eyes searched his countenance swiftly, and who then gripped his arm.
“I think,” said Sargon, “that it is you.”
Mr. Godley, who was not without a sense of humour, attempted to reply
that it certainly was him, but that impediment of his, partly natural
but greatly developed by affectation, arrested him about the word
“certainly,” and he was still sawing the air with his profile when
Sargon spoke again.
“I have need of your help,” said Sargon. “The great task is beginning.”
Mr. Godley went through the preliminary convulsions of explaining that
he had the better part of an hour to spare and that he was willing to
give help in any reasonable matter provided it was first explained to
him clearly just exactly what the matter was. But he could only give
help for a limited time. His engagement with his class at the Birkbeck
was imperative. Sargon paid little heed to the significance of the
various sounds that Mr. Godley was biting off and swallowing. He led
his captive by the arm and explained, with helpful gestures of his free
hand, the full significance of this call. “You are, I perceive, a young
man of scientific qualifications. They will be needed. I do not know
if you recognize me--your memory may still be imperfect--but I recall
your face, chief among the wise men of our ancient court. Yes, indeed,
chief among our wise men.”
“N-no-no-not as-as-assure that I follow you aw-ow-ow quite,” said the
young man. “My my--my aw-ow-ow-work issferr’ll aw-ow-ow-known as yet.”
“_I_ know it,” said Sargon boldly. “_I_ know it. I have been seeking
you. Do not be deceived by my plain incognito. Believe me I have
tremendous powers behind me. In a little while all men will understand.
The age of confusion draws near its end; a new age begins. We are the
first two particles, the very first, in a great crystallization----”
“Where aaare we g-g-g-oing agg-aggs-aggs-exactly?” asked the young man.
“Trust me,” said Sargon bravely. “Keep with me.”
The young man struggled with some complex question. But now three
fresh individuals came under the magic attraction of the call and the
young man’s question fell in unheeded chunks. These new adherents were
a little group of men standing at the kerb, about a small, almost
inaudible hurdy-gurdy on which was a placard stating: “We want Work
not Charity; but there is no Work for Us in this So-called Civilized
State.” They were clad in faded khaki, and were all youths of less than
five-and-twenty.
“Now look at that!” said Sargon. “Is it not time the new age began?”
He addressed himself to the man on the right of the organ-grinder.
“All this is to be altered here and now,” he said. “I have work for you
to do.”
“Oh!” said the ex-soldier in the accent of a fairly well-educated man.
“What sort of work?”
“We’re straight,” said the organ-grinder. “We’ll take it. If it’s work
we can do. We ain’t fakers. Wot work is it?”
“Shillin’ an hour?” said the third.
“More than that. Much more than that. And very great and responsible
work. A harvest! A splendid harvest! You shall be leaders of men.
Follow after me.”
“Far?” asked the man who had spoken first.
Sargon made a gesture that effectually concealed his own lack of a
definite plan, and led the way.
“Lead on, Macbeth,” said the organ-grinder, and swung his hurdy-gurdy
into its carrying position on his back. The two other ex-soldiers
exchanged views that it was all right and that anyhow they’d see what
was offered them. Mr. Godley, keeping abreast of his leader, began an
immense and ultimately futile struggle with a fresh question.
The next disciple was not so much called as fell into the gathering
body of Sargonites. He was a tall gentleman of a rich brown colour with
frizzy black hair, and a vast disarming smile. He was dressed in an
almost luminous grey frock-suit, a pink tie, buttoned shoes with bright
yellow uppers, and a hat as distinguished as Sargon’s own. He carried
a grey alpaca umbrella. He held out a sheet of paper in a big mahogany
hand and emitted in a rich abundant voice the word “Escuse.” The
paper had printed on it at the head the words, “Lean and Mackay, 329
Leadenhall Street, E.C.” and below written in ink, “Mr. Kama Mobamba.”
Sargon regarded his interlocutor for a moment and then recognized him.
“The Elamite King!” he said.
“Non spik English,” said the black gentleman. “Portugaish.”
“No,” said Sargon with a gesture that explained his intention.
“Providence. Follow after me.”
The coloured gentleman fell in trustfully.
“Look here!” protested one of the ex-soldiers. “There ain’t going to be
coloured labor on this job?”
“Peace!” said Sargon. “Very soon everything will be shown to you.”
