Part 2

In such terms was Chris Hossett wooed and won by Mr. Preemby. He was scared, dreadfully scared, but also he was tremendously roused. It impressed him as being a wildly romantic affair and very terrifying and a little hard on Meeta Pinkey. But he was bustled along too fast to think very much about Meeta Pinkey. He was introduced over again to the Hossett parents next day as their daughter’s affianced husband, and in secret she gave him three golden sovereigns to buy her an engagement ring as a surprise. Mrs. Hossett behaved at first as though she approved of Mr. Preemby and disapproved of the marriage, and then after what was clearly a stormy scene upstairs with her daughter, she behaved as though she approved highly of the marriage and thought Mr. Preemby a very objectionable person. Mr. Hossett would not speak to Mr. Preemby directly, but he spoke of him to his wife and to imaginary auditors in Mr. Preemby’s presence as a “scoundrel” who had “got hold” of his girl. Yet he, too, seemed to regard the marriage as desirable, and no one made any reply to his _obiter dicta_.

It was all very puzzling and exalting to Mr. Preemby. He did little except what he was told to do. He was carried over his marriage as a man might be carried over a weir. He left any explanation to Mrs. Witcherly of what was happening for some more favourable occasion. He went off on Tuesday with his little valise as though he was going back to Norwich. He wrote a simple letter of regret to the house-agent and coal-merchant. Private affairs, he said, of an urgent nature prevented his return to his duties. Mrs. and Miss Hossett went up to London with him. They all took rooms at a temperance hotel in Bloomsbury, and Mr. Preemby was married by special licence at St. Martin’s by Trafalgar Square.

Then he went down to the Limpid Stream Laundry to live with his parents-in-law and master the duties of assistant manager, canvasser and publicity agent. Mr. Hossett never spoke to him and sometimes talked rather unpleasantly about him when he was in the room, making accusations that were better ignored, but Mrs. Hossett gradually became cordial again. And presently Mr. Hossett had a heart seizure and died, and in the course of a few months Mr. Preemby found himself a father. When he was first confronted with his daughter and, as it proved, his only child, he thought her an extremely ugly little red object. He had never seen a baby at so early a stage before. She had a lot of very fine moist dark hair which subsequently gave place to a later crop; she had large indeterminate features and remarkably large feet and hands. Mr. Preemby had an absurd impression that he had seen her somewhere before and hadn’t liked her. Then in a day or so she became a quite ordinary pink baby and wonder gave place to affection.

She was christened Christina Alberta after her mother and Mr. Preemby.

§ 5

In time all these experiences mellowed in Mr. Preemby’s memory into a vague, glorious, romantic, adventurous past. He continued to be rather dreamy and distraught, but on the whole he made a dutiful, faithful husband, and he got on very well with his masterful and capable wife.

She was, he had discovered on his marriage, three years his senior, and she continued to be in every respect his senior to the day of her death. But she treated him with proprietary affection; she chose all his clothes for him, she cultivated his manners and bearing and upheld him against all other people. She dressed him rather more like a golf champion than he would have done himself if he had had any say in the matter. She would not let him have a bicycle for many years, she was a little exacting about his ways of keeping the laundry accounts, she fixed his pocket-money at ten shillings a week, and she was disposed to restrict his opportunities for conversation with feminine members of the laundry staff. But he made no marked protest against these slight deviations from the customary obedience of a wife. A tendency to plumpness manifested itself, and he grew considerable quantities of blonde moustache without apparent effort.

Their home was an agreeable one, the more so after Mrs. Hossett had followed her husband to his resting-place, under a marble crucifix with a dove and olive branch in relievo at the intersection of the arms, at Woodford Wells. Mr. Preemby became a great reader, reading not only romantic novels--he had a great distaste for “realism” in any form--but ancient history, astronomy, astrology and mystical works. He became deeply interested in the problem of the pyramids and in the probable history of the lost continent of Atlantis. Mental science also attracted him, and the possibility of increasing will-power very greatly. He would sometimes practise will-power before the looking-glass in his bedroom when Mrs. Preemby was not about. At nights he would sometimes will himself to sleep instead of going to sleep in the usual fashion. He gave a considerable amount of attention to prophecy and eschatology. He developed views of his own about the Day of Judgment that might have led to a breach with the Established Church if Mrs. Preemby had not thought that such a breach would react unfavourably upon the Laundry. As time went on he accumulated a library of upwards of a thousand volumes and a very considerable vocabulary.

