Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Georgie, though crestfallen, retained his sense of fairness, and made no attempt to deny that the smell that now spread freely from the disengaged pipe was the same as that which filled the garden-room.

  “Seems like it,” he said, “and there’s your bob, not but what the other was a drain. We’ll find the leak and have it put to rights now.”

  “And then I hope you’ll fill up that great hole,” said Lucia.

  “No time to-day, ma’am,” said Georgie. “I’ll see if I can spare a couple of men to-morrow, or next day at the latest.”

  Lucia’s Georgie, standing on the threshold of Mallards, suddenly observed that the excavation extended right across the street, and that he was quite cut off from the Cottage. He pulled off his gas-mask.

  “But, look, how am I to get home?” he asked in a voice of acute lamentation. “I can’t climb down into that pit and up on the other side.”

  Great laughter from the brethren.

  “Well, sir, that is awkward,” said Per. “I’m afraid you’ll have to nip round by the High Street and up the next turning to get to your little place. But it will be all right, come the day after to-morrow.”

  Lucia carried her tile reverently into the house, and beckoned to Georgie.

  “That square-tiled opening confirms all I conjectured about the lines of foundation in the cellar,” she said. “Those wonderful Romans used to have furnaces underneath the floors of their houses and their temples — I’ve been reading about it — and the hot air was conveyed in tiled flues through the walls to heat them. Undoubtedly this was a hot-air flue and not a drain at all.”

  “That would be interesting,” said Georgie. “But the pipe seemed to run through the earth, not through a wall. At least there was no sign of a wall that I saw.”

  “The wall may have perished at that point,” said Lucia after only a moment’s thought. “I shall certainly find it further on in the garden, where I must begin digging at once. But not a word to anybody yet. Without doubt, Georgie, a Roman villa stood here or perhaps a temple. I should be inclined to say a temple. On the top of the hill, you know: just where they always put temples.”

  Dusk had fallen before the leak in the gas pipe was repaired, and a rope was put up round the excavation and hung with red lanterns. Had the pit been less deep, or the sides of it less precipitous, Lucia would have climbed down into it and continued her study of the hot-air flue. She took the tile to her bathroom and scrubbed it clean. Close to the broken edge of it there were stamped the letters S.P.

  She dined alone that night and went back to the garden-room from which the last odours of gas had vanished. She searched in vain in her books from the London Library for any mention of Tilling having once been a Roman town, but its absence made the discovery more important, as likely to prove a new chapter in the history of Roman Britain. Eagerly she turned over the pages: there were illustrations of pottery which fortified her conviction that her fragments were of Roman origin: there was a picture of a Roman tile as used in hot-air flues which was positively identical with her specimen. Then what could S.P. stand for? She ploughed through a list of inscriptions found in the South of England and suddenly gave a great crow of delight. There was one headed S.P.Q.R., which being interpreted meant Senatus Populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the People of Rome.” Her instinct had been right: a private villa would never have borne those imperial letters; they were reserved for state-erected buildings, such as temples. . . . It said so in her book.

  CHAPTER VII.

  For the next few days Lucia was never once seen in the streets of Tilling, for all day she supervised the excavations in her garden. To the great indignation of her gardener, she hired two unemployed labourers at very high wages in view of the importance of their work, and set them to dig a trench across the potato-patch which Elizabeth had despoiled and the corner of the asparagus bed, so that she must again strike the line of the hot-air flue, which had been so providentially discovered at the corner of the garden-room. Great was her triumph when she hit it once more, though it was a pity to find that it still ran through the earth, and not, as she had hoped through the buried remains of a wall. But the soil was rich in relics, it abounded in pieces of pottery on the same type as those she had decided were Roman, and there were many pretty fragments of iridescent, oxydised glass, and a few bones which she hoped might turn out to be those of red deer which at the time of the Roman occupation were common in Kent and Sussex. Her big table in the garden-room was cleared of its books and writing apparatus, and loaded with cardboard trays of glass and pottery. She scarcely entered the Office at all, and but skimmed through the communications from Mammoncash.

