BOOK THE THIRD THE RESURRECTION OF SARGON, KING OF KINGS (continued 3)

“He takes me as a matter of course,” she said. “He seems weak and drowsy and his chest is bad.” She spoke more definitely to Devizes. “I think you ought to overhaul him.”

“There is a doctor in attendance?” he asked Bobby.

Bobby explained. Devizes considered. Was Sargon dozing? Yes. Then let him doze for a bit. Bobby, working now a little more consciously for effect, went on with his story. Christina Alberta regarded him with manifest approval.

By tea-time Bobby had adjusted his mind to the existence of Devizes and the unexpectedness of Christina Alberta. All that carried over from his state of expectation was the idea that his relations with Christina Alberta were to be very profound and intimate. He still believed that, hidden away in her somewhere, there must be a blue-eyed, yielding, really feminine person, but it was very deeply hidden. Meanwhile the superimposed disguise struck him as agreeable, alert, humorous, and friendly. Devizes too he saw more and more as a strong, capable, understanding personality. He had seen Devizes examining Sargon, and it was clever, confidence-provoking doctoring. Sargon’s lungs, he said, were badly congested, especially on the left side; he was on the edge of pneumonia and without much vitality to fight it. He ought to be kept in a warmer, less draughty room with a night-nurse available. Mrs. Plumer had no room for a nurse, and not an hour away by automobile was Paul Lambone’s excessively comfortable week-end cottage at Udimore. A little masterly telephoning and telegraphing and the cottage was available, fires were alight in the best bedroom, a trained nurse was on her way to it, and it was all settled for Sargon, warmly wrapped up and fortified with hot-water bottles, to go thither. Bobby found himself a mere accessory in this new system of things; he was to follow next day to Udimore on his motor bicycle, for there would be room for all of them in Paul Lambone’s cottage. Apparently Paul Lambone’s conception of a simple cottage in the wilderness involved a housekeeper, several servants, and four or five visitors’ rooms.

This fellow Devizes carried out all his arrangements with a smooth competence that gave Bobby no scope for self-assertion. Sargon and Christina Alberta and Devizes would depart at five and get to Udimore by six, by which time the nurse would be installed. Then Devizes would go back to London and get there in time to dress for a dinner he had to attend. On Saturday morning he would be busy in London, and then he would come back to Udimore and see if Sargon was recovered enough for the beginnings of his mental treatment. Perhaps the unknown Paul Lambone would be there too. He was a lazy person, Bobby gathered; he’d have to be brought down by Devizes. Bobby was to stay at Udimore for some days. He made modest protestations. “No, you’re in it now,” said Devizes cheerfully and glanced at Christina Alberta. “You’re in for Sargon like the rest of us. Bring your work with you.”

“Yes, do come,” said Christina Alberta.

The only reason Bobby had for resisting the invitation was that it attracted him so much.

§ 3

This “cottage” at Udimore, which struck Bobby as being a really very pretty and comfortable modern house, and these three people, Christina Alberta, Devizes and Paul Lambone, who now grouped themselves round Sargon, exercised his mind in a quite extraordinary way. They struck him as being novel and definite to a degree he’d never met in anyone before, and even the house was fresh and decisive in its broad white grace, like no house that had ever before held his attention. It made most of the other houses he had ever observed seem accidental and aggregatory and second-hand and wandering in their purpose. But this house was the work of a clever young architect who had considered Paul Lambone intelligently, and its white rough-cast walls sat comfortably on the hill-side and looked with an honest, entirely detached admiration at Rye and across the marsh to Winchelsea and the remote blue sea; and it had seats and arbours and a gazebo for sitting about in, and up hill was a walled garden with broad paths up which you looked from the back of the house through lead-paned windows. You could watch the sunset from a number of excellent points of view, but it did not shine upon any room to weary and blind you. There was a kind wall to shelter hollyhocks and delphiniums from the south-west wind, and to bear a plum or so and a pear and a fig tree. Downstairs was mainly one great rambling room with a dining recess in one corner and the power of opening itself out into a loggia, and with conversational centres about fire-places or windows as the season might require, but there were several little studies about the house in which one could be shut off and write. Bookshelves grew in convenient corners, and the house was everywhere mysteriously warm from unseen and scarce suspected radiators. The house was so like Paul Lambone, and Paul Lambone so much a part of his house that he seemed to be really no more than its voice and its eyes.

Paul Lambone was the first successful writer Bobby had ever met. Bobby knew various needy young writers, tadpole writers, insecure writers, but this was the first completely grown-up and established and massively adult writer he had ever known. The man struck Bobby as being stupendously secure and free and prosperous. And the remarkable thing was that he was in no way a great writer, no Dickens nor Scott nor Hardy; his work wasn’t, after all, in Bobby’s opinion anything so very remotely above Bobby’s own efforts. A certain terseness he had at times, a certain penetration: those were the chief differences. In Bobby’s imagination the literary and artistic life had hitherto had an unavoidable flavour of casual adventure, glorious achievements, maddening difficulties, wild delights and tragic unhappinesses. Swift, Savage, Goldsmith, the Carlyles, Balzac, Dumas, Edgar Allan Poe, these had been his types. But this new bright house was as sound and comfortable as any country house, and Lambone sat in it with as safe a dignity as though he was a provincial banker or a mine owner or the senior member of some widespread firm of solicitors. No fears of losing his “job” or “writing himself out” oppressed him. He said and did exactly what he thought proper, and the policeman saluted him as he passed.

If this sort of thing could spring from the Book of Everyday Wisdom and Paul’s amiable novels, what hitherto unsuspected possibilities of accumulation and ease and security and helpfulness might there not be in Aunt Suzannah’s kindly responsiveness? It had never before seemed credible to Bobby that a day might come when he would be secure and his own master, able to refuse limitations himself and to release other people from limitations. All Bobby’s life hitherto had been a matter of direction and eminent necessity. He had been sent to school and sent to college. He had been on the eve of being put into the position of agent upon a friendly estate when the Great War had seized upon him and the rest of his generation and drilled him and sent him off to Mesopotamia. And after the war he had had to do something to supplement his diminished inheritance. Life had been so indicated and prescribed for him at every stage, his parents’ existence had been so entirely directed by a class tradition, that Bobby’s mind was exceptionally well prepared to be impressed by Paul Lambone’s freedoms.

It was curious to note how completely Paul Lambone arose out of the present-day world, and how completely he didn’t belong to it. He had all its advantages and so little of its standard obligations. He had escaped from it with most of its gifts. He had to go to no court, follow no seasons, make no calls, and perform no functions. Was he exceptional in his circumstances altogether, or were there a lot of people escaping, as he was escaping, prosperously, from the old decaying social system? a queer sort of new people who didn’t belong?

