Lucia Victrix

by E. F. Benson

  ‘Dear Worship,’ she said. ‘Give me a treat, and let your hands just stray over the piano. Haven’t heard you play for ever so long.’

  Lucia never needed pressing and opened the lid of the instrument.

  ‘I’m terribly rusty, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘for I get no time for practising nowadays. Beethoven, dear, or a morsel of precious Mozart; whichever you like.’

  ‘Oh, prettioth Mothart, pleath,’ mumbled Elizabeth, who had effaced herself behind Lucia’s business-table. A moment sufficed, and her eye, as she turned round towards the piano again and drank in precious Mozart, fell on Mrs Simpson’s piece of damp sponge. Something small and bright, long-lost and familiar, gleamed there. Hesitation would have been mere weakness (besides, it belonged to her husband). She reached out a stealthy hand, and put it inside her bead-bag.

  It was barely eleven when the party broke up, for Elizabeth was totally unable to concentrate on cards when her bag contained the lock, if not the key to the unsolved mystery, and she insisted that dear Worship looked very tired. But both she and Benjy were very tired before they had framed and been forced to reject all the hypotheses which could account for the reappearance in so fantastic a place of this fragment of the riding-whip. If the relic had come to light in one of Diva’s jam-puffs, the quality of the mystery would have been less baffling, for at least it would have been found on the premises where it was lost, but how it had got to Lucia’s table was as inexplicable as the doctrine of free will. They went over the ground five or six times.

  ‘Lucia wasn’t even present when it vanished,’ said Elizabeth as the clock struck midnight. ‘Often, as you know, I think Worship is not quite as above-board as I should wish a colleague to be, but here I do not suspect her.’

  Benjy poured himself out some whisky. Finding that Elizabeth was far too absorbed in speculation to notice anything that was going on round her, he hastily drank it, and poured out some more.

  ‘Pillson then,’ he suggested.

  ‘No; I rang him up that night from Diva’s, as he was going to his bath,’ said she, ‘and he denied knowing anything about it. He’s fairly truthful – far more truthful than Worship anyhow – as far as I’ve observed.’

  ‘Diva then,’ said Benjy, quietly strengthening his drink.

  ‘But I searched and I searched, and she had not been out of my sight for five minutes. And where’s the rest of it? One could understand the valuable silver cap disappearing – though I don’t say for a moment that Diva would have stolen it – but it’s just that part that has reappeared.’

  ‘All mos’ mysterious,’ said Benjy. ‘But wo’ll you do next, Liz? There’s the cruksh. Wo’ll you do next?’

  Benjy had not observed that the Mayoress was trembling slightly, like a motor-bicycle before it starts. Otherwise he would not have been so surprised when she sprang up with a loud crow of triumph.

  ‘I have it,’ she cried. ‘Eureka! as Worship so often says when she’s thought of nothing at all. Don’t say a word to anybody, Benjy, about the silver cap, but have a fresh cane put into it, and use it as a property (isn’t that the word?) at your tiger-talk, just as if it had never been lost. That’ll be a bit of puzzle-work for guilty persons, whoever they may be. And it may lead to something in the way of discovery. The thief may turn pale or red or betray himself in some way … What a time of night!’

  Puzzle-work began next morning.

  ‘I can’t make out what’s happened to it,’ said Georgie, in a state of fuss, as he came down very late to breakfast, ‘and Foljambe can’t either.’

  Lucia gave an annoyed glance at the clock. It was five minutes to ten; Georgie was getting lazier and lazier in the morning. She gave the special peal of silvery laughter in which mirth played a minor part.

  ‘Good afternoon, caro,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Quite rested? Capital!’

  Georgie did not like her tone.

  ‘No, I’m rather tired still,’ he said. ‘I shall have a nap after breakfast.’

  Lucia abandoned her banter, as he did not seem to appreciate it.

  ‘Well, I’ve finished,’ she said. ‘Poor Worship has got to go and dictate to Mrs Simpson. And what was it you and Foljambe couldn’t find?’

  ‘The silver top to Benjy’s riding-whip. I was sure it was in my yesterday’s waistcoat pocket, but it isn’t, and Foljambe and I have been through all my suits. Nowhere.’

