by E. F. Benson
She hurried off to stop any possibility of such depredation, and had made some telling allusions to the eighth commandment when on a second peal of the town-crier’s bell, the procession of mummers came down the steps of the garden-room and advancing across the lawn disappeared behind the stage. Poor Major Benjy (so weak of him to allow himself to be dragged into this sort of thing) looked a perfect guy in his crown (who could he be meant for?) and as for Diva – Then there was Georgie (Drake indeed!), and last of all Queen Elizabeth with her train held up by two choir-boys. Poor Lucia! Not content with a week of mumming at Riseholme she had to go on with her processions and dressings-up here. Some people lived on limelight.
Miss Mapp could not bring herself to take a seat close to the stage, and be seen applauding – there seemed to be some hitch with the curtain: no, it righted itself, what a pity! – and she hung about on the outskirts of the audience. Glees were interposed between the tableaux; how thin were the voices of those little boys out of doors! Then Irene, dressed like a sailor, recited that ludicrous parody. Roars of laughter. Then Major Benjy was King Cophetua: that was why he had a crown. Oh dear, oh dear! It was sad to reflect that an elderly, sensible man (for when at his best, he was that) could be got hold of by a pushing woman. The final tableau, of course (anyone might have guessed that), was the knighting of Drake by Queen Elizabeth. Then amid sycophantic applause the procession of guys returned and went back into the garden-room. Mr and Mrs Wyse followed them, and it seemed pretty clear that they were going to have a private tea there. Doubtless she would be soon sought for among the crowd with a message from Lucia to hope that she would join them in her own garden-room, but as nothing of the sort came, she presently thought that it would be only kind to Lucia to do so, and add her voice to the general chorus of congratulation that was no doubt going on. So with a brisk little tap on the door, and the inquiry ‘May I come in?’ she entered.
There they all were, as pleased as children with dressing-up. King Cophetua still wore his crown, tilted slightly to one side like a forage cap, and he and Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary were seated round the tea-table and calling each other your Majesty. King Cophetua had a large whisky and soda in front of him and Miss Mapp felt quite certain it was not his first. But though sick in soul at these puerilities she pulled herself together and made a beautiful curtsey to the silly creatures. And the worst of it was that there was no one left of her own intimate circle to whom she could in private express her disdain, for they were all in it, either actively or, like the Wyses, truckling to Lucia.
Lucia for the moment seemed rather surprised to see her, but she welcomed her and poured her out a cup of rather tepid tea, nasty to the taste. She must truckle, too, to the whole lot of them, though that tasted nastier than the tea.
‘How I congratulate you all,’ she cried. ‘Padre, you looked too cruel as executioner, your mouth so fixed and stern. It was quite a relief when the curtain came down. Irene, quaint one, how you made them laugh! Diva, Mr Georgie, and above all our wonderful Queen Lucia. What a treat it has all been! The choir! Those beautiful glees. A thousand pities, Mr Wyse, that the Contessa was not here.’
There was still Susan to whom she ought to say something pleasant, but positively she could not go on, until she had eaten something solid. But Lucia chimed in.
‘And your garden, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘How they are enjoying it. I believe if the truth was known they are all glad that our little tableaux are over, so that they can wander about and admire the flowers. I must give a little party some night soon with Chinese lanterns and fairy-lights in the beds.’
‘Upon my word, your Majesty is spoiling us all,’ said Major Benjy. ‘Tilling’s never had a month with so much pleasure provided for it. Glorious.’
Miss Mapp had resolved to stop here if it was anyhow possible, till these sycophants had dispersed, and then have one private word with Lucia to indicate how ready she was to overlook all the little frictions that had undoubtedly arisen. She fully meant, without eating a morsel of humble pie herself, to allow Lucia to eat proud pie, for she saw that just for the present she herself was nowhere and Lucia everywhere. So Lucia should glut herself into a sense of complete superiority, and then it would be time to begin fresh manoeuvres. Major Benjy and Diva soon took themselves off: she saw them from the garden-window going very slowly down the street, ever so pleased to have people staring at them, and Irene, at the Padre’s request, went out to dance a hornpipe on the lawn in her sailor clothes. But the two Wyses (always famous for sticking) remained and Georgie.
