§ 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.