by E. F. Benson
“My dear, too sad about the Museum,” she said. “All your beautiful things. Poor Daisy, too, her idea.”
Georgie explained about the silver lining to the cloud.
“But what’s so marvellous,” he said, “is Vittoria. Fire, water, moonlight. I never heard of anything so extraordinary, and I thought it only meant the damp on the walls, and the new oil-stoves. It was prophetical, Lucia, and Mrs. Boucher thinks so too.”
Lucia still showed no elation. Oddly enough, she had thought it meant damp and oil-stoves, too, for she did remember what Georgie had forgotten that he had told her just before the epiphany of Vittoria. But now this stupendous fulfilment of Vittoria’s communication of which she had never dreamed, had happened. As for Abfou, it was a mere waste of time to give another thought to poor dear malicious Abfou. She sighed.
“Yes, Georgie, it was strange,” she said. “That was our first sitting, wasn’t it? When I got so drowsy and felt so queer. Very strange indeed: convincing, I think. But whether I shall go on sitting now, I hardly know.”
“Oh, but you must,” said Georgie. “After all the rubbish—”
Lucia held up a finger.
“Now, Georgie, don’t be unkind,” she said. “Let us say, ‘Poor Daisy,’ and leave it there. That’s all. Any other news?”
Georgie retailed the monstrous demand of Lady Ambermere.
“And, as Robert says, it’s so hard to know what to offer her,” he concluded.
Lucia gave the gayest of laughs.
“Georgie, what would poor Riseholme do without me?” she said. “I seem to be made to pull you all out of difficulties. That mismanaged golf-club, Pug, and now there’s this. Well, shall I be kind and help you once more?”
She turned over the leaves of her paper.
“Ah, that’s it,” she said. “Listen, Georgie. Sale at Pemberton’s auction-rooms in Knightsbridge yesterday. Various items. Autograph of Crippen the murderer. Dear me, what horrid minds people have! Mother-of-pearl brooch belonging to the wife of the poet Mr. Robert Montgomery; a pair of razors belonging to Carlyle, all odds and ends of trumpery, you see… Ah yes, here it is. Pair of riding gaiters, in good condition, belonging to His Majesty King George the Fourth. That seems a sort of guide, doesn’t it, to the value of Queen Charlotte’s mittens. And what do you think they fetched? A terrific sum, Georgie; fifty pounds is nowhere near it. They fetched ten shillings and sixpence.”
“No!” said Georgie. “And Lady Ambermere asked fifty pounds!”
Lucia laughed again.
“Well, Georgie, I suppose I must be good-natured,” she said. “I’ll draft a little letter for your committee to Lady Ambermere. How you all bully me and work me to death! Why, only yesterday I said to Pepino that those months we spent in London seemed a holiday compared to what I have to do here. Dear old Riseholme! I’m sure I’m very glad to help it out of its little holes.”
Georgie gave a gasp of admiration. It was but a month or two ago that all Riseholme rejoiced when Abfou called her a snob, and now here they all were again (with the exception of Daisy) going to her for help and guidance in all those employments and excitements in which Riseholme revelled. Golf-competitions and bridge tournament, and duets, and real séances, and deliverance from Lady Ambermere, and above all, the excitement supplied by her personality.
“You’re too wonderful,” he said, “indeed, I don’t know what we should do without you.”
Lucia got up.
“Well, I’ll scribble a little letter for you,” she said, “bringing in the price of George the Fourth’s gaiters in good condition. What shall we—I mean what shall you offer? I think you must be generous, Georgie, and not calculate the exact difference between the value of a pair of gaiters in good condition belonging to a king, and that of a pair of moth-eaten mittens belonging to a queen consort. Offer her the same; in fact, I think I should enclose a treasury note for ten shillings and six stamps. That will be more than generous, it will be munificent.”
Lucia sat down at her writing-table, and after a few minutes’ thought, scribbled a couple of sides of note-paper in that neat handwriting that bore no resemblance to Vittoria’s. She read them through, and approved.
