Part 18

“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?