BOOK THE FIRST THE COMING OF SARGON, KING OF KINGS (continued 3)

“But why did you do that, Daddy?”

“One always does that,” said Mr. Preemby. “It makes the atmosphere more favourable. We lit a candle which Miss Margaret Rewster got for us and turned out all the electric lights; and while we were doing this, in came young Mr. Charles Fenton and said—what did he say? A peculiar expression. Ah, yes! ‘Gollys,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’”

“Was that the young man with the motor bicycle?”

“Yes. The young man from Cambridge. We explained what we were doing and asked him to join us. He declared he knew nothing of psychic phenomena, had never experimented with it at all and seemed very doubtful about taking part in the trial. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in it,’ he said. ‘We shall just waste our time.’ Indeed I remember now that he did go out intending to visit a music-hall, and then he came back and said it was raining. It’s very important to note that he was not at all eager to join us and that he was quite uninformed about occult things because, you see, as I will tell you, we found out presently that he was a person of exceptional psychic gifts, much greater psychic gifts than anyone else among us.

“Well, we arranged ourselves about the table in the usual manner, thumbs and little fingers touching, and for a time nothing seemed to happen at all. We found Miss Emily Rewster was peeping in through the slightly open door, and perhaps that may have had an unfavourable influence. I suppose she wondered what we were doing and why we had asked her sister for a candle. Then Mr. Fenton got very restive and grumbled to himself and said it was the silliest way of passing an evening he had ever tried. It was a little difficult to persuade him to keep silence and persevere. ‘All right,’ said he, with a kind of resentment. ‘Have it your own way.’ And then suddenly came two violent raps, raps like little pistol shots, not immediately under the table it was, but as if it was in the air a foot or so under the table. And then the table began to move. Slowly at first, shifting along the floor, and then quite strongly twisting and pushing up against our hands. It was very weird and impressive, Christina Alberta, very weird and impressive indeed. It rose nearly two feet I should think and then Mr. Hockleby broke the circle and it fell rather heavily, I fancy, and the leg hit his shin. He uttered an exclamation and stooped to rub his leg, and in the indistinct light he hit his head on the edge of the table. It seemed almost a judgment on his scepticism I thought. We turned up one or two of the lights to attend to him. ‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘This is a bit too rum for me.’

“I asked him to try just once more.

“‘I don’t like this table riding up like this,’ he said. ‘It’s such a bad example for the chairs. Suppose some of them start playing cup and ball with us! You might get a nasty toss from a buck-jumping chair. And besides, it’s a lot too like a Channel crossing for my taste.’

“I think we were all a good deal excited by what had happened, and all the others, even Mr. Hockleby, were eager to continue.

“‘Next time I shall press down,’ he said. I think he was a little suspicious that either his wife or me had something to do with the phenomena. Evidently spiritualism was a long-standing dispute between him and his wife. His wife said she had seen tables move before, but none so actively as this one had done.

“Down we sat again. We had hardly waited a minute before the table began rocking about in the most extraordinary fashion, and then absolutely flew up so violently that the elder Miss Solbé was thrown back over that Ottoman there is there, and I was bumped under my chin. At the same time there was a perfect volley of cracks, like somebody cracking his fingers, but ever so much louder. It was quite a comfort to have the lights up again and see Mr. Hockleby holding the table down firmly in its proper place. ‘Damn you,’ he said—quite loudly. ‘Damn you. Keep down.’ Miss Hockleby and her father picked up Miss Solbé, who was on the floor in a sort of hysterical fit of laughter, with her feet waving about.

“‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘It goes through one like an electric shock.’

“He spoke quite simply.

“The only one of us who had had any experience with occult phenomena was Mrs. Hockleby, and she had not done anything of the sort since her marriage to Mr. Hockleby five or six years before, because of his scepticism. She said now that it was very evident that some very strong and resolute spirit was present and was trying to communicate with us, and she explained a simple and safe method of getting into communication. We were to reform the circle round the table and we were to call over the alphabet, and when we came to the letter the spirit wanted there would be a rap and so we should be able to arrive at something definite. There is a sort of code quite well understood it seems in the spirit world, in which you convey ‘No’ by one rap and ‘Yes’ by two, and so on.

“We set to work at this,” said Mr. Preemby. “We asked if the spirit would like to spell out anything and it answered with two very loud raps, and then Mr. Hockleby read out the letters: A B C and so on. When it got to S the spirit gave a rap so loud it made me jump.”

“And what did you spell out, Daddy?”

“A name quite unknown to me then—SARGON, and then KING OF KINGS. We asked: was the spirit that was communicating with us Sargon? The answer came No. Was Sargon present? Yes. Then who was our communicant? OUJAH. Who was Oujah? WISE MAN. It was a very slow process spelling out the words in this way, and by the time we had got so far we were all very tired. Mr. Fenton in particular was very tired. He yawned and seemed greatly exhausted, and said at last he felt so weary and muzzy that he must go to bed. That was really very natural, because though none of us realized it at the time he was the actual medium under Oujah’s control. He went to bed and we tried to go on without him, but the magic had departed and we could not get so much as a rap. So we sat for a time talking all this over. Mr. Hockleby in particular was greatly flabbergasted, and then the rest of us went to bed.”

“Evidently Mr. Fenton made the raps,” said Christina Alberta.

“Evidently his presence was necessary for the raps to be made,” corrected Mr. Preemby. “Quite unconsciously he was a Mejum.”

There was a pause.

“Go on with the story,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 3

“The next evening was wet again, and as his Spare Part hadn’t come Mr. Fenton was able to join us once more. He made some little objection at first because he said he and his people were all Particular Baptists, and he was doubtful whether this sort of thing was not Necromancy and forbidden in the Bible. But I persuaded him out of that. And this time we spelt out a quite singular message. It was AWAKE, SARGON! ARISE OR BE FOREVER FALLEN!

“Even from the first I had had a feeling that those messages from Sargon had something to do with me. Now suddenly conviction came upon me. I asked ‘Is Sargon present?’ ‘Yes.’ I knew it would be so. ‘Is it anyone in the circle?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it this gentleman?’—pointing to Mr. Hockleby. A very loud No. ‘Is it me?’ ‘Yes.’

“Mr. Hockleby I noted at the time looked annoyed—as though he felt it was he who ought to be Sargon.

“Then young Mr. Fenton stood up suddenly. ‘Oh! I can’t stand any more of this,’ he said. ‘My head feels quite muzzy. I’m sure this sort of thing is harmful.’ He walked across the room and sat down suddenly with his hands hanging over the arms of the chair—it was one of the big arm-chairs covered in cretonne. We all felt very much concerned, but as for myself I was all in a daze at the thought of being this Sargon and being called upon so openly to rouse myself to action. I did not understand fully as yet all that it meant to me, but I did realize that it meant a very great deal.”

“But what did you think it meant?” said Christina Alberta sharply, and her perplexed gaze searched his profile. His blue eyes stared at things far away beyond the distant hills, strange things, fantastic empires, secret cities, mystical traditions, and his brows were knit in the effort to keep his story together.

“All in good time,” said Mr. Preemby. “Let me tell my story in my own way. I was telling you, I think, that young Mr. Fenton said he felt heavy and strange. Mrs. Hockleby happily was quite equal to that situation. She had seen the same thing before. ‘Don’t struggle against it,’ she said. ‘Let yourself go. Just lean back in your chair. If you want to lie quiet, do. If you want to say anything, do. Let the influence work.’ And she turned to me and whispered ‘trance.’

“‘What is a trance?’ said Mr. Fenton—just like that. ‘What is a trance?’

