, several servants, and four or five visitors’ rooms.
This fellow Devizes carried out all his arrangements with a smooth competence that gave Bobby no scope for self-assertion. Sargon and Christina Alberta and Devizeswould depart at five and get to Udimore by six, by which time the nurse would be installed. Then Devizes would go back to London and get there in time to dress for a dinner he had to attend. On Saturday morning he would be busy in London, and then he would come back to Udimore and see if Sargon was recovered enough for the beginnings of his mental treatment. Perhaps the unknown Paul Lambone would be there too. He was a lazy person, Bobby gathered; he’d have to be brought down by Devizes. Bobby was to stay at Udimore for some days. He made modest protestations. “No, you’reinit now,” said Devizes cheerfully and glanced at Christina Alberta. “You’re in for Sargon like the rest of us. Bring your work with you.”
“Yes, do come,” said Christina Alberta.
The only reason Bobby had for resisting the invitation was that it attracted him so much.
This “cottage” at Udimore, which struck Bobby as being a really very pretty and comfortable modern house, and these three people, Christina Alberta, Devizes and Paul Lambone, who now grouped themselves round Sargon, exercised his mind in a quite extraordinary way. They struck him as being novel and definite to a degree he’d never met in anyone before, and even the house was fresh and decisive in its broad white grace, like no house that had ever before held his attention. It made most of the other houses he had ever observed seem accidental and aggregatory and second-hand and wandering in their purpose. But this house was the work of a clever young architect who had considered Paul Lambone intelligently, and its white rough-cast walls sat comfortably on the hill-side and looked with an honest, entirely detached admiration at Rye and across the marsh to Winchelsea and the remote blue sea; and it had seats and arbours and a gazebo forsitting about in, and up hill was a walled garden with broad paths up which you looked from the back of the house through lead-paned windows. You could watch the sunset from a number of excellent points of view, but it did not shine upon any room to weary and blind you. There was a kind wall to shelter hollyhocks and delphiniums from the south-west wind, and to bear a plum or so and a pear and a fig tree. Downstairs was mainly one great rambling room with a dining recess in one corner and the power of opening itself out into a loggia, and with conversational centres about fire-places or windows as the season might require, but there were several little studies about the house in which one could be shut off and write. Bookshelves grew in convenient corners, and the house was everywhere mysteriously warm from unseen and scarce suspected radiators. The house was so like Paul Lambone, and Paul Lambone so much a part of his house that he seemed to be really no more than its voice and its eyes.
Paul Lambone was the first successful writer Bobby had ever met. Bobby knew various needy young writers, tadpole writers, insecure writers, but this was the first completely grown-up and established and massively adult writer he had ever known. The man struck Bobby as being stupendously secure and free and prosperous. And the remarkable thing was that he was in no way a great writer, no Dickens nor Scott nor Hardy; his work wasn’t, after all, in Bobby’s opinion anything so very remotely above Bobby’s own efforts. A certain terseness he had at times, a certain penetration: those were the chief differences. In Bobby’s imagination the literary and artistic life had hitherto had an unavoidable flavour of casual adventure, glorious achievements, maddening difficulties, wild delights and tragic unhappinesses. Swift, Savage, Goldsmith, the Carlyles, Balzac, Dumas, Edgar Allan Poe, these had been his types. But this new bright house was as sound and comfortable as any country house, and Lambone sat in itwith as safe a dignity as though he was a provincial banker or a mine owner or the senior member of some widespread firm of solicitors. No fears of losing his “job” or “writing himself out” oppressed him. He said and did exactly what he thought proper, and the policeman saluted him as he passed.
If this sort of thing could spring from theBook of Everyday Wisdomand Paul’s amiable novels, what hitherto unsuspected possibilities of accumulation and ease and security and helpfulness might there not be in Aunt Suzannah’s kindly responsiveness? It had never before seemed credible to Bobby that a day might come when he would be secure and his own master, able to refuse limitations himself and to release other people from limitations. All Bobby’s life hitherto had been a matter of direction and eminent necessity. He had beensentto school andsentto college. He had been on the eve of beingput intothe position of agent upon a friendly estate when the Great War had seized upon him and the rest of his generation and drilled him and sent him off to Mesopotamia. And after the war he had had to do something to supplement his diminished inheritance. Life had been so indicated and prescribed for him at every stage, his parents’ existence had been so entirely directed by a class tradition, that Bobby’s mind was exceptionally well prepared to be impressed by Paul Lambone’s freedoms.
