a noble entrance with large stucco pillars on either side and an arch
over, on which is a design in relievo of Neptune and sea-horses and
the words “Lonsdale Mews.” Inside there had once been stables and
coach-houses, and over each a bedroom and a sitting-room, which was
also, in the more prolific past, generally used as a bedroom, and a
cupboard and a landing and so forth, the little home of the coachman
(and his wife and family) attached to the genteel carriage and horses
below. But the advancement of science and the progress of invention
have abolished gentility, and so reduced the number of coachmen and
carriages in the world that Lonsdale Mews has had to accept other
tenants; and being too narrow down the centre for the coming and
going of automobiles without a great deal of bashing of mudguards and
radiators, has had to paint itself up attractively and fall back upon
art and the intelligenzia.
Christina Alberta’s two young friends were in possession of one of
these perverted coachmen’s homes, and as they were very inadequately
prepared to pay the rent--it was a quite aristocratic rent--they were
extremely glad to welcome Mr. Preemby and particularly Christina
Alberta as co-tenants. Mr. Preemby was to have the big room downstairs
and there he was to arrange his books and his surplus furnishings and
ornaments and curious objects, and have a sofa that could be made into
an apparent bed when he wanted to sleep in London. And Christina
Alberta was to have a little bedroom for herself behind this wherein a
breezy decorative scheme of orange and bright blue more than made up
for a certain absence of daylight and fresh air. But when the two young
friends had a party or when Mr. Preemby was away they were to have the
use of the big downstairs room, and in the case of a party Christina
Alberta’s room was to be a ladies’ cloak-room.
The lessors were to retain the use of the upstairs rooms and in the
matter of the kitchen all things therein were to be held in common.
None of this agreement was put into writing and many issues were left
over frankly for future controversy. “We are to be the pigs that pay
the rent,” said Christina Alberta; that was the general idea. “Much
we’ll work out,” said Mr. Harold Crumb. “Much will work itself out.
It’s no good being too definite.” What was definite was that Mr.
Preemby was to pay the rent.
Mr. Harold Crumb was a red-haired young man, a shock-headed young man
with a rampant profile, dressed in a blue overall, frayed grey trousers
and slippers. He had large freckled hands and he did Black and White,
which Mr. Preemby had supposed to be a whisky but discovered was an
art. Harold lived by attempting to sell drawings for advertisements and
pictured jokes for the weekly papers. His expression was lofty and his
voice constrained and it seemed to Mr. Preemby that he was suffered
rather than met by Mr. Crumb. With Christina Alberta Mr. Crumb seemed
to be on terms of tacit friendship and no word passed between them.
He lifted his hand and twiddled his fingers at her--with a kind of
melancholy.
Mrs. Crumb was more effusive. She embraced Christina Alberta warmly
and answered to the name of “Fay.” Then she turned to Mr. Preemby and
shook hands with him quite normally. She was a slender young lady
with carelessly bobbed corn-coloured hair, pale-grey eyes and an
absent-minded face. She also was dressed in a blue overall, she wore
oyster-coloured stockings and slippers and possibly other things, and
her business in life, Mr. Preemby learnt, was to review books for
various newspapers and write romantic fiction for bookstall magazines.
Her right forefinger had that indelible inkiness which only the
habitual use of an incontinent fountain-pen can give. There was a big
screen in the downstairs room Mr. Preemby was to have that Mr. Crumb
had made and Mrs. Crumb had covered with the bright mendacious wrappers
of the books she had reviewed. This exercised Mr. Preemby the more
because several of the wrappers were manifestly upside down, and he
could not understand whether this was due to art, carelessness or some
serious mental lapse.
“We’ll have something to eat,” she told Mr. Preemby, and then they
could settle up things. But she had a surprisingly rapid articulation
and it sounded like, “We’ll ’f sum t’eat ’n’ then we’ll set lup
thins.” It took ten or twelve seconds to come through to Mr. Preemby’s
understanding. Meanwhile she had turned to Christina Alberta. “’Dabit
’f work to do,” she explained. “Bres no’ clear’ d’way. Late las’ ni’.
