by E. F. Benson
They met.
‘Lovely new steps,’ said Elizabeth very agreeably. ‘Quite a pleasure to walk up them. Thank you, dear, for them. But those poor almond-trees. So sad and pinched, and hardly a blossom on them. Perhaps they weren’t the flowering sort. Or do you think they’ll get acclimatized after some years?’
‘They’re coming out beautifully,’ said Lucia in a very firm voice. ‘I’ve never seen such healthy trees in all my life. By next week they will be a blaze of blossom. Blaze.’
‘I’m sure I hope you’ll be right, dear,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but I don’t see any buds coming myself.’ Lucia took no further notice of her, and continued to admire her almond-trees in a loud voice to Georgie.
‘And how gay the pink blossom looks against the blue sky, darling,’ she said. ‘You must bring your paint-box here some morning and make a sketch of them. Such a feast for the eye.’
She tripped down the rest of the steps, and Elizabeth paused at the top to read the tablet.
‘You know Mapp is really the best name for her,’ said Lucia, still slightly bubbling with resentment. ‘Irene is quite right never to call her anything else. Poor Mapp is beginning to imitate herself: she says exactly the things which somebody taking her off would say.’
‘And I’m sure she wanted to be pleasant just now,’ said Georgie, ‘but the moment she began to praise your steps she couldn’t bear it, and found herself obliged to crab something else of yours.’
‘Very likely. I never knew a woman so terribly in the grip of her temperament. Look, Georgie: they’re playing cricket on my field. Let us go and sit in the pavilion for a little. It would be appreciated.’
‘Darling, it’s so dull watching cricket,’ said Georgie. ‘One man hits the ball away and another throws it back and all the rest eat daisies.’
‘We’ll just go and show ourselves,’ said Lucia. ‘We needn’t stop long. As President I feel I must take an interest in their games. I wish I had time to study cricket. Doesn’t the field look beautifully level now? You could play billiards on it.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Georgie, ‘I saw Mr Woolgar in the town this morning. He told me he had a client, very desirable he thought, but he wasn’t at liberty to mention the name yet, inquiring if I would let the Cottage for three months from the end of June. Only six guineas a week offered, and I asked eight. But even at that a three months’ let would be pleasant.’
‘The client’s name is Mapp,’ said Lucia with decision. ‘Diva told me yesterday that the woman with the canaries had taken Grebe for three months from the end of June at twenty guineas a week.’
‘That may be only a coincidence,’ said Georgie.
‘But it isn’t,’ retorted Lucia. ‘I can trace the windings of her mind like the course of a river across the plain. She thinks she wouldn’t get it for six guineas if you knew she was the client, for she had let out that she was getting twenty for Grebe. Stick to eight, Georgie, or raise it to ten.’
‘I’m going to have tea with Diva,’ said Georgie, ‘and the Mapps will be there. I might ask her suddenly if she was going to take a bungalow again for the summer, and see how she looks.’
‘Anyhow they can’t get flooded out of Mallards Cottage,’ observed Lucia.
They had skirted the cricket-ground and come to the pavilion, but since Tilling was fielding Lucia’s appearance did not evoke the gratification she had anticipated, since none of the visiting side had the slightest idea who she was. The Tilling bowling was being slogged all over the field, and the fieldsmen had really no time to eat daisies with this hurricane hitting going on. One ball crashed on to the wall of the pavilion just above Georgie’s head, and Lucia willingly consented to leave her cricket-field, for she had not known the game was so perilous. They went up into the High Street and through the churchyard again, and were just in sight of Mallards Cottage on which was a board: ‘To be let Furnished or Sold’, when the door opened, and Elizabeth came out, locking the door after her: clearly she had been to inspect it, or how could she have got the keys? Lucia knew that Georgie had seen her, and so did not even say ‘I told you so.’
‘You must promise to do a sketch of my almond-trees against the sky, Georgie,’ she said. ‘They will be in their full beauty by next week. And we must really give one of our omnibus dinner-parties soon. Saturday would do: I have nothing on Saturday evening, I think. I will telephone all round now.’
