fresh disappearance, went down with Devizes to Cummerdown. They found
a Medical Superintendent by no means so amazed as they were. Sargon
had been missing at breakfast time; everything seemed to point to
his just walking out of the Asylum. That sort of thing had happened
before. It showed a certain sleepy negligence on the part of one or
two attendants, and they would be reprimanded. But as for wonder, the
Medical Superintendent refused to wonder. Lunatics often stray or
escape, and unless they are dangerous the authorities made no great
commotion about it. They kept it out of the newspapers as far as it was
possible to do so.
“This place isn’t Portland,” said the Medical Superintendent. “They get
back all right. I give him a day. He’s probably coming back now. He may
be hiding up a mile away. I’m chiefly anxious about his catching cold.
Pneumonia is the standard death of a lunatic. But it’s wonderfully warm
for the time of year. I’ve never known such an October.”
He was much more desirous to talk to Devizes about lunacy reform,
and convince him that he was a highly progressive and able Medical
Superintendent than to discuss the special case of Mr. Preemby. “We
do what we can,” he said, “but we’re fixed by the extreme economy we
have to practise. Low-grade attendants and not enough even of them.
The public indifference to lunatics is monstrous. Everybody--even the
people with insane relations--wants to forget all about them.”
“But how could Preemby have got out of the grounds?” asked Devizes.
“Aren’t there walls all round?”
“Like everything else about lunacy law, the back is not as good as
the front,” said the superintendent. “But here we have got at least
a complete wall of sorts all round. The original building used to be
a private mansion with a walled park. For a time--in the eighteenth
century--it was a boys’ school.”
He showed them from his window over the roofs of a clump of
outbuildings the limits of the garden and farm at the back, dropping
towards a streamlet and defined by a roadside wall and old thorn and
oak trees. “For my own part,” said the Medical Superintendent, “I admit
the urgency of very drastic reforms.”
“I wonder if Cousin Widgery can throw any light on this,” said Devizes.
“Widgery?”
“That was his visitor yesterday.”
“_Was_ it?” said the Medical Superintendent, and reflected and went to
his desk as if to look for a paper. “I thought it was a different sort
of name--rather more like Goodchild. Perhaps I’ve mixed up the names.”
“Mr. Sam Widgery,” said Christina Alberta, “would be the last person
who’d want Daddy to get out. He probably came to make sure that he
wouldn’t. He may have come just for the pleasure of gloating over him.
Uncle Sam’s not a pretty soul. He may have wanted to make sure the wall
went all the way round.”
The Medical Superintendent forgot his doubt about the name and the
paper and turned with a fresh idea to them. “You don’t think there was
any animus? You don’t think he may have made for Mr. Widgery? Where
does this Mr. Widgery live?”
But neither Devizes nor Christina Alberta thought there was any great
possibility of Mr. Preemby beating back to Woodford Wells.
“He’s much more likely to go to Canterbury or Windsor or start straight
off for Rome,” said Christina Alberta.
“Or Mesopotamia--or the British Museum,” said Devizes.
“Or _anywhere_!” said Christina Alberta with a note of despair.
They returned to London completely baffled. Christina Alberta was
for a visit to the Cummerdown Police Station and for a search in the
villages round about, but Devizes explained that this might do more
harm than good. Until now Christina Alberta had never heard of that one
kindly weakness in the British lunacy laws, the release of the fourteen
days freedom. If the lunatic can get away from the Asylum and remain
at large for that period, he or she becomes legally sane again, and
cannot be touched without a fresh examination and a new certificate. To
set the whole countryside hunting for Preemby might merely lead to his
recapture by the Asylum authorities. And whatever happened the mystery
must not get into the papers.
“But while we do nothing, he may be lying dead in some out-of-the-way
ditch,” said Christina Alberta.
“If he’s dead he won’t mind a little delay in finding him,” said
Devizes.
No, the only thing was to wait at Lonsdale Mews against the chance of
his returning thither. The Crumbs went off to Shoreham and Christina
Alberta was left alone in the studio, but after one endless day of it
Paul Lambone thought of a convenient agency called “Universal Aunts,”
and a suitable lady was sent to relieve her from a continuous vigil.
