“At the—at thePlace, they told me your name was Preemby.â€
“Albert Edward Preemby.... I wonder.â€
He lay reflecting for a time. “I remember that for a long time I thought I was Albert Edward Preemby, a small creature, a little man living a mean life in a laundry. A laundry with large blue vans. The swastika. You cannotimagine what a small, insignificant life it was that this Preemby led. And then suddenly I thought I could not possibly be Preemby and also an immortal soul. Either there was no Preemby, I thought, or there was no God. There could not possibly be both. It perplexed and worried me very much. Because there I was—Preemby. I am not good at thinking—all my thinking goes off into a kind of dreaming. And then when there came evidence that seemed satisfactory—perhaps I jumped at what I was told. But Sargon must have been a great king, a very great king, and I am small and weak and not very intelligent. When the keepers and attendants bullied me and ill-treated me I did not behave as a great king should have behaved, and when I saw them doing evil things to other—other patients, I did not interfere. Yet all the time I think I am something different from the Albert Edward Preemby I used to be, something more and something better. But it leaves me confused to think who I am, and I am very tired. Perhaps, when I have rested a day or two, I may be better able to think about these things.â€
The faded voice died away. The blue eyes remained staring tranquilly at the sky.
Bobby said nothing for a little while. Then he remarked, “I have seen men ill-treated.â€
And then; “and I am not so slight as you are.â€
He said no more. It did not seem as though Sargon had heard him. Bobby stood up.
“You must rest. You are perfectly safe here. If we can remain unnoted here for two weeks then it will be impossible ever to send you back to that place again. Are you comfortable?â€
“It is a beautiful bed,†said Sargon.
But beautiful though the bed was it was not sufficient to arrest the trouble in Sargon’s aching chest. He seemed very exhausted that evening. In the night he began coughing; he coughed so distressingly that Bobby went in tohim. In the morning he was spiritless and did not want to eat. Bobby sat in the room downstairs working at the pile of Aunt Suzannah correspondence that Billy had sent on to him. He was half-minded to appeal to Tessy to come down and help with the nursing, but there was no bedroom available for her. Mrs. Plumer pressed for a doctor and he put her off. Finally, on her own responsibility, she brought in a young man who was just starting a practice in the place. Bobby had a terrifying interview, but the young doctor betrayed no suspicions. On the whole, he was reassuring. There was congestion of the lungs but nothing worse. Sargon must keep very warm and take this and that. No urgent need for a nurse. Keep him warm and give him his medicine.
Late in the evening Bobby went up to say good night and found Sargon better and more talkative.
“I have been thinking of Christina Alberta and I should like to see her. I would like to see her and tell her things I have been thinking about her. I have been thinking out all sorts of curious things. Perhaps I am not so much to her as she may think. But chiefly I want to talk to her about a young man I dislike. What was he called? When I was last at Lonsdale Mews, she danced with him.â€
“Lonsdale Mews!â€
“Yes, yes, of course. I had forgotten. Eight Lonsdale Mews, Lonsdale Road, Chelsea. But my mind is very confused and I do not know what I should say to her even if she came.â€
Bobby wrote down the address forthwith.
“And this Christina Alberta is all you have?†he asked.
“All I have.
“Twenty. Quite a child really. I ought never to have left her. But there came a sort of wonder upon me—As though the world was opening. It made everything else seem very trivial.â€
“There came a sort of wonder upon me as though the world was opening.â€
“There came a sort of wonder upon me as though the world was opening.â€
Bobby wrote that down also. And he sat very late before the fire in the ground-floor room thinking that over and thinking over the message he would have to send to Christina Alberta in the morning. To-morrow he would have to explain himself and his extraordinary intervention in Preemby affairs. It was by no means plain to himself as yet, and to-morrow he would have to make plain to a probably very indignant young lady why her father had so caught his sympathies and fascinated his imagination as to tempt him to this escapade. He found himself thrown back on self-analysis. He found himself scrutinizing his own motives and his own scheme of existence.
He knew and understood that feeling, “as though the world was opening†so well. Still better did he know that feeling of dead emptiness in life out of which it arose. In his own case he had thought this habitual discontent with the daily round, this urgency towards something strange and grandiose, was due to the dislocation of all his expectations of life by the great war; that it was a subjective aspect of nervous instability; but in the case of this little laundryman it could not have been the war that had sent him out, a sort of emigrant from himself, to find a fantastic universal kingdom. It must be something more fundamental than the war accident. It must be a normal disposition in men towards detachment from safety and comfort.
