One might evade it by living by rule or custom. People seemed to do
so. A time might come when that call to Christina Alberta to be
Christina Alberta to the uttermost and fulfil her mysterious mission
to that immense being beyond the lights might no longer distress her
life. She had thought that in a certain recklessness and violence with
herself she might fight her way out to the call. She had made love now.
Anyhow, she hadn’t evaded _that_. But--was it going to matter as much
as she had thought it would matter? She and her little friends were
playing desperate games with the material of love in a world where Dr.
Marie Stopes and Mr. D. H. Lawrence were twin stars, and it was just
something you went through--and came out much as you had been before.
More restless, perhaps, but no further on. It left you just where you
had been, face to face with the unsolved darkness and that mysterious,
distressing, unanswerable call to come out of it all and really live
and die.
She had made love.... Queer it had been....
These furtive people were watching and watching her, reading her
thoughts, perhaps, penetrating her....
Christina Alberta shut her copy of the _Sketch_ with something of a
snap, and walked out of the drawing-room with a serene expression. She
shut the door behind her and went downstairs to find what had happened
to her father in the smoking-room.
“I’m leaving the best part of the talk behind me,” reflected Christina
Alberta.
§ 6
She found that her father and the gentleman from the forests of Burmah,
after a very prolonged and brilliant “h’rrmping” match, had settled
down to conversation. But unhappily the conversation was unsuitable for
her.
“Siam, Cambodia, Tonquin, the country is full of such temples. They
take you there and show you them.”
“Wonderful,” said Mr. Preemby. “Wonderful. And you do not think the
carvings you speak of--? Some high symbolism?”
Both gentlemen became aware of Christina Alberta, attentive and
hovering.
“Symbolism,” said the arboreal gentleman, “Symbolism,” and had
complicated pharyngeal difficulties. “Heathenish indecency. Difficult
to discuss.... Presence of young lady.... H’rrmp.”
“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby. “Had you come down to say good night, my
dear? We are having a rather--rather technical talk.”
“Sounds like it, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, and went round and sat
on the arm of his chair for a moment.
“Good night, little Daddy,” she said.
Reflective moment.
“I think this Tumbridge is going to suit me,” said Mr. Preemby.
“I hope it will, little Daddy. Good night.”
§ 7
Christina Alberta’s first evening at the Petunia Boarding House has
been described with some particularity because it is a sample of all
the still and uneventful evenings that seemed to lie before Mr. Preemby
there. It impressed her as an unfathomable enormity of uneventfulness
in which nothing harmful or disturbing could conceivably occur to him.
The last remote possibility of imaginative disturbance seemed to remove
itself next day when Mrs. Bone announced to the whiskered gentleman’s
wife that she and her husband were off to Bath on the morrow: they
were in luck it seemed; they had got the exact rooms for the winter in
the exact boarding house they had always had their eyes on. “Tunbridge
seems so bleak,” she said. “After Burmah.”
The dinner was like the previous dinner; the Birds of Passage had gone
and Mr. Preemby astonished himself, Christina Alberta, the chubby maid
and the assembled company by demanding whether it was possible to send
out (h’rrmp) for a bottle or flask of Chianti. “It’s an Italian wine,”
said Mr. Preemby to inform and help the chubby maid in her inquiries.
But there was no Chianti on the wine-list supplied, and after a
conversation markedly reminiscent of that of the Birds of Passage
overnight, the Preemby table was stocked with a bottle of Australian
Burgundy and, at Christina Alberta’s request, a bottle of mineral water.
After this display of initiative, self-assertion and social derring-do,
Mr. Preemby did little but h’rrmp throughout the rest of the meal.
The subsequent life of the drawing-room was also vacantly similar
to the previous evening. Christina Alberta got her possibly illegal
cigarette in the lounge, indeed she smoked two, and Miss Margaret
Rewster looked at her through the bead curtain near the office and
Miss Emily had a sniff from the landing upstairs, though nothing was
said. And then Mr. Preemby followed Major Bone into the smoking-room
to gather whatever further information he could about the temple
decorations and religious customs of the peoples of further India.
