Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Sweet of you to tell us, dear,” she said, “but pray don’t make yourself uneasy about any responsibility for us. My Benjy and I have been studying too, and we’ve made up our minds to buy some more Siriami. So set your mind at ease.”

  Diva moaned.

  “Oh, dear me! Must begin thinking about it all over again,” she said, as Lucia, at this interruption from the meeting, went into the post-office.

  Elizabeth waited till the swing-door had shut.

  “I’m more and more convinced,” she said, “that the dear thing has no more idea what she’s talking about than when she makes psychic bids. I shall do the opposite of whatever she recommends.”

  “Most confusing,” moaned Diva again. “I wish I hadn’t begun to make money at all.”

  Elizabeth followed Lucia into the post-office, and Benjy went to catch the tram, while Diva, with ploughed and furrowed face, walked up and down the pavement in an agony of indecision as to whether to follow Lucia’s example and sell her three remaining shares or to back Elizabeth and repurchase her two.

  “Whatever I do is sure to be wrong,” she thought to herself, and then her attention was switched off finance altogether. Along the High Street came Lucia’s motor. Cadman turned to go up the street leading to the church and Mallards Cottage, but had to back again to let Susan’s Royce come down. Foljambe was sitting by her husband on the box, and for an instant there appeared at the window of the car the face of a man curiously like Georgie. Yet it couldn’t be he, for he had a neat white beard. Perhaps Lucia had a friend staying with her, but, if so, it was very odd that nobody had heard about him. “Most extraordinary,” thought Diva. “Who can it possibly be?”

  She got no second glimpse for the head was withdrawn in a great hurry, and Lucia came out of the post-office as calm as if she had been buying a penny stamp instead of conducting these vast operations.

  “So that’s done!” she said lightly, “and now I must go and see whether I can persuade Georgie to come out for a drive.”

  “Your car has just gone by,” said Diva.

  “Tante grazie. I must hurry.”

  Lucia went up to Mallards Cottage, and found Georgie had gone into his house, for fear that Elizabeth might peer into the car if she saw it standing there.

  “And I was a little imprudent,” he said, “for I simply couldn’t resist looking out as we turned up from the High Street to see what was going on, and there was Diva standing quite close. But I don’t think she could have recognised me.”

  In view of this contingency, however, the re-embarkation was delayed for a few minutes, and then conducted with great caution. This was lucky, for Diva had told Elizabeth of that puzzling apparition at the window of the car, and Elizabeth, after a brilliant and sarcastic suggestion that it was Mr. Montagu Norman who had come down to consult Lucia as to the right policy of the Bank of England in this world crisis, decided that the matter must be looked into at once. So the two ladies separated and Diva hurried up to the Church Square in case the car left Georgie’s house by that route, while Elizabeth went up to Mallards, where, from the window of the garden-room she could command the other road of exit . . . So, before Georgie entered the car again, Foljambe reconnoitred this way and that, and came back with the alarming intelligence that Diva was lurking in Church Square, and that Elizabeth was in her usual lair behind the curtains. Cadman and Foljambe therefore stood as a screen on each side of Georgie’s doorstep while he, bending double, stole into the car. They passed under the window of the garden-room, and Lucia, leaning far forward to conceal Georgie, kissed and waved her hand to the half-drawn curtains to show Elizabeth that she was perfectly aware who was in ambush behind them.

  “That’s thwarted them,” she said, as she put down the window when danger-points were passed. “Poor Elizabeth couldn’t have seen you, and Diva may hide in Church Square till Doomsday. Let’s drive out past the golf links along the road by the sea and let the breeze blow away all these pettinesses.”

  She sighed.

  “Georgie, how glad I am that I’ve taken up finance seriously,” she said. “It gives me real work to do at last. It’s time I had some, for I’m fifty next week. Of course I shall give a birthday party, and I shall have a cake with fifty-one candles on it, so as to prepare me for my next birthday. After all, it isn’t the years that give the measure of one’s age, but energy and capacity for enterprise. Achievement. Adventure.”

  “I’m sure you were as busy as any woman could be,” said Georgie.

