by E. F. Benson
“And haven’t even you seen him? Fancy!” said Elizabeth. “He must be terribly ill.”
Lucia did not say that actually she had seen him, nor did she mention his beard. She intended to find out what that meant before she disclosed it.
“Oh, I don’t think that,” she said. “But men like to be left quite alone when they’re not the thing.”
Elizabeth kissed her finger-tips across the table to her husband. Really rather sickening.
“That’s not the way of my little Benjy-boy,” she said. “Why, he had a touch of chill out at Monte, and pas un moment did I get to myself till he was better. Wasn’t it so, mischief?”
Major Benjy wiped his great walrus-moustache which had been dipped in that cauldron of tea.
“Girlie is a wizard in the sick-room,” he said. “Bucks a man up more than fifty tonics. Ring Georgie up, Liz: say you’ll pop in after dinner and sit with him.”
Lucia waited for the upshot of this offer with some anxiety. Georgie would certainly be curious to see Elizabeth after her marriage and it would be too shattering if he accepted this proposal after having refused her own company. Luckily nothing so lamentable happened. Elizabeth returned from the telephone in a very short space of time, a little flushed, and, for the moment, forgetting to talk French.
“Not up to seeing people,” she said, “so Foljambe told me. A rude woman I’ve always thought: I wonder Mr. Georgie can put up with her. Diva, dear, more chocolates? I’m sure there are plenty more in the cupboard. More tea, anybody? Benjy, dear, another cup? Shall we get back to our rubbers then? All so exciting!”
The wee laddies presently began to get as incautious as the guid wives. It was maddening to be a game up and sixty, and not to be allowed to secure one of the fattest scores above ever known in Sussex. Already it reached nearly to the top of the scoring-sheet, but now owing to penalties from their own overbidding, a second sky-scraper was mounting rapidly beside the first. Then the guid wives got a game, and the deadly process began again.
“Très amusant!” exclaimed Elizabeth, sorting her hand with a fixed smile, because it was so amusing, and a trembling hand because it was so agonizing. “Now let me see; que faire?”
“Hold your hand a wee bitty higher, Mistress Mapp-Flint,” said the Padre, “or sure I can’t help getting a keek o’t.”
“Monsieur, the more you keeked the less you’d like it,” said Elizabeth, scanning a hand of appalling rubbish. Quite legitimate to say that.
At this precise moment when Elizabeth was wondering whether it might not pay to be psychic for once, Major Benjy at the other table laid down his hand as dummy, and cast just one glance, quick as a lizard at the knotted face of his wife. “Excuse me,” he said and quietly stole from the room. Elizabeth, so thought Diva, had not noticed his exit, but she certainly noticed his return, though she had got frightfully entangled in her hand, for Lucia had been psychic, too, and God knew what would happen. . . .
“Not kept you waiting, I hope,” said Benjy stealing back. “Just a telephone message. Ha, we seem to be getting on, partner. Well, I must say, beautifully played.”
Diva thought these congratulations had a faint odour about them as if he had been telephoning to a merchant who dealt in spirituous liquors. . . .
It was not till half-past seven that the great tussle came to an end, resulting in a complete wash-out, and the whole party, marvelling at the lateness of the hour left in a great hurry so as not to keep dinner (or a tray) waiting. Mr. Wyse vainly begged Lucia and Diva to be taken home in the Royce: it was such a dark night, he observed, but saw that there was a full moon, and it would be so wet underfoot, but he became aware that the pavements were bone-dry. So after a phrase or two in French from Elizabeth, in Italian from Lucia, in Scotch and Irish from the Padre, so that the threshold of Mallards resembled the Tower of Babel, Diva and Lucia went briskly down towards the High Street, both eager for a communing about the balance of the matrimonial equation.
