Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Poor things, they’ll come to nothing,” she said. “I could have told dear hostess that, if she had asked me. You might as well plant cedars of Lebanon. And the dining-room, Diva! The colour of green apples, enough to give anybody indigestion before you begin! The glaring white paint in the hall! The garden-room! I feel that the most, and so does poor Benjy. I was prepared for something pretty frightful, but not as bad as this!”

  “Don’t agree,” said Diva. “It’s all beautiful. Should hardly have known it again. You’d got accustomed to see the house all dingy, Elizabeth, and smothered in cobwebs and your own water-colours and muck—”

  That was sufficient rudeness for Elizabeth to turn her back on Diva, but it was for a further purpose that she whisked round and positively twinkled up those steep steps again. Diva gasped. For weeks now Elizabeth had leant on Benjy if there were steps to mount, and had walked with a slow and dignified gait, and all of a sudden she had resumed her nimble and rapid movement. And then the light broke. Diva felt she would burst unless she at once poured her interpretation of these phenomena into some feminine ear, and she hurried out of the greenhouse nearly tripping up on the steps that Elizabeth had so lightly ascended.

  The rest of the party had gathered again in the garden-room, and by some feminine intuition Diva perceived in the eyes of the other women the knowledge which had just dawned on her. Presently the Mapp-Flints said good-bye, and Mr. Wyse, who, with the obtuseness of a man, had noticed nothing, was pressing Elizabeth to take the Royce and go for a drive. Then came the first-hand authentic disclosure.

  “So good of you,” said she, “but Benjy and I have promised ourselves a long walk. Lovely party, Lucia: some day you must come and see your old house. Just looked at your peach trees: I hope you’ll have quantities of fruit. Come along, Benjy, or there won’t be time for our tramp. Good-bye, sweet garden-room.”

  They went out, and instantly there took place a species of manœuvre which partook of the nature of a conjuring trick and a conspiracy. Evie whispered something to her Padre, and he found that he had some urgent district-visiting to do: Susan had a quiet word with her husband, and he recollected that he must get off his letter to Contessa Amelia Faraglione by the next post and Lucia told Georgie that if he could come back in half-an-hour she would be at leisure to try that new duet. The four ladies therefore were left, and Evie and Diva, as soon as the door of the garden-room was shut, broke into a crisp, unrehearsed dialogue of alternate sentences, like a couple of clergymen intoning the Commination service.

  “She’s given it up,” chanted Diva. “She nipped up those steep steps from the greenhouse, as if it was on the flat.”

  “But such a sell, isn’t it,” cried Evie. “It would have been exciting. Ought we to say anything about it to her? She must feel terribly disappointed—”

  “Not a bit,” said Diva. “I don’t believe she ever believed it. Wanted us to believe it: that’s all. Most deceitful.”

  “And Kenneth had been going through the Churching of Women.”

  “And she had no end of drives in your motor, Susan. False pretences, I call it. You’d never have lent her it at all, unless—”

  “And all that nutritious honey from the Contessa.”

  “And I think she’s taken in the old green skirt again, but the strips of tiger-skin make it hard to be certain.”

  “And I’m sure she was crocheting a baby-cap in white wool, and she must have pulled a lot of it out and begun again. She was wearing it.”

  “And while I think of it,” said Diva in parenthesis, “there’ll be a fine mess of tiger hairs on your dining-room carpet, Lucia. I saw clouds of them fly when she banged her foot.”

  Susan Wyse had not had any chance at present of joining in this vindictive chant. Sometimes she had opened her mouth to speak, but one of the others had been quicker. At this point, as Diva and Evie were both a little out of breath, she managed to contribute.

  “I don’t grudge her her drives,” she said, “but I do feel strongly about that honey. It was very special honey. My sister-in-law, the Contessa, took it daily when she was expecting her baby, and it weighed eleven pounds.”

  “Eleven pounds of honey? O dear me, that is a lot!” said Evie.