It was curious to note how completely Paul Lambone arose out of the present-day world, and how completely he didn’t belong to it. He had all its advantages and so little of its standard obligations. He had escaped from it with most of its gifts. He had to go to no court, follow no seasons, make no calls, and perform no functions. Was he exceptional in his circumstances altogether, or were there a lot of people escaping, as he was escaping, prosperously, from the old decaying social system? a queer sort of new people who didn’t belong?
Bobby sat on the terrace and looked over the back of his seat at this extremely new but very sightly and comfortable cottage of Lambone’s, with this freshly arrived idea of a new sort of people getting loose in the world and living unrelated to the old order of things and shaping out new ways of living, very active in his mind. This house seemed to embody that idea; it was new and novel, but not a bit apologetic nor rebellious. It was just breaking out like a new fashion. It was just arising like a new century. He had always assumed that revolutions came from below through the rage of the excluded and the disinherited. He had thought every one took that for granted. But suppose revolutions were merely smashes-up that hadn’t very much to do with real progress either way, and that the new age dawned anywhere in the social order where people could get free enough to work out new ideas.
New ideas!
Sargon was new, Paul Lambone was new, Devizes new; before the war there could not have been any such people. They had grown out of their own past selves; they were as different from pre-war people as nineteenth-century people had been different from eighteenth-century people. Newest of all was this Christina Alberta who had effaced her blue-eyed predecessor. She was so direct and free in her thoughts and talk that she made Bobby feel that his own mind wore a bonnet and flounces. He had gone for two walks with her, once to Brede and once to Rye, and he liked her tremendously. Whether he was in love with her he didn’t yet know. Falling in love with her for anyone was evidently going to be a quite unconventional, untested, and difficult series of exercises. Nothing at all like that unborn normal affair with the non-existent blue-eyed girl.
She seemed to like him, and particularly the way his hair grew on his head. She had mentioned it twice and ruffled it once.
A queer aspect of the situation was the riddle of how sheand Sargon and himself came to be the guests of Paul Lambone with Devizes in attendance. It was just a part of Paul Lambone’s freedom from prescription that he should be able to give sanctuary to Sargon and assemble this odd, unconventional week-end party. But Bobby had a sense of hidden links and missing clues. Devizes was a natural enough visitor, of course; he was manifestly Lambone’s close friend. But their interest in Sargon was stronger than Bobby could imagine it ought to be. He was puzzled; he examined all sorts of possibilities in a gingerly fashion. Some impulse like his own, no doubt, but not quite the same, lay at the bottom of this—Sargonism.
Bobby had begun by feeling very hostile to Devizes as an unexpected intruder on a system of relationships sufficiently interesting without him. He was glad that he had to go to London for Friday, and not particularly pleased by his return on Saturday. Then he found his feelings changing to a curious respect, mingled with a defensive element that was almost like fear.
Devizes was more aware of you than Lambone. He looked at you, his mind came at you. It had the habit of coming at people. He was more actively and aggressively interested in things than Lambone and more self-forgetful. Lambone observed enough to make bright comments; Devizes made penetrating observations. Bobby often felt encumbered with himself; most people he thought were encumbered with themselves, but Devizes to a conspicuous degree wasn’t. He was a man of science; a man of scientific habits. Bobby had known one or two scientific men before, rather wrapped away from ordinary things, but the interest that wrapped them was something that wrapped them away from oneself; one had been concerned chiefly with stresses in glass and another with the eggs of echinoderms. You always seemed to be looking at the backs of these fellows’ heads and smiling at their immensepreoccupation. But this man Devizes was wrapped up in the motives and thoughts of people; he didn’t look away from you; he looked into you. That grew upon Bobby’s consciousness. Devizes’ eye lacked delicacy.
He had come down for the week-end chiefly to deal with Sargon. He went up and had long talks to Sargon. He was “treating” Sargon. He didn’t go up and talk to Sargon as man to man, as Bobby would have done. He went up to a sort of mental jiu-jitsu with Sargon to exercise him and push him about into new attitudes. Devizes was formidable enough in himself, but far more formidable as a portent. He had all the appearance of being a precursor, the most vigorous precursor—they were all precursors!—of a new type of human relationships, relationships without delicate reservations, without rich accumulations of feeling behind emotions avoided and things unsaid. So it seemed to Bobby, who didn’t for a moment suspect how much these people were avoiding and suppressing. Christina Alberta’s thoughts and speech seemed to him to be moving about without a stitch on, like the people in some horrible Utopia by Wells. He compared the vast impalpable network of “understanding” he and Tessy had woven between each other.
