Christina Alberta

“ The car emitted a handsome and determined young woman of advanced appearance, hatless and short-skirted, and a lean, dark, prosperous-looking man of thirty-eight or forty in blue serge and a grey felt hat. The man opened the gate for the girl, and she surveyed the house as she advanced.
Bobby realized that Christina Alberta had not kept her promise to be blue-eyed and fragile. She had betrayed him. Yet for all her treachery he had built up a sense of personal relationship with her that gripped him still. ”

“ By tea-time Bobby had adjusted his mind to the existence of Devizes and the unexpectedness of Christina Alberta. All that carried over from his state of expectation was the idea that his relations with Christina Alberta were to be very profound and intimate. He still believed that, hidden away in her somewhere, there must be a blue-eyed, yielding, really feminine person, but it was very deeply hidden. Meanwhile the superimposed disguise struck him as agreeable, alert, humorous, and friendly. Devizes too he saw more and more as a strong, capable, understanding personality. ”

“ Christina Alberta looked unusually small and overshadowed by her two odd men friends. It was a grey day outside, and the general effect of the gathering was thin and scattered and damp and chilly. The organ was playing as Bobby came in, and he thought he had never heard a less musical organ. The service as it went on sounded more and more trite and theological and insincere. What an old second-hand damp mackintosh the Church of England is, thought Bobby, for a striving soul to wear? But then what can any religion in the world really be in the face of normal death? ”

“ Christina Alberta’s heart went out to him, and yet impelled by some tremendous force within her she rose and Devizes rose beside her and they marched stiffly forward. She could not help herself, she could not control the rigid movements of her hands and feet. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In dreams absurd things happen, dreams when you think them over afterwards are all at sixes and sevens, but this is all sane and orderly. One might think, Christina Alberta, that I had never dreamt dreams and that all these memories of that previous existence which crowd upon me now were a deception of my imagination! But I can go right back as if it was yesterday, and I am surer by far that I am Sargon than that I am Albert Edward Preemby your father. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every individual of a social species needed love; to fail in that need was to escape out of social life to lonely futility. “Mutual comfort,” Bobby quoted. In his past Bobby had dreamt of the love of children. Even now he remembered as a fact that he had dreamt particularly of a little girl of his own that he could protect and explore. But now the thought and interest of Christina Alberta had blotted that out. It was extraordinary to him to perceive how possessed he was by her. He could endure no prospect of life just now unless it was to include Christina Alberta as its principal fact. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bobby was naturally, inherently, afraid; his instinct was for security, protection, kindliness and help. He clung to his “Aunt Suzannah” job for safety. He didn’t believe Christina Alberta knew one tenth of the dangers she ran of insult, defeat, humiliation, neglect, repulse, fatigue and lonely distress. His imagination presented a tormenting picture of her away there in dark, confused, immense and blundering London, as an excessively fragile figure, light on its feet, shock-head erect, arms akimbo, unaware of monstrous ambushed dangers. ”

“ Himself? Not herself. In fact, a lover.
[260] “Damn Teddy!” cried Christina Alberta, and knocked a puff of dust out of the railway cushion with her fist. “He messes it up.
“And I knew what he was. I knew all the time exactly what he was!
“I’ve got to stick it alone,” said Christina Alberta.
“And besides who’d have cared for me, anyhow, with a nose like mine?”
“Even if there were such things in the world as lovers who loved like that! But it’s a world of people who don’t care. It’s a world of people who haven’t the guts to care. It’s a dust-heap of a world,” said Christina Alberta. ”

“ Teddy Winterton appeared wading through obstructive seated people. His eye was fixed on Christina Alberta. “Hullo!” said Lambone in not too cordial greeting, and glanced at Christina Alberta and back at the new-comer.
Teddy struggled for an unoccupied chair over which some lady had thrown a sealskin coat, and captured it with profuse apologies to the owner of the cloak and squeezed it in at the end of the table between Harold and Fay, who barred his way to Christina Alberta. “Have pity on a lonely man,” he said genially and tried to catch the eye of Christina Alberta. ”

“ Sargon was new, Paul Lambone was new, Devizes new; before the war there could not have been any such people. They had grown out of their own past selves; they were as different from pre-war people as nineteenth-century people had been different from eighteenth-century people. Newest of all was this Christina Alberta who had effaced her blue-eyed predecessor. She was so direct and free in her thoughts and talk that she made Bobby feel that his own mind wore a bonnet and flounces. ”