  “No, the baby—”

  The chant broke out afresh.

  “And so rude about the sherry,” said Diva, “saying it was poison.”

  “And pretending not to know where the dining-room was.”

  “And saying that the colour of the walls gave her indigestion like green apples. She’s enough to give anybody indigestion herself.”

  The torrent spent itself: Lucia had been sitting with eyes half-closed and eyebrows drawn together as if trying to recollect something, and then took down a volume from her bookshelves of classical literature and rapidly turned over the pages. She appeared to find what she wanted, for she read on in silence a moment, and then replaced the book with a far-away sigh.

  “I was saying to Georgie the other day,” she said, “how marvellously modern Aristophanes was. I seemed to remember a scene in one of his plays — the Thesmophoriazusae — where a somewhat similar situation occurred. A woman, a dear, kind creature really, of middle-age or a little more, had persuaded her friends (or thought she had) that she was going to have a baby. Such Attic wit — there is nothing in English like it. I won’t quote the Greek to you, but the conclusion was that it was only a ‘wind-egg.’ Delicious phrase, really untranslatable, but that is what it comes to. Shan’t we all leave it at that? Poor dear Elizabeth! Just a wind-egg. So concise.”

  She gave a little puff with her pursed lips, as if blowing the wind-egg away.

  Rather awed by this superhuman magnanimity the conductors of the Commination service dispersed, and Lucia went into the dining-room to see if there was any serious deposit of tiger-hairs on her new carpet beside Elizabeth’s place. Certainly there were some, though not quite the clouds of which Diva had spoken. Probably then that new pretty decoration would not be often seen again since it was moulting so badly. “Everything seems to go wrong with the poor soul,” thought Lucia in a spasm of most pleasurable compassion, “owing to her deplorable lack of foresight. She bought Siriami without ascertaining whether it paid dividends: she tried to make us all believe that she was going to have a baby without ascertaining whether there was the smallest reason to suppose she would, and with just the same blind recklessness she trimmed the old green skirt with tiger without observing how heavily it would moult when she moved.”

  She returned to the garden-room for a few minutes’ intensive practice of the duet she and Georgie would read through when he came back, and seating herself at the piano she noticed a smell as of escaping gas. Yet it could not be coal gas, for there was none laid on now to the garden-room, the great chandelier and other lamps being lit by electricity. She wondered whether this smell was paint not quite dry yet, for during the renovation of the house her keen perception had noticed all kinds of smells incident to decoration: there was the smell of pear-drops in one room, and that was varnish: there was the smell of advanced corruption in another, and that was the best size: there was the smell of elephants in the cellar and that was rats. So she thought no more about it, practised for a quarter of an hour, and then hurried away from the piano when she saw Georgie coming down the street, so that he should not find her poaching in the unseen suite by Mozart.

  Georgie was reproachful.

  “It was tarsome of you,” he said, “to send me away when I longed to hear what you all thought about Elizabeth. I knew what it meant when I saw how she skipped and pranced and had taken in the old green skirt again—”

  “Georgie, I never noticed that,” said Lucia. “Are you sure?”

  “Perfectly certain, and how she was going for a tramp with Benjy. The baby’s off. I wonder if Benjy was an accomplice—”

  “Dear Georgie!” remonstrated Lucia.

  Georgie blushed at the idea that he could have meant anything so indelicate.

>   “Accomplice to the general deception was what I was going to say when you interrupted. I think we’ve all been insulted. We ought to mark our displeasure.”

  Lucia had no intention of repeating her withering comment about the wind-egg. It was sure to get round to him.

  “Why be indignant with the poor thing?” she said. “She has been found out and that’s quite sufficient punishment. As to her making herself so odious at lunch and doing her best, without any success, to spoil my little party, that was certainly malicious. But about the other, Georgie, let us remember what a horrid job she had to do. I foresaw that, you may remember, and expressed my wish that, when it came, we should all be kind to her. She must have skipped and pranced, as you put it, with an aching heart, and certainly with aching legs. As for poor Major Benjy, I’m sure he was putty in her hands, and did just what she told him. How terribly a year’s marriage has aged him, has it not?”

