CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER

MR. WELLS has also written the following novels:

THE WHEELS OF CHANCE. LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM. KIPPS. TONO-BUNGAY. ANN VERONICA. MR. POLLY. THE NEW MACHIAVELLI. MARRIAGE. THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS. THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN. BEALBY. THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH. THE SOUL OF A BISHOP. JOAN AND PETER. THE UNDYING FIRE. THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART.

The following Fantastic and Imaginative Romances:

THE TIME MACHINE. THE WONDERFUL VISIT. THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. THE INVISIBLE MAN. THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. THE SLEEPER AWAKES. THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. THE SEA LADY. THE FOOD OF THE GODS. IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET. THE WAR IN THE AIR. THE WORLD SET FREE. MEN LIKE GODS. THE DREAM.

Numerous Short Stories collected under the following Titles:

THE STOLEN BACILLUS. THE PLATTNER STORY. TALES OF SPACE AND TIME. TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM.

The same Short Stories will also be found in three volumes:

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. TALES OF WONDER. TALES OF LIFE AND ADVENTURE.

A Series of Books on Social, Religious, and Political Questions:

ANTICIPATIONS (1900). A MODERN UTOPIA. THE FUTURE IN AMERICA. NEW WORLDS FOR OLD. FIRST AND LAST THINGS. GOD THE INVISIBLE KING. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY. RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS. THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION. WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PEACE. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD. THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER. A YEAR OF PROPHESYING.

And Two Little Books about Children’s Play, called:

FLOOR GAMES AND LITTLE WARS.

A uniform Atlantic Edition of Mr. Wells’ works is in course of publication.

CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER

BY H. G. WELLS

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1925 All rights reserved

Copyright, 1925, By H. G. WELLS.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1925. Reprinted September 22, 1925. Reprinted November, 1925. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE CORNWALL PRESS

BOOK THE FIRST THE COMING OF SARGON, KING OF KINGS

[10]

CHAPTER THE FIRST The Early Life of Mr. Preemby

§ 1

THIS is the story of a certain Mr. Preemby, a retired laundryman and widower, who abandoned his active interest in the Limpid Stream Laundry, in the parish of Saint Simon Unawares, near Woodford Wells, upon the death of his wife in the year of grace 1920. Some very remarkable experiences came to him. The story is essentially a contemporary story: it is a story of London in the age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, broadcasting, and the first Labour peers. The historical element in it is insignificant and partly erroneous, and the future, though implicitly present, is substantially ignored.

Since washing in London, like the milk trade and baking and the linen drapery and various other branches of commerce, is something rather specialized and hereditary and a little difficult towards outsiders, it is necessary to explain that Mr. Preemby was not a laundryman born. He had little of the spirit and go of a true London laundryman. He married into laundrying. He met a Miss Hossett at Sheringham in 1899, an heiress and a young lady of great decision of character; he wooed and won her and married her, as you will be told, almost without realizing what he was doing. The Hossetts are big people in the laundry world, and the Limpid Stream concern, which presently fell into the capable hands of Mrs. Preemby, was only one[12] of a series of related and sympathetic businesses in the north, north-east and south-west districts of London.

Mr. Preemby, as Miss Hossett’s family came to recognize quite frankly and explicitly at a very early stage, derived from a less practical strain than his wife. His father had been an artist of considerable charm and unpunctuality, a photographic artist, who resided at Sheringham and made what were called in the eighteen-eighties, “gem” photographs of the summer visitors to that place. In the eighteen-eighties he was a well-known Sheringham figure, dark and handsome and sometimes a little unkempt, wearing a brown velvet jacket and a large grey soft felt hat. He would fall into conversation with the visitors upon the beach, and a certain air of distinction about him would bring a sufficient proportion to his studio to maintain him. His wife, our Mr. Preemby’s mother, was a patient, underdeveloped personality, the daughter of a farmer near Diss. When presently Mr. Preemby senior passed out of his son’s life—he became romantically entangled with a small variety entertainment in the summer of 1887 and vanished away with it in the autumn with as little fuss as possible,

never to return to Sheringham—Mrs. Preemby senior became the working partner in a small lodging-house and died in a year or so’s time, leaving her furniture, her interest in the lodging-house and her only son to her cousin and partner, Mrs. Witcherly.

