by E. F. Benson
‘That’s the best of Tilling,’ cried Georgie enthusiastically, throwing prudence to the sea-winds, and leaning out of the window. ‘There’s always something exciting going on. If it isn’t one thing it’s another, and very often both!’
Benjy dealt the sand-pit one or two frightful biffs and Lucia suddenly remembered that she had done with such paltry trifles.
‘Drive on, Cadman,’ she said. ‘Georgie, I’m afraid Major Benjy’s nature has not been broadened and enriched by marriage. Marriage, one hoped, might have brought that about, but I don’t see the faintest sign of it. Indeed I can’t make up my mind about their marriage at all. They dab and stroke each other, and they’re Benjy-boy and Girlie, but is it more than lip-service and finger-tips? Some women, I know, have had their greatest triumphs when youth was long, long past: Diane de Poictiers was fifty, was she not, when she became the King’s mistress, but she was an enchantress, and you could not reasonably call Elizabeth an enchantress. Of course you haven’t seen them together yet, but you will at my birthday-party.’
Georgie gingerly fingered the portion of beard on the ailing side of his face.
‘Not much chance of it,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I shall get rid of this by then. Too tarsome.’
Lucia looked at him again with a tilted head.
‘Well, we shall see,’ she said. ‘My dear, the sun glinting on the sea! Is that what Homer – or was it Aeschylus – meant by the “numberless laughter of ocean”? An immortal phrase.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder if it was,’ said Georgie. ‘But about Benjy and Elizabeth. I can’t see how you could expect anybody to be broadened and enriched by marrying Elizabeth. Nor by marrying Benjy for that matter.’
‘Perhaps I was too sanguine. I hope they won’t come to grief over their speculations. They’re ignorant of the elements of finance. I told them both this morning what I was going to do. So they went and did exactly the opposite.’
‘It’s marvellous the way you’ve picked it up,’ said Georgie. ‘I’m fifty pounds richer by following your advice –’
‘No, Georgie, not advice. My lead, if you like.’
‘Lead then. I’m not sure I shan’t have another go.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said she. ‘It began to get on your mind: you dreamed about gold mines. Don’t get like Diva: she was wringing her hands on the pavement in agony as to what she should do.’
‘But how can you help thinking about it?’
‘I do think about it,’ she said, ‘but calmly, as if finance was a science, which indeed it is. I study, I draw my conclusions, I act. By the way, do you happen to know how much a rupee is worth?’
‘No idea,’ said Georgie, ‘but not very much, I believe. If you have a great many of them, they make a lakh. But I don’t know how many it takes, nor what a lakh is when they’ve made it.’
No startling developments occurred during the next week. Siriami shares remained steady, but the continued strain so told on Diva that, having bought seven more because the Mapp-Flints were making further purchases, she had a nervous crisis one morning when they went down sixpence, sold her entire holding (ten shares) and with the help of a few strychnine pills regained her impaired vitality. But she watched with the intensest interest the movements of the market, for once again, as so often before, a deadly duel was in progress between Elizabeth and Lucia, but now it was waged as on some vast battlefield consisting of railway lines running between the shafts of gold mines. Lucia, so to speak, on the footboard of an engine on the Southern Railway shrieked by, drawing a freight of Burma Corporation, while Elizabeth put lumps of ore from Siriami on the metals to wreck her train. For Southern Railway Prefs began to move: one morning they were one point up, another morning they were three, and at Mallards the two chagrined operators snatched up their copies of the Financial Post and ate with a poor appetite. It was known all over Tilling that this fierce fight was in progress, and when, next Sunday morning, the sermon was preached by a missionary who had devoted himself to the enlightenment of the heathen both in Burma and West Africa, Lucia, sitting among the auxiliary choir on one side of the church and the Mapp-Flints on the other, seemed indeed to be the incarnations of those dark countries. Mr Wyse, attending closely to the sermon, thought that was a most extraordinary coincidence: even missionary work in foreign lands seemed to be drawn into the vortex.
