Part 25

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.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

_The Last Phase_

§ 1

It was 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.

§ 2

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 do _you_ come 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 distant relation, 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, working now 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 Devizes would 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’re _in_ it 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.

§ 3

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 for sitting 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 it with 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 the _Book of Everyday Wisdom_ and 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 been _sent_ to school and _sent_ to college. He had been on the eve of being _put into_ the 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 she and 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 immense preoccupation. 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 of thought, 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?

§ 4