Chapter THE SECOND: How Bobby Stole a Lunatic (2)

He felt himself now the cleverest fellow that ever stole a lunatic. Not that it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get a lunatic away. If you knew how.... They quivered and jolted along the little minor road and so on to the smooth main highway to Ashford and Folkestone. The accelerator was urged to do its best. “Good-bye, Cummerdown,” sang Bobby. “Cummerdown Hill, good-bye!”

The little old motor bike was going beautifully.

§ 7

They got their breakfast at an inn near a Post Office a mile or so beyond Offham. Bobby left Sargon dozing in the side-car and went to send a telegram to Dymchurch announcing his coming. There was some delay in the Post Office, as the post-mistress had mislaid her spectacles. Bobby returned to find the breakfast nearly ready and to assist Sargon out of his sack and into the little room of the inn. The landlord was a short, stout man, with a grave observant face. He watched this emergence of Sargon and his progress to a chair behind the little white tablecloth, with silent wonder. Then for a time he hid. Then he came back into the little room where the table was set. For some moments he stood regarding Sargon. “Umph!” he said at last and turned about and went slowly into his kitchen where some sort of wife seemed to be cooking things. “’E’s a rummun”; Bobby heard him remark, and so was prepared for discussion.

The ham and eggs and coffee were served and received with eagerness. The landlord stood over them scrutinizing their reception of his provisions. “Hain’t ’ad no breakfast, then?” he said.

“Having it now,” said Bobby, helping himself to mustard.

“Come far?” said the landlord after a thoughtful pause.

“Fairly,” said Bobby with judgment.

“Going far?” the landlord tried.

“So-so,” said Bobby.

The landlord rallied his forces for a great effort. “We get some rummy customers here at times,” he said.

“You must attract them,” said Bobby.

The landlord could make nothing of that. He turned about and said “Umph”--meaningly.

“Umph,” said Bobby, just saturating it with meaning.

The landlord made a cunning attempt as they were departing. “Hope you enjoyed your breakfast,” he said. “I don’t know rightly whether it’s a lady or a gentleman you got with you--still----”

Bobby’s mercurial temperament was far too high just then. “It’s hermaphrodite,” he said in a confidential whisper and left the landlord with that.

But when they had gone a few miles further he told Sargon he had decided to buy him some socks and a jacket and trousers at the next shop they saw. “As it is,” he said, “you are ambiguous. And then we’ll put that hat and jacket and the sacking by the wayside for anyone who wants to use them. And I’ll have to send another telegram. I made a mistake.”

Bobby’s mental state became more febrile as the day wore on. He developed a wonderfully circumstantial lie about a cottage and a fire and how his friend had only escaped with just a few articles of clothing hastily put on. “Everything else,” said Bobby, “practically incinerated.” They were going down to take refuge with a variable relation, a brother, an uncle, a maiden aunt. As the day progressed the circumstances of the fire became richer and more remarkable and the particulars of the escape more definitely thrilling. Bobby told such lies with great sincerity and gravity; they were a form of freedom--from reality.

Sargon himself said very little. For him this adventure was a severer endurance test than Bobby realized at the time. For the most part he was either cramped up and boxed in under the hood and wind-screen and being jolted and jumped along the hard high-road, or he was hastily changing some garment by the roadside, or he was sitting still in the side-car taking refreshment and being lucidly but perplexingly, and usually quite unnecessarily, explained.

§ 8

Mrs. Plumer, of Maresett Cottage, Dymchurch, was an anxious widow woman. She had a kind, serviceable heart, but it was troubled about many things. She saved and eked out almost too much. She let most of her rooms in the summer and some even in the winter, but she hated to think of the things careless lodgers might do to her furniture. She liked everything to be in order and lodgers better looking and better behaved than Mrs. Pringle’s lodgers or Mrs. Mackinder’s lodgers. She had taken a fancy to Bobby because he had fitted in nicely when she had had only one room to spare, and because he had shaved in cold water instead of calling down as every other man lodger did--there was no bell in that room--for hot. Also he talked agreeably when he came in and out and didn’t want more at meals.

She was very pleased when he wrote to take her downstairs living-room and two bedrooms for himself and a friend for a fortnight. There were few people in Dymchurch who got “lets” in November. They might come “any time” after Tuesday.

She told Mrs. Pringle and Mrs. Mackinder that she was expecting two young gentlemen, and left them to suppose that her guests might stay on indefinitely.

