Lucia Victrix

by E. F. Benson

  Lucia stared at her a moment, assimilating this monstrous suggestion, then sprang to her feet with a gasp of horror.

  ‘Oh, the poisonous tongues!’ she cried ‘Oh, the asps. And besides –’

  She stopped. She found herself entangled in the web she herself had woven, and never had any spider known to natural history so completely encircled itself. She had told Tilling that she was going to dine and sleep at Poppy’s Castle, and had shown everybody those elegant photographs as tacit evidence that she had done so. Tilling therefore, had concluded that Olga and Georgie had spent the night alone at Mallards, and here was Irene intolerably commending her for her open-mindedness not only in condoning but in promoting this assignation. The fair fame, the unsullied morality of herself and Georgie, not to mention Olga, was at stake, and (oh, how it hurt!) she would be forced to give the utmost publicity to the fact that she had come back to Tilling the same evening. That would be a frightful loss of prestige, but there was no choice. She laughed scornfully.

  ‘Foolish of me to have been indignant for a single moment at such an idea!’ she said. ‘I never heard such rubbish. I found poor Poppy very unwell, so I just had tea with her, cheered her up and took some photographs and came home at once. Tilling is really beyond words!’

  ‘Darling, what a disappointment!’ said Irene. ‘It would have been so colossal of you. And what a come-down for poor Georgie. Just an old maid again.’

  The news was very soon known, and Tilling felt that Lucia and Georgie had let them down. Everything had been so exciting and ducal and compromising, and there was really nothing left of it. Elizabeth and Diva lost no time in discussing it in Diva’s tea-room next morning when marketing was done, and were severe.

  ‘The deceitfulness of it is what disgusts me most,’ said the Mayoress. ‘Far worse than the snobbishness. Worship let it be widely known that she was staying the night with Poppy, and then she skulks back, doesn’t appear at all next morning to make us think that she was still away –’

  ‘And shows us all those photographs,’ chimed in Diva, ‘as a sort of … what’s the word?’

  ‘Can’t say, dear,’ said Elizabeth, regarding her rose-leaf cheeks with high approval in the looking-glass over the mantelpiece.

  ‘Affidavit, that’s it, as testifying that she had stayed with Poppy. Never told us she hadn’t.’

  ‘My simple brain can’t follow her conjuring tricks,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and I should be sorry if it could. But I’m only too thankful she did come back. It will be a great relief to the Padre, I expect, to be told that. I wonder, if you insist on knowing what I think, whether Mr Georgie somehow decoyed that lovely creature to Tilling, telling her that Lucia was here. That’s only my guess, and if so we must try to forgive him, for if anything is certain in this bad business, it is that he’s madly in love with her. I know myself how a man looks –’

  Diva gave a great gasp, but her eyebrows could not express any higher degree of astonishment.

  ‘Oh! Elizabeth!’ she cried. ‘Was a man ever madly in love with you? Who was it? Do tell me!’

  ‘There are things one can’t speak of even to an old friend like you,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Yes, he’s madly in love with her, and I think Worship knows it. Did you notice her demonstrations of affection to sweet Olga? She was making the best of it, I believe; putting on a brazen – no, let us say a brave face. How worn and anxious she looked the other night when we were all so gay. That pitiful little minuet! I’m sorry for her. When she married Mr Georgie, she thought life would be so safe and comfortable. A sad awakening, poor thing … Oh, another bit of news. Quaint Irene tells me she is doing a portrait of Worship. Quite marvellous, she says, and it will be ready for our summer exhibition. After that Lucia means to present it to the Borough, and have it hung in the Town Hall. And Irene’s Academy picture of Benjy and me will be back in time for our exhibition, too. Interesting to compare them.’

  Lucia bore her loss of prestige with characteristic gallantry. Indeed, she seemed to be quite unconscious that she had lost any, and continued to let her album of snap-shots remain open on the piano at the Sheffield Castle page, and airily talked about the Florentine mirror which just did not come into the photograph of Poppy’s bedroom. Occasionally a tiresome moment occurred, as when Elizabeth, being dummy at a bridge-party in the garden-room, pored over the Castle page, and came back to her place, saying,

  ‘So clever of you, Worship, to take so many pretty photographs in so short a time.’

  Lucia was not the least disconcerted.

  ‘They were all very short exposures, dear,’ she said. ‘I will explain that to you sometime.’

