Christina Alberta's father

by H. G. Wells

Paul Lambone was the first successful writer Bobby had ever met. Bobby knew various needy young writers, tadpole writers, insecure writers, but this was the first completely grown-up and established and massively adult writer he had ever known. The man struck Bobby as being stupendously secure and free and prosperous. And the remarkable thing was that he was in no way a great writer, no Dickens nor Scott nor Hardy; his work wasn’t, after all, in Bobby’s opinion anything so very remotely above Bobby’s own efforts. A certain terseness he had at times, a certain penetration: those were the chief differences. In Bobby’s imagination the literary and artistic life had hitherto had an unavoidable flavour of casual adventure, glorious achievements, maddening difficulties, wild delights and tragic unhappinesses. Swift, Savage, Goldsmith, the Carlyles, Balzac, Dumas, Edgar Allan Poe, these had been his types. But this new bright house was as sound and comfortable as any country house, and Lambone sat in it with as safe a dignity as though he was a provincial banker or a mine owner or the senior member of some widespread firm of solicitors. No fears of losing his “job” or “writing himself out” oppressed him. He said and did exactly what he thought proper, and the policeman saluted him as he passed.

If this sort of thing could spring from the Book of Everyday Wisdom and Paul’s amiable novels, what hitherto unsuspected possibilities of accumulation and ease and security and helpfulness might there not be in Aunt Suzannah’s kindly responsiveness? It had never before seemed credible to Bobby that a day might come when he would be secure and his own master, able to refuse limitations himself and to release other people from limitations. All Bobby’s life hitherto had been a matter of direction and eminent necessity. He had been sent to school and sent to college. He had been on the eve of being put into the position of agent upon a friendly estate when the Great War had seized upon him and the rest of his generation and drilled him and sent him off to Mesopotamia. And after the war he had had to do something to supplement his diminished inheritance. Life had been so indicated and prescribed for him at every stage, his parents’ existence had been so entirely directed by a class tradition, that Bobby’s mind was exceptionally well prepared to be impressed by Paul Lambone’s freedoms.

It was curious to note how completely Paul Lambone arose out of the present-day world, and how completely he didn’t belong to it. He had all its advantages and so little of its standard obligations. He had escaped from it with most of its gifts. He had to go to no court, follow no seasons, make no calls, and perform no functions. Was he exceptional in his circumstances altogether, or were there a lot of people escaping, as he was escaping, prosperously, from the old decaying social system? a queer sort of new people who didn’t belong?

Bobby sat on the terrace and looked over the back of his seat at this extremely new but very sightly and comfortable cottage of Lambone’s, with this freshly arrived idea of a new sort of people getting loose in the world and living unrelated to the old order of things and shaping out new ways of living, very active in his mind. This house seemed to embody that idea; it was new and novel, but not a bit apologetic nor rebellious. It was just breaking out like a new fashion. It was just arising like a new century. He had always assumed that revolutions came from below through the rage of the excluded and the disinherited. He had thought every one took that for granted. But suppose revolutions were merely smashes-up that hadn’t very much to do with real progress either way, and that the new age dawned anywhere in the social order where people could get free enough to work out new ideas.

New ideas!

Sargon was new, Paul Lambone was new, Devizes new; before the war there could not have been any such people. They had grown out of their own past selves; they were as different from pre-war people as nineteenth-century people had been different from eighteenth-century people. Newest of all was this Christina Alberta who had effaced her blue-eyed predecessor. She was so direct and free in her thoughts and talk that she made Bobby feel that his own mind wore a bonnet and flounces. He had gone for two walks with her, once to Brede and once to Rye, and he liked her tremendously. Whether he was in love with her he didn’t yet know. Falling in love with her for anyone was evidently going to be a quite unconventional, untested, and difficult series of exercises. Nothing at all like that unborn normal affair with the non-existent blue-eyed girl.

She seemed to like him, and particularly the way his hair grew on his head. She had mentioned it twice and ruffled it once.

A queer aspect of the situation was the riddle of how she and Sargon and himself came to be the guests of Paul Lambone with Devizes in attendance. It was just a part of Paul Lambone’s freedom from prescription that he should be able to give sanctuary to Sargon and assemble this odd, unconventional week-end party. But Bobby had a sense of hidden links and missing clues. Devizes was a natural enough visitor, of course; he was manifestly Lambone’s close friend. But their interest in Sargon was stronger than Bobby could imagine it ought to be. He was puzzled; he examined all sorts of possibilities in a gingerly fashion. Some impulse like his own, no doubt, but not quite the same, lay at the bottom of this—Sargonism.

Bobby had begun by feeling very hostile to Devizes as an unexpected intruder on a system of relationships sufficiently interesting without him. He was glad that he had to go to London for Friday, and not particularly pleased by his return on Saturday. Then he found his feelings changing to a curious respect, mingled with a defensive element that was almost like fear.

Devizes was more aware of you than Lambone. He looked at you, his mind came at you. It had the habit of coming at people. He was more actively and aggressively interested in things than Lambone and more self-forgetful. Lambone observed enough to make bright comments; Devizes made penetrating observations. Bobby often felt encumbered with himself; most people he thought were encumbered with themselves, but Devizes to a conspicuous degree wasn’t. He was a man of science; a man of scientific habits. Bobby had known one or two scientific men before, rather wrapped away from ordinary things, but the interest that wrapped them was something that wrapped them away from oneself; one had been concerned chiefly with stresses in glass and another with the eggs of echinoderms. You always seemed to be looking at the backs of these fellows’ heads and smiling at their immense preoccupation. But this man Devizes was wrapped up in the motives and thoughts of people; he didn’t look away from you; he looked into you. That grew upon Bobby’s consciousness. Devizes’ eye lacked delicacy.