Part 4

After a month of deep mourning, Christina Alberta put aside her long skirts and returned to the more kilt-like garments to which she was accustomed. She had not been inactive while her father had conducted his business settlement with Mr. Sam Widgery, and she had worked out a scheme of living that seemed to promise quite a happy life for her father and herself. She fell in with the Boarding House idea and with the project of beginning at Tunbridge Wells. She ceased to struggle with the fact that he continued to call it quietly but insistently _Tum_bridge Wells; it seemed to her upon reflection that _Tum_bridge was really the place he, at any rate, was going to live at. That gentle departure from exactitude was quite of a piece with his general habit of living a little askew from actual things.

But she impressed upon him the view that since their lives were to be migratory henceforth, and since there were a certain number of books, unsaleable articles of furniture that Mrs. Widgery would not take over at a valuation, a number of curiosities--for example, a piece of shell which he believed to be a fragment of a Great Auk’s Egg, a Rosicrucian regalia, and a mummified hawk from Egypt which had prophetic qualities, to consider--there must be a sort of permanent headquarters in London, at which these objects could be stored and to which he and she could return from the various Boarding Houses round and about the earth. And, pursuant to this suggestion, she made inquiries and worked out an admirable project for sharing some accommodation with two little friends of hers who practised art, literature, and picturesque economies in a converted mews in Chelsea. In fact, she made arrangements with them. She told Mr. Preemby she had made these arrangements according to his instructions, and after a time it did come to seem to him that he had given her the instructions upon which she acted.

Lonsdale Mews opens out of Lonsdale Road, Chelsea; and there is quite a noble entrance with large stucco pillars on either side and an arch over, on which is a design in relievo of Neptune and sea-horses and the words “Lonsdale Mews.” Inside there had once been stables and coach-houses, and over each a bedroom and a sitting-room, which was also, in the more prolific past, generally used as a bedroom, and a cupboard and a landing and so forth, the little home of the coachman (and his wife and family) attached to the genteel carriage and horses below. But the advancement of science and the progress of invention have abolished gentility, and so reduced the number of coachmen and carriages in the world that Lonsdale Mews has had to accept other tenants; and being too narrow down the centre for the coming and going of automobiles without a great deal of bashing of mudguards and radiators, has had to paint itself up attractively and fall back upon art and the intelligenzia.

Christina Alberta’s two young friends were in possession of one of these perverted coachmen’s homes, and as they were very inadequately prepared to pay the rent--it was a quite aristocratic rent--they were extremely glad to welcome Mr. Preemby and particularly Christina Alberta as co-tenants. Mr. Preemby was to have the big room downstairs and there he was to arrange his books and his surplus furnishings and ornaments and curious objects, and have a sofa that could be made into an apparent bed when he wanted to sleep in London. And Christina Alberta was to have a little bedroom for herself behind this wherein a breezy decorative scheme of orange and bright blue more than made up for a certain absence of daylight and fresh air. But when the two young friends had a party or when Mr. Preemby was away they were to have the use of the big downstairs room, and in the case of a party Christina Alberta’s room was to be a ladies’ cloak-room.

The lessors were to retain the use of the upstairs rooms and in the matter of the kitchen all things therein were to be held in common. None of this agreement was put into writing and many issues were left over frankly for future controversy. “We are to be the pigs that pay the rent,” said Christina Alberta; that was the general idea. “Much we’ll work out,” said Mr. Harold Crumb. “Much will work itself out. It’s no good being too definite.” What was definite was that Mr. Preemby was to pay the rent.

Mr. Harold Crumb was a red-haired young man, a shock-headed young man with a rampant profile, dressed in a blue overall, frayed grey trousers and slippers. He had large freckled hands and he did Black and White, which Mr. Preemby had supposed to be a whisky but discovered was an art. Harold lived by attempting to sell drawings for advertisements and pictured jokes for the weekly papers. His expression was lofty and his voice constrained and it seemed to Mr. Preemby that he was suffered rather than met by Mr. Crumb. With Christina Alberta Mr. Crumb seemed to be on terms of tacit friendship and no word passed between them. He lifted his hand and twiddled his fingers at her--with a kind of melancholy.

