He had come down for the week-end chiefly to deal with Sargon. He went up and had long talks to Sargon. He was “treating” Sargon. He didn’t go up and talk to Sargon as man to man, as Bobby would have done. He went up to a sort of mental jiu-jitsu with Sargon to exercise him and push him about into new attitudes. Devizes was formidable enough in himself, but far more formidable as a portent. He had all the appearance of being a precursor, the most vigorous precursor—they were all precursors!—of a new type of human relationships, relationships without delicate reservations, without rich accumulations of feeling behind emotions avoided and things unsaid. So it seemed to Bobby, who didn’t for a moment suspect how much these people were avoiding and suppressing. Christina Alberta’s thoughts and speech seemed to him to be moving about without a stitch on, like the people in some horrible Utopia by Wells. He compared the vast impalpable network of “understanding” he and Tessy had woven between each other.
“New people,” he whispered, and looked Paul Lambone’s new house in the face. To him they were stupendously new, an immense discovery. The war had overstrained him, he realized, and left him too tired for a time to see new things. He had been one of the vast multitude of those who had come out of the war in the expectation of a trite and obvious old-fashioned millennium, and who expressed their disappointment by declaring that nothing had happened except devastation and impoverishment. They were too jaded at first to observe anything else. But indeed Bobby now realized the European world had been travelling faster and faster since the break-up of the armed peace in 1914; and here were new types, new habits of thought, new ideas, new reactions, new morals, new ways of living. He discovered himself in the advent of a new age, a new age that was coming so fast that there hadn’t been time ever to clear the forms and institutions of the old age away. They weren’t reversed or abolished, they weren’t overthrown, they were just disregarded. Which was just why it was possible to get along for a year or so without noting the tremendous changes everything was undergoing.
“New People.” Did that apply to Sargon? That was Sargon’s room: the two long windows between the buttresses. Was Sargon also an escape from the established order of relationships into novel things? What was the real significance of the absurd little man with his preposterous map of the world and his still more preposterous planisphere, who wanted to be Lord of the Earth?
§ 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.”