you think it is just nothing but studios and dances and excursions and
char-à-bancs and meal-times and harvest?” he said. “Obviously there is
something more in it than that. Obviously. All that is just a Veil.
Outward Showing. H’rrmp. And I don’t know what is behind it, and I am
just a plain boarder--in a boarding house--and my life is passing away.
Very difficult. H’rrmp. Almost impossible. It worries me exceedingly.
Somewhere there must be a clue.”
“But that’s how we _all_ feel, Daddy,” cried Christina Alberta.
“Things can’t be what they seem,” said Mr. Preemby, waving his hand
with a gesture of contemptuous dismissal towards Rusthall Village,
public house, lamp-posts, a policeman, a dog, a grocer’s delivery van
and three passing automobiles. “That at any rate is obvious. It would
be too absurd. Infinite space; stars and so forth. Just for running
about in--between meals....”
Now who would have thought, Christina Alberta reflected, that this sort
of thing was going on in his head? Who would have thought it?
“Either I am a Reincarnation,” said Mr. Preemby, “or I am not. And if
I am not, then I want to know what all this business of the world is
about. Symbolical it _must_ be, Christina Alberta. But of what?
“All those years at the Laundry I knew that that life wasn’t
real. A period of rest and preparation. Your dear mother thought
differently--we never discussed it, h’rrmp, but it was so.”
Christina Alberta could find no adequate comment and they went on in
silence for some time. When they spoke again it was to discuss how they
could get round to the High Rocks Hotel for tea.
§ 4
Mr. Preemby was evidently depressed and more than a little aggrieved,
but he had none of the comprehensive despondency of your melancholic
type. Concurrently he was quite actively interested in the boarding
house, and the fellow boarders he encountered there. It was a novel
experience for him to be in a boarding house. During his married
life he had always spent his holidays with Mrs. Preemby in seaside
apartments, so that she could supervise the provisioning properly, and
detect, expose and rectify errors and extortion. They had taken drives
inland during these vacations, or camped on the beach while Mr. Preemby
and Christina Alberta had made sandcastles or pottered among rocks, and
Mrs. Preemby had sat in a folding-chair and pined for the Laundry. If
the weather was bad they kept in their apartments, where Mr. Preemby
and Christina Alberta could read books while Mrs. Preemby could pine
for the Laundry almost as well as she could on the beach. But deep
in Mr. Preemby’s heart there had always been a craving for such a
collective, promiscuous life as a boarding house affords.
They had made the acquaintance of the second Miss Rewster, Miss
Margaret Rewster, on their arrival with the luggage. She was a taller,
more anxious and less richly belaced variation of her sister. They
both, Mr. Preemby discovered, had a peculiar hovering quality. They
seemed always hovering behind bead curtains or down passages, or
looking over from staircase landings or peeping round doors; poor
dears! they were dreadfully anxious not to interfere with their guests,
but they were equally anxious that everything should be all right. At
meal-times they operated with the joints and dishes behind a screen,
and the chubby maid carried round the plates and vegetables. And
whenever Mr. Preemby looked at the screen he found either Miss Margaret
Rewster peeping over the top of it at him or Miss Emily Rewster peeping
round the end. It made him quite nervous with his forks and spoons.
When he dropped his serviette he hoped that would pass unobserved, but
Miss Emily noted it at once and sent the chubby maid to pick it up for
him.
Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta came down to dinner as soon as Miss
Margaret had sounded the second gong, and so they were the first to be
seated and could survey their fellow-guests at an advantage. Christina
Alberta was quietly observant, but Mr. Preemby said “h’rrmp” at each
fresh arrival. The next to appear were two Birds of Passage, a young
man in Hudibrastic golfing knickerbockers, and a lady, presumably his
wife, in a bright yellow sporting jumper, who were motoring about Kent;
they made strenuous attempts to seize a table in the window which was
already reserved for Petunia Regulars and were subdued with difficulty,
but perfect dignity, by Miss Emily. They then consulted loudly about
wine--the young man called the lady “Old Thing,” and “Old Top,” forms
of expression new and interesting to Mr. Preemby, and she called him
“Badger”--and the chubby maid produced a card of wines that could be
sent out for. The young man read out the names and prices of wines and
made his selection almost as though he were a curate officiating in a
very large cathedral. His wife, to follow out that comparison, made the
responses. “Chablis such as we should get here might be too sweet,” he
proclaimed.