On Wednesday she was excited and rather perplexed by a series of telegrams from Bobby. The first said plainly and distinctly: “_Arriving with aunt about four Roothing._” That disappointed her. She would have infinitely preferred two gentlemen.

But within an hour came another wire and this said: “_Error in telegram not aunt uncle sorry Roothing._”

Now what was one to make of _that_?

Presently the child from the Post Office was back again. “_Uncle catching cold fire hot-water bottles whisky._”

The next sensational telegram announced a delay. “_Tyre trouble not so soon later Roothing._”

Then came: “_Sixish almost certain good fire please Roothing._”

“It’s very good of him,” said Mrs. Plumer “to keep me informed like this. But I hope the old gentleman won’t be fussy.”

The fire in the downstairs sitting-room was burning brightly at six, there was a kettle on the hob, there were not only tea-things, but whisky, sugar, glasses, and a lemon on the table and a hot-water bottle in both the beds upstairs when the fugitives arrived. Mrs. Plumer’s first feelings at the sight of Sargon were feelings of disappointment. She had allowed her mind to run away with the idea of a warm, comfortable uncle with at most a whisky-drinking cold, an uncle who would be, if not absolutely golden, at least gilt-edged. She had, if anything, exaggerated her memories of Mr. Roothing’s geniality. So soon as she held open her door at the roar and toot of the motor bicycle, she saw that her anticipations would have to be modified again. Things were rather indistinct in the deepening twilight, but she could see that Bobby wasn’t wearing the full and proper leather costume with gauntlets and goggles complete, that a real young gentleman would have worn on such an occasion and which Mrs. Pringle and Mrs. Mackinder would have respected, and that the shape he was extracting from the side-car was not the shape of a properly-expanded uncle. It looked much more like a large hen taken out of a small basket on market day.

As Sargon came into the light of the living-room, Mrs. Plumer’s disillusionment deepened and decreased. She had rarely seen so strange and weather-beaten an outcast. His blue eyes stared pitifully out of a pale face; his hair, beneath an unsuitable black felt hat, was greatly disordered. He was clad chiefly in an excessive pair of trousers which he clutched nervously to keep up; very full they were with his dressing-gown tails; his too ample white socks fell like gaiters over his old felt slippers and betrayed his distressful ankles. He looked afraid. He stared at her almost as though he anticipated an unfriendly reaction. And Bobby, too, standing beside him, looked rough and travel-worn and eventful, and not at all the self-effacing young gentleman she had remembered.

When Bobby saw the swift play of Mrs. Plumer’s expression he realized that their foothold in this pleasant, restful, firelit apartment was precarious. Happily a reserve lie he had thought of, but not hitherto used, came aptly to his mind.

“Isn’t it a shame!” he said. “They went off with his clothes. Even his socks.”

“They seem to have,” said Mrs. Plumer, “whoever they were.”

“Pure hold-up. This side of Ashford. My big bag too.”

“And where did the gentleman get the clothes he’s wearing?” she asked. Her tone was unpleasantly sceptical.

“They exchanged. I’d gone back along the road to see if I could see anything of the tyre-pump I’d dropped, never thinking anything of the sort was possible on an English high-road. (Come and sit by the fire, uncle.) And when I came back they’d gone and there he was--as you see him. Imagine my astonishment!”

“And you never sent a telegram about it!” said Mrs. Plumer.

“Too near home. I’d have got here first, anyhow. Well, we’ve had adventures enough to-day, anyhow. I’ve never known such a journey. Thank heaven, we’ve had our tea. I think the best place for uncle is bed--until we can arrange some clothes for him. What do you think, Mrs. Plumer?”

“After he’s had a good wash,” said Mrs. Plumer. She was still doubtful, but a sort of kindliness was struggling to the surface. “Weren’t you afraid when they jumped out on you, sir!” She asked Sargon directly. His blue eyes sought Bobby’s for instructions.

“It was a great shock to him,” said Bobby, “a great shock. He’s hardly got over it yet.”

“Hardly got over it yet,” said Sargon in confirmation.

“Took all your clothes off, they did. It’s shameful,” said Mrs. Plumer. “And you with a cold coming on.”

“We’ll get him to bed. Of course, if you’ve got anything for us to eat we might have it first here. Perhaps just a bit of toasted cheese or Welsh Rarebit, or something of that sort, and a good hot grog. Eh, uncle?”

“Don’t want much to eat,” said Sargon. “No.”

“I haven’t forgotten that Welsh Rarebit you made for me, Mrs. Plumer, after I got caught in the rain on the way from Hythe.”

