CHAPTER THE THIRDIn Lonsdale Mews
AFTERa 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 insistentlyTumbridge Wells; it seemed to her upon reflection thatTumbridge 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 aboutthe 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 whenhe 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 anabsent-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. Andhe’sgone 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 awhat, Daddy?”
“In a Mew. Or in aStudjo.... 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 Nightit says, and that’sPassion 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 wallthere—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 alreadythat 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 aStudjo, I thought they were two girls. I didn’t think they were a married couple.”
“They aren’t sofearfullymarried,” 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.”
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 andsaid “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, andby 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 thePatriotic Newsand 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.Sheloves you tremendously already,” said Christina Alberta.
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 thedrapery 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 norPunchfunny. 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 tomenext. First it was laziness made you lie and nowit 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 theCrumbs. 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.Soppyyou 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.
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 thesesame impressions sorted out, impressions about his new surroundings, impressions about Christina Alberta, impressions of new and unprecedented personalities, a marmalade of impressions.
Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta arrived at the studio according to plan about half-past three, but the Picton van which had started that morning with Mr. Preemby’s bags and trunks and the crates of books and curiosities and the late Mrs. Preemby’s roomy wardrobe, which had after all been rescued from the clutches of Sam Widgery, did not arrive until it was nearly six. Unfortunately the furniture dealer in Brompton Road from whom Mr. Preemby had purchased a specimen-cabinet and a long low walnut bookcase had delivered these articles the day before, and all the animosity of the modern artist towards self-assertive wood had been aroused in Harold. He and Fay and a friend or so who had dropped in, had sat up quite late painting these new pieces a deep ultramarine blue with stars and splashes of gold like the paper they put around the necks of Ayala, Tsarist and suchlike champagnes. When Mr. Preemby saw their handiwork he could scarcely believe it was the same specimen-cabinet and bookcase.
“I suppose one could get it off again,” said Mr. Preemby.
“But see how they are assimilated by the room,” said Harold in high expostulation.
“I mean if we moved at any time,” said Mr. Preemby. “I know it’s art, and it goes with the things here very nicely, but there’s neighbourhoods I wouldn’t like to move into—not with these things as they are. You don’t know what people’s imaginations are like.”
Matters went a little tediously until the arrival of the Picton van. The sofa-bed was arranged and rearranged. The bed things, blankets, sheets and pillow-cases, were to be put in a bundle on the top of Mr. Preemby’s flat trunk behind the book-wrapper screen. “We shall have to find some other place for the bottled beer,” said Harold. “It’stoo hot in the kitchen and too dangerous in the passage. But I’ve an idea we might have it in the scullery under the sink, with a cloth over it and water dripping on the cloth. Evaporation. I’ll see about it.”
Mr. Preemby was surprised by a yawn. “I suppose you’d like to have some tea,” said Fay suddenly, and she and Christina Alberta prepared some.
Harold was obviously in a strained and nervous state. Mr. Preemby’s patient little figure, sitting about hands on knees, waiting for Picton’s van, looking at things with innocent eyes and saying “h’rrmp” had much the same effect of nervous dislocation upon Harold that the mild and patient camel has on a horse. Harold chafed and pranced. He walked about and went upstairs and out and returned; he smoked endless cigarettes and pressed endless cigarettes upon Mr. Preemby; he made recondite remarks in a strained voice. “All this is like something out of Dostoievsky,” he said to Mr. Preemby. “In a different scheme of colouring of course. Different, but the same. Don’t you think so, Mr. Preemby?”
Mr. Preemby nodded his head in a sympathetic, humorous, not too explicit manner. “H’rrmp,” he said. “Itisa bit like that.”
“Things will work themselves out,” said Harold. “Things will work themselves out. You know that poem of Ruby Parham’s.” He cleared his throat. “It is called ‘Waiting,’” he said. “It goes like this—”
His eyes became fixed and glazed; his voice gathered volume, so that the words seemed more than life-sized.
“After every minute“Comes another minute“And then, rest assured,“Another.“Like drops from a ledge in the rain.“You may not want to go on;“Buttheywill,“Oh! endlessly“Taking your life away, death, not final and complete,“But death in the midst of life,“Particles of death,“Death by attrition.“Drip on Old Death—in life!“Slow, dull, implacable, unendurable!“Drip on.”
