BOOK THE FIRST THE COMING OF SARGON, KING OF KINGS (continued 2)

“I suppose one could get it off again,” said Mr. Preemby.

“But see how they are assimilated by the room,” said Harold in high expostulation.

“I mean if we moved at any time,” said Mr. Preemby. “I know it’s art, and it goes with the things here very nicely, but there’s neighbourhoods I wouldn’t like to move into—not with these things as they are. You don’t know what people’s imaginations are like.”

Matters went a little tediously until the arrival of the Picton van. The sofa-bed was arranged and rearranged. The bed things, blankets, sheets and pillow-cases, were to be put in a bundle on the top of Mr. Preemby’s flat trunk behind the book-wrapper screen. “We shall have to find some other place for the bottled beer,” said Harold. “It’s too hot in the kitchen and too dangerous in the passage. But I’ve an idea we might have it in the scullery under the sink, with a cloth over it and water dripping on the cloth. Evaporation. I’ll see about it.”

Mr. Preemby was surprised by a yawn. “I suppose you’d like to have some tea,” said Fay suddenly, and she and Christina Alberta prepared some.

Harold was obviously in a strained and nervous state. Mr. Preemby’s patient little figure, sitting about hands on knees, waiting for Picton’s van, looking at things with innocent eyes and saying “h’rrmp” had much the same effect of nervous dislocation upon Harold that the mild and patient camel has on a horse. Harold chafed and pranced. He walked about and went upstairs and out and returned; he smoked endless cigarettes and pressed endless cigarettes upon Mr. Preemby; he made recondite remarks in a strained voice. “All this is like something out of Dostoievsky,” he said to Mr. Preemby. “In a different scheme of colouring of course. Different, but the same. Don’t you think so, Mr. Preemby?”

Mr. Preemby nodded his head in a sympathetic, humorous, not too explicit manner. “H’rrmp,” he said. “It is a bit like that.”

“Things will work themselves out,” said Harold. “Things will work themselves out. You know that poem of Ruby Parham’s.” He cleared his throat. “It is called ‘Waiting,’” he said. “It goes like this—”

His eyes became fixed and glazed; his voice gathered volume, so that the words seemed more than life-sized.

“After every minute “Comes another minute “And then, rest assured, “Another. “Like drops from a ledge in the rain. “You may not want to go on; “But they will, “Oh! endlessly “Taking your life away, death, not final and complete, “But death in the midst of life, “Particles of death, “Death by attrition. “Drip on Old Death—in life! “Slow, dull, implacable, unendurable! “Drip on.”

“That ‘Drip on’ is great. But perhaps you don’t like modern poetry?”

“I don’t mind it,” said Mr. Preemby genially.

“Of course, nothing of a really destructive nature can have happened to that van,” said Mr. Crumb in a pessimistic tone.

When Picton’s van arrived and the roomy wardrobe began its destructive march through the passage, Mr. Crumb called suddenly upon his maker in a loud distressful voice and vanished for the better part of an hour.

Christina Alberta was torn between a sympathetic understanding of Harold’s state of mind and the fear that her Daddy might perceive the unfavourable reaction he produced in Harold and be hurt by it. She and Fay became brightly helpful with the unpacking. “If I might have one of those blue pinafores of Mr. Crumb’s to put on,” said Mr. Preemby, “I’d be glad. These black things of mine show every mark.”

Mr. Crumb’s overall reached far below Mr. Preemby’s knees and somehow justified his calling it a pinafore. It brought out something endearingly infantile in his appearance that appealed to the maternal instinct lurking in Mrs. Crumb. She struggled with a persuasion that he was really a little boy of nine who had been naughty and grown a big moustache and that she had to take care of him and restrain him and generally tell him not to. The books were put in the bookshelves as Mr. Preemby said, “just anyhow”; they could be sorted up later, but the curiosities and specimens took longer and had to be “put out” more or less in the cabinet. There were not only real curiosities and specimens but many little things that Mr. Preemby had accumulated because they looked like curiosities and specimens. There was, for instance, a piece of one of the laundry delivery van mudguards so bent by a collision as to resemble a human torso in the most striking fashion; there was the almost complete skull of an unknown mammal, probably a fallow deer, picked up in Epping Forest, there was a potato, now rather shrivelled, in which it was possible to detect thirty-seven distinct human faces and—specimen of an entirely different quality—a large flint in which there were no less than fifty-five. Ages ago some primordial Preemby had discovered and loved that very same flint and had brought out the likenesses by chipping an eye here or a nostril there; but Mr. Preemby did not suspect the help of that remote and perhaps ancestral hand. Even in waking life Mr. Preemby saw faces in everything. What he would have been like with a high temperature it is impossible to imagine.

Christina Alberta’s anxiety about her father’s reception by the Crumbs diminished as she saw his virtual conquest of Fay. Fay treated him firmly but indulgently, and they lost a good deal of time while she tried to see all the fifty-five faces of the wonderful flint. They had to start and start again, but always they lost count about “Twen-tee” or “Twen-tee-one.” The question would arise whether they were counting one of the faces over again.

Harold returned in a moody state and could be heard, all too distinctly, kicking Mr. Preemby’s packing cases in the hall, but Fay went out to him with a lofty sleep-walking expression in her pale eyes, and the concussions ceased, and presently Harold came downstairs again looking almost handsome in nankeen trousers, a blue jacket with big silver buttons and a voluminous black tie, and was quite nice to Mr. Preemby.

“You won’t mind my touching that wardrobe of yours up a bit?” he said. “It damps us off, as it is. Kind of reproaches us. One of us has to be altered, you see, it or me, and either I paint it or else I get a silk hat with a deep mourning band and a gold-handled umbrella—which would cost no end of money. Whereas I have the paint.”

“If you can get the paint off again,” said Mr. Preemby. “You see if I was to move—back.... It’s all right to have all this paint in a Mew. But out of a Mew....”

“Exactly,” said Harold. “My idea is to make a little pink house of it with windows and so on. Something very simple. Rather like the scenery of a Russian Sketch. Chauve Souris sort of stuff. Conventional to the n^th. And we might put up placards at the corner of it according to what is going on. Make a bit of an institution of it.”

“So long as it makes things agreeable,” said Mr. Preemby.

He found his hair being ruffled affectionately. “Dear little Daddy!” said Christina Alberta.

§ 5

But now appeared a new-comer and life was made uncomfortable and complicated for Christina Alberta again by the presence of Mr. Teddy Winterton’s candid insincerity. His graceful body, his movements, his voice, stirred her senses as she hated them to be stirred; his quiet impudence invaded her sense of humour; he wounded her pride and she longed to be even with him. She had no power over him and he behaved as if he owned her. She was always letting him go just a little too far. When he was about her nose cast a shadow that reached to her horizon. He stood now in the doorway—trousers of one pattern of tweed, waistcoat of another, Norfolk jacket of a third extensively unbuttoned in the accepted student style, and he watched Mr. Preemby carry his collection of roc’s bones, found near Staines, across the studio on a tea-tray. His eyes were round with surprise and amusement; his mouth said noiselessly, “What is it?”

Christina Alberta was not going to have her Daddy laughed at by any Teddy Winterton. “Mr. Winterton,” she said. “This is my father.”

“I’ll just get rid of my bones,” said Mr. Preemby, “and then I’ll shake hands.”

“We’ll just finish up Mr. Preemby’s things and then we’ll all go round to Poppinetti’s to get some dinner,” said Fay. “There’s hardly anything left to unpack now.”

