CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER
Mr. Wells has also written the following novels:
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE.
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM.
KIPPS.
TONO-BUNGAY.
ANN VERONICA.
MR. POLLY.
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI.
MARRIAGE.
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS.
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN.
BEALBY.
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT.
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH.
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP.
JOAN AND PETER.
THE UNDYING FIRE.
THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART.
The following Fantastic and Imaginative Romances:
THE TIME MACHINE.
THE WONDERFUL VISIT.
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU.
THE INVISIBLE MAN.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.
THE SLEEPER AWAKES.
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.
THE SEA LADY.
THE FOOD OF THE GODS.
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET.
THE WAR IN THE AIR.
THE WORLD SET FREE.
MEN LIKE GODS.
THE DREAM.
Numerous Short Stories collected under the following Titles:
THE STOLEN BACILLUS.
THE PLATTNER STORY.
TALES OF SPACE AND TIME.
TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM.
The same Short Stories will also be found in three volumes:
TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED.
TALES OF WONDER.
TALES OF LIFE AND ADVENTURE.
A Series of Books on Social, Religious, and Political Questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900).
A MODERN UTOPIA.
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA.
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD.
FIRST AND LAST THINGS.
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING.
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY.
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS.
THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION.
WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PEACE.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER.
A YEAR OF PROPHESYING.
And Two Little Books about Children’s Play, called:
FLOOR GAMES AND LITTLE WARS.
_A uniform Atlantic Edition of Mr. Wells’ works is in course of
publication._
CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S
FATHER
BY
H. G. WELLS
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1925
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY H. G. WELLS.
Set up and electrotyped.
Published September, 1925.
Reprinted September 22, 1925.
Reprinted November, 1925.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE CORNWALL PRESS
_CONTENTS_
BOOK THE FIRST
_The Coming of Sargon, King of Kings_
PAGE
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE EARLY LIFE OF MR. PREEMBY 11
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHRISTINA ALBERTA 28
CHAPTER THE THIRD
IN LONSDALE MEWS 50
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE PETUNIA BOARDING HOUSE 85
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE SCALES FALL FROM MR. PREEMBY’S EYES 114
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
CHRISTINA ALBERTA CONSULTS A WISE MAN 132
BOOK THE SECOND
_The World Rejects Sargon, King of Kings_
CHAPTER THE FIRST
INCOGNITO 163
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES 195
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE JOURNEY OF SARGON UNDERNEATH THE WORLD 218
BOOK THE THIRD
_The Resurrection of Sargon, King of Kings_
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHRISTINA ALBERTA IN SEARCH OF A FATHER 245
CHAPTER THE SECOND
HOW BOBBY STOLE A LUNATIC 300
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE LAST PHASE 343
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
MAY AT UDIMORE 369
CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER
_BOOK THE FIRST_
THE COMING OF SARGON, KING
OF KINGS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
_The Early Life of Mr. Preemby_
§ 1
This is the story of a certain Mr. Preemby, a retired laundryman
and widower, who abandoned his active interest in the Limpid Stream
Laundry, in the parish of Saint Simon Unawares, near Woodford
Wells, upon the death of his wife in the year of grace 1920. Some
very remarkable experiences came to him. The story is essentially a
contemporary story: it is a story of London in the age of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, broadcasting, and the first Labour peers. The historical
element in it is insignificant and partly erroneous, and the future,
though implicitly present, is substantially ignored.
Since washing in London, like the milk trade and baking and the linen
drapery and various other branches of commerce, is something rather
specialized and hereditary and a little difficult towards outsiders,
it is necessary to explain that Mr. Preemby was not a laundryman born.
He had little of the spirit and go of a true London laundryman. He
married into laundrying. He met a Miss Hossett at Sheringham in 1899,
an heiress and a young lady of great decision of character; he wooed
and won her and married her, as you will be told, almost without
realizing what he was doing. The Hossetts are big people in the laundry
world, and the Limpid Stream concern, which presently fell into the
capable hands of Mrs. Preemby, was only one of a series of related
and sympathetic businesses in the north, north-east and south-west
districts of London.
Mr. Preemby, as Miss Hossett’s family came to recognize quite frankly
and explicitly at a very early stage, derived from a less practical
strain than his wife. His father had been an artist of considerable
charm and unpunctuality, a photographic artist, who resided at
Sheringham and made what were called in the eighteen-eighties,
“gem” photographs of the summer visitors to that place. In the
eighteen-eighties he was a well-known Sheringham figure, dark and
handsome and sometimes a little unkempt, wearing a brown velvet jacket
and a large grey soft felt hat. He would fall into conversation with
the visitors upon the beach, and a certain air of distinction about
him would bring a sufficient proportion to his studio to maintain him.
His wife, our Mr. Preemby’s mother, was a patient, underdeveloped
personality, the daughter of a farmer near Diss. When presently Mr.
Preemby senior passed out of his son’s life--he became romantically
entangled with a small variety entertainment in the summer of 1887 and
vanished away with it in the autumn with as little fuss as possible,
never to return to Sheringham--Mrs. Preemby senior became the working
partner in a small lodging-house and died in a year or so’s time,
leaving her furniture, her interest in the lodging-house and her only
son to her cousin and partner, Mrs. Witcherly.