Next morning on the breakfast-table at Mallards was Lucia’s invitation to the Mapp-Flints to honour her with their presence at dinner on Friday next, the occasion of her Jubilee. Southern Prefs had gone up again and Siriami down, but, so Elizabeth surmised, ‘all Tilling’ would be there, and if she and Benjy refused, which seemed the proper way to record what they felt about it, all Tilling would certainly conclude that they had not been asked.
‘It’s her ways that I find so hard to bear,’ said Elizabeth, cracking the top of her boiled egg with such violence that the rather under-cooked contents streamed on to her plate. ‘Her airs, her arrogance. Even if she says nothing about Siriami I shall know she’s pitying us for not having followed her lead, and buying those wild-cat shares of hers. What has Bohemian Corporation, or whatever it is, been doing? I didn’t look.’
‘Up sixpence,’ said Benjy, gloomily.
Elizabeth moistened her lips.
‘I suspected as much, and you see I was right. But I suppose we had better go to her Jubilee, and perhaps we shall learn something of this mystery about Georgie. I’m sure she’s keeping something dark: I feel it in my bones. Women of a certain age are like that. They know that they are getting on in years and have become entirely unattractive, and so they make mysteries in order to induce people to take an interest in them a little longer, poor things. There was that man with a beard whom Diva saw in her car; there’s a mystery which has never been cleared up. Probably it was her gardener, who has a beard, dressed up, and she hoped we might think she had someone staying with her whom we were to know nothing about. Just a mystery.’
‘Well, she made no mystery about selling Siriami and buying those blasted Prefs,’ said Benjy.
‘My fault then, I suppose,’ said Elizabeth bitterly, applying the pepper-pot to the pool of egg on her plate, and scooping it up with her spoon. ‘I see: I ought to have followed Lucia’s lead, and have invested my money as she recommended. And curtsied, and said “Thank your gracious Majesty.” Quite.’
‘I didn’t say you ought to have done anything of the kind,’ said Benjy.
Elizabeth had applied pepper with too lavish a hand, and had a frightful fit of sneezing before she could make the obvious rejoinder.
‘No, but you implied it, Benjy, which, if anything, is worse,’ she answered hoarsely.
‘No I didn’t. No question of “ought” about it. But I wish to God I had done as she suggested. Southern Prefs have risen ten points since she told us.’
‘We won’t discuss it any further, please,’ said Elizabeth.
Everyone accepted the invitation to the Jubilee, and now Lucia thought it time to put into action her scheme for getting Georgie to make his re-entry into the world of Tilling. He was quite himself again save for the pointed white beard which Foljambe had once more trimmed very skilfully, his cook was returning from her holiday next day, and he would be going back to shut himself up in his lonely little house until he could present his normal face to his friends. On that point he was immovable: nobody should see him with a little white beard, for it would be the end of his jeune premier-ship of Tilling: no jeune premier ever had a white beard, however little. And Dr Dobbie had told him not to think of ‘irritating the nerve-ends’ with the razor until they were incapable of resentment. In another three weeks or so, Dr Dobbie thought. This verdict depressed Georgie: there would be three weeks more of skulking out in his motor, heavily camouflaged, and of return to his dreary solitude in the evening. He wanted to hear the Padre mingle Irish with Scotch, he wanted to see Diva with her Eton crop, he wanted to study the effect of matrimony on Mapp and Flint, and what made him
miss this daily bread the more was that Lucia was very sparing in supplying him with it, for she was rather strict in her inhuman resolve to have done with petty gossip. Taken unawares, she could still manifest keen interest in seeing Benjy hit a golf-ball into a bunker, but she checked herself in an annoying manner and became lofty again. Probably her inhumanity would wear off, but it was tarsome that when he so particularly thirsted for local news, she should be so parsimonious with it.
However, they dined very comfortably that night, though she had many far-away glances, as if at distant blue hills, which indicated that she was thinking out some abstruse problem: Georgie supposed it was some terrific financial operation of which she would not speak at meals. Then she appeared to have solved it, for the blue-hill-look vanished, she riddled him with several gimlet-glances, and suddenly gabbled about the modern quality of the Idylls of Theocritus. ‘Yet perhaps modern is the wrong word,’ she said. ‘Let us call it the timeless quality, Georgie, senza tempo in fact. It is characteristic, don’t you think of all great artists: Vandyck has it preeminently. What timeless distinction his portraits have! His Lady Castlemaine, the Kéroualle, Nell Gwyn –’
‘But surely Vandyck was dead before their time,’ began Georgie. ‘Charles I, you know, not Charles II.’