  “Possibly, but about paltry things, scoring off Elizabeth when she was pushing and that genus omne. I shall give all that up. I shall dissociate myself from all the petty gossip of the place. I shall—”

  “Oh, look,” interrupted Georgie. “There’s Benjy playing golf with the Padre. There! He missed the ball completely, and he’s stamping with rage.”

  “No! So it is!” cried Lucia, wildly interested. “Pull up a minute, Cadman. There now he’s hit it again into a sandpit, and the Padre’s arguing with him. I wonder what language he’s talking.”

  “That’s the best of Tilling,” cried Georgie enthusiastically, throwing prudence to the sea-winds, and leaning out of the window. “There’s always something exciting going on. If it isn’t one thing it’s another, and very often both!”

  Benjy dealt the sand-pit one or two frightful biffs and Lucia suddenly remembered that she had done with such paltry trifles.

  “Drive on, Cadman,” she said. “Georgie, I’m afraid Major Benjy’s nature has not been broadened and enriched by marriage. Marriage, one hoped, might have brought that about, but I don’t see the faintest sign of it. Indeed I can’t make up my mind about their marriage at all. They dab and stroke each other, and they’re Benjy-boy and Girlie, but is it more than lip-service and finger-tips? Some women, I know, have had their greatest triumphs when youth was long, long past: Diane de Poictiers was fifty, was she not, when she became the King’s mistress, but she was an enchantress, and you could not reasonably call Elizabeth an enchantress. Of course you haven’t seen them together yet, but you will at my birthday party.”

  Georgie gingerly fingered the portion of beard on the ailing side of his face.

  “Not much chance of it,” he said. “I don’t suppose I shall get rid of this by then. Too tarsome.”

  Lucia looked at him again with a tilted head.

  “Well, we shall see,” she said. “My dear, the sun glinting on the sea! Is that what Homer — or was it Æschylus? — meant by the ‘numberless laughter of ocean?’ An immortal phrase.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder if it was,” said Georgie. “But about Benjy and Elizabeth. I can’t see how you could expect anybody to be broadened and enriched by marrying Elizabeth. Nor by marrying Benjy for that matter.”

  “Perhaps I was too sanguine. I hope they won’t come to grief over their speculations. They’re ignorant of the elements of finance. I told them both this morning what I was going to do. So they went and did exactly the opposite.”

  “It’s marvellous the way you’ve picked it up,” said Georgie. “I’m fifty pounds richer by following your advice—”

  “No, Georgie, not advice. My lead, if you like.”

  “Lead then. I’m not sure I shan’t have another go.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said she. “It began to get on your mind: you dreamed about gold mines. Don’t get like Diva: she was wringing her hands on the pavement in agony as to what she should do.”

  “But how can you help thinking about it?”

  “I do think about it,” she said, “but calmly, as if finance was a science, which indeed it is. I study, I draw my conclusions, I act. By the way, do you happen to know how much a rupee is worth?”

  “No idea,” said Georgie, “but not very much, I believe. If you have a great many of them, they make a lakh. But I don’t know how many it takes, nor what a lakh is when they’ve made it.”

  No startling developments occurred during the next week. Siriami shares remained stea
dy, but the continued strain so told on Diva that, having bought seven more because the Mapp-Flints were making further purchases she had a nervous crisis one morning when they went down sixpence, sold her entire holding (ten shares) and with the help of a few strychnine pills regained her impaired vitality. But she watched with the intensest interest the movements of the market, for once again, as so often before, a deadly duel was in progress between Elizabeth and Lucia, but now it was waged as on some vast battlefield consisting of railway lines running between the shafts of gold mines. Lucia, so to speak, on the footboard of an engine on the Southern railway shrieked by, drawing a freight of Burma Corporation, while Elizabeth put lumps of ore from Siriami on the metals to wreck her train. For Southern Railway Prefs began to move: one morning they were one point up, another morning they were three, and at Mallards the two chagrined operators snatched up their copies of the Financial Post and ate with a poor appetite. It was known all over Tilling that this fierce fight was in progress, and when, next Sunday morning, the sermon was preached by a missionary who had devoted himself to the enlightenment of the heathen both in Burma and West Africa, Lucia, sitting among the auxiliary choir on one side of the church and the Mapp-Flints on the other seemed indeed to be the incarnations of those dark countries. Mr. Wyse, attending closely to the sermon thought that was a most extraordinary coincidence: even missionary work in foreign lands seemed to be drawn into the vortex.