Bobby sat on the terrace and looked over the back of his seat at this extremely new but very sightly and comfortable cottage of Lambone’s, with this freshly arrived idea of a new sort of people getting loose in the world and living unrelated to the old order of things and shaping out new ways of living, very active in his mind. This house seemed to embody that idea; it was new and novel, but not a bit apologetic nor rebellious. It was just breaking out like a new fashion. It was just arising like a new century. He had always assumed that revolutions came from below through the rage of the excluded and the disinherited. He had thought every one took that for granted. But suppose revolutions were merely smashes-up that hadn’t very much to do with real progress either way, and that the new age dawned anywhere in the social order where people could get free enough to work out new ideas.

New ideas!

Sargon was new, Paul Lambone was new, Devizes new; before the war there could not have been any such people. They had grown out of their own past selves; they were as different from pre-war people as nineteenth-century people had been different from eighteenth-century people. Newest of all was this Christina Alberta who had effaced her blue-eyed predecessor. She was so direct and free in her thoughts and talk that she made Bobby feel that his own mind wore a bonnet and flounces. He had gone for two walks with her, once to Brede and once to Rye, and he liked her tremendously. Whether he was in love with her he didn’t yet know. Falling in love with her for anyone was evidently going to be a quite unconventional, untested, and difficult series of exercises. Nothing at all like that unborn normal affair with the non-existent blue-eyed girl.

She seemed to like him, and particularly the way his hair grew on his head. She had mentioned it twice and ruffled it once.

A queer aspect of the situation was the riddle of how she and Sargon and himself came to be the guests of Paul Lambone with Devizes in attendance. It was just a part of Paul Lambone’s freedom from prescription that he should be able to give sanctuary to Sargon and assemble this odd, unconventional week-end party. But Bobby had a sense of hidden links and missing clues. Devizes was a natural enough visitor, of course; he was manifestly Lambone’s close friend. But their interest in Sargon was stronger than Bobby could imagine it ought to be. He was puzzled; he examined all sorts of possibilities in a gingerly fashion. Some impulse like his own, no doubt, but not quite the same, lay at the bottom of this—Sargonism.

Bobby had begun by feeling very hostile to Devizes as an unexpected intruder on a system of relationships sufficiently interesting without him. He was glad that he had to go to London for Friday, and not particularly pleased by his return on Saturday. Then he found his feelings changing to a curious respect, mingled with a defensive element that was almost like fear.

Devizes was more aware of you than Lambone. He looked at you, his mind came at you. It had the habit of coming at people. He was more actively and aggressively interested in things than Lambone and more self-forgetful. Lambone observed enough to make bright comments; Devizes made penetrating observations. Bobby often felt encumbered with himself; most people he thought were encumbered with themselves, but Devizes to a conspicuous degree wasn’t. He was a man of science; a man of scientific habits. Bobby had known one or two scientific men before, rather wrapped away from ordinary things, but the interest that wrapped them was something that wrapped them away from oneself; one had been concerned chiefly with stresses in glass and another with the eggs of echinoderms. You always seemed to be looking at the backs of these fellows’ heads and smiling at their immense preoccupation. But this man Devizes was wrapped up in the motives and thoughts of people; he didn’t look away from you; he looked into you. That grew upon Bobby’s consciousness. Devizes’ eye lacked delicacy.

He had come down for the week-end chiefly to deal with Sargon. He went up and had long talks to Sargon. He was “treating” Sargon. He didn’t go up and talk to Sargon as man to man, as Bobby would have done. He went up to a sort of mental jiu-jitsu with Sargon to exercise him and push him about into new attitudes. Devizes was formidable enough in himself, but far more formidable as a portent. He had all the appearance of being a precursor, the most vigorous precursor—they were all precursors!—of a new type of human relationships, relationships without delicate reservations, without rich accumulations of feeling behind emotions avoided and things unsaid. So it seemed to Bobby, who didn’t for a moment suspect how much these people were avoiding and suppressing. Christina Alberta’s thoughts and speech seemed to him to be moving about without a stitch on, like the people in some horrible Utopia by Wells. He compared the vast impalpable network of “understanding” he and Tessy had woven between each other.

“New people,” he whispered, and looked Paul Lambone’s new house in the face. To him they were stupendously new, an immense discovery. The war had overstrained him, he realized, and left him too tired for a time to see new things. He had been one of the vast multitude of those who had come out of the war in the expectation of a trite and obvious old-fashioned millennium, and who expressed their disappointment by declaring that nothing had happened except devastation and impoverishment. They were too jaded at first to observe anything else. But indeed Bobby now realized the European world had been travelling faster and faster since the break-up of the armed peace in 1914; and here were new types, new habits of thought, new ideas, new reactions, new morals, new ways of living. He discovered himself in the advent of a new age, a new age that was coming so fast that there hadn’t been time ever to clear the forms and institutions of the old age away. They weren’t reversed or abolished, they weren’t overthrown, they were just disregarded. Which was just why it was possible to get along for a year or so without noting the tremendous changes everything was undergoing.

“New People.” Did that apply to Sargon? That was Sargon’s room: the two long windows between the buttresses. Was Sargon also an escape from the established order of relationships into novel things? What was the real significance of the absurd little man with his preposterous map of the world and his still more preposterous planisphere, who wanted to be Lord of the Earth?

§ 4

When Bobby came to talk it over with Sargon it seemed to him that Devizes had taken the little man completely to pieces and presented him with the disarticulated portions of himself. Devizes went back to London on Monday; he took Christina Alberta with him in his hired car; but Lambone urged Bobby to stay on for a day or so to cheer up the patient. Lambone, so far as he could discover his own intentions, meant to stay on at Udimore for a week or more and work. Bobby saw Christina Alberta off, meditated on her for an hour, then gave the rest of the morning to Aunt Suzannah and the afternoon to Sargon; and Sargon, who was distinctly better, sat propped up by two pillows and discussed the dissected structure of himself.

“Not a bit fatigued,” said Sargon. “I’m having a tonic now. Every three hours.”

He considered his next remark for some moments before he made it. “Who is this Mr. Paul Lambone?” he asked. “It is very hospitable for him to entertain us. Very. (H’rrmp).... Is he a friend of yours?”

“He’s quite a well-known writer. He’s a friend of Christina Alberta’s.”

“She has so many friends. Young people do nowadays. And what is this Dr. Devizes?”

“He is a nervous specialist, and he was consulted—he was consulted about the possibilities of getting you away from that—Place.”

“Nervous specialist. He is a wonderful talker—most intelligent and (h’rrmp) understanding. I have a curious feeling that somewhere, somewhen, somehow I have met him before. In this life—or some other. It is all quite vague, and he does not seem to have any corresponding recollection. No. Probably a coincidence of some sort.”