His wife viewed these intellectual preoccupations with friendly sympathy, at times even with pride, but she took little part in them herself. The Laundry was good enough for her. She loved the Laundry more and more; loved its piled clean and starched shirts and collars and its folded and stacked sheets, loved the creak of its machinery and the suddy bustle of the washing room. She loved to have it all going on, orderly and right; to feel everything going through the tubs and washers and wringers, sure and safe; nothing astray, nothing missing at the end. When she walked about the place voices were hushed and scrubbing became respectfully assiduous. And she liked making things pay.

On Sunday afternoons and on days when the laundry had no need of his services, Mr. Preemby took long walks. In fine weather he would walk into Epping Forest or to Ongar or even into the rustic peace of the Roothings, but in dull weather he would go Londonward. After a while the trams were extended as far as the present terminus at Woodford and it became possible to ride very pleasantly right into the heart of London by way of Seven Sisters Road and Camden Town or, with a little bit of extra walking, by the Lea Bridge Road and the Angel and Holborn.

The greatness and multitudinous activities of London stirred slumbering strands of Mr. Preemby’s imagination. He would go in and lunch at an Aërated Bread Shop on a scone and butter, with a cup of cocoa and perhaps a jam-puff, and he would spend hours looking into shop windows and sometimes even making small purchases. He loved Charing Cross Road with its book-shops, Tottenham Court Road, Holborn, Clerkenwell, and the Whitechapel Road, but Piccadilly and Bond Street and Regent Street seemed costly and lacking in true intellectual interest, and he felt his baggy tweed knickerbockers and cap a little out of tune in these smart places. Sometimes he would go to the British Museum and look very hard at objects connected with the pyramids. Great public events always drew him to London. If there was a great murder or a great fire or a Royal Wedding or a Royal Funeral, Mr. Preemby would be sure to be looking at it where the crowd was thickest, often with a neat packet of provisions, a sandwich, an orange, or so forth, that Mrs. Preemby had provided. But he never saw illuminations and fireworks because Mrs. Preemby liked to have him at home when the day’s work was over. He enjoyed the Great War of 1914-18 gravely and profoundly. Once he passed a man who he thought afterwards was almost certainly a German spy. The thought thrilled him for days. He had given him a good look anyhow. He attended air raids in plenty, and he saw the Potters Bar Zeppelin shot down. He was a good four years too old for compulsory military service when the time came, and Mrs. Preemby would not let him be a special constable because she thought he might catch cold.

Mr. Preemby’s work in the counting house was not very onerous, but he also gave thought and attention to the extension of the business outside. He invented several attractive circulars. His experience as a house-agent had trained him to note the existence of large comfortable-looking houses that might otherwise have escaped his observation and to ascertain whether they were occupied; he would then find out whether the Limpid Stream Laundry got the washing from such establishments, and if not he would send a circular and even follow it up with a personal letter. He was vaguely observant about the premises. He would go sometimes and look for quite a long time at the furnaces or the delivery vans or any new piece of machinery like the new calendering machine until he got used to it. But if he stood about where there were girls working, Mrs. Preemby would make some excuse to get him back into the office because, as she explained, she thought a man standing about affected the girls’ work unfavourably. He took in and sometimes read the _British Laundryman_ and the _Dyers’ and Cleaners’ Gazette_.

Occasionally he had happy ideas. It was his idea to paint the delivery vans bright blue and decorate them with a swastika, and to paint exactly the same colour and design on the front of the laundry and put it on the bills. But when he wanted to put the van drivers into swastika caps and blue the clothes baskets, Mrs. Preemby said she thought the thing had gone far enough. It was also Mr. Preemby who suggested Ford cars instead of horse vans as early as 1913. This change was made in 1915.

