Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And a committee?” asked Lucia.

  “Yes. Daisy and Mrs. Boucher and I, and we co-opted Robert,” he said with affected carelessness.

  Again some nameless pang shot through Lucia. Absent or present, she ought to have been the chairman of the committee and told them exactly what to do, and how to do it. But she felt no doubt that she could remedy all that when she came down to Riseholme for a week-end. In the meantime, it was sufficient to have pulled his secret out of Georgie, like a cork, with a loud pop, and an effusion of contents.

  “Most interesting,” she said. “I must think what I can give you for your museum. Well, that’s a nice little gossip.”

  Georgie could not bring himself to tell her that the stocks had already been moved from the village green to the tithe-barn, for he seemed to remember that Lucia and Pepino had presented them to the Parish Council. Now the Parish Council had presented them to the Museum, but that was a reason the more why the Parish Council and not he should face the donors.

  “A nice little gossip,” said Lucia. “And what a pleasant party last night. I just popped over, to congratulate dear Olga on the favourable, indeed the very favourable reception of ‘Lucrezia,’ for I thought she would be hurt — artists are so sensitive — if I did not add my little tribute, and then you saw how she refused to let me go, but insisted that I should come in. And I found it all most pleasant: one met many friends, and I was very glad to be able to look in.”

  This expressed very properly what Lucia meant to convey. She did not in the least want to put Olga in her place, but to put herself, in Georgie’s eyes, in her own place. She had just, out of kindness, stepped across to congratulate Olga, and then had been dragged in. Unfortunately Georgie did not believe a single word of it: he had already made up his mind that Lucia had laid an ambush for Olga, so swiftly and punctually had she come out of the shadow of the gas-lamp on her arrival. He answered her therefore precisely in the spirit in which she had spoken. Lucia would know very well. . . .

  “It was good of you,” he said enthusiastically. “I’m sure Olga appreciated your coming immensely. How forgetful of her not to have asked you at first! And as for ‘Lucrezia’ just having a favourable reception, I thought it was the most brilliant success it is possible to imagine.”

  Lucia felt that her attitude hadn’t quite produced the impression she had intended. Though she did not want Georgie (and Riseholme) to think she joined in the uncritical adulation of Olga, she certainly did not want Georgie to tell Olga that she didn’t. And she still wanted to hear the Princess’s name.

  “No doubt, dear Georgie,” she said, “it was a great success. And she was in wonderful voice, and looked most charming. As you know, I am terribly critical, but I can certainly say that. Yes. And her party delicious. So many pleasant people. I saw you having great jokes with the Princess.”

  Pepino having been asleep when Lucia came back last night, and not having seen her this morning, had not heard about the Princess.

  “Indeed, who was that?” he asked Lucia.

  Very tiresome of Pepino. But Lucia’s guide (better than poor Daisy’s Abfou) must have been very attentive to her needs that morning, for Pepino had hardly uttered these awkward words, when the telephone rang. She could easily therefore trip across to it, protesting at these tiresome interruptions, and leave Georgie to answer.

  “Yes, Mrs. Lucas,” said Lucia. “Covent Garden? Yes. Then please put me through. . . . Dearest Olga is ringing up. No doubt about ‘The Valkyrie’ next week. . . .”

  Georgie had a brain wave. He felt sure Lucia would have answered Pepino’s question instantly if she had known what the Princess’s name was. He had noticed that Lucia in spite of her hangings about had not been presented to the illustrious lady last night, and the brainwave that she did not know the illustrious lady’s name swept over him. He also saw that Lucia was anxiously listening not to the telephone only, but to him. If Lucia (and there could be no doubt about that) wanted to know, she must eat her humble pie and ask him. . . .

  “Yes, dear Diva, it’s me,” said Lucia. “Couldn’t sleep a wink: ‘Lucrezia’ running in my head all night. Marvellous. You rang me up?”

  Her face fell.

  “Oh, I am disappointed you can’t come,” she said. “You are naughty. I shall have to give you a little engagement book to put things down in. . . .”

  Lucia’s guide befriended her again, and her face brightened. It grew almost to an unearthly brightness as she listened to Olga’s apologies and a further proposal.

  “Sunday evening?” she said. “Now let me think a moment: yes, I am free on Sunday. So glad you said Sunday, because all other nights are full. Delightful. And how nice to see Princess Isabel again. Good-bye.”

