Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  While waiting for them to appear again in the station-yard, Miss Mapp looked to see what vehicles were standing there. It was already ten minutes past four, and the Ardingly motors must have been there by this time, if there was anything “doing” by the 4.15. But positively the only vehicle there was an open trolly laden with a piano in a sack. Apart from knowing all about that piano, for Mrs. Poppit had talked about little else than her new upright Bluthner before her visit to Buckingham Palace, a moment’s reflection convinced Miss Mapp that this was a very unlikely mode of conveyance for any guest… She watched for a few moments more, but as no other friends appeared in the station-yard, she concluded that they were hanging about the street somewhere, poor things, and decided not to make inquiries about her coke just yet.

  She had tea while she arranged flowers, in the very front of the window in her garden-room, and presently had the satisfaction of seeing many of the baffled loyalists trudging home. There was no need to do more than smile and tap the window and kiss her hand: they all knew that she had been busy with her flowers, and that she knew what they had been busy about… Out again they all came towards half-past six, and when she had watched the last of them down the hill, she hurried back to the roof again, to make a final inspection of the loose tiles through her binoculars. Brief but exciting was that inspection, for opposite the entrance to the station was drawn up a motor. So clear was the air and so serviceable her binoculars that she could distinguish the vulgar coronet on the panels, and as she looked Mrs. Poppit and Isabel hurried across the station-yard. It was then but the work of a moment to slip on the dust-cloak trimmed with blue braid, adjust the hat with the blue riband, and take up the parasol with its furled Union Jack inside it. The stick of the flag was uppermost; she could whip it out in a moment.

  Miss Mapp had calculated her appearance to a nicety. Just as she got to the sharp corner opposite the station, where all cars slowed down and her coal-merchant’s office was situated, the train drew up. By the gates into the yard were standing the Major in his top-hat, the Captain in his Panama, Irene in a civilized skirt; Diva in a brand-new walking dress, and the Padre and wee wifey. They were all looking in the direction of the station, and Miss Mapp stepped into the coal-merchant’s unobserved. Oddly enough the coke had been sent three days before, and there was no need for peremptoriness.

  “So good of you, Mr. Wootten!” she said; “and why is everyone standing about this afternoon?”

  Mr. Wootten explained the reason of this, and Miss Mapp, grasping her parasol, went out again as the car left the station. There were too many dear friends about, she decided, to use the Union Jack, and having seen what she wanted to she determined to slip quietly away again. Already the Major’s hat was in his hand, and he was bowing low, so too were Captain Puffin and the Padre, while Irene, Diva and Evie were making little ducking movements… Miss Mapp was determined, when it came to her turn, to show them, as she happened to be on the spot, what a proper curtsy was.

  The car came opposite her, and she curtsied so low that recovery was impossible, and she sat down in the road. Her parasol flew out of her hand and out of her parasol flew the Union Jack. She saw a young man looking out of the window, dressed in khaki, grinning broadly, but not, so she thought, graciously, and it suddenly struck her that there was something, beside her own part in the affair, which was not as it should be. As he put his head in again there was loud laughter from the inside of the car.

  Mr. Wootten helped her up and the entire assembly of her friends crowded round her, hoping she was not hurt.

  “No, dear Major, dear Padre, not at all, thanks,” she said. “So stupid: my ancle turned. Oh, yes, the Union Jack I bought for my nephew, it’s his birthday to-morrow. Thank you. I just came to see about my coke: of course I thought the Prince had arrived when you all went down to meet the 4.15. Fancy my running straight into it all! How well he looked.”

  This was all rather lame, and Miss Mapp hailed Mrs. Poppit’s appearance from the station as a welcome diversion… Mrs. Poppit was looking vexed.

  “I hope you saw him well, Mrs. Poppit,” said Miss Mapp, “after meeting two trains, and taking all that trouble.”