Bobby saw nothing in the coincidence.

Sargon shut his eyes for a second or so.

“We talked of my recent experiences,” he resumed.

“Naturally,” said Bobby, helping.

“There has been a lot of confusion about my personality. It is a trouble more frequent nowadays than it used to be. Most of my life I have thought that I was a person called Albert Edward Preemby, a limited person, a most limited person. Then I had a light. I began to realize that nobody could really be such a thing as that Albert Edward Preemby. I began to seek for myself. I had reason—too long to explain—to suppose that I was Sargon the First, the great Sumerian, the founder of the first Empire in the world. Then—then came trouble. You saw something of it. I grasped at the sceptre—one afternoon—in Holborn—rashly. Most painful affair. I was sent to that Place. Yes. It shook me. Humiliations. Hardship. Real—uncleanness. I doubted whether I wasn’t after all just that little Preemby. A human rabbit. My faith faltered. I admit it faltered.”

He mused painfully for some moments.

Then he laid his hand reassuringly on Bobby’s wrist.

“I am Sargon,” he said. “Talking to your friend Devizes has cleared my mind greatly. I am Sargon, but in a rather different sense from what I had imagined. Preemby was, as I had supposed, a mere accidental covering. But——”

The little face puckered with intellectual effort. “I am not exclusively Sargon. You—you perhaps are still unawakened—but you are Sargon too. His blood is in our veins. We are co-heirs. It is fairly easy to understand. Sargon, regal position. Naturally many wives. Political—biological necessity. Offspring numerous. They again—positions of advantage—many children. Next generation, more. Like a vast expanding beam of intellectual and moral force. You can prove it—prove it by mathematics. Dr. Devizes and I—we worked it out on a piece of paper. We are all descended from Sargon, just as we are all descended from Cæsar—just as nearly all English and Americans are descended from William the Conqueror. Few people realize this. A little arithmetic—it is perfectly plain. Long before the Christian era the blood of Sargon was diffused throughout all mankind. His traditions still more so. We all inherit. Not merely from him—from all the great kings, from all the noble conquerors. From all the brave and beautiful women. All the statesmen and inventors and creators. If not directly from them, from their fathers and mothers. All that rich wine from the past is in my veins. And I thought I was just Albert Edward Preemby! And at Woodford Wells I went for a silly little walk nearly every afternoon with sixpence in my pocket to spend and nothing in the world to do! For twenty years. It seems incredible.”

The blue eyes sought confirmation from Bobby, who nodded.

“There was I walking about Epping Forest in a suit of clothes I never really liked—a rather exaggerated golfing suit with baggy knickerbockers that my wife chose for me—they seemed to get baggier every year—and I was quite ignorant that I was the heir of all the ages, and that the whole earth down to the centre and up to the sky was mine. And yours. Ours. I had no sense of duty to it; I hadn’t woke up to self-respect. I wasn’t only Sargon, but all the men and women who have ever mattered on earth. I was God’s Everlasting Servant. Instead of which I was rather timid about horses and strange dogs, and often when I saw people approaching and thought they were observing me and speaking about me, I did not know what to do with my arms and legs, and became quite confused about them.”

He paused to smile at the thought of it.

“It has been interesting to talk to your Dr. Devizes of the absurdity of that contracted blind littleness in which I lived so long. We talked of the Great Man I really was, the Great Men we really were. All the Incorporated Great Men. You and I, the same. Because in the past you and I and he were one, and in the future we may come together again. We have just separated to take hold of things as the hand separates into thumb and fingers. We talked of the time when the spirit that is in us made the first hut, launched the first ship, rode the first horse. We could not remember those great moments as exact incidents, but we recalled them—generally. We recalled a blazing day when a band of men went out across a sandy desert for the first time, and when a man first stood upon a glacier. It was—slippery. Then I remembered watching my people heap up the earth-walls of my first city. We went out against the robbers of the first herds. Then Dr. Devizes and I stood in imagination on a sort of quarter-deck, and watched our men lugging the great oars of the galley that took us to Iceland and Vinland. We both saw. We planned the Great Walls of China; I counted our lateen sails upon our grand canal. You see, I have built a million wonderful temples and made an innumerable multititude of lovely sculptures, paintings, jewels and decorations. I had forgotten it, but I have. And I have loved a billion loves—I have indeed—to bring me here. We all have. We talked it over, your Dr. Devizes and I. I had not dreamt the millionth part of what I am. When I thought I was Sargon wholly and solely I still did not realize my great inheritance and my enormous destiny. Even now I am only beginning to see that.... It is preposterous to think that I who have all this past of efforts and adventures behind me should have been content to run about Woodford Wells in a ridiculous suit of tweeds with plus-four breeches that were extremely heavy and uncomfortable—they tickled me, you know—on hot days. Yet I did. I did.... Not realizing.... I used to go on until I could endure it no longer, and then I would have to stop and scratch behind my knees....

“Of course, when I called myself Sargon, King of Kings, and proposed to rule all the world I was—Dr. Devizes called it—symbolizing. Of course, everybody is really Sargon, King of Kings, and everybody ought to take hold of all the world and save it and rule it just as I have got to do.”

He had concluded his exposition. He had spread out his disarticulated parts before Bobby just as Devizes had returned them to him.

§ 5

“But just what are you going to do?” said Bobby.

“I have been thinking of that.”

For a little while he continued to think.

“It becomes all different,” he said, “when one realizes that one is not the only Sargon. I thought of being a great king, a great leader, with the rest of the world just following me. I doubt if I ever felt quite up to a job of that sort, but I couldn’t see any other way of being Sargon and a king. Now I do. I did my best, but even when I went to Buckingham Palace I realized that the thing was going to be too big for me. I was telling Dr. Devizes—I told him, that since he was Sargon and King just as much as me and that almost anyone might become Sargon and King, then it wasn’t a case for palaces and thrones any longer, or for being proclaimed and crowned—such things were as much out of date as flint implements; and that the real things was to be just a kingly person and work with all the other kingly persons in the world to make the world worthy of our high descent. Anyone who wakes up to that becomes a kingly person. We can be active kings even if we remain kings incognito. One can be a laundryman like I was when I was just Preemby, and think of nothing but the profits and needs and vanities and fears of a little laundryman—and how dull it was!—or one can be a king, the descendant of ten thousand kings, the joint heir to the inheritance of all human affairs, the lord of the generations still unborn—who happens to be living in exile as a laundryman.”

He paused.

“I agree with most of that,” said Bobby. “It’s—it’s attractive.”

