cheeks. Her quick wits had filled in all the gaps. She understood
now--and then again it vanished. She would have liked to have gone
away and thought it all over at once. But that wouldn’t do. She must
disregard the questions that surged up within her. Her mind went
forward like an obstinate traveller caught in a whirlwind. Her mother
for example. She was trying to recall something about her mother that
had long been stifled in her mind. “Went away and left me to it,”
was it? “Went off and left me to it?” Her mother lying in bed and
wandering. Who had left her to what? That standing perplexity. That
suspicion. That dream. But attend to him now, Christina Alberta; attend
to him! She was observing him with all her being, and yet she seemed
deaf to what he said.
He was saying that now that he agreed with them that Preemby was
sane, he could see his way to the real business before them. It was
the old, old story of making lunatics out of sane people which they
encountered in Preemby’s case. It was the old, old story of making
lunatics out of sane people which they encountered in Preemby’s case.
(He repeated his sentence word for word without apparently realizing
he had said it twice.) All exceptional people were in danger of being
misunderstood, but such a type as Preemby, original and yet incapable
of abstract expression or philosophical method, which sought fantastic
expression for its feelings and impulses, was particularly liable to
give offence, awaken suspicion and dread and hostility. It was just
these borderland cases he was always trying to save from asylums, and
just such cases that were always going there. And they were the last
people to bring into contact with real insanity. “To go back to my
metaphor, the basketful of fruit isn’t rotten, is scarcely speckled
with decay, but it is disordered and overturned. A mind is a delicate
thing to knock about. It will rot very easily, and a mind like your
father’s particularly will rot very easily under asylum conditions.
After all this rigmarole I come to just the conclusion you’ve already
reached, that we have to get Preemby out of Cummerdown Hill and away
under restful conditions as soon as possible. When we’ll comb out his
particular complex and get him into working relations with the world
again. I’m quite sure we can do that somehow, make his incognito
permanent, make him an Emperor in exile, restore his proper name,
organize a common daily round for him and get him back more and more to
be a chastened and released Preemby.”
He paused.
“That’s it,” said Lambone, roused from a profound contemplation of the
two interesting faces before him.
“It isn’t easy. Even to get at him isn’t easy. There will be delays.
A careless magistrate and a silly doctor can make a lunatic in five
minutes. It takes no end of time to unmake one.”
“That’s what I want to set about doing,” said Christina Alberta.
“Naturally,” said Devizes, “and I’m with you.”
He explained one or two points in lunacy law, began sketching a scheme
of operations, considered the people to whom she ought to write and the
people to whom he ought to write, and how soon it would be possible
to see Preemby, and give him a word of encouragement. Already Devizes
had had several brushes with lunacy organization; he was considered
a troublesome but dangerous man for a medical superintendent to be
up against. That might arouse either hostile obstruction or the
propitiatory spirit. They must go carefully.
Lambone scarcely interrupted now at all. He had ceased to be acutely
interested in Preemby, immured away there in Cummerdown. He was lost
in admiration of the self-control his astonishing friends displayed.
He tried to imagine what an undertow of strange excitement, of queer
thoughts and confused emotions there must be beneath their highly
intelligent discussion of the case of Mr. Preemby. They wasted very
little attention upon the onlooker. Christina Alberta’s face was
faintly flushed, and her eyes glowed; Devizes was rather less of a
conversationalist than usual and rather more like a university tutor
with an exceptionally interesting student.
The subject was exhausted at last and the time came to depart. Devizes
came to the door with them.
“Don’t forget that I’m always round the corner, so to speak,” he said.
“I’m in the telephone directory. And don’t forget, Christina Alberta,
don’t forget I’m your long-lost cousin, very much at your service.”
“I won’t forget that,” said Christina Alberta, meeting his eye.
A little pause, and then rather stiffly they shook hands.
§ 7
“Am I mad?” said Christina Alberta as soon as she and Paul Lambone were
in the street together. “Am I dreaming?”
Lambone was clumsy. “Mad? Dreaming? How?”
“Oh! don’t pretend not to understand. That he’s my real father? Don’t
pretend! or, please don’t pretend! Is he or is he not?”
Lambone did not reply for a moment. “You flash at things--like a
lizard. How could it have happened?”
“Then you _did_ think?”
“My dear Christina Alberta, he didn’t know you existed until he set
eyes on you. I’m sure of that.”
