CHAPTER THE SIXTHChristina Alberta Consults a Wise Man
CHRISTINA ALBERTAand Paul Lambone had been great friends for nearly a year. He liked her and admired her, and as became his literary line of work, he studied her. And she liked him and trusted him, and showed off a good lot when she was with him.
Paul Lambone wrote novels and short stories and books of good advice, and he was particularly celebrated for the pervading wisdom of his novels and the excellence of his advice. It was his pervading wisdom that had picked him up out of the general poverty of writers and placed him in a position of comparative prosperity. Not that his conduct of his affairs was wise, but that the quality of his wisdom was extremely saleable. Some writers prosper by reason of their distinctive passion, some by reason of their austerity and truth, some by their excellent invention, and some even by simple good writing, but Paul Lambone prospered because of his kindness and wisdom. When you read the stories you always felt that he was really sorry for the misfortunes and misbehaviour of his characters and anxious to help them as much as he could. And when they blundered or sinned he would as often as not tell you what was the better course they might have chosen. His book of advice, and particularly hisBook of Everyday Wisdomand hisWhat to Do on a Hundred and One Occasionssold largely and continually.
But like that James, King of England, to whom theBible was dedicated, Paul Lambone was far wiser in his thoughts and counsels than in his acts. In small matters and most of the time his proceedings were foolish or selfish or indecisive or all of those things. His wisdom did not reach below the level of his eyes, and his face and body and arms and legs were given over to the unhappiest tendencies which were restrained by his general indolence rather than by any real self-control. He was very well off chiefly because he was lazy; he asked the highest possible prices for everything he wrote because that was just as easy as asking the lowest, and there was always a chance that the bargain would not come off and then he would be saved the trouble of correcting his proofs. He accumulated money because he was too unenterprising to buy things or incur the responsibility of possessions, and so he just let a trust invest it for him. His literary reputation was high because a literary reputation in England and America depends almost entirely upon apparent reluctance of output. The terse beauty of his style was mainly due to his sedulous indisposition to write two words where one would suffice. And in the comfort and leisure his indolence accumulated for him, he sat about and talked and was genially wise and got fatter than was becoming. He tried to eat less as a preferable alternative to taking exercise, but in the presence of drink and nourishment his indolence flagged and failed him. He went about a good deal, and was always eager for new things because they saved him from boredom, the malign parent of much needless activity. He had an expensive little cottage near Rye in Kent to which he could motor without needless trouble whenever London bored him, and directly his cottage bored him he would come back to London. And he visited people’s houses a lot because it was too troublesome to resist invitations.
There were, it must be admitted, limits to the wisdom of Paul Lambone. It is often more difficult to see what isnear us than what is far away; many a stout fellow who looks with a clear, discerning eye upon the universe sees little of his toes, and ignores the intervening difficulty; and something sub-conscious in Paul Lambone’s mind obstinately refused to recognize the defective nature of many of his private acts. He knew he was indolent, but he would not allow himself to admit that his indolence was fundamental and vicious. He thought there was a Paul Lambone in reserve of very great energy. He liked to think of himself as a man of swift and accurate decisions who, once aroused, was capable of demoniac energy. He had spent many an hour in arm-chairs, on garden seats, and on Downland turf, thinking out his course of action on various possible occasions of war, business, criminal attempt or domestic crisis. His favourite heroes in real life were Napoleon, Julius Cæsar, Lord Kitchener, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Ford, and suchlike heroic ants.
He liked Christina Alberta because of her tremendous go. She was always up to something; she preferred standing to sitting, and she kicked her legs about while she talked to you. He idealized her go; he attributed to her much more go than she really had. He was secretly persuaded that her blood must be like a bird’s, a degree or so above normal. He felt that in imagination she had much in common with him. He called her the Last Thing, the Van, the Ultimate Modern Girl, and the Life Force. He openly professed pity for the unaided single-handed man who would in accordance with our social laws presently have to marry her and go her pace and try to keep her in order.
She had been to tea with him once or twice. She perceived his admiration and suspected a certain affection, and she basked in admiration and affection. She liked his books and thought he was very like what he thought he was himself. She told him all sorts of things about herself just to lift his eyebrows.
And he was wise all over her and round and about her, tremendously wise.
It was quite interesting to be rung up by Christina Alberta and asked if she might come for tea and advice. “Come along now,” he said. “I’m probably all alone for tea.”
And as he replaced the instrument he said: “Now I wonder what the young woman has been up to! And what she wants me to do for her.”
He went back to his sitting-room and spread himself on his very nice Persian hearthrug, and regarded the pretty silver kettle that swung over his spirit lamp. “It won’t be money,” he considered. “She isn’t the sort that tries to get money....
“She’s barked her shins on something....
“Girls nowadays are a lot too plucky—they’re a lot too plucky altogether.... I hope it’s nothing serious.... She’s just a kid.”
Christina Alberta appeared in due course. Erect as ever, but nevertheless looking a little dashed and subdued.
“Uncle,” she said—for that was her theory of their relationship—“I’m in trouble. You’ve got to give me all sorts of advice.”