Young Albert Edward Preemby was then a good-looking, slender youth of
sixteen, with his father’s curliness and his mother’s fair hair and
eyes of horizon blue, dreamy and indisposed for regular employment.
Even as a child he had been given to reverie; at school he would
sit with sums or book neglected before him, looking beyond them at
unknown things; his early experiences in business were disappointing
by reason of this abstraction. After a number of unsuccessful attempts
to exploit his gifts at some favourable point in the complex machinery
of our civilization, he came to rest for several years in the office
of a house-agent and coal-merchant in Norwich to whom his mother was
distantly related.
Some ancient, remembered, sentimental tie helped Albert Edward to this
appointment and shielded any imperfections in his performance from too
urgent a criticism. He did much better at it than anyone could have
expected. The calling of a house-agent differs from most other callings
in the fact that the necessary driving energy is supplied entirely
by the clientele, and there was something about the letting of the
larger houses that touched the dormant imagination of young Preemby.
He revealed a natural gift for attractive description and was duly
entrusted with the work of collecting particulars from prospective
lessors. He had a quite useful hopefulness. And even the coal proved
unexpectedly interesting so soon as he found that none of it had to be
carried about by him. He could never believe that all the golden scales
one finds in it were pyrites. He cherished a secret dream of a great
commercial enterprise to work cinder heaps for residual gold. He told
no one of this project, he took no steps to realize it, but it warmed
his daily routines with its promise of release and wealth. And when
things were slack in the office in the early afternoon and he was left
in charge, he would go and sit on the coal counter and pick out the
coal samples for the little trays and turn them over and over and view
them from various angles and weigh them in his hand and lapse into the
most splendid visions.
And if inquirers after houses came in, he would receive them with a
manner almost regal.
In Norwich he became a member of the Y.M.C.A., but he was interested
in its literary rather than its religious side, and he attended any
political debates available. He never spoke in these debates, but he
sat at the back reflecting that politicians are, after all, no more
than puppets in the hands of the silent rich men who sit behind the
scenes. It was in Norwich, too, that he was able to buy his first
tailor-made suit, of a most becoming grey. When he went to stay with
Mrs. Witcherly at Sheringham for his summer holiday of a fortnight, she
was delighted by the improvement in his appearance and much impressed
by the active hopefulness that had replaced his former lethargy. Upon
the sea front in the afternoon in his grey suit, to anyone who did not
know about him, he might have been almost any sort of prosperous summer
visitor.
It seems a yesterday, and yet it seems ages ago, that our plump and
short Mr. Preemby was that small blonde young man twirling his stick
and glancing furtively but desirously at the lady bathers in their vast
petticoated bathing-dresses and oilskin caps, as he strolled along
the Sheringham front. That was in the days when motor cars were still
rather a joke, a smell, and a noise and wayside repairs, and flying was
understood to be impossible. Queen Victoria had had her Diamond Jubilee
and nobody thought Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, would ever survive
to be King. The War in South Africa was being arranged for that summer,
to last six months and employ forty thousand men. And it was on the
third day of his grey suit holiday at Sheringham that Mr. Preemby was
run into by his future wife, Miss Hossett, riding on a bicycle, and
thrown against and almost run over by her friend Miss Meeta Pinkey.
Because, incredible as it may seem to the modern reader, people did
succeed in those distant nineties, before the coming of the more
suitable automobile, in knocking down and running over other people
with the sluggish apparatus, bicycles, horse-drawn vehicles and so
forth, then available.
§ 2
Miss Meeta Pinkey was an emotional blonde girl, and she fell off her
machine gracefully and naturally into Mr. Preemby’s arms as he was
hurled against her. It would seem to have been the original intention
of Destiny to have made this the beginning of a permanent relationship,
but in this matter Destiny had reckoned without Miss Hossett. Miss
Meeta Pinkey was as ripe for love just then as dry gunpowder is for
a bang, and she was already deeply in love with Mr. Preemby before
she had been replaced securely on her feet. She stood flushed and
round-eyed and breathless, and Mr. Preemby looked quite manly and
handsome after picking up her bicycle with an air of rescue.
Miss Hossett, after butting against Mr. Preemby, had swerved,
dismounted and stood now prepared for a dispute. The collision
had further loosened the already loose handlebar of the entirely
untrustworthy hired machine she had been riding. It was this looseness
had caused the accident. Her attention seemed divided equally between
this and the possible grievance of Mr. Preemby. “I rang my bell,” she
said.
She was flushed and erect. She was a round-faced girl with a long, thin
neck, a good bright complexion, glasses on her thin nose and a resolute
thin-lipped mouth.
“I did all I could to avoid you,” she said.
“Awkward of me,” said Mr. Preemby disarmingly. “I was lost in a
day-dream.”
“You aren’t hurt--?” asked Meeta.
“Startled,” said Mr. Preemby, “especially where the wheel got me. This
place is full of corners.”
“I’d’ve been over,” said Meeta, “if you hadn’t caught me.”
Miss Hossett was reassured about any possible conflict with Mr.
Preemby. Evidently he was going to be quite nice about the accident.
“This handlebar was as loose as could be,” she said. “Look at it! You
can twist it about like on a swivel. They ought to be punished for
letting out such machines. Some of these days one of ’em’ll get let in
for Damages. Then they’ll be a bit more careful. Scandalous I call it.”
