explicit manner. “H’rrmp,” he said. “It _is_ a bit like that.”
“Things will work themselves out,” said Harold. “Things will work
themselves out. You know that poem of Ruby Parham’s.” He cleared his
throat. “It is called ‘Waiting,’” he said. “It goes like this--”
His eyes became fixed and glazed; his voice gathered volume, so that
the words seemed more than life-sized.
“After every minute
“Comes another minute
“And then, rest assured,
“Another.
“Like drops from a ledge in the rain.
“You may not want to go on;
“But _they_ will,
“Oh! endlessly
“Taking your life away, death, not final and complete,
“But death in the midst of life,
“Particles of death,
“Death by attrition.
“Drip on Old Death--in life!
“Slow, dull, implacable, unendurable!
“Drip on.”
“That ‘Drip on’ is great. But perhaps you don’t like modern poetry?”
“I don’t _mind_ it,” said Mr. Preemby genially.
“Of course, nothing of a really destructive nature _can_ have happened
to that van,” said Mr. Crumb in a pessimistic tone.
When Picton’s van arrived and the roomy wardrobe began its destructive
march through the passage, Mr. Crumb called suddenly upon his maker in
a loud distressful voice and vanished for the better part of an hour.
Christina Alberta was torn between a sympathetic understanding of
Harold’s state of mind and the fear that her Daddy might perceive the
unfavourable reaction he produced in Harold and be hurt by it. She and
Fay became brightly helpful with the unpacking. “If I might have one of
those blue pinafores of Mr. Crumb’s to put on,” said Mr. Preemby, “I’d
be glad. These black things of mine show every mark.”
Mr. Crumb’s overall reached far below Mr. Preemby’s knees and somehow
justified his calling it a pinafore. It brought out something
endearingly infantile in his appearance that appealed to the maternal
instinct lurking in Mrs. Crumb. She struggled with a persuasion that he
was really a little boy of nine who had been naughty and grown a big
moustache and that she had to take care of him and restrain him and
generally tell him not to. The books were put in the bookshelves as Mr.
Preemby said, “just anyhow”; they could be sorted up later, but the
curiosities and specimens took longer and had to be “put out” more or
less in the cabinet. There were not only real curiosities and specimens
but many little things that Mr. Preemby had accumulated because they
looked like curiosities and specimens. There was, for instance, a piece
of one of the laundry delivery van mudguards so bent by a collision as
to resemble a human torso in the most striking fashion; there was the
almost complete skull of an unknown mammal, probably a fallow deer,
picked up in Epping Forest, there was a potato, now rather shrivelled,
in which it was possible to detect thirty-seven distinct human faces
and--specimen of an entirely different quality--a large flint in which
there were no less than fifty-five. Ages ago some primordial Preemby
had discovered and loved that very same flint and had brought out the
likenesses by chipping an eye here or a nostril there; but Mr. Preemby
did not suspect the help of that remote and perhaps ancestral hand.
Even in waking life Mr. Preemby saw faces in everything. What he would
have been like with a high temperature it is impossible to imagine.
Christina Alberta’s anxiety about her father’s reception by the Crumbs
diminished as she saw his virtual conquest of Fay. Fay treated him
firmly but indulgently, and they lost a good deal of time while she
tried to see all the fifty-five faces of the wonderful flint. They had
to start and start again, but always they lost count about “Twen-tee”
or “Twen-tee-one.” The question would arise whether they were counting
one of the faces over again.
Harold returned in a moody state and could be heard, all too
distinctly, kicking Mr. Preemby’s packing cases in the hall, but Fay
went out to him with a lofty sleep-walking expression in her pale eyes,
and the concussions ceased, and presently Harold came downstairs again
looking almost handsome in nankeen trousers, a blue jacket with big
silver buttons and a voluminous black tie, and was quite nice to Mr.
Preemby.
“You won’t mind my touching that wardrobe of yours up a bit?” he said.
“It damps us off, as it is. Kind of reproaches us. One of us has to be
altered, you see, it or me, and either I paint it or else I get a silk
hat with a deep mourning band and a gold-handled umbrella--which would
cost no end of money. Whereas I _have_ the paint.”
“If you can get the paint off again,” said Mr. Preemby. “You see if I
was to move--_back_.... It’s all right to have all this paint in a Mew.
But out of a Mew....”
