by E. F. Benson
The raft, with legs sometimes madly waltzing, sometimes floating smoothly along, was borne swiftly towards the bottom of the cliff, below which the flood was pouring by. The Padre, with his new umbrella, ran down the steps that led to the road below in order to hook it in, if it approached within umbrella-distance. On and on it came, now clearly recognizable as Lucia’s great kitchen-table upside down, until it was within a yard or two of the bank. To attempt to wade out to it, for any effective purpose, was useless: the strongest would be swept away in such a headlong torrent, and even if he reached the raft there would be three helpless people on it instead of two and it would probably sink. To hook it with the umbrella was the only chance, for there was no time to get a boat-hook or a rope to throw out to the passengers. The Padre made a desperate lunge at it, slipped and fell flat into the water, and was only saved from being carried away by clutching at the iron railing alongside the lowest of the submerged steps. Then some fresh current tweaked the table and, still moving in the general direction of the flood-water, it sheered off across the fields. As it receded Lucia showed the real stuff of which she was made. She waved her hand and her clear voice rang out gaily across the waste of water.
‘Au reservoir, all of you,’ she cried. ‘We’ll come back: just wait till we come back,’ and she was seen to put her arm round the huddled form of Mapp, and comfort her.
The kitchen-table was observed by the watchers to get into the main channel of the river, where the water was swifter yet. It twirled round once or twice as if waving a farewell, and then shot off towards the sea and that great bank of thick mist which hung over the horizon.
There was not yet any reason to despair. A telephone-message was instantly sent to the fishermen at the port, another to the coast-guards, another to the lifeboat, that a kitchen-table with a cargo of ladies on it was coming rapidly down the river, and no effort must be spared to arrest its passage out to sea. But, one after the other, as the short winter afternoon waned, came discouraging messages from the coast. The flood had swept from their moorings all the fishing boats anchored at the port or drawn up on the shore above high-water mark, and a coast-guardsman had seen an unintelligible object go swiftly past the mouth of the river before the telephone-message was received. He could not distinguish what it was, for the fog out in the Channel had spread to the coastline, and it had seemed to him more like the heads and necks of four sea-serpents playing together than anything else. But when interrogated as to whether it might be the legs of a kitchen-table upside down he acknowledged that the short glimpse which he obtained of it before it got lost in the fog would suit a kitchen-table as well as sea-serpents. He had said sea-serpents because it was in the sea, but it was just as like the legs of a kitchen-table, which had never occurred to him as possible. His missus had just such a kitchen-table — but as he seemed to be diverging into domestic reminiscences, the Mayor of Tilling, who himself conducted inquiries instead of opening the whist drive at the Institute with a short speech on the sin of gambling, cut him off. It was only too clear that this imaginative naturalist had seen — too late — the kitchen-table going out to sea.
The lifeboat had instantly responded to the SOS call on its services, and the great torrent of the flood having now gone by, the crew had been able to launch the boat and had set off to search the English Channel, in the blinding fog, for the table. The tide was setting west down the coast, the flood pouring out from the river mouth was discharged east, but they had gone off to row about in every direction, where the kitchen-table might have been carried. Rockets had been sent up from the station in case the ladies didn’t know where they were. That, so the Mayor reflected, might conceivably show the ladies where they were, but it didn’t really enable them to get anywhere else.
Dusk drew on and the friends of the missing went back to their respective houses, for there was no good in standing about in this dreadful cold fog which had now crept up from the marsh. Pneumonia wouldn’t help matters. Four of them, Georgie and Major Benjy and Diva and quaint Irene, lived solitary and celibate, and the prospect of a lonely evening with only suspense and faint hopes to feed upon was perfectly ghastly. In consequence, when each of them in turn was rung up by Mr Wyse, who hoped, in a broken voice, that he might find them disengaged and willing to come round to his house for supper (not dinner), they all gladly accepted. Mr Wyse requested them not to dress as for dinner, and this was felt to show a great delicacy: not dressing would be a sort of symbol of their common anxiety. Supper would be at half-past eight, and Mr Wyse trusted that there would be encouraging news before that hour.
