Chapter THE FIRST: Christina Alberta in Search of a Father (2)

“Do you think--he liked me?”

“He liked you all right, Christina Alberta. Don’t you worry about that.”

§ 8

It was a little more than two days before Christina Alberta, to use her own expression, “got back” to her lost Daddy.

Those two days were full of an immense excitement. Devizes was the most wonderful fact in the world. She exploded into love for him. She had the most vivid impression of him, dark and tall, rather grave, watchful and amazingly understandable. Yet vivid as her impression was she doubted every detail of it, and wanted to go back to him and verify it all over again. It was their quality of mutual understanding that was at once the most delightful and the most incredible aspect of the whole affair. Their brains no doubt were unlike, as every two individual brains must be, yet their unlikeness was not a mere accumulation of accidental difference, but the unlikeness of two variations of one theme. She could feel his intentions beneath his words. Her mind had jumped with his realizations and there must be kinks and turns in her brain, kinks and turns that just made her difficult and queer for most people, which would find the completest parallels in his. She didn’t believe there was a thing in her thoughts and acts that she would be surprised at his knowing and comprehending.

She had never before thought of parentage with any enthusiasm. She had viewed it rather in the spirit of Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw, and conceived of parents generally in relation to their children as embarrassed hypocrites with an instinctive disposition towards restraint and suppression. She had made an exception of her own particular pair; Daddy had been a great friend anyhow, though mother for the most part had been a concentrated incarnate “Don’t.” But she had never realized there might be something rather intimately interesting in consanguinity. And then suddenly a door had opened, a man had come in and sat down and talked to her and discovered himself the nearest thing in life to her. And she to him. She wanted to go to him again; she wanted to see more of him, be with him. But he made no sign and she could think of no decent excuse for a call upon him. The very intensity of her desire made her unable to go to him easily. She wrote the various letters they had agreed she should write, and then decided to master mental science and lunacy generally. That and the case of her “Daddy” she perceived to be her formal link with Devizes.

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

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

“Delighted,” said Devizes.

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

“When did you first know my mother?”

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

“Daddy wasn’t there.”

“He came in afterwards.”

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

“I see.”

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

“What was my mother like in those days?”

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

“I know.”

“I suppose you do.”

“She wore glasses then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Was she fresh then? Was she happy?”

“A little too fierce to be happy.”

“Did you--ever--love her?”

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

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

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

His eyes defied hers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§ 9

Christina Alberta got back to her Daddy in a dream.

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

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

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

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

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

§ 10

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

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

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

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

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

Christina Alberta refrained from bad language.

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

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

Fay would not understand. She pestered.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, damn!” said Christina Alberta.

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

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

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

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

“Right-o,” and the voice was cut off.

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

§ 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Widgery?”

“That was his visitor yesterday.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§ 12

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

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

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

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

He looked across at her and smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not an easy one evidently.

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

Christina Alberta was greatly elated at her successful repulse of his projected cross-examination. Instead of making a display herself she could watch him. She watched him over the flowers on the table and had to be nudged by the waiter when he brought the pheasant to her elbow. “How _should_ one begin?” he plunged. She had heard of Pragmatism? Yes. She was probably better read in that sort of thing than he was. He was, he considered, a sort of Pragmatist. Most modern-minded, intelligent people he held were Pragmatists as he understood it. Pragmatist? As he understood it? He met her eye and explained. In this sense he meant it; we, none of us, had a clear vision of reality; nobody perhaps would ever do more than approach reality. What we perceived was just that much of reality that got through to us, through our very defective powers of interpretation. “They’ve done this pheasant _en casserole_ very well,” he broke off. “Three minutes’ truce we ought to give it. Do you find I’m talking comprehensibly? I doubt it.”

“I’m hanging on,” said Christina Alberta....

“Perhaps I’m beginning rather too far off.”

Pheasant....

“To come back to my confession of faith,” he said presently.... “Mind you, Christina Alberta, you’ve got to say your bit afterwards.”

“It won’t be as definite as yours,” she said. “Some of yours I shall steal. But go on--telling me.”

“Well, keep hold, Christina Alberta. I feel I’m going to be at once hesitating and condensed. And I’m not sure of what you know or don’t know. If I say I’m an Agnostic about the nature of the universe, and how it began and where it ends, does that convey anything to you?”

“Just what I think,” said Christina Alberta.

