Part 16

It has been said in an earlier chapter that Mr. Preemby, after his wife’s death, was like some seed which germinates and thrusts out bold and unexpected things. A new phase in that belated germination began as he walked through the London streets beside his captor policeman. If the thing had happened to Mr. Preemby while he was still Mr. Preemby, it would have been merely a dreadful, shameful horror. It would have been an insupportable experience, a thing to regret, a thing to get through and conceal and if possible obliterate from record and memory. If, again, it had happened in the early days of Sargon’s dreams it would have been an occasion for an immense dramatic improvisation. He would have thought of the effect upon the spectators and passers-by, he would have posed and gesticulated and said profound, memorable words. But some power of growth had taken possession of him now and he did none of these things. He posed now neither to the world without nor to himself within. For the first time in his life almost he was looking directly at himself and at what he had done and what had befallen him, and so full of wonder was he at this ultimate discovery of reality that he forgot all the vast fabric of make-believe, imaginative response, and deliberate self-delusion, up which he had clambered to this new phase of vision. He walked so quietly through the lit streets that only the most observant noted he was in charge and that the policeman was on duty; to the rest he might have been any casual companion of a home-going policeman.

One determination had been released in this renascent mind with an extraordinary strength and clearness, that he was not, and never would again be, that Albert Edward Preemby who had launched him into existence. He was a being called, it mattered not what, in reality, but for his present purposes, Sargon, Sargon the Magnificent King. The first concrete visions of Sumeria and his ancient glories had passed now into the background of his mind. He had not lost his belief in them at all, but they were now ancient history to him, and even the revelation at the boarding house seemed very far away. His ideas had travelled long distances and gathered much in the past week. The expectation of an immediate sensational splendour had been rudely shattered. The Power that had called him had surprised him exceedingly, but had not overwhelmed him. He knew quite clearly that he had to be Sargon who lived not for himself but for the Whole World, and that to relinquish or deny that was to perish utterly. It had not seemed to be necessary to him that his own faith should be tried, but manifestly the Power had determined that it should be tried. And manifestly he was to be put through some austere process of preparation before he entered into his Empire. He was to know what prison was and to stand a trial. He would be asked to deny himself.

What should he say to them? I am not He--I am not Him--which was it? I am not Him you suppose I am. He muttered it to himself.

“Whassay?” said the policeman.

“Nothing. Is it much further?” asked Sargon.

It was just round the corner. Sargon found himself in a little austere room with half a dozen quite amiable but slightly disrespectful men in uniform. He was asked his name and address by one who sat at a table. “Sargon,” he said. “Sargon the First.”

“No Christian name?”

“Pre-Christian,” said Sargon.

“No given name, I mean,” said the questioner.

“No.”

“And the address?”

“None at present.”

“Just anywhere?”

Sargon did not answer.

“Case for Gifford Street,” said a voice behind him.

“Memory case or something,” said the man at the table. “Anyhow, it’s Gifford Street.”

Sargon reflected. “What’s Gifford Street?” he asked.

“’Ospital. Where they’ll give you a bit of a rest and quiet.”

“But I want to meet a magistrate in open court. I have a message. I am in no need of rest or quiet.”

“They’ll tell you all about that at Gifford Street. Buxton, will you take ’im round?”

“But I am perfectly well! Why should I go to hospital?”

“Routine I suppose,” said the seated policeman and gave his mind to other things.

§ 2

Queer! Why should it be a hospital? The way the Power was treating him was a strange way. He had to submit to the Power; he had to maintain himself Sargon. Still he could have wished for more explicitness.

He was so turned inward now that he went along beside Constable Buxton, not noting the streets nor the traffic nor the passers-by. Presently they were at a door in a high wall, within which there were buildings. Then they were in a little office and a large, grey-faced porter looked at him and exchanged muttered explanations with the constable. Then they were going across a wide yard and through large doors into a corridor where there was an unoccupied stretcher and two or three nurses in uniform. They came to a little glazed-in office and Sargon was asked to sit down on a bench against a wall while there was telephoning. Constable Buxton hovered down the corridor as though the task was nearly done.