‘That may be so, possibly you are right,’ said Lucia with her habitual shamelessness. ‘But my proposition holds. Vandyck is timeless, he shows the dignity, the distinction which can be realized in every age. But I always maintain – I wonder if you will agree with me – that his portraits of men are far, far finer than his women. More perception: I doubt if he ever understood women really. But his men! That coloured print I have of his Gelasius in the next room by the piano. Marvellous! Have you finished your coffee? Let us go.’
Lucia strolled into the drawing-room, glanced at a book on the table, and touched a few notes on the piano as if she had forgotten all about Gelasius.
‘Shall we give ourselves a holiday to-night, Georgie, and not tackle that dwefful diffy Brahms?’ she asked. ‘I shall have to practise my part before I am fit to play it with you. Wonderful Brahms! As Pater says of something else, “the soul with all its maladies” has entered into his music.’
She closed the piano, and casually pointed to a coloured print that hung on the wall above it beside a false Chippendale mirror.
‘Ah, there’s the Gelasius I spoke of,’ she said. ‘Rather a dark corner. I must find a worthier place for him.’
Georgie came across to look at it. Certainly it was a most distinguished face: high eyebrowed with a luxuriant crop of auburn hair and a small pointed beard. A man in early middle life, perhaps forty at the most. Georgie could not remember having noticed it before, which indeed was not to be wondered at, since Lucia had bought it that very afternoon. She had seen the great resemblance to Georgie, and her whole magnificent scheme had flashed upon her.
‘Dear me, what a striking face,’ he said. ‘Stupid of me never to have looked at it before.’
Lucia made no answer, and turning, he saw that she was eagerly glancing first at the picture and then at him, and then at the picture again. Then she sat down on the piano-stool and clasped her hands.
‘Absolutely too straordinario,’ she said as if speaking to herself.
‘What is?’ asked Georgie.
‘Caro, do not pretend to be so blind! Why it’s the image of you. Take a good look at it, then move a step to the right and look at yourself in the glass.’
Georgie did as he was told, and a thrill of rapture tingled in him. For years he had known (and lamented) that his first chin receded and that a plump second chin was advancing from below, but now his beard completely hid these blemishes.
‘Well, I do see what you mean,’ he said.
‘Who could help it? Georgie, you are Gelasius, which I’ve always considered Vandyck’s masterpiece. And it’s your beard that has done it. Unified! Harmonized! And to think that you intend to shut yourself up for three weeks more and then cut it off! It’s murder. Artistic murder!’
Georgie cast another look at Gelasius and then at himself. All these weeks he had taken only the briefest and most disgusted glances into his looking-glass because of the horror of his beard, and had been blind to what it had done for him. He felt a sudden stab of longing to be a permanent Gelasius, but there was one frightful snag in the way, irrespective of the terribly shy-making moment when he should reveal himself to Tilling so radically altered. The latter, with such added distinction to show them, he thought he could tone himself up to meet. But –
‘Well?’ asked Lucia rather impatiently. She had her part ready.
‘What’s so frightfully tarsome is that my beard’s so grey that you might call it white,’ he said. ‘There’s really not a grey hair on my head or in my moustache, and the stupid thing has come out this colour. No colour at all, in fact. Do you think it’s because I’m run down?’
Lucia pounced on this: it was a brilliant thought of Georgie’s, and made her part easier.
‘Of course that’s why,’ she said. ‘As you get stronger, your beard will certainly get its colour back. Just a question of time. I think it’s beginning already.’
‘But what am I to do till then?’ asked Georgie. ‘Such an odd appearance.’
She laughed.
‘Fancy asking a woman that!’ she said. ‘Dye it, Georgino. Temporarily of course, just anticipating Nature. There’s that barber in Hastings you go to. Drive over there to-morrow.’
