by E. F. Benson
The bicycle gave a violent swerve.
‘Oh, take care,’ cried Elizabeth in an anxious voice, ‘or you’ll get off ever so quick.’
‘We’ll rest a bit,’ said Diva to her instructor, and she stepped from her machine and went back to the gate to have it out with her friend. ‘What’s the matter with you,’ she said to Elizabeth, ‘is that you can’t bear us following Lucia’s lead. Don’t deny it. Look in your own heart, and you’ll find it’s true, Elizabeth. Get over it, dear. Make an effort. Far more Christian!’
‘Thank you for your kind interest in my character, Diva,’ retorted Elizabeth. ‘I shall know now where to come when in spiritual perplexity.’
‘Always pleased to advise you,’ said Diva. ‘And now give me a treat. You told us all you learned to ride in ten minutes when you were a girl. I’ll give you my machine for ten minutes. See if you can ride at the end of it! A bit coy, dear? Not surprised. And rapid motion might be risky for your relaxed throat.’
There was a moment’s pause. Then both ladies were so pleased at their own brilliant dialectic that Elizabeth said she would pop in to Diva’s establishment for tea, and Diva said that would be charming.
In spite of Elizabeth (or perhaps even because of her) this revival of the bicycling nineties grew most fashionable. Major Benjy turned traitor and was detected by his wife surreptitiously practising with the gardener’s bicycle on the cinder path in the kitchen-garden. Mr Wyse suddenly appeared on the wheel riding in the most elegant manner. Figgis, his butler, he said, happened to remember that he had a bicycle put away in the garage and had furbished it up. Mr Wyse introduced a new style: he was already an adept and instead of wearing a preoccupied expression, made no more of it than if he was strolling about on foot. He could take a hand off his handlebar, to raise his hat to the Mayor, as if one hand was all he needed. When questioned about this feat, he said that it was not really difficult to take both hands off without instantly crashing, but Lucia, after several experiments in the garden, concluded that Mr Wyse, though certainly a very skilful performer, was wrong about that. To crown all, Susan, after a long wait at the corner of Porpoise Street, where a standing motor left only eight or nine feet of the roadway clear, emerged majestically into the High Street on a brand new tricycle. ‘Those large motors,’ she complained to the Mayor, ‘ought not to be allowed in our narrow streets.’
The Town Hall was crowded to its utmost capacity on the morning that Lucia was summoned to appear before her own Court for dangerous riding. She had bicycled there, now negotiating the anti-vehicular posts with the utmost precision, and, wearing her semi-official hat, presided on the Borough Bench. She and her brother magistrates had two cases to try before hers came on, of which one was that of a motor-cyclist whose brakes were out of order. The Bench, consulting together, took a grave view of the offence, and imposed a penalty of twenty shillings. Lucia in pronouncing sentence, addressed some severe remarks to him: he would have been unable to pull up, she told him, in case of an emergency, and was endangering the safety of his fellow citizens. The magistrates gave him seven days in which to pay. Then came the great moment. The Mayor rose, and in a clear unfaltering voice, said:
‘Your Worships, I am personally concerned in the next case, and will therefore quit my seat on the Bench. Would the senior of Your Worships kindly preside in my temporary absence?’
She descended into the body of the Town Hall.
‘The next case before Your Worships,’ said the Town Clerk, ‘is one of dangerous riding of a push-bicycle on the part of Mrs Lucia Pillson. Mrs Lucia Pillson.’
She pleaded guilty in a voice of calm triumph, and the Bench heard the evidence. The first witness was a constable, who swore that he would speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He was on point duty by the railway-bridge at 11 a.m. on Tuesday the twelfth instant. He observed a female bicyclist approaching at a dangerous speed down Landgate Street, when there was a lot of traffic about. He put out his arm to stop her, but she dashed by him. He estimated her speed at twenty miles an hour, and she seemed to have no control over her machine. After she had passed, he observed a tool-bag on the back of the saddle emblazoned with the Borough coat of arms. He made inquiries at the bicycle-shop and ascertained that a machine of this description had been supplied the day before to Mrs Pillson of Mallards House. He reported to his superior.
‘Have you any questions, Your Worsh – to ask the witness?’ asked the Town Clerk.