A small bright-eyed man in a grey suit came and looked at Sargon. For some moments they regarded each other in silence. “Well?” said the man in the grey suit.

“My name is Sargon. I do not know why I have been brought here. Is this a hospital? I understand it is. I am not ill.”

“You may be ill without knowing it.”

“No.”

“We just want to have you here for a bit to have a look at you.”

Sargon shrugged his shoulders.

A very big man with exaggerated shoulders and a large, clean-shaven, intensely self-satisfied looking face appeared. He had a wide, thin-lipped mouth, protruding grey eyes and highly oiled and entirely subjugated sandy hair with an army “quif” on the forehead.

“Busy evening,” he said. “This is number three.”

“Pretty full then,” said the small man in grey.

“Too full,” said Mr. Jordan, “You don’t know where you are. This _’im_?” he asked and indicated Sargon by creasing his thick neck and depressing the corner of his mouth towards him.

“This,” said the little man in grey to Sargon, “is Mr. Jordan. He’s going to show you just where you have to go and just what you have to do.”

Immediately, instinctively, Sargon disliked Mr. Jordan. But he stood up obediently because his idea of submission to the Power seemed in some way to overlap and include this new coercion. Mr. Jordan produced a voice of flat, oily, insincere amiability. “You come along, Old Chap, with me,” he said. “We’ll make you comfortable all right ’fyou don’t give no trouble.”

They went round a corner and up a cheerless stone staircase that turned back on itself; they came to a landing and double doors with glass panes in them that opened upon a very long, dark passage lit by a single very remote light. And suddenly it appeared to Sargon that behind him and already distant lay that outer world of freedom, the streets and the lights, the coming and going of people and things, the endless chance encounters, the events and the spectacle of life to which the Power had sent him, and before him were dark and narrow and dreadful experiences. Why should he turn his back thus voluntarily on the great outer world he had come to save? Was this again only another mistake he was making? He took a step or so away from Jordan and faced him.

“No,” he said. “I do not want to go further into this place. I do not wish it. Let me return. I have disciples to call and many things to do.”

The full moon of Jordan’s face displayed incredulous astonishment that passed into fierceness. “_Wot?_” he said.

He left a tremendous pause after “Wot” and then spoke very rapidly. “None of your tricks _’ere_, you thundering old Bastard.” With a swift movement his huge, raw, red hand gripped Sargon by the upper arm. His thin lips were retracted to show his teeth; his eyes seemed popping out. He gripped not to hold but to pinch and compress and injure, and he dug his fingers in between muscle and bone, so that Sargon stared at him with dilated eyes and uttered a sharp, involuntary cry of pain.

The grip relaxed from the acutely painful to the merely uncomfortable, and the big face came down close to Sargon’s. It was manifest that Mr. Jordan had been regaling himself on cheese and cocoa. “Don’t you try it on, you Old Fool! Don’t you blooming well try it on. Whatever it is, don’t you try it on ’ere. You’re right enough to understand what I say. See? You do exactly wot you’re told ’ere. You do exactly wot you’re told. You do your best to avoid givin’ trouble and I’ll do my best ditto. But if you start doin’ tricks--Gawd ’elp you! See?”

And he crushed the arm again.

“Understan’?”

The blue eyes seemed to assent.

“Down that passage, blast you!” said Mr. Jordan.

A distressed and wondering and yet not absolutely abject Sargon was taken to a wet and untidy bathroom in which a broken chair, pools of water, great splashings on the wall, and some crumpled towels in the corner suggested a recent struggle. There he was made to undress and take a tepid bath, dried with a towel that had already been in action, put into a grey nightgown that was doubtfully clean, a grey shoddy dressing-gown that certainly wasn’t, and a pair of down-at-heel slippers two sizes too big, and so garbed, was led by Mr. Jordan, a little propitiated now by alert obedience, into the ward in which he was to pass the night.

A rufous man with very light eyelashes appeared.

“’Ere ’e is, Mr. ’Iggs,” said Mr. Jordan.

“I’ve got his bed ready,” said Mr. Higgs. “’Ow many more of ’em?”

“Perfec’ shower of ’em,” said Mr. Jordan.

