Part 20

She set out for the Reading Room of the British Museum, for which she had a students’ ticket, and she tried to concentrate her mind upon the book she had requisitioned, instead of letting it wander off into the strangest reveries about this miraculously discovered blood relation. In the afternoon she rang up Lambone to be given tea, with the intention of learning everything that the wise man could tell her about Devizes and generally turning him over conversationally. But Lambone was out. The next day the craving for Devizes was overpowering. She rang him up.

“May I have some tea?” she asked. “I’ve got nothing much to say, but I want to see you.”

“Delighted,” said Devizes.

When she got to him she found herself shy, and him as shy as herself. For a little while they made polite conversation; it might almost have been the conversation of two people at a formal call in a country town. He called her “Christina Alberta,” but she called him “Doctor Devizes,” and he asked her if she played or danced, and whether she had ever been abroad. She sat in an arm-chair and he stood over her on the hearthrug. It was clear that the only way to intimacy lay in a frank treatment of her Daddy. She felt that if this sort of talk went on for another minute she would have to scream or throw her tea-cup in the fire. So she plunged.

“When did you first know my mother?”

Devizes’ attitude stiffened, and he smiled faintly at her boldness. “I was a Cambridge undergraduate reading for the Natural Science Tripos, and I went down to Sheringham to read. We--we picked each other up on the beach. We made love--in a scared, furtive, desperate, ignorant sort of way. People were primitive in those days--compared with what they are now.”

“Daddy wasn’t there.”

“He came in afterwards.”

Devizes considered for a moment. He decided that it wasn’t fair to oblige her to go on questioning him. “My father,” he said, “was a pretty considerable old bully. He was Sir George Devizes, the man who invented the Devizes biscuit and cured old Alphonso, and he was celebrated for being rude to his patients. He would smack their stomachs and tell them they ought to be scooped out. He helped make Unter Magenbad. He suspected me of being a bit of a soft, though as a matter of fact I wasn’t, and he generally had the effect of laying up for a quarrel with me. He kept me pretty short. He wasn’t particularly nice to my mother. He used to get at my mother through me. I didn’t dare to have a scrape of any sort. I was really afraid of him. If I saw a scrape blowing up my habit and disposition was to run away.”

“I see.”

Devizes considered the implications of that “I see.” “Not that I ran away from any definite scrape that I knew of at Sheringham,” he said very carefully.

“What was my mother like in those days?”

“A sort of subdued fierceness. A flushed warm face. She was pretty, you know, and very upright in her carriage. And she had a swift decision beneath her stiffness. Her wishes would suddenly crystallize out, and after that there was no bending her.”

“I know.”

“I suppose you do.”

“She wore glasses then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Was she fresh then? Was she happy?”

“A little too fierce to be happy.”

“Did you--ever--love her?”

“It is a long time ago, Christina Alberta. There was--seaside love-making. Why do you cross-examine me like this?”

“I want to know. Why”--Christina Alberta had a momentary terror at her own boldness--“Why didn’t you marry her?”

Devizes made no pretence of surprise at the question. “There was no reason manifest why I should have married her. None at all. I can’t conceive what my father would have done if I had come back from Sheringham engaged to a chance acquaintance. And anyhow, why should I have done anything of the sort?”

His eyes defied hers.

“I left her my address,” he added. “She could have written to me. She never did.”

“Did a letter go astray?” said Christina Alberta, and added hastily, “my imagination is running away with me.”

She hesitated and trembled at the next words she had resolved to say, but she said them, with a forced offhandedness. “You see--I might have fancied you as a father?”

It produced no catastrophe. He looked her in the face and then smiled. After that smile she felt that they understood each other completely, and it was very pleasant to think that. “Instead of which, you have to adopt me as a cousin,” he said deliberately. “Cousins it is, Christina Alberta. It’s the best we can do. We have to put our heads together and think of your Daddy. He’s our common concern. I’m interested in that little man. He’s defended himself against many things by those dreams of his. Very wilful dreams they may have been. Who knows? Necessary protective dreams.”

