“Painted over. I don’t want them. But that is not what I want to say. What I want to say is that you are wrong about my Daddy, you are quite wrong about him. That I do know. Mr. Lambone has dressed him up to suit his own philosophy. He had that philosophy long before he knew him. And you talked my Daddy over and put Mr. Lambone’s ideas into him when he was beaten and broken because they suited his case. They weren’t there before. I know him and exactly how he thought. I was brought up on him. He talked to me more than to anyone. And it is all nonsense to talk of him—his exaltation, as being like the great soul coming like the tidal sea into the pool of the little soul. It didn’t. When he said he was Lord of the World he wanted to be Lord of the World. He didn’t want to incorporate any other people at all—or be incorporated. He was just as exclusively himself when he was Sargon as when he was Albert Edward Preemby. More so.... And I believe that is how it is with all of us.”
She went on rather hurriedly, for she knew there were forces there very ready to silence her.
“I want to be myself and nothing else. I want the world—for myself. I want to be a goddess in the world. It does not matter that I am an ugly girl with natural bad manners. It does not matter that it is impossible. That is what I want. That is what I am made to want. One may get moments anyhow. A moment of glory is better than none.... I believe that sort of thing is what you all want really. You just persuade yourselves you don’t. And you call that religion. I don’t believe anyone has ever believed religion from the beginning. Buddhism, Christianity, this fantastic Sargonism, this burlesque religion you invent to make an evening’s talk, they are all consolations and patchings-up—bandages and wooden legs. People have tried to believe in such religions no doubt. Broken people. But because we cannot satisfy the desires of our hearts—why should we cry ‘Sour grapes’ at them?
“I don’t want to serve—anything or anybody. I may be heading for frustration, the universe may be a system of frustration, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this is how I feel about it. I may be defeated; it may be certain that I shall be defeated—but as for bringing a contrite heart out of the mess and starting again as a good little part of something—I don’t fink. Oh, I know I beat my hands against a wall. It’s not my fault. Why don’t we take? Oh, why don’t we dare?”
Miss Lambone stirred and rustled.
The darkness that was Devizes spoke to Christina Alberta, and Miss Lambone became still.
“We don’t take and we don’t dare,” he said, “we don’t defy laws and customs because there are other things in our lives, in us and not outside us, that are more important to us. That is why. It pleases Paul to dress up his view of these things in old mystical phrasing, but what he says is really an unscientific way of putting psychological fact. You think you are simple, but you are really complex. You are the individual but you are the race also. That is your nature and mine and everyone’s. The more our intelligence awakens the more we know that.”
“But it is the difference that is distinctively me, and not the general part. The race in me is no more to me than the ground I walk on. I am Christina Alberta; I am not Woman or Mankind. As Christina Alberta, I want and I want and I want. And when the door is slammed upon my imaginations I cry out against it. Why pretend I give up a thing because I can’t have it? Why make a glory of renunciation and letting-go? I hate the idea of self-sacrifice. What is the good of coming into the world as Christina Alberta just in order to sacrifice being Christina Alberta? What is the good of being different if one is not to live a different life?”
Unexpectedly Miss Lambone intervened, “The life of a woman is one long sacrifice,” she said.
There was a pause.