“Well.” He started afresh and got into parenthetical difficulties. The Pêche Melba came to interrupt and permit a fresh start. He unfolded a psychologist’s vision of the world for her inspection, a curious and yet attractive vision to her. He expressed himself in terms of mind and understanding. She was used to hearing everything expressed in terms of labour and material necessity. Life, he said, was one continuous thing, all life was connected. He tried to illustrate that. The conscious life of most lower animals was intensely individual, a lizard, for example, was just itself, just its instincts and appetites; it received no teaching and no tradition, it handed on nothing to its kind. But the higher animals were taught when they were young, learnt and taught others and communicated with each other. Men far more than any animal. He had developed picture-writing, speech, oral tradition, scientific record. There was now a common mind of the race, a great growing body of knowledge and interpretations.

“People like ourselves are just cross-sections of that flow. Individually we receive it, react to it, change it a little, and pass away. We are just passing phases of that increasing mind--which may be for all we can certainly say, an immortal mind. Does this sound like Greek--or nonsense to you?”

“No,” she said, “I think I get the drift of it.” She looked at his intent face. He wasn’t in the least talking down to her; he was simply trying to express himself as well as he possibly could to her. He was treating her like an equal. Like an equal!

That was his general philosophy. He was coming to the question of himself now, he said. He became very earnest over the coffee cups and ash tray on the swept tablecloth. He spread elucidatory hands before her. He was conscientiously explicit. He saw in himself two phases, or rather two levels of existence. Roughly speaking, two. They had links and intermediate stages of course, but they could be ignored when one just wanted to express the idea. First of all, he was the old instinctive individual, fearful, greedy, lustful, jealous, self-assertive. That was the primary self. He had to attend to that primary self because it carried all the rest of him, as a rider must see that his horse gets oats. Deeper lay social instincts and dispositions arising out of family life. That was the second self, the social self. Man, he threw out, is a creature that has become more and more consciously social in the last two or three hundred thousand years. He has been lengthening his life, keeping his children with him longer and longer, enlarging his community from family herds into clans and tribes and nations. The deep-lying continuity of life was becoming more apparent and finding more and more definite expression with this socialization of man. To educate anyone in the proper sense of the word was to make him more and more aware of this continuity. The importance of the passionate feverish self was then reduced. True education was self-subordination to a greater life, to the social self. The natural instincts and limitations of the primary self were in conflict with this wider underflow; education, _good_ education, tended to correct them.

“Here am I,” said Devizes, “as we all are, a creature in a state of internal conflict, quicker, fiercer mortal instincts at issue with a deeper, calmer, less brightly lit, but finally stronger drive towards immortal purposes. And I am--how shall I put it?--I personally am, to the best of my ability, on the side of the deeper things. My aptitudes and temperament and opportunities have brought me to psychology--as a profession. I work to add to the accumulation of human knowledge and understanding about the mind. I work for illumination. My particular work is to study and cure troubled and tangled minds. I try to straighten them out and simplify them and illuminate them. And above all I try to learn from them. I seek the mental or physical cause of their distresses. I try to set down as clearly and accessibly as possible, all I observe and learn. That’s my job. That’s my aim. It gives me a general direction for my life. All the stuff of my mere individual existence I try to subordinate to that end. Not always. My monkey individual gets loose at times and gibbers on the roof. And at other times it’s rather good company as a relief from overwork. Vanity and self-indulgence have their uses. But never mind the monkey now. I do not want to be a brilliant person; I want to be a vital part. That’s my essential creed. I want to be the sort of wheel in the machinery they call a mental expert. As good a wheel as I can be. That’s what I’m up to in general terms, Christina Alberta. That’s what I think I am.”

“Yes,” said Christina Alberta, reflecting profoundly. “Of course I can’t produce a statement like that. You’ve got your system--complete.”

“And finished,” said Devizes. “You’ve got to tell your story in your own way. At your age--you ought to be with loose ends to all your convictions.”

“I wonder if I can tell you any story.”

“You’ve got to try your best now. It’s only fair play.”

“Yes.”

There was a little silence.

“It’s wonderful to talk to you like this,” said Christina Alberta. “It’s wonderful to talk to anyone like this.”

“I feel that you and I--have to understand each other.”

She met his grave eyes for a moment. There was a wave of emotion within her. She could not speak. She reached out her hand to touch his, and for a moment their hands were together.

§ 13

Christina Alberta only got to her confession of faith in the studio after they had returned thither and relieved the Universal Aunt. Even then they didn’t settle down to the business all at once. Devizes walked about and looked for drawings by Harold; he deduced Harold from his drawings to a quite remarkable extent, Christina Alberta thought. He was curious about Fay. “What’s Mrs. Crumb like?” he asked. “Show me something of hers, something that seems to give her.”

It pleased Christina Alberta very much to think that he was shy with her. She felt that this was a recognition of her equality. He was respecting her and she was very eager that she should be respected by him.

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; it isn’t common for a man to get an unexpected daughter abruptly at the age of twenty-one.

She said she hadn’t much in the way of metaphysics; she was a Materialist.

