Christina Alberta's Father by H. G. Wells (Illustrated) (eBook)

H. G. Wells (Autor)

H. G. Wells (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
233 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-1-78656-592-1 (ISBN)

Infos

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'Christina Alberta's Father' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of H. G. Wells'.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Wells includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

eBook features:
* The complete unabridged text of 'Christina Alberta's Father'
* Beautifully illustrated with images related to Wells's works
* Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook
* Excellent formatting of the text

Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

Textauszug

CHAPTER THE SECOND

CHRISTINA ALBERTA

1

THIS story, it was clearly explained in the first paragraph of the first section of the first chapter, is a story about Mr. Preemby in the later years, the widower years, of his life. That statement has all the value of an ordinary commercial guarantee, and on no account shall we ever wander far from Mr. Preemby. But the life of his daughter was so closely interwoven with his own during that time that it is necessary to tell many things about her distinctly and explicitly before we get our real story properly begun. And even after it has begun, and while it goes on, and right up to the end, Christina Alberta will continue to intrude.

Intrusion was in her nature. She was never what is called an engaging child. But she always had a great liking for her daddy and he had the greatest affection and respect for her.

She had little or no tact, and there was always something remote and detached, something of the fairy changeling about her. Even her personal appearance was tactless. She had a prominent nose which tended to grow larger, whereas Mrs. Preemby’s nose was small and bright and pinched between her glasses, and her father’s delicately chiselled and like some brave little boat shooting a great cascade of moustache; she was dark and both her parents were fair. As she grew up the magic forces of adolescence assembled her features into a handsome effect, but she was never really pretty. Her eyes were brown and bright and hard. She had her mother’s thin-lipped, resolute mouth and modestly determined chin. And she had her mother’s clear firm skin and bright colour. She was a humming, shouting, throwing, punching child with a tendency not to hear admonitions and an almost instinctive dexterity in avoiding sudden slaps. She flitted about. She might be up the drying-ground or she might be under your bed. The only thing to do was to down and look.

She danced. Neither Mr. Preemby nor Mrs. Preemby danced, and this continual jiggeting about perplexed and worried them. A piano or a distant band would set her dancing or she would dance to her own humming; she danced to hymn-tunes and on a Sunday. There was a standing offer from Mr. Preemby of sixpence if ever she sat quiet for five minutes, but it was never taken up.

At her first school, a mixed day-school in Buckhurst Hill, she was first of all extremely unpopular and then extremely popular and then she was expelled. Afterwards she did fairly well at the Taverners’ Girls’ School at Woodford, where she was recognized from the first as a humorist. There was always a difficulty in calling her any other name than Christina Alberta. People tried all sorts of names but none of them stuck but “Christina Alberta.”

“Babs” and “Baby” and “Bertie” and “Buss” she was called at home and “Ally” and “Tina,” and at school they tried “Nosey” and “Suds” and “Feet” and “Preemy” and “Prim.” Also “Golliwog” because of her hair at hockey. These all came off again, and left the original name exposed.

She was quick at her lessons and particularly at history, geography, and drawing, but disrespectful to her teachers; at school hockey she played forward right with marked success. She could run like the wind, and she never seemed blown. Her pinch was simply frightful. She could make sudden grimmaces with her nose that gave the weaker sort hysterics. She was particularly disposed to do this at school prayers.

Between her mother and herself there was a streak of animosity. It was not a very broad streak, but it was there. Her mother seemed to cherish some incommunicable grievance against her. It didn’t prevent Mrs. Preemby from doing her duty by the child, but it restrained any real warmth of affection between them. From an early age it was Daddy got the kisses and got climbed over and pulled about. He returned this affection. He called her “my own little girl” and would even say at times that she was a Wonder. He took her for walks with him and told her many secret things that were in his mind, about the Lost Atlantis and the Lamas of Tibet and the fundamentals of Astrology preserved indecipherably in the proportions of the pyramids. He’d often wished, he said, to have a good look at the pyramids. Sometimes one man saw things that others didn’t. She would listen intently, although not always in quite the right spirit.

He would tell her of the virtue and science of Atlantis. “They walked about in long white robes,” he said. “More like Bible characters than human beings.”

