Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Ah, my Financial Post,” she said. “I thought it would be amusing, dear, just to see what was happening to Lucia’s gold mine. I take such an interest in it for her sake.”

  She turned over the unfamiliar pages, and clapped her hands in sympathetic delight.

  “Oh, Benjy-boy, isn’t that nice for her?” she cried. “Siriami has gone up another three shillings. Quite a fortune!”

  Benjy was just as pleased as Elizabeth, though he marvelled at the joy that Lucia’s enrichment had given her.

  “No! That’s tremendous,” he said. “Very pleasant indeed.”

  “Lovely!” exclaimed Elizabeth. “The dear thing! And an article about West African mines. Most encouraging prospects, and something about the price of gold: the man expects to see it higher yet.”

  Elizabeth grew absorbed over this, and let her poached egg get cold.

  “I see what it means!” she said. “The actual price of gold itself is going up, just as if it was coals or tobacco, so of course the gold they get out of the mine is worth more. Poor muddle-headed Diva, thinking that the number of shillings in a pound had something to do with it! And Diva will be pleased too. I know she bought some shares yesterday, after the rabbit, for she sent a telegram, and the clerk asked if a word was Siriami.”

  “Did she indeed?” asked Benjy. “How many?”

  “I couldn’t see. Ring the bell, dear, and don’t shout Quai-hai. Withers has forgotten the pepper.”

  Exultant Benjy forgot about his copy of the Financial Post, on which he was sitting, and disclosed it.

  “What? Another Financial Post?” cried Elizabeth. “Did you order one, too? Oh, Benjy, make a clean breast of it. Have you been buying Siriami as well as Lucia and Diva?”

  “Well, Liz, I had a hundred pounds lying idle. And not such a bad way of using them after all. A hundred and fifty shares. Three times that in shillings. Pretty good.”

  “Secretive one!” said Elizabeth. “Naughty!”

  Benjy had a brain-wave.

  “And aren’t you going to tell me how many you bought?” he asked.

  Evidently it was no use denying the imputation. Elizabeth instinctively felt that he would not believe her, for her joy for Lucia’s sake must already have betrayed her.

  “Three hundred,” she said. “Oh, what fun! And what are we to do next? They think gold will go higher. Benjy, I think I shall buy some more. What’s the use of, say, a hundred pounds in War Loan earning three pound ten a year? I shouldn’t miss three pound ten a year. . . . But I must get to my jobs. Not sure that I won’t treat you to a woodcock to-night, if Susan allows me to have one.”

  In the growing excitement over Siriami, Elizabeth got quite indifferent as to whether the blinds were up or down in the windows of Georgie’s house. During the next week the shares continued to rise, and morning after morning Benjy appeared with laudable punctuality at breakfast, hungry for the Financial Post. An unprecedented extravagance infected both him and Elizabeth: sometimes he took a motor out to the links, for what did a few shillings matter when Siriami was raining so many on him, and Elizabeth vied with Susan in luxurious viands for the table. Bridge at threepence a hundred, which had till lately aroused the wildest passions, failed to thrill, and next time the four gamblers, the Mapp-Flints and Diva and Lucia, met for a game, they all agreed to play double the ordinary stake, and even at that enhanced figure a recklessness in declaration, hitherto unknown, manifested itself. They lingered over tea discussing gold and the price of gold, the signification of which was now firmly grasped by everybody, and there were frightful searchings of heart on the part of the Mapp-Flints and Diva as to whether to sell out and realize their gains, or to invest more in hopes of a further rise. And never had Lucia shewn herself more nauseatingly Olympian. She referred to her “few shares” when everybody knew she had bought five hundred to begin with and had made one if not two more purchases since, and she held forth as if she was a City Editor herself.

  “I was telephoning to my broker this morning,” she began.

  “What? A trunk call?” interrupted Diva. “Half-a-crown, isn’t it?”

