The Complete Mapp & Lucia

by E. F. Benson

  “Now that is nice!” she said. “And we’ll have a good gossip. So lovely to be in Riseholme again. And isn’t it naughty of me? I was almost glad when I saw the last of my guests off this morning, and promised myself a real Riseholme day. Such dears all of them, too, and tremendously in the movement; such arguments and discussions as we had! All day yesterday I was occupied, talks with one, strolls with another, and all the time I was longing to trot round and see you and Daisy and all the rest. Any news, Georgie? What did you do with yourself yesterday?”

  “Well, I was very busy too,” said Georgie. “Quite a rush. I had two guests at lunch, and then I had tea at Olga’s—”

  “Is she here still?” asked Lucia. She did not intend to ask that, but she simply could not help it.

  “Oh yes. She’s going to stop here two or three days, as she doesn’t sing in London again till Thursday.”

  Lucia longed to ask if the Princess was remaining as well, but she had self control enough not to. Perhaps it would come out some other way…

  “Dear Olga,” said Lucia effusively. “I reckon her quite a Riseholmite.”

  “Oh quite,” said Georgie, who was determined not to let his ice melt. “Yes: I had tea at Olga’s, and we had the most wonderful weedj. Just she and the Princess and Daisy and I.”

  Lucia gave her silvery peal of laughter. It sounded as if it had ‘turned’ a little in this hot weather, or got a little tarnished.

  “Dear Daisy!” she said. “Is she not priceless? How she adores her conjuring tricks and hocus-pocuses! Tell me all about it. An Egyptian guide: Abfou, was it not?”

  Georgie thought it might be wiser not to tell Lucia all that Abfou had vouchsafed, unless she really insisted, for Abfou had written the most sarcastic things about her in perfect English at top-speed. He had called her a snob again, and said she was too grand now for her old friends, and had been really rude about her shingled hair.

  “Yes, Abfou,” he said. “Abfou was in great form, and Olga has telegraphed for a planchette. Abfou said she was most psychical, and had great mediumistic gifts. Well, that went on a long time.”

  “What else did Abfou say?” asked Lucia, fixing Georgie with her penetrating eye.

  “Oh, he talked about Riseholme affairs,” said Georgie. “He knew the Princess had been to the Museum, for he had seen her there. It was he, you know, who suggested the Museum. He kept writing Museum, though we thought it was Mouse at first.”

  Lucia felt perfectly certain in her own mind that Abfou had been saying things about her. But perhaps, as it was Daisy who had been operating, it was better not to ask what they were. Ignorance was not bliss, but knowledge might be even less blissful. And Georgie was not thawing: he was polite, he was reserved, but so far from chatting, he was talking with great care. She must get him in a more confidential mood.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “Pepino and I haven’t given you anything for the Museum yet. I must send you the Elizabethan spit from my music-room. They say it is the most perfect spit in existence. I don’t know what Pepino didn’t pay for it.”

  “How kind of you,” said Georgie. “I will tell the committee of your offer. Olga gave us a most magnificent present yesterday: the manuscript of ‘Lucrezia,’ which Cortese had given her. I took it to the Museum directly after breakfast, and put it in the glass case opposite the door.”

  Again Lucia longed to be as sarcastic as Abfou, and ask whether a committee meeting had been held to settle if this should be accepted. Probably Georgie had some perception of that, for he went on in a great hurry.

  “Well, the weedj lasted so long that I had only just time to get home to dress for dinner and go back to Olga’s,” he said.

  “Who was there?” asked Lucia.

  “Colonel and Mrs. Boucher, that’s all,” said Georgie. “And after dinner Olga sang too divinely. I played her accompaniments. A lot of Schubert songs.”

  Lucia was beginning to feel sick with envy. She pictured to herself the glory of having taken her party across to Olga’s after dinner last night, of having played the accompaniments instead of Georgie (who was a miserable accompanist), of having been persuaded afterwards to give them the little morsel of Stravinski, which she had got by heart. How brilliant it would all have been; what a sumptuous paragraph Hermione would have written about her weekend! Instead of which Olga had sung to those old Bouchers, neither of whom knew one note from another, nor cared the least for the distinction of hearing the prima-donna sing in her own house. The bitterness of it could not be suppressed.