“Good for the laundries, Daddy,” said Christina Alberta.

“All we know of astrology is just fragments of what they knew. They knew the past and future.”

“Pity they were all drowned,” she remarked without apparent irony.

“Maybe they weren’t all drowned,” he said darkly.

“You don’t mean there’s Atlantics about nowadays.”

“Some may have escaped. Descendants may be nearer than you suppose. Why you and me, Christina, we may have Atlantic blood!”

His manner conveyed his conviction.

“It doesn’t seem to help much,” she said.

“Helps more than you think. Hidden gifts. Insight. Things like that. We aren’t common persons, Christina Alberta.”

For some moments the two of them pursued independent reveries.

“Still we don’t know we’re Atlantics,” said Christina Alberta.

2

After she had fought her way to the sixth form in the Taverners’ School the educational outlook of Christina Alberta was troubled by dissensions both within the school and without. The staff was divided about her; her discipline was bad, her class work rank or vile, but she passed examinations, and particularly external examinations by independent examiners, with conspicuous success. There was a general desire to get her out of the school; but whether that was to be done by a university scholarship or a simple request to her parents to take her away, was a question under dispute. The games mistress was inclined to regard murder as a third possible course because of the girl’s utter disregard for style in games, her unsportsmanlike trick of winning them in irregular and unexpected ways, and her tendency to make drill and gymnastics an occasion for a low facetiousness far more suitable for the ordinary class-room. The English and Literature mistress concurred — although Christina Alberta would spend hours over her essays working in sentences and paragraphs from Pater and Ruskin and Hazlitt so that they might pass as her own original constructions. It was not Christina Alberta’s fault if ever and again these threads of literary gold were marked in red ink, “Clumsy” or “Might be better expressed” or “Too flowery.” Only the head-mistress had a really good word for Christina Alberta. But then the head-mistress, as became her position, made a speciality of understanding difficult cases.

And Christina Alberta was always quietly respectful to the head-mistress, and could produce a better side to her nature with the most disconcerting alacrity whenever the head-mistress was called in.

Christina Alberta, as soon as the issue became clear to her, decided for the scholarship. She reformed almost obtrusively; she became tidy, she ceased to be humorous, she lost sets of tennis to the games-mistress like a little sportswoman, and she stopped arguing and became the sedulous ape of Stevenson for the estranged English mistress. But it was up-hill work even in the school. There was a little too much elegant surrender in her reformed tennis and a little too much parody about her English in velveteen. The possibility that she would ever join that happy class of girls who go in from the suburbs to classes in London and lead the higher life beyond parental inspection and sometimes until quite late in the evening in studios, laboratories, and college lecture-rooms, seemed a very insecure one, even without reckoning with the quiet but determined opposition of her mother.

For Mrs. Preemby was not the woman to like a daughter educated above her parentage and station. She came to lament her weakness in not bringing Christina Alberta into the laundry as she herself had been brought in at the age of fourteen. Then she would have learnt the business from the ground up, and have qualified herself to help and at last succeed her mother, even as Mrs. Preemby had helped and succeeded Mrs. Hossett. But the school with its tennis and music and French and so forth had turned the girl against this clean and cleansing life. She was rising seventeen now, and the sooner she abandoned these things which lead straight to school-teaching, spinsterhood, Italian holidays, “art” clothes, and stuck-up incapacity, the better for her and every one.

She made a campaign against Christina Alberta’s habit of sitting about in unladylike attitudes and reading; and when Mr. Preemby took the unusual and daring course of saying that it was a bit hard on the girl, and that he didn’t see any harm in a book or so now and then, Mrs. Preemby took him up to Christina Alberta’s own little room to see what came of it, and more particularly to see the sort of pictures she’d stuck up there. Even when he was confronted with a large photographic reproduction of Michael Angelo’s creation of Adam as the master had painted that event on the roof of the Sistine...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.7.2017
• Reihe/Serie: Delphi Parts Edition (H. G. Wells)
• Reihe/Serie: Delphi Parts Edition (H. G. Wells)
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Anthologien
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: complete • Island • Kipps • Polly • Science • Time • war
• ISBN-10: 1-78656-592-7 / 1786565927
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78656-592-1 / 9781786565921