Mrs. Crumb was more effusive. She embraced Christina Alberta warmly and answered to the name of “Fay.” Then she turned to Mr. Preemby and shook hands with him quite normally. She was a slender young lady with carelessly bobbed corn-coloured hair, pale-grey eyes and an absent-minded face. She also was dressed in a blue overall, she wore oyster-coloured stockings and slippers and possibly other things, and her business in life, Mr. Preemby learnt, was to review books for various newspapers and write romantic fiction for bookstall magazines. Her right forefinger had that indelible inkiness which only the habitual use of an incontinent fountain-pen can give. There was a big screen in the downstairs room Mr. Preemby was to have that Mr. Crumb had made and Mrs. Crumb had covered with the bright mendacious wrappers of the books she had reviewed. This exercised Mr. Preemby the more because several of the wrappers were manifestly upside down, and he could not understand whether this was due to art, carelessness or some serious mental lapse.

“We’ll have something to eat,” she told Mr. Preemby, and then they could settle up things. But she had a surprisingly rapid articulation and it sounded like, “We’ll ’f sum t’eat ’n’ then we’ll set lup thins.” It took ten or twelve seconds to come through to Mr. Preemby’s understanding. Meanwhile she had turned to Christina Alberta. “’Dabit ’f work to do,” she explained. “Bres no’ clear’ d’way. Late las’ ni’. You be’r loo’ roun’ he’ while Nolly gessomeat an’ Ikn do ’p stairs fore you see’t.”

“Right-o,” said Christina Alberta, understanding perfectly. Mr. Preemby was left stunned, with his lips moving slowly. “So long,” said Harold, and took some money out of a black Wedgwood tea-pot and went and fell over things in the passage, and presently went out into the wide world while Fay vanished upstairs.

“She’s gone upstairs,” said Mr. Preemby, interpreting slowly, “to do their rooms. And _he’s_ gone to get some meat. It’s a nice large room, Christina Alberta--and quite well lit. Quite.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Mew before,” said Mr. Preemby, approaching a group of attractive drawings on the wall.

“In a _what_, Daddy?”

“In a Mew. Or in a _Studjo_.... I suppose these are Originals.”

Christina Alberta awaited his reaction to the drawings with a slight anxiety.

“Looks like a lot of fruit and human legs and things,” said Mr. Preemby. “Wonder what they mean? _Summer Night_ it says, and that’s _Passion in Solitude_. Don’t quite see it, but I suppose it’s symbolical or something.” He turned his round blue eyes to the room generally. “I could get a mahogany cabinet for my Curiosities and have it against the wall _there_--I’d like the sort with glass doors so that people could see the things--and if there was some shelves put across that place, it would hold most of my books. There’ll have to be a bed somewhere, Christina Alberta.”

“They’ve got a sofa upstairs,” said Christina Alberta, “with an end that pulls down.”

“Might go there.”

“Or under the window.”

“Of course there’s my clothes,” said Mr. Preemby. “I almost wish I hadn’t practically promised Sam Widgery your mother’s wardrobe. Rosewood it is. It has a lot of room in it and it might have gone against that bit of wall there. The trunk will make a sort of seat if we get the corners mended. Wonder how that screen would look the other way up. Books might go behind it. These easels and things I suppose they’ll take upstairs.... We’ll get things settled all right.”

Christina Alberta turned about with arms akimbo to follow his proposals. She perceived that they threatened a considerable disturbance of the æsthetic balance of the studio. She’d just thought of a little bed-sofa affair with a bright rug over it. Silly of her to forget the baggage. But in the end perhaps it might be possible to arrest a lot of his gear in the passage. The passage was so choked already that a little more in it hardly seemed to matter. He could go out and get what things he wanted when he wanted them. She had a momentary anticipation of him in his shirt and braces, routing in trunks.

“Of course,” said Mr. Preemby, “when you said you’d got two little friends in a _Studjo_, I thought they were two girls. I didn’t think they were a married couple.”