  “Very likely: and put my view of the situation about gold before him. He agreed with me that the price of gold was very high already, and that if, as I suggested, America might come off the gold standard — however, that is a very complicated problem; and I hope to hear from him to-morrow morning about it. Then we had a few words about English rails. Undeniably there have been much better traffic returns lately, and I am distinctly of the opinion that one might do worse—”

  Diva was looking haggard. She ate hardly any chocolates, and had already confessed that she was sleeping very badly.

  “Don’t talk to me about English rails,” she said. “The price of gold is worrying enough.”

  Lucia spread her hands wide with a gesture of infinite capacity.

  “You should enlarge your horizon, Diva,” she said. “You should take a broad, calm view of world-conditions. Look at the markets, gold, industrials, rails as from a mountain height; get a panoramic view. My few shares in Siriami have certainly given me a marvellous profit, and I am beginning to ask myself whether there is not more chance of capital-appreciation, if you follow me, elsewhere. Silver, for instance, is rising — nothing to do with the number of pennies in a shilling — one has to consider that. I feel very responsible, for Georgie has bought a little parcel — we call it — of Siriami on my advice. If one follows silver, I don’t think one could do better — and my broker agrees — than to buy a few Burma Corporation. I am thinking seriously of clearing out of Siriami, and investing there. Wonderfully interesting, is it not?”

  “It’s so interesting that it keeps me awake,” said Diva. “From one o’clock to two this morning, I thought I would buy more, and from six to seven I thought I would sell. I don’t know which to do.”

  Elizabeth rose. Lucia’s lecture was quite intolerable. Evidently she was constituting herself a central bureau for the dispensing of financial instruction. So characteristic of her: she must boss and direct everybody. There had been her musical parties at which all Tilling was expected to sit in a dim light and listen to her and Georgie play endless sonatas. There had been her gymnastic class, now happily defunct, for the preservation of suppleness and slimness in middle-age, and when Contract Bridge came in she had offered to hold classes in that. True, she had been the first cause of the enrichment of them all by the purchase of Siriami, but no one could go on being grateful for ever, and Elizabeth’s notable independence of character revolted against the monstrous airs she exhibited, and inwardly she determined that she would do exactly the opposite of anything Lucia recommended.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said, “for all you’ve told us. Most interesting and instructive. How wonderfully you’ve grasped it all! Now do you think we may go back to our Bridge before it gets too late to begin another rubber? And I declare I haven’t asked about notre pauvre ami, Mr. Georgie. One hasn’t seen him about yet, though Foljambe always tells me he’s much better. And such odd things happen at his house. One day all his blinds will be down, as if the house was empty, and the next there’ll be Foljambe coming at eight in the morning as usual.”

  “No! What a strange thing!” said Lucia.

  Diva managed to eat just one of those nougat chocolates of which she generally emptied the dish. It was lamentable how little pleasure it gave her, and how little she was thrilled by the mystery of those drawn blinds.

  “I noticed that too,” she said. “But then I forgot all about it.”

  “Not before you suggested he was dead, dear,” said Elizabeth. “I only hope Foljambe looks after him properly.”

  “I saw him this morning,” said Lucia. “He has everything he wants.”

  The Bridge was of a character that a week ago would have aroused the deepest emotions. Diva and Lucia played against the family and won three swift rubbers at these new dizzy points. There were neither vituperations between the vanquished nor crows of delig
ht from the victors, and though at the end Diva’s scoring, as usual, tallied with nobody’s, she sacrificed a shilling without insisting that the others should add up again. There was no frenzy, there was no sarcasm even when Benjy doubled his adversaries out or when Elizabeth forgot he always played the club convention, and thought he had some. All was pale and passionless; the sense of the vast financial adventures going on made it almost a matter of indifference who won. Occasionally, at the end of a hand Lucia gave a short exposition of the psychic bid which had so flummoxed her opponents, but nobody cared.