“Well, I daresay I could get you a Welsh Rarebit,” said Mrs. Plumer, softening visibly.

“Famous,” said Bobby. “Make a new man of him. And meanwhile I’ll run the old bike round to the shed. If I may put it in the shed? You’ll be all right here, uncle?”

“It’s safe?”

“Every one’s safe with Mrs. Plumer,” said Bobby, and held the door open for her to precede him out of the room.

“I’ll tell you about him to-morrow morning,” he said to her confidentially in the passage. “He’s a wonderful man.”

“He’s all right?” asked Mrs. Plumer.

“Right as can be.”

“He looks that distraught!”

“He’s a poet,” said Bobby, “besides playing on the violin,” and so satisfied her completely.

But he did not feel that he had brought the wonderful day to a completely successful end until he had got Sargon washed and brushed and tucked up cosily in Mrs. Plumer’s bright little best bedroom. “Now we’re anchored,” he said. He went into his own room and sat down for a time to invent things about his uncle in case Mrs. Plumer was desirous of more explicit information when he went downstairs. He decided to say “He’s eccentric,” in an impressive, elucidatory way. “And very shy.” His uncle, he would explain, was suffering from overwork, due to writing an heroic poem about the Prince of Wales’ journey round the world. He wanted a complete rest. And sea air. The more he stayed in bed and indoors the better. He filled in a few useful details of this story, sat for a little while twiddling the toes of his boots, and then got up and went downstairs. He felt sure he could carry it off all right with Mrs. Plumer. He found her waiting for him. The chief difficulty he encountered was her conviction that the police ought to be told of the highway robbery this side of Ashford at once.

“H’m,” said Bobby and for a moment he was at a loss. Then he decided. “I’ve done that already,” he said.

“But when?”

“I telephoned from an Automobile Association box. To the Ashford police. It will be in their district you know. Not in Romney Marsh. Sharp fellows, the Ashford police. I had to describe the lost clothes and everything. They don’t let much get by them.”

She took it beautifully. After that everything was easy.

§ 9

The next morning found Sargon developing an evil cold in his throat and chest. His chest was painful and he was feverish, red-cheeked, bright-eyed, and short of breath. Bobby did not care to consult a doctor. He believed that all doctors constituted a league for the re-incarceration of escaped lunatics. He imagined secret notices about escapes being circulated throughout the profession. He motored to Hythe and got ammoniated quinine, several sorts of voice jujube, two iodine preparations for the chest, and suchlike trifles that the chemist recommended. When he returned about midday the patient looked better and seemed in less pain. After Bobby had administered quinine and rubbed his chest and made a generally curative fuss, he was able and disposed to talk.

“The pillow all right?” said Bobby.

“Perfect.”

“You ought to doze for a bit now.”

“Yes.”

Sargon thought. “I shall not have to go back to that Place again?”

“I hope not.”

The flushed face became very earnest. “Promise me not. Promise me not. I couldn’t endure it.”

“No need to be anxious,” said Bobby. “Here, you are quite safe.”

“And there will be no need to get into that side-car again?”

“None.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“It bumped--horribly.... Where is Christina Alberta?”

Bobby did not answer for a moment or so.

“Perhaps I ought to explain. I do not know who Christina Alberta is. I took you out of the asylum because I do not believe you are mad. But I know nothing of your family. I know nothing about your circumstances at all. I just couldn’t bear the thought of you in an asylum.”

Sargon lay in silence for a little while with his blue eyes on Bobby’s face. “You were sorry for me?”

“I liked you from the very first moment I saw you in Midgard Street.”

“_Liked_ me? But you believed I was Sargon, King of Kings?”

“Practically,” said Bobby.

“You didn’t. Neither, I suppose, did I.”

The vague blue eyes left Bobby’s face and stared out of the window at the sky. “I have been very much confused in my mind,” said Sargon. “Even now I am not clear. But I realize I am confused. Christina Alberta is my daughter. The Princess Royal I called her. In Sumeria. She is a very dear, bold girl. She is all I have. I left her and came away from her, and I must have distressed her greatly.”

“Then she may not know where you have been?”

“She may be looking for me.”

“Where is she?”

“I have been trying to remember. It was in a studio somewhere--with peculiar pictures. I never liked those pictures. A studio in a Mew. It had a name but I cannot remember its name. It is stupid of me. Probably Christina Alberta is there with her friends--still wondering what has become of me.”

“At the--at the _Place_, they told me your name was Preemby.”

“Albert Edward Preemby.... I wonder.”