  Everybody thought that a very fit retort, for now the Poppy-crisis was no longer recent, and it was not the custom of Tilling to keep such incidents alive too long: it was not generous or kind, and besides, they grew stale. But Lucia paid her back in her own coin, for next day, when playing bridge at the Mapp-Flints, she looked long and earnestly at Benjy’s tiger-whip, which now hung in its old place among bead-aprons and Malayan creases.

  ‘Is that the one he broke at his interesting lecture, dear Elizabeth,’ she asked, ‘or the one he lost at Diva’s tea-rooms?’

  Evie continued to squeak in a disconcerting manner during the whole of the next hand, and the Poppy-crisis (for the present) was suffered to lapse.

  The annual Art Exhibition moved into the foreground of current excitements, and the Tilling artists sent in their contributions: Lucia her study of dahlias, entitled ‘Belli fiori’, and a sketch of the courtyard of Sheffield Castle, which she had weeded for purposes of Art. She called it ‘From Memory’, though it was really from her photograph, and, without specifying the Castle, she added the motto

  ‘The splendour falls on Castle walls’.

  Elizabeth sent in ‘A misty morning on the Marsh’. She was fond of misty mornings, because the climatic conditions absolutely prohibited defined draughtsmanship. Georgie (without any notion of challenging her) contributed ‘A sunny morning on the Marsh’, with sheep and dykes and clumps of ragwort very clearly delineated: Mr Wyse, one of his usual still-life studies of a silver tankard, a glass half-full of (probably) Capri wine, and a spray of nasturtiums: Diva another piece of still-life, in pastel, of two buns and a tartlet (probably sardine) on a plate. This was perhaps an invasion of Mr Wyse’s right to reproduce still-life, but Diva had to be in the kitchen so much, waiting for kettles to boil and buns to rise, that she had very little leisure for landscape. Susan Wyse sent a mystical picture of a budgerigar with a halo above its head, and rays of orange light emanating from the primary feathers of its spread wings: ‘Lost Awhile’ was the touching title. But in spite of these gems, the exhibition was really Irene’s show. She had been elected an honorary member of the hanging committee, and at their meetings she showed that she fully appreciated this fact.

  ‘My birth of Venus,’ she stated, ‘must be hung quite by itself at one end of the room, with all the studies I made for it below. They are of vast interest. Opposite it, also by itself, must be my picture of Lucia. There were no studies for that; it was an inspiration, but none of your potty little pictures must be near it. Hang them where you like – oh, darling Lucia, you don’t mind your dahlias and your Castle walls being quite out of range, do you? But those are my terms, and if you don’t like them, I shall withdraw my pictures. And the walls behind them must be painted duck’s-egg green. Take it or leave it. Now I can’t bother about settling about the rest, so I shall go away. Let me know what you decide.’

  There was no choice. To reject the Picture of the Year and that which Irene promised them should be the picture of next year was inconceivable. The end-walls of the studio where the exhibition was held were painted duck’s-egg green, a hydrangea and some ferns were placed beneath each, and in front of them a row of chairs. Lucia, as Mayor, opened the show and made an inaugural speech, tracing the history of pictorial Art from earliest times, and, coming down to the present, alluded to the pictures of all her f
riends, the poetical studies of the marsh, the loving fidelity of the still-life exhibits, the spiritual uplift of the budgerigar. ‘Of the two great works of Miss Coles,’ she concluded, ‘which will make our exhibition so ever-memorable, I need not speak. One has already acquired world-wide fame, and I hope it will not be thought egotistic of me if I confidently prophesy that the other will also. I am violating no secrets if I say that it will remain in Tilling in some conspicuous and public place, the cherished possession for ever of our historic town.’

  She bowed, she smiled, she accepted a special copy of the catalogue, which Georgie had decorated with a blue riband, and, very tactfully, instead of looking at the picture of herself, sat down with him in front of that of Elizabeth and Benjy, audibly pointing out its beauties to him.

  ‘Wonderful brush-work,’ she said, waving her catalogue as if it was a paint-brush. ‘Such life and movement! The waves. Venus’s button-boots. Quite Dutch. But how Irene has developed since then! Presently we will look at the picture of me with this fresh in our minds.’

  Elizabeth and Benjy were compelled, by the force of Lucia’s polite example, to sit in front of her picture, and they talked quietly behind their catalogues.

  ‘Can’t make head or tail of it,’ murmured Benjy. ‘I never saw such a jumble.’

