§ 6
Christina Alberta’s meeting next day with Wilfred Devizes turned out to be a much more exciting affair than she or he had expected it to be.
Acting on the advice of Paul Lambone, she had brought photographs and a letter or so in her Daddy’s handwriting with her, and she had thought out what she judged would be significant things to tell about him. She went in a taxi with Paul Lambone to Devizes’ house just off Cavendish Square, and they were shown up at once past a waiting-room and a consulting-room to a dignified little sitting-room with an open fire and a table with tea-things and a great array of bookcases. Devizes came in to them forthwith.
She was a little shocked to think that this lank, dark, shock-headed man could be recognizably like her. He was younger than she had expected him to be, younger she thought, than her Daddy or Mr. Lambone, and he wore a long unbuttoned morning coat. He carried the nose all right; he was indeed very good-looking.
“Hullo, Paul,” he said cheerfully. “Is this the young lady whose father’s been stolen? We’ll have some tea. It’s Miss——?”
“Miss Preemby,” said Paul Lambone, “but every one calls her Christina Alberta.”
Devizes turned an eye that was by habit and disposition a scrutinizing eye upon her. He betrayed a faint momentary surprise and came and shook hands. “Tell me all about it,” he said. “You don’t think he’s really mad, but only rather exceptional and odd. That’s it, isn’t it? Lambone tells me he is sane. It’s quite possible. I’d better go over the state of his mind first, and then we can discuss the question of the asylum afterwards. I gather you want to get him under your own care—outside. That isn’t by any means simple. We’ll have to study the obstacles. Meanwhile tea.... I’ve been disentangling the delusions of a perfectly terrible old lady, and I’m rather deflated. Just tell me all about it in your own way.”
“Tell him,” said Paul, settling his shoulders into his arm-chair, and preparing to interrupt.
Christina Alberta began to unfold her premeditated discourse. Every now and then Devizes would interrupt her with a question. He kept his eyes on her, and it seemed to her even from the beginning that they betrayed something more than attention to what she was saying. He looked at her as though he had seen her before and couldn’t quite remember where. She described her Daddy’s talks to her when she was a girl, about the Pyramids and the Lost Atlantis and so forth, and the odd spirit of release and renewed growth that had followed the death of her mother. She told of the spiritualistic séance and the coming of Sargon. Devizes was very keen on various aspects of the Sargon story. “It was odd that the suggestion fell in so aptly with Preemby’s mental disposition. What was that young man up to? I don’t quite understand him.”
“I don’t know. I think he just hit by chance on the stuff he talked. It was just bad luck that it fitted.”
“Undergraduate idea of fun?”
“Undergraduate fun. It might have been Tut-an-ka-man.”
“But it happened to be Sargon.”
“He may have been reading some ancient history.”
“He didn’t, I suppose, know anything about your father?”
“Couldn’t have done. I suppose he thought my—my Daddy looked a little small and absurd, and I suppose it appealed to his sense of humour to single him out from the others and make him a great king. I’d like to have a few minutes straight talk with that young man.”
“This you see isn’t a delusion, Devizes. It’s a deception,” said Paul Lambone.
“Is he generally coherent,” asked Devizes.
“Granted his thesis, he’s amazingly coherent,” she said.
“He doesn’t sometimes become some one else, God or a millionaire, or anything of that sort?”
“No. He believes in reincarnation and hints at having lived other lives, but that’s all.”
“Thousands of people do that,” said Lambone.
“And nobody is persecuting him? Nobody makes noises to trouble him or gets at him with X-rays or anything of that sort?”
“Not a shadow of that sort of thing.”
“The man’s sane. Unless he went mad when he walked out of your friends’ studio.”
“I’m for his sanity right out,” said Lambone. “I wish I’d had a chance to talk to him. There’s something—everybody’s chattering now about an Inferiority Complex. Well, isn’t it common for people who have been rather put upon and deceived and so forth, and who don’t want to face the facts of life, to take refuge in an assumed personality? And putting the reveries, the spiritualist séance and so forth all together, doesn’t it work out on those lines?”
“He knows he is really, au fond, Preemby?” Devizes asked.
“It annoyed him to tell him so,” said Christina Alberta. “I think one reason why he went away was because I and my friend, Mrs. Crumb that is, at the studio where we live, would try to make him be sensible about that. It drove him away. He knows he is really Preemby and he hates it. He knows this is all a make-believe.”
Paul Lambone took up the discourse. “I do so sympathize with that. So far from that being insane it’s perfectly rational. Becoming somebody else greater than oneself is part of half the religions of the world. All the Mithraists used to become Mithra. The Serapists, if I remember rightly, used to become Osiris. We all want to be born again really. Every one with any sense and humility does. Into something greater. ‘Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ That’s why Christina Alberta’s Daddy is so tremendously interesting. He’s got imagination; he’s got originality. He may be a feeble little chap, but he has that.”
