CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER

MR. WELLS has also written the following novels:

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE.
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM.
KIPPS.
TONO-BUNGAY.
ANN VERONICA.
MR. POLLY.
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI.
MARRIAGE.
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS.
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN.
BEALBY.
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT.
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH.
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP.
JOAN AND PETER.
THE UNDYING FIRE.
THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART.

The following Fantastic and Imaginative Romances:

THE TIME MACHINE.
THE WONDERFUL VISIT.
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU.
THE INVISIBLE MAN.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
THE SLEEPER AWAKES.
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.
THE SEA LADY.
THE FOOD OF THE GODS.
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET.
THE WAR IN THE AIR.
THE WORLD SET FREE.
MEN LIKE GODS.
THE DREAM.

Numerous Short Stories collected under the following Titles:

THE STOLEN BACILLUS.
THE PLATTNER STORY.
TALES OF SPACE AND TIME.
TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM.

The same Short Stories will also be found in three volumes:

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED.
TALES OF WONDER.
TALES OF LIFE AND ADVENTURE.

A Series of Books on Social, Religious, and Political Questions:

ANTICIPATIONS (1900).
A MODERN UTOPIA.
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA.
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD.
FIRST AND LAST THINGS.
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING.
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY.
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS.
THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION.
WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PEACE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER.
A YEAR OF PROPHESYING.

And Two Little Books about Children’s Play, called:

FLOOR GAMES AND LITTLE WARS.

A uniform Atlantic Edition of Mr. Wells’ works is in course of publication.

CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S
FATHER

BY
H. G. WELLS

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1925
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1925,
By H. G. WELLS.

Set up and electrotyped.
Published September, 1925.
Reprinted September 22, 1925.
Reprinted November, 1925.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE CORNWALL PRESS

CONTENTS

CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER

BOOK THE FIRST
THE COMING OF SARGON, KING
OF KINGS

CHAPTER THE FIRST
The Early Life of Mr. Preemby

§ 1

THIS is the story of a certain Mr. Preemby, a retired laundryman and widower, who abandoned his active interest in the Limpid Stream Laundry, in the parish of Saint Simon Unawares, near Woodford Wells, upon the death of his wife in the year of grace 1920. Some very remarkable experiences came to him. The story is essentially a contemporary story: it is a story of London in the age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, broadcasting, and the first Labour peers. The historical element in it is insignificant and partly erroneous, and the future, though implicitly present, is substantially ignored.

Since washing in London, like the milk trade and baking and the linen drapery and various other branches of commerce, is something rather specialized and hereditary and a little difficult towards outsiders, it is necessary to explain that Mr. Preemby was not a laundryman born. He had little of the spirit and go of a true London laundryman. He married into laundrying. He met a Miss Hossett at Sheringham in 1899, an heiress and a young lady of great decision of character; he wooed and won her and married her, as you will be told, almost without realizing what he was doing. The Hossetts are big people in the laundry world, and the Limpid Stream concern, which presently fell into the capable hands of Mrs. Preemby, was only one of a series of related and sympathetic businesses in the north, north-east and south-west districts of London.

Mr. Preemby, as Miss Hossett’s family came to recognize quite frankly and explicitly at a very early stage, derived from a less practical strain than his wife. His father had been an artist of considerable charm and unpunctuality, a photographic artist, who resided at Sheringham and made what were called in the eighteen-eighties, “gem” photographs of the summer visitors to that place. In the eighteen-eighties he was a well-known Sheringham figure, dark and handsome and sometimes a little unkempt, wearing a brown velvet jacket and a large grey soft felt hat. He would fall into conversation with the visitors upon the beach, and a certain air of distinction about him would bring a sufficient proportion to his studio to maintain him. His wife, our Mr. Preemby’s mother, was a patient, underdeveloped personality, the daughter of a farmer near Diss. When presently Mr. Preemby senior passed out of his son’s life—he became romantically entangled with a small variety entertainment in the summer of 1887 and vanished away with it in the autumn with as little fuss as possible, never to return to Sheringham—Mrs. Preemby senior became the working partner in a small lodging-house and died in a year or so’s time, leaving her furniture, her interest in the lodging-house and her only son to her cousin and partner, Mrs. Witcherly.

Young Albert Edward Preemby was then a good-looking, slender youth of sixteen, with his father’s curliness and his mother’s fair hair and eyes of horizon blue, dreamy and indisposed for regular employment. Even as a child he had been given to reverie; at school he would sit with sums or book neglected before him, looking beyond them at unknown things; his early experiences in business were disappointing by reason of this abstraction. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to exploit his gifts at some favourable point in the complex machinery of our civilization, he came to rest for several years in the office of a house-agent and coal-merchant in Norwich to whom his mother was distantly related.

Some ancient, remembered, sentimental tie helped Albert Edward to this appointment and shielded any imperfections in his performance from too urgent a criticism. He did much better at it than anyone could have expected. The calling of a house-agent differs from most other callings in the fact that the necessary driving energy is supplied entirely by the clientele, and there was something about the letting of the larger houses that touched the dormant imagination of young Preemby. He revealed a natural gift for attractive description and was duly entrusted with the work of collecting particulars from prospective lessors. He had a quite useful hopefulness. And even the coal proved unexpectedly interesting so soon as he found that none of it had to be carried about by him. He could never believe that all the golden scales one finds in it were pyrites. He cherished a secret dream of a great commercial enterprise to work cinder heaps for residual gold. He told no one of this project, he took no steps to realize it, but it warmed his daily routines with its promise of release and wealth. And when things were slack in the office in the early afternoon and he was left in charge, he would go and sit on the coal counter and pick out the coal samples for the little trays and turn them over and over and view them from various angles and weigh them in his hand and lapse into the most splendid visions.

And if inquirers after houses came in, he would receive them with a manner almost regal.

In Norwich he became a member of the Y.M.C.A., but he was interested in its literary rather than its religious side, and he attended any political debates available. He never spoke in these debates, but he sat at the back reflecting that politicians are, after all, no more than puppets in the hands of the silent rich men who sit behind the scenes. It was in Norwich, too, that he was able to buy his first tailor-made suit, of a most becoming grey. When he went to stay with Mrs. Witcherly at Sheringham for his summer holiday of a fortnight, she was delighted by the improvement in his appearance and much impressed by the active hopefulness that had replaced his former lethargy. Upon the sea front in the afternoon in his grey suit, to anyone who did not know about him, he might have been almost any sort of prosperous summer visitor.

It seems a yesterday, and yet it seems ages ago, that our plump and short Mr. Preemby was that small blonde young man twirling his stick and glancing furtively but desirously at the lady bathers in their vast petticoated bathing-dresses and oilskin caps, as he strolled along the Sheringham front. That was in the days when motor cars were still rather a joke, a smell, and a noise and wayside repairs, and flying was understood to be impossible. Queen Victoria had had her Diamond Jubilee and nobody thought Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, would ever survive to be King. The War in South Africa was being arranged for that summer, to last six months and employ forty thousand men. And it was on the third day of his grey suit holiday at Sheringham that Mr. Preemby was run into by his future wife, Miss Hossett, riding on a bicycle, and thrown against and almost run over by her friend Miss Meeta Pinkey.

Because, incredible as it may seem to the modern reader, people did succeed in those distant nineties, before the coming of the more suitable automobile, in knocking down and running over other people with the sluggish apparatus, bicycles, horse-drawn vehicles and so forth, then available.

§ 2

Miss Meeta Pinkey was an emotional blonde girl, and she fell off her machine gracefully and naturally into Mr. Preemby’s arms as he was hurled against her. It would seem to have been the original intention of Destiny to have made this the beginning of a permanent relationship, but in this matter Destiny had reckoned without Miss Hossett. Miss Meeta Pinkey was as ripe for love just then as dry gunpowder is for a bang, and she was already deeply in love with Mr. Preemby before she had been replaced securely on her feet. She stood flushed and round-eyed and breathless, and Mr. Preemby looked quite manly and handsome after picking up her bicycle with an air of rescue.

Miss Hossett, after butting against Mr. Preemby, had swerved, dismounted and stood now prepared for a dispute. The collision had further loosened the already loose handlebar of the entirely untrustworthy hired machine she had been riding. It was this looseness had caused the accident. Her attention seemed divided equally between this and the possible grievance of Mr. Preemby. “I rang my bell,” she said.

She was flushed and erect. She was a round-faced girl with a long, thin neck, a good bright complexion, glasses on her thin nose and a resolute thin-lipped mouth.

“I did all I could to avoid you,” she said.

“Awkward of me,” said Mr. Preemby disarmingly. “I was lost in a day-dream.”

“You aren’t hurt—?” asked Meeta.

“Startled,” said Mr. Preemby, “especially where the wheel got me. This place is full of corners.”

“I’d’ve been over,” said Meeta, “if you hadn’t caught me.”

Miss Hossett was reassured about any possible conflict with Mr. Preemby. Evidently he was going to be quite nice about the accident. “This handlebar was as loose as could be,” she said. “Look at it! You can twist it about like on a swivel. They ought to be punished for letting out such machines. Some of these days one of ’em’ll get let in for Damages. Then they’ll be a bit more careful. Scandalous I call it.”

“You can’t ride it at all now,” said Mr. Preemby.

“No,” she agreed. “Have to take it back to them.”

It seemed only right and proper for Mr. Preemby to wheel the machine for her back through the town to the hiring place, where Miss Hossett reproved the hirer, refused to pay anything, and secured the return of her deposit in a few well-chosen words. Miss Pinkey paid the hire of her bicycle for a First Hour. It seemed natural after that for the little party of three to keep together. They kept together with a faint sense of adventure, and Mr. Preemby behaved as nothing less than a normal lodger at Miss Witcherly’s establishment and summer visitor to the seaside. His new-found friends were Londoners, and he referred himself to Norwich and the management of house property. He was quite amusing about Sheringham. He said it was “a dear little backward-forward place,” that it was a real treat to come to for a breath of sea air.