  “I should have been dead long ago,” said Georgie.

  Lucia looked round the room.

  “My dear, I’m so happy to be back in this house,” she said, “and to know it’s my own, that I would forgive Elizabeth almost anything. Now let us have an hour’s harmony.”

  They went to the piano where, most carelessly, Lucia had left on the music-rack the duet they were to read through for the first time. But Georgie did not notice it. He began to sniff.

  “Isn’t there a rather horrid smell of gas?” he asked.

  “I thought I smelled something,” said Lucia, successfully whisking off the duet. “But the foreman of the gasworks is in the house now, attending to the stove in the kitchen. I’ll get him to come and smell too.”

  Lucia sent the message by Grosvenor, and an exceedingly cheerful young man bounded into the room. He smelt, too, and burst into a merry laugh.

  “No, ma’am, that’s not my sort of gas,” he said gaily. “That’ll be sewer gas, that will. That’s the business of the town surveyor and he’s my brother. I’ll ring him up at once and get him to come and see to it.”

  “Please do,” said Lucia.

  “He’ll nip up in a minute to oblige Mrs. Lucas,” said the gasman. “Dear me, how we all laughed at Miss Irene’s procession, if you’ll excuse my mentioning it. But this is business now, not pleasure. Horrid smell that. It won’t do at all.”

  Lucia and Georgie moved away from the immediate vicinity of the sewer, and presently with a rap on the door, a second young man entered exactly like the first.

  “A pleasure to come and see into your little trouble, ma’am,” he said. “In the window my brother said. Ah, now I’ve got it.”

  He laughed very heartily.

  “No, no,” he said. “Georgie’s made a blooming error — beg your pardon, sir, I mean my brother — Let’s have him in.”

  In came Georgie of the gasworks.

  “You’ve got something wrong with your nosepiece, Georgie,” said the sewer man. “That’s coal gas, that is.”

  “Get along, Percy!” said Georgie. “Sewers. Your job, my lad.”

  Lucia assumed her most dignified manner.

  “Your immediate business, gentlemen,” she said, “is to ascertain whether I am living (i) in a gas pipe or (ii) in a main drain.”

  Shouts of laughter.

  “Well, there’s a neat way to put it,” said Percy appreciatively. “We’ll tackle it for you, ma’am. We must have a joint investigation, Georgie, till we’ve located it. It must be percolating through the soil and coming up through the floor. You send along two of your fellows in the morning, and I’ll send two of the Corporation men, and we’ll dig till we find out. Bet you a shilling it’s coal gas.”

  “I’ll take you. Sewers,” said Georgie.

  “But I can’t live in a room that’s full of either,” said Lucia. “One may explode and the other may poison me.”

  “Don’t you worry about that, ma’am,” said Georgie. “I’ll guarantee you against an explosion, if it’s my variety of gas. Not near up to inflammatory point.”

  “And I’ve workmen, ma’am,” said Percy, “who spend their days revelling in a main drain, you may say, and live to ninety. We’ll start to dig in the road outside in the morning, Georgie and me, for that’s where it must come from. No one quite knows where the drains are in this old part of the town, but we’ll get on to their scent if it’s sewers, and then tally-ho. Good afternoon, ma’am. All O.K.”