“But then. Wasn’t it plain? He _knew them both_!”
“Devizes,” said Lambone, “is ten years younger than I am. He’s barely
forty. He must have been--not more than eighteen. Nineteen at most.
It’s a little difficult.”
“That makes it easier. You never knew mother. If they were both
young----”
“It’s just possible,” said Lambone, “there is some other explanation.”
“But what?”
“Can’t imagine. I suppose he was at Sheringham--perhaps for a
holiday--and met her. But----”
“It must have been something casual, a kind of accident. Mother used to
have flashes.... I never quite understood her. She used to suppress me,
and perhaps she was suppressing herself.... And at the end--she said
something. Someone had left her to it.... Do you know--at times--I’ve
had fancies--suspicions! It seemed as though she guessed that I was
guessing. Now I know--I _was_. It’s incredible. And yet it explains a
hundred things.”
“He certainly never knew of you. He’s--amazed.”
“And what’s going to happen next?”
“Legally you’re Preemby’s daughter. Nothing can alter that. All the
resemblances and coincidences in the world won’t alter that.”
“And all the law in the world won’t alter the facts. And----”
She turned on Lambone with a flushed face. “Do you realize what it
means to think you are the daughter of a certified lunatic? And then
find you are not? All last night I was awake with that unendurable
thought.”
“All night--at your age!”
“It seemed all night. Last night--I _tried_ to imagine that something
of this sort had happened. Tried--and couldn’t. Tried to bring back all
those old fancies. And here it is! I might have known. I did know and
wouldn’t know.
“Tell me about this real father of mine. I don’t know a thing about
him. Is he a good man? Is he a bad man? Has he a wife?”
“He adored his wife. And so did I. She was one of the loveliest and
cleverest young women I’ve ever known. She was strong and jolly--and
the beastly influenza and pneumonia got her. In a week. It cut him to
ribbons. They’d had no children. They’d had only four years together.
He’s attractive to women, but I don’t think there’ll be a second Mrs.
Devizes for a long time. I can’t imagine it. Any other woman! Why! All
that house--it’s full of her presence.”
“Yes,” said Christina Alberta, and thought for a time.
They were detached for a time in crossing Bond Street, and the pavement
was too crowded and Piccadilly was too congested for them to talk again
until they went in St. James’ Street.
“Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, “seems ten thousand miles away. But
when I’m over the amazement of this I expect I’ll get back to him all
right. But just for a time--he must wait.”
“You’ll come in for a bit?” said Lambone at the corner of Half Moon
Street. “I could give you some dinner.”
“No, thanks. I’ll walk all the way to Chelsea,” said Christina
Alberta. “I want to think this out by myself. I want to get alone with
this spinning head of mine and try to slow it down. My life’s gone
topsy-turvy. Or it’s been topsy-turvy and it’s suddenly come right side
up. I don’t know which. Oh!--I don’t know anything. I’ve got to begin
all over again.”
She shook hands and paused. Lambone waited, for manifestly she had
something to say. She got it out at last.
“Do you think--he liked me?”
“He liked you all right, Christina Alberta. Don’t you worry about that.”
§ 8
It was a little more than two days before Christina Alberta, to use her
own expression, “got back” to her lost Daddy.
Those two days were full of an immense excitement. Devizes was the
most wonderful fact in the world. She exploded into love for him. She
had the most vivid impression of him, dark and tall, rather grave,
watchful and amazingly understandable. Yet vivid as her impression
was she doubted every detail of it, and wanted to go back to him and
verify it all over again. It was their quality of mutual understanding
that was at once the most delightful and the most incredible aspect
of the whole affair. Their brains no doubt were unlike, as every
two individual brains must be, yet their unlikeness was not a mere
accumulation of accidental difference, but the unlikeness of two
variations of one theme. She could feel his intentions beneath his
words. Her mind had jumped with his realizations and there must be
kinks and turns in her brain, kinks and turns that just made her
difficult and queer for most people, which would find the completest
parallels in his. She didn’t believe there was a thing in her thoughts
and acts that she would be surprised at his knowing and comprehending.
