Lucia Victrix

by E. F. Benson

  ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to finish it this morning,’ said Georgie.

  ‘No chance then of your coming back?’ she asked.

  ‘In August, I hope,’ said he, ‘for I’ve taken Mallards Cottage for two months.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Pillson, that is good news!’ cried Miss Mapp. ‘Lovely! All August and September. Fancy!’

  ‘I’ve got to be away for a week in August,’ said Georgie, ‘as we’ve got an Elizabethan fête at Riseholme. I’m Francis Drake.’

  That was a trove for Miss Mapp and must be published at once. She prepared to flit off.

  ‘Oh how wonderful!’ she said. ‘Dear me, I can quite see you. The Golden Hind! Spanish treasure! All the pomp and majesty. I wonder if I could manage to pop down to see it. But I won’t interrupt you any more. So pleased to think it’s only au reservoir and not good-bye.’

  She walked up the street again, bursting with her budget of news. Only the Wyses could possibly know that Georgie had taken Mallards Cottage, and nobody that he was going to impersonate Francis Drake … There was the Padre talking to Major Benjy, no doubt on his way to the steam-tram, and there were Diva and Irene a little farther on.

  ‘Good morning, Padre: good morning, Major Benjy,’ said she.

  ‘Good morrow, Mistress Mapp,’ said the Padre. ‘An’ hoo’s the time o’ day wi’ ye? ’Tis said you’ve a fair tenant for yon Mallards.’

  Miss Mapp fired off her news in a broadside.

  ‘Indeed, I have, Padre,’ she said. ‘And there’s Mallards Cottage, too, about which you won’t have heard. Mr Pillson has taken that, though he won’t be here all the time as he’s playing Francis Drake in a fête at Riseholme for a week.’

  Major Benjy was not in a very good temper. It was porridge-morning with him, and his porridge had been burned. Miss Mapp already suspected something of the sort, for there had been loud angry sounds from within as she passed his dining-room window.

  ‘That fellow whom I saw with Mrs Lucas this morning with a cape over his arm?’ he said scornfully. ‘Not much of a hand against the Spaniards, I should think. Ridiculous! Tea-parties with a lot of old cats more in his line. Pshaw!’ And away he went to the tram, shovelling passengers off the pavement.

  ‘Porridge burned, I expect,’ said Miss Mapp, thoughtfully, ‘though I couldn’t say for certain. Morning, dear Irene. Another artist is coming to Tilling for August and September.’

  ‘Hoot awa’, woman,’ said Irene, in recognition of the Padre’s presence. ‘I ken that fine, for Mistress Wyse told me half an hour agone.’

  ‘But he’ll be away for a week, though of course you know that, too,’ said Miss Mapp, slightly nettled. ‘Acting Francis Drake in a fête at Riseholme.’

  Diva trundled up.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard, Elizabeth,’ she said in a great hurry, ‘that Mr Pillson has taken Mallards Cottage.’

  Miss Mapp smiled pityingly.

  ‘Quite correct, dear Diva,’ she said. ‘Mr Pillson told me himself hours ago. He’s sketching the Landgate now – a sweet picky – and insisted that I should sit down and chat to him while he worked.’

  ‘Lor! How you draw them all in, Mapp,’ said quaint Irene. ‘He looks a promising young man for his age, but it’s time he had his hair dyed again. Grey at the roots.’

  The Padre tore himself away; he had to hurry home and tell wee wifie.

  ‘Aweel, I mustn’t stand daffing here,’ he said, ‘I’ve got my sermon to think on.’

