§ 5
In the Boarding Houses of the past the common dining-table was the social centre where people met and mind clashed upon and polished mind. But the spirit of aloofness, the separate table system, has changed all that, and now it is in the smoking-room or the sitting-room that the vestiges of social intercourse, advances, retreats, coquettings, exchanges, games and jests are to be found. But the company of the Petunia Boarding House was not in a state of social fusion. The only coalescence was a conversation. The wife of the gentleman from the Burmese forests had secured an arm-chair by the side of the fire-place, and she was describing in a low whisper the numerous servants she had had in Burmah, to the cheerful wife and the younger Miss Solbé who was knitting. The Miss Solbé with the spectacles had fortified herself behind a table on the other side of the fire and was engaged meticulously with a very elaborate Patience. The gentleman with the side-whiskers sat rigidly on one of the sofas, behind a copy of the Times, while his daughter sat at a table close at hand and also threaded her way through a Patience. The Birds of Passage, after inquiries about movies and music-halls, had gone out.
Nobody took the slightest notice of Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta. The two stood for some moments in the middle of the room, and then panic came upon Mr. Preemby. A dishonourable panic so that he threw his daughter to these silent, motionless wolves.
“H’rrmp,” he said. “I think my dear, I will go to the smoking-room. I think I will go and smoke. There are some illustrated papers over there on the bookcase for you if you care to look at them.”
Christina Alberta walked over to the low bookcase and Mr. Preemby departed, h’rrmping.
She stood pretending an interest in the illustrated jokes and in the portraits of actresses and society people in the Sketch and Tatler. Out of the tail of her eye she surveyed those fellow-guests of hers, and with a negligent ear she collected the gist of Mrs. Bone’s dissertation upon the servant question in Burmah. “They will plant the whole family upon you if they can—uncles and cousins even. Before you know where you are....
“Of course a white woman is a Little Queen out there....
“The chief fault of the cooking from my point of view, was the way it upset Major Bone. His stomach... far more delicate than a woman’s.”
“He looks so stout and strong,” said Miss Solbé.
“In everything but that. In everything. But the Curries they used to make——”
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. Their hours, their days were passing; a few thousand days more perhaps for each of them, a few score thousand hours. Then there would be no more chance of living for ever. And instead of filling up this scanty allowance of hours and days with every possible sensation and every possible effort and accomplishment, here they were, gathered into a sort of magic box of atmosphere in which nothing could possibly be done. By anyone....
Christina Alberta felt like a moth caught under a glass. Well, for a day or so, she had an excuse, little Daddy must be settled. But then? Nothing could be done here. Neither joy nor sorrow nor sin nor creative effort—because even Miss Solbé’s knitting was being knitted to a prescription on a dirty cutting of printed paper. Everything they were employed upon was an evasion, everything. Even the whispered delicate hints of the diuretic, dyspeptic, infuriating and wildly aphrodisiac effects of Burmah Curry upon Major Bone in his younger days that were being handed out by his good lady to her intent hearers, were just a substitution of second-hand knowledge for realities.
And this Patience! Would she, Christina Alberta asked herself, would she ever come to play Patiences in Boarding Houses? Was it credible that some day she also would come to sit voluntarily in such an atmosphere?
“Rather sell matches in a gutter,” whispered Christina Alberta.
What a marvellous thing is Man! What ingenuities he has! what powers and capabilities! He invents paper and perfects printing! He develops the most beautiful methods of colour printing. He makes cardboard like silk and ivory out of rags and vegetable pulp. And all it would seem, that human beings, hanging for a little while in life between the nothingness before death and the nothingness after death, should fiddle away long hours in a feeble, fuddled conflict with the permutations of duplicate sets of four differently coloured thirteens! Cards! The marvel of cards! All over the world millions of people drawing nearer to death and nothingness were pursuing the chances of the four thirteens: bridge, whist, nap, skat, a hundred forms of it. Directly they could get in out of the wet and dark, they sat down to that sort of thing, to the cards shining under the still lamps, to being endlessly surprised, delighted, indignant and despondent by chances that anyone who chose to sit down to it could work out and tabulate in a week!
“Getting it out, dear?” said the younger Miss Solbé.
“The spades are Wicked to-night,” said the Miss Solbé with the glasses.
“Mine is going rather well,” said the daughter of the gentleman with the whiskers.
“Does your daughter play Miss Milligan?” asked the younger Solbé sister.
“Eight-eights,” said the comfortable wife. “Miss Milligan is too much for her.”
“Well, it is a Beast you know,” said the stepdaughter. “You never know where you are with it.”
“Patience is Patience,” said the elder Miss Solbé. “Nowadays I often get it out. But not when the spades come as they’ve done to-night, both twos in the top row, and no aces till the last round but one.”
Christina Alberta thought it was time to change from the Sketch to the Tatler. She tried to do this with careless ease and flopped a dozen papers on the floor. “Oh, Damn!” said Christina Alberta to a great stillness. She struggled to pick up and replace the disordered sheets. For a time every one seemed to be regarding her. Then Mrs. Bone took up her discourse again.
