there came a sort of wonder upon me--As though the world was opening.
It made everything else seem very trivial.”
§ 10
“_There came a sort of wonder upon me as though the world was opening._”
Bobby wrote that down also. And he sat very late before the fire in
the ground-floor room thinking that over and thinking over the message
he would have to send to Christina Alberta in the morning. To-morrow
he would have to explain himself and his extraordinary intervention
in Preemby affairs. It was by no means plain to himself as yet, and
to-morrow he would have to make plain to a probably very indignant
young lady why her father had so caught his sympathies and fascinated
his imagination as to tempt him to this escapade. He found himself
thrown back on self-analysis. He found himself scrutinizing his own
motives and his own scheme of existence.
He knew and understood that feeling, “as though the world was opening”
so well. Still better did he know that feeling of dead emptiness
in life out of which it arose. In his own case he had thought this
habitual discontent with the daily round, this urgency towards
something strange and grandiose, was due to the dislocation of all his
expectations of life by the great war; that it was a subjective aspect
of nervous instability; but in the case of this little laundryman it
could not have been the war that had sent him out, a sort of emigrant
from himself, to find a fantastic universal kingdom. It must be
something more fundamental than the war accident. It must be a normal
disposition in men towards detachment from safety and comfort.
He glanced towards the pile of his Aunt Suzannah correspondence on
the table and the next sheet of “copy” for _Wilkins’ Weekly_ he had
distilled therefrom. He rose from his arm-chair and went back to his
work with his wisdom refreshed. He wrote: “So soon as man’s elementary
needs are satisfied and he is sure of food, clothing and shelter, he
comes under the sway of a greater imperative; he goes out to look for
trouble. So that I would not discourage ‘Croydon’s’ desire to become
a missionary in West Africa in spite of his religious doubts and his
peculiar feeling about black people. Such a region as Sherborough
Island will probably supply him with a good sustained, sustaining, and
ennobling system of troubles. A white man who has once challenged the
hostility of a West African secret society will have little leisure for
morbid introspection. He will hardly have a dull moment....”
He stopped writing. “Reads a little ironical,” he said “And not quite
Aunt Suzannah enough.”
He reflected. “My mind scampers off from me at times. Not in the vein
to-day.”
The one thing they must never feel about Aunt Suzannah was that she
could be ironical. No! it wouldn’t do. He ran his pen through the six
sentences he had just written and pushed the sheet away from him. He
drew another sheet towards him on which he had been composing with
great difficulty a telegram to be sent next morning to “Preemby, 8
Lonsdale Mews, Chelsea.” He read over various drafts. The current form
ran as follows: “_Your father safe but with severe chest cold care of
Roothing Maresett Cottage Dymchurch desires see you discretion very
necessary return confinement fatal results best station Hythe and cab
could meet you Hythe if wire in time but do not know you personally am
tallish slender dark Roothing._”
Properly considered it was all right.
He tried to imagine what sort of girl this Christina Alberta Preemby
would be. She would be blue-eyed of course and probably very fair;
a little taller and rounder than her father, soft-voiced and rather
dreamy. She would be timid and affectionate, very kind and gentle and
a little incompetent. Perhaps it would be well to meet her at Hythe
so soon as he knew which train she was coming by. The cab business
might be a strain on her. He would have to tell her what to do. To
a considerable extent now he had made himself responsible for the
fortunes of both these people. And he liked to think that. He liked to
think that perhaps these might become his own people, more of his own
people than the Malmesburys. Because to be frank about it with himself
he was a little bit of an interpolation in the Malmesbury household.
They liked him; they were perfect dears to him; but they could do
without him. Even that little devil Susan managed without him; she
liked him and tyrannized over him but he knew he wasn’t indispensable
to her. Here at last might be two people who couldn’t do without him,
who might to an extraordinary extent become his people.
Of course he would have to put on a little more appearance of strength
and determination than was actually his quality. He owed it to them to
keep up their confidence in him so that he might be able to direct them
in their difficulties.
He would say to her--what would he say to her? “I have been hasty, I
know, but I know something of the strain that is put upon the sane
patient in an asylum. I thought that the first thing to do was to get
your father out of it. It didn’t occur to me that for a time he might
have forgotten your address. Perhaps I ought to have come to you before
I acted. But then how was I to know there _was_ a you? Until he told me
of your existence. In so many cases in these asylums the relatives are
hostile to release. It is dreadful to admit it, but it is so.”