She had never before thought of parentage with any enthusiasm. She
had viewed it rather in the spirit of Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw,
and conceived of parents generally in relation to their children
as embarrassed hypocrites with an instinctive disposition towards
restraint and suppression. She had made an exception of her own
particular pair; Daddy had been a great friend anyhow, though mother
for the most part had been a concentrated incarnate “Don’t.” But
she had never realized there might be something rather intimately
interesting in consanguinity. And then suddenly a door had opened, a
man had come in and sat down and talked to her and discovered himself
the nearest thing in life to her. And she to him. She wanted to go to
him again; she wanted to see more of him, be with him. But he made no
sign and she could think of no decent excuse for a call upon him. The
very intensity of her desire made her unable to go to him easily. She
wrote the various letters they had agreed she should write, and then
decided to master mental science and lunacy generally. That and the
case of her “Daddy” she perceived to be her formal link with Devizes.
She set out for the Reading Room of the British Museum, for which she
had a students’ ticket, and she tried to concentrate her mind upon
the book she had requisitioned, instead of letting it wander off
into the strangest reveries about this miraculously discovered blood
relation. In the afternoon she rang up Lambone to be given tea, with
the intention of learning everything that the wise man could tell her
about Devizes and generally turning him over conversationally. But
Lambone was out. The next day the craving for Devizes was overpowering.
She rang him up.
“May I have some tea?” she asked. “I’ve got nothing much to say, but I
want to see you.”
“Delighted,” said Devizes.
When she got to him she found herself shy, and him as shy as herself.
For a little while they made polite conversation; it might almost have
been the conversation of two people at a formal call in a country town.
He called her “Christina Alberta,” but she called him “Doctor Devizes,”
and he asked her if she played or danced, and whether she had ever been
abroad. She sat in an arm-chair and he stood over her on the hearthrug.
It was clear that the only way to intimacy lay in a frank treatment
of her Daddy. She felt that if this sort of talk went on for another
minute she would have to scream or throw her tea-cup in the fire. So
she plunged.
“When did you first know my mother?”
Devizes’ attitude stiffened, and he smiled faintly at her boldness. “I
was a Cambridge undergraduate reading for the Natural Science Tripos,
and I went down to Sheringham to read. We--we picked each other up on
the beach. We made love--in a scared, furtive, desperate, ignorant sort
of way. People were primitive in those days--compared with what they
are now.”
“Daddy wasn’t there.”
“He came in afterwards.”
Devizes considered for a moment. He decided that it wasn’t fair to
oblige her to go on questioning him. “My father,” he said, “was a
pretty considerable old bully. He was Sir George Devizes, the man
who invented the Devizes biscuit and cured old Alphonso, and he
was celebrated for being rude to his patients. He would smack their
stomachs and tell them they ought to be scooped out. He helped make
Unter Magenbad. He suspected me of being a bit of a soft, though as a
matter of fact I wasn’t, and he generally had the effect of laying up
for a quarrel with me. He kept me pretty short. He wasn’t particularly
nice to my mother. He used to get at my mother through me. I didn’t
dare to have a scrape of any sort. I was really afraid of him. If I saw
a scrape blowing up my habit and disposition was to run away.”
“I see.”
Devizes considered the implications of that “I see.” “Not that I ran
away from any definite scrape that I knew of at Sheringham,” he said
very carefully.
“What was my mother like in those days?”
“A sort of subdued fierceness. A flushed warm face. She was pretty, you
know, and very upright in her carriage. And she had a swift decision
beneath her stiffness. Her wishes would suddenly crystallize out, and
after that there was no bending her.”
“I know.”
“I suppose you do.”
“She wore glasses then?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Was she fresh then? Was she happy?”
“A little too fierce to be happy.”
“Did you--ever--love her?”
“It is a long time ago, Christina Alberta. There was--seaside
love-making. Why do you cross-examine me like this?”
“I want to know. Why”--Christina Alberta had a momentary terror at her
own boldness--“Why didn’t you marry her?”
Devizes made no pretence of surprise at the question. “There was no
reason manifest why I should have married her. None at all. I can’t
conceive what my father would have done if I had come back from
Sheringham engaged to a chance acquaintance. And anyhow, why should I
have done anything of the sort?”
His eyes defied hers.
“I left her my address,” he added. “She could have written to me. She
never did.”
“Did a letter go astray?” said Christina Alberta, and added hastily,
“my imagination is running away with me.”
She hesitated and trembled at the next words she had resolved to say,
but she said them, with a forced offhandedness. “You see--I might have
fancied you as a father?”