“I don’t think you have any ub-ub-business to mislead ap-ap-people,”
said Mr. Godley, who was becoming more and more interested in, and
perplexed by, Sargon’s proceedings.
Sargon quickened his pace.
“This--this gentleman s-s-s-simply wa-wa-wanted tu-tu-tu-tu-to go to
that address,” said Mr. Godley.
In his eagerness to get the idea home to Sargon he became a little
disregardful of his microscope box which inflicted a sudden sharp
blow on the knee of a passing gentleman, a business man in a silk
hat. The victim cursed aloud with extraordinary vehemence and stood
hopping on the pavement with his hand to his knee. Then he succumbed
to a passionate impulse to tell Mr. Godley exactly what he thought of
his conduct, his upbringing, and his type of human being. He joined
the followers of Sargon at a brisk limp, occasionally saying “Hi!”
in a breathless voice. A rather intoxicated man in deep mourning had
witnessed the incident. He came hurrying, with a certain margin of
error, to the side of the angry gentleman in the silk hat.
“’Sgraceful salt,” he said. “’Sgraceful! F’want a witness _I_’m your
man!”
His general intention was to go forward at the side of the gentleman
in the silk hat, but there were chemically emancipated factors in his
being that drove him sideways. The resultant was a sinuous course that
presently involved him with a display of oranges in a barrow at the
pavement edge. It was not a serious nor a prolonged contact, but it
involved a certain scattering of oranges in the gutter and added a new
ingredient, a very angry costermonger’s assistant with a remonstrance
and a claim for damages, to the gathering body of Sargon’s followers.
The moral of a proverb depends entirely upon the image chosen, and
though a rolling stone gathers no moss, a rolling snowball grows
by what it rolls upon. A small hurrying group of people in a
London street is a moving body of the snowball type; its physical
pull is considerable; it appeals to curiosity and the increasing
gregariousness of mankind. Sargon, blue-eyed and exalted, with Mr.
Godley intent and eloquent upon his left hand, and Mr. Kama Mobamba,
tall, silent, smiling, with a shining confidence upon his ebony face
that soon he would be led into the presence of Messrs. Lean and
Mackay, formed the spearhead of the procession. Behind came the three
out-of-work ex-soldiers, who were now involved in obscure protests
and explanations with the gentleman in the silk hat, and a smart but
rather incomprehensible young newspaper reporter, who had acquired his
native tongue in Oldham, and had just come up to London to push his
fortunes, and was anxious for something called a “scoop.” He seemed to
think that Sargon might be the “scoop” he sought. Two ambiguous-looking
individuals in caps and neck-wraps had also fallen in, possibly for
nefarious purposes, a vague-faced young woman of the streets in a
weather-worn magenta hat was asking what was “_up_” and the intoxicated
man in mourning was explaining as wittily and obscurely as possible.
There was also a fringe of skirmishing juveniles. And an Eton boy. He
was very, very young and fresh-faced, a scion of one of the oldest and
best families in England and a convinced and fierce Communist. He had
been on his way with a bosom friend to the celebrated model engine shop
in Holborn when Sargon had swept past him and the inscription on the
organ had caught his eye.
He was a boy of swift initiatives and with a highly developed dramatic
sense.
“Sorry, old Fellow,” he said to his friend. “But I feel the time has
come. Unless I’m very much mistaken that little bunch is the beginning
of the Social Revolution, and I must do my duty.”
“Oo I _say_, Rabbit!” said the friend. “Come and buy that steam-launch
first, anyhow.”
“_What’s_ a model steam-launch?” said Rabbit scornfully, and turned to
follow Sargon.
He would have liked to have had a swift strong hand-clasp first, but
you can’t do that sort of thing with a chap who will always keep both
hands in his trouser pockets. He darted off, and his friend followed
discreetly in a state between amusement and dismay, and at such a
distance as seemed to him to exonerate him from any personal complicity
with the social revolution.
“Where are we going?” asked the young Etonian as he came up with the
hindmost of the out-of-work ex-soldiers.
“_He_ knows,” said the out-of-work ex-soldier, indicating Sargon.
§ 3
But that was exactly what our dear Sargon did not know. By this time he
was no longer a convinced and complete Sargon. A scared and doubting
and protesting Preemby was struggling back into his being.