  Miss Mapp did a little more shopping, hung about on the chance of seeing Lucia again, and then went back to Mallards, to attend to her sweet flowers. Some of the beds wanted weeding, and now as she busied herself with that useful work and eradicated groundsel, each plant as she tore it up and flung it into her basket might have been Mr and Mrs Wyse. It was very annoying that they had stuck their hooks (so the process represented itself to her vigorous imagery) into Lucia, for Miss Mapp had intended to have no one’s hook there but her own. She wanted to run her, to sponsor her, to arrange little parties for her, and cause Lucia to arrange little parties at her dictation, and, while keeping her in her place, show her off to Tilling. Providence, or whatever less beneficent power ruled the world, had not been considerate of her clear right to do this, for it was she who had been put to the expense of advertising Mallards in The Times, and it was entirely owing to that that Lucia had come down here, and wound up that pleasant machine of subletting houses, so that everybody scored financially as well as got a change. But there was nothing to be done about that for the present: she must wait till Lucia arrived here, and then be both benignant and queenly. A very sweet woman, up till now, was her verdict, though possibly lacking in fine discernment, as witnessed by her having made friends with the Wyses. Then there was Georgie: she was equally well disposed towards him for the present, but he, like Lucia, must be good, and recognize that she was the arbiter of all things social in Tilling. If he behaved properly in that regard she would propose him as an honorary member of the Tilling Art Society, and, as member of the hanging committee, see that his work had a conspicuous place on the walls of the exhibition, but it was worth remembering (in case he was not good) that quaint Irene had said that his hair was dyed, and that Major Benjy thought that he would have been very little use against the Spaniards.

  But thinking was hungry work, and weeding was dirty work, and she went indoors to wash her hands for lunch after this exciting morning.

  There was a dreadful block in Porpoise Street when Lucia’s car came to pick up her and Georgie after their breakfast at Starling Cottage, for Mrs Wyse’s Royce was already drawn up there. The two purred and backed and advanced foot by foot, they sidled and stood on pavements meant for pedestrians, and it was not till Lucia’s car had gone backwards again round the corner below Miss Mapp’s garden-room, and Mrs Wyse’s forward towards the High Street, that Lucia’s could come to the door, and the way down Porpoise Street lie open for their departure to Riseholme. As long as they were in sight, Susan stood waving her hand, and Algernon bowing.

  Often during the drive Lucia tried, but always in vain, to start the subject which had kept them both awake last night, and tell Georgie that never would she marry again, but the moment she got near the topic of friendship, or even wondered how long Mrs Plaistow had been a widow or whether Major Benjy would ever marry, Georgie saw a cow or a rainbow or something out of the window and violently directed attention to it. She could not quite make out what was going on in his mind. He shied away from such topics as friendship and widowhood, and she wondered if that was because he was not feeling quite ready yet, but was screwing himself up. If he only would let her develop those topics she could spare him the pain of a direct refusal, and thus soften the blow. But she had to give it up, determining, however, that when he came to dine with her that evening, she would not be silenced by his irrelevances: she would make it quite clear to him, before he embarked on his passionate declaration that, with all her affection for him, she could never marry him … Poor Georgie!

  She dropped him at his house, and as soon as he had told Foljambe about his having taken the house at Tilling (for that must be done at once), he would come across to the Hurst.

  ‘I hope she will like the idea,’ said Georgie very gravely, as he got out, ‘and there is an excellent room for her, isn’t there?’

  Foljambe opened the door to him.

  ‘A pleasant outing, I hope, sir,’ said she.

  ‘Very indeed, thank you, Foljambe,’ said Georgie. ‘And I’ve got great news. Mrs Lucas has taken a house at Tilling for August and September, and so have I. Quite close to hers. You could throw a stone.’

  ‘That’ll be an agreeable change,’ said Foljambe.

  ‘I think you’ll like it. A beautiful bedroom for you.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall,’ said Foljambe.

  Georgie was immensely relieved, and, as he went gaily across to the Hurst, he quite forgot for the time about this menace of matrimony.

&n
bsp; ‘She likes the idea,’ he said before he had opened the gate into Perdita’s garden, where Lucia was sitting.

  ‘Georgie, the most wonderful thing,’ cried she. ‘Oh, Foljambe’ pleased, is she? So glad. An excellent bedroom. I knew she would. But I’ve found a letter from Adele Brixton; you know, Lady Brixton who always goes to America when her husband comes to England, and the other way about, so that they only pass each other on the Atlantic; she wants to take the Hurst for three months. She came down here for a Sunday, don’t you remember, and adored it. I instantly telephoned to say I would let it.’

  ‘Well, that is luck for you,’ said Georgie. ‘But three months – what will you do for the third?’