“New people,” he whispered, and looked Paul Lambone’s new house in the face. To him they were stupendously new, an immense discovery. The war had overstrained him, he realized, and left him too tired for a time to see new things. He had been one of the vast multitude of those who had come out of the war in the expectation of a trite and obvious old-fashioned millennium, and who expressed their disappointment by declaring that nothing had happened except devastation and impoverishment. They were too jaded at first to observe anything else. But indeed Bobby now realized the European world had been travelling faster and faster since the break-up of the armed peace in 1914; and here were new types, new habits ofthought, new ideas, new reactions, new morals, new ways of living. He discovered himself in the advent of a new age, a new age that was coming so fast that there hadn’t been time ever to clear the forms and institutions of the old age away. They weren’t reversed or abolished, they weren’t overthrown, they were just disregarded. Which was just why it was possible to get along for a year or so without noting the tremendous changes everything was undergoing.
“New People.” Did that apply to Sargon? That was Sargon’s room: the two long windows between the buttresses. Was Sargon also an escape from the established order of relationships into novel things? What was the real significance of the absurd little man with his preposterous map of the world and his still more preposterous planisphere, who wanted to be Lord of the Earth?
When Bobby came to talk it over with Sargon it seemed to him that Devizes had taken the little man completely to pieces and presented him with the disarticulated portions of himself. Devizes went back to London on Monday; he took Christina Alberta with him in his hired car; but Lambone urged Bobby to stay on for a day or so to cheer up the patient. Lambone, so far as he could discover his own intentions, meant to stay on at Udimore for a week or more and work. Bobby saw Christina Alberta off, meditated on her for an hour, then gave the rest of the morning to Aunt Suzannah and the afternoon to Sargon; and Sargon, who was distinctly better, sat propped up by two pillows and discussed the dissected structure of himself.
“Not a bit fatigued,” said Sargon. “I’m having a tonic now. Every three hours.”
He considered his next remark for some moments before he made it. “Whoisthis Mr. Paul Lambone?” he asked.“It is very hospitable for him to entertain us. Very. (H’rrmp).... Is he a friend of yours?”
“He’s quite a well-known writer. He’s a friend of Christina Alberta’s.”
“She has so many friends. Young people do nowadays. And what is this Dr. Devizes?”
“He is a nervous specialist, and he was consulted—he was consulted about the possibilities of getting you away from that—Place.”
“Nervous specialist. He is a wonderful talker—most intelligent and (h’rrmp) understanding. I have a curious feeling that somewhere, somewhen, somehow I have met him before. In this life—or some other. It is all quite vague, and he does not seem to have any corresponding recollection. No. Probably a coincidence of some sort.”
Bobby saw nothing in the coincidence.
Sargon shut his eyes for a second or so.
“We talked of my recent experiences,” he resumed.
“Naturally,” said Bobby, helping.
“There has been a lot of confusion about my personality. It is a trouble more frequent nowadays than it used to be. Most of my life I have thought that I was a person called Albert Edward Preemby, a limited person, a most limited person. Then I had a light. I began to realize that nobody could really be such a thing as that Albert Edward Preemby. I began to seek for myself. I had reason—too long to explain—to suppose that I was Sargon the First, the great Sumerian, the founder of the first Empire in the world. Then—then came trouble. You saw something of it. I grasped at the sceptre—one afternoon—in Holborn—rashly. Most painful affair. I was sent to that Place. Yes. It shook me. Humiliations. Hardship. Real—uncleanness. I doubted whether I wasn’t after all just that little Preemby. A human rabbit. My faith faltered. I admit it faltered.”
He mused painfully for some moments.
Then he laid his hand reassuringly on Bobby’s wrist.