Up to the beginning of the calling of the disciples Sargon had ruled
in his own soul assured and unchallenged. But he had expected his
disciples to respond to his call, to recognize and remember, to be
immediately understanding and helpful. The calling was to have been
like the lighting of a lamp in their minds and the world about them.
He had expected not only his own clear and unquestioning conviction
but accession and reinforcement for it. And so leaping from soul to
soul the restoration of Humanity, the Empire of Sargon would have
spread. For disciples who made conditions, for disciples who followed,
gesticulating strangely and spluttering and bubbling and stammering
injurious criticisms, for disciples who asked for a minimum wage, and
for disciples who came limping after one calling “Hi!” as though one
was a cab, Sargon was totally unprepared.
Had he called these disciples rashly? Had he been premature again? Had
he made another mistake?
These were unpleasantly urgent questions for a Master to solve while
he was going briskly to nowhere in particular about four miles an hour
along Holborn with his following gathering at his heels. Perhaps all
leadership is a kind of flight. In every leader of men perhaps the
fugitive has been latent. In Sargon now it was more than latent; it was
awake and stirring, and its name was Preemby.
Since first mankind in its slow ascent from mere animalism became
susceptible to Prophets and Great Teachers and Leaders there must
always have been something of this internal conflict between the
greatness of the mission and something discreetly less, and there
must also have been always something of this clash of the disciples’
quality and motive with the teacher’s expectations. The very calling
of disciples seems to admit a sense of weakness on the prophet’s part.
Their calling puts him in pledge. He puts himself in pledge to them.
They will, he knows, hold him to it when he falters; deep gregarious
instincts assure him he will not desert his declaration to them even
when he might desert himself. They desert him--inevitably. In the whole
record of the world there is only one unvarying, faithful disciple, Abu
Bekr. All other disciples failed and crippled their Masters and misled
them. They deserted or they drove the prophet whither he would not go.
Great things and little things of the same kind follow the same laws.
At the head of that small wedge of commotion driving along lamp-lit
Holborn in the October twilight went Sargon the Lord and Protector of
Mankind, the Restorer of Faith and Justice, the Magnificent One, and
though he was already aware of an error made and dangers incurred, he
was still resolved to pull a great occasion by some stupendous gesture
out of the jaws of disaster. And closer than his shadow was Preemby,
scared nearly out of his wits, ready for a desperate headlong bolt down
any side turning, a bolt from explanation, a bolt from effort, a bolt
back to Preembyism and infinite nothingness.
Suddenly there came to Sargon a reassuring voice, the voice of one who
had at least seemed to believe and accept.
There had been a slight altercation with Billy before Bobby came
hurrying across the road. “There he goes!” said Bobby.
“That isn’t him,” said Billy. “Where’s his moustache? He was pretty
nearly all moustache.”
“Shaved,” said Bobby. “I’d swear to him anywhere. A sort of prance in
his walk. It’s our prophet, Billy, and he’s heading for trouble.”
“Looks more like a welsher,” said Billy. “Where’d he get that ecstatic
nigger? It’s too rummy for me altogether, Bobby. You keep out of it.
There’s a policeman tacking on now.”
Bobby hesitated. “Can’t let him go like that,” he said, and dodged
across the road just as four racing omnibuses blotted out the
Sargonites from Billy’s eyes.
“Forgive me, but where are you going?” said Bobby, stooping to Sargon’s
grateful ear in spite of a considerable push from Mr. Godley.
“I have declared myself,” said Sargon, and straightway reassurance
came. This was the First of the Disciples, and he had found his way to
his Master. Quite clearly now did Sargon see what he had to do. These
first followers had to be instructed. The Teaching had to begin. To do
that it was necessary to lead them apart out of the hurry and tumult
of the street. A vision came to Sargon of a long brightly lit table,
and an array of disciples asking questions, and of memorable answers
and great sayings. And straight ahead, glowing, bursting with light,
already a friend, there towered up the inviting mass of the Rubicon
Restaurant, pioneer in the great enterprise of supplying dinners de
luxe at popular prices.
“Yonder,” said Sargon with a sweeping gesture of the hand, “we will
rest and sit at meat, and I will talk, and all things shall be
explained.”