  ‘Georgie, I don’t know, and I’m not going to think,’ she said. ‘Something will happen: it’s sure to. My dear, it’s perfect rapture to feel the great tide of life flowing again. How I’m going to set to work on all the old interests and the new ones as well. Tilling, the age of Anne, and I shall get a translation of Pope’s Iliad and of Plato’s Symposium till I can rub up my Greek again. I have been getting lazy, and I have been getting – let us go into dinner – narrow. I think you have been doing the same. We must open out, and receive new impressions, and adjust ourselves to new conditions!’

  This last sentence startled Georgie very much, though it might only apply to Tilling, but Lucia did not seem to notice his faltering step as he followed her into the panelled dining-room with the refectory-table, below which it was so hard to adjust the feet with any comfort, owing to the foot-rail.

  ‘Those people at Tilling,’ she said, ‘how interesting it will all be. They seemed to me very much alive, especially the women, who appear to have got their majors and their padres completely under their thumbs. Delicious, isn’t it, to think of the new interchange of experience which awaits us. Here, nothing happens. Our dear Daisy gets a little rounder and Mrs Arbuthnot a little deafer. We’re in a rut: Riseholme is in a rut. We want, both of us, to get out of it, and now we’re going to. Fresh fields and pastures new, Georgie … Nothing on your mind, my dear? You were so distrait as we drove home.’

  Some frightful revivification, thought poor Georgie, had happened to Lucia. It had been delightful, only a couple of days ago, to see her returning to her normal interests, but this repudiation of Riseholme and the craving for the Iliad and Tilling and the Symposium indicated an almost dangerous appetite for novelty. Or was it only that having bottled herself up for a year, it was natural that, the cork being now out, she should overflow in these ebullitions? She seemed to be lashing her tail, goading herself to some further revelation of her mental or spiritual needs. He shuddered at the thought of what further novelty might be popping out next. The question perhaps.

  ‘I’m sorry I was distrait,’ said he. ‘Of course I was anxious about how Foljambe might take the idea of Tilling.’

  Lucia struck the pomander, and it was a relief to Georgie to know that Grosvenor would at once glide in … She laughed and laid her hand affectionately on his.

  ‘Georgie, dear, you are’ – she took refuge in Italian as Grosvenor appeared – ‘you are una vecchia signorina.’ (That means ‘old maid’, thought Georgie.) ‘Wider horizons, Georgie: that is what you want. Put the rest of the food on the table, Grosvenor, and we’ll help ourselves. Coffee in the music-room when I ring.’

  This was ghastly: Lucia, with all this talk of his being an old maid and needing to adapt himself to new conditions, was truly alarming. He almost wondered if she had been taking monkey-gland during her seclusion. Was she going to propose to him in the middle of dinner? Never, in all the years of his friendship with her, had he felt himself so strangely alien. But he was still the master of his fate (at least he hoped so), and it should not be that.

  ‘Shall I give you some strawberry fool?’ he asked miserably.

  Lucia did not seem to hear him.

  ‘Georgie, we must have ickle talk, before I ring for coffee,’ she said. ‘How long have you and I been dear friends? Longer than either of us care to think.’

  ‘But all so pleasant,’ said Georgie, rubbing his cold moist hands on his napkin … He wondered if drowning was anything like this.

  ‘My dear, what do the years matter, if they have only deepened and broadened our friendship? Happy years, Georgie, bringing their sheaves with them. That lovely scene in Esmondi; Winchester Cathedral! And now we’re both getting on. You’re rather alone in the world, and so am I, but people like us with this dear strong bond of friendship between us can look forward to old age – can’t we? – without any qualms. Tranquillity comes with years, and that horrid thing which Freud calls sex is expunged. We must read some Freud, I think; I have read none at present. That was one of the things I wanted to say all the time that you would show me cows out of the window. Our friendship is just perfect as it is.’

  Georgie’s relief when he found that Foljambe liked the idea of Tilling was nothing, positively nothing, to the relief he felt now.

  ‘My dear, how sweet of you to say that,’ he said. ‘I, too, find the quality of our friendship perfect in every way. Quite impossible, in fact, to think of – I mean, I quite agree with you. As you say, we’re getting on in years, I mean I am. You’re right a thousand times.’

