if I ain’t a blood relation of his, I am of yours. I’m your next-of-kin
and your best friend and I got to think what’s got to be done about
_you_. I got to act for _you_. In spite of bad language and everything.
I tell you he’s right and safe where he is and I’m not going to have
anything done to disturb him. Nothing at all. There he is and there
he’s going to stay, and I’m going to act as Mr. Punter advised me to
act. I’m going to keep back his dividends as they fall due, and pay you
what I think proper to pay you for your keep and so on and charge it to
him, and I’m going to see you live an orderly sort of life in future
now too, same as my poor cousin Christina would have wanted you to do.
You’ve been knocking about the world in a perfectly scandalous way and
learning to curse and swear. It can’t go on. That’s how things are,
Chrissie, and the sooner you see them the right way round the better.”
The young woman stood speechless while Mr. Widgery unfolded his
intentions.
“Where’s Mrs. Widgery?” she said at last with an effect of stupendous
self-control.
“Up in the laundry seeing to things. No need to bother her. We been
talking about all this, over and over, and we’re quite of one mind
in the matter. It’s _our_ right to look after you and it’s _our_
responsibility to look after you, and we mean to do our duty by you,
Chrissie, whether you like it or not.”
Unpleasant doubts assailed Christina Alberta. She was still two months
short of one and twenty, and it was quite conceivable that the law
gave this ugly, oily creature all sorts of preposterous powers of
interference with her. Still it was her style to carry off things with
a brave face.
“All this is just nonsense,” she said. “I’m not going to have my Daddy
put away like this without a word from me, and I’m not going to let you
muddle about with his property. Everybody in the family knows you’re
a crooked muddler. Mother used to say so. I’m going to see about him
myself, and I’m going to have him sent off to some special sort of
mental nursing place where he can have proper attention. And that’s
what I came to tell you.”
Mr. Widgery’s little eyes seemed to weigh and judge her. “You’re giving
yourself high and mighty airs, Chrissie,” he said, after a little
pause. “You’ll do this and you’ll do that. You’ve got a sort of wrong
idea of what you can do in the world. You haven’t got any money and you
haven’t got any authority, and the sooner you get that into your head
the better.”
That scared feeling was gaining upon Christina Alberta. In order to
counteract it she deliberately lost her temper. “I’ll jolly soon show
you what I can do and what you can’t,” she said with a flaming face.
“Now don’t _yew_ go getting excited,” said Mr. Widgery. “You of all
people shouldn’t get excited.”
“_Excited!_” said Christina Alberta; rallying for a repartee, and then
struck by an ugly thought she stopped short and stared at the little
bright brown eyes in the pock-marked face. Mutely they answered her
mute amazed question. This was the third or fourth time he had used the
word “excited” and now she knew what he was aiming at. Suddenly she
realized the train of ideas that her Daddy’s extinction had set going
in his head. He also had been studying the lunacy laws--and dreaming
dreams.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Widgery. “You’ve always been a queerish sort of
girl, Chrissie, and the rackety life you lead and now this affair has
been a strain on you. Must have been. You’ve got no quiet friends but
your aunt and me and no quiet place to come to but here. Don’t you go
flaring out at me, Chrissie; I mean well by you. I’m not going to go
paying you money to keep you up there in London. Why!--you might go
gettings drugs or anything. Call me a something rascal if you like.
Swear at me as though you were out of your senses; it won’t alter what
I mean to do. I want you to come down here and rest your mind and
nerves for a time, and let me get in some one to see you--see what
ought to be done about you.... You’ll thank me for it some day.”
His big grey face seemed to expand and swim about before her eyes and
the room grew small and dark.
“It’s my duty to see after you,” he said. “It can’t hurt you or anyone
for us to have advice.”
In the train from Liverpool Street she had told herself she had
intended to wipe the floor with Mr. Sam Widgery, but things hardly
seemed to be happening like that.
“Bah!” she cried. “D’you think I’d come back here?”
“Better than being lost in London, Chrissie,” he said. “Better than
being lost in London. We can’t have you wandering off in London, same
as your father did.”
She felt that the time had come for her to go, but for a second or so
she could not move to do so. She could not move because she feared he
might do something to detain her, and if he did she did not know what
she would do. Then she pulled herself up by the feet.