“She began moving her hands in front of his face, ‘making passes,’ I think they call it. He shut his eyes, gave a sort of sigh and his head lolled back. We all sat round him waiting, and presently he began to mutter.

“At first it was just nonsense. ‘Oojah Woojer Boojer,’ words like that. Then more distinctly, ‘Oujah the Wise Man, Sargon’s servant. Oujah comes to serve Sargon. To awaken him.’ After that he seemed to wander off into sheer rubbish. ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ he whispered in his own voice and then, ‘That damned Spare Part.’

“Mrs. Hockleby said that was quite characteristic of this sort of trance, and then Mr. Hockleby got a writing-pad and a pencil to take down anything more that was said.

“And presently when Mr. Fenton spoke again, he did not speak in his own voice but in a kind of hoarse whisper quite different from his usual voice. It was the voice of this Oujah speaking—Oujah the control. With a slight accent—Sumerian I suppose.

“Well, the things he said were very astonishing indeed. I think that this Oujah was anxious to secure my attention by convincing me that he knew of things, intimate things that nobody else could know. At the same time he did not wish the others to know too clearly what he was aiming at. How did it go? What can I remember? Mr. Hockleby has a lot of it written down, but so far I have not had time to make a copy. ‘Child of the sea and the desert,’ he said, ‘the blue waters and the desert sand.’ Is it too fanciful to find an allusion to Sheringham in that? ‘Cascades and great waters and a thing like a wheel on a blue shield.’ That is more puzzling. But ‘cascades and great waters’ set me thinking of our big washers. And you remember the swastika on our blue delivery vans, Christina Alberta? Is not that oddly suggestive of a thing like a wheel on a blue shield? The Norse peoples called the swastika the fire-wheel. ‘Armies with their white garments fluttering, the long lines drawn out—armies of delivery.’ That again is queer. One is reminded of armies and also—don’t think me absurd!—of the drying-ground and the vans. It is like one thing becoming transparent and your seeing the other behind it.”

“Are you sure of the exact phrases, Daddy?”

“Mr. Hockleby has them written down. If I have not got them quite right you will be able to read his notes.”

“The swastika may be a coincidence,” said Christina Alberta. “Or you may have been drawing it on the edges of the newspaper. You do sometimes. And he may have seen it.”

“That does not account for the blue ground. He laid great stress on the blue ground. And there were other things; matters known only to me and your dear mother. I could not tell you them without telling you everything. And small things, entirely private to me. The name of my late grandfather at Diss. Munday his name was. It is sometimes difficult to argue about things although one may be absolutely convinced. And all this was mixed up with broken sentences about a great city and the two daughters of the western King and the Wise Man. And also he called me Belshazzar. Belshazzar seemed to drift in and out of his thoughts. ‘Come again to a world that has fallen into disorder.’ These are remarkable words. And then ‘Beware of women; they take the sceptre out of the hands of the king. But do they know how to rule? Ask Tutankhamen. Ask the ruins in the desert.’”

“Pah,” said Christina Alberta. “As though women have ever had a fair chance!”

“Well, anyhow, Mr. Hockleby has that written down.... And it seemed to me that this too applied to me, for because of my great fondness for your mother I had let so many years of my life slip away. He said many other things, Christina Alberta, richly suggestive things. But I have told you enough for you to understand what has happened. In the end Mr. Fenton came-to quite suddenly, much more suddenly than is usual in such cases, Mrs. Hockleby said. He sat up and yawned and rubbed his eyes. ‘Oh, Lord!’ he said, ‘what nonsense all this is! I’m going to bed.’

“We asked him if he felt exhausted. He said he was. ‘Absolutely fed up,’ were his actual words.

“We asked him if that was the end of his message.

“‘What message?’ he said. He had absolutely no memory of his communications at all. ‘Have I been talking?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t the sort of thing one ought to get up to. What sort of things have I been saying? Nothing objectionable I hope. If so I apologize. I mustn’t do any more of this sort of thing.’

“Mrs. Hockleby told him she had never met anyone with such a promise of great psychic power as he had, before. He said he was really very sorry to hear it. She said he owed it to himself to cultivate so rare and strange a gift, but he said That wouldn’t do for his people at all. The rain had stopped and he said he thought he would take a walk down to the Pantiles and back before turning in. Perfectly simple and natural he was from first to last, and rather unwilling. And he really did look tired out.”

“Didn’t he laugh once?” asked Christina Alberta.

“Why should he? He seemed a little afraid of what he had transmitted. The next day his Spare Part came. Mrs. Hockleby did her utmost to try to get him once more in the afternoon and develop his Communication, but he would not do so. He was full of questions about the ferry at Tilbury and the time of high tide. He would not even give us his name and address. When I spoke of sending Mr. Hockleby’s notes to the Occult Review he was suddenly quite alarmed. He said that if his name appeared in connection with them it might mean a very serious row with his family. He would not even allow us to put a Mr. F. from Cambridge. ‘Put quite another name,’ he said, ‘quite a different name. Put anything you like that does not point to me, a Mr. Walker, say, from London. Or something of that sort.’

“Of course there was nothing for us to do but agree.”

§ 4

“And that was the whole of your communication, Daddy?”

“It was only the beginning. Because after that I began to remember. I began to remember more and more.”

“Remember?”

“Things from my other lives. Memories stored up. This young Mr. Fenton was, so to speak, no more than the first cut in the curtain of forgetfulness that hung between this present life and all my previous existences. Now it was rent and torn open so that I could see things through it at a dozen points. Now I begin to realize what I really was and what I can really be....

“You know, Christina Alberta, I have never actually believed I was myself—not even as a schoolboy. And now it is interesting, I know and understand clearly that I am somebody else. I have always been somebody else.”

“But who do you believe you are, Daddy?”

“So far as I can gather I was first a chief called Porg in a city called Kleb in the very beginning of the world, æons and æons ago, and I tamed my people and taught them many things. Then afterwards I was this Sargon—Sargon the King of Kings. There is very little about him here in the Public Library, in the Encyclopædia Britannica; an upstart who took his name, my name, three thousand years later, an Assyrian fellow is the Sargon they tell about—he got mixed up with the Jews and he besieged Samaria—but I was the original Sargon long before there were Jews or anything of the sort, long before Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And afterwards I was Belshazzar, the last crown prince of the Babylonians, but that is not very clear. That remains obscure. Only one part of the record is lit—as yet. And possibly I have been other people. But the figure that stands out in my memory now is Sargon. It is his memories have been returning to me. It is he who has returned in me.”

“But Daddy, you don’t really believe all this?”

“Believe!—I know. Long before this Communication came to me I had had those intimations,—that assurance that I was somebody else. Now I see clearly. I can remember days in Akkadia now just as clearly as I can remember days in Woodford Wells. I could almost doubt whether I have ever lived at Woodford Wells; it seems so far away now. It was when I was in bed the night after Mr. Fenton had gone that these memories began to come. I was in bed, and then suddenly I was not in bed—I was reclining on a couch under a canopy, a canopy of pure white wool very finely woven and embroidered with emblems and symbols and suchlike things in golden thread, and I was upon my state barge upon the Euphrates. Two King’s daughters, sisters, with slender necks, not unlike the two Miss Solbés except that they were fairer—and decidedly younger—much younger—and clad rather more in accordance with the requirements of a warm climate, chiefly in woven gold—sat and fanned me with fans of Eagles’ feathers dyed a royal purple. And at my feet sat my councillor Prewm, who was oddly enough extremely like Mr. Hockleby—just the same iron-grey whiskers and with the same little tufts of hair over his ears. He was wearing an extremely tall cap of some black woollen substance, and he was making memoranda with a wooden style on a tablet of wet clay. It was like writing on a mud pie. And beyond him were the officers of the boat on a kind of bridge—they were wearing leather helmets studded with brass—and then one saw the rowers below, chained to their oars, and then on either side spread the broad brown river just crinkled by the breeze. The little boats fled to make way for us. They had coarse, square sails, and they lowered them and turned them about all in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. It was very pretty to see. Along the banks were little villages of mud-brick houses and clumps and lines of palm trees; and everywhere there were primitive contrivances, great bent poles of wood like giant fishing-rods, for raising water out of the river for the cultivation of the land. And the people were all crowded along the water’s edge and bowing with their hands and foreheads in the water and crying, ‘Sargon the Conqueror, Sargon, King of Kings!’”