And at home with her peaceful interested father and her busy, occasionally, rather astringent, mother, Christina Alberta grew to girlhood and womanhood.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

_Christina Alberta_

§ 1

This story, it was clearly explained in the first paragraph of the first section of the first chapter, is a story about Mr. Preemby in the later years, the widower years, of his life. That statement has all the value of an ordinary commercial guarantee, and on no account shall we ever wander far from Mr. Preemby. But the life of his daughter was so closely interwoven with his own during that time that it is necessary to tell many things about her distinctly and explicitly before we get our real story properly begun. And even after it has begun, and while it goes on, and right up to the end, Christina Alberta will continue to intrude.

Intrusion was in her nature. She was never what is called an engaging child. But she always had a great liking for her Daddy and he had the greatest affection and respect for her.

She had little or no tact, and there was always something remote and detached, something of the fairy changeling about her. Even her personal appearance was tactless. She had a prominent nose which tended to grow larger, whereas Mrs. Preemby’s nose was small and bright and pinched between her glasses, and her father’s delicately chiselled and like some brave little boat shooting a great cascade of moustache; she was dark and both her parents were fair. As she grew up the magic forces of adolescence assembled her features into a handsome effect, but she was never really pretty. Her eyes were brown and bright and hard. She had her mother’s thin-lipped, resolute mouth and modestly determined chin. And she had her mother’s clear firm skin and bright colour. She was a humming, shouting, throwing, punching child with a tendency not to hear admonitions and an almost instinctive dexterity in avoiding sudden slaps. She flitted about. She might be up the drying-ground or she might be under your bed. The only thing to do was to down and look.

She danced. Neither Mr. Preemby nor Mrs. Preemby danced, and this continual jiggeting about perplexed and worried them. A piano or a distant band would set her dancing or she would dance to her own humming; she danced to hymn-tunes and on a Sunday. There was a standing offer from Mr. Preemby of sixpence if ever she sat quiet for five minutes, but it was never taken up.

At her first school, a mixed day-school in Buckhurst Hill, she was first of all extremely unpopular and then extremely popular and then she was expelled. Afterwards she did fairly well at the Taverners’ Girls’ School at Woodford, where she was recognized from the first as a humorist. There was always a difficulty in calling her any other name than Christina Alberta. People tried all sorts of names but none of them stuck but “Christina Alberta.” “Babs” and “Baby” and “Bertie” and “Buss” she was called at home and “Ally” and “Tina,” and at school they tried “Nosey” and “Suds” and “Feet” and “Preemy” and “Prim.” Also “Golliwog” because of her hair at hockey. These all came off again, and left the original name exposed.

She was quick at her lessons and particularly at history, geography and drawing, but disrespectful to her teachers; at school hockey she played forward right with marked success. She could run like the wind, and she never seemed blown. Her pinch was simply frightful. She could make sudden grimaces with her nose that gave the weaker sort hysterics. She was particularly disposed to do this at school prayers.

Between her mother and herself there was a streak of animosity. It was not a very broad streak, but it was there. Her mother seemed to cherish some incommunicable grievance against her. It didn’t prevent Mrs. Preemby from doing her duty by the child, but it restrained any real warmth of affection between them. From an early age it was Daddy got the kisses and got climbed over and pulled about. He returned this affection. He called her “my own little girl” and would even say at times that she was a Wonder. He took her for walks with him and told her many secret things that were in his mind, about the Lost Atlantis and the Lamas of Tibet and the fundamentals of Astrology preserved indecipherably in the proportions of the pyramids. He’d often wished, he said, to have a good look at the pyramids. Sometimes one man saw things that others didn’t. She would listen intently, although not always in quite the right spirit.

He would tell her of the virtue and science of Atlantis. “They walked about in long white robes,” he said. “More like Bible Characters than human beings.”

“Good for the laundries, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.