“Well,” she said with a step past him doorward that turned him on his
heel; “I’ve told you what I think of you. I’d better be getting back to
London.”
In his eyes she saw the thought of obstructing her flash into being and
die. “Won’t you stay and have something,” he said, “before you go back?”
“Eat _here_!” she cried and got to the door.
Her hand trembled so that it was difficult to turn the handle. He
stood motionless, staring at her with his lower lip dropping and an
expression of doubt upon his face. It was as if he was not quite sure
of himself nor of the course he meant to pursue. The course he wanted
to pursue was appallingly plain.
§ 4
She walked with dignity out of the open front door and down the garden
path. She did not look back, but she knew his face came up close to the
window and watched her. Never in her whole life had panic come so near
to her. She would have liked to run.
After the train had started she felt a little safer. “How the devil can
he get at me?” she said aloud to the empty compartment.
But she wasn’t at all sure that she couldn’t be got at and she found
herself trying to estimate just how much support and friendship she
might find in her London friends. Could she, for instance, count upon
Mr. Paul Lambone? If supplies were cut off could she get some sort
of job and keep herself for a time until she could extract her silly
Daddy from the net into which he had fallen? How would Harold and Fay,
perennially hard-up, behave if supplies ran out? And meanwhile there
was Daddy, wondering why no help came to him--puzzled by what had
happened to him and no doubt getting sillier and sillier.
Christina Alberta was growing up fast now. Beneath all her radicalism
and rebellion there had always hitherto been a belief, tacit,
sub-conscious, in the rightness and security and sustaining energy
of the social framework. There is under most youthful rebellion. She
had assumed without thinking very much about it that hospitals were
places of comfort and luxury, doctors in full possession and use of
all existing science, prisons clean and exemplary places, that though
laws might still be unjust that the administration of the law was
untouched by knavery or weakness. She had had the same confidence in
the ultimate integrity of social life that a little child has in the
invincible safeness of nursery and home. But now she was awakening to
the fact that the whole world was insecure. It was not that it was a
wicked or malignant world, but that it was an inattentive and casual
world. It dreaded bothers. It would do the meanest, most dangerous, and
cruellest things to escape the pressure of bothers, and it would refuse
to be bothered by any sufferings or evil it could possibly contrive
to ignore. It was a dangerous world, a world of bothered people in
which one might be lost and forgotten while one was still alive and
suffering. It was a world in which it is not good to be alone, and she
was beginning to feel herself very dangerously alone.
She had never, she reflected, thought very much of her family, but now
she perceived a family may dissolve away too soon. She wanted a wall to
put her back against if after all Sam Widgery screwed up his courage
to be aggressive; she wanted some one who would be her very own, a
safe ally, some one she could count upon, some one closer than law
or custom, some one who would go about and find out exactly what had
happened to her if she fell into disaster, who would refuse to accept
her downfall, some one who would care for her more than he cared for
himself and not be lightly turned away.
_Himself?_ Not _herself_. In fact, a lover.
“Damn Teddy!” cried Christina Alberta, and knocked a puff of dust out
of the railway cushion with her fist. “He messes it up.
“And I knew what he was. I knew all the time exactly what he was!
“I’ve got to stick it alone,” said Christina Alberta.
“And besides who’d have cared for me, anyhow, with a nose like mine?”
“Even if there were such things in the world as lovers who loved like
that! But it’s a world of people who don’t care. It’s a world of people
who haven’t the guts to care. It’s a dust-heap of a world,” said
Christina Alberta.
§ 5
Her thoughts began to flow into a new region. After all, wasn’t there
something too disagreeably justifiable in the suggestion that she
was--how to put it--_queer_? Hitherto Christina Alberta had always
regarded herself as a model of sanity and mental directness--with no
fault indeed except possibly her nose. Now the word “queer” stuck in
her mind like a thorn that has gone right home. She could not get it
out again.
She had always, she knew, been different. She had always had a style of
her own.
Most of the people she had met in the world had impressed her as being
colourless, weak in speech and action, evasive--that was the word,
“evasive.” They evaded the use of all sorts of blunt words, they didn’t
know why. Christina Alberta was all for saying “Damn” and “guts” and so
forth until some one convinced her of some better reason for avoiding
them than merely that they weren’t used by “nice” people. These others
were always not saying things because they weren’t said and not doing
things because they weren’t done. And for what was said and what was
done, however manifestly preposterous it was, they had a sort of
terrified imitativeness. They just ran about being as far as possible
somebody else until they died. Why exist at all then? Why not get out
of it and leave some one else in possession? But, anyhow, they got
through life. They didn’t get into trouble. They supported one another.
