Part 26

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. “Who _is_ this 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.

“I _am_ Sargon,” he said. “Talking to your friend Devizes has cleared my mind greatly. I _am_ Sargon, 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 not _exclusively_ Sargon. 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 for me--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 multititude of 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.

§ 5

“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 the _only_ Sargon. 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 quite _up_ to a job of that sort, but I couldn’t see any other way of being Sargon 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 to _do_. 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 and economics 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 within that 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 better about 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.”

§ 6

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 the _Encyclopædia 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 she had 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-looking blacks 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 anything was 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 that analogy 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.