“Take off that brigand’s cloak,” he said, “and sit down there and make me some tea. I’ve been watching your love affair out of the corner of my eye for some time. I’m not surprised.”
Christina Alberta paused with her cloak in her hand and stared at him. “That’s nothing,” she said. “I can manage that little affair all right. Such as it is. Don’t you worry aboutme, in that respect. Don’t imagine things. But there is something—something different.” She threw the cloak over a chair back and came and stood by the silver tea-tray.
“You know my Daddy,” she said, arms akimbo.
“I never saw a more dissimilar parent.”
“Well—” She considered how she should put it. “He’s behaving queerly. So that people may think—people who don’t know him—that he’s going out of his mind.”
Mr. Lambone reflected. “Was it ever such a very serious mind to go out of?”
“Oh! don’t make jokes. His mind was good enough to keep him out of trouble, and now something’s happened and it isn’t. People will think—some of them think already—he is mad. They may take him away. And there’s just him and me. It’s serious, Uncle. And I don’t know what I ought to do. I don’t know enough to know. I’m scared. I’ve got no friends that I can talk to about it. None. You’d think I’d have women friends. I haven’t. I don’t get on with older women. They want to boss me. Or I think they do. And I irritate them. They know, they feel—the proper ones—that I don’t—oh! respect their standards. And the other sort just hate me. Because I’m young. The girls I know—no good for what I want just now.”
“But isn’t there a man,” said Lambone, “on whom you have a sort of claim?”
“You know who it is, I suppose?”
He was frank. “Things rather show.”
“If you know him—” She left the sentence unfinished.
“I know the young man only very incidentally,” he said.
“I go to Teddy,” said Christina Alberta without any further reservations. “I went to him as a matter of fact before I telephoned to you. He hardly listened to what I had to say. He didn’t bother.” She winced. Suddenly tears stood in her eyes. “He was just loafing about in his studio. He kissed me and tried to excite me. He would hardly listen to what I had to tell him.... That I suppose is what one gets from a lover.”
“So it’s got to that,” Paul Lambone reflected with hidden dismay, and then remarked a little belatedly: “Not every lover.”
“Mine—anyhow.”
“And you came away?”
“Well!What doyouthink?”
“H’m,” said Lambone. “Youhavebarked your shins, Christina Alberta! More than I thought.”
“Oh, Hell take Teddy!” said Christina Alberta, putting it on a bit and helping herself by being noisy. “What does that matter now? I’ve done with Teddy. I was a fool. Never mind that. The thing is my Daddy. What am I to do about my Daddy?”
“Well, first you’ve got to tell me all about it,” said Lambone. “Because at present, you know, I’ve hardly got the hang of the trouble. And before you do that you sit down in that easy chair and I make the tea. No, not you. Your nerves are on edge and you’ll upset something. You’ve been having your first dose of adult worry. Sit down there and don’t say anything for a minute. I’m glad you came along to me. Very glad.... I liked that Daddy of yours really. Little innocent-eyed man he was. Blue eyes. And he was talking—what nonsensewashe talking? About the Lost Atlantis. But it was quite nice nonsense.... No, don’t interrupt. Just let me recall my own impression of him until you’ve had your tea.”
When the tea was made and Christina Alberta had sipped a cup and looked more comfortable, Lambone, who felt he was managing things beautifully, told her she might begin.
“He’s getting queer in his mind, but you know that he isn’t really going out of his mind,” said Lambone. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Thatisit,” said Christina Alberta. “You see—” She paused.
Lambone sat down in a second arm-chair and sipped his tea in a leisurely manner. “It’s a little difficult,” he said.
“You see,” said Christina Alberta, knitting her brows at the fire, “he’s a person of peculiar imaginativeness. He always has been. Always. He’s always lived half in a dream. We’ve been very much together ever since I was born almost, and from the earliest times I remember his talks, rambling talks, about the Lost Atlantis, and about the secrets of the pyramids and Yogis and the Lamas of Tibet. And astrology. All such wonderful, impossible, far-off things. The further off the better. Why!—he almost got me into a dream too. I was a Princess of Far Atlantis lost in the world. I used to play at that, and sometimes my play came very near to believing. I could Princess it for a whole afternoon. Lots of children day-dream like that.”
“I did,” said Lambone. “For days together I would be a great Indian chief, sentenced to death again and again—disguised as a small preparatory schoolboy. The incongruity didn’t matter a rap. Everybody does it more or less for a time.”
“But he’s gone on doing it all his life. And he’s doing it now more than ever. He’s lost the last trace of any sense that it is a dream. And some one played a trick upon him at Tunbridge Wells. Not realizing what it might mean for him. They seem to have muddled about with spiritualism in the evenings while I was in London, table-rapping and so forth, and a man who had nothing better to do pretended to have a trance. He told Daddy he was Sargon the First, Sargon King of Kings he called him, who was Lord of Akkadia and Sumeria—you know—ages ago, before Babylon was born or thought of. The man who did it couldn’t have hit on anything more mischievous so far as Daddy was concerned. You see he was exactlyready for it; leaving Woodford Wells where he had spent half his life in one routine had cut him off, even more than he was usually cut off, from reality. He was uprooted already before this idea came to him. And now it’s just swamping him. It suited him exactly. It—fixed him. Always before one could get him back—by talking about my mother or the laundry vans, or something familiar like that. But now I can’t get him back. I can’t. He’s Sargon, incognito, come back as Lord of the World, and he believes that just as firmly as I believe that I am his daughter Christina Alberta Preemby talking to you now. It’s a reverie no longer. He’s got his evidence and he believes.”