“But Daddy, this was a dream?”

“How could I dream of things I had never seen nor heard of before?”

“One does.”

“One does not,” he replied with a quiet, invincible obstinacy. “I remember I was coming back from the South where I had given peace to a multitude of warring tribes, Elamites and Perrizites and Jebusites and people of that sort, and I was returning to my capital. I remember distinctly many details of the campaign and I know that with an effort I could recall more in the proper order. In dreams absurd things happen, dreams when you think them over afterwards are all at sixes and sevens, but this is all sane and orderly. One might think, Christina Alberta, that I had never dreamt dreams and that all these memories of that previous existence which crowd upon me now were a deception of my imagination! But I can go right back as if it was yesterday, and I am surer by far that I am Sargon than that I am Albert Edward Preemby your father. The former is my true self, the latter is just a very simple, unpretending wrapping that for some purpose, at present inexplicable to me, has hidden me from the world.”

He waved his hand with a bolder gesture than was habitual to him. He sat with his eyes wide open, looking at unseen things.

The girl regarded him for some seconds in silence. She was trying to grasp the full import of this amazing speech.

“And this was your Communication?” she said at last.

“You have to know,” he said. “You have to serve and help me.”

(Help him! How could she help him or herself? How far was this thing going? What was she to do?)

“Have you told anyone else of this, Daddy?” she asked abruptly. “Have you told anyone else?”

He turned his solemn little face towards her.

“Ah, there,” he said, “we have to be very discreet and careful—very careful indeed. Here and now is not the time to proclaim that Sargon, King of Kings, has come back to the civilization he did so much to found. One has to be careful, Christina Alberta. There is a spirit of opposition.

“For instance, I have told something of my first vision—dream you may call it if you like—to Mr. Hockleby. I described the resemblance between himself and Prewm. He was by no means pleased. His is a seditious, insubordinate nature. And besides—since then—I have recalled what happened—on the advice of Oujah—to Prewm....

“And I have realized since then that, though one may be convinced oneself, it does not follow that one will convince other people. It is true that Miss Hockleby and the two Miss Solbés have asked me to tell them more of my dreams—they too call them dreams. But their manner was curious rather than respectful and I have been extremely reserved with them.”

“That’s my wise Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, “You have to think of your dignity.”

“I have to think of my dignity, certainly. Nevertheless—” His hands went out in a new amplitude of gesture. “Here I am and this is my world. My world! I nursed it in its infancy. I taught it law and obedience. Here I am, the most ancient of monarchs. Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar, Greece and Rome, the Kingdoms and Empires, things of yesterday—interludes while I have been sleeping. And clearly I have been sleeping. And clearly I have not been sent back to the world without a mission. This is a great and crowded world now, Christina Alberta, but it is in a sad state of disorder. Even the newspapers remark upon it. People are not happy now. They are not happy as they were under my rule in Sumeria thousands of years ago. In the sunshine and abundance of Sumeria.”

“But what can you do, Daddy?”

“Dear Princess, my child, that I have to think out. Nothing hastily; nothing rashly.”

“No,” said Christina Alberta.

There came a pause. “One person only seems to have any belief in me. The younger Miss Solbé—— Did you say anything, dear?”

“No. Go on.”

“I have asked her if she too has had any dreams, any vague memories of a previous existence. She seems to have had something confirmatory in a shadowy sort of way. Very vague intimations. She tells them timidly, when her sister is not about. But she is under a misapprehension that her relationship to me was a particularly close and special one. She was not my Queen. There she is wrong. It is perhaps natural for her to think so, but I remember quite distinctly how it was. She was one of the Twenty Principal Concubines who carried the Eagle fans.”

“Have you told her that?”

“Not yet,” said Mr. Preemby. “Not yet. One has to go discreetly in all these things.”

Another pause followed. Christina Alberta looked at her wrist-watch. “My word!” she cried. “We shall be late for lunch!”

She noted as they walked back towards the Petunia Boarding House that his bearing and manner had undergone a subtle change. He seemed larger and taller and his face was serener and he held his head higher. He did not h’rrmp once. He seemed to expect people and things to get out of his way, and it was as if the path was a carpet that was being unrolled before his advance. Had she been able to see herself she would have remarked an equal change in her own carriage. The dance had gone out of her paces. She walked like one upon whose shoulders the responsibilities of life might easily become overwhelming.

They were late for lunch and all the other boarders were in their places, beginning. Every one turned to look at Mr. Preemby’s face as they came in, and then they glanced at one another. “So you’ve come back to us,” said Mrs. Hockleby to Christina Alberta, meeting her eye.

“It’s jolly to be back,” said Christina Alberta.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH Christina Alberta Consults a Wise Man

§ 1

CHRISTINA ALBERTA and Paul Lambone had been great friends for nearly a year. He liked her and admired her, and as became his literary line of work, he studied her. And she liked him and trusted him, and showed off a good lot when she was with him.

Paul Lambone wrote novels and short stories and books of good advice, and he was particularly celebrated for the pervading wisdom of his novels and the excellence of his advice. It was his pervading wisdom that had picked him up out of the general poverty of writers and placed him in a position of comparative prosperity. Not that his conduct of his affairs was wise, but that the quality of his wisdom was extremely saleable. Some writers prosper by reason of their distinctive passion, some by reason of their austerity and truth, some by their excellent invention, and some even by simple good writing, but Paul Lambone prospered because of his kindness and wisdom. When you read the stories you always felt that he was really sorry for the misfortunes and misbehaviour of his characters and anxious to help them as much as he could. And when they blundered or sinned he would as often as not tell you what was the better course they might have chosen. His book of advice, and particularly his Book of Everyday Wisdom and his What to Do on a Hundred and One Occasions sold largely and continually.

But like that James, King of England, to whom the Bible was dedicated, Paul Lambone was far wiser in his thoughts and counsels than in his acts. In small matters and most of the time his proceedings were foolish or selfish or indecisive or all of those things. His wisdom did not reach below the level of his eyes, and his face and body and arms and legs were given over to the unhappiest tendencies which were restrained by his general indolence rather than by any real self-control. He was very well off chiefly because he was lazy; he asked the highest possible prices for everything he wrote because that was just as easy as asking the lowest, and there was always a chance that the bargain would not come off and then he would be saved the trouble of correcting his proofs. He accumulated money because he was too unenterprising to buy things or incur the responsibility of possessions, and so he just let a trust invest it for him. His literary reputation was high because a literary reputation in England and America depends almost entirely upon apparent reluctance of output. The terse beauty of his style was mainly due to his sedulous indisposition to write two words where one would suffice. And in the comfort and leisure his indolence accumulated for him, he sat about and talked and was genially wise and got fatter than was becoming. He tried to eat less as a preferable alternative to taking exercise, but in the presence of drink and nourishment his indolence flagged and failed him. He went about a good deal, and was always eager for new things because they saved him from boredom, the malign parent of much needless activity. He had an expensive little cottage near Rye in Kent to which he could motor without needless trouble whenever London bored him, and directly his cottage bored him he would come back to London. And he visited people’s houses a lot because it was too troublesome to resist invitations.