Mr Wyse got up from the tea-table and passed round behind Miss Mapp’s chair. Out of the corner of her eye she could see he was looking at the wall where a straw-coloured picture of her own hung. He always used to admire it, and it was pleasant to feel that he was giving it so careful and so respectful a scrutiny. Then he spoke to Lucia.
‘How well I remember seeing you painting that,’ he said, ‘and how long I took to forgive myself for having disturbed you in my blundering car. A perfect little masterpiece, Mallards Cottage and the crooked chimney. To the life.’
Susan heaved herself up from the sofa and joined in the admiration.
‘Perfectly delightful,’ she said. ‘The lights, the shadows. Beautiful! What a touch!’
Miss Mapp turned her head slowly as if she had a stiff neck, and verified her awful conjecture that it was no longer a picture of her own that hung there, but the very picture of Lucia’s which had been rejected for the Art Exhibition. She felt as if no picture but a bomb hung there, which might explode at some chance word, and blow her into a thousand fragments. It was best to hurry from this perilous neighbourhood.
‘Dear Lucia,’ she said, ‘I must be off. Just one little stroll, if I may, round my garden, before I go home. My roses will never forgive me, if I go away without noticing them.’
She was too late.
‘How I wish I had known it was finished!’ said Mr Wyse. ‘I should have begged you to allow us to have it for our Art Exhibition. It would have been the gem of it. Cruel of you, Mrs Lucas!’
‘But I sent it in to the hanging committee,’ said Lucia. ‘Georgie sent his, too, of Mallards. They were both sent back to us.’
Mr Wyse turned from the picture to Lucia with an expression of incredulous horror, and Miss Mapp quietly turned to stone.
‘But impossible,’ he said. ‘I am on the hanging committee myself, and I hope you cannot think I should have been such an imbecile. Susan is on the committee too: so is Miss Mapp. In fact, we are the hanging committee. Susan, that gem, that little masterpiece never came before us.’
‘Never,’ said Susan. ‘Never. Never, never.’
Mr Wyse’s eye transferred itself to Miss Mapp. She was still stone and her face was as white as the wall of Mallards Cottage in the masterpiece. Then for the first time in the collective memory of Tilling Mr Wyse allowed himself to use slang.
‘There has been some hanky-panky,’ he said. ‘That picture never came before the hanging committee.’
The stone image could just move its eyes and they looked, in a glassy manner, at Lucia. Lucia’s met them with one short gimlet thrust, and she whisked round to Georgie. Her face was turned away from the others, and she gave him a prodigious wink, as he sat there palpitating with excitement.
‘Georgino mio,’ she said. ‘Let us recall exactly what happened. The morning, I mean, when the hanging committee met. Let me see: let me see. Don’t interrupt me: I will get it all clear.’
Lucia pressed her hands to her forehead.
‘I have it,’ she said. ‘It is perfectly vivid to me now. You had taken our little pictures down to the framer’s, Georgie, and told him to send them in to Elizabeth’s house direct. That was it. The errand-boy from the framer’s came up here that very morning, and delivered mine to Grosvenor, and yours to Foljambe. Let me think exactly when that was. What time was it, Mr Wyse, that the hanging committee met?’
‘At twelve, precisely,’ said Mr Wyse.
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‘That fits in perfectly,’ said Lucia. ‘I called to Georgie out of the window here, and we told each other that our pictures had been rejected. A moment later, I saw your car go down to the High Street and when I went down there soon afterwards, it was standing in front of Miss – I mean Elizabeth’s house. Clearly what happened was that the framer misunderstood Georgie’s instructions, and returned the pictures to us before the hanging committee sat at all. So you never saw them, and we imagined all the time – did we not, Georgie? – that you had simply sent them back.’
‘But what must you have thought of us?’ said Mr Wyse, with a gesture of despair.
‘Why, that you did not conscientiously think very much of our art,’ said Lucia. ‘We were perfectly satisfied with your decision. I felt sure that my little picture had a hundred faults and feeblenesses.’