Young Albert Edward Preemby was then a good-looking, slender youth of sixteen, with his father’s curliness and his mother’s fair hair and eyes of horizon blue, dreamy and indisposed for regular employment. Even as a child he had been given to reverie; at school he would sit with sums or book neglected before him, looking beyond them at unknown things; his early experiences in business were disappointing by reason of this abstraction. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to exploit his gifts at some favourable point in the complex machinery of our civilization, he[13] came to rest for several years in the office of a house-agent and coal-merchant in Norwich to whom his mother was distantly related.

Some ancient, remembered, sentimental tie helped Albert Edward to this appointment and shielded any imperfections in his performance from too urgent a criticism. He did much better at it than anyone could have expected. The calling of a house-agent differs from most other callings in the fact that the necessary driving energy is supplied entirely by the clientele, and there was something about the letting of the larger houses that touched the dormant imagination of young Preemby. He revealed a natural gift for attractive description and was duly entrusted with the work of collecting particulars from prospective lessors. He had a quite useful hopefulness. And even the coal proved unexpectedly interesting so soon as he found that none of it had to be carried about by him. He could never believe that all the golden scales one finds in it were pyrites. He cherished a secret dream of a great commercial enterprise to work cinder heaps for residual gold. He told no one of this project, he took no steps to realize it, but it warmed his daily routines with its promise

of release and wealth. And when things were slack in the office in the early afternoon and he was left in charge, he would go and sit on the coal counter and pick out the coal samples for the little trays and turn them over and over and view them from various angles and weigh them in his hand and lapse into the most splendid visions.

And if inquirers after houses came in, he would receive them with a manner almost regal.

In Norwich he became a member of the Y.M.C.A., but he was interested in its literary rather than its religious side, and he attended any political debates available. He never spoke in these debates, but he sat at the back reflecting that politicians are, after all, no more than puppets in the hands of the silent rich men who sit behind the[14] scenes. It was in Norwich, too, that he was able to buy his first tailor-made suit, of a most becoming grey. When he went to stay with Mrs. Witcherly at Sheringham for his summer holiday of a fortnight, she was delighted by the improvement in his appearance and much impressed by the active hopefulness that had replaced his former lethargy. Upon the sea front in the afternoon in his grey suit, to anyone who did not know about him, he might have been almost any sort of prosperous summer visitor.

It seems a yesterday, and yet it seems ages ago, that our plump and short Mr. Preemby was that small blonde young man twirling his stick and glancing furtively but desirously at the lady bathers in their vast petticoated bathing-dresses and oilskin caps, as he strolled along the Sheringham front. That was in the days when motor cars were still rather a joke, a smell, and a noise and wayside repairs, and flying was understood to be impossible. Queen Victoria had had her Diamond Jubilee and nobody thought Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, would ever survive to be King. The War in South Africa was being arranged for that summer, to last six months and employ forty thousand men. And it was on the third day of his grey suit holiday at Sheringham that Mr. Preemby was run into by his future wife, Miss Hossett, riding on a bicycle, and thrown against and almost run over by her friend Miss Meeta Pinkey.

Because, incredible as it may seem to the modern reader, people did succeed in those distant nineties, before the coming of the more suitable automobile, in knocking down and running over other people with the sluggish apparatus, bicycles, horse-drawn vehicles and so forth, then available.

§ 2

Miss Meeta Pinkey was an emotional blonde girl, and she fell off her machine gracefully and naturally into Mr.[15] Preemby’s arms as he was hurled against her. It would seem to have been the original intention of Destiny to have made this the beginning of a permanent relationship, but in this matter Destiny had reckoned without Miss Hossett. Miss Meeta Pinkey was as ripe for love just then as dry gunpowder is for a bang, and she was already deeply in love with Mr. Preemby before she had been replaced securely on her feet. She stood flushed and round-eyed and breathless, and Mr. Preemby looked quite manly and handsome after picking up her bicycle with an air of rescue.