“I think that will settle it,” she said. “If there is any further bother with the Vecchia, let me know. There’s one more thing, Georgie, and then let us have a little music. How do you think the fire broke out?”
Georgie felt her penetrating eye was on him. She had not asked that question quite idly. He tried to answer it quite idly.
“It’s most mysterious,” he said. “The oil stoves are always put out quite early in the evening, and lit again next morning. The boy says he put them out as usual.”
Lucia’s eye was still on him.
“Georgie, how do you think the fire broke out?” she repeated.
This time Georgie felt thoroughly uncomfortable. Had Lucia the power of divination?…
“I don’t know,” he said. “Have you any idea about it?”
“Yes,” said Lucia. “And so have you. I’ll tell you my idea if you like. I saw our poor misguided Daisy coming out of the Museum close on seven o’clock last night.”
“So did I,” said Georgie in a whisper.
“Well, the oil-stoves must have been put out long before that,” said Lucia. “Mustn’t they?”
“Yes,” said Georgie.
“Then how was it that there was a light coming out of the Museum windows? Not much of a light, but a little light, I saw it. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know,” said Georgie.
Lucia held up a censuring finger.
“Georgie, you must be very dull this morning,” she said. “What I make of it is that our poor Daisy lit the oil-stoves again. And then probably in her fumbling way, she spilt some oil. Something of the sort, anyhow. In fact, I’m afraid Daisy burned down the Museum.”
There was a terrible pause.
“What are we to do?” said Georgie.
Lucia laughed.
“Do?” she said. “Nothing, except never know anything about it. We know quite well that poor Daisy didn’t do it on purpose. She hasn’t got the pluck or the invention to be an incendiary. It was only her muddling, meddling ways.”
“But the insurance money?” said Georgie.
“What about it? The fire was an accident, whether Daisy confessed what she had done or not. Poor Daisy! We must be nice to Daisy, Georgie. Her golf, her Abfou! Such disappointments. I think I will ask her to be my partner in the foursome for the Lucas Cup. And perhaps if there was another place on the golf-committee, we might propose her for it.”
Lucia sighed, smiling wistfully.
“A pity she is not a little wiser,” she said.
Lucia sat looking wistful for a moment. Then to Georgie’s immense surprise she burst out into peals of laughter.
“My dear, what is the matter?” said Georgie.
Lucia was helpless for a little, but she gasped and recovered and wiped her eyes.
“Georgie, you are dull this morning!” she said. “Don’t you see? Poor Daisy’s meddling has made the reputation of Vittoria and crumpled up Abfou. Fire, water, moonlight: Vittoria’s prophecy. Vittoria owes it all to poor dear Daisy!”
Georgie’s laughter set Lucia off again, and Pepino coming in found both at it.
“Good morning, Georgie,” he said. “Terrible about the Museum. A sad loss. What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing, caro,” said Lucia. “Just a little joke of Daisy’s. Not worth repeating, but it amused Georgie and me. Come, Georgie, half an hour’s good practice of celestial Mozartino. We have been lazy lately.”
THE END
Mapp and Lucia
First Published 1931
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTE
R 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 1
Though it was nearly a year since her husband’s death, Emmeline Lucas (universally known to her friends as Lucia) still wore the deepest and most uncompromising mourning. Black certainly suited her very well, but that had nothing to do with this continued use of it, whatever anybody said. Pepino and she had been the most devoted couple for over twenty-five years, and her grief at his loss was heart-felt: she missed him constantly and keenly. But months ago now, she, with her very vital and active personality, had felt a most natural craving to immerse herself again in all those thrilling interests which made life at this Elizabethan village of Riseholme so exciting a business, and she had not yet been able to make up her mind to take the plunge she longed for. Though she had not made a luxury out of the tokens of grief, she had perhaps made, ever so slightly, a stunt of them.