  ‘Georgie, how very queer,’ she said. ‘When did you see it last?’

  ‘Sometime yesterday,’ he said, opening a letter. A bill.

  ‘It’ll turn up. Things do,’ said Lucia.

  He was still rather vexed with her.

  ‘They seem to be better at vanishing,’ he said. ‘There was Blue Birdie –’

  He opened the second of his letters, and the thought of riding-whip and Blue Birdie alike were totally expunged from his brain.

  ‘My dear,’ he cried. ‘You’d never guess. Olga Bracely. She’s back from her world-tour.’

  Lucia pretended to recall distant memories. She actually had the most vivid recollection of Olga Bracely, and, not less, of Georgie’s unbounded admiration of her in his bachelor days. She wished the world-tour had been longer.

  ‘Olga Bracely?’ she said vaguely. ‘Ah, yes. Prima donna. Charming voice; some notes lovely. So she’s got back. How nice!’

  ‘– and she’s going to sing at Covent Garden next month,’ continued Georgie, deep in her letter. ‘They’re producing Cortese’s opera, Lucrezia, on May the twentieth. Oh, she’ll give us seats in her box. It’s a gala performance. Isn’t that too lovely? And she wants us to come and stay with her at Riseholme.’

  ‘Indeed, most kind of her,’ said Lucia. ‘The dear thing! But she doesn’t realize how difficult it is for me to get away from Tilling while I am Mayor.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she has the slightest idea that you are Mayor,’ said Georgie, beginning to read the letter over again.

  ‘Ah, I forgot,’ said Lucia. ‘She has been on a world-tour, you told me. And as for going up to hear Lucrezia though it’s very kind of her – I think we must get out of it. Cortese brought it down to Riseholme, I remember, as soon as he had finished it, and dear Olga begged me to come and hear her sing the great scene – I think she called it – and, oh, that cacophonous evening! Ah! Eureka! Did you not say the date was May the twentieth? – How providential! That’s the very evening we have fixed for my lecture on Beethoven. Olga will understand how impossible it is to cancel that.’

  ‘But that’s quite easily altered,’ said Georgie. ‘You made out just the roughest schedule, and Benjy’s tiger-slaying is the only date fixed. And think of hearing the gala performance in London! Lucrezia’s had the hugest success in America and Australia. And in Berlin and Paris.’

  Lucia’s decisive mind wavered. She saw herself sitting in a prominent box at Covent Garden, with all her seed-pearls and her Mayoral badge. Reporters would be eager to know who she was, and she would be careful to tell the box-attendant, so that they could find out without difficulty. And at Tilling, what réclame to have gone up to London on the prima donna’s invitation to hear this performance of the world-famous Lucrezia. She might give an interview to the Hampshire Argus about it when she got back.

  ‘Of course we must go,’ continued Georgie. ‘But she wants to know at once.’

  Still Lucia hesitated. It would be almost as magnificent to tell Tilling that she had refused Olga’s invitation, except for the mortifying fact that Tilling would probably not believe her. And if she refused, what would Georgie do? Would he leave her to lecture on Beethoven all by herself, or would he loyally stand by her, and do his part in the four-handed pianoforte arrangement of the Fifth Symphony? He furnished the answer to that unspoken question.

  ‘I’m sorry if you find it impossible to go,’ he said quite firmly, ‘but I shall go anyhow. You can play bits of the “Moonlight” by yourself. You’ve often said it was another key to Beethoven’s soul.’

  It suddenly struck
Lucia that Georgie seemed not to care two hoots whether she went or not. Her sensitive ear could not detect the smallest regret in his voice, and the prospect of his going alone was strangely distasteful. She did not fear any temperamental disturbance; Georgie’s passions were not volcanic, but there was glitter and glamour in opera houses and prima donnas which might upset him if he was unchaperoned.

  ‘I’ll try to manage it somehow, dear, for your sake,’ she said, ‘for I know how disappointed you would be if I didn’t join you in Olga’s welcome to London. Dear me; I’ve been keeping Mrs Simpson waiting a terrible time. Shall I take Olga’s letter and dictate a grateful acceptance from both of us?’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Georgie. ‘I’ll do it. You’re much too busy. And as for that bit of Benjy’s riding-whip, I dare say it will turn up.’