It produced no catastrophe. He looked her in the face and then smiled.
After that smile she felt that they understood each other completely,
and it was very pleasant to think that. “Instead of which, you have to
adopt me as a cousin,” he said deliberately. “Cousins it is, Christina
Alberta. It’s the best we can do. We have to put our heads together and
think of your Daddy. He’s our common concern. I’m interested in that
little man. He’s defended himself against many things by those dreams
of his. Very wilful dreams they may have been. Who knows? Necessary
protective dreams.”
Christina Alberta did not speak for a little time. She nodded. She was
glad at their manifest understanding and yet she was disappointed,
though she could not have told herself what else she had expected. This
man a yard away was the nearest thing in the world to her, and always
there might be this invisible barrier between them. They were linked by
an invisible tie and they were separated by an unfathomable necessity.
Never before in her life had she known what love could be; she wanted
to be free to love him; she wanted him to love her.
She realized that she was standing quite still, and that Devizes was
standing just as still upon his hearthrug, watching her face. His
mouth and eyes were quiet and serene, but she imagined he must be
gripping his hands together behind him. She had to obey him. There was
nothing for her to do but follow his lead.
“Daddy’s our common concern,” she said. “I suppose I shall begin to
hear from some of those people to-morrow.”
§ 9
Christina Alberta got back to her Daddy in a dream.
It was a queer dream. She was going about the world with Devizes and
they were locked together in such a way that she and he could never
look at each other, but were always side by side. But also with
the sublime incoherence of dreams they were at the same time great
ebony images, and they sat stiffly side by side like a Pharaoh and
his consort, and they looked over a great space; they were very big
effigies indeed and their profiles were alike. All through the dream
she thought of Devizes and herself as black. The space before them was
sometimes a sandy desert and sometimes a grey cloudy expanse. Then
suddenly something round and white came bounding into the midst of this
arena and became a little man, a familiar little blue-eyed man, tied up
into a ball with ropes and sorely maimed, who rolled about and panted
and struggled to be free. Oh! but he struggled pitifully. Christina
Alberta’s heart went out to him, and yet impelled by some tremendous
force within her she rose and Devizes rose beside her and they marched
stiffly forward. She could not help herself, she could not control the
rigid movements of her hands and feet. They stepped high and forcibly.
She was voiceless, she tried to cry out, “We shall trample upon him!
We shall trample upon him!” but there was no more than a hoarse
inarticulate sound of horror in her throat....
They were upon him. She felt the body of her Daddy writhe under her.
He was like a bladder. His soft, ineffectual body, with her feet upon
him, bent and bulged about. She forgot there was anything else but
her Daddy and herself. Why had she treated him like this? Devizes
disappeared. Her Daddy was clinging to her knees and now a crowd of
vile figures had appeared and sought to drag him away. “Save me,
Christina Alberta,” he was pleading, though she heard no sound. “Save
me. Save me! Every day they torture me.” But they dragged him away and
she could not put out her arms to him. Because she was made of ebony
and all of one piece with Devizes.
Then some one, a bird or a Sphinx with the face and voice of Lambone,
came into the dream. “Listen to your Daddy,” he said. “Do not despise
him or simply pity him. He has much to teach you. The world will never
learn anything until it will learn from ridiculous people. All people
are ridiculous. I am. I am ridiculous. We learn in suffering what we
teach in song.” She saw that her Daddy was now sheltering between the
paws of the Sphinx, and that the evil men had vanished.
She became intensely aware of a revealing absurdity in her dream. No
previous incompatibility had shocked her at all, and she had never
thought that she was dreaming up to this point. But now she became
intensely oppressed by the idea that the Sphinx was an ancient Egyptian
and classical figure, and that Sargon was a still more ancient
Sumerian. The dream was going wrong. The periods, the cultures, were
mixed. She conveyed this to Sphinx-Lambone, and he turned his head to
answer her, and immediately the evil figures were back, and taking
advantage of Lambone’s inattention, were dragging her Daddy away. She
tried to call Lambone’s attention to that, but he said there would be
plenty of time to recover her Daddy when the point about the Sphinx
was settled. He wasn’t a Sphinx, he explained, but a Winged Bull. He
never had been a Sphinx. Or why should he be wearing a long curly
stone beard? She wanted to argue that it was a false beard and that
he had only just put it on. And anyhow it was just like him to start
an inopportune discussion. Meanwhile her Daddy was receding into
wretchedness. She became aware of this rapidly and painfully. It was
her Daddy still, but his body was different; it was not a human body
any more, but a basket of fruit overturned. Unless she did something at
once it would go rotten and be bad for ever.
