Part 28

“And given you some very helpful ideas for your treatment. Don’t be ungrateful. You think that Sargon is over. He has only just begun. You are becoming too professional with success, Devizes. You begin to take up cases and work them off and drop them out of your mind. You don’t go on with them and learn. You don’t sit about and think about them as I do. I continue to think about Sargon. I go on with him because he is still a living being for me. I have got a new religion from him, the religion of Sargonism. I declare him prophet of a new dispensation. It is my latest new religion. There will always be new religions, and the new religions will always be the only ones that matter. Religion is a living thing, and what is alive must be continually dying and be continually born again--differently but the same.”

“You believe in immortality, Mr. Lambone,” said Miss Means. “I wish that I could. But when I try to imagine it my wits fail me. Sometimes one seems to _feel_ what it might be. On a night like this perhaps----”

Her pretty clear voice died away in the stillness as the trail of a falling star dies away.

Paul, a large dark lump on the dim pale sofa, went on speaking. “Immortality,” he said, “is a mystery. One can only speak of it in dark metaphors. How can we believe that each of our individual commonplace lives is to have an endless commonplace sequel? That is incredible nonsense. Yet we go on living after death nevertheless. When we die we are changed. All wise teachers have insisted upon that. As Roothing said, we are not boxed up and buried and forgotten. Our real death is an escape, and we escape and become--what did you say?--dispersed. Immortal life is endless consequence. Our lives are like lines in a great poem. It is an unfinished and yet it is a perfect poem. The line begins and ends but it has to be there, and once it is there, it is there eternally. Nothing could follow if it was not there. But every star has not the same glory. Some lives, some lines, stand out as more significant than the others. They open a new branch of the subject, they start a new point of view, they express something fresh. They are geniuses, they are prophets, they are major stars. Sargon was the last, the latest of these prophets, and I am his Paul. Not for nothing was I christened Paul.”

“Paul of Tarsus,” said Devizes, “was a man of energy.”

“There will always be minor differences in such parallels,” said Lambone.

“I will tell you my doctrine,” he said.

He began to talk in that clear miniature voice of his, which was so like a little mouse running out of the mountain of his person, of Sargon and his struggles with his individuality, and of the struggles in every man between his individual life and something greater that is also in him. There was a streak of fantasy in what he was saying, a touch of burlesque in his constant use of theological and religious phrasing, and withal a profound sincerity. In every human being, he declared, the little laundryman battled with the King of Kings. He expanded and amplified his theme. Ever and again Devizes would cut into the monologue and talk for a time, not so much to make objections as to restate and amend and amplify. The others said little. Margaret Means twice made soft sweet sounds suggestive of intellectual sensuousness, and once Christina Alberta said “But--!” very loudly and then “Never mind. Go on” and relapsed for a long time into a silence that could be felt. Bobby sat still, sometimes listening intently and sometimes with his mind spreading out like an uncared-for stream into a number of parallel channels. The argument itself was interesting to follow, but moving at the side of that was the question of the talker’s sincerity. How much of all this stuff did Lambone mean? How much of what he said was of a piece with the rest of his observant, self-indulgent life, his life as a humorous comment on a universe that was profoundly absurd?

How easily Lambone played with phrases and ideas for which men had lived and died! How widely he had read and thought to bring so many things together! He produced a great effect of erudition. The Golden Bough he had at his fingers’ ends. He talked of the sacramental mysteries of half a dozen cults, from Mithraism to ritual sacrifices, of varying ideas of personality that had held and swayed human life from Fiji to Yucatan. Now he was in pre-Christian Alexandria, and now among the Chinese philosophers. The “Superior Person” of Confucius he declared was merely an example of our way of translating all Chinese phrases as ridiculously as possible; it meant really the Higher and Greater Man, the Universal Man, in whom the inferior egotistical man merged himself. It was the salvation of the Revivalist everywhere; it was the Spiritual Man of Pauline Christianity. When the late Mr. Albert Edward Preemby poured out all his little being into the personality of Sargon, King of Kings, he was only doing over again what the saints and mystics, the religious teachers and fanatics, have done throughout the ages. He was just the Master under the Bo Tree translated into the cockney of Woodford Wells.

Presently Devizes was talking. Devizes was a great contrast to Lambone. He talked a different language. He did not seem nearly so clear and clever to Bobby as Lambone did, but he had an effect of sincerity and solidity of conviction that Lambone lacked altogether. His interventions made all that Lambone said seem like a wild and picturesque parody of something that was otherwise inexpressible. Both he and Lambone had an air of casting verbal nets for some truth that still eluded them. And yet this truth so remotely and imperfectly apprehended was for each of them the most important thing in life.