Christina Alberta did not speak for a little time. She nodded. She was glad at their manifest understanding and yet she was disappointed, though she could not have told herself what else she had expected. This man a yard away was the nearest thing in the world to her, and always there might be this invisible barrier between them. They were linked by an invisible tie and they were separated by an unfathomable necessity. Never before in her life had she known what love could be; she wanted to be free to love him; she wanted him to love her.

She realized that she was standing quite still, and that Devizes was standing just as still upon his hearthrug, watching her face. His mouth and eyes were quiet and serene, but she imagined he must be gripping his hands together behind him. She had to obey him. There was nothing for her to do but follow his lead.

“Daddy’s our common concern,” she said. “I suppose I shall begin to hear from some of those people to-morrow.”

§ 9

Christina Alberta got back to her Daddy in a dream.

It was a queer dream. She was going about the world with Devizes and they were locked together in such a way that she and he could never look at each other, but were always side by side. But also with the sublime incoherence of dreams they were at the same time great ebony images, and they sat stiffly side by side like a Pharaoh and his consort, and they looked over a great space; they were very big effigies indeed and their profiles were alike. All through the dream she thought of Devizes and herself as black. The space before them was sometimes a sandy desert and sometimes a grey cloudy expanse. Then suddenly something round and white came bounding into the midst of this arena and became a little man, a familiar little blue-eyed man, tied up into a ball with ropes and sorely maimed, who rolled about and panted and struggled to be free. Oh! but he struggled pitifully. Christina Alberta’s heart went out to him, and yet impelled by some tremendous force within her she rose and Devizes rose beside her and they marched stiffly forward. She could not help herself, she could not control the rigid movements of her hands and feet. They stepped high and forcibly. She was voiceless, she tried to cry out, “We shall trample upon him! We shall trample upon him!” but there was no more than a hoarse inarticulate sound of horror in her throat....

They were upon him. She felt the body of her Daddy writhe under her. He was like a bladder. His soft, ineffectual body, with her feet upon him, bent and bulged about. She forgot there was anything else but her Daddy and herself. Why had she treated him like this? Devizes disappeared. Her Daddy was clinging to her knees and now a crowd of vile figures had appeared and sought to drag him away. “Save me, Christina Alberta,” he was pleading, though she heard no sound. “Save me. Save me! Every day they torture me.” But they dragged him away and she could not put out her arms to him. Because she was made of ebony and all of one piece with Devizes.

Then some one, a bird or a Sphinx with the face and voice of Lambone, came into the dream. “Listen to your Daddy,” he said. “Do not despise him or simply pity him. He has much to teach you. The world will never learn anything until it will learn from ridiculous people. All people are ridiculous. I am. I am ridiculous. We learn in suffering what we teach in song.” She saw that her Daddy was now sheltering between the paws of the Sphinx, and that the evil men had vanished.

She became intensely aware of a revealing absurdity in her dream. No previous incompatibility had shocked her at all, and she had never thought that she was dreaming up to this point. But now she became intensely oppressed by the idea that the Sphinx was an ancient Egyptian and classical figure, and that Sargon was a still more ancient Sumerian. The dream was going wrong. The periods, the cultures, were mixed. She conveyed this to Sphinx-Lambone, and he turned his head to answer her, and immediately the evil figures were back, and taking advantage of Lambone’s inattention, were dragging her Daddy away. She tried to call Lambone’s attention to that, but he said there would be plenty of time to recover her Daddy when the point about the Sphinx was settled. He wasn’t a Sphinx, he explained, but a Winged Bull. He never had been a Sphinx. Or why should he be wearing a long curly stone beard? She wanted to argue that it was a false beard and that he had only just put it on. And anyhow it was just like him to start an inopportune discussion. Meanwhile her Daddy was receding into wretchedness. She became aware of this rapidly and painfully. It was her Daddy still, but his body was different; it was not a human body any more, but a basket of fruit overturned. Unless she did something at once it would go rotten and be bad for ever.