  She snapped the receiver back in triumph.

  “What was it you asked me, Pepino?” she said. “Oh, yes: it was Princess Isabel. Dear Olga insists on my dining with her on Sunday to meet her again. Such a nice woman.”

  “I thought we were going down to Riseholme for the Sunday,” said Pepino.

  Lucia made a little despairing gesture.

  “My poor head!” she said. “It is I who ought to have an engagement book chained to me. What am I to do? I hardly like to disappoint dear Olga. But you go down, Pepino, just the same. I know you are longing to get a breath of country air. Georgie will give you dinner one night, I am sure, and the other he will dine with you. Won’t you, Georgie? So dear of you. Now who shall I get to fill my Olga’s place at lunch to-morrow? Mrs. Garroby-Ashton, I think. Dear me, it is close on twelve, and Sophy will scold me if I keep her waiting. How the morning flashes by! I had hardly begun my practise, when Georgie came, and I’ve hardly had a word with him before it is time to go out. What will happen to my morning’s post I’m sure I don’t know. But I insist on your getting your breath of country-air on Sunday, Pepino. I shall have plenty to do here, with all my arrears.”

  There was one note Lucia found she had to write before she went out, and she sent Pepino to show Georgie the house while she scribbled it, and addressing it to Mr. Stephen Merriall at the office of the Evening Gazette, sent it off by hand. This was hardly done when Mrs. Alingsby arrived, and they went off together to the private view of the Post-Cubists, and revelled in the works of those remarkable artists. Some were portraits and some landscapes, and it was usually easy to tell which was which, because a careful scrutiny revealed an eye or a stray mouth in some, and a tree or a house in others. Lucia was specially enthusiastic over a picture of Waterloo Bridge, but she had mistaken the number in the catalogue, and it proved to be a portrait of the artist’s wife. Luckily she had not actually read out to Sophy that it was Waterloo Bridge, though she had said something about the river, but this was easily covered up in appreciation.

  “Too wonderful,” she said. “How they get to the very soul of things! What is it that Wordsworth says? ‘The very pulse of the machine.’ Pulsating, is it not?”

  Mrs. Alingsby was tall and weird and intense, dressed rather like a bird-of-paradise that had been out in a high gale, but very well connected. She had long straight hair which fell over her forehead, and sometimes got in her eyes, and she wore on her head a scarlet jockey-cap with an immense cameo in front of it. She hated all art that was earlier than 1923, and a considerable lot of what was later. In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning. But she had collected round her a group of interesting outlaws, of whom the men looked like women, and the women like nothing at all, and though nobody ever knew what they were talking about, they themselves were talked about. Lucia had been to a party of hers, where they all sat in a room with black walls, and listened to early Italian music on a spinet while a charcoal brazier on a blue hearth was fed with incense. . . . Lucia’s general opinion of her was that she might be useful up to a point, for she certainly excited interest.

  “Wordsworth?” she asked. “Oh, yes,
I remember who you mean. About the Westmoreland Lakes. Such a kill-joy.”

  She put on her large horn spectacles to look at the picture of the artist’s wife, and her body began to sway with a lithe circular motion.

  “Marvellous! What a rhythm!” she said. “Sigismund is the most rhythmical of them all. You ought to be painted by him. He would make something wonderful of you. Something andante, adagio almost. He’s coming to see me on Sunday. Come and meet him. Breakfast about half-past twelve. Vegetarian with cocktails.”

  Lucia accepted this remarkable invitation with avidity: it would be an interesting and progressive meal. In these first weeks, she was designedly experimental; she intended to sweep into her net all there was which could conceivably harbour distinction, and sort it out by degrees. She was no snob in the narrow sense of the word; she would have been very discontented if she had only the high-born on her visiting list. The high-born, of course, were safe — you could not make a mistake in having a duchess to tea, because in her own line a duchess had distinction — but it would not have been enough to have all the duchesses there were: it might even have been a disappointing tea-party if the whole room was packed with them. What she wanted was the foam of the wave, the topmost, the most sunlit of the billows that rode the sea. Anything that had proved itself billowish was her game, and anything which showed signs of being a billow, even if it entailed a vegetarian lunch with cocktails and the possible necessity of being painted like the artist’s wife with an eyebrow in one corner of the picture and a substance like desiccated cauliflower in the centre. That had always been her way: whatever those dear funny folk at Riseholme had thought of, a juggler, a professor of Yoga, a geologist, a psycho-analyst had been snapped up by her and exploited till he exploded.