“You can’t ride it at all now,” said Mr. Preemby.
“No,” she agreed. “Have to take it back to them.”
It seemed only right and proper for Mr. Preemby to wheel the machine
for her back through the town to the hiring place, where Miss Hossett
reproved the hirer, refused to pay anything, and secured the return
of her deposit in a few well-chosen words. Miss Pinkey paid the hire
of her bicycle for a First Hour. It seemed natural after that for
the little party of three to keep together. They kept together with
a faint sense of adventure, and Mr. Preemby behaved as nothing less
than a normal lodger at Miss Witcherly’s establishment and summer
visitor to the seaside. His new-found friends were Londoners, and he
referred himself to Norwich and the management of house property. He
was quite amusing about Sheringham. He said it was “a dear little
backward-forward place,” that it was a real treat to come to for a
breath of sea air.
“I don’t like regular smart places,” said Mr. Preemby. “I’m too
absent-minded.”
§ 3
In after years Mr. Preemby would often try to recall the various stages
that led to his marrying Miss Hossett, but there was always a vague
sense that he missed out something, though he knew not what it was nor
where it ought to have come in.
At first things did not look in the least like his marrying Miss
Hossett. Indeed they did not look like his marrying anyone, and if
the word marriage had been whispered in his ears as the possible
consequence of this encounter he would have been terrified. He
perceived that he was acceptable company to these girls, but it seemed
to him that it was Meeta who formed the link between them and himself.
A fourth person presently joined their company who answered to the
name of Wilfred, and it seemed to Mr. Preemby that the air of mutual
proprietorship between Wilfred and Miss Hossett was unchallengeable.
The young people wandered in a little party along the sea front until
the sea front came to an end, and there they found a sheltered and
comparatively secluded niche in the brow of the low cliffs and gave
themselves up to the delights of Spooning; and it was Meeta who Spooned
with Mr. Preemby that afternoon and Wilfred who Spooned with Miss
Hossett. Across the gulf of a quarter of a century the memory of Mr.
Preemby was still certain that this was so.
The fashions of life change from age to age. Knowledge has spread
and refinement increased; and a generation of young people, more
restrained, more sophisticated, or more decisive than their
predecessors has taken possession of the world. This Spooning was an
artless, clumsy dalliance in great favour in those vanished days, a
dalliance that was kept within the bounds of strict decorum--if ever
that became necessary--by cries of “Starp it” or “Starpit, I tell you,”
on the part of the lady. They embraced, they kissed, and put their
silly young heads together and so whiled away the long waiting-time
before love had its way with them. The summer resorts of England were
littered with young people indulging in these poor, silly, undignified
anticipations of love. Mr. Preemby, it became manifest, was a natural
born Spooner.
“It’s lovely,” said Miss Meeta, “the way you squeeze me.”
Mr. Preemby squeezed some more and ventured to kiss a hot ear.
“Go On with you!” said Miss Meeta, in a voice thick with delight. “That
little moustache of yours--it _tickles_.”
Flushed with encouragement and preoccupied with ideas for further
enterprises, Mr. Preemby did not remark that the affairs of Miss
Hossett and her Wilfred followed a more troubled and less satisfactory
course. Wilfred was not a type that appealed to Mr. Preemby. In
spite of the fact that he was much less neat in his dress than Mr.
Preemby--he had grey flannel trousers, an old fancy vest, a tweed
Norfolk jacket, and low brown shoes with light-coloured socks--he
impressed Mr. Preemby as being consciously a social superior. He was
young--the youngest of the party--and yet dominant. He had large red
hands and big feet, much untidy hair, ill-regulated features that
might later be handsome, and a hoarse guffaw. He viewed Mr. Preemby as
though he knew all about him and thought the worse of him for it, but
did not intend to make any positive trouble for the present about his
existence. He was, Meeta whispered, a medical student at Cambridge, and
his father was a Harley Street physician who had been knighted. He did
not Spoon with any abandonment; he seemed weary of Spooning, he had
perhaps been Spooning for some days, and his conversation with Miss
Hossett went on in subdued contentious tones. He sat a little apart
from her amidst the sand and coarse bluish grass, and her face was
flushed. What they said was inaudible to our intertwined couple.
“Chris and Wilfred don’t get on together as we do,” Meeta said in a low
voice. “They’re sillies.”
“He’s like all the men,” said Meeta, “’Sept one perhaps. Want
everything they do and give nothing.
“He won’t even say they’re engaged,” she said. “Dodged seeing her
father.”
There was a pause for reflection and then a renewal of endearments.
“I’m gorne on you,” said Meeta. “I _am_ fair gorne on you. You’ve got
the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. China blue they are.”
§ 4
So detachedly it was that Mr. Preemby and his future wife passed their
first afternoon together. He remembered it, as he remembered most
actual things, indistinctly, in a setting of hot sand and sunshine,
blue-grey grass and a line of poppies nodding against an intense blue
sky. And then across these opening memories Chris Hossett seemed to
leap at him with flushed cheeks and glowing eyes, magnified by her
glasses.
Two or three days intervened before that passionate pounce. Mr.
