“I hate to think of his being burnt and scattered,” he said.
“It’s not so disagreeable,” said Miss Lambone, “as to think of the body all shut up in the coffin and decaying.”
“Oh, don’t!” cried Bobby. “It’s death—any death, that I hate to think of. Now when it is spring time, when the whole world is so full of life, I remember all he was, the hopes he had, and they are scattered and dispersed. Anyhow they are scattered and dispersed, they are not boxed up and locked up and buried.... When I was here last he was like a little boy who has just heard of the world. He was going to fly, going to India and China, going to learn all about everything and then do all sorts of splendid things. And there were the beastly bacteria at work in his lungs and beating his strength down and none of it was ever to happen.... When first I heard he was dead I could not believe it.”
“Is he dead?” said Paul Lambone.
There was no reply to be made to that.
Paul adjusted his shoulder-blades a little more comfortably against the back of the small deep sofa on which he sat. “The more I think over Sargon the less dead he seems to me, and the more important he becomes. I don’t agree with you, Roothing. I don’t find anything futile in his life. I think he was—symbolically—perfect. I have thought about him endlessly.”
“And talked,” said Devizes, “endlessly.”
“And given you some very helpful ideas for your treatment. Don’t be ungrateful. You think that Sargon is over. He has only just begun. You are becoming too professional with success, Devizes. You begin to take up cases and work them off and drop them out of your mind. You don’t go on with them and learn. You don’t sit about and think about them as I do. I continue to think about Sargon. I go on with him because he is still a living being for me. I have got a new religion from him, the religion of Sargonism. I declare him prophet of a new dispensation. It is my latest new religion. There will always be new religions, and the new religions will always be the only ones that matter. Religion is a living thing, and what is alive must be continually dying and be continually born again—differently but the same.”
“You believe in immortality, Mr. Lambone,” said Miss Means. “I wish that I could. But when I try to imagine it my wits fail me. Sometimes one seems to feel what it might be. On a night like this perhaps——”
Her pretty clear voice died away in the stillness as the trail of a falling star dies away.