Part 7

But this sudden and unprecedented intervention in her personal affairs made Christian Alberta thoughtful for all the rest of the way to London. Ever and again she glanced furtively at her Daddy.

He seemed to have forgotten her.

But it was dreadfully true. Teddy Winterton had become--altogether--too familiar.

§ 3

In all ages competent observers have noted the erratic unexpectedness of destiny, and now Christina Alberta was to add her own small experience to this ever accumulating testimony. It seemed to her that in planting him out in the wholesome quiet of Royal Tunbridge Wells she was securing for her Daddy the very best possible conditions for a happy and harmless life. There had, indeed, been a notable change in the little man since her mother’s death, a release of will, a new freedom of expression, a disposition to comment and even form judgments upon things about him. She had herself likened it to the germination of a seed brought out of a suppressing aridity into moisture and the light, but she had not followed up that comparison so far as to speculate what efflorescences might arise out of this belated unfolding of his initiatives. That here, of all places, he would meet just the stimulus that was needed for the most fantastic expansions of his imaginative life, that for him Tunbridge Wells should prove the way out of this everyday world of ours into what was to be for him an altogether more wonderful and satisfactory existence, never entered her head.

For three days, until a fretting urgency for events carried her back to London, she stayed in the Petunia Boarding House, and for all those three days there was no intimation of the great change in his mind that impended. On the whole he seemed unusually dull and quiet during those three days. He liked Tunbridge Wells very much, he said, but he was greatly disappointed by the High Rocks and by the Toad Rock when he came to examine them. He even doubted whether they were not “simply natural.” This was a terrible concession. He tried hard to believe that the Toad Rock was like one of the big Maya carvings of a toad from Yucatan, a cast of which he had seen in the British Museum, but it was evident that with all the will possible he could not manage so great an act of faith. All the decoration, he declared, all the inscription had been obliterated, and then, making the great blonde moustache bristle like a clothes-brush: “There never were any decorations or inscriptions. Never.”

It was clear to Christina Alberta that he must have evolved very extraordinary expectations, indeed, to be so much cast down. She found herself very interested in the riddle of what was fermenting in his mind. It seemed to her as if he had regarded Tunbridge Wells as a sort of Poste Restante at which some letter of supreme importance had awaited him. And there was no letter.

“But what did you expect, little Daddy?” said Christina Alberta, when on the afternoon of the first day he took her to the Toad Rock to see for herself how ordinary and insignificant a rock it was. “Did you expect some wonderful carvings?”

“I expected--something for me. Something significant.”

“For you?”

“Yes, for me. And every one. About Life and the Mysteries. I had grown a sort of feeling there would be something there. _Now_--I don’t know where to turn.”

“But what sort of thing, what significance did you expect?”

“Isn’t Life a Riddle, Christina Alberta? Haven’t you noticed that? Do you think it is just nothing but studios and dances and excursions and char-à-bancs and meal-times and harvest?” he said. “Obviously there is something more in it than that. Obviously. All that is just a Veil. Outward Showing. H’rrmp. And I don’t know what is behind it, and I am just a plain boarder--in a boarding house--and my life is passing away. Very difficult. H’rrmp. Almost impossible. It worries me exceedingly. Somewhere there must be a clue.”

“But that’s how we _all_ feel, Daddy,” cried Christina Alberta.

“Things can’t be what they seem,” said Mr. Preemby, waving his hand with a gesture of contemptuous dismissal towards Rusthall Village, public house, lamp-posts, a policeman, a dog, a grocer’s delivery van and three passing automobiles. “That at any rate is obvious. It would be too absurd. Infinite space; stars and so forth. Just for running about in--between meals....”

Now who would have thought, Christina Alberta reflected, that this sort of thing was going on in his head? Who would have thought it?

“Either I am a Reincarnation,” said Mr. Preemby, “or I am not. And if I am not, then I want to know what all this business of the world is about. Symbolical it _must_ be, Christina Alberta. But of what?

“All those years at the Laundry I knew that that life wasn’t real. A period of rest and preparation. Your dear mother thought differently--we never discussed it, h’rrmp, but it was so.”

