of the Disappointing Peace, were years of very great difficulty for
the laundry business. The munitions business put laundry girls above
themselves and there was no doing anything with them. Coal, soap,
everything was at unheard-of prices, and it was impossible to get back
on the customers by raising the charges. People, even the best sort
of people, were giving up cleanliness. Gentlemen of position would
wear their dress-shirts three or four times and make their undervests
and under-pants last a fortnight. Household linen was correspondingly
eked out. People moved about; the new army officers’ wives came and
went, here to-day and gone to-morrow, leaving unpaid bills. Never
had Mrs. Preemby known so many bad debts. Van men came back from the
army so shell-shocked and militarized that they embezzled out of pure
nervousness and habit. Income tax became a nightmare. Outside as
within, Mrs. Preemby’s life was a conflict. She kept the Limpid Stream
Laundry paying all through that awful time because she was a wonder at
management, but she did it at a terrible loss of vitality.
She became bitterly critical of the unhelpfulness of Mr. Preemby and
her daughter. When they tried to be helpful she criticized their
incapacity. They did more harm than good.
Meal-times were awful. She would sit flushed and glowering through her
glasses, obviously afflicted by a passionate realization of the world’s
injustice and eating very little. Mr. Preemby’s attempts to start a
cheerful conversation were rarely successful. Even Christina Alberta
was overawed.
“Things going a little better this morning?” Mr. Preemby would try.
“Can’t I get rest from business even at my meals?” the poor lady would
complain.
Or, “Looks like pleasant weather for the Derby.”
“Pity you can’t go there for all the help you are in the place. I
suppose you haven’t heard what’s happened to van number two.”
“No!” said Mr. Preemby.
“You wouldn’t. Hind mudguard smashed. Been done for weeks. And nobody
knows who did it. One would think that that was a man’s business
anyhow. But it’s left for me to find out. And pay for. Like everything
else in the place.”
“I’d better make inquiries.”
“I know those inquiries of yours. Better leave the whole thing alone
now. Grin and bear it....”
The silence of the meal would be restored.
She seemed to set a high value upon these awful silences. She even
complained that he ate his cheese biscuits audibly. But how else can
one eat cheese biscuits? Christina Alberta was made of sterner stuff
and became controversial. Then her mother would flare out at her
insolence and declare that “one or the other of us” leaves the table.
“I’ll read upstairs,” said Christina Albert. “It isn’t _my_ wish to be
lunching here.”
Before the abrupt ending of Christina Alberta’s university career she
was present only at breakfast and supper; supper wasn’t nearly as
awful in quality as breakfast, and breakfast could easily be bolted
and got away from; but after the New Hope Club catastrophe, she was
present at all the meals, a sort of lightning-conductor for her father
and something of a restraint upon, and an added exasperation to, her
mother. She took the line of agreeing that if her university career
was to end, then she must go into the laundry business; but she argued
very stoutly that to do that with any hope of success under modern
conditions meant a “proper business training.” If she could not go to
the London School of Economics then she ought to go to Tomlinson’s
Commercial Training School in Chancery Lane and learn book-keeping,
shorthand, typing, business correspondence, précis, commercial French,
and so forth. And after three weeks of painful midday meals this
proposal was adopted under stringent conditions and her season-ticket
to London was renewed. She worked her way very passably through
another winter with Tomlinson’s as her school and most of London as
her playground. She learnt all sorts of things. She added a new set of
friends and acquaintances, some with bobbed hair and some without, of
the most various social origins and associations, to the circle she had
already acquired at the London School of Economics.
When presently Mrs. Preemby began to speak of a gnawing pain that
oppressed her, both her husband and daughter took it at first as a
new development of her general grievance against them and felt no
particular apprehension about it. Mr. Preemby said he thought she ought
to take advice or see some one about it, but for some days she treated
the suggestion with scorn. If once she got in a doctor, she said,
they’d have to find some one else to look after the laundry. Doctors
put you to bed and give you things to keep you there. Otherwise how
could they get a living?