For instance. There was that book-shop on the green, ‘Ye Signe of ye Daffodille’, under the imprint of which Pepino had published his severely limited edition of Fugitive Lyrics and Pensieri Persi. A full six months after his death Lucia had been walking past it with Georgie Pillson, and had seen in the window a book she would have liked to purchase. But next to it, on the shelf, was the thin volume of Pepino’s Pensieri Persi, and, frankly, it had been rather stuntish of her to falter on the threshold and, with eyes that were doing their best to swim, to say to Georgie: ‘I can’t quite face going in, Georgie. Weak of me, I know, but there it is. Will you please just pop in, caro, and ask them to send me Beethoven’s Days of Boyhood? I will stroll on.’
So Georgie had pressed her hand and done this errand for her, and of course he had repeated this pathetic little incident to others. Tasteful embroideries had been tacked on to it, and it was soon known all over Riseholme that poor Lucia had gone into ‘Ye Signe of ye Daffodille’ to buy the book about Beethoven’s boyhood, and had been so sadly affected by the sight of Pepino’s poems in their rough brown linen cover with dark-green tape to tie them up with (although she constantly saw the same volume in her own house), that she had quite broken down. Some said that sal volatile had been administered.
Similarly, she had never been able to bring herself to have a game of golf, or to resume her Dante-readings, and having thus established the impression that her life had been completely smashed up it had been hard to decide that on Tuesday or Wednesday next she would begin to glue it together again. In consequence she had remained in as many pieces as before. Like a sensible woman she was very careful of her physical health, and since this stunt of mourning made it impossible for her to play golf or take brisk walks, she sent for a very illuminating little book, called An Ideal System of Callisthenics for those no longer Young, and in a secluded glade of her garden she exposed as much of herself as was proper to the invigorating action of the sun, when there was any, and had long bouts of skipping, and kicked, and jerked, and swayed her trunk, gracefully and vigorously, in accordance with the instructions laid down. The effect was most satisfactory, and at the very, very back of her mind she conceived it possible that some day she might conduct callisthenic classes for those ladies of Riseholme who were no longer young.
Then there was the greater matter of the Elizabethan fête to be held in August next, when Riseholme would be swarming with tourists. The idea of it had been entirely Lucia’s, and there had been several meetings of the fête-committee (of which, naturally, she was President) before Pepino’s death. She had planned the great scene in it: this was to be Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the Golden Hind, when, on the completion of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world, Her Majesty went to dine with him on board his ship at Deptford and knighted him. The Golden Hind was to be moored in the pond on the village green; or, more accurately, a platform on piles was to be built there, in the shape of a ship’s deck, with masts and rudder and cannons and bulwarks, and banners and ancients, particularly ancients. The pond would be an admirable stage, for rows of benches would be put up all round it, and everybody would see beautifully. The Queen’s procession with trumpeters and men-at-arms and ladies of the Court was planned to start from the Hurst, which was Lucia’s house, and make its glittering and melodious way across the green to Deptford to the sound of madrigals and medieval marches. Lucia would impersonate the Queen, Pepino following her as Raleigh, and Georgie would be Francis Drake. But at an early stage of these incubations Pepino had died, and Lucia had involved herself in this inextricable widowhood. Since then the reins of government had fallen into Daisy Quantock’s podgy little hands, and she, in this as in all other matters, had come to consider herself quite the Queen of Riseholme, until Lucia could get a move on again and teach her better.
One morning in June, some seven weeks before the date fixed for the fête, Mrs Quantock telephoned from her house a hundred yards away to say that she particularly wanted to see Lucia, if she might pop over for a little talk. Lucia had heard nothing lately about the preparations for the fête, for the last time that it had been mentioned in her presence, she had gulped and sat with her hand over her eyes for a moment overcome with the memory of how gaily she had planned it. But she knew that the preparations for it must by this time be well in hand, and now she instantly guessed that it was on this subject that Daisy wanted to see her. She had premonitions of that kind sometimes, and she was sure that this was one of them. Probably Daisy wanted to address a moving appeal to her that, for the sake of Riseholme generally, she should make this fête the occasion of her emerging from her hermetic widowhood. The idea recommended itself to Lucia, for before the date fixed for it, she would have been a widow for over a year, and she reflected that her dear Pepino would never have wished her to make this permanent suttee of herself: also there was the prestige of Riseholme to be considered. Besides, she was really itching to get back into the saddle again, and depose Daisy from her awkward, clumsy seat there, and this would be an admirable opportunity. So, as was usual now with her, she first sighed into the telephone, said rather faintly that she would be delighted to see dear Daisy, and then sighed again. Daisy, very stupidly, hoped she had not got a cough, and was reassured on that point.
