Christina Alberta's father

by H. G. Wells

A distinct flavour of friendliness for Devizes crept by imperceptible degrees into Bobby’s mind. Difficulties that had seemed to threaten his explanation vanished; this man, he perceived, could understand anything a fellow did. Devizes made him feel that the extraction of Sargon from Cummerdown by a perfect stranger was the most simple and natural thing to do imaginable. Bobby warmed to his story; his sense of humour took heart of grace, and he became frank and amusing about his difficulties on the visiting day. As he was telling of the foxy-faced deaf mute, Christina Alberta came back again into the downstairs room.

“He takes me as a matter of course,” she said. “He seems weak and drowsy and his chest is bad.” She spoke more definitely to Devizes. “I think you ought to overhaul him.”

“There is a doctor in attendance?” he asked Bobby.

Bobby explained. Devizes considered. Was Sargon dozing? Yes. Then let him doze for a bit. Bobby, working now a little more consciously for effect, went on with his story. Christina Alberta regarded him with manifest approval.

By tea-time Bobby had adjusted his mind to the existence of Devizes and the unexpectedness of Christina Alberta. All that carried over from his state of expectation was the idea that his relations with Christina Alberta were to be very profound and intimate. He still believed that, hidden away in her somewhere, there must be a blue-eyed, yielding, really feminine person, but it was very deeply hidden. Meanwhile the superimposed disguise struck him as agreeable, alert, humorous, and friendly. Devizes too he saw more and more as a strong, capable, understanding personality. He had seen Devizes examining Sargon, and it was clever, confidence-provoking doctoring. Sargon’s lungs, he said, were badly congested, especially on the left side; he was on the edge of pneumonia and without much vitality to fight it. He ought to be kept in a warmer, less draughty room with a night-nurse available. Mrs. Plumer had no room for a nurse, and not an hour away by automobile was Paul Lambone’s excessively comfortable week-end cottage at Udimore. A little masterly telephoning and telegraphing and the cottage was available, fires were alight in the best bedroom, a trained nurse was on her way to it, and it was all settled for Sargon, warmly wrapped up and fortified with hot-water bottles, to go thither. Bobby found himself a mere accessory in this new system of things; he was to follow next day to Udimore on his motor bicycle, for there would be room for all of them in Paul Lambone’s cottage. Apparently Paul Lambone’s conception of a simple cottage in the wilderness involved a housekeeper, several servants, and four or five visitors’ rooms.

This fellow Devizes carried out all his arrangements with a smooth competence that gave Bobby no scope for self-assertion. Sargon and Christina Alberta and Devizes would depart at five and get to Udimore by six, by which time the nurse would be installed. Then Devizes would go back to London and get there in time to dress for a dinner he had to attend. On Saturday morning he would be busy in London, and then he would come back to Udimore and see if Sargon was recovered enough for the beginnings of his mental treatment. Perhaps the unknown Paul Lambone would be there too. He was a lazy person, Bobby gathered; he’d have to be brought down by Devizes. Bobby was to stay at Udimore for some days. He made modest protestations. “No, you’re in it now,” said Devizes cheerfully and glanced at Christina Alberta. “You’re in for Sargon like the rest of us. Bring your work with you.”

“Yes, do come,” said Christina Alberta.

The only reason Bobby had for resisting the invitation was that it attracted him so much.

§ 3

This “cottage” at Udimore, which struck Bobby as being a really very pretty and comfortable modern house, and these three people, Christina Alberta, Devizes and Paul Lambone, who now grouped themselves round Sargon, exercised his mind in a quite extraordinary way. They struck him as being novel and definite to a degree he’d never met in anyone before, and even the house was fresh and decisive in its broad white grace, like no house that had ever before held his attention. It made most of the other houses he had ever observed seem accidental and aggregatory and second-hand and wandering in their purpose. But this house was the work of a clever young architect who had considered Paul Lambone intelligently, and its white rough-cast walls sat comfortably on the hill-side and looked with an honest, entirely detached admiration at Rye and across the marsh to Winchelsea and the remote blue sea; and it had seats and arbours and a gazebo for sitting about in, and up hill was a walled garden with broad paths up which you looked from the back of the house through lead-paned windows. You could watch the sunset from a number of excellent points of view, but it did not shine upon any room to weary and blind you. There was a kind wall to shelter hollyhocks and delphiniums from the south-west wind, and to bear a plum or so and a pear and a fig tree. Downstairs was mainly one great rambling room with a dining recess in one corner and the power of opening itself out into a loggia, and with conversational centres about fire-places or windows as the season might require, but there were several little studies about the house in which one could be shut off and write. Bookshelves grew in convenient corners, and the house was everywhere mysteriously warm from unseen and scarce suspected radiators. The house was so like Paul Lambone, and Paul Lambone so much a part of his house that he seemed to be really no more than its voice and its eyes.