“I don’t like regular smart places,” said Mr. Preemby. “I’m too absent-minded.”

§ 3

In after years Mr. Preemby would often try to recall the various stages that led to his marrying Miss Hossett, but there was always a vague sense that he missed out something, though he knew not what it was nor where it ought to have come in.

At first things did not look in the least like his marrying Miss Hossett. Indeed they did not look like his marrying anyone, and if the word marriage had been whispered in his ears as the possible consequence of this encounter he would have been terrified. He perceived that he was acceptable company to these girls, but it seemed to him that it was Meeta who formed the link between them and himself. A fourth person presently joined their company who answered to the name of Wilfred, and it seemed to Mr. Preemby that the air of mutual proprietorship between Wilfred and Miss Hossett was unchallengeable.

The young people wandered in a little party along the sea front until the sea front came to an end, and there they found a sheltered and comparatively secluded niche in the brow of the low cliffs and gave themselves up to the delights of Spooning; and it was Meeta who Spooned with Mr. Preemby that afternoon and Wilfred who Spooned with Miss Hossett. Across the gulf of a quarter of a century the memory of Mr. Preemby was still certain that this was so.

The fashions of life change from age to age. Knowledge has spread and refinement increased; and a generation of young people, more restrained, more sophisticated, or more decisive than their predecessors has taken possession of the world. This Spooning was an artless, clumsy dalliance in great favour in those vanished days, a dalliance that was kept within the bounds of strict decorum—if ever that became necessary—by cries of “Starp it” or “Starpit, I tell you,” on the part of the lady. They embraced, they kissed, and put their silly young heads together and so whiled away the long waiting-time before love had its way with them. The summer resorts of England were littered with young people indulging in these poor, silly, undignified anticipations of love. Mr. Preemby, it became manifest, was a natural born Spooner.

“It’s lovely,” said Miss Meeta, “the way you squeeze me.”

Mr. Preemby squeezed some more and ventured to kiss a hot ear.

“Go On with you!” said Miss Meeta, in a voice thick with delight. “That little moustache of yours—it tickles.”

Flushed with encouragement and preoccupied with ideas for further enterprises, Mr. Preemby did not remark that the affairs of Miss Hossett and her Wilfred followed a more troubled and less satisfactory course. Wilfred was not a type that appealed to Mr. Preemby. In spite of the fact that he was much less neat in his dress than Mr. Preemby—he had grey flannel trousers, an old fancy vest, a tweed Norfolk jacket, and low brown shoes with light-coloured socks—he impressed Mr. Preemby as being consciously a social superior. He was young—the youngest of the party—and yet dominant. He had large red hands and big feet, much untidy hair, ill-regulated features that might later be handsome, and a hoarse guffaw. He viewed Mr. Preemby as though he knew all about him and thought the worse of him for it, but did not intend to make any positive trouble for the present about his existence. He was, Meeta whispered, a medical student at Cambridge, and his father was a Harley Street physician who had been knighted. He did not Spoon with any abandonment; he seemed weary of Spooning, he had perhaps been Spooning for some days, and his conversation with Miss Hossett went on in subdued contentious tones. He sat a little apart from her amidst the sand and coarse bluish grass, and her face was flushed. What they said was inaudible to our intertwined couple.

“Chris and Wilfred don’t get on together as we do,” Meeta said in a low voice. “They’re sillies.”

“He’s like all the men,” said Meeta, “’Sept one perhaps. Want everything they do and give nothing.

“He won’t even say they’re engaged,” she said. “Dodged seeing her father.”

There was a pause for reflection and then a renewal of endearments.

“I’m gorne on you,” said Meeta. “I am fair gorne on you. You’ve got the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. China blue they are.”

§ 4

So detachedly it was that Mr. Preemby and his future wife passed their first afternoon together. He remembered it, as he remembered most actual things, indistinctly, in a setting of hot sand and sunshine, blue-grey grass and a line of poppies nodding against an intense blue sky. And then across these opening memories Chris Hossett seemed to leap at him with flushed cheeks and glowing eyes, magnified by her glasses.

Two or three days intervened before that passionate pounce. Mr. Preemby, in his character of an incidental visitor to Sheringham, was under no obligation to produce a social background, but Miss Pinkey introduced him to two large, kindly aunts of a sedentary sort, as a young man related to Miss Hossett who had saved her from a nasty fall off a bicycle, and he and she both went to tea with Chris Hossett’s “people.” Old Mr. Hossett was a very ailing man, excessively fat and irritable; he had never been the same, whatever the same was, after his only son had died; and Mrs. Hossett, an energetic lean threat of what her daughter might become, had to wait on Mr. Hossett hand and foot. She had spectacles instead of Chris’s glasses, her eyes were careworn and her complexion was leaden and her neck lean. There were also a married cousin and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Widgery, who seemed to be under the impression that Mr. Preemby was a relation of Miss Pinkey’s. Mr. Widgery had a long pock-marked face and the dullest brown eyes Mr. Preemby had ever seen. There was nothing difficult to eat at tea and Mr. Preemby got on very well listening to an explanation of the precariousness of Mr. Hossett’s existence, due to heart trouble, from Mrs. Hossett and of just how unsatisfactory and distressing it was to come away and leave the laundry in the hands of a manager. Wilfred did not come to the tea. He had been asked but he did not come.

The next day Mr. Preemby met Wilfred on the sea front watching the girls bathing from a bathing machine. Afterwards all four went for a walk in search of privacy, and it became evident that Miss Hossett declined to Spoon further with Wilfred. It was evident that there was profound trouble between Chris and Wilfred. They scarcely spoke as they returned towards the town; and before the sea front was reached Wilfred said “So long” quite suddenly, and turned away and vanished up a road running inland. Thereupon Wilfred passed out of Mr. Preemby’s world; Mr. Preemby never knew what became of him and never wanted to know; and the next day he became aware for the first time of Miss Hossett’s magnified eyes, regarding him with an interest and a challenge that made him feel almost uncomfortable.

Miss Hossett became a serious obstacle to the Spooning of Meeta. The quartette was now reduced to a trio; and Mr. Preemby found himself the apex, so to speak, of a triangle, the eternal triangle in an exceptionally acute form. Whenever Meeta was on the one hand, Chris was on the other. She called him “Our Teddy”; she pressed upon him; she went so far as to stroke his hair. Meeta’s endearments faded to some extent in the presence of this competition, but she made no explicit objection.

Deep in the nature of the human male is a fount of polygamous pride. Mr. Preemby in these novel circumstances was proud and disingenuous. He believed himself “carrying on” with two girls at once, and it seemed to him to be a very splendid situation. But indeed it was not so much a case of carrying on as of being carried off. In the American world of emotional imaginations there is an ideal called the Cave Man, much cherished by quiet, unaggressive women because its realization would involve so little trouble on their own part. The Cave Man is supposed to seize and grip and carry off and adore. In this simple love story of Mr. Preemby’s Miss Hossett played the Cave Man’s rôle, up to the carrying-off point at any rate. On the first occasion of their being alone together she drew him to her and kissed him on the mouth with a warmth and an intensity and thoroughness that astonished and overwhelmed Mr. Preemby. It was quite different from Meeta’s coy achievements, or anything he had ever met around Norwich. He had not known that there was such kissing.

And in the warm summer twilight Mr. Preemby found himself being carried off to a lonely piece of beach to Spoon with Chris Hossett. The light of a rising full moon mingled with the afterglow; pebbles shone out like gems and stars. He carried himself bravely but he was all atremble. He knew that this time the enterprises would not come from him. And the Spooning of Chris Hossett was no more like the Spooning of Meeta than a furnace glow is like the light of the moon.

“I love you,” said Chris as though that justified anything, and as they stumbled homeward at an hour that Mr. Preemby called “feefully late,” she said: “You’re going to marry me aren’t you? You’ve got to marry me now. And then we can really make love. ’Soften as we like.”

“I can’t rightly say that I’m exactly in a position to keep a wife just at present,” said Mr. Preemby.

“I don’t see that there’s any necessity for me to ask a man to keep me,” said Miss Hossett. “You’re a wonder, Teddy, anyhow, and I’m going to marry you. It’s got to be, and there you are.”

“But ’ow can I marry you?” asked Mr. Preemby almost peevishly—for he was really very tired.

“One would think to hear you that no one had ever married before,” said Chris Hossett. “And besides—after this—you must.”

“Mind you I’ve got to go back to Norwich next Tuesday,” said Mr. Preemby.

“You ought to have thought of that before,” she said.

“But I’ll lose my situation.”

“Naturally father will find you something better. We aren’t poor people, Teddy. There’s no need to be scared about it....”

In such terms was Chris Hossett wooed and won by Mr. Preemby. He was scared, dreadfully scared, but also he was tremendously roused. It impressed him as being a wildly romantic affair and very terrifying and a little hard on Meeta Pinkey. But he was bustled along too fast to think very much about Meeta Pinkey. He was introduced over again to the Hossett parents next day as their daughter’s affianced husband, and in secret she gave him three golden sovereigns to buy her an engagement ring as a surprise. Mrs. Hossett behaved at first as though she approved of Mr. Preemby and disapproved of the marriage, and then after what was clearly a stormy scene upstairs with her daughter, she behaved as though she approved highly of the marriage and thought Mr. Preemby a very objectionable person. Mr. Hossett would not speak to Mr. Preemby directly, but he spoke of him to his wife and to imaginary auditors in Mr. Preemby’s presence as a “scoundrel” who had “got hold” of his girl. Yet he, too, seemed to regard the marriage as desirable, and no one made any reply to his obiter dicta.