“Three,” said Mr. Higgs.

“Well,” said Mr. Jordan. “So long.”

“So long,” said Mr. Higgs.

Neither of them addressed the Lord of the Whole World directly. He might have been a parcel passed from hand to hand.

§ 3

When Sargon entered the Observation Ward of the Gifford Street Infirmary his sense of having left life, ordinary current life, far away behind him, beyond these grey passages and corridors and staircases and glass offices and high walls and little doors, was enormously reinforced. Never had he seen anything so emptily bleak and cheerless as this place. A heartless great dingy room it was, with green-grey distempered walls discoloured in patches, lit by a few bare lights that gave neither high-lights nor shadows. Black night and a greasily lit brick wall stared in through uncurtained windows. Half-way down the length of the place projecting pieces of wall suggested that two former rooms had been thrown into one. The floor was of polished bare boards. Far off was a table set against the wall with two or three torn and crumpled magazines thereon, and at the end an empty fire-place. In the near half, on either side, there were iron bedsteads in rows, twenty or thirty perhaps altogether. There was a foul smell in the air, faint and yet indescribably offensive, a fæcal smell mixed with a heavy soapy odour.

Even had it been unoccupied, this cold, large, evil-smelling room would have seemed a strange inhospitable place to Sargon. For it had always been the lot of Mr. Preemby, even in the days of his early poverty, to live snug, to have carpets, even if they were shabby carpets, under his feet, and an encumbrance of furniture and silly human pictures and brackets and things about him on the walls. Here in this harsh plainness it was as though the fussy, accumulative, home-making imagination of man had never been.

But the strange soulless atmosphere of the place was but the first instant impression of Sargon. It was followed by a far more vivid and terrible realization, that this place was inhabited by beings who were only at the first glance men. Then as one looked again it became clear that they were not exactly men, they did not look up at his entry as men should, or they showed their awareness of him by queer unnatural movements. Several were in bed; others were dressed in shabby and untidy clothes and either sat on their beds or were seated in chairs about the lower part of the room. One individual only was in motion; a grave-faced young man who was walking with an appearance of concentrated method to and fro in a restricted circle in the far corner of the ward. Another sat and seemed to remove a perpetually recurrent cobweb from his face by a perpetually repeated gesture. Two men were jammed behind the table against the wall and one, a fleshy lout with a shining pink skin and curling red hair on his bare chest, was making violent gestures, hammering the table with a freckled fist, talking in a voice that rose and sank and occasionally broke into curses while the other, a sallow-complexioned, cadaverous individual, seemed to be sunken in profound despair. In one of the beds close at hand a young man with a shock of black hair and an expression of fatuous satisfaction, that changed with dramatic suddenness to triumphant fierceness or insinuating lucidity, sat up and gesticulated and composed and recited an interminable poem--something in the manner of Browning. It was running in this fashion:

“God shall smite them And blight them They may prevail but God will requite them Light ’em. Burn ’em to ashes and burn ’em to atoms Atoms! Burning atoms--exactly like stars. See? Stars in the void and all over the place. Atoms galore and God can’t show his face. (Triumphant discovery.) He _hasn’t_ a face. That’s it! That’s it, my Boys! Atheists wrong and theology wrong, Plainly and simply here’s every one wrong! And I have to tell ’em! There’s a God, _item_ one, but he hasn’t a face So he can’t show his face. That’s the kink of it. Naturally every one thinks he’s _non est_ But he’s there as I know to my cost; For I’m lost But I’ve shown how it is all the same. No face--what a game! I found God in the void Unmasked and a little annoyed. _Quod erat demonstrandum_ X.L....”

“There’s your bed,” said Mr. Higgs at Sargon’s elbow, shoving him slightly.

Sargon moved a little unwillingly, his puzzled eyes still on the talker.

“You’ll hear enough of him before you’re done, Old Chap,” said Mr. Higgs. “Hop into bed now.”

Impelled partly by the arm of Mr. Higgs and partly by his natural disposition to please, Sargon got into bed. Mr. Higgs assisted him in a rough brotherly fashion. But before Sargon could pull up the clothes about him, Mr. Higgs, glancing over his shoulder, became aware of something that was happening down the room--Sargon could not see what.