“Stripped of its theological trappings,” Devizes said to Lambone, “your new religion is simply a statement of this. That our race has reached, and is now receding, from a maximum of _individuation_. That it turns now towards synthesis and co-operation. It will move back towards what you call Sargon, the great ruler, and it will swallow up individual egotistical men in its common aims. As already scientific work swallows them up. Or good administrative work. Or art. That is what you are saying.”

“Exactly,” said Paul Lambone. “If we _must_ talk your language, Devizes, and not mine. Art, science, public service, creative work of every sort, these are parts of what you, I suppose, would call the race mind, parts of the race life. Every man who matters is a fresh thought, a fresh idea. He is himself still, it is true, but his significance is that he comes out of his past and out of his conditions and he flows on to further men. This is the new realization that is changing all the values in human life. It is happening everywhere. Even in the books and reading of to-day you can see the thing happening. History now becomes more important than biography. What made up the whole of life in the romantic past; the love story, the treasure story, the career, getting on, making a fortune, the personal deed and victory, the sacrifices for an individual friend or love or leader; remains no longer the whole of life and sometimes not even the leading interest in life. We are passing into a new way of living, into a new sort of lives, into new relationships. The world which seemed for a time not to be changing any more is changing very swiftly ... in its mental substance.”

“New sorts of people,” said Bobby softly, and went off from listening to Lambone’s lucid little voice into a final recapitulation of the puzzling things Christina Alberta had said and done that day.

§ 5

Bobby was recalled to the matter of the talk by a movement in the chair behind him.

Lambone’s smooth voice was explaining: “So that it does not matter so much what we achieve as what we contribute. That cherished personal life which men and women struggle to round off and make noble and perfect, disappears from the scheme of things. What matters more and more is the work one does. What matters less and less is our personal romance and our personal honour. Or rather our honour will go out of us into our work. Our love affairs, our devotions and private passions, for example, will fall more and more definitely into a subordination to our science or whatever our function is. Our romances and our fame and honour will join our vices among the things we suppress. There was a time when men lived for a noble tomb and in order to leave sweet and great memories behind them; soon it will matter nothing to a man and his work to know that he will probably die in a ditch--misunderstood. So long as he gets the work done.”

“With no last Judgment ever to vindicate him,” said Devizes.

“That will not matter in the least to him.”

“I agree. Some of us begin to feel like that even now.”

“Even if one has done nothing worth doing,” said Paul Lambone, and in his voice was that faint quality of the sigh of one who has crowned a rather difficult and uncertain card castle, “even if Sargon had died unrescued in his Asylum and all the world had thought him mad, all the same he would have escaped, his imagination would have touched the imagination of the greater life.”

Came a pause of edification and then a sigh of satisfaction from Miss Lambone. She never understood in the least what her brother was talking about, but she adored him when he talked. Nobody she thought had ever talked like him, or could possibly talk like him. His voice was so clear and bright, like the best sort of print. Only sometimes you wished you had spectacles.

But now Miss Lambone was to receive a shock. Christina Alberta suddenly came out of the silence in which she had been sitting.

“I don’t believe in this,” said Christina Alberta out of the depths of her chair.

Bobby was beginning to know the voice of Christina Alberta very well; and he knew now that she was terrified at having to talk, and at the same time desperately resolved to get something said. He knew too that she was gripping hard at the arms of her chair. He glanced at Devizes and in that instant the lighthouse beam touched his face and Bobby saw it very intent, watching Christina Alberta steadily and as if forgetful of all other things. It was intent and tender and tenderly apprehensive, grave and very pale in that white illumination. When the light had passed away Bobby still seemed to see that face, but now conversely it was a face of ebony.

“I do not believe in _any_ of this,” said Christina Alberta.

She paused with the effect of marshalling her argument. “It is theology, I suppose,” she said. “Or mysticism. It is all an intellectual game that men have played to comfort themselves. Men rather than women. It makes no real difference. Tragedy _is_ tragedy, failure _is_ failure, death is death.”

“But is there ever complete failure?” asked Lambone.

“Suppose,” said Christina Alberta, “suppose a man is thrown into prison and misrepresented to all the world, suppose he is taken away presently and made to dig his own grave, and shot at the edge of it and buried and then lied about for a time and forgotten. It isn’t part of the race that is murdered, it isn’t a wonderful thing that passes on; it is a man who has been killed and made away with. Your mysticism is just an attempt to dodge the desolation of that. It doesn’t. Such things have happened. They happen to-day. In Russia. In America. Everywhere. Men are just wiped out, body and soul, hope and will. That man and his black personal universe are done with and over, and there is an end to his business; he is beaten and wiped out, and all the clever talk upon easy sofas in the warm twilight will not alter that one jot. It is frustration. If I am frustrated I am frustrated, if I have desires and dreams and they are defeated and die, I die. It is playing with words to say I do not die or that they are changed and sublimated and carried on into something better.”