  The prospectus of the Mayoral series of cultural lectures at the Literary Institute was re-cast, for the other lecturers, wildly excited at the prospect, found every night equally convenient. Mrs Simpson was supplied with packets of tickets, and books of receipts and counterfoils for those who sent a shilling for a single lecture or five shillings for the whole course. She arrived now at half-past nine o’clock so as to be ready for the Mayor’s dictation of official correspondence at ten, and had always got through this additional work by that time. Complimentary tickets in the front row were sent to Town Councillors for Lucia’s inaugural lecture, with the request that they should be returned if the recipient found himself unable to attend. Apart from these, the sale was very sluggish. Mr John Gielgud could not attend the lecture on Shakespearian technique, and previous engagements prevented the Bishop and Sir Henry Wood from listening to the Padre on free will and Lucia on Beethoven. But luckily the Hampshire Argus had already announced that they had received invitations.

  ‘Charming letters from them all, Georgie,’ said Lucia, tearing them up, ‘and their evident disappointment at not being able to come really touches me. And I don’t regret, far from it, that apparently we shall not have very large audiences. A small audience is more intime; the personal touch is more quickly established. And now for my sleep-walking scene in the first lecture. I should like to discuss that with you. I shall give that with Elizabethan realism.’

  ‘Not pyjamas?’ asked Georgie, in an awe-struck voice.

  ‘Certainly not: it would be a gross anachronism. But I shall have all the lights in the room extinguished. Night.’

  ‘Then they won’t see you,’ said Georgie. ‘You would lose the personal touch.’

  Lucia puzzled over this problem.

  ‘Ah! I have it!’ she said. ‘An electric torch.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be an anachronism, too?’ interrupted Georgie.

  ‘Rather a pedantic criticism, Georgie,’ said Lucia.

  ‘An electric torch: and as soon as the room is plunged in darkness, I shall turn it on to my face. I shall advance slowly, only my face visible suspended in the air, to the edge of the platform. Eyes open I think: I believe sleep-walkers often have their eyes open. Very wide, something like this, and unseeing. Filled with an expression of internal soul-horror. Have you half an hour to spare? Put the lights out, dear: I have my electric torch. Now.’

  As the day for the inaugural lecture drew near and the bookings continued unsatisfactory except from the intime point of view, Lucia showered complimentary tickets right and left. Grosvenor and Foljambe received them and Diva’s Janet. In fact, those who had purchased tickets felt defrauded, since so many were to be had without even asking for them. This discontent reached Lucia’s ears, and in an ecstasy of fair-mindedness she paid Mrs Simpson the sum of one shilling for each complimentary ticket she had sent out. But even that did not silence the carpings of Elizabeth.

  ‘What it really comes to, Diva,’ she said, ‘is that Worship is paying everybody to attend her lecture.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Diva. ‘She is taking seats for her lecture, and giving them to her friends.’

  ‘Much the same thing,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but we won’t argue. Of course she’ll take the same number for Benjy’s lecture and yours and all the others.’

  ‘Don’t see why, if, as you say, she’s only paying people to go to hers. Major Benjy can pay people to go to his.’

  Elizabeth softened at the thought of the puzzle that would rack the brains of Tilling when Benjy lectured.

  ‘The dear boy is quite excited about it,’ she said. ‘He’s going to have his tiger-skins hung up behind the platform to give local jungle-colour. He’s copied out his lecture twice already and is thinking of having it typed. I dare say Worship would allow Mrs Simpson to do it for nothing to fill up her time a little. He read it to me: most dramatic. How I shuddered when he told how he had hit the man-slayer across the nose while he seized his rifle. Such a pity he can’t whack that very tiger-skin with the riding-whip he used then. He’s never quite got over its loss.’

  Elizabeth eyed Diva narrowly and thought she looked very uncomfortable, as if she knew something about that loss. But she replied in the most spirited manner.

  ‘Wouldn’t be very wise of him,’ she said. ‘Might take a lot more of the fur off. Might hurt the dead tiger more than he hurt the live one.’

  ‘Very droll,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But as the riding-whip vanished so mysteriously in your house, there’s the end of it.’