It was all very puzzling and exalting to Mr. Preemby. He did little except what he was told to do. He was carried over his marriage as a man might be carried over a weir. He left any explanation to Mrs. Witcherly of what was happening for some more favourable occasion. He went off on Tuesday with his little valise as though he was going back to Norwich. He wrote a simple letter of regret to the house-agent and coal-merchant. Private affairs, he said, of an urgent nature prevented his return to his duties. Mrs. and Miss Hossett went up to London with him. They all took rooms at a temperance hotel in Bloomsbury, and Mr. Preemby was married by special licence at St. Martin’s by Trafalgar Square.

Then he went down to the Limpid Stream Laundry to live with his parents-in-law and master the duties of assistant manager, canvasser and publicity agent. Mr. Hossett never spoke to him and sometimes talked rather unpleasantly about him when he was in the room, making accusations that were better ignored, but Mrs. Hossett gradually became cordial again. And presently Mr. Hossett had a heart seizure and died, and in the course of a few months Mr. Preemby found himself a father. When he was first confronted with his daughter and, as it proved, his only child, he thought her an extremely ugly little red object. He had never seen a baby at so early a stage before. She had a lot of very fine moist dark hair which subsequently gave place to a later crop; she had large indeterminate features and remarkably large feet and hands. Mr. Preemby had an absurd impression that he had seen her somewhere before and hadn’t liked her. Then in a day or so she became a quite ordinary pink baby and wonder gave place to affection.

She was christened Christina Alberta after her mother and Mr. Preemby.

§ 5

In time all these experiences mellowed in Mr. Preemby’s memory into a vague, glorious, romantic, adventurous past. He continued to be rather dreamy and distraught, but on the whole he made a dutiful, faithful husband, and he got on very well with his masterful and capable wife.

She was, he had discovered on his marriage, three years his senior, and she continued to be in every respect his senior to the day of her death. But she treated him with proprietary affection; she chose all his clothes for him, she cultivated his manners and bearing and upheld him against all other people. She dressed him rather more like a golf champion than he would have done himself if he had had any say in the matter. She would not let him have a bicycle for many years, she was a little exacting about his ways of keeping the laundry accounts, she fixed his pocket-money at ten shillings a week, and she was disposed to restrict his opportunities for conversation with feminine members of the laundry staff. But he made no marked protest against these slight deviations from the customary obedience of a wife. A tendency to plumpness manifested itself, and he grew considerable quantities of blonde moustache without apparent effort.

Their home was an agreeable one, the more so after Mrs. Hossett had followed her husband to his resting-place, under a marble crucifix with a dove and olive branch in relievo at the intersection of the arms, at Woodford Wells. Mr. Preemby became a great reader, reading not only romantic novels—he had a great distaste for “realism” in any form—but ancient history, astronomy, astrology and mystical works. He became deeply interested in the problem of the pyramids and in the probable history of the lost continent of Atlantis. Mental science also attracted him, and the possibility of increasing will-power very greatly. He would sometimes practise will-power before the looking-glass in his bedroom when Mrs. Preemby was not about. At nights he would sometimes will himself to sleep instead of going to sleep in the usual fashion. He gave a considerable amount of attention to prophecy and eschatology. He developed views of his own about the Day of Judgment that might have led to a breach with the Established Church if Mrs. Preemby had not thought that such a breach would react unfavourably upon the Laundry. As time went on he accumulated a library of upwards of a thousand volumes and a very considerable vocabulary.

His wife viewed these intellectual preoccupations with friendly sympathy, at times even with pride, but she took little part in them herself. The Laundry was good enough for her. She loved the Laundry more and more; loved its piled clean and starched shirts and collars and its folded and stacked sheets, loved the creak of its machinery and the suddy bustle of the washing room. She loved to have it all going on, orderly and right; to feel everything going through the tubs and washers and wringers, sure and safe; nothing astray, nothing missing at the end. When she walked about the place voices were hushed and scrubbing became respectfully assiduous. And she liked making things pay.

On Sunday afternoons and on days when the laundry had no need of his services, Mr. Preemby took long walks. In fine weather he would walk into Epping Forest or to Ongar or even into the rustic peace of the Roothings, but in dull weather he would go Londonward. After a while the trams were extended as far as the present terminus at Woodford and it became possible to ride very pleasantly right into the heart of London by way of Seven Sisters Road and Camden Town or, with a little bit of extra walking, by the Lea Bridge Road and the Angel and Holborn.

The greatness and multitudinous activities of London stirred slumbering strands of Mr. Preemby’s imagination. He would go in and lunch at an Aërated Bread Shop on a scone and butter, with a cup of cocoa and perhaps a jam-puff, and he would spend hours looking into shop windows and sometimes even making small purchases. He loved Charing Cross Road with its book-shops, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Clerkenwell, and the Whitechapel Road, but Piccadilly and Bond Street and Regent Street seemed costly and lacking in true intellectual interest, and he felt his baggy tweed knickerbockers and cap a little out of tune in these smart places. Sometimes he would go to the British Museum and look very hard at objects connected with the pyramids. Great public events always drew him to London. If there was a great murder or a great fire or a Royal Wedding or a Royal Funeral, Mr. Preemby would be sure to be looking at it where the crowd was thickest, often with a neat packet of provisions, a sandwich, an orange, or so forth, that Mrs. Preemby had provided. But he never saw illuminations and fireworks because Mrs. Preemby liked to have him at home when the day’s work was over. He enjoyed the Great War of 1914-18 gravely and profoundly. Once he passed a man who he thought afterwards was almost certainly a German spy. The thought thrilled him for days. He had given him a good look anyhow. He attended air raids in plenty, and he saw the Potters Bar Zeppelin shot down. He was a good four years too old for compulsory military service when the time came, and Mrs. Preemby would not let him be a special constable because she thought he might catch cold.

Mr. Preemby’s work in the counting house was not very onerous, but he also gave thought and attention to the extension of the business outside. He invented several attractive circulars. His experience as a house-agent had trained him to note the existence of large comfortable-looking houses that might otherwise have escaped his observation and to ascertain whether they were occupied; he would then find out whether the Limpid Stream Laundry got the washing from such establishments, and if not he would send a circular and even follow it up with a personal letter. He was vaguely observant about the premises. He would go sometimes and look for quite a long time at the furnaces or the delivery vans or any new piece of machinery like the new calendering machine until he got used to it. But if he stood about where there were girls working, Mrs. Preemby would make some excuse to get him back into the office because, as she explained, she thought a man standing about affected the girls’ work unfavourably. He took in and sometimes read the British Laundryman and the Dyers’ and Cleaners’ Gazette.

Occasionally he had happy ideas. It was his idea to paint the delivery vans bright blue and decorate them with a swastika, and to paint exactly the same colour and design on the front of the laundry and put it on the bills. But when he wanted to put the van drivers into swastika caps and blue the clothes baskets, Mrs. Preemby said she thought the thing had gone far enough. It was also Mr. Preemby who suggested Ford cars instead of horse vans as early as 1913. This change was made in 1915.

And at home with her peaceful interested father and her busy, occasionally, rather astringent, mother, Christina Alberta grew to girlhood and womanhood.

CHAPTER THE SECOND
Christina Alberta

§ 1

THIS story, it was clearly explained in the first paragraph of the first section of the first chapter, is a story about Mr. Preemby in the later years, the widower years, of his life. That statement has all the value of an ordinary commercial guarantee, and on no account shall we ever wander far from Mr. Preemby. But the life of his daughter was so closely interwoven with his own during that time that it is necessary to tell many things about her distinctly and explicitly before we get our real story properly begun. And even after it has begun, and while it goes on, and right up to the end, Christina Alberta will continue to intrude.

Intrusion was in her nature. She was never what is called an engaging child. But she always had a great liking for her Daddy and he had the greatest affection and respect for her.

She had little or no tact, and there was always something remote and detached, something of the fairy changeling about her. Even her personal appearance was tactless. She had a prominent nose which tended to grow larger, whereas Mrs. Preemby’s nose was small and bright and pinched between her glasses, and her father’s delicately chiselled and like some brave little boat shooting a great cascade of moustache; she was dark and both her parents were fair. As she grew up the magic forces of adolescence assembled her features into a handsome effect, but she was never really pretty. Her eyes were brown and bright and hard. She had her mother’s thin-lipped, resolute mouth and modestly determined chin. And she had her mother’s clear firm skin and bright colour. She was a humming, shouting, throwing, punching child with a tendency not to hear admonitions and an almost instinctive dexterity in avoiding sudden slaps. She flitted about. She might be up the drying-ground or she might be under your bed. The only thing to do was to down and look.

She danced. Neither Mr. Preemby nor Mrs. Preemby danced, and this continual jiggeting about perplexed and worried them. A piano or a distant band would set her dancing or she would dance to her own humming; she danced to hymn-tunes and on a Sunday. There was a standing offer from Mr. Preemby of sixpence if ever she sat quiet for five minutes, but it was never taken up.

At her first school, a mixed day-school in Buckhurst Hill, she was first of all extremely unpopular and then extremely popular and then she was expelled. Afterwards she did fairly well at the Taverners’ Girls’ School at Woodford, where she was recognized from the first as a humorist. There was always a difficulty in calling her any other name than Christina Alberta. People tried all sorts of names but none of them stuck but “Christina Alberta.” “Babs” and “Baby” and “Bertie” and “Buss” she was called at home and “Ally” and “Tina,” and at school they tried “Nosey” and “Suds” and “Feet” and “Preemy” and “Prim.” Also “Golliwog” because of her hair at hockey. These all came off again, and left the original name exposed.

