§ 2
The first to be called was a young man of Leytonstone named Godley, a young man with a large and excessively grave grey face and a deliberation of utterance amounting to an impediment. He was carrying a microscope in a wooden box. He was a student of biology with a cytological bias; naturally very polite and temperamentally disposed to be precise and deliberate in all he said and did. He was making his way from Liverpool Street station to the Birkbeck Institute by a circuitous route because he had nearly an hour in hand before his class began. He stood poised on the pavement edge at a street-corner waiting for two vans to pass, when his call came to him.
He found a very earnest, barefaced little man beside him whose blue eyes searched his countenance swiftly, and who then gripped his arm.
“I think,” said Sargon, “that it is you.”
Mr. Godley, who was not without a sense of humour, attempted to reply that it certainly was him, but that impediment of his, partly natural but greatly developed by affectation, arrested him about the word “certainly,” and he was still sawing the air with his profile when Sargon spoke again.
“I have need of your help,” said Sargon. “The great task is beginning.”
Mr. Godley went through the preliminary convulsions of explaining that he had the better part of an hour to spare and that he was willing to give help in any reasonable matter provided it was first explained to him clearly just exactly what the matter was. But he could only give help for a limited time. His engagement with his class at the Birkbeck was imperative. Sargon paid little heed to the significance of the various sounds that Mr. Godley was biting off and swallowing. He led his captive by the arm and explained, with helpful gestures of his free hand, the full significance of this call. “You are, I perceive, a young man of scientific qualifications. They will be needed. I do not know if you recognize me—your memory may still be imperfect—but I recall your face, chief among the wise men of our ancient court. Yes, indeed, chief among our wise men.”
“N-no-no-not as-as-assure that I follow you aw-ow-ow quite,” said the young man. “My my—my aw-ow-ow-work issferr’ll aw-ow-ow-known as yet.”
“I know it,” said Sargon boldly. “I know it. I have been seeking you. Do not be deceived by my plain incognito. Believe me I have tremendous powers behind me. In a little while all men will understand. The age of confusion draws near its end; a new age begins. We are the first two particles, the very first, in a great crystallization——”
“Where aaare we g-g-g-oing agg-aggs-aggs-exactly?” asked the young man.
“Trust me,” said Sargon bravely. “Keep with me.”
The young man struggled with some complex question. But now three fresh individuals came under the magic attraction of the call and the young man’s question fell in unheeded chunks. These new adherents were a little group of men standing at the kerb, about a small, almost inaudible hurdy-gurdy on which was a placard stating: “We want Work not Charity; but there is no Work for Us in this So-called Civilized State.” They were clad in faded khaki, and were all youths of less than five-and-twenty.
“Now look at that!” said Sargon. “Is it not time the new age began?”
He addressed himself to the man on the right of the organ-grinder.
“All this is to be altered here and now,” he said. “I have work for you to do.”
“Oh!” said the ex-soldier in the accent of a fairly well-educated man. “What sort of work?”
“We’re straight,” said the organ-grinder. “We’ll take it. If it’s work we can do. We ain’t fakers. Wot work is it?”
“Shillin’ an hour?” said the third.
“More than that. Much more than that. And very great and responsible work. A harvest! A splendid harvest! You shall be leaders of men. Follow after me.”
“Far?” asked the man who had spoken first.
Sargon made a gesture that effectually concealed his own lack of a definite plan, and led the way.
“Lead on, Macbeth,” said the organ-grinder, and swung his hurdy-gurdy into its carrying position on his back. The two other ex-soldiers exchanged views that it was all right and that anyhow they’d see what was offered them. Mr. Godley, keeping abreast of his leader, began an immense and ultimately futile struggle with a fresh question.
The next disciple was not so much called as fell into the gathering body of Sargonites. He was a tall gentleman of a rich brown colour with frizzy black hair, and a vast disarming smile. He was dressed in an almost luminous grey frock-suit, a pink tie, buttoned shoes with bright yellow uppers, and a hat as distinguished as Sargon’s own. He carried a grey alpaca umbrella. He held out a sheet of paper in a big mahogany hand and emitted in a rich abundant voice the word “Escuse.” The paper had printed on it at the head the words, “Lean and Mackay, 329 Leadenhall Street, E.C.” and below written in ink, “Mr. Kama Mobamba.”