One, two, three days passed. There came no sign from Sargon, no news
of any fresh calling of disciples or visits to the King. He had
evaporated. A vision of a little crumpled-up body in a ditch replaced
the tormented figure in the cell in the distressed imagination of
Christina Alberta. But the mind refuses to go on with a painful fancy
that leads to nothing, and Christina Alberta’s imagination presently
ceased further dealings with her Daddy until fresh material came to
hand. “He will turn up somewhere,” she repeated feebly, and became a
great consumer of evening papers. “He will turn up somehow.” Her chief
anxiety was that he should not turn up with too tremendous head-lines.
She began to adjust herself like an early Christian for the Second
Coming. The riddle of her Daddy’s disappearance became a habit of
mind, became, as it were, a frame, a proscenium arch to her current
activities. Beneath it she returned to the urgent and extraordinary
problem of herself and her relationship to Devizes.
§ 12
It was manifest that he was almost as excited as she was at their
mutual discovery. The possible proceedings of Sargon, fantastic as
they might prove to be when they came to light, remained for him
as for her a matter of urgent importance, but the thought of this
strange relationship completely overshadowed it. Each had a reciprocal
desire to get at the other, to discover what magic of sympathy and
understanding might not be latent in their consanguinity.
The evening after the Universal Aunt was installed he took Christina
Alberta out to dine with him at a pleasant little Italian restaurant in
the corner of Sloane Square, and afterwards he came back to the studio
with her and talked until nearly one in the morning. He showed himself
shyly anxious to find out her aims and purposes in life, and what she
was doing and what might be done to let out her possibilities. He was
evidently disposed to shoulder just as much parental responsibility as
he could, subject to the preservation of appearances and a proper care
for the self-respect of the vanished Sargon. She attracted him and he
liked her. Her feelings for him were more tumultuous and abundant and
indefinite. She didn’t particularly want help or support from him. The
idea of being dependent upon him for anything repelled rather than
attracted her, but she wanted to get hold of him, to please and satisfy
him, to be better than he had expected and interesting in fresh ways.
She wanted him to like her--to care for her more than mere liking. She
wanted that anxiously and tremendously.
She liked a sort of ease and confidence he had with waiters and cabmen
and the common services of life. He seemed to know just what people
would do and they seemed to know just what he would do; there was
no tension in these matters, no nervous “h’rrmping.” These common
attributes of habitual prosperity were so little in her experience
that they seemed a distinction of his; and they threw a flavour of
knowing what he was about, and being serenely in control over most of
the conversation, when indeed he was as curious and experimental and
emotionally stirred almost as she was. The eyes that met hers when she
talked were steady, friendly, interested, intimate eyes, and her heart
went out to them.
Over the dinner he talked at first about music. He had had no music
in his education, and now he was discovering it. A friend of his had
been taking him to concerts, and he had got a pianola, “so as to spell
it out at home first.” But Christina Alberta’s education had missed
out music too, and she hadn’t as yet discovered it. So that topic died
out presently. He tried her about pictures, but there again she wasn’t
particularly interested. They had a little silence.
He looked across at her and smiled.
“I’d like to ask you all sorts of questions, Christina Alberta, if I
dared,” he said.
She blushed--absurdly. “Any questions you like,” she said.
“Immense questions,” he said. “For example--generally--what do you
think you are up to?”
She understood what he meant at once. But she was so unprepared with an
answer that she became evasive.
“Up to!” she said, playing for time. “I suppose I’m looking for my lost
Daddy.”
“But what are you up to generally? What are you doing with your life?
Where are you going?”
“I’m at sea,” she said at last. “Lots of my generation are, I think.
The girls especially. You are older than I am; I’m only beginning.
I don’t want to seem cheeky, but aren’t you better able to say what
_you_ are up to? Suppose--” Her slightly scared gravity broke into an
impudent smile that Devizes found very congenial--“suppose you play
first?”
He considered that. “Perfectly fair,” he said. “I will. Have another
olive. I’m glad you like olives. I do too. Nobody’s called me to
account for a long time. What _is_ my game? It’s a fair question.”
But not an easy one evidently.
“I suppose one ought to begin right back at one’s philosophy,” he said.
“A long story. But I started the idea.”
