The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  Who the expected friend was who had disappointed Mrs. Poppit could be thought out later: at present, as Miss Mapp smiled at Withers and hummed her tune again, she had to settle whether she was going to be delighted to accept, or obliged to decline. The argument in favour of being obliged to decline was obvious: Mrs. Poppit deserved to be “served out” for not including her among the original guests, and if she declined it was quite probable that at this late hour her hostess might not be able to get anyone else, and so one of her tables would be completely spoiled. In favour of accepting was the fact that she would get a rubber of bridge and a good tea, and would be able to say something disagreeable about the red-currant fool, which would serve Miss Poppit out for attempting to crib her ancestral dishes…

  A bright, a joyous, a diabolical idea struck her, and she went herself to the telephone, and genteelly wiped the place where Withers had probably breathed on it.

  “So kind of you, Isabel,” she said, “but I am very busy today, and you didn’t give me much notice, did you? So I’ll try to look in if I can, shall I? I might be able to squeeze it in.”

  There was a pause, and Miss Mapp knew that she had put Isabel in a hole. If she successfully tried to get somebody else, Miss Mapp might find she could squeeze it in, and there would be nine. If she failed to get someone else, and Miss Mapp couldn’t squeeze it in, then there would be seven… Isabel wouldn’t have a tranquil moment all day.

  “Ah, do squeeze it in,” she said in those horrid wheedling tones which for some reason Major Flint found so attractive. That was one of the weak points about him, and there were many, many others. But that was among those which Miss Mapp found it difficult to condone.

  “If I possibly can,” said Miss Mapp. “But at this late hour—Good-bye, dear, or only au reservoir, we hope.”

  She heard Isabel’s polite laugh at this nearly new and delicious Malaprop before she rang off. Isabel collected malaprops and wrote them out in a note book. If you reversed the note-book and began at the other end, you would find the collection of Spoonerisms, which were very amusing, too.

  Tea, followed by a bridge-party, was, in summer, the chief manifestation of the spirit of hospitality in Tilling. Mrs. Poppit, it is true, had attempted to do something in the way of dinner-parties, but though she was at liberty to give as many dinner-parties as she pleased, nobody else had followed her ostentatious example. Dinner-parties entailed a higher scale of living; Miss Mapp, for one, had accurately counted the cost of having three hungry people to dinner, and found that one such dinner-party was not nearly compensated for, in the way of expense, by being invited to three subsequent dinner-parties by your guests. Voluptuous teas were the rule, after which you really wanted no more than little bits of things, a cup of soup, a slice of cold tart, or a dished-up piece of fish and some toasted cheese. Then, after the excitement of bridge (and bridge was very exciting in Tilling), a jig-saw puzzle or Patience cooled your brain and composed your nerves. In winter, however, with its scarcity of daylight, Tilling commonly gave evening bridge-parties, and asked the requisite number of friends to drop in after dinner, though everybody knew that everybody else had only partaken of bits of things. Probably the ruinous price of coal had something to do with these evening bridge-parties, for the fire that warmed your room when you were alone would warm all your guests as well, and then, when your hospitality was returned, you could let your sitting-room fire go out. But though Miss Mapp was already planning something in connection with winter bridge, winter was a long way off yet…

  Before Miss Mapp got back to her window in the garden-room Mrs. Poppit’s great offensive motor-car, which she always alluded to as“the Royce,” had come round the corner and, stopping opposite Major Flint’s house, was entirely extinguishing all survey of the street beyond. It was clear enough then that she had sent the Royce to take the two out to the golf-links, so that they should have time to play their round and catch the 2.20 back to Tilling again, so as to be in good time for the bridge-party. Even as she looked, Major Flint came out of his house on one side of the Royce and Captain Puffin on the other. The Royce obstructed their view of each other, and simultaneously each of them shouted across to the house of the other. Captain Puffin emitted a loud “Coo-ee, Major,” (an Australian ejaculation, learned on his voyages), while Major Flint bellowed “Qui-hi, Captain,” which, all the world knew, was of Oriental origin. The noise each of them made prevented him from hearing the other, and presently one in a fuming hurry to start ran round in front of the car at the precise moment that the other ran round behind it, and they both banged loudly on each other’s knockers. These knocks were not so precisely simultaneous as the shouts had been, and this led to mutual discovery, hailed with peals of falsetto laughter on the part of Captain Puffin and the more manly guffaws of the Major… After that the Royce lumbered down the grass-grown cobbles of the street, and after a great deal of reversing managed to turn the corner.