Preemby, in his character of an incidental visitor to Sheringham, was
under no obligation to produce a social background, but Miss Pinkey
introduced him to two large, kindly aunts of a sedentary sort, as a
young man related to Miss Hossett who had saved her from a nasty fall
off a bicycle, and he and she both went to tea with Chris Hossett’s
“people.” Old Mr. Hossett was a very ailing man, excessively fat and
irritable; he had never been the same, whatever the same was, after his
only son had died; and Mrs. Hossett, an energetic lean threat of what
her daughter might become, had to wait on Mr. Hossett hand and foot.
She had spectacles instead of Chris’s glasses, her eyes were careworn
and her complexion was leaden and her neck lean. There were also a
married cousin and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Widgery, who seemed to be
under the impression that Mr. Preemby was a relation of Miss Pinkey’s.
Mr. Widgery had a long pock-marked face and the dullest brown eyes
Mr. Preemby had ever seen. There was nothing difficult to eat at tea
and Mr. Preemby got on very well listening to an explanation of the
precariousness of Mr. Hossett’s existence, due to heart trouble, from
Mrs. Hossett and of just how unsatisfactory and distressing it was to
come away and leave the laundry in the hands of a manager. Wilfred did
not come to the tea. He had been asked but he did not come.
The next day Mr. Preemby met Wilfred on the sea front watching the
girls bathing from a bathing machine. Afterwards all four went for a
walk in search of privacy, and it became evident that Miss Hossett
declined to Spoon further with Wilfred. It was evident that there was
profound trouble between Chris and Wilfred. They scarcely spoke as they
returned towards the town; and before the sea front was reached Wilfred
said “So long” quite suddenly, and turned away and vanished up a road
running inland. Thereupon Wilfred passed out of Mr. Preemby’s world;
Mr. Preemby never knew what became of him and never wanted to know;
and the next day he became aware for the first time of Miss Hossett’s
magnified eyes, regarding him with an interest and a challenge that
made him feel almost uncomfortable.
Miss Hossett became a serious obstacle to the Spooning of Meeta. The
quartette was now reduced to a trio; and Mr. Preemby found himself
the apex, so to speak, of a triangle, the eternal triangle in an
exceptionally acute form. Whenever Meeta was on the one hand, Chris was
on the other. She called him “Our Teddy”; she pressed upon him; she
went so far as to stroke his hair. Meeta’s endearments faded to some
extent in the presence of this competition, but she made no explicit
objection.
Deep in the nature of the human male is a fount of polygamous pride.
Mr. Preemby in these novel circumstances was proud and disingenuous.
He believed himself “carrying on” with two girls at once, and it
seemed to him to be a very splendid situation. But indeed it was not
so much a case of carrying on as of being carried off. In the American
world of emotional imaginations there is an ideal called the Cave Man,
much cherished by quiet, unaggressive women because its realization
would involve so little trouble on their own part. The Cave Man is
supposed to seize and grip and carry off and adore. In this simple
love story of Mr. Preemby’s Miss Hossett played the Cave Man’s rôle,
up to the carrying-off point at any rate. On the first occasion of
their being alone together she drew him to her and kissed him on the
mouth with a warmth and an intensity and thoroughness that astonished
and overwhelmed Mr. Preemby. It was quite different from Meeta’s coy
achievements, or anything he had ever met around Norwich. He had not
known that there was such kissing.
And in the warm summer twilight Mr. Preemby found himself being carried
off to a lonely piece of beach to Spoon with Chris Hossett. The light
of a rising full moon mingled with the afterglow; pebbles shone
out like gems and stars. He carried himself bravely but he was all
atremble. He knew that this time the enterprises would not come from
him. And the Spooning of Chris Hossett was no more like the Spooning of
Meeta than a furnace glow is like the light of the moon.
“I love you,” said Chris as though that justified anything, and as they
stumbled homeward at an hour that Mr. Preemby called “feefully late,”
she said: “You’re going to marry me aren’t you? You’ve _got_ to marry
me now. And then we can _really_ make love. ’Soften as we like.”
“I can’t rightly say that I’m exactly in a position to keep a wife just
at present,” said Mr. Preemby.
“I don’t see that there’s any necessity for me to ask a man to keep
me,” said Miss Hossett. “You’re a wonder, Teddy, anyhow, and I’m going
to marry you. It’s got to be, and there you are.”
“But _’ow_ can I marry you?” asked Mr. Preemby almost peevishly--for he
was really very tired.
“One would think to hear you that no one had ever married before,” said
Chris Hossett. “And besides--after this--you _must_.”
“Mind you I’ve got to go back to Norwich next Tuesday,” said Mr.
Preemby.
“You ought to have thought of that before,” she said.
“But I’ll lose my situation.”
“Naturally father will find you something better. We aren’t poor
people, Teddy. There’s no need to be scared about it....”
In such terms was Chris Hossett wooed and won by Mr. Preemby. He was
scared, dreadfully scared, but also he was tremendously roused. It
impressed him as being a wildly romantic affair and very terrifying and
a little hard on Meeta Pinkey. But he was bustled along too fast to
think very much about Meeta Pinkey. He was introduced over again to the
Hossett parents next day as their daughter’s affianced husband, and in
secret she gave him three golden sovereigns to buy her an engagement
ring as a surprise. Mrs. Hossett behaved at first as though she
approved of Mr. Preemby and disapproved of the marriage, and then after
what was clearly a stormy scene upstairs with her daughter, she behaved
as though she approved highly of the marriage and thought Mr. Preemby a
very objectionable person. Mr. Hossett would not speak to Mr. Preemby
directly, but he spoke of him to his wife and to imaginary auditors in
Mr. Preemby’s presence as a “scoundrel” who had “got hold” of his girl.
