we agreed it’s got to be a student for two or three years more. You
need have no anxiety about ways and means. You and I are of the same
Clan--a clan of two practically--and I am the head. I’ll see you
through just as though you were a son. And now, what sort of work is it
to be? Law? Medicine? a general education for journalism or affairs?
Doors open to women now--fresh doors every day.”
To that Christina Alberta could speak a little more fully. She had been
thinking out some of these things. She wanted to know about life and
the world as a whole. Could she have a good year at physical science,
biology and geology chiefly and anthropology? Would that be possible?
And then if she was any good at medical work, another year at mental
science or politics and public health? “It sounds ambitious I know,”
she said.
“Ambitious! It’s an encyclopædia in a year.”
“But I want to know about all these things.”
“Naturally.”
“Could I have longer than that?”
“You’d have to have longer than that.”
“It seems to be asking for so much.”
“It wouldn’t be if you were in trousers. We’ve agreed to unsex you to
that extent. Why shouldn’t you be ambitious?”
“You think I might do work--scientific work--at last--as you do?”
“Why not?”
“A girl?”
“You’re the sort of stuff I am, Christina Alberta.”
“Do you think--some day--I might even come to work--to work with you?”
“Kindred minds may follow kindred courses,” he said, with the
completest recognition of their relationship “Why not?”
She stood and looked at him with a dark excitement in her eyes and he
had a momentary intimation of all that he might be to her. Gallant she
was and fine and ambitious; a wonderful life to come out of nothingness
into his own. And she meant this relationship to grow, as well it might
grow, into something very great and deep for both of them.
He went off at a tangent to talk of the contrast of men and women
students and of men and women as workers. “You’ll never run parallel
with men, you free women, so don’t expect it. You’ve got to work out
a way that is similar perhaps but different. Different down to the
roots.” He argued that probably the whole fabric of a man had its
qualities that a woman’s did not possess and vice versa, down even to
a muscular fibre or a nerve tendril. A time might come when we should
be able to put a drop of blood or a scrap of skin under the microscope
or apply some subtle reagent to it and tell its sex. “A man resists,”
he said. “A man is intractable. He has greater inertia, physical and
mental. That keeps him to his course. Men compared with women are
steadier and stupider. Women compared with men are quicker and sillier.
Bludgeons and bodkins.”
He talked of his student days when women medical students were still
rather novel intrusions, and from that he passed to his father’s
prejudices, to his father’s treatment of his mother and his boyish
days. Presently they were exchanging experiences of childish delusions
and fancies. She forgot how much older and more experienced he was in
the ease of his talk. He told her about himself because he recognized
her right to know about him; he listened with a friendly eagerness
to all she chose to tell him of her Daddy and herself and about
her impressions and her few adventures in encounter as a suburban
student in London. They shared their delight in Paul Lambone’s kindly
absurdity. Presently it occurred to her to offer him drink. The Crumbs
had left a bottle of beer and a syphon. But Devizes asked her to make
tea and helped her with the kettle. Meanwhile the mutual exploration
went on. Their friendliness grew richer and deeper as they talked. She
had never before met so intimate and delightful a curiosity as his. She
had had friends before but no such friendliness; she had had a lover
but never such intimacy.
It was one o’clock before he went away.
The talk had ebbed. He sat thoughtful for a moment.
“I must go,” he said, and stood up. They faced each other, a little at
a loss for parting words.
“It’s been wonderful to talk to you,” she said.
“It’s a great thing to have discovered you.”
Another pause. “It’s a great thing for me,” she said lamely.
“We’ll talk--many times,” he said.
He wanted to call her “my dear,” and an absurd shyness prevented him.
And she was aware of that suppression.
She stood up straight before him in the passage with a flush on her
cheeks and her eyes alight, and he wondered he had not thought her
beautiful from the beginning. “Good-bye for the time,” he said, and
smiled at her gravely and took and held her hand for a moment.
“Good night,” she said, and hesitated and then opened the green door
for him and stood and watched him go up the Mews.
At the top he turned and waved his hand to her before he disappeared.
“Good night,” she whispered and started, and looked about her as if she
feared that her unspoken thoughts had been audible.
Father. Her father!
So real fathers leave one aglow like this!