“And what does he want to do about it?”
“All sorts of things. He wants to declare himself Lord of the World. He says things are in a bad way and he wants to save them.”
“Theyarein a bad way,” said Lambone. “People don’t begin to know half how bad they are. Still—I suppose having a delusion about who one is, isn’t Insanity. Does he want to make some sort of fuss?”
“I’m afraid, yes.”
“Soon?”
“That’s what worries me.
“You see,” she went on, “I’m afraid he’s going to strike most people as queer. He’s back at Lonsdale Mews. We had to come up from Tunbridge Wells yesterday. On a few hours’ notice. It’s that has upset me. For a couple of days things went on all right. Practically we were turned out of the boarding house. There was a frightfully disagreeable man there, a Mr. Hockleby, and he seemed to take a violent dislike to Daddy. You know those unreasonable dislikes people take at times?”
“A very disagreeable side of human nature.Iknow. Why, people have taken dislikes tome!... But go on.”
“He and his daughter got upset about Daddy’s queerness. They frightened the Miss Rewsters, the sisters who runthe place. They said he might break out at any moment, and either he would have to leave or they would. There they were all whispering on the stairs and talking of sending for a policeman and having him taken away. What could I do? We had to clear out. You see Daddy had a sort of idea that when he was Sargon Mr. Hockleby had been alive too and had had to be impaled for seditious behaviour; and instead of letting bygones be bygones as one ought to do in such cases, he said something about it to him, and Mr. Hockleby construed it as a threat. It’s all so difficult, you see.”
“He didn’t try to impale him over again, or anything?”
“No. He doesn’t do things like that. It’s only his imagination that is doing tremendous things. He isn’t.”
“And now he’s in London?”
“He has a sort of idea he’s overlord of the King, and he wants to go to the King at Buckingham Palace and tell him about it. He says the King is a thoroughly good man, thoroughly good; and directly he hears how things are, he will acknowledge Daddy as his feudal superior and place him on the throne. Of course if he tries to do anything of that sort he will be locked up for a certainty. And he’s written letters to the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor and the President of the United States and Lenin, and so forth, directing them to wait upon him for his instructions. But I’ve persuaded him not to post them till he can have a proper seal made.”
“Rather like Muhammad’s letters to the potentates,” said Lambone.
“He’s thinking, too, of a banner or something of that sort, but all that’s quite vague. He’s just got the phrase ‘raise my banner.’ I don’t think that matters much yet. But the Buckingham Palace idea,—something may come of that.”
“This is no end interesting,” said Lambone, and walked across his room and back, and then half sat on the armof his easy chair with his hands deep in his pockets. “Tell me; is he distraught to look at?”
“Not a bit of it.”
“Untidy in his dress?”
“Neat as ever.”
“I remember when I saw him how neat he was. Is he—at all—incoherent? Or does it all hold together?”
“Absolutely. He’s perfectly logical and coherent. He talks I think rather better and more clearly than usual.”
“It’s just one simple delusion? He has no delusions about having great physical strength or beauty or anything of that sort?”
“None. He’s not a bit crazy. He’s just possessed by this one grand impossible idea.”
“He’s not throwing away money or anything of that sort?”
“Not a bit of it. He’s always been—careful with money.”
“And he is now?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s hope that lasts. I don’t see that a man is insane because he believes he is a King or an Emperor—if some one tells him he is. After all, George V has no other grounds for imagining he is a King. The only difference is that rather more people have told him so. Fancying yourself a King isn’t lunacy, and behaving in accordance with that idea isn’t lunacy either. It may be some day, but it isn’t so yet. No.”
“But I’m afraid that people will think that it is.... You see it’s only in the last few days I’ve realized how fond I am of my father and how horrible it would be for me if anyone attempted to take him away. I’m afraid of asylums. Restraint for those who can least understand restraint. He particularly would go mad in a week, really mad, if he got into one. That Mr. Hockleby has frightened me—he’s frightened me. He was so intent and cruel. He wasevilabout Daddy—malignant. A nasty man.”
“Yes, I know,” said Lambone. “Hate.”
“Yes,” she said. “Hate.”
She jumped to her feet and took possession of the hearthrug, looking with her bobbed hair and short skirts and manly pose and serious face the most ridiculous and attractive mixture of fresh youth and mature responsibility conceivable.
“You see, I don’t know what they can do with him—whether they can take him away from me. I’ve never been much afraid of what might happen before, but I am now. I don’t know how to take hold of all this. I thought life was just a lark and people were fools to be afraid of doing anything. But now I seelife’s dangerous. I’ve never been much afraid of what happened to myself. But this is different. He’s walking about in a dream of glory—with absolute wretchedness hanging over him. Think of it! People getting hold of him! Perhaps hitting him! An asylum!”