Yet he, too, seemed to regard the marriage as desirable, and no one
made any reply to his _obiter dicta_.
It was all very puzzling and exalting to Mr. Preemby. He did little
except what he was told to do. He was carried over his marriage as
a man might be carried over a weir. He left any explanation to Mrs.
Witcherly of what was happening for some more favourable occasion. He
went off on Tuesday with his little valise as though he was going back
to Norwich. He wrote a simple letter of regret to the house-agent and
coal-merchant. Private affairs, he said, of an urgent nature prevented
his return to his duties. Mrs. and Miss Hossett went up to London with
him. They all took rooms at a temperance hotel in Bloomsbury, and Mr.
Preemby was married by special licence at St. Martin’s by Trafalgar
Square.
Then he went down to the Limpid Stream Laundry to live with his
parents-in-law and master the duties of assistant manager, canvasser
and publicity agent. Mr. Hossett never spoke to him and sometimes
talked rather unpleasantly about him when he was in the room, making
accusations that were better ignored, but Mrs. Hossett gradually became
cordial again. And presently Mr. Hossett had a heart seizure and died,
and in the course of a few months Mr. Preemby found himself a father.
When he was first confronted with his daughter and, as it proved, his
only child, he thought her an extremely ugly little red object. He had
never seen a baby at so early a stage before. She had a lot of very
fine moist dark hair which subsequently gave place to a later crop; she
had large indeterminate features and remarkably large feet and hands.
Mr. Preemby had an absurd impression that he had seen her somewhere
before and hadn’t liked her. Then in a day or so she became a quite
ordinary pink baby and wonder gave place to affection.
She was christened Christina Alberta after her mother and Mr. Preemby.
§ 5
In time all these experiences mellowed in Mr. Preemby’s memory into a
vague, glorious, romantic, adventurous past. He continued to be rather
dreamy and distraught, but on the whole he made a dutiful, faithful
husband, and he got on very well with his masterful and capable wife.
She was, he had discovered on his marriage, three years his senior,
and she continued to be in every respect his senior to the day of her
death. But she treated him with proprietary affection; she chose all
his clothes for him, she cultivated his manners and bearing and upheld
him against all other people. She dressed him rather more like a golf
champion than he would have done himself if he had had any say in the
matter. She would not let him have a bicycle for many years, she was
a little exacting about his ways of keeping the laundry accounts, she
fixed his pocket-money at ten shillings a week, and she was disposed
to restrict his opportunities for conversation with feminine members
of the laundry staff. But he made no marked protest against these
slight deviations from the customary obedience of a wife. A tendency
to plumpness manifested itself, and he grew considerable quantities of
blonde moustache without apparent effort.
Their home was an agreeable one, the more so after Mrs. Hossett had
followed her husband to his resting-place, under a marble crucifix
with a dove and olive branch in relievo at the intersection of the
arms, at Woodford Wells. Mr. Preemby became a great reader, reading
not only romantic novels--he had a great distaste for “realism” in any
form--but ancient history, astronomy, astrology and mystical works.
He became deeply interested in the problem of the pyramids and in the
probable history of the lost continent of Atlantis. Mental science
also attracted him, and the possibility of increasing will-power
very greatly. He would sometimes practise will-power before the
looking-glass in his bedroom when Mrs. Preemby was not about. At
nights he would sometimes will himself to sleep instead of going to
sleep in the usual fashion. He gave a considerable amount of attention
to prophecy and eschatology. He developed views of his own about the
Day of Judgment that might have led to a breach with the Established
Church if Mrs. Preemby had not thought that such a breach would react
unfavourably upon the Laundry. As time went on he accumulated a library
of upwards of a thousand volumes and a very considerable vocabulary.
His wife viewed these intellectual preoccupations with friendly
sympathy, at times even with pride, but she took little part in them
herself. The Laundry was good enough for her. She loved the Laundry
more and more; loved its piled clean and starched shirts and collars
and its folded and stacked sheets, loved the creak of its machinery and
the suddy bustle of the washing room. She loved to have it all going
on, orderly and right; to feel everything going through the tubs and
washers and wringers, sure and safe; nothing astray, nothing missing
at the end. When she walked about the place voices were hushed and
scrubbing became respectfully assiduous. And she liked making things
pay.
On Sunday afternoons and on days when the laundry had no need of his
services, Mr. Preemby took long walks. In fine weather he would walk
into Epping Forest or to Ongar or even into the rustic peace of the
Roothings, but in dull weather he would go Londonward. After a while
the trams were extended as far as the present terminus at Woodford and
it became possible to ride very pleasantly right into the heart of
London by way of Seven Sisters Road and Camden Town or, with a little
bit of extra walking, by the Lea Bridge Road and the Angel and Holborn.