“IamSargon,” he said. “Talking to your friend Devizes has cleared my mind greatly. IamSargon, but in a rather different sense from what I had imagined. Preemby was, as I had supposed, a mere accidental covering. But——”
The little face puckered with intellectual effort. “I am notexclusivelySargon. You—you perhaps are still unawakened—but you are Sargon too. His blood is in our veins. We are co-heirs. It is fairly easy to understand. Sargon, regal position. Naturally many wives. Political—biological necessity. Offspring numerous. They again—positions of advantage—many children. Next generation, more. Like a vast expanding beam of intellectual and moral force. You can prove it—prove it by mathematics. Dr. Devizes and I—we worked it out on a piece of paper. We are all descended from Sargon, just as we are all descended from Cæsar—just as nearly all English and Americans are descended from William the Conqueror. Few people realize this. A little arithmetic—it is perfectly plain. Long before the Christian era the blood of Sargon was diffused throughout all mankind. His traditions still more so. We all inherit. Not merely from him—from all the great kings, from all the noble conquerors. From all the brave and beautiful women. All the statesmen and inventors and creators. If not directly from them, from their fathers and mothers. All that rich wine from the past is in my veins. And I thought I was just Albert Edward Preemby! And at Woodford Wells I went for a silly little walk nearly every afternoon with sixpence in my pocket to spend and nothing in the world to do! For twenty years. It seems incredible.”
The blue eyes sought confirmation from Bobby, who nodded.
“There was I walking about Epping Forest in a suit of clothes I never really liked—a rather exaggerated golfing suit with baggy knickerbockers that my wife chose forme—they seemed to get baggier every year—and I was quite ignorant that I was the heir of all the ages, and that the whole earth down to the centre and up to the sky was mine. And yours. Ours. I had no sense of duty to it; I hadn’t woke up to self-respect. I wasn’t only Sargon, but all the men and women who have ever mattered on earth. I was God’s Everlasting Servant. Instead of which I was rather timid about horses and strange dogs, and often when I saw people approaching and thought they were observing me and speaking about me, I did not know what to do with my arms and legs, and became quite confused about them.”
He paused to smile at the thought of it.
“It has been interesting to talk to your Dr. Devizes of the absurdity of that contracted blind littleness in which I lived so long. We talked of the Great Man I really was, the Great Men we really were. All the Incorporated Great Men. You and I, the same. Because in the past you and I and he were one, and in the future we may come together again. We have just separated to take hold of things as the hand separates into thumb and fingers. We talked of the time when the spirit that is in us made the first hut, launched the first ship, rode the first horse. We could not remember those great moments as exact incidents, but we recalled them—generally. We recalled a blazing day when a band of men went out across a sandy desert for the first time, and when a man first stood upon a glacier. It was—slippery. Then I remembered watching my people heap up the earth-walls of my first city. We went out against the robbers of the first herds. Then Dr. Devizes and I stood in imagination on a sort of quarter-deck, and watched our men lugging the great oars of the galley that took us to Iceland and Vinland. We both saw. We planned the Great Walls of China; I counted our lateen sails upon our grand canal. You see, I have built a million wonderful temples and made an innumerable multititudeof lovely sculptures, paintings, jewels and decorations. I had forgotten it, but I have. And I have loved a billion loves—I have indeed—to bring me here. We all have. We talked it over, your Dr. Devizes and I. I had not dreamt the millionth part of what I am. When I thought I was Sargon wholly and solely I still did not realize my great inheritance and my enormous destiny. Even now I am only beginning to see that.... It is preposterous to think that I who have all this past of efforts and adventures behind me should have been content to run about Woodford Wells in a ridiculous suit of tweeds with plus-four breeches that were extremely heavy and uncomfortable—they tickled me, you know—on hot days. Yet I did. I did.... Not realizing.... I used to go on until I could endure it no longer, and then I would have to stop and scratch behind my knees....
“Of course, when I called myself Sargon, King of Kings, and proposed to rule all the world I was—Dr. Devizes called it—symbolizing. Of course, everybody is really Sargon, King of Kings, and everybody ought to take hold of all the world and save it and rule it just as I have got to do.”
He had concluded his exposition. He had spread out his disarticulated parts before Bobby just as Devizes had returned them to him.
“But just what are you going to do?” said Bobby.
“I have been thinking of that.”
For a little while he continued to think.