“Having an exceptional mind isn’t insanity,” said Devizes, “or else we should put all our poets and artists in asylums.”
“Few would come up to that standard,” said Lambone. “I wish they did.”
Devizes reflected. “I think I’ve got things clear. He’s coherent. He’s neat in his dress. He isn’t persecuted. He’s unselfish in his thoughts, almost romantically so. And he’s not fattish and lumpish, and he’s never had any sort of fit. There’s no insane type a properly qualified doctor could class him under, but then most doctors are altogether unqualified for mental practice. A stupid doctor might mistake his imaginations for the splendour of paranoia or take his abstraction in reverie for dementia præcox or think he was a masked epileptic. But all these are cases of mental disease, and your father is probably not diseased at all. He’s mentally disturbed, but that’s all. The difference between him and a real lunatic is the difference between a basketful of fruit that’s been overturned, and a basketful that’s gone rotten. Overturned fruit gets bruised and rots very easily—but being overturned isn’t being rotten. What sort of man is he to look at?”
“She’s got photographs,” said Lambone.
“I’d like to see them,” he said, and was given a recent one of Mr. Preemby as laundryman. “Too much moustache by a long way,” he said. “Is there anything—with some at least of his face uncovered? There’s nothing here but his eyes.”
“I thought you’d feel that,” said Lambone. “There’s one of Mr. Preemby as a young man, taken soon after his wedding with Mrs. Preemby. Have you got it, Christina Alberta?... Here we are.... That’s Mrs. Preemby in the chair. The moustache—in bulk—has yet to come.”
“He married young?” Devizes asked Christina Alberta.
“He must have done,” she said. “I don’t know his exact age. My mother never told me.”
Devizes scrutinized the photograph. “Queer,” he said, and seemed to be searching his memory. “Something familiar. I’ve met people like this.
“They were both London people, I suppose,” he said, looking hard at Christina Alberta.
“Woodford Wells,” said Christina Alberta.
“My father was born at Sheringham,” she added as an afterthought.
“Sheringham. That’s queer.” With a manifestly deepened interest he looked at the couple posed against one of those rustic backgrounds dear to Victorian photographers. “Chrissy,” he repeated to himself. “Chrissy. Christina Alberta. It can’t be.”
For some moments Dr. Devizes ceased to attend to his consultants and they remained intently observing him. He tried to fix his attention on the young man’s face in the picture, but it was the young woman who sat on the rustic style that absorbed his interest. Amazing how completely he had forgotten her face, and how she came back now incredibly unlike and yet like his memory of her. He remembered the glasses and the neck and shoulders. And a sort of stiff defiance. “When were your mother and father married?” he asked. “How long ago?”
“Eighteen ninety-nine,” she answered.
“And then you were born straight away?” He asked the question with an affectation of ease.
“There was a decent interval,” said Christina Alberta with a clumsy levity. “I was born in nineteen hundred.”
“A little, fair, blue-eyed chap with rather an absent-minded manner. I seem to see him,” Devizes said, and resumed his examination of the photograph. Nobody spoke for the better part of a minute. “Good Lord!” whispered Lambone to himself. Devizes drank a cup of tea absent-mindedly. “Extraordinary,” he ejaculated. “I never dreamt of it.”
“What is?”
His answer went off at a tangent. “Christina Alberta’s resemblance to my mother. It’s amazing. It’s been worrying me ever since I came into the room. It’s been distracting my attention. I’ve got a little picture....”
He jumped up and went out of the room. Christina Alberta, puzzled, excited, turned instantly on Lambone. “He knew my father and mother,” she said.
“Apparently,” said Lambone with something defensive in his voice.
“Apparently!” she echoed. “But—he knew them! He knew them well. And—What’s he thinking of?”
Devizes reappeared holding out a small gold-framed picture. “Look at that!” he said and handed it to Paul Lambone. “It might be Christina Alberta. Don’t you see how like it is? Allowing for that preposterous hair piled upon her head and the way her dress goes up round her neck.”
He handed the picture to Christina Alberta and looked at Lambone in amazed interrogation.
“It might be me in fancy dress,” Christina Alberta agreed, with the picture in her hands. There came a long pause. She looked up and saw the expression of his face. Her mind gave a fantastic leap, so fantastic that it instantly leapt back to the point of departure. It was like a flash of lightning in a night as dark as pitch. She made a great effort to pull the conversation together, to behave as though her mind had never leapt at all. “But what has all this to do with my Daddy’s case?” she asked.