“What a change, Diva!” began Lucia. “It’s quite charming to see what matrimony has done for Elizabeth. Miraculous, isn’t it? At present there does not seem to be a trace left of her old cantankerousness. She seems positively to dote on him. Those little tweaks and dabs, and above all her giving up the garden-room to him: that shows there must be something real and heartfelt, don’t you think? Fond eyes following him—”
“Not so sure about the fond eyes,” said Diva. “Pretty sharp they looked when he came back from telephoning. Another kind of cup of tea was what he was after. That I’ll swear to. Reeked!”
“No!” said Lucia. “You don’t say so!”
“Yes, I do. Teetotal lunches at the bungalow indeed! Rubbish. Whisky bottles, I bet, buried all over the garden.”
“Dear Diva, that’s pure imagination,” said Lucia very nobly. “If you say such things you’ll get to believe them.”
“Ho! I believe them already,” said Diva. “There’ll be developments yet.”
“I hope they’ll be happy ones, anyhow,” said Lucia. “Of course, as the Padre would say, Major Benjy was apt to lift the elbow occasionally, but I shall continue to believe that’s all done with. Such an enormous cup of tea: I never saw such a cup, and I think it’s a perfect marriage. Perfect! I wonder—”
Diva chipped in.
“I know what you mean. They sleep in that big room overlooking the street. Withers told my cook. Dressing-room for Major Benjy next door; that slip of a room. I’ve seen him shaving at the window myself.”
Lucia walked quickly on after Diva turned into her house in the High Street. Diva was a little coarse sometimes, but in fairness Lucia had to allow that when she said “I wonder,” Diva had interpreted what she wondered with absolute accuracy. If she was right about the precise process of Major Benjy’s telephoning, it would look as if matrimony had not wrought so complete a change in him as in his bride, but perhaps Diva’s sense of smell had been deranged by her enormous consumption of chocolates.
Then like a faint unpleasant odour the thought of her approaching fiftieth birthday came back to her. Only this morning she had resolved to make a worthy use of the few years that lay in front of her and of the energy that boiled inside her, and to couple the two together and achieve something substantial. Yet, even while that resolve was glowing within her, she had frittered four hours away over tea and Bridge, with vast expenditure of nervous force and psychic divination, and there was nothing to shew for it except weariness of the brain, a few dubious conclusions as to the effect of matrimony on the middle-aged and a distaste for small cards. . . . Relaxation, thought Lucia in this sharp attack of moralizing, should be in itself productive. Playing duets with Georgie was productive because their fingers in spite of occasional errors, evoked the divine harmonies of Mozartino and Beethoven: when she made sketches of the twilight marsh her eye drank in the loveliness of Nature, but these hours of Bridge, however strenuous, had not really enriched or refreshed her, and it was no use pretending that they had.
“I must put up in large capital letters over my bed ‘I am fifty’,” she thought as she let herself into her house, “and that will remind me every morning and evening that I’ve done nothing yet which will be remembered after I am gone. I’ve been busy (I will say that for myself) but beyond giving others a few hours of enchantment at the piano, and helping them to keep supple, I’ve done nothing for the world or indeed for Tilling. I must take myself in hand.”
The evening post had come in but there was nothing for her except a packet covered with seals which she knew must be her pass-book returned from the bank. She did not trouble to open it, and after a tray (for she had made a substantial tea) she picked up the evening paper, to see if she could find any hints about a career for a woman of fifty. Women seemed to be much to the fore: there was one flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, but Lucia felt it was a little late for her to take up flying: probably it required an immense amount of practice before you could, with any degree of confidence, start fo
r New York alone, two or three thousand feet up in the air.
Then eight others were making a tour of pavilions and assembly rooms in towns on the South Coast, and entrancing everybody by their graceful exhibitions (in tights, or were their legs bare?) of physical drill; but on thinking it over, Lucia could not imagine herself heading a team of Tilling ladies, Diva and Elizabeth and Susan Wyse, with any reasonable hope of entrancing anybody. The pages of reviews of books seemed to deal entirely with novels by women, all of which were works of high genius. Lucia had long felt that she could write a marvellous novel, but perhaps there were enough geniuses already. Then there was a woman who, though it was winter, was in training to swim the Channel, but Lucia hated sea-bathing and could not swim. Certainly women were making a stir in the world, but none of their achievements seemed suited to the ambitions of a middle-aged widow.