‘None,’ said Lucia eagerly. ‘Not one.’
The next witness was the pedestrian she had so nearly annihilated. Lucia was dismayed to see that he was the operator with the fire-pot. He began to talk about his experiences when tarring telegraph-posts some while ago, but, to her intense relief, was promptly checked and told he must confine himself to what occurred at 11 a.m. on Tuesday. He deposed that at that precise hour, as he was crossing the road by the railway-bridge, a female bicyclist dashed by him at a speed which he estimated at over twenty miles an hour. A gratified smile illuminated the Mayor’s face, and she had no questions to ask him.
That concluded the evidence, and the Inspector of Police said there were no previous convictions against the accused.
The Bench consulted together: there seemed to be some difference of opinion as to the amount of the fine. After a little discussion the temporary Chairman told Lucia that she also would be fined twenty shillings. She borrowed it from Georgie, who was sitting near, and so did not ask for time in which to pay. With a superb air she took her place again on the Bench.
Georgie waited for her till the end of the sitting, and stood a little in the background, but well in focus, while Lucia posed on the steps of the Town Hall, in the act of mounting her bicycle, for the photographer of the Hampshire Argus. His colleague on the reporting staff had taken down every word uttered in this cause célèbre and Lucia asked him to send proofs to her, before it went to press. It was a slight disappointment that no reporters or photographers had come down from London, for Mrs Simpson had been instructed to inform the Central News Agency of the day and hour of the trial … But the Mayor was well satisfied with the local prestige which her reckless athleticism had earned for her. Elizabeth, indeed, had attempted to make her friends view the incident in a different light, and she had a rather painful scene on the subject with the Padre and Evie.
‘All too terrible,’ she said. ‘I feel that poor Worship has utterly disgraced herself, and brought contempt on the dignified office she holds. Those centuries of honourable men who have been Mayors here must turn in their graves. I’ve been wondering whether I ought not, in mere self-respect, to resign from being Mayoress. It associates me with her.’
‘That’s not such a bad notion,’ said the Padre, and Evie gave several shrill squeaks.
‘On the other hand, I should hate to desert her in her trouble,’ continued the Mayoress. ‘So true what you said in your sermon last Sunday, Padre, that it’s our duty as Christians always to stand by our friends, whenever they are in trouble and need us.’
‘So because she needs you, which she doesn’t an atom,’ burst out Evie, ‘you come and tell us that she’s disgraced herself, and made everybody turn in their graves. Most friendly, Elizabeth.’
‘And I’m of wee wifie’s opinion, mem,’ said the Padre, with the brilliant thought of Evie becoming Mayoress in his mind, ‘and if you feel you canna’ preserve your self-respect unless you resign, why, it’s your Christian duty to do so, and I warrant that won’t incommode her, so don’t let the standing by your friends deter you. And if you ask me what I think of Mistress Lucia’s adventure, ’twas a fine spunky thing to have gone flying down the Landgate Street at thirty miles an hour. You and I daurna do it, and peradventure we’d be finer folk if we daur. And she stood and said she was guilty like a God-fearing upstanding body and she deserves a medal, she does. Come awa’, wifie: we’ll get to our bicycle-lesson.’
The Padre’s view was reflected in the town generally, and his new fi
gure of thirty miles an hour accepted. Though it was a very lawless and dangerous feat, Tilling felt proud of having so spirited a Mayor. Diva indulged in secret visions of record-breaking when she had learned to balance herself, and Susan developed such a turn of speed on her tricycle that Algernon called anxiously after her ‘Not so fast, Susan, I beg you. Supposing you met something.’ The Padre scudded about his parish on the wheel, and, as the movement grew, Lucia offered to coach anybody in her garden. It became fashionable to career up and down the High Street after dark, when traffic was diminished, and the whole length of it resounded with tinkling bells and twinkled with bicycle-lamps. There were no collisions, for everyone was properly cautious, but on one chilly evening the flapping skirt of Susan’s fur coat got so inextricably entangled in the chain of her tricycle that she had to shed it, and Figgis trundled coat and tricycle back to Porpoise Street in the manner of a wheelbarrow.