“After every minute“Comes another minute“And then, rest assured,“Another.“Like drops from a ledge in the rain.“You may not want to go on;“Buttheywill,“Oh! endlessly“Taking your life away, death, not final and complete,“But death in the midst of life,“Particles of death,“Death by attrition.“Drip on Old Death—in life!“Slow, dull, implacable, unendurable!“Drip on.”
“That ‘Drip on’ is great. But perhaps you don’t like modern poetry?”
“I don’tmindit,” said Mr. Preemby genially.
“Of course, nothing of a really destructive naturecanhave happened to that van,” said Mr. Crumb in a pessimistic tone.
When Picton’s van arrived and the roomy wardrobe began its destructive march through the passage, Mr. Crumb called suddenly upon his maker in a loud distressful voice and vanished for the better part of an hour.
Christina Alberta was torn between a sympathetic understanding of Harold’s state of mind and the fear that her Daddy might perceive the unfavourable reaction he produced in Harold and be hurt by it. She and Fay became brightly helpful with the unpacking. “If I might have one of those blue pinafores of Mr. Crumb’s to put on,” said Mr. Preemby, “I’d be glad. These black things of mine show every mark.”
Mr. Crumb’s overall reached far below Mr. Preemby’s knees and somehow justified his calling it a pinafore. It brought out something endearingly infantile in his appearance that appealed to the maternal instinct lurking in Mrs. Crumb. She struggled with a persuasion that he was really a little boy of nine who had been naughty and grown a big moustache and that she had to take care of him and restrain him and generally tell him not to. The books were put in the bookshelves as Mr. Preemby said, “just anyhow”; they could be sorted up later, but the curiosities and specimens took longer and had to be “put out” more orless in the cabinet. There were not only real curiosities and specimens but many little things that Mr. Preemby had accumulated because they looked like curiosities and specimens. There was, for instance, a piece of one of the laundry delivery van mudguards so bent by a collision as to resemble a human torso in the most striking fashion; there was the almost complete skull of an unknown mammal, probably a fallow deer, picked up in Epping Forest, there was a potato, now rather shrivelled, in which it was possible to detect thirty-seven distinct human faces and—specimen of an entirely different quality—a large flint in which there were no less than fifty-five. Ages ago some primordial Preemby had discovered and loved that very same flint and had brought out the likenesses by chipping an eye here or a nostril there; but Mr. Preemby did not suspect the help of that remote and perhaps ancestral hand. Even in waking life Mr. Preemby saw faces in everything. What he would have been like with a high temperature it is impossible to imagine.
Christina Alberta’s anxiety about her father’s reception by the Crumbs diminished as she saw his virtual conquest of Fay. Fay treated him firmly but indulgently, and they lost a good deal of time while she tried to see all the fifty-five faces of the wonderful flint. They had to start and start again, but always they lost count about “Twen-tee” or “Twen-tee-one.” The question would arise whether they were counting one of the faces over again.
Harold returned in a moody state and could be heard, all too distinctly, kicking Mr. Preemby’s packing cases in the hall, but Fay went out to him with a lofty sleep-walking expression in her pale eyes, and the concussions ceased, and presently Harold came downstairs again looking almost handsome in nankeen trousers, a blue jacket with big silver buttons and a voluminous black tie, and was quite nice to Mr. Preemby.
“You won’t mind my touching that wardrobe of yours upa bit?” he said. “It damps us off, as it is. Kind of reproaches us. One of us has to be altered, you see, it or me, and either I paint it or else I get a silk hat with a deep mourning band and a gold-handled umbrella—which would cost no end of money. Whereas Ihavethe paint.”
“If you can get the paint off again,” said Mr. Preemby. “You see if I was to move—back.... It’s all right to have all this paint in a Mew. But out of a Mew....”
“Exactly,” said Harold. “My idea is to make a little pink house of it with windows and so on. Something very simple. Rather like the scenery of a Russian Sketch.Chauve Sourissort of stuff. Conventional to thenth. And we might put up placards at the corner of it according to what is going on. Make a bit of an institution of it.”
“So long as it makes things agreeable,” said Mr. Preemby.
He found his hair being ruffled affectionately. “Dear little Daddy!” said Christina Alberta.