There were, it must be admitted, limits to the wisdom of Paul Lambone. It is often more difficult to see what is near us than what is far away; many a stout fellow who looks with a clear, discerning eye upon the universe sees little of his toes, and ignores the intervening difficulty; and something sub-conscious in Paul Lambone’s mind obstinately refused to recognize the defective nature of many of his private acts. He knew he was indolent, but he would not allow himself to admit that his indolence was fundamental and vicious. He thought there was a Paul Lambone in reserve of very great energy. He liked to think of himself as a man of swift and accurate decisions who, once aroused, was capable of demoniac energy. He had spent many an hour in arm-chairs, on garden seats, and on Downland turf, thinking out his course of action on various possible occasions of war, business, criminal attempt or domestic crisis. His favourite heroes in real life were Napoleon, Julius Cæsar, Lord Kitchener, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Ford, and suchlike heroic ants.

He liked Christina Alberta because of her tremendous go. She was always up to something; she preferred standing to sitting, and she kicked her legs about while she talked to you. He idealized her go; he attributed to her much more go than she really had. He was secretly persuaded that her blood must be like a bird’s, a degree or so above normal. He felt that in imagination she had much in common with him. He called her the Last Thing, the Van, the Ultimate Modern Girl, and the Life Force. He openly professed pity for the unaided single-handed man who would in accordance with our social laws presently have to marry her and go her pace and try to keep her in order.

She had been to tea with him once or twice. She perceived his admiration and suspected a certain affection, and she basked in admiration and affection. She liked his books and thought he was very like what he thought he was himself. She told him all sorts of things about herself just to lift his eyebrows.

And he was wise all over her and round and about her, tremendously wise.

§ 2

It was quite interesting to be rung up by Christina Alberta and asked if she might come for tea and advice. “Come along now,” he said. “I’m probably all alone for tea.”

And as he replaced the instrument he said: “Now I wonder what the young woman has been up to! And what she wants me to do for her.”

He went back to his sitting-room and spread himself on his very nice Persian hearthrug, and regarded the pretty silver kettle that swung over his spirit lamp. “It won’t be money,” he considered. “She isn’t the sort that tries to get money....

“She’s barked her shins on something....

“Girls nowadays are a lot too plucky—they’re a lot too plucky altogether.... I hope it’s nothing serious.... She’s just a kid.”

Christina Alberta appeared in due course. Erect as ever, but nevertheless looking a little dashed and subdued.

“Uncle,” she said—for that was her theory of their relationship—“I’m in trouble. You’ve got to give me all sorts of advice.”

“Take off that brigand’s cloak,” he said, “and sit down there and make me some tea. I’ve been watching your love affair out of the corner of my eye for some time. I’m not surprised.”

Christina Alberta paused with her cloak in her hand and stared at him. “That’s nothing,” she said. “I can manage that little affair all right. Such as it is. Don’t you worry about me, in that respect. Don’t imagine things. But there is something—something different.” She threw the cloak over a chair back and came and stood by the silver tea-tray.

“You know my Daddy,” she said, arms akimbo.

“I never saw a more dissimilar parent.”

“Well—” She considered how she should put it. “He’s behaving queerly. So that people may think—people who don’t know him—that he’s going out of his mind.”

Mr. Lambone reflected. “Was it ever such a very serious mind to go out of?”

“Oh! don’t make jokes. His mind was good enough to keep him out of trouble, and now something’s happened and it isn’t. People will think—some of them think already—he is mad. They may take him away. And there’s just him and me. It’s serious, Uncle. And I don’t know what I ought to do. I don’t know enough to know. I’m scared. I’ve got no friends that I can talk to about it. None. You’d think I’d have women friends. I haven’t. I don’t get on with older women. They want to boss me. Or I think they do. And I irritate them. They know, they feel—the proper ones—that I don’t—oh! respect their standards. And the other sort just hate me. Because I’m young. The girls I know—no good for what I want just now.”

“But isn’t there a man,” said Lambone, “on whom you have a sort of claim?”

“You know who it is, I suppose?”

He was frank. “Things rather show.”

“If you know him—” She left the sentence unfinished.

“I know the young man only very incidentally,” he said.

“I go to Teddy,” said Christina Alberta without any further reservations. “I went to him as a matter of fact before I telephoned to you. He hardly listened to what I had to say. He didn’t bother.” She winced. Suddenly tears stood in her eyes. “He was just loafing about in his studio. He kissed me and tried to excite me. He would hardly listen to what I had to tell him.... That I suppose is what one gets from a lover.”

“So it’s got to that,” Paul Lambone reflected with hidden dismay, and then remarked a little belatedly: “Not every lover.”

“Mine—anyhow.”

“And you came away?”

“Well! What do you think?”

“H’m,” said Lambone. “You have barked your shins, Christina Alberta! More than I thought.”

“Oh, Hell take Teddy!” said Christina Alberta, putting it on a bit and helping herself by being noisy. “What does that matter now? I’ve done with Teddy. I was a fool. Never mind that. The thing is my Daddy. What am I to do about my Daddy?”

“Well, first you’ve got to tell me all about it,” said Lambone. “Because at present, you know, I’ve hardly got the hang of the trouble. And before you do that you sit down in that easy chair and I make the tea. No, not you. Your nerves are on edge and you’ll upset something. You’ve been having your first dose of adult worry. Sit down there and don’t say anything for a minute. I’m glad you came along to me. Very glad.... I liked that Daddy of yours really. Little innocent-eyed man he was. Blue eyes. And he was talking—what nonsense was he talking? About the Lost Atlantis. But it was quite nice nonsense.... No, don’t interrupt. Just let me recall my own impression of him until you’ve had your tea.”

§ 3

When the tea was made and Christina Alberta had sipped a cup and looked more comfortable, Lambone, who felt he was managing things beautifully, told her she might begin.

“He’s getting queer in his mind, but you know that he isn’t really going out of his mind,” said Lambone. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“That is it,” said Christina Alberta. “You see—” She paused.

Lambone sat down in a second arm-chair and sipped his tea in a leisurely manner. “It’s a little difficult,” he said.

“You see,” said Christina Alberta, knitting her brows at the fire, “he’s a person of peculiar imaginativeness. He always has been. Always. He’s always lived half in a dream. We’ve been very much together ever since I was born almost, and from the earliest times I remember his talks, rambling talks, about the Lost Atlantis, and about the secrets of the pyramids and Yogis and the Lamas of Tibet. And astrology. All such wonderful, impossible, far-off things. The further off the better. Why!—he almost got me into a dream too. I was a Princess of Far Atlantis lost in the world. I used to play at that, and sometimes my play came very near to believing. I could Princess it for a whole afternoon. Lots of children day-dream like that.”

“I did,” said Lambone. “For days together I would be a great Indian chief, sentenced to death again and again—disguised as a small preparatory schoolboy. The incongruity didn’t matter a rap. Everybody does it more or less for a time.”

“But he’s gone on doing it all his life. And he’s doing it now more than ever. He’s lost the last trace of any sense that it is a dream. And some one played a trick upon him at Tunbridge Wells. Not realizing what it might mean for him. They seem to have muddled about with spiritualism in the evenings while I was in London, table-rapping and so forth, and a man who had nothing better to do pretended to have a trance. He told Daddy he was Sargon the First, Sargon King of Kings he called him, who was Lord of Akkadia and Sumeria—you know—ages ago, before Babylon was born or thought of. The man who did it couldn’t have hit on anything more mischievous so far as Daddy was concerned. You see he was exactly ready for it; leaving Woodford Wells where he had spent half his life in one routine had cut him off, even more than he was usually cut off, from reality. He was uprooted already before this idea came to him. And now it’s just swamping him. It suited him exactly. It—fixed him. Always before one could get him back—by talking about my mother or the laundry vans, or something familiar like that. But now I can’t get him back. I can’t. He’s Sargon, incognito, come back as Lord of the World, and he believes that just as firmly as I believe that I am his daughter Christina Alberta Preemby talking to you now. It’s a reverie no longer. He’s got his evidence and he believes.”

