“Even if there were such things in the world as lovers who loved like that! But it’s a world of people who don’t care. It’s a world of people who haven’t the guts to care. It’s a dust-heap of a world,” said Christina Alberta.
§ 5
Her thoughts began to flow into a new region. After all, wasn’t there something too disagreeably justifiable in the suggestion that she was—how to put it—queer? Hitherto Christina Alberta had always regarded herself as a model of sanity and mental directness—with no fault indeed except possibly her nose. Now the word “queer” stuck in her mind like a thorn that has gone right home. She could not get it out again.
She had always, she knew, been different. She had always had a style of her own.
Most of the people she had met in the world had impressed her as being colourless, weak in speech and action, evasive—that was the word, “evasive.” They evaded the use of all sorts of blunt words, they didn’t know why. Christina Alberta was all for saying “Damn” and “guts” and so forth until some one convinced her of some better reason for avoiding them than merely that they weren’t used by “nice” people. These others were always not saying things because they weren’t said and not doing things because they weren’t done. And for what was said and what was done, however manifestly preposterous it was, they had a sort of terrified imitativeness. They just ran about being as far as possible somebody else until they died. Why exist at all then? Why not get out of it and leave some one else in possession? But, anyhow, they got through life. They didn’t get into trouble. They supported one another. And, on the other hand, if you didn’t evade? You puzzled other people. You left the track. You were like a train leaving the rails and trying to take a cross-country short-cut. You hit against—everything.
Was this evasive life she had always despised really the sane life? Was ceasing to evade ceasing to be sane? Sheep, she had read, had a disease called gid; then they wandered alone and died. Was all this originality and thinking for oneself and not going with the crowd and so forth, that had been her pride and glory, just the way out from the sane life? Originality, eccentricity, queerness, craziness, madness; was that merely a quantitative scale?
Was not her Daddy’s queerness this, that after years of the extremest evasion he had at last tried to break away to something real and strange? And had she, after her fashion, been attempting anything else? Was she, too, lop-sided? Lop-sided in a different direction, perhaps, but lop-sided none the less. An inherited lop-sidedness?
Her mind went off at a tangent on the question whether she had really inherited anything whatever from her Daddy. Was his queerness her sort of queerness at all? It ought to be, seeing that they were father and daughter.
How different they were! For a father and daughter how amazingly different they were!...
But were they father and daughter? A much repressed fantasy came back to her—a fantasy based on the flimsiest foundations, on chance phrases her mother had used, on moments of intuition. Once or twice a reverie had arisen out of these lurking particles of memory and had taken her by surprise only to be thrust aside again with contempt.