  But Pepino was not as nimble as she. The incense at Sophy’s had made him sneeze, and the primitive tunes on the spinet had made him snore; that had been all the uplift they had held for him. Thus, though she did not mind tiring herself to death, because Pepino was having such an interesting time, she didn’t mind his going down to Riseholme for the Sunday to rest, while she had a vegetarian lunch with post-cubists, and a dinner with a princess. Literally, she could scarcely tell which of the two she looked forward to most; the princess was safe, but the post-cubists might prove more perilously paying. It was impossible to make a corner in princesses for they were too independent, but already, in case of post-cubism turning out to be the rage, she could visualise her music-room and even the famous Chippendale chairs being painted black, and the Sargent picture of Auntie being banished to the attic. She could not make them the rage, for she was not (as yet) the supreme arbiter here that she had been at Riseholme, but should they become the rage, there was no one surely more capable than herself of giving the impression that she had discovered them.

  Lucia spent a strenuous afternoon with correspondence and telephonings, and dropped into Mrs. Sandeman’s for a cup of tea, of which she stood sorely in need. She found there was no need to tell dearest Aggie about the party last night at Olga’s, for the Evening Gazette had come in, and there was an account of it, described in Hermione’s matchless style. Hermione had found the bijou residence of the prima-donna in Brompton Square full of friends — très intimes — who had been invited to celebrate the huge success of “Lucrezia” and to congratulate Mrs. Shuttleworth. There was Princess Isabel, wearing her wonderful turquoises, chatting with the composer, Signor Cortese (Princess Isabel spoke Italian perfectly), and among other friends Hermione had noticed the Duchess of Whitby, Lord Limpsfield, Mrs. Garroby-Ashton, and Mrs. Philip Lucas.

  CHAPTER V.

  The mystery of that Friday evening in the last week in June became portentous on the ensuing Saturday morning. . . .

  A cab had certainly driven from the station to The Hurst late on Friday evening, but owing to the darkness it was not known who got out of it. Previously the windows of The Hurst had been very diligently cleaned all Friday afternoon. Of course the latter might be accounted for by the mere fact that they needed cleaning, but if it had been Pepino or Lucia herself who had arrived by the cab (if both of them, they would almost certainly have come by their motor), surely some sign of their presence would have manifested itself either to Riseholme’s collective eye, or to Riseholme’s ear. But the piano, Daisy felt certain, had not been heard, nor had the telephone tinkled for anybody. Also, when she looked out about half-past ten in the evening, and again when she went upstairs to bed, there were no lights in the house. But somebody had come, and as the servants’ rooms looked out on to the back, it was probably a servant or servants. Daisy had felt so terribly interested in this that she came restlessly down, and had a quarter of an hour’s weedjing to see if Abfou could tell her. She had been quite unable to form any satisfactory conjecture herself, and Abfou, after writing Museum once or twice, had relapsed into rapid and unintelligible Arabic. She did not ring up Georgie to ask his help in solving this conundrum, because she hoped to solve it unaided and be able to tell him the answer.

  She went upstairs again, and after a little deep-breathing and bathing her feet in alternate applications of hot and cold water in order to produce somnolence, found herself more widely awake than ever. Her well-trained mind cantered about on scents that led nowhere, and she was unable to find any that seemed likely to lead anywhere. Of Lucia nothing whatever was known except what was accessible to anybody who spent a penny on the Evening Gazette. She had written to nobody, she had given no sign of any sort, and, but for the Evening Gazette, she might, as far as Riseholme was concerned, be dead. But the Evening Gazette showed that she was alive, painfully alive in fact, if Hermione could be trusted. She had been seen here, there and everythere in London: Hermione had observed her chatting in the Park with friends, sitting with friends in her box at the opera, shopping in Bond Street, watching polo (why, she did not know a horse from a cow!) at Hurlingham, and even in a punt at Henley. She had been entertaining in her own house too: there had been dinner-parties and musical parties, and she had dined at so many houses that Daisy had added them all up, hoping to prove that she had spent more evenings than there had been evenings to spend, but to her great regret they came out exactly right. Now she was having her portrait painted by Sigismund, and not a word had she written, not a glimpse of herself had she vouchsafed, to Riseholme. . . . Of course Georgie had seen her, when he went up to stay with Olga, but his account of her had been far from reassuring. She had said that she did not care how tired she got while Pepino was enjoying London so tremendously. Why then, thought Daisy with a sense of incredulous indignation, had Pepino come down a few Sundays ago, all by himself, and looking a perfect wreck? . . . “Very odd, I call it,” muttered Daisy, turning over to her other side.