She was quick at her lessons and particularly at history, geography and drawing, but disrespectful to her teachers; at school hockey she played forward right with marked success. She could run like the wind, and she never seemed blown. Her pinch was simply frightful. She could make sudden grimaces with her nose that gave the weaker sort hysterics. She was particularly disposed to do this at school prayers.

Between her mother and herself there was a streak of animosity. It was not a very broad streak, but it was there. Her mother seemed to cherish some incommunicable grievance against her. It didn’t prevent Mrs. Preemby from doing her duty by the child, but it restrained any real warmth of affection between them. From an early age it was Daddy got the kisses and got climbed over and pulled about. He returned this affection. He called her “my own little girl” and would even say at times that she was a Wonder. He took her for walks with him and told her many secret things that were in his mind, about the Lost Atlantis and the Lamas of Tibet and the fundamentals of Astrology preserved indecipherably in the proportions of the pyramids. He’d often wished, he said, to have a good look at the pyramids. Sometimes one man saw things that others didn’t. She would listen intently, although not always in quite the right spirit.

He would tell her of the virtue and science of Atlantis. “They walked about in long white robes,” he said. “More like Bible Characters than human beings.”

“Good for the laundries, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.

“All we know of astrology is just fragments of what they knew. They knew the past and future.”

“Pity they were all drowned,” she remarked without apparent irony.

“Maybe they weren’t all drowned,” he said darkly.

“You don’t mean there’s Atlantics about nowadays.”

“Some may have escaped. Descendants may be nearer than you suppose. Why you and me, Christina, we may have Atlantic blood!”

His manner conveyed his conviction.

“It doesn’t seem to help much,” she said.

“Helps more than you think. Hidden gifts. Insight. Things like that. We aren’t common persons, Christina Alberta.”

For some moments the two of them pursued independent reveries.

“Still we don’t know we’re Atlantics,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 2

After she had fought her way to the sixth form in the Taverners’ School the educational outlook of Christina Alberta was troubled by dissensions both within the school and without. The staff was divided about her, her discipline was bad, her class-work rank or vile, but she passed examinations, and particularly external examinations by independent examiners, with conspicuous success. There was a general desire to get her out of the school; but whether that was to be done by a university scholarship or a simple request to her parents to take her away, was a question under dispute. The games-mistress was inclined to regard murder as a third possible course because of the girl’s utter disregard for style in games, her unsportsmanlike trick of winning them in irregular and unexpected ways, and her tendency to make drill and gymnastics an occasion for a low facetiousness far more suitable for the ordinary class-room. The English and Literature mistress concurred—although Christina Alberta would spend hours over her essays working in sentences and paragraphs from Pater and Ruskin and Hazlitt so that they might pass as her own original constructions. It was not Christina Alberta’s fault if ever and again these threads of literary gold were marked in red ink, “Clumsy” or “Might be better expressed” or “Too flowery.” Only the head-mistress had a really good word for Christina Alberta. But then the head-mistress, as became her position, made a specialty of understanding difficult cases.

And Christina Alberta was always quietly respectful to the head-mistress, and could produce a better side to her nature with the most disconcerting alacrity whenever the head-mistress was called in.

Christina Alberta, as soon as the issue became clear to her, decided for the scholarship. She reformed almost obtrusively, she became tidy, she ceased to be humorous, she lost sets of tennis to the games-mistress like a little sports-woman, and she stopped arguing and became the sedulous ape of Stevenson for the estranged English mistress. But it was up-hill work even in the school. There was a little too much elegant surrender in her reformed tennis and a little too much parody about her English in velveteen. The possibility that she would ever join that happy class of girls who go in from the suburbs to classes in London and lead the higher life beyond parental inspection and sometimes until quite late in the evening in studios, laboratories and college lecture-rooms, seemed a very insecure one, even without reckoning with the quiet but determined opposition of her mother.

For Mrs. Preemby was not the woman to like a daughter educated above her parentage and station. She came to lament her weakness in not bringing Christina Alberta into the laundry as she herself had been brought in at the age of fourteen. Then she would have learnt the business from the ground up, and have qualified herself to help and at last succeed her mother, even as Mrs. Preemby had helped and succeeded Mrs. Hossett. But the school with its tennis and music and French and so forth had turned the girl against this clean and cleansing life. She was rising seventeen now, and the sooner she abandoned these things which lead straight to school-teaching, spinsterhood, Italian holidays, “art” clothes and stuck-up incapacity, the better for her and every one.

She made a campaign against Christina Alberta’s habit of sitting about in unladylike attitudes and reading; and when Mr. Preemby took the unusual and daring course of saying that it was a bit hard on the girl, and that he didn’t see any harm in a book or so now and then, Mrs. Preemby took him up to Christina Alberta’s own little room to see what came of it, and more particularly to see the sort of pictures she’d stuck up there. Even when he was confronted with a large photographic reproduction of Michael Angelo’s creation of Adam as the master had painted that event on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he still made a feeble show of resistance, and said that it was “Art.”

“You’d stand anything she did, I believe,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Look at it. Art! Look at these books! Darwin’s Origin of Species! That’s a nice book for a girl to be prying into.”

“Very likely she doesn’t see the harm of it,” said Mr. Preemby.

“Her!” said Mrs. Preemby compactly. “And look at this!”

“This” was Howe’s Atlas of Biology. She opened it to display its large pages crowded with pictures of the detailed dissection of a frog.

“Reely, my dear!” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s one of her schoolbooks. There reely isn’t nothing what I should call improper in that. It’s Science. And, after all, it’s only a frog.”

“Pretty things they teach at school nowadays. What with your Art and your Science. Doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Why, when I was a girl if I’d asked Ma what was inside any animal, she’d have slapped me and slapped me hard. And rightly. There’s things rightly hid from us—and hid they ought to be. God shows us as much as is good for us. More. No need to open animals. And here—here’s a book in French!”

“H’m,” said Mr. Preemby, yielding a little. He took up the lemon-yellow volume and turned it over in his hand.

“All this reading!” said Mrs. Preemby and indicated three shelves of books.

Mr. Preemby assembled his courage. “You mustn’t expect me to go against reading, Chris,” he said. “It’s a pleasure and a light. There’s things in books.... Reely, Chris, I believe you’d be happier if you read a bit. Christina Alberta is a born reader, whether you like it or not. She gets it from me, I suppose.”

Mrs. Preemby started and regarded his flushed opposition; the anger in her eyes was magnified through her glasses. “It’s wonderful,” she said after a little pause; “it’s truly wonderful how Christina Alberta manages to get everything she wants.”

§ 3

Miss Maltby-Neverson, the head-mistress of the Taverners’ School, called upon Mrs. Preemby and shook her resolution a good deal. She was obviously a lady, and the school washing ran in term-time to twenty pounds a week. She was taken to see the scandalous picture and she said: “Very beautiful, I’m sure. One of the really Great Paintings in the world. Pro-foundly religious. It’s the very words of the Bible made into a picture. What do you find in it to object to, Mrs. Preemby?”

Whereupon, as if by a trick, the picture ceased to be scandalous and Mrs. Preemby was ashamed of herself. She saw now there never had been anything wrong about that picture.

Miss Maltby-Neverson said that Christina Alberta was a difficult type but a thoroughly interesting personality, a real personality. She had a great capacity for affection.

“I haven’t found that,” said Mrs. Preemby.

“It is a type I have studied,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson, simply but conclusively.

She explained that Christina Alberta was an active type. Left to herself without employment to stretch her faculties she might easily get into almost any sort of mischief. Almost any sort. Not that there was anything wrong in her essentially. It was just energy. Given good hard work and a scope for ambition, she might become a very satisfactory woman indeed—possibly even a distinguished woman.

“I’ve no use for distinguished women,” said Mrs. Preemby shortly.

“The world has,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson gently.

“I’m afraid I’m one of the old-fashioned sort,” said Mrs. Preemby.

“Christina Alberta isn’t.”

“Let the man be distinguished abroad and the woman distinguished at home,” said Mrs. Preemby. “I’m sorry to differ from you, Miss Maltby-Neverson, but one cannot help one’s opinions.”

“It depends upon ourselves,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson.

“I’m afraid I like men to rule,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Woman has her place in the world, and it isn’t man’s.”

“But I thought Mr. Preemby rather favoured the scholarship idea.”

Mrs. Preemby was baffled. “He did,” she said as though she did not see clearly what that had to do with the matter. “Give the thing a trial,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson. “After all, she may not win this scholarship.”

But Christina Alberta won it with marks to spare. She took no risks. It was a biennial scholarship which had been established by a benefactor of advanced views. It was tenable at the London School of Economics. As soon as Christina Alberta knew she had secured it she went, without consulting her mother or anyone, to a hairdresser’s and had her hair bobbed. To Mrs. Preemby this was almost a worse blow than the scholarship. She surveyed her shock-headed, handsome-nosed daughter in her short gymnastic skirts with a qualm of sincere hatred.

She wished she could make her daughter feel about herself as she felt about her. “I wish you could only see yourself,” she said with concentrated bitterness.

“Oh, I know,” said Christina Alberta.

“I suppose you’re a judgment on me,” said Mrs. Preemby.

§ 4

But Christina Alberta had only studied in the London School of Economics for a year, she was beginning her second year when her mother obliged her to resign her scholarship. Christina Alberta had stayed late in London one evening without telling her mother she was going to do so, she had gone to a discussion of the Population Question at the New Hope Club in Fitzgerald Street, and she had come home smelling so strongly of tobacco that her mother had repented of and revoked all her concessions to modernity there and then.

