Christina Alberta's father

by H. G. Wells

He began to think vaguely of his possible destination. Whither was he going?

He was seeking quarters, he was seeking indeed some lonely hermitage. He had slipped away from the Princess Royal, who also had come back—rather needlessly he thought—into this modern world, because it was necessary for him to be absolutely alone for a time. He had to spend some days or weeks in spiritual struggle and meditation and mental purification before his revelation came. Even she might not minister to him during that period. She was devoted, but she hampered him. Indeed, she hampered him greatly. She did not fully understand. Her remarks and questions were generally disconcerting and sometimes downright annoying. It was quite probable that the metamorphosis might never occur with her about. And, besides, always in the history of great Visitants and marvellous returns there had been this opening phase of withdrawal and self-communion. Buddha, Muhammad; they had all done it. Perhaps he would fast. Perhaps fasting would be necessary. Perhaps there would be Celestial Visitants.

He wished he knew more of the technique of fasting. Did one just stop having meals or were there ceremonies and precautions? But of that later. First he had to find that quiet room, his secret place of final preparation.

Presently he found himself in the grey squares of Bloomsbury and every house he passed displayed in its window a genteel card offering “Apartments” or “Bed and Breakfast.” Here also were “Private Hotels” and even a plain “Boarding House.” Well, here no doubt it had to be. A simple room amidst his unsuspecting people, a simple, simply furnished room.

§ 4

But through all Bloomsbury, to judge by the dark green and silver cards in its ground-floor windows, was offering shelter and sustenance to the homeless and the stranger, the new Lord of the World found it no easy matter to secure that simple room he needed for his own use. For more than an hour he was visiting one grey house after another, knocking, standing on doorsteps, entering passages laid with immemorial oilcloth, and demanding a sight of the accommodation offered, inspecting it, asking prices—and—it became more and more evident—arousing suspicion. The people stared at his rolled-up map and his planisphere and seemed to dislike them instinctively. He had not expected such blunt demands for information; his vague mysteriousness was swept aside, he found himself difficult to explain. They wanted to know how he was occupied and when he would like to move in. None of them seemed prepared for him to just sit down in his room there and then. They expected him to go out and fetch his luggage. It undermined his confidence that behind him there was no luggage. All these people, he realized more and more distinctly, would expect him to produce luggage and might behave unreasonably if he did not do so. A mere readiness to pay in advance, he gathered, was not enough for them.

He had counted upon finding kind and simple people behind these lodging-house doors, people who would accept him and look up to him from the first and wonder about him and his planisphere, speculate about its significance and gradually realize the marvellous visitant that had come to them. But the people he saw were not simple people. Mostly they were dingy, sophisticated people. They came up out of basements in a mood of sceptical scrutiny, men in shirt sleeves, morose for the most part and generally ill-shaven; extremely knowing and anything but virginal young women, grimy looking older women, hungrily lean or unwholesomely fat. One had a goitre-like growth. And always there was something defensive in their manner.

And the rooms he saw were even less simple than the people. His consciousness was invaded by a sense of the vast moral changes that had happened to the world since he had ruled the white-robed honesty of his Sumerian irrigators. Then a room would have a table, a seat or two, a shelf with a few phials, an image or suchlike religious object, a clay tablet and a writing style, perhaps, if the occupant was educated. But these rooms were encumbered with contradictions. They had windows to let in the light and dark curtains to keep it out. Sargon’s hidden second youth in the laundry had made him very sensitive to dirtiness, and the cotton-lace curtains of those places were generally very dirty indeed. Electric light was still rare in “apartments”; mostly they were lit from gas brackets that descended from the centre of the ceiling and carried globes of frosted and cut glass. Always there was a considerable table in the centre and two uneasy arm-chairs. And there were lumpish sideboards of shiny, liver-coloured wood and comfortless sofas and incredible ornaments. Sometimes the rooms, and particularly the bedrooms, had a meretricious smartness and gaiety with mezzotints of ladies in the natural state trying to pass themselves off as allegorical figures or of the Baths in the congested harems of wealthy, rather than refined, Orientals. The over-mantels were extraordinary affairs and much loaded with crockery ornaments, little jars, small gilt-winged angels, red devils, or encouraging looking ladies in bathing-dresses that were too tight for them. A common form of decoration was to fasten up plates on the wall much as one sees vermin nailed up on a barn.

A considerable number of these homes for hire were as shabby as roadside tramps. One stood out in his memory as faded and dusty and grey and threadbare beyond the possibility of reality. His self-absorption was penetrated by the wonder of who could live and who could have lived in such quarters. All his life had been amongst clean and bright surroundings; it was rare that he had any glimpses of that worn and weary stratum of English town life in which things are patched indeed, but in which it is rare for anything to be mended or cleaned and incredible that anything should be replaced. Even the air in these rooms seemed long out of date and the glass over the rusty engravings of the Monarch of the Glen and the Stag at Bay spotted by remote ancestral flies.

“Does anyone ever stay here?” asked Sargon of the shattered-looking lady in charge.