But now appeared a new-comer and life was made uncomfortable and complicated for Christina Alberta again by the presence of Mr. Teddy Winterton’s candid insincerity. His graceful body, his movements, his voice, stirred her senses as she hated them to be stirred; his quiet impudence invaded her sense of humour; he wounded her pride and she longed to be even with him. She had no power over him and he behaved as if he owned her. She was always letting him go just a little too far. When he was about her nose cast a shadow that reached to her horizon. He stood now in the doorway—trousers of one pattern of tweed, waistcoat of another, Norfolk jacket of a third extensively unbuttoned in the accepted student style, and he watched Mr. Preemby carry his collection of roc’s bones, found near Staines, across the studio on atea-tray. His eyes were round with surprise and amusement; his mouth said noiselessly, “What is it?”
Christina Alberta was not going to have her Daddy laughed at by any Teddy Winterton. “Mr. Winterton,” she said. “This is my father.”
“I’ll just get rid of my bones,” said Mr. Preemby, “and then I’ll shake hands.”
“We’ll just finish up Mr. Preemby’s things and then we’ll all go round to Poppinetti’s to get some dinner,” said Fay. “There’s hardly anything left to unpack now.”
“Just one or two Antediluvium bones,” said Mr. Preemby.
Teddy seized upon one. “This,” he said, inspecting it, “is a fossil rhinoceros thigh-bone from the Crag.”
“It’s an Antediluvium horse,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Forgive me! It’s a rhinoceros bone!”
“Horses had rhinoceros bones in those days,” said Mr. Preemby. “And the rhinoceroses—! They were incredible. If I had one I shouldn’t have anywhere to put it.”
Mr. Preemby was extracted from his overall and restored to the black coat and the grey felt hat with the black band. He became one of a straggling party that went out of Lonsdale Mews to a little Italian restaurant in the King’s Road. Three neighbours of the Crumbs mixed themselves up with the party, a very quiet man with silver hair and a young man and a dusky girl.
Mr. Preemby was much impressed by the novelty of thus going out for dinner, and expatiated on its advantages to the silver-haired man who seemed to be the quiet sort of listening man that Mr. Preemby liked to meet. “You see you don’t have tocookthe meal and you don’t have to lay the table and afterwards naturally there isn’t any washing up. But I expect it comes more expensive.”
The silver-haired man nodded intelligently. “Exactly,” he said.
Harold Crumb overheard this. “Expensive,” he said, “it isn’t. No. Every other crime Poppinetti can commit, but that is barred by the circumstances of his clientele. He feeds us on stolen pigeons, hisdindeis guinea-pig, his beef,a l’omnibus: what he minces God knows; what he puts into his ravioli makes even the Lord God repent of his extreme creativeness. But you see, you don’tthinkabout his ravioli, you eat ’em, and they’re damned good. There are always flowers on the table and an effect of inexpensive refinement. You will see. You will see.”
Mr. Preemby saw. Poppinetti was a small man but carefully modelled on Caruso, and he received his large party with the deference of a diplomatist and the effusion of a geyser. He was particularly gracious to Mr. Preemby, bowing profoundly to him, and saluting him with great richness subsequently whenever he caught his eye. He seemed to Mr. Preemby to spend the rest of their time together going to remoter and remoter parts of the restaurant in order to catch Mr. Preemby’s eye and bow and smile to him from greater and greater distances. Mr. Preemby had curious doubts whether he wasn’t being mistaken for somebody else.
Signor Poppinetti, with an air of peculiar favour, guided the party to a long, unattractive table near the centre of the restaurant and took their conflicting orders with the gestures of a conductor guiding an orchestra through a difficult passage. Mr. Preemby was passive but observant; he presently found himself eating macaroni and drinking a rough red wine with a name that sounded to his London tuned ears like a challenge. Chianti.
Harold Crumb showed great earnestness in the matter of macaroni. “In order to taste macaroni,” he assured Mr. Preemby, “it is necessary to fill the mouth absolutely full, good measure, pressed in and running over. To cut up macaroni with your fork as you are doing, is as awful as to cut an oyster. It—it devitalizes it.”
“I like it cut up,” said Mr. Preemby with unexpected firmness. And he cut up some more.