“And what does he want to do about it?”

“All sorts of things. He wants to declare himself Lord of the World. He says things are in a bad way and he wants to save them.”

“They are in a bad way,” said Lambone. “People don’t begin to know half how bad they are. Still—I suppose having a delusion about who one is, isn’t Insanity. Does he want to make some sort of fuss?”

“I’m afraid, yes.”

“Soon?”

“That’s what worries me.

“You see,” she went on, “I’m afraid he’s going to strike most people as queer. He’s back at Lonsdale Mews. We had to come up from Tunbridge Wells yesterday. On a few hours’ notice. It’s that has upset me. For a couple of days things went on all right. Practically we were turned out of the boarding house. There was a frightfully disagreeable man there, a Mr. Hockleby, and he seemed to take a violent dislike to Daddy. You know those unreasonable dislikes people take at times?”

“A very disagreeable side of human nature. I know. Why, people have taken dislikes to me!... But go on.”

“He and his daughter got upset about Daddy’s queerness. They frightened the Miss Rewsters, the sisters who run the place. They said he might break out at any moment, and either he would have to leave or they would. There they were all whispering on the stairs and talking of sending for a policeman and having him taken away. What could I do? We had to clear out. You see Daddy had a sort of idea that when he was Sargon Mr. Hockleby had been alive too and had had to be impaled for seditious behaviour; and instead of letting bygones be bygones as one ought to do in such cases, he said something about it to him, and Mr. Hockleby construed it as a threat. It’s all so difficult, you see.”

“He didn’t try to impale him over again, or anything?”

“No. He doesn’t do things like that. It’s only his imagination that is doing tremendous things. He isn’t.”

“And now he’s in London?”

“He has a sort of idea he’s overlord of the King, and he wants to go to the King at Buckingham Palace and tell him about it. He says the King is a thoroughly good man, thoroughly good; and directly he hears how things are, he will acknowledge Daddy as his feudal superior and place him on the throne. Of course if he tries to do anything of that sort he will be locked up for a certainty. And he’s written letters to the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor and the President of the United States and Lenin, and so forth, directing them to wait upon him for his instructions. But I’ve persuaded him not to post them till he can have a proper seal made.”

“Rather like Muhammad’s letters to the potentates,” said Lambone.

“He’s thinking, too, of a banner or something of that sort, but all that’s quite vague. He’s just got the phrase ‘raise my banner.’ I don’t think that matters much yet. But the Buckingham Palace idea,—something may come of that.”

“This is no end interesting,” said Lambone, and walked across his room and back, and then half sat on the arm of his easy chair with his hands deep in his pockets. “Tell me; is he distraught to look at?”

“Not a bit of it.”

“Untidy in his dress?”

“Neat as ever.”

“I remember when I saw him how neat he was. Is he—at all—incoherent? Or does it all hold together?”

“Absolutely. He’s perfectly logical and coherent. He talks I think rather better and more clearly than usual.”

“It’s just one simple delusion? He has no delusions about having great physical strength or beauty or anything of that sort?”

“None. He’s not a bit crazy. He’s just possessed by this one grand impossible idea.”

“He’s not throwing away money or anything of that sort?”

“Not a bit of it. He’s always been—careful with money.”

“And he is now?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s hope that lasts. I don’t see that a man is insane because he believes he is a King or an Emperor—if some one tells him he is. After all, George V has no other grounds for imagining he is a King. The only difference is that rather more people have told him so. Fancying yourself a King isn’t lunacy, and behaving in accordance with that idea isn’t lunacy either. It may be some day, but it isn’t so yet. No.”

“But I’m afraid that people will think that it is.... You see it’s only in the last few days I’ve realized how fond I am of my father and how horrible it would be for me if anyone attempted to take him away. I’m afraid of asylums. Restraint for those who can least understand restraint. He particularly would go mad in a week, really mad, if he got into one. That Mr. Hockleby has frightened me—he’s frightened me. He was so intent and cruel. He was evil about Daddy—malignant. A nasty man.”

“Yes, I know,” said Lambone. “Hate.”

“Yes,” she said. “Hate.”

She jumped to her feet and took possession of the hearthrug, looking with her bobbed hair and short skirts and manly pose and serious face the most ridiculous and attractive mixture of fresh youth and mature responsibility conceivable.

“You see, I don’t know what they can do with him—whether they can take him away from me. I’ve never been much afraid of what might happen before, but I am now. I don’t know how to take hold of all this. I thought life was just a lark and people were fools to be afraid of doing anything. But now I see life’s dangerous. I’ve never been much afraid of what happened to myself. But this is different. He’s walking about in a dream of glory—with absolute wretchedness hanging over him. Think of it! People getting hold of him! Perhaps hitting him! An asylum!”

“About the law on these matters I know very little,” Lambone reflected. “I doubt if they can do very much to him without your consent. But I agree about asylums. From their very nature they must be horrible places, haunted places. Most of the attendants—hardened. Even if they start well. Every day at it ... too much for anyone.... I don’t know how a lunatic is made, a legal lunatic I mean, or who has a right to take him. Somebody—I think two doctors—have to certify him or something of that sort. But, anyhow, I don’t think your father is a lunatic.”

“Nor I. But that may not save him.”

“Something else may. He’s as you say an imaginative—a super-imaginative man, possessed by a fantastic idea. Well, isn’t that a case perhaps for a psycho-analyst?”

“Possibly. Who’d talk him back—to something like he used to be.”

“Yes. If such a man as Wilfred Devizes, for example, could talk to him——”

“I don’t know much about these people. I’ve read some Freud of course—and a little Jung.”

“I know Devizes slightly. We talked at lunch. And I liked his wife. And if perhaps you could get your father away into a country cottage. By the by—have you got any money?”

“He’s got the cheque-book, but he makes me an allowance. So far there’s been no money trouble. He signs his cheques all right.”

“But he may not presently.”

“Oh! Of course at any time he may begin putting a swastika or a royal cipher in the place of his signature, and then the fat would be in the fire. I shouldn’t know where to turn. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“No,” said Lambone.

For some seconds—it seemed quite a long time to Christina Alberta—he said nothing more. He sat half leaning upon the arm of his chair and looked past her at the fire. She had said what she wanted to say, and now stood waiting for him to speak. His wisdom told him that things had to be done in this matter very soon; his temperament inclined him just to stay in that pleasant room and say things. Meanwhile she looked about the room and realized how comfortable a wise man could be. It was the best furnished room she had ever been in. The chairs were jolly; there were bound books in the bookcase, a delightful old Chinese horse on the top of it; all his tea-things were silver or fine china; there was a great writing-desk with silver candlesticks; the windows that gave on Half Moon Street were curtained with a rich, subtly folding material very pleasing to the eye. Her eyes came back to his big fat face and his peevish mouth and fine, meditative eyes.

“Something,” he said and sighed, “ought to be done at once. It isn’t a matter to leave about. He might commit some indiscretion. And get into trouble.”

“I’m afraid of that.”

“Exactly. He’s safe—where you left him?”

“There’s somebody with him.”

“Who won’t let anything happen?”

“Yes.”

“So far, good.”

“But what am I to do?”

“What are you to do?” he echoed, and said no more for some seconds.

