§ 4
It seemed to Mr. Preemby that the first evening he spent in his new quarters in Lonsdale Mews was the most eventful evening in his life. Impressions crowded upon each other. Insomnia was not among his habits, but when at last he lay upon his shake-up bed he was kept awake for most of what was left of the night (it was the frayed piece with the bleak dawn in the middle of it) trying to get these same impressions sorted out, impressions about his new surroundings, impressions about Christina Alberta, impressions of new and unprecedented personalities, a marmalade of impressions.
Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta arrived at the studio according to plan about half-past three, but the Picton van which had started that morning with Mr. Preemby’s bags and trunks and the crates of books and curiosities and the late Mrs. Preemby’s roomy wardrobe, which had after all been rescued from the clutches of Sam Widgery, did not arrive until it was nearly six. Unfortunately the furniture dealer in Brompton Road from whom Mr. Preemby had purchased a specimen-cabinet and a long low walnut bookcase had delivered these articles the day before, and all the animosity of the modern artist towards self-assertive wood had been aroused in Harold. He and Fay and a friend or so who had dropped in, had sat up quite late painting these new pieces a deep ultramarine blue with stars and splashes of gold like the paper they put around the necks of Ayala, Tsarist and suchlike champagnes. When Mr. Preemby saw their handiwork he could scarcely believe it was the same specimen-cabinet and bookcase.
“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 nth. 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.