You be’r loo’ roun’ he’ while Nolly gessomeat an’ Ikn do ’p stairs fore
you see’t.”
“Right-o,” said Christina Alberta, understanding perfectly. Mr. Preemby
was left stunned, with his lips moving slowly. “So long,” said Harold,
and took some money out of a black Wedgwood tea-pot and went and fell
over things in the passage, and presently went out into the wide world
while Fay vanished upstairs.
“She’s gone upstairs,” said Mr. Preemby, interpreting slowly, “to do
their rooms. And _he’s_ gone to get some meat. It’s a nice large room,
Christina Alberta--and quite well lit. Quite.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Mew before,” said Mr. Preemby,
approaching a group of attractive drawings on the wall.
“In a _what_, Daddy?”
“In a Mew. Or in a _Studjo_.... I suppose these are Originals.”
Christina Alberta awaited his reaction to the drawings with a slight
anxiety.
“Looks like a lot of fruit and human legs and things,” said Mr.
Preemby. “Wonder what they mean? _Summer Night_ it says, and that’s
_Passion in Solitude_. Don’t quite see it, but I suppose it’s
symbolical or something.” He turned his round blue eyes to the room
generally. “I could get a mahogany cabinet for my Curiosities and have
it against the wall _there_--I’d like the sort with glass doors so that
people could see the things--and if there was some shelves put across
that place, it would hold most of my books. There’ll have to be a bed
somewhere, Christina Alberta.”
“They’ve got a sofa upstairs,” said Christina Alberta, “with an end
that pulls down.”
“Might go there.”
“Or under the window.”
“Of course there’s my clothes,” said Mr. Preemby. “I almost wish
I hadn’t practically promised Sam Widgery your mother’s wardrobe.
Rosewood it is. It has a lot of room in it and it might have gone
against that bit of wall there. The trunk will make a sort of seat if
we get the corners mended. Wonder how that screen would look the other
way up. Books might go behind it. These easels and things I suppose
they’ll take upstairs.... We’ll get things settled all right.”
Christina Alberta turned about with arms akimbo to follow his
proposals. She perceived that they threatened a considerable
disturbance of the æsthetic balance of the studio. She’d just thought
of a little bed-sofa affair with a bright rug over it. Silly of her
to forget the baggage. But in the end perhaps it might be possible to
arrest a lot of his gear in the passage. The passage was so choked
already that a little more in it hardly seemed to matter. He could
go out and get what things he wanted when he wanted them. She had a
momentary anticipation of him in his shirt and braces, routing in
trunks.
“Of course,” said Mr. Preemby, “when you said you’d got two little
friends in a _Studjo_, I thought they were two girls. I didn’t think
they were a married couple.”
“They aren’t so _fearfully_ married,” said Christina Alberta.
“No,” said Mr. Preemby, and was restrained by modesty from further
speech for some seconds. “Of course,” he said, “if presently a Family
came along--well, we’d have to move out, Christina Alberta.”
“Never meet families half-way,” said Christina Alberta. “It isn’t very
likely anyhow. You trust Fay.”
“You never know,” said Mr. Preemby rather weakly, and showed a tendency
to drift back to those ambiguous drawings.
“About time we had a look at the upstairs rooms, Daddy,” said Christina
Alberta, and went out into the passage to call “Fay!”
The answer came remotely. “Lo?”
“Read-_dee_?”
“Not yet.”
Christina Alberta found her Daddy back in the illustrated corner with
his head on one side like an inquiring sparrow. For some time nothing
was said. “Of course,” he remarked at last; “it’s Art.” He turned away
with his face pursed up beneath the moustache, humming faintly. She
perceived it was just as much Art as he could stand.