“About the law on these matters I know very little,” Lambone reflected. “I doubt if they can do very much to him without your consent. But I agree about asylums. From their very nature they must be horrible places, haunted places. Most of the attendants—hardened. Even if they start well. Every day at it ... too much for anyone.... I don’t know how a lunatic is made, a legal lunatic I mean, or who has a right to take him. Somebody—I think two doctors—have to certify him or something of that sort. But, anyhow, I don’t think your father is a lunatic.”
“Nor I. But that may not save him.”
“Something else may. He’s as you say an imaginative—a super-imaginative man, possessed by a fantastic idea. Well, isn’t that a case perhaps for a psycho-analyst?”
“Possibly. Who’d talk him back—to something like he used to be.”
“Yes. If such a man as Wilfred Devizes, for example, could talk to him——”
“I don’t know much about these people. I’ve read some Freud of course—and a little Jung.”
“I know Devizes slightly. We talked at lunch. And I liked his wife. And if perhaps you could get your father away into a country cottage. By the by—have you got any money?”
“He’s got the cheque-book, but he makes me an allowance. So far there’s been no money trouble. He signs his cheques all right.”
“But he may not presently.”
“Oh! Of course at any time he may begin putting a swastika or a royal cipher in the place of his signature, and then the fatwouldbe in the fire. I shouldn’t know where to turn. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No,” said Lambone.
For some seconds—it seemed quite a long time to Christina Alberta—he said nothing more. He sat half leaning upon the arm of his chair and looked past her at the fire. She had said what she wanted to say, and now stood waiting for him to speak. His wisdom told him that things had to be done in this matter very soon; his temperament inclined him just to stay in that pleasant room and say things. Meanwhile she looked about the room and realized how comfortable a wise man could be. It was the best furnished room she had ever been in. The chairs were jolly; there were bound books in the bookcase, a delightful old Chinese horse on the top of it; all his tea-things were silver or fine china; there was a great writing-desk with silver candlesticks; the windows that gave on Half Moon Street were curtained with a rich, subtly folding material very pleasing to the eye. Her eyes came back to his big fat face and his peevish mouth and fine, meditative eyes.
“Something,” he said and sighed, “ought to be done at once. It isn’t a matter to leave about. He might commit some indiscretion. And get into trouble.”
“I’m afraid of that.”
“Exactly. He’s safe—where you left him?”
“There’s somebody with him.”
“Who won’t let anything happen?”
“Yes.”
“So far, good.”
“But what am I to do?”
“What are you to do?” he echoed, and said no more for some seconds.
“Well?” she said.
“What in fact areweto do? I ought to see him. Decidedly. Yes, I ought to see him.”
“Then come and see him.”
“I ought to come and see him. Now.”
“Then let’s.”
He nodded. He seemed to be making an intense internal effort. “Why not?” he asked.
“Well?”
“And then—then we can broach a visit to Wilfred Devizes. Generally fix that up. Then our subsequent action will be determined by what Wilfred Devizes says. The sooner he sees Devizes the better. It’s a question whether it wouldn’t be better for you or both of us to see Devizes first. No. Father first. Then when I’m properly instructed—as a lawyer would say—Devizes.”
A great tranquillity descended upon him.
She could not restrain a faint exclamation of impatience.
He looked up as if he awakened from profound meditation. “I’ll come along now,” he said, “to Lonsdale Mews. I’ll have a talk to your father and then I’ll try to get at Devizes and fix up some sort of a meeting between them. That’s what I ought to do. I’ll go along with you now—at once.”
“Right-o,” said Christina Alberta, “comealong.” She threw on her cloak and clapped her hat upon her head in a dozen seconds and stood waiting.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“I’ll just change this jacket,” said Lambone; and kept her waiting a full ten minutes.
The taxi dropped them at the entrance of the Mews.
“I suppose it won’t matter our arriving together?” said Lambone. “He won’t think it’s something preconcerted?”
“He doesn’t have suspicions of that sort.”
But when they reached the studio a little surprise awaited them. Fay Crumb opened the door to them and her eyes looked paler and her neck longer and her face more absent-minded than ever.
“I’m so glad you’ve come at last,” she said in a flat, distraught voice. “You see—he’s gone!”
“Gone!”
“Completely. He’s been away since three. He went out alone.”
“But, Fay, you promised!”
“I know. I could see he was restless and I kept telling him you’d be back soon. It wasn’t so easy keeping him. He walked up and down and talked. ‘I must go out to my people,’ he said. ‘I feel they need me. I must be about my proper business.’ I didn’t know what to do. I just hid his hat. I never dreamt he’d go out without his hat—prim as he is. I just went upstairs for a moment to get something—I forget what now—but, anyhow, it wasn’t there, and I may have spent five minutes looking for it—and meanwhile he slipped out. He left the door open and I never heard him go. As soon as I knew he’d gone I ran up the Mews right up into Lonsdale Road and stood about there.... He’d vanished. I’ve been hoping he’d comeback every moment since. Before you returned. But! He hasn’t come back.”
Her conviction was all too manifest that he would never come back.
“I’d have done anything—” she said.