“Just one or two Antediluvium bones,” said Mr. Preemby.

Teddy seized upon one. “This,” he said, inspecting it, “is a fossil rhinoceros thigh-bone from the Crag.”

“It’s an Antediluvium horse,” said Mr. Preemby.

“Forgive me! It’s a rhinoceros bone!”

“Horses had rhinoceros bones in those days,” said Mr. Preemby. “And the rhinoceroses—! They were incredible. If I had one I shouldn’t have anywhere to put it.”

Mr. Preemby was extracted from his overall and restored to the black coat and the grey felt hat with the black band. He became one of a straggling party that went out of Lonsdale Mews to a little Italian restaurant in the King’s Road. Three neighbours of the Crumbs mixed themselves up with the party, a very quiet man with silver hair and a young man and a dusky girl.

Mr. Preemby was much impressed by the novelty of thus going out for dinner, and expatiated on its advantages to the silver-haired man who seemed to be the quiet sort of listening man that Mr. Preemby liked to meet. “You see you don’t have to cook the meal and you don’t have to lay the table and afterwards naturally there isn’t any washing up. But I expect it comes more expensive.”

The silver-haired man nodded intelligently. “Exactly,” he said.

Harold Crumb overheard this. “Expensive,” he said, “it isn’t. No. Every other crime Poppinetti can commit, but that is barred by the circumstances of his clientele. He feeds us on stolen pigeons, his dinde is guinea-pig, his beef, a l’omnibus: what he minces God knows; what he puts into his ravioli makes even the Lord God repent of his extreme creativeness. But you see, you don’t think about his ravioli, you eat ’em, and they’re damned good. There are always flowers on the table and an effect of inexpensive refinement. You will see. You will see.”

Mr. Preemby saw. Poppinetti was a small man but carefully modelled on Caruso, and he received his large party with the deference of a diplomatist and the effusion of a geyser. He was particularly gracious to Mr. Preemby, bowing profoundly to him, and saluting him with great richness subsequently whenever he caught his eye. He seemed to Mr. Preemby to spend the rest of their time together going to remoter and remoter parts of the restaurant in order to catch Mr. Preemby’s eye and bow and smile to him from greater and greater distances. Mr. Preemby had curious doubts whether he wasn’t being mistaken for somebody else.

Signor Poppinetti, with an air of peculiar favour, guided the party to a long, unattractive table near the centre of the restaurant and took their conflicting orders with the gestures of a conductor guiding an orchestra through a difficult passage. Mr. Preemby was passive but observant; he presently found himself eating macaroni and drinking a rough red wine with a name that sounded to his London tuned ears like a challenge. Chianti.

Harold Crumb showed great earnestness in the matter of macaroni. “In order to taste macaroni,” he assured Mr. Preemby, “it is necessary to fill the mouth absolutely full, good measure, pressed in and running over. To cut up macaroni with your fork as you are doing, is as awful as to cut an oyster. It—it devitalizes it.”

“I like it cut up,” said Mr. Preemby with unexpected firmness. And he cut up some more.

“Otherwise,” he said in a confidential aside to the silver-haired man, “I can’t help thinking it’s earthworms.”

“Exactly. Exactly,” said the silver-haired man.

Harold exemplified generously. His rampant face riding over a squirming mouthful of macaroni was like St. George and the Dragon on an English sovereign. He whistled as he ate. Long snakes of macaroni hung thoughtful for a moment and then, drawn by some incomprehensible fascination, fled into him. Teddy Winterton and one of the new-comers from the studio next door emulated him. Christina Alberta and Fay showed the furtive dexterity of the female. But Mr. Preemby was glad when macaroni was over, even though it raised the problem of eating an egg on spinach with a fork.

But he was not really troubled in his mind as a younger man might have been. He had the savoir-faire of middle-age. This restaurant dinner was on the whole a bright and agreeable experience for him. He liked even the corrosive taste of the Chianti. This Chianti you drank out of quite largish tumblers because it was almost as cheap and light as beer. It did not intoxicate, but it warmed the mind, and it cast a pleasant and convincing indistinctness over the universe so that the Tunbridges all became Tumbridges without any question, and the secret dreams and convictions of the heart became certain knowledge. Presently Mr. Preemby found himself able and willing to tell things and hint much more important things about his collections to the white-haired man and also to the dark, untidy girl who was sitting on his other side, and who came from the other studio and about whose name he had no idea, and presently to others; and when the bird came—it was a bird new to Mr. Preemby, and called, he gathered, rabbkey or turkit—most of the party was talking in the loud, confused, explosive way these young people affected about the lost Atlantis.

He had never spoken so freely before upon this topic. At home he had always been restrained by the late Mrs. Preemby’s genuine lack of interest. And even now he was not prepared for positive statements or for an encounter with sceptical arguments about that great lost continent of the Golden Age. Atlantis had been the scene and substance of his secret reveries for many years; he knew his knowledge of it was of a different order from common knowledge, more intuitive, mystical, profound. From the outset his manner was defensive, discreet and obscure, as of one willing but not permitted to speak.

How did he know that there had been this lost continent?

“H’rrmp,” he said with the faint smile of peculiar knowledge; “studied it for years.”

“What is the evidence?” asked the untidy young lady.

“So abundant. Impossible to retail it. Convincing. Of various sorts. Plato has much about it. Unfinished fragment. Many books have been written. Many inscriptions in Egypt.”

“What sort of people were they?” asked the untidy girl.

“Very wonderful people, young lady,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp. Very wonderful people.”

“Philosophy, no end I suppose?” asked the young man from the next studio with his mouth full.

“What we know—a mere remnant,” said Mr. Preemby. “Mere remnant.”

“How did they dress?”

“H’rrmp. Robes. White robes—extremely dignified. Blue—azure—when justice was administered. Plato tells us that much.”

“Could they fly?”

“They understood it. It was not made a practice of.”

“Motor cars? All that sort of thing?”

“If they wanted to. There was less motoring—more meditation. We live—age of transition. H’rrmp.”

“And then it all went phut?” said the young man from the next studio. “Submerged and all that. What a lesson!”

“That need not have happened,” said Mr. Preemby darkly.

Mr. Preemby became dimly aware of scepticism. “There’s not an atom of evidence that there ever was a continent in the Atlantic,” Mr. Teddy Winterton was saying to Christina Alberta; “within thirty million years of anything human. The ocean troughs go right back to the Mesozoic age.”

Mr. Preemby would have noticed this remark but the untidy girl asked him suddenly if he did not think that the swastika was a symbol derived from Atlantis. He said he was quite certain it was. She asked what it meant exactly; she had always been curious about its significance: and he became guarded and mysterious. She wanted moreover to know things about the costume of that lost world, about its social customs, about its religion. Were women citizens? She was certainly the most intelligent about it of all the company. The silver-haired man seemed to be faintly amused.

The rest of the company wandered off into a discussion of the possibility of going to the Chelsea Arts Ball in the character of a party from the Lost Atlantis. Many of their ideas Mr. Preemby thought trivial and undignified. “Leaves us unlimited scope,” said Harold Crumb. “We could invent weapons—have wings if we liked. Magic carbuncles on our shields—illuminated. Mysterious books and tablets. And a sort of peculiar wailing, drumming music; Mya, mya, mya.”

He pursed up his face and made a curious mooing noise with it to convey his intention, twiddling his fingers to assist the effect.