Christina Alberta was greatly elated at her successful repulse of his
projected cross-examination. Instead of making a display herself she
could watch him. She watched him over the flowers on the table and had
to be nudged by the waiter when he brought the pheasant to her elbow.
“How _should_ one begin?” he plunged. She had heard of Pragmatism? Yes.
She was probably better read in that sort of thing than he was. He was,
he considered, a sort of Pragmatist. Most modern-minded, intelligent
people he held were Pragmatists as he understood it. Pragmatist? As he
understood it? He met her eye and explained. In this sense he meant it;
we, none of us, had a clear vision of reality; nobody perhaps would
ever do more than approach reality. What we perceived was just that
much of reality that got through to us, through our very defective
powers of interpretation. “They’ve done this pheasant _en casserole_
very well,” he broke off. “Three minutes’ truce we ought to give it. Do
you find I’m talking comprehensibly? I doubt it.”
“I’m hanging on,” said Christina Alberta....
“Perhaps I’m beginning rather too far off.”
Pheasant....
“To come back to my confession of faith,” he said presently.... “Mind
you, Christina Alberta, you’ve got to say your bit afterwards.”
“It won’t be as definite as yours,” she said. “Some of yours I shall
steal. But go on--telling me.”
“Well, keep hold, Christina Alberta. I feel I’m going to be at once
hesitating and condensed. And I’m not sure of what you know or don’t
know. If I say I’m an Agnostic about the nature of the universe, and
how it began and where it ends, does that convey anything to you?”
“Just what I think,” said Christina Alberta.
“Well.” He started afresh and got into parenthetical difficulties. The
Pêche Melba came to interrupt and permit a fresh start. He unfolded a
psychologist’s vision of the world for her inspection, a curious and
yet attractive vision to her. He expressed himself in terms of mind and
understanding. She was used to hearing everything expressed in terms of
labour and material necessity. Life, he said, was one continuous thing,
all life was connected. He tried to illustrate that. The conscious
life of most lower animals was intensely individual, a lizard, for
example, was just itself, just its instincts and appetites; it received
no teaching and no tradition, it handed on nothing to its kind. But
the higher animals were taught when they were young, learnt and taught
others and communicated with each other. Men far more than any animal.
He had developed picture-writing, speech, oral tradition, scientific
record. There was now a common mind of the race, a great growing body
of knowledge and interpretations.
“People like ourselves are just cross-sections of that flow.
Individually we receive it, react to it, change it a little, and pass
away. We are just passing phases of that increasing mind--which may be
for all we can certainly say, an immortal mind. Does this sound like
Greek--or nonsense to you?”
“No,” she said, “I think I get the drift of it.” She looked at his
intent face. He wasn’t in the least talking down to her; he was simply
trying to express himself as well as he possibly could to her. He was
treating her like an equal. Like an equal!
That was his general philosophy. He was coming to the question of
himself now, he said. He became very earnest over the coffee cups
and ash tray on the swept tablecloth. He spread elucidatory hands
before her. He was conscientiously explicit. He saw in himself two
phases, or rather two levels of existence. Roughly speaking, two.
They had links and intermediate stages of course, but they could be
ignored when one just wanted to express the idea. First of all, he was
the old instinctive individual, fearful, greedy, lustful, jealous,
self-assertive. That was the primary self. He had to attend to that
primary self because it carried all the rest of him, as a rider
must see that his horse gets oats. Deeper lay social instincts and
dispositions arising out of family life. That was the second self, the
social self. Man, he threw out, is a creature that has become more
and more consciously social in the last two or three hundred thousand
years. He has been lengthening his life, keeping his children with him
longer and longer, enlarging his community from family herds into clans
and tribes and nations. The deep-lying continuity of life was becoming
more apparent and finding more and more definite expression with this
socialization of man. To educate anyone in the proper sense of the word
was to make him more and more aware of this continuity. The importance
of the passionate feverish self was then reduced. True education was
self-subordination to a greater life, to the social self. The natural
instincts and limitations of the primary self were in conflict with
this wider underflow; education, _good_ education, tended to correct
them.