“Otherwise,” he said in a confidential aside to the silver-haired man, “I can’t help thinking it’s earthworms.”
“Exactly. Exactly,” said the silver-haired man.
Harold exemplified generously. His rampant face riding over a squirming mouthful of macaroni was like St. George and the Dragon on an English sovereign. He whistled as he ate. Long snakes of macaroni hung thoughtful for a moment and then, drawn by some incomprehensible fascination, fled into him. Teddy Winterton and one of the new-comers from the studio next door emulated him. Christina Alberta and Fay showed the furtive dexterity of the female. But Mr. Preemby was glad when macaroni was over, even though it raised the problem of eating an egg on spinach with a fork.
But he was not really troubled in his mind as a younger man might have been. He had thesavoir-faireof middle-age. This restaurant dinner was on the whole a bright and agreeable experience for him. He liked even the corrosive taste of the Chianti. This Chianti you drank out of quite largish tumblers because it was almost as cheap and light as beer. It did not intoxicate, but it warmed the mind, and it cast a pleasant and convincing indistinctness over the universe so that the Tunbridges all became Tumbridges without any question, and the secret dreams and convictions of the heart became certain knowledge. Presently Mr. Preemby found himself able and willing to tell things and hint much more important things about his collections to the white-haired man and also to the dark, untidy girl who was sitting on his other side, and who came from the other studio and about whose name he had no idea, and presently to others; and when the bird came—it was a bird new to Mr. Preemby, and called, he gathered,rabbkeyorturkit—most of the party was talkingin the loud, confused, explosive way these young people affected about the lostAtlantis.
He had never spoken so freely before upon this topic. At home he had always been restrained by the late Mrs. Preemby’s genuine lack of interest. And even now he was not prepared for positive statements or for an encounter with sceptical arguments about that great lost continent of the Golden Age. Atlantis had been the scene and substance of his secret reveries for many years; he knew his knowledge of it was of a different order from common knowledge, more intuitive, mystical, profound. From the outset his manner was defensive, discreet and obscure, as of one willing but not permitted to speak.
How did he know that there had been this lost continent?
“H’rrmp,” he said with the faint smile of peculiar knowledge; “studied it for years.”
“What is the evidence?” asked the untidy young lady.
“So abundant. Impossible to retail it. Convincing. Of various sorts. Plato has much about it. Unfinished fragment. Many books have been written. Many inscriptions in Egypt.”
“What sort of people were they?” asked the untidy girl.
“Very wonderful people, young lady,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp. Very wonderful people.”
“Philosophy, no end I suppose?” asked the young man from the next studio with his mouth full.
“What we know—a mere remnant,” said Mr. Preemby. “Mere remnant.”
“How did they dress?”
“H’rrmp. Robes. White robes—extremely dignified. Blue—azure—when justice was administered. Plato tells us that much.”
“Could they fly?”
“They understood it. It was not made a practice of.”
“Motor cars? All that sort of thing?”
“If they wanted to. There was less motoring—more meditation. We live—age of transition. H’rrmp.”
“And then it all went phut?” said the young man from the next studio. “Submerged and all that. What a lesson!”
“That need not have happened,” said Mr. Preemby darkly.
Mr. Preemby became dimly aware of scepticism. “There’s not an atom of evidence that there ever was a continent in the Atlantic,” Mr. Teddy Winterton was saying to Christina Alberta; “within thirty million years of anything human. The ocean troughs go right back to the Mesozoic age.”
Mr. Preemby would have noticed this remark but the untidy girl asked him suddenly if he did not think that the swastika was a symbol derived from Atlantis. He said he was quite certain it was. She asked what it meant exactly; she had always been curious about its significance: and he became guarded and mysterious. She wanted moreover to know things about the costume of that lost world, about its social customs, about its religion. Were women citizens? She was certainly the most intelligent about it of all the company. The silver-haired man seemed to be faintly amused.
The rest of the company wandered off into a discussion of the possibility of going to the Chelsea Arts Ball in the character of a party from the Lost Atlantis. Many of their ideas Mr. Preemby thought trivial and undignified. “Leaves us unlimited scope,” said Harold Crumb. “We could invent weapons—have wings if we liked. Magic carbuncles on our shields—illuminated. Mysterious books and tablets. And a sort of peculiar wailing, drumming music; Mya, mya, mya.”