Christina Alberta and Paul Lambone looked at one another. “This rather puts the lid on,” said Christina Alberta. “What are we going to do now?”
Lambone followed Christina Alberta into the studio and sat down at once on the simple couch that became Mr. Preemby’s bed at night. The couch squeaked and submitted. He stared at the floor and reflected. “I’ve got no engagements this evening,” he said. “None.”
“It won’t be much good waiting here for him,” said Christina Alberta.
“I feel in my bones he won’t head back here for hours and hours,” he said.
“And meanwhile he may be up to anything!” said Christina Alberta.
“Any old lark,” said Lambone.
“Anything,” said Christina Alberta.
“Three,” said Lambone and consulted his watch: “it’s now nearly five. Do you think there is any particular place, Christina Alberta, more than any other place, where we might go and look for him? Where, in fact, we ought to look for him?”
“But will you come and look for him?”
“I’m at your service.”
“It wasn’t in the bond.”
“I want to. If you won’t walk too fast. I feel I ought to.”
Christina Alberta stood before him with her armsakimbo. “I would bet five to one,” she said slowly, “that he heads for Buckingham Palace and demands an audience—No, that isn’t how he puts it—offers to give an audience to his Vassal, the King. He was full of that this morning. And then—Then I suppose they will lock him up and have an inquiry into his mental condition.”
“H’m,” said Lambone, and then, rising to the occasion: “Let’s go to Buckingham Palace.
“We’ll go there at once,” he said, and moved slowly doorward. “We’ll get a taxi.”
They found a taxi in the King’s Road. Christina Alberta did not belong to the taxi-ing class, and she was impressed by a sudden realization that Lambone had all these thousands of taxi-cabs upon the streets alert to do his bidding. The taxi dropped them according to instructions at the foot of the Victoria Memorial which gesticulates in front of Buckingham Palace, and they stood side by side surveying that building. “It looks much as usual,” said Lambone.
“You didn’t expect him to bend it?” said Christina Alberta.
“If he made a disturbance they’ve cleared him up very completely. That flag I suppose means G. R. is at home.... I wonder—what do we do next?”
He was rather at a loss. The emotional atmosphere of this wide-open place was quite different from the emotional atmosphere of his flat or the Lonsdale Mews. In the flat and in the Mews the appeal had been for him to act; the appeal here was not to make himself conspicuous. He was a man of decorous instincts. A car passed, a beautiful, big, shining Napier, and he thought the occupants looked at him as though they recognized him. Lots of people knew him nowadays and might recognize him. In his flat, in the studio at Lonsdale Mews, he could foregather with Christina Alberta without compunction; butnow, in this very conspicuous place, this most conspicuous place, he had a momentary realization that he and she didn’t exactly match, he with his finished effect of being a man about town, a large, distinguished, mature man about town, and she with her air of excessive youthfulness, her very short skirts and her hat, like the calyptra of a black mushroom, pulled over her bobbed hair. People might think them an incongruous couple. People might wonder what had brought them together and what he was up to with her.
“I suppose we ought to ask some one,” she said.
“Who?”
“Oh!—one of those sentinels.”
“May one speak to the sentinels at the gate? Frankly, I’m afraid of those tremendous chaps in the busbies. I’d as soon speak to the Horse Guard in Whitehall. He’d probably look right over our heads and say nothing. And we should just dither away from beneath him. I couldn’t stand that....”
“But what are we to do?”
“Nothing rash.”
“Wemustask some one.”
“Away there on the left towards Victoria there’s what looks like the real business way in. There’s two policemen. I’m not afraid of policemen. No. And of course that man at the corner is a plain-clothes man.”
“Then let’s askhim!”
Lambone made no move. “Suppose he hasn’t come here at all!”
“I know he meant to do so.”
“I suppose if he hasn’t come,” said Lambone, “we ought to wait about here on the chance of his coming.” He felt extremely like flight at that instant. “There ought to be seats here.
“Come along,” he said, with a sudden return to manly decision, “let’s ask one of those bobbies at the far gate.”
The policeman at the gate to whom they addressed themselves listened gravely to their inquiries, making no instant reply. He belonged to that great majority of English speakers who are engaged upon the improvement of the word “yes.” His particular idea was to make it long and purry.
“Yurrss,” he said breaking presently into speech: “Yurrss. There was a small gentleman without a ’at on. Yurrss. He’adblue eyes. And a moustache? Yurrss, come to think of it therewasa moustache. A rather considerable moustache. Well, ’e said he wanted to speak to King George on a rather urgent matter. It always is a rather urgent matter. Never ‘quite.’ Always ‘rather.’ We replied, according to formula, ’e’d ’ave to write for’n ’pointment. ‘Perhaps,’ ’e says, ‘You don’t know who I am?’ They all say that. ‘I guess it’s something important,’ I says. ‘Not the Ormighty, by any chance,’ I says. But ’e was ’ere last week and ’e wouldn’ go away and they ’ad to take ’im off in a taxi-cab. You know therewasa chap ’ere, sir—Thursday last or Friday, I forget which—with a long white beard and ’air all down ’is back. Very like ’im I should think. Well any’ow this sort of dashed your gentleman. He kind of mumbled a name.”