The Padre and Mrs Bartlett had been bidden as well, so that there was a supper-party of eight. Supper began with the most delicious caviare, and on the black oak mantelpiece were two threepenny Christmas cards. Susan helped herself plentifully to the caviare. There was no use in not eating.
‘Dear Lucia’s Christmas present to me,’ she said. ‘Hers and yours I should say, Mr Georgie.’
‘Lucia sent me a wonderful box of nougat chocolates,’ said Diva. ‘She and you, I mean, Mr Georgie.’
Major Benjy audibly gulped.
‘Mrs Lucia,’ he said, ‘if I may call her so, sent me half a dozen bottles of pre-war whisky.’
The Padre had pulled himself together by this time, and spoke Scotch.
‘I had a wee mischance wi’ my umbrella two days agone,’ he said, ‘and Mistress Lucia, such a menseful woman, sent me a new one. An’ now that’s gone bobbin’ out to sea.’
‘You’re too pessimistic, Kenneth,’ said Mrs Bartlett. ‘An umbrella soon gets waterlogged and sinks, I tell you. The chances are it will be picked up in the marsh to-morrow, and it’ll find its way back to you, for there’s that beautiful silver band on the handle with your name engraved on it.’
‘Eh, ’twould be a bonnie thing to recover it,’ said her husband.
Mr Wyse thought that the conversation was getting a little too much concerned with minor matters; the recovery of an umbrella, though new, was a loss that might be lamented later. Besides, the other missing lady had not been mentioned yet. He pointed to the two threepenny Christmas cards on the mantelpiece.
‘Our friend Elizabeth Mapp sent those to my wife and me yesterday,’ he said. ‘We shall keep them always among our most cherished possessions in case — I mean in any case. Pretty designs. Roofs covered with snow. Holly. Robins. She had a very fine artistic taste. Her pictures had always something striking and original about them.’
Everybody cudgelled their brains for something appropriate to say about Elizabeth’s connection with Art. The effort was quite hopeless, for her ignoble trick in rejecting Lucia’s and Georgie’s pictures for the last exhibition, and the rejection by the new committee of her own for the forthcoming exhibition were all that could occur to the most nimble brain, and while the artist was in direst peril on the sea, or possibly now at rest beneath it, it would be in the worst taste to recall those discordant incidents. A very long pause of silence followed, broken only by the crashing of toast in the mouths of those who had not yet finished their caviare.
Irene had eaten no caviare, nor hitherto had she contributed anything to the conversation. Now she suddenly burst into shrieks of hysterical laughter and sobs.
‘What rubbish you’re all talking,’ she cried, wiping her eyes. ‘How can you be so silly? I’m sure I beg your pardons, but there it is. I’ll go home, please.’
She fled from the room and banged the front door so loudly that the house shook, and one of Miss Mapp’s cards fell into the fireplace.
‘Poor thing. Very excitable and uncontrolled,’ said Susan. ‘But I think she’s better alone.’
There was a general feeling of relief that Irene had gone, and as Mrs Wyse’s excellent supper progressed, with its cold turkey and its fried slices of plum pudding, its toasted cheese and its figs stuffed with almonds sent by Amelia from Capri, the general numbness caused by the catastrophe began to pass off. Consumed with anxiety as all were for the two (e
specially one of them) who had vanished into the Channel fogs on so unusual a vehicle, they could not fail to recognize what problems of unparalleled perplexity and interest were involved in what all still hoped might not turn out to be a tragedy. But whether it proved so or not, the whole manner of these happenings, the cause, the conditions, the circumstances which led to the two unhappy ladies whisking by on the flood must be discussed, and presently Major Benjy broke into this unnatural reticence.
‘I’ve seen many floods on the Jumna,’ he said, refilling his glass of port, ‘but I never saw one so sudden and so — so fraught with enigmas. They must have been in the kitchen. Now we all know there was a Christmas-tree there—’
A conversational flood equal to the largest ever seen on the Jumna was unloosed; a torrent of conjectures, and reconstruction after reconstruction of what could have occurred to produce what they had all seen, was examined and rejected as containing some inherent impossibility. And then what did the gallant Lucia’s final words mean, when she said, ‘Just wait till we come back’? By now discussion had become absolutely untrammelled, the rivalry between the two, Miss Mapp’s tricks and pointless meannesses, Lucia’s scornful victories, and, no less, her domineering ways were openly alluded to.