He pursed up his face and made a curious mooing noise with it to convey his intention, twiddling his fingers to assist the effect.
It was no good protesting against such imaginativeignorance. But to the dark, untidy girl and to the acquiescent man with silvery hair Mr. Preemby continued to be quietly oracular and communicative from behind his moustache.
“But how are these things known?” the dark girl persisted. “There is nothing in the British Museum.”
“You forget,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp, the Freemasons. There are Inner Groups—traditions. Thank you. Just half a glass more. Oh! you’ve filled it! Thank you.”
As he talked he was aware of something going on between Christina Alberta and Winterton. At first it seemed not to matter in the slightest degree, but to be just part of the general unusualness of the gathering, and then it seemed to matter a great deal. He saw Christina Alberta’s little fist resting on the table, and suddenly Winterton’s hand enveloped it. She snatched her hand away. Then something was whispered and her hand came back. In another moment the hands were five inches apart and it was as if nothing had ever happened between them.
He would probably have forgotten the momentary invasion of his attention by Christina Alberta if something else had not occurred at the phase of dessert. Poppinetti’s idea of dessert was a sort of lottery of walnuts—if you found a sound one you won—masses of compressed and damaged dates and a few defiant apples. There was a great crackling. The company was littering the table with walnut shells, and the green, black and yellow corruption they had contained, when this second incident caught Mr. Preemby’s eye. He saw Teddy Winterton run his hand very softly along Christina Alberta’s forearm. And her arm was not withdrawn.
Every one was talking just then and for a moment it seemed to Mr. Preemby that he alone had seen, and then he caught an observant expression on the face of the silver-haired man. It was all very confusing, and this Chianti—though it was really not intoxicating—made everythingswimmy, but Mr. Preemby knew somehow that the silver-haired man had also seen that furtive familiarity, and that he too didn’t quite approve of it.
Ought one to take notice? Ought one to say anything? Perhaps afterwards. Perhaps when they were alone together, he might ask her quietly, “Are you and that young man Winterton engaged?”
“A bit too much,” said Mr. Preemby quietly, meeting the eye of the silver-haired man. “I don’t like that sort of thing.”
“Quite,” said the silver-haired man.
“I shall speak to her.”
“You’re right there,” said the silver-haired man warmly. A very sensible fellow.
A great rustle and a scraping of chairs. Poppinetti, figuring upon an accounts-pad, came to collect the money. “I’ll pay for us, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, “and we’ll settle up afterwards.”
Poppinetti bowing. Poppinetti on Mr. Preemby’s right and on Mr. Preemby’s left; several Poppinettis bowing. A great activity of Poppinettis handing hats and so forth. Poppinettis whichever way you turned. The restaurant rotating slightly. Was this Chianti perhaps stronger than Mr. Preemby had been led to believe? A number of Poppinettis opening a number of doors and saying polite things. Difficult to choose a door. Right the first time. Out into the street. People going by. Taxis. No more Poppinettis. But a girl ought not to let a young man stroke her arm at dinner, when anyone might see it happen. It wasn’t correct. Something had to be said. Something tactful.
Mr. Preemby became aware that he was walking next to Mrs. Crumb. “It was lovely to hear you talking about the New Atlantis,” she said. “I wish I had been sitting nearer.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Something very nice about Mrs. Crumb. What was it? Not sofearfullymarried, but married quite enough.
Mr. Preemby thought they were going back for coffee and a little talk and then bed; he had no idea of the immense amount of evening still before him. He knew nothing as yet of the capacity for sitting up late and getting lively in the small hours possessed by this new world of young people into which Christina Alberta had led him.
And in a sort of hectic discontinuous way they were lively for hours. It became vaguely evident to Mr. Preemby that there was a periodic “day” set apart by Mrs. Crumb for evening gatherings in the studio, and that this evening he had chosen for his settling down was such an evening. Fresh people dropped in. One it seemed was a portentous arrival, he came in quite soon after the return from Poppinetti’s; he was very fat and broad, a white-faced man of forty or so, rather short of breath, with exceedingly intelligent eyes under a broad forehead and a rather loose, peevish mouth. He carried himself with the involuntary self-consciousness of a man who thinks he is pointed out. His name it seemed was Paul Lambone, and he had written all sorts of things. Everybody treated him with a faint deference. He greeted Christina Alberta with great warmth.