Lucia gave a few moments’ thought as to whether she would be found at the piano, playing the funeral march from Beethoven’s Sonata in A flat which she now knew by heart, or be sitting out in Perdita’s garden, reading Pepino’s poems. She decided on the latter, and putting on a shady straw hat with a crêpe bow on it, and taking a copy of the poems from the shelf, hurried out into Perdita’s garden. She also carried with her a copy of to-day’s Times, which she had not yet read.
Perdita’s garden requires a few words of explanation. It was a charming little square plot in front of the timbered façade of the Hurst, surrounded by yew-hedges and intersected with paths of crazy pavement, carefully smothered in stone-crop, which led to the Elizabethan sundial from Wardour Street in the centre. It was gay in spring with those flowers (and no others) on which Perdita doted. There were ‘violets dim’, and primroses and daffodils, which came before the swallow dared and took the winds (usually of April) with beauty. But now in June the swallow had dared long ago, and when spring and the daffodils were over, Lucia always allowed Perdita’s garden a wider, though still strictly Shakespearian scope. There was eglantine (Penzance briar) in full flower now, and honeysuckle and gillyflowers and plenty of pansies for thoughts, and yards of rue (more than usual this year), and so Perdita’s garden was gay all the summer.
Here then, this morning, Lucia seated herself by the sundial, all in black, on a stone bench on which was carved the motto ‘Come thou north wind, and blow thou south, that my garden spices may flow forth.’ Sitting there with Pepino’s poems and The Times she obscured about one-third of this text, and fat little Daisy would obscure the rest… It was rather annoying that the tapes which tied the covers of Pepino’s poems had got into a hard knot, which she was quite unable to unravel, for she had meant tha
t Daisy should come up, unheard by her, in her absorption, and find her reading Pepino’s lyric called ‘Loneliness’. But she could not untie the tapes, and as soon as she heard Daisy’s footsteps she became lost in reverie with the book lying shut on her lap, and the famous far-away look in her eyes.
It was a very hot morning. Daisy, like many middle-aged women who enjoyed perfect health, was always practising some medical regime of a hygienic nature, and just now she was a devoted slave to the eliminative processes of the body. The pores of the skin were the most important of these agencies, and, after her drill of physical jerks by the open window of her bedroom, she had trotted in all this heat across the green to keep up the elimination. She mopped and panted for a little.
‘Made quite a new woman of me,’ she said. ‘You should try it, dear Lucia. But so good of you to see me, and I’ll come to the point at once. The Elizabethan fête, you know. You see it won’t be till August. Can’t we persuade you, as they say, to come amongst us again? We all want you: such a fillip you’d give it.’
Lucia made no doubt that this request implied the hope that she might be induced to take the part of Queen Elizabeth, and under the spell of the exuberant sunshine that poured in upon Perdita’s garden, she felt the thrill and the pulse of life bound in her veins. The fête would be an admirable occasion for entering the arena of activities again, and, as Daisy had hinted (delicately for Daisy), more than a year of her widowhood would have elapsed by August. It was self-sacrificing, too, of Daisy to have suggested this herself, for she knew that according to present arrangements Daisy was to take the part of the Virgin Queen, and Georgie had told her weeks ago (when the subject of the fête had been last alluded to) that she was already busy pricking her fingers by sewing a ruff to go round her fat little neck, and that she had bought a most sumptuous string of Woolworth pearls. Perhaps dear Daisy had realized what a very ridiculous figure she would present as Queen, and was anxious for the sake of the fête to retire from so laughable a role. But, however that might be, it was nice of her to volunteer abdication.