Georgie went upstairs to his own sitting-room to get a reposeful half-hour, before going to his tea-party. More and more he marvelled at Lucia’s superb vitality: she was busier now than she had ever pretended to be, and her labours were but as fuel to feed her fires. This walk to-day, for instance, had for him necessitated a short period of quiescence before he set off again for fresh expenditure of force, but he could hear her voice crisp and vigorous as she rang up number after number, and the reason why she was not coming to Diva’s party was that she had a class of girl-guides in the garden-room at half-past four, and a meeting of the Governors of the hospital at six. At 7.15 (for 7.30) she was to preside at the annual dinner of the cricket club. Not a very full day.
Lucia had been returned at the top of the poll in the last elections for the Town Council. Never did she miss a meeting, never did she fail to bring forward some fresh scheme for the employment of the unemployed, for the lighting of streets or the paving of roads or for the precedence of perambulators over pedestrians on the narrow pavements of the High Street. Bitter had been the conflict which called for a decision on that knotty question. Mapp, for instance, meeting two perambulators side by side had refused to step into the road and so had the nursery-maids. Instead they had advanced, chatting gaily together, solid as a phalanx and Mapp had been forced to retreat before them and turn up a side-street. ‘What with Susan’s great bus,’ she passionately exclaimed, ‘filling up the whole of the roadway, and perambulators sweeping all before them on the pavements, we shall have to do our shopping in aeroplanes.’
Diva, to whom she made this protest, had been sadly forgetful of recent events, which, so to speak, had not happened and replied:
‘Rubbish, dear Elizabeth! If you had ever had occasion to push a perambulator, you wouldn’t have wheeled it on to the road to make way for the Queen.’ … Then, seeing her error, Diva had made things worse by saying she hadn’t meant that, and the bridge party to which Georgie was going this afternoon was to mark the reconciliation after the resultant coolness. The legislation suggested by Lucia to meet this traffic problem was a model of wisdom: perambulators had precedence on pavements, but they must proceed in single file. Heaps of room for everybody.
Georgie, resting and running over her activities in his mind, felt quite hot at the thought of them, and applied a little eau-de-cologne to his forehead. To-morrow she was taking all her girl-guides for a day by the sea at Margate: they were starting in a chartered bus at eight in the morning, but she expected to be back for dinner. The occupations of her day fitted into each other like a well-cut jigsaw puzzle, and not a piece was missing from the picture. Was all this activity merely the outpouring of her inexhaustible energy that spouted like the water from the rock when Moses smote it? Sometimes he wondered whether there was not an ulterior purpose behind it. If so, she never spoke of it, but drove relentlessly on in silence.
He grew a little drowsy; he dozed, but he was awakened by a step on the stairs and a tap at his door. Lucia always tapped, for it was his private room, and she entered with a note in her hand. Her face seemed to glow with some secret radiance which she repressed with difficulty: to mask it she wore a frown, and her mouth was working with thought.
‘I must consult you, Georgie,’ she said, sinking into a chair. ‘There is a terribly momentous decision thrust upon me.’
Georgie dismissed the notion that Mapp had made some violent assault upon the infant occupiers of the perambulators as inadequate.
‘Darling, what has happened?’ he asked.
She gazed out of the window without speaking.
‘I have just received a note from the Mayor,’ she said at length in a shaken voice. ‘While we were so light-heartedly looking at almond-trees, a private meeting of the Town Council was being held.’
‘I see,’ said Georgie, ‘and they didn’t send you notice. Outrageous. Anyhow, I think I should threaten to resign. After all you’ve done for them, too!’
She shook her head.
‘No: you mustn’t blame them,’ she said. ‘They were right, for a piece of business was before them at which it was impossible I should be present.’
‘Oh, something not quite nice?’ suggested Georgie. ‘But I think they should have told you.’
Again she shook her head.
‘Georgie, they decided to sound me as to whether I would accept the office of Mayor next year. If I refuse, they would have to try somebody else. It’s all private at present, but I had to speak to you about it, for naturally it will affect you very greatly.’