“Well?” she said.

“What in fact are we to do? I ought to see him. Decidedly. Yes, I ought to see him.”

“Then come and see him.”

“I ought to come and see him. Now.”

“Then let’s.”

He nodded. He seemed to be making an intense internal effort. “Why not?” he asked.

“Well?”

“And then—then we can broach a visit to Wilfred Devizes. Generally fix that up. Then our subsequent action will be determined by what Wilfred Devizes says. The sooner he sees Devizes the better. It’s a question whether it wouldn’t be better for you or both of us to see Devizes first. No. Father first. Then when I’m properly instructed—as a lawyer would say—Devizes.”

A great tranquillity descended upon him.

She could not restrain a faint exclamation of impatience.

He looked up as if he awakened from profound meditation. “I’ll come along now,” he said, “to Lonsdale Mews. I’ll have a talk to your father and then I’ll try to get at Devizes and fix up some sort of a meeting between them. That’s what I ought to do. I’ll go along with you now—at once.”

“Right-o,” said Christina Alberta, “come along.” She threw on her cloak and clapped her hat upon her head in a dozen seconds and stood waiting.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“I’ll just change this jacket,” said Lambone; and kept her waiting a full ten minutes.

§ 4

The taxi dropped them at the entrance of the Mews.

“I suppose it won’t matter our arriving together?” said Lambone. “He won’t think it’s something preconcerted?”

“He doesn’t have suspicions of that sort.”

But when they reached the studio a little surprise awaited them. Fay Crumb opened the door to them and her eyes looked paler and her neck longer and her face more absent-minded than ever.

“I’m so glad you’ve come at last,” she said in a flat, distraught voice. “You see—he’s gone!”

“Gone!”

“Completely. He’s been away since three. He went out alone.”

“But, Fay, you promised!”

“I know. I could see he was restless and I kept telling him you’d be back soon. It wasn’t so easy keeping him. He walked up and down and talked. ‘I must go out to my people,’ he said. ‘I feel they need me. I must be about my proper business.’ I didn’t know what to do. I just hid his hat. I never dreamt he’d go out without his hat—prim as he is. I just went upstairs for a moment to get something—I forget what now—but, anyhow, it wasn’t there, and I may have spent five minutes looking for it—and meanwhile he slipped out. He left the door open and I never heard him go. As soon as I knew he’d gone I ran up the Mews right up into Lonsdale Road and stood about there.... He’d vanished. I’ve been hoping he’d come back every moment since. Before you returned. But! He hasn’t come back.”

Her conviction was all too manifest that he would never come back.

“I’d have done anything—” she said.

Christina Alberta and Paul Lambone looked at one another. “This rather puts the lid on,” said Christina Alberta. “What are we going to do now?”

§ 5

Lambone followed Christina Alberta into the studio and sat down at once on the simple couch that became Mr. Preemby’s bed at night. The couch squeaked and submitted. He stared at the floor and reflected. “I’ve got no engagements this evening,” he said. “None.”

“It won’t be much good waiting here for him,” said Christina Alberta.

“I feel in my bones he won’t head back here for hours and hours,” he said.

“And meanwhile he may be up to anything!” said Christina Alberta.

“Any old lark,” said Lambone.

“Anything,” said Christina Alberta.

“Three,” said Lambone and consulted his watch: “it’s now nearly five. Do you think there is any particular place, Christina Alberta, more than any other place, where we might go and look for him? Where, in fact, we ought to look for him?”

“But will you come and look for him?”

“I’m at your service.”

“It wasn’t in the bond.”

“I want to. If you won’t walk too fast. I feel I ought to.”

Christina Alberta stood before him with her arms akimbo. “I would bet five to one,” she said slowly, “that he heads for Buckingham Palace and demands an audience—No, that isn’t how he puts it—offers to give an audience to his Vassal, the King. He was full of that this morning. And then—Then I suppose they will lock him up and have an inquiry into his mental condition.”

“H’m,” said Lambone, and then, rising to the occasion: “Let’s go to Buckingham Palace.

“We’ll go there at once,” he said, and moved slowly doorward. “We’ll get a taxi.”

They found a taxi in the King’s Road. Christina Alberta did not belong to the taxi-ing class, and she was impressed by a sudden realization that Lambone had all these thousands of taxi-cabs upon the streets alert to do his bidding. The taxi dropped them according to instructions at the foot of the Victoria Memorial which gesticulates in front of Buckingham Palace, and they stood side by side surveying that building. “It looks much as usual,” said Lambone.

“You didn’t expect him to bend it?” said Christina Alberta.

“If he made a disturbance they’ve cleared him up very completely. That flag I suppose means G. R. is at home.... I wonder—what do we do next?”

He was rather at a loss. The emotional atmosphere of this wide-open place was quite different from the emotional atmosphere of his flat or the Lonsdale Mews. In the flat and in the Mews the appeal had been for him to act; the appeal here was not to make himself conspicuous. He was a man of decorous instincts. A car passed, a beautiful, big, shining Napier, and he thought the occupants looked at him as though they recognized him. Lots of people knew him nowadays and might recognize him. In his flat, in the studio at Lonsdale Mews, he could foregather with Christina Alberta without compunction; but now, in this very conspicuous place, this most conspicuous place, he had a momentary realization that he and she didn’t exactly match, he with his finished effect of being a man about town, a large, distinguished, mature man about town, and she with her air of excessive youthfulness, her very short skirts and her hat, like the calyptra of a black mushroom, pulled over her bobbed hair. People might think them an incongruous couple. People might wonder what had brought them together and what he was up to with her.

“I suppose we ought to ask some one,” she said.

“Who?”

“Oh!—one of those sentinels.”

“May one speak to the sentinels at the gate? Frankly, I’m afraid of those tremendous chaps in the busbies. I’d as soon speak to the Horse Guard in Whitehall. He’d probably look right over our heads and say nothing. And we should just dither away from beneath him. I couldn’t stand that....”

“But what are we to do?”

“Nothing rash.”

“We must ask some one.”

“Away there on the left towards Victoria there’s what looks like the real business way in. There’s two policemen. I’m not afraid of policemen. No. And of course that man at the corner is a plain-clothes man.”

“Then let’s ask him!”

Lambone made no move. “Suppose he hasn’t come here at all!”

“I know he meant to do so.”

“I suppose if he hasn’t come,” said Lambone, “we ought to wait about here on the chance of his coming.” He felt extremely like flight at that instant. “There ought to be seats here.

“Come along,” he said, with a sudden return to manly decision, “let’s ask one of those bobbies at the far gate.”

§ 6

The policeman at the gate to whom they addressed themselves listened gravely to their inquiries, making no instant reply. He belonged to that great majority of English speakers who are engaged upon the improvement of the word “yes.” His particular idea was to make it long and purry.

“Yurrss,” he said breaking presently into speech: “Yurrss. There was a small gentleman without a ’at on. Yurrss. He ’ad blue eyes. And a moustache? Yurrss, come to think of it there was a moustache. A rather considerable moustache. Well, ’e said he wanted to speak to King George on a rather urgent matter. It always is a rather urgent matter. Never ‘quite.’ Always ‘rather.’ We replied, according to formula, ’e’d ’ave to write for’n ’pointment. ‘Perhaps,’ ’e says, ‘You don’t know who I am?’ They all say that. ‘I guess it’s something important,’ I says. ‘Not the Ormighty, by any chance,’ I says. But ’e was ’ere last week and ’e wouldn’ go away and they ’ad to take ’im off in a taxi-cab. You know there was a chap ’ere, sir—Thursday last or Friday, I forget which—with a long white beard and ’air all down ’is back. Very like ’im I should think. Well any’ow this sort of dashed your gentleman. He kind of mumbled a name.”