She had been waiting for that moment for many months. “This ends it,” she said as she let her daughter in.

Christina Alberta found there was no immediate way round or through that decision. She worked her father and Miss Maltby-Neverson in vain. But instead of resigning her scholarship right out as she had been told to do, she played for time and explained her absence by a vague reference to family trouble.

Mrs. Preemby in those days was already in very bad health, but this fact was completely overshadowed in the minds of both her daughter and her husband by the far more urgent fact that she was now constantly in a very bad temper. Everything was conspiring to worry her—except Mr. Preemby, who knew better than to do anything of the sort.

The closing years of the Great War, and still more so the opening year of the Disappointing Peace, were years of very great difficulty for the laundry business. The munitions business put laundry girls above themselves and there was no doing anything with them. Coal, soap, everything was at unheard-of prices, and it was impossible to get back on the customers by raising the charges. People, even the best sort of people, were giving up cleanliness. Gentlemen of position would wear their dress-shirts three or four times and make their undervests and under-pants last a fortnight. Household linen was correspondingly eked out. People moved about; the new army officers’ wives came and went, here to-day and gone to-morrow, leaving unpaid bills. Never had Mrs. Preemby known so many bad debts. Van men came back from the army so shell-shocked and militarized that they embezzled out of pure nervousness and habit. Income tax became a nightmare. Outside as within, Mrs. Preemby’s life was a conflict. She kept the Limpid Stream Laundry paying all through that awful time because she was a wonder at management, but she did it at a terrible loss of vitality.

She became bitterly critical of the unhelpfulness of Mr. Preemby and her daughter. When they tried to be helpful she criticized their incapacity. They did more harm than good.

Meal-times were awful. She would sit flushed and glowering through her glasses, obviously afflicted by a passionate realization of the world’s injustice and eating very little. Mr. Preemby’s attempts to start a cheerful conversation were rarely successful. Even Christina Alberta was overawed.

“Things going a little better this morning?” Mr. Preemby would try.

“Can’t I get rest from business even at my meals?” the poor lady would complain.

Or, “Looks like pleasant weather for the Derby.”

“Pity you can’t go there for all the help you are in the place. I suppose you haven’t heard what’s happened to van number two.”

“No!” said Mr. Preemby.

“You wouldn’t. Hind mudguard smashed. Been done for weeks. And nobody knows who did it. One would think that that was a man’s business anyhow. But it’s left for me to find out. And pay for. Like everything else in the place.”

“I’d better make inquiries.”

“I know those inquiries of yours. Better leave the whole thing alone now. Grin and bear it....”

The silence of the meal would be restored.

She seemed to set a high value upon these awful silences. She even complained that he ate his cheese biscuits audibly. But how else can one eat cheese biscuits? Christina Alberta was made of sterner stuff and became controversial. Then her mother would flare out at her insolence and declare that “one or the other of us” leaves the table. “I’ll read upstairs,” said Christina Albert. “It isn’t my wish to be lunching here.”

Before the abrupt ending of Christina Alberta’s university career she was present only at breakfast and supper; supper wasn’t nearly as awful in quality as breakfast, and breakfast could easily be bolted and got away from; but after the New Hope Club catastrophe, she was present at all the meals, a sort of lightning-conductor for her father and something of a restraint upon, and an added exasperation to, her mother. She took the line of agreeing that if her university career was to end, then she must go into the laundry business; but she argued very stoutly that to do that with any hope of success under modern conditions meant a “proper business training.” If she could not go to the London School of Economics then she ought to go to Tomlinson’s Commercial Training School in Chancery Lane and learn book-keeping, shorthand, typing, business correspondence, précis, commercial French, and so forth. And after three weeks of painful midday meals this proposal was adopted under stringent conditions and her season-ticket to London was renewed. She worked her way very passably through another winter with Tomlinson’s as her school and most of London as her playground. She learnt all sorts of things. She added a new set of friends and acquaintances, some with bobbed hair and some without, of the most various social origins and associations, to the circle she had already acquired at the London School of Economics.

When presently Mrs. Preemby began to speak of a gnawing pain that oppressed her, both her husband and daughter took it at first as a new development of her general grievance against them and felt no particular apprehension about it. Mr. Preemby said he thought she ought to take advice or see some one about it, but for some days she treated the suggestion with scorn. If once she got in a doctor, she said, they’d have to find some one else to look after the laundry. Doctors put you to bed and give you things to keep you there. Otherwise how could they get a living?

Then suddenly she changed. One morning she confessed she felt “dreadful.” She went back to bed and Mr. Preemby, with strange premonitions that the world was coming to an end, trotted off for a doctor. The clinical thermometer showed a temperature mounting above one hundred and one. “It hurts. My side hurts,” said Mrs. Preemby. “I’ve had it once before, but not like this.”

Christina Alberta came home that evening to discover herself capable of fear, remorse, and tenderness.

She had some strange moments with her mother in between phases of weak delirium and insensibility. Mrs. Preemby’s face seemed to have become smaller and prettier; the feverish flush in her cheeks simulated youth. She was no longer hard or angry, but rather pathetically friendly. And Christina Alberta hadn’t seen her in bed for years.

“Take care of your Daddy,” said Mrs. Preemby. “You owe more to him—and less to him—than you think. I had to do all I’ve done. Take care of him. He’s gentle and good and easily persuaded and not to be trusted alone in the world....

“I’ve never been quite all a mother should be to you. But you’ve been difficult, Christina.... I’ve had a great respect for you....

“I’m glad you haven’t my eyes. Glasses are a Curse....”

Anxiety about the laundry occupied a large part of her thoughts.

“That woman Smithers in the washing room is a thief, and I’d get rid of the new man Baxandale. I don’t know why I’ve kept Mrs. Smithers on so long.... Weakness.... I’m not sure about him, there’s nothing positive yet, but I feel he’s not straight.... I’m very much afraid we’ve let Lady Badger’s account run too long. Nowadays titles—want watching. I’ve been misled by her. She promised a cheque.... But I doubt about you two in the laundry altogether. He can’t and you won’t. You might have done it.... Never mind that now.

“Sell it as a going concern? The Widgerys might come in. He’s hard, but he’s straight. Straight enough. They might like to come in....

“It’s never entered my head I wasn’t good for twenty years yet.... I wish the doctor wouldn’t think of operating. It won’t do any good.”

She repeated many of her phrases.

“I hate the thought of being opened,” she said. “I suppose—. Like those frogs in your book....

“Packed like a bag.... Never get it back again. Loose bits....

“Washing-basket or something to keep it together.”

Then her mind went off at a tangent to things beyond Christina Alberta’s understanding.

“Sneaked off and left me to it.... I wonder what he’s doing now.... Suppose.... Fancy, if it should be him that had to operate.... Operate....

“Children we were.”

She seemed to recollect herself and regarded her daughter with a hard inquiring eye. Some instinct in Christina Alberta told her to assume an incurious expression. But these words struck upon her mind and stayed there and germinated like a seed. Children they were, and he had sneaked off? Queer and yet according with all sorts of other imponderables.

§ 5

Mr. Preemby looked unusually small but unusually dignified in his full mourning. Christina Alberta was also extremely black and shiny. Her skirts reached for the first time in her life to her ankles; a sacrifice that she felt would be particularly acceptable to the spirit of the departed.

A new thing had come into Christina Alberta’s life—responsibility. She perceived that for unfathomable reasons she was responsible for Mr. Preemby.

It was clear that the sudden death of his wife under the surgeon’s knife had been a very great blow to him. He did not break down or weep or give way to paroxysms of grief, but he was enormously still and sad. His round china-blue eyes and his moustache looked at the world with a mournful solemnity. The undertaker had rarely met so satisfactory a widower. “Everything of the best,” said Mr. Preemby. “Whatever she can have, she must have.” Under the circumstances, the undertaker, who was a friend of the family, having met both Mr. and Mrs. Preemby at whist-drives quite frequently, showed commendable moderation.

“You can’t imagine what all this means to me,” said Mr. Preemby to Christina Alberta, quite a number of times. “It was a pure love match,” he said; “pure romance. She had nothing to gain by marrying me. But neither of us thought of sordid things.” He was silent for a little while, struggling with intractable memories. He subdued them. “We just met,” he said, smiling faintly; “and it seemed that it had to be.”

“Sneaked off and left me”; came a faint whisper in Christina Alberta’s memory.

§ 6

There was much to see to in those days of mourning. Christina Alberta did her best to help, watch and guide Mr. Preemby even as her mother had desired, but she was surprised to find in him certain entirely unexpected decisions that had apparently leapt into existence within a few hours of her mother’s death. One was a clear resolve that he and she must part company with the laundry either by selling it or letting it, or, if no means of disposing of it offered, by burning it down or blowing it up as speedily as possible. He did not discuss this; he treated it as an unavoidable necessity. He expressed no animosity for the laundry, he made no hostile criticism of the life he had led there, but every thought betrayed his fundamental aversion. And also they were to go away—right away—from Woodford Wells and never return thither. She had come to much the same decisions on her own account, but she had not expected to find them in such quiet strength in him.

He became explicit about the future as they sat at supper on the evening of the funeral.

“Your mother’s cousin, Sam Widgery,” he said, “was talking to me.”

He munched for a moment; his moustache went up and down and his eyes of china-blue stared out of the window at the sunset sky. “He wants to take it over.”

“The laundry?”