‘Do you mean that I shall be something?’ asked Georgie eagerly.
‘Not officially, of course, but how many duties must devolve on the Mayor’s husband!’
‘A sort of Mayoress,’ said Georgie with the eagerness clean skimmed off his voice.
‘A thousand times more than that,’ cried Lucia. ‘You will have to be my right hand, Georgie. Without you I couldn’t dream of undertaking it. I should entirely depend on you, on your judgment and your wisdom. There will be hundreds of questions on which a man’s instinct will be needed by me. We shall be terribly hard-worked. We shall have to entertain, we shall have to take the lead, you and I, in everything, in municipal life as well as social life, which we do already. If you cannot promise to be always by me for my guidance and support, I can only give one answer. An unqualified negative.’
Lucia’s eloquence, with all the practice she had had at Town Councils, was most effective. Georgie no longer saw himself as a Mayoress, but as the Power behind the Throne; he thought of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, and bright images bubbled in his brain. Lucia, with a few sideways gimlet-glances, saw the effect, and, wise enough to say no more, continued gazing out of the window. Georgie gazed too: they both gazed.
When Lucia thought that her silence had done as much as it could, she sighed, and spoke again.
‘I understand. I will refuse then,’ she said.
That, in common parlance, did the trick.
‘No, don’t fuss me,’ he said. ‘Me must fink.’
‘Si, caro: pensa seriosamente,’ said she. ‘But I must make up my mind now: it wouldn’t be fair on my colleagues not to. There are plenty of others, Georgie, if I refuse. I should think Mr Twistevant would make an admirable Mayor. Very business-like. Naturally, I do not approve of his views about slums and, of course, I should have to resign my place on the Town Council and some other bodies. But what does that matter?’
‘Darling, if you put it like that,’ said Georgie, ‘I must say that I think it your duty to accept. You would be condoning slums almost, if you didn’t.’
The subdued radiance in Lucia’s face burst forth like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
‘If you think it’s my duty, I must accept,’ she said. ‘You would despise me otherwise. I’ll write at once.’
She paused at the door.
‘I wonder what Elizabeth –’ she began, then thought better of it, and tripped lightly downstairs.
Tilling had unanimously accepted Lucia’s invitation for dinner and bridge on Saturday, and Georgie, going upstairs to dress, heard himself called from Lucia’s bedroom.
He entered.
Her bed was paved with hats: it was a parterre of hats, of which the boxes stood on the floor, a rampart of boxes. The hats were of the most varied styles. There was one like an old-fashioned beaver hat with a feather in it. There was a Victorian bonnet with strings. There was a three-cornered hat, like that which Napoleon wore in the retreat from Moscow. There was a head-dress like those worn by nuns, and a beret made of cloth of gold. There was a hat like a full-bottomed wig with ribands in it, and a Stuart-looking head-dress like those worn by the ladies of the Court in the time of Charles I. Lucia sitting in front of her glass, with her head on one side, was trying the effect of a green turban.
‘I want your opinion, dear,’ she said. ‘For official occasions as when the Mayor and Corporation go in state to church, or give a civic welcome to distinguished visitors, the Mayor, if a woman, has an official hat, part of her robes. But there are many semi-official occasions, Georgie, when one would not be wearing robes, but would still like to wear something distinctive. When I preside at Town Councils, for instance, or at all those committees of which I shall be chairman. On all those occasions I should wear the same hat: an undress uniform, you might call it. I don’t think the green turban would do, but I am rather inclined to that beret in cloth of gold.’
Georgie tried on one or two himself.
‘I like the beret,’ he said. ‘You could trim it with your beautiful seed-pearls.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ said Lucia cordially. ‘Or what about the thing like a wig. Rather majestic: the Mayor of Tilling, you know, used to have the power of life and death. Let me try it on again.’
‘No, I like the beret better than that,’ said Georgie critically. ‘Besides the Mayor doesn’t have the power of life and death now. Oh, but what about this Stuart-looking one? Rather Vandyckish, don’t you think?’