He was inclined to think Major Bone rather biased by evangelical
prejudice. But Major Bone was not even indignant about Eastern
religions that night. He wanted to talk about Bath, and he talked about
Bath. He told Mr. Preemby in very great detail about a remarkable
occurrence at Bath. He had met a gentleman named Bone, a gentleman
much of his own age and appearance, a Captain Bone who had also once
been in Burmah. He detailed various extremely dramatic conversations
between himself and the other Bone, occasionally going back and
correcting himself. They had made the most elaborate comparison of
their genealogies, and it did not appear that they were even remotely
related. “Most curious coincidence that has ever occurred to me,” said
Major Bone. “In Bath. In nineteen-eh-nine.”
In the drawing-room Patience prevailed and Mrs. Bone was talking about
Bath. The cheerful wife of the whiskered gentleman said “Deavning” to
Christina Alberta quite suddenly.
“Oh! Good evening,” said Christina Alberta.
“You had a walk to-day?”
“We’ve been to see the Toad Rock and the High Rock and Eridge Park.”
“Quite a nice walk,” said the cheerful lady, and restored her attention
to Mrs. Bone. Christina Alberta gathered she was to be noticed, but not
made a pet of.
There was nothing for it but to go through the _Tatlers_ and _Sketches_
again. This time the pictures were exhausted, but there were reviews of
books and one or two short stories. Christina Alberta read them all.
When she went to say good night to her Daddy she had come to a
decision. “Daddy,” she said, “on Thursday, that’s the day after
to-morrow, I must go back to London. There are some lectures beginning.”
Mr. Preemby made no effective opposition.
The third evening was in countenance like the second except that the
Bones had gone and that Christina Alberta was sustained by the thought
that next day she would pass from the vacuities of Tunbridge to the
tangled riddles of London. And there was a Bird of Passage present, an
untidy young man of the student type with a lot of hair imperfectly
controlled by unguents whose motor bicycle had broken down just outside
Tunbridge Wells. He lived somewhere away in the north, it seemed, in
Northumberland; he would have to wait in Tunbridge for two or three
days while some broken part of his machine was replaced from Coventry;
he had taken refuge in the Petunia Boarding House and it was jolly hard
luck on him. He couldn’t budget for a trip to London; he would just
have to sit down in Tunbridge. He was a Cambridge undergraduate and a
geologist; he had a bag of specimens on his machine. These facts he
conveyed across the width of the room to Mr. Preemby in the course of a
rather one-sided conversation.
From the first Christina Alberta did not like this young gentleman from
Cambridge. He was like a younger, cruder Teddy Winterton, with impudent
bad manners instead of impudent good manners, and with neither bodily
grace nor good looks. And while he spoke to Mr. Preemby he glanced at
her. But she had no inkling of the part he might play in the life of
her Daddy and herself.
When she and her Daddy went into the lounge for coffee and her
cigarette, the young man came and placed himself at an adjacent table
and initiated some more conversation. Was Tunbridge Wells an amusing
place? Was there any chance of his getting any golf or tennis?
“There are a number of delightful walks,” said Mr. Preemby.
“Not much fun alone,” said the young man.
“There are the pleasures of observation,” said Mr. Preemby.
“All this country has been pretty well worked over,” said the young man
of science. “Is there a Museum here?”
Mr. Preemby did not know.
“There ought to be a Museum in every town.”
Presently the coffee and the cigarettes were finished. This evening Mr.
Preemby was for the drawing-room. Major Bone had gone, the smoking-room
had no attractions, and Mr. Preemby had exchanged a few amiable words
with the gentleman with whiskers and hoped to follow them up. Christina
Alberta went with him. At the sight of the old _Tatlers_ and _Sketches_
she remembered she had bought a book in the High Street that day, a
second-hand copy of Rousseau’s _Confessions_. She went off to get
it. She found the young gentleman from Cambridge still sitting in the
lounge smoking cigarettes.
“Pretty gloomy here,” he said.
“Oh! _I_ don’t know,” said Christina Alberta with an open mind, pausing
before him.
“Nothing much doing--what?”
“It’s not a Gala Night.”
“I’m stranded.”
“You must bear up.”
“S’pose you wouldn’t be disposed to come out for a bit and forage
around for some fun?” said the young man from Cambridge, taking his
courage in both hands.
“Sorry,” said Christina Alberta conclusively, and turned to go on.
“No offence?” said the young man from Cambridge.
“Nice of you to think of me,” said Christina Alberta who would rather
have been thought utterly shameless than the least bit prudish. “Good
hunting.”
