Christina Alberta's father

by H. G. Wells

“I have always wanted to know things, but now I shall have the will really to know them. I shall be different now. It seems incredible that a little while ago I was bothered about what I should do with my time. Now I am only eager to get at things, and however long my time may be I know it will be full. It is astonishing to me that there has been flying in my kingdom for a dozen years, and I have never been in an aeroplane. I must look at the world from an aeroplane. And perhaps I shall need to go to India and China and suchlike strange and wonderful countries, because they, too, are a part of my inheritance. I need to know about them. And jungles and wildernesses that we have to subjugate; I have to see them. The beasts are under us; we have to cherish them or destroy them mercifully as the necessities of our kingdom may require. It is a terrible thing even to be lord of a beast. All the beasts, wild or tame, are under our dominion. And there is science. All the wonderful work men do in laboratories and their marvellous discoveries are our care. If I do not understand I may hinder. How blind I have been to the splendour of my life. When I think of all these things, I can hardly endure to be here in bed; I am so impatient to get on with them. But I suppose I must be patient with these poor wheezing lungs.

“Patient,” he repeated.

He looked at his wrist-watch and it had stopped. “Can you tell me the time? At seven I ought to take some more of that excellent tonic. It is working wonders in me. But no! don’t trouble; the nurse will be thinking of it.... It puts fresh life into me.”

§ 6

But Sargon did not live forty years more, nor thirty, nor twenty. He lived just a day under seven weeks from that conversation. He stayed in bed for two days after Bobby returned to London; then Lambone also went and he became intractable. As his strength returned he bothered his nurse more and more for books he couldn’t name or describe, and for volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica; and when she declared that seven volumes of that monumental publication were surely as much as any invalid could need at one time, he got up and put on his rough little dressing-gown and came paddling downstairs, h’rrmping resolutely, to the library. After that he got up for three days running. A fire was made in the most bookish corner of the downstairs room and screens put to keep him warm. But his tonic was driving him, perhaps it was too stimulating a tonic, and he would not stay in his protected corner.

The nurse seems to have been a weak, complaining character, indisposed to act without authority. She telephoned through to Devizes in London, but she did not succeed in making clear to him the gravity of Sargon’s misbehaviour. The crowning offence came when he wouldn’t go to bed at seven, but instead slipped out, in an overcoat and a wrapper indeed but in slippers, upon the terrace before the house. His bare ankles and legs were exposed to the cold wind. The slow-moving periodic beams of light from the lighthouse upon the coast, sweeping across the phantom hills under the clear starlight, had drawn him out, those processional lights, and Sirius that white splendour, and the steadfast sprawling glory of Orion. It was a clear November night with frost in the air. The nurse heard him cough and rushed out to him. He was looking at Sirius through Lambone’s field-glasses and she had to drag him in by main force. She lost her temper; there was an ungracious struggle.

The next day he was in no state to leave his bed. Yet he tossed about and exposed his inflamed chest in feeble attempts to read. “I know nothing,” he complained. For a while he got better again, and then it is highly probable that he went to his open window in the night and sat for a long time wondering at the stars. After that came a relapse and a week or so of struggle, and then after a phase of delirium came great weakness, and then one night, death. He was quite alone when he died.

Bobby had not expected the death at all. He heard of it from Christina Alberta with great astonishment. He had been told nothing of Sargon being worse nor of his misbehaviour; he had been thinking of him rather enviously as growing steadily stronger and better and gratifying day by day a happy and expanding curiosity. He had looked forward presently to another talk and another phase in this odd belated adolescence. It was as though an interesting story had come to an abrupt end in the middle, as though all its concluding chapters had been torn out rudely and unreasonably.

This mood of frustrated sympathy lasted over the cremation of Sargon at Golders Green. Bobby went to that queer ceremony. He arrived late with Billy; the coffin that held the little body stood ready to glide into the furnace, the Church of England burial service had already begun. There were very few people in the chapel. Christina Alberta in the black she had worn for her mother was in the front seat, as chief mourner, between Paul Lambone and Devizes. Behind her with an air of earnest support were Harold and Fay Crumb, astonishingly in deep mourning and following the service meticulously in two prayer-books. An unpleasant-looking individual with a very long pock-marked sheep’s face, small eyes and habitual-looking blacks turned round and stared at Bobby as he came in. He was accompanied by a very large blonde lady who seemed to have slept in her mourning under a bed. Relations of the deceased? The air of relationship was unmistakable. Behind, a young woman and two detached old ladies seemed to be indulging a simple propensity for funeral services at large. They completed the congregation.

Christina Alberta looked unusually small and overshadowed by her two odd men friends. It was a grey day outside, and the general effect of the gathering was thin and scattered and damp and chilly. The organ was playing as Bobby came in, and he thought he had never heard a less musical organ. The service as it went on sounded more and more trite and theological and insincere. What an old second-hand damp mackintosh the Church of England is, thought Bobby, for a striving soul to wear? But then what can any religion in the world really be in the face of normal death? Theologically one should rejoice when a good man dies, but none of these religions had had the pluck to brazen it out to that extent. None can get rid of the effect of confrontation with a blank amazing interrogation. Was there anything within that coffin there that heard or cared a jot for those sombre mummeries?