“How’s the newest Van?” he said, shaking her hand as though he liked it, and speaking with a singularly small voice for so ample a person. “How’s the last step in Advance?”
“You’ve got to meet my father,” said Christina Alberta.
“Has it got a father? I thought it just growed like Topsy—out of Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw and all the rest of them.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Mr. Lambone turned to him. “What a Handful a daughter is!” he said, and bowed slightly towards Christina Alberta, “even the best of them.”
Mr. Preemby replied after the manner of the parents in Woodford Wells. “She’s a good daughter to me, sir.”
“Yes, but they aren’t like sons.”
“You have sons, sir, I presume.”
“Only dream children. I’ve not had your courage to realize things. I’ve married a hundred times in theory and here I am just a sort of bachelor uncle to everybody. Poking in among the younger people and observing their behaviour with”—his intelligent eyes looked quietly over his garrulous mouth at Christina Alberta—“terror and admiration.”
Two other visitors appeared in the doorway and Mr. Lambone turned from Mr. Preemby to greet them as soon as Fay had done her welcome, a fierce-looking young man with an immense head of black hair and a little lady like a china doll dressed to remind one of Watteau.
Conversation became general and Mr. Preemby receded into the background of events.
He found himself side by side with his friend with the silver hair, against his bookcase. “I didn’t expect a party,” he said.
“I thought so too.”
“I only got here this afternoon. The vans came late and lots of my things are still to be unpacked.”
The silver-haired man nodded sympathetically. “Often the case,” he murmured.
Every one was talking loudly. It was difficult to hear. It was confused sort of talking, and whenever two or three seemed to be interested in what they were saying, Fay Crumb went and interrupted them as a good hostess should. Other people, only vaguely apprehended by Mr. Preemby, got into the studio somehow. There was a red-haired young lady with a tremendous decolletage; behindyou could see almost to her waist. He h’rrmp’d at it and thought of saying something about it, something cold and quiet, to the silver-haired man. But he didn’t. He couldn’t think of anything sufficiently cold and quiet to say.
Fay Crumb came and asked whether he would like some whisky or beer. “Not on the top of that nice Chianti, thank you,” said Mr. Preemby.
The conversation seemed to get noisier and noisier. In one corner Harold Crumb could be heard quoting the poems of Vachel Lindsay. Then Mr. Lambone came up and seemed to want to talk about the Lost Atlantis, but Mr. Preemby was shy of talking about the Lost Atlantis with Mr. Lambone. “Getting on all right, Daddy?” said Christina Alberta, drifting by and not waiting for any answer but an “h’rrmp.”
There appeared three young people with a gramophone they explained they had just bought, and Fay discovered that the beer had been forgotten and sent Harold out to borrow some from a neighbour. These new-comers made no very profound impression on Mr. Preemby’s now jaded mind, except that one of them, the owner of the gramophone, a very fair young man with a long, intelligent nose, was wearing the big horn of the gramophone as a headdress, and that he meant to have that gramophone going whatever else might occur.
The music was dance-music, jazz for the most part and a few waltzes, and it revived Mr. Preemby considerably. He sat up and beat time with the leg-bones of a roc, and presently two or three couples were dancing on the studio floor. Curious dancing, Mr. Preemby thought; almost like walking—jiggety walking with sudden terrific back-swipes of the legs. There was an interruption when Harold returned with the borrowed beer—bringing its lenders with it. Then there was a general clamour for Christina Alberta and Teddy to “do” their dance. Teddy was quite willing but Christina Alberta seemed reluctant,and when Mr. Preemby saw the dance he was not surprised.
“H’rrmp,” he said, and stroked his moustache and looked at the silver-haired man.
It really was too familiar altogether; for some moments the principals vanished upstairs, and came back altered. For some reason Teddy had adopted a cloth cap and a red neck-wrap; he was, in fact, being an Apache, and the bearing of Christina Alberta had become very proud and spirited with her arms akimbo.