In an instant the genial authoritativeness of Mr. Higgs gave way to rage. “Yaaps, you dirty old devil!” said Mr. Higgs. “You’re at it again!”

He quitted Sargon and ran down the room very swiftly. Sargon sat up in bed to see what was happening. Three or four of the other patients did the same. A very dirty old man with a face of extreme misery, who was sitting in a chair, was seized upon and bumped up and down and hit several times with great vigour by Mr. Higgs. Then Mr. Higgs departed and returned, still uttering admonitions, with a pail and a rag.

For Mr. Higgs was not only an attendant on the mentally afflicted but also, on account of economy, the floor-scrubber and general cleaner of the ward. He had been trained in the navy to ideals of a speckless brightness and he scrubbed better than he attended.

“Lie down there!” cried Mr. Higgs returning up the ward with his pail. “It ain’t nothing to do with you.”

The Lord of the World lay down.

§ 4

It was an extremely uninteresting ceiling to look at except for a streak of yellowish stains, but it was better to look at the ceiling for a time than to look too much at these distressing people around him. They were distressing and distracting, and Sargon knew that it was urgently necessary not to be distracted, but to think over his position very carefully before anything further happened to him. All this rush of consequences had been so unexpected, preposterous and violent since--a few hours ago--he had surveyed London from the dome of Saint Paul’s and decided that the moment had come to take hold of his Lordship of the World, that he perceived he might very conceivably be overwhelmed. How serene and distant now was that spectacle of London spread out under the amber sunshine between its far blue hills and its shining river, with its dense clusters of shipping and the black ant-currents of folk below. From that he had come swiftly, inevitably, to this echoing prison. For prison he saw it was. He knew quite well that these men around him were demented men and that he had been seized upon as a lunatic, but he thought that the Workhouse Observation Ward in which he was, was a lunatic asylum already. In his wildest imaginations he had never imagined the Power over all things could treat him thus. The possibility of a brief interlude in prison, of a severe but very public and triumphant trial, had entered his mind; but not that he might be hustled away out of the possibility of any such appeal. He had to think his position out anew, to discover what all this monstrous experience was intended to show and to teach him, and what he had to do to meet this strange occasion.

And it was very difficult to do this with a raucous voice down the room uttering foul threats about the ward attendant and a great fist beating the table in sudden storms and with that smooth, fluctuating, unending recitation nearer at hand, that cosmic poem, now almost inaudible--so that one strained to catch the words--and now in high-pitched delight. For long stretches it was just incoherent jumble and Sargon would hold it almost completely out of his attention while he pursued his own perplexities, and then it would rush together into something that challenged its way to mingle with his inmost thoughts.

“Filthy old Nature, she drives us amain; One goad is lust and the other goad pain. And so we get back to old nowhere again. Nowhere to start from and nowhere again. Want and be hurt, want and be hurt, Out of the dirt you came, back to the dirt. Hunger for dirt and dirty regretting Dirty our feeding and dirty begetting Smear yourself, paint yourself, wear a fine shirt Put a brave face on it, Yah!--you are dirt.”

“Now is that true?” asked Sargon of himself. Is that true? Dirt? What is dirt? But no! he must not wander off after this mad raving! What was it he had been thinking about? He had been asking why had the Power thrust him into this dreadful place? Why had the Power brought him to this place? If only the man would stop that improvisation of his for a little while it might be possible to think that out. Why had he been given over to the commands of Jordan and Higgs to live among the madmen and--sudden fantastic side question!--why had _they_?

If only that poem would cease! If only that voice would fade to silence! It was now mere rubble and rubbish, as though thought had been broken up with a pickaxe and loaded in carts and shot down a slope. Don’t listen to it, Sargon! Don’t listen to it! Concentrate!

In his endeavour to concentrate, Sargon forgot even Higgs. He sat up in bed and drew his knees nearly to his chin and thought.

