§ 4
But Christina Alberta had only studied in the London School of Economics for a year, she was beginning her second year when her mother obliged her to resign her scholarship. Christina Alberta had stayed late in London one evening without telling her mother she was going to do so, she had gone to a discussion of the Population Question at the New Hope Club in Fitzgerald Street, and she had come home smelling so strongly of tobacco that her mother had repented of and revoked all her concessions to modernity there and then.
She had been waiting for that moment for many months. “This ends it,” she said as she let her daughter in.
Christina Alberta found there was no immediate way round or through that decision. She worked her father and Miss Maltby-Neverson in vain. But instead of resigning her scholarship right out as she had been told to do, she played for time and explained her absence by a vague reference to family trouble.
Mrs. Preemby in those days was already in very bad health, but this fact was completely overshadowed in the minds of both her daughter and her husband by the far more urgent fact that she was now constantly in a very bad temper. Everything was conspiring to worry her—except Mr. Preemby, who knew better than to do anything of the sort.
The closing years of the Great War, and still more so the opening year of the Disappointing Peace, were years of very great difficulty for the laundry business. The munitions business put laundry girls above themselves and there was no doing anything with them. Coal, soap, everything was at unheard-of prices, and it was impossible to get back on the customers by raising the charges. People, even the best sort of people, were giving up cleanliness. Gentlemen of position would wear their dress-shirts three or four times and make their undervests and under-pants last a fortnight. Household linen was correspondingly eked out. People moved about; the new army officers’ wives came and went, here to-day and gone to-morrow, leaving unpaid bills. Never had Mrs. Preemby known so many bad debts. Van men came back from the army so shell-shocked and militarized that they embezzled out of pure nervousness and habit. Income tax became a nightmare. Outside as within, Mrs. Preemby’s life was a conflict. She kept the Limpid Stream Laundry paying all through that awful time because she was a wonder at management, but she did it at a terrible loss of vitality.
She became bitterly critical of the unhelpfulness of Mr. Preemby and her daughter. When they tried to be helpful she criticized their incapacity. They did more harm than good.
Meal-times were awful. She would sit flushed and glowering through her glasses, obviously afflicted by a passionate realization of the world’s injustice and eating very little. Mr. Preemby’s attempts to start a cheerful conversation were rarely successful. Even Christina Alberta was overawed.
“Things going a little better this morning?” Mr. Preemby would try.
“Can’t I get rest from business even at my meals?” the poor lady would complain.
Or, “Looks like pleasant weather for the Derby.”
“Pity you can’t go there for all the help you are in the place. I suppose you haven’t heard what’s happened to van number two.”
“No!” said Mr. Preemby.
“You wouldn’t. Hind mudguard smashed. Been done for weeks. And nobody knows who did it. One would think that that was a man’s business anyhow. But it’s left for me to find out. And pay for. Like everything else in the place.”
“I’d better make inquiries.”
“I know those inquiries of yours. Better leave the whole thing alone now. Grin and bear it....”
The silence of the meal would be restored.
She seemed to set a high value upon these awful silences. She even complained that he ate his cheese biscuits audibly. But how else can one eat cheese biscuits? Christina Alberta was made of sterner stuff and became controversial. Then her mother would flare out at her insolence and declare that “one or the other of us” leaves the table. “I’ll read upstairs,” said Christina Albert. “It isn’t my wish to be lunching here.”
Before the abrupt ending of Christina Alberta’s university career she was present only at breakfast and supper; supper wasn’t nearly as awful in quality as breakfast, and breakfast could easily be bolted and got away from; but after the New Hope Club catastrophe, she was present at all the meals, a sort of lightning-conductor for her father and something of a restraint upon, and an added exasperation to, her mother. She took the line of agreeing that if her university career was to end, then she must go into the laundry business; but she argued very stoutly that to do that with any hope of success under modern conditions meant a “proper business training.” If she could not go to the London School of Economics then she ought to go to Tomlinson’s Commercial Training School in Chancery Lane and learn book-keeping, shorthand, typing, business correspondence, précis, commercial French, and so forth. And after three weeks of painful midday meals this proposal was adopted under stringent conditions and her season-ticket to London was renewed. She worked her way very passably through another winter with Tomlinson’s as her school and most of London as her playground. She learnt all sorts of things. She added a new set of friends and acquaintances, some with bobbed hair and some without, of the most various social origins and associations, to the circle she had already acquired at the London School of Economics.
When presently Mrs. Preemby began to speak of a gnawing pain that oppressed her, both her husband and daughter took it at first as a new development of her general grievance against them and felt no particular apprehension about it. Mr. Preemby said he thought she ought to take advice or see some one about it, but for some days she treated the suggestion with scorn. If once she got in a doctor, she said, they’d have to find some one else to look after the laundry. Doctors put you to bed and give you things to keep you there. Otherwise how could they get a living?
Then suddenly she changed. One morning she confessed she felt “dreadful.” She went back to bed and Mr. Preemby, with strange premonitions that the world was coming to an end, trotted off for a doctor. The clinical thermometer showed a temperature mounting above one hundred and one. “It hurts. My side hurts,” said Mrs. Preemby. “I’ve had it once before, but not like this.”
Christina Alberta came home that evening to discover herself capable of fear, remorse, and tenderness.
She had some strange moments with her mother in between phases of weak delirium and insensibility. Mrs. Preemby’s face seemed to have become smaller and prettier; the feverish flush in her cheeks simulated youth. She was no longer hard or angry, but rather pathetically friendly. And Christina Alberta hadn’t seen her in bed for years.
“Take care of your Daddy,” said Mrs. Preemby. “You owe more to him—and less to him—than you think. I had to do all I’ve done. Take care of him. He’s gentle and good and easily persuaded and not to be trusted alone in the world....
“I’ve never been quite all a mother should be to you. But you’ve been difficult, Christina.... I’ve had a great respect for you....
“I’m glad you haven’t my eyes. Glasses are a Curse....”
Anxiety about the laundry occupied a large part of her thoughts.
“That woman Smithers in the washing room is a thief, and I’d get rid of the new man Baxandale. I don’t know why I’ve kept Mrs. Smithers on so long.... Weakness.... I’m not sure about him, there’s nothing positive yet, but I feel he’s not straight.... I’m very much afraid we’ve let Lady Badger’s account run too long. Nowadays titles—want watching. I’ve been misled by her. She promised a cheque.... But I doubt about you two in the laundry altogether. He can’t and you won’t. You might have done it.... Never mind that now.
“Sell it as a going concern? The Widgerys might come in. He’s hard, but he’s straight. Straight enough. They might like to come in....
“It’s never entered my head I wasn’t good for twenty years yet.... I wish the doctor wouldn’t think of operating. It won’t do any good.”
She repeated many of her phrases.
“I hate the thought of being opened,” she said. “I suppose—. Like those frogs in your book....
“Packed like a bag.... Never get it back again. Loose bits....
“Washing-basket or something to keep it together.”
Then her mind went off at a tangent to things beyond Christina Alberta’s understanding.
“Sneaked off and left me to it.... I wonder what he’s doing now.... Suppose.... Fancy, if it should be him that had to operate.... Operate....
“Children we were.”
She seemed to recollect herself and regarded her daughter with a hard inquiring eye. Some instinct in Christina Alberta told her to assume an incurious expression. But these words struck upon her mind and stayed there and germinated like a seed. Children they were, and he had sneaked off? Queer and yet according with all sorts of other imponderables.