“It becomes all different,” he said, “when one realizes that one is not theonlySargon. I thought of being a great king, a great leader, with the rest of the world just following me. I doubt if I ever felt quiteupto a job of that sort, but I couldn’t see any other way of beingSargon and a king. Now I do. I did my best, but even when I went to Buckingham Palace I realized that the thing was going to be too big for me. I was telling Dr. Devizes—I told him, that since he was Sargon and King just as much as me and that almost anyone might become Sargon and King, then it wasn’t a case for palaces and thrones any longer, or for being proclaimed and crowned—such things were as much out of date as flint implements; and that the real things was to be just a kingly person and work with all the other kingly persons in the world to make the world worthy of our high descent. Anyone who wakes up to that becomes a kingly person. We can be active kings even if we remain kings incognito. One can be a laundryman like I was when I was just Preemby, and think of nothing but the profits and needs and vanities and fears of a little laundryman—and how dull it was!—or one can be a king, the descendant of ten thousand kings, the joint heir to the inheritance of all human affairs, the lord of the generations still unborn—who happens to be living in exile as a laundryman.”
He paused.
“I agree with most of that,” said Bobby. “It’s—it’s attractive.”
“So far it is as plain as can be. But after that the difficulties begin. It isn’t enough just to say you are a king. You have to be a king. You have todo. You can’t be a king and not do kingly things. But it’s just there that Dr. Devizes and I—we weren’t so clear. There’s a lot to be thought out. What is my kingly task? In this frail body—and what I am? I am not clear. Yet the mere fact that I am not clear shows clearly where I have to begin. I have to get clear. I have to get knowledge, find out about my kingdom. That’s reasonable. I have to learn more about my great inheritance, our great inheritance, the history of it, the possibilities of it, the ways of the men who misrule it. I have to learn about business andeconomics and money; and then when I see it all plain I have to exert myself and vote and work, and I have to find out what particular gifts I have and how I may best give them to our kingdom. Each king must glorify his particular reign with his particular gift. We agreed about that.
“So far I do not know my particular gift. Dr. Devizes says that so far as he is concerned he must work out human motives and human relationships; his gift and his natural interest is for mental science. He has his task meted out for him, his kingly task. But for me at present there isn’t that much self-knowledge. I have to begin lower down and with broader questions. I have to learn about the universe and about the history of this world-empire of Sargon’s, and of all the things I have neglected in my dreams and littleness. I have to go to school again. To learn how to think harder. I don’t mind the fatigue. But I am impatient. When I think of all that lies before me, the reading, the inquiries, the visits to museums and suchlike places, I want to get up right away and begin. I have lived so unobservant and irresponsible a life that I am puzzled how to account for the years I have spent. I have mooned them away. But I am glad I have awakened to my kingship before it is too late.
“I am quite a young man still. I am a little past forty, but that is nothing. Half of that was childhood and boyhood, and much of the rest inattention. For all I know I may live for another forty years. I’m not half through. And they may be the best years, the full years. I can spend three or four just learning—learning the round world. I shall begin to find out politics, and why men and women are servile and little-minded. I shall begin to realize how I can extend to those others this great liberation that has come to me. I shall begin to have a political life. A man who has no political life is like a rat which lives in a ship rather than like a man who navigates it. Then withinthat I shall begin to find my own proper life, my particular task. It is premature, I think, but I am very greatly drawn to the riddle of madness and asylums. I do not understand why there is madness. It puzzles and distresses me, and Dr. Devizes agrees with me that when a thing puzzles and distresses the mind the thing to do is to gather all the knowledge and ideas one can about it—scientifically. Presently it ceases to distress; it interests and occupies. And when I was in—that Place, I talked to some of those poor creatures. I was very sorry for them, I made them promises to help them when my kingdom came. And now I begin to see what my kingdom is, and the way in which I must enter in to possess it. Perhaps in good time I shall learn and spread knowledge about asylums, and make things better in them so that they will not simply imprison people but help and cure them.
“It was Dr. Devizes’ idea, I think—or we may have worked it out together—that there is a real and important purpose in madness. It is a sort of simplification, a removal of checks and controls, and a sort of natural experiment. The secret things of the mind are laid bare. But then if poor souls are to suffer that sort of thing to yield knowledge for others, they ought to be treated properly; they ought to be cherished and made the utmost use of, and not handed over to such brutes as we had.... I can’t tell you. Not yet. Brutes they were.... And in their sane moments—they all have sane moments, these lunatics—they ought to be comforted and told.”
The queer little round face, with its sprouting moustache and its pale blue eyes, stared at Bobby.