He ran his hand over the wall and turned intelligent eyes to Christina
Alberta. “It’s just canvas,” he said; “what you pack things in. With
sort of dabs of gold paint. I don’t think I’ve ever seen walls that
wasn’t either done with paper or distemper before. I suppose really one
might put all sorts of things on walls, cloth, bed-ticking, tarpaulin.
Odd how one doesn’t think of things.”
§ 2
Presently “upstairs” was “read-ee;” Mrs. Harold Crumb was free to
answer questions and make explanations and Mr. Preemby could learn
more of Christina Alberta’s plans for his comfort. Upstairs was more
various but less spacious than downstairs, the beds were dressed-up
rather than disguised as divans and there was more vaguely improper but
highly decorative Art. Like Christina Alberta Mrs. Crumb had not fully
considered Mr. Preemby’s possibilities in the way of luggage, but she
rose to the occasion very well. When Mr. Preemby spoke of the mahogany
cabinet and the wardrobe, she said that it would be quite easy for
Harold to “camouflage” them with very, very bright-coloured paint, and
she thought a lot might be done for Mr. Preemby’s trunks and clothes
by making a curtained alcove in a corner. “Trouble with clothes,” said
Mrs. Crumb, “is when somebody starts charades or dressing up. Nothing
is sacred. Last week, somebody tore my only pyjamas limb from limb.”
“We’d have to arrange,” said Mr. Preemby, a little uneasily.
“We’ll have to arrange somehow,” said Mrs. Crumb.
But before anything could be arranged definitely Harold returned from
his shopping with a large piece of purple beefsteak in a mere loin
cloth of newspaper, and a lettuce and a bundle of small onions in his
hand and two large bottles of beer under his arm, and everybody’s
attention was directed to the preparation of the midday meal.
“Generally,” said Harold, “we go Out for a meal. There’s quite a decent
aufschnittery and a little Italian place and so forth not five minutes
away in the King’s Road. It’s more fun feeding Out. But we thought
you’d like to see the studio put through its paces.”
Mr. Preemby in the course of his life had rarely seen meals prepared;
somebody else had always laid a table and said “Dinner’s ready,
Daddy,” or “Supper’s ready, Daddy,” as the case might be, and he
had just sat down, and it was with real interest that he obeyed Mr.
Crumb’s invitation to “come and see how we do it,” and assisted under
direction in the operations. Mr. Crumb, in a few well-chosen words,
introduced the cooking apparatus that clustered around the gas-stove;
the gas-stove was lit explosively, Mr. Preemby handed things and held
things under direction and got in the way a good deal. Christina
Alberta, who seemed used to the job, chopped the onions and dressed a
salad at a small kitchen table close at hand, and the steak got itself
grilled fiercely and flaringly.
Meanwhile Mrs. Crumb laid a blue-painted table in what was to be
Mr. Preemby’s room with an orange-coloured cloth and a selection of
plates and parts of plates, yellow-glazed mugs with rudely painted
inscriptions in some rustic dialect, “Here’s t’ absent frens” and
the like, several knives and forks, a pewter mug full of cigarettes
and a bunch of sunflowers in a brown-glazed bowl. And at this table
Mr. Preemby presently found himself seated very hot in the face and
liberally splashed with fat from the grilled steak. Nobody said grace,
and the meal began.
There was a general assumption that Mr. Preemby’s tenancy was settled,
though there were many points upon which he would have liked a clearer
definition. He was particularly anxious to exclude as tactfully as
possible his garments and his specimens from promiscuous use as
properties when these charades occurred, but he did not know quite how
to reopen the subject. And he was preoccupied by a doubt whether his
long nightgowns of Saxony flannel, if they were publicly exposed, might
not be considered old-fashioned by these artistic young people. But
their talk jumped about so that it was difficult to lead up to what he
had to say. He was accustomed, especially when company was present,
to clear his throat “h’rrmp” and waggle his moustache up and down a
little before he spoke, and by the time he was ready to deliver what
he had to say one of the others was away with something else. So that
he hardly said anything but an occasional “h’rrmp” all through the meal.