The greatness and multitudinous activities of London stirred slumbering
strands of Mr. Preemby’s imagination. He would go in and lunch at an
Aërated Bread Shop on a scone and butter, with a cup of cocoa and
perhaps a jam-puff, and he would spend hours looking into shop windows
and sometimes even making small purchases. He loved Charing Cross Road
with its book-shops, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Clerkenwell, and
the Whitechapel Road, but Piccadilly and Bond Street and Regent Street
seemed costly and lacking in true intellectual interest, and he felt
his baggy tweed knickerbockers and cap a little out of tune in these
smart places. Sometimes he would go to the British Museum and look
very hard at objects connected with the pyramids. Great public events
always drew him to London. If there was a great murder or a great fire
or a Royal Wedding or a Royal Funeral, Mr. Preemby would be sure to be
looking at it where the crowd was thickest, often with a neat packet
of provisions, a sandwich, an orange, or so forth, that Mrs. Preemby
had provided. But he never saw illuminations and fireworks because Mrs.
Preemby liked to have him at home when the day’s work was over. He
enjoyed the Great War of 1914-18 gravely and profoundly. Once he passed
a man who he thought afterwards was almost certainly a German spy. The
thought thrilled him for days. He had given him a good look anyhow. He
attended air raids in plenty, and he saw the Potters Bar Zeppelin shot
down. He was a good four years too old for compulsory military service
when the time came, and Mrs. Preemby would not let him be a special
constable because she thought he might catch cold.
Mr. Preemby’s work in the counting house was not very onerous, but
he also gave thought and attention to the extension of the business
outside. He invented several attractive circulars. His experience
as a house-agent had trained him to note the existence of large
comfortable-looking houses that might otherwise have escaped his
observation and to ascertain whether they were occupied; he would then
find out whether the Limpid Stream Laundry got the washing from such
establishments, and if not he would send a circular and even follow
it up with a personal letter. He was vaguely observant about the
premises. He would go sometimes and look for quite a long time at the
furnaces or the delivery vans or any new piece of machinery like the
new calendering machine until he got used to it. But if he stood about
where there were girls working, Mrs. Preemby would make some excuse to
get him back into the office because, as she explained, she thought
a man standing about affected the girls’ work unfavourably. He took
in and sometimes read the _British Laundryman_ and the _Dyers’ and
Cleaners’ Gazette_.
Occasionally he had happy ideas. It was his idea to paint the delivery
vans bright blue and decorate them with a swastika, and to paint
exactly the same colour and design on the front of the laundry and
put it on the bills. But when he wanted to put the van drivers into
swastika caps and blue the clothes baskets, Mrs. Preemby said she
thought the thing had gone far enough. It was also Mr. Preemby who
suggested Ford cars instead of horse vans as early as 1913. This change
was made in 1915.
And at home with her peaceful interested father and her busy,
occasionally, rather astringent, mother, Christina Alberta grew to
girlhood and womanhood.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
_Christina Alberta_
§ 1
This story, it was clearly explained in the first paragraph of the
first section of the first chapter, is a story about Mr. Preemby in the
later years, the widower years, of his life. That statement has all the
value of an ordinary commercial guarantee, and on no account shall we
ever wander far from Mr. Preemby. But the life of his daughter was so
closely interwoven with his own during that time that it is necessary
to tell many things about her distinctly and explicitly before we get
our real story properly begun. And even after it has begun, and while
it goes on, and right up to the end, Christina Alberta will continue to
intrude.
Intrusion was in her nature. She was never what is called an engaging
child. But she always had a great liking for her Daddy and he had the
greatest affection and respect for her.
She had little or no tact, and there was always something remote
and detached, something of the fairy changeling about her. Even her
personal appearance was tactless. She had a prominent nose which tended
to grow larger, whereas Mrs. Preemby’s nose was small and bright and
pinched between her glasses, and her father’s delicately chiselled and
like some brave little boat shooting a great cascade of moustache; she
was dark and both her parents were fair. As she grew up the magic
forces of adolescence assembled her features into a handsome effect,
but she was never really pretty. Her eyes were brown and bright and
hard. She had her mother’s thin-lipped, resolute mouth and modestly
determined chin. And she had her mother’s clear firm skin and bright
colour. She was a humming, shouting, throwing, punching child with a
tendency not to hear admonitions and an almost instinctive dexterity
in avoiding sudden slaps. She flitted about. She might be up the
drying-ground or she might be under your bed. The only thing to do was
to down and look.
She danced. Neither Mr. Preemby nor Mrs. Preemby danced, and this
continual jiggeting about perplexed and worried them. A piano or a
distant band would set her dancing or she would dance to her own
humming; she danced to hymn-tunes and on a Sunday. There was a standing
offer from Mr. Preemby of sixpence if ever she sat quiet for five
minutes, but it was never taken up.
At her first school, a mixed day-school in Buckhurst Hill, she was
first of all extremely unpopular and then extremely popular and then
she was expelled. Afterwards she did fairly well at the Taverners’
Girls’ School at Woodford, where she was recognized from the first as
a humorist. There was always a difficulty in calling her any other
name than Christina Alberta. People tried all sorts of names but none
of them stuck but “Christina Alberta.” “Babs” and “Baby” and “Bertie”
and “Buss” she was called at home and “Ally” and “Tina,” and at school
they tried “Nosey” and “Suds” and “Feet” and “Preemy” and “Prim.” Also
“Golliwog” because of her hair at hockey. These all came off again, and
left the original name exposed.