She tried to cry out words of comfort and reassurance to the poor
tragic little figure before the dream came to an end--for now she knew
surely that it was a dream. Of course he was suffering intolerably. Why
had she not written to him or telegraphed to him? Surely they would
give him a letter or a telegram! A profound self-detestation for her
incompetence and negligence, and a great horror of pain and cruelty
came upon her, and she awoke completely to black night and infinite
dismay in her little hard bed in her stuffy little bedroom in Lonsdale
Mews.
§ 10
But the impression of her Daddy, desolate and broken-hearted and in
danger, remained with her, terribly vivid. It clung to her. She got up
in the morning anxious and depressed by it.
“I am not doing enough for him,” she said. “I am letting days slip
by--and for him they must be days of despair.”
“Sure th’ ’Sylums ’nt so ba-s-at,” said Fay. “Sure yr overrating it.”
“But to live among lunatics and be classed as a lunatic!”
“They’ve _bans_ play-them. Foxhill ’Sylum there’s _buful_ ban.
’Ntainments nors-sorts treats,” said Fay.
Christina Alberta refrained from bad language.
“You getting ill ove’ all this,” said Fay. “You doing no good ’n Lun.
Youffar be’r come dow’ Shore’m. The’s th’ouse spoilin’. In this las’
bit of fine w’r.”
For the October weather was holding out that year quite wonderfully,
a succession of calm golden days, and the Crumbs had been offered the
loan of a bungalow on the beach at Shoreham by a friend who had used it
throughout the summer. They wanted to go down to it before the weather
broke, but going down to it meant leaving Christina Alberta all alone
in the studio, and they did not want to do that. But they meant to go
to Shoreham. Christina Alberta, now that she had discovered Devizes,
could not endure the thought of getting out of telephone range of
him. London, she argued, was manifestly her proper centre. She could
get down to Cummerdown Hill in an hour; she could keep in touch with
everything. The Crumbs might go but she _must_ stay.
Fay would not understand. She pestered.
About eleven o’clock Christina Alberta went to the Post Office
telephone booth and rang up Devizes.
“Can’t something be done to hurry things up?” she asked. “I’ve got
Daddy on my nerves. I can’t bear to think of him there day after day.
I’ve been dreaming of him.”
“Worrying is no good. We--I’ve got some bad news for you. So put all
your controls on.”
He paused. Christina Alberta, for all her love of Devizes, had to
restrain her violent desire to snap, “Oh! what is it?”
“Visiting day was yesterday. He had one visitor. I suppose that’s the
agreeable relation you described--what was his name? Wiggles? Mr.
Widgery. But your Daddy can’t be seen again by the outer world for a
week. Not until next Tuesday.”
“Oh, damn!” said Christina Alberta.
“Exactly. I’ll do what I can to arrange some sort of special access.
I got on to the Medical Superintendent himself. But he’s queer. He’s
evidently quite friendly and well disposed, but he fences about. He
can’t say either Yes or No. Odd! I’m free to-day in the afternoon,
but I’m tied up to-morrow. I was for going down to see _him_--the
superintendent I mean, for a talk after lunch. ‘Better in a day or so,’
he says. Hope there’s nothing wrong that he’s keeping back. Afterwards
he promised me to ring me up later, and then abruptly he switched off.
So hold yourself ready, there. What’s your telephone number?”
“Haven’t got one. You must telegraph.”
“Or I’ll chase round in a taxi and pick you up. Sorry to hold you up
like this, Christina Alberta.”
“I don’t mind anything so long as it’s getting towards Daddy.”
“Right-o,” and the voice was cut off.
The telegram came after an interval of two hours, two hours which
had been devoted to a rambling dispute with Fay about the Shoreham
difficulty. The message ran as follows: “_Has your father turned up he
escaped at dawn this morning in slippers and dressing-gown and nothing
seen of him since if not appeared meet me Victoria two-seven for
Cummerdown telephone Gerrard 0247 if there._”
§ 11
But Mr. Preemby did not turn up anywhere. He just vanished.