“As a going concern. And he being our nearest relation, so to speak, I’d as soon he had it as anybody else. Other things being equal.... Wish I knew what to ask him for it. I don’t want to ask him too little. So I said I didn’t care to discuss things at a funeral. Said he’d better come along to-morrow. Their place isn’t doing well. It’s got sort of embedded in Walthamstow. It would pay him to get out and let the land go for building. He hasn’t got very much money.... But he wants this place. He reely wants this place.”

His blue eyes were the eyes of one who sees visions.

“I don’t know if they taught you about making companies at the School of Economics. I’m a child at all that sort of thing. He talks about partnership or a mortgage or something like that, but what we want—what we want is a limited company. And what we want is something like debentures only rather more like preference shares. We want it so that whatever he draws out of the business we’ve got to draw out more. Otherwise the company can cut away the security for your debentures by paying too much dividend on the ordinary shares. He’ll have the ordinary shares. Him and his wife. I don’t say he’d do such a thing deliberately, but he might very easily be led into doing it. He’s got to be looked after. We want to fix it so that if he pays more on his shares than we get on our shares we’d get our interest levelled up. It’s all very difficult and complicated, Christina Alberta.”

Christina Alberta regarded Mr. Preemby with a new and deepening respect. She had never heard him make such a speech before at meals, but then he had never before been free from interruption and correction.

“We’ll have to have it fixed up properly by our solicitors,” said Mr. Preemby.

“We shan’t be badly off,” he continued, helping himself to cheese.

“There’s a mortgage or so we’ve got and some houses at Buckhurst Hill. It’s a curious thing, but your poor dear mother had a sort of faith in my eye for house property. She often let me guide her. And I always had a feeling for making some sort of reserve out of the business.... Very likely Sam Widgery will take over most of the furniture of this house. It’s a bigger house than his....”

“Where do you think of going to live, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta.

“I don’t rightly know,” said Mr. Preemby after a moment or so of introspection. “I keep thinking of different places.”

“London,” she said. “If I could go back to study—before it is too late.”

“London,” he said, “it might be.”

He hesitated over his next suggestion with the hesitation that had become a habit, so accustomed was he to see his suggestions crumpled up and flung aside. “Have you ever heard of Boarding Houses, Christina Alberta?” he asked with an unreal carelessness. “Have you ever thought it might be possible for us to go and live in Boarding Houses?”

“In London?”

“All over the world—almost, there are Boarding Houses. You see, Christina Alberta, we might get rid of our furniture here, except for my books and a few little things, and we might put most of that away for a time—Taylor’s Repository would take care of that for us—and we might go and live sometimes in a Boarding House here, and sometimes in a Boarding House there. Then you could study and needn’t keep house, and I could read and look at things and make memorandums about some Theories I’ve thought of, and talk to people and hear people talking. All sorts of people go to Boarding Houses—all sorts of interesting people. These last nights I’ve been thinking no end about living in Boarding Houses. I keep on thinking of it, turning it over in my mind. It would be a new life for me—like beginning again. Life’s been so regular here. All very well while your poor dear mother was alive, but now I feel I want distraction. I want to move about and see all sorts of things and different kinds of people. I want to forget. Why, in some of these Boarding Houses there’s Chinese and Indians and Russian princesses, and professors and actors and all sorts of people. Just to hear them!”

“There’s Boarding Houses full of students in Bloomsbury.”

“Every sort,” said Mr. Preemby.

“One place that attracts me,” said Mr. Preemby, pouring out what remained of the beer, “is Tumbridge Wells.”

“Isn’t that sometimes called Tunbridge, Daddy?”

“Formerly. But now it is always spoken of as Tumbridge Wells. At this Tumbridge Wells, Christina Alberta, there are hills with names that point directly to some connection with the ancient Israelites, Mount Ephraim and Mount Gilboa and so on, and there are a number of curiously shaped rocks, shaped in the likeness of great toads and prehistoric monsters and mystical forms and nobody knows whether they are the work of God’s hand or man’s. I am very anxious to see these things for myself. They may have a deeper and closer significance for us than is commonly supposed. There are plenty of Boarding Houses at Tumbridge Wells—I was told only the other day by a man I met in the Assyrian room in the British Museum—and some of them are said to be very comfortable and reasonable indeed.”

“We might go there for the holidays,” said Christina Alberta, “before the London session begins.”

Outside was the summer afterglow, and a dusky peace filled the room. Father and daughter followed divergent trains of thought. Mr. Preemby was the first to break the silence.

“Now that I shall be in mourning, or half mourning, for some time I have decided to give away all those Harris tweed knickerbocker suits and stockings of mine. Some poor man might feel the comfort of them—in winter. I have never really liked those very baggy knickerbockers, but of course while your poor dear mother was alive her taste was Law to me. And those caps; they get over your eyes when you’re hot. That tweed stuff.... It is overrated. When you ride a bicycle or anything it ravels out with the friction of the seat. Makes you look ridiculous.... And I think that quite soon I shall get myself one of those soft grey felt hats—with a black band.”

“I have always wanted to see you wear one, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.

“It would count as mourning?”

“Oh! yes, Daddy.”

Mr. Preemby meditated pleasantly. The girl had common sense. Her advice was worth having. “As for putting the swastika on your poor dear mother’s tombstone, perhaps you are right in thinking it is not what she herself would have chosen. It may be better after all to do as you suggest and erect a simple cross. After all—it is her tombstone.”

Whereupon Christina Alberta got up from her chair and went round the table—almost at a prance, until she remembered things—and kissed him. For some obscure reason she hated the swastika almost as much as she loved her Daddy. For her it had become the symbol of silliness, and she did not like to think of him as silly. Particularly now when for some obscure reason she was beginning to think of him as ill-used.

§ 7

There was much to see to before the Preembys could go to Tunbridge Wells. There had to be quite a number of interviews with Mr. Sam Widgery at Woodford Wells and afterwards in the dingy offices of Messrs. Payne and Punter in Lincoln’s Inn. It was clear from the first to these men of affairs that Mr. Preemby was a child at business, but as they went on with him they realized that he was an extremely greedy and intractable child. It was six weeks before Mr. and Mrs. Sam Widgery could move in, sullenly and resentfully, to the Limpid Stream premises, and Mr. Preemby and his daughter could go on after a day or so in London to select a Boarding House at Tunbridge Wells.

Christina Alberta spent her early days as an orphan struggling against an unreasonable cheerfulness and a profound sense of release. She found her father ready to accept almost any explanation of her need to run up to London for a day and even disposed to be tolerant when she came home late. She had quite a little world of miscellaneous acquaintances in London; fellow-students and their friends, fellow-students from the London School of Economics and fellow-students at Tomlinson’s School and art students they knew and medical students they knew and girls from the provinces who had chucked their families and got typing jobs, and so on to models and chorus girls and vaguely employed rather older young men of the intellectual class. She met them in and about the class-rooms and in A.B.C.’s and suchlike places and in the New Hope Club, where there were even Labour politicians and men who claimed to be Bolsheviks, and she went to parties and duologues in studios in high, remote, extraordinary flats. It was tremendous fun, although a lot of it had to be snatched from the insistent claims and inquiries of Woodford Wells. And people liked her, they liked Christina Alberta, laughed at her jokes they did and admired her thundering cheek and never said anything about her nose. It was much more her natural world than the Taverners’ School people had ever been. Nobody seemed to mind that she came out of a laundry; for all they seemed to care about that sort of thing, she might have come out of a gaol. In between the excitements of student life she even did some reading.

In her first grief for her mother she tried not to feel a sense of new unstinted freedom in regard to all these adventures and experiences. Her Daddy in his grief, bless him! was smoking much more than he had ever done before; he was even trying cigars; he had no nose for tobacco reek in his daughter—or for anything of that sort. He asked few questions and they were easily answered. Long years of exercise had made him almost constitutionally acquiescent. Christina Alberta realized that within very wide limits indeed now she might do anything she pleased whenever she liked. She realized also that there was no particular hurry to do anything at all. All the others seemed to be running about in pairs like knives and forks. It suited her humour to stay detached.

And the world had altered. This break-up of the old home, the death of her mother, the disappearance of every control, except her credulous, inattentive Daddy, had jerked her forward from childhood to maturity. Hitherto home had seemed an eternal, indestructible thing, from which you started out for adventures, to which, whatever happened, you returned like a sea-rover to rest and where you went to bed and slept as you had been wont to sleep, secure, unthreatened. Now here the two of them, Daddy and herself, were in the open; no bolting place at all for them; anything might happen to them and might insist upon going on happening. She could now do just anything she pleased, it was true, but also she realized that now she had to take the unlimited consequences.

So that in spite of her sense of novel, unbounded freedoms, Christina Alberta found she did not go up to London any more than she would have done during her mother’s lifetime. Many of her most attractive friends, it is true, were away upon their holidays. And she found her father’s company unusually interesting. Every time she came back to him he seemed to be slightly enlarged and of a firmer colour and consistency. He reminded her of Practical Biology (Botanical Section) in the Taverners’ School, when you take a dried-up bean out of its package and put it in a jar with water and observe it under the influence of warmth and moisture. It germinates. And he was germinating.

Mother had kept him dried up for nearly twenty years, but now he was germinating and nobody could tell what sort of thing he might become.

CHAPTER THE THIRD
In Lonsdale Mews

§ 1

AFTER a month of deep mourning, Christina Alberta put aside her long skirts and returned to the more kilt-like garments to which she was accustomed. She had not been inactive while her father had conducted his business settlement with Mr. Sam Widgery, and she had worked out a scheme of living that seemed to promise quite a happy life for her father and herself. She fell in with the Boarding House idea and with the project of beginning at Tunbridge Wells. She ceased to struggle with the fact that he continued to call it quietly but insistently Tumbridge Wells; it seemed to her upon reflection that Tumbridge was really the place he, at any rate, was going to live at. That gentle departure from exactitude was quite of a piece with his general habit of living a little askew from actual things.