“So far it is as plain as can be. But after that the difficulties begin. It isn’t enough just to say you are a king. You have to be a king. You have to do. You can’t be a king and not do kingly things. But it’s just there that Dr. Devizes and I—we weren’t so clear. There’s a lot to be thought out. What is my kingly task? In this frail body—and what I am? I am not clear. Yet the mere fact that I am not clear shows clearly where I have to begin. I have to get clear. I have to get knowledge, find out about my kingdom. That’s reasonable. I have to learn more about my great inheritance, our great inheritance, the history of it, the possibilities of it, the ways of the men who misrule it. I have to learn about business and economics and money; and then when I see it all plain I have to exert myself and vote and work, and I have to find out what particular gifts I have and how I may best give them to our kingdom. Each king must glorify his particular reign with his particular gift. We agreed about that.

“So far I do not know my particular gift. Dr. Devizes says that so far as he is concerned he must work out human motives and human relationships; his gift and his natural interest is for mental science. He has his task meted out for him, his kingly task. But for me at present there isn’t that much self-knowledge. I have to begin lower down and with broader questions. I have to learn about the universe and about the history of this world-empire of Sargon’s, and of all the things I have neglected in my dreams and littleness. I have to go to school again. To learn how to think harder. I don’t mind the fatigue. But I am impatient. When I think of all that lies before me, the reading, the inquiries, the visits to museums and suchlike places, I want to get up right away and begin. I have lived so unobservant and irresponsible a life that I am puzzled how to account for the years I have spent. I have mooned them away. But I am glad I have awakened to my kingship before it is too late.

“I am quite a young man still. I am a little past forty, but that is nothing. Half of that was childhood and boyhood, and much of the rest inattention. For all I know I may live for another forty years. I’m not half through. And they may be the best years, the full years. I can spend three or four just learning—learning the round world. I shall begin to find out politics, and why men and women are servile and little-minded. I shall begin to realize how I can extend to those others this great liberation that has come to me. I shall begin to have a political life. A man who has no political life is like a rat which lives in a ship rather than like a man who navigates it. Then within that I shall begin to find my own proper life, my particular task. It is premature, I think, but I am very greatly drawn to the riddle of madness and asylums. I do not understand why there is madness. It puzzles and distresses me, and Dr. Devizes agrees with me that when a thing puzzles and distresses the mind the thing to do is to gather all the knowledge and ideas one can about it—scientifically. Presently it ceases to distress; it interests and occupies. And when I was in—that Place, I talked to some of those poor creatures. I was very sorry for them, I made them promises to help them when my kingdom came. And now I begin to see what my kingdom is, and the way in which I must enter in to possess it. Perhaps in good time I shall learn and spread knowledge about asylums, and make things better in them so that they will not simply imprison people but help and cure them.

“It was Dr. Devizes’ idea, I think—or we may have worked it out together—that there is a real and important purpose in madness. It is a sort of simplification, a removal of checks and controls, and a sort of natural experiment. The secret things of the mind are laid bare. But then if poor souls are to suffer that sort of thing to yield knowledge for others, they ought to be treated properly; they ought to be cherished and made the utmost use of, and not handed over to such brutes as we had.... I can’t tell you. Not yet. Brutes they were.... And in their sane moments—they all have sane moments, these lunatics—they ought to be comforted and told.”

The queer little round face, with its sprouting moustache and its pale blue eyes, stared at Bobby.

“When first I saw you,” said Sargon, “I did not realize in the least how things really were between us. I was still wrapped up in vaingloriousness; I thought I was a great prophet and teacher and king, and that all the world had to obey me. I thought you were going to be the first and best and nearest of my disciples. But now I know better about myself. And about other people. They are here not to be my followers and disciples but to be my fellow kings. We have to work together with all the others who are awakened, for our kingdom and the great progress of mankind.”

He went on talking rather to himself than to Bobby.

“I have always wanted to know things, but now I shall have the will really to know them. I shall be different now. It seems incredible that a little while ago I was bothered about what I should do with my time. Now I am only eager to get at things, and however long my time may be I know it will be full. It is astonishing to me that there has been flying in my kingdom for a dozen years, and I have never been in an aeroplane. I must look at the world from an aeroplane. And perhaps I shall need to go to India and China and suchlike strange and wonderful countries, because they, too, are a part of my inheritance. I need to know about them. And jungles and wildernesses that we have to subjugate; I have to see them. The beasts are under us; we have to cherish them or destroy them mercifully as the necessities of our kingdom may require. It is a terrible thing even to be lord of a beast. All the beasts, wild or tame, are under our dominion. And there is science. All the wonderful work men do in laboratories and their marvellous discoveries are our care. If I do not understand I may hinder. How blind I have been to the splendour of my life. When I think of all these things, I can hardly endure to be here in bed; I am so impatient to get on with them. But I suppose I must be patient with these poor wheezing lungs.

“Patient,” he repeated.

He looked at his wrist-watch and it had stopped. “Can you tell me the time? At seven I ought to take some more of that excellent tonic. It is working wonders in me. But no! don’t trouble; the nurse will be thinking of it.... It puts fresh life into me.”

§ 6

But Sargon did not live forty years more, nor thirty, nor twenty. He lived just a day under seven weeks from that conversation. He stayed in bed for two days after Bobby returned to London; then Lambone also went and he became intractable. As his strength returned he bothered his nurse more and more for books he couldn’t name or describe, and for volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica; and when she declared that seven volumes of that monumental publication were surely as much as any invalid could need at one time, he got up and put on his rough little dressing-gown and came paddling downstairs, h’rrmping resolutely, to the library. After that he got up for three days running. A fire was made in the most bookish corner of the downstairs room and screens put to keep him warm. But his tonic was driving him, perhaps it was too stimulating a tonic, and he would not stay in his protected corner.

The nurse seems to have been a weak, complaining character, indisposed to act without authority. She telephoned through to Devizes in London, but she did not succeed in making clear to him the gravity of Sargon’s misbehaviour. The crowning offence came when he wouldn’t go to bed at seven, but instead slipped out, in an overcoat and a wrapper indeed but in slippers, upon the terrace before the house. His bare ankles and legs were exposed to the cold wind. The slow-moving periodic beams of light from the lighthouse upon the coast, sweeping across the phantom hills under the clear starlight, had drawn him out, those processional lights, and Sirius that white splendour, and the steadfast sprawling glory of Orion. It was a clear November night with frost in the air. The nurse heard him cough and rushed out to him. He was looking at Sirius through Lambone’s field-glasses and she had to drag him in by main force. She lost her temper; there was an ungracious struggle.

The next day he was in no state to leave his bed. Yet he tossed about and exposed his inflamed chest in feeble attempts to read. “I know nothing,” he complained. For a while he got better again, and then it is highly probable that he went to his open window in the night and sat for a long time wondering at the stars. After that came a relapse and a week or so of struggle, and then after a phase of delirium came great weakness, and then one night, death. He was quite alone when he died.

