Chapter the Second — Christina Alberta
§ 1
This story, it was clearly explained in the first paragraph of the first section of the first chapter, is a story about Mr. Preemby in the later years, the widower years, of his life. That statement has all the value of an ordinary commercial guarantee, and on no account shall we ever wander far from Mr. Preemby. But the life of his daughter was so closely interwoven with his own during that time that it is necessary to tell many things about her distinctly and explicitly before we get our real story properly begun. And even after it has begun, and while it goes on, and right up to the end, Christina Alberta will continue to intrude.
Intrusion was in her nature. She was never what is called an engaging child. But she always had a great liking for her Daddy and he had the greatest affection and respect for her.
She had little or no tact, and there was always something remote and detached, something of the fairy changeling about her. Even her personal appearance was tactless. She had a prominent nose which tended to grow larger, whereas Mrs. Preemby’s nose was small and bright and pinched between her glasses, and her father’s delicately chiselled and like some brave little boat shooting a great cascade of moustache; she was dark and both her parents were fair. As she grew up the magic forces of adolescence assembled her features into a handsome effect, but she was never really pretty. Her eyes were brown and bright and hard. She had her mother’s thin-lipped, resolute mouth and modestly determined chin. And she had her mother’s clear firm skin and bright colour. She was a humming, shouting, throwing, punching child with a tendency not to hear admonitions and an almost instinctive dexterity in avoiding sudden slaps. She flitted about. She might be up the drying-ground or she might be under your bed. The only thing to do was to down and look.
She danced. Neither Mr. Preemby nor Mrs. Preemby danced, and this continual jiggeting about perplexed and worried them. A piano or a distant band would set her dancing or she would dance to her own humming; she danced to hymn-tunes and on a Sunday. There was a standing offer from Mr. Preemby of sixpence if ever she sat quiet for five minutes, but it was never taken up.
At her first school, a mixed day-school in Buckhurst Hill, she was first of all extremely unpopular and then extremely popular and then she was expelled. Afterwards she did fairly well at the Taverners’ Girls’ School at Woodford, where she was recognized from the first as a humorist. There was always a difficulty in calling her any other name than Christina Alberta. People tried all sorts of names but none of them stuck but “Christina Alberta.” “Babs” and “Baby” and “Bertie” and “Buss” she was called at home and “Ally” and “Tina,” and at school they tried “Nosey” and “Suds” and “Feet” and “Preemy” and “Prim.” Also “Golliwog” because of her hair at hockey. These all came off again, and left the original name exposed.
She was quick at her lessons and particularly at history, geography and drawing, but disrespectful to her teachers; at school hockey she played forward right with marked success. She could run like the wind, and she never seemed blown. Her pinch was simply frightful. She could make sudden grimaces with her nose that gave the weaker sort hysterics. She was particularly disposed to do this at school prayers.
Between her mother and herself there was a streak of animosity. It was not a very broad streak, but it was there. Her mother seemed to cherish some incommunicable grievance against her. It didn’t prevent Mrs. Preemby from doing her duty by the child, but it restrained any real warmth of affection between them. From an early age it was Daddy got the kisses and got climbed over and pulled about. He returned this affection. He called her “my own little girl” and would even say at times that she was a Wonder. He took her for walks with him and told her many secret things that were in his mind, about the Lost Atlantis and the Lamas of Tibet and the fundamentals of Astrology preserved indecipherably in the proportions of the pyramids. He’d often wished, he said, to have a good look at the pyramids. Sometimes one man saw things that others didn’t. She would listen intently, although not always in quite the right spirit.
He would tell her of the virtue and science of Atlantis. “They walked about in long white robes,” he said. “More like Bible Characters than human beings.”
“Good for the laundries, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.
“All we know of astrology is just fragments of what they knew. They knew the past and future.”
“Pity they were all drowned,” she remarked without apparent irony.
“Maybe they weren’t all drowned,” he said darkly.
“You don’t mean there’s Atlantics about nowadays.”
“Some may have escaped. Descendants may be nearer than you suppose. Why you and me, Christina, we may have Atlantic blood!”
His manner conveyed his conviction.
“It doesn’t seem to help much,” she said.
“Helps more than you think. Hidden gifts. Insight. Things like that. We aren’t common persons, Christina Alberta.”
For some moments the two of them pursued independent reveries.
“Still we don’t know we’re Atlantics,” said Christina Alberta.