At the top he turned and waved his hand to her before he disappeared. “Good night,” she whispered and started, and looked about her as if she feared that her unspoken thoughts had been audible.
Father. Her father!
So real fathers leave one aglow like this!
He had left her tense as a violin string on which the bow rests motionless. Now Daddy, who wasn’t her father, she would just have hugged and kissed.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
How Bobby Stole a Lunatic
§ 1
A MAN may be a mental expert and yet fail to take the most obvious hints in a detective investigation. The medical superintendent at Cummerdown Hill had doubted for a moment whether Widgery was the name of Sargon’s visitor. He had thought it was more like Goodchild. But since there was no known Goodchild in the world of Christina Alberta, neither she nor Devizes had troubled to scrutinize this momentary uncertainty. Nor had she and Devizes asked themselves why Widgery should have made a second visit to his cousin. Indeed, he had not done so. It was a much younger man who had visited Sargon that Tuesday; he had falsely represented himself as Sargon’s nephew and given the name of “Robin Goodchild.” His real name was Robert Roothing, and he had come for the sole purpose of getting Sargon out of the asylum as soon as possible, because he could not endure the thought of his staying there.
Circumstances had conspired with a natural predisposition to give Bobby a great horror of all restraint. His mother, a gentle dark creature, the wife of a large blond negligent landowner, had died when Bobby was twelve; and he had been entrusted to the care of a harsh, old-fashioned aunt—to whom the cupboard seemed a proper place for discipline. When she discovered that he was really distressed by it, she sought to break his “cowardice” by giving him quite liberal doses of it—even when he had committed no offence. He went to a school where discipline was maintained by “keeping-in.” The war eliminated his father, who died suddenly of over-excitement while in command of an anti-aircraft gun during an air-raid, and it led Bobby through some tiresome campaigning in Mesopotamia and the beleaguerment of Kut to an extremely unsympathetic Turkish prison. In any case he would probably have been a free-going easy creature, but now he had so passionate a hatred of cages that he wanted to release even canaries. He disliked the iron fences round the public parks and squares with a propagandist passion, he wrote articles about them in Wilkins’ Weekly and elsewhere clamouring for their “liberation,” and he never went by train if he could help it because of the claustrophobia that assailed him in the compartment. He would ride a push-bike except for long distances, and then he would borrow Billy’s motor bicycle. He did his best to prevent his craving for the large and open from becoming too conspicuous or a nuisance to other people, but Tessy and Billy understood about it and did their best to make things easy for him.
It was not only claustrophobia that Bobby had to fight against. He carried on a secret internal conflict with a disinclination to act upon most occasions, that he believed had developed in him as a result of war experiences. Sometimes it seemed to him to be just indolence, sometimes fastidiousness, sometimes sheer funk and cowardice. He could not tell. He had a rankling memory of a case of cruelty he had witnessed in the prisoners’ camp when he had stood by and done nothing. He would wake up sometimes at three o’clock in the morning and say to himself aloud, “I stood by and I did nothing. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” And at times he would walk up and down his study repeating: “Act! You vegetable! you hiding cur! Out and act!” Meanwhile he obeyed routines and did whatever came to his hand. As “Aunt Suzannah” he was excellent, indefatigably considerate, lucid, really helpful. Wilkins’ Weekly was proud of him. He was the backbone of the paper.
And now this affair of Sargon’s had twisted him up very badly between his desire to free the little man, who had taken an extraordinary hold upon his imagination and sympathy, and his sense of the immense forces against which he would have to pit himself if he tried to give him any help. It was only after a considerable struggle with himself that he had called at the police station and the Gifford Street Workhouse. He was afraid of awkward questions, afraid above all of being “detained.” The workhouse was a detestable place with high walls and a paved court and a general effect of sinister seclusion from the grubby street outside. For the best part of a day after his Gifford Street visit he hesitated whether he should do anything more.