Christina Alberta's father

by H. G. Wells

There were many little things awaiting attention at the laundry, and after two or three cigarettes Mr. Preemby decided, “It’s time for us to be going, Christina Alberta.” “We’ll work it out all right,” said Harold on their departure.

There were intervals of meditation as Mr. Preemby and Christina Alberta returned in the train from Liverpool Street to Woodford Wells. “It’s not what I’ve been accustomed to,” said Mr. Preemby. “It’s all very different from the way your mother used to manage things.... Less orderly.... Of course I could keep my clothes locked up in my trunk.”

“You’ll do all right. They’re perfect Dears. She loves you tremendously already,” said Christina Alberta.

§ 3

But before she went to sleep that night Christina Alberta experienced compunction. She felt compunction about these arrangements she was making for her Daddy. She doubted whether he would be truly comfortable and happy in that studio in Lonsdale Mews, and able to lead the life of steadfast curiosity he anticipated with so much quiet pleasure—ever humming to himself about it and working his moustache and saying “h’rrmp,” when he was not otherwise engaged.

This story, it cannot be too often reiterated, is the story of Mr. Preemby who became, as we shall tell in due course, Sargon, King of Kings. But Christina Alberta has got herself hatched into this story very much like a young cuckoo in a wagtail’s nest and it is impossible to ignore her. She was virtually in control of him and she had the egotism of her sex and age.

She had also a pitiless conscience. It was almost the only thing she could not manage in her life. It managed her. It was a large, crystalline conscience with no foundations and no relationships; it just flooded by itself in her being; it was her gravitational centre and the rest of her could not get away from it.

When Christina Alberta went up for examination and judgment before Christina Alberta there was no nonsense in the proceedings, a fearful frankness; it was cards on the table, everything in evidence, no etiquette, not a stitch on, X-rays if necessary. These examinations were all the more terrible because they were done in what was practically an empty room, without screens, curtains, standards or general beliefs of any sort. It is appalling to think of the drapery and function that was absent from Christina Alberta’s court of conscience. In the first place Christina Alberta was completely and explicitly irreligious. In the next she was theoretically anti-social and amoral. She did not believe in respectability, Christian morality, the institution of the family, the capitalist system, or the British Empire. She would say so with extreme plainness and considerable detail except when her parent was about. Prevalent winds of sentiment did not stir her. She did not find the Prince of Wales ravishing nor Punch funny. She thought modern dancing tiresome, though she did it very well, and Wimbledon tennis and tennis-talk an intolerable bore. She favoured Bolshevism because everybody she disliked abused it and she hoped for a world-wide social revolution of an entirely destructive and cleansing type. What was to follow this revolution Christina Alberta, with the happy confidence of youth, did not seem to mind.

It is not for us to speculate here why a young woman born and bred between Woodford Wells and central London in the opening years of the twentieth century should confront the world with a mind so entirely swept and void of positive and restraining convictions; we put the fact on record. And if she had been sustained by all the beliefs in Christendom and a sure and certain respect for every detail of the social code, whatever that code may be, she could not have confronted the world with a more cheerful confidence, nor with a stronger persuasion that Christina Alberta had to behave, in some undefined fashion, well. Christina Alberta had to be Christina Alberta, clear and sound, or the court of conscience made things plain and hard for her.

“Christina Alberta,” the court would say, “you are the dirtiest, filthiest little thing that ever streaked the dust of life. How do you propose to get clean again?”