“Not Sargon?” asked Christina Alberta.
“It might ’ave been. Any’ow, ‘There is no exceptions,’ I says. ‘Not even if you was a close relation. We got no option here. We’re just machines.’ He stood sort of looking baffled for a time. ‘All this must be altered,’ he said in a sort of low, earnest voice. ‘It’s the duty of every king to give audience to every one, every day.’ I says, ‘Very likely it is, sir. But we policemen aren’t in any position to ’elp it,’ I says, ‘much less alter it.’ So off ’e goes. I kind of tipped the wink to the detective at the corner and ’e watched ’im go along the front and then cross over to themonument and stand looking up at the windows. And then ’e shrugged ’is shoulders and took ’imself off. And that’s the last I see of ’im.”
Lambone asked a superfluous question.
“It might be Piccadilly way,” said the policeman, “it might be down towards Trafalgar Square. Fact is, sir, I didn’t notice.”
It was clear that the conversation was drawing to an end.
“So that’s that,” said Lambone. “So far, good. He’s still at large.”
He expressed his thanks to the policeman.
“And now,” he said with an air of bringing out the solution of a difficult problem very successfully, “all we have to do is to find him.”
“But where?”
“That’s the essence of the problem.”
He led the way back to the Victoria Memorial and stood side by side with Christina Alberta beneath that perfect symbol of the British Empire, the statue of Queen Victoria. They stared down the Mall to the distant Admiralty Arch, and for a moment neither of them said a word. It was a warm and serene October afternoon; the cupolas of Whitehall and Westminster’s two towers and a brown pile of mansions were just visible over the trees on the right, transfigured to beauty by the afternoon glow; the two tall columns of the Duke of York and Nelson rose over the trees and buildings to the left; it was in the pause before the dinner and theatre traffic begins, and only a few taxi-cabs and a car or so emphasized the breadth of the processional roadway. Half a dozen windows in the Admiralty had taken fire already from the sinking sun.
“I suppose,” said Lambone, “he’s gone down there.”
Christina Alberta stood with her arms akimbo and her feet a little apart. “I suppose he has.”
The wide road ran straight to the distant Admiralty Arch. And through that remote little opening was Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and a radiating tangle of roads and streets spreading out and beyond and further into the twilight blue.
“What will he make for now?”
“Heaven knows. I’m bankrupt. I haven’t an idea.”
Neither spoke for a little while.
“He’s gone,” she said, “just gone,” and that simple and desolating thought filled her mind.
But the thoughts of Paul Lambone were more complex and intricate.
He perceived that a serious adventure was happening to him and that he was called upon to exert himself. He had suddenly been called away from his tea and hot tea-cake to hunt a slightly demented comparative stranger about London. He wanted to do it, and he wanted to do it properly and in a way to impress Christina Alberta. And his intelligence told him that the best thing he could do would be to follow upon the probable track of his quarry and come up with him before he got into mischief. Or while he was getting into mischief—and interfere and carry him off. And meanwhile his more exercised lower nature was exhorting him to leave Christina Alberta to do the pursuing alone, and go back as straightly as possible to his ample arm-chair and sit down and think things out. And then go to his best club to dinner. And in fact quietly and neatly get out of this unexpected and tiresome business altogether.
And then he looked at Christina Alberta and realized that he could do nothing of the sort. He couldn’t leave her. He looked at her profile, the profile of a grave child, and an almost maternal emotion was aroused in him. She lookedwith anxious and perplexed eyes at the blue and limitless city that had swallowed up her Daddy. The scene was still warm with the evening sun-glow, but the blue twilight gathered in the lower eastern sky. Here and there a yellow pin-point showed that London was beginning to light itself up. She couldn’t go down that road alone. Absurdly, preposterously they were linked. The impulse to disentangle himself was the impulse of a selfish discretion that was rapidly taking all the happiness out of his life and leaving security and luxuries in its place. This was a call to that latent Paul Lambone toact. Even supposing she was a common, queer little flapper that his imagination had made into a friend and heroine, was that any reason whatever why he shouldn’t see her through this trouble that had come upon her?
He made his decision.
“He won’t go back for ages,” he said following up the problem. “Nobody would on an evening like this.”
“No,” she said. “But I don’t see that that gives me any hint of what I ought to do next.”
“We can keep together and go down towards Trafalgar Square. We might look along the Embankment. When we are tired we can get some dinner somewhere. You can get a sort of dinner almost anywhere I suppose. We shall want our dinner.... Perhaps it’s not so hopeless a job as it seems at first. A big job but not a hopeless one. There are limitations to what he may do. Limitations in himself I mean. I don’t think he’ll go into uninteresting streets. His feeling is—spectacular. He’s much more likely to keep to open spaces and near conspicuous buildings. That cuts out a lot of streets. And he won’t go far east. In another hour the city will be shutting up and going home and putting out its lights. He’ll turn back out of that—westward.”
“You can spare the time?”
“I’ve no engagements at all to-night. It was to have beenan ‘off’ night. And this business attracts me. It is interesting to see just how far we can infer and guess his proceedings. It’s a curious mental exercise.... Do you know I think we shall find him!”