  “Saw who?” said Mrs. Poppit with a deplorable lack both of manner and grammar. “Why” — light seemed to break on her odious countenance. “Why, you don’t think that was the Prince, do you, Miss Mapp? He arrived here at one, so the station-master has just told me, and has been playing golf all afternoon.”

  The Major looked at the Captain, and the Captain at the Major. It was months and months since they had missed their Saturday afternoon’s golf.

  “It was the Prince of Wales who looked out of that car-window,” said Miss Mapp firmly. “Such a pleasant smile. I should know it anywhere.”

  “The young man who got into the car at the station was no more the Prince of Wales than you are,” said Mrs. Poppit shrilly. “I was close to him as he came out: I curtsied to him before I saw.”

  Miss Mapp instantly changed her attack: she could hardly hold her smile on to her face for rage.

  “How very awkward for you,” she said. “What a laugh they will all have over it this evening! Delicious!”

  Mrs. Poppit’s face suddenly took on an expression of the tenderest solicitude.

  “I hope, Miss Mapp, you didn’t jar yourself when you sat down in the road just now,” she said.

  “Not at all, thank you so much,” said Miss Mapp, hearing her heart beat in her throat… If she had had a naval fifteen-inch gun handy, and had known how to fire it, she would, with a sense of duty accomplished, have discharged it point-blank at the Order of the Member of the British Empire, and at anybody else who might be within range…

  Sunday, of course, with all the opportunities of that day, still remained, and the seats of the auxiliary choir, which were advantageously situated, had never been so full, but as it was all no use, the Major and Captain Puffin left during the sermon to catch the 12.20 tram out to the links. On this delightful day it was but natural that the pleasant walk there across the marsh was very popular, and golfers that afternoon had a very trying and nervous time, for the ladies of Tilling kept bobbing up from behind sand-dunes and bunkers, as, regardless of the players, they executed swift flank marches in all directions. Miss Mapp returned exhausted about tea-time to hear from Withers that the Prince had spent an hour or more rambling about the town, and had stopped quite five minutes at the corner by the garden-room. He had actually sat down on Miss Mapp’s steps and smoked a cigarette. She wondered if the end of the cigarette was there still: it was hateful to have cigarette-ends defiling the steps to her front-door, and often before now, when sketchers were numerous, she had sent her housemaid out to remove these untidy relics. She searched for it, but was obliged to come to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing to remove…

  CHAPTER III.

  Diva was sitting at the open drawing-room window of her house in the High Street, cutting with a pair of sharp nail scissors into the old chintz curtains which her maid had told her no longer “paid for the mending.” So, since they refused to pay for their mending any more, she was preparing to make them pay, pretty smartly too, in other ways. The pattern was of little bunches of pink roses peeping out through trellis work, and it was these which she had just begun to cut out. Though Tilling was noted for the ingenuity with which its more fashionable ladies devised novel and quaint effects in their dress in an economical manner, Diva felt sure, ransack her memory though she might, that nobody had thought of this before.

  The hot weather had continued late into September and showed no signs of breaking yet, and it would be agreeable to her and acutely painful to others that just at the end of the summer she should appear in a perfectly new costume, before the days of jumpers and heavy skirts and large woollen scarves came in. She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses. The belt of the skirt would be simil
arly decorated, and so would the edge of it, if there were enough clean ones. The jacket and skirt had already gone to the dyer’s, and would be back in a day or two, white no longer, but of a rich purple hue, and by that time she would have hundreds of these little pink roses ready to be tacked on. Perhaps a piece of the chintz, trellis and all, could be sewn over the belt, but she was determined to have single little bunches of roses peppered all over the collar and cuffs of the jacket and, if possible, round the edge of the skirt. She had already tried the effect, and was of the opinion that nobody could possibly guess what the origin of these roses was. When carefully sewn on they looked as if they were a design in the stuff.