Every one backed against the walls to clear a dancing floor. At the beginning it wasn’t so bad. But presently this Mr. Teddy was pitching Christina Alberta about, throwing her over his shoulder, taking hold of her, bending her backward, holding her almost upside down, both legs in the air and her hands dragging on the ground. And she was red and excited and seemed to like these violent familiarities. There was a kind of undesirable suitability between them for such purposes. She and Teddy looked into each other’s eyes with a sort of intimacy and yet with a sort of fierce defiance. At one point in the extraordinary dance she had to smack his face, a good hard smack, nicely timed. She did it with a spirit that made every one applaud. Whereupon he smiled and took her nice little neck in his hands and strangled her with great realism.
Then the gramophone had its death rattle and the dance was over.
Mr. Preemby’s throat had not troubled him much since dinner, but now he said “h’rrmp” repeatedly.
They wanted Christina Alberta, bright and panting and shock-headed, to repeat the performance, but she wouldn’t. She had had a glimpse of the solemn dismay and perplexity upon her Daddy’s face.
The people from the studio next door were the next togive a display: they obliged with an imitation of a Russian imitation of a peasant dance from Saratoff. There was a gramophone record that was not quite the proper music, but it would do. That dance really amused Mr. Preemby. The young man went down quite close to the floor and kicked out his feet with the greatest agility and the girl was as wooden as a doll. Every one clapped hands in time to the music, and so did Mr. Preemby.
And then came a further irruption. Five people in fancy dress demanding beer. They impressed Mr. Preemby as strange and bright-coloured, but totally uninteresting. One wore a red coxcomb and was dressed as a jester in cap and bells. The others just wore tights and bright things that signified nothing at all. They had been at some party given by somebody or other for the “Young people.” They announced with shouts, “They shut down at midnight. Yes, they shut down at midnight. When the young people go to bed.”
It was only too manifest that No. 8 Lonsdale Mews meant to do nothing of the sort.
Beer. Mr. Preemby declined. The last of the beer. Cigarettes. Much smoke. The last of the whisky. More gramophone, more dancing and Harold Crumb’s voice loose again in recitation. Beer or whisky had thickened it. But there were countervailing noises. Movement. A circle was cleared. Not more dancing! No. Feats of strength and dexterity with chairs, performed chiefly by Teddy Winterton, the gramophone owner, and Harold. This stunting stopped presently and the company flowed back towards the middle of the room. Talk Mr. Preemby could not follow; phrases he could not understand. Nobody taking the slightest notice of him.
A sense of weariness and futility and desolation came upon him. How differently were the evenings of the past spent by the good wise people of the lost Atlantis! Philosophicaldiscourse they had, the lute, the lyre. Elevated thoughts.
He caught sight of Mrs. Crumb yawning furtively. Suddenly, stupendously he yawned. And yawned again.
“Yaaw,” he said to Paul Lambone who was at his side.
“Proyawaw—Prolly thiswe sitting on my beawawd.”
“You live here?” said Mr. Lambone.
“Come to-day. Christina Albyawawawter arranged it.”
“The devil she did!” said Mr. Lambone, and looked across the studio at her. For some moments he seemed lost in thought.
“Very remarkable young woman that daughter of yours,” he said. “Makes me feel old-fashioned.”
He looked at the wrist-watch he wore, “Half-past one,” he said. “I’ll start the Go....”
Mr. Preemby heard a few sentences of the parting between Teddy Winterton and Christina Alberta. “Yes or no?” said Teddy.
“No,” said Christina Alberta with emphasis.
“Not a bit of it,” said Teddy.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“But youdo.”
“Oh, go to the devil!”
“Not as if there were risks.”
“I shan’t come. It’s preposterous.”
“I shall wait all the same.”
“You may wait.”
“Little Chrissy Hesitation. Anything to please you.”
It took until past two o’clock for the Go Paul Lambone had started to remove the last of the company.
“All hands to the bedmaking,” cried Fay. “It isn’t always like this, Mr. Preemby.”
“Confess I feel tired,” said Mr. Preemby. “Had a long day of it.”
Christina Alberta regarded him with belated compunction. “It just happened like this,” she said.
“Not used to such late hours,” said Mr. Preemby, sitting on his bed when at last it was made, and he did a yawn that almost dislocated his jaw.
“Night,” said Fay, yawning also.
“We’ll turn in,” said Harold. “So long, Mr. Preemby.” The yawning seized upon Harold also. What a face he had!