“All we know of astrology is just fragments of what they knew. They knew the past and future.”

“Pity they were all drowned,” she remarked without apparent irony.

“Maybe they weren’t all drowned,” he said darkly.

“You don’t mean there’s Atlantics about nowadays.”

“Some may have escaped. Descendants may be nearer than you suppose. Why you and me, Christina, we may have Atlantic blood!”

His manner conveyed his conviction.

“It doesn’t seem to help much,” she said.

“Helps more than you think. Hidden gifts. Insight. Things like that. _We_ aren’t common persons, Christina Alberta.”

For some moments the two of them pursued independent reveries.

“Still we don’t _know_ we’re Atlantics,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 2

After she had fought her way to the sixth form in the Taverners’ School the educational outlook of Christina Alberta was troubled by dissensions both within the school and without. The staff was divided about her, her discipline was bad, her class-work rank or vile, but she passed examinations, and particularly external examinations by independent examiners, with conspicuous success. There was a general desire to get her out of the school; but whether that was to be done by a university scholarship or a simple request to her parents to take her away, was a question under dispute. The games-mistress was inclined to regard murder as a third possible course because of the girl’s utter disregard for style in games, her unsportsmanlike trick of winning them in irregular and unexpected ways, and her tendency to make drill and gymnastics an occasion for a low facetiousness far more suitable for the ordinary class-room. The English and Literature mistress concurred--although Christina Alberta would spend hours over her essays working in sentences and paragraphs from Pater and Ruskin and Hazlitt so that they might pass as her own original constructions. It was not Christina Alberta’s fault if ever and again these threads of literary gold were marked in red ink, “Clumsy” or “Might be better expressed” or “Too flowery.” Only the head-mistress had a really good word for Christina Alberta. But then the head-mistress, as became her position, made a specialty of understanding difficult cases.

And Christina Alberta was always quietly respectful to the head-mistress, and could produce a better side to her nature with the most disconcerting alacrity whenever the head-mistress was called in.

Christina Alberta, as soon as the issue became clear to her, decided for the scholarship. She reformed almost obtrusively, she became tidy, she ceased to be humorous, she lost sets of tennis to the games-mistress like a little sports-woman, and she stopped arguing and became the sedulous ape of Stevenson for the estranged English mistress. But it was up-hill work even in the school. There was a little too much elegant surrender in her reformed tennis and a little too much parody about her English in velveteen. The possibility that she would ever join that happy class of girls who go in from the suburbs to classes in London and lead the higher life beyond parental inspection and sometimes until quite late in the evening in studios, laboratories and college lecture-rooms, seemed a very insecure one, even without reckoning with the quiet but determined opposition of her mother.

For Mrs. Preemby was not the woman to like a daughter educated above her parentage and station. She came to lament her weakness in not bringing Christina Alberta into the laundry as she herself had been brought in at the age of fourteen. Then she would have learnt the business from the ground up, and have qualified herself to help and at last succeed her mother, even as Mrs. Preemby had helped and succeeded Mrs. Hossett. But the school with its tennis and music and French and so forth had turned the girl against this clean and cleansing life. She was rising seventeen now, and the sooner she abandoned these things which lead straight to school-teaching, spinsterhood, Italian holidays, “art” clothes and stuck-up incapacity, the better for her and every one.

She made a campaign against Christina Alberta’s habit of sitting about in unladylike attitudes and reading; and when Mr. Preemby took the unusual and daring course of saying that it was a bit hard on the girl, and that he didn’t see any harm in a book or so now and then, Mrs. Preemby took him up to Christina Alberta’s own little room to see what came of it, and more particularly to see the sort of pictures she’d stuck up there. Even when he was confronted with a large photographic reproduction of Michael Angelo’s creation of Adam as the master had painted that event on the roof of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he still made a feeble show of resistance, and said that it was “Art.”

“You’d stand anything she did, I believe,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Look at it. Art! Look at these books! Darwin’s _Origin of Species_! That’s a nice book for a girl to be prying into.”