And, on the other hand, if you didn’t evade? You puzzled other people.
You left the track. You were like a train leaving the rails and trying
to take a cross-country short-cut. You hit against--everything.
Was this evasive life she had always despised really the sane life? Was
ceasing to evade ceasing to be sane? Sheep, she had read, had a disease
called gid; then they wandered alone and died. Was all this originality
and thinking for oneself and not going with the crowd and so forth,
that had been her pride and glory, just the way out from the sane life?
Originality, eccentricity, queerness, craziness, madness; was that
merely a quantitative scale?
Was not her Daddy’s queerness this, that after years of the extremest
evasion he had at last tried to break away to something real and
strange? And had she, after her fashion, been attempting anything else?
Was she, too, lop-sided? Lop-sided in a different direction, perhaps,
but lop-sided none the less. An inherited lop-sidedness?
Her mind went off at a tangent on the question whether she had really
inherited anything whatever from her Daddy. Was his queerness her sort
of queerness at all? It ought to be, seeing that they were father and
daughter.
How different they were! For a father and daughter how amazingly
different they were!...
But were they father and daughter? A much repressed fantasy came back
to her--a fantasy based on the flimsiest foundations, on chance phrases
her mother had used, on moments of intuition. Once or twice a reverie
had arisen out of these lurking particles of memory and had taken her
by surprise only to be thrust aside again with contempt.
Blup. Blup. Blup. There came a familiar variation to the familiar
sounds of the train. Christina Alberta was running into Liverpool
Street Station and her perplexities were all unsolved.
The old fantasy lost heart and faded away. What was the good of such
dreams? There she was.
§ 6
Christina Alberta’s meeting next day with Wilfred Devizes turned out to
be a much more exciting affair than she or he had expected it to be.
Acting on the advice of Paul Lambone, she had brought photographs and a
letter or so in her Daddy’s handwriting with her, and she had thought
out what she judged would be significant things to tell about him. She
went in a taxi with Paul Lambone to Devizes’ house just off Cavendish
Square, and they were shown up at once past a waiting-room and a
consulting-room to a dignified little sitting-room with an open fire
and a table with tea-things and a great array of bookcases. Devizes
came in to them forthwith.
She was a little shocked to think that this lank, dark, shock-headed
man could be recognizably like her. He was younger than she had
expected him to be, younger she thought, than her Daddy or Mr. Lambone,
and he wore a long unbuttoned morning coat. He carried the nose all
right; he was indeed very good-looking.
“Hullo, Paul,” he said cheerfully. “Is this the young lady whose
father’s been stolen? We’ll have some tea. It’s Miss----?”
“Miss Preemby,” said Paul Lambone, “but every one calls her Christina
Alberta.”
Devizes turned an eye that was by habit and disposition a scrutinizing
eye upon her. He betrayed a faint momentary surprise and came and shook
hands. “Tell me all about it,” he said. “You don’t think he’s really
mad, but only rather exceptional and odd. That’s it, isn’t it? Lambone
tells me he is sane. It’s quite possible. I’d better go over the state
of his mind first, and then we can discuss the question of the asylum
afterwards. I gather you want to get him under your own care--outside.
That isn’t by any means simple. We’ll have to study the obstacles.
Meanwhile tea.... I’ve been disentangling the delusions of a perfectly
terrible old lady, and I’m rather deflated. Just tell me all about it
in your own way.”
“Tell him,” said Paul, settling his shoulders into his arm-chair, and
preparing to interrupt.
Christina Alberta began to unfold her premeditated discourse. Every now
and then Devizes would interrupt her with a question. He kept his eyes
on her, and it seemed to her even from the beginning that they betrayed
something more than attention to what she was saying. He looked at her
as though he had seen her before and couldn’t quite remember where.
She described her Daddy’s talks to her when she was a girl, about the
Pyramids and the Lost Atlantis and so forth, and the odd spirit of
release and renewed growth that had followed the death of her mother.