“It might be too sweet?”
“What of a Pommard, Old Top?”
“Why _not_ a Pommard, Badger?”
“The Beaune is a shilling cheaper and just as likely to be good--or
bad.”
“Just as likely.”
The chubby maid flew out of the room, list in hand, with her thumb on
the wine he had chosen.
Meanwhile under cover of this hubbub the two ladies Mr. Preemby
had seen at tea in the lounge on the occasion of his first visit,
percolated unobtrusively to a table near the window. They were
obviously sisters, both rather slender and tall with small, round,
bright-coloured faces on stalk-like necks; they had sharp little noses,
and one of them wore tortoiseshell spectacles. A gentleman with a white
moustache, larger and nobler even than Mr. Preemby’s, accompanied by a
small alert-looking wife, was the next to appear. Possibly this was the
gentleman who had been in a forest in Burmah. The small alert-looking
wife bowed to the slender ladies, who became agitated like reeds in a
wind. The gentleman took no notice of them, grunted as he sat down,
produced glasses and read the menu.
“Tomato soup _again_!” he said.
“It’s usually very nice tomato soup,” said his wife.
“But Three Times Running!” he said. “It favours acidity. I don’t _like_
tomato soup.”
The table in the bow window was occupied by three people who drifted
in separately. First came a little, thin, dark lady in grey, carrying
a bead work-bag, then a little dark, bald man with large side-whiskers
whom she addressed as father, and then a plump, healthy-looking wife
with a radiant manner who swept in and distributed greetings.
“Did you get your walk, Major Bone?” she said to the gentleman from the
Burmese forest.
“Just to Rusthall Common and back,” said Major Bone, speaking thickly
through his moustache and soup. “Just to Rusthall Common.”
“And you got a char-à-banc to Crohamhurst, Miss Solbé?” The two sisters
answered in unison. “Oh! we had a _lovely_ ride.”
“So picturesque,” said the one with spectacles.
“So open and pleasant,” said the one without spectacles.
“Did you see the sea?”
“Oh, plainly!” said the one with spectacles.
“Ever so far away,” said the one without.
“Just as if the sky had a steel edge,” said the one with spectacles.
“Exactly like a leetle silver line,” said the one without.
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Small portions of fish followed the tomato soup, and were consumed
in comparative silence. There was a little burst of scarcely audible
conversation at the window table.
“Now is _this_ the same fish as we had yesterday?” asked the wife.
“It is a very similar fish,” said the gentleman with whiskers.
“The menu simply says, ‘Fish,’” said the stepdaughter.
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
“I think our back tyres were too tight to-day, Old Top,” said the
man in plus fours, in a very loud, clear voice. “I felt the road
dreadfully.”
“I felt the road dreadfully,” said the lady in the yellow jumper.
“I must let them down a little to-morrow morning.”
“It would be better.”
“To-morrow morning will do. I won’t trouble to-night.”
“Much better to-morrow morning, Badger. You’re tired to-night after all
that bumping. You’d make your hands dirty.”
Silence and active business with knives and forks.
“Porruck hasn’t written about that,” said the Major from the forest.
“Very likely he’s busy,” said his wife.
Silence.
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.
Christina Alberta searched her mind for some conversational opening
that would give her father a reasonable opportunity to make an
acceptable reply, but she could think of nothing that was neither
too disconcerting nor too dangerous. She met his eye and he had the
expression of one who holds out against a strain.
Fish gave place to lamb.
“I thought that road from Sittingbourne was just awful,” said the
motoring gentleman.
“It was _just_ awful,” responded his wife.
Christina Alberta saw her father’s face working. He was going to say
something. “H’rrmp. To-morrow, if it is fine, I think we will go for a
walk in the morning.”
The knives and forks were hushed. Everybody was listening.
“I’d love a walk to-morrow, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta. “I should
think there were some jolly walks about this place.”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Preemby. “Very probably. The Guide Book is very
reassuring. H’rrmp.”
He had the dignified expression of a man who has carried off a
difficult duty.
Resumption of activity with knives and forks.
“Hard to tell this lamb from mutton,” said Major Bone, “if it wasn’t
for the mint sauce.”
“Peas are never so nice as they are from your own garden,” said the
wife of the whiskered gentleman to her stepdaughter.
“It’s late for peas,” said the stepdaughter.