He was Sargon; that was the great issue. He had to remain Sargon. He was probably in this place of trouble and torment because of the conflict between his being Sargon and the possibility of his relapsing into Preemby. The Power had called him to be Sargon and to serve and suffer for and at last to rule the Whole World, but manifestly it was not a simple direct call. There was something working in opposition to this destiny, an Anti-Power, opposed to the Power, which was trying to put him back to Preemby and Preembyism, to being little and insignificant, to living obscurely and to no purpose and so at last to dying and becoming utterly and finally dead. That Anti-Power it was that had been permitted to bring him here, to frighten and torment him, to din mad rhymes into his ears, to urge upon him in a monotonous persistent voice that he was dirt and that God was without a face, and a multitude of suchlike blasphemies. But they were not true. The Anti-Power might talk and talk--would God there could be a respite from his talking!--but the truth was outside this place and greater than this place and altogether comprehended it. He was one, Sargon was one, from the beginning in Sumeria, in many lands and now here, the same spirit, the ruler who serves; he was one just as London was one when it was seen from on high up above there, endlessly multitudinous yet drawn together into a single personality. And so was the whole world one. To be Preemby was to be like a wretched little back street house down below there, swallowed up in the general effect. Never more could he be Preemby, even if he would. That was what he had to keep hold of. He could only be Sargon by denying Preemby--even though he had to face the pains of death.

Yet all the while the Anti-Power was insulting life and himself through that disordered poet and his recitation. The man had now fallen under the spell of a fascinating but detestable word, if one may call such a thing a word, “Tra-la-la.”

“Tra-la-la. Tra-la-la. That is the note of it. Get the full gloat of it. Tra-la-la. Tra-la-la. All times and places Happy derision for Gods without faces. Tra-la-la sunshine or Tra-la-la rain. Eat, drink, and kiss ’em and at it again. Tra-la-la. Tra-la-la. Kiss ’em and Kiss ’em and at it again. At it again! Tra-la-la.”

He varied his recitation with a loud explosive noise made by his lips on the back of his hand.

“Pray don’t think me cynical,” he said to Sargon. “It is just pure Joy de Vive.”

Sargon could not stand it any longer. This was damnable teaching to fling out before the very regenerator of mankind. He suddenly thrust out a pointing finger. “You are wrong!” he said loudly and sharply.

The poet stared for a minute and with a gesture of salutation said: “Tra-la-la-la.”

“I tell you life is real,” cried Sargon. “Life is immense. Life is full of meaning and order. I have come to tell you and all men so.”

The poet interrupted smilingly and politely with:

“Tra-la-la Tra-la-la Life is a hiccup and life is a sneeze A smell from a dunghill borne on the breeze A thing of no moment--so do as you please! Tra-la-la. Tra-la-la.”

He was going on, but Sargon would not hear him. He lifted his voice to drown his antagonist. “I tell you, you poor soul! you are utterly wrong and blind,” he said. “For the light has come to me and understanding is mine. You are not the lost thing you deem you are, or at least you need not be. No! I, too, was a lost thing such as you are, a little while ago. I, too, thought I was a grain, a fragment, a thing of no account. But the call has come to me, and I have been called to call others to take part with me in a new awakening. I have had a vision and I have seen the world like one who awakens from a long sleep. All things are joined together and work together and continue for ever.”

The poet wrinkled up his nose and waved his hand at Sargon as who should wave aside some object of offence. “Tra-la-la,” he shouted.

“All things I tell you are joined together and work together----”

“Tra-la-la,” louder.

“I tell you,” much louder.

“Shuddup there,” cried the loud and wrathful voice of Sanity embodied in Mr. Higgs.

“You’ll have the whole ward jabbering in a minute,” said Mr. Higgs, approaching and addressing Sargon in tones of earnest expostulation. “Shud Dup.”

And after a brief pause of reflection the Lord of the Whole World obeyed.

With a gesture of extreme dignity he indicated to Higgs that his crude demands were conceded.

“That’s o right,” said Higgs. “_You_ can hold in if you want to. So you better. _He_ can’t.”

The poet went on in a soft insinuating undertone reviling and mocking Sargon’s faith to a refrain of: “Tra-la-la. Tra-la-la.”

§ 5