  Next morning on the breakfast table at Mallards was Lucia’s invitation to the Mapp-Flints to honour her with their presence at dinner on Friday next, the occasion of her Jubilee. Southern Prefs had gone up again and Siriami down, but, so Elizabeth surmised, “all Tilling” would be there, and if she and Benjy refused, which seemed the proper way to record what they felt about it, all Tilling would certainly conclude that they had not been asked.

  “It’s her ways that I find it so hard to bear,” said Elizabeth, cracking the top of her boiled egg with such violence that the rather under-cooked contents streamed on to her plate. “Her airs, her arrogance. Even if she says nothing about Siriami I shall know she’s pitying us for not having followed her lead, and buying those wild-cat shares of hers. What has Bohemian Corporation, or whatever it is, been doing? I didn’t look.”

  “Up sixpence,” said Benjy, gloomily.

  Elizabeth moistened her lips.

  “I suspected as much, and you see I was right. But I suppose we had better go to her Jubilee, and perhaps we shall learn something of this mystery about Georgie. I’m sure she’s keeping something dark: I feel it in my bones. Women of a certain age are like that. They know that they are getting on in years and have become entirely unattractive, and so they make mysteries in order to induce people to take an interest in them a little longer, poor things. There was that man with a beard whom Diva saw in her car; there’s a mystery which has never been cleared up. Probably it was her gardener, who has a beard, dressed up, and she hoped we might think she had someone staying with her whom we were to know nothing about. Just a mystery.”

  “Well, she made no mystery about selling Siriami and buying those blasted Prefs,” said Benjy.

  “My fault then, I suppose,” said Elizabeth bitterly, applying the pepper pot to the pool of egg on her plate, and scooping it up with her spoon. “I see: I ought to have followed Lucia’s lead, and have invested my money as she recommended. And curtsied, and said ‘Thank your gracious Majesty.’ Quite.”

  “I didn’t say you ought to have done anything of the kind,” said Benjy.

  Elizabeth had applied pepper with too lavish a hand, and had a frightful fit of sneezing before she could make the obvious rejoinder.

  “No, but you implied it, Benjy, which, if anything, is worse,” she answered hoarsely.

  “No I didn’t. No question of ‘ought’ about it. But I wish to God I had done as she suggested. Southern Prefs have risen ten points since she told us.”

  “We won’t discuss it any further, please,” said Elizabeth.

  Everyone accepted the invitation to the Jubilee, and now Lucia thought it time to put into action her scheme for getting Georgie to make his re-entry into the world of Tilling. He was quite himself again save for the pointed white beard which Foljambe had once more trimmed very skilfully, his cook was returning from her holiday next day, and he would be going back to shut himself up in his lonely little house until he could present his normal face to his friends. On that point he was immovable: nobody should see him with a little white beard, for it would be the end of his jeune premiership of Tilling: no jeune premier ever had a white beard, however little. And Dr. Dobbie had told him not to think of “irritating the nerve-ends” with the razor until they were incapable of resentment. In another three weeks or so, Dr. Dobbie thought. This verdict depressed Georgie: there would be three weeks more of skulking out in his motor, heavily camouflaged, and of return to his dreary solitude in the evening. He wanted to hear the Padre mingle Irish with Scotch, he wanted to see Diva with her Eton crop, he wanted to study the effect of matrimony on Mapp and Flint, and what made him miss this daily bread the more was that Lucia was very sparing in supplying him with it, for she was rather strict in her inhuman resolve to have done with petty gossip. Taken unawares, she could still manifest keen interest in seeing Benjy hit a golf ball into a bunker, but she checked herself in an annoying manner and became lofty again. Probably her inhumanity would wear off, but it was tarsome that when he so particularly thirsted for local news, she should be so parsimonious with it.