Then suddenly she changed. One morning she confessed she felt
“dreadful.” She went back to bed and Mr. Preemby, with strange
premonitions that the world was coming to an end, trotted off for a
doctor. The clinical thermometer showed a temperature mounting above
one hundred and one. “It hurts. My side hurts,” said Mrs. Preemby.
“I’ve had it once before, but not like this.”
Christina Alberta came home that evening to discover herself capable of
fear, remorse, and tenderness.
She had some strange moments with her mother in between phases of weak
delirium and insensibility. Mrs. Preemby’s face seemed to have become
smaller and prettier; the feverish flush in her cheeks simulated youth.
She was no longer hard or angry, but rather pathetically friendly. And
Christina Alberta hadn’t seen her in bed for years.
“Take care of your Daddy,” said Mrs. Preemby. “You owe more to him--and
less to him--than you think. I had to do all I’ve done. Take care of
him. He’s gentle and good and easily persuaded and not to be trusted
alone in the world....
“I’ve never been quite all a mother should be to you. But you’ve been
_difficult_, Christina.... I’ve had a great respect for you....
“I’m glad you haven’t my eyes. Glasses are a Curse....”
Anxiety about the laundry occupied a large part of her thoughts.
“That woman Smithers in the washing room is a thief, and I’d get rid
of the new man Baxandale. I don’t know why I’ve kept Mrs. Smithers on
so long.... Weakness.... I’m not sure about _him_, there’s nothing
positive yet, but I feel he’s not straight.... I’m very much afraid
we’ve let Lady Badger’s account run too long. Nowadays titles--want
watching. I’ve been misled by her. She promised a cheque.... But I
doubt about you two in the laundry altogether. He can’t and you won’t.
_You_ might have done it.... Never mind that now.
“Sell it as a going concern? The Widgerys might come in. He’s hard, but
he’s straight. Straight enough. They might like to come in....
“It’s never entered my head I wasn’t good for twenty years yet.... I
wish the doctor wouldn’t think of operating. It won’t do any good.”
She repeated many of her phrases.
“I hate the thought of being opened,” she said. “I suppose--. Like
those frogs in your book....
“Packed like a bag.... Never get it back again. Loose bits....
“Washing-basket or something to keep it together.”
Then her mind went off at a tangent to things beyond Christina
Alberta’s understanding.
“Sneaked off and left me to it.... I wonder what he’s doing now....
Suppose.... Fancy, if it should be him that had to operate....
Operate....
“Children we were.”
She seemed to recollect herself and regarded her daughter with a
hard inquiring eye. Some instinct in Christina Alberta told her to
assume an incurious expression. But these words struck upon her mind
and stayed there and germinated like a seed. Children they were, and
he had sneaked off? Queer and yet according with all sorts of other
imponderables.
§ 5
Mr. Preemby looked unusually small but unusually dignified in his
full mourning. Christina Alberta was also extremely black and shiny.
Her skirts reached for the first time in her life to her ankles; a
sacrifice that she felt would be particularly acceptable to the spirit
of the departed.
A new thing had come into Christina Alberta’s life--responsibility. She
perceived that for unfathomable reasons she was responsible for Mr.
Preemby.
It was clear that the sudden death of his wife under the surgeon’s
knife had been a very great blow to him. He did not break down or weep
or give way to paroxysms of grief, but he was enormously still and sad.
His round china-blue eyes and his moustache looked at the world with
a mournful solemnity. The undertaker had rarely met so satisfactory
a widower. “Everything of the best,” said Mr. Preemby. “Whatever she
can have, she must have.” Under the circumstances, the undertaker, who
was a friend of the family, having met both Mr. and Mrs. Preemby at
whist-drives quite frequently, showed commendable moderation.
“You can’t imagine what all this means to me,” said Mr. Preemby to
Christina Alberta, quite a number of times. “It was a pure love match,”
he said; “pure romance. She had nothing to gain by marrying me. But
neither of us thought of sordid things.” He was silent for a little
while, struggling with intractable memories. He subdued them. “We just
met,” he said, smiling faintly; “and it seemed that it _had_ to be.”
“Sneaked off and left me”; came a faint whisper in Christina Alberta’s
memory.
