Chapter THE FIRST: Christina Alberta in Search of a Father (1)

§ 1

Hitherto Christina Alberta had faced life with a bold, disdainful, and successful gesture. The discretions and scruples of others were not for her. She had seen no reason for their prudent hesitations, their conventions and restraints. Now for the first time she knew dismay. Her Daddy had vanished into a world that she suddenly realized could be immensely cruel. Teddy was rotten, so plainly rotten that only a fool wrapped up in her own sensations would have touched him. She lay awake for most of the night after her Daddy had vanished, biting her hands and damning Teddy. Lambone the great friend was lazy, incompetent, and futile. Harold and Fay seemed already a little tired of her misfortune and vaguely disposed to blame her for bringing her Daddy to London. She had no one else to whom she could turn. No one remained to her--except Christina Alberta herself, feeling a little soiled now and more than a little afraid. “But what am I to do?” she asked the night, again and again, in her stuffy but artistic little bedroom.

Among the other disadvantages of her position she had less than a pound of ready money.

It has to be recorded that for two whole days Christina Alberta did not even take the obvious step of going to the police. She had a queer instinctive knowledge of the danger of bringing the police and the social system generally to bear upon her odd little Daddy. She had an innate distrust of official human beings. It was Paul Lambone who induced her to go to the police. He had the grace to be ashamed of his unhelpfulness, and after an interval of two clear days he came round to the Lonsdale Mews to offer his generous but sluggish help once more. He caught her having tea with Fay.

“Christina Alberta,” he said, looking a very large comfortable figure of sorrow, “I’ve been worrying and worrying about you all the time. I didn’t help enough. I thought he’d come back of his own accord and that all the fuss was a little premature. Have you heard anything?”

Christina Alberta was torn between the desire to snap his head off and the realization that he was, after his fashion, quite sincerely friendly to her and could be very useful.

“_Say_ it!” said Lambone. “You’ll be better, my dear, after you’ve said it and then we can talk matters over.”

He got the reassurance of a smile. He brightened visibly. He was the sort of man who would hate to feel hated even by a cockroach. “I won’t sit in that chair, thanks,” he said to Fay. “It’s too comfortable. And at any moment we may think of something, and I may have to leap up and act.

“Spartan,” he said, sitting down.

“Eh?” said Fay.

“Spartan. My doctor tells me to say it before every meal and especially before tea. I don’t know why. Magic or Coué or something. Are these things cocoanut cakes? I thought so.... Good they are. And what are we going to do about it, Christina Alberta?”

He became sane and helpful and more and more like the man who wrote _What to Do on a Hundred and One Occasions_. He made Christina Alberta admit to bankruptcy, and made it clear to her that it was her duty to accept a loan of twenty-five pounds from him. He then dealt with the point about reporting the disappearance to the police, and convinced Christina Alberta upon that. If Mr. Preemby had fallen into bad hands the sooner the police looked for him the better. But he did not think that likely; he was much more inclined to the idea that Preemby had made a disturbance and been taken up. He guessed he would be dealt with as a mental case. He had consulted those useful books _The Justice of the Peace_ and the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, and displayed the excellence of his mental digestion. Christina Alberta perceived that he had in him the makings of a competent barrister.

He carried off Christina Alberta in a taxi to Scotland Yard. “Either they’ll tell us there or tell us where we shall be told,” he said.

Fay was impressed by the originality of that. “Now if it was a lost umbrella,” she said, “I could understand it. But I’d never have thought of going to Scotland Yard for a lost father.”

By six Mr. Preemby had been traced to Gifford Street. But there was no seeing him at Gifford Street. He had been certified as a lunatic and he was bound, the attendant thought but wasn’t quite sure, for Cummerdown Hill. Paul Lambone tried to be dignified and important and to prevail over the attendant and extract further information, but not very successfully. In the end he and Christina Alberta departed with little more than one immense discouraging fact. They would not be able to see Mr. Preemby nor to learn anything very material about his condition until the next visiting day, whenever that might be, at Cummerdown Hill. Then if he was “fit to be visited,” they might go and see him. The attendant was rigid in his statements and had the air of disliking both Lambone and Christina Alberta extremely.