He glanced towards the pile of his Aunt Suzannah correspondence on the table and the next sheet of “copy†forWilkins’ Weeklyhe had distilled therefrom. He rose from his arm-chair and went back to his work with his wisdom refreshed. He wrote: “So soon as man’s elementary needs are satisfied and he is sure of food, clothing and shelter,he comes under the sway of a greater imperative; he goes out to look for trouble. So that I would not discourage ‘Croydon’s’ desire to become a missionary in West Africa in spite of his religious doubts and his peculiar feeling about black people. Such a region as Sherborough Island will probably supply him with a good sustained, sustaining, and ennobling system of troubles. A white man who has once challenged the hostility of a West African secret society will have little leisure for morbid introspection. He will hardly have a dull moment....â€
He stopped writing. “Reads a little ironical,†he said “And not quite Aunt Suzannah enough.â€
He reflected. “My mind scampers off from me at times. Not in the vein to-day.â€
The one thing they must never feel about Aunt Suzannah was that she could be ironical. No! it wouldn’t do. He ran his pen through the six sentences he had just written and pushed the sheet away from him. He drew another sheet towards him on which he had been composing with great difficulty a telegram to be sent next morning to “Preemby, 8 Lonsdale Mews, Chelsea.†He read over various drafts. The current form ran as follows: “Your father safe but with severe chest cold care of Roothing Maresett Cottage Dymchurch desires see you discretion very necessary return confinement fatal results best station Hythe and cab could meet you Hythe if wire in time but do not know you personally am tallish slender dark Roothing.â€
Properly considered it was all right.
He tried to imagine what sort of girl this Christina Alberta Preemby would be. She would be blue-eyed of course and probably very fair; a little taller and rounder than her father, soft-voiced and rather dreamy. She would be timid and affectionate, very kind and gentle and a little incompetent. Perhaps it would be well to meet her at Hythe so soon as he knew which train she was coming by. The cab business might be a strain on her. He would haveto tell her what to do. To a considerable extent now he had made himself responsible for the fortunes of both these people. And he liked to think that. He liked to think that perhaps these might become his own people, more of his own people than the Malmesburys. Because to be frank about it with himself he was a little bit of an interpolation in the Malmesbury household. They liked him; they were perfect dears to him; but they could do without him. Even that little devil Susan managed without him; she liked him and tyrannized over him but he knew he wasn’t indispensable to her. Here at last might be two people who couldn’t do without him, who might to an extraordinary extent become his people.
Of course he would have to put on a little more appearance of strength and determination than was actually his quality. He owed it to them to keep up their confidence in him so that he might be able to direct them in their difficulties.
He would say to her—what would he say to her? “I have been hasty, I know, but I know something of the strain that is put upon the sane patient in an asylum. I thought that the first thing to do was to get your father out of it. It didn’t occur to me that for a time he might have forgotten your address. Perhaps I ought to have come to you before I acted. But then how was I to know therewasa you? Until he told me of your existence. In so many cases in these asylums the relatives are hostile to release. It is dreadful to admit it, but it is so.â€
Then rather humorously and quite modestly he would describe the escape. He was already forgetting the uncertainties of the visiting-day conversation and the numerous accidental factors in the meeting by the culvert. But all history has this knack of eliminating unnecessary detail.
So he would make his statement. It did not occur to him that Christina Alberta might be the sort of person who interrupts speeches with elucidatory questions.
He lit a cigarette, strolled about the room, and came to rest standing before the fire and looking down on the glowing coals. He was sure now that Christina Alberta was blue-eyed, fragile, shy—with a deep sweet vein of humorous fantasy hidden away in her. Very probably she concealed a gift for writing. It would be for him perhaps to discover that and cultivate it and bring it out. Together they would protect Sargon, already more than half recovered from the intoxication of his dream. They would have to soften the humiliations of his complete awakening. How fortunate and as it were providential it was that he had been impelled to rescue the little man!—for otherwise he would never have met Christina Alberta, never won her timid wealth of love....
“Eh!
“But this is all damned nonsense!†said Bobby violently, and threw his cigarette into the fire. “This is just fancy! I haven’t evenseenthe girl!â€
He lit his candle, put out Mrs. Plumer’s oil lamp with all the devices and precautions proper to this dangerous survival from the Dark Ages, and went up to bed. He stopped and listened outside Sargon’s door. The patient was asleep and breathing rather noisily—ever and again choking with a little cough.
“I wish the weather had kept warmer,†said Bobby.
When he opened his own bedroom door, the flame of his candle writhed and flared horizontally, the curtains streamed into the room and a sheet of paper flapped on the dressing-table. He put down the candle and went to shut the window. The wind was rising and there was a little patter of raindrops on the pane.