The two Miss Solbés and the motoring gentleman began talking at the
same time. Mrs. Bone expressed the idea that it was hard to get good
lamb nowadays. Taking courage from this sudden swirl of conversation
Mr. Preemby was emboldened to remark to Christina Alberta that he had
always been attracted to Tumbridge Wells. He felt the air was a strong
air. It gave him an appetite.
“You must be careful not to get fat,” said Christina Alberta.
The outburst of active human exchanges came to an end. Baked apple and
custard were consumed in comparative silence. The chubby maid came to
ask Mr. Preemby whether he would like his coffee in the lounge or the
smoking-room. “The lounge I think,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp. The
lounge.”
The Misses Solbé, bearing glasses containing sugar and lemon juice,
flitted from the room. The people from the window table followed.
The function of dinner was completed. They found themselves alone
in the lounge. Most of the people seemed to have drifted into the
sitting-room. The gentleman from the forests of Burmah went by towards
the smoking-room, carrying a large cigar which had an air of also
coming from the forests of Burmah. It did not look like a cigar that
had been rolled or filled; it looked like a cigar of old gnarled wood
that had been hewn from a branching tree. A straw came out of the end
of it....
Christina Alberta stood and contemplated a vast void of time, two hours
it might be, before she could decently go to bed. “Oh! this is the
Life!” she said.
“Extremely comfortable,” said Mr. Preemby, sitting down with much
creaking in a basket arm-chair.
Christina Alberta sat on a glass-topped table and lit a cigarette. She
saw those two hours stretching before her, and she wanted to scream.
The chubby maid brought coffee and seemed gently surprised at Christina
Alberta’s cigarette. Whisperings off stage. Then Miss Emily became
dimly visible through the bead curtain at the end of the passage,
hovering. She vanished again and Christina Alberta finished her
cigarette in peace. Mr. Preemby drank up his coffee. Pause. Christina
Alberta swung her legs rhythmically. Then she slid off the table to her
feet.
“Daddy,” she said, “let’s go into the sitting-room and see if anything
is happening there.”
§ 5
In the Boarding Houses of the past the common dining-table was the
social centre where people met and mind clashed upon and polished mind.
But the spirit of aloofness, the separate table system, has changed
all that, and now it is in the smoking-room or the sitting-room that
the vestiges of social intercourse, advances, retreats, coquettings,
exchanges, games and jests are to be found. But the company of the
Petunia Boarding House was not in a state of social fusion. The only
coalescence was a conversation. The wife of the gentleman from the
Burmese forests had secured an arm-chair by the side of the fire-place,
and she was describing in a low whisper the numerous servants she
had had in Burmah, to the cheerful wife and the younger Miss Solbé
who was knitting. The Miss Solbé with the spectacles had fortified
herself behind a table on the other side of the fire and was engaged
meticulously with a very elaborate Patience. The gentleman with the
side-whiskers sat rigidly on one of the sofas, behind a copy of the
_Times_, while his daughter sat at a table close at hand and also
threaded her way through a Patience. The Birds of Passage, after
inquiries about movies and music-halls, had gone out.
Nobody took the slightest notice of Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta.
The two stood for some moments in the middle of the room, and then
panic came upon Mr. Preemby. A dishonourable panic so that he threw his
daughter to these silent, motionless wolves.
“H’rrmp,” he said. “I think my dear, I will go to the smoking-room.
I think I will go and smoke. There are some illustrated papers over
there on the bookcase for you if you care to look at them.”
Christina Alberta walked over to the low bookcase and Mr. Preemby
departed, h’rrmping.
She stood pretending an interest in the illustrated jokes and in
the portraits of actresses and society people in the _Sketch_ and
_Tatler_. Out of the tail of her eye she surveyed those fellow-guests
of hers, and with a negligent ear she collected the gist of Mrs. Bone’s
dissertation upon the servant question in Burmah. “They will plant the
whole family upon you if they can--uncles and cousins even. Before you
know where you are....
“Of course a white woman is a Little Queen out there....
“The chief fault of the cooking from my point of view, was the way it
upset Major Bone. His stomach ... far more delicate than a woman’s.”
“He looks so stout and strong,” said Miss Solbé.
“In everything but that. In everything. But the Curries they used to
make----”
She sank her voice, and the heads of the younger Miss Solbé and the
pleasant mannered lady closed in upon her for the rich particulars.