But she impressed upon him the view that since their lives were to be migratory henceforth, and since there were a certain number of books, unsaleable articles of furniture that Mrs. Widgery would not take over at a valuation, a number of curiosities—for example, a piece of shell which he believed to be a fragment of a Great Auk’s Egg, a Rosicrucian regalia, and a mummified hawk from Egypt which had prophetic qualities, to consider—there must be a sort of permanent headquarters in London, at which these objects could be stored and to which he and she could return from the various Boarding Houses round and about the earth. And, pursuant to this suggestion, she made inquiries and worked out an admirable project for sharing some accommodation with two little friends of hers who practised art, literature, and picturesque economies in a converted mews in Chelsea. In fact, she made arrangements with them. She told Mr. Preemby she had made these arrangements according to his instructions, and after a time it did come to seem to him that he had given her the instructions upon which she acted.

Lonsdale Mews opens out of Lonsdale Road, Chelsea; and there is quite a noble entrance with large stucco pillars on either side and an arch over, on which is a design in relievo of Neptune and sea-horses and the words “Lonsdale Mews.” Inside there had once been stables and coach-houses, and over each a bedroom and a sitting-room, which was also, in the more prolific past, generally used as a bedroom, and a cupboard and a landing and so forth, the little home of the coachman (and his wife and family) attached to the genteel carriage and horses below. But the advancement of science and the progress of invention have abolished gentility, and so reduced the number of coachmen and carriages in the world that Lonsdale Mews has had to accept other tenants; and being too narrow down the centre for the coming and going of automobiles without a great deal of bashing of mudguards and radiators, has had to paint itself up attractively and fall back upon art and the intelligenzia.

Christina Alberta’s two young friends were in possession of one of these perverted coachmen’s homes, and as they were very inadequately prepared to pay the rent—it was a quite aristocratic rent—they were extremely glad to welcome Mr. Preemby and particularly Christina Alberta as co-tenants. Mr. Preemby was to have the big room downstairs and there he was to arrange his books and his surplus furnishings and ornaments and curious objects, and have a sofa that could be made into an apparent bed when he wanted to sleep in London. And Christina Alberta was to have a little bedroom for herself behind this wherein a breezy decorative scheme of orange and bright blue more than made up for a certain absence of daylight and fresh air. But when the two young friends had a party or when Mr. Preemby was away they were to have the use of the big downstairs room, and in the case of a party Christina Alberta’s room was to be a ladies’ cloak-room.

The lessors were to retain the use of the upstairs rooms and in the matter of the kitchen all things therein were to be held in common. None of this agreement was put into writing and many issues were left over frankly for future controversy. “We are to be the pigs that pay the rent,” said Christina Alberta; that was the general idea. “Much we’ll work out,” said Mr. Harold Crumb. “Much will work itself out. It’s no good being too definite.” What was definite was that Mr. Preemby was to pay the rent.

Mr. Harold Crumb was a red-haired young man, a shock-headed young man with a rampant profile, dressed in a blue overall, frayed grey trousers and slippers. He had large freckled hands and he did Black and White, which Mr. Preemby had supposed to be a whisky but discovered was an art. Harold lived by attempting to sell drawings for advertisements and pictured jokes for the weekly papers. His expression was lofty and his voice constrained and it seemed to Mr. Preemby that he was suffered rather than met by Mr. Crumb. With Christina Alberta Mr. Crumb seemed to be on terms of tacit friendship and no word passed between them. He lifted his hand and twiddled his fingers at her—with a kind of melancholy.

Mrs. Crumb was more effusive. She embraced Christina Alberta warmly and answered to the name of “Fay.” Then she turned to Mr. Preemby and shook hands with him quite normally. She was a slender young lady with carelessly bobbed corn-coloured hair, pale-grey eyes and an absent-minded face. She also was dressed in a blue overall, she wore oyster-coloured stockings and slippers and possibly other things, and her business in life, Mr. Preemby learnt, was to review books for various newspapers and write romantic fiction for bookstall magazines. Her right forefinger had that indelible inkiness which only the habitual use of an incontinent fountain-pen can give. There was a big screen in the downstairs room Mr. Preemby was to have that Mr. Crumb had made and Mrs. Crumb had covered with the bright mendacious wrappers of the books she had reviewed. This exercised Mr. Preemby the more because several of the wrappers were manifestly upside down, and he could not understand whether this was due to art, carelessness or some serious mental lapse.

“We’ll have something to eat,” she told Mr. Preemby, and then they could settle up things. But she had a surprisingly rapid articulation and it sounded like, “We’ll ’f sum t’eat ’n’ then we’ll set lup thins.” It took ten or twelve seconds to come through to Mr. Preemby’s understanding. Meanwhile she had turned to Christina Alberta. “’Dabit ’f work to do,” she explained. “Bres no’ clear’ d’way. Late las’ ni’. You be’r loo’ roun’ he’ while Nolly gessomeat an’ Ikn do ’p stairs fore you see’t.”

“Right-o,” said Christina Alberta, understanding perfectly. Mr. Preemby was left stunned, with his lips moving slowly. “So long,” said Harold, and took some money out of a black Wedgwood tea-pot and went and fell over things in the passage, and presently went out into the wide world while Fay vanished upstairs.

“She’s gone upstairs,” said Mr. Preemby, interpreting slowly, “to do their rooms. And he’s gone to get some meat. It’s a nice large room, Christina Alberta—and quite well lit. Quite.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Mew before,” said Mr. Preemby, approaching a group of attractive drawings on the wall.

“In a what, Daddy?”

“In a Mew. Or in a Studjo.... I suppose these are Originals.”

Christina Alberta awaited his reaction to the drawings with a slight anxiety.

“Looks like a lot of fruit and human legs and things,” said Mr. Preemby. “Wonder what they mean? Summer Night it says, and that’s Passion in Solitude. Don’t quite see it, but I suppose it’s symbolical or something.” He turned his round blue eyes to the room generally. “I could get a mahogany cabinet for my Curiosities and have it against the wall there—I’d like the sort with glass doors so that people could see the things—and if there was some shelves put across that place, it would hold most of my books. There’ll have to be a bed somewhere, Christina Alberta.”

“They’ve got a sofa upstairs,” said Christina Alberta, “with an end that pulls down.”

“Might go there.”

“Or under the window.”

“Of course there’s my clothes,” said Mr. Preemby. “I almost wish I hadn’t practically promised Sam Widgery your mother’s wardrobe. Rosewood it is. It has a lot of room in it and it might have gone against that bit of wall there. The trunk will make a sort of seat if we get the corners mended. Wonder how that screen would look the other way up. Books might go behind it. These easels and things I suppose they’ll take upstairs.... We’ll get things settled all right.”

Christina Alberta turned about with arms akimbo to follow his proposals. She perceived that they threatened a considerable disturbance of the æsthetic balance of the studio. She’d just thought of a little bed-sofa affair with a bright rug over it. Silly of her to forget the baggage. But in the end perhaps it might be possible to arrest a lot of his gear in the passage. The passage was so choked already that a little more in it hardly seemed to matter. He could go out and get what things he wanted when he wanted them. She had a momentary anticipation of him in his shirt and braces, routing in trunks.

“Of course,” said Mr. Preemby, “when you said you’d got two little friends in a Studjo, I thought they were two girls. I didn’t think they were a married couple.”

“They aren’t so fearfully married,” said Christina Alberta.

“No,” said Mr. Preemby, and was restrained by modesty from further speech for some seconds. “Of course,” he said, “if presently a Family came along—well, we’d have to move out, Christina Alberta.”

“Never meet families half-way,” said Christina Alberta. “It isn’t very likely anyhow. You trust Fay.”

“You never know,” said Mr. Preemby rather weakly, and showed a tendency to drift back to those ambiguous drawings.

“About time we had a look at the upstairs rooms, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, and went out into the passage to call “Fay!”

The answer came remotely. “Lo?”

“Read-dee?”

“Not yet.”

Christina Alberta found her Daddy back in the illustrated corner with his head on one side like an inquiring sparrow. For some time nothing was said. “Of course,” he remarked at last; “it’s Art.” He turned away with his face pursed up beneath the moustache, humming faintly. She perceived it was just as much Art as he could stand.

He ran his hand over the wall and turned intelligent eyes to Christina Alberta. “It’s just canvas,” he said; “what you pack things in. With sort of dabs of gold paint. I don’t think I’ve ever seen walls that wasn’t either done with paper or distemper before. I suppose really one might put all sorts of things on walls, cloth, bed-ticking, tarpaulin. Odd how one doesn’t think of things.”

§ 2

Presently “upstairs” was “read-ee;” Mrs. Harold Crumb was free to answer questions and make explanations and Mr. Preemby could learn more of Christina Alberta’s plans for his comfort. Upstairs was more various but less spacious than downstairs, the beds were dressed-up rather than disguised as divans and there was more vaguely improper but highly decorative Art. Like Christina Alberta Mrs. Crumb had not fully considered Mr. Preemby’s possibilities in the way of luggage, but she rose to the occasion very well. When Mr. Preemby spoke of the mahogany cabinet and the wardrobe, she said that it would be quite easy for Harold to “camouflage” them with very, very bright-coloured paint, and she thought a lot might be done for Mr. Preemby’s trunks and clothes by making a curtained alcove in a corner. “Trouble with clothes,” said Mrs. Crumb, “is when somebody starts charades or dressing up. Nothing is sacred. Last week, somebody tore my only pyjamas limb from limb.”

“We’d have to arrange,” said Mr. Preemby, a little uneasily.

“We’ll have to arrange somehow,” said Mrs. Crumb.