“When first I saw you,” said Sargon, “I did not realize in the least how things really were between us. I was still wrapped up in vaingloriousness; I thought I was a great prophet and teacher and king, and that all the world had to obey me. I thought you were going to be the first and best and nearest of my disciples. But now I know betterabout myself. And about other people. They are here not to be my followers and disciples but to be my fellow kings. We have to work together with all the others who are awakened, for our kingdom and the great progress of mankind.”
He went on talking rather to himself than to Bobby.
“I have always wanted to know things, but now I shall have the will really to know them. I shall be different now. It seems incredible that a little while ago I was bothered about what I should do with my time. Now I am only eager to get at things, and however long my time may be I know it will be full. It is astonishing to me that there has been flying in my kingdom for a dozen years, and I have never been in an aeroplane. I must look at the world from an aeroplane. And perhaps I shall need to go to India and China and suchlike strange and wonderful countries, because they, too, are a part of my inheritance. I need to know about them. And jungles and wildernesses that we have to subjugate; I have to see them. The beasts are under us; we have to cherish them or destroy them mercifully as the necessities of our kingdom may require. It is a terrible thing even to be lord of a beast. All the beasts, wild or tame, are under our dominion. And there is science. All the wonderful work men do in laboratories and their marvellous discoveries are our care. If I do not understand I may hinder. How blind I have been to the splendour of my life. When I think of all these things, I can hardly endure to be here in bed; I am so impatient to get on with them. But I suppose I must be patient with these poor wheezing lungs.
“Patient,” he repeated.
He looked at his wrist-watch and it had stopped. “Can you tell me the time? At seven I ought to take some more of that excellent tonic. It is working wonders in me. But no! don’t trouble; the nurse will be thinking of it.... It puts fresh life into me.”
But Sargon did not live forty years more, nor thirty, nor twenty. He lived just a day under seven weeks from that conversation. He stayed in bed for two days after Bobby returned to London; then Lambone also went and he became intractable. As his strength returned he bothered his nurse more and more for books he couldn’t name or describe, and for volumes of theEncyclopædia Britannica; and when she declared that seven volumes of that monumental publication were surely as much as any invalid could need at one time, he got up and put on his rough little dressing-gown and came paddling downstairs, h’rrmping resolutely, to the library. After that he got up for three days running. A fire was made in the most bookish corner of the downstairs room and screens put to keep him warm. But his tonic was driving him, perhaps it was too stimulating a tonic, and he would not stay in his protected corner.
The nurse seems to have been a weak, complaining character, indisposed to act without authority. She telephoned through to Devizes in London, but she did not succeed in making clear to him the gravity of Sargon’s misbehaviour. The crowning offence came when he wouldn’t go to bed at seven, but instead slipped out, in an overcoat and a wrapper indeed but in slippers, upon the terrace before the house. His bare ankles and legs were exposed to the cold wind. The slow-moving periodic beams of light from the lighthouse upon the coast, sweeping across the phantom hills under the clear starlight, had drawn him out, those processional lights, and Sirius that white splendour, and the steadfast sprawling glory of Orion. It was a clear November night with frost in the air. The nurse heard him cough and rushed out to him. He was looking at Sirius through Lambone’s field-glasses and shehad to drag him in by main force. She lost her temper; there was an ungracious struggle.
The next day he was in no state to leave his bed. Yet he tossed about and exposed his inflamed chest in feeble attempts to read. “I know nothing,” he complained. For a while he got better again, and then it is highly probable that he went to his open window in the night and sat for a long time wondering at the stars. After that came a relapse and a week or so of struggle, and then after a phase of delirium came great weakness, and then one night, death. He was quite alone when he died.
Bobby had not expected the death at all. He heard of it from Christina Alberta with great astonishment. He had been told nothing of Sargon being worse nor of his misbehaviour; he had been thinking of him rather enviously as growing steadily stronger and better and gratifying day by day a happy and expanding curiosity. He had looked forward presently to another talk and another phase in this odd belated adolescence. It was as though an interesting story had come to an abrupt end in the middle, as though all its concluding chapters had been torn out rudely and unreasonably.