Miss Hossett, after butting against Mr. Preemby, had swerved, dismounted and stood now prepared for a dispute. The collision had further loosened the already loose handlebar of the entirely untrustworthy hired machine she had been riding. It was this looseness had caused the accident. Her attention seemed divided equally between this and the possible grievance of Mr. Preemby. “I rang my bell,” she said.

She was flushed and erect. She was a round-faced girl with a long, thin neck, a good bright complexion, glasses on her thin nose and a resolute thin-lipped mouth.

“I did all I could to avoid you,” she said.

“Awkward of me,” said Mr. Preemby disarmingly. “I was lost in a day-dream.”

“You aren’t hurt—?” asked Meeta.

“Startled,” said Mr. Preemby, “especially where the wheel got me. This place is full of corners.”

“I’d’ve been over,” said Meeta, “if you hadn’t caught me.”

Miss Hossett was reassured about any possible conflict with Mr. Preemby. Evidently he was going to be quite nice about the accident. “This handlebar was as loose as could be,” she said. “Look at it! You can twist it about like on a swivel. They ought to be punished for letting[16] out such machines. Some of these days one of ’em’ll get let in for Damages. Then they’ll be a bit more careful. Scandalous I call it.”

“You can’t ride it at all now,” said Mr. Preemby.

“No,” she agreed. “Have to take it back to them.”

It seemed only right and proper for Mr. Preemby to wheel the machine for her back through the town to the hiring place, where Miss Hossett reproved the hirer, refused to pay anything, and secured the return of her deposit in a few well-chosen words. Miss Pinkey paid the hire of her bicycle for a First Hour. It seemed natural after that for the little party of three to keep together. They kept together with a faint sense of adventure, and Mr. Preemby behaved as nothing less than a normal lodger at Miss Witcherly’s establishment and summer visitor to the seaside. His new-found friends were Londoners, and he referred himself to Norwich and the management of house property. He was quite amusing about Sheringham. He said it was “a dear little backward-forward place,” that it was a real treat to come to for a breath of sea air.

“I don’t like regular smart places,” said Mr. Preemby. “I’m too absent-minded.”

§ 3

In after years Mr. Preemby would often try to recall the various stages that led to his marrying Miss Hossett, but there was always a vague sense that he missed out something, though he knew not what it was nor where it ought to have come in.

At first things did not look in the least like his marrying Miss Hossett. Indeed they did not look like his marrying anyone, and if the word marriage had been whispered in his ears as the possible consequence of this encounter he would have been terrified. He perceived that he was[17] acceptable company to these girls, but it seemed to him that it was Meeta who formed the link between them and himself. A fourth person presently joined their company who answered to the name of Wilfred, and it seemed to Mr. Preemby that the air of mutual proprietorship between Wilfred and Miss Hossett was unchallengeable.

The young people wandered in a little party along the sea front until the sea front came to an end, and there they found a sheltered and comparatively secluded niche in the brow of the low cliffs and gave themselves up to the delights of Spooning; and it was Meeta who Spooned with Mr. Preemby that afternoon and Wilfred who Spooned with Miss Hossett. Across the gulf of a quarter of a century the memory of Mr. Preemby was still certain that this was so.

The fashions of life change from age to age. Knowledge has spread and refinement increased; and a generation of young people, more restrained, more sophisticated, or more decisive than their predecessors has taken possession of the world. This Spooning was an artless, clumsy dalliance in great favour in those vanished days, a dalliance that was kept within the bounds of strict decorum—if ever that became necessary—by cries of “Starp it” or “Starpit, I tell you,” on the part of the lady. They embraced, they kissed, and put their silly young heads together and so whiled away the long waiting-time before love had its way with them. The summer resorts of England were littered with young people indulging in these poor, silly, undignified anticipations of love. Mr. Preemby, it became manifest, was a natural born Spooner.

“It’s lovely,” said Miss Meeta, “the way you squeeze me.”

Mr. Preemby squeezed some more and ventured to kiss a hot ear.

“Go On with you!” said Miss Meeta, in a voice thick with delight. “That little moustache of yours—it tickles.”

