They made their way to Chelsea without much further conversation. Fay had never before seen Christina Alberta looking tired.
When Fay opened the door Christina Alberta pushed in past her. “Daddy!” she cried in the dark passage. “Daddy!”
Fay clicked on the light. “No,” said Christina Alberta. “Of course he’s not here. He’s gone. Fay! What am I to do?”
Fay’s pale blue eyes became rounder. Christina Alberta, the valiant, the modern, was in tears.
“There’s the hospitals,” said Fay, doing her best to be brisk and cheerful.
BOOK THE SECOND
THE WORLD REJECTS SARGON,
KING OF KINGS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Incognito
§ 1
MR. PREEMBY had disappeared from Christina Alberta’s world. For a time he must disappear almost as completely from this story. Mr. Preemby fades out. Taking over his outward likeness we have now to tell of another and greater person, Sargon the First, the Magnificent One, King of all Kings, the Inheritor of the Earth.
It is no doubt a very wonderful and glorious thing to discover that instead of being the rather obscure widower of a laundry proprietor with no particular purpose in the world one is Lord of the Whole World, but it is also, to a conscientious man anxious to do right, an extremely disturbing and oppressive discovery. And at first it is natural that there should be something a little confusing to the mind in this vast and glittering idea. It was an idea that carried with it an effect of release and enlargement. For purposes as yet obscure, he had been caught like a caged creature in that limited and uninteresting Preemby life. His imagination had rebelled against its finality; some deep instinct had warned him that his life was an illusion; in moments of reverie, and sometimes between sleeping and waking, there had been intimations of a light and purpose beyond the apparent reality. Now abruptly, as though a portal swung open, as though a curtain was drawn, that light poured upon him dazzlingly. His was no single life that begins and ends and is done with like an empty song. His existence was like a thread that shone and vanished and returned in the unending fabric of being; that was woven into a purpose. In the past he had been Porg in the city of Kleb, and he had been Sargon and Belshazzar. Many others had he been, but those memories still slumbered under the dark waters of forgetfulness. But the memory of Sargon shone bright. It was his Sargon self that had returned and no other of his selves. For some reason that was still obscure the Power that ruled his life needed him to be Sargon once again, in this great distressful world of to-day. Sargon had begun life humbly as an outcast babe and had risen to restore and rule and extend a mightier Empire than the old world had ever seen before. Certain qualities (h’rrmp) had been displayed by Sargon, and because of these qualities the Power had called upon him again.