This mood of frustrated sympathy lasted over the cremation of Sargon at Golders Green. Bobby went to that queer ceremony. He arrived late with Billy; the coffin that held the little body stood ready to glide into the furnace, the Church of England burial service had already begun. There were very few people in the chapel. Christina Alberta in the black she had worn for her mother was in the front seat, as chief mourner, between Paul Lambone and Devizes. Behind her with an air of earnest support were Harold and Fay Crumb, astonishingly in deep mourning and following the service meticulously in two prayer-books. An unpleasant-looking individual with a very long pock-marked sheep’s face, small eyes and habitual-lookingblacks turned round and stared at Bobby as he came in. He was accompanied by a very large blonde lady who seemed to have slept in her mourning under a bed. Relations of the deceased? The air of relationship was unmistakable. Behind, a young woman and two detached old ladies seemed to be indulging a simple propensity for funeral services at large. They completed the congregation.
Christina Alberta looked unusually small and overshadowed by her two odd men friends. It was a grey day outside, and the general effect of the gathering was thin and scattered and damp and chilly. The organ was playing as Bobby came in, and he thought he had never heard a less musical organ. The service as it went on sounded more and more trite and theological and insincere. What an old second-hand damp mackintosh the Church of England is, thought Bobby, for a striving soul to wear? But then what can any religion in the world really be in the face of normal death? Theologically one should rejoice when a good man dies, but none of these religions had had the pluck to brazen it out to that extent. None can get rid of the effect of confrontation with a blank amazing interrogation. Was there anything within that coffin there that heard or cared a jot for those sombre mummeries?
Bobby’s thoughts converged upon that still thing within the coffin. The little face would be wearing a waxen unaccustomed dignity; the round, preposterously innocent blue eyes would be closed and a little sunken. Where were those thoughts and hopes, now, that Bobby had listened to a few weeks since? Sargon had talked of flying, of visiting India and China, of doing noble work in the world. He had said that half his life still lay before him. He had seemed to be opening like a flower on the first sunny morning of a belated spring. And it was all delusion; the door of death that had slammed upon him was already closing then.
Surely those hopes had been life! In them if in anythingwas something of the life that lives and cannot die. But was it yonder? No. That in the coffin there was no more than a photographic impression, a cast garment, the parings of a nail. There was more of Sargon now in Bobby’s brain alone, than in that coffin. But Sargon, where was he? Where were those dreams and desires?
Bobby became aware of the voice of the officiating clergyman driving high, like a flying bird, over the welter of his thoughts: “But some men will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or any other grain: But God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased him, but to every seed its own body....”
“Queer, tortuous, ingenious fellow that Paul,” thought Bobby. Now what exactly was he driving at there? Queer fellow! Bad manners too with his “Thou fool.” A rather strained analogy this about the seed, “sown in corruption.” After all a seed was the cleanest, most living bit of vegetable matter you could have; it had to be sown in clean mould. Growing plants you manured perhaps, but not seed-boxes. But there was a queer insistence in the discourse of the “difference,” the discontinuity, of the new life. What was to come was to be altogether different from what was sown. Bobby had never noted that before, never noted how plainly the apostle insisted that no body, no earthly sort of body, no personality, ever came back.
“The glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory.”
What was the drift of that? Was it translated properly? What had Paul been up against in Corinth? After all, why couldn’t the Church speak to one’s living needs instead of disinterring this Levantine argument? And thatanalogy of the seed; was it after all a good one? Whatever comes from a seed must itself die again; it is no more immortal than the plant that came before it. The clergyman was going too fast, too, to follow him closely. Better get a prayer-book at home afterwards and read all this.
“O Grave where is thy sting? O death where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is in the law.”
No. There was no following that. It sounded like nonsense. One just missed the implications. It was like listening to some one who was too far off to be heard distinctly but who made eloquent gestures and noises.
The service came to an embarrassed pause. Everyone was motionless, arrested.
“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.... He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow....”
Set in motion by unseen hands the coffin went gliding towards the furnace doors which opened to receive it. There was a deep roar, a sound like a mighty rushing wind, an elemental and chaotic sound....
Life is a faint dispersed film upon one little planet, but flames roar like this and great winds rush and whirl, out to the remotest star in the unfathomable depths of space. That deep disorderly tumult is the true voice of lifeless matter, not of dead matter, for what has never lived cannot be dead, but of lifeless matter, outside of and beneath and beyond life.
Everyone in the chapel seemed still and bowed and hushed and dwarfed to minute dimensions until the furnace doors had closed again upon that soulless devouring clamour.