her eyes, the Christina Alberta he generally knew, except for the
traces of her tears. “If women can’t control their emotions better,”
she said, “they’ll have to go back to Harems. We can’t have it both
ways. But I _won’t_ marry you. There’s no man in the world I can marry.
I’m going to be a free and independent woman, Bobby. From now on.”
“But I don’t understand!” said Bobby.
“It’s not because I don’t want you to love me.”
He was baffled. “_Bobby!_” she whispered, and seemed to glow.
Bobby took her back into his arms and held her, and pressed his cheek
and ears against hers, and kissed her and kissed her again, and it
seemed to him to mark his own unworthiness that he should think at such
a time that there were no such wonderful kisses in the world as kisses
flavoured with salt tears.
And yet she wasn’t going to marry him! She had snatched herself back
from him and nevertheless she was in his arms.
He was enormously perplexed at what was happening, but it was quite
clear that the end of his engagement was not to be the end of his
love-making. Anyhow here was love. It was so manifestly the time for
love. High May ruled the world. About them there were hawthorn trees
white with blossom and great bushes of elder just breaking into flower.
§ 4
Bobby sat in the gloaming with his friends and thought of the things
that had happened to him that day, thought of Christina Alberta’s
salt tears and the incessant intriguing strangeness of her ways. He
was still immensely puzzled, but now in a large, restful, contented
fashion. Christina Alberta and he were not to marry it seemed;
nevertheless he had kissed her and embraced her, and he was free to sit
at her feet. For a time he was not even to humiliate himself by telling
these others he was not to marry her. He said nothing. His thoughts and
feelings were beyond words. Christina Alberta too was darkly silent.
Everyone indeed seemed preoccupied. Talk about the view and the stars
and the coming of the nightingales, and about migratory birds and
lighthouses rambled on for a time and died away.
They were all too full for talking. The silence lengthened. He wondered
what would happen if nobody spoke any more. He thought of Christina
Alberta close behind him and he began to quiver in all his being. The
silence was becoming oppressive. He felt as though he could no longer
change his attitude. Nobody stirred. But Lambone saved the situation.
“It is exactly six months ago to-night that Sargon died upstairs,” said
Lambone. He paused and seemed to answer an unspoken question. “We don’t
know when he died exactly. He just faded out in the night.”
“I wish I could have known him,” said Margaret Means after quite a long
interval.
Bobby’s thoughts came round to Sargon. That still young woman sitting
in the darkness behind him ceased to dominate his thoughts. He was
moved to speak, and had to cough to clear his throat.
“I hate to think of his being burnt and scattered,” he said.
“It’s not so disagreeable,” said Miss Lambone, “as to think of the body
all shut up in the coffin and decaying.”
“Oh, don’t!” cried Bobby. “It’s death--any death, that I hate to think
of. Now when it is spring time, when the whole world is so full of
life, I remember all he was, the hopes he had, and they are scattered
and dispersed. Anyhow they are scattered and dispersed, they are not
boxed up and locked up and buried.... When I was here last he was like
a little boy who has just heard of the world. He was going to fly,
going to India and China, going to learn all about everything and then
do all sorts of splendid things. And there were the beastly bacteria at
work in his lungs and beating his strength down and none of it was ever
to happen.... When first I heard he was dead I could not believe it.”
“_Is_ he dead?” said Paul Lambone.
There was no reply to be made to that.
Paul adjusted his shoulder-blades a little more comfortably against the
back of the small deep sofa on which he sat. “The more I think over
Sargon the less dead he seems to me, and the more important he becomes.
I don’t agree with you, Roothing. I don’t find anything futile in his
life. I think he was--symbolically--perfect. I have thought about him
endlessly.”
“And talked,” said Devizes, “endlessly.”
“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.”