  Miss Mapp set off with her basket to do her shopping. She carried in it the weekly books, which she would leave, with payment but not without argument, at the tradesmen’s shops. There was an item for suet which she intended to resist to the last breath in her body, though her butcher would probably surrender long before that. There was an item for eggs at the dairy which she might have to pay, though it was a monstrous overcharge. She had made up her mind about the laundry, she intended to pay that bill with an icy countenance and say “Good morning for ever,” or words to that effect, unless the proprietor instantly produced the—the article of clothing which had been lost in the wash (like King John’s treasures), or refunded an ample sum for the replacing of it. All these quarrelsome errands were meat and drink to Miss Mapp: Tuesday morning, the day on which she paid and disputed her weekly bills, was as enjoyable as Sunday mornings when, sitting close under the pulpit, she noted the glaring inconsistencies and grammatical errors in the discourse. After the bills were paid and business was done, there was pleasure to follow, for there was a fitting-on at the dress-maker’s, the fitting-on of a tea-gown, to be worn at winter-evening bridge-parties, which, unless Miss Mapp was sadly mistaken, would astound and agonize by its magnificence all who set eyes on it. She had found the description of it, as worn by Mrs. Titus W. Trout, in an American fashion paper; it was of what was described as kingfisher blue, and had lumps and wedges of lace round the edge of the skirt, and orange chiffon round the neck. As she set off with her basket full of tradesmen’s books, she pictured to herself with watering mouth the fury, the jealousy, the madness of envy which it would raise in all properly-constituted breasts.

  In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends, in spite, too, of her restless activities, Miss Mapp was not, as might have been expected, a lady of lean and emaciated appearance. She was tall and portly, with plump hands, a broad, benignant face and dimpled, well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping distance, but to a more superficial view she was a rollicking, good-natured figure of a woman. Her mode of address, too, bore out this misleading impression: nothing, for instance, could have been more genial just now than her telephone voice to Isabel Poppit, or her smile to Withers, even while she so strongly suspected her of using the telephone for her own base purposes, and as she passed along the High Street, she showered little smiles and bows on acquaintances and friends. She markedly drew back her lips in speaking, being in no way ashamed of her long white teeth, and wore a practically perpetual smile when there was the least chance of being under observation. Though at sermon time on Sunday, as has been already remarked, she greedily noted the weaknesses and errors of which those twenty minutes was so rewardingly full, she sat all the time with down-dropped eyes and a pretty sacred smile on her lips, and now, when she spied on the other side of the street the figure of the vicar, she tripped slantingly
across the road to him, as if by the move of a knight at chess, looking everywhere else, and only perceiving him with glad surprise at the very last moment. He was a great frequenter of tea parties and except in Lent an assiduous player of bridge, for a clergyman’s duties, so he very properly held, were not confined to visiting the poor and exhorting the sinner. He should be a man of the world, and enter into the pleasures of his prosperous parishioners, as well as into the trials of the troubled. Being an accomplished card-player he entered not only into their pleasures but their pockets, and there was no lady of Tilling who was not pleased to have Mr. Bartlett for a partner. His winnings, so he said, he gave annually to charitable objects, though whether the charities he selected began at home was a point on which Miss Mapp had quite made up her mind. “Not a penny of that will the poor ever see,” was the gist of her reflections when on disastrous days she paid him seven-and-ninepence. She always called him “Padre,” and had never actually caught him looking over his adversaries’ hands.