“Goo-i.”
“Gawooi-i.”
The door closed upon them.
There was much to say to Christina Alberta, but it was too late and Mr. Preemby was too weary to say it now And also he had no idea what it was he ought to say.
A casual remark fell out, “I liked that man with the white hair,” he said.
“Did you?” said Christina Alberta absently.
“He was intelligent. He took a great interest in the Lost Atlantis.”
“He’s stone deaf,” said Christina Alberta, “and he’s ashamed of it—poor dear.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Preemby.
“All this is going to be rather noisy for you, Daddy,” she said, coming to what she had in mind.
“Itisa bit ramshackle,” said Mr. Preemby.
“We ought to go to Tunbridge Wells quite soon and look round there.”
“To-morrow,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Not to-morrow.”
“Why not?”
“The next day,” said Christina Alberta. “I’m not quitesure about to-morrow. I’d sort of half promised to go somewhere else—. But it doesn’t matter very much really.”
“I’d like to go to Tumbridge Wells to-morrow,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Why not?” said Christina Alberta as if to herself, and hesitated.
Se walked to the door and came back. “Good night, little Daddy,” she said.
“Are we going then? To-morrow?”
“No.... Yes.... I don’t know. Ihadplanned to do something to-morrow. Important in a kind of way.... We’ll go to-morrow, Daddy.”
She walked away from him with her arms akimbo and stared at those queer pictures.
She spun round on her feet. “I can’t go to-morrow,” she said.
“Yes, I will,” she contradicted.
“Oh, hell!” she cried, in a most unaccountable and unladylike way. “I don’t know what todo!”
Mr. Preemby looked at her with grave and weary eyes. This was a new Christina Alberta to him. She ought not to swear. She didnotought to swear. She’d caught it up from these people. She didn’t know what it meant. He must talk to her—to-morrow. About that and one or two other things. But Heavens! how tired he was!
“You—” He yawned. “You must take care of yourself, Christina Alberta,” he said.
“I’ll do that all right, Daddy. Trust me.”
She came and sat down beside him on his little half-fictitious bed. “We can’t decide to-night, Daddy. We’re too tired. We’ll settle to-morrow. Have to see what the weather’s like for one thing. Wouldn’t do to walk about Tunbridge if it was wet. We’ll decide about everything to-morrow—when our heads are cool. Why! you dear little Daddy! It’s just upon half-past two.”
She put her arm round his shoulders and kissed him on the top of his head and the lobe of his ear. He loved her to touch him and kiss him. He did not understand in the least how much he loved her to kiss him.
“Deartiredlittle Daddy,” she said in her softest voice: “You are ever so kind to me. Good night.”
She had gone.
For some time Mr. Preemby sat quite motionless in a state of almost immobile thought.
The floor of the studio was littered with burnt matches and cigarette ends and the air smelt of stale smoke and beer. On the blue-painted table stood an empty beer-bottle and two or three glasses containing dregs of beer and cigarette ash.
It was all very different from Woodford Wells,—very different indeed.
But it was Experience.
Mr. Preemby bestirred himself to undress.
That night-shirt of Saxony flannel had still to be unpacked.
In the morning Christina Alberta was still restless and quite undecided about going to Tunbridge Wells, though the weather was perfectly fine. About half-past eleven she disappeared, and after a light lunch with Fay—Harold was out also—it became evident to Mr. Preemby that the visit to Tunbridge Wells was postponed for the day. So he went to South Kensington to look at the Museums there. He did not go into them actually, he just looked at them and at the colleges and buildings generally. It was a preliminary reconnaissance.
The Museums were quite good to look at. Larger, more extensive, than the British Museum. Probably they contained—all sorts of things.
Christina Alberta reappeared in the studio about half-pastsix looking very bright and exalted. There was something about her subtly triumphant.
She offered no explanation of her disappearance. She was full of the visit to Tunbridge on the morrow. They must catch a train soon after nine and have a good long day. She was unusually affectionate to her Daddy.
Harold was out for the evening and Fay had some reviewing to do, so they had quite a quiet and domestic evening. Mr. Preemby read with a varying attention a nice deep confusing book he had found in the room upstairs calledFantasia of the Unconsciousabout the Lost Atlantis and similar things.