The two young ladies did most of the talking. Harold seemed moody,
making an occasional correction or comment upon his wife’s remarks and
eating most of the steak with the pained expression of one who has
tender teeth and is used to better food. Once he asked Mr. Preemby
if he really cared for Good Music, and once if he had been to see
the Iberian dancers last year, but neither of these inquiries led to
a sustained conversation. “H’rrmp. No-oh,” said Mr. Preemby. “Not
exactly. Not particularly,” and in the second case, “No-oh, I didn’t.”
Mrs. Crumb talked brightly of various newspaper jobs she had got and
how she had been asked to do a children’s corner in the _Patriotic
News_ and whether she would accept the offer--Mr. Preemby thought the
editors and newspaper proprietors she mentioned seemed a depraved
lot--but mainly the talk concerned the movements and readjustments of a
large circle of friends. After the meal there was coffee, and Harold,
with an air of resignation, went and washed up.
There were many little things awaiting attention at the laundry, and
after two or three cigarettes Mr. Preemby decided, “It’s time for us
to be going, Christina Alberta.” “We’ll work it out all right,” said
Harold on their departure.
There were intervals of meditation as Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta
returned in the train from Liverpool Street to Woodford Wells. “It’s
not what I’ve been accustomed to,” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s all very
different from the way your mother used to manage things.... Less
orderly.... Of course I could keep my clothes locked up in my trunk.”
“You’ll do all right. They’re perfect Dears. _She_ loves you
tremendously already,” said Christina Alberta.
§ 3
But before she went to sleep that night Christina Alberta experienced
compunction. She felt compunction about these arrangements she was
making for her Daddy. She doubted whether he would be truly comfortable
and happy in that studio in Lonsdale Mews, and able to lead the life of
steadfast curiosity he anticipated with so much quiet pleasure--ever
humming to himself about it and working his moustache and saying
“h’rrmp,” when he was not otherwise engaged.
This story, it cannot be too often reiterated, is the story of Mr.
Preemby who became, as we shall tell in due course, Sargon, King of
Kings. But Christina Alberta has got herself hatched into this story
very much like a young cuckoo in a wagtail’s nest and it is impossible
to ignore her. She was virtually in control of him and she had the
egotism of her sex and age.
She had also a pitiless conscience. It was almost the only thing
she could not manage in her life. It managed her. It was a large,
crystalline conscience with no foundations and no relationships; it
just flooded by itself in her being; it was her gravitational centre
and the rest of her could not get away from it.
When Christina Alberta went up for examination and judgment before
Christina Alberta there was no nonsense in the proceedings, a fearful
frankness; it was cards on the table, everything in evidence, no
etiquette, not a stitch on, X-rays if necessary. These examinations
were all the more terrible because they were done in what was
practically an empty room, without screens, curtains, standards or
general beliefs of any sort. It is appalling to think of the drapery
and function that was absent from Christina Alberta’s court of
conscience. In the first place Christina Alberta was completely and
explicitly irreligious. In the next she was theoretically anti-social
and amoral. She did not believe in respectability, Christian morality,
the institution of the family, the capitalist system, or the British
Empire. She would say so with extreme plainness and considerable detail
except when her parent was about. Prevalent winds of sentiment did not
stir her. She did not find the Prince of Wales ravishing nor _Punch_
funny. She thought modern dancing tiresome, though she did it very
well, and Wimbledon tennis and tennis-talk an intolerable bore. She
favoured Bolshevism because everybody she disliked abused it and she
hoped for a world-wide social revolution of an entirely destructive and
cleansing type. What was to follow this revolution Christina Alberta,
with the happy confidence of youth, did not seem to mind.