Christina Alberta could find no adequate comment and they went on in silence for some time. When they spoke again it was to discuss how they could get round to the High Rocks Hotel for tea.

§ 4

Mr. Preemby was evidently depressed and more than a little aggrieved, but he had none of the comprehensive despondency of your melancholic type. Concurrently he was quite actively interested in the boarding house, and the fellow boarders he encountered there. It was a novel experience for him to be in a boarding house. During his married life he had always spent his holidays with Mrs. Preemby in seaside apartments, so that she could supervise the provisioning properly, and detect, expose and rectify errors and extortion. They had taken drives inland during these vacations, or camped on the beach while Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta had made sandcastles or pottered among rocks, and Mrs. Preemby had sat in a folding-chair and pined for the Laundry. If the weather was bad they kept in their apartments, where Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta could read books while Mrs. Preemby could pine for the Laundry almost as well as she could on the beach. But deep in Mr. Preemby’s heart there had always been a craving for such a collective, promiscuous life as a boarding house affords.

They had made the acquaintance of the second Miss Rewster, Miss Margaret Rewster, on their arrival with the luggage. She was a taller, more anxious and less richly belaced variation of her sister. They both, Mr. Preemby discovered, had a peculiar hovering quality. They seemed always hovering behind bead curtains or down passages, or looking over from staircase landings or peeping round doors; poor dears! they were dreadfully anxious not to interfere with their guests, but they were equally anxious that everything should be all right. At meal-times they operated with the joints and dishes behind a screen, and the chubby maid carried round the plates and vegetables. And whenever Mr. Preemby looked at the screen he found either Miss Margaret Rewster peeping over the top of it at him or Miss Emily Rewster peeping round the end. It made him quite nervous with his forks and spoons. When he dropped his serviette he hoped that would pass unobserved, but Miss Emily noted it at once and sent the chubby maid to pick it up for him.

Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta came down to dinner as soon as Miss Margaret had sounded the second gong, and so they were the first to be seated and could survey their fellow-guests at an advantage. Christina Alberta was quietly observant, but Mr. Preemby said “h’rrmp” at each fresh arrival. The next to appear were two Birds of Passage, a young man in Hudibrastic golfing knickerbockers, and a lady, presumably his wife, in a bright yellow sporting jumper, who were motoring about Kent; they made strenuous attempts to seize a table in the window which was already reserved for Petunia Regulars and were subdued with difficulty, but perfect dignity, by Miss Emily. They then consulted loudly about wine--the young man called the lady “Old Thing,” and “Old Top,” forms of expression new and interesting to Mr. Preemby, and she called him “Badger”--and the chubby maid produced a card of wines that could be sent out for. The young man read out the names and prices of wines and made his selection almost as though he were a curate officiating in a very large cathedral. His wife, to follow out that comparison, made the responses. “Chablis such as we should get here might be too sweet,” he proclaimed.

“It might be too sweet?”

“What of a Pommard, Old Top?”

“Why _not_ a Pommard, Badger?”

“The Beaune is a shilling cheaper and just as likely to be good--or bad.”

“Just as likely.”

The chubby maid flew out of the room, list in hand, with her thumb on the wine he had chosen.

Meanwhile under cover of this hubbub the two ladies Mr. Preemby had seen at tea in the lounge on the occasion of his first visit, percolated unobtrusively to a table near the window. They were obviously sisters, both rather slender and tall with small, round, bright-coloured faces on stalk-like necks; they had sharp little noses, and one of them wore tortoiseshell spectacles. A gentleman with a white moustache, larger and nobler even than Mr. Preemby’s, accompanied by a small alert-looking wife, was the next to appear. Possibly this was the gentleman who had been in a forest in Burmah. The small alert-looking wife bowed to the slender ladies, who became agitated like reeds in a wind. The gentleman took no notice of them, grunted as he sat down, produced glasses and read the menu.

“Tomato soup _again_!” he said.

“It’s usually very nice tomato soup,” said his wife.

“But Three Times Running!” he said. “It favours acidity. I don’t _like_ tomato soup.”