She told of the spiritualistic séance and the coming of Sargon. Devizes
was very keen on various aspects of the Sargon story. “It was odd that
the suggestion fell in so aptly with Preemby’s mental disposition. What
was that young man up to? I don’t quite understand him.”
“I don’t know. I think he just hit by chance on the stuff he talked. It
was just bad luck that it fitted.”
“Undergraduate idea of fun?”
“Undergraduate fun. It might have been Tut-an-ka-man.”
“But it happened to be Sargon.”
“He may have been reading some ancient history.”
“He didn’t, I suppose, know anything about your father?”
“Couldn’t have done. I suppose he thought my--my Daddy looked a little
small and absurd, and I suppose it appealed to his sense of humour to
single him out from the others and make him a great king. I’d like to
have a few minutes straight talk with that young man.”
“This you see isn’t a delusion, Devizes. It’s a deception,” said Paul
Lambone.
“Is he generally coherent,” asked Devizes.
“Granted his thesis, he’s amazingly coherent,” she said.
“He doesn’t sometimes become some one else, God or a millionaire, or
anything of that sort?”
“No. He believes in reincarnation and hints at having lived other
lives, but that’s all.”
“Thousands of people do that,” said Lambone.
“And nobody is persecuting him? Nobody makes noises to trouble him or
gets at him with X-rays or anything of that sort?”
“Not a shadow of that sort of thing.”
“The man’s sane. Unless he went mad when he walked out of your friends’
studio.”
“I’m for his sanity right out,” said Lambone. “I wish I’d had a chance
to talk to him. There’s something--everybody’s chattering now about
an Inferiority Complex. Well, isn’t it common for people who have
been rather put upon and deceived and so forth, and who don’t want
to face the facts of life, to take refuge in an assumed personality?
And putting the reveries, the spiritualist séance and so forth all
together, doesn’t it work out on those lines?”
“He knows he is really, _au fond_, Preemby?” Devizes asked.
“It annoyed him to tell him so,” said Christina Alberta. “I think one
reason why he went away was because I and my friend, Mrs. Crumb that
is, at the studio where we live, would try to make him be sensible
about that. It drove him away. He knows he is really Preemby and he
hates it. He knows this is all a make-believe.”
Paul Lambone took up the discourse. “I do so sympathize with that. So
far from that being insane it’s perfectly rational. Becoming somebody
else greater than oneself is part of half the religions of the world.
All the Mithraists used to become Mithra. The Serapists, if I remember
rightly, used to become Osiris. We all want to be born again really.
Every one with any sense and humility does. Into something greater.
‘Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ That’s why Christina
Alberta’s Daddy is so tremendously interesting. He’s got imagination;
he’s got originality. He may be a feeble little chap, but he has that.”
“Having an exceptional mind isn’t insanity,” said Devizes, “or else we
should put all our poets and artists in asylums.”
“Few would come up to that standard,” said Lambone. “I wish they did.”
Devizes reflected. “I think I’ve got things clear. He’s coherent. He’s
neat in his dress. He isn’t persecuted. He’s unselfish in his thoughts,
almost romantically so. And he’s not fattish and lumpish, and he’s
never had any sort of fit. There’s no insane type a properly qualified
doctor could class him under, but then most doctors are altogether
unqualified for mental practice. A stupid doctor might mistake his
imaginations for the splendour of paranoia or take his abstraction in
reverie for _dementia præcox_ or think he was a masked epileptic. But
all these are cases of mental disease, and your father is probably
not diseased at all. He’s mentally disturbed, but that’s all. The
difference between him and a real lunatic is the difference between a
basketful of fruit that’s been overturned, and a basketful that’s gone
rotten. Overturned fruit gets bruised and rots very easily--but being
overturned isn’t being rotten. What sort of man is he to look at?”
“She’s got photographs,” said Lambone.
“I’d like to see them,” he said, and was given a recent one of Mr.
Preemby as laundryman. “Too much moustache by a long way,” he said.
“Is there anything--with some at least of his face uncovered? There’s
nothing here but his eyes.”
“I thought you’d feel that,” said Lambone. “There’s one of Mr. Preemby
as a young man, taken soon after his wedding with Mrs. Preemby. Have
you got it, Christina Alberta?... Here we are.... That’s Mrs. Preemby
in the chair. The moustache--in bulk--has yet to come.”
