Lambone sat down in a second arm-chair and sipped his tea in a leisurely manner. “It’s a little difficult,” he said.
“You see,” said Christina Alberta, knitting her brows at the fire, “he’s a person of peculiar imaginativeness. He always has been. Always. He’s always lived half in a dream. We’ve been very much together ever since I was born almost, and from the earliest times I remember his talks, rambling talks, about the Lost Atlantis, and about the secrets of the pyramids and Yogis and the Lamas of Tibet. And astrology. All such wonderful, impossible, far-off things. The further off the better. Why!—he almost got me into a dream too. I was a Princess of Far Atlantis lost in the world. I used to play at that, and sometimes my play came very near to believing. I could Princess it for a whole afternoon. Lots of children day-dream like that.”
“I did,” said Lambone. “For days together I would be a great Indian chief, sentenced to death again and again—disguised as a small preparatory schoolboy. The incongruity didn’t matter a rap. Everybody does it more or less for a time.”
“But he’s gone on doing it all his life. And he’s doing it now more than ever. He’s lost the last trace of any sense that it is a dream. And some one played a trick upon him at Tunbridge Wells. Not realizing what it might mean for him. They seem to have muddled about with spiritualism in the evenings while I was in London, table-rapping and so forth, and a man who had nothing better to do pretended to have a trance. He told Daddy he was Sargon the First, Sargon King of Kings he called him, who was Lord of Akkadia and Sumeria—you know—ages ago, before Babylon was born or thought of. The man who did it couldn’t have hit on anything more mischievous so far as Daddy was concerned. You see he was exactly ready for it; leaving Woodford Wells where he had spent half his life in one routine had cut him off, even more than he was usually cut off, from reality. He was uprooted already before this idea came to him. And now it’s just swamping him. It suited him exactly. It—fixed him. Always before one could get him back—by talking about my mother or the laundry vans, or something familiar like that. But now I can’t get him back. I can’t. He’s Sargon, incognito, come back as Lord of the World, and he believes that just as firmly as I believe that I am his daughter Christina Alberta Preemby talking to you now. It’s a reverie no longer. He’s got his evidence and he believes.”
“And what does he want to do about it?”
“All sorts of things. He wants to declare himself Lord of the World. He says things are in a bad way and he wants to save them.”
“They are in a bad way,” said Lambone. “People don’t begin to know half how bad they are. Still—I suppose having a delusion about who one is, isn’t Insanity. Does he want to make some sort of fuss?”
“I’m afraid, yes.”
“Soon?”
“That’s what worries me.