“Very likely she doesn’t see the harm of it,” said Mr. Preemby.

“_Her!_” said Mrs. Preemby compactly. “And look at this!”

“This” was Howe’s _Atlas of Biology_. She opened it to display its large pages crowded with pictures of the detailed dissection of a frog.

“Reely, my dear!” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s one of her schoolbooks. There reely isn’t nothing what I should call _improper_ in that. It’s Science. And, after all, it’s only a frog.”

“Pretty things they teach at school nowadays. What with your Art and your Science. Doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Why, when I was a girl if I’d asked Ma what was inside _any_ animal, she’d have slapped me and slapped me hard. And rightly. There’s things rightly hid from us--and hid they ought to be. God shows us as much as is good for us. More. No need to _open_ animals. And here--here’s a book _in French_!”

“H’m,” said Mr. Preemby, yielding a little. He took up the lemon-yellow volume and turned it over in his hand.

“All this reading!” said Mrs. Preemby and indicated three shelves of books.

Mr. Preemby assembled his courage. “You mustn’t expect me to go against reading, Chris,” he said. “It’s a pleasure and a light. There’s things in books.... Reely, Chris, I believe you’d be happier if you read a bit. Christina Alberta is a born reader, whether you like it or not. She gets it from me, I suppose.”

Mrs. Preemby started and regarded his flushed opposition; the anger in her eyes was magnified through her glasses. “It’s wonderful,” she said after a little pause; “it’s truly wonderful how Christina Alberta manages to get everything she wants.”

§ 3

Miss Maltby-Neverson, the head-mistress of the Taverners’ School, called upon Mrs. Preemby and shook her resolution a good deal. She was obviously a lady, and the school washing ran in term-time to twenty pounds a week. She was taken to see the scandalous picture and she said: “Very beautiful, I’m sure. One of the really Great Paintings in the world. Pro-foundly religious. It’s the very words of the Bible made into a picture. What do you find in it to object to, Mrs. Preemby?”

Whereupon, as if by a trick, the picture ceased to be scandalous and Mrs. Preemby was ashamed of herself. She saw now there never had been anything wrong about that picture.

Miss Maltby-Neverson said that Christina Alberta was a difficult type but a thoroughly interesting personality, a _real_ personality. She had a great capacity for affection.

“I haven’t found that,” said Mrs. Preemby.

“It is a type I have studied,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson, simply but conclusively.

She explained that Christina Alberta was an _active_ type. Left to herself without employment to _stretch_ her faculties she might easily get into almost any sort of mischief. Almost any sort. Not that there was anything wrong in her essentially. It was just energy. Given good hard work and a scope for ambition, she might become a very satisfactory woman indeed--possibly even a distinguished woman.

“I’ve no use for distinguished women,” said Mrs. Preemby shortly.

“The world has,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson gently.

“I’m afraid I’m one of the old-fashioned sort,” said Mrs. Preemby.

“Christina Alberta isn’t.”

“Let the man be distinguished abroad and the woman distinguished at home,” said Mrs. Preemby. “I’m sorry to differ from you, Miss Maltby-Neverson, but one cannot help one’s opinions.”

“It depends upon ourselves,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson.

“I’m afraid I like men to rule,” said Mrs. Preemby. “Woman has her place in the world, and it isn’t man’s.”

“But I thought Mr. Preemby rather favoured the scholarship idea.”

Mrs. Preemby was baffled. “He _did_,” she said as though she did not see clearly what that had to do with the matter. “Give the thing a trial,” said Miss Maltby-Neverson. “After all, she may not win this scholarship.”

But Christina Alberta won it with marks to spare. She took no risks. It was a biennial scholarship which had been established by a benefactor of advanced views. It was tenable at the London School of Economics. As soon as Christina Alberta knew she had secured it she went, without consulting her mother or anyone, to a hairdresser’s and had her hair bobbed. To Mrs. Preemby this was almost a worse blow than the scholarship. She surveyed her shock-headed, handsome-nosed daughter in her short gymnastic skirts with a qualm of sincere hatred.