“He married young?” Devizes asked Christina Alberta.
“He must have done,” she said. “I don’t know his exact age. My mother
never told me.”
Devizes scrutinized the photograph. “Queer,” he said, and seemed to be
searching his memory. “Something familiar. I’ve met people like this.
“They were both London people, I suppose,” he said, looking hard at
Christina Alberta.
“Woodford Wells,” said Christina Alberta.
“My father was born at Sheringham,” she added as an afterthought.
“Sheringham. That’s queer.” With a manifestly deepened interest he
looked at the couple posed against one of those rustic backgrounds
dear to Victorian photographers. “Chrissy,” he repeated to himself.
“Chrissy. Christina Alberta. It _can’t_ be.”
For some moments Dr. Devizes ceased to attend to his consultants and
they remained intently observing him. He tried to fix his attention on
the young man’s face in the picture, but it was the young woman who sat
on the rustic style that absorbed his interest. Amazing how completely
he had forgotten her face, and how she came back now incredibly unlike
and yet like his memory of her. He remembered the glasses and the neck
and shoulders. And a sort of stiff defiance. “When were your mother and
father married?” he asked. “How long ago?”
“Eighteen ninety-nine,” she answered.
“And then you were born straight away?” He asked the question with an
affectation of ease.
“There was a decent interval,” said Christina Alberta with a clumsy
levity. “I was born in nineteen hundred.”
“A little, fair, blue-eyed chap with rather an absent-minded manner.
I seem to see him,” Devizes said, and resumed his examination of
the photograph. Nobody spoke for the better part of a minute. “Good
Lord!” whispered Lambone to himself. Devizes drank a cup of tea
absent-mindedly. “Extraordinary,” he ejaculated. “I never dreamt of it.”
“What is?”
His answer went off at a tangent. “Christina Alberta’s resemblance
to my mother. It’s amazing. It’s been worrying me ever since I came
into the room. It’s been distracting my attention. I’ve got a little
picture....”
He jumped up and went out of the room. Christina Alberta, puzzled,
excited, turned instantly on Lambone. “He knew my father and mother,”
she said.
“Apparently,” said Lambone with something defensive in his voice.
“_Apparently!_” she echoed. “But--he _knew_ them! He _knew_ them well.
And--_What’s he thinking of?_”
Devizes reappeared holding out a small gold-framed picture. “Look at
that!” he said and handed it to Paul Lambone. “It might be Christina
Alberta. Don’t you see how like it is? Allowing for that preposterous
hair piled upon her head and the way her dress goes up round her neck.”
He handed the picture to Christina Alberta and looked at Lambone in
amazed interrogation.
“It might be me in fancy dress,” Christina Alberta agreed, with the
picture in her hands. There came a long pause. She looked up and
saw the expression of his face. Her mind gave a fantastic leap, so
fantastic that it instantly leapt back to the point of departure. It
was like a flash of lightning in a night as dark as pitch. She made a
great effort to pull the conversation together, to behave as though
her mind had never leapt at all. “But what has all this to do with my
Daddy’s case?” she asked.
“Nothing directly. Your resemblance to my mother is a pure coincidence.
Pure. But it’s a curious coincidence! Just for the moment it pulled
my attention aside. Forgive me. I’ve a belief that where there’s
resemblance of this sort there’s a blood relationship. I suppose your
mother’s people--what did you say they were called--Hoskin?”
“Did I say? I don’t remember. I _didn’t_ say. I didn’t. Her name was
Hossett.”
“Ah, yes!--Hossett. I suppose that two or three generations back the
Hossetts and Devizes intermarried. And there we are! Cousins--at we
don’t know what remove. But types go under in a family and then bob up
again. It sort of links us, Christina Alberta, doesn’t it? It gives me
a special interest. I don’t feel now that you’re just any old patient.
Or, rather, just Paul’s friend. I feel linked. Well--That’s that.
Let’s come back to your father. Who married your mother just when they
were starting the old South African war. He’s always been a dreamy,
unobservant type. As we were saying. Even from the beginning....”
He stopped short.
“Always,” said Christina Alberta, after a long pause.
“We’ve been into all that,” said Devizes and paused, and was for a
minute entirely at a loss for words. “Yes,” he said at last.