Lucia turned the page. Dame Catherine Winterglass was dead at the age of fifty-five, and there was a long obituary notice of this remarkable spinster. For many years she had been governess to the children of a solicitor who lived at Balham, but at the age of forty-five she had been dismissed to make way for somebody younger. She had a capital of £500, and had embarked on operations on the Stock Exchange, making a vast fortune. At the time of her death she had a house in Grosvenor Square where she entertained Royalty, an estate at Mocomb Regis in Norfolk for partridge shooting, a deer forest in Scotland, and a sumptuous yacht for cruising in the Mediterranean; and from London, Norfolk, Ross-shire and the Riviera she was always in touch with the centres of finance. An admirable woman, too: hospitals, girl-guides, dogs’ homes, indigent parsons, preventions of cruelty and propagations of the Gospel were the recipients of her noble bounty. No deserving case (and many undeserving) ever appealed to her in vain and her benefactions were innumerable. Right up to the end of her life, in spite of her colossal expenditure, it was believed that she grew richer and richer.
Lucia forgot all about nocturnal arrangements at Mallards, and read this account through again. What an extraordinary power money had! It enabled you not only to have everything you could possibly want yourself, but to do so much good, to relieve suffering, to make the world (as the Padre had said last Sunday) “a better place.” Hitherto she had taken very little interest in money, being quite content every six months or so to invest a few hundred pounds from her constantly accruing balance in some gilt-edged security, the dividends from which added some negligible sum to her already ample income. But here was this woman who, starting with a total capital of a paltry five hundred pounds, had for years lived in Sybaritic luxury and done no end of good as well. “To be sure,” thought Lucia, “she had the start of me by five years, for she was only forty-five when she began, but still . . .”
Grosvenor entered.
“Foljambe’s back from Mr. Georgie’s ma’am,” she said. “You told me you wanted to see her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Lucia, deep in meditation about Dame Catherine. “To-morrow will do.”
She let the paper drop, and fixed her gimlet eyes on the bust of Beethoven, for this conduced to concentration. She did not covet yachts and deer forests, but there were many things she would like to do for Tilling: a new organ was wanted at the church, a new operating theatre was wanted at the hospital and she herself wanted Mallards. She intended to pass the rest of her days here, and it would be wonderful to be a great benefactress to the town, a notable figure, a civic power and not only the Queen (she had no doubt about that) of its small social life. These benefactions and the ambitions for herself, which she had been unable to visualize before, outlined themselves with distinctness and seemed wreathed together: the one twined round the other. Then the parable of the talents occurred to her. She had been like the unprofitable servant who, distrusting his financial ability, had wrapped it up in a napkin, for really to invest money in Government Stock was comparable with that, such meagre interest did it produce.
She picked up her paper again and turned to the page of financial news, and strenuously applied her vigorous mind to an article on the trend of markets by the City Editor. Those tedious gilt-edged stocks had fallen a little (as he had foreseen) but there was great activity in Industrials and in gold shares. Then there was a list of the shares which the City Editor had recommended to his readers a month ago. All of them (at least all that he quoted) had experienced a handsome rise: one had doubled in price. Lucia ripped open the sealed envelope containing her pass-book and observed with a pang of retrospective remorse that it revealed that she had the almost indecent balance of twelve hundred pounds. If only, a month ago, she had invested a thousand of it in that share recommended by this clever City Editor each pound would have made another pound!
But it was no use repining, and she turned to see what the wizard recommended now. Goldfields of West Africa were very promising, notably Siriami, and the price was eight to nine shillings. She did not quite know what that meant: probably there were two grades of shares, the best costing nine shillings, and a slightly inferior kind costing eight. Supposing she bought five hundred shares of Siriami and they behaved as those others had done, she would in a month’s time have doubled the sum she had invested.