  “Dear old Schubert songs!” she said with extraordinary acidity. “Such sweet old-fashioned things. ‘Wiedmung,’ I suppose.”

  “No, that’s by Schumann,” said Georgie, who was nettled by her tone, though he guessed what she was suffering.

  Lucia knew he was right, but had to uphold her own unfortunate mistake.

  “Schubert, I think,” she said. “Not that it matters. And so, as dear old Pepys said, and so to bed?”

  Georgie was certainly enjoying himself.

  “Oh no, we didn’t go to bed till terribly late,” he said. “But you would have hated to be there, for what we did next. We turned on the gramophone—”

  Lucia gave a little wince. Her views about gramophones as being a profane parody of music, were well known.

  “Yes, I should have run away then,” she said.

  “We turned on the gramophone and danced!” said Georgie firmly.

  This was the worst she had heard yet. Again she pictured what yesterday evening might have been. The idea of having popped in with her party after dinner, to hear Olga sing, and then dance impromptu with a prima-donna and a princess… It was agonising: it was intolerable.

  She gave a dreadful little titter.

  “How very droll!” she said. “I can hardly imagine it. Mrs. Boucher in her bath-chair must have been an unwieldy partner, Georgie. Are you not very stiff this morning?”

  “No, Mrs. Boucher didn’t dance,” said Georgie with fearful literalness. “She looked on and wound up the gramophone. Just we four danced: Olga and the Princess and Colonel Boucher and I.”

  Lucia made a great effort with herself. She knew quite well that Georgie knew how she would have given anything to have brought her party across, and it only made matters worse (if they could be made worse) to be sarcastic about it and pretend to find it all ridiculous. Olga certainly had left her and her friends alone, just as she herself had left Riseholme alone, in this matter of her weekend party. Yet it was unwise to be withering about Colonel Boucher’s dancing. She had made it clear that she was busy with her party, and but for this unfortunate accident of Olga’s coming down, nothing else could have happened in Riseholme that day except by her dispensing. It was unfortunate, but it must be lived down, and if dear old Riseholme was offended with her, Riseholme must be propitiated.

  “Great fun it must have been,” she said. “How delicious a little impromptu thing like that is! And singing too: well, you had a nice evening, Georgie. And now let us make some delicious little plan for to-day. Pop in presently and have ‘ickle music and bit of lunch.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve just promised to lunch with Daisy,” said he.

  This again was rather ominous, for there could be no doubt that Daisy, having said she was engaged, had popped in here to effect an engagement.

  “How gay!” said Lucia. “Come and dine this evening then! Really, Georgie, you are busier than any of us in London.”

  “Too tarsome,” said Georgie, “because Olga’s coming in here.”

  “And the Princess?” asked Lucia before she could stop herself.

  “No, she went away this morning,” said Georgie.

  That was something, anyhow, thought Lucia. One distinguished person had gone away from Riseholme. She waited, in slowly diminishing confidence, for Georgie to ask her to dine with him instead. Perhaps he would ask Pepino too, but if not, Pepino would be quite happy with his telescope and his cross-words all by himself. But it
was odd and distasteful to wait to be asked to dinner by anybody in Riseholme instead of everyone wanting to be asked by her.

  “She went away by the ten thirty,” said Georgie, after an awful pause.

  Lucia had already learned certain lessons in London. If you get a snub—and this seemed very like a snub—the only possible course was to be unaware of it. So, though the thought of being snubbed by Georgie nearly made her swoon, she was unaware of it.

  “Such a good train,” she said, magnificently disregarding the well-known fact that it stopped at every station, and crawled in between.

