by E. F. Benson
This was ghastly: Lucia, with all this talk of his being an old maid and needing to adapt himself to new conditions, was truly alarming. He almost wondered if she had been taking monkey-gland during her seclusion. Was she going to propose to him in the middle of dinner? Never, in all the years of his friendship with her, had he felt himself so strangely alien. But he was still the master of his fate (at least he hoped so), and it should not be that.
‘Shall I give you some strawberry fool?’ he asked miserably.
Lucia did not seem to hear him.
‘Georgie, we must have ickle talk, before I ring for coffee,’ she said. ‘How long have you and I been dear friends? Longer than either of us care to think.’
‘But all so pleasant,’ said Georgie, rubbing his cold moist hands on his napkin… He wondered if drowning was anything like this.
‘My dear, what do the years matter, if they have only deepened and broadened our friendship? Happy years, Georgie, bringing their sheaves with them. That lovely scene in Esmondi; Winchester Cathedral! And now we’re both getting on. You’re rather alone in the world, and so am I, but people like us with this dear strong bond of friendship between us can look forward to old age—can’t we?—without any qualms. Tranquillity comes with years, and that horrid thing which Freud calls sex is expunged. We must read some Freud, I think; I have read none at present. That was one of the things I wanted to say all the time that you would show me cows out of the window. Our friendship is just perfect as it is.’
Georgie’s relief when he found that Foljambe liked the idea of Tilling was nothing, positively nothing, to the relief he felt now.
‘My dear, how sweet of you to say that,’ he said. ‘I, too, find the quality of our friendship perfect in every way. Quite impossible, in fact, to think of—I mean, I quite agree with you. As you say, we’re getting on in years, I mean I am. You’re right a thousand times.’
Lucia saw the sunlit dawn of relief in Georgie’s face, and though she had been quite sincere in hoping that he would not be terribly hurt when she hinted to him that he must give up all hopes of being more to her than he was, she had not quite expected this effulgence. It was as if instead of pronouncing his sentence, she had taken from him some secret burden of terrible anxiety. For the moment her own satisfaction at having brought this off without paining him was swallowed up in surprise that he was so far from being pained. Was it possible that all his concern to interest her in cows and rainbows was due to apprehension that she might be leading up, via the topics of friendship and marriage, to something exceedingly different from the disclosure which had evidently gratified him rather than the reverse?
She struck the pomander quite a sharp blow.
‘Let us go and have our coffee then,’ she said. ‘It is lovely that we are of one mind. Lovely! And there’s another subject we haven’t spoken about at all. Miss Mapp. What do you make of Miss Mapp? There was a look in her eye when she heard we were going to lunch with Mrs Wyse that amazed me. She would have liked to bite her or scratch her. What did it mean? It was as if Mrs Wyse—she asked me to call her Susan by the way, but I’m not sure that I can manage it just yet without practising—as if Mrs Wyse had pocketed something of hers. Most extraordinary. I don’t belong to Miss Mapp. Of course it’s easy to see that she thinks herself very much superior to all the rest of Tilling. She says that all her friends are angels and lambs, and then just crabs them a little. Marcate mie parole, Georgino! I believe she wants to run me. I believe Tilling is seething with intrigue. But we shall see. How I hate all that sort of thing! We have had a touch of it now and then in Riseholme. As if it mattered who took the lead! We should aim at being equal citizens of a noble republic, where art and literature and all the manifold interests of the world are our concern. Now let us have a little music.’
Whatever might be the state of affairs at Tilling, Riseholme during this month of July boiled and seethed with excitements. It was just like old times, and all circled, as of old, round Lucia. She had taken the plunge; she had come back (though just now for so brief a space before her entering upon Mallards) into her native centrality. Gradually, and in increasing areas, grey and white and violet invaded the unrelieved black in which she had spent the year of her widowhood; one day she wore a white belt, another there were grey panels in her skirt, another her garden-hat had a violet riband on it. Even Georgie, who had a great eye for female attire, could not accurately follow these cumulative changes: he could not be sure whether she had worn a grey cloak before, or whether she had had white gloves in church last Sunday. Then, instead of letting her hair droop in slack and mournful braids over her ears, it resumed its old polished and corrugated appearance, and on her pale cheeks (ashen with grief) there bloomed a little brown rouge, which made her look as if she had been playing golf again, and her lips certainly were ruddier. It was all intensely exciting, a series of subtle changes at the end of which, by the middle of July, her epiphany in church without anything black about her, and with the bloom of her vitality quite restored, passed almost unremarked.