“Not Sargon?” asked Christina Alberta.

“It might ’ave been. Any’ow, ‘There is no exceptions,’ I says. ‘Not even if you was a close relation. We got no option here. We’re just machines.’ He stood sort of looking baffled for a time. ‘All this must be altered,’ he said in a sort of low, earnest voice. ‘It’s the duty of every king to give audience to every one, every day.’ I says, ‘Very likely it is, sir. But we policemen aren’t in any position to ’elp it,’ I says, ‘much less alter it.’ So off ’e goes. I kind of tipped the wink to the detective at the corner and ’e watched ’im go along the front and then cross over to the monument and stand looking up at the windows. And then ’e shrugged ’is shoulders and took ’imself off. And that’s the last I see of ’im.”

Lambone asked a superfluous question.

“It might be Piccadilly way,” said the policeman, “it might be down towards Trafalgar Square. Fact is, sir, I didn’t notice.”

It was clear that the conversation was drawing to an end.

§ 7

“So that’s that,” said Lambone. “So far, good. He’s still at large.”

He expressed his thanks to the policeman.

“And now,” he said with an air of bringing out the solution of a difficult problem very successfully, “all we have to do is to find him.”

“But where?”

“That’s the essence of the problem.”

He led the way back to the Victoria Memorial and stood side by side with Christina Alberta beneath that perfect symbol of the British Empire, the statue of Queen Victoria. They stared down the Mall to the distant Admiralty Arch, and for a moment neither of them said a word. It was a warm and serene October afternoon; the cupolas of Whitehall and Westminster’s two towers and a brown pile of mansions were just visible over the trees on the right, transfigured to beauty by the afternoon glow; the two tall columns of the Duke of York and Nelson rose over the trees and buildings to the left; it was in the pause before the dinner and theatre traffic begins, and only a few taxi-cabs and a car or so emphasized the breadth of the processional roadway. Half a dozen windows in the Admiralty had taken fire already from the sinking sun.

“I suppose,” said Lambone, “he’s gone down there.”

Christina Alberta stood with her arms akimbo and her feet a little apart. “I suppose he has.”

The wide road ran straight to the distant Admiralty Arch. And through that remote little opening was Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and a radiating tangle of roads and streets spreading out and beyond and further into the twilight blue.

“What will he make for now?”

“Heaven knows. I’m bankrupt. I haven’t an idea.”

Neither spoke for a little while.

“He’s gone,” she said, “just gone,” and that simple and desolating thought filled her mind.

But the thoughts of Paul Lambone were more complex and intricate.

He perceived that a serious adventure was happening to him and that he was called upon to exert himself. He had suddenly been called away from his tea and hot tea-cake to hunt a slightly demented comparative stranger about London. He wanted to do it, and he wanted to do it properly and in a way to impress Christina Alberta. And his intelligence told him that the best thing he could do would be to follow upon the probable track of his quarry and come up with him before he got into mischief. Or while he was getting into mischief—and interfere and carry him off. And meanwhile his more exercised lower nature was exhorting him to leave Christina Alberta to do the pursuing alone, and go back as straightly as possible to his ample arm-chair and sit down and think things out. And then go to his best club to dinner. And in fact quietly and neatly get out of this unexpected and tiresome business altogether.

And then he looked at Christina Alberta and realized that he could do nothing of the sort. He couldn’t leave her. He looked at her profile, the profile of a grave child, and an almost maternal emotion was aroused in him. She looked with anxious and perplexed eyes at the blue and limitless city that had swallowed up her Daddy. The scene was still warm with the evening sun-glow, but the blue twilight gathered in the lower eastern sky. Here and there a yellow pin-point showed that London was beginning to light itself up. She couldn’t go down that road alone. Absurdly, preposterously they were linked. The impulse to disentangle himself was the impulse of a selfish discretion that was rapidly taking all the happiness out of his life and leaving security and luxuries in its place. This was a call to that latent Paul Lambone to act. Even supposing she was a common, queer little flapper that his imagination had made into a friend and heroine, was that any reason whatever why he shouldn’t see her through this trouble that had come upon her?

He made his decision.

“He won’t go back for ages,” he said following up the problem. “Nobody would on an evening like this.”

“No,” she said. “But I don’t see that that gives me any hint of what I ought to do next.”

“We can keep together and go down towards Trafalgar Square. We might look along the Embankment. When we are tired we can get some dinner somewhere. You can get a sort of dinner almost anywhere I suppose. We shall want our dinner.... Perhaps it’s not so hopeless a job as it seems at first. A big job but not a hopeless one. There are limitations to what he may do. Limitations in himself I mean. I don’t think he’ll go into uninteresting streets. His feeling is—spectacular. He’s much more likely to keep to open spaces and near conspicuous buildings. That cuts out a lot of streets. And he won’t go far east. In another hour the city will be shutting up and going home and putting out its lights. He’ll turn back out of that—westward.”

“You can spare the time?”

“I’ve no engagements at all to-night. It was to have been an ‘off’ night. And this business attracts me. It is interesting to see just how far we can infer and guess his proceedings. It’s a curious mental exercise.... Do you know I think we shall find him!”

She stood quite still for some moments.

“It’s awfully good of you to come with me,” she said.

“I come on one condition.... That you don’t walk too fast. We’ve never walked much together, Christina Alberta, but I’ve seen enough of you to know that you walk abominably fast.”

§ 8

Every one knows the Café Neptune near Piccadilly Circus and the various crowd that assembles there. There you see artists and painters that are scarcely artists, poets and mere writers, artists’ models and drug-fiends, undergraduates in arts and medicine who are no better than they should be, publishers and gay lawyers, Bolsheviks and White Refugees, American visitors who come to scoff and remain a prey, stray students from the Far East and Jews and Jews and Jews—and Jewesses. And hither at about half-past nine that night came a stout, large, and wearily-distinguished-looking man accompanied by an attractive young lady in short skirts and bobbed hair who carried a large and shapely nose high and sternly, and they threaded their way among the tables through the smoky atmosphere, seeking a congenial place. Out of the garrulous confusing mirk arose a young man with a mop of red hair and protruded a rampant face and asked in a large whisper: “Have you found him?”

“Not a trace,” said Paul Lambone.

Fay Crumb’s face looked up from the table through a haze of cigarette smoke.

“Nor we. We’ve been looking too.”

“As well here as anywhere,” said the stout man. “Where have you looked?”

“Here,” said Harold, “and hereabouts. It seemed a suitable rendezvous.”

“We’ve ranged far and wide,” said Lambone. “We’ve done miles—oh! endless miles. And Christina Alberta has refused all nourishment—for me as well as for herself. At last I said, either I sit down and eat or I drop down and die. May we take these chairs? You have that one, Christina Alberta. Waiter! It is a case of extreme fatigue. No—neither Munchner nor Pilsener. I must have champagne. Bollinger 1914 will do and it must be iced—rather over-iced, and with it, sandwiches—a very considerable number of sandwiches of smoked salmon. Yes—a dozen. Ah!”

He dropped his wrists on the table. “When I have had some drink I will talk,” he wheezed and became silent.

“When did you leave the Mews?” Christina Alberta asked Fay.

“Half-past eight.... Not a sign of him.”

“Have you been far?” Harold asked Lambone.

“Far!” said Lambone and for a time was incapable of more.

His voice seemed to recede in perspective. “Asking policemen for a small, hatless man. Over great areas of London. On and on—from one policeman to another.... She’s a most determined young woman. God help the man who wins her love! Not a soul had seen him. But I can’t talk yet....”