  Thanks to Lucia’s prudent distribution of complimentary tickets, the room was very well filled at the inaugural lecture. Georgie for a week past had been threatened with a nervous collapse at the thought of taking the chair, but he had staved this off by patent medicines, physical exercises and breakfast in bed. Wearing his ruby-coloured dinner-suit, he told the audience in a firm and audible voice that any introductory words from him were quite unnecessary, as they all knew the lecturer so well. He then revealed the astonishing fact that she was their beloved Mayor of Tilling, the woman whom he had the honour to call wife. She would now address them on the Technique of the Shakespearian Stage.

  Lucia first gave them a brief and lucid definition of Drama as the audible and visible presentation of situations of human woe or weal, based on and developing from those dynamic individual forces which evoke the psychological clashes of temperament that give rise to action. This action (drama) being strictly dependent on the underlying motives which prompt it and on emotional stresses might be roughly summed up as Plot. It was important that her audience should grasp that quite clearly. She went on to say that anything that distracts attention from Plot or from the psychology of which it is the logical outcome, hinders rather than helps Drama, and therefore the modern craze for elaborate decorations and embellishments must be ruthlessly condemned. It was otherwise in Shakespeare’s day. There was hardly any scenery for the setting of his masterpieces, and she ventured to put forward a theory which had hitherto escaped the acumen of more erudite Shakespearian scholars than she. Shakespeare was a staunch upholder of this simplicity and had unmistakably shown that in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In that glorious masterpiece a play was chosen for the marriage festival at Athens, and the setting of it clearly proves Shakespeare’s conviction that the less distraction of scenery there was on the stage, the better for Drama. The moon appeared in this play within a play. Modern décor would have provided a luminous disk moving slowly across the sky by some mechanical device. Not so Shakespeare. A man came on with a lantern, and told them that his lantern was the moon and he the man in the moon. There he was static and undistracting. Again the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe were separated by a wall. Modern décor would have furnished a convincing edifice covered with climbing roses. Not so Shakespeare. A man came out of the wings and said, ‘I am the wall.’ The lovers required a chink to talk through. The wall held up his hand and parted his fingers. Thus, in the guise of a jest the Master poured scorn on elaborate scenery.

  ‘I will now,’ said Lucia, ‘without dress or scenery of any sort, give you an illustration of the technique of the Shakespearian Stage. Lady Macbeth in the sleep-
walking scene.’

  Foljambe, previously instructed, was sitting by the switchboard, and on a sign from Georgie, plunged the hall in darkness. Everybody thought that a fuse had gone. That fear was dispelled because Lucia, fumbling in the dark, could not find her electric torch, and Georgie called out ‘Turn them on again, Foljambe.’ Lucia found her torch and once more the lights went out. Then the face of the Mayor sprang into vivid illumination, suspended against the blackness, and her open, sleep-walking eyes gleamed with soul-horror in the focused light. A difficult moment came when she made the pantomimic washing of her hands for the beam went wobbling about all over the place and once fell full on Georgie’s face, which much embarrassed him. He deftly took the torch from her and duly controlled its direction. At the end of the speech Foljambe restored the lights, and Lucia went on with her lecture.

  Owing to the absence of distinguished strangers she did not give a supper-party afterwards, at which her subject could be further discussed and illuminated, but she was in a state of high elation herself as she and Georgie partook of a plain supper alone.

  ‘From the first moment,’ she said, waving a sandwich, ‘I knew that I was in touch with my audience and held them in my hand. A delicious sensation of power and expansion, Georgie; it is no use my trying to describe it to you, for you have to experience it to understand it. I regret that the Hampshire Argus cannot have a verbatim report in its issue this week. Mr McConnell – how he enjoyed it – told me that it went to press to-night. I said I quite understood, and should not think of asking him to hold it up. I gave him the full typescript for next week, and promised to let him have a close-up photograph of Lady Macbeth; just my face with the background blacked out. He thanked me most warmly. And I thought, didn’t you, that I did the sleep-walking scene at the right moment, just after I had been speaking of Shakespearian simplicity. A little earlier than I had meant, but I suddenly felt that it came there. I knew it came there.’