“After every minute
“Comes another minute
“And then, rest assured,
“Another.
“Like drops from a ledge in the rain.
“You may not want to go on;
“But they will,
“Oh! endlessly
“Taking your life away, death, not final and complete,
“But death in the midst of life,
“Particles of death,
“Death by attrition.
“Drip on Old Death—in life!
“Slow, dull, implacable, unendurable!
“Drip on.”
“That ‘Drip on’ is great. But perhaps you don’t like modern poetry?”
“I don’t mind it,” said Mr. Preemby genially.
“Of course, nothing of a really destructive nature can have happened to that van,” said Mr. Crumb in a pessimistic tone.
When Picton’s van arrived and the roomy wardrobe began its destructive march through the passage, Mr. Crumb called suddenly upon his maker in a loud distressful voice and vanished for the better part of an hour.
Christina Alberta was torn between a sympathetic understanding of Harold’s state of mind and the fear that her Daddy might perceive the unfavourable reaction he produced in Harold and be hurt by it. She and Fay became brightly helpful with the unpacking. “If I might have one of those blue pinafores of Mr. Crumb’s to put on,” said Mr. Preemby, “I’d be glad. These black things of mine show every mark.”
Mr. Crumb’s overall reached far below Mr. Preemby’s knees and somehow justified his calling it a pinafore. It brought out something endearingly infantile in his appearance that appealed to the maternal instinct lurking in Mrs. Crumb. She struggled with a persuasion that he was really a little boy of nine who had been naughty and grown a big moustache and that she had to take care of him and restrain him and generally tell him not to. The books were put in the bookshelves as Mr. Preemby said, “just anyhow”; they could be sorted up later, but the curiosities and specimens took longer and had to be “put out” more or less in the cabinet. There were not only real curiosities and specimens but many little things that Mr. Preemby had accumulated because they looked like curiosities and specimens. There was, for instance, a piece of one of the laundry delivery van mudguards so bent by a collision as to resemble a human torso in the most striking fashion; there was the almost complete skull of an unknown mammal, probably a fallow deer, picked up in Epping Forest, there was a potato, now rather shrivelled, in which it was possible to detect thirty-seven distinct human faces and—specimen of an entirely different quality—a large flint in which there were no less than fifty-five. Ages ago some primordial Preemby had discovered and loved that very same flint and had brought out the likenesses by chipping an eye here or a nostril there; but Mr. Preemby did not suspect the help of that remote and perhaps ancestral hand. Even in waking life Mr. Preemby saw faces in everything. What he would have been like with a high temperature it is impossible to imagine.
Christina Alberta’s anxiety about her father’s reception by the Crumbs diminished as she saw his virtual conquest of Fay. Fay treated him firmly but indulgently, and they lost a good deal of time while she tried to see all the fifty-five faces of the wonderful flint. They had to start and start again, but always they lost count about “Twen-tee” or “Twen-tee-one.” The question would arise whether they were counting one of the faces over again.
Harold returned in a moody state and could be heard, all too distinctly, kicking Mr. Preemby’s packing cases in the hall, but Fay went out to him with a lofty sleep-walking expression in her pale eyes, and the concussions ceased, and presently Harold came downstairs again looking almost handsome in nankeen trousers, a blue jacket with big silver buttons and a voluminous black tie, and was quite nice to Mr. Preemby.
“You won’t mind my touching that wardrobe of yours up a bit?” he said. “It damps us off, as it is. Kind of reproaches us. One of us has to be altered, you see, it or me, and either I paint it or else I get a silk hat with a deep mourning band and a gold-handled umbrella—which would cost no end of money. Whereas I have the paint.”