  However, they dined very comfortably that night, though she had many far-away glances, as if at distant blue hills, which indicated that she was thinking out some abstruse problem: Georgie supposed it was some terrific financial operation of which she would not speak at meals. Then she appeared to have solved it, for the blue-hill-look vanished, she riddled him with several gimlet-glances, and suddenly gabbled about the modern quality of the Idylls of Theocritus. “Yet perhaps modern is the wrong word,” she said. “Let us call it the timeless quality, Georgie, senza tempo in fact. It is characteristic, don’t you think of all great artists: Vandyck has it pre-eminently. What timeless distinction his portraits have! His Lady Castlemaine, the Kéroualle, Nell Gwynn—”

  “But surely Vandyck was dead before their time,” began Georgie. “Charles I, you know, not Charles II.”

  “That may be so, possibly you are right,” said Lucia with her habitual shamelessness. “But my proposition holds. Vandyck is timeless, he shows the dignity, the distinction which can be realized in every age. But I always maintain — I wonder if you will agree with me — that his portraits of men are far, far finer than his women. More perception: I doubt if he ever understood women really. But his men! That coloured print I have of his Gelasius in the next room by the piano. Marvellous! Have you finished your coffee? Let us go.”

  Lucia strolled into the drawing-room, glanced at a book on the table, and touched a few notes on the piano as if she had forgotten all about Gelasius.

  “Shall we give ourselves a holiday to-night, Georgie, and not tackle that dwefful diffy Brahms?” she asked. “I shall have to practise my part before I am fit to play it with you. Wonderful Brahms! As Pater says of something else, ‘the soul with all its maladies’ has entered into his music.”

  She closed the piano, and casually pointed to a coloured print that hung on the wall above it beside a false Chippendale mirror.

  “Ah, there’s the Gelasius I spoke of,” she said. “Rather a dark corner. I must find a worthier place for him.”

  Georgie came across to look at it. Certainly it was a most distinguished face: high eye-browed with a luxuriant crop of auburn hair and a small pointed beard. A man in early middle life, perhaps forty at the most. Georgie could not remember having noticed it before, which indeed was not to be wondered at, since Lucia had bought it that very afternoon. She had seen the great resemblance to Georgie, and her whole magnificent scheme had flashed upon her.

  “Dear me, what a striking face,”
he said. “Stupid of me never to have looked at it before.”

  Lucia made no answer, and turning, he saw that she was eagerly glancing first at the picture and then at him, and then at the picture again. Then she sat down on the piano stool and clasped her hands.

  “Absolutely too straordinario,” she said as if speaking to herself.

  “What is?” asked Georgie.

  “Caro, do not pretend to be so blind! Why it’s the image of you. Take a good look at it, then move a step to the right and look at yourself in the glass.”

  Georgie did as he was told, and a thrill of rapture tingled in him. For years he had known (and lamented) that his first chin receded and that a plump second chin was advancing from below, but now his beard completely hid these blemishes.

  “Well, I do see what you mean,” he said.

  “Who could help it? Georgie, you are Gelasius, which I’ve always considered Vandyck’s masterpiece. And it’s your beard that has done it. Unified! Harmonised! And to think that you intend to shut yourself up for three weeks more and then cut it off! It’s murder. Artistic murder!”

  Georgie cast another look at Gelasius and then at himself. All these weeks he had taken only the briefest and most disgusted glances into his looking-glass because of the horror of his beard, and had been blind to what it had done for him. He felt a sudden stab of longing to be a permanent Gelasius, but there was one frightful snag in the way, irrespective of the terribly shy-making moment when he should reveal himself to Tilling so radically altered. The latter, with such added distinction to shew them, he thought he could tone himself up to meet. But —

  “Well?” asked Lucia rather impatiently. She had her part ready.

  “What’s so frightfully tarsome is that my beard’s so grey that you might call it white,” he said. “There’s really not a grey hair on my head or in my moustache, and the stupid thing has come out this colour. No colour at all, in fact. Do you think it’s because I’m run down?”

  Lucia pounced on this: it was a brilliant thought of Georgie’s, and made her part easier.