She stood quite still for some moments.
“It’s awfully good of you to come with me,” she said.
“I come on one condition.... That you don’t walk too fast. We’ve never walked much together, Christina Alberta, but I’ve seen enough of you to know that you walk abominably fast.”
Every one knows the Café Neptune near Piccadilly Circus and the various crowd that assembles there. There you see artists and painters that are scarcely artists, poets and mere writers, artists’ models and drug-fiends, undergraduates in arts and medicine who are no better than they should be, publishers and gay lawyers, Bolsheviks and White Refugees, American visitors who come to scoff and remain a prey, stray students from the Far East and Jews and Jews and Jews—and Jewesses. And hither at about half-past nine that night came a stout, large, and wearily-distinguished-looking man accompanied by an attractive young lady in short skirts and bobbed hair who carried a large and shapely nose high and sternly, and they threaded their way among the tables through the smoky atmosphere, seeking a congenial place. Out of the garrulous confusing mirk arose a young man with a mop of red hair and protruded a rampant face and asked in a large whisper: “Have you found him?”
“Not a trace,” said Paul Lambone.
Fay Crumb’s face looked up from the table through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“Nor we.We’vebeen looking too.”
“As well here as anywhere,” said the stout man. “Where have you looked?”
“Here,” said Harold, “and hereabouts. It seemed a suitable rendezvous.”
“We’ve ranged far and wide,” said Lambone. “We’ve done miles—oh! endless miles. And Christina Alberta has refused all nourishment—for me as well as for herself. At last I said, either I sit down and eat or I drop down and die. May we take these chairs? You have that one, Christina Alberta. Waiter! It is a case of extreme fatigue. No—neither Munchner nor Pilsener. I must have champagne. Bollinger 1914 will do and it must be iced—rather over-iced, and with it, sandwiches—a very considerable number of sandwiches of smoked salmon. Yes—a dozen. Ah!”
He dropped his wrists on the table. “When I have had some drink I will talk,” he wheezed and became silent.
“When did you leave the Mews?” Christina Alberta asked Fay.
“Half-past eight.... Not a sign of him.”
“Have you been far?” Harold asked Lambone.
“Far!” said Lambone and for a time was incapable of more.
His voice seemed to recede in perspective. “Asking policemen for a small, hatless man. Over great areas of London. On and on—from one policeman to another.... She’s a most determined young woman. God help the man who wins her love! Not a soul had seen him. But I can’t talkyet....”
Harold clawed his chin softly with long artistic fingers. “It is just possible,” he said slowly, “that he went in somewhere and bought a hat.”
“Of course he must have got a hat,” said Fay.
“It never occurred to either of us that he would do anything so sane.”
“We never thought of asking in the hatters’ shops,” said Christina Alberta.
“Happily,” said Lambone, and turned to welcome his refreshment. “That would have been the last straw.”
“For a long time we were on the trail of another hatless man,” said Christina Alberta. “We ran him down in the Essex Road after tracking him all up Pentonville. But he was just a vegetarian in sandals and a beard. And there was a report of a hatless man near the Britannia, but that came to nothing. He seemed just to have come out of his house somewhere to buy fried fish off a barrow in the Camden Town High Street.”
“Extraordinary how a crowd collects when you ask the simplest questions,” said Lambone with his mouth full of sandwich. “And how urgently helpful it can be. They almost forced us up a staircase after that fried-fish man, who struck me as an extremely pugnacious, suspicious-looking fellow. The crowd would have it we wanted him, and he didn’t seem to want in the very least to be wanted. If I hadn’t had an inspiration something very disagreeable might have happened. I just said ‘No, it’s not this gentleman, it’s another of the same name.’”
“But what did he say?”
“‘Youbetter,’ he said. But anyhow it satisfied the crowd, and afterwards we got away quite easily on an omnibus that took us down to Portland Road Station.”
The champagne arrived in its ice pail. “Hardly cold, sir, yet,” said the waiter, feeling the bottle.
“It’s not a time for fastidiousness,” said Lambone and took a third sandwich. “You’re not eating, Christina Alberta. And I insist upon your having at least one glass of this.”
Christina Alberta drank a little and ate mechanically.
“I wonder if we shall ever see him again,” said Harold. “London is so vast. Sovast! But I always feel that, when I see anyone go out anywhere. There is a tremendous courage in going out. London must be full of lost people. I used to be afraid of London until I discovered the Tubesand the Underground. I felt I might be sucked up side-streets to God knows where. And keep on going round corners into longer and longer streets for ever. I used to dream of the last street of all—endless. But whenever I get nervous I just ask for the nearest tube station and there I am.”
“Hemaybe back at the studio now,” said Fay.
Paul Lambone reached his fourth sandwich and his third glass of champagne with great rapidity. He became more leisurely in his refreshment.
“I am disappointed,” he said, “that I didn’t think of the possibility of his buying a hat. It has disorganized all my inductions. You see I was so concentrated on what was going on inside his head that I never troubled about what might be going on outside it. But a man of his neat and proper habits—acquired through a lifetime of orderly living—would get himself a hat almost mechanically.... We may have passed quite close to him in that.”