She tried to cry out words of comfort and reassurance to the poor tragic little figure before the dream came to an end--for now she knew surely that it was a dream. Of course he was suffering intolerably. Why had she not written to him or telegraphed to him? Surely they would give him a letter or a telegram! A profound self-detestation for her incompetence and negligence, and a great horror of pain and cruelty came upon her, and she awoke completely to black night and infinite dismay in her little hard bed in her stuffy little bedroom in Lonsdale Mews.

§ 10

But the impression of her Daddy, desolate and broken-hearted and in danger, remained with her, terribly vivid. It clung to her. She got up in the morning anxious and depressed by it.

“I am not doing enough for him,” she said. “I am letting days slip by--and for him they must be days of despair.”

“Sure th’ ’Sylums ’nt so ba-s-at,” said Fay. “Sure yr overrating it.”

“But to live among lunatics and be classed as a lunatic!”

“They’ve _bans_ play-them. Foxhill ’Sylum there’s _buful_ ban. ’Ntainments nors-sorts treats,” said Fay.

Christina Alberta refrained from bad language.

“You getting ill ove’ all this,” said Fay. “You doing no good ’n Lun. Youffar be’r come dow’ Shore’m. The’s th’ouse spoilin’. In this las’ bit of fine w’r.”

For the October weather was holding out that year quite wonderfully, a succession of calm golden days, and the Crumbs had been offered the loan of a bungalow on the beach at Shoreham by a friend who had used it throughout the summer. They wanted to go down to it before the weather broke, but going down to it meant leaving Christina Alberta all alone in the studio, and they did not want to do that. But they meant to go to Shoreham. Christina Alberta, now that she had discovered Devizes, could not endure the thought of getting out of telephone range of him. London, she argued, was manifestly her proper centre. She could get down to Cummerdown Hill in an hour; she could keep in touch with everything. The Crumbs might go but she _must_ stay.

Fay would not understand. She pestered.

About eleven o’clock Christina Alberta went to the Post Office telephone booth and rang up Devizes.

“Can’t something be done to hurry things up?” she asked. “I’ve got Daddy on my nerves. I can’t bear to think of him there day after day. I’ve been dreaming of him.”

“Worrying is no good. We--I’ve got some bad news for you. So put all your controls on.”

He paused. Christina Alberta, for all her love of Devizes, had to restrain her violent desire to snap, “Oh! what is it?”

“Visiting day was yesterday. He had one visitor. I suppose that’s the agreeable relation you described--what was his name? Wiggles? Mr. Widgery. But your Daddy can’t be seen again by the outer world for a week. Not until next Tuesday.”

“Oh, damn!” said Christina Alberta.

“Exactly. I’ll do what I can to arrange some sort of special access. I got on to the Medical Superintendent himself. But he’s queer. He’s evidently quite friendly and well disposed, but he fences about. He can’t say either Yes or No. Odd! I’m free to-day in the afternoon, but I’m tied up to-morrow. I was for going down to see _him_--the superintendent I mean, for a talk after lunch. ‘Better in a day or so,’ he says. Hope there’s nothing wrong that he’s keeping back. Afterwards he promised me to ring me up later, and then abruptly he switched off. So hold yourself ready, there. What’s your telephone number?”

“Haven’t got one. You must telegraph.”

“Or I’ll chase round in a taxi and pick you up. Sorry to hold you up like this, Christina Alberta.”

“I don’t mind anything so long as it’s getting towards Daddy.”

“Right-o,” and the voice was cut off.

The telegram came after an interval of two hours, two hours which had been devoted to a rambling dispute with Fay about the Shoreham difficulty. The message ran as follows: “_Has your father turned up he escaped at dawn this morning in slippers and dressing-gown and nothing seen of him since if not appeared meet me Victoria two-seven for Cummerdown telephone Gerrard 0247 if there._”

§ 11

But Mr. Preemby did not turn up anywhere. He just vanished.