It was no good protesting against such imaginative ignorance. But to the dark, untidy girl and to the acquiescent man with silvery hair Mr. Preemby continued to be quietly oracular and communicative from behind his moustache.

“But how are these things known?” the dark girl persisted. “There is nothing in the British Museum.”

“You forget,” said Mr. Preemby. “H’rrmp, the Freemasons. There are Inner Groups—traditions. Thank you. Just half a glass more. Oh! you’ve filled it! Thank you.”

As he talked he was aware of something going on between Christina Alberta and Winterton. At first it seemed not to matter in the slightest degree, but to be just part of the general unusualness of the gathering, and then it seemed to matter a great deal. He saw Christina Alberta’s little fist resting on the table, and suddenly Winterton’s hand enveloped it. She snatched her hand away. Then something was whispered and her hand came back. In another moment the hands were five inches apart and it was as if nothing had ever happened between them.

He would probably have forgotten the momentary invasion of his attention by Christina Alberta if something else had not occurred at the phase of dessert. Poppinetti’s idea of dessert was a sort of lottery of walnuts—if you found a sound one you won—masses of compressed and damaged dates and a few defiant apples. There was a great crackling. The company was littering the table with walnut shells, and the green, black and yellow corruption they had contained, when this second incident caught Mr. Preemby’s eye. He saw Teddy Winterton run his hand very softly along Christina Alberta’s forearm. And her arm was not withdrawn.

Every one was talking just then and for a moment it seemed to Mr. Preemby that he alone had seen, and then he caught an observant expression on the face of the silver-haired man. It was all very confusing, and this Chianti—though it was really not intoxicating—made everything swimmy, but Mr. Preemby knew somehow that the silver-haired man had also seen that furtive familiarity, and that he too didn’t quite approve of it.

Ought one to take notice? Ought one to say anything? Perhaps afterwards. Perhaps when they were alone together, he might ask her quietly, “Are you and that young man Winterton engaged?”

“A bit too much,” said Mr. Preemby quietly, meeting the eye of the silver-haired man. “I don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Quite,” said the silver-haired man.

“I shall speak to her.”

“You’re right there,” said the silver-haired man warmly. A very sensible fellow.

A great rustle and a scraping of chairs. Poppinetti, figuring upon an accounts-pad, came to collect the money. “I’ll pay for us, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, “and we’ll settle up afterwards.”

Poppinetti bowing. Poppinetti on Mr. Preemby’s right and on Mr. Preemby’s left; several Poppinettis bowing. A great activity of Poppinettis handing hats and so forth. Poppinettis whichever way you turned. The restaurant rotating slightly. Was this Chianti perhaps stronger than Mr. Preemby had been led to believe? A number of Poppinettis opening a number of doors and saying polite things. Difficult to choose a door. Right the first time. Out into the street. People going by. Taxis. No more Poppinettis. But a girl ought not to let a young man stroke her arm at dinner, when anyone might see it happen. It wasn’t correct. Something had to be said. Something tactful.

Mr. Preemby became aware that he was walking next to Mrs. Crumb. “It was lovely to hear you talking about the New Atlantis,” she said. “I wish I had been sitting nearer.”

“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.

Something very nice about Mrs. Crumb. What was it? Not so fearfully married, but married quite enough.

§ 6

Mr. Preemby thought they were going back for coffee and a little talk and then bed; he had no idea of the immense amount of evening still before him. He knew nothing as yet of the capacity for sitting up late and getting lively in the small hours possessed by this new world of young people into which Christina Alberta had led him.

And in a sort of hectic discontinuous way they were lively for hours. It became vaguely evident to Mr. Preemby that there was a periodic “day” set apart by Mrs. Crumb for evening gatherings in the studio, and that this evening he had chosen for his settling down was such an evening. Fresh people dropped in. One it seemed was a portentous arrival, he came in quite soon after the return from Poppinetti’s; he was very fat and broad, a white-faced man of forty or so, rather short of breath, with exceedingly intelligent eyes under a broad forehead and a rather loose, peevish mouth. He carried himself with the involuntary self-consciousness of a man who thinks he is pointed out. His name it seemed was Paul Lambone, and he had written all sorts of things. Everybody treated him with a faint deference. He greeted Christina Alberta with great warmth.

“How’s the newest Van?” he said, shaking her hand as though he liked it, and speaking with a singularly small voice for so ample a person. “How’s the last step in Advance?”

“You’ve got to meet my father,” said Christina Alberta.

“Has it got a father? I thought it just growed like Topsy—out of Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw and all the rest of them.”

“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby.

Mr. Lambone turned to him. “What a Handful a daughter is!” he said, and bowed slightly towards Christina Alberta, “even the best of them.”

Mr. Preemby replied after the manner of the parents in Woodford Wells. “She’s a good daughter to me, sir.”

“Yes, but they aren’t like sons.”

“You have sons, sir, I presume.”

“Only dream children. I’ve not had your courage to realize things. I’ve married a hundred times in theory and here I am just a sort of bachelor uncle to everybody. Poking in among the younger people and observing their behaviour with”—his intelligent eyes looked quietly over his garrulous mouth at Christina Alberta—“terror and admiration.”

Two other visitors appeared in the doorway and Mr. Lambone turned from Mr. Preemby to greet them as soon as Fay had done her welcome, a fierce-looking young man with an immense head of black hair and a little lady like a china doll dressed to remind one of Watteau.

Conversation became general and Mr. Preemby receded into the background of events.

He found himself side by side with his friend with the silver hair, against his bookcase. “I didn’t expect a party,” he said.

“I thought so too.”

“I only got here this afternoon. The vans came late and lots of my things are still to be unpacked.”

The silver-haired man nodded sympathetically. “Often the case,” he murmured.

Every one was talking loudly. It was difficult to hear. It was confused sort of talking, and whenever two or three seemed to be interested in what they were saying, Fay Crumb went and interrupted them as a good hostess should. Other people, only vaguely apprehended by Mr. Preemby, got into the studio somehow. There was a red-haired young lady with a tremendous decolletage; behind you could see almost to her waist. He h’rrmp’d at it and thought of saying something about it, something cold and quiet, to the silver-haired man. But he didn’t. He couldn’t think of anything sufficiently cold and quiet to say.

Fay Crumb came and asked whether he would like some whisky or beer. “Not on the top of that nice Chianti, thank you,” said Mr. Preemby.

The conversation seemed to get noisier and noisier. In one corner Harold Crumb could be heard quoting the poems of Vachel Lindsay. Then Mr. Lambone came up and seemed to want to talk about the Lost Atlantis, but Mr. Preemby was shy of talking about the Lost Atlantis with Mr. Lambone. “Getting on all right, Daddy?” said Christina Alberta, drifting by and not waiting for any answer but an “h’rrmp.”

There appeared three young people with a gramophone they explained they had just bought, and Fay discovered that the beer had been forgotten and sent Harold out to borrow some from a neighbour. These new-comers made no very profound impression on Mr. Preemby’s now jaded mind, except that one of them, the owner of the gramophone, a very fair young man with a long, intelligent nose, was wearing the big horn of the gramophone as a headdress, and that he meant to have that gramophone going whatever else might occur.

The music was dance-music, jazz for the most part and a few waltzes, and it revived Mr. Preemby considerably. He sat up and beat time with the leg-bones of a roc, and presently two or three couples were dancing on the studio floor. Curious dancing, Mr. Preemby thought; almost like walking—jiggety walking with sudden terrific back-swipes of the legs. There was an interruption when Harold returned with the borrowed beer—bringing its lenders with it. Then there was a general clamour for Christina Alberta and Teddy to “do” their dance. Teddy was quite willing but Christina Alberta seemed reluctant, and when Mr. Preemby saw the dance he was not surprised.