Miss Mapp had become unpetrified. Could it be that by some miraculous oversight she had not put into those parcels the formal, typewritten rejection of the committee? It did not seem likely, for she had a very vivid remembrance of the gratification it gave her to do so, but the only alternative theory was to suppose a magnanimity on Lucia’s part which seemed even more miraculous. She burst into speech.
‘How we all congratulate ourselves,’ she cried, ‘that it has all been cleared up! Such a stupid errand-boy! What are we to do next, Mr Wyse? Our exhibition must secure Lucia’s sweet picture, and of course Mr Pillson’s too. But how are we to find room for them? Everything is hung.’
‘Nothing easier,’ said Mr Wyse. ‘I shall instantly withdraw my paltry little piece of still-life, and I am sure that Susan –’
‘No, that would never do,’ said Miss Mapp, currying favour all round. ‘That beautiful wallflower, I could almost smell it: that King of Italy. Mine shall go: two or three of mine. I insist on it.’
Mr Wyse bowed to Lucia and then to Georgie.
‘I have a plan better yet,’ he said. ‘Let us put – if we may have the privilege of securing what was so nearly lost to our exhibition – let us put these two pictures on easels as showing how deeply we appreciate our good fortune in getting them.’
He bowed to his wife, he bowed – was it quite a bow? – to Miss Mapp, and had there been a mirror, he would no doubt have bowed to himself.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘our little sketches will not thus suffer so much from their proximity to –’ and he bowed to Lucia. ‘And if Mr Pillson will similarly allow us –’ he bowed to Georgie.
Georgie, following Lucia’s lead, graciously offered to go round to the Cottage and bring back his picture of Mallards, but Mr Wyse would not hear of such a thing. He and Susan would go off in the Royce now, with Lucia’s masterpiece, and fetch Georgie’s from Mallards Cottage, and the sun should not set before they both stood on their distinguished easels in the enriched exhibition. So off they went in a great hurry to procure the easels before the sun went down and Miss Mapp, unable alone to face the reinstated victims of her fraud, scurried after them in a tumult of mixed emotions. Outside in the garden Irene, dancing hornpipes, was surrounded by both sexes of the enraptured youth of Tilling, for the boys knew she was a girl, and the girls thought she looked so like a boy. She shouted out ‘Come and dance, Mapp,’ and Elizabeth fled from her own sweet garden as if it had been a plague-stricken area, and never spoke to her roses at all.
The Queen and Drake were left alone in the garden-room.
‘Well, I never!’ said Georgie. ‘Did you? She sent them back all by herself.’
‘I’m not the least surprised,’ said Lucia. ‘It’s like her.’
‘But why did you let her off?’ he asked. ‘You ought to have exposed her and have done with her.’
Lucia showed a momentary exultation, and executed a few steps from a Morris-dance.
‘No, Georgie, that would have been a mistake,’ she said. ‘She knows that we know, and I can’t wish her worse than that. And I rather think, though he makes me giddy with so much bowing, that Mr Wyse has guessed. He certainly suspects something of the sort.’
‘Yes, he said there had been some hanky-panky,’ said Georgie. ‘That was a strong thing for him to say. All the same –’
Lucia shook her head.
‘No, I’m right,’ she said. ‘Don’t you see I’ve taken the moral stuffing out of that woman far more completely than if I had exposed her?’
‘But she’s a cheat,’ cried Georgie. ‘She’s a liar, for she sent back our pictures with a formal notice that the committee had rejected them. She hasn’t got any moral stuffing to take out.’
Lucia pondered this.
‘That’s true, there doesn’t seem to be much,’ she said. ‘But even then, think of the moral stuffing that I’ve put into myself. A far greater score, Georgie, than to have exposed her, and it must be quite agonizing for her to have that hanging over her head. Besides, she can’t help being deeply grateful to me if there are any depths in that poor shallow nature. There may be: we must try to discover them. Take a broader view of it all, Georgie … Oh, and I’ve thought of something fresh! Send round to Mr Wyse for the exhibition your picture of the Landgate, which poor Elizabeth sold. He will certainly hang it and she will see it there. That will round everything off nicely.’