“Exactly,” said Harold. “My idea is to make a little pink house of it
with windows and so on. Something very simple. Rather like the scenery
of a Russian Sketch. _Chauve Souris_ sort of stuff. Conventional to the
_n_^{th}. And we might put up placards at the corner of it according to
what is going on. Make a bit of an institution of it.”
“So long as it makes things agreeable,” said Mr. Preemby.
He found his hair being ruffled affectionately. “Dear little Daddy!”
said Christina Alberta.
§ 5
But now appeared a new-comer and life was made uncomfortable and
complicated for Christina Alberta again by the presence of Mr. Teddy
Winterton’s candid insincerity. His graceful body, his movements, his
voice, stirred her senses as she hated them to be stirred; his quiet
impudence invaded her sense of humour; he wounded her pride and she
longed to be even with him. She had no power over him and he behaved
as if he owned her. She was always letting him go just a little too
far. When he was about her nose cast a shadow that reached to her
horizon. He stood now in the doorway--trousers of one pattern of tweed,
waistcoat of another, Norfolk jacket of a third extensively unbuttoned
in the accepted student style, and he watched Mr. Preemby carry his
collection of roc’s bones, found near Staines, across the studio on a
tea-tray. His eyes were round with surprise and amusement; his mouth
said noiselessly, “What is it?”
Christina Alberta was not going to have her Daddy laughed at by any
Teddy Winterton. “Mr. Winterton,” she said. “This is my father.”
“I’ll just get rid of my bones,” said Mr. Preemby, “and then I’ll shake
hands.”
“We’ll just finish up Mr. Preemby’s things and then we’ll all go round
to Poppinetti’s to get some dinner,” said Fay. “There’s hardly anything
left to unpack now.”
“Just one or two Antediluvium bones,” said Mr. Preemby.
Teddy seized upon one. “This,” he said, inspecting it, “is a fossil
rhinoceros thigh-bone from the Crag.”
“It’s an Antediluvium horse,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Forgive me! It’s a rhinoceros bone!”
“Horses had rhinoceros bones in those days,” said Mr. Preemby. “And the
rhinoceroses--! They were incredible. If I had one I shouldn’t have
anywhere to put it.”
Mr. Preemby was extracted from his overall and restored to the black
coat and the grey felt hat with the black band. He became one of a
straggling party that went out of Lonsdale Mews to a little Italian
restaurant in the King’s Road. Three neighbours of the Crumbs mixed
themselves up with the party, a very quiet man with silver hair and a
young man and a dusky girl.
Mr. Preemby was much impressed by the novelty of thus going out for
dinner, and expatiated on its advantages to the silver-haired man who
seemed to be the quiet sort of listening man that Mr. Preemby liked to
meet. “You see you don’t have to _cook_ the meal and you don’t have to
lay the table and afterwards naturally there isn’t any washing up. But
I expect it comes more expensive.”
The silver-haired man nodded intelligently. “Exactly,” he said.
Harold Crumb overheard this. “Expensive,” he said, “it isn’t. No.
Every other crime Poppinetti can commit, but that is barred by the
circumstances of his clientele. He feeds us on stolen pigeons, his
_dinde_ is guinea-pig, his beef, _a l’omnibus_: what he minces God
knows; what he puts into his ravioli makes even the Lord God repent
of his extreme creativeness. But you see, you don’t _think_ about his
ravioli, you eat ’em, and they’re damned good. There are always flowers
on the table and an effect of inexpensive refinement. You will see. You
will see.”
Mr. Preemby saw. Poppinetti was a small man but carefully modelled
on Caruso, and he received his large party with the deference of a
diplomatist and the effusion of a geyser. He was particularly gracious
to Mr. Preemby, bowing profoundly to him, and saluting him with great
richness subsequently whenever he caught his eye. He seemed to Mr.
Preemby to spend the rest of their time together going to remoter and
remoter parts of the restaurant in order to catch Mr. Preemby’s eye and
bow and smile to him from greater and greater distances. Mr. Preemby
had curious doubts whether he wasn’t being mistaken for somebody else.
Signor Poppinetti, with an air of peculiar favour, guided the party
to a long, unattractive table near the centre of the restaurant and
took their conflicting orders with the gestures of a conductor guiding
an orchestra through a difficult passage. Mr. Preemby was passive but
observant; he presently found himself eating macaroni and drinking a
rough red wine with a name that sounded to his London tuned ears like a
challenge. Chianti.