“Here am I,” said Devizes, “as we all are, a creature in a state of
internal conflict, quicker, fiercer mortal instincts at issue with a
deeper, calmer, less brightly lit, but finally stronger drive towards
immortal purposes. And I am--how shall I put it?--I personally am, to
the best of my ability, on the side of the deeper things. My aptitudes
and temperament and opportunities have brought me to psychology--as a
profession. I work to add to the accumulation of human knowledge and
understanding about the mind. I work for illumination. My particular
work is to study and cure troubled and tangled minds. I try to
straighten them out and simplify them and illuminate them. And above
all I try to learn from them. I seek the mental or physical cause
of their distresses. I try to set down as clearly and accessibly as
possible, all I observe and learn. That’s my job. That’s my aim. It
gives me a general direction for my life. All the stuff of my mere
individual existence I try to subordinate to that end. Not always. My
monkey individual gets loose at times and gibbers on the roof. And at
other times it’s rather good company as a relief from overwork. Vanity
and self-indulgence have their uses. But never mind the monkey now. I
do not want to be a brilliant person; I want to be a vital part. That’s
my essential creed. I want to be the sort of wheel in the machinery
they call a mental expert. As good a wheel as I can be. That’s what I’m
up to in general terms, Christina Alberta. That’s what I think I am.”
“Yes,” said Christina Alberta, reflecting profoundly. “Of course I
can’t produce a statement like that. You’ve got your system--complete.”
“And finished,” said Devizes. “You’ve got to tell your story in your
own way. At your age--you ought to be with loose ends to all your
convictions.”
“I wonder if I can tell you any story.”
“You’ve got to try your best now. It’s only fair play.”
“Yes.”
There was a little silence.
“It’s wonderful to talk to you like this,” said Christina Alberta.
“It’s wonderful to talk to anyone like this.”
“I feel that you and I--have to understand each other.”
She met his grave eyes for a moment. There was a wave of emotion within
her. She could not speak. She reached out her hand to touch his, and
for a moment their hands were together.
§ 13
Christina Alberta only got to her confession of faith in the studio
after they had returned thither and relieved the Universal Aunt. Even
then they didn’t settle down to the business all at once. Devizes
walked about and looked for drawings by Harold; he deduced Harold from
his drawings to a quite remarkable extent, Christina Alberta thought.
He was curious about Fay. “What’s Mrs. Crumb like?” he asked. “Show me
something of hers, something that seems to give her.”
It pleased Christina Alberta very much to think that he was shy with
her. She felt that this was a recognition of her equality. He was
respecting her and she was very eager that she should be respected by
him.
He got to an anchorage at last in the gaily painted seat by the
gas-fire; and Christina Alberta, after flitting about the room for
a time, came and stood before it, shapely legs wide apart and hands
behind her back in an attitude that would have shocked all her feminine
ancestors for many generations. But it did not shock Devizes; he found
her more and more interesting to watch, and he sat at his ease and
regarded her with a lively admiration. Most of us get used to our
daughters so gradually; they grow up and we carry the wonder of them
as Milo carried his ox; it isn’t common for a man to get an unexpected
daughter abruptly at the age of twenty-one.
She said she hadn’t much in the way of metaphysics; she was a
Materialist.
“No prayers at mother’s knee? Religion of Mother and Daddy? School
prayers and teaching? Church or chapel?”
“It all washed out and faded out, I think, as they laid it on.”
“No fear of hell? Most of my generation went through the fear of hell.”
“Not a trace of it,” said the New Age.
“But--a desire for God in the night?”
Christina Alberta paused for a little while. “I have that,” she said.
“It comes--sometimes. I don’t know whether it’s very important or not
important at all.”
“It’s part,” said Devizes slowly, “of something that has to do with
wanting to be more than a miserable worm--and disliking meanness--and
so forth.”
“Yes. Do you know more about it?”
Rather oddly he didn’t answer that. “And how do you see yourself in
relation to mankind--and the animals--and the stars? What sense of
obligation have you? What do you think the road is along which you have
to go?”