As the days grew longer and the weather warmer, picnic-parties were arranged to points of interest within easy distance, a castle, a church or a Martello tower, and they ate sandwiches and drank from their thermos-flasks in ruined dungeons or on tombstones or by the edge of a moat. The party, by reason of the various rates of progress which each found comfortable, could not start together, if they were to arrive fairly simultaneously, and Susan on her tricycle was always the first to leave Tilling, and Diva followed. There was some competition for the honour of being the last to leave: Lucia, with the cachet of furious riding to her credit, waited till she thought the Padre must have started, while he was sure that his normal pace was faster than hers. In consequence, they usually both arrived very late and very hot. They all wondered how they could ever have confined physical exercise within the radius of pedestrianism, and pitied Elizabeth for the pride that debarred her from joining in these pleasant excursions.
7
Lucia had failed to convince the Directors of the Southern Railway that the Royal Fish Train was a practicable scheme. ‘Should Their Majesties’ so ran the final communication ‘express their Royal wish to be supplied with fish from Tilling, the Directors would see that the delivery was made with all expedition, but in their opinion the ordinary resources of the line will suffice to meet their requirements, of which at present no intimation has been received.’
‘A sad want of enterprise, Georgie,’ said the Mayor as she read this discouraging reply. ‘A failure to think municipally and to see the distinction of bringing an Elizabethan custom up to date. I shall not put the scheme before my Council at all.’ Lucia dropped this unenterprising ultimatum into the waste-paper basket. The afternoon post had just arrived and the two letters which it brought for her followed the ultimatum.
‘My syllabus for a series of lectures at the Literary Institute is not making a good start,’ she said. ‘I asked Mr Desmond McCarthy to talk to us about the less known novelists of the time of William IV, but he has declined. Nor can Mr Noel Coward speak on the technique of the modern stage on any of the five nights I offered him. I am surprised that they should not have welcomed the opportunity to get more widely known.’
‘Tarsome of them,’ said Georgie sympathetically, ‘such a chance for them.’
Lucia gave him a sharp glance, then mused for a while in silence over her scheme. Fresh ideas began to flood her mind so copiously that she could scarcely scribble them down fast enough to keep up with them.
‘I think I will lecture on the Shakespearian drama myself,’ she said. ‘That should be the inaugural lecture, say April the fifteenth. I don’t seem to have any engagement that night, and you will take the chair for me … Georgie, we might act a short scene together, without dresses or scenery to illustrate the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage. Really, on reflection I think my first series of lectures had much better be given by local speakers. The Padre would address us one night on free will or the origin of evil. Irene on the technique of fresco-painting. Diva on catering for the masses. Then I ought to ask Elizabeth to lecture on something, though I’m sure I don’t know on what subject she has any ideas of the slightest value. Ah! Instead, Major Benjy on tiger-shooting. Then a musical evening: the art of Beethoven, with examples. That would make six lectures; six would be enough. I think it would be expected of me to give the last as well as the first. Admission, a shilling, or five shillings for the series. Official, I think, under the patronage of the Mayor.’
‘No,’ said Georgie, going back to one of the earlier topics. ‘I won’t act any Shakespearian scene with you to illustrate Elizabethan simplicity. And if you ask me I don’t believe people will pay a shilling to hear the Padre lecture on free will. They can hear that sort of thing every Sunday morning for nothing but the offertory.’
‘I will consider that,’ said Lucia, not listening and beginning to draw up a schedule of the discourses. ‘And if you won’t do a scene with me, I might do the sleep-walking from Macbeth by myself. But you must help me with the Beethoven evening. Extracts from the Fifth Symphony for four hands on the piano. That glorious work contains, as I have always maintained, the key to the Master’s soul. We must practise hard, and get our extracts by heart.’
Georgie felt the sensation, that was now becoming odiously familiar, of being hunted and harried. Life for him was losing that quality of leisure, which gave one time to feel busy and ready to take so thrilled an interest in the minute happenings of the day. Lucia was poisoning that eager fount by this infusion of Mayoral duties and responsibilities, and tedious schemes for educational lectures and lighting of the streets. True, the old pellucid spring gushed out sometimes: who, for instance, but she could have made Tilling bicycle-crazy, or have convinced Susan that Blue Birdie had gone to a higher sphere? That was her real métier, to render the trivialities of life intense for others. But how her schemes for the good of Tilling bored him!