The bright vision of a discourse to a gathering of disciples at a table
had so restored the gloriousness of Sargon that by the time he reached
the entrance of the Rubicon Restaurant, which bulges invitingly at a
corner, he had called two further disciples. One of these acquisitions
was a matchbox-holding beggar of venerable appearance, and the other
a highly intelligent-looking man of perhaps fifty, lean and thinly
bearded, carrying a book on the Doukhobors and wearing mittens and
a tall black felt hat--a hat of an unusual shape rather like the
steam-dome of a railway engine. This last acquisition was made at the
very door of the Restaurant.
“Come in here,” said Sargon, seizing his arm, “and take meat with me. I
have things to tell you that will change your whole life.”
“This is very _suddan_,” said the intelligent-looking man, speaking
in the high neighing protesting accent of an English scholar and
gentleman, as he yielded himself to Sargon’s grip.
§ 4
The actual invasion of the Rubicon Restaurant was a confused and swift
affair. Sargon’s mind was clear and simple now; he had to make that
vision of a long white table with his disciples grouped about him
a reality or incur a great defeat. His following was animated by a
mixture of unequal and incompatible motives, as all followings are,
and it was now swollen to something near thirty--the exact number
is uncertain because it passed marginally into mere onlookers and
passers-by--by the action of the least worthy of the three out-of-work
ex-soldiers, who had been uttering these magic words, “A Free Feed!”
ever since the Rubicon Restaurant had been in sight.
The attention of that challenging individual, the outside porter, had
happened to be distracted by the arrival of guests in a motor car when
the Sargonites came along. They therefore swept through the outer
entrance without encountering any obstacle other than the rotating
door, which chopped the little crowd into ones and twos before it
reached the entrance hall. Perhaps twenty got into the entrance hall,
that space of marble and mahogany and hovering cloak-room attendants,
before the mechanical incompetence of the man in deep mourning and
his subsequent extraction by the politely indignant outer porter, the
costermonger’s assistant intervening unhelpfully, jammed the apparatus.
The man with the bruised shin seems to have fallen out before the
restaurant was reached, and the vague-faced young woman in the magenta
had drifted away at some unnoted moment.
In the spacious, glittering and observant outer hall a tendency to
dispersal manifested itself. The out-of-work ex-soldier with the organ,
seized by a sudden shyness, made for the gentleman’s cloak-room to
deposit his instrument and became involved in an argument with his
colleagues. The two ambiguous young men in caps and neck-wraps seem to
have hesitated about the correctness of their costume. But Sargon held
the newly caught gentleman tight, and the venerable match-seller did
not mean to be separated from his patron in this bright, luxurious,
dangerous place. Mr. Kama Mobamba, tall and smiling and shining, handed
hat and umbrella to an attendant and followed closely upon the Master,
serene in his assurance that these were the lordly portals of the long
sought firm of African traders, Lean and Mackay. And Mr. Godley, with
his natural passion for explicitness, would not leave Sargon until
he had made it perfectly clear to him why he did not feel bound to
accompany him further. He came next after the others into the Large
Restaurant, making noises like a cuckoo clock that has lost control
of itself. The reporter from Oldham was also holding on, though in
considerable doubt now what sort of story he would have to write. The
Eton boy, more than half aware now of his error, and so disposed to be
a little detached also, came into the restaurant after depositing hat
and umbrella without.
Bobby never came through. He was overtaken and held up in the entrance
hall by Billy. “This isn’t your affair, Bobby,” said Billy. “This
really isn’t your affair.”
“I can’t make out what he’s up to,” said Bobby. “He’s bound to get into
trouble.”
“Never mind.”
“But I do mind.”
“The management’s scared,” said Billy. “They’re sending for the police.
There’s a crowd gathered outside. Look at the faces looking in. See
that chap peering through the hole in the glass? Nice thing for Tessy
and Susan if we get into some police-court scrape.”
“But we can’t leave him to get into a mess here.”
“But how can we help him?”
§ 5
Within the restaurant Sargon made his supreme and final effort and
encountered swift and overwhelming defeat. But at any rate he did not
run away. He made a frontal attack on the world he had set out to
subdue--as Sargon. As Sargon, invincibly Sargon, he met disaster.
Things had not begun to be very brisk yet in the Rubicon Restaurant.