§ 6
There was much to see to in those days of mourning. Christina Alberta
did her best to help, watch and guide Mr. Preemby even as her mother
had desired, but she was surprised to find in him certain entirely
unexpected decisions that had apparently leapt into existence within a
few hours of her mother’s death. One was a clear resolve that he and
she must part company with the laundry either by selling it or letting
it, or, if no means of disposing of it offered, by burning it down or
blowing it up as speedily as possible. He did not discuss this; he
treated it as an unavoidable necessity. He expressed no animosity for
the laundry, he made no hostile criticism of the life he had led there,
but every thought betrayed his fundamental aversion. And also they were
to go away--right away--from Woodford Wells and never return thither.
She had come to much the same decisions on her own account, but she had
not expected to find them in such quiet strength in him.
He became explicit about the future as they sat at supper on the
evening of the funeral.
“Your mother’s cousin, Sam Widgery,” he said, “was talking to me.”
He munched for a moment; his moustache went up and down and his eyes
of china-blue stared out of the window at the sunset sky. “He wants to
take it over.”
“The laundry?”
“As a going concern. And he being our nearest relation, so to speak,
I’d as soon he had it as anybody else. Other things being equal....
Wish I knew what to ask him for it. I don’t want to ask him too
little. So I said I didn’t care to discuss things at a funeral. Said
he’d better come along to-morrow. Their place isn’t doing well. It’s
got sort of embedded in Walthamstow. It would pay him to get out and
let the land go for building. He hasn’t got very much money.... But he
wants this place. He reely wants this place.”
His blue eyes were the eyes of one who sees visions.
“I don’t know if they taught you about making companies at the
School of Economics. I’m a child at all that sort of thing. He talks
about partnership or a mortgage or something like that, but what we
want--what we want is a limited company. And what we want is something
like debentures only rather more like preference shares. We want it so
that whatever he draws out of the business we’ve got to draw out more.
Otherwise the company can cut away the security for your debentures
by paying too much dividend on the ordinary shares. _He_’ll have the
ordinary shares. Him and his wife. I don’t say he’d do such a thing
deliberately, but he might very easily be led into doing it. He’s got
to be looked after. We want to fix it so that if he pays more on his
shares than we get on our shares we’d get our interest levelled up.
It’s all very difficult and complicated, Christina Alberta.”
Christina Alberta regarded Mr. Preemby with a new and deepening
respect. She had never heard him make such a speech before at meals,
but then he had never before been free from interruption and correction.
“We’ll have to have it fixed up properly by our solicitors,” said Mr.
Preemby.
“We shan’t be badly off,” he continued, helping himself to cheese.
“There’s a mortgage or so we’ve got and some houses at Buckhurst Hill.
It’s a curious thing, but your poor dear mother had a sort of faith in
my eye for house property. She often let me guide her. And I always
had a feeling for making some sort of reserve _out_ of the business....
Very likely Sam Widgery will take over most of the furniture of this
house. It’s a bigger house than his....”
“Where do you think of going to live, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta.
“I don’t rightly know,” said Mr. Preemby after a moment or so of
introspection. “I keep thinking of different places.”
“London,” she said. “If I could go back to study--before it is too
late.”
“London,” he said, “it might be.”
He hesitated over his next suggestion with the hesitation that had
become a habit, so accustomed was he to see his suggestions crumpled
up and flung aside. “Have you ever heard of Boarding Houses, Christina
Alberta?” he asked with an unreal carelessness. “Have you ever thought
it might be possible for us to go and live in Boarding Houses?”
“In London?”
“All over the world--almost, there are Boarding Houses. You see,
Christina Alberta, we might get rid of our furniture here, except for
my books and a few little things, and we might put most of that away
for a time--Taylor’s Repository would take care of that for us--and we
might go and live sometimes in a Boarding House here, and sometimes in
a Boarding House there. Then you could study and needn’t keep house,
and I could read and look at things and make memorandums about some
Theories I’ve thought of, and talk to people and hear people talking.
All sorts of people go to Boarding Houses--all sorts of interesting
people. These last nights I’ve been thinking no end about living in
Boarding Houses. I keep on thinking of it, turning it over in my mind.