She was quick at her lessons and particularly at history, geography and
drawing, but disrespectful to her teachers; at school hockey she played
forward right with marked success. She could run like the wind, and she
never seemed blown. Her pinch was simply frightful. She could make
sudden grimaces with her nose that gave the weaker sort hysterics. She
was particularly disposed to do this at school prayers.
Between her mother and herself there was a streak of animosity. It
was not a very broad streak, but it was there. Her mother seemed to
cherish some incommunicable grievance against her. It didn’t prevent
Mrs. Preemby from doing her duty by the child, but it restrained any
real warmth of affection between them. From an early age it was Daddy
got the kisses and got climbed over and pulled about. He returned this
affection. He called her “my own little girl” and would even say at
times that she was a Wonder. He took her for walks with him and told
her many secret things that were in his mind, about the Lost Atlantis
and the Lamas of Tibet and the fundamentals of Astrology preserved
indecipherably in the proportions of the pyramids. He’d often wished,
he said, to have a good look at the pyramids. Sometimes one man saw
things that others didn’t. She would listen intently, although not
always in quite the right spirit.
He would tell her of the virtue and science of Atlantis. “They walked
about in long white robes,” he said. “More like Bible Characters than
human beings.”
“Good for the laundries, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.
“All we know of astrology is just fragments of what they knew. They
knew the past and future.”
“Pity they were all drowned,” she remarked without apparent irony.
“Maybe they weren’t all drowned,” he said darkly.
“You don’t mean there’s Atlantics about nowadays.”
“Some may have escaped. Descendants may be nearer than you suppose. Why
you and me, Christina, we may have Atlantic blood!”
His manner conveyed his conviction.
“It doesn’t seem to help much,” she said.
“Helps more than you think. Hidden gifts. Insight. Things like that.
_We_ aren’t common persons, Christina Alberta.”
For some moments the two of them pursued independent reveries.
“Still we don’t _know_ we’re Atlantics,” said Christina Alberta.
§ 2
After she had fought her way to the sixth form in the Taverners’
School the educational outlook of Christina Alberta was troubled by
dissensions both within the school and without. The staff was divided
about her, her discipline was bad, her class-work rank or vile, but
she passed examinations, and particularly external examinations by
independent examiners, with conspicuous success. There was a general
desire to get her out of the school; but whether that was to be done by
a university scholarship or a simple request to her parents to take her
away, was a question under dispute. The games-mistress was inclined to
regard murder as a third possible course because of the girl’s utter
disregard for style in games, her unsportsmanlike trick of winning
them in irregular and unexpected ways, and her tendency to make drill
and gymnastics an occasion for a low facetiousness far more suitable
for the ordinary class-room. The English and Literature mistress
concurred--although Christina Alberta would spend hours over her essays
working in sentences and paragraphs from Pater and Ruskin and Hazlitt
so that they might pass as her own original constructions. It was not
Christina Alberta’s fault if ever and again these threads of literary
gold were marked in red ink, “Clumsy” or “Might be better expressed”
or “Too flowery.” Only the head-mistress had a really good word for
Christina Alberta. But then the head-mistress, as became her position,
made a specialty of understanding difficult cases.
And Christina Alberta was always quietly respectful to the
head-mistress, and could produce a better side to her nature with the
most disconcerting alacrity whenever the head-mistress was called in.
Christina Alberta, as soon as the issue became clear to her, decided
for the scholarship. She reformed almost obtrusively, she became
tidy, she ceased to be humorous, she lost sets of tennis to the
games-mistress like a little sports-woman, and she stopped arguing
and became the sedulous ape of Stevenson for the estranged English
mistress. But it was up-hill work even in the school. There was a
little too much elegant surrender in her reformed tennis and a little
too much parody about her English in velveteen. The possibility that
she would ever join that happy class of girls who go in from the
suburbs to classes in London and lead the higher life beyond parental
inspection and sometimes until quite late in the evening in studios,
laboratories and college lecture-rooms, seemed a very insecure one,
even without reckoning with the quiet but determined opposition of her
mother.
For Mrs. Preemby was not the woman to like a daughter educated above
her parentage and station. She came to lament her weakness in not
bringing Christina Alberta into the laundry as she herself had been
brought in at the age of fourteen. Then she would have learnt the
business from the ground up, and have qualified herself to help and at
last succeed her mother, even as Mrs. Preemby had helped and succeeded
Mrs. Hossett. But the school with its tennis and music and French and
so forth had turned the girl against this clean and cleansing life. She
was rising seventeen now, and the sooner she abandoned these things
which lead straight to school-teaching, spinsterhood, Italian holidays,
“art” clothes and stuck-up incapacity, the better for her and every one.
She made a campaign against Christina Alberta’s habit of sitting
about in unladylike attitudes and reading; and when Mr. Preemby took
the unusual and daring course of saying that it was a bit hard on
the girl, and that he didn’t see any harm in a book or so now and
then, Mrs. Preemby took him up to Christina Alberta’s own little room
to see what came of it, and more particularly to see the sort of
pictures she’d stuck up there. Even when he was confronted with a large
photographic reproduction of Michael Angelo’s creation of Adam as the
master had painted that event on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in
Rome, he still made a feeble show of resistance, and said that it was
“Art.”
“You’d stand anything she did, I believe,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Look at
it. Art! Look at these books! Darwin’s _Origin of Species_! That’s a
nice book for a girl to be prying into.”
“Very likely she doesn’t see the harm of it,” said Mr. Preemby.