“They aren’t so _fearfully_ married,” said Christina Alberta.

“No,” said Mr. Preemby, and was restrained by modesty from further speech for some seconds. “Of course,” he said, “if presently a Family came along--well, we’d have to move out, Christina Alberta.”

“Never meet families half-way,” said Christina Alberta. “It isn’t very likely anyhow. You trust Fay.”

“You never know,” said Mr. Preemby rather weakly, and showed a tendency to drift back to those ambiguous drawings.

“About time we had a look at the upstairs rooms, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, and went out into the passage to call “Fay!”

The answer came remotely. “Lo?”

“Read-_dee_?”

“Not yet.”

Christina Alberta found her Daddy back in the illustrated corner with his head on one side like an inquiring sparrow. For some time nothing was said. “Of course,” he remarked at last; “it’s Art.” He turned away with his face pursed up beneath the moustache, humming faintly. She perceived it was just as much Art as he could stand.

He ran his hand over the wall and turned intelligent eyes to Christina Alberta. “It’s just canvas,” he said; “what you pack things in. With sort of dabs of gold paint. I don’t think I’ve ever seen walls that wasn’t either done with paper or distemper before. I suppose really one might put all sorts of things on walls, cloth, bed-ticking, tarpaulin. Odd how one doesn’t think of things.”

§ 2

Presently “upstairs” was “read-ee;” Mrs. Harold Crumb was free to answer questions and make explanations and Mr. Preemby could learn more of Christina Alberta’s plans for his comfort. Upstairs was more various but less spacious than downstairs, the beds were dressed-up rather than disguised as divans and there was more vaguely improper but highly decorative Art. Like Christina Alberta Mrs. Crumb had not fully considered Mr. Preemby’s possibilities in the way of luggage, but she rose to the occasion very well. When Mr. Preemby spoke of the mahogany cabinet and the wardrobe, she said that it would be quite easy for Harold to “camouflage” them with very, very bright-coloured paint, and she thought a lot might be done for Mr. Preemby’s trunks and clothes by making a curtained alcove in a corner. “Trouble with clothes,” said Mrs. Crumb, “is when somebody starts charades or dressing up. Nothing is sacred. Last week, somebody tore my only pyjamas limb from limb.”

“We’d have to arrange,” said Mr. Preemby, a little uneasily.

“We’ll have to arrange somehow,” said Mrs. Crumb.

But before anything could be arranged definitely Harold returned from his shopping with a large piece of purple beefsteak in a mere loin cloth of newspaper, and a lettuce and a bundle of small onions in his hand and two large bottles of beer under his arm, and everybody’s attention was directed to the preparation of the midday meal.

“Generally,” said Harold, “we go Out for a meal. There’s quite a decent aufschnittery and a little Italian place and so forth not five minutes away in the King’s Road. It’s more fun feeding Out. But we thought you’d like to see the studio put through its paces.”

Mr. Preemby in the course of his life had rarely seen meals prepared; somebody else had always laid a table and said “Dinner’s ready, Daddy,” or “Supper’s ready, Daddy,” as the case might be, and he had just sat down, and it was with real interest that he obeyed Mr. Crumb’s invitation to “come and see how we do it,” and assisted under direction in the operations. Mr. Crumb, in a few well-chosen words, introduced the cooking apparatus that clustered around the gas-stove; the gas-stove was lit explosively, Mr. Preemby handed things and held things under direction and got in the way a good deal. Christina Alberta, who seemed used to the job, chopped the onions and dressed a salad at a small kitchen table close at hand, and the steak got itself grilled fiercely and flaringly.

Meanwhile Mrs. Crumb laid a blue-painted table in what was to be Mr. Preemby’s room with an orange-coloured cloth and a selection of plates and parts of plates, yellow-glazed mugs with rudely painted inscriptions in some rustic dialect, “Here’s t’ absent frens” and the like, several knives and forks, a pewter mug full of cigarettes and a bunch of sunflowers in a brown-glazed bowl. And at this table Mr. Preemby presently found himself seated very hot in the face and liberally splashed with fat from the grilled steak. Nobody said grace, and the meal began.