Lucia finished sketching out her schedule, and began gabbling again.
‘Yes, Georgie, the dates seem to work out all right,’ she said, ‘though Mrs Simpson must check them for me. April the fifteenth: my inaugural lecture on Shakespeare. April the twenty-second: the Padre on free will which I am convinced will attract all serious people, for it is a most interesting subject, and I don’t think any final explanation of it has yet been given. April the twenty-ninth: Irene on the technique of fresco-painting. May the sixth: Diva on tea-shops. I expect I shall have to write it for her. May the thirteenth: Major Benjy on tigers. May the twentieth: Beethoven, me again … I should like to see these little centres of enlightenment established everywhere in England, and I count it a privilege to be able, in my position, to set an example. The BBC, I don’t deny, is doing good work, but lectures delivered viva voce are so much more vivid. Personal magnetism. I shall always entertain the lecturer and a few friends to a plain supper-party here afterwards, and we can continue the discussion in the garden-room. I shall ask some distinguished expert on the subject to come down and stay the night after each lecture: the Bishop when the Padre lectures on free will; Mr Gielgud when I speak about Shakespearian technique; Sir Henry Wood when we have our Beethoven night; and perhaps the Manager of Messrs Lyons after Diva’s discourse. I shall send my Town Council complimentary seats in the first row for the inaugural lecture. How does that strike you for a rough sketch? You know how I value your judgment, and it is most important to get the initial steps right.’
Georgie was standing by her table, suppressing a yawn as he glanced at the schedule, and feeling in his waistcoat pocket for his gun-metal match-box with the turquoise latch. As he scooped for it, there dropped out the silver top of Major Benjy’s riding-whip, which he always kept on his person. It fell noiselessly on the piece of damp sponge which Mrs Simpson always preferred to use for moistening postage-stamps, rather than the less genteel human tongue. Simultaneously the telephone-bell rang, and Lucia jumped up.
‘That incessant summons!’ she said. ‘A perfect slavery. I think I must take my name off the exchange, and give my number to just a few friends … Yes, yes, I am the Mayor of T
illing. Irene, is it? … My dear how colossal! I don’t suppose anybody in Tilling has ever had a picture in the Royal Academy before. Is that the amended version of your fresco, Venus with no clothes on coming to Tilling? I’m sure this one is far nicer. How I wish I had seen it before you sent it in, but when the Academy closes you must show it at our picture-exhibition here. Oh, I’ve put you down to give a lecture in my Mayoral course of Culture on the technique of painting in fresco. And you’re going up to London for varnishing day? Do take care. So many pictures have been ruined by being varnished too much.’
She rang off.
‘Accepted, is it?’ said Georgie in great excitement. ‘There’ll be wigs on the green if it’s exhibited here. I believe I told you about it, but you were wrestling with the Royal Fish Express. Elizabeth, unmistakable, in a shawl and bonnet and striped skirt and button-boots, standing on an oyster-shell, and being blown into Tilling by Benjy in a top-hat among the clouds.’
‘Dear me, that sounds rather dangerously topical,’ said Lucia. ‘But it’s time to dress. The Mapp-Flints are dining, aren’t they? What a coincidence!’
They had a most harmonious dinner, with never a mention of bicycles. Benjy readily consented to read a paper on tiger-shooting on May 13.
‘Ah, what a joy,’ said Lucia. ‘I will book it. And some properties perhaps, to give vividness. The riding-whip with which you hit the tiger in the face. Oh, how stupid of me. I had forgotten about its mysterious disappearance which was never cleared up. Pass me the sugar, Georgie.’
There was a momentary pause, and Lucia grew very red in the face as she buried her orange in sugar. But that was soon over, and presently the Mayor and Mayoress went out to the garden-room with interlaced waists and arms. Lucia had told Georgie not to stop too long in the dining-room and Benjy made the most of his time and drank a prodigious quantity of a sound but inexpensive port. Elizabeth had eaten a dried fig for dessert, and a minute but adamantine fig-seed had lodged itself at the base of one of her beautiful teeth. She knew she would not have a tranquil moment till she had evicted it, and she needed only a few seconds unobserved.