Actually, Georgie had got a big bottle upstairs of the precise shade, and had been touching up with it this morning. But Lucia’s suggestion of Hastings was most satisfactory. It implied surely that she had no cognizance of these hidden practices.
‘I shouldn’t quite like to do that,’ said he.
Lucia had by now developed her full horse-power in persuasiveness. She could quite understand (knowing Georgie) why he intended to shut himself up for another three weeks, sooner than show himself to Tilling with auburn hair and a white beard (and indeed, though she personally had got used to it, he was a very odd object). Everyone would draw the inevitable conclusion that he dyed his hair, and though they knew it perfectly well already, the public demonstration of that fact would be intolerable to him, for the poor lamb evidently thought that this was a secret shared only by his bottle of hair-dye. Besides, she had now for over a fortnight concealed him like some Royalist giving a hiding place to King Charles, and while he had been there, she had not been able to ask a single one of her friends to the house, for fear they should catch a glimpse of him. Her kindliness revolted at the thought of his going back to his solitude, but she had had enough of his undiluted company. He had been a charming companion: she had even admitted to herself that it would be pleasant to have him always here, but not at the price of seeing nobody else … She opened the throttle.
‘But how perfectly unreasonable,’ she cried. ‘Dyeing it is only a temporary measure till it resumes its colour. And the improvement! My dear, I never saw such an improvement. Diva’s not in it! And how can you contemplate going back to solitary confinement, for indeed it’s that, for weeks and weeks more, and then at the end to scrap it? The distinction, Georgie, the dignity, and, to be quite frank, the complete disappearance of your chin, which was the one weak feature in your face. And it’s in your power to be a living Vandyck masterpiece, and you’re hesitating whether you shall madly cast away, as the hymn says, that wonderful chance. Hastings to-morrow, directly after breakfast, I implore you. It will be dry by lunchtime, won’t it? Why, a woman with the prospect of improving her appearance so colossally would be unable to sleep a wink to-night from sheer joy. Oh, amico mio,’ she said, lapsing into the intimate dialect, ‘’Oo will vex povera Lucia vewy, vewy much if you shave off vostra bella barba. Di grazia! Georgie.’
‘Me must fink,’ said Georgie. He left his chair and gazed once more at Gelasius and then at himself, and wondered if he had the nerve to appear without warning in the High Street even if his beard
was auburn.
‘I believe you’re right,’ he said at length. ‘Fancy all this coming out of my shingles. But it’s a tremendous step to take … Yes, I’ll do it. And I shall be able to come to your birthday-party after all.’
‘It wouldn’t be a birthday-party without you,’ said Lucia warmly.
Georgie’s cook having returned, he went back to his own house after the operation next morning. He had taken a little hand-glass with him to Hastings, and all the way home he had constantly consulted it in order to get used to himself, for he felt as if a total stranger with a seventeenth-century face was sharing the car with him, and his agitated consciousness suggested that anyone looking at him at all closely would conclude that this lately discovered Vandyck (like the Carlisle Holbein) was a very doubtful piece. It might be after Vandyck, but assuredly a very long way after. Foljambe opened the door of Mallards Cottage to him, and she considerably restored his shattered confidence. For the moment her jaw dropped, as if she had been knocked out, at the shock of this transformation, but then she recovered completely, and beamed up at him.
‘Well, that is a pleasant change, sir,’ she said, ‘from your white beard, if you’ll pardon me,’ and Georgie hurried upstairs to get an ampler view of himself in the big mirror in his bedroom than the hand-glass afforded. He then telephoned to Lucia to say that the operation was safely over and she promised to come up directly after lunch and behold.
The nerve-strain had tired him so did the constant excursions upstairs to get fresh impressions of himself. Modern costume was a handicap, but a very pretty little cape of his with fur round the neck had a Gelasian effect, and when Lucia arrived he came down in this. She was all applause: she walked slowly round him to get various points of view, ejaculating, ‘My dear, what an improvement,’ or ‘My dear, what an improvement,’ to which Georgie replied, ‘Do you really like it?’ until her iteration finally convinced him that she was sincere. He settled to rest for the remainder of the day after these fatigues, and to burst upon all Tilling at the marketing-hour next morning.