Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The conspiracy of silence had become a cross-examination of questions. These admissions were being forced from her.

  “And then did you go out to supper?” asked Evie.

  “Ah no! Music takes too much out of me. Back to the hotel and so to bed, as Pepys says.”

  “And next morning, Worship, after such an exciting evening?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Poor me! A bundle of agenda for the Council meeting on Monday. I had to slave at them until nearly lunch-time.”

  “You and Mr Georgie in your hotel?” asked Diva.

  “No: dear Olga insisted that we should lunch with her at the Ritz,” said Lucia in the slow drawling voice which she adopted when her audience were on tenterhooks. No party, just the four of us.”

  “Who was the fourth?”

  “The Duchess. She was very late, just as she had been at the opera. A positive obsession with her. So we didn’t wait.”

  Not waiting for a Duchess produced a stunning effect.

  Diva recovered first.

  “Good food?” she asked.

  “Fair, I should have called it. Or do you mean Poppy’s food? How you will laugh! A dressed crab and oceans of black coffee. The only diet on which she feels really well.”

  “Sounds most indigestible,” said Diva. “What an odd sort of stomach. And then?”

  “How you all catechize me! Then Cortese came in. He is the composer, I must explain, of Lucrezia, and conducted it. Italian, with all the vivaciousness of the South—”

  “So you had a good talk in Italian to him, dear,” said Elizabeth viciously.

  “Alas, no. We had to rush off almost immediately to catch our train. Hardly a word with him.”

  “What a pity!” said Elizabeth. “And just now you told us you were not going to be here long. Gadding off again?”

  “Alas, yes; though how ungrateful of me to say ‘alas’,” said Lucia still drawling. “Dear Olga implored Georgie and me to spend the week-end with her at Riseholme. She would not take a refusal. It will be delicious to see the dear old place again. I shall make her sing to us. These great singers are always at their best with a small intime sympathetic audience.”

  “And will there be some Duchesses there?” asked Elizabeth, unable to suppress her bitterness.

  “Chi lo sa?” said Lucia with superb indifference. “Ah, here come the men. Let us get to our Bridge.”

  The men, who were members of this conspiracy, had shewn a stronger self-control than the women, and had not asked Georgie a single question about high-life, but they knew now about his new ties. Evie could not resist saying in an aside to her husband:

  “Fancy, Kenneth, the Duchess of Sheffield lives on dressed crab and black coffee.”

  Who could resist such an alluring fragment? Certainly not the Padre.

  “Eh, that’s a singular diet,” he said, “and has Mistress Mayor been telling you a’ about it? An’ what does she do when there’s no crab to be had?”

  From the eagerness in his voice, Lucia instantly guessed that the men had heard nothing, and were consumed with curiosity.

  “Enough of my silly tittle-tattle,” she said. “More important matters lie before us. Elizabeth, will you and the Padre and Mr. Wyse play at my table?”

  For a while cards overrode all other interests, but it was evident that the men were longing to know all that their vow of self-control had hidden from them: first one and then another, during the deals, alluded to shellfish and Borgias. But Lucia was adamant: they had certainly conspired to show no interest in the great events of the London visit, and they must be punished. But when the party broke up, Mr. Wyse insisted on driving Diva back in the Royce, and plied her with questions, and Major Benjy and the Padre, by the time they got home, knew as much as their wives.

  Lucia and Georgie, with Grosvenor as maid (for it was only fair that she should have her share in these magnificent excursions) motored to Riseholme next morning. Lucia took among her luggage the tin box labelled “Housing,” in order to keep abreast of municipal work, but in the hurry of departure forget to put any municipal papers inside it. She would have liked to take Mrs. Simpson as well, but Grosvenor occupied the seat next her chauffeur, and three inside would have been uncomfortable. Olga gave a garden-party in her honour in the afternoon, and Lucia was most gracious to all her old friends, in the manner of a Dowager Queen who has somehow come into a far vaster kingdom, but who has a tender remembrance of her former subjects, however humble, and she had a kind word for them all. After the party had dispersed, she and Georgie and Olga sat on in the garden, and her smiles were touched with sadness.