And the young man from Cambridge perceived that he was dismissed.
Christina Alberta went into the drawing-room for another tremendous
bout of nothingness. But anyhow she had got Rousseau to read, and
to-morrow she would be in London.
About the Rousseau--? She had always wanted to know how she stood
towards Rousseau.
He carried her on to ten o’clock. But she didn’t think much of
Rousseau. He ought to have known a few of the New Hope Club girls.
They’d have shown him.
§ 8
For three weeks Christina Alberta did not return to Tunbridge Wells,
and when she returned she had passed through a variety of experiences
that will have their due effect upon the course of this story. This
story is the story of Mr. Preemby, and we have little sympathy with
that modern sort of novel which will not let a girl alone but must
follow her up into the most private and intimate affairs. Christina
Alberta was perplexed and worried and would have hated the pursuit
of such a searchlight. Suffice it that events had crowded so closely
upon her that for whole days together she thought scarcely at all of
her possibly quite lonely little Daddy at Tunbridge Wells. Then came a
letter that brought her bustling down.
“I think it only right to tell you,” said the letter, “that Very
Important Communications indeed have been made to me _of the Utmost
Importance_, and that I ought to tell you about them. They seem to
alter all our lives. I know you are immearced in your studies, but
these Communications are so Important that I want to talk them over
with you soon. I would come up to the Studio to tell you about it all,
but very likely Mr. Crumb might be in and I would much prefer to tell
you here on the Common amid more congenial surroundings. Some of it you
will find almost unbeleavable.”
“Communications?” said Christina Alberta, re-reading the letter.
“Communications?”
She went down to Tunbridge Wells that afternoon.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
_The Scales Fall from Mr. Preemby’s Eyes_
§ 1
“The scales,” said Mr. Preemby, “have fallen from my eyes.”
He had chosen a seat upon the Common which commanded an extensive view
of the town, the town crowned by the green cupolas of the Opera House
and lying as though the houses had been shot out of a cart down the
long incline to the Pantiles. Beyond were the wide distances of the
Kentish hill country, blue and remote.
Christina Alberta waited for more.
“This experience,” said Mr. Preemby, speaking with an occasional
h’rrmp; “all these experiences--difficult to relate. Naturally I think
you are of a sceptical disposition--taking after your dear mother. She
was very sceptical. Of psychic phenomena in particular. She said it was
Nonsense. And when your dear mother said a thing was Nonsense, then it
was Nonsense. It only made things disagreeable if you argued it was
anything else. As for myself--always the open mind. No dogma either
way. I just refrained.”
“But, Daddy, have you been having psychic experiences? How could you
have psychic experiences down here?”
“Let me tell you the story in due order. I want you to see it as I saw
it--in due order.”
“How did it begin?”
Mr. Preemby held up a propitiatory hand. “Please! In my own way,” he
said.
Christina Alberta bit her lips and scrutinized the tranquil resolution
of his profile. There was no hurrying him; he had to tell his tale as
he had prepared it.
“I do not think,” said Mr. Preemby, “that mine is a very credulous sort
of mind. It is true I am not given to argument. I do not _say_ very
much. But I think and observe. I think and observe and I have a kind of
gift for judging people. I do not think I am a very easy man to deceive.
“And it is to be noted that I started the whole affair. It began at my
suggestion. I do not know what put it into my head, but I do know that
it was me started the whole thing going.
“You know, after your departure our little band at the Petunia Boarding
House was reduced to just six persons, not counting the young gentleman
from Cambridge who was, as Miss Rewster says, a Bird of Passage.
Naturally the six of us felt rather drawn together. There were the two
Miss Solbés, both very intelligent young ladies, and there were Mr.
Hockleby and Mrs. Hockleby, and Miss Hockleby, and there was me. We
were drawn together at lunch after you had gone off--it was a little
showery and we had a fire in the drawing-room and Miss Solbé, the
one with the glasses, tried to show me one of her Patiences. We got
into quite an interesting argument about whether it was possible to
_will_ which card would turn up next. I have always inclined to the
view that for certain people, people with the necessary gift, it was
possible to do so, but Mr. Hockleby showed himself extremely sceptical
in the matter. He said that if there was a card on the top of the
pack ready to turn up, and if one willed that a different card should
turn up, then that meant that one had really by sheer will force to
re-manufacture two of the cards in the pack, make them over again, each
into the other, make them blank, reprint them and everything. But I
tried to explain to him that this is not philosophically sound because
of predestination. If you were predestined to will that such a card
should be on the top of the pack, then that card was also predestined
to be there. He argued----”
“But is it necessary to tell me all this, Daddy, before we get to your
psychic experience?”