Sargon regarded his interlocutor for a moment and then recognized him. “The Elamite King!” he said.
“Non spik English,” said the black gentleman. “Portugaish.”
“No,” said Sargon with a gesture that explained his intention. “Providence. Follow after me.”
The coloured gentleman fell in trustfully.
“Look here!” protested one of the ex-soldiers. “There ain’t going to be coloured labor on this job?”
“Peace!” said Sargon. “Very soon everything will be shown to you.”
“I don’t think you have any ub-ub-business to mislead ap-ap-people,” said Mr. Godley, who was becoming more and more interested in, and perplexed by, Sargon’s proceedings.
Sargon quickened his pace.
“This—this gentleman s-s-s-simply wa-wa-wanted tu-tu-tu-tu-to go to that address,” said Mr. Godley.
In his eagerness to get the idea home to Sargon he became a little disregardful of his microscope box which inflicted a sudden sharp blow on the knee of a passing gentleman, a business man in a silk hat. The victim cursed aloud with extraordinary vehemence and stood hopping on the pavement with his hand to his knee. Then he succumbed to a passionate impulse to tell Mr. Godley exactly what he thought of his conduct, his upbringing, and his type of human being. He joined the followers of Sargon at a brisk limp, occasionally saying “Hi!” in a breathless voice. A rather intoxicated man in deep mourning had witnessed the incident. He came hurrying, with a certain margin of error, to the side of the angry gentleman in the silk hat.
“’Sgraceful salt,” he said. “’Sgraceful! F’want a witness I’m your man!”
His general intention was to go forward at the side of the gentleman in the silk hat, but there were chemically emancipated factors in his being that drove him sideways. The resultant was a sinuous course that presently involved him with a display of oranges in a barrow at the pavement edge. It was not a serious nor a prolonged contact, but it involved a certain scattering of oranges in the gutter and added a new ingredient, a very angry costermonger’s assistant with a remonstrance and a claim for damages, to the gathering body of Sargon’s followers.
The moral of a proverb depends entirely upon the image chosen, and though a rolling stone gathers no moss, a rolling snowball grows by what it rolls upon. A small hurrying group of people in a London street is a moving body of the snowball type; its physical pull is considerable; it appeals to curiosity and the increasing gregariousness of mankind. Sargon, blue-eyed and exalted, with Mr. Godley intent and eloquent upon his left hand, and Mr. Kama Mobamba, tall, silent, smiling, with a shining confidence upon his ebony face that soon he would be led into the presence of Messrs. Lean and Mackay, formed the spearhead of the procession. Behind came the three out-of-work ex-soldiers, who were now involved in obscure protests and explanations with the gentleman in the silk hat, and a smart but rather incomprehensible young newspaper reporter, who had acquired his native tongue in Oldham, and had just come up to London to push his fortunes, and was anxious for something called a “scoop.” He seemed to think that Sargon might be the “scoop” he sought. Two ambiguous-looking individuals in caps and neck-wraps had also fallen in, possibly for nefarious purposes, a vague-faced young woman of the streets in a weather-worn magenta hat was asking what was “up” and the intoxicated man in mourning was explaining as wittily and obscurely as possible. There was also a fringe of skirmishing juveniles. And an Eton boy. He was very, very young and fresh-faced, a scion of one of the oldest and best families in England and a convinced and fierce Communist. He had been on his way with a bosom friend to the celebrated model engine shop in Holborn when Sargon had swept past him and the inscription on the organ had caught his eye.
He was a boy of swift initiatives and with a highly developed dramatic sense.
“Sorry, old Fellow,” he said to his friend. “But I feel the time has come. Unless I’m very much mistaken that little bunch is the beginning of the Social Revolution, and I must do my duty.”
“Oo I say, Rabbit!” said the friend. “Come and buy that steam-launch first, anyhow.”
“What’s a model steam-launch?” said Rabbit scornfully, and turned to follow Sargon.
He would have liked to have had a swift strong hand-clasp first, but you can’t do that sort of thing with a chap who will always keep both hands in his trouser pockets. He darted off, and his friend followed discreetly in a state between amusement and dismay, and at such a distance as seemed to him to exonerate him from any personal complicity with the social revolution.
“Where are we going?” asked the young Etonian as he came up with the hindmost of the out-of-work ex-soldiers.
“He knows,” said the out-of-work ex-soldier, indicating Sargon.