For had there even been those ancient days? Sumeria was now very far away from him, and the white towns and the blue river and the river galleys had faded and the worshipping crowds were just a faint smear upon his mind no stranger than the fading memory of a dream. He said nothing for a time, and then in a very loud whisper he said: “Help thou my unbelief.”
Sometimes he prayed in a whisper and sometimes he prayed silently and sometimes he sat quite still. Higgs came and looked at him once or twice but did not interfere with him. The poem in the adjacent bed still went on, but it had now become a mere rhyming stream of blasphemous obscenities.
For a time after he had made an end to his praying, Sargon must have slept; he must have slept because he was awakened by the dawn. It did not come gradually; he awoke to it.
A cold, shadowless light filled the ward and the electric lamps that had seemed so bright were just luminous orange-yellow threads. And Higgs was standing in the doorway peering intently at the red-haired man, who was lying with his head on the table as though he were asleep—but perhaps only pretending to be asleep.
§ 7
It was on the afternoon of the following day that two strangers came to see Sargon. He was taken to them and they talked a little with him, and then chiefly with each other. Higgs was off duty but Jordan hovered in the background.
Neither of these gentlemen explained their business with Sargon to him. One of them was a short man in a black coat; he wore a gold watch-chain and a rich-looking tie with a jewelled pin; he had a gold pince-nez, a little pointed nose, a fat, clean-shaven white face, and a mouth like an oblique spade-thrust in a lump of dough. He spoke with something between a sniff and a lisp, and he was evidently rather in a hurry and annoyed at having been called in to see Sargon. The other was large and grey and worn-looking; he impressed Sargon in some indefinable way as being a medical man who had private troubles. He seemed to consider himself in charge of the conversation, and would occasionally refer upon some point of fact to the hovering Jordan.
“Understand,” said the pasty-faced man, “you wanted to give some sort of dinner party to all sorts of people. Eh?—at the Rubicon. I suppose it came on you sort of sudden like. Eh?”
“I wished to confer with certain people,” said Sargon. “It may have been a mistake on my part.”
“No doubt it was a mistake, Mr.—Mr.——”