He had left her tense as a violin string on which the bow rests
motionless. Now Daddy, who wasn’t her father, she would just have
hugged and kissed.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
_How Bobby Stole a Lunatic_
§ 1
A man may be a mental expert and yet fail to take the most obvious
hints in a detective investigation. The medical superintendent at
Cummerdown Hill had doubted for a moment whether Widgery was the name
of Sargon’s visitor. He had thought it was more like Goodchild. But
since there was no known Goodchild in the world of Christina Alberta,
neither she nor Devizes had troubled to scrutinize this momentary
uncertainty. Nor had she and Devizes asked themselves why Widgery
should have made a second visit to his cousin. Indeed, he had not done
so. It was a much younger man who had visited Sargon that Tuesday; he
had falsely represented himself as Sargon’s nephew and given the name
of “Robin Goodchild.” His real name was Robert Roothing, and he had
come for the sole purpose of getting Sargon out of the asylum as soon
as possible, because he could not endure the thought of his staying
there.
Circumstances had conspired with a natural predisposition to give Bobby
a great horror of all restraint. His mother, a gentle dark creature,
the wife of a large blond negligent landowner, had died when Bobby was
twelve; and he had been entrusted to the care of a harsh, old-fashioned
aunt--to whom the cupboard seemed a proper place for discipline. When
she discovered that he was really distressed by it, she sought to break
his “cowardice” by giving him quite liberal doses of it--even when
he had committed no offence. He went to a school where discipline
was maintained by “keeping-in.” The war eliminated his father, who
died suddenly of over-excitement while in command of an anti-aircraft
gun during an air-raid, and it led Bobby through some tiresome
campaigning in Mesopotamia and the beleaguerment of Kut to an extremely
unsympathetic Turkish prison. In any case he would probably have been
a free-going easy creature, but now he had so passionate a hatred of
cages that he wanted to release even canaries. He disliked the iron
fences round the public parks and squares with a propagandist passion,
he wrote articles about them in _Wilkins’ Weekly_ and elsewhere
clamouring for their “liberation,” and he never went by train if he
could help it because of the claustrophobia that assailed him in the
compartment. He would ride a push-bike except for long distances, and
then he would borrow Billy’s motor bicycle. He did his best to prevent
his craving for the large and open from becoming too conspicuous or a
nuisance to other people, but Tessy and Billy understood about it and
did their best to make things easy for him.
It was not only claustrophobia that Bobby had to fight against. He
carried on a secret internal conflict with a disinclination to act
upon most occasions, that he believed had developed in him as a result
of war experiences. Sometimes it seemed to him to be just indolence,
sometimes fastidiousness, sometimes sheer funk and cowardice. He
could not tell. He had a rankling memory of a case of cruelty he had
witnessed in the prisoners’ camp when he had stood by and done nothing.
He would wake up sometimes at three o’clock in the morning and say
to himself aloud, “I stood by and I did nothing. Oh God! Oh _God_!
Oh GOD!” And at times he would walk up and down his study repeating:
“_Act!_ You vegetable! you hiding cur! Out and act!” Meanwhile he
obeyed routines and did whatever came to his hand. As “Aunt Suzannah”
he was excellent, indefatigably considerate, lucid, really helpful.
_Wilkins’ Weekly_ was proud of him. He was the backbone of the paper.
And now this affair of Sargon’s had twisted him up very badly between
his desire to free the little man, who had taken an extraordinary hold
upon his imagination and sympathy, and his sense of the immense forces
against which he would have to pit himself if he tried to give him any
help. It was only after a considerable struggle with himself that he
had called at the police station and the Gifford Street Workhouse. He
was afraid of awkward questions, afraid above all of being “detained.”
The workhouse was a detestable place with high walls and a paved court
and a general effect of sinister seclusion from the grubby street
outside. For the best part of a day after his Gifford Street visit he
hesitated whether he should do anything more.
“Bobby’s got a grouch,” Susan told Tessy. “He’s stoopid. Just sits and
says ’E ’as to fink sumpfink over. What’s he fink fings over for? Said
I was to come downstairs again, there was a good girl.... Meant it....
Said so.... Puss’d me ’way.... I do-o-n’t fink I lo-o-o-ove Bobby
’nymore.”
Great distress. A storm of tears. Tessy was deeply sympathetic.
But after tea Bobby was brighter and drew Susan her “Good night
picture” and came down and sat on her bed and talked her to sleep the
same as usual, and Tessy perceived that the worst of Bobby’s trouble
was over.
At supper Bobby unfolded his plans.
“I mean to go to Cummerdown Hill to-morrow,” he said compactly.
“To see Sargon?” said Tessy understandingly.
“If I can. But it won’t be visiting day. That’s Tuesday. I want to look
round.”
Billy raised his eyebrows and helped himself to butter.
“But--” said Tessy, and stopped short.
“Yes?” said Bobby.
“You won’t be able to see him. You don’t know the name he’s under.”
“They’ll call him Mr. Sargon,” said Billy.
“His name’s Preemby. He’s a laundryman. They told me at the workhouse.
His people _want him to be there_!”
“I can’t stand the thought of it,” said Bobby after a brief silence.
“Don’t follow,” said Billy.
“That nice little thing being made into a lunatic. Like a little
blue-eyed bird he was. High walls. Great louting warders. Sargon, King
of Kings.... I’ve got to do something about it or I shall burst.”
He looked at once weak and desperate. Tessy reflected. “You’d better
go,” she said.
“But what good will that do?” said Billy, and was quelled by a glance
from Tessy.
“If you can lend me the old motor bike and the side-car. You’re not
using it this week-end.”
“You can take off the side-car,” said Billy.
“I may want it,” said Bobby.
“You don’t mean--!” said Billy.
Bobby came as near to an explosion as he ever did.
“Oh never mind _what_ I mean. I tell you I’m going down to Cummerdown
to have a look at the place. No doubt I’m a futile ass, Billy, but I
just can’t help myself going. The poor little beggar’s got no friends.
His own family’s helped to put him away. Families do. It’s an infernal
world. I’ve got to do something. If it’s only to shake ’em up. If I
stay here another day I shall start smacking Susan.”
“Somebody ought to,” said Billy.
“If he can only keep away for fourteen days clear----”
“He’s free?” said Tessy.
“He has to be certified all over again--anyhow,” said Bobby.
§ 2
Bobby discovered that the village of Cummerdown lies nearly two miles
away from the asylum, and does its best very successfully to have as
little to do with it as possible. It nestles among trees just off the
high-road to Ashford and Hastings, and has one cramped little inn that
gave him a bleak bedroom and accommodated his machine and side-car in
an open outhouse crowded with two carts and a Ford and populous with
hens. The day was still young, and after he had deposited the elderly
rucksac in which he had brought his “things” upstairs, he set out with
a walking-stick and an air of detached interest to reconnoitre the
asylum and develop his plans for the rescue of Sargon. That golden
autumn was still holding out; the pleasant lane he followed to the
high-road was patterned with green and yellow chestnut leaves and the
trees overhead were full of sunshine. It was a reassuring day. It
encouraged him. It took him with a kindly seriousness and made him feel
that rescuing people from lunatic asylums was the sort of work the sun
could shine upon and nature welcome.
It had needed a great effort to get down from London. He had felt then
like a midget setting out to attack an embattled universe. Amidst the
Croydon traffic he had been half-minded to go back, but he had felt
that he could not face Tessy until he had been at least definitely
defeated. It was delightful to note an increased assurance within
himself as he drew nearer to his enterprise. He felt much more on
the scale of the powers he attacked. After all, what were laws and
regulations but just things patched up by men like himself? What were
prison walls but the slow work of shirking bricklayers and evasive
contractors? The attendants and custodians, the superintendents and
so forth he was setting out to circumvent, were all as fallible as
himself. And the thing was urgent and outrageous, this seizure of a
harmless little fantastic, this frightful imprisonment. It had to be
fought. The world would be intolerable unless such things were fought.
Queer world it was! Such beauty on these tree-stems, such a glow, and
the delightfulness of rustling one’s feet through these leaves! But all
that was by the way; the real business of life was to fight evil things.
He came out from between the trees and saw the wide downs opening out
before him and the blocked masses of the asylum with its broad bare
grounds and walls, an eyesore. This was his objective. In that place
somewhere was Sargon, and he had to be released.
He seated himself on a convenient stile and inspected that heavy
architecture and tried to frame a plan. That white building in the
centre looked like a gaunt Georgian private house. That was probably
the nucleus of the whole place. Two men were visible in front of it
mowing the grass--patients perhaps. The wall and railings along the
road looked implacable. Two stern-looking lodges there were, no doubt
with a testy janitor lurking within, and there were iron gates--one
open. A van was coming out, a furniture dealer’s van. For a time
Bobby’s mind ran on the possibility of becoming a tradesman with
parcels or a crate to deliver.... Many difficulties that way....
“But why a frontal attack?” said Bobby with an effect of discovery. The
place fell away behind, down-hill. He would inspect the rear. If he
worked round by the open down to the right, he would probably get on to
slopes commanding a view of the asylum grounds.
An hour later Bobby was sitting on a heap of flints by the side of a
minor road which ran over the rising ground behind the asylum. He
found the rear of the place much more hopeful and much more interesting
than the front. There were fields with a number of men working in them,
and at one place near the buildings a row of men seemed to be digging
a trench under the supervision of an attendant. There was quite a lot
of movement closer to the buildings, under a sort of open shed half
a dozen men seemed to be taking exercise by walking up and down. It
vexed Bobby to think that any one of these figures might be his Sargon.
If only he had the elementary common sense to bring a field-glass, he
reproached himself, he might have been able to make out his little
friend’s features. “No clearness of thought,” he whispered. “No
decision.” A lot of these people seemed to be going about very freely,
carrying gardening implements and so forth. One he noted, walking about
and gesticulating as if he talked to himself; he was manifestly a
patient and quite unattended.
The wall bounding the asylum on this side had none of the austerity of
the front wall. It seemed to be an old estate wall; in several places
it was covered with ivy and here and there it was overhung with trees.
The ground dropped away to his right, there was a little stream which
ran out of the asylum grounds at the lowest corner; the corner was
shaded by trees and seemed to be left to the trees and undergrowth; the
stream ran under a low arch in the wall and went on down a widening
valley towards London. The seclusion and shade of this corner appealed
to Bobby very strongly. It seemed to him exactly the point at which
Sargon ought to be got out of the place. He decided that presently
he would stroll down and examine its possibilities as precisely as
possible. If one could get Sargon to come down there----
He found the details difficult. He meant to have a plan worked out
in every detail and to communicate it to Sargon on the next visiting
day, but it was very hard to fit this plan together. He did not know
when it would be most convenient for Sargon to attempt to slip away,
whether this was to be a daylight or a night affair. He saw before
him a great vista of inquiries to be made and suspicious people to be
faced. “Damn!” said Bobby, and for a time he was again for abandoning
the attempt.
Why couldn’t one go in at these gates, boldly and overwhelmingly, and
say, “There is a sane man here and I have come to set him free?” A
superman might do that, or an archangel. How splendid it would be to be
a sort of Archangel-Knight-Errant, a great flaming presence of light
and winged power, righting wrongs, reproving oppressors, liberating
every kind of captive creature. Then one might do things. Bobby lapsed
into a childish day-dream.
Presently he roused himself, stood up and went down towards the exit of
the stream. The wall struck him as quite climbable--even by a little
old gentleman. The stream came out meandering among pebbles through
a short tunnel. One could have got into the asylum grounds or out of
them quite easily over the wall by the ivy or through the culvert. He
resolved to come again at twilight and--just to satisfy himself about
his own pluck among other things--get into the asylum premises and walk
about a little.
Yes. He would do that.
He tried to imagine himself assisting Sargon over the wall. One could
get on the top of the wall and reach down to his hands. A cripple could
do it. The motor bicycle would have to be waiting up there in the lane.
And then? _Where would he take him?_
This was a new consideration. For a time Bobby’s mind was appalled and
paralyzed by the complexities of his enterprise. He had not thought of
taking him anywhere in particular.
The days that intervened before visiting day seemed at once
interminable and frightfully swift. He had been to Dymchurch in the
summer with the Malmesburys, and liked the landlady of his lodgings
very much; he wired to her “Can I come with a relation not ill but
overworked for week or so you will remember me last summer Roothing the
Feathers Cummerdown” and had got a reply, “Glad to see you any time.”