He brought it to her, and came opposite the mirror himself, so that his face was framed there beside hers. His beard had been trimmed that day to a beautiful point.
‘Georgino! Your beard: my hat,’ cried Lucia. ‘What a harmony! Not a question about it!’
‘Yes, I think it does suit us,’ said Georgie, blushing a little.
Trouble for Lucia
1
Lucia Pillson, the Mayor-Elect of Tilling and her husband Georgie were talking together one October afternoon in the garden-room at Mallards. The debate demanded the exercise of their keenest faculties. Viz.:
Should Lucia, when next month she entered on the supreme Municipal Office, continue to go down to the High Street every morning after breakfast with her market-basket, and make her personal purchases at the shops of the baker, the grocer, the butcher and wherever else the needs of the day’s catering directed? There were pros and cons to be considered, and Lucia had been putting the case for both sides with the tedious lucidity of opposing counsel addressing the Court. It might be confidently expected that, when she had finished exploring the entire territory, she would be fully competent to express the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge. In anticipation of the numerous speeches she would soon be called upon to make as Mayor, she was cultivating, whenever she remembered to do so, a finished oratorical style, and a pedantic Oxford voice.
‘I must be very careful, Georgie,’ she said. ‘Thoroughly democratic as you know I am in the truest sense of the word, I shall be entrusted, on the ninth of November next, with the duty of upholding the dignity and tradition of my high office. I’m not sure that I ought to go popping in and out of shops, as I have hitherto done, carrying my market-basket and bustling about just like anybody else. Let me put a somewhat similar case to you. Supposing you saw a newly appointed Lord Chancellor trotting round the streets of Westminster in shorts, for the sake of exercise. What would you feel about it? What would your reactions be?’
‘I hope you’re not thinking of putting on shorts, are you?’ asked Georgie, hoping to introduce a lighter tone.
‘Certainly not,’ said Lucia. ‘A parallel case only. And then there’s this. It would be intolerable to my democratic principles that, if I went into the grocer’s to make some small purchase, other customers already there should stand aside in order that I might be served first. That would never do. Never!’
Georgie surveyed with an absent air the pretty piece of needlework on which he was engaged. He was embroidering the Borough arms of Tilling in coloured silks on the back of the whi
te kid gloves which Lucia would wear at the inaugural ceremony, and he was not quite sure that he had placed the device exactly in the middle.
‘How tarsome,’ he said. ‘Well, it will have to do. I dare say it will stretch right. About the Lord Chancellor in shorts. I don’t think I should mind. It would depend a little on what sort of knees he had. As for other customers standing aside because you were the Mayor, I don’t think you need be afraid of that for a moment. Most unlikely.’
Lucia became violently interested in her gloves.
‘My dear, they look too smart for anything,’ she said. ‘Beautiful work, Georgie. Lovely. They remind me of the jewelled gloves you see in primitive Italian pictures on the hands of kneeling Popes and adoring Bishops.’
‘Do you think the arms are quite in the middle?’ he asked.
‘It looks perfect. Shall I try it on?’
Lucia displayed the back of her gloved hand, leaning her forehead elegantly against the finger-tips.
‘Yes, that seems all right,’ said Georgie. ‘Give it me back. It’s not quite finished. About the other thing. It would be rather marked if you suddenly stopped doing your marketing yourself, as you’ve done it every day for the last two years or so. Except Sundays. Some people might say that you were swanky because you were Mayor. Elizabeth would.’
‘Possibly. But I should be puzzled, dear, to name off-hand anything that mattered less to me than what Elizabeth Mapp-Flint said, poor woman. Give me your opinion, not hers.’
‘You might drop the marketing by degrees, if you felt it was undignified,’ said Georgie yawning. ‘Shop every day this week, and only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday next week –’
‘No, dear,’ interrupted Lucia. ‘That would be hedging, and I never hedge. One thing or the other.’
‘A hedge may save you from falling into a ditch,’ said Georgie brilliantly.
‘Georgino, how epigrammatic! What does it mean exactly? What ditch?’