“It is just to illustrate the fact that Mr. Hockleby was an extremely
sceptical person.”
“Was that young man from Cambridge present at the discussions?”
“No-oh. No. He was not. He had probably gone down to the Garage to see
if his Spare Part had come. He was always going down to the Garage to
see about his Spare Part.”
§ 2
Mr. Preemby h’rrmped and began a new section of his narrative.
“It was in the evening after dinner,” he said, “that things really
began. I went into the smoking-room--to smoke--and afterwards I went
into the drawing-room, and when I went into the drawing-room I had no
more thought of occult phenomena, Christina Alberta, than I had of
flying over the moon. But as I came into the drawing-room I saw Miss
Solbé looking at her Patience cards which she had just put out, and
the way she was holding her hands on the table reminded me of the way
I had read that people put their hands together on the table when they
were trying experiments in table-turning. And almost without thinking I
said: ‘Why, Miss Solbé, the way you are holding your hands is just the
way they do when they are going to do table-turning!’ I said it just
like that.
“Mr. Hockleby was reading his paper at the time--the _Times_, I think,
but it may have been the _Morning Post_--but he put it down when he
heard me say that and he looked over his glasses at me and said, ‘You
don’t believe in that sort of thing, Mr. Preemby, surely?’
“His wife was sitting with her back to me and from the way she spoke
I think she must have been eating some sort of sweet or lozenge at the
time. ‘_I_ do,’ she said. ‘We did it at home dozens of times before I
was married.’
“And I don’t know what put it into my head, Christina Alberta; it
seemed almost as though it was something behind myself that did it, or
it may have been a sort of antagonism I have always felt about that
man Hockleby; but anyhow, I said, ‘I’d really like to try some of this
table-turning.’
“The younger Miss Solbé, she’s really quite a charming young lady when
you get to know her, and it seems she has been reading a little occult
literature lately----”
“How old is she, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta, regarding him with a
look of novel suspicion.
“I don’t think she can be very much more than thirty-two or three.
Thirty-four at the outside. And really quite well-read, quite
well-read. Well, anyhow, she said she would like to try it. And Miss
Hockleby, evidently she had been brought up on strictly sceptical lines
by her father, she was curious too. So to cut a long story short,
we tried it. Only Mr. Hockleby objected and Mrs. Hockleby overruled
that. She was the only one among us who had ever seen anything of the
sort before, and so it was she who arranged things and told us what
to do. We chose a very solid table, the one that usually has the big
aspidistra on it, and while we were turning out the light----”
“But why did you do that, Daddy?”
“One always does that,” said Mr. Preemby. “It makes the atmosphere more
favourable. We lit a candle which Miss Margaret Rewster got for us and
turned out all the electric lights; and while we were doing this, in
came young Mr. Charles Fenton and said--_what_ did he say? A peculiar
expression. Ah, yes! ‘Gollys,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’”
“Was that the young man with the motor bicycle?”
“Yes. The young man from Cambridge. We explained what we were doing
and asked him to join us. He declared he knew nothing of psychic
phenomena, had never experimented with it at all and seemed very
doubtful about taking part in the trial. ‘I don’t think there’s
anything in it,’ he said. ‘We shall just waste our time.’ Indeed I
remember now that he did go out intending to visit a music-hall, and
then he came back and said it was raining. It’s very important to
note that he was not at all eager to join us and that he was quite
uninformed about occult things because, you see, as I will tell you, we
found out presently that he was a person of exceptional psychic gifts,
much greater psychic gifts than anyone else among us.