Then rather humorously and quite modestly he would describe the escape.
He was already forgetting the uncertainties of the visiting-day
conversation and the numerous accidental factors in the meeting by the
culvert. But all history has this knack of eliminating unnecessary
detail.
So he would make his statement. It did not occur to him that Christina
Alberta might be the sort of person who interrupts speeches with
elucidatory questions.
He lit a cigarette, strolled about the room, and came to rest standing
before the fire and looking down on the glowing coals. He was sure
now that Christina Alberta was blue-eyed, fragile, shy--with a deep
sweet vein of humorous fantasy hidden away in her. Very probably she
concealed a gift for writing. It would be for him perhaps to discover
that and cultivate it and bring it out. Together they would protect
Sargon, already more than half recovered from the intoxication of his
dream. They would have to soften the humiliations of his complete
awakening. How fortunate and as it were providential it was that he had
been impelled to rescue the little man!--for otherwise he would never
have met Christina Alberta, never won her timid wealth of love....
“_Eh!_
“But this is all damned nonsense!” said Bobby violently, and threw his
cigarette into the fire. “This is just fancy! I haven’t even _seen_ the
girl!”
He lit his candle, put out Mrs. Plumer’s oil lamp with all the devices
and precautions proper to this dangerous survival from the Dark Ages,
and went up to bed. He stopped and listened outside Sargon’s door. The
patient was asleep and breathing rather noisily--ever and again choking
with a little cough.
“I wish the weather had kept warmer,” said Bobby.
When he opened his own bedroom door, the flame of his candle writhed
and flared horizontally, the curtains streamed into the room and a
sheet of paper flapped on the dressing-table. He put down the candle
and went to shut the window. The wind was rising and there was a little
patter of raindrops on the pane.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
_The Last Phase_
§ 1
It was part of the general unsatisfactoriness of Bobby’s make-up that
he was acutely responsive to meteorological conditions. That late
Indian summer was over now, and the heavens and the earth and the
air between began to push, hustle, wet, chill, darken, distress and
bully him. Jumbled grey clouds came hurrying across Dymchurch from
Dungeness and the Atlantic, torn, angular, outstretched clouds with
malicious expressions like witches and warlocks, emitting fierce
squirts of rain. Under their skirts came the waves in long rolling
regiments, threatening from afar, breaking into premature handfuls of
foam, gathering force at last, towering up for a last culminating thud
against the sea-wall and spouting heavenward in white fountains of
suddy water.
“Face it, man,” said Bobby. “Face it. It’s only Nature. Brace up to it.
Think of this poor girl.”
He forced himself to do a morning’s walk along the top of the sea-wall,
with his wet trousers flapping against his legs like flags against
their staves.
“Glorious wind!” he told Sargon when he went in to see him. “But I wish
there was a gleam of sun.”
“Have you any news from Christina Alberta?” asked Sargon.
“There’s hardly time yet for a reply to my wire. But she’ll surely
come,” said Bobby, and went downstairs to dry his legs at the fire.
He did not expect a summons to Hythe to meet the young lady very much
before half-past twelve. Meanwhile he went out to the shed and assured
himself that the motor bicycle and side-car were in perfect order for a
hasty journey. Half-past twelve came, one, half-past one. He had some
lunch. He became very restless, and rose and looked out of the window
frequently to see if the messenger girl was coming with Christina
Alberta’s telegram. About two a large, silent, luxurious-looking,
hired Daimler car appeared outside and stopped at Mrs. Plumer’s gate.
A hatless bobbed head appeared at the window and exchanged remarks
with the driver, who descended and opened the door. The car emitted a
handsome and determined young woman of advanced appearance, hatless and
short-skirted, and a lean, dark, prosperous-looking man of thirty-eight
or forty in blue serge and a grey felt hat. The man opened the gate for
the girl, and she surveyed the house as she advanced.
Bobby realized that Christina Alberta had not kept her promise to be
blue-eyed and fragile. She had betrayed him. Yet for all her treachery
he had built up a sense of personal relationship with her that gripped
him still. He watched her approach with an excitement he found
difficult to control. He wondered who the devil the dark man was. A
cousin perhaps. She discovered Bobby watching her from the window and
their eyes met.