As they came away from Gifford Street Christina Alberta observed that Lambone was angry. She had never seen him angry before. It was a very transitory phase. There was an unusual depth of pink in his cheeks.

“Dog in office,” he said. “Just there to annoy people--anxious people. One would think ... man in my position ... certain standing.... Some attention.... Any other country but this, Man of letters has respect.”

Christina Alberta agreed mutely.

“Manners in a public official--primary.”

“He was detestable,” said Christina Alberta.

“Not at the end of my resources,” said Lambone.

Christina Alberta waited.

“Ought to have gone to Devizes in the first place. Knows more about mental cases and lunacy law than any other man in London. Wonderful fellow. I’ll go back to my flat and I’ll ring him up and make an appointment. Then he’ll put us wise about the whole business. And I want you to meet him anyhow. You’ll appreciate Devizes. Come to think of it, you’re remarkably like him.”

“How?”

“Got the Life Force and all that. And physically like him. Very. The same nose--much the same profile.”

“It’s a nose more suitable for a man,” said Christina Alberta. “I suppose _he_ carries it off all right!”

“It’s a damned good nose, Christina Alberta,” said Lambone. “It’s a valiant nose. Don’t you break down to any modesty about it. It was your nose attracted me first to you. You’ll spike a husband with it yet, and he’ll adore it and follow it even as you do. Nowadays women have to be free and individualized; they have got to have features and distinction. The days of the wanton curl and the swan neck and complexion have gone. Not that you haven’t the clearest skin I’ve ever set eyes upon, Christina Alberta.”

“Tell me some more about Dr. Devizes,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 2

But it wasn’t the next day that Christina Alberta met Devizes. She put that off for a day and fled down to Woodford Wells in response to a remarkable communication from Mr. Sam Widgery.

The Widgerys had never been correspondents of the Preembys except in so far as the payment of the dividends upon Mr. Preemby’s interest in the Limpid Stream Laundry necessitated letters. There had been a certain amount of friction in the flotation of the company, and Mr. Widgery had remained resentful and sought to show as much by a studied curtness in his communications. But now came this letter addressed to “Miss Chrissie Preemby.” “_My dear Chrissie_,” the letter began.

“_This is a shocking business about your poor father I can’t tell you how shocked I am I went up post haste to the workhouse where you had put him as soon as they wrote to me and got his watch and cheque-book. It is fortunate they found my address in his pocket or I suppose I should have been kept in the dark as per usual about all this he did not know me and denied his own name but afterwards he said he knew me for a filching commercial wrogue and would have my ears cut off and threatened me. I was to be unpailed whatever that may be. I have been thinking over all this business and since you are not yet of age I suppose I am a sort of guardian to you and have to look into your interests at the laundry which is not paying nearly so well as your father led me to believe. I think he was already queer at the time and didn’t fully understand what he was doing and I doubt if all that of his about preference shares which I never held with really but did to humour him ought to stand. Luckily there is no hurry about this has you won’t have to pay anything for him where he is Mr. Punter says so long as you leave well alone and we can see about these other things when you have got over the first shock of your father’s breakdown. My wife sends her love and kind sympathy. You must keep calm and not let these things disturb you too much because very often it is hereriterary and one cannot be too careful so leave everything to me and believe me to remain_

“_Your affectionate cousin_

“_Sam Widgery_.”

“Rather!” said Christina Alberta and telephoned forthwith to put off Paul Lambone and Wilfred Devizes and hurried off with a combatant light in her eye to the Underground and Liverpool Street Station.

§ 3

When Christina Alberta got down to Woodford Wells it seemed to her that the laundry was just a little smaller than it used to be and that a slight tarnish had fallen upon the bright blue delivery vans. The swastika upon them had been covered over by paper bills in red lettering saying: “Under Entirely New Management. Address all Communications to the Managing Director Samuel Widgery Esq. By Order.”