  Lucia saw the sunlit dawn of relief in Georgie’s face, and though she had been quite sincere in hoping that he would not be terribly hurt when she hinted to him that he must give up all hopes of being more to her than he was, she had not quite expected this effulgence. It was as if instead of pronouncing his sentence, she had taken from him some secret burden of terrible anxiety. For the moment her own satisfaction at having brought this off without paining him was swallowed up in surprise that he was so far from being pained. Was it possible that all his concern to interest her in cows and rainbows was due to apprehension that she might be leading up, via the topics of friendship and marriage, to something exceedingly different from the disclosure which had evidently gratified him rather than the reverse?

  She struck the pomander quite a sharp blow.

  ‘Let us go and have our coffee then,’ she said. ‘It is lovely that we are of one mind. Lovely! And there’s another subject we haven’t spoken about at all. Miss Mapp. What do you make of Miss Mapp? There was a look in her eye when she heard we were going to lunch with Mrs Wyse that amazed me. She would have liked to bite her or scratch her. What did it mean? It was as if Mrs Wyse – she asked me to call her Susan by the way, but I’m not sure that I can manage it just yet without practising – as if Mrs Wyse had pocketed something of hers. Most extraordinary. I don’t belong to Miss Mapp. Of course it’s easy to see that she thinks herself very much superior to all the rest of Tilling. She says that all her friends are angels and lambs, and then just crabs them a little. Marcate mie parole, Georgino! I believe she wants to run me. I believe Tilling is seething with intrigue. But we shall see. How I hate all that sort of thing! We have had a touch of it now and then in Riseholme. As if it mattered who took the lead! We should aim at being equal citizens of a noble republic, where art and literature and all the manifold interests of the world are our concern. Now let us have a little music.’

  Whatever might be the state of affairs at Tilling, Riseholme during this month of July boiled and seethed with excitements. It was just like old times, and all circled, as of old, round Lucia. She had taken the plunge; she had come back (though just now for so brief a space before her entering upon Mallards) into her native centrality. Gradually, and in increasing areas, grey and white and violet invaded the unrelieved black in which she had spent the year of her widowhood; one day she wore a white belt, another there were grey panels in her skirt, another her garden-hat had a violet riband on it. Even Georgie, who had a great eye for female attire, could not accurately follow these cumulative changes: he could not be sure whether she had worn a grey cloak before, or whether she had had white gloves in church last Sunday. Then, instead of letting her hair droop in slack and mournful braids over her ears, it resumed its old
polished and corrugated appearance, and on her pale cheeks (ashen with grief) there bloomed a little brown rouge, which made her look as if she had been playing golf again, and her lips certainly were ruddier. It was all intensely exciting, a series of subtle changes at the end of which, by the middle of July, her epiphany in church without anything black about her, and with the bloom of her vitality quite restored, passed almost unremarked.

  These outward and visible signs were duly representative of what had taken place within. Time, the great healer, had visited her sick-room, laid his hand on her languid brow, and the results were truly astonishing. Lucia became as good as new, or as good as old. Mrs Arbuthnot and her tall daughters, Piggy and Goosie, Georgie and Daisy and her husband, greedy Robert, Colonel Boucher and his wife, and the rest were all bidden to dinner at the Hurst once more, and sometimes Lucia played to them the slow movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, and sometimes she instructed them in such elements of Contract Bridge as she had mastered during the day. She sketched, she played the organ in church in the absence of the organist who had measles, she sang a solo, ‘O for the wings of a Dove’ when he recovered and the leading chorister got chicken-pox, she had lessons in book-binding at ‘Ye Signe of ye Daffodille’, she sat in Perdita’s garden, not reading Shakespeare, but Pope’s Iliad, and murmured half-forgotten fragments of Greek irregular verbs as she went to sleep. She had a plan for visiting Athens in the spring (‘“the violet-crowned”, is not that a lovely epithet, Georgie?’) and in compliment to Queen Anne regaled her guests with rich thick chocolate. The hounds of spring were on the winter traces of her widowhood, and snapped up every fragment of it, and indeed spring seemed truly to have returned to her, so various and so multi-coloured were the blossoms that were unfolding. Never at all had Riseholme seen Lucia in finer artistic and intellectual fettle, and it was a long time since she had looked so gay. The world, or at any rate Riseholme, which at Riseholme came to much the same thing, had become her parish again.