  “Such a joy to see all the dear, quaint folk again,” she said, “but what a sad change has come over the place! Riseholme, which in old days used to be seething with every sort of interest, has become just like any other vegetating little village—”

  “I don’t agree at all,” said Georgie loudly. “It’s seething still. Daisy Quantock’s got a French parlourmaid who’s an atheist, and Mrs. Antrobus has learned the deaf and dumb alphabet, as she’s got so deaf that the most expensive ear-trumpet isn’t any use to her. Everybody has been learning it, too, and when Mrs. Boucher gave a birthday party for her only last week, they all talked deaf and dumb to each other, so that Mrs. Antrobus could understand what was being said. I call that marvellous manners.”

  The old flame flickered for a moment in Lucia’s breast.

  “No!” she cried. “What else?”

  “I haven’t finished this yet,” said Georgie. “And they were all using their hands so much to talk, that they couldn’t get on with their dinner, and it took an hour and a half, though it was only four courses.”

  “Georgie, how thrilling!” said Olga. “Go on.”

  Georgie turned to the more sympathetic listener.

  “You see, they couldn’t talk fast, because they were only learning, but when Mrs. Antrobus replied, she was so quick, being an expert, that nobody except Piggie and Goosie—”

  Lucia tilted her head sideways, with a sidelong glance at Olga, busy with a looking-glass and lipstick.

  “Ah; I recollect. Her daughters,” she said.

  “Yes, of course. They could tell you what she said if they were looking, but if they weren’t looking you had to guess, like when somebody talks fast in a foreign language which you don’t know much of, and you make a shot at what he’s saying.”

  Lucia gave him a gimlet-glance. But of course, Georgie couldn’t have been thinking of her and the Italian crisis.

  “Their dear, funny little ways!” she said. “But everyone I talked to was so eager to hear about Tilling and my mayoral work, that I learned nothing about what was going on here. How they besieged me with questions! What else, Georgie?”

  “Well, the people who have got your house now have made a swimming bath in the garden and have lovely mixed bathing parties.”

  Lucia repressed a pang of regret that she had never thought of doing that, and uttered a shocked sort of noise.

  “Oh, what a sad desecration!” she said. “Where is it? In my pleached alley, or in Perdita’s garden?”

  “In the pleached alley, and it’s a great success. I wish I’d brought my bathing-suit.”

  “And do they keep up my tableaux and Elizabethan fêtes and literary circles?” she asked.

  “I didn’t hear anything about them, but there’s a great deal going on. Very gay, and lots of people come down for week-ends from town.”

  Lucia rose.

  “And cocktail parties, I suppose,” she said. “Well, well, one must expect one’s traces to be removed by the hand of time. That wonderful sonnet of Shakespeare’s about it. Olga mia, will you excuse me till dinner-time? Some housing plans I have got to study, or I shall never be able to face my Council on Monday.”

  Lucia came down to dinner steeped in the supposed contents of her tin box and with a troubled face.

  “Those riband-developments!” she said. “They form one of the greatest problems I have to
tackle.”

  Olga looked utterly bewildered.

  “Ribands?” she asked. “Things in hats.”

  Lucia gave a bright laugh.

  “Stupid of me not to explain, dear,” she said. “How could you know? Building developments: dreadful hideous dwellings along the sweet country roads leading into Tilling. Red-brick villas instead of hedges of hawthorn and eglantine. It seems such desecration.”

  Georgie sighed. Lucia had already told him what she meant to say to her Council on Monday afternoon, and would assuredly tell him what she had said on Monday evening.

  “Caterpillars!” she cried with a sudden inspiration. “I shall compare those lines of houses to caterpillars, hungry red caterpillars wriggling out across the marsh and devouring its verdant loveliness. A vivid metaphor like that is needed. But I know, dear Olga, that nothing I say to you will go any further. My Councillors have a right to know my views before anybody else.”