  At an early hour next morning the combined exploration began. Up came the pavement outside the garden-room and the cobbles of the street, and deeper all day grew the chasm, while the disturbed earth reeked even more strongly of the yet unidentified smell. The news of what was in progress reached the High Street at the marketing hour, and the most discouraging parallels to this crisis were easily found. Diva had an uncle who had died in the night from asphyxiation owing to a leak of coal gas, and Evie, not to be outdone in family tragedies, had an aunt, who, when getting into a new house (ominous), noticed a “faint” smell in the dining-room, and died of blood-poisoning in record time. But Diva put eucalyptus on her handkerchief and Evie camphor and both hurried up to the scene of the excavation. To Elizabeth this excitement was a god-send, for she had been nervous as to her reception in the High Street after yesterday’s revelation, but found that everyone was entirely absorbed in the new topic. Personally she was afraid (though hoping she might prove to be wrong) that the clearing out of the cellars at Mallards might somehow have tapped a reservoir of a far deadlier quality of vapour than either coal gas or sewer gas. Benjy, having breathed the polluted air of the garden-room yesterday, thought it wise not to go near the plague-spot at all, but after gargling with a strong solution of carbolic, fled to the links, with his throat burning very uncomfortably, to spend the day in the aseptic sea air. Georgie (not Percy’s gay brother) luckily remembered that he had bought a gas-mask during the war, in case the Germans dropped pernicious bombs on Riseholme, and Foljambe found it and cleared out the cobwebs. He adjusted it (tarsome for the beard) and watched the digging from a little distance, looking like an elephant whose trunk had been cut off very short. The Padre came in the character of an expert, for he could tell sewer gas from coal gas, begorra, with a single sniff, but he had scarcely taken a proper sniff when the church clock struck eleven, and he had to hurry away to read matins. Irene, smoking a pipe, set up her easel on the edge of the pit and painted a fine impressionist sketch of navvies working in a crater. Then, when the dinner-hour arrived, the two gay brothers, Gas and Drains, leaped like Quintus Curtius into the chasm and shovelled feverishly till their workmen returned, in order that no time should be lost in arriving at a solution and the settlement of their bet.

  As the excavation deepened Lucia with a garden-spud, raked carefully among the baskets of earth which were brought up, and soon had a small heap of fragments of pottery, which she carried into Mallards. Georgie was completely puzzled at this odd conduct, and, making himself understood with difficulty through the gas-mask, asked her what she was doing.

  Lucia looked round to make sure she would not be overheard.

  “Roman pottery without a doubt,” she whispered. “I am sure they will presently come across some remains of my Roman villa—”

  A burst of cheering came from the bowels of the earth. One of the gas workmen with a vigorous stroke of his pick at the side of the pit close to the garden-room brought down a slide of earth, and exposed the mouth of a tiled aperture some nine inches square.

  “Drains and sewers it is,” he cried, “and out we go,” and he and his comrade downed tools and clambered out of the pit, leaving the town surveyor’s men to attend to the job now demonstrated to be theirs.

  The two gay brethren instantly jumped into the excavation. The aperture certainly did look like a drain, but just as certainly there was nothing coming down it. Percy put his nose into it, and inhaled deeply as a Yogi, drawing a long breath through his nostrils.

  “Clean as a whistle, Georgie,” he said, “and sweet as a sugar-plum. Drains it
may have been, old man, but not in the sense of our bet. We were looking for something active and stinkful—”

  “But drains it is, Per,” said Georgie.

  A broken tile had fallen from the side of it, and Percy picked it up.

  “There’s been no sewage passing along that for a sight of years,” he said. “Perhaps it was never a drain at all.”

  Into Lucia’s mind there flashed an illuminating hypocaustic idea.

  “Please give me that tile,” she called out.

  “Certainly, ma’am,” said Percy, reaching up with it, “and have a sniff at it yourself. Nothing there to make your garden-room stink. You might lay that on your pillow—”

  Percy’s sentence was interrupted by a second cheer from his two men who had gone on working, and they also downed tools.

  “‘Ere’s the gas pipe at last,” cried one. “Get going at your work again, gas brigade!”

  “And lumme, don’t it stink,” said the other. “Leaking fit to blow up the whole neighbourhood. Soil’s full of it.”

  They clambered out of the excavation, and stood with the gas workers to await further orders.

  “Have a sniff at that, Georgie,” said Per encouragingly, “and then hand me a bob. That’s something like a smell, that is. Put that on your pillow and you’ll sleep so as you’ll never wake again.”