  Georgie dined with her on the evening of the joyful day when she had come across the hot-air flue again. There was a slightly earthy odour in the garden-room where after dinner they pored over fragments of pottery, and vainly endeavoured to make pieces fit together.

  “It’s most important, Georgie,” she said, “as you will readily understand, to keep note of the levels at which objects are discovered. Those in Tray D come from four feet down in the corner of the asparagus bed: that is the lowest level we have reached at present, and they, of course, are the earliest.”

  “Oh, and look at Tray A,” said Georgie. “All those pieces of clay tobacco pipes. I didn’t know the Romans smoked. Did they?”

  Lucia gave a slightly superior laugh.

  “Caro, of course they didn’t,” she said. “Tray A: yes, I thought so. Tray A is from a much higher level, let me see, yes, a foot below the surface of the ground. We may put it down therefore as being subsequent to Queen Elizabeth when tobacco was introduced. At a guess I should say those pipes were Cromwellian. A Cromwellian look, I fancy. I am rather inclined to take a complete tile from the continuation of the air flue which I laid bare this morning, and see if it is marked in full S.P.Q.R. The tile from the street, you remember, was broken and had only S.P. on it. Yet is it a Vandalism to meddle at all with such a fine specimen of a flue evidently in situ?”

  “I think I should do it,” said Georgie, “you can put it back when you’ve found the letters.”

  “I will then. To-morrow I expect my trench to get down to floor level. There may be a tesselated pavement like that found at Richborough. I shall have to unearth it all, even if I have to dig up the entire kitchen garden. And if it goes under the garden-room, I shall have to underpin it, I think they call it. Fancy all this having come out of a smell of gas!”

  “Yes, that was a bit of luck,” said Georgie stifling a yawn over Tray A, where he was vainly trying to make a complete pipe out of the fragments.

  Lucia put on the kind, the indulgent smile suitable to occasions when Georgie did not fully appreciate her wisdom or her brilliance.

  “Scarcely fair to call it entirely luck,” she said, “for you must remember that when the cellar was dug out I told you plainly that I should find Roman remains in the garden. That was before the gas smelt.”

  “I’d forgotten that,” said Georgie. “To be sure you did.”

  “Thank you, dear. And to-morrow morning, if you are strolling and shopping in the High Street, I think you might let it be known that I am excavating in the garden and that the results, so far, are most promising. Roman remains: you might go as far as that. But I do not want a crowd of sightseers yet: they will only impede the work. I shall admit nobody at present.”

  Foljambe had very delicately told Georgie that there was a slight defect in the plumbing system at Mallards Cottage, and accordingly he went down to the High Street next day to see about this. It was pleasant to be the bearer of such exciting news about Roman remains, and he announced it to Diva through the window and presently met Elizabeth. She had detached the tiger-skin border from the familiar green skirt.

  “Hope the smell of gas or drains or both has quite gone away now, Mr. Georgie,” she said. “I’m told it was enough to stifle anybody. Odd that I never had any trouble in my time nor Aunt Caroline in hers. Lucia none the wo
rse?”

  “Not a bit. And no smell left,” said Georgie.

  “So glad! Most dangerous it must have been. Any news?”

  “Yes: she’s very busy digging up the kitchen garden—”

  “What? My beautiful garden?” cried Elizabeth shrilly. “Ah, I forgot. Yes?”

  “And she’s finding most interesting Roman remains. A villa, she thinks, or more probably a temple.”

  “Indeed! I must go up and have a peep at them.”

  “She’s not showing them to anybody just yet,” said Georgie. “She’s deep down in the asparagus bed. Pottery. Glass. Air flues.”

  “Well, that is news! Quite an archæologist, and nobody ever suspected it,” observed Elizabeth smiling her widest. “Padre, dear Lucia has found a Roman temple in my asparagus bed.”

  “Ye dinna say! I’ll rin up, bedad.”

  “No use,” said Elizabeth. “Not to be shown to anybody yet.”

  Georgie passed on to the plumbers. “Spencer & Son” was the name of the firm, and there was the proud legend in the window that it had been established in Tilling in 1820 and undertook all kinds of work connected with plumbing and drains. Mr. Spencer promised to send a reliable workman up at once to Mallards Cottage.

