§ 8
It was a little more than two days before Christina Alberta, to use her own expression, “got back” to her lost Daddy.
Those two days were full of an immense excitement. Devizes was the most wonderful fact in the world. She exploded into love for him. She had the most vivid impression of him, dark and tall, rather grave, watchful and amazingly understandable. Yet vivid as her impression was she doubted every detail of it, and wanted to go back to him and verify it all over again. It was their quality of mutual understanding that was at once the most delightful and the most incredible aspect of the whole affair. Their brains no doubt were unlike, as every two individual brains must be, yet their unlikeness was not a mere accumulation of accidental difference, but the unlikeness of two variations of one theme. She could feel his intentions beneath his words. Her mind had jumped with his realizations and there must be kinks and turns in her brain, kinks and turns that just made her difficult and queer for most people, which would find the completest parallels in his. She didn’t believe there was a thing in her thoughts and acts that she would be surprised at his knowing and comprehending.
She had never before thought of parentage with any enthusiasm. She had viewed it rather in the spirit of Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw, and conceived of parents generally in relation to their children as embarrassed hypocrites with an instinctive disposition towards restraint and suppression. She had made an exception of her own particular pair; Daddy had been a great friend anyhow, though mother for the most part had been a concentrated incarnate “Don’t.” But she had never realized there might be something rather intimately interesting in consanguinity. And then suddenly a door had opened, a man had come in and sat down and talked to her and discovered himself the nearest thing in life to her. And she to him. She wanted to go to him again; she wanted to see more of him, be with him. But he made no sign and she could think of no decent excuse for a call upon him. The very intensity of her desire made her unable to go to him easily. She wrote the various letters they had agreed she should write, and then decided to master mental science and lunacy generally. That and the case of her “Daddy” she perceived to be her formal link with Devizes.
She set out for the Reading Room of the British Museum, for which she had a students’ ticket, and she tried to concentrate her mind upon the book she had requisitioned, instead of letting it wander off into the strangest reveries about this miraculously discovered blood relation. In the afternoon she rang up Lambone to be given tea, with the intention of learning everything that the wise man could tell her about Devizes and generally turning him over conversationally. But Lambone was out. The next day the craving for Devizes was overpowering. She rang him up.
“May I have some tea?” she asked. “I’ve got nothing much to say, but I want to see you.”
“Delighted,” said Devizes.
When she got to him she found herself shy, and him as shy as herself. For a little while they made polite conversation; it might almost have been the conversation of two people at a formal call in a country town. He called her “Christina Alberta,” but she called him “Doctor Devizes,” and he asked her if she played or danced, and whether she had ever been abroad. She sat in an arm-chair and he stood over her on the hearthrug. It was clear that the only way to intimacy lay in a frank treatment of her Daddy. She felt that if this sort of talk went on for another minute she would have to scream or throw her tea-cup in the fire. So she plunged.
“When did you first know my mother?”
Devizes’ attitude stiffened, and he smiled faintly at her boldness. “I was a Cambridge undergraduate reading for the Natural Science Tripos, and I went down to Sheringham to read. We—we picked each other up on the beach. We made love—in a scared, furtive, desperate, ignorant sort of way. People were primitive in those days—compared with what they are now.”
“Daddy wasn’t there.”
“He came in afterwards.”
Devizes considered for a moment. He decided that it wasn’t fair to oblige her to go on questioning him. “My father,” he said, “was a pretty considerable old bully. He was Sir George Devizes, the man who invented the Devizes biscuit and cured old Alphonso, and he was celebrated for being rude to his patients. He would smack their stomachs and tell them they ought to be scooped out. He helped make Unter Magenbad. He suspected me of being a bit of a soft, though as a matter of fact I wasn’t, and he generally had the effect of laying up for a quarrel with me. He kept me pretty short. He wasn’t particularly nice to my mother. He used to get at my mother through me. I didn’t dare to have a scrape of any sort. I was really afraid of him. If I saw a scrape blowing up my habit and disposition was to run away.”
“I see.”
Devizes considered the implications of that “I see.” “Not that I ran away from any definite scrape that I knew of at Sheringham,” he said very carefully.
“What was my mother like in those days?”
“A sort of subdued fierceness. A flushed warm face. She was pretty, you know, and very upright in her carriage. And she had a swift decision beneath her stiffness. Her wishes would suddenly crystallize out, and after that there was no bending her.”
“I know.”
“I suppose you do.”
“She wore glasses then?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Was she fresh then? Was she happy?”
“A little too fierce to be happy.”
“Did you—ever—love her?”
“It is a long time ago, Christina Alberta. There was—seaside love-making. Why do you cross-examine me like this?”
“I want to know. Why”—Christina Alberta had a momentary terror at her own boldness—“Why didn’t you marry her?”
Devizes made no pretence of surprise at the question. “There was no reason manifest why I should have married her. None at all. I can’t conceive what my father would have done if I had come back from Sheringham engaged to a chance acquaintance. And anyhow, why should I have done anything of the sort?”
His eyes defied hers.
“I left her my address,” he added. “She could have written to me. She never did.”
“Did a letter go astray?” said Christina Alberta, and added hastily, “my imagination is running away with me.”
She hesitated and trembled at the next words she had resolved to say, but she said them, with a forced offhandedness. “You see—I might have fancied you as a father?”
It produced no catastrophe. He looked her in the face and then smiled. After that smile she felt that they understood each other completely, and it was very pleasant to think that. “Instead of which, you have to adopt me as a cousin,” he said deliberately. “Cousins it is, Christina Alberta. It’s the best we can do. We have to put our heads together and think of your Daddy. He’s our common concern. I’m interested in that little man. He’s defended himself against many things by those dreams of his. Very wilful dreams they may have been. Who knows? Necessary protective dreams.”
Christina Alberta did not speak for a little time. She nodded. She was glad at their manifest understanding and yet she was disappointed, though she could not have told herself what else she had expected. This man a yard away was the nearest thing in the world to her, and always there might be this invisible barrier between them. They were linked by an invisible tie and they were separated by an unfathomable necessity. Never before in her life had she known what love could be; she wanted to be free to love him; she wanted him to love her.
She realized that she was standing quite still, and that Devizes was standing just as still upon his hearthrug, watching her face. His mouth and eyes were quiet and serene, but she imagined he must be gripping his hands together behind him. She had to obey him. There was nothing for her to do but follow his lead.
“Daddy’s our common concern,” she said. “I suppose I shall begin to hear from some of those people to-morrow.”