“My dear,” said Miss Lambone to Miss Means. “You are sure you are not feeling cold?” Her voice conveyed a faint intimation that she would cease to be acutely interested in the talk if this chit of a girl intervened any further in the discussion, and that she would begin to do things with wraps and shawls and break up the meeting.

“I’m perfectly happy, dear,” Miss Means answered. “All this--! I wish it could go on for ever.”

But Christina Alberta disregarded Miss Lambone’s warning. She had something to say and there was some one she wanted to say it to, not too pointedly, not too plainly.

“All this theology, this religion, the new religions that are only the old ones painted over----”

“Reborn,” said Paul.

“Painted over. I don’t want them. But that is not what I want to say. What I want to say is that you are wrong about my Daddy, you are quite wrong about him. That I do know. Mr. Lambone has dressed him up to suit his own philosophy. He had that philosophy long before he knew him. And you talked my Daddy over and put Mr. Lambone’s ideas into him when he was beaten and broken because they suited his case. They weren’t there before. I know him and exactly how he thought. I was brought up on him. He talked to me more than to anyone. And it is all nonsense to talk of him--his exaltation, as being like the great soul coming like the tidal sea into the pool of the little soul. It didn’t. When he said he was Lord of the World he wanted to be Lord of the World. He didn’t want to incorporate any other people at all--or be incorporated. He was just as exclusively himself when he was Sargon as when he was Albert Edward Preemby. More so.... And I believe that is how it is with all of us.”

She went on rather hurriedly, for she knew there were forces there very ready to silence her.

“I want to be myself and nothing else. I want the world--for myself. I want to be a goddess in the world. It does not matter that I am an ugly girl with natural bad manners. It does not matter that it is impossible. That is what I want. That is what I am made to want. One may get moments anyhow. A moment of glory is better than none.... I believe that sort of thing is what you all want really. You just persuade yourselves you don’t. And you call that religion. I don’t believe anyone has ever believed religion from the beginning. Buddhism, Christianity, this fantastic Sargonism, this burlesque religion you invent to make an evening’s talk, they are all consolations and patchings-up--bandages and wooden legs. People have tried to believe in such religions no doubt. Broken people. But because we cannot satisfy the desires of our hearts--why should we cry ‘Sour grapes’ at them?

“I don’t want to serve--anything or anybody. I may be heading for frustration, the universe may be a system of frustration, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this is how I feel about it. I may be defeated; it may be certain that I shall be defeated--but as for bringing a contrite heart out of the mess and starting again as a good little part of something--I _don’t_ fink. Oh, I know I beat my hands against a wall. It’s not my fault. Why don’t we take? Oh, why don’t we dare?”

Miss Lambone stirred and rustled.

The darkness that was Devizes spoke to Christina Alberta, and Miss Lambone became still.

“We don’t take and we don’t dare,” he said, “we don’t defy laws and customs because there are other things in our lives, _in_ us and not outside us, that are more important to us. That is why. It pleases Paul to dress up his view of these things in old mystical phrasing, but what he says is really an unscientific way of putting psychological fact. You think you are simple, but you are really complex. You are the individual but you are the race also. That is your nature and mine and everyone’s. The more our intelligence awakens the more we know that.”

“But it is the difference that is distinctively me, and not the general part. The race in me is no more to me than the ground I walk on. I am Christina Alberta; I am not Woman or Mankind. As Christina Alberta, I want and I want and I want. And when the door is slammed upon my imaginations I cry out against it. Why pretend I give up a thing because I can’t have it? Why make a glory of renunciation and letting-go? I hate the idea of self-sacrifice. What is the good of coming into the world as Christina Alberta just in order to sacrifice being Christina Alberta? What is the good of being different if one is not to live a different life?”

Unexpectedly Miss Lambone intervened, “The life of a woman is one long sacrifice,” she said.

There was a pause.

“But we have the vote now?” said Christina Alberta almost flippantly. “Why is a woman’s life sacrifice?”

“Think of the children we bear,” said Miss Lambone in a constrained voice.

“_Well!_” said Christina Alberta, and suppressed some scandalous remark.

“The most astonishing thing about us,” she broke out again, after a pause; “the most astonishing thing in the feminine make-up is that hardly any of us _do_ seem to want children. A lot of us anyhow don’t. Now that I am beginning to learn something about biology, I realize how marvellous that is. As a race of creatures specialized for children, we ought to be eaten up by the desire for children. As a matter of fact most modern women will do anything to avoid having children. We dread them. To me they seem like a swarm of hidden dwarfs, prepared to come upon me and eat up my whole existence. It’s not simply I don’t want them; I live in fear of them. Love we _may_ want. Many of us do. Intensely. We want to love and be loved--to get close and near to some one. It’s a delusion I suppose. One of Nature’s clumsy tricks. It is all a delusion. He vanishes--he was never there. Under the old conditions it availed; it got the children Nature wanted. But we don’t think of children. We don’t want to think about them. There it is! And anyway children do not take a woman out of her egotism; they only extend and intensify it. I have known intelligent girls marry and have children, and when the baby appeared their minds evaporated. They became creatures of instinct, messing about with napkins. I could scream at the thought of it. No, I am an egoist pure and simple. I am Christina Alberta, and her only. I am not Sargon. I refuse altogether to mix with that promiscuous anybody-nobody.”