The table in the bow window was occupied by three people who drifted in separately. First came a little, thin, dark lady in grey, carrying a bead work-bag, then a little dark, bald man with large side-whiskers whom she addressed as father, and then a plump, healthy-looking wife with a radiant manner who swept in and distributed greetings.

“Did you get your walk, Major Bone?” she said to the gentleman from the Burmese forest.

“Just to Rusthall Common and back,” said Major Bone, speaking thickly through his moustache and soup. “Just to Rusthall Common.”

“And you got a char-à-banc to Crohamhurst, Miss Solbé?” The two sisters answered in unison. “Oh! we had a _lovely_ ride.”

“So picturesque,” said the one with spectacles.

“So open and pleasant,” said the one without spectacles.

“Did you see the sea?”

“Oh, plainly!” said the one with spectacles.

“Ever so far away,” said the one without.

“Just as if the sky had a steel edge,” said the one with spectacles.

“Exactly like a leetle silver line,” said the one without.

“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.

Small portions of fish followed the tomato soup, and were consumed in comparative silence. There was a little burst of scarcely audible conversation at the window table.

“Now is _this_ the same fish as we had yesterday?” asked the wife.

“It is a very similar fish,” said the gentleman with whiskers.

“The menu simply says, ‘Fish,’” said the stepdaughter.

“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.

“I think our back tyres were too tight to-day, Old Top,” said the man in plus fours, in a very loud, clear voice. “I felt the road dreadfully.”

“I felt the road dreadfully,” said the lady in the yellow jumper.

“I must let them down a little to-morrow morning.”

“It would be better.”

“To-morrow morning will do. I won’t trouble to-night.”

“Much better to-morrow morning, Badger. You’re tired to-night after all that bumping. You’d make your hands dirty.”

Silence and active business with knives and forks.

“Porruck hasn’t written about that,” said the Major from the forest.

“Very likely he’s busy,” said his wife.

Silence.

“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.

Christina Alberta searched her mind for some conversational opening that would give her father a reasonable opportunity to make an acceptable reply, but she could think of nothing that was neither too disconcerting nor too dangerous. She met his eye and he had the expression of one who holds out against a strain.

Fish gave place to lamb.

“I thought that road from Sittingbourne was just awful,” said the motoring gentleman.

“It was _just_ awful,” responded his wife.

Christina Alberta saw her father’s face working. He was going to say something. “H’rrmp. To-morrow, if it is fine, I think we will go for a walk in the morning.”

The knives and forks were hushed. Everybody was listening.

“I’d love a walk to-morrow, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta. “I should think there were some jolly walks about this place.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Preemby. “Very probably. The Guide Book is very reassuring. H’rrmp.”

He had the dignified expression of a man who has carried off a difficult duty.

Resumption of activity with knives and forks.

“Hard to tell this lamb from mutton,” said Major Bone, “if it wasn’t for the mint sauce.”

“Peas are never so nice as they are from your own garden,” said the wife of the whiskered gentleman to her stepdaughter.

“It’s late for peas,” said the stepdaughter.

The two Miss Solbés and the motoring gentleman began talking at the same time. Mrs. Bone expressed the idea that it was hard to get good lamb nowadays. Taking courage from this sudden swirl of conversation Mr. Preemby was emboldened to remark to Christina Alberta that he had always been attracted to Tumbridge Wells. He felt the air was a strong air. It gave him an appetite.

“You must be careful not to get fat,” said Christina Alberta.

The outburst of active human exchanges came to an end. Baked apple and custard were consumed in comparative silence. The chubby maid came to ask Mr. Preemby whether he would like his coffee in the lounge or the smoking-room. “The lounge I think,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp. The lounge.”

The Misses Solbé, bearing glasses containing sugar and lemon juice, flitted from the room. The people from the window table followed. The function of dinner was completed. They found themselves alone in the lounge. Most of the people seemed to have drifted into the sitting-room. The gentleman from the forests of Burmah went by towards the smoking-room, carrying a large cigar which had an air of also coming from the forests of Burmah. It did not look like a cigar that had been rolled or filled; it looked like a cigar of old gnarled wood that had been hewn from a branching tree. A straw came out of the end of it....