Harold Crumb showed great earnestness in the matter of macaroni. “In
order to taste macaroni,” he assured Mr. Preemby, “it is necessary to
fill the mouth absolutely full, good measure, pressed in and running
over. To cut up macaroni with your fork as you are doing, is as awful
as to cut an oyster. It--it devitalizes it.”
“I like it cut up,” said Mr. Preemby with unexpected firmness. And he
cut up some more.
“Otherwise,” he said in a confidential aside to the silver-haired man,
“I can’t help thinking it’s earthworms.”
“Exactly. Exactly,” said the silver-haired man.
Harold exemplified generously. His rampant face riding over a
squirming mouthful of macaroni was like St. George and the Dragon on
an English sovereign. He whistled as he ate. Long snakes of macaroni
hung thoughtful for a moment and then, drawn by some incomprehensible
fascination, fled into him. Teddy Winterton and one of the new-comers
from the studio next door emulated him. Christina Alberta and Fay
showed the furtive dexterity of the female. But Mr. Preemby was glad
when macaroni was over, even though it raised the problem of eating an
egg on spinach with a fork.
But he was not really troubled in his mind as a younger man might have
been. He had the _savoir-faire_ of middle-age. This restaurant dinner
was on the whole a bright and agreeable experience for him. He liked
even the corrosive taste of the Chianti. This Chianti you drank out
of quite largish tumblers because it was almost as cheap and light as
beer. It did not intoxicate, but it warmed the mind, and it cast a
pleasant and convincing indistinctness over the universe so that the
Tunbridges all became Tumbridges without any question, and the secret
dreams and convictions of the heart became certain knowledge. Presently
Mr. Preemby found himself able and willing to tell things and hint much
more important things about his collections to the white-haired man and
also to the dark, untidy girl who was sitting on his other side, and
who came from the other studio and about whose name he had no idea, and
presently to others; and when the bird came--it was a bird new to Mr.
Preemby, and called, he gathered, _rabbkey_ or _turkit_--most of the
party was talking in the loud, confused, explosive way these young
people affected about the lost _Atlantis_.
He had never spoken so freely before upon this topic. At home he had
always been restrained by the late Mrs. Preemby’s genuine lack of
interest. And even now he was not prepared for positive statements
or for an encounter with sceptical arguments about that great lost
continent of the Golden Age. Atlantis had been the scene and substance
of his secret reveries for many years; he knew his knowledge of it was
of a different order from common knowledge, more intuitive, mystical,
profound. From the outset his manner was defensive, discreet and
obscure, as of one willing but not permitted to speak.
How did he know that there had been this lost continent?
“H’rrmp,” he said with the faint smile of peculiar knowledge; “studied
it for years.”
“What is the evidence?” asked the untidy young lady.
“So abundant. Impossible to retail it. Convincing. Of various sorts.
Plato has much about it. Unfinished fragment. Many books have been
written. Many inscriptions in Egypt.”
“What sort of people were they?” asked the untidy girl.
“Very wonderful people, young lady,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp. Very
wonderful people.”
“Philosophy, no end I suppose?” asked the young man from the next
studio with his mouth full.
“What we know--a mere remnant,” said Mr. Preemby. “Mere remnant.”
“How did they dress?”
“H’rrmp. Robes. White robes--extremely dignified. Blue--azure--when
justice was administered. Plato tells us that much.”
“Could they fly?”
“They understood it. It was not made a practice of.”
“Motor cars? All that sort of thing?”
“If they wanted to. There was less motoring--more meditation. We
live--age of transition. H’rrmp.”
“And then it all went phut?” said the young man from the next studio.
“Submerged and all that. What a lesson!”
“That need not have happened,” said Mr. Preemby darkly.
Mr. Preemby became dimly aware of scepticism. “There’s not an atom of
evidence that there ever was a continent in the Atlantic,” Mr. Teddy
Winterton was saying to Christina Alberta; “within thirty million years
of anything human. The ocean troughs go right back to the Mesozoic age.”
Mr. Preemby would have noticed this remark but the untidy girl asked
him suddenly if he did not think that the swastika was a symbol derived
from Atlantis. He said he was quite certain it was. She asked what it
meant exactly; she had always been curious about its significance:
and he became guarded and mysterious. She wanted moreover to know
things about the costume of that lost world, about its social customs,
about its religion. Were women citizens? She was certainly the most
intelligent about it of all the company. The silver-haired man seemed
to be faintly amused.