  Diva spent the evening alone without appetite for her tray. She took Paddy out for his stroll observing without emotion that someone, no doubt in allusion to him, had altered the notice of “No Parking” outside her house to “No Barking.” It scarcely seemed worth while to erase that piece of wretched bad taste, and as for playing Patience to beguile the hour before bedtime, she could not bother to lay the cards out, but sat in front of her fire re-reading the City news in yesterday’s and to-day’s paper. She brooded over her note of purchase of Siriami shares: she made small addition sums in pencil on her blotting-paper: the greed of gold caused her to contemplate buying more: the instinct of prudence prompted her to write a telegram to her broker to sell out her entire holding. “Which shall I do? Oh, which shall I do?” she muttered to herself. Ten struck and eleven: it was long after her usual bedtime on solitary evenings, and eventually she fell into a doze. From that she passed into deep sleep and woke with her fire out and her clock on the stroke of midnight, but with her mind made up. “I shall sell two of my shares and keep the other three,” she said aloud.

  For the first time for many nights she slept beautifully till she was called, and woke fresh and eager for the day. There on her dressing-table lay the three half-crowns which she had taken from Elizabeth the evening before. They had seemed then but joyless and negligible tokens; now they gleamed with their accustomed splendour. “And to think that I won all that without really enjoying it,” thought Diva, as she performed a few of those salubrious flexes and jerks which Lucia had taught her. Just glancing at the Financial Post she saw that Siriami had gone up another sixpence, but she did not falter in her prudent determination to secure some part of her profits.

  The same crisis which, for Diva, had sucked all the sweetness out of life but supplied Lucia with grist for the Imitation of Dame Catherine Winterglass. Georgie, with a white pointed beard (that clever Foljambe had trimmed it for him, as neatly as if she had been a barber all her life) came down to breakfast for the first time this morning, and pounced on the Financial Post.

  “My dear, another sixpence up!” he exclaimed. “What shall I do?”

  Lucia already knew that: she had taken a swift glance at the paper before he came down, and had replaced it as if undisturbed. She shook a finger at him.

  “Now, Georgie, what about my rule that we have no business talk at meals? How are you? That’s much more important.”

  “Beautiful night,” said Georgie, “except that I dreamt about a gold mine and the bottom fell out of it, and all the ore slid down to the centre of the earth.”

  “That will never do, Georgie. You must not let money get on your mind. I’ll attend to your interests when I get to work after breakfast. And are your face and neck better?”

  “Terribly sore still. I don’t know when I shall be able to shave.”

  Lucia gave him a glance with head a little tilted, as if he was a landscape she proposed to paint. That neat beard gave character and distinction to his face. It hid his plump second chin and concealed the slightly receding shape of the first: another week’s growth would give it a greater solidity. There was something Stuart-like, something Vandyckish about his face. To be sure the colour of his beard contrasted rather strangely with his auburn hair and moustache, in which not the faintest hint of grey was manifest, but that could be remedied. It was not time, however, to say anything about that yet.

  “Don’t think about it then,” she said. “And now for to-day. I really think you ought to get some air. It’s so mild and sunny. Wrap up well and come for a drive with me before lunch.”

  “But they’ll see me,” said Georgie.

  “Not if you lean well back till we’re out of the town. I shall walk up there when I’ve gone into my affairs and yours, for I’m sure to have a telegram to send, and the car shall take you and Foljambe straight up to your house. I shall join you, so that we shall appear to be starting from there. Now I must get to work. I see there’s a letter from my broker.”