Christina Alberta stood and contemplated a vast void of time, two hours it might be, before she could decently go to bed. “Oh! this is the Life!” she said.

“Extremely comfortable,” said Mr. Preemby, sitting down with much creaking in a basket arm-chair.

Christina Alberta sat on a glass-topped table and lit a cigarette. She saw those two hours stretching before her, and she wanted to scream.

The chubby maid brought coffee and seemed gently surprised at Christina Alberta’s cigarette. Whisperings off stage. Then Miss Emily became dimly visible through the bead curtain at the end of the passage, hovering. She vanished again and Christina Alberta finished her cigarette in peace. Mr. Preemby drank up his coffee. Pause. Christina Alberta swung her legs rhythmically. Then she slid off the table to her feet.

“Daddy,” she said, “let’s go into the sitting-room and see if anything is happening there.”

§ 5

In the Boarding Houses of the past the common dining-table was the social centre where people met and mind clashed upon and polished mind. But the spirit of aloofness, the separate table system, has changed all that, and now it is in the smoking-room or the sitting-room that the vestiges of social intercourse, advances, retreats, coquettings, exchanges, games and jests are to be found. But the company of the Petunia Boarding House was not in a state of social fusion. The only coalescence was a conversation. The wife of the gentleman from the Burmese forests had secured an arm-chair by the side of the fire-place, and she was describing in a low whisper the numerous servants she had had in Burmah, to the cheerful wife and the younger Miss Solbé who was knitting. The Miss Solbé with the spectacles had fortified herself behind a table on the other side of the fire and was engaged meticulously with a very elaborate Patience. The gentleman with the side-whiskers sat rigidly on one of the sofas, behind a copy of the _Times_, while his daughter sat at a table close at hand and also threaded her way through a Patience. The Birds of Passage, after inquiries about movies and music-halls, had gone out.

Nobody took the slightest notice of Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta. The two stood for some moments in the middle of the room, and then panic came upon Mr. Preemby. A dishonourable panic so that he threw his daughter to these silent, motionless wolves.

“H’rrmp,” he said. “I think my dear, I will go to the smoking-room. I think I will go and smoke. There are some illustrated papers over there on the bookcase for you if you care to look at them.”

Christina Alberta walked over to the low bookcase and Mr. Preemby departed, h’rrmping.

She stood pretending an interest in the illustrated jokes and in the portraits of actresses and society people in the _Sketch_ and _Tatler_. Out of the tail of her eye she surveyed those fellow-guests of hers, and with a negligent ear she collected the gist of Mrs. Bone’s dissertation upon the servant question in Burmah. “They will plant the whole family upon you if they can--uncles and cousins even. Before you know where you are....

“Of course a white woman is a Little Queen out there....

“The chief fault of the cooking from my point of view, was the way it upset Major Bone. His stomach ... far more delicate than a woman’s.”

“He looks so stout and strong,” said Miss Solbé.

“In everything but that. In everything. But the Curries they used to make----”

She sank her voice, and the heads of the younger Miss Solbé and the pleasant mannered lady closed in upon her for the rich particulars.

What a Lot they were! Christina Alberta reflected. And they were living beings! The astonishing thing to Christina Alberta was that they were alive. And being alive and having presumably been a cause of considerable trouble, distress, emotion and hope to various people before they were got alive, they were now all in the most resolute way avoiding anything that with the extremest stretch of civility could be spoken of as living. Their hours, their days were passing; a few thousand days more perhaps for each of them, a few score thousand hours. Then there would be no more chance of living for ever. And instead of filling up this scanty allowance of hours and days with every possible sensation and every possible effort and accomplishment, here they were, gathered into a sort of magic box of atmosphere in which nothing could possibly be done. By anyone....

Christina Alberta felt like a moth caught under a glass. Well, for a day or so, she had an excuse, little Daddy must be settled. But then? Nothing could be done here. Neither joy nor sorrow nor sin nor creative effort--because even Miss Solbé’s knitting was being knitted to a prescription on a dirty cutting of printed paper. Everything they were employed upon was an evasion, everything. Even the whispered delicate hints of the diuretic, dyspeptic, infuriating and wildly aphrodisiac effects of Burmah Curry upon Major Bone in his younger days that were being handed out by his good lady to her intent hearers, were just a substitution of second-hand knowledge for realities.

