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.
§ 5
“But just what are you going to do?” said Bobby.
“I have been thinking of that.”
For a little while he continued to think.