Christina Alberta, in a state of incredulous astonishment at this fresh disappearance, went down with Devizes to Cummerdown. They found a Medical Superintendent by no means so amazed as they were. Sargon had been missing at breakfast time; everything seemed to point to his just walking out of the Asylum. That sort of thing had happened before. It showed a certain sleepy negligence on the part of one or two attendants, and they would be reprimanded. But as for wonder, the Medical Superintendent refused to wonder. Lunatics often stray or escape, and unless they are dangerous the authorities made no great commotion about it. They kept it out of the newspapers as far as it was possible to do so.

“This place isn’t Portland,” said the Medical Superintendent. “They get back all right. I give him a day. He’s probably coming back now. He may be hiding up a mile away. I’m chiefly anxious about his catching cold. Pneumonia is the standard death of a lunatic. But it’s wonderfully warm for the time of year. I’ve never known such an October.”

He was much more desirous to talk to Devizes about lunacy reform, and convince him that he was a highly progressive and able Medical Superintendent than to discuss the special case of Mr. Preemby. “We do what we can,” he said, “but we’re fixed by the extreme economy we have to practise. Low-grade attendants and not enough even of them. The public indifference to lunatics is monstrous. Everybody--even the people with insane relations--wants to forget all about them.”

“But how could Preemby have got out of the grounds?” asked Devizes. “Aren’t there walls all round?”

“Like everything else about lunacy law, the back is not as good as the front,” said the superintendent. “But here we have got at least a complete wall of sorts all round. The original building used to be a private mansion with a walled park. For a time--in the eighteenth century--it was a boys’ school.”

He showed them from his window over the roofs of a clump of outbuildings the limits of the garden and farm at the back, dropping towards a streamlet and defined by a roadside wall and old thorn and oak trees. “For my own part,” said the Medical Superintendent, “I admit the urgency of very drastic reforms.”

“I wonder if Cousin Widgery can throw any light on this,” said Devizes.

“Widgery?”

“That was his visitor yesterday.”

“_Was_ it?” said the Medical Superintendent, and reflected and went to his desk as if to look for a paper. “I thought it was a different sort of name--rather more like Goodchild. Perhaps I’ve mixed up the names.”

“Mr. Sam Widgery,” said Christina Alberta, “would be the last person who’d want Daddy to get out. He probably came to make sure that he wouldn’t. He may have come just for the pleasure of gloating over him. Uncle Sam’s not a pretty soul. He may have wanted to make sure the wall went all the way round.”

The Medical Superintendent forgot his doubt about the name and the paper and turned with a fresh idea to them. “You don’t think there was any animus? You don’t think he may have made for Mr. Widgery? Where does this Mr. Widgery live?”

But neither Devizes nor Christina Alberta thought there was any great possibility of Mr. Preemby beating back to Woodford Wells.

“He’s much more likely to go to Canterbury or Windsor or start straight off for Rome,” said Christina Alberta.

“Or Mesopotamia--or the British Museum,” said Devizes.

“Or _anywhere_!” said Christina Alberta with a note of despair.

They returned to London completely baffled. Christina Alberta was for a visit to the Cummerdown Police Station and for a search in the villages round about, but Devizes explained that this might do more harm than good. Until now Christina Alberta had never heard of that one kindly weakness in the British lunacy laws, the release of the fourteen days freedom. If the lunatic can get away from the Asylum and remain at large for that period, he or she becomes legally sane again, and cannot be touched without a fresh examination and a new certificate. To set the whole countryside hunting for Preemby might merely lead to his recapture by the Asylum authorities. And whatever happened the mystery must not get into the papers.

“But while we do nothing, he may be lying dead in some out-of-the-way ditch,” said Christina Alberta.

“If he’s dead he won’t mind a little delay in finding him,” said Devizes.

No, the only thing was to wait at Lonsdale Mews against the chance of his returning thither. The Crumbs went off to Shoreham and Christina Alberta was left alone in the studio, but after one endless day of it Paul Lambone thought of a convenient agency called “Universal Aunts,” and a suitable lady was sent to relieve her from a continuous vigil.