‘But “Just wait till we come back” is what we’re talking about,’ cried Diva. ‘We must keep to the point, Major Benjy. I believe she simply meant “Don’t give up hope. We shall come back.” And I’m sure they will.’
‘No, there’s more in it than that,’ said Georgie, interrupting. ‘I know Lucia better than any of you. She meant that she had something frightfully interesting to tell us when she did come back, as of course she will, and I’d bet it was something about Elizabeth. Some new thing she’d found her out in.’
‘But at such a solemn moment,’ said the Padre, again forgetting his pseudo-Highland origin, ‘when they were being whirled out to sea with death staring them in the face, I hardly think that such trivialities as those which had undoubtedly before caused between those dear ladies the frictions which we all deplored—’
‘Nonsense, Kenneth,’ said his wife, rather to his relief, for he did not know how he was to get out of this sentence, ‘you enjoyed those rows as much as anybody.’
‘I don’t agree with you, Padre,’ said Georgie. ‘To begin with, I’m sure Lucia didn’t think she was facing death and even if she did, she’d still have been terribly interested in life till she went phut.’
‘Thank God I live on a hill,’ exclaimed Major Benjy, thinking, as usual, of himself.
Mr Wyse held up his hand. As he was the host, it was only kind to give him a chance, for he had had none as yet. ‘Your pardon,’ he said, ‘if I may venture to suggest what may combine the ideas of our reverend friend and of Mr Pillson’ — he made them two bows— ‘I think Mrs Lucas felt she was facing death — who wouldn’t? — but she was of that vital quality which never gives up interest in life, until, in fact (which we trust with her is not the case), all is over. But like a true Christian, she was, as we all saw, employed in comforting the weak. She could not have been using her last moments, which we hope are nothing of the sort, better. And if there had been frictions, they arose only from the contact of two highly vitalized—’
‘She kissed Elizabeth too,’ cried Mrs Bartlett. ‘I saw her. She hasn’t done that for ages. Fancy!’
‘I want to get back to the kitchen,’ said Diva. ‘What could have taken Elizabeth to the kitchen? I’ve got a brilliant idea, though I don’t know what you’ll think of it. She knew Lucia was giving a Christmas-tree to the choir-boys, because I told her so yesterday—’
‘I wonder what’s happened to that,’ said the Padre. ‘If it wasn’t carried away by the flood, and I think we should have seen it go by, it might be dried.’
Diva, as usual when interrupted, had held her mouth open, and went straight on.
‘ — and she knew the servants were out, because I’d told her that too, and she very likely wanted to see the Christmas-tree. So I suggest that she went round the back way into the kitchen — that would be extremely like her, you know — in order to have a look at it, without asking a favour of—’
‘Well, I do call that clever,’ interrupted Georgie admiringly. ‘Go on. What happened next?’
Diva had not got further than that yet, but now a blinding brilliance illuminated her and she clapped her hands.
‘I see, I see,’ she cried. ‘In she went into the kitchen and while she was looking at it, Lucia came in too, and then the flood came in too. All three of them. That would explain what was behind her words, “Just wait till we come back.” She meant that she wanted to tell us that she’d found Elizabeth in her kitchen.’
It was universally felt that Diva had hit it, and after such a stroke of reconstructive genius, any further discussion must be bathos. Instantly a sad reaction set in, and they all looked at each other much shocked to find how wildly interested they had become in these trivial affairs, while their two friends were, to put the most hopeful view of the case, on a kitchen-table somewhere in the English Channel. But still Lucia had said that she and her companion were coming back, and though no news had arrived of the castaways, every one of her friends, at the bottom of their hearts, felt that these were not idle words, and that they must keep alive their confidence in Lucia. Miss Mapp alone would certainly have been drowned long ago, but Lucia, whose power of resource all knew to be unlimited, was with her. No one could suggest what she could possibly do in such difficult circumstances, but never yet had she been floored, nor failed to emerge triumphant from the most menacing situations.
