§ 6
There was much to see to in those days of mourning. Christina Alberta did her best to help, watch and guide Mr. Preemby even as her mother had desired, but she was surprised to find in him certain entirely unexpected decisions that had apparently leapt into existence within a few hours of her mother’s death. One was a clear resolve that he and she must part company with the laundry either by selling it or letting it, or, if no means of disposing of it offered, by burning it down or blowing it up as speedily as possible. He did not discuss this; he treated it as an unavoidable necessity. He expressed no animosity for the laundry, he made no hostile criticism of the life he had led there, but every thought betrayed his fundamental aversion. And also they were to go away—right away—from Woodford Wells and never return thither. She had come to much the same decisions on her own account, but she had not expected to find them in such quiet strength in him.
He became explicit about the future as they sat at supper on the evening of the funeral.
“Your mother’s cousin, Sam Widgery,” he said, “was talking to me.”
He munched for a moment; his moustache went up and down and his eyes of china-blue stared out of the window at the sunset sky. “He wants to take it over.”
“The laundry?”
“As a going concern. And he being our nearest relation, so to speak, I’d as soon he had it as anybody else. Other things being equal.... Wish I knew what to ask him for it. I don’t want to ask him too little. So I said I didn’t care to discuss things at a funeral. Said he’d better come along to-morrow. Their place isn’t doing well. It’s got sort of embedded in Walthamstow. It would pay him to get out and let the land go for building. He hasn’t got very much money.... But he wants this place. He reely wants this place.”
His blue eyes were the eyes of one who sees visions.
“I don’t know if they taught you about making companies at the School of Economics. I’m a child at all that sort of thing. He talks about partnership or a mortgage or something like that, but what we want—what we want is a limited company. And what we want is something like debentures only rather more like preference shares. We want it so that whatever he draws out of the business we’ve got to draw out more. Otherwise the company can cut away the security for your debentures by paying too much dividend on the ordinary shares. He’ll have the ordinary shares. Him and his wife. I don’t say he’d do such a thing deliberately, but he might very easily be led into doing it. He’s got to be looked after. We want to fix it so that if he pays more on his shares than we get on our shares we’d get our interest levelled up. It’s all very difficult and complicated, Christina Alberta.”
Christina Alberta regarded Mr. Preemby with a new and deepening respect. She had never heard him make such a speech before at meals, but then he had never before been free from interruption and correction.
“We’ll have to have it fixed up properly by our solicitors,” said Mr. Preemby.
“We shan’t be badly off,” he continued, helping himself to cheese.
“There’s a mortgage or so we’ve got and some houses at Buckhurst Hill. It’s a curious thing, but your poor dear mother had a sort of faith in my eye for house property. She often let me guide her. And I always had a feeling for making some sort of reserve out of the business.... Very likely Sam Widgery will take over most of the furniture of this house. It’s a bigger house than his....”
“Where do you think of going to live, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta.
“I don’t rightly know,” said Mr. Preemby after a moment or so of introspection. “I keep thinking of different places.”
“London,” she said. “If I could go back to study—before it is too late.”
“London,” he said, “it might be.”
He hesitated over his next suggestion with the hesitation that had become a habit, so accustomed was he to see his suggestions crumpled up and flung aside. “Have you ever heard of Boarding Houses, Christina Alberta?” he asked with an unreal carelessness. “Have you ever thought it might be possible for us to go and live in Boarding Houses?”
“In London?”
“All over the world—almost, there are Boarding Houses. You see, Christina Alberta, we might get rid of our furniture here, except for my books and a few little things, and we might put most of that away for a time—Taylor’s Repository would take care of that for us—and we might go and live sometimes in a Boarding House here, and sometimes in a Boarding House there. Then you could study and needn’t keep house, and I could read and look at things and make memorandums about some Theories I’ve thought of, and talk to people and hear people talking. All sorts of people go to Boarding Houses—all sorts of interesting people. These last nights I’ve been thinking no end about living in Boarding Houses. I keep on thinking of it, turning it over in my mind. It would be a new life for me—like beginning again. Life’s been so regular here. All very well while your poor dear mother was alive, but now I feel I want distraction. I want to move about and see all sorts of things and different kinds of people. I want to forget. Why, in some of these Boarding Houses there’s Chinese and Indians and Russian princesses, and professors and actors and all sorts of people. Just to hear them!”
“There’s Boarding Houses full of students in Bloomsbury.”
“Every sort,” said Mr. Preemby.
“One place that attracts me,” said Mr. Preemby, pouring out what remained of the beer, “is Tumbridge Wells.”
“Isn’t that sometimes called Tunbridge, Daddy?”
“Formerly. But now it is always spoken of as Tumbridge Wells. At this Tumbridge Wells, Christina Alberta, there are hills with names that point directly to some connection with the ancient Israelites, Mount Ephraim and Mount Gilboa and so on, and there are a number of curiously shaped rocks, shaped in the likeness of great toads and prehistoric monsters and mystical forms and nobody knows whether they are the work of God’s hand or man’s. I am very anxious to see these things for myself. They may have a deeper and closer significance for us than is commonly supposed. There are plenty of Boarding Houses at Tumbridge Wells—I was told only the other day by a man I met in the Assyrian room in the British Museum—and some of them are said to be very comfortable and reasonable indeed.”
“We might go there for the holidays,” said Christina Alberta, “before the London session begins.”
Outside was the summer afterglow, and a dusky peace filled the room. Father and daughter followed divergent trains of thought. Mr. Preemby was the first to break the silence.
“Now that I shall be in mourning, or half mourning, for some time I have decided to give away all those Harris tweed knickerbocker suits and stockings of mine. Some poor man might feel the comfort of them—in winter. I have never really liked those very baggy knickerbockers, but of course while your poor dear mother was alive her taste was Law to me. And those caps; they get over your eyes when you’re hot. That tweed stuff.... It is overrated. When you ride a bicycle or anything it ravels out with the friction of the seat. Makes you look ridiculous.... And I think that quite soon I shall get myself one of those soft grey felt hats—with a black band.”
“I have always wanted to see you wear one, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.
“It would count as mourning?”
“Oh! yes, Daddy.”
Mr. Preemby meditated pleasantly. The girl had common sense. Her advice was worth having. “As for putting the swastika on your poor dear mother’s tombstone, perhaps you are right in thinking it is not what she herself would have chosen. It may be better after all to do as you suggest and erect a simple cross. After all—it is her tombstone.”
Whereupon Christina Alberta got up from her chair and went round the table—almost at a prance, until she remembered things—and kissed him. For some obscure reason she hated the swastika almost as much as she loved her Daddy. For her it had become the symbol of silliness, and she did not like to think of him as silly. Particularly now when for some obscure reason she was beginning to think of him as ill-used.