What a Lot they were! Christina Alberta reflected. And they were
living beings! The astonishing thing to Christina Alberta was that
they were alive. And being alive and having presumably been a cause
of considerable trouble, distress, emotion and hope to various people
before they were got alive, they were now all in the most resolute way
avoiding anything that with the extremest stretch of civility could
be spoken of as living. Their hours, their days were passing; a few
thousand days more perhaps for each of them, a few score thousand
hours. Then there would be no more chance of living for ever. And
instead of filling up this scanty allowance of hours and days with
every possible sensation and every possible effort and accomplishment,
here they were, gathered into a sort of magic box of atmosphere in
which nothing could possibly be done. By anyone....
Christina Alberta felt like a moth caught under a glass. Well, for a
day or so, she had an excuse, little Daddy must be settled. But then?
Nothing could be done here. Neither joy nor sorrow nor sin nor creative
effort--because even Miss Solbé’s knitting was being knitted to a
prescription on a dirty cutting of printed paper. Everything they were
employed upon was an evasion, everything. Even the whispered delicate
hints of the diuretic, dyspeptic, infuriating and wildly aphrodisiac
effects of Burmah Curry upon Major Bone in his younger days that were
being handed out by his good lady to her intent hearers, were just a
substitution of second-hand knowledge for realities.
And this Patience! Would she, Christina Alberta asked herself, would
she ever come to play Patiences in Boarding Houses? Was it credible
that some day she also would come to sit voluntarily in such an
atmosphere?
“Rather sell matches in a gutter,” whispered Christina Alberta.
What a marvellous thing is Man! What ingenuities he has! what powers
and capabilities! He invents paper and perfects printing! He develops
the most beautiful methods of colour printing. He makes cardboard like
silk and ivory out of rags and vegetable pulp. And all it would seem,
that human beings, hanging for a little while in life between the
nothingness before death and the nothingness after death, should fiddle
away long hours in a feeble, fuddled conflict with the permutations
of duplicate sets of four differently coloured thirteens! Cards!
The marvel of cards! All over the world millions of people drawing
nearer to death and nothingness were pursuing the chances of the four
thirteens: bridge, whist, nap, skat, a hundred forms of it. Directly
they could get in out of the wet and dark, they sat down to that
sort of thing, to the cards shining under the still lamps, to being
endlessly surprised, delighted, indignant and despondent by chances
that anyone who chose to sit down to it could work out and tabulate in
a week!
“Getting it out, dear?” said the younger Miss Solbé.
“The spades are _Wicked_ to-night,” said the Miss Solbé with the
glasses.
“Mine is going rather well,” said the daughter of the gentleman with
the whiskers.
“Does your daughter play _Miss Milligan_?” asked the younger Solbé
sister.
“_Eight-eights_,” said the comfortable wife. “_Miss Milligan_ is too
much for her.”
“Well, it _is_ a Beast you know,” said the stepdaughter. “You never
know where you are with it.”
“Patience is Patience,” said the elder Miss Solbé. “Nowadays I often
get it out. But not when the spades come as they’ve done to-night, both
twos in the top row, and no aces till the last round but one.”
Christina Alberta thought it was time to change from the _Sketch_ to
the _Tatler_. She tried to do this with careless ease and flopped a
dozen papers on the floor. “Oh, _Damn_!” said Christina Alberta to a
great stillness. She struggled to pick up and replace the disordered
sheets. For a time every one seemed to be regarding her. Then Mrs. Bone
took up her discourse again.
“And you can’t imagine their obstinacy,” she said. “They are _wilfully_
ignorant. When you show them, _then_ they won’t do it. I took my
cook-boy in hand for a time--boy I call him, but he was quite a
middle-aged man--and I said to him, ‘just let me show you some plain
English cookery, a boiled fowl with nice white sauce, a few plain
potatoes and vegetables--quite plain with the natural flavour left
in--the sort of food that builds up these brave young Englishmen you
see.’ Of course I’m not a good cook myself, but anyhow I knew more
of English cooking than he did. But we never got further than the
plain boiled fowl. He expressed the most violent disapproval--really
violent I mean--of the whole proceedings. As I took hold of the things
and got to work he began to behave in the most extraordinary way. He
tried _not_ to follow what I was doing. Tried not to. He said that if
he cooked a fowl like that he would lose caste, lose his position in
the local guild of cooks, be perpetually defiled and outcast. _Why_,
he would not say. When I persisted he rushed up and down pulling at
his black hair--a black madman, his eyes rolling frightfully. I could
never make out what there was in a plain boiled fowl to cause such
excitement. ‘This in my kitchen,’ he said. ‘This in _my_ kitchen!’