[18]Flushed with encouragement and preoccupied with ideas for further enterprises, Mr. Preemby did not remark that the affairs of Miss Hossett and her Wilfred followed a more troubled and less satisfactory course. Wilfred was not a type that appealed to Mr. Preemby. In spite of the fact that he was much less neat in his dress than Mr. Preemby—he had grey flannel trousers, an old fancy vest, a tweed Norfolk jacket, and low brown shoes with light-coloured socks—he impressed Mr. Preemby as being consciously a social superior. He was young—the youngest of the party—and yet dominant. He had large red hands and big feet, much untidy hair, ill-regulated features that might later be handsome, and a hoarse guffaw. He viewed Mr. Preemby as though he knew all about him and thought the worse of him for it, but did not intend to make any positive trouble for the present about his existence. He was, Meeta whispered, a medical student at Cambridge, and his father was a Harley Street physician who had been knighted. He did not Spoon with any abandonment; he

seemed weary of Spooning, he had perhaps been Spooning for some days, and his conversation with Miss Hossett went on in subdued contentious tones. He sat a little apart from her amidst the sand and coarse bluish grass, and her face was flushed. What they said was inaudible to our intertwined couple.

“Chris and Wilfred don’t get on together as we do,” Meeta said in a low voice. “They’re sillies.”

“He’s like all the men,” said Meeta, “’Sept one perhaps. Want everything they do and give nothing.

“He won’t even say they’re engaged,” she said. “Dodged seeing her father.”

There was a pause for reflection and then a renewal of endearments.

“I’m gorne on you,” said Meeta. “I am fair gorne on you. You’ve got the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. China blue they are.”

[19]

§ 4

So detachedly it was that Mr. Preemby and his future wife passed their first afternoon together. He remembered it, as he remembered most actual things, indistinctly, in a setting of hot sand and sunshine, blue-grey grass and a line of poppies nodding against an intense blue sky. And then across these opening memories Chris Hossett seemed to leap at him with flushed cheeks and glowing eyes, magnified by her glasses.

Two or three days intervened before that passionate pounce. Mr. Preemby, in his character of an incidental visitor to Sheringham, was under no obligation to produce a social background, but Miss Pinkey introduced him to two large, kindly aunts of a sedentary sort, as a young man related to Miss Hossett who had saved her from a nasty fall off a bicycle, and he and she both went to tea with Chris Hossett’s “people.” Old Mr. Hossett was a very ailing man, excessively fat and irritable; he had never been the same, whatever the same was, after his only son had died; and Mrs. Hossett, an energetic lean threat of what her daughter might become, had to wait on Mr. Hossett hand and foot. She had spectacles instead of Chris’s glasses, her eyes were careworn and her complexion was leaden and her neck lean. There were also a married cousin and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Widgery, who seemed to be under the impression that Mr. Preemby was a relation of Miss Pinkey’s. Mr. Widgery had a long pock-marked face and the dullest brown eyes Mr. Preemby had

ever seen. There was nothing difficult to eat at tea and Mr. Preemby got on very well listening to an explanation of the precariousness of Mr. Hossett’s existence, due to heart trouble, from Mrs. Hossett and of just how unsatisfactory and distressing it was to come away and leave the laundry in the hands of a manager. Wilfred did not come to the tea. He had been asked but he did not come.

[20]The next day Mr. Preemby met Wilfred on the sea front watching the girls bathing from a bathing machine. Afterwards all four went for a walk in search of privacy, and it became evident that Miss Hossett declined to Spoon further with Wilfred. It was evident that there was profound trouble between Chris and Wilfred. They scarcely spoke as they returned towards the town; and before the sea front was reached Wilfred said “So long” quite suddenly, and turned away and vanished up a road running inland. Thereupon Wilfred passed out of Mr. Preemby’s world; Mr. Preemby never knew what became of him and never wanted to know; and the next day he became aware for the first time of Miss Hossett’s magnified eyes, regarding him with an interest and a challenge that made him feel almost uncomfortable.

Miss Hossett became a serious obstacle to the Spooning of Meeta. The quartette was now reduced to a trio; and Mr. Preemby found himself the apex, so to speak, of a triangle, the eternal triangle in an exceptionally acute form. Whenever Meeta was on the one hand, Chris was on the other. She called him “Our Teddy”; she pressed upon him; she went so far as to stroke his hair. Meeta’s endearments faded to some extent in the presence of this competition, but she made no explicit objection.