And this Patience! Would she, Christina Alberta asked herself, would she ever come to play Patiences in Boarding Houses? Was it credible that some day she also would come to sit voluntarily in such an atmosphere?

“Rather sell matches in a gutter,” whispered Christina Alberta.

What a marvellous thing is Man! What ingenuities he has! what powers and capabilities! He invents paper and perfects printing! He develops the most beautiful methods of colour printing. He makes cardboard like silk and ivory out of rags and vegetable pulp. And all it would seem, that human beings, hanging for a little while in life between the nothingness before death and the nothingness after death, should fiddle away long hours in a feeble, fuddled conflict with the permutations of duplicate sets of four differently coloured thirteens! Cards! The marvel of cards! All over the world millions of people drawing nearer to death and nothingness were pursuing the chances of the four thirteens: bridge, whist, nap, skat, a hundred forms of it. Directly they could get in out of the wet and dark, they sat down to that sort of thing, to the cards shining under the still lamps, to being endlessly surprised, delighted, indignant and despondent by chances that anyone who chose to sit down to it could work out and tabulate in a week!

“Getting it out, dear?” said the younger Miss Solbé.

“The spades are _Wicked_ to-night,” said the Miss Solbé with the glasses.

“Mine is going rather well,” said the daughter of the gentleman with the whiskers.

“Does your daughter play _Miss Milligan_?” asked the younger Solbé sister.

“_Eight-eights_,” said the comfortable wife. “_Miss Milligan_ is too much for her.”

“Well, it _is_ a Beast you know,” said the stepdaughter. “You never know where you are with it.”

“Patience is Patience,” said the elder Miss Solbé. “Nowadays I often get it out. But not when the spades come as they’ve done to-night, both twos in the top row, and no aces till the last round but one.”

Christina Alberta thought it was time to change from the _Sketch_ to the _Tatler_. She tried to do this with careless ease and flopped a dozen papers on the floor. “Oh, _Damn_!” said Christina Alberta to a great stillness. She struggled to pick up and replace the disordered sheets. For a time every one seemed to be regarding her. Then Mrs. Bone took up her discourse again.

“And you can’t imagine their obstinacy,” she said. “They are _wilfully_ ignorant. When you show them, _then_ they won’t do it. I took my cook-boy in hand for a time--boy I call him, but he was quite a middle-aged man--and I said to him, ‘just let me show you some plain English cookery, a boiled fowl with nice white sauce, a few plain potatoes and vegetables--quite plain with the natural flavour left in--the sort of food that builds up these brave young Englishmen you see.’ Of course I’m not a good cook myself, but anyhow I knew more of English cooking than he did. But we never got further than the plain boiled fowl. He expressed the most violent disapproval--really violent I mean--of the whole proceedings. As I took hold of the things and got to work he began to behave in the most extraordinary way. He tried _not_ to follow what I was doing. Tried not to. He said that if he cooked a fowl like that he would lose caste, lose his position in the local guild of cooks, be perpetually defiled and outcast. _Why_, he would not say. When I persisted he rushed up and down pulling at his black hair--a black madman, his eyes rolling frightfully. I could never make out what there was in a plain boiled fowl to cause such excitement. ‘This in my kitchen,’ he said. ‘This in _my_ kitchen!’

“There I stood quietly boiling my fowl while all this pother went on. He hovered about me. He talked--fortunately in his own language. I even caught him pretending to be sick behind my back. Then he came and implored me to desist--with tears in his great brown eyes. He tried to say things in English. The Major always says that he was simply swearing, but I believe the wretched man really did believe that if he was to boil a fowl in the plain, wholesome, simple way nice people in England do it daily, he would be hung in the air, and the great jays of Burmah would come and peck--ahem!”

She cast a side glance at Christina Alberta, apparently lost in the _Sketch_, and lowered her voice.

“Peck at his _entrails_, just his insides you know, for a Thousand, Thousand Years.”

Sensation.