These outward and visible signs were duly representative of what had taken place within. Time, the great healer, had visited her sick-room, laid his hand on her languid brow, and the results were truly astonishing. Lucia became as good as new, or as good as old. Mrs Antrobus and her tall daughters, Piggy and Goosie, Georgie and Daisy and her husband, greedy Robert, Colonel Boucher and his wife, and the rest were all bidden to dinner at the Hurst once more, and sometimes Lucia played to them the slow movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, and sometimes she instructed them in such elements of Contract Bridge as she had mastered during the day. She sketched, she played the organ in church in the absence of the organist who had measles, she sang a solo, ‘O for the wings of a Dove’ when he recovered and the leading chorister got chicken-pox, she had lessons in book-binding at ‘Ye Signe of ye Daffodille’, she sat in Perdita’s garden, not reading Shakespeare, but Pope’s Iliad, and murmured half-forgotten fragments of Greek irregular verbs as she went to sleep. She had a plan for visiting Athens in the spring (“the violet-crowned”, is not that a lovely epithet, Georgie?’) and in compliment to Queen Anne regaled her guests with rich thick chocolate. The hounds of spring were on the winter traces of her widowhood, and snapped up every fragment of it, and indeed spring seemed truly to have returned to her, so various and so multi-coloured were the blossoms that were unfolding. Never at all had Riseholme seen Lucia in finer artistic and intellectual fettle, and it was a long time since she had looked so gay. The world, or at any rate Riseholme, which at Riseholme came to much the same thing, had become her parish again.
Georgie, worked to the bone with playing duets, with consulting Foljambe as to questions of linen and plate (for it appeared that Isabel Poppit, in pursuance of the simple life, slept between blankets in the back-yard, and ate uncooked vegetables out of a wooden bowl like a dog), with learning Vanderbilt conventions, with taking part in Royal processions across the green, with packing his bibelots and sending them to the bank, with sketching, so that he might be in good form when he began to paint at Tilling with a view to exhibiting in the Art Society, wondered what was the true source of these stupendous activities of Lucia’s, whether she was getting fit, getting in training, so to speak, for a campaign at Tilling. Somehow it seemed likely, for she would hardly think it worth while to run the affairs of Riseholme with such energy, when she was about to disappear from it for three months. Or was she intending to let Riseholme see how dreadfully flat everything would become when she left them? Very likely both these purposes were at work; it was like her to kill two birds with one stone. Indeed, she was perhaps killing three birds with one stone, for multifarious as were the interests in which she was engaged there was one, now looming large in Riseholme, namely the Elizabethan fête, of which she seemed strangely unconscious. Her drive, her powers of instilling her friends with her own fervour, never touched that: she did not seem to know that a fête was being contemplated at all, though now
a day seldom passed without a procession of some sort crossing the green or a Morris-dance getting entangled with the choristers practising madrigals, or a crowd of soldiers and courtiers being assembled near the front entrance of the Ambermere Arms, while Daisy harangued them from a chair put on the top of a table, pausing occasionally because she forgot her words, or in order to allow them to throw up their hats and cry ‘God Save the Queen’s Grace’, ‘To hell with Spain’, and other suitable ejaculations. Daisy, occasionally now in full dress, ruff and pearls and all, came across to the gate of the Hurst, to wait for the procession to join her, and Lucia sitting in Perdita’s garden would talk to her about Tilling or the importance of being prudent if you were vulnerable at contract, apparently unaware that Daisy was dressed up at all. Once Lucia came out of the Ambermere Arms when Daisy was actually mounting the palfrey that drew the milk-cart for a full-dress rehearsal, and she seemed to be positively palfrey-blind. She merely said ‘Don’t forget that you and Robert are dining with me to-night. Half-past seven, so that we shall get a good evening’s bridge,’ and went on her way… Or she would be passing the pond on which the framework of the Golden Hind was already constructed, and on which Georgie was even then kneeling down to receive the accolade amid the faint cheers of Piggy and Goosie, and she just waved her hand to Georgie and said: ‘Musica after lunch, Georgie?’ She made no sarcastic comments to anybody, and did not know that they were doing anything out of the ordinary.