“H’rrmp,” he said, and stroked his moustache and looked at the silver-haired man.

It really was too familiar altogether; for some moments the principals vanished upstairs, and came back altered. For some reason Teddy had adopted a cloth cap and a red neck-wrap; he was, in fact, being an Apache, and the bearing of Christina Alberta had become very proud and spirited with her arms akimbo.

Every one backed against the walls to clear a dancing floor. At the beginning it wasn’t so bad. But presently this Mr. Teddy was pitching Christina Alberta about, throwing her over his shoulder, taking hold of her, bending her backward, holding her almost upside down, both legs in the air and her hands dragging on the ground. And she was red and excited and seemed to like these violent familiarities. There was a kind of undesirable suitability between them for such purposes. She and Teddy looked into each other’s eyes with a sort of intimacy and yet with a sort of fierce defiance. At one point in the extraordinary dance she had to smack his face, a good hard smack, nicely timed. She did it with a spirit that made every one applaud. Whereupon he smiled and took her nice little neck in his hands and strangled her with great realism.

Then the gramophone had its death rattle and the dance was over.

Mr. Preemby’s throat had not troubled him much since dinner, but now he said “h’rrmp” repeatedly.

They wanted Christina Alberta, bright and panting and shock-headed, to repeat the performance, but she wouldn’t. She had had a glimpse of the solemn dismay and perplexity upon her Daddy’s face.

The people from the studio next door were the next to give a display: they obliged with an imitation of a Russian imitation of a peasant dance from Saratoff. There was a gramophone record that was not quite the proper music, but it would do. That dance really amused Mr. Preemby. The young man went down quite close to the floor and kicked out his feet with the greatest agility and the girl was as wooden as a doll. Every one clapped hands in time to the music, and so did Mr. Preemby.

And then came a further irruption. Five people in fancy dress demanding beer. They impressed Mr. Preemby as strange and bright-coloured, but totally uninteresting. One wore a red coxcomb and was dressed as a jester in cap and bells. The others just wore tights and bright things that signified nothing at all. They had been at some party given by somebody or other for the “Young people.” They announced with shouts, “They shut down at midnight. Yes, they shut down at midnight. When the young people go to bed.”

It was only too manifest that No. 8 Lonsdale Mews meant to do nothing of the sort.

Beer. Mr. Preemby declined. The last of the beer. Cigarettes. Much smoke. The last of the whisky. More gramophone, more dancing and Harold Crumb’s voice loose again in recitation. Beer or whisky had thickened it. But there were countervailing noises. Movement. A circle was cleared. Not more dancing! No. Feats of strength and dexterity with chairs, performed chiefly by Teddy Winterton, the gramophone owner, and Harold. This stunting stopped presently and the company flowed back towards the middle of the room. Talk Mr. Preemby could not follow; phrases he could not understand. Nobody taking the slightest notice of him.

A sense of weariness and futility and desolation came upon him. How differently were the evenings of the past spent by the good wise people of the lost Atlantis! Philosophical discourse they had, the lute, the lyre. Elevated thoughts.

He caught sight of Mrs. Crumb yawning furtively. Suddenly, stupendously he yawned. And yawned again.

“Yaaw,” he said to Paul Lambone who was at his side.

“Proyawaw—Prolly thiswe sitting on my beawawd.”

“You live here?” said Mr. Lambone.

“Come to-day. Christina Albyawawawter arranged it.”

“The devil she did!” said Mr. Lambone, and looked across the studio at her. For some moments he seemed lost in thought.

“Very remarkable young woman that daughter of yours,” he said. “Makes me feel old-fashioned.”

He looked at the wrist-watch he wore, “Half-past one,” he said. “I’ll start the Go....”

§ 7

Mr. Preemby heard a few sentences of the parting between Teddy Winterton and Christina Alberta. “Yes or no?” said Teddy.

“No,” said Christina Alberta with emphasis.

“Not a bit of it,” said Teddy.

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“But you do.”

“Oh, go to the devil!”

“Not as if there were risks.”

“I shan’t come. It’s preposterous.”

“I shall wait all the same.”

“You may wait.”

“Little Chrissy Hesitation. Anything to please you.”

§ 8

It took until past two o’clock for the Go Paul Lambone had started to remove the last of the company.

“All hands to the bedmaking,” cried Fay. “It isn’t always like this, Mr. Preemby.”

“Confess I feel tired,” said Mr. Preemby. “Had a long day of it.”

Christina Alberta regarded him with belated compunction. “It just happened like this,” she said.

“Not used to such late hours,” said Mr. Preemby, sitting on his bed when at last it was made, and he did a yawn that almost dislocated his jaw.

“Night,” said Fay, yawning also.

“We’ll turn in,” said Harold. “So long, Mr. Preemby.” The yawning seized upon Harold also. What a face he had!

“Goo-i.”

“Gawooi-i.”

The door closed upon them.

There was much to say to Christina Alberta, but it was too late and Mr. Preemby was too weary to say it now And also he had no idea what it was he ought to say.

A casual remark fell out, “I liked that man with the white hair,” he said.

“Did you?” said Christina Alberta absently.

“He was intelligent. He took a great interest in the Lost Atlantis.”

“He’s stone deaf,” said Christina Alberta, “and he’s ashamed of it—poor dear.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Preemby.

“All this is going to be rather noisy for you, Daddy,” she said, coming to what she had in mind.

“It is a bit ramshackle,” said Mr. Preemby.

“We ought to go to Tunbridge Wells quite soon and look round there.”

“To-morrow,” said Mr. Preemby.

“Not to-morrow.”

“Why not?”

“The next day,” said Christina Alberta. “I’m not quite sure about to-morrow. I’d sort of half promised to go somewhere else—. But it doesn’t matter very much really.”

“I’d like to go to Tumbridge Wells to-morrow,” said Mr. Preemby.

“Why not?” said Christina Alberta as if to herself, and hesitated.

Se walked to the door and came back. “Good night, little Daddy,” she said.

“Are we going then? To-morrow?”

“No.... Yes.... I don’t know. I had planned to do something to-morrow. Important in a kind of way.... We’ll go to-morrow, Daddy.”

She walked away from him with her arms akimbo and stared at those queer pictures.

She spun round on her feet. “I can’t go to-morrow,” she said.

“Yes, I will,” she contradicted.

“Oh, hell!” she cried, in a most unaccountable and unladylike way. “I don’t know what to do!”

Mr. Preemby looked at her with grave and weary eyes. This was a new Christina Alberta to him. She ought not to swear. She did not ought to swear. She’d caught it up from these people. She didn’t know what it meant. He must talk to her—to-morrow. About that and one or two other things. But Heavens! how tired he was!

“You—” He yawned. “You must take care of yourself, Christina Alberta,” he said.

“I’ll do that all right, Daddy. Trust me.”

She came and sat down beside him on his little half-fictitious bed. “We can’t decide to-night, Daddy. We’re too tired. We’ll settle to-morrow. Have to see what the weather’s like for one thing. Wouldn’t do to walk about Tunbridge if it was wet. We’ll decide about everything to-morrow—when our heads are cool. Why! you dear little Daddy! It’s just upon half-past two.”