  “My lips are sealed,” said Olga.

  “And yet we must build these new houses,” said the Mayor, putting both her elbows on the table and disregarding her plate of chicken. “We must abolish the slums in Tilling, and that means building on the roads outside. Such a multiplicity of conflicting interests.”

  “I suppose the work is tremendous,” said Olga.

  “Yes, I think we might call it tremendous, mightn’t we, Georgie?” asked Lucia.

  Georgie was feeling fearfully annoyed with her. She was only putting it on in order to impress Olga, but the more fervently he agreed, the sooner, it might be hoped, she would stop.

  “Overwhelming. Incessant,” he asserted.

  The hope was vain.

  “No, dear, not overwhelming,” she said, eating her chicken in a great hurry. “I am not overwhelmed by it. Working for others enlarges one’s capacity for work. For the sake of my dear Tilling I can undertake without undue fatigue, what would otherwise render me a perfect wreck. Ich Dien. Of course I have to sacrifice other interests. My reading? I scarcely open a book. My painting? I have done nothing since I made a sketch of some gorgeous dahlias in the autumn, which Georgie didn’t think too bad.”

  “Lovely,” said Georgie in a voice of wood.

  “Thank you, dear. My music? I have hardly played a note. But as you must know so well, dear Olga, music makes an imperishable store of memories within one: morsels of Mozart: bits of Beethoven all audible to the inward ear.”

  “How well I remember you playing the slow movement of the Moonlight Sonata,” said Olga, seeking, like Georgie to entice her away from Mayoral topics. But the effect of this was appalling. Lucia assumed her rapt music-face, and with eyes fixed on the ceiling, indicated slow triplets on the table cloth. Her fingers faltered, they recovered, and nobody could guess how long she would continue: probably to the end of the movement, and yet it seemed rude to interrupt this symbolic recital. But presently she sighed.

  “Naughty fingers,” she said, as if shaking the triplets off. “So forgetful of them!”

  Somehow she had drained the life out of the others, but dinner was over, and they moved into Olga’s music-room. The piano stood open, and Lucia, as if walking in sleep, like Lady Macbeth, glided on to the music stool. The naughty fingers became much better, indeed they became as good as they had ever been. She dwelt long on the last note of the famous slow movement, gazing wistfully up, and they all sighed, according to the traditional usage when Lucia played the Moonlight.

  “Thank you, dear,” said Olga. “Perfect.”

  Lucia suddenly sprang off the music-stool with a light laugh.

  “Better than I had feared,” she said, “but far from perfect. And now, dear Olga, dare I? Might we? One little song. Shall I try to accompany you?”

  Olga thought she could accompany herself and Lucia seated herself on a sort of throne close beside her and resumed her rapt expression, as Olga sang the “Ave” out of Lucrezia. That solemn strain seemed vaguely familiar to Lucia, but she could not place it. Was it Beethoven? Was it from Fidelio or from Creation Hymn? Perhaps it was wiser only to admire with emotion without committing herself to the composer.

  “That wonderful old tune!” she said. “What a treat to hear it again. Those great melodies are the very foundation-stone of music.”

  “But isn’t it the prayer in Lucrezia?” asked Georgie.

  Lucia instantly remembered that it was.

  “Yes, of course it is, Georgie,” she said. “But in the plain-song mode. I expressed myself badly.”

  “She hadn’t the smallest idea what it was,” thought Olga, “but she could wriggle out of a thumb-screw.” Then aloud:

  “Yes, that was Cortese’s intention,” she said. “He will be pleased to know you think he has caught it. By the way, he rang up just before dinner to ask if he and his wife might come down to-morrow afternoon for the night. I sent a fervent ‘yes’.”

  “My dear, you spoil us!” said Lucia ecstatically. “That will be too delightful.”