  It was odd, and Pepino had been odd. He had dined with Georgie one night, and on the other Georgie had dined with him, but he had said nothing about Lucia that Hermione had not trumpeted to the world. Otherwise, Pepino had not been seen at all on that Sunday except when Mrs. Antrobus, not feeling very well in the middle of the Psalms on Sunday morning, had come out, and observed him standing on tip-toe and peering into the window of the Museum that looked on to the Roman Antiquities. Mrs. Antrobus (feeling much better as soon as she got into the air) had come quite close up to him before he perceived her, and then with only the curtest word of greeting, just as if she was the Museum Committee, he had walked away so fast that she could not but conclude that he wished to be alone. It was odd too, and scarcely honourable, that he should have looked into the window like that, and clearly it was for that purpose that he had absented himself from church, thinking that he would be unobserved. Daisy had not the smallest doubt that he was spying for Lucia, and had been told merely to collect information and to say nothing, for though he knew that Georgie was on the committee, he had carefully kept off the subject of the Museum on both their tête-à-tête dinners. Probably he had begun his spying the moment church began, and if Mrs. Antrobus had not so providentially felt faint, no one would h
ave known anything about it. As it was, it was quite likely that he had looked into every window by the time she saw him, and knew all that the Museum contained. Since then, the Museum had been formally opened by Lady Ambermere, who had lent (not presented) some mittens which she said belonged to Queen Charlotte (it was impossible to prove that they hadn’t), and the committee had put up some very baffling casement curtains which would make an end to spying for ever.

  Now this degrading espionage had happened three weeks ago (come Sunday), and therefore for three weeks (come Monday), Lucia must have known all about the Museum. But not a word had she transmitted on that or any other subject; she had not demanded a place on the committee, nor presented the Elizabethan spit which so often made the chimney of her music-room to smoke, nor written to say that they must arrange it all quite differently. That she had a plan, a policy about the Museum, no one who knew Lucia could possibly doubt, but her policy (which thus at present was wrapped in mystery) might be her complete and eternal ignoring of it. It would indeed be dreadful if she intended to remain unaware of it, but Daisy doubted if anyone in her position and of her domineering character could be capable of such inhuman self-control. No: she meant to do something when she came back, but nobody could guess what it was, or when she was coming.

  Daisy tossed and turned as she revolved these knotty points. She was sure Lucia would punish them all for making a Museum while she was away, and not asking her advice and begging her to be president, and she would be ill with chagrin when she learned how successful it was proving. The tourist season, when char-a-bancs passed through Riseholme in endless procession, had begun, and whole parties after lunching at the Ambermere Arms went to see it. In the first week alone there had been a hundred and twenty-six visitors, and that meant a corresponding take of shillings without reckoning sixpenny catalogues. Even the committee paid their shillings when they went in to look at their own exhibits, and there had been quite a scene when Lady Ambermere with a party from the Hall tried to get in without paying for any of them on the ground that she had lent the Museum Queen Charlotte’s mittens. Georgie, who was hanging up another picture of his, had heard it all and hidden behind a curtain. The small boy in charge of the turnstile (bought from a bankrupt circus for a mere song) had, though trembling with fright, absolutely refused to let the turnstile turn until the requisite number of shillings had been paid, and didn’t care whose mittens they were which Lady Ambermere had lent, and when, snatching up a catalogue without paying for it, she had threatened to report him to the committee, this intrepid lad had followed her, continuing to say “Sixpence, please, my lady,” till one of the party, in order to save brawling in a public place, had produced the insignificant sum. And if Lucia tried to get in without paying, on the ground that she and Pepino had given the stocks to the Parish Council, which had lent them to the Museum, she would find her mistake. At length, in the effort to calculate what would be the total receipts of the year if a hundred and twenty-six people per week paid their shillings, Daisy lapsed into an uneasy arithmetical slumber.