The rest of the company wandered off into a discussion of the
possibility of going to the Chelsea Arts Ball in the character of
a party from the Lost Atlantis. Many of their ideas Mr. Preemby
thought trivial and undignified. “Leaves us unlimited scope,” said
Harold Crumb. “We could invent weapons--have wings if we liked. Magic
carbuncles on our shields--illuminated. Mysterious books and tablets.
And a sort of peculiar wailing, drumming music; Mya, mya, mya.”
He pursed up his face and made a curious mooing noise with it to convey
his intention, twiddling his fingers to assist the effect.
It was no good protesting against such imaginative ignorance. But to
the dark, untidy girl and to the acquiescent man with silvery hair Mr.
Preemby continued to be quietly oracular and communicative from behind
his moustache.
“But how are these things known?” the dark girl persisted. “There is
nothing in the British Museum.”
“You forget,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp, the Freemasons. There are
Inner Groups--traditions. Thank you. Just half a glass more. Oh! you’ve
filled it! Thank you.”
As he talked he was aware of something going on between Christina
Alberta and Winterton. At first it seemed not to matter in the
slightest degree, but to be just part of the general unusualness of the
gathering, and then it seemed to matter a great deal. He saw Christina
Alberta’s little fist resting on the table, and suddenly Winterton’s
hand enveloped it. She snatched her hand away. Then something was
whispered and her hand came back. In another moment the hands were five
inches apart and it was as if nothing had ever happened between them.
He would probably have forgotten the momentary invasion of his
attention by Christina Alberta if something else had not occurred
at the phase of dessert. Poppinetti’s idea of dessert was a sort
of lottery of walnuts--if you found a sound one you won--masses of
compressed and damaged dates and a few defiant apples. There was a
great crackling. The company was littering the table with walnut
shells, and the green, black and yellow corruption they had contained,
when this second incident caught Mr. Preemby’s eye. He saw Teddy
Winterton run his hand very softly along Christina Alberta’s forearm.
And her arm was not withdrawn.
Every one was talking just then and for a moment it seemed
to Mr. Preemby that he alone had seen, and then he caught an
observant expression on the face of the silver-haired man. It was
all very confusing, and this Chianti--though it was really not
intoxicating--made everything swimmy, but Mr. Preemby knew somehow
that the silver-haired man had also seen that furtive familiarity, and
that he too didn’t quite approve of it.
Ought one to take notice? Ought one to say anything? Perhaps
afterwards. Perhaps when they were alone together, he might ask her
quietly, “Are you and that young man Winterton engaged?”
“A bit too much,” said Mr. Preemby quietly, meeting the eye of the
silver-haired man. “I don’t like that sort of thing.”
“Quite,” said the silver-haired man.
“I shall speak to her.”
“You’re right there,” said the silver-haired man warmly. A very
sensible fellow.
A great rustle and a scraping of chairs. Poppinetti, figuring upon an
accounts-pad, came to collect the money. “I’ll pay for us, Daddy,” said
Christina Alberta, “and we’ll settle up afterwards.”
Poppinetti bowing. Poppinetti on Mr. Preemby’s right and on Mr.
Preemby’s left; several Poppinettis bowing. A great activity of
Poppinettis handing hats and so forth. Poppinettis whichever way
you turned. The restaurant rotating slightly. Was this Chianti
perhaps stronger than Mr. Preemby had been led to believe? A number
of Poppinettis opening a number of doors and saying polite things.
Difficult to choose a door. Right the first time. Out into the street.
People going by. Taxis. No more Poppinettis. But a girl ought not to
let a young man stroke her arm at dinner, when anyone might see it
happen. It wasn’t correct. Something had to be said. Something tactful.
Mr. Preemby became aware that he was walking next to Mrs. Crumb. “It
was lovely to hear you talking about the New Atlantis,” she said. “I
wish I had been sitting nearer.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Something very nice about Mrs. Crumb. What was it? Not so _fearfully_
married, but married quite enough.
§ 6
Mr. Preemby thought they were going back for coffee and a little talk
and then bed; he had no idea of the immense amount of evening still
before him. He knew nothing as yet of the capacity for sitting up late
and getting lively in the small hours possessed by this new world of
young people into which Christina Alberta had led him.
And in a sort of hectic discontinuous way they were lively for hours.