It would be a new life for me--like beginning again. Life’s been so
regular here. All very well while your poor dear mother was alive, but
now I feel I want distraction. I want to move about and see all sorts
of things and different kinds of people. I want to forget. Why, in
some of these Boarding Houses there’s Chinese and Indians and Russian
princesses, and professors and actors and all sorts of people. Just to
hear them!”
“There’s Boarding Houses full of students in Bloomsbury.”
“Every sort,” said Mr. Preemby.
“One place that attracts me,” said Mr. Preemby, pouring out what
remained of the beer, “is Tumbridge Wells.”
“Isn’t that sometimes called Tunbridge, Daddy?”
“Formerly. But now it is always spoken of as Tumbridge Wells. At this
Tumbridge Wells, Christina Alberta, there are hills with names that
point directly to some connection with the ancient Israelites, Mount
Ephraim and Mount Gilboa and so on, and there are a number of curiously
shaped rocks, shaped in the likeness of great toads and prehistoric
monsters and mystical forms and nobody knows whether they are the work
of God’s hand or man’s. I am very anxious to see these things for
myself. They may have a deeper and closer significance for us than is
commonly supposed. There are plenty of Boarding Houses at Tumbridge
Wells--I was told only the other day by a man I met in the Assyrian
room in the British Museum--and some of them are said to be very
comfortable and reasonable indeed.”
“We might go there for the holidays,” said Christina Alberta, “before
the London session begins.”
Outside was the summer afterglow, and a dusky peace filled the room.
Father and daughter followed divergent trains of thought. Mr. Preemby
was the first to break the silence.
“Now that I shall be in mourning, or half mourning, for some time I
have decided to give away all those Harris tweed knickerbocker suits
and stockings of mine. Some poor man might feel the comfort of them--in
winter. I have never really liked those _very_ baggy knickerbockers,
but of course while your poor dear mother was alive her taste was Law
to me. And those caps; they get over your eyes when you’re hot. That
tweed stuff.... It is overrated. When you ride a bicycle or anything it
ravels out with the friction of the seat. Makes you look ridiculous....
And I think that quite soon I shall get myself one of those soft grey
felt hats--with a black band.”
“I have always wanted to see you wear one, Daddy,” said Christina
Alberta.
“It would count as mourning?”
“Oh! yes, Daddy.”
Mr. Preemby meditated pleasantly. The girl had common sense. Her advice
was worth having. “As for putting the swastika on your poor dear
mother’s tombstone, perhaps you are right in thinking it is not what
she herself would have chosen. It may be better after all to do as you
suggest and erect a simple cross. After all--it is _her_ tombstone.”
Whereupon Christina Alberta got up from her chair and went round the
table--almost at a prance, until she remembered things--and kissed him.
For some obscure reason she hated the swastika almost as much as she
loved her Daddy. For her it had become the symbol of silliness, and she
did not like to think of him as silly. Particularly now when for some
obscure reason she was beginning to think of him as ill-used.
§ 7
There was much to see to before the Preembys could go to Tunbridge
Wells. There had to be quite a number of interviews with Mr. Sam
Widgery at Woodford Wells and afterwards in the dingy offices of
Messrs. Payne and Punter in Lincoln’s Inn. It was clear from the first
to these men of affairs that Mr. Preemby was a child at business, but
as they went on with him they realized that he was an extremely greedy
and intractable child. It was six weeks before Mr. and Mrs. Sam Widgery
could move in, sullenly and resentfully, to the Limpid Stream premises,
and Mr. Preemby and his daughter could go on after a day or so in
London to select a Boarding House at Tunbridge Wells.