She put her arm round his shoulders and kissed him on the top of his head and the lobe of his ear. He loved her to touch him and kiss him. He did not understand in the least how much he loved her to kiss him.

“Dear tired little Daddy,” she said in her softest voice: “You are ever so kind to me. Good night.”

She had gone.

For some time Mr. Preemby sat quite motionless in a state of almost immobile thought.

The floor of the studio was littered with burnt matches and cigarette ends and the air smelt of stale smoke and beer. On the blue-painted table stood an empty beer-bottle and two or three glasses containing dregs of beer and cigarette ash.

It was all very different from Woodford Wells,—very different indeed.

But it was Experience.

Mr. Preemby bestirred himself to undress.

That night-shirt of Saxony flannel had still to be unpacked.

§ 9

In the morning Christina Alberta was still restless and quite undecided about going to Tunbridge Wells, though the weather was perfectly fine. About half-past eleven she disappeared, and after a light lunch with Fay—Harold was out also—it became evident to Mr. Preemby that the visit to Tunbridge Wells was postponed for the day. So he went to South Kensington to look at the Museums there. He did not go into them actually, he just looked at them and at the colleges and buildings generally. It was a preliminary reconnaissance.

The Museums were quite good to look at. Larger, more extensive, than the British Museum. Probably they contained—all sorts of things.

Christina Alberta reappeared in the studio about half-past six looking very bright and exalted. There was something about her subtly triumphant.

She offered no explanation of her disappearance. She was full of the visit to Tunbridge on the morrow. They must catch a train soon after nine and have a good long day. She was unusually affectionate to her Daddy.

Harold was out for the evening and Fay had some reviewing to do, so they had quite a quiet and domestic evening. Mr. Preemby read with a varying attention a nice deep confusing book he had found in the room upstairs called Fantasia of the Unconscious about the Lost Atlantis and similar things.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH The Petunia Boarding House

§ 1

MOST places in the world have sister cities and twins and parallels, but Tunbridge Wells is Tunbridge Wells, and there is nothing really like it upon our planet. Not that it is in any way strange or fantastic, but because of its brightly delicate distinction. It is clean and open, and just pleasantly absurd. It is not more than thirty miles from London, as the crow flies, but the North Downs six miles away dismiss with a serene and gracious gesture all thoughts of London from the mind. It is away from the main line out of London, inconvenient for season-ticket holders; there is no direct route for the hurrying motorist over those saving Downs; to Dover and Kent generally he goes to the east of it, and to Brighton he goes to the west—if he survive the hills of Westerham and Sevenoaks. Rich men’s estates encircle it with accessible parks. Eridge, Bayham, Penshurst Park, Knole and the like protect it from overmuch breeding of little villa residences. There it lies, on a rare piece of rocky soil, dry underfoot, airy and wholesome, with its friendly Common in the midst of it; its Spa of evil-tasting beneficent waters as the Stuart princesses drank them, its Pantiles and its Pump Room, much as Dr. Johnson knew the place. Mount Sion and Mount Ephraim, Beulah Road and something evangelical in the air, remind the light-minded visitor that London in the past was a Puritan city. Many a serious liver has been touched and found grace at Tunbridge Wells. Many a light liver has found fresh strength there. And thither came Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta seeking a boarding house—and they could have sought it in no more favourable locality.

They set about the search in a systematic way as became a couple, one of whom had been partially trained for sociological research at the London School of Economics and partially trained for business at the Tomlinson School. Mr. Preemby had been for beginning with a general look-round, just walking round and looking quietly at things for a bit, but Christina Alberta consulted all the agents in order, and bought a map and guide to the town and sat down on a seat on the Common and planned the operations that led quite readily and easily to the Petunia Boarding House.

In the guide Mr. Preemby read with approval some very promising words. “Listen to this, my dear,” he said. “H’rrmp. ‘General Characteristics. Emphasis might very well be laid on the character enjoyed by Tunbridge Wells as a magnet for high-class residents and visitors. The town is never overrun with trippers, nor are its streets ever defiled by the vulgar or the inane. Its inhabitants are composed, for the most part, of well-to-do people who naturally create a social atmosphere tinged by culture and refinement.’”

“Tinged is a jolly good word for it, I expect,” said Christina Alberta.

“I think my instinct has guided me aright to this place,” said Mr. Preemby.

The Petunia Boarding House looks obliquely upon the Common from where Petunia Road runs into the quaint and pleasant High Street. It has not the towering magnificence of the Wellington, the Royal Mount Ephraim, the Marlborough, or their fellows, which face the sun so bravely from the hill-crest above the Common, but it is a house of dignified comfort. The steps, the portico, the ample hall, the name in letters of gold on black, made Mr. Preemby say h’rrmp several times. An excessively chubby maid in a very, very tight black dress and a cap and apron, came and looked at Mr. and Miss Preemby with a distraught evasive expression, answered some preliminary questions incoherently, and said she would call Miss Emily Rewster—Miss Margaret was out. Thereupon Miss Emily Rewster, who had been hovering attentively behind a bead curtain, thrust it aside and came ingratiatingly into the foreground. She was a little high-coloured old lady, with an air of genteel savoir-faire; she had a lace cap and wore a great deal of lace and several flounces, and she had the most frankly dyed chestnut hair that Christina Alberta had ever seen. “Was it just for a week or so Mr. Preemby wanted to come, or something—perheps—more permanent?”

Explanations were exchanged. Mr. Preemby was to be “more permanent”; Christina Alberta intermittent—and rather a difficulty. The existence of headquarters in Chelsea was revealed discreetly, but not the fact that they were in a Mews.

Miss Emily Rewster thought Christina Alberta could be fitted in if she wasn’t too particular about having the same room, or exactly the same sort of room every time she came. “We have to menage,” said Miss Emily Rewster.

“So long as the window opens,” said Christina Alberta.

The rooms exhibited were very satisfactory, (h’rrmp) very satisfactory. A glimpse of a bathroom was given. “You say when you want one,” said Miss Emily Rewster. There was a dining-room with separate tables, and there were flowers on every table, very refined and pleasant, and there was a large drawing-room with a piano and a great number of arm-chairs and sofas wearing flounces so like the flounces of Miss Emily Rewster, and antimacassars so like her cap, and with so entirely her air of accommodating receptiveness that it seemed as though they must be at least her cousins who had joined her in the enterprise. The piano wore a sort of lace bed-spread, and there were polished tables bearing majolica pots of aspidistra on mats and little less serious tables for use, and there was a low bookcase with books in it and a great heap of illustrated papers on the top. The hall expanded at the back into a rather modernish lounge where two ladies were having tea; and there was also a smoking-room, where, said Miss Emily Rewster to Christina Alberta rather coyly, “the gentlemen smoke.”

“We’ve been very full this season,” said Miss Emily Rewster, “very full. We’ve had nearly thirty sitting at dinner. But of course the season is drawing in now. Just at present we’re down to nine at breakfast and seven at dinner; two gentlemen in business here. But people come and people go. I’ve had two inquiries by post to-day. One an invalid lady and her sister. They think of drinking the waters. And there are Birds of Passage as well as Regulars. Just for a night or so. Motor families. They take us en route. That’s where we have an advantage in being so close to the shops.”

She beamed intimately at Mr. Preemby. “Often my sister or I pop out at the last moment and get in things ourselves. When every one else is busy. We don’t mind any little trouble if it makes people comfortable.”

