§ 7
“I’ve let the second-floor front to a lunatic,” said Bobby, breaking the news to his ground-floor friends, Mr. and Mrs. Malmesbury.
“Oh, Bobby! and with Susan about!” cried Mrs. Malmesbury reproachfully.
“But he’s a quite harmless lunatic, Tessy—and he had to be taken in somewhere.”
“But a lunatic!” said Mrs. Malmesbury.
“I only said that for effect,” said Bobby. “He’s really morbidly sane. I wouldn’t have let him go for anything. Some day when I really get to work on that novel I’ll put him in. I must have material, Tessy. And he’s wonderful.”
He was preparing supper for the Malmesburys and himself. He was frying some sausages and potatoes over a gas-ring. Previously Bobby had done most of the putting of Susan to bed, and he had sat and told her stories according to custom until she was fast asleep. Tessy Malmesbury was out of sorts; she had a neuralgic headache, Billy Malmesbury had taken her for a walk in Regent’s Park and she had come home exhausted; things would have gone to pieces badly if Bobby had not taken them in hand.
Tessy was never very well nowadays; she was a slight and fragile little thing and Susan had been a violent and aggressive child long before she was born. In the long-lost days before the war when Bobby had seen Tessy first she had been the lightest, daintiest, most perfect thing imaginable; he had compared her to a white petal drifting down through sunlight, and almost written a poem about her; he had loved her tremendously. But it had seemed to him impossible to make love to so exquisite a being, and Billy Malmesbury, who was less scrupulous, had slipped in front of him and married her; she had not appreciated the delicacy of not making love to her. And then came the war and wounds and here they all were again, fagged and near the thirties, in a world where their small annuities brought them far less than they had promised to do. Billy was the junior partner of an architect and much encumbered with drawing-boards. He was a large-framed young man with a big, round, good-looking, slightly astonished face, pleasantly dappled with freckles. He had a great protective affection for Bobby. He sat now and designed a new sort of labour-saving pantry and, with a sense of infinite protection, let Bobby get the meal.
“And now I can tell you,” said Bobby, when at last all three of them were sitting at table.
“It’s a little dear of a lunatic,” he said. “If it’s a lunatic at all.”
“I hope it isn’t,” said Tessy.
“He’s quite tidy in his person and he hangs together—mentally he hangs together—and his eyes aren’t in the least wild. A leetle too bright and open perhaps. But he does think the world belongs to him.”
“Well, Susan does that,” said Billy.
“And so does Billy,” said Tessy.
“But not quite with the same air of magnificent responsibility. You see he thinks he’s a certain Mesopotamian monarch called Sargon—I’ve heard of him because we had a little dust-up with the Turks round and about his stamping ground—he thinks he’s this Sargon come again and come somehow—that bit’s a little difficult—into the empire of the whole earth. It was Sargon, you know, who started all these British Lions and Imperial Eagles in the world. And so he proposes to take possession of the planet, which is in such a frightful mess——”
“Hear, hear!” said Billy.
“And put it in order.”
“What more simple?” cried Tessy.
“Exactly. Why haven’t we all thought of that?” said Billy.
“But where does he come from?” asked Tessy.
“Not a sign. He might be a suburban nurseryman or a small draper or something of that sort. I can’t place him. One or two phrases he used suggested a house-agent. But he may have picked them up from advertisements. And his first proceeding—perfectly rational—was to buy a map of the world. Naturally if you are going to rule the world, you ought to have a map of it handy.”
“Has he any money?”
“Enough to pay his way. He’s got a small note-case. That seems to be all right. After we’d got a bag for him—he hadn’t any luggage, and I thought he’d better buy a bag to satisfy Mrs. Richman—we sat down upstairs and had a simple straightforward talk about the world and what had to be done with it. Most instructive.”
Bobby helped himself to some more fried potatoes.
“And what is going to be done with it?”
“Let me see,” said Bobby; “it’s quite an attractive little programme. Rather I think on the lines of the Labour programme. Only simpler and more thorough. The Distinction of Rich and Poor is to be Abolished Altogether. Women are to be Freed from all Disadvantages. There is to be No More War. He gets at the roots of things every time.”
“If those are the roots,” said Billy.
“But isn’t the real question how to do it?” asked Tessy, “Aren’t we all agreed about those things—in theory?”