Mrs Wyse’s cuckoo clock struck the portentous hour of 1 a.m. They all sighed, they all got up, they all said good night with melancholy faces, and groped their ways home in the cold fog. Above Georgie’s head as he turned the corner by Mallards there loomed the gable of the garden-room, where so often a chink of welcoming light had shone between the curtains, as the sound of Mozartino came from within. Dark and full of suspense as was the present, he could still, without the sense of something forever past from his life, imagine himself sitting at the piano again with Lucia, waiting for her Uno, due, TRE as they tried over for the first time the secretly familiar duets.
The whole of the next day this thick fog continued both on land and water, but no news came from seawards save the bleating and hooting of fog-horns, and as the hours passed, anxiety grew more acute. Mrs Wyse opened the picture exhibition on behalf of Lucia, for it was felt that in any case she would have wished that, but owing to the extreme inclemency of the weather only Mr Wyse and Georgie attended this inaugural ceremony. Mrs Wyse in the lamented absence of the authoress read Lucia’s lecture on modern art from the typewritten copy which she had sent Georgie to look through and criticize. It lasted an hour and twenty minutes, and after Georgie’s applause had died away at the end, Mr Wyse read the speech he had composed to propose a vote of thanks to Lucia for her most enthralling address. This also was rather long, but written in the most classical and urbane style. Georgie seconded this in a shorter speech, and Mrs Wyse (vice Lucia) read another longer speech of Lucia’s which was appended in manuscript to her lecture, in which she thanked them for thanking her, and told them how diffident she had felt in thus appearing before them. There was more applause, and then the three of them wandered round the room and peered at each other’s pictures through the dense fog. Evening drew in again, without news, and Tilling began to fear the worst.
Next morning there came a mute and terrible message from the sea. The fog had cleared, the day was of crystalline brightness, and since air and exercise would be desirable after sitting at home all the day before, and drinking that wonderful pre-war whisky, Major Benjy set off by the eleven o’clock tram to play a round of golf with the Padre. Though hope was fast expiring, neither of them said anything definitely indicating that they no longer really expected to see their friends again, but there had been talk indirectly bearing on the catastrophe; the Major had asked casu
ally whether Mallards was a freehold, and the Padre replied that both it and Grebe were the property of their occupiers and not held on lease; he also made a distant allusion to memorial services, saying he had been to one lately, very affecting. Then Major Benjy lost his temper with the caddie, and their game assumed a more normal aspect.
They had now come to the eighth hole, the tee of which was perched high like a pulpit on the sand-dunes and overlooked the sea. The match was most exciting: hole after hole had been halved in brilliant sixes and sevens, the players were both on the top of their form, and in their keenness had quite banished from their minds the overshadowing anxiety. Here Major Benjy topped his ball into a clump of bents immediately in front of the tee, and when he had finished swearing at his caddie for moving on the stroke, the Padre put his iron shot on to the green.
‘A glorious day,’ he exclaimed, and, turning to pick up his clubs, gazed out seawards. The tide was low, and an immense stretch of ‘shining sands’ as in Charles Kingsley’s poem was spread in front of him. Then he gave a gasp.
‘What’s that?’ he said to Major Benjy, pointing with a shaking finger.
‘Good God,’ said Major Benjy. ‘Pick up my ball, caddie.’ They scrambled down the steep dunes and walked across the sands to where lay this object which had attracted the Padre’s attention. It was an immense kitchen-table upside down with its legs in the air, wet with brine but still in perfect condition. Without doubt it was the one which they had seen two days before whirling out to sea. But now it was by itself, no ladies were sitting upon it. The Padre bared his head.
‘Shall we abandon our game, Major?’ he said. ‘We had better telephone from the Club-house to the Mayor. And I must arrange to get some men to bring the table back. It’s far too heavy for us to think of moving it.’
The news that the table had come ashore spread swiftly through Tilling, and Georgie, hearing that the Padre had directed that when it had passed the Custom House it should be brought to the Vicarage, went round there at once. It seemed almost unfeeling in this first shock of bereavement to think about tables, but it would save a great deal of bother afterwards to see to this now. The table surely belonged to Grebe.