Under this pointed unconsciousness of hers, a species of blight spread over the scheme to which Riseholme ought to have been devoting its most enthusiastic energies. The courtiers were late for rehearsals, they did not even remove their cigarettes when they bent to kiss the Queen’s hand, Piggy and Goosie made steps of Morris-dances when they ought to have been holding up Elizabeth’s train, and Georgie snatched up a cushion, when the accolade was imminent, to protect his shoulder. The choir-boys droned their way through madrigals, sucking peppermints, there was no life, no keenness about it all, because Lucia, who was used to inspire all Riseholme’s activities, was unaware that anything was going on.
One morning when only a fortnight of July was still to run, Drake was engaged on his croquet-lawn tapping the balls about and trying to tame his white satin shoes which hurt terribly. From the garden next door came the familiar accents of the Queen’s speech to her troops.
‘And though I am only a weak woman,’ declaimed Daisy who was determined to go through the speech without referring to her book. ‘Though I am only a weak woman, a weak woman—’ she repeated.
‘Yet I have the heart of a Prince,’ shouted Drake with the friendly intention of prompting her.
‘Thank you, Georgie. Or ought it to be Princess, do you think?’
‘No: Prince,’ said Georgie.
‘Prince,’ cried Daisy. ‘Though I am only a weak woman, yet I have the heart of a Prince… Let me see… Prince.’
There was silence.
‘Georgie,’ said Daisy in her ordinary voice. ‘Do stop your croquet a minute and come to the paling. I want to talk.’
‘I’m trying to get used to these shoes,’ said Georgie. ‘They hurt frightfully. I shall have to take them to Tilling and wear them there. Oh, I haven’t told you, Lady Brixton came down yesterday evening—’
‘I know that,’ said Daisy.
‘—and she thinks that her brother will take my house for a couple of months, as long as I don’t leave any servants. He’ll be here for the fête, if he does, so I wonder if you could put me up. How’s Robert’s cold?’
‘Worse,’ she said. ‘I’m worse too. I can’t remember half of what I knew by heart a week ago. Isn’t there some memory-system?’
‘Lots, I believe,’ said Georgie. ‘But it’s rather late. They don’t improve your memory all in a minute. I really think you had better read your speech to the troops, as if it was the opening of Parliament.’
‘I won’t,’ said Daisy, taking off her ruff. ‘I’ll learn it if it costs me the last breath of blood in my body—I mean drop.’
‘Well it will be very awkward if you forget it all,’ said Georgie. ‘We can’t cheer nothing at all. Such a pity, because your voice carries perfectly now. I could hear you while I was breakfasting.’
‘And it’s not only that,’ said Daisy. ‘There’s no life in the thing. It doesn’t look as if it was happening.’
‘No, that’s true,’ said Georgie. ‘These tarsome shoes of mine are real enough, though!’
‘I begin to think we ought to have had a producer,’ said Daisy. ‘But it was so much finer to do it all ourselves, like—like Oberammergau. Does Lucia ever say anything about it? I think it’s too mean for words of her to take no interest in it.’
‘Well, you must remember that you asked her only to be my wife,’ said Georgie. ‘Naturally she wouldn’t like that.’
‘She ought to help us instead of going about as if we were all invisible,’ exclaimed Daisy.
‘My dear, she did offer to help you. At least, I told you ages ago, that I felt sure she would if you asked her to.’
‘I feel inclined to chuck the whole thing,’ said Daisy.
‘But you can’t. Masses of tickets have been sold. And who’s to pay for the Golden Hind and the roast sheep and all the costumes?’ asked Georgie. ‘Not to mention all our trouble. Why not ask her to help, if you want her to?’
‘Georgie, will you ask her?’ said Daisy.
‘Certainly not,’ said Georgie very firmly. ‘You’ve been managing it from the first. It’s your show. If I were you, I would ask her at once. She’ll be over here in a few minutes, as we’re going to have a music. Pop in.’
A melodious cry of ‘Georgino mio!’ resounded from the open window of Georgie’s drawing-room, and he hobbled away down the garden walk. Ever since that beautiful understanding they had arrived at, that both of them shrank, as from a cup of hemlock, from the idea of marriage, they had talked Italian or baby-language to a surprising extent from mere lightness of heart.