  ‘A little puzzling at first,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but I’m beginning to grasp it. Seated at her piano you see, to show how divinely she plays. Scarlet robe and chain, to show she’s Mayor. Cards littered about for her bridge. Rather unkind. Bicycle leaning against the piano. Her paint-box because she’s such a great artist. A pity the whole thing looks like a jumble-sale, with Worship as auctioneer. And such a sad falling off as a work of Art. I’m afraid success has gone to Irene’s head.’

  ‘Time we looked at our own picture,’ said Benjy. ‘Fancy this daub in the Town Hall, if that’s what she meant by some conspicuous and public place.’

  ‘It hasn’t got there yet,’ whispered Elizabeth. ‘As a Councillor, I shall have something to say to that.’

  They crossed over to the other side of the room, passing Lucia and Georgie on the way, as if in some figure of the Lancers. Evie and the Padre were standing close in front of the Venus and Evie burst into a series of shrill squeaks.

  ‘Oh, dear me! Did you ever, Kenneth!’ she said. ‘Poor Elizabeth. What a face and so like!’

  ‘Well indeed!’ said Kenneth. ‘Surely the puir oyster-shell canna’ bear that weight, and down she’ll go and get a ducking. An’ the Major up in the clouds wi’ his wee bottle … Eh, and here’s Mistress Mapp-Flint herself and her guid man. A proud day for ye. Come along wifie.’

  Irene had not been at the opening, but now she entered in her shorts and scarlet jersey. Her eye fell on the hydrangea below the Venus.

  ‘Take that foul thing away,’ she screamed. ‘It kills my picture. What, another of them under my Lucia! Throw them into the street, somebody. By whose orders were they put there? Where’s the hanging committee? I summon the hanging committee.’

  The offending vegetables were borne away by Georgie and the Padre, and Irene, having cooled down, joined Benjy and Elizabeth by the Venus. She looked from it to them and from them to it.

  ‘My God, how I’ve improved since I did that!’ she said. ‘I think I must repaint some of it, and put more character into your faces.’

  ‘Don’t touch it, dear,’ said Elizabeth nervously. ‘It’s perfect as it is. Genius.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Irene, ‘but a few touches would make it more scathing. There’s rouge on your cheeks now, Mapp, and that would give your face a hungry impropriety. I’ll see to that this afternoon when the exhibition closes for the day.’

  ‘But not while it’s on view, quaint one,’ argued Elizabeth. ‘The committee accepted it as it was. Most irregular.’

  ‘They’ll like it far better when I’ve touched it up,’ said Irene. ‘You’ll see.’ And she joined Lucia and Georgie.

  ‘Darling, it’s not unworthy of you, is it?’ she asked. ‘And how noble you are to give it to the Borough for the Town Hall. It must hang just above the Mayor’s chair. That’s the only place for it.’

  ‘There’ll be no difficulty about that,’ said Lucia.

  She announced her gift to the Town Council at their next meeting, coupled with the artist’s desire that it should be hung on the wall behind the Mayor’s chair. Subdued respectful applause followed her gracious speech and an uncomfortable silence, for most of her Councillors had already viewed the work of Art with feelings of bewildered stupefaction. Then she was formally thanked for her generous intention and the Town Clerk intimated that before the Borough accepted any gift, a small committee was always appointed to inspect it. Apart from Elizabeth, who said she would be honoured to serve on it, some diffidence was shown; several Councillors explained that they had no knowledge of the pictorial art, but eventually two of them said they would do their best.

  This committee met next morning at the exhibition, and sat in depressed silence in front of the picture. Then Elizabeth sighed wistfully and said ‘Tut, tut’ and the two others looked to her for a lead. She continued to gaze at the picture.

  ‘Me to say something, gentlemen?’ she asked, suddenly conscious of their scrutiny, ‘Well, if you insist. I trust you will disagree with what I feel I’m bound to say, for otherwise I fear a very painful duty lies in front of us. So generous of our beloved Mayor, and so like her, isn’t it? But I don’t see how it is possible for us to recommend the Council to accept her gift. I wouldn’t for the world set up my opinion against yours, but that’s what I feel. Most distressing for me, you will well understand, being so intimate a friend of hers, but private affection cannot rank against public responsibility.’ A slight murmur of sympathy followed this speech, and the committee found that they were of one mind in being conscientiously unable to recommend the Council to accept the Mayor’s gift.

  ‘Very sad,’ said Elizabeth, shaking her head. ‘Our proceedings, I take it, are confidential until we communicate them officially to the Council.’