Bobby had not expected the death at all. He heard of it from Christina Alberta with great astonishment. He had been told nothing of Sargon being worse nor of his misbehaviour; he had been thinking of him rather enviously as growing steadily stronger and better and gratifying day by day a happy and expanding curiosity. He had looked forward presently to another talk and another phase in this odd belated adolescence. It was as though an interesting story had come to an abrupt end in the middle, as though all its concluding chapters had been torn out rudely and unreasonably.

This mood of frustrated sympathy lasted over the cremation of Sargon at Golders Green. Bobby went to that queer ceremony. He arrived late with Billy; the coffin that held the little body stood ready to glide into the furnace, the Church of England burial service had already begun. There were very few people in the chapel. Christina Alberta in the black she had worn for her mother was in the front seat, as chief mourner, between Paul Lambone and Devizes. Behind her with an air of earnest support were Harold and Fay Crumb, astonishingly in deep mourning and following the service meticulously in two prayer-books. An unpleasant-looking individual with a very long pock-marked sheep’s face, small eyes and habitual-looking blacks turned round and stared at Bobby as he came in. He was accompanied by a very large blonde lady who seemed to have slept in her mourning under a bed. Relations of the deceased? The air of relationship was unmistakable. Behind, a young woman and two detached old ladies seemed to be indulging a simple propensity for funeral services at large. They completed the congregation.

Christina Alberta looked unusually small and overshadowed by her two odd men friends. It was a grey day outside, and the general effect of the gathering was thin and scattered and damp and chilly. The organ was playing as Bobby came in, and he thought he had never heard a less musical organ. The service as it went on sounded more and more trite and theological and insincere. What an old second-hand damp mackintosh the Church of England is, thought Bobby, for a striving soul to wear? But then what can any religion in the world really be in the face of normal death? Theologically one should rejoice when a good man dies, but none of these religions had had the pluck to brazen it out to that extent. None can get rid of the effect of confrontation with a blank amazing interrogation. Was there anything within that coffin there that heard or cared a jot for those sombre mummeries?

Bobby’s thoughts converged upon that still thing within the coffin. The little face would be wearing a waxen unaccustomed dignity; the round, preposterously innocent blue eyes would be closed and a little sunken. Where were those thoughts and hopes, now, that Bobby had listened to a few weeks since? Sargon had talked of flying, of visiting India and China, of doing noble work in the world. He had said that half his life still lay before him. He had seemed to be opening like a flower on the first sunny morning of a belated spring. And it was all delusion; the door of death that had slammed upon him was already closing then.

Surely those hopes had been life! In them if in anything was something of the life that lives and cannot die. But was it yonder? No. That in the coffin there was no more than a photographic impression, a cast garment, the parings of a nail. There was more of Sargon now in Bobby’s brain alone, than in that coffin. But Sargon, where was he? Where were those dreams and desires?

Bobby became aware of the voice of the officiating clergyman driving high, like a flying bird, over the welter of his thoughts: “But some men will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or any other grain: But God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased him, but to every seed its own body....”

“Queer, tortuous, ingenious fellow that Paul,” thought Bobby. Now what exactly was he driving at there? Queer fellow! Bad manners too with his “Thou fool.” A rather strained analogy this about the seed, “sown in corruption.” After all a seed was the cleanest, most living bit of vegetable matter you could have; it had to be sown in clean mould. Growing plants you manured perhaps, but not seed-boxes. But there was a queer insistence in the discourse of the “difference,” the discontinuity, of the new life. What was to come was to be altogether different from what was sown. Bobby had never noted that before, never noted how plainly the apostle insisted that no body, no earthly sort of body, no personality, ever came back.

“The glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory.”

What was the drift of that? Was it translated properly? What had Paul been up against in Corinth? After all, why couldn’t the Church speak to one’s living needs instead of disinterring this Levantine argument? And that analogy of the seed; was it after all a good one? Whatever comes from a seed must itself die again; it is no more immortal than the plant that came before it. The clergyman was going too fast, too, to follow him closely. Better get a prayer-book at home afterwards and read all this.

“O Grave where is thy sting? O death where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is in the law.”

No. There was no following that. It sounded like nonsense. One just missed the implications. It was like listening to some one who was too far off to be heard distinctly but who made eloquent gestures and noises.

The service came to an embarrassed pause. Everyone was motionless, arrested.

“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.... He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow....”

Set in motion by unseen hands the coffin went gliding towards the furnace doors which opened to receive it. There was a deep roar, a sound like a mighty rushing wind, an elemental and chaotic sound....

Life is a faint dispersed film upon one little planet, but flames roar like this and great winds rush and whirl, out to the remotest star in the unfathomable depths of space. That deep disorderly tumult is the true voice of lifeless matter, not of dead matter, for what has never lived cannot be dead, but of lifeless matter, outside of and beneath and beyond life.

Everyone in the chapel seemed still and bowed and hushed and dwarfed to minute dimensions until the furnace doors had closed again upon that soulless devouring clamour.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH May at Udimore

§ 1

BOBBY forgot that glimpse of the elemental powers that the furnace doors had given him altogether, for such things do not remain naturally in the mind. They inconvenience life. But the voice of the clergyman hustling the arguments of St. Paul along, and the scene in the Crematorium Chapel with the little coffin waiting to be launched into eternity and the few still black mourners dotted among the yellow benches came back to him very vividly when Paul Lambone began to quote and twist those familiar sentences about the contrast between the corruptible and the incorruptible and expand a fantastic philosophy of his own. Bobby had always intended to read that funeral service over again slowly and judicially, but he had never done so and he regretted it now very much. It left him—and Paul of Tarsus—at the mercy of Paul Lambone, and he knew that Paul Lambone loved ingenious slight misquotations.

It was a very warm, serenely still May evening, and Lambone’s party sat after dinner in the twilight, some just inside the house and some on deck-chairs upon the terrace. They looked out over the marsh and over the still sea. The sky was like the inside of a deep blue globe on which an ever increasing multitude of starry midges was alighting, and Rye and Winchelsea crouched low beneath it, black low lumps with a street light and a window or so showing minutely. Receding out to sea was a liner quite brightly lit. With a swift steadiness the beam of the nearer lighthouse swept the distant flats, came near, lit the faces of the talkers, lit the room, called a church tower and a group of trees into existence and dropped them back into the darkness and forgot about them and passed on. And then presently it was coming again, a thin white streak of light hurrying far away across the levels.