  “Excellent,” said Georgie with conviction. He had not the slightest intention of asking Lucia to dine, for he wanted his tête-à-tête with Olga. There would be such a lot to talk over, and besides it would be tiresome to have Lucia there, for she would be sure to gabble away about her wonderful life in London, and her music-room and her Chippendale chairs, and generally to lay down the law. She must be punished too, for her loathsome conduct in disregarding her old friends when she had her party from London, and be made to learn that her old friends were being much smarter than she was.

  Lucia kept her end up nobly.

  “Well, Georgie, I must trot away,” she said. “Such a lot of people to see. Look in, if you’ve got a spare minute. I’m off again to-morrow. Such a whirl of things in London this week.”

  Lucia, instead of proceeding to see lots of people, went back to her house and saw Pepino. He was sitting in the garden in very old clothes, smoking a pipe, and thoroughly enjoying the complete absence of anything to do. He was aware that officially he loved the bustle of London, but it was extremely pleasant to sit in his garden and smoke a pipe, and above all to be rid of those rather hectic people who had talked quite incessantly from morning till night all Sunday. He had given up the cross-word, and was thinking over the material for a sonnet on Tranquillity, when Lucia came out to him.

  “I was wondering, Pepino,” she said, “if it would not be pleasanter to go up to town this afternoon. We should get the cool of the evening for our drive, and really, now all our guests have gone, and we are going to-morrow, these hours will be rather tedious. We are spoilt, caro, you and I, by our full life up there, where any moment the telephone bell may ring with some delightful invitation. Of course in August we will be here, and settle down to our quaint old life again, but these little odds and ends of time, you know.”

  Pepino was reasonably astonished. Half an hour ago Lucia had set out, burning with enthusiasm to pick up the ‘old threads,’ and now all she seemed to want to do was to drop the old threads as quickly as possible. Though he knew himself to be incapable of following the swift and antic movements of Lucia’s mind, he was capable of putting two and two together. He had been faintly conscious all yesterday that matters were not going precisely as Lucia wished, and knew that her efforts to entice Olga and her guest to the house had been as barren as a fig-tree, but there must have been something more than that. Though not an imaginative man (except in thinking that words rhymed when they did not), it occurred to him that Riseholme was irritated with Lucia, and was indicating it in some unusual manner.

  “Why, my dear, I thought you were going to have people in to lunch and dinner,” he said, “and see about sending the spit to the Museum, and be tremendously busy all day.”

  Lucia pulled herself together. She had a momentary impulse to confide in Pepino and tell him all the ominous happenings of the last hour, how Daisy had said she was engaged for lunch and Mrs. Boucher had friends to lunch, and Georgie had Olga to dinner and had not asked her, and how the munificent gift of the spit was to be considered by the Museum committee before they accepted it. But to have done that would be to acknowledge not one snub but many snubs, which was contrary to the whole principle of successful attainment. Never must she confess, even to Pepino, that the wheels of her chariot seemed to drive heavily, or that Riseholme was not at the moment agape to receive the signs of her favour. She must not even confess it to herself, and she made a rapid and complete volte face.

  “It shall be as you like, caro,” she said. “You would prefer to spend a quiet day here, so you shall. As for me, you’ve never known me yet otherwise than busy, have you? I have a stack of letters to write, and there’s my piano looking, oh, so reproachfully at me, for I haven’t touched the dear keys since I came, and I must just glance through ‘Henry VIII,’ as we’re going to see it to-morrow. I shall be busy enough, and you will have your day in the sun and the air. I only thought you might prefer to run up to town to-day, instead of waiting till to-morrow. Now don’t keep me chatting here any longer.”