“After all that may only be a phase in your development,” said Devizes.

“It is the only one I know.”

“That is evident. But I assure you, Christina Alberta, that this revolt and distress of yours is a phase. You are talking rebellion and egoism and anarchism as a healthy baby screams to get breath into its lungs, and escape from the stuffiness of old air. The baby doesn’t know why it screams and no doubt finds some dim little grievance in its brain----”

“Go on,” said Christina Alberta. “Chastise me and chastise me.”

It seemed to Bobby that there were tears in her voice.

“No, but you are so young, my dear,” said Devizes.

My dear!

“Not so young. Not so actually young,” cried Christina Alberta.

“If I live to be eighty,” said Christina Alberta, “shall I ever be able to feel more than I am feeling now? Why will you always treat me like a child nowadays?”

“Feeling isn’t the only measure,” said Devizes. “Even now, to-night, you are talking below your beliefs. You are not an egoistic adventurer. You take sides on a score of matters. You insist you are a Communist for example.”

“Oh! just to smash up things,” said Christina Alberta. “Just to smash up everything.”

“No. You say that to-night, but you have told me differently before. You have a care for the world. You want to help forward the common interest. You develop a passion for scientific truth. Well--there’s no way of fencing in your individuality from other minds in science or in public affairs. You’re a part by necessity; you can’t be a complete whole. You find already you can’t keep away from these things. They will take you more and more, whether you like it or not, because it is the spirit of the time. That is what is happening to us all. You can’t escape. Our work, our part, is the first thing in our lives. To that, pride must bow now and passion and romance. We have to slam and lock and bar the door against all personal passion that might wreck our work. Bar it and put it out of your mind. As a secondary thing. Work. Give the greater things a chance to keep you.”

“That’s all very well.”

“It’s everything.”

“Why _should_ they keep me?” came from Christina Alberta, sullenly and resolutely.

“I know that this is your faith,” she said. “You told me all about it. You’ve always told me about it.” Bobby’s quick ear detected a change in her voice “Do you remember our first talk together? Do you remember our talk in Lonsdale Mews? When we dined together at that Italian place? That night. Just after we had found each other.”

Found each other?

“But I did not know then that your faith meant all the suppressions and sacrifices and discretions it seems to do. I thought it was something robust and bold. I did not understand its--qualifications. But since then we have argued about these things and argued. That day at Kew Gardens. That day when you took me for that walk over the downs to Shere. We have threshed things out. Why should we argue again? I am giving in--what can I do but give in?--and soon I will be a Sargonite with you and Paul. But not this summer. Not now. This night--This wonderful first night of summer. To-night I rebel against any renunciation, any fobbing-off of individuals with second-best things. I am going to be impossible and absurd. For the last time. I want the world from the stars to the bottom of the sea for myself, for my own hungry self. And all between. The precious things between. The love.... _There!_”

Vague questions appeared and vanished again on the screen of Bobby’s mind. What had Christina Alberta renounced? What was she renouncing? What was anyone renouncing? And had his ears cheated him, or had Devizes called her, “my dear”? In front of Margaret Means and in face of all the circumstances of the case it seemed to Bobby that Devizes was the last person who ought to call Christina Alberta “my dear.” And what was this about “fobbing-off”? Was this really a shameless plainness of speech, an atrocious confession, or something that he misunderstood?

Miss Lambone stirred uneasily.

It was as if an evil spirit possessed Christina Alberta. “Oh, _damn_ renunciation!” she said with bitter gusto.

They seemed to be sitting for some moments in a profound silence, and then the nightingale became very audible.

§ 6

“I think,” said Miss Lambone in the silence, “that it is getting just a _leetle_ chilly.”

“It is so beautiful here,” said Miss Means, who was warm in Miss Lambone’s shawl. “Perfectly beautiful.

“How you can talk of frustration--!” she added, and left her sentence incomplete.

“I think,” said Miss Lambone, “that I shall go in and light the candles. It is too wonderful a night for the electric lights, far too wonderful. We will just light the candles and the fire. And perhaps you will play us something beautiful. These are such marvellous fire-places here that they blaze up at once. I don’t know if you have noticed them--a new sort. The fire is all on the hearth--no draught below, but the shape of the back draws it up.

“I love a wood fire,” said Miss Lambone, and sighed and rose slowly and voluminously.

§ 7