Christina Alberta spent her early days as an orphan struggling against
an unreasonable cheerfulness and a profound sense of release. She found
her father ready to accept almost any explanation of her need to run
up to London for a day and even disposed to be tolerant when she came
home late. She had quite a little world of miscellaneous acquaintances
in London; fellow-students and their friends, fellow-students from the
London School of Economics and fellow-students at Tomlinson’s School
and art students they knew and medical students they knew and girls
from the provinces who had chucked their families and got typing jobs,
and so on to models and chorus girls and vaguely employed rather older
young men of the intellectual class. She met them in and about the
class-rooms and in A.B.C.’s and suchlike places and in the New Hope
Club, where there were even Labour politicians and men who claimed to
be Bolsheviks, and she went to parties and duologues in studios in
high, remote, extraordinary flats. It was tremendous fun, although a
lot of it had to be snatched from the insistent claims and inquiries
of Woodford Wells. And people liked her, they liked Christina Alberta,
laughed at her jokes they did and admired her thundering cheek and
never said anything about her nose. It was much more her natural world
than the Taverners’ School people had ever been. Nobody seemed to mind
that she came out of a laundry; for all they seemed to care about
that sort of thing, she might have come out of a gaol. In between the
excitements of student life she even did some reading.
In her first grief for her mother she tried not to feel a sense of new
unstinted freedom in regard to all these adventures and experiences.
Her Daddy in his grief, bless him! was smoking much more than he
had ever done before; he was even trying cigars; he had no nose for
tobacco reek in his daughter--or for anything of that sort. He asked
few questions and they were easily answered. Long years of exercise
had made him almost constitutionally acquiescent. Christina Alberta
realized that within very wide limits indeed now she might do anything
she pleased whenever she liked. She realized also that there was no
particular hurry to do anything at all. All the others seemed to be
running about in pairs like knives and forks. It suited her humour to
stay detached.
And the world had altered. This break-up of the old home, the death of
her mother, the disappearance of every control, except her credulous,
inattentive Daddy, had jerked her forward from childhood to maturity.
Hitherto home had seemed an eternal, indestructible thing, from which
you started out for adventures, to which, whatever happened, you
returned like a sea-rover to rest and where you went to bed and slept
as you had been wont to sleep, secure, unthreatened. Now here the two
of them, Daddy and herself, were in the open; no bolting place at all
for them; anything might happen to them and might insist upon going on
happening. She could now do just anything she pleased, it was true, but
also she realized that now she had to take the unlimited consequences.
So that in spite of her sense of novel, unbounded freedoms, Christina
Alberta found she did not go up to London any more than she would have
done during her mother’s lifetime. Many of her most attractive friends,
it is true, were away upon their holidays. And she found her father’s
company unusually interesting. Every time she came back to him he
seemed to be slightly enlarged and of a firmer colour and consistency.
He reminded her of Practical Biology (Botanical Section) in the
Taverners’ School, when you take a dried-up bean out of its package
and put it in a jar with water and observe it under the influence of
warmth and moisture. It germinates. And he was germinating.
Mother had kept him dried up for nearly twenty years, but now he was
germinating and nobody could tell what sort of thing he might become.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
_In Lonsdale Mews_
§ 1
After a month of deep mourning, Christina Alberta put aside her long
skirts and returned to the more kilt-like garments to which she was
accustomed. She had not been inactive while her father had conducted
his business settlement with Mr. Sam Widgery, and she had worked out
a scheme of living that seemed to promise quite a happy life for her
father and herself. She fell in with the Boarding House idea and with
the project of beginning at Tunbridge Wells. She ceased to struggle
with the fact that he continued to call it quietly but insistently
_Tum_bridge Wells; it seemed to her upon reflection that _Tum_bridge
was really the place he, at any rate, was going to live at. That gentle
departure from exactitude was quite of a piece with his general habit
of living a little askew from actual things.
But she impressed upon him the view that since their lives were to be
migratory henceforth, and since there were a certain number of books,
unsaleable articles of furniture that Mrs. Widgery would not take over
at a valuation, a number of curiosities--for example, a piece of shell
which he believed to be a fragment of a Great Auk’s Egg, a Rosicrucian
regalia, and a mummified hawk from Egypt which had prophetic qualities,
to consider--there must be a sort of permanent headquarters in
London, at which these objects could be stored and to which he and
she could return from the various Boarding Houses round and about
the earth. And, pursuant to this suggestion, she made inquiries
and worked out an admirable project for sharing some accommodation
with two little friends of hers who practised art, literature, and
picturesque economies in a converted mews in Chelsea. In fact, she
made arrangements with them. She told Mr. Preemby she had made these
arrangements according to his instructions, and after a time it did
come to seem to him that he had given her the instructions upon which
she acted.