  She let the circumcised roses fall on to the window-seat, and from time to time, when they grew numerous, swept them into a cardboard box. Though she worked with zealous diligence, she had an eye to the movements in the street outside, for it was shopping-hour, and there were many observations to be made. She had not anything like Miss Mapp’s genius for conjecture, but her memory was appallingly good, and this was the third morning running on which Elizabeth had gone into the grocer’s. It was odd to go to your grocer’s every day like that; groceries twice a week was sufficient for most people. From here on the floor above the street she could easily look into Elizabeth’s basket, and she certainly was carrying nothing away with her from the grocer’s, for the only thing there was a small bottle done up in white paper with sealing wax, which, Diva had no need to be told, certainly came from the chemist’s, and was no doubt connected with too many plums.

  Miss Mapp crossed the street to the pavement below Diva’s house, and precisely as she reached it, Diva’s maid opened the door into the drawing-room, bringing in the second post, or rather not bringing in the second post, but the announcement that there wasn’t any second post. This opening of the door caused a draught, and the bunches of roses which littered the window-seat rose brightly in the air. Diva managed to beat most of them down again, but two fluttered out of the window. Precisely then, and at no other time, Miss Mapp looked up, and one settled on her face, the other fell into her basket. Her trained faculties were all on the alert, and she thrust them both inside her glove for future consideration, without stopping to examine them just then. She only knew that they were little pink roses, and that they had fluttered out of Diva’s window…

  She paused on the pavement, and remembered that Diva had not yet expressed regret about the worsted, and that she still “popped” as much as ever. Thus Diva deserved a punishment of some sort, and happily, at that very moment she thought of a subject on which she might be able to make her uncomfortable. The street was full, and it would be pretty to call up to her, instead of ringing her bell, in order to save trouble to poor overworked Janet. (Diva only kept two servants, though of course poverty was no crime.)

  “Diva darling!” she cooed.

  Diva’s head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.

  “Hullo!” she said. “Want me?”

  “May I pop up for a moment, dear?” said Miss Mapp. “That’s to say if you’re not very busy.”

  “Pop away,” said Diva. She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said “pop” in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever. “I’ll tell my maid to pop down and open the door.”

  While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work-cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations. But in order to appear naturally employed, she pulled out the woollen scarf she was knitting for the autumn and winter, forgetting for the moment that the rose-madder stripe at the end on which she was now engaged was made of that fatal worsted which Miss Mapp considered to have been feloniously appropriated. That was the sort of thing Miss Mapp never forgot. Even among her sweet flowers. Her eye fell on it the moment she entered the room, and she tucked the two chintz roses more securely into her glove.

  “I thought I would just pop across from the grocer’s,” she said. “What a pretty scarf, dear! That’s a lovely shade of rose-madder. Where can I have seen something like it before?”

  This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony. Diva was no coward.

  “Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” she said.

  Miss Mapp appeared to recollect, and smiled as far back as her wisdom-teeth. (Diva couldn’t do that.)

  “I have it,” she said. “It was the wool I ordered at Heynes’s, and then he sold it you, and I couldn’t get any more.”

  “So it was,” said Diva. “Upset you a bit. There was the wool in the shop. I bought it.”

  “Yes, dear; I see you did. But that wasn’t what I popped in about. This coal-strike, you know.”

  “Got a cellar full,” said Diva.

  “Diva, you’ve not been hoarding, have you?” asked Miss Mapp with great anxiety. “They can take away every atom of coal you’ve got, if so, and fine you I don’t know what for every hundredweight of it.”

  “Pooh!” said Diva, rather forcing the indifference of this rude interjection.

  “Yes, love, pooh by all means, if you like poohing!” said Miss Mapp. “But I should have felt very unfriendly if one morning I found you were fined — found you were fined — quite a play upon words — and I hadn’t warned you.”

  Diva felt a little less poohish.

  “But how much do they allow you to have?” she asked.

  “Oh, quite a little: enough to go on with. But I daresay they won’t discover you. I just took the trouble to come and warn you.”

  Diva did remember something about hoarding; there had surely been dreadful exposures of prudent housekeepers in the papers which were very uncomfortable reading.