§ 2
Bobby, with an instinct that is given to young people for such
occasions, perceived that he interested Christina Alberta extremely. He
parleyed with her and Devizes in Mrs. Plumer’s little downstairs room.
He spoke chiefly to her. Devizes he treated as a secondary figure, a
voice at her elbow. “He’s got a nasty cold on his chest,” he said.
“He’s been asking for Miss Preemby----”
“Christina Alberta,” said Christina Alberta.
“Christina Alberta a lot. But it was only last night I could get the
address out of him. He’d forgotten it before. We’ve been here over a
day. He caught the cold coming here.”
“How did you come here?” Devizes threw in.
“Motor bicycle,” said Bobby. “But there was a lot of waiting about
before we could get away and it was a cold raw morning, and he had
just his nightgown and dressing-gown and slippers. So hard to foresee
everything.”
“But how did you come to be rescuing him?”
Bobby smiled at Devizes. “Somebody had to be rescuing him.”
He turned to Christina Alberta again. “Couldn’t bear the thought of his
being under lock and key. He took a room, you see, in the place where
I lodged, and there was something innocent and--delightful about him.
I’ve a weakness, a sympathy perhaps, with absurdity.... You ought to go
up to him and see him.”
“Yes, we’d better look at him,” said Devizes.
(Who the devil was this fellow?)
Bobby asserted himself. “Christina Alberta first, I think.”
He took Christina Alberta up to her daddy and closed the door on a
warm embrace. “And now, Mr. de Vezes, or whatever you are,” he said
to himself on the staircase, “where do _you_ come in?” He descended
and found Devizes standing very irritatingly upon his hearthrug before
his fire. As he stood there a remote resemblance to Christina Alberta
was perceptible. Bobby had an incoherent recognition of the fact that
in some obscure way Devizes was responsible for Christina Alberta’s
failure to produce blue eyes. He was a little slow in saying what he
intended to say, and Devizes was able to take the initiative. “Forgive
my blunt impertinence,” he said, “but may I ask who you are?”
“I’m a writer,” said Bobby, refraining from any glance at the
accumulation of Aunt Suzannah material upon the side table.
“You’ve finished lunch?” asked Devizes in a disregarded parenthesis.
“May I ask the same question of you?” said Bobby, “and how it is you
come to be connected with the Preembys?”
“I’m a blood relation,” said Devizes, considering it. “On the mother’s
side. A sort of cousin. And I happen to be a nervous and mental
specialist. That’s why I’ve been brought in to-day.”
“I see,” said Bobby. “You’ve got no intention of--putting him back?”
“None at all. We’re not antagonists, Mr----”
“Roothing.”
“We’re on the same side. You did well to get him out. We were trying
to do the same thing by less original methods. We’re very grateful to
you. The lunacy laws are rather a clumsy and indiscriminating machine.
But, as you probably know, if he keeps clear of them for fourteen
days, they’ll have to begin with him all over again. He renews his
sanity. We’re allies in that. We’ve got to know each other better. Your
intervention--most surprising--strikes me as being at once eccentric
and courageous. I wish you’d tell me more about it, how you met him,
how they got hold of him, and what set you thinking of an escape.”
“H’m,” said Bobby, and came and asserted his right to half the
hearthrug. He had thought of the way in which he could tell this
story--to Christina Alberta--the original Christina Alberta with the
blue eyes. He felt that that version needed considerable revision,
indeed, possibly even a complete rearrangement, for the present hearer.
He was by no means sure he wanted to tell it to the present hearer. The
man was a doctor and a mental specialist and a distant relation, and
he was for keeping Sargon out of an asylum, and that was all to the
good, but it still lingered in Bobby’s mind that he was an interloper.
Nevertheless, he made way for Bobby quite civilly on the hearthrug,
and his manner was attentive and respectful. Bobby embarked upon a
description of Sargon’s first appearance in Midgard Street.
Devizes showed himself alert and intelligent. He grasped the
significance of Sargon’s projected visit to the dome of Saint Paul’s at
once. “I’ve no doubt he did it,” said Devizes. “Neither have I,” said
Bobby, “though I’ve not asked him about it yet.” They pieced together
the probable story of the calling of the disciples before Billy and
Bobby had come upon the procession. “It’s touching,” said Devizes, “and
immense.” Bobby approved these words.