  The news disseminated by Georgie quickly spread from end to end of the High Street, and reached the ears of an enterprising young gentleman who wrote paragraphs of local news for the Hastings Chronicle. This should make a thrilling item, and he called at Mallards just as Lucia was coming in from her morning’s digging, and begged to be allowed to communicate any particulars she could give him to the paper. There seemed no harm in telling him what she had allowed Georgie to reveal to Tilling (in fact she liked the idea) and told him briefly that she had good reason to hope that she was on the track of a Roman villa, or, more probably, a temple. It was too late for the news to appear in this week’s issue, but it would appear next week, and he would send her a copy. Lucia lunched in a great hurry and returned to the asparagus bed.

  Soon after Georgie appeared to help. Lucia was standing in the trench with half of her figure below ground level, like Erda in Wagner’s justly famous opera. If only Georgie had not dyed his beard, he might have been Wotan.

  “Ben arrivato,” she called to him in the Italian translation. “I’m on the point of taking out a tile from my hot-air flue. I am glad you are here as a witness, and it will be interesting for you. This looks rather a loose one. Now.”

  She pulled it out and turned it over.

  “Georgie,” she cried. “Here’s the whole of the stamped letters of which I had only two.”

  “Oh, how exciting,” said Georgie. “I do hope there’s a Q.R. as well as the S.P.”

  Lucia rubbed the dirt off the inscription and then replaced the tile.

  “What is the name of that plumber in the High Street established a century ago?” she asked in a perfectly calm voice.

  Georgie guessed what she had found.

  “My dear, how tarsome!” he said. “I’m afraid it is Spencer.”

  Lucia got nimbly out of the trench, and wiped her muddy boots against the box edging of the path.

  “Georgie, that is a valuable piece of evidence,” she said. “No doubt this is an old drain. I confess I was wrong about it. Let us date it, tentatively, circa 1830. Now we know more about the actual levels. First we have the Cromwellian stratum: tobacco pipes. Below again — what is that?”

  There were two workmen in the trench, the one with a pick, the other shovelling the earth into a basket to dump it on to the far corner of the potato-patch uprooted by Elizabeth. Georgie was glad of this diversion (whatever it might be) for it struck him that the stratum which Lucia had assigned to Cromwell was far above the air flue stratum, once pronounced to be Roman, but now dated circa 1830 . . . The digger had paused with his pickaxe poised in the air.

  “Lovely bit of glass here, ma’am,” he said. “I nearly went crash into it!”

  Lucia jumped back into the trench and became Erda again. It was a narrow escape indeed. The man’s next blow must almost certainly have shattered a large and iridescent piece of glass, which gleamed in the mould. Tenderly and carefully, taking off her gloves, Lucia loosened it.

  “Georgie!” she said in a voice faint and ringing with emotion, “take it from me in both hands with the utmost caution. A wonderful piece of glass, with an inscription stamped on it.”

  “Not Spencer again, I hope,” said Georgie.

  Lucia passed it to him from the trench, and he received it in his cupped hands.

  “Don’t move till I get out and take it from you,” said she. “Not another stroke for the present,” she called to her workman.

  There was a tap for the garden-hose close by. Lucia let the water drip very gently, drop by drop, on to the trove. It was brilliantly iridescent, of a rich greenish colour below the oxydized surface, and of curved shape. Evidently it was a piece of some glass vessel, ewer or bottle. Tilting it this way and that to catch the light she read the letters stamped on it.

  “A.P.O.L.” she announced.

  “It’s like crosswords,” said Georgie. “All I can think of is ‘Apology’.”

  Lucia sat down on a neighbouring bench, panting with excitement but radiant with triumph.

  “Do you remember how I said that I suspected I should find the remains of a Roman temple?” she asked.

  “Yes: or a villa,” said Georgie.

  “I thought a temple more probable, and said so. Look at it, Georgie. Some sacrificial vessel — there’s a hint for you — some flask for libations dedicated to a God. What God?”

  “Apollo!” cried Georgie. “My dear, how perfectly wonderful! I don’t see what else it could be. That makes up for all the Spencers. And it’s the lowest level of all, so that’s all right anyhow.”