He lay reflecting for a time. “I remember that for a long time I thought I was Albert Edward Preemby, a small creature, a little man living a mean life in a laundry. A laundry with large blue vans. The swastika. You cannot imagine what a small, insignificant life it was that this Preemby led. And then suddenly I thought I could not possibly be Preemby and also an immortal soul. Either there was no Preemby, I thought, or there was no God. There could not possibly be both. It perplexed and worried me very much. Because there I was--Preemby. I am not good at thinking--all my thinking goes off into a kind of dreaming. And then when there came evidence that seemed satisfactory--perhaps I jumped at what I was told. But Sargon must have been a great king, a very great king, and I am small and weak and not very intelligent. When the keepers and attendants bullied me and ill-treated me I did not behave as a great king should have behaved, and when I saw them doing evil things to other--other patients, I did not interfere. Yet all the time I think I am something different from the Albert Edward Preemby I used to be, something more and something better. But it leaves me confused to think who I am, and I am very tired. Perhaps, when I have rested a day or two, I may be better able to think about these things.”

The faded voice died away. The blue eyes remained staring tranquilly at the sky.

Bobby said nothing for a little while. Then he remarked, “I have seen men ill-treated.”

And then; “and I am not so slight as you are.”

He said no more. It did not seem as though Sargon had heard him. Bobby stood up.

“You must rest. You are perfectly safe here. If we can remain unnoted here for two weeks then it will be impossible ever to send you back to that place again. Are you comfortable?”

“It is a beautiful bed,” said Sargon.

But beautiful though the bed was it was not sufficient to arrest the trouble in Sargon’s aching chest. He seemed very exhausted that evening. In the night he began coughing; he coughed so distressingly that Bobby went in to him. In the morning he was spiritless and did not want to eat. Bobby sat in the room downstairs working at the pile of Aunt Suzannah correspondence that Billy had sent on to him. He was half-minded to appeal to Tessy to come down and help with the nursing, but there was no bedroom available for her. Mrs. Plumer pressed for a doctor and he put her off. Finally, on her own responsibility, she brought in a young man who was just starting a practice in the place. Bobby had a terrifying interview, but the young doctor betrayed no suspicions. On the whole, he was reassuring. There was congestion of the lungs but nothing worse. Sargon must keep very warm and take this and that. No urgent need for a nurse. Keep him warm and give him his medicine.

Late in the evening Bobby went up to say good night and found Sargon better and more talkative.

“I have been thinking of Christina Alberta and I should like to see her. I would like to see her and tell her things I have been thinking about her. I have been thinking out all sorts of curious things. Perhaps I am not so much to her as she may think. But chiefly I want to talk to her about a young man I dislike. What was he called? When I was last at Lonsdale Mews, she danced with him.”

“Lonsdale Mews!”

“Yes, yes, of course. I had forgotten. Eight Lonsdale Mews, Lonsdale Road, Chelsea. But my mind is very confused and I do not know what I should say to her even if she came.”

Bobby wrote down the address forthwith.

“And this Christina Alberta is all you have?” he asked.

“All I have.

“Twenty. Quite a child really. I ought never to have left her. But there came a sort of wonder upon me--As though the world was opening. It made everything else seem very trivial.”

§ 10

“_There came a sort of wonder upon me as though the world was opening._”

Bobby wrote that down also. And he sat very late before the fire in the ground-floor room thinking that over and thinking over the message he would have to send to Christina Alberta in the morning. To-morrow he would have to explain himself and his extraordinary intervention in Preemby affairs. It was by no means plain to himself as yet, and to-morrow he would have to make plain to a probably very indignant young lady why her father had so caught his sympathies and fascinated his imagination as to tempt him to this escapade. He found himself thrown back on self-analysis. He found himself scrutinizing his own motives and his own scheme of existence.

He knew and understood that feeling, “as though the world was opening” so well. Still better did he know that feeling of dead emptiness in life out of which it arose. In his own case he had thought this habitual discontent with the daily round, this urgency towards something strange and grandiose, was due to the dislocation of all his expectations of life by the great war; that it was a subjective aspect of nervous instability; but in the case of this little laundryman it could not have been the war that had sent him out, a sort of emigrant from himself, to find a fantastic universal kingdom. It must be something more fundamental than the war accident. It must be a normal disposition in men towards detachment from safety and comfort.