One, two, three days passed. There came no sign from Sargon, no news of any fresh calling of disciples or visits to the King. He had evaporated. A vision of a little crumpled-up body in a ditch replaced the tormented figure in the cell in the distressed imagination of Christina Alberta. But the mind refuses to go on with a painful fancy that leads to nothing, and Christina Alberta’s imagination presently ceased further dealings with her Daddy until fresh material came to hand. “He will turn up somewhere,” she repeated feebly, and became a great consumer of evening papers. “He will turn up somehow.” Her chief anxiety was that he should not turn up with too tremendous head-lines. She began to adjust herself like an early Christian for the Second Coming. The riddle of her Daddy’s disappearance became a habit of mind, became, as it were, a frame, a proscenium arch to her current activities. Beneath it she returned to the urgent and extraordinary problem of herself and her relationship to Devizes.

§ 12

It was manifest that he was almost as excited as she was at their mutual discovery. The possible proceedings of Sargon, fantastic as they might prove to be when they came to light, remained for him as for her a matter of urgent importance, but the thought of this strange relationship completely overshadowed it. Each had a reciprocal desire to get at the other, to discover what magic of sympathy and understanding might not be latent in their consanguinity.

The evening after the Universal Aunt was installed he took Christina Alberta out to dine with him at a pleasant little Italian restaurant in the corner of Sloane Square, and afterwards he came back to the studio with her and talked until nearly one in the morning. He showed himself shyly anxious to find out her aims and purposes in life, and what she was doing and what might be done to let out her possibilities. He was evidently disposed to shoulder just as much parental responsibility as he could, subject to the preservation of appearances and a proper care for the self-respect of the vanished Sargon. She attracted him and he liked her. Her feelings for him were more tumultuous and abundant and indefinite. She didn’t particularly want help or support from him. The idea of being dependent upon him for anything repelled rather than attracted her, but she wanted to get hold of him, to please and satisfy him, to be better than he had expected and interesting in fresh ways. She wanted him to like her--to care for her more than mere liking. She wanted that anxiously and tremendously.

She liked a sort of ease and confidence he had with waiters and cabmen and the common services of life. He seemed to know just what people would do and they seemed to know just what he would do; there was no tension in these matters, no nervous “h’rrmping.” These common attributes of habitual prosperity were so little in her experience that they seemed a distinction of his; and they threw a flavour of knowing what he was about, and being serenely in control over most of the conversation, when indeed he was as curious and experimental and emotionally stirred almost as she was. The eyes that met hers when she talked were steady, friendly, interested, intimate eyes, and her heart went out to them.

Over the dinner he talked at first about music. He had had no music in his education, and now he was discovering it. A friend of his had been taking him to concerts, and he had got a pianola, “so as to spell it out at home first.” But Christina Alberta’s education had missed out music too, and she hadn’t as yet discovered it. So that topic died out presently. He tried her about pictures, but there again she wasn’t particularly interested. They had a little silence.

He looked across at her and smiled.

“I’d like to ask you all sorts of questions, Christina Alberta, if I dared,” he said.

She blushed--absurdly. “Any questions you like,” she said.

“Immense questions,” he said. “For example--generally--what do you think you are up to?”

She understood what he meant at once. But she was so unprepared with an answer that she became evasive.

“Up to!” she said, playing for time. “I suppose I’m looking for my lost Daddy.”

“But what are you up to generally? What are you doing with your life? Where are you going?”

“I’m at sea,” she said at last. “Lots of my generation are, I think. The girls especially. You are older than I am; I’m only beginning. I don’t want to seem cheeky, but aren’t you better able to say what _you_ are up to? Suppose--” Her slightly scared gravity broke into an impudent smile that Devizes found very congenial--“suppose you play first?”

He considered that. “Perfectly fair,” he said. “I will. Have another olive. I’m glad you like olives. I do too. Nobody’s called me to account for a long time. What _is_ my game? It’s a fair question.”

But not an easy one evidently.

“I suppose one ought to begin right back at one’s philosophy,” he said. “A long story. But I started the idea.”