“ So it seemed to Bobby, who didn’t for a moment suspect how much these people were avoiding and suppressing. Christina Alberta’s thoughts and speech seemed to him to be moving about without a stitch on, like the people in some horrible Utopia by Wells. He compared the vast impalpable network of “understanding” he and Tessy had woven between each other.
“New people,” he whispered, and looked Paul Lambone’s new house in the face. To him they were stupendously new, an immense discovery. The war had overstrained him, he realized, and left him too tired for a time to see new things. ”

“ The champagne arrived in its ice pail. “Hardly cold, sir, yet,” said the waiter, feeling the bottle.
“It’s not a time for fastidiousness,” said Lambone and took a third sandwich. “You’re not eating, Christina Alberta. And I insist upon your having at least one glass of this.”
Christina Alberta drank a little and ate mechanically.
“I wonder if we shall ever see him again,” said Harold. “London is so vast. So vast! But I always feel that, when I see anyone go out anywhere. There is a tremendous courage in going out. London must be full of lost people. ”

“ Widgery’s little eyes seemed to weigh and judge her. “You’re giving yourself high and mighty airs, Chrissie,” he said, after a little pause. “You’ll do this and you’ll do that. You’ve got a sort of wrong idea of what you can do in the world. You haven’t got any money and you haven’t got any authority, and the sooner you get that into your head the better.”
That scared feeling was gaining upon Christina Alberta. ”

“ Had he been cheated at Tunbridge Wells when the call first came to him to arise and awake? Were those memories of Sumeria no more than dreams? Was he indeed just Albert Edward Preemby—gone crazy? In a crazy, pointless universe of commonplace inanities? If so he was indeed the most foolish of living men. He had left his comfort and securities, sound though insignificant; he had run away from his dear Christina Alberta—to obey a Power that was nothing more than his own imagination and to follow a phantom end. For days he had been shutting Christina Alberta out of his thoughts ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then she detached herself and stood wiping her eyes, the Christina Alberta he generally knew, except for the traces of her tears. “If women can’t control their emotions better,” she said, “they’ll have to go back to Harems. We can’t have it both ways. But I won’t marry you. There’s no man in the world I can marry. I’m going to be a free and independent woman, Bobby. ”

“ It seemed to Bobby that there were tears in her voice.
“No, but you are so young, my dear,” said Devizes.
My dear!
“Not so young. Not so actually young,” cried Christina Alberta.
“If I live to be eighty,” said Christina Alberta, “shall I ever be able to feel more than I am feeling now? Why will you always treat me like a child nowadays?”
“Feeling isn’t the only measure,” said Devizes. “Even now, to-night, you are talking below your beliefs. You [392] are not an egoistic adventurer. You take sides on a score of matters. You insist you are a Communist for example.” ”

“ He got to an anchorage at last in the gaily painted seat by the gas-fire; and Christina Alberta, after flitting about the room for a time, came and stood before it, shapely legs wide apart and hands behind her back in an attitude that would have shocked all her feminine ancestors for many generations. But it did not shock Devizes; he found her more and more interesting to watch, and he sat at his ease and regarded her with a lively admiration. Most of us get used to our daughters so gradually; they grow up and we carry the wonder of them as Milo carried his ox ”

“ For a little while neither he nor Bobby said a word.
“I want to get you out of this,” said Bobby.
“Are my friends doing anything?” asked Sargon. “What is Christina Alberta doing? Is she well?”
“She is splendid,” he said haphazard. No doubt she was one of this beastly family of Sargon’s that was content to leave him here. “I want you to listen to me,” he said.
But Sargon had things to tell. “Everyone in this place is always thinking about what their friends outside are doing for them. The poor souls come and talk to me. They know I am different from what they are. They write letters, petitions. ”

“ It has to be recorded that for two whole days Christina Alberta did not even take the obvious step of going to the police. She had a queer instinctive knowledge of the danger [246] of bringing the police and the social system generally to bear upon her odd little Daddy. She had an innate distrust of official human beings. It was Paul Lambone who induced her to go to the police. He had the grace to be ashamed of his unhelpfulness, and after an interval of two clear days he came round to the Lonsdale Mews to offer his generous but sluggish help once more. He caught her having tea with Fay. ”

“ Christina Alberta had in a way made nothing of her sex, not by struggling against it, but by making it cheap for herself as a man makes it cheap for himself—so that it was a thing of mere intermittent moods and impulses for her—and she could go on to other things. ”

“ Teddy was rotten, so plainly rotten that only a fool wrapped up in her own sensations would have touched him. She lay awake for most of the night after her Daddy had vanished, biting her hands and damning Teddy. Lambone the great friend was lazy, incompetent, and futile. Harold and Fay seemed already a little tired of her misfortune and vaguely disposed to blame her for bringing her Daddy to London. She had no one else to whom she could turn. No one remained to her—except Christina Alberta herself, feeling a little soiled now and more than a little afraid. ”