“I should have known him,” said Christina Alberta.
“But, until that Pentonville man drew a red herring across the trail, I am convinced we were close on his footsteps. You see Christina Alberta insisted upon my asking every policeman we saw—even men, overworked, irritable, snappy,rudemen controlling the traffic—but at any rate I chose the route—I inferred the route. You see, my dear Watson”—he smiled faintly in weary self-approval at Crumb—“the essential thing in a case like this is to put yourself in your man’s place, to think his thoughts instead of your own. That is what I tried—so far as being out of breath would allow it—to impress on Christina Alberta. It’s fairly straightforward. Here you have a man convinced, beautifully and enviably convinced, that he is the supreme lord of the world, unknown, unrecognized as yet, but on the eve of his proclamation. Will such a man go along any street just as easily as any other? Not at all! He will be elated, expansive, ascendant. Very well; he willgo up hill and not down. He will choose wide highways and not narrow ones and tend towards the middle of the street——”
“He hasn’t been run over!” cried Christina Alberta sharply.
“No. No. He would avoid traffic because that would hustle him and impair his dignity. Open spaces would attract him. High buildings, bright lights, the intimations of any assembly would draw him powerfully. So he certainly crossed Trafalgar Square from the Admiralty Arch in a diagonal direction, towards the conspicuous invitation of the Coliseum.... You see my method?”
He did not wait for Crumb to answer. “But the more I think over our missing friend,” he went on, “the more I admire and envy him. What crawling things we are!—content to be subjects, units, items, pawns, drops of water and grains of sand, in the multitudinous, unmeaning muddle of human affairs. He soars above it. He soars above it now. He rejects his commonness and inferiority in one magnificent gesture.Hisworld. The grandeur of it! Wherever he is to-night and whatever fate overtake him, he is a happy man. And we sit here, we sit here and drink—I am ordering another bottle of that wine, Harold, and I expect you and Mrs. Crumb to abandon that warm and sticky beer and join me—Waiter! Yes—another, please—we sit here in this crowded, smoky gathering (lookat ’em!) while he plans the salvation of the world that we let slide, and lifts his kingly will to God. Glorious exaltation! Suppose that all of us could be touched——”
Christina Alberta interrupted. “I think we ought to telephone to the hospitals. I didn’t think before of the possibility of his being run over. Always he has been a little careless at crossings.”
Paul Lambone lifted a deprecating hand and searched in his mind for some excuse for rest.
“A little later,” he said after a slight pause, “the hospitalstaffs will be more at leisure. It is their rush hour now—ten to eleven. Yes, the Rush Hour....”
Teddy Winterton appeared wading through obstructive seated people. His eye was fixed on Christina Alberta. “Hullo!” said Lambone in not too cordial greeting, and glanced at Christina Alberta and back at the new-comer.
Teddy struggled for an unoccupied chair over which some lady had thrown a sealskin coat, and captured it with profuse apologies to the owner of the cloak and squeezed it in at the end of the table between Harold and Fay, who barred his way to Christina Alberta. “Have pity on a lonely man,” he said genially and tried to catch the eye of Christina Alberta.
“You shall have one glass of champagne,” said Lambone with a slightly forced welcome in his tone.
“How do, Christina Alberta!” said Teddy forcing her attention.
Christina Alberta turned to Fay. “Will you come back with me now,” she said to her, “back to the flat? I must do that telephoning to the hospitals now or it won’t be done.”
Fay looked at her curiously. “It’s serious,” said Christina Alberta’s eyes, and Fay stood up and struggled with her coat. Teddy leaped to his feet to assist her. Christina Alberta had not removed her cloak, and was ready. “I say, Christina Alberta,” said Teddy. “I want a word with you.”
“Go on, Fay,” said Christina Alberta, giving her friend a little dig in the back and pretending not to hear him.
Teddy followed them out to the Piccadilly pavement. “Just a word,” he said. Fay was for standing a little way off, but Christina Alberta would not let that happen.
“I don’t want a word,” she said.
“But I might help you.”
“You might have done. But it’s too late. I never want to see you again.”
“Give a fellow a chance.”
“You’ve had your chance. And tried to take it.”
“You might at least keep up appearances,” said Teddy.
“Damn appearances!” said Christina Alberta. “Oh!Comeon, Fay.”
She gripped her friend’s arm.
Teddy was left hovering. He hesitated and then went back into the café to rejoin Crumb and Lambone.
The two young women went on in silence for a little while.
“Anything up?” Fay ventured.
“Everything’s up,” said Christina Alberta. “I wonder if there’s a ghost of a chance of finding Daddy at the studio.”
They made their way to Chelsea without much further conversation. Fay had never before seen Christina Alberta looking tired.
When Fay opened the door Christina Alberta pushed in past her. “Daddy!” she cried in the dark passage. “Daddy!”
Fay clicked on the light. “No,” said Christina Alberta. “Of course he’s not here. He’s gone. Fay! What am I todo?”
Fay’s pale blue eyes became rounder. Christina Alberta, the valiant, the modern, was in tears.
“There’s the hospitals,” said Fay, doing her best to be brisk and cheerful.