“I’m beginning to see my way,” she thought, and the way was so absorbing that she had not heard the telephone bell ring, and now Grosvenor came in to say that Georgie wanted to speak to her. Lucia wondered whether Foljambe had seen her peeping in at his window this afternoon and had reported this intrusion, and was prepared, if this was the case and Georgie resented it, not exactly to lie about it, but to fail to understand what he was talking about until he got tired of explaining. She adopted that intimate dialect of baby-language with a peppering of Italian words in which they often spoke together.
“Is zat ‘oo, Georgino mio?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Georgie in plain English.
“Lubly to hear your voice again. Come sta? Better I hope.”
“Yes, going on all right, but very slow. All too tarsome. And I’m getting dreadfully depressed seeing nobody and hearing nothing.”
Lucia dropped dialect.
“But, my dear, why didn’t you let me come and see you before? You’ve always refused.”
“I know.”
There was a long pause. Lucia with her psychic faculties alert after so much Bridge felt sure he had something more to say, and like a wise woman she refrained from pressing him. Clearly he had rung her up to tell her something, but found it difficult to bring himself to the point.
At last it came.
“Will you come in to-morrow then?”
“Of course I will. Delighted. What time?”
“Any time is the same to me,” said Georgie gloomily. “I sit in this beastly little room all day.”
“About twelve then, after church?” she asked.
“Do. And I must warn you that I’m very much changed.”
(“That’s the beard,” thought Lucia.) She made her voice register deep concern.
“My dear, what do you mean?” she asked with a clever tremolo.
“Nothing to be anxious about at all, though it’s frightful. I won’t tell you because it’s so hard to explain it all. Any news?”
That sounded better: in spite of this frightful change Georgie had his human interests alive.
“Lots: quantities. For instance, Elizabeth says n’est ce pas and chérie, because she’s been to France.”
“No!” said Georgie with a livelier inflexion. “We’ll have a good talk: lots must have happened. But remember there’s a shocking change.”
“It won’t shock me,” said Lucia. “Twelve then, to-morrow. Good night, Georgino.”
“Buona notte,” said he.
CHAPTER II.
Major Benjy was in church with his wife next morning: this was weighty evidence as regards her influence over him, for never yet had he been known to spend a fine Sunday morning except on the golf links. He sat with her among the auxiliary choir sharing her hymn-book and making
an underground sort of noise during the hymns. The Padre preached a long sermon in Scotch about early Christianity in Ireland which was somehow confusing to the geographical sense. After service Lucia walked away a little ahead of the Mapp-Flints, so that they certainly saw her ring the bell at Mallards Cottage and be admitted, and Elizabeth did not fail to remember that Georgie had said only yesterday afternoon that he was not up to seeing anybody. Lucia smiled and waved her hand as she went in to make sure Elizabeth saw, and Elizabeth gave a singularly mirthless smile in answer. As it was Sunday, she tried to feel pleased that he must be better this morning, but with only partial success. However, she would sit in the window of the garden-room and see how long Lucia stayed.
Georgie was not yet down and Lucia had a few minutes alone in his sitting-room among the tokens of his handiwork. There were dozens of his water-colour sketches on the walls, the sofa was covered with a charming piece of gros-point from his nimble needle, and his new piece in petit point, not yet finished, lay on one of the numerous little tables. One window looked on to the street, the other on to a tiny square of flower garden with a patch of crazy pavement surrounding a brick pillar on the top of which stood a replica of the Neapolitan Narcissus. Georgie had once told Lucia that he had just that figure when he was a boy, and with her usual tact she had assured him he had it still. There were large soft cushions in all the chairs, there was a copy of Vogue, a work-basket containing wools, a feather brush for dusting, a screen to shut off all draughts from the door, and a glass case containing his bibelots, including a rather naughty enamelled snuff-box: two young people — Then she heard his slippered tread on the stairs and in he came.
He had on his new blue suit: round his neck was a pink silk scarf with an amethyst pin to keep it in place, and above the scarf his face, a shade plumper than Narcissus’s, thatched by his luxuriant auburn hair and decorated with an auburn moustache turned up at the ends, was now framed in a short grey, almost white beard.