“There I stood quietly boiling my fowl while all this pother went on.
He hovered about me. He talked--fortunately in his own language. I
even caught him pretending to be sick behind my back. Then he came and
implored me to desist--with tears in his great brown eyes. He tried
to say things in English. The Major always says that he was simply
swearing, but I believe the wretched man really did believe that if he
was to boil a fowl in the plain, wholesome, simple way nice people in
England do it daily, he would be hung in the air, and the great jays of
Burmah would come and peck--ahem!”
She cast a side glance at Christina Alberta, apparently lost in the
_Sketch_, and lowered her voice.
“Peck at his _entrails_, just his insides you know, for a Thousand,
Thousand Years.”
Sensation.
“You never know What Ideas Easterners will get into their Heads,” said
the younger Miss Solbé. “East is East, and West is West.”
But now Christina Alberta’s attention was distracted by another set
of phenomena. She had discovered that the thin, bald gentleman with
side-whiskers, rigid behind his _Times_, was not really reading that
interesting vestige of the British constitution at all. His gaze was
not directed to the edge of his paper, but beyond it. He was staring
from behind that ambush and round the corner of his glasses in a
strange, hard-eyed way, without passion or admiration, at the upper
part of Christina Alberta’s black-stockinged legs as they delivered
their last challenge to human censure before disappearing beneath her
all too exiguous but extremely comfortable skirt. And also she was
realizing that a furtive but intense scrutiny of her bobbed hair was
disorganizing the Patience of the whiskered gentleman’s daughter very
seriously, and that it was also interfering with the proper laying out
of a second and different sort of Patience by the elder Miss Solbé. And
suddenly, to her extreme annoyance, Christina Alberta found a flush
of indignation mantling her cheek, and a combative tingle passing
down the backbone of her straight little body. “Why the devil,” Miss
Preemby asked herself, “why the devil shouldn’t a girl cut her hair
to save trouble and bother, and wear clothes in which she can walk
about?” Anyhow, a mop of well-washed hair was ten times better than
those feeble, aimless interweavings of pigtails and fringes and scraps
and ends. And as for showing one’s legs and body; why shouldn’t one
show one’s legs and body? It was just a part of the universal evasion
of life by these people that had got most of their bodies hidden
away, tied up in a sort of bundle. Do they ever venture to look at
themselves? Those Solbé girls, once upon a time, they must have been
jolly little girls with an amused interest in their stalky little legs,
before they said Shush! and put them away.
Christina Alberta’s speculative vein took charge for a time. What
becomes of legs that are put away and never looked at and encouraged?
Do they get etiolated and queer, dead-white and funny-shaped and
afraid of the light? And after you’ve really packed your body away
and forgotten it, nothing is left of you but a head sticking out and
hands that wave about and feet with hidden and distorted toes; and you
go about between meal-times and take trips in chars-à-bancs to see
what every one sees and feel what every one feels, and you play games
by rule and example according to your age and energy, and become more
and more addicted to Patience until you are ready to cover yourself up
in bed for the last time of all and die. Evasion! And the fuss they
had caused getting born! The fuss, the morality and marriages and
everything that was necessary before these vacuous lives were begotten!
But it was all evasion, and the life shown in these _Tatlers_
and _Sketches_ was evasion just as much. Just as much. All these
photographs of the pushful pretty, the actresses for sale and the
daughters who had to be sold, looked at you with just your own
question in their eyes: “Is this the Life?” The unending photographs
of Lady Diana This, and Lady Marjorie That, and Mr. So-and-So and a
Friend of the Duke of York or the Duchess of Shonts, at dog-shows, at
horse-shows, at race meetings, at royal inaugurations and the like,
were inevitably suggestive of obstinate doubts that were in need of a
perennial reassurance. The photographs of people playing tennis and
suchlike games were livelier, but there, too, if you care to look at
it, were evasions. Evasions. Evasions.
Christina Alberta turned over the back numbers of the _Sketch_ without
looking at the pictures before her eyes.
What was this Life she and these people and every one by games and
jokes and meetings and ceremonies and elaborate disregards and
concealments were all evading? What was this great thing outside,
this something like a huge, terrible, attractive and compelling black
monster, beyond the lights, beyond the movements and appearances, that
called to her and challenged her to come?