“We’ve been on the separate table system ever since the war,” said Miss Emily Rewster. “So much more pleasant. You can keep yourself Quate to yourself if you wish, or you can be Friendly. People often Speak in the Drawing-room or in the Smoking-room. And they bow. Sometimes people get Quate friendly. Play Games. Get up Excursions together. Quate Pleasant.”

Christina Alberta asked an obvious question.

“Very pleasant people indeed,” said Miss Emily. “Very pleasant people. A retired gentleman and his wife and her stepdaughter and two retired maiden ladies and a gentleman and his lady who has been in a forest in Burmah and so on.”

Christina Alberta restrained a ribald impulse to ask what a “retired gentleman” or a “retired maiden lady” really meant.

“I’ve always been attracted to Tumbridge Wells,” said Mr. Preemby.

“Royal Tunbridge Wells if you please,” said Miss Emily radiantly. “The ‘Royal’ was added in nineteen nine, you know, by gracious command of his Majesty.”

“I didn’t know,” said Mr. Preemby with profound respect, and tried it over; “Royal Tumbridge Wells.”

“Makes it rather a mouthful,” said Christina Alberta.

“A very pleasant mouthful for Us, I can assure you,” said Miss Emily loyally.

The Petunia Boarding House seemed so satisfactory to Mr. Preemby that it was arranged that he should return the next day but one, bringing with him some clothes and other luggage, and that Christina Alberta was to come and stay with him for a few days—there was a little room upstairs she could have—and then she would go back to London and her studies and take her chance of coming again when there was a room for her.

§ 2

In the train back to London Mr. Preemby rehearsed these arrangements and made his plans.

“I shall come down here the day after to-morrow, after I have put my collections in order at the Mew. I shall put the best things so that they can be seen through the glass of the cabinet, but I think I shall lock them up, and I shall bring down a few necessary books, and then when I have quite settled in I shall go and have a good look at these celebrated Rocks here.”

“We could come down in the morning,” said Christina Alberta, “and go and look at them in the afternoon.”

“Not the same afternoon,” said Mr. Preemby. “No. I want my mind to be quite fresh and open when I look at the Rocks. I think it will be best to see them quite early—after a night’s sleep. When there are no other visitors. I think—I think, Christina Alberta, that for the first time I’d better go to them quite alone. Without you. Sometimes you say things, Christina Alberta—you don’t mean to say them of course—but they put me out....”

Christina Alberta reflected. “What do you expect to find at these Rocks, Daddy?”

Mr. Preemby waved his moustache and the rest of his face slowly from side to side. “I go with an Open Mind,” he said. “Perhaps all of Atlantis was not lost. Some of it may be hidden. There are legends preserved by the philosopher Plato. Partly in cipher. Who knows? It may be here. It may be in Africa. A plan. A sign. The toad rock must be most singular. In the British Museum there is a toad rock from Central America....”

He mused pleasantly for a time.

“I shall take a note-book,” he said, “and several coloured pencils.”

He continued to meditate. His next remark came after an interval of three or four minutes, and was a surprise for Christina Alberta.

“I hope, my dear,” said Mr. Preemby, “that among all these artists and people you are not getting Ram Shackle.

“I should be sorry to think you were getting Ram Shackle,” said Mr. Preemby.

“But Daddy, what makes you think I may be getting—Ram Shackle?” asked Christina Alberta.

“One or two little things I saw at the Mew,” said Mr. Preemby. “Just one or two little things. You’ve got to be careful, Christina Alberta. A girl has to take care of herself. And your friends—decidedly Ram Shackle. Don’t mind my making a remark about them, Christina Alberta. Just a word in season.”

Christina Alberta’s answer came after a little interval, and without her usual confident ring. “Don’t you worry about me, Daddy,” she said. “I’m all right.”

Mr. Preemby seemed about to change the subject. Then he remarked, “I don’t like that feller, Teddy Winterton. He’s too familiar.”

“I don’t like him either,” said Christina Alberta. “He is too familiar.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Preemby. “I thought you didn’t notice,” and relapsed into meditation.

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.

“You never know What Ideas Easterners will get into their Heads,” said the younger Miss Solbé. “East is East, and West is West.”

But now Christina Alberta’s attention was distracted by another set of phenomena. She had discovered that the thin, bald gentleman with side-whiskers, rigid behind his Times, was not really reading that interesting vestige of the British constitution at all. His gaze was not directed to the edge of his paper, but beyond it. He was staring from behind that ambush and round the corner of his glasses in a strange, hard-eyed way, without passion or admiration, at the upper part of Christina Alberta’s black-stockinged legs as they delivered their last challenge to human censure before disappearing beneath her all too exiguous but extremely comfortable skirt. And also she was realizing that a furtive but intense scrutiny of her bobbed hair was disorganizing the Patience of the whiskered gentleman’s daughter very seriously, and that it was also interfering with the proper laying out of a second and different sort of Patience by the elder Miss Solbé. And suddenly, to her extreme annoyance, Christina Alberta found a flush of indignation mantling her cheek, and a combative tingle passing down the backbone of her straight little body. “Why the devil,” Miss Preemby asked herself, “why the devil shouldn’t a girl cut her hair to save trouble and bother, and wear clothes in which she can walk about?” Anyhow, a mop of well-washed hair was ten times better than those feeble, aimless interweavings of pigtails and fringes and scraps and ends. And as for showing one’s legs and body; why shouldn’t one show one’s legs and body? It was just a part of the universal evasion of life by these people that had got most of their bodies hidden away, tied up in a sort of bundle. Do they ever venture to look at themselves? Those Solbé girls, once upon a time, they must have been jolly little girls with an amused interest in their stalky little legs, before they said Shush! and put them away.

Christina Alberta’s speculative vein took charge for a time. What becomes of legs that are put away and never looked at and encouraged? Do they get etiolated and queer, dead-white and funny-shaped and afraid of the light? And after you’ve really packed your body away and forgotten it, nothing is left of you but a head sticking out and hands that wave about and feet with hidden and distorted toes; and you go about between meal-times and take trips in chars-à-bancs to see what every one sees and feel what every one feels, and you play games by rule and example according to your age and energy, and become more and more addicted to Patience until you are ready to cover yourself up in bed for the last time of all and die. Evasion! And the fuss they had caused getting born! The fuss, the morality and marriages and everything that was necessary before these vacuous lives were begotten!

But it was all evasion, and the life shown in these Tatlers and Sketches was evasion just as much. Just as much. All these photographs of the pushful pretty, the actresses for sale and the daughters who had to be sold, looked at you with just your own question in their eyes: “Is this the Life?” The unending photographs of Lady Diana This, and Lady Marjorie That, and Mr. So-and-So and a Friend of the Duke of York or the Duchess of Shonts, at dog-shows, at horse-shows, at race meetings, at royal inaugurations and the like, were inevitably suggestive of obstinate doubts that were in need of a perennial reassurance. The photographs of people playing tennis and suchlike games were livelier, but there, too, if you care to look at it, were evasions. Evasions. Evasions.

Christina Alberta turned over the back numbers of the Sketch without looking at the pictures before her eyes.

What was this Life she and these people and every one by games and jokes and meetings and ceremonies and elaborate disregards and concealments were all evading? What was this great thing outside, this something like a huge, terrible, attractive and compelling black monster, beyond the lights, beyond the movements and appearances, that called to her and challenged her to come?