  When her colleagues had gone, the Mayoress strolled round the gallery. A misty morning on the marsh really looked very well: its vague pearly opalescence seemed to emphasize the faulty drawing in Georgie’s sunny morning on the marsh and Diva’s tartlets. Detaching herself from it, she went to the Venus, and a horrified exclamation burst from her. Quaint Irene had carried out her awful threat, had tinged her cheeks with unnatural colour, and had outlined her mouth with a thin line of vermilion, giving it a coyly beckoning expression. So gross a parody of her face and indeed of her character could not be permitted to remain there: something must be done, and, leaving the gallery in great agitation, she went straight to Mallards, for no one but Lucia had the smallest influence with that quaint and venomous young person.

  The Mayor had snatched a short respite from her incessant work, and was engaged on a picture of some fine hollyhocks in her garden. She was feeling very buoyant, for the Poppy-crisis seemed to be quite over, and she knew that she had guessed correctly the purport of her Mayoress’s desire to see her on urgent business. Invisible to mortal eye, there was a brazier of coals of fire on the lawn beside her, which she would presently pour on to the Mayoress’s head.

  ‘Good morning, dear Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘I’ve just snatched half an hour while good Mrs Simpson is typing some letters for me. Susan and Mr Wyse have implored me to do another little flower-study for our esposizione, to fill up the vacant place by my dahlias. I shall call it “Jubilant July” As you know, I am always at your disposal. What good wind blows you here?’

  ‘Lovely of you to spare the time,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’ve just been to the esposizione, and I felt it was my duty to see you at once. Quaint Irene has done something too monstrous. She’s altered my face; she’s given it a most disgusting expression. The picture can’t be allowed to remain there in its present condition. I wondered if you with your great influence –’

  Lucia half-closed her e
yes, and regarded her sketch with intolerable complacency.

  ‘Yes: that curious picture of Irene’s,’ she said at length. ‘What a Puck-like genius! I went with her to our gallery a couple of hours ago, to see what she had done to the Venus: she was so eager to know what I thought about her little alterations.’

  ‘An outrage, an abomination!’ cried Elizabeth.

  ‘I should not put it quite as strongly as that,’ said Lucia, returning to her hollyhocks and putting in a vein on one of the leaves with exquisite delicacy. ‘But I told her that I could not approve of those new touches. They introduced, to my mind, a note of farce into her satire, which was out of place, though amusing in itself. She agreed with me after a little argument into which I need not go. She will remove them again during the lunch-hour.’

  ‘Oh thank you, dear,’ said Elizabeth effusively. ‘I always say what a true friend you are. I was terribly upset.’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Lucia sucking her paint-brush. ‘Quite easy.’

  Elizabeth turned her undivided attention to the hollyhocks.

  ‘What a lovely sketch!’ she said. ‘How it will enrich our exhibition. Thank you, dear, again. I won’t keep you from your work any longer. How you find time for all you do is a constant amazement to me.’

  She ambled swiftly away. It would have been awkward if, at such a genial moment, Lucia had asked whether the artistic committee appointed by the Council had inspected Irene’s other masterpiece yet.

  The holiday months of August and September were at hand, when the ladies of Tilling were accustomed to let their houses and move into smaller houses themselves at a cheaper rent than what they received. Diva, for instance, having let her own house, was accustomed to move into Irene’s who took a remote cottage on the marsh, where she could pursue her art and paint nude studies of herself in a looking-glass. But this year Diva refused to quit ye olde tea-house, when, with the town full of visitors, she would be doing so roaring a business; the Wyses decided not to go to Italy to stay with the Contessa, since international relations were so strained, and Lucia felt it her duty as Mayor, to remain in Tilling. The only letting done, in fact, was by the Padre, who left his curate in charge, while he and Evie took a prolonged holiday in bonnie Scotland, and let the Vicarage to the Mapp-Flints who had a most exciting tenant. This was a Miss Susan Leg, who, so Tilling was thrilled to learn from an interview she gave to a London paper, was none other than the world-wide novelist, Rudolph da Vinci. Miss Leg (so she stated in this piece of self-revelation) never took a holiday. ‘I shall not rest,’ she finely observed, ‘till the shadows of life’s eventide close round me,’ and she went on to explain that she would be studying, in view of a future book, this little centre of provincial English life. ‘I am well aware,’ said Miss Leg, ‘that my readers expect of me an aristocratic setting for my romances, but I intend to prove to them that life is as full of human interest in any simple, humble country village as in Belgravia and the country houses of the nobility.’