  “But all these orders were only for the period of the war,” she said.

  “No doubt you’re right, dear,” said Miss Mapp brightly. “I’m sure I hope you are. Only if the coal strike comes on, I think you’ll find that the regulations against hoarding are quite as severe as they ever were. Food hoarding, too. Twemlow — such a civil man — tells me that he thinks we shall have plenty of food, or anyhow sufficient for everybody for quite a long time, provided that there’s no hoarding. Not been hoarding food, too, dear Diva? You naughty thing: I believe that great cupboard is full of sardines and biscuits and bovril.”

  “Nothing of the kind,” said Diva indignantly. “You shall see for yourself” — and then she suddenly remembered that the cupboard was full of chintz curtains and little bunches of pink roses, neatly cut out of them, and a pair of nail scissors.

  There was a perfectly perceptible pause, during which Miss Mapp noticed that there were no curtains over the window. There certainly used to be, and they matched with the chintz cover of the window seat, which was decorated with little bunches of pink roses peeping through trellis. This was in the nature of a bonus: she had not up till then connected the chintz curtains with the little things that had fluttered down upon her and were now safe in her glove; her only real object in this call had been to instil a general uneasiness into Diva’s mind about the coal strike and the danger of being well provided with fuel. That she humbly hoped that she had accomplished. She got up.

  “Must be going,” she said. “Such a lovely little chat! But what has happened to your pretty curtains?”

  “Gone to the wash,” said Diva firmly.

  “Liar,” thought Miss Mapp, as she tripped downstairs. “Diva would have sent the cover of the window-seat too, if that was the case. Liar,” she thought again as she kissed her hand to Diva, who was looking gloomily out of the window.

  As soon as Miss Mapp had gained her garden-room, she examined the mysterious treasures in her left-hand glove. Without the smallest doubt Diva had taken down her curtains (and high time too, for they were sadly shabby), and was cutting the roses out of them. But what on earth was she doing that for? For what garish purpose could she want to use bunches of roses cut out of chintz curtains
?

  Miss Mapp had put the two specimens of which she had providentially become possessed in her lap, and they looked very pretty against the navy-blue of her skirt. Diva was very ingenious: she used up all sorts of odds and ends in a way that did credit to her undoubtedly parsimonious qualities. She could trim a hat with a tooth-brush and a banana in such a way that it looked quite Parisian till you firmly analysed its component parts, and most of her ingenuity was devoted to dress: the more was the pity that she had such a roundabout figure that her waistband always reminded you of the equator…

  “Eureka!” said Miss Mapp aloud, and, though the telephone bell was ringing, and the postulant might be one of the servants’ friends ringing them up at an hour when their mistress was usually in the High Street, she glided swiftly to the large cupboard underneath the stairs which was full of the things which no right-minded person could bear to throw away: broken basket-chairs, pieces of brown paper, cardboard boxes without lids, and cardboard lids without boxes, old bags with holes in them, keys without locks and locks without keys and worn chintz covers. There was one — it had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room — covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out), and Miss Mapp dragged it dustily from its corner, setting in motion a perfect cascade of cardboard lids and some door-handles.

  Withers had answered the telephone, and came to announce that Twemlow the grocer regretted he had only two large tins of corned beef, but ——

  “Then say I will have the tongue as well, Withers,” said Miss Mapp. “Just a tongue — and then I shall want you and Mary to do some cutting out for me.”

  The three went to work with feverish energy, for Diva had got a start, and by four o’clock that afternoon there were enough poppies cut out to furnish, when in seed, a whole street of opium dens. The dress selected for decoration was, apart from a few mildew-spots, the colour of ripe corn, which was superbly appropriate for September. “Poppies in the corn,” said Miss Mapp over and over to herself, remembering some sweet verses she had once read by Bernard Shaw or Clement Shorter or somebody like that about a garden of sleep somewhere in Norfolk…