“And you can’t imagine their obstinacy,” she said. “They are wilfully ignorant. When you show them, then they won’t do it. I took my cook-boy in hand for a time—boy I call him, but he was quite a middle-aged man—and I said to him, ‘just let me show you some plain English cookery, a boiled fowl with nice white sauce, a few plain potatoes and vegetables—quite plain with the natural flavour left in—the sort of food that builds up these brave young Englishmen you see.’ Of course I’m not a good cook myself, but anyhow I knew more of English cooking than he did. But we never got further than the plain boiled fowl. He expressed the most violent disapproval—really violent I mean—of the whole proceedings. As I took hold of the things and got to work he began to behave in the most extraordinary way. He tried not to follow what I was doing. Tried not to. He said that if he cooked a fowl like that he would lose caste, lose his position in the local guild of cooks, be perpetually defiled and outcast. Why, he would not say. When I persisted he rushed up and down pulling at his black hair—a black madman, his eyes rolling frightfully. I could never make out what there was in a plain boiled fowl to cause such excitement. ‘This in my kitchen,’ he said. ‘This in my kitchen!’
“There I stood quietly boiling my fowl while all this pother went on. He hovered about me. He talked—fortunately in his own language. I even caught him pretending to be sick behind my back. Then he came and implored me to desist—with tears in his great brown eyes. He tried to say things in English. The Major always says that he was simply swearing, but I believe the wretched man really did believe that if he was to boil a fowl in the plain, wholesome, simple way nice people in England do it daily, he would be hung in the air, and the great jays of Burmah would come and peck—ahem!”
She cast a side glance at Christina Alberta, apparently lost in the Sketch, and lowered her voice.
“Peck at his entrails, just his insides you know, for a Thousand, Thousand Years.”
Sensation.
“You never know What Ideas Easterners will get into their Heads,” said the younger Miss Solbé. “East is East, and West is West.”
But now Christina Alberta’s attention was distracted by another set of phenomena. She had discovered that the thin, bald gentleman with side-whiskers, rigid behind his Times, was not really reading that interesting vestige of the British constitution at all. His gaze was not directed to the edge of his paper, but beyond it. He was staring from behind that ambush and round the corner of his glasses in a strange, hard-eyed way, without passion or admiration, at the upper part of Christina Alberta’s black-stockinged legs as they delivered their last challenge to human censure before disappearing beneath her all too exiguous but extremely comfortable skirt. And also she was realizing that a furtive but intense scrutiny of her bobbed hair was disorganizing the Patience of the whiskered gentleman’s daughter very seriously, and that it was also interfering with the proper laying out of a second and different sort of Patience by the elder Miss Solbé. 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. And as for showing one’s legs and body; why shouldn’t one show one’s legs and body? It was just a part of the universal evasion of life by these people that had got most of their bodies hidden away, tied up in a sort of bundle. Do they ever venture to look at themselves? Those Solbé girls, once upon a time, they must have been jolly little girls with an amused interest in their stalky little legs, before they said Shush! and put them away.
Christina Alberta’s speculative vein took charge for a time. What becomes of legs that are put away and never looked at and encouraged? Do they get etiolated and queer, dead-white and funny-shaped and afraid of the light? And after you’ve really packed your body away and forgotten it, nothing is left of you but a head sticking out and hands that wave about and feet with hidden and distorted toes; and you go about between meal-times and take trips in chars-à-bancs to see what every one sees and feel what every one feels, and you play games by rule and example according to your age and energy, and become more and more addicted to Patience until you are ready to cover yourself up in bed for the last time of all and die. Evasion! And the fuss they had caused getting born! The fuss, the morality and marriages and everything that was necessary before these vacuous lives were begotten!
But it was all evasion, and the life shown in these Tatlers and Sketches was evasion just as much. Just as much. All these photographs of the pushful pretty, the actresses for sale and the daughters who had to be sold, looked at you with just your own question in their eyes: “Is this the Life?” The unending photographs of Lady Diana This, and Lady Marjorie That, and Mr. So-and-So and a Friend of the Duke of York or the Duchess of Shonts, at dog-shows, at horse-shows, at race meetings, at royal inaugurations and the like, were inevitably suggestive of obstinate doubts that were in need of a perennial reassurance. The photographs of people playing tennis and suchlike games were livelier, but there, too, if you care to look at it, were evasions. Evasions. Evasions.
Christina Alberta turned over the back numbers of the Sketch without looking at the pictures before her eyes.
What was this Life she and these people and every one by games and jokes and meetings and ceremonies and elaborate disregards and concealments were all evading? What was this great thing outside, this something like a huge, terrible, attractive and compelling black monster, beyond the lights, beyond the movements and appearances, that called to her and challenged her to come?
One might evade the call of it by playing Patience and games perhaps. One might evade it by living by rule or custom. People seemed to do so. A time might come when that call to Christina Alberta to be Christina Alberta to the uttermost and fulfil her mysterious mission to that immense being beyond the lights might no longer distress her life. She had thought that in a certain recklessness and violence with herself she might fight her way out to the call. She had made love now. Anyhow, she hadn’t evaded that. But—was it going to matter as much as she had thought it would matter? She and her little friends were playing desperate games with the material of love in a world where Dr. Marie Stopes and Mr. D. H. Lawrence were twin stars, and it was just something you went through—and came out much as you had been before. More restless, perhaps, but no further on. It left you just where you had been, face to face with the unsolved darkness and that mysterious, distressing, unanswerable call to come out of it all and really live and die.
She had made love.... Queer it had been....
These furtive people were watching and watching her, reading her thoughts, perhaps, penetrating her....
Christina Alberta shut her copy of the Sketch with something of a snap, and walked out of the drawing-room with a serene expression. She shut the door behind her and went downstairs to find what had happened to her father in the smoking-room.
“I’m leaving the best part of the talk behind me,” reflected Christina Alberta.