Lucia moved across to the piano and sat down on the treble music-stool.
‘Let us forget all about these piccoli disturbi, Georgie,’ she said, ‘and have some music to put us in tune with beauty again. No, you needn’t shut the door: it is so hot, and I am sure that no one else will dream of passing that notice of “Private”, or come in here unasked. Ickle bit of divine Mozartino?’
Lucia found the duet at which she had worked quietly at odd moments.
‘Let us try this,’ she said, ‘though it looks rather diffy. Oh, one thing more, Georgie. I think you and I had better keep those formal notices of rejection from the hanging committee just in case. We might need them some day, though I’m sure I hope we shan’t. But one must be careful in dealing with that sort of woman. That’s all I think. Now let us breathe harmony and loveliness again. Uno, due … pom.’
6
It was a mellow morning of October, the season, as Lucia reflected, of mists and mellow fruitfulness, wonderful John Keats. There was no doubt about the mists, for there had been several sea-fogs in the English Channel, and the mellow fruitfulness of the garden at Mallards was equally indisputable. But now the fruitfulness of that sunny plot concerned Lucia far more than it had done during August and September, for she had taken Mallards for another month (Adele Brixton having taken the Hurst, Riseholme, for three), not on those original Shylock terms of fifteen guineas a week, and no garden-produce – but of twelve guineas a week, and all the garden-produce. It was a wonderful year for tomatoes: there were far more than a single widow could possibly eat, and Lucia, instead of selling them, constantly sent little presents of them to Georgie and Major Benjy. She had sent one basket of them to Miss Mapp, but these had been returned and Miss Mapp had written an effusive note saying that they would be wasted on her. Lucia had applauded that; it showed a very proper spirit.
The chain of consequences, therefore, of Lucia’s remaining at Mallards was far-reaching. Miss Mapp took Wasters for another month at a slightly lower rent, Diva extended her lease of Taormina, and Irene still occupied the four-roomed labourer’s cottage outside Tilling, which suited her so well, and the labourer and his family remained in the hop-picker’s shanty. It was getting chilly of nights in the shanty, and he looked forward to the time when, Adele having left the Hurst, his cottage could be restored to him. Nor did the chain of consequences end here, for Georgie could not go back to Riseholme without Foljambe, and Foljambe would not go back there and leave her Cadman, while Lucia remained at Mallards. So Isabel Poppit continued to inhabit her bungalow by the sea, and Georgie remained in Mallards Cottage. With her skin turned black with all those sun-baths, and her hair spiky and wiry with so many sea-baths, Isabel resembled a cross between a kipper and a sea-urchin.
September had been full of events. The Art Exhibition had been a great success, and quantities of the pictures had been sold. Lucia had bought Georgie’s picture of Mallards, Georgie had bought Lucia’s picture of Mallards Cottage, Mr Wyse had bought his wife’s pastel of the King of Italy, and sent it as a birthday present to Amelia, and Susan Wyse had bought her husband’s teacup and wallflower and kept them herself. But the greatest gesture of all had been Lucia’s purchase of one of Miss Mapp’s six exhibits, and this had practically forced Miss Mapp, so powerful was the suggestion hidden in it, to buy Georgie’s picture of the Landgate, which he had given her, and which she had sold (not even for her own benefit but for that of the hospital) for sixpence at her jumble-sale. She had had to pay a guinea to regain what had once been hers, so that in the end the revengeful impulse which had prompted her to put it in the sixpenny tray had been cruelly expensive. But she had still felt herself to be under Lucia’s thumb in the whole matter of the exhibition (as indeed she was) and this purchase was of the nature of a propitiatory act. They had met one morning at the show, and Lucia had looked long at this sketch of Georgie’s and then, looking long at Elizabeth, she had said it was one of the most charming and exquisite of his water-colours. Inwardly raging, yet somehow impotent to resist, Elizabeth had forked up. But she was now busily persuading herself that this purchase had something to do with the hospital, and that she need not make any further contributions to its funds this year: she felt there was a very good chance of persuading herself about this. No one had bought quaint Irene’s pictures, and she had turned the women wrestlers into men.