“Well, we arranged ourselves about the table in the usual manner,
thumbs and little fingers touching, and for a time nothing seemed to
happen at all. We found Miss Emily Rewster was peeping in through the
slightly open door, and perhaps that may have had an unfavourable
influence. I suppose she wondered what we were doing and why we had
asked her sister for a candle. Then Mr. Fenton got very restive and
grumbled to himself and said it was the silliest way of passing an
evening he had ever tried. It was a little difficult to persuade him
to keep silence and persevere. ‘_All_ right,’ said he, with a kind of
resentment. ‘Have it your own way.’ And then suddenly came two violent
raps, raps like little pistol shots, not immediately under the table it
was, but as if it was in the air a foot or so under the table. And then
the table began to move. Slowly at first, shifting along the floor, and
then quite strongly twisting and pushing up against our hands. It was
very weird and impressive, Christina Alberta, very weird and impressive
indeed. It rose nearly two feet I should think and then Mr. Hockleby
broke the circle and it fell rather heavily, I fancy, and the leg hit
his shin. He uttered an exclamation and stooped to rub his leg, and
in the indistinct light he hit his head on the edge of the table. It
seemed almost a judgment on his scepticism I thought. We turned up one
or two of the lights to attend to him. ‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr.
Fenton. ‘This is a bit too rum for me.’
“I asked him to try just once more.
“‘I don’t like this table riding up like this,’ he said. ‘It’s such a
bad example for the chairs. Suppose some of them start playing cup and
ball with us! You might get a nasty toss from a buck-jumping chair. And
besides, it’s a lot too like a Channel crossing for my taste.’
“I think we were all a good deal excited by what had happened, and all
the others, even Mr. Hockleby, were eager to continue.
“‘Next time I shall _press_ down,’ he said. I think he was a little
suspicious that either his wife or me had something to do with the
phenomena. Evidently spiritualism was a long-standing dispute between
him and his wife. His wife said she had seen tables move before, but
none so actively as this one had done.
“Down we sat again. We had hardly waited a minute before the table
began rocking about in the most extraordinary fashion, and then
absolutely flew up so violently that the elder Miss Solbé was thrown
back over that Ottoman there is there, and I was bumped under my chin.
At the same time there was a perfect volley of cracks, like somebody
cracking his fingers, but ever so much louder. It was quite a comfort
to have the lights up again and see Mr. Hockleby holding the table down
firmly in its proper place. ‘Damn you,’ he said--quite loudly. ‘Damn
you. Keep down.’ Miss Hockleby and her father picked up Miss Solbé, who
was on the floor in a sort of hysterical fit of laughter, with her feet
waving about.
“‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘It goes through one like an
electric shock.’
“He spoke quite simply.
“The only one of us who had had any experience with occult phenomena
was Mrs. Hockleby, and she had not done anything of the sort since
her marriage to Mr. Hockleby five or six years before, because of
his scepticism. She said now that it was very evident that some very
strong and resolute spirit was present and was trying to communicate
with us, and she explained a simple and safe method of getting into
communication. We were to reform the circle round the table and we
were to call over the alphabet, and when we came to the letter the
spirit wanted there would be a rap and so we should be able to arrive
at something definite. There is a sort of code quite well understood
it seems in the spirit world, in which you convey ‘No’ by one rap and
‘Yes’ by two, and so on.
“We set to work at this,” said Mr. Preemby. “We asked if the spirit
would like to spell out anything and it answered with two very loud
raps, and then Mr. Hockleby read out the letters: A B C and so on. When
it got to S the spirit gave a rap so loud it made me jump.”
“And what did you spell out, Daddy?”
“A name quite unknown to me then--SARGON, and then KING OF KINGS. We
asked: was the spirit that was communicating with us Sargon? The answer
came _No_. Was Sargon present? _Yes._ Then who was our communicant?
OUJAH. Who was Oujah? WISE MAN. It was a very slow process spelling
out the words in this way, and by the time we had got so far we were
all very tired. Mr. Fenton in particular was very tired. He yawned and
seemed greatly exhausted, and said at last he felt so weary and muzzy
that he _must_ go to bed. That was really very natural, because though
none of us realized it at the time he was the actual medium under
Oujah’s control. He went to bed and we tried to go on without him, but
the magic had departed and we could not get so much as a rap. So we
sat for a time talking all this over. Mr. Hockleby in particular was
greatly flabbergasted, and then the rest of us went to bed.”
“Evidently Mr. Fenton made the raps,” said Christina Alberta.
“Evidently his presence was necessary for the raps to be made,”
corrected Mr. Preemby. “Quite unconsciously he was a Mejum.”
There was a pause.
“Go on with the story,” said Christina Alberta.
§ 3