When one’s attention wandered from the talk one became aware of an abundance of nightingales. They were nightingales newly come from the south. One or it might be two were in the trees close at hand; others remoter wove a gauze curtain of faint sweet sounds over the visible universe.

Bobby sat on the step between the room and the terrace with his back against a pillar and with his empty coffee-cup beside him. He had put himself there by the feet of Christina Alberta, who was deep in a big arm-chair and very still. Her face was dim except when her cigarette glowed and showed a red-lit unfamiliar face. And yet that afternoon she had been the most familiar thing in the world to him; she had kissed him and pulled his ears and he had kissed her bare shoulders and clasped her in his arms. Devizes too was silent and preoccupied. He sat over against Christina Alberta on the other side of the opening of the room; and he was so much in the twilight that except when the lighthouse beam lit his face, only his shining shoes and socks were clearly visible to Bobby. There had been times when Bobby had thought that Devizes was in love with Christina Alberta, and he had a vague inexplicable feeling that to some extent she was or had been in love with Devizes. He had a sense of unfathomed deeps in their relationship, but he did not know where these deeps lay. If Christina Alberta loved Devizes she would have said so. Bobby knew of no reason why she should not. But to-day she had hugged and kissed Bobby so that it was impossible to believe she loved anyone else.

Yet in the last three or four months she had gone about with Devizes a lot; Bobby had seen her mind responding and changing with her talks with this man. She used to quote him, and she would say things exactly like the things he said. It had been a great inconvenience and trial to Bobby, this preoccupation. And then suddenly he found Devizes wasn’t the lover at all, never could have been a lover. That day she had proved that up to the hilt. And now in a state between pride and servitude Bobby sat at her feet. He sat at her feet and close to her; Devizes in the darkness was remote, a full three yards away.

Except for Lambone’s unquenchable flow it had not been a very talkative party. To-night it was less talkative than ever. “This is too perfect,” Margaret Means had sighed. “I can’t talk. I just thank God I am alive,” and she had nestled into her big deck-chair upon the terrace. This was the girl—it had suddenly become apparent to Bobby a fortnight ago in London—whom Devizes intended to marry. Abruptly she had come upon the scene to destroy the triangle that had obsessed Bobby’s imagination. A sweetly pretty fragile thing she was; in the twilight she seemed as faint and fragrant as nightstock, and she was a wonderful pianist. Last night she had played for two hours. Paul’s sister, Miss Lambone, had been evoked from somewhere in the west of England to come and be hostess to the engaged couple. Bobby had tried to talk to Christina Alberta about Margaret, but Christina Alberta hadn’t wanted to talk about her. “You see,” said Christina Alberta compactly, “she has opened the whole world of music to him. That’s what brought them together. She’s clever; she’s very clear and clever.

“I’d never heard of her—until you mentioned their engagement.

“They’ve gone to concerts together and that sort of thing. He’s known her much longer than he has known me.”

“When did you first meet Devizes?”

“About the time my Daddy came to Midgard Street. As recently as that. It’s hardly six months. Paul Lambone took me to him to get advice about Daddy. But they have been going about—for more than a year. I thought it was just music that interested them. They’d seemed to be friends. And I thought he didn’t mean to marry again. He just suddenly decided.”

Christina Alberta reflected. “That’s the way with life, Bobby. Things accumulate, and then you suddenly decide.”

“Had she been undecided? Had she made him wait?”

“Not her,” said Christina Alberta with a remarkable hardness in her voice.

“No,” she said. “He decided.”

She seemed to feel there was still something to express. “He just took hold of the situation.”

§ 2

This was Bobby’s second visit to Udimore. Paul Lambone had suddenly seen fit to gather this party; apparently on the spur of Devizes’ engagement. In the interval Bobby had seen Christina Alberta a number of times and developed an immense sense of relationship to her. It filled his life. He had always been dreaming things about her from the time when he anticipated her with blue eyes and a fragile person, and always she was and did things that tore his dreams to shreds. This made her profoundly interesting. More and more he had become dependent upon her for interest. He wanted to marry her if only to make sure he wouldn’t lose the interest of her. She had refused—twice. Without any of the graces proper to the occasion. “No fear, Bobby,” she said. “It wouldn’t do. I’m not the woman you take me for.”

“You never are,” he said. “I don’t mind that.”

“You’re the dearest companion,” she said. “I like the way your hair grows.”

“Then why not make it yours, and be companions for ever?”

“Nothing more frightful,” she said, and so dismissed the proposal.

They went about together; they spent much of their spare time together except for those distressing occasions when she would suddenly throw him over to go to a theatre or walk with Devizes. Or to go to Devizes to talk. She never hesitated to throw him over for Devizes. Yet Bobby got a lot of her. She didn’t know much about theatres or music-halls or restaurants or dancing-places or that sort of thing, and Bobby was discreetly competent in that province. The Malmesburys felt themselves deserted, and Susan was vindictive in her resentment at his frequent absence from her bed-time rituals. Tessy, Bobby declared, remained his dearest friend; but when he tried to tell her all about himself in the old, old fashion—which he did when Christina Alberta was away with Devizes—he naturally had to tell her all about Christina Alberta. But Tessy declined in the most emphatic way to be told about Christina Alberta. It was extremely surprising and disappointing to Bobby to find out how incapable Tessy was of appreciating the endless interestingness and charm of Christina Alberta. It was a blind spot in her mind. She seemed to assume that Christina Alberta was no better than she should be, whereas she was much better. It estranged Bobby and Tessy very much, and it was a great sorrow to Bobby.

Because Christina Alberta was good—and interesting—beyond dispute. She was growing with tremendous rapidity mentally and in her knowledge of the world. Every time he met her she seemed more of a person, with richer, fuller, more commanding ideas. She seemed to be living every moment of her time. She was working now at the Royal College of Science under Macbride. She was taking hold of her new studies there with tremendous enthusiasm. She was in love with comparative anatomy. Bobby had always thought that comparative anatomy was dry, pedantic stuff about bones, but she declared it lit up the whole story of life for her. It changed her ideas about the world and about herself profoundly. “It is the most romantic stuff I have ever read or thought about,” she said. “It makes human history seem silly.”

She took him three times to the Natural History Museum at South Kensington to show him something of the fine realizations that stirred her mind. She made it clear to him how the bones of a wing or the scratches of a flint could restore the storms and sunlight and passions of ten million years ago.

And then suddenly a week ago Christina Alberta had consented to marry Bobby. She had taken back her two refusals. But the way she did it made it like everything else she did, astonishing and disconcerting. She had a confession to make, and for a time until he could think it over thoroughly that confession seemed to Bobby to explain her refusals completely and to clear up everything about her.