  Reverently holding this (quite large) piece of the sacrificial vessel in her joined hands, Lucia conveyed it to the garden-room, dried the water off it with blotting-paper, and put it in a tray by itself, since the objects in Tray D, once indubitably Roman, had been found to be Spenserian.

  “All important to find the rest of it,” she said. “We must search with the utmost care. Let us go back and plan what is to be done. I think I had better lock the door of the garden-room.”

  The whole system of digging was revised. Instead of the earth at the bottom of the trench being loosened with strong blows of the pick, Lucia, starting at the point where this fragment of a sacrificial vessel was found, herself dug with a trowel, so that no random stroke should crash into the missing pieces: when she was giddy with blood to the head from this stooping position, Georgie took her place. Then there was the possibility that missing pieces might have been already shovelled out of the trench, so the two workmen were set to turn over the mound of earth already excavated with microscopic diligence.

  “It would be unpardonable of me,” said Lucia, “if I missed finding the remaining portions, for they must be here, Georgie. I’m so giddy: take the trowel.”

  “Something like a coin, ma’am,” sang out one of the workmen on the dump. “Or it may be a button.”

  Lucia vaulted out of the trench with amazing agility.

  “A coin without doubt,” she said. “Much weathered, alas, but we may be able to decipher it. Georgie, would you kindly put it — you have the key of the garden-room — in the same tray as the sacrificial vessel?”

  For the rest of the afternoon the search was rewarded by no further discovery. Towards sunset a great bank of cloud arose in the west, and all night long, the heavens streamed with torrential rain. The deluge disintegrated the dump, and the soil was swept over the newly-planted lettuces, and on to the newly gravelled garden-path. The water drained down into the trench from the surface of the asparagus bed, and next day work was impossible, for there was a foot of water in it, and still the rain continued. Driven to more mercenary pursuits, Lucia spent a restless morning in the office, considering the latest advice from Mammoncash. He was strongly of opinion t
hat the rise in the Industrial market had gone far enough: he counselled her to take her profits, of which he enclosed a most satisfactory list, and again recommended gilt-edged stock. Prices there had dwindled a good deal since the Industrial boom began, and the next week or two ought to see a rise. Lucia gazed at the picture of Dame Catherine Winterglass for inspiration, and then rang up Mammoncash (trunk-call) and assented. In her enthusiasm for archæological discoveries, all this seemed tedious business: it required a great effort to concentrate on so sordid an aim as money-making, when further pieces of sacrificial vessels (or vessel) from a temple of Apollo must be lurking in the asparagus bed. But the rain continued and at present they were inaccessible below a foot or more of opaque water enriched with the manure she had dug into the surrounding plots.

  Several days elapsed before digging could be resumed, and Tilling rang with the most original reports about Lucia’s discoveries. She herself was very cautious in her admissions, for before the complete “Spencer” tile was unearthed, she had, on the evidence of the broken “S.P.” tile, let it be known that she had found Roman remains, part of a villa or a temple, in the asparagus bed, and now this evidence was not quite so conclusive as it had been. The Apolline sacrificial vessel, it is true, had confirmed her original theory, but she must wait for more finds, walls or tesselated pavement, before it was advisable to admit sightseers to the digging, or make any fresh announcement. Georgie was pledged to secrecy, all the gardener knew was that she had spoiled his asparagus bed, and as for the coin (for coin it was and no button) the most minute scrutiny could not reveal any sort of image or superscription on its corroded surface: it might belong to the age of Melchizedeck or Hadrian or Queen Victoria. So since Tilling could learn nothing from official quarters, it took the obvious course, sanctified by tradition, of inventing discoveries for itself: a statue was hinted at and a Roman altar. All this was most fortunate for Elizabeth, for the prevailing excitement about the ancient population of Tilling following on the gas and sewer affair, had rendered completely obsolete its sense of having been cheated when it was clear that she was not about to add to the modern population, and her appearance in the High Street alert and active as usual ceased to rouse any sort of comment. To make matters square between the late and the present owner of Mallards, it was only right that, just as Lucia had never believed in Elizabeth’s baby, so now Elizabeth was entirely incredulous about Lucia’s temple.