“Of course there was nothing for us to do but agree.”
§ 4
“And that was the whole of your communication, Daddy?”
“It was only the beginning. Because after that I began to remember. I began to remember more and more.”
“Remember?”
“Things from my other lives. Memories stored up. This young Mr. Fenton was, so to speak, no more than the first cut in the curtain of forgetfulness that hung between this present life and all my previous existences. Now it was rent and torn open so that I could see things through it at a dozen points. Now I begin to realize what I really was and what I can really be....
“You know, Christina Alberta, I have never actually believed I was myself—not even as a schoolboy. And now it is interesting, I know and understand clearly that I am somebody else. I have always been somebody else.”
“But who do you believe you are, Daddy?”
“So far as I can gather I was first a chief called Porg in a city called Kleb in the very beginning of the world, æons and æons ago, and I tamed my people and taught them many things. Then afterwards I was this Sargon—Sargon the King of Kings. There is very little about him here in the Public Library, in the Encyclopædia Britannica; an upstart who took his name, my name, three thousand years later, an Assyrian fellow is the Sargon they tell about—he got mixed up with the Jews and he besieged Samaria—but I was the original Sargon long before there were Jews or anything of the sort, long before Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And afterwards I was Belshazzar, the last crown prince of the Babylonians, but that is not very clear. That remains obscure. Only one part of the record is lit—as yet. And possibly I have been other people. But the figure that stands out in my memory now is Sargon. It is his memories have been returning to me. It is he who has returned in me.”
“But Daddy, you don’t really believe all this?”