She got him to take her to Hampton Court. But they did not go into the gardens because they saw through the park gates that the chestnuts of Bushey Avenue were in full blossom; they went instead by the pond and up under the riotously flowering branches. A belated spring was coming now in a hurry, warm and brilliant. The trees were glorious. It was as if a bright green sea was splashing up warm creamy foam under a shower of cannon shots. The blue sky hummed with light.

“The spring has come fast now that it has begun to come,” she said.

He felt she had something to say and waited.

“I never know, Bobby—this year less than ever—whether spring is the happiest time in the year or the most miserably restless. Everybody and everything is falling in love.”

“I didn’t wait for spring,” said Bobby.

“But what of the frogs that can’t find water?” said Christina Alberta.

“There’s water where there are frogs,” said Bobby.

“Everybody is marrying and giving in marriage,” she said. “I thought—I thought—Dr. Devizes at least was an inconsolable widower. But the spring tides have caught even him. They catch everybody.”

“They’ve caught you?”

“I don’t know. I’m miserable, Bobby, and restless and all astir.”

“Then let yourself go.”

“One aches—alone.”

“But are you alone?”

“Fairly.”

“There’s me.”

“Bobby dear, what do you want in me?”

“You. To be with you. To be always about with you. And to be loved by you.”

“It’s kind of you.”

“Oh, nonsense! Kindness!”

“Listen, Bobby,” she said, and made a long pause.

Her voice when she spoke had adopted the ease of casual conversation. “Do you believe in chastity, Bobby? Could you love a girl who wasn’t—chaste?”

Bobby winced as if she had struck his face with a whip. He went white. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Plainly,” she said.

For a time neither of them said a word.

“You have had your experiences,” she thrust. “In France. They all did.”

Bobby made no answer to that.

“Now you know,” she flung at him.

For a little while the light had gone out of Bobby’s world.

“Did you love the man?” he asked.

“If I did I don’t remember it. It was just—curiosity. And the stir of growing up. And the intolerable sense of being forbidden. No—I think I was almost—cold-blooded. I liked the look of him. And then I disliked him.... But there it is, Bobby. That’s how things are.”

Bobby weighed his words. “I’d care if it were any girl but you. You—you’re different. I love you. What has or hasn’t happened to you doesn’t matter. At least—it doesn’t matter so much.”

“You’re sure it doesn’t matter so much?”

“Quite.”

“Sure for good?”

“Yes.”

“From this moment you forget, you begin to forget what I have told you? As I want to forget it?”

“It will go soon enough if you want to forget it. It doesn’t matter at all. I see now, it doesn’t matter at all.”

“But why on earth do you want to marry me, Bobby? What is there in me? I’m ugly, rude, greedy, inconsiderate. I’ve no purity, no devotion.”

“You’re incessantly interesting. You’re straight, swift, and endlessly beautiful.”

“Bobby, truly! Does it look like that to you?”

“Yes. Doesn’t my manner—? Don’t you know?”

“Yes,” she said gravely; “I suppose I know.”

She came to a stop in front of him with her arms akimbo. They stood looking at one another, and Bobby winced as if he was going to cry. Her face was grave and troubled, and then at the sight of his expression her smile broke through. Her gravity vanished. She was a different Christina Alberta. She was suddenly the gayest conceivable thing to him, confident and impudent.

“If you were to kiss me, Bobby, right here and now in Bushey Park, would they lock us up?...”

Most wonderful it was to Bobby to take her in his arms. A new Christina Alberta was revealed to Bobby; Christina Alberta seen from a distance of six inches or so, an amazingly beautiful Christina Alberta. One might have thought she had never lived for anything but being loved by Bobby.

“You’re learning,” said Christina Alberta after a little while. “Now do it all over again, Bobby. Nobody seems to be looking....”

§ 3

Neither Lambone nor Devizes had seemed in the least surprised at their engagement. Indeed their attitude of gratified expectation was almost embarrassing. The young couple had come down to Udimore with Devizes and Miss Means under the ample protection of Miss Lambone almost as though they had been appointed for each other from the beginning of things.

But at Udimore there were further surprises and perplexities for Bobby. All day Saturday Christina Alberta seemed to be not so much in love as in a thoroughly bad temper. She seemed far more concerned by the fact that Devizes was going to marry Miss Means than by the generous devotion that Bobby was prepared to lavish upon her. She was inattentive to his various little manœuvres to get isolated with her. The two couples played tennis after tea until it was time to dress for dinner; she was badly out of practice and fundamentally unorthodox, and Margaret played with a smoothness and sweetness that roused her to a pitch of viciousness only too evident to Bobby’s fine perceptions. It seemed to Bobby that Devizes also noted her annoyance, but Miss Means was blissfully unobservant of anything in the world but Devizes.

On Sunday morning Christina Alberta carried off Bobby through the distant cheerfulness of church bells for a walk to Brede Castle. And she announced to Bobby that she did not intend to marry him.

Bobby protested. “You don’t love me?”

“Haven’t I kissed you? Didn’t I hug you? Haven’t I ruffled your hair?”

“Then why don’t you want to marry me?”

“I do not want to marry anyone. I don’t love anybody. Except of course you. But even you, I can’t marry. I want to be loved, Bobby, yes. But not to be married.”

“But why? Not the—the old reason?”

“No. I took your word about that. But all the same I don’t want to marry you, Bobby.... I think it’s because I don’t want to be bound up with anyone’s life. I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be my free and independent self. I’ve got to grow. That’s it, Bobby. I want to be free to grow.”

Bobby made protesting noises.

“I don’t want some one seeing me grow all the time. You’d always be looking at me, Bobby; I know you would.”

It was useless of Bobby to say he wouldn’t. He would.

“I didn’t know that things were going to take me like this until I fixed to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I consented—honestly I did. I wanted dreadfully then to get close to some one, as close as possible, and to be kissed and told ‘There! There!’ and to keep there. It was a comfort for me, Bobby. You are a comfort for me. I’d ache to madness without you. But how close we come when we love, Bobby, and how far away we are all the time! How can we know each other when we hardly know ourselves? When we don’t dare know ourselves?

“You are such a dear, Bobby. You are so warm and kind that it seems ungrateful not to give myself to you with both hands. But I just can’t. I’m not a normal woman perhaps. Or something has happened to me unawares. Perhaps life has cheated me out of something.... Oh, I don’t know, Bobby. I want some one dreadfully; I want you dreadfully and I don’t want you at all. I’d rather be dead than a female thing like Margaret Means. If that’s marrying——!”

“But I thought,” said Bobby, “after all that’s happened——”

“No.”

“I’ll wait ten years for you,” said Bobby, “on the chance of your altering your mind.”

“You are the dearest comforter,” said Christina Alberta, and stopped short....

And suddenly she had put her hands upon his shoulders and clung to him and broken into a wild passion of weeping.