“In theory, yes,” said Bobby. “But not in reality. If every one really wanted to abolish the difference of rich and poor it would be as easy as pie to find a way. There’s always a way to everything if you want to do it enough. But nobody really wants to do these things. Not as we want meals. All sorts of other things people want, but wanting to have no rich and poor any more isn’t real wanting; it is just a matter of pious sentiment. And so it is about war. We don’t want to be poor and we don’t want to be hurt or worried by war, but that’s not wanting to end those things. He wants to end them.”
“But how’s he going to set about it?” said Billy.
“That is still a little vague. I think there is to be a sort of Proclamation. He’s thinking that out upstairs now. He seems to think that he has to call up some sort of disciples. Then I think he will go down to Westminster and take the Speaker’s place on the Woolsack or something of that sort. It is the Speaker sits on the Woolsack, isn’t it? Or is it the Lord Chancellor? Anyhow, there are to be demonstrations—on a large and dignified scale. The people have forgotten the ancient simple laws, he says. He himself had forgotten them. But he has remembered them now; they have come back to him, and presently every one will remember them, all the great old things, justice, faith, obedience, mutual service. As it was in Ancient Sumeria. Dreamland Ancient Sumeria, you know. The dear old Golden Age. He has come to remind people of the true things in life—which every one has forgotten. And when he has reminded them every one will remember. And be good. And there you are, Tessy! I hope it will affect Susan—but I don’t feel at all sure. I have a sort of feeling that Susan could stash up any golden age they started in about five minutes, but then perhaps I’m a bit prejudiced about her.”
“It’s rather wonderful all the same,” said Billy.
“He is rather wonderful. He sits up there and looks at you with his little round innocent face and tells you all these things. And, assuming he’s Lord of the World, they’re perfectly right and proper. He sits with the map of the world unrolled on the table. I ventured to suggest that he would require a lot of subordinate rulers and directors. ‘They will come,’ he said. ‘No office, no duty shall be done henceforth except by the Proper People. That has been neglected too long. Let every man do that he is best fitted to do. Then everything will be well.’”
“And when’s all this to begin?” asked Billy.
“Any time. I don’t think—” Bobby’s expression became profoundly judicial. “I don’t think he’ll do anything for a day or so. I pointed out to him that he ought to consider his demonstrations very carefully before he makes them, and he seemed inclined to agree. Some mistake, he says, has occurred already—I couldn’t find out what. Apparently to-morrow he is just going to look at London, quietly but firmly, from the Monument and from the Dome of Saint Paul’s. And also he wants to observe the manners of his subjects in the streets and railway stations, and wherever there is a concourse of people. The scales have fallen from his eyes, he explains, and now that he knows that he is Lord of the World he realizes how distressed and unsatisfactory everybody’s life is—even when they don’t know it’s unsatisfactory. His own life was terribly unsatisfactory he says, unreal and frustrated, until he awoke and realized the greatness of his destiny.”
“And what was that life of his?” asked Tessy.
“I tried to get that. And he caught the eager note in my voice I suppose, and shut up like an oyster. The draper’s shop perhaps. Or a milk-round. I wonder.”
“But, Bobby,” cried Billy in the expostulatory tone of one who remonstrates with wild unreason; “he must come from somewhere!”
“Exactly,” said Bobby. “And somewhere must be looking for him. But you can’t always hurry these things. And meanwhile I take it it’s our bounden duty to keep an eye on him and see that he doesn’t bump himself too hard or fall into the wrong hands.... Until some one comes along.... Don’t you get up, Tessy, you’re tired.”
And Bobby jumped to his feet and proceeded to change the plates and dishes while Billy fell into a profound meditation upon the problem of the new neighbour upstairs.
Presently he smiled and shook his head in kindly disapproval.
“This will suit Bobby all right,” he said to Tessy. “Whenever he ought to be upstairs in his own room getting on with that novel of his he will be up on the second floor talking to—what is it?—Sargon.”
“Accumulating material,” corrected Bobby from the Welsh dresser where he was turning a tin of peaches out into a glass dish. “Accumulating evidence.... Not even a spider could spin a yarn out of an empty stomach. Tessy, have you just simply lost the cream or have you put it away in a new place very carefully for me to guess? Oh, right-o! I’ve got it.”