“Nothing directly. Your resemblance to my mother is a pure coincidence. Pure. But it’s a curious coincidence! Just for the moment it pulled my attention aside. Forgive me. I’ve a belief that where there’s resemblance of this sort there’s a blood relationship. I suppose your mother’s people—what did you say they were called—Hoskin?”
“Did I say? I don’t remember. I didn’t say. I didn’t. Her name was Hossett.”
“Ah, yes!—Hossett. I suppose that two or three generations back the Hossetts and Devizes intermarried. And there we are! Cousins—at we don’t know what remove. But types go under in a family and then bob up again. It sort of links us, Christina Alberta, doesn’t it? It gives me a special interest. I don’t feel now that you’re just any old patient. Or, rather, just Paul’s friend. I feel linked. Well—That’s that. Let’s come back to your father. Who married your mother just when they were starting the old South African war. He’s always been a dreamy, unobservant type. As we were saying. Even from the beginning....”
He stopped short.
“Always,” said Christina Alberta, after a long pause.
“We’ve been into all that,” said Devizes and paused, and was for a minute entirely at a loss for words. “Yes,” he said at last.
Her heart was beating fast and there was a flush of excitement on her cheeks. Her quick wits had filled in all the gaps. She understood now—and then again it vanished. She would have liked to have gone away and thought it all over at once. But that wouldn’t do. She must disregard the questions that surged up within her. Her mind went forward like an obstinate traveller caught in a whirlwind. Her mother for example. She was trying to recall something about her mother that had long been stifled in her mind. “Went away and left me to it,” was it? “Went off and left me to it?” Her mother lying in bed and wandering. Who had left her to what? That standing perplexity. That suspicion. That dream. But attend to him now, Christina Alberta; attend to him! She was observing him with all her being, and yet she seemed deaf to what he said.
He was saying that now that he agreed with them that Preemby was sane, he could see his way to the real business before them. It was the old, old story of making lunatics out of sane people which they encountered in Preemby’s case. It was the old, old story of making lunatics out of sane people which they encountered in Preemby’s case. (He repeated his sentence word for word without apparently realizing he had said it twice.) All exceptional people were in danger of being misunderstood, but such a type as Preemby, original and yet incapable of abstract expression or philosophical method, which sought fantastic expression for its feelings and impulses, was particularly liable to give offence, awaken suspicion and dread and hostility. It was just these borderland cases he was always trying to save from asylums, and just such cases that were always going there. And they were the last people to bring into contact with real insanity. “To go back to my metaphor, the basketful of fruit isn’t rotten, is scarcely speckled with decay, but it is disordered and overturned. A mind is a delicate thing to knock about. It will rot very easily, and a mind like your father’s particularly will rot very easily under asylum conditions. After all this rigmarole I come to just the conclusion you’ve already reached, that we have to get Preemby out of Cummerdown Hill and away under restful conditions as soon as possible. When we’ll comb out his particular complex and get him into working relations with the world again. I’m quite sure we can do that somehow, make his incognito permanent, make him an Emperor in exile, restore his proper name, organize a common daily round for him and get him back more and more to be a chastened and released Preemby.”
He paused.
“That’s it,” said Lambone, roused from a profound contemplation of the two interesting faces before him.
“It isn’t easy. Even to get at him isn’t easy. There will be delays. A careless magistrate and a silly doctor can make a lunatic in five minutes. It takes no end of time to unmake one.”
“That’s what I want to set about doing,” said Christina Alberta.
“Naturally,” said Devizes, “and I’m with you.”
He explained one or two points in lunacy law, began sketching a scheme of operations, considered the people to whom she ought to write and the people to whom he ought to write, and how soon it would be possible to see Preemby, and give him a word of encouragement. Already Devizes had had several brushes with lunacy organization; he was considered a troublesome but dangerous man for a medical superintendent to be up against. That might arouse either hostile obstruction or the propitiatory spirit. They must go carefully.
Lambone scarcely interrupted now at all. He had ceased to be acutely interested in Preemby, immured away there in Cummerdown. He was lost in admiration of the self-control his astonishing friends displayed. He tried to imagine what an undertow of strange excitement, of queer thoughts and confused emotions there must be beneath their highly intelligent discussion of the case of Mr. Preemby. They wasted very little attention upon the onlooker. Christina Alberta’s face was faintly flushed, and her eyes glowed; Devizes was rather less of a conversationalist than usual and rather more like a university tutor with an exceptionally interesting student.
The subject was exhausted at last and the time came to depart. Devizes came to the door with them.
“Don’t forget that I’m always round the corner, so to speak,” he said. “I’m in the telephone directory. And don’t forget, Christina Alberta, don’t forget I’m your long-lost cousin, very much at your service.”
“I won’t forget that,” said Christina Alberta, meeting his eye.
A little pause, and then rather stiffly they shook hands.