There was a general assumption that Mr. Preemby’s tenancy was settled, though there were many points upon which he would have liked a clearer definition. He was particularly anxious to exclude as tactfully as possible his garments and his specimens from promiscuous use as properties when these charades occurred, but he did not know quite how to reopen the subject. And he was preoccupied by a doubt whether his long nightgowns of Saxony flannel, if they were publicly exposed, might not be considered old-fashioned by these artistic young people. But their talk jumped about so that it was difficult to lead up to what he had to say. He was accustomed, especially when company was present, to clear his throat “h’rrmp” and waggle his moustache up and down a little before he spoke, and by the time he was ready to deliver what he had to say one of the others was away with something else. So that he hardly said anything but an occasional “h’rrmp” all through the meal.

The two young ladies did most of the talking. Harold seemed moody, making an occasional correction or comment upon his wife’s remarks and eating most of the steak with the pained expression of one who has tender teeth and is used to better food. Once he asked Mr. Preemby if he really cared for Good Music, and once if he had been to see the Iberian dancers last year, but neither of these inquiries led to a sustained conversation. “H’rrmp. No-oh,” said Mr. Preemby. “Not exactly. Not particularly,” and in the second case, “No-oh, I didn’t.”

Mrs. Crumb talked brightly of various newspaper jobs she had got and how she had been asked to do a children’s corner in the _Patriotic News_ and whether she would accept the offer--Mr. Preemby thought the editors and newspaper proprietors she mentioned seemed a depraved lot--but mainly the talk concerned the movements and readjustments of a large circle of friends. After the meal there was coffee, and Harold, with an air of resignation, went and washed up.

There were many little things awaiting attention at the laundry, and after two or three cigarettes Mr. Preemby decided, “It’s time for us to be going, Christina Alberta.” “We’ll work it out all right,” said Harold on their departure.

There were intervals of meditation as Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta returned in the train from Liverpool Street to Woodford Wells. “It’s not what I’ve been accustomed to,” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s all very different from the way your mother used to manage things.... Less orderly.... Of course I could keep my clothes locked up in my trunk.”

“You’ll do all right. They’re perfect Dears. _She_ loves you tremendously already,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 3

But before she went to sleep that night Christina Alberta experienced compunction. She felt compunction about these arrangements she was making for her Daddy. She doubted whether he would be truly comfortable and happy in that studio in Lonsdale Mews, and able to lead the life of steadfast curiosity he anticipated with so much quiet pleasure--ever humming to himself about it and working his moustache and saying “h’rrmp,” when he was not otherwise engaged.

This story, it cannot be too often reiterated, is the story of Mr. Preemby who became, as we shall tell in due course, Sargon, King of Kings. But Christina Alberta has got herself hatched into this story very much like a young cuckoo in a wagtail’s nest and it is impossible to ignore her. She was virtually in control of him and she had the egotism of her sex and age.

She had also a pitiless conscience. It was almost the only thing she could not manage in her life. It managed her. It was a large, crystalline conscience with no foundations and no relationships; it just flooded by itself in her being; it was her gravitational centre and the rest of her could not get away from it.

When Christina Alberta went up for examination and judgment before Christina Alberta there was no nonsense in the proceedings, a fearful frankness; it was cards on the table, everything in evidence, no etiquette, not a stitch on, X-rays if necessary. These examinations were all the more terrible because they were done in what was practically an empty room, without screens, curtains, standards or general beliefs of any sort. It is appalling to think of the drapery and function that was absent from Christina Alberta’s court of conscience. In the first place Christina Alberta was completely and explicitly irreligious. In the next she was theoretically anti-social and amoral. She did not believe in respectability, Christian morality, the institution of the family, the capitalist system, or the British Empire. She would say so with extreme plainness and considerable detail except when her parent was about. Prevalent winds of sentiment did not stir her. She did not find the Prince of Wales ravishing nor _Punch_ funny. She thought modern dancing tiresome, though she did it very well, and Wimbledon tennis and tennis-talk an intolerable bore. She favoured Bolshevism because everybody she disliked abused it and she hoped for a world-wide social revolution of an entirely destructive and cleansing type. What was to follow this revolution Christina Alberta, with the happy confidence of youth, did not seem to mind.