‘Me tummin’,’ he called. ”Oo very good girl, Lucia. ‘Oo molto punctuale.’
(He was not sure about that last word, nor was Lucia, but she understood it.) ‘Georgino! Che curiose scalpe!’ said Lucia, leaning out of the window.
‘Don’t be so cattiva. They are cattivo enough,’ said Georgie. ‘But Drake did have shoes exactly like these.’
The mere mention of Drake naturally caused Lucia to talk about something else. She did not understand any allusion to Drake.
‘Now for a good practice,’ she said, as Georgie limped into the drawing-room. ‘Foljambe beamed at me. How happy it all is! I hope you said you were at home to nobody. Let us begin at once. Can you manage the sostenuto pedal in those odd shoes?’
Foljambe entered.
‘Mrs Quantock, sir,’ she said.
‘Daisy darling,’ said Lucia effusively. ‘Come to hear our little practice? We must play our best, Georgino.’
Daisy was still in queenly costume, except for the ruff. Lucia seemed as usual to be quite unconscious of it.
‘Lucia, before you begin—’ said Daisy.
‘So much better than interrupting,’ said Lucia. ‘Thank you, dear. Yes?’
‘About this fête. Oh, for gracious sake don’t go on seeming to know nothing about it. I tell you there is to be one. And it’s all nohow. Can’t you help us?’
Lucia sprang from the music-stool. She had been waiting for this moment, not impatiently, but ready for it if it came, as she knew it must, without any scheming on her part. She had been watching from Perdita’s garden the straggling procession smoking cigarettes, the listless halberdiers not walking in step, the courtiers yawning in Her Majesty’s face, the languor and the looseness arising from the lack of an inspiring mind. The scene on the Golden Hind, and that of Elizabeth’s speech to her troops were equally familiar to her, for though she could not observe them from under her garden-hat close at hand, her husband had been fond of astronomy and there were telescopes great an
d small, which brought these scenes quite close. Moreover, she had that speech which poor Daisy found so elusive by heart. So easy to learn, just the sort of cheap bombast that Elizabeth would indulge in: she had found it in a small history of England, and had committed it to memory, just in case…
‘But I’ll willingly help you, dear Daisy,’ she said. ‘I seem to remember you told me something about it. You as Queen Elizabeth, was it not, a roast sheep on the Golden Hind, a speech to the troops, Morris-dances, bear-baiting, no, not bear-baiting. Isn’t it all going beautifully?’
‘No! It isn’t,’ said Daisy in a lamentable voice. ‘I want you to help us, will you? It’s all like dough.’
Great was Lucia. There was no rubbing in: there was no hesitation, there was nothing but helpful sunny cordiality in response to this SOS.
‘How you all work me!’ she said, ‘but I’ll try to help you if I can. Georgie, we must put off our practice, and get to grips with all this, if the fête is to be a credit to Riseholme. Addio, caro Mozartino for the present. Now begin, Daisy, and tell me all the trouble.’
For the next week Mozartino and the Symposium and Contract Bridge were non-existent and rehearsals went on all day. Lucia demonstrated to Daisy how to make her first appearance, and, when the trumpeters blew a fanfare, she came out of the door of the Hurst, and without the slightest hurry majestically marched down the crazy pavement. She did not fumble at the gate as Daisy always did, but with a swift imperious nod to Robert Quantock, which made him pause in the middle of a sneeze, she caused him to fly forward, open it, and kneel as she passed through. She made a wonderful curtsey to her lieges and motioned them to close up in front of her. And all this was done in the clothes of today, without a ruff or a pearl to help her.
‘Something like that, do you think, dear Daisy, for the start of the procession?’ she said to her. ‘Will you try it like that and see how it goes? And a little more briskness, gentlemen, from the halberdiers. Would you form in front of me now, while Mrs Quantock goes into the house… Ah, that has more snap, hasn’t it? Excellent. Quite like guardsmen. Piggy and Goosie, my dears, you must remember that you are Elizabethan Countesses. Very stately, please, and Countesses never giggle. Sweep two low curtsies, and while still down pick up the Queen’s train. You opened the gate very properly, Robert. Very nice indeed. Now may we have that all over again. Queen, please,’ she called to Daisy.