“_Her!_” said Mrs. Preemby compactly. “And look at this!”
“This” was Howe’s _Atlas of Biology_. She opened it to display its
large pages crowded with pictures of the detailed dissection of a frog.
“Reely, my dear!” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s one of her schoolbooks.
There reely isn’t nothing what I should call _improper_ in that. It’s
Science. And, after all, it’s only a frog.”
“Pretty things they teach at school nowadays. What with your Art and
your Science. Doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Why, when I was a
girl if I’d asked Ma what was inside _any_ animal, she’d have slapped
me and slapped me hard. And rightly. There’s things rightly hid from
us--and hid they ought to be. God shows us as much as is good for us.
More. No need to _open_ animals. And here--here’s a book _in French_!”
“H’m,” said Mr. Preemby, yielding a little. He took up the lemon-yellow
volume and turned it over in his hand.
“All this reading!” said Mrs. Preemby and indicated three shelves of
books.
Mr. Preemby assembled his courage. “You mustn’t expect me to go against
reading, Chris,” he said. “It’s a pleasure and a light. There’s things
in books.... Reely, Chris, I believe you’d be happier if you read a
bit. Christina Alberta is a born reader, whether you like it or not.
She gets it from me, I suppose.”
Mrs. Preemby started and regarded his flushed opposition; the anger
in her eyes was magnified through her glasses. “It’s wonderful,” she
said after a little pause; “it’s truly wonderful how Christina Alberta
manages to get everything she wants.”
§ 3
Miss Maltby-Neverson, the head-mistress of the Taverners’ School,
called upon Mrs. Preemby and shook her resolution a good deal. She was
obviously a lady, and the school washing ran in term-time to twenty
pounds a week. She was taken to see the scandalous picture and she
said: “Very beautiful, I’m sure. One of the really Great Paintings in
the world. Pro-foundly religious. It’s the very words of the Bible made
into a picture. What do you find in it to object to, Mrs. Preemby?”
Whereupon, as if by a trick, the picture ceased to be scandalous and
Mrs. Preemby was ashamed of herself. She saw now there never had been
anything wrong about that picture.
Miss Maltby-Neverson said that Christina Alberta was a difficult type
but a thoroughly interesting personality, a _real_ personality. She had
a great capacity for affection.
“I haven’t found that,” said Mrs. Preemby.
“It is a type I have studied,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson, simply but
conclusively.
She explained that Christina Alberta was an _active_ type. Left to
herself without employment to _stretch_ her faculties she might
easily get into almost any sort of mischief. Almost any sort. Not
that there was anything wrong in her essentially. It was just energy.
Given good hard work and a scope for ambition, she might become a very
satisfactory woman indeed--possibly even a distinguished woman.
“I’ve no use for distinguished women,” said Mrs. Preemby shortly.
“The world has,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson gently.
“I’m afraid I’m one of the old-fashioned sort,” said Mrs. Preemby.
“Christina Alberta isn’t.”
“Let the man be distinguished abroad and the woman distinguished
at home,” said Mrs. Preemby. “I’m sorry to differ from you, Miss
Maltby-Neverson, but one cannot help one’s opinions.”
“It depends upon ourselves,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson.
“I’m afraid I like men to rule,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Woman has her
place in the world, and it isn’t man’s.”
“But I thought Mr. Preemby rather favoured the scholarship idea.”
Mrs. Preemby was baffled. “He _did_,” she said as though she did not
see clearly what that had to do with the matter. “Give the thing a
trial,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson. “After all, she may not win this
scholarship.”
But Christina Alberta won it with marks to spare. She took no risks. It
was a biennial scholarship which had been established by a benefactor
of advanced views. It was tenable at the London School of Economics.
As soon as Christina Alberta knew she had secured it she went, without
consulting her mother or anyone, to a hairdresser’s and had her
hair bobbed. To Mrs. Preemby this was almost a worse blow than the
scholarship. She surveyed her shock-headed, handsome-nosed daughter in
her short gymnastic skirts with a qualm of sincere hatred.
She wished she could make her daughter feel about herself as she
felt about her. “I wish you could only see yourself,” she said with
concentrated bitterness.
“Oh, _I_ know,” said Christina Alberta.
“I suppose you’re a judgment on me,” said Mrs. Preemby.
§ 4
But Christina Alberta had only studied in the London School of
Economics for a year, she was beginning her second year when her mother
obliged her to resign her scholarship. Christina Alberta had stayed
late in London one evening without telling her mother she was going to
do so, she had gone to a discussion of the Population Question at the
New Hope Club in Fitzgerald Street, and she had come home smelling so
strongly of tobacco that her mother had repented of and revoked all her
concessions to modernity there and then.
She had been waiting for that moment for many months. “This ends it,”
she said as she let her daughter in.
Christina Alberta found there was no immediate way round or through
that decision. She worked her father and Miss Maltby-Neverson in vain.
But instead of resigning her scholarship right out as she had been
told to do, she played for time and explained her absence by a vague
reference to family trouble.
Mrs. Preemby in those days was already in very bad health, but this
fact was completely overshadowed in the minds of both her daughter and
her husband by the far more urgent fact that she was now constantly in
a very bad temper. Everything was conspiring to worry her--except Mr.
Preemby, who knew better than to do anything of the sort.