It is not for us to speculate here why a young woman born and bred
between Woodford Wells and central London in the opening years of the
twentieth century should confront the world with a mind so entirely
swept and void of positive and restraining convictions; we put the
fact on record. And if she had been sustained by all the beliefs in
Christendom and a sure and certain respect for every detail of the
social code, whatever that code may be, she could not have confronted
the world with a more cheerful confidence, nor with a stronger
persuasion that Christina Alberta had to behave, in some undefined
fashion, well. Christina Alberta had to be Christina Alberta, clear and
sound, or the court of conscience made things plain and hard for her.
“Christina Alberta,” the court would say, “you are the dirtiest,
filthiest little thing that ever streaked the dust of life. How do you
propose to get clean again?”
Or, “Christina Alberta, you have been lying again. You’ll lie to _me_
next. First it was laziness made you lie and now it is cowardice. What
are you going to make of yourself, Christina Alberta?”
There came a time when the court had to address Christina Alberta
in this fashion: “Your nose, Christina Alberta, is large beyond
comparison. It will probably go on growing all your life--as noses
often do. Yet you are setting yourself out to charm and fascinate Teddy
Winterton. You go to places where you think you will meet him. You fuss
and preen yourself like any female idiot. You dream all sorts of things
about him, disgraceful things. You are soppy on this young man in spite
of the fact that you know he is--no sort of good. You like him to touch
you. You sit and look at him foolishly and you gloat. Does he gloat
on you? Isn’t it time you considered where you are going, Christina
Alberta?”
* * * * *
And now the court was in full session and the charge, the charge for
which there was no defence, was that she was going to take her absurd,
unprotected Daddy and entrust him and his foolishness and his silly
books and his ridiculous treasures and all his dreams and desires to
the insecure and unsympathetic studio of the Crumbs, not because of any
vague and general hunger for London, though that was in the background,
but because that studio was frequented by the all too seductive Teddy,
because there she had met him and danced wildly with him and been
suddenly and astonishingly kissed by him and kissed him. And then he
had beguiled her to learn a dance with him and had got her to come to
tea with him at his studio to meet his sister--who hadn’t turned up.
And there had been other meetings. He was impudent and provocative
and evasive. All her being was in a state of high excitement about
him. Coldly and exactly now the court unfolded the operations of her
mind to her; showed how the thought of Teddy, always present and never
admitted, had guided her decision to harbour with the Crumbs. Only
now did she come to confession and clear vision. “You have lied to
yourself, Christina Alberta,” said the court; “and that is the worst
sort of lie. What are you going to do about it?”
“I can’t let the Crumbs down now. They count upon us.”
“You are in a mess, Christina Alberta. You are in a worse mess than
we thought you were. _Soppy_ you are about Teddy Winterton. Why not
call things by their right names? You are in love. Perhaps something
frightful has happened to you. Little rabbits run about the hedges and
every day is like every other day for them; they waggle their little
noses and wiggle their little tails and do what they like with their
paws. Until one day there is a ping and the snare snaps on the little
furry foot and everything you try to do after that is different. The
snare holds your movements and you must just dance round it and squeal
if you like, till the man comes along. Is that what has happened to
you? And for Teddy! Teddy, with that open, lying face!”
“No,” said Christina Alberta, “I don’t love him. I don’t love him.
I’ve been silly and soppy and adrift. I am no more worthy to be called
Christina Alberta. But it hasn’t got me yet and it shan’t get me. I’ll
pull Daddy out of it and myself out of it; I vow and swear....”
“H’m,” said the court.
§ 4
It seemed to Mr. Preemby that the first evening he spent in his new
quarters in Lonsdale Mews was the most eventful evening in his life.
Impressions crowded upon each other. Insomnia was not among his habits,
but when at last he lay upon his shake-up bed he was kept awake for
most of what was left of the night (it was the frayed piece with the
bleak dawn in the middle of it) trying to get these same impressions
sorted out, impressions about his new surroundings, impressions about
Christina Alberta, impressions of new and unprecedented personalities,
a marmalade of impressions.
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’s too
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?”