“H’m,” said Christina Alberta. She considered she was a Communist, she
said, though she didn’t belong to the Party. But she knew some other
young people who did. She produced some of the phrases of the movement,
“the materialist conception of history” and so forth. He said he failed
to understand and asked rather irritating questions; she thought
controversially. She didn’t realize at first how widely apart was their
phraseology. As they talked this became apparent. He seemed to have
nothing too good to say for the Communist idea, for wasn’t it just his
own idea of being a part of a greater being of life? but he seemed to
have nothing too bad for practical Communism. Marxist Communism he
said wasn’t a constructive movement at all; it was merely a solvent.
It had no idea, no plan. Christina Alberta was put on the defensive.
“Enthusiasm for an ideal Communist state isn’t nearly so important as
the question of immediate Communist tactics in a decaying society,” she
recited, in an almost official tone. That was how her young friends in
the Party talked. But when she talked like this to him it didn’t seem
so effective. He wouldn’t leave her phrases alone. He wanted to know
what she meant by decay in a society, whether there had ever been a
society not actively in decay and not also actively in growth, what
good tactics were except in relation to general strategy and whether
there could be any strategy without a clear war-end. She countered more
vigorously than effectively and their manner became controversial.
He pressed the difference in their opinions. Communism for him meant a
new spirit, a spirit of science reorganizing the world upon scientific
collective lines, but the whole temper of party communism was
contemporary. It was saturated with the feelings and ideas of existing
social classes, with the natural resentment of the dispossessed. It
had the angry dogmatism of desperate people not sure of their grip.
It needed more of the passion of creative self-forgetfulness. Many
Communists, he said, were simply reversed capitalists, egotists without
capital; they wanted revenge and expropriation, and when they were
through with that they would be left with nothing but social ruins
and everything to begin all over again. And they were suspicious and
intolerant because of their want of internal assurance. They distrusted
their best friends, their proper leaders, scientific men like Keynes
and Soddy.
“Keynes a Communist!” cried Christina Alberta in derision. “He doesn’t
accept the first scientific fact of the class war.”
“It isn’t much of a fact--certainly not a First Scientific Fact,” he
replied. “Keynes builds up slowly a conception of a scientifically
organized exchange system. Most of your friends in Russia don’t seem
capable even of realizing that such a thing is necessary.”
“But they do!”
“Have they shown it?”
“What do _you_ know of the Russian Bolsheviks?”
“What do _you_? You just look at the labels on people. Nothing genuine
without the red label--and everything genuine with.”
She said he saw things from his “bourgeois” standpoint, and he laughed
cheerfully at her social classifications; there was no bourgeoisie
in England, he said; she attempted some of the stock cynicisms and
sarcasms of the movement but with an unusual lack of conviction. It
was easy for him to criticize, she said, living as he did on invested
capital.
“It would make it easier,” he smiled. “But really I live on my fees.”
“You have invested capital.”
“Some. I don’t live on it.”
They had exhausted the dispute for a time. After all she reflected she
hadn’t put up such a bad fight, considering her age and standing. The
momentary glow of controversial exasperation faded again. They drifted
to the more immediate question in which they were interested, the
question of what she was to do with her life.
§ 14
“We progress, Christina Alberta,” said Devizes, “but it’s still
generally the rule that a woman’s life is determined very largely by
the character and occupations of--the leading man in the play. Have you
by any chance been in love yet?”
She wanted to tell him all the truth about herself, but some things are
untellable. She hesitated and blushed hotly. “Nowadays,” she said, and
stopped. “I’ve some imagination. I’ve run about London. I’ve perhaps
imagined things----”
His eyes were very searching for a moment but none the less kindly.
“I’ve been in love--in a kind of way,” she admitted.
He nodded with a dreadful effect of complete comprehension.
“I don’t want to run my life in relation to any man,” she extended.
“Clever girls never do. Any more than clever young men want to spend
their lives adoring a goddess.”
“In any case I don’t see myself becoming a child-producing
housekeeper,” she said.
“Even if you married. No. I doubt whether you are that type. But if you
are going to reject that easy way--and it _is_ an easy way, in spite of
what people say--if you are going to be a citizen on your own as a man
is, then you’ve got to do a man’s work, Christina Alberta. There’s to
be none of the Pretty Fanny business you know.”
“Well, _am_ I?” asked Christina Alberta.
“No, I don’t think you are. And in that case, I guess you want some
more education. You’re clever, but you’re a bit patchy.”
“I’m good enough to get a job. And then learn.”