It became vaguely evident to Mr. Preemby that there was a periodic
“day” set apart by Mrs. Crumb for evening gatherings in the studio,
and that this evening he had chosen for his settling down was such
an evening. Fresh people dropped in. One it seemed was a portentous
arrival, he came in quite soon after the return from Poppinetti’s; he
was very fat and broad, a white-faced man of forty or so, rather short
of breath, with exceedingly intelligent eyes under a broad forehead and
a rather loose, peevish mouth. He carried himself with the involuntary
self-consciousness of a man who thinks he is pointed out. His name
it seemed was Paul Lambone, and he had written all sorts of things.
Everybody treated him with a faint deference. He greeted Christina
Alberta with great warmth.
“How’s the newest Van?” he said, shaking her hand as though he liked
it, and speaking with a singularly small voice for so ample a person.
“How’s the last step in Advance?”
“You’ve got to meet my father,” said Christina Alberta.
“Has it got a father? I thought it just growed like Topsy--out of
Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw and all the rest of them.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Mr. Lambone turned to him. “What a Handful a daughter is!” he said, and
bowed slightly towards Christina Alberta, “even the best of them.”
Mr. Preemby replied after the manner of the parents in Woodford Wells.
“She’s a good daughter to me, sir.”
“Yes, but they aren’t like sons.”
“You have sons, sir, I presume.”
“Only dream children. I’ve not had your courage to realize things. I’ve
married a hundred times in theory and here I am just a sort of bachelor
uncle to everybody. Poking in among the younger people and observing
their behaviour with”--his intelligent eyes looked quietly over his
garrulous mouth at Christina Alberta--“terror and admiration.”
Two other visitors appeared in the doorway and Mr. Lambone turned
from Mr. Preemby to greet them as soon as Fay had done her welcome,
a fierce-looking young man with an immense head of black hair and a
little lady like a china doll dressed to remind one of Watteau.
Conversation became general and Mr. Preemby receded into the background
of events.
He found himself side by side with his friend with the silver hair,
against his bookcase. “I didn’t expect a party,” he said.
“I thought so too.”
“I only got here this afternoon. The vans came late and lots of my
things are still to be unpacked.”
The silver-haired man nodded sympathetically. “Often the case,” he
murmured.
Every one was talking loudly. It was difficult to hear. It was confused
sort of talking, and whenever two or three seemed to be interested in
what they were saying, Fay Crumb went and interrupted them as a good
hostess should. Other people, only vaguely apprehended by Mr. Preemby,
got into the studio somehow. There was a red-haired young lady with a
tremendous decolletage; behind you could see almost to her waist. He
h’rrmp’d at it and thought of saying something about it, something cold
and quiet, to the silver-haired man. But he didn’t. He couldn’t think
of anything sufficiently cold and quiet to say.
Fay Crumb came and asked whether he would like some whisky or beer.
“Not on the top of that nice Chianti, thank you,” said Mr. Preemby.
The conversation seemed to get noisier and noisier. In one corner
Harold Crumb could be heard quoting the poems of Vachel Lindsay. Then
Mr. Lambone came up and seemed to want to talk about the Lost Atlantis,
but Mr. Preemby was shy of talking about the Lost Atlantis with Mr.
Lambone. “Getting on all right, Daddy?” said Christina Alberta,
drifting by and not waiting for any answer but an “h’rrmp.”
There appeared three young people with a gramophone they explained they
had just bought, and Fay discovered that the beer had been forgotten
and sent Harold out to borrow some from a neighbour. These new-comers
made no very profound impression on Mr. Preemby’s now jaded mind,
except that one of them, the owner of the gramophone, a very fair young
man with a long, intelligent nose, was wearing the big horn of the
gramophone as a headdress, and that he meant to have that gramophone
going whatever else might occur.
The music was dance-music, jazz for the most part and a few waltzes,
and it revived Mr. Preemby considerably. He sat up and beat time with
the leg-bones of a roc, and presently two or three couples were dancing
on the studio floor. Curious dancing, Mr. Preemby thought; almost
like walking--jiggety walking with sudden terrific back-swipes of the
legs. There was an interruption when Harold returned with the borrowed
beer--bringing its lenders with it. Then there was a general clamour
for Christina Alberta and Teddy to “do” their dance. Teddy was quite
willing but Christina Alberta seemed reluctant, and when Mr. Preemby
saw the dance he was not surprised.
“H’rrmp,” he said, and stroked his moustache and looked at the
silver-haired man.
It really was too familiar altogether; for some moments the principals
vanished upstairs, and came back altered. For some reason Teddy had
adopted a cloth cap and a red neck-wrap; he was, in fact, being an
Apache, and the bearing of Christina Alberta had become very proud and
spirited with her arms akimbo.