It is not for us to speculate here why a young woman born and bred between Woodford Wells and central London in the opening years of the twentieth century should confront the world with a mind so entirely swept and void of positive and restraining convictions; we put the fact on record. And if she had been sustained by all the beliefs in Christendom and a sure and certain respect for every detail of the social code, whatever that code may be, she could not have confronted the world with a more cheerful confidence, nor with a stronger persuasion that Christina Alberta had to behave, in some undefined fashion, well. Christina Alberta had to be Christina Alberta, clear and sound, or the court of conscience made things plain and hard for her.

“Christina Alberta,” the court would say, “you are the dirtiest, filthiest little thing that ever streaked the dust of life. How do you propose to get clean again?”

Or, “Christina Alberta, you have been lying again. You’ll lie to _me_ next. First it was laziness made you lie and now it is cowardice. What are you going to make of yourself, Christina Alberta?”

There came a time when the court had to address Christina Alberta in this fashion: “Your nose, Christina Alberta, is large beyond comparison. It will probably go on growing all your life--as noses often do. Yet you are setting yourself out to charm and fascinate Teddy Winterton. You go to places where you think you will meet him. You fuss and preen yourself like any female idiot. You dream all sorts of things about him, disgraceful things. You are soppy on this young man in spite of the fact that you know he is--no sort of good. You like him to touch you. You sit and look at him foolishly and you gloat. Does he gloat on you? Isn’t it time you considered where you are going, Christina Alberta?”

* * * * *

And now the court was in full session and the charge, the charge for which there was no defence, was that she was going to take her absurd, unprotected Daddy and entrust him and his foolishness and his silly books and his ridiculous treasures and all his dreams and desires to the insecure and unsympathetic studio of the Crumbs, not because of any vague and general hunger for London, though that was in the background, but because that studio was frequented by the all too seductive Teddy, because there she had met him and danced wildly with him and been suddenly and astonishingly kissed by him and kissed him. And then he had beguiled her to learn a dance with him and had got her to come to tea with him at his studio to meet his sister--who hadn’t turned up. And there had been other meetings. He was impudent and provocative and evasive. All her being was in a state of high excitement about him. Coldly and exactly now the court unfolded the operations of her mind to her; showed how the thought of Teddy, always present and never admitted, had guided her decision to harbour with the Crumbs. Only now did she come to confession and clear vision. “You have lied to yourself, Christina Alberta,” said the court; “and that is the worst sort of lie. What are you going to do about it?”

“I can’t let the Crumbs down now. They count upon us.”

“You are in a mess, Christina Alberta. You are in a worse mess than we thought you were. _Soppy_ you are about Teddy Winterton. Why not call things by their right names? You are in love. Perhaps something frightful has happened to you. Little rabbits run about the hedges and every day is like every other day for them; they waggle their little noses and wiggle their little tails and do what they like with their paws. Until one day there is a ping and the snare snaps on the little furry foot and everything you try to do after that is different. The snare holds your movements and you must just dance round it and squeal if you like, till the man comes along. Is that what has happened to you? And for Teddy! Teddy, with that open, lying face!”

“No,” said Christina Alberta, “I don’t love him. I don’t love him. I’ve been silly and soppy and adrift. I am no more worthy to be called Christina Alberta. But it hasn’t got me yet and it shan’t get me. I’ll pull Daddy out of it and myself out of it; I vow and swear....”

“H’m,” said the court.

§ 4

It seemed to Mr. Preemby that the first evening he spent in his new quarters in Lonsdale Mews was the most eventful evening in his life. Impressions crowded upon each other. Insomnia was not among his habits, but when at last he lay upon his shake-up bed he was kept awake for most of what was left of the night (it was the frayed piece with the bleak dawn in the middle of it) trying to get these same impressions sorted out, impressions about his new surroundings, impressions about Christina Alberta, impressions of new and unprecedented personalities, a marmalade of impressions.