§ 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.