But before anything could be arranged definitely Harold returned from his shopping with a large piece of purple beefsteak in a mere loin cloth of newspaper, and a lettuce and a bundle of small onions in his hand and two large bottles of beer under his arm, and everybody’s attention was directed to the preparation of the midday meal.

“Generally,” said Harold, “we go Out for a meal. There’s quite a decent aufschnittery and a little Italian place and so forth not five minutes away in the King’s Road. It’s more fun feeding Out. But we thought you’d like to see the studio put through its paces.”

Mr. Preemby in the course of his life had rarely seen meals prepared; somebody else had always laid a table and said “Dinner’s ready, Daddy,” or “Supper’s ready, Daddy,” as the case might be, and he had just sat down, and it was with real interest that he obeyed Mr. Crumb’s invitation to “come and see how we do it,” and assisted under direction in the operations. Mr. Crumb, in a few well-chosen words, introduced the cooking apparatus that clustered around the gas-stove; the gas-stove was lit explosively, Mr. Preemby handed things and held things under direction and got in the way a good deal. Christina Alberta, who seemed used to the job, chopped the onions and dressed a salad at a small kitchen table close at hand, and the steak got itself grilled fiercely and flaringly.

Meanwhile Mrs. Crumb laid a blue-painted table in what was to be Mr. Preemby’s room with an orange-coloured cloth and a selection of plates and parts of plates, yellow-glazed mugs with rudely painted inscriptions in some rustic dialect, “Here’s t’ absent frens” and the like, several knives and forks, a pewter mug full of cigarettes and a bunch of sunflowers in a brown-glazed bowl. And at this table Mr. Preemby presently found himself seated very hot in the face and liberally splashed with fat from the grilled steak. Nobody said grace, and the meal began.

There was a general assumption that Mr. Preemby’s tenancy was settled, though there were many points upon which he would have liked a clearer definition. He was particularly anxious to exclude as tactfully as possible his garments and his specimens from promiscuous use as properties when these charades occurred, but he did not know quite how to reopen the subject. And he was preoccupied by a doubt whether his long nightgowns of Saxony flannel, if they were publicly exposed, might not be considered old-fashioned by these artistic young people. But their talk jumped about so that it was difficult to lead up to what he had to say. He was accustomed, especially when company was present, to clear his throat “h’rrmp” and waggle his moustache up and down a little before he spoke, and by the time he was ready to deliver what he had to say one of the others was away with something else. So that he hardly said anything but an occasional “h’rrmp” all through the meal.

The two young ladies did most of the talking. Harold seemed moody, making an occasional correction or comment upon his wife’s remarks and eating most of the steak with the pained expression of one who has tender teeth and is used to better food. Once he asked Mr. Preemby if he really cared for Good Music, and once if he had been to see the Iberian dancers last year, but neither of these inquiries led to a sustained conversation. “H’rrmp. No-oh,” said Mr. Preemby. “Not exactly. Not particularly,” and in the second case, “No-oh, I didn’t.”

Mrs. Crumb talked brightly of various newspaper jobs she had got and how she had been asked to do a children’s corner in the Patriotic News and whether she would accept the offer—Mr. Preemby thought the editors and newspaper proprietors she mentioned seemed a depraved lot—but mainly the talk concerned the movements and readjustments of a large circle of friends. After the meal there was coffee, and Harold, with an air of resignation, went and washed up.

There were many little things awaiting attention at the laundry, and after two or three cigarettes Mr. Preemby decided, “It’s time for us to be going, Christina Alberta.” “We’ll work it out all right,” said Harold on their departure.

There were intervals of meditation as Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta returned in the train from Liverpool Street to Woodford Wells. “It’s not what I’ve been accustomed to,” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s all very different from the way your mother used to manage things.... Less orderly.... Of course I could keep my clothes locked up in my trunk.”

“You’ll do all right. They’re perfect Dears. She loves you tremendously already,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 3

But before she went to sleep that night Christina Alberta experienced compunction. She felt compunction about these arrangements she was making for her Daddy. She doubted whether he would be truly comfortable and happy in that studio in Lonsdale Mews, and able to lead the life of steadfast curiosity he anticipated with so much quiet pleasure—ever humming to himself about it and working his moustache and saying “h’rrmp,” when he was not otherwise engaged.

This story, it cannot be too often reiterated, is the story of Mr. Preemby who became, as we shall tell in due course, Sargon, King of Kings. But Christina Alberta has got herself hatched into this story very much like a young cuckoo in a wagtail’s nest and it is impossible to ignore her. She was virtually in control of him and she had the egotism of her sex and age.

She had also a pitiless conscience. It was almost the only thing she could not manage in her life. It managed her. It was a large, crystalline conscience with no foundations and no relationships; it just flooded by itself in her being; it was her gravitational centre and the rest of her could not get away from it.

When Christina Alberta went up for examination and judgment before Christina Alberta there was no nonsense in the proceedings, a fearful frankness; it was cards on the table, everything in evidence, no etiquette, not a stitch on, X-rays if necessary. These examinations were all the more terrible because they were done in what was practically an empty room, without screens, curtains, standards or general beliefs of any sort. It is appalling to think of the drapery and function that was absent from Christina Alberta’s court of conscience. In the first place Christina Alberta was completely and explicitly irreligious. In the next she was theoretically anti-social and amoral. She did not believe in respectability, Christian morality, the institution of the family, the capitalist system, or the British Empire. She would say so with extreme plainness and considerable detail except when her parent was about. Prevalent winds of sentiment did not stir her. She did not find the Prince of Wales ravishing nor Punch funny. She thought modern dancing tiresome, though she did it very well, and Wimbledon tennis and tennis-talk an intolerable bore. She favoured Bolshevism because everybody she disliked abused it and she hoped for a world-wide social revolution of an entirely destructive and cleansing type. What was to follow this revolution Christina Alberta, with the happy confidence of youth, did not seem to mind.

It is not for us to speculate here why a young woman born and bred between Woodford Wells and central London in the opening years of the twentieth century should confront the world with a mind so entirely swept and void of positive and restraining convictions; we put the fact on record. And if she had been sustained by all the beliefs in Christendom and a sure and certain respect for every detail of the social code, whatever that code may be, she could not have confronted the world with a more cheerful confidence, nor with a stronger persuasion that Christina Alberta had to behave, in some undefined fashion, well. Christina Alberta had to be Christina Alberta, clear and sound, or the court of conscience made things plain and hard for her.

“Christina Alberta,” the court would say, “you are the dirtiest, filthiest little thing that ever streaked the dust of life. How do you propose to get clean again?”

Or, “Christina Alberta, you have been lying again. You’ll lie to me next. First it was laziness made you lie and now it is cowardice. What are you going to make of yourself, Christina Alberta?”

There came a time when the court had to address Christina Alberta in this fashion: “Your nose, Christina Alberta, is large beyond comparison. It will probably go on growing all your life—as noses often do. Yet you are setting yourself out to charm and fascinate Teddy Winterton. You go to places where you think you will meet him. You fuss and preen yourself like any female idiot. You dream all sorts of things about him, disgraceful things. You are soppy on this young man in spite of the fact that you know he is—no sort of good. You like him to touch you. You sit and look at him foolishly and you gloat. Does he gloat on you? Isn’t it time you considered where you are going, Christina Alberta?”

And now the court was in full session and the charge, the charge for which there was no defence, was that she was going to take her absurd, unprotected Daddy and entrust him and his foolishness and his silly books and his ridiculous treasures and all his dreams and desires to the insecure and unsympathetic studio of the Crumbs, not because of any vague and general hunger for London, though that was in the background, but because that studio was frequented by the all too seductive Teddy, because there she had met him and danced wildly with him and been suddenly and astonishingly kissed by him and kissed him. And then he had beguiled her to learn a dance with him and had got her to come to tea with him at his studio to meet his sister—who hadn’t turned up. And there had been other meetings. He was impudent and provocative and evasive. All her being was in a state of high excitement about him. Coldly and exactly now the court unfolded the operations of her mind to her; showed how the thought of Teddy, always present and never admitted, had guided her decision to harbour with the Crumbs. Only now did she come to confession and clear vision. “You have lied to yourself, Christina Alberta,” said the court; “and that is the worst sort of lie. What are you going to do about it?”

“I can’t let the Crumbs down now. They count upon us.”

“You are in a mess, Christina Alberta. You are in a worse mess than we thought you were. Soppy you are about Teddy Winterton. Why not call things by their right names? You are in love. Perhaps something frightful has happened to you. Little rabbits run about the hedges and every day is like every other day for them; they waggle their little noses and wiggle their little tails and do what they like with their paws. Until one day there is a ping and the snare snaps on the little furry foot and everything you try to do after that is different. The snare holds your movements and you must just dance round it and squeal if you like, till the man comes along. Is that what has happened to you? And for Teddy! Teddy, with that open, lying face!”

“No,” said Christina Alberta, “I don’t love him. I don’t love him. I’ve been silly and soppy and adrift. I am no more worthy to be called Christina Alberta. But it hasn’t got me yet and it shan’t get me. I’ll pull Daddy out of it and myself out of it; I vow and swear....”

“H’m,” said the court.

§ 4

It seemed to Mr. Preemby that the first evening he spent in his new quarters in Lonsdale Mews was the most eventful evening in his life. Impressions crowded upon each other. Insomnia was not among his habits, but when at last he lay upon his shake-up bed he was kept awake for most of what was left of the night (it was the frayed piece with the bleak dawn in the middle of it) trying to get these same impressions sorted out, impressions about his new surroundings, impressions about Christina Alberta, impressions of new and unprecedented personalities, a marmalade of impressions.