“You see how he got me,” said Bobby.
A distinct flavour of friendliness for Devizes crept by imperceptible
degrees into Bobby’s mind. Difficulties that had seemed to threaten his
explanation vanished; this man, he perceived, could understand anything
a fellow did. Devizes made him feel that the extraction of Sargon from
Cummerdown by a perfect stranger was the most simple and natural thing
to do imaginable. Bobby warmed to his story; his sense of humour took
heart of grace, and he became frank and amusing about his difficulties
on the visiting day. As he was telling of the foxy-faced deaf mute,
Christina Alberta came back again into the downstairs room.
“He takes me as a matter of course,” she said. “He seems weak and
drowsy and his chest is bad.” She spoke more definitely to Devizes. “I
think you ought to overhaul him.”
“There is a doctor in attendance?” he asked Bobby.
Bobby explained. Devizes considered. Was Sargon dozing? Yes. Then let
him doze for a bit. Bobby, working now a little more consciously for
effect, went on with his story. Christina Alberta regarded him with
manifest approval.
By tea-time Bobby had adjusted his mind to the existence of Devizes
and the unexpectedness of Christina Alberta. All that carried over
from his state of expectation was the idea that his relations with
Christina Alberta were to be very profound and intimate. He still
believed that, hidden away in her somewhere, there must be a blue-eyed,
yielding, really feminine person, but it was very deeply hidden.
Meanwhile the superimposed disguise struck him as agreeable, alert,
humorous, and friendly. Devizes too he saw more and more as a strong,
capable, understanding personality. He had seen Devizes examining
Sargon, and it was clever, confidence-provoking doctoring. Sargon’s
lungs, he said, were badly congested, especially on the left side; he
was on the edge of pneumonia and without much vitality to fight it. He
ought to be kept in a warmer, less draughty room with a night-nurse
available. Mrs. Plumer had no room for a nurse, and not an hour away by
automobile was Paul Lambone’s excessively comfortable week-end cottage
at Udimore. A little masterly telephoning and telegraphing and the
cottage was available, fires were alight in the best bedroom, a trained
nurse was on her way to it, and it was all settled for Sargon, warmly
wrapped up and fortified with hot-water bottles, to go thither. Bobby
found himself a mere accessory in this new system of things; he was
to follow next day to Udimore on his motor bicycle, for there would
be room for all of them in Paul Lambone’s cottage. Apparently Paul
Lambone’s conception of a simple cottage in the wilderness involved a
housekeeper, several servants, and four or five visitors’ rooms.
This fellow Devizes carried out all his arrangements with a smooth
competence that gave Bobby no scope for self-assertion. Sargon and
Christina Alberta and Devizes would depart at five and get to Udimore
by six, by which time the nurse would be installed. Then Devizes would
go back to London and get there in time to dress for a dinner he had
to attend. On Saturday morning he would be busy in London, and then
he would come back to Udimore and see if Sargon was recovered enough
for the beginnings of his mental treatment. Perhaps the unknown Paul
Lambone would be there too. He was a lazy person, Bobby gathered; he’d
have to be brought down by Devizes. Bobby was to stay at Udimore for
some days. He made modest protestations. “No, you’re _in_ it now,” said
Devizes cheerfully and glanced at Christina Alberta. “You’re in for
Sargon like the rest of us. Bring your work with you.”
“Yes, do come,” said Christina Alberta.
The only reason Bobby had for resisting the invitation was that it
attracted him so much.
§ 3
This “cottage” at Udimore, which struck Bobby as being a really very
pretty and comfortable modern house, and these three people, Christina
Alberta, Devizes and Paul Lambone, who now grouped themselves round
Sargon, exercised his mind in a quite extraordinary way. They struck
him as being novel and definite to a degree he’d never met in anyone
before, and even the house was fresh and decisive in its broad white
grace, like no house that had ever before held his attention. It made
most of the other houses he had ever observed seem accidental and
aggregatory and second-hand and wandering in their purpose. But this
house was the work of a clever young architect who had considered Paul
Lambone intelligently, and its white rough-cast walls sat comfortably
on the hill-side and looked with an honest, entirely detached
admiration at Rye and across the marsh to Winchelsea and the remote
blue sea; and it had seats and arbours and a gazebo for sitting about
in, and up hill was a walled garden with broad paths up which you
looked from the back of the house through lead-paned windows. You could
watch the sunset from a number of excellent points of view, but it did
not shine upon any room to weary and blind you. There was a kind wall
to shelter hollyhocks and delphiniums from the south-west wind, and to
bear a plum or so and a pear and a fig tree. Downstairs was mainly one
great rambling room with a dining recess in one corner and the power
of opening itself out into a loggia, and with conversational centres
about fire-places or windows as the season might require, but there
were several little studies about the house in which one could be shut
off and write. Bookshelves grew in convenient corners, and the house
was everywhere mysteriously warm from unseen and scarce suspected
radiators. The house was so like Paul Lambone, and Paul Lambone so much
a part of his house that he seemed to be really no more than its voice
and its eyes.
Paul Lambone was the first successful writer Bobby had ever met.
Bobby knew various needy young writers, tadpole writers, insecure
writers, but this was the first completely grown-up and established
and massively adult writer he had ever known. The man struck Bobby as
being stupendously secure and free and prosperous. And the remarkable
thing was that he was in no way a great writer, no Dickens nor Scott
nor Hardy; his work wasn’t, after all, in Bobby’s opinion anything so
very remotely above Bobby’s own efforts. A certain terseness he had
at times, a certain penetration: those were the chief differences. In
Bobby’s imagination the literary and artistic life had hitherto had
an unavoidable flavour of casual adventure, glorious achievements,
maddening difficulties, wild delights and tragic unhappinesses. Swift,
Savage, Goldsmith, the Carlyles, Balzac, Dumas, Edgar Allan Poe,
these had been his types. But this new bright house was as sound and
comfortable as any country house, and Lambone sat in it with as safe
a dignity as though he was a provincial banker or a mine owner or
the senior member of some widespread firm of solicitors. No fears of
losing his “job” or “writing himself out” oppressed him. He said and
did exactly what he thought proper, and the policeman saluted him as he
passed.
If this sort of thing could spring from the _Book of Everyday Wisdom_
and Paul’s amiable novels, what hitherto unsuspected possibilities of
accumulation and ease and security and helpfulness might there not be
in Aunt Suzannah’s kindly responsiveness? It had never before seemed
credible to Bobby that a day might come when he would be secure and his
own master, able to refuse limitations himself and to release other
people from limitations. All Bobby’s life hitherto had been a matter
of direction and eminent necessity. He had been _sent_ to school and
_sent_ to college. He had been on the eve of being _put into_ the
position of agent upon a friendly estate when the Great War had seized
upon him and the rest of his generation and drilled him and sent him
off to Mesopotamia. And after the war he had had to do something to
supplement his diminished inheritance. Life had been so indicated
and prescribed for him at every stage, his parents’ existence had
been so entirely directed by a class tradition, that Bobby’s mind was
exceptionally well prepared to be impressed by Paul Lambone’s freedoms.
It was curious to note how completely Paul Lambone arose out of the
present-day world, and how completely he didn’t belong to it. He had
all its advantages and so little of its standard obligations. He had
escaped from it with most of its gifts. He had to go to no court,
follow no seasons, make no calls, and perform no functions. Was he
exceptional in his circumstances altogether, or were there a lot
of people escaping, as he was escaping, prosperously, from the old
decaying social system? a queer sort of new people who didn’t belong?
Bobby sat on the terrace and looked over the back of his seat at this
extremely new but very sightly and comfortable cottage of Lambone’s,
with this freshly arrived idea of a new sort of people getting loose in
the world and living unrelated to the old order of things and shaping
out new ways of living, very active in his mind. This house seemed to
embody that idea; it was new and novel, but not a bit apologetic nor
rebellious. It was just breaking out like a new fashion. It was just
arising like a new century. He had always assumed that revolutions came
from below through the rage of the excluded and the disinherited. He
had thought every one took that for granted. But suppose revolutions
were merely smashes-up that hadn’t very much to do with real progress
either way, and that the new age dawned anywhere in the social order
where people could get free enough to work out new ideas.