  “Good morning, Padre,” she said as soon as she perceived him. “What a lovely day! The white butterflies were enjoying themselves so in the sunshine in my garden. And the swallows!”

  Miss Mapp, as every reader will have perceived, wanted to know whether he was playing bridge this afternoon at the Poppits. Major Flint and Captain Puffin certainly were, and it might be taken for granted that Godiva Plaistow was. With the Poppits and herself that made six…

  Mr. Bartlett was humorously archaic in speech. He interlarded archaisms with Highland expressions, and his face was knobby, like a chest of drawers.

  “Ha, good morrow, fair dame,” he said. “And prithee, art not thou even as ye white butterflies?”

  “Oh, Mr. Bartlett,” said the fair dame with a provocative glance. “Naughty! Comparing me to a delicious butterfly!”

  “Nay, prithee, why naughty?” said he. “Yea, indeed, it’s a day to make ye little fowles rejoice! Ha! I perceive you are on the errands of the guid wife Martha.” And he pointed to the basket.

  “Yes; Tuesday morning,” said Miss Mapp. “I pay all my household books on Tuesday. Poor but honest, dear Padre. What a rush life is today! I hardly know which way to turn. Little duties in all directions! And you; you’re always busy! Such a busy bee!”

  “Busy B? Busy Bartlett, quo’ she! Yes, I’m a busy B today, Mistress Mapp. Sermon all morning: choir practice at three, a baptism at six. No time for a walk today, let alone a bit turn at the gowf.”

  Miss Mapp saw her opening, and made a busy bee line for it.

  “Oh, but you should get regular exercise, Padre,” said she.“You take no care of yourself. After the choir practice now, and before the baptism, you could have a brisk walk. To please me!”

  “Yes. I had meant to get a breath of air then,” said he.“But ye guid Dame Poppit has insisted that I take a wee hand at the cartes with them, the wifey and I. Prithee, shall we meet there?”

  (“That makes seven without me,” thought Miss Mapp in parenthesis.) Aloud she said:

  “If I can squeeze it in, Padre. I have promised dear Isabel to do my best.”

  “Well, and a lassie can do no mair,” said he. “Au reservoir then.”

  Miss Mapp was partly pleased, partly annoyed by the agility with which the Padre brought out her own particular joke. It was she who had brought it down to Tilling, and she felt she had an option on it at the end of every interview, if she meant (as she had done on this occasion) to bring it out. On the other hand it was gratifying to see how popular it had become. She had heard it last month when on a visit to a friend at that sweet and refined village called Riseholme. It was rather looked down on there, as not being sufficiently intellectual. But within a week of Miss Mapp’s return, Tilling rang with it, and she let it be understood that she was the original humorist.

  Godiva Plaistow came whizzing along the pavement, a short, stout, breathless body who might, so thought Miss Mapp, have acted up to the full and fell associations of her Christian name without exciting the smallest curiosity on the part of the lewd. (Miss Mapp had much the same sort of figure, but her height, so she was perfectly satisfied to imagine, converted corpulence into majesty.) The swift alternation of those Dutch-looking feet gave the impression that Mrs. Plaistow was going at a prodigious speed, but they could stop revolving without any warning, and then she stood still. Just when a collision with Miss Mapp seemed imminent, she came to a dead halt.

  It was as well to be quite certain that she was going to the Poppits, and Miss Mapp forgave and forgot about the worsted until she had found out. She could never quite manage the indelicacy of saying“Godiva,” whatever Mrs. Plaistow’s figure and age might happen to be, but always addressed her as “Diva,” very affectionately, whenever they were on speaking terms.

  “What a lovely morning, Diva darling,” she said; and noticing that Mr. Bartlett was well out of earshot, “The white butterflies were enjoying themselves so in the sunshine in my garden. And the swallows.”

  Godiva was telegraphic in speech.

  “Lucky birds,” she said. “No teeth. Beaks.”