One might evade the call of it by playing Patience and games perhaps. One might evade it by living by rule or custom. People seemed to do so. A time might come when that call to Christina Alberta to be Christina Alberta to the uttermost and fulfil her mysterious mission to that immense being beyond the lights might no longer distress her life. She had thought that in a certain recklessness and violence with herself she might fight her way out to the call. She had made love now. Anyhow, she hadn’t evaded that. But—was it going to matter as much as she had thought it would matter? She and her little friends were playing desperate games with the material of love in a world where Dr. Marie Stopes and Mr. D. H. Lawrence were twin stars, and it was just something you went through—and came out much as you had been before. More restless, perhaps, but no further on. It left you just where you had been, face to face with the unsolved darkness and that mysterious, distressing, unanswerable call to come out of it all and really live and die.

She had made love.... Queer it had been....

These furtive people were watching and watching her, reading her thoughts, perhaps, penetrating her....

Christina Alberta shut her copy of the Sketch with something of a snap, and walked out of the drawing-room with a serene expression. She shut the door behind her and went downstairs to find what had happened to her father in the smoking-room.

“I’m leaving the best part of the talk behind me,” reflected Christina Alberta.

§ 6

She found that her father and the gentleman from the forests of Burmah, after a very prolonged and brilliant “h’rrmping” match, had settled down to conversation. But unhappily the conversation was unsuitable for her.

“Siam, Cambodia, Tonquin, the country is full of such temples. They take you there and show you them.”

“Wonderful,” said Mr. Preemby. “Wonderful. And you do not think the carvings you speak of—? Some high symbolism?”

Both gentlemen became aware of Christina Alberta, attentive and hovering.

“Symbolism,” said the arboreal gentleman, “Symbolism,” and had complicated pharyngeal difficulties. “Heathenish indecency. Difficult to discuss.... Presence of young lady.... H’rrmp.”

“H’rrmp,” said Mr. Preemby. “Had you come down to say good night, my dear? We are having a rather—rather technical talk.”

“Sounds like it, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, and went round and sat on the arm of his chair for a moment.

“Good night, little Daddy,” she said.

Reflective moment.

“I think this Tumbridge is going to suit me,” said Mr. Preemby.

“I hope it will, little Daddy. Good night.”

§ 7

Christina Alberta’s first evening at the Petunia Boarding House has been described with some particularity because it is a sample of all the still and uneventful evenings that seemed to lie before Mr. Preemby there. It impressed her as an unfathomable enormity of uneventfulness in which nothing harmful or disturbing could conceivably occur to him. The last remote possibility of imaginative disturbance seemed to remove itself next day when Mrs. Bone announced to the whiskered gentleman’s wife that she and her husband were off to Bath on the morrow: they were in luck it seemed; they had got the exact rooms for the winter in the exact boarding house they had always had their eyes on. “Tunbridge seems so bleak,” she said. “After Burmah.”

The dinner was like the previous dinner; the Birds of Passage had gone and Mr. Preemby astonished himself, Christina Alberta, the chubby maid and the assembled company by demanding whether it was possible to send out (h’rrmp) for a bottle or flask of Chianti. “It’s an Italian wine,” said Mr. Preemby to inform and help the chubby maid in her inquiries. But there was no Chianti on the wine-list supplied, and after a conversation markedly reminiscent of that of the Birds of Passage overnight, the Preemby table was stocked with a bottle of Australian Burgundy and, at Christina Alberta’s request, a bottle of mineral water.

After this display of initiative, self-assertion and social derring-do, Mr. Preemby did little but h’rrmp throughout the rest of the meal.

The subsequent life of the drawing-room was also vacantly similar to the previous evening. Christina Alberta got her possibly illegal cigarette in the lounge, indeed she smoked two, and Miss Margaret Rewster looked at her through the bead curtain near the office and Miss Emily had a sniff from the landing upstairs, though nothing was said. And then Mr. Preemby followed Major Bone into the smoking-room to gather whatever further information he could about the temple decorations and religious customs of the peoples of further India. He was inclined to think Major Bone rather biased by evangelical prejudice. But Major Bone was not even indignant about Eastern religions that night. He wanted to talk about Bath, and he talked about Bath. He told Mr. Preemby in very great detail about a remarkable occurrence at Bath. He had met a gentleman named Bone, a gentleman much of his own age and appearance, a Captain Bone who had also once been in Burmah. He detailed various extremely dramatic conversations between himself and the other Bone, occasionally going back and correcting himself. They had made the most elaborate comparison of their genealogies, and it did not appear that they were even remotely related. “Most curious coincidence that has ever occurred to me,” said Major Bone. “In Bath. In nineteen-eh-nine.”

In the drawing-room Patience prevailed and Mrs. Bone was talking about Bath. The cheerful wife of the whiskered gentleman said “Deavning” to Christina Alberta quite suddenly.

“Oh! Good evening,” said Christina Alberta.

“You had a walk to-day?”

“We’ve been to see the Toad Rock and the High Rock and Eridge Park.”

“Quite a nice walk,” said the cheerful lady, and restored her attention to Mrs. Bone. Christina Alberta gathered she was to be noticed, but not made a pet of.

There was nothing for it but to go through the Tatlers and Sketches again. This time the pictures were exhausted, but there were reviews of books and one or two short stories. Christina Alberta read them all.

When she went to say good night to her Daddy she had come to a decision. “Daddy,” she said, “on Thursday, that’s the day after to-morrow, I must go back to London. There are some lectures beginning.”

Mr. Preemby made no effective opposition.

The third evening was in countenance like the second except that the Bones had gone and that Christina Alberta was sustained by the thought that next day she would pass from the vacuities of Tunbridge to the tangled riddles of London. And there was a Bird of Passage present, an untidy young man of the student type with a lot of hair imperfectly controlled by unguents whose motor bicycle had broken down just outside Tunbridge Wells. He lived somewhere away in the north, it seemed, in Northumberland; he would have to wait in Tunbridge for two or three days while some broken part of his machine was replaced from Coventry; he had taken refuge in the Petunia Boarding House and it was jolly hard luck on him. He couldn’t budget for a trip to London; he would just have to sit down in Tunbridge. He was a Cambridge undergraduate and a geologist; he had a bag of specimens on his machine. These facts he conveyed across the width of the room to Mr. Preemby in the course of a rather one-sided conversation.

From the first Christina Alberta did not like this young gentleman from Cambridge. He was like a younger, cruder Teddy Winterton, with impudent bad manners instead of impudent good manners, and with neither bodily grace nor good looks. And while he spoke to Mr. Preemby he glanced at her. But she had no inkling of the part he might play in the life of her Daddy and herself.

When she and her Daddy went into the lounge for coffee and her cigarette, the young man came and placed himself at an adjacent table and initiated some more conversation. Was Tunbridge Wells an amusing place? Was there any chance of his getting any golf or tennis?

“There are a number of delightful walks,” said Mr. Preemby.

“Not much fun alone,” said the young man.

“There are the pleasures of observation,” said Mr. Preemby.

“All this country has been pretty well worked over,” said the young man of science. “Is there a Museum here?”

Mr. Preemby did not know.

“There ought to be a Museum in every town.”

Presently the coffee and the cigarettes were finished. This evening Mr. Preemby was for the drawing-room. Major Bone had gone, the smoking-room had no attractions, and Mr. Preemby had exchanged a few amiable words with the gentleman with whiskers and hoped to follow them up. Christina Alberta went with him. At the sight of the old Tatlers and Sketches she remembered she had bought a book in the High Street that day, a second-hand copy of Rousseau’s Confessions. She went off to get it. She found the young gentleman from Cambridge still sitting in the lounge smoking cigarettes.