Harold clawed his chin softly with long artistic fingers. “It is just possible,” he said slowly, “that he went in somewhere and bought a hat.”

“Of course he must have got a hat,” said Fay.

“It never occurred to either of us that he would do anything so sane.”

“We never thought of asking in the hatters’ shops,” said Christina Alberta.

“Happily,” said Lambone, and turned to welcome his refreshment. “That would have been the last straw.”

“For a long time we were on the trail of another hatless man,” said Christina Alberta. “We ran him down in the Essex Road after tracking him all up Pentonville. But he was just a vegetarian in sandals and a beard. And there was a report of a hatless man near the Britannia, but that came to nothing. He seemed just to have come out of his house somewhere to buy fried fish off a barrow in the Camden Town High Street.”

“Extraordinary how a crowd collects when you ask the simplest questions,” said Lambone with his mouth full of sandwich. “And how urgently helpful it can be. They almost forced us up a staircase after that fried-fish man, who struck me as an extremely pugnacious, suspicious-looking fellow. The crowd would have it we wanted him, and he didn’t seem to want in the very least to be wanted. If I hadn’t had an inspiration something very disagreeable might have happened. I just said ‘No, it’s not this gentleman, it’s another of the same name.’”

“But what did he say?”

“‘You better,’ he said. But anyhow it satisfied the crowd, and afterwards we got away quite easily on an omnibus that took us down to Portland Road Station.”

The champagne arrived in its ice pail. “Hardly cold, sir, yet,” said the waiter, feeling the bottle.

“It’s not a time for fastidiousness,” said Lambone and took a third sandwich. “You’re not eating, Christina Alberta. And I insist upon your having at least one glass of this.”

Christina Alberta drank a little and ate mechanically.

“I wonder if we shall ever see him again,” said Harold. “London is so vast. So vast! But I always feel that, when I see anyone go out anywhere. There is a tremendous courage in going out. London must be full of lost people. I used to be afraid of London until I discovered the Tubes and the Underground. I felt I might be sucked up side-streets to God knows where. And keep on going round corners into longer and longer streets for ever. I used to dream of the last street of all—endless. But whenever I get nervous I just ask for the nearest tube station and there I am.”

“He may be back at the studio now,” said Fay.

Paul Lambone reached his fourth sandwich and his third glass of champagne with great rapidity. He became more leisurely in his refreshment.

“I am disappointed,” he said, “that I didn’t think of the possibility of his buying a hat. It has disorganized all my inductions. You see I was so concentrated on what was going on inside his head that I never troubled about what might be going on outside it. But a man of his neat and proper habits—acquired through a lifetime of orderly living—would get himself a hat almost mechanically.... We may have passed quite close to him in that.”

“I should have known him,” said Christina Alberta.

“But, until that Pentonville man drew a red herring across the trail, I am convinced we were close on his footsteps. You see Christina Alberta insisted upon my asking every policeman we saw—even men, overworked, irritable, snappy, rude men controlling the traffic—but at any rate I chose the route—I inferred the route. You see, my dear Watson”—he smiled faintly in weary self-approval at Crumb—“the essential thing in a case like this is to put yourself in your man’s place, to think his thoughts instead of your own. That is what I tried—so far as being out of breath would allow it—to impress on Christina Alberta. It’s fairly straightforward. Here you have a man convinced, beautifully and enviably convinced, that he is the supreme lord of the world, unknown, unrecognized as yet, but on the eve of his proclamation. Will such a man go along any street just as easily as any other? Not at all! He will be elated, expansive, ascendant. Very well; he will go up hill and not down. He will choose wide highways and not narrow ones and tend towards the middle of the street——”

“He hasn’t been run over!” cried Christina Alberta sharply.

“No. No. He would avoid traffic because that would hustle him and impair his dignity. Open spaces would attract him. High buildings, bright lights, the intimations of any assembly would draw him powerfully. So he certainly crossed Trafalgar Square from the Admiralty Arch in a diagonal direction, towards the conspicuous invitation of the Coliseum.... You see my method?”

He did not wait for Crumb to answer. “But the more I think over our missing friend,” he went on, “the more I admire and envy him. What crawling things we are!—content to be subjects, units, items, pawns, drops of water and grains of sand, in the multitudinous, unmeaning muddle of human affairs. He soars above it. He soars above it now. He rejects his commonness and inferiority in one magnificent gesture. His world. The grandeur of it! Wherever he is to-night and whatever fate overtake him, he is a happy man. And we sit here, we sit here and drink—I am ordering another bottle of that wine, Harold, and I expect you and Mrs. Crumb to abandon that warm and sticky beer and join me—Waiter! Yes—another, please—we sit here in this crowded, smoky gathering (look at ’em!) while he plans the salvation of the world that we let slide, and lifts his kingly will to God. Glorious exaltation! Suppose that all of us could be touched——”

Christina Alberta interrupted. “I think we ought to telephone to the hospitals. I didn’t think before of the possibility of his being run over. Always he has been a little careless at crossings.”

Paul Lambone lifted a deprecating hand and searched in his mind for some excuse for rest.

“A little later,” he said after a slight pause, “the hospital staffs will be more at leisure. It is their rush hour now—ten to eleven. Yes, the Rush Hour....”

§ 9

Teddy Winterton appeared wading through obstructive seated people. His eye was fixed on Christina Alberta. “Hullo!” said Lambone in not too cordial greeting, and glanced at Christina Alberta and back at the new-comer.

Teddy struggled for an unoccupied chair over which some lady had thrown a sealskin coat, and captured it with profuse apologies to the owner of the cloak and squeezed it in at the end of the table between Harold and Fay, who barred his way to Christina Alberta. “Have pity on a lonely man,” he said genially and tried to catch the eye of Christina Alberta.

“You shall have one glass of champagne,” said Lambone with a slightly forced welcome in his tone.

“How do, Christina Alberta!” said Teddy forcing her attention.

Christina Alberta turned to Fay. “Will you come back with me now,” she said to her, “back to the flat? I must do that telephoning to the hospitals now or it won’t be done.”

Fay looked at her curiously. “It’s serious,” said Christina Alberta’s eyes, and Fay stood up and struggled with her coat. Teddy leaped to his feet to assist her. Christina Alberta had not removed her cloak, and was ready. “I say, Christina Alberta,” said Teddy. “I want a word with you.”

“Go on, Fay,” said Christina Alberta, giving her friend a little dig in the back and pretending not to hear him.

Teddy followed them out to the Piccadilly pavement. “Just a word,” he said. Fay was for standing a little way off, but Christina Alberta would not let that happen.

“I don’t want a word,” she said.

“But I might help you.”

“You might have done. But it’s too late. I never want to see you again.”

“Give a fellow a chance.”

“You’ve had your chance. And tried to take it.”

“You might at least keep up appearances,” said Teddy.

“Damn appearances!” said Christina Alberta. “Oh! Come on, Fay.”

She gripped her friend’s arm.

Teddy was left hovering. He hesitated and then went back into the café to rejoin Crumb and Lambone.

The two young women went on in silence for a little while.

“Anything up?” Fay ventured.

“Everything’s up,” said Christina Alberta. “I wonder if there’s a ghost of a chance of finding Daddy at the studio.”

They made their way to Chelsea without much further conversation. Fay had never before seen Christina Alberta looking tired.

When Fay opened the door Christina Alberta pushed in past her. “Daddy!” she cried in the dark passage. “Daddy!”

Fay clicked on the light. “No,” said Christina Alberta. “Of course he’s not here. He’s gone. Fay! What am I to do?”

Fay’s pale blue eyes became rounder. Christina Alberta, the valiant, the modern, was in tears.

“There’s the hospitals,” said Fay, doing her best to be brisk and cheerful.