  Lucia’s voice had assumed that firm tone which Georgie knew well to betoken that she meant to have her way, and that all protest was merely a waste of nervous force. Off she went to the little room once known as the library, but now more properly to be called the Office. This was an inviolable sanctuary: Grosvenor had orders that she must never be disturbed there except under stress of some great emergency, such as a trunk-call from London. The table where Lucia used to sit with her Greek and Latin dictionaries and the plays of Aristophanes and the Odes of Horace with their English translations was now swept clean of its classical lore, and a ledger stood there, a bundle of prospectuses, some notes of purchase and a clip of communications from her broker. She opened the letter she had received this morning, and read it with great care. The rise in gold (and in consequence in gold mines) he thought had gone far enough and he repeated his suggestion that home-rails and silver merited attention. There lay the annual report of Burma Corporation, and a very confusing document she found it, for it dealt with rupees and annas instead of pounds and shillings, and she did not know the value of an anna or what relation it bore to a rupee: they might as well have been drachmas and obols. Then there was a statement about the earnings of the Great Western Railway (Lucia had no idea how many people went by train), and another about the Southern Railway shewing much improved traffics. Once more she referred to her broker’s last two letters, and then, with the dash and decision of Dame Catherine, made up her mind. She would sell out her entire holding in Siriami, and Burma Corporation and Southern Rails Preferred should enact a judgment of Solomon on the proceeds and each take half. She felt that she was slighting that excellent line, the Great Western, but it must get on without her support. Then she wrote out the necessary telegram to her broker, and touched the bell on her table. Grosvenor, according to orders, only opened the door an inch or two, and Lucia sent for Georgie.

  Like a client he pulled a high chair up to the table.

  “Georgie, I’ve gone very carefully into the monetary situation,” she said, “and I am selling all my Siriami. As you and others in Tilling followed me in your little purchases, I feel it my duty to tell you all what I am doing.”

  Georgie gave a sigh of relief, as when a very rapid movement in a piano duet came to an end.

  “I shall sell, too, then,” he said. “I’m very glad. I’m not up to the excitement after my shingles. It’s been very pleasant because I’ve made fifty pounds, but I’ve had enough. Will you take a telegram for me when you go?”

  Lucia closed her ledger, put a paper-weight on her prospectuses, and clipped Mammoncash’s letter into its sheaf.

  “I think — I say I think — that you’re right, Georgie,” she said. “The situation is becoming too difficult for me to advise about, and I am glad you have settled to clear out, so that I have no further responsibility. Now I shall walk up to Tilling — I find these great decisions very stimulating — and a quarter of an hour later, you will start in the car with Foljambe. I think — I say I think — that Mammoncash, my broker you know, telegraphic address, will approve my decision.”

  As he had already strongly recommended this course, it was probable he would do so, and Lucia walked briskly up to the High Street. Then, seeing Benjy and Elizabeth hanging about outside the post-office, she assumed a slower gait and a rapt, financial face.

  “Bon jour, chérie,” said Elizabeth, observing that she took two telegrams out of her bag. “Those sweet Siria
mis. Up another sixpence.”

  Lucia seemed to recall her consciousness from an immense distance, and broke the transition in Italian.

  “Ah, si, si! Buono piccolo Siriami! . . . So glad, dear Elizabeth and Major Benjy that my little pet has done well for you. But I’ve been puzzling over it this morning and I think the price of gold is high enough. That’s my impression—”

  Diva whizzed across the road from the greengrocer’s. All her zest and brightness had come back to her.

  “Such a relief to have made up my mind, Lucia,” she said. “I’ve telegraphed to sell two-thirds of my Siriami shares, and I shall keep the rest.”

  “Very likely you’re right, dear,” said Lucia. “Very likely I’m wrong, but I’m selling all my little portfolio of them.”

  Diva’s sunny face clouded over.

  “Oh, but that’s terribly upsetting,” she said. “I wonder if I’m too greedy. Do tell me what you think.”

  Lucia had now come completely out of her remote financial abstraction, and addressed the meeting.

  “Far be it from me to advise anybody,” she said. “The monetary situation is too complicated for me to take the responsibility. But my broker admits — I must say I was flattered — that there is a great deal to be said for my view, and since you all followed my lead in your little purchases of Siriami, I feel bound to tell you what I am doing to-day. Not one share of Siriami am I keeping, and I’m reinvesting the whole — I beg of you all not to consider this advice in any way — in Burma Corporation and Southern Railway Preferred, Prefs as we call them. I have given some study to the matter, and while I don’t think anyone would go far wrong in buying them, I should be sorry if any of you followed me blindly, without going into the matter for yourselves—”

  Elizabeth simply could not stand it a moment longer.