“Wetting you instead of wedding you,” she sobbed and laughed. “Oh, my poor Bobby! you dear lover!”

She clung to him for a time. Then she detached herself and stood wiping 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.”

“Why should they keep me?” came from Christina Alberta, sullenly and resolutely.

“I know that this is your faith,” she said. “You told me all about it. You’ve always told me about it.” Bobby’s quick ear detected a change in her voice “Do you remember our first talk together? Do you remember our talk in Lonsdale Mews? When we dined together at that Italian place? That night. Just after we had found each other.”

Found each other?

“But I did not know then that your faith meant all the suppressions and sacrifices and discretions it seems to do. I thought it was something robust and bold. I did not understand its—qualifications. But since then we have argued about these things and argued. That day at Kew Gardens. That day when you took me for that walk over the downs to Shere. We have threshed things out. Why should we argue again? I am giving in—what can I do but give in?—and soon I will be a Sargonite with you and Paul. But not this summer. Not now. This night—This wonderful first night of summer. To-night I rebel against any renunciation, any fobbing-off of individuals with second-best things. I am going to be impossible and absurd. For the last time. I want the world from the stars to the bottom of the sea for myself, for my own hungry self. And all between. The precious things between. The love.... There!”

Vague questions appeared and vanished again on the screen of Bobby’s mind. What had Christina Alberta renounced? What was she renouncing? What was anyone renouncing? And had his ears cheated him, or had Devizes called her, “my dear”? In front of Margaret Means and in face of all the circumstances of the case it seemed to Bobby that Devizes was the last person who ought to call Christina Alberta “my dear.” And what was this about “fobbing-off”? Was this really a shameless plainness of speech, an atrocious confession, or something that he misunderstood?

Miss Lambone stirred uneasily.

It was as if an evil spirit possessed Christina Alberta. “Oh, damn renunciation!” she said with bitter gusto.

They seemed to be sitting for some moments in a profound silence, and then the nightingale became very audible.

§ 6

“I think,” said Miss Lambone in the silence, “that it is getting just a leetle chilly.”

“It is so beautiful here,” said Miss Means, who was warm in Miss Lambone’s shawl. “Perfectly beautiful.

“How you can talk of frustration—!” she added, and left her sentence incomplete.

“I think,” said Miss Lambone, “that I shall go in and light the candles. It is too wonderful a night for the electric lights, far too wonderful. We will just light the candles and the fire. And perhaps you will play us something beautiful. These are such marvellous fire-places here that they blaze up at once. I don’t know if you have noticed them—a new sort. The fire is all on the hearth—no draught below, but the shape of the back draws it up.

“I love a wood fire,” said Miss Lambone, and sighed and rose slowly and voluminously.

§ 7

Two days later Bobby came into one of the little studies on the garden side of Paul Lambone’s house. Paul had found out that Bobby wanted a few days of uninterrupted thought in which to begin his novel, and had asked him to stay on after the other guests had returned to London. It was a perfect room for a writer of Bobby’s temperament; it had a low writing-table close to the sill of the casemented window, and on the sill was a silver bowl of forget-me-nots and white tulips. A little glass-paned door released one into the garden without one’s having to go back through the house. The writing-table had everything a fastidious writer could desire, a pleasant paper-rack and wafers, and real quill pens, and plenty of elbow room. The chair he sat in was an arm-chair, immensely comfortable but not too luxurious; no hint of repose in it but only a completely loyal support for a working occupant. A garden path ran up hill from the window, a garden path skirted by wonderful clusters of pansies. On either side of the pansies were rose bushes, and though not a rosebud was showing, yet the fresh green leaves, tinged with ruddy brown, were very exquisite in the light.

He stood looking up the path for a time and then sat down and drew the writing-pad towards him. He took one of those delightful quills, tested the delicious flexibility of its points, dipped it in the ink and wrote in his very neat and beautiful handwriting:

UPS AND DOWNS A Pedestrian Novel BY ROBERT ROOTHING CHAPTER THE FIRST WHICH INTRODUCES OUR HERO

He wrote this very readily because it was very familiar to him. From first to last he had written it on fair fresh sheets of paper perhaps half a dozen times.

Then he stopped short and sat quite still with his head on one side. Then very neatly he corrected “which introduces” into “in which we introduce.”

It was nearly two years now since he had first begun his novel in this fashion, and he was still quite uncertain about the details of his hero’s introduction. His original intention about the story still floated pleasantly in the sky of his mind; a promise of a happy succession of fine, various and delightful adventures, told easily and good-humouredly; the fortunes of a kindly, unpretending, not too brave but brave enough young man, on his way through the world, to live happily afterwards with a delicious young woman. “Picaresque” was the magic word. None of these adventures had as yet assumed a concrete form in his mind. He felt they would come to him definitely enough one day. If one sat and mused one half saw them, and that was assurance enough for him. And so having rewritten his title page neatly and prettily, he fell into a day-dream and was presently thinking round and about his Christina Alberta as a good hero should.

Bobby was always being puzzled by Christina Alberta, always coming upon something that seemed to clear up everything, and then being puzzled again. But now it seemed to him that he really did know the last fact of importance that was to be known about her. Overnight Paul Lambone had described how he had taken her to Devizes to get advice, and how they had blundered upon the reality of her parentage. He told his story well as a story-writer should; he gave it dramatic point. Evidently he told the tale of set intention, because it was time Bobby knew. Lambone was aware of Christina Alberta’s engagement. He did not know and nobody but Bobby knew that she never intended to be married. But this, it seemed to Bobby, made the understanding of her situation possible; explained that watchful tenderness of Devizes’ face suddenly betrayed by the light of his inadvertent “my dear”; explained her position as though she belonged to him and Paul Lambone instead of being a rather unaccountable visitor; excused her vehement jealousy of Margaret Means, because evidently she had become violently possessive of her father, and had counted perhaps upon recognition and being very much with him. No doubt Margaret Means stood in the way of that. It was natural for Christina Alberta to want to be with Devizes and work with him, and natural for her to suspect and anticipate and resent an intervening personality. Apart from the magic of kinship it was natural that two such subtle and abundant personalities should attract each other greatly. That Devizes should have decided quite abruptly to marry Margaret Means did not present any difficulties to Bobby; he was not thinking very closely about Devizes. Margaret Means was pretty enough for anyone to want to marry her. There are times, as Bobby knew, when that sweet prettiness can stab one like an arrow. It had evidently stabbed and won Devizes. And almost the only thing that gave Bobby a second thought, but no more than a second thought, was Christina Alberta’s fluctuation of purpose, why she should have consented to marry him and then have changed her mind so quickly and definitely and yet have retained him as a lover.