  Miss Mapp remembered her disappearance round the dentist’s corner half an hour ago, and her own firm inference on the problem.

  “Toothache, darling?” she said. “So sorry.”

  “Wisdom,” said Godiva. “Out at one o’clock. Gas. Ready for bridge this afternoon. Playing? Poppits.”

  “If I can squeeze it in, dear,” said Miss Mapp. “Such a hustle today.”

  Diva put her hand to her face as “wisdom” gave her an awful twinge. Of course she did not believe in the “hustle,” but her pangs prevented her from caring much.

  “Meet you then,” she said. “Shall be all comfortable then. Au—”

  This was more than could be borne, and Miss Mapp hastily interrupted.

  “Au reservoir, Diva dear,” she said with extreme acerbity, and Diva’s feet began swiftly revolving again.

  The problem about the bridge-party thus seemed to be solved. The two Poppits, the two Bartletts, the Major and the Captain with Diva darling and herself made eight, and Miss Mapp with a sudden recrudescence of indignation against Isabel with regard to the red-currant fool and the belated invitation, made up her mind that she would not be able to squeeze it in, thus leaving the party one short. Even apart from the red-currant fool it served the Poppits right for not asking her originally, but only when, as seemed now perfectly clear, somebody else had disappointed them. But just as she emerged from the butcher’s shop, having gained a complete victory in the matter of that suet, without expending the last breath in her body or anything like it, the whole of the seemingly solid structure came toppling to the ground. For on emerging, flushed with triumph, leaving the baffled butcher to try his tricks on somebody else if he chose but not on Miss Mapp, she ran straight into the Disgrace of Tilling and her sex, the suffragette, post-impressionist artist (who painted from the nude, both male and female), the socialist and the Germanophil, all incarnate in one frame. In spite of these execrable antecedents, it was quite in vain that Miss Mapp had tried to poison the collective mind of Tilling against this Creature. If she hated anybody, and she undoubtedly did, she hated Irene Coles. The bitterest part of it all was that if Miss Coles was amused at anybody, and she undoubtedly was, she was amused at Miss Mapp.

  Miss Coles was strolling along in the attire to which Tilling generally had got accustomed, but Miss Mapp never. She had an old wide-awake hat jammed down on her head, a tall collar and stock, a large loose coat, knickerbockers and grey stockings. In her mouth was a cigarette, in her hand she swung the orthodox wicker-basket. She had certainly been to the other fishmonger’s at the end of the High Street, for a lobster, revived perhaps after a sojourn on the ice, by this warm sun, which the butterflies and the swallows had been rejoicing in, was climbing with claws and waving legs over the edge of it.

  Irene removed her cigarette from her mouth and did something in the gutter which is usually associated with the floor of third-cl
ass smoking carriages. Then her handsome, boyish face, more boyish because her hair was closely clipped, broke into a broad grin.

  “Hullo, Mapp!” she said. “Been giving the tradesmen what for on Tuesday morning?”

  Miss Mapp found it extremely difficult to bear this obviously insolent form of address without a spasm of rage. Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as “quaint Irene,” but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.

  “Oh, you sweet thing!” she said. “Treasure!”

  Irene, in some ghastly way, seemed to take note of this. Why men like Captain Puffin and Major Flint found Irene “fetching” and“killing” was more than Miss Mapp could understand, or wanted to understand.

  Quaint Irene looked down at her basket.

  “Why, there’s my lunch going over the top like those beastly British Tommies,” she said, “Get back, love.”

  Miss Mapp could not quite determine whether “love” was a sarcastic echo of “Treasure.” It seemed probable.

  “Oh, what a dear little lobster,” she said. “Look at his sweet claws.”

  “I shall do more than look at them soon,” said Irene, poking it into her basket again. “Come and have tiffin, qui-hi, I’ve got to look after myself today.”

  “What has happened to your devoted Lucy?” asked Miss Mapp. Irene lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards.