Sargon was new, Paul Lambone was new, Devizes new; before the war
there could not have been any such people. They had grown out of
their own past selves; they were as different from pre-war people as
nineteenth-century people had been different from eighteenth-century
people. Newest of all was this Christina Alberta who had effaced her
blue-eyed predecessor. She was so direct and free in her thoughts and
talk that she made Bobby feel that his own mind wore a bonnet and
flounces. He had gone for two walks with her, once to Brede and once
to Rye, and he liked her tremendously. Whether he was in love with her
he didn’t yet know. Falling in love with her for anyone was evidently
going to be a quite unconventional, untested, and difficult series
of exercises. Nothing at all like that unborn normal affair with the
non-existent blue-eyed girl.
She seemed to like him, and particularly the way his hair grew on his
head. She had mentioned it twice and ruffled it once.
A queer aspect of the situation was the riddle of how she and Sargon
and himself came to be the guests of Paul Lambone with Devizes
in attendance. It was just a part of Paul Lambone’s freedom from
prescription that he should be able to give sanctuary to Sargon and
assemble this odd, unconventional week-end party. But Bobby had a
sense of hidden links and missing clues. Devizes was a natural enough
visitor, of course; he was manifestly Lambone’s close friend. But their
interest in Sargon was stronger than Bobby could imagine it ought
to be. He was puzzled; he examined all sorts of possibilities in a
gingerly fashion. Some impulse like his own, no doubt, but not quite
the same, lay at the bottom of this--Sargonism.
Bobby had begun by feeling very hostile to Devizes as an unexpected
intruder on a system of relationships sufficiently interesting without
him. He was glad that he had to go to London for Friday, and not
particularly pleased by his return on Saturday. Then he found his
feelings changing to a curious respect, mingled with a defensive
element that was almost like fear.
Devizes was more aware of you than Lambone. He looked at you, his
mind came at you. It had the habit of coming at people. He was more
actively and aggressively interested in things than Lambone and more
self-forgetful. Lambone observed enough to make bright comments;
Devizes made penetrating observations. Bobby often felt encumbered
with himself; most people he thought were encumbered with themselves,
but Devizes to a conspicuous degree wasn’t. He was a man of science;
a man of scientific habits. Bobby had known one or two scientific men
before, rather wrapped away from ordinary things, but the interest that
wrapped them was something that wrapped them away from oneself; one had
been concerned chiefly with stresses in glass and another with the eggs
of echinoderms. You always seemed to be looking at the backs of these
fellows’ heads and smiling at their immense preoccupation. But this
man Devizes was wrapped up in the motives and thoughts of people; he
didn’t look away from you; he looked into you. That grew upon Bobby’s
consciousness. Devizes’ eye lacked delicacy.
He had come down for the week-end chiefly to deal with Sargon. He went
up and had long talks to Sargon. He was “treating” Sargon. He didn’t
go up and talk to Sargon as man to man, as Bobby would have done. He
went up to a sort of mental jiu-jitsu with Sargon to exercise him
and push him about into new attitudes. Devizes was formidable enough
in himself, but far more formidable as a portent. He had all the
appearance of being a precursor, the most vigorous precursor--they were
all precursors!--of a new type of human relationships, relationships
without delicate reservations, without rich accumulations of feeling
behind emotions avoided and things unsaid. So it seemed to Bobby,
who didn’t for a moment suspect how much these people were avoiding
and suppressing. Christina Alberta’s thoughts and speech seemed to
him to be moving about without a stitch on, like the people in some
horrible Utopia by Wells. He compared the vast impalpable network of
“understanding” he and Tessy had woven between each other.
“New people,” he whispered, and looked Paul Lambone’s new house in the
face. To him they were stupendously new, an immense discovery. The
war had overstrained him, he realized, and left him too tired for a
time to see new things. He had been one of the vast multitude of those
who had come out of the war in the expectation of a trite and obvious
old-fashioned millennium, and who expressed their disappointment
by declaring that nothing had happened except devastation and
impoverishment. They were too jaded at first to observe anything else.
But indeed Bobby now realized the European world had been travelling
faster and faster since the break-up of the armed peace in 1914; and
here were new types, new habits of thought, new ideas, new reactions,
new morals, new ways of living. He discovered himself in the advent of
a new age, a new age that was coming so fast that there hadn’t been
time ever to clear the forms and institutions of the old age away. They
weren’t reversed or abolished, they weren’t overthrown, they were just
disregarded. Which was just why it was possible to get along for a year
or so without noting the tremendous changes everything was undergoing.
“New People.” Did that apply to Sargon? That was Sargon’s room: the two
long windows between the buttresses. Was Sargon also an escape from the
established order of relationships into novel things? What was the real
significance of the absurd little man with his preposterous map of the
world and his still more preposterous planisphere, who wanted to be
Lord of the Earth?
§ 4
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.