But indeed it is never so brisk in the Rubicon of an evening as it is
at lunch time; it is too far from the west; pre-eminently a luncheon
place. And the hour even for such briskness as is customary had not yet
come. The neat lines of the little white tables, each with its lamp
and flowers, were only broken here and there by occupants. A family
group going to a circus; a little knot of people going to a meeting in
the Kingsway Hall; three or four couples of theatre-goers in evening
dress; three or four of those odd couples of a rather inexperienced
looking middle-aged business man and an extremely inexperienced looking
young woman in imperfectly conceived dinner dress who are to be seen
everywhere in London, and a group of three business men from the north
dressed in a canny grey and dining with a resolute completeness from
cocktail to liqueur, was all the company yet assembled in the body of
the restaurant. There were one or two occupants in the lower gallery,
dimly seen; the upper gallery was unlit. The atmosphere was still
timorous and chilly; even the three men from the north exacted their
tale of London luxury in a subdued and even furtive manner.
The staff was still largely unemployed. The head-waiters, wine-waiters
and table-waiters fidgeted serviettes and glasses, or stood about with
that expression of self-astonishment and melancholy upon their faces
habitual to waiters. A slight hubbub in the entrance hall and the sound
of the smashing of the glass in the rotating door by the last effort of
the man in mourning preceded the entry of Sargon.
Every one looked up. The guests forgot their food and their company
manners; the waiters forgot their secret sorrows. Sargon appeared,
an inconspicuous figure, a little white, almost luminous face, round
bright eyes. With one hand he still gripped his last disciple. With the
other he waved aside the gobbets of speech which Mr. Godley proffered
him. A tall expectant negro face rose like a shield of ebony and ivory
above him. Behind were the match-seller and other followers, less
clearly apprehended.
A head-waiter faced him. Behind hovered a manager and a little further
off an assistant manager fiddled with the fruit on the buffet.
Sargon released his latest catch and stood forward.
“Set a table here,” he said with a fine gesture. “Set a table here for
a great company. I have called a following and must needs discourse
with them.”
“Table, sir,” said the head-waiter. “For ’ow many, sir?”
“A great company.”
“Well, sir,” said the head-waiter with an appealing glance at the
manager, “we’d like to ’ave an idea ’ow many.”
The manager came up to take control and the assistant manager deserted
his piles of fruit and came up behind helpfully. Sargon perceived he
was against opposition and gathered all the forces within him. “It is a
great company,” he said. “It must sit at meat with me here and I must
discourse to it. These people yonder may join. Set all the tables one
to another. The day of separate tables and separate lives is at an end.
Let even the tables manifest the Brotherhood of Man. Under Our Rule.
Set them together.”
At the words “Brotherhood of Man” one of the three business men from
the north was smitten with understanding. “It’s a blood-stained
Bolshevik,” he said, or words to that effect. “Shovin’ in here! Of all
places!”
“Oughtn’t to be allowed,” said his friend. “Aren’t we to have _no_
peace from them?”
The first business man expressed a general antipathy for incarmined
Bolsheviks and went on eating bread in a hurried, fussed, irritated
manner. “When’s that Fricassee of Chicken coming?” he said. “They must
have dropped it or something.”
But the manager’s intelligence had been even quicker than the business
man’s. A swift signal had been given at the very beginning of Sargon’s
speech. The waiter sent to summon the police had already sped past
Billy and Bobby and the rest of the uncertain crowd in the entrance
hall, draughty now and uneasy because of the broken glass in the
rotating door that the man in mourning had broken.
But Sargon heeded nothing of this byplay. He held on to the only course
that he could see before him, which was to overwhelm the opposition
that gathered against him.
“We don’t have banquets in this room, sir,” said the manager, playing
for time. “Banquets you can have in the Syrian Hall or in the Elysian
Chamber or in the Great Masonic or Little Masonic Hall--given due
notice and after proper arrangements, but this is the general public
restaurant. You can’t _suddenly_ give a banquet to an unknown company
or society or something here. We don’t cater for that. It isn’t done.”
“It will be done to-night,” said Sargon, with a glance and intonation
and gesture that would have bent all dream Sumeria to its knees.
But the managers of European restaurants are made of sterner stuff, it
seems, than were the old Sumerians. “I’m afraid _not_, sir,” he said,
and stood blandly obstructive.
“Do you know,” cried Sargon, “who it is with whom you have to deal?”
“Not one of our regular customers, sir,” said the manager, with the
apologetic air of one who scores a point perforce.