So that was all right. But the rest of the plan failed very largely to
materialize. He made his nocturnal visit to the asylum grounds without
misadventure.
The morning of visiting day found him with half a dozen plans, and they
all had gaps and none seemed much better or worse than the others. And
he had walked round the asylum grounds at various discreet distances,
by night and day just twenty-three times, not counting loops, returns
and visits to particular points of interest. Fortunately asylums are
much preoccupied with their internal affairs, and do not keep look-out
men upon the battlements. They do not reckon with rescuers from outside.
Bobby made his final decision among these conflicting projects over
his breakfast bacon. With a resolute sang-froid and his nerves all
a-tingle, he set out for the asylum to see Sargon and begin the work of
rescue as he had thought it out. First he had to find out what freedom
of movement was permitted Sargon, when it might be possible for him to
get away to the corner by the culvert, and he had to arrange a time for
that meeting. Then he would have to provide also for alternative times
if Sargon failed to keep his first appointment. Bobby would be waiting
under the wall and the motor bicycle and side-car would be hidden among
the bushes up by the road. In a trice Sargon would be over the wall.
After that they could laugh at pursuit. Off they would go to Dymchurch,
and there, safe and untrackable, Sargon would keep indoors until the
fifteen days needed to make him legally a sane man again had passed.
And then Bobby could find out those relations of his and talk the
matter over with them, and get things on a proper footing. So Bobby
planned it out.
Just at the lodge gates he decided upon an assumed name. He wasn’t
quite clear why he didn’t give his own name, but an assumed name seemed
to him to be more in the spirit of the adventure.
§ 3
When Sargon was informed that he was to be visited by Mr. Robin
Goodchild he was in a depressed mood. He betrayed no surprise at the
name. It seemed to him to be as good as any other name. It might be
the name of some intelligent inquirer or possibly even some precursor
of the release he still hoped for. His spirits rose. He submitted
cheerfully to a searching examination of his personal tidiness, and he
nodded acquiescently to a warning not to talk about “_every_ blessed
thing” he’d seen.
His spirits rose still more when he saw the dark kindliness of Bobby’s
face. It was the one disciple who had ever seemed to believe. He held
out both his hands in a little storm of emotion. Whatever sort of
muddler Bobby might be to himself, to Sargon in that moment at least he
was strength and hope.
The meeting occurred in the reception-room downstairs, for no one
from the outside world may ever penetrate to the wards and the
bleak realities of everyday asylum life. The reception-room had a
baize-covered table in the middle, a black horsehair sofa and numerous
chairs; it was totally devoid of small movables; there was an A B C
time-table and one or two illustrated weeklies on the table, and the
walls bore brown-spotted steel engravings of Prince Albert and Queen
Victoria in the Highlands and of Windsor Castle from the Thames. There
were three or four groups, each of two or three people, with their
heads together conversing in tactful undertones; there were several
women and one little girl; a tearful lady in profound mourning sat
apart by the empty fire-place and no doubt awaited a patient; two
attendants tried hard not to look as though they were listening as
intently as possible to the conversations going on about them. The
patients present were all in the sanest phase, “fit to be visited.”
There was no madness visible; at most only a little nervous oddity.
Bobby had been watching these other groups while he waited, and he had
been impressed by a certain quality of furtiveness in their behaviour.
The furtiveness he connected with the alertness of the attendants.
One affected to look out of the window, the other half sat at a
table holding an old _Graphic_, and ever and again there would be a
quick glance at this patient or that. It had not occurred to Bobby
that his talk to Sargon would be semi-public; it was a disconcerting
interference that would greatly hamper him in giving his instructions.
Bobby saw at once that Sargon was very much thinner than when he had
taken his room in Midgard Street. He looked ill and worn, an effect
that was emphasized by the fact that he was badly shaven and wearing
ill-fitting clothes. His eyes seemed larger and sunken under his brows
and his forehead more definitely lined. Yet if he looked unhappier he
also looked more intelligent. He seemed more aware of the things about
him--less a man in a dream.
“I have come to see if I can be of service to you,” said Bobby, holding
out his hands. “Your friends and disciples are anxious for your
welfare.”
“You have come to see me,” he said, and glanced sideways at the
listening attendant and dropped his voice; “me--_Sargon_?”