§ 11
But Mr. Preemby did not turn up anywhere. He just vanished.
Christina Alberta, in a state of incredulous astonishment at this fresh disappearance, went down with Devizes to Cummerdown. They found a Medical Superintendent by no means so amazed as they were. Sargon had been missing at breakfast time; everything seemed to point to his just walking out of the Asylum. That sort of thing had happened before. It showed a certain sleepy negligence on the part of one or two attendants, and they would be reprimanded. But as for wonder, the Medical Superintendent refused to wonder. Lunatics often stray or escape, and unless they are dangerous the authorities made no great commotion about it. They kept it out of the newspapers as far as it was possible to do so.
“This place isn’t Portland,” said the Medical Superintendent. “They get back all right. I give him a day. He’s probably coming back now. He may be hiding up a mile away. I’m chiefly anxious about his catching cold. Pneumonia is the standard death of a lunatic. But it’s wonderfully warm for the time of year. I’ve never known such an October.”
He was much more desirous to talk to Devizes about lunacy reform, and convince him that he was a highly progressive and able Medical Superintendent than to discuss the special case of Mr. Preemby. “We do what we can,” he said, “but we’re fixed by the extreme economy we have to practise. Low-grade attendants and not enough even of them. The public indifference to lunatics is monstrous. Everybody—even the people with insane relations—wants to forget all about them.”
“But how could Preemby have got out of the grounds?” asked Devizes. “Aren’t there walls all round?”
“Like everything else about lunacy law, the back is not as good as the front,” said the superintendent. “But here we have got at least a complete wall of sorts all round. The original building used to be a private mansion with a walled park. For a time—in the eighteenth century—it was a boys’ school.”
He showed them from his window over the roofs of a clump of outbuildings the limits of the garden and farm at the back, dropping towards a streamlet and defined by a roadside wall and old thorn and oak trees. “For my own part,” said the Medical Superintendent, “I admit the urgency of very drastic reforms.”
“I wonder if Cousin Widgery can throw any light on this,” said Devizes.
“Widgery?”
“That was his visitor yesterday.”
“Was it?” said the Medical Superintendent, and reflected and went to his desk as if to look for a paper. “I thought it was a different sort of name—rather more like Goodchild. Perhaps I’ve mixed up the names.”
“Mr. Sam Widgery,” said Christina Alberta, “would be the last person who’d want Daddy to get out. He probably came to make sure that he wouldn’t. He may have come just for the pleasure of gloating over him. Uncle Sam’s not a pretty soul. He may have wanted to make sure the wall went all the way round.”
The Medical Superintendent forgot his doubt about the name and the paper and turned with a fresh idea to them. “You don’t think there was any animus? You don’t think he may have made for Mr. Widgery? Where does this Mr. Widgery live?”
But neither Devizes nor Christina Alberta thought there was any great possibility of Mr. Preemby beating back to Woodford Wells.
“He’s much more likely to go to Canterbury or Windsor or start straight off for Rome,” said Christina Alberta.
“Or Mesopotamia—or the British Museum,” said Devizes.
“Or anywhere!” said Christina Alberta with a note of despair.
They returned to London completely baffled. Christina Alberta was for a visit to the Cummerdown Police Station and for a search in the villages round about, but Devizes explained that this might do more harm than good. Until now Christina Alberta had never heard of that one kindly weakness in the British lunacy laws, the release of the fourteen days freedom. If the lunatic can get away from the Asylum and remain at large for that period, he or she becomes legally sane again, and cannot be touched without a fresh examination and a new certificate. To set the whole countryside hunting for Preemby might merely lead to his recapture by the Asylum authorities. And whatever happened the mystery must not get into the papers.
“But while we do nothing, he may be lying dead in some out-of-the-way ditch,” said Christina Alberta.
“If he’s dead he won’t mind a little delay in finding him,” said Devizes.
No, the only thing was to wait at Lonsdale Mews against the chance of his returning thither. The Crumbs went off to Shoreham and Christina Alberta was left alone in the studio, but after one endless day of it Paul Lambone thought of a convenient agency called “Universal Aunts,” and a suitable lady was sent to relieve her from a continuous vigil.
One, two, three days passed. There came no sign from Sargon, no news of any fresh calling of disciples or visits to the King. He had evaporated. A vision of a little crumpled-up body in a ditch replaced the tormented figure in the cell in the distressed imagination of Christina Alberta. But the mind refuses to go on with a painful fancy that leads to nothing, and Christina Alberta’s imagination presently ceased further dealings with her Daddy until fresh material came to hand. “He will turn up somewhere,” she repeated feebly, and became a great consumer of evening papers. “He will turn up somehow.” Her chief anxiety was that he should not turn up with too tremendous head-lines. She began to adjust herself like an early Christian for the Second Coming. The riddle of her Daddy’s disappearance became a habit of mind, became, as it were, a frame, a proscenium arch to her current activities. Beneath it she returned to the urgent and extraordinary problem of herself and her relationship to Devizes.