“No prayers at mother’s knee? Religion of Mother and Daddy? School prayers and teaching? Church or chapel?”

“It all washed out and faded out, I think, as they laid it on.”

“No fear of hell? Most of my generation went through the fear of hell.”

“Not a trace of it,” said the New Age.

“But--a desire for God in the night?”

Christina Alberta paused for a little while. “I have that,” she said. “It comes--sometimes. I don’t know whether it’s very important or not important at all.”

“It’s part,” said Devizes slowly, “of something that has to do with wanting to be more than a miserable worm--and disliking meanness--and so forth.”

“Yes. Do you know more about it?”

Rather oddly he didn’t answer that. “And how do you see yourself in relation to mankind--and the animals--and the stars? What sense of obligation have you? What do you think the road is along which you have to go?”

“H’m,” said Christina Alberta. She considered she was a Communist, she said, though she didn’t belong to the Party. But she knew some other young people who did. She produced some of the phrases of the movement, “the materialist conception of history” and so forth. He said he failed to understand and asked rather irritating questions; she thought controversially. She didn’t realize at first how widely apart was their phraseology. As they talked this became apparent. He seemed to have nothing too good to say for the Communist idea, for wasn’t it just his own idea of being a part of a greater being of life? but he seemed to have nothing too bad for practical Communism. Marxist Communism he said wasn’t a constructive movement at all; it was merely a solvent. It had no idea, no plan. Christina Alberta was put on the defensive. “Enthusiasm for an ideal Communist state isn’t nearly so important as the question of immediate Communist tactics in a decaying society,” she recited, in an almost official tone. That was how her young friends in the Party talked. But when she talked like this to him it didn’t seem so effective. He wouldn’t leave her phrases alone. He wanted to know what she meant by decay in a society, whether there had ever been a society not actively in decay and not also actively in growth, what good tactics were except in relation to general strategy and whether there could be any strategy without a clear war-end. She countered more vigorously than effectively and their manner became controversial.

He pressed the difference in their opinions. Communism for him meant a new spirit, a spirit of science reorganizing the world upon scientific collective lines, but the whole temper of party communism was contemporary. It was saturated with the feelings and ideas of existing social classes, with the natural resentment of the dispossessed. It had the angry dogmatism of desperate people not sure of their grip. It needed more of the passion of creative self-forgetfulness. Many Communists, he said, were simply reversed capitalists, egotists without capital; they wanted revenge and expropriation, and when they were through with that they would be left with nothing but social ruins and everything to begin all over again. And they were suspicious and intolerant because of their want of internal assurance. They distrusted their best friends, their proper leaders, scientific men like Keynes and Soddy.

“Keynes a Communist!” cried Christina Alberta in derision. “He doesn’t accept the first scientific fact of the class war.”

“It isn’t much of a fact--certainly not a First Scientific Fact,” he replied. “Keynes builds up slowly a conception of a scientifically organized exchange system. Most of your friends in Russia don’t seem capable even of realizing that such a thing is necessary.”

“But they do!”

“Have they shown it?”

“What do _you_ know of the Russian Bolsheviks?”

“What do _you_? You just look at the labels on people. Nothing genuine without the red label--and everything genuine with.”

She said he saw things from his “bourgeois” standpoint, and he laughed cheerfully at her social classifications; there was no bourgeoisie in England, he said; she attempted some of the stock cynicisms and sarcasms of the movement but with an unusual lack of conviction. It was easy for him to criticize, she said, living as he did on invested capital.

“It would make it easier,” he smiled. “But really I live on my fees.”

“You have invested capital.”

“Some. I don’t live on it.”

They had exhausted the dispute for a time. After all she reflected she hadn’t put up such a bad fight, considering her age and standing. The momentary glow of controversial exasperation faded again. They drifted to the more immediate question in which they were interested, the question of what she was to do with her life.

§ 14

“We progress, Christina Alberta,” said Devizes, “but it’s still generally the rule that a woman’s life is determined very largely by the character and occupations of--the leading man in the play. Have you by any chance been in love yet?”

She wanted to tell him all the truth about herself, but some things are untellable. She hesitated and blushed hotly. “Nowadays,” she said, and stopped. “I’ve some imagination. I’ve run about London. I’ve perhaps imagined things----”

His eyes were very searching for a moment but none the less kindly.

“I’ve been in love--in a kind of way,” she admitted.

He nodded with a dreadful effect of complete comprehension.

“I don’t want to run my life in relation to any man,” she extended.

“Clever girls never do. Any more than clever young men want to spend their lives adoring a goddess.”

“In any case I don’t see myself becoming a child-producing housekeeper,” she said.

