§ 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.