He glanced towards the pile of his Aunt Suzannah correspondence on the table and the next sheet of “copy” for _Wilkins’ Weekly_ he had distilled therefrom. He rose from his arm-chair and went back to his work with his wisdom refreshed. He wrote: “So soon as man’s elementary needs are satisfied and he is sure of food, clothing and shelter, he comes under the sway of a greater imperative; he goes out to look for trouble. So that I would not discourage ‘Croydon’s’ desire to become a missionary in West Africa in spite of his religious doubts and his peculiar feeling about black people. Such a region as Sherborough Island will probably supply him with a good sustained, sustaining, and ennobling system of troubles. A white man who has once challenged the hostility of a West African secret society will have little leisure for morbid introspection. He will hardly have a dull moment....”

He stopped writing. “Reads a little ironical,” he said “And not quite Aunt Suzannah enough.”

He reflected. “My mind scampers off from me at times. Not in the vein to-day.”

The one thing they must never feel about Aunt Suzannah was that she could be ironical. No! it wouldn’t do. He ran his pen through the six sentences he had just written and pushed the sheet away from him. He drew another sheet towards him on which he had been composing with great difficulty a telegram to be sent next morning to “Preemby, 8 Lonsdale Mews, Chelsea.” He read over various drafts. The current form ran as follows: “_Your father safe but with severe chest cold care of Roothing Maresett Cottage Dymchurch desires see you discretion very necessary return confinement fatal results best station Hythe and cab could meet you Hythe if wire in time but do not know you personally am tallish slender dark Roothing._”

Properly considered it was all right.

He tried to imagine what sort of girl this Christina Alberta Preemby would be. She would be blue-eyed of course and probably very fair; a little taller and rounder than her father, soft-voiced and rather dreamy. She would be timid and affectionate, very kind and gentle and a little incompetent. Perhaps it would be well to meet her at Hythe so soon as he knew which train she was coming by. The cab business might be a strain on her. He would have to tell her what to do. To a considerable extent now he had made himself responsible for the fortunes of both these people. And he liked to think that. He liked to think that perhaps these might become his own people, more of his own people than the Malmesburys. Because to be frank about it with himself he was a little bit of an interpolation in the Malmesbury household. They liked him; they were perfect dears to him; but they could do without him. Even that little devil Susan managed without him; she liked him and tyrannized over him but he knew he wasn’t indispensable to her. Here at last might be two people who couldn’t do without him, who might to an extraordinary extent become his people.

Of course he would have to put on a little more appearance of strength and determination than was actually his quality. He owed it to them to keep up their confidence in him so that he might be able to direct them in their difficulties.

He would say to her--what would he say to her? “I have been hasty, I know, but I know something of the strain that is put upon the sane patient in an asylum. I thought that the first thing to do was to get your father out of it. It didn’t occur to me that for a time he might have forgotten your address. Perhaps I ought to have come to you before I acted. But then how was I to know there _was_ a you? Until he told me of your existence. In so many cases in these asylums the relatives are hostile to release. It is dreadful to admit it, but it is so.”

Then rather humorously and quite modestly he would describe the escape. He was already forgetting the uncertainties of the visiting-day conversation and the numerous accidental factors in the meeting by the culvert. But all history has this knack of eliminating unnecessary detail.

So he would make his statement. It did not occur to him that Christina Alberta might be the sort of person who interrupts speeches with elucidatory questions.

He lit a cigarette, strolled about the room, and came to rest standing before the fire and looking down on the glowing coals. He was sure now that Christina Alberta was blue-eyed, fragile, shy--with a deep sweet vein of humorous fantasy hidden away in her. Very probably she concealed a gift for writing. It would be for him perhaps to discover that and cultivate it and bring it out. Together they would protect Sargon, already more than half recovered from the intoxication of his dream. They would have to soften the humiliations of his complete awakening. How fortunate and as it were providential it was that he had been impelled to rescue the little man!--for otherwise he would never have met Christina Alberta, never won her timid wealth of love....

“_Eh!_

“But this is all damned nonsense!” said Bobby violently, and threw his cigarette into the fire. “This is just fancy! I haven’t even _seen_ the girl!”

He lit his candle, put out Mrs. Plumer’s oil lamp with all the devices and precautions proper to this dangerous survival from the Dark Ages, and went up to bed. He stopped and listened outside Sargon’s door. The patient was asleep and breathing rather noisily--ever and again choking with a little cough.

“I wish the weather had kept warmer,” said Bobby.

When he opened his own bedroom door, the flame of his candle writhed and flared horizontally, the curtains streamed into the room and a sheet of paper flapped on the dressing-table. He put down the candle and went to shut the window. The wind was rising and there was a little patter of raindrops on the pane.