  Lucia proved her quality on that dismal day. She played her piano with all her usual concentration, she read ‘Henry VIII,’ she wrote her letters, and it was not till the Evening Gazette came in that she allowed herself a moment’s relaxation. Hurriedly she turned the pages, stopping neither for cross-word nor record of international interests, till she came to Hermione’s column. She had feared (and with a gasp of relief she saw how unfounded her fears had been) that Hermione would have devoted his picturesque pen to Olga and the Princess, and given her and her party only the fag-end of his last paragraph, but she had disquieted herself in vain. Olga had taken no notice of him, and now (what could be fairer?) he took no notice of Olga. He just mentioned that she had a ‘pretty little cottage’ at Riseholme, where she came occasionally for weekends, and there were three long sumptuous paragraphs about The Hurst, and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lucas who had Lord Limpsfield and the wife of the member, Mrs. Garroby-Ashton, and Mrs. Alingsby staying with them. Lady Ambermere and her party from the Hall had come to tea, and it was all glorious and distinguished. Hermione had proved himself a true friend, and there was not a word about Olga and the Princess going to lunch with Georgie, or about Daisy and her absurd weedj… Lucia read the luscious lines through twice, and then, as she often did, sent her copy across to Georgie, in order to help him to readjust values. Almost simultaneously Daisy sent de Vere across to him with her copy, and Mrs. Boucher did the same, calling attention to the obnoxious paragraphs with blue and red pencil respectively, and a great many exclamation marks in both cases.

  Riseholme settled back into its strenuous life again when Lucia departed next morning to resume her vapid existence in London. It was not annoyed with her any more, because it had ‘larned’ her, and was quite prepared to welcome her back if (and when) she returned in a proper spirit and behaved herself suitably. Moreover, even with its own perennial interests to attend to, it privately missed the old Lucia, who gave them a lead in everything, even though she domineered, and was absurd, and pretended to know all about everything, and put her finger into every pie within reach. But it did not miss the new shingled Lucia, the one who had come down with a party of fresh friends, and had laughed at the Museum, and had neglected her old friends altogether, till she found out that Olga and a Princess were in the place: the less seen of her the better. It was considered also that she had remained down here this extra day in order to propitiate those whom she had treated as pariahs, and condescend to take notice of them again, and if there was one thing that Riseholme could not stand, and did not mean to stand from anybody, it was condescension. It was therefore perfectly correct for Daisy and Mrs. Boucher to say they were engaged for lunch, and for Georgie to decline to ask her to dinner... These three formed the committee of the Museum, and they met that morning to audit the accounts for the week and discuss any other business connected or unconnected with their office. There was not, of course, with so small and intimate a body, any need to have a chairman, and they all rapped the table when they wanted to be listened to.

  Mrs. Boucher was greedily counting the shillings which had been taken from the till, while Georgie counted the counterfoils of the tickets.

  “A hundred and twenty-three,” he said. “That’s nearly the best week we’ve had yet.”

  “And fifteen and four is nineteen,” said Mrs. Boucher, “and four is twenty-three which make
s exactly six pounds three shillings. Well, I do call that good. And I hear we’ve had a wonderful bequest made. Most generous of our dear Olga. I think she ought not only to be thanked, but asked to join the committee. I always said—”

  Daisy rapped the table.

  “Abfou said just the same,” she interrupted. “I had a sitting this morning, and he kept writing ‘committee.’ I brought the paper along with me, because I was going to propose that myself. But there’s another thing first, and that’s about Insurance. Robert told me he was insuring the building and its contents separately for a thousand pounds each. We shall have to pay a premium, of course. Oh, here’s Abfou’s message. ‘Committee,’ you see ‘committee’ written three times. I feel quite sure he meant Olga.”

  “He spells it with only one ‘m,’” said Georgie, “but I expect he means that. There’s one bit of business that comes before that, for I have been offered another object for the Museum, and I said I would refer the offer to the Committee before I accepted it. Lucia came to see me yesterday morning and asked—”

  “The Elizabethan spit,” said Mrs. Boucher. “I don’t see what we want with it, for my part, and if I had to say what I thought, I should thank her most politely, and beg that she would keep it herself. Most kind of her, I’m sure. Sorry to refuse, which was just what I said when she asked me to lunch yesterday. There’d have been legs of cold chickens of which her friends from London had eaten wings.”

  “She asked me too,” said Daisy, “and I said ‘no.’ Did she leave this morning?”