She went up the garden path to the door that had been home to her for nearly all her life, and it was opened to her by Sam Widgery himself, who had seen her coming. “So you came down,” he said, and seemed to hesitate about admitting her. He was a tallish, stooping man with a large bare pock-marked face, a dropping nether lip, a large nose that snored occasionally when he breathed, and furtive very small brown eyes. He was clad in dark grey ill-fitting garments, with a frayed collar and a very worn made-up black satin tie. His waistcoat was mainly unbuttoned and he fidgeted with his hands. He looked at Christina Alberta as though he found her more formidable than he had thought her.

“Did you see Daddy?” said Christina Alberta, coming straight to the point.

He compressed his mouth and shook his head from side to side as though he recalled painful things.

“Was he bad? Was he queer or--_dreadful_?”

“Not too loud, my dear,” he said in his husky whispering voice. “We don’t want _every one_ to hear about your trouble. Come in here where we can talk properly.”

He led the way into the little living-room in which her father had so recently planned the conditions for the conversion of the laundry into a limited company. The familiar furniture had been rearranged rather amazingly, and a large, dark bureau had been placed under the window. With discreet gestures, Sam Widgery closed the door and came towards her. “Sit down, Chrissie,” he said, “and don’t get excited. I was afraid you might come rushing down here. But of course I was bound to write to you.”

“Did you see him?” she repeated.

“Mad as a hatter,” he said. “They say he made a riot at the Rubicon Restaurant. Wanted to give a great banquet there to all the beggars in London.”

“Did you see him? Was he well? Was he unhappy? What have they done with him?”

“You mustn’t _pelt_ me with questions, Chrissie. You mustn’t let your mind go on at such a pace. I told you in my letter I went up and saw him. They called him out and he came to me in a little room.”

“Where was it? Where was this workhouse?”

“There you go again. Just sit down and take things quietly, my girl. I can’t answer all these questions at once.”

“Where was it you saw him? Was it at Gifford Street?”

“Yes. Where else could it be? They was waiting to remove him.”

“Where?”

“Some asylum I suppose?”

“Cummerdown Hill?”

“Come to think of it, it _was_ Cummerdown Hill. Yes--they said Cummerdown Hill. He came out. He looked much as usual, but more vacant perhaps, until he set eyes on me and then he gave a sort of start and said, ‘Don’t know you,’ he said. Like that.”

“Well, that wasn’t mad. Did he _look_ mad? I suppose he didn’t want to talk to you--after all the disagreeable things that have been said.”

“Very likely. Any’ow I said to him, ‘What! don’t know _me_?’ I said; ‘not know old Sam Widgery what you planted your laundry on?’ Just like that--joking at him like. Quite kindly but--humorous. ‘I don’t know you,’ he says and tried to go. ‘Hold hard!’ I said and took him by the arm. ‘You’re a base, complaining scoundrel,’ he says to me and sort of tried to push me away. ‘You’d rewin any laundry!’ he says--him to me, what was in the laundry business a dozen years before he married your poor mother. ‘Any ’ow I haven’t your complaint,’ I says, ‘Mr. Albert Edward Preemby.’ He sort of stiffened. ‘Sargum,’ he says, ‘if you please....’”

“Sargon,” Christina Alberta corrected.

“Maybe. It sounded like ‘Sargum.’ And ‘Sargum’ he would have it. Mad as a hatter on that. I tried to talk but what was the good of talking? I couldn’t get anything plain or straight out of him at all. Started threatening me with the bastinado--whatever that may be. I asked him to be decent with his language. ‘I’ve ’ad enough’ I says to the attendant at last and the attendant took him away. And so we’re quit of him, Chrissie.”

“Quit of him!”

“Quit of him. What can anyone do?”

“Everything. Did he look very unhappy? Did he look frightened or ill-treated?”

“Why should he? They’re taking proper care of him and he’s out of harm’s way.”

“You’re sure he looked--serene?”

“Bit jaded perhaps. That’s his own internal workings I expect. But he’s where he ought to be, Chrissie. I feel that. What we’ve got to do, from what Mr. Punter says, is to let well alone. There he is with everything he wants, living on the ratepayers’ money. We’ve got ourselves to consider. We’ve got to think of that crazy preference-share idea he’s saddled the laundry with. _That’s_ urgent. It’s a charge of nearly five hundred a year as things are, nearly ten pound a week. There isn’t a laundry in London could stand it.”

“I shall have to see my Daddy,” said Christina Alberta. “I don’t believe he _is_ so comfortable. I’ve heard horrid stories of asylums. Anyhow, I ought to go right away and see him.”

“Can’t do that, Chrissie,” said Mr. Widgery, shaking his large grey face slowly from side to side and watching her as he spoke. “They don’t have visitors running in and out of these mad-houses just whenever they want to. Wouldn’t _do_, you know. The poor creatures have to be kept quiet and not excited. I daresay I could give you a letter for next visiting day----”

“_You!_ Give _me_ a letter!”

Mr. Widgery shrugged his shoulders. “It would help you to get in. But you won’t make anything of him, Chrissie, even if you see him. And you’ll have to wait for a visiting day. You must do that.”

“I want to see him.”

“Very likely. But regulations are regulations. Meanwhile there’s all this business muddle we got to put straight. While he’s in that asylum I think what I ought to do is to give you ’n allowance, five pounds a week say, and keep back the rest until we’re able to get something settled up. Or four. Or perhaps as you want it--not a definite sum. I don’t know. I haven’t thought it out yet. You can’t possibly want to do with all that ten pounds a week with him off your hands. Then we’ll be able to see where we stand and everything will be all right again.”

He paused and scratched his cheek and watched her with his little sidelong eyes. “See?” he said as if to stimulate her to speech.

Christina Alberta looked at him in a silence that became painful. Then she stood up and regarded him--her arms akimbo and her face alight.

“I see now,” she said. “You damned old Rascal!”

Mr. Widgery had nice old-fashioned ideas about young ladies and ladylike language. He was taken aback. “Now!” he said. “_Now!_”

“Always I should think,” said Christina Alberta.

“You mustn’t say things like that, Chrissie. You mustn’t use words like that. You mustn’t get wrong ideas about all this. What d’you mean? Old rascal! Something old rascal! Why? I’m only doing what I got to do. You aren’t really of age yet, you’re just a mere child legally speaking, and it falls to _me_ naturally, _me_, his nearest relative so to speak, to make such arrangements as have to be made about his affairs. That’s all. You mustn’t get wrong ideas about it all and you mustn’t get excited. See?”

“I called you,” said Christina Alberta, “a damned old Rascal.”

He did not meet her eye. He spoke as if he appealed to the bureau.

“And does it do you any good to use such horrible expressions? And does it do me any harm? And does it alter the fact that whether I like it or not, I’ve got to look after his property now and see about it and see you don’t get into any trouble or mischief? All me and your aunt have been thinking about is just what’s right and proper to be done for you. And then you turn on me like a serpent and use language----!”

Words failed Mr. Widgery, and still seeking sympathy from the bureau, he shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands.

“You’re no relation of his,” said Christina Alberta. “I guessed when I read your letter that this was the sort of thing you’d be up to. You’re glad to have him out of the way because he was such a one for punctual payments. You think I’m all alone; you think I’m just a girl and that you can do what you like now with me. You’ve made a mistake. I’ll make you pay up every penny that’s due on the laundry and I’ll see you do it more punctually than ever. And why didn’t you do something to get him out as soon as you heard they’d taken him?”

“Now don’t you go getting excited, Chrissie,” said Mr. Widgery. “Even 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.

Her heart was beating fast and there was a flush of excitement on her 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.