“Pretty gloomy here,” he said.

“Oh! I don’t know,” said Christina Alberta with an open mind, pausing before him.

“Nothing much doing—what?”

“It’s not a Gala Night.”

“I’m stranded.”

“You must bear up.”

“S’pose you wouldn’t be disposed to come out for a bit and forage around for some fun?” said the young man from Cambridge, taking his courage in both hands.

“Sorry,” said Christina Alberta conclusively, and turned to go on.

“No offence?” said the young man from Cambridge.

“Nice of you to think of me,” said Christina Alberta who would rather have been thought utterly shameless than the least bit prudish. “Good hunting.”

And the young man from Cambridge perceived that he was dismissed.

Christina Alberta went into the drawing-room for another tremendous bout of nothingness. But anyhow she had got Rousseau to read, and to-morrow she would be in London.

About the Rousseau—? She had always wanted to know how she stood towards Rousseau.

He carried her on to ten o’clock. But she didn’t think much of Rousseau. He ought to have known a few of the New Hope Club girls. They’d have shown him.

§ 8

For three weeks Christina Alberta did not return to Tunbridge Wells, and when she returned she had passed through a variety of experiences that will have their due effect upon the course of this story. This story is the story of Mr. Preemby, and we have little sympathy with that modern sort of novel which will not let a girl alone but must follow her up into the most private and intimate affairs. Christina Alberta was perplexed and worried and would have hated the pursuit of such a searchlight. Suffice it that events had crowded so closely upon her that for whole days together she thought scarcely at all of her possibly quite lonely little Daddy at Tunbridge Wells. Then came a letter that brought her bustling down.

“I think it only right to tell you,” said the letter, “that Very Important Communications indeed have been made to me of the Utmost Importance, and that I ought to tell you about them. They seem to alter all our lives. I know you are immearced in your studies, but these Communications are so Important that I want to talk them over with you soon. I would come up to the Studio to tell you about it all, but very likely Mr. Crumb might be in and I would much prefer to tell you here on the Common amid more congenial surroundings. Some of it you will find almost unbeleavable.”

“Communications?” said Christina Alberta, re-reading the letter. “Communications?”

She went down to Tunbridge Wells that afternoon.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH The Scales Fall from Mr. Preemby’s Eyes

§ 1

“THE scales,” said Mr. Preemby, “have fallen from my eyes.”

He had chosen a seat upon the Common which commanded an extensive view of the town, the town crowned by the green cupolas of the Opera House and lying as though the houses had been shot out of a cart down the long incline to the Pantiles. Beyond were the wide distances of the Kentish hill country, blue and remote.

Christina Alberta waited for more.

“This experience,” said Mr. Preemby, speaking with an occasional h’rrmp; “all these experiences—difficult to relate. Naturally I think you are of a sceptical disposition—taking after your dear mother. She was very sceptical. Of psychic phenomena in particular. She said it was Nonsense. And when your dear mother said a thing was Nonsense, then it was Nonsense. It only made things disagreeable if you argued it was anything else. As for myself—always the open mind. No dogma either way. I just refrained.”

“But, Daddy, have you been having psychic experiences? How could you have psychic experiences down here?”

“Let me tell you the story in due order. I want you to see it as I saw it—in due order.”

“How did it begin?”

Mr. Preemby held up a propitiatory hand. “Please! In my own way,” he said.

Christina Alberta bit her lips and scrutinized the tranquil resolution of his profile. There was no hurrying him; he had to tell his tale as he had prepared it.

“I do not think,” said Mr. Preemby, “that mine is a very credulous sort of mind. It is true I am not given to argument. I do not say very much. But I think and observe. I think and observe and I have a kind of gift for judging people. I do not think I am a very easy man to deceive.

“And it is to be noted that I started the whole affair. It began at my suggestion. I do not know what put it into my head, but I do know that it was me started the whole thing going.

“You know, after your departure our little band at the Petunia Boarding House was reduced to just six persons, not counting the young gentleman from Cambridge who was, as Miss Rewster says, a Bird of Passage. Naturally the six of us felt rather drawn together. There were the two Miss Solbés, both very intelligent young ladies, and there were Mr. Hockleby and Mrs. Hockleby, and Miss Hockleby, and there was me. We were drawn together at lunch after you had gone off—it was a little showery and we had a fire in the drawing-room and Miss Solbé, the one with the glasses, tried to show me one of her Patiences. We got into quite an interesting argument about whether it was possible to will which card would turn up next. I have always inclined to the view that for certain people, people with the necessary gift, it was possible to do so, but Mr. Hockleby showed himself extremely sceptical in the matter. He said that if there was a card on the top of the pack ready to turn up, and if one willed that a different card should turn up, then that meant that one had really by sheer will force to re-manufacture two of the cards in the pack, make them over again, each into the other, make them blank, reprint them and everything. But I tried to explain to him that this is not philosophically sound because of predestination. If you were predestined to will that such a card should be on the top of the pack, then that card was also predestined to be there. He argued——”

“But is it necessary to tell me all this, Daddy, before we get to your psychic experience?”

“It is just to illustrate the fact that Mr. Hockleby was an extremely sceptical person.”

“Was that young man from Cambridge present at the discussions?”

“No-oh. No. He was not. He had probably gone down to the Garage to see if his Spare Part had come. He was always going down to the Garage to see about his Spare Part.”

§ 2

Mr. Preemby h’rrmped and began a new section of his narrative.

“It was in the evening after dinner,” he said, “that things really began. I went into the smoking-room—to smoke—and afterwards I went into the drawing-room, and when I went into the drawing-room I had no more thought of occult phenomena, Christina Alberta, than I had of flying over the moon. But as I came into the drawing-room I saw Miss Solbé looking at her Patience cards which she had just put out, and the way she was holding her hands on the table reminded me of the way I had read that people put their hands together on the table when they were trying experiments in table-turning. And almost without thinking I said: ‘Why, Miss Solbé, the way you are holding your hands is just the way they do when they are going to do table-turning!’ I said it just like that.

“Mr. Hockleby was reading his paper at the time—the Times, I think, but it may have been the Morning Post—but he put it down when he heard me say that and he looked over his glasses at me and said, ‘You don’t believe in that sort of thing, Mr. Preemby, surely?’

“His wife was sitting with her back to me and from the way she spoke I think she must have been eating some sort of sweet or lozenge at the time. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘We did it at home dozens of times before I was married.’

“And I don’t know what put it into my head, Christina Alberta; it seemed almost as though it was something behind myself that did it, or it may have been a sort of antagonism I have always felt about that man Hockleby; but anyhow, I said, ‘I’d really like to try some of this table-turning.’

“The younger Miss Solbé, she’s really quite a charming young lady when you get to know her, and it seems she has been reading a little occult literature lately——”

“How old is she, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta, regarding him with a look of novel suspicion.

“I don’t think she can be very much more than thirty-two or three. Thirty-four at the outside. And really quite well-read, quite well-read. Well, anyhow, she said she would like to try it. And Miss Hockleby, evidently she had been brought up on strictly sceptical lines by her father, she was curious too. So to cut a long story short, we tried it. Only Mr. Hockleby objected and Mrs. Hockleby overruled that. She was the only one among us who had ever seen anything of the sort before, and so it was she who arranged things and told us what to do. We chose a very solid table, the one that usually has the big aspidistra on it, and while we were turning out the light——”