“Even if you married. No. I doubt whether you are that type. But if you are going to reject that easy way--and it _is_ an easy way, in spite of what people say--if you are going to be a citizen on your own as a man is, then you’ve got to do a man’s work, Christina Alberta. There’s to be none of the Pretty Fanny business you know.”

“Well, _am_ I?” asked Christina Alberta.

“No, I don’t think you are. And in that case, I guess you want some more education. You’re clever, but you’re a bit patchy.”

“I’m good enough to get a job. And then learn.”

“Learn,” he said. “That’s enough to take you all your time. I’d rather we agreed it’s got to be a student for two or three years more. You need have no anxiety about ways and means. You and I are of the same Clan--a clan of two practically--and I am the head. I’ll see you through just as though you were a son. And now, what sort of work is it to be? Law? Medicine? a general education for journalism or affairs? Doors open to women now--fresh doors every day.”

To that Christina Alberta could speak a little more fully. She had been thinking out some of these things. She wanted to know about life and the world as a whole. Could she have a good year at physical science, biology and geology chiefly and anthropology? Would that be possible? And then if she was any good at medical work, another year at mental science or politics and public health? “It sounds ambitious I know,” she said.

“Ambitious! It’s an encyclopædia in a year.”

“But I want to know about all these things.”

“Naturally.”

“Could I have longer than that?”

“You’d have to have longer than that.”

“It seems to be asking for so much.”

“It wouldn’t be if you were in trousers. We’ve agreed to unsex you to that extent. Why shouldn’t you be ambitious?”

“You think I might do work--scientific work--at last--as you do?”

“Why not?”

“A girl?”

“You’re the sort of stuff I am, Christina Alberta.”

“Do you think--some day--I might even come to work--to work with you?”

“Kindred minds may follow kindred courses,” he said, with the completest recognition of their relationship “Why not?”

She stood and looked at him with a dark excitement in her eyes and he had a momentary intimation of all that he might be to her. Gallant she was and fine and ambitious; a wonderful life to come out of nothingness into his own. And she meant this relationship to grow, as well it might grow, into something very great and deep for both of them.

He went off at a tangent to talk of the contrast of men and women students and of men and women as workers. “You’ll never run parallel with men, you free women, so don’t expect it. You’ve got to work out a way that is similar perhaps but different. Different down to the roots.” He argued that probably the whole fabric of a man had its qualities that a woman’s did not possess and vice versa, down even to a muscular fibre or a nerve tendril. A time might come when we should be able to put a drop of blood or a scrap of skin under the microscope or apply some subtle reagent to it and tell its sex. “A man resists,” he said. “A man is intractable. He has greater inertia, physical and mental. That keeps him to his course. Men compared with women are steadier and stupider. Women compared with men are quicker and sillier. Bludgeons and bodkins.”

He talked of his student days when women medical students were still rather novel intrusions, and from that he passed to his father’s prejudices, to his father’s treatment of his mother and his boyish days. Presently they were exchanging experiences of childish delusions and fancies. She forgot how much older and more experienced he was in the ease of his talk. He told her about himself because he recognized her right to know about him; he listened with a friendly eagerness to all she chose to tell him of her Daddy and herself and about her impressions and her few adventures in encounter as a suburban student in London. They shared their delight in Paul Lambone’s kindly absurdity. Presently it occurred to her to offer him drink. The Crumbs had left a bottle of beer and a syphon. But Devizes asked her to make tea and helped her with the kettle. Meanwhile the mutual exploration went on. Their friendliness grew richer and deeper as they talked. She had never before met so intimate and delightful a curiosity as his. She had had friends before but no such friendliness; she had had a lover but never such intimacy.

It was one o’clock before he went away.

The talk had ebbed. He sat thoughtful for a moment.

“I must go,” he said, and stood up. They faced each other, a little at a loss for parting words.

“It’s been wonderful to talk to you,” she said.

“It’s a great thing to have discovered you.”

Another pause. “It’s a great thing for me,” she said lamely.

“We’ll talk--many times,” he said.

He wanted to call her “my dear,” and an absurd shyness prevented him. And she was aware of that suppression.

She stood up straight before him in the passage with a flush on her cheeks and her eyes alight, and he wondered he had not thought her beautiful from the beginning. “Good-bye for the time,” he said, and smiled at her gravely and took and held her hand for a moment.

“Good night,” she said, and hesitated and then opened the green door for him and stood and watched him go up the Mews.

At the top he turned and waved his hand to her before he disappeared. “Good night,” she whispered and started, and looked about her as if she feared that her unspoken thoughts had been audible.

Father. Her father!

So real fathers leave one aglow like this!

He had left her tense as a violin string on which the bow rests motionless. Now Daddy, who wasn’t her father, she would just have hugged and kissed.