  In spite of her ecstasy, this was grave news, and as she went to bed she pondered it. There would be Cortese, whose English was very limited (though less circumscribed than her own Italian), there would be Olga, who, though she said she spoke Italian atrociously, was fluent and understood it perfectly, and possibly Cortese’s wife knew no English at all. If she did not, conversation must be chiefly conducted in Italian, and Lucia’s vivid imagination pictured Olga translating to her what they were all saying, and re-translating her replies to them. Then no doubt he would play to them, and she would have to guess whether he was playing Beethoven or Mozart or plain-song or Cortese. It would be an evening full of hazards and humiliations. Better perhaps, in view of a pretended engagement on Monday morning, to leave on Sunday afternoon, before these dangerous foreigners arrived. “If only I could bring myself to say that I can neither speak nor understand Italian, and know nothing about music!” thought Lucia. “But I can’t after all these years. It’s wretched to run away like this, but I couldn’t bear it.”

  Georgie came down very late to breakfast. He had had dreams of Olga trying through a song to his accompaniment. She stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders, and her face close to his. Then he began singing, too, and their voices blended exquisitely. . . . Dressing was a festival with his tiled bathroom next door, and he debated as to which of his new ties Olga would like best. Breakfast, Grosvenor had told him, would be on the verandah, but it was such a warm morning there was no need for his cape.

  The others were already down.

  “Georgie, this will never do,” said Olga, as he came out. ‘‘Lucia says she must go back to Tilling this afternoon. Keep her in order. Tell her she shan’t.”

  “But what’s happened, Lucia?” he asked. “If we start early to-morrow we shall be in heaps of time for your Council meeting.”

  Lucia began to gabble.

  “I’m too wretched about it,” she said, “But when I went upstairs last night, I looked into those papers again which I brought down with me, and I find there is so much I must talk over with my Town Clerk if I am to be equipped for my Council in the afternoon. You know what Monday morning is, Georgie. I must not neglect my duties though I have to sacrifice my delicious evening here. I must be adamant.’’

  “Too sad,” said Olga. “But there’s no reason why you should go, Georgie. I’ll drive you back tomorrow. My dear, what a pretty tie!”

  “I shall stop then,” said he. “I’ve nothing to do at Tilling. I thought you’d like my tie.”

  Lucia had never contemplated this, and she did not like it. But having announced herself as adamant, she could not instantly turn to putty. Just one chance of getting him to come with her remained.

  “I shall have to take Grosvenor with me,” she said.

  Georgie pictured a strange maid bringing in his tea, and getting his bath ready, with the risk of her finding his toupée, and other aids to juvenility. He faced it: it was worth it.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he replied. “I shall be able
to manage perfectly.”

  CHAPTER IX.

  Lucia was in for a run of bad luck, and it began that very afternoon. Ten minutes before she started with Grosvenor for Tilling, Cortese and his wife arrived. The latter was English and knew even less Italian than she did. And Cortese brought with him the first act of his new opera. It was too late to change her plans and she drove off after a most affectionate parting from Olga, whom she charged to come and stay at Tilling any time at a moment’s notice. Just a telephone message to say she was coming, and she could start at once sure of the fondest welcome . . . But it was all most tiresome, for no doubt Cortese would run through the first act of his opera to-night, and the linguistic panic which had caused her to flee from Riseholme as from a plague-stricken village, leaving her nearest and dearest there, had proved to be utterly foundationless.

  For the present that was all she knew: had she known what was to occur half an hour after she had left, she would certainly have turned and gone back to the plague-stricken village again, trusting to her unbounded ingenuity to devise some reason for her reappearance. A phone-call from the Duchess of Sheffield came for Madame Cortese.

  “Poor mad Cousin Poppy,” she said. “What on earth can she want?”

  “Dressed crab,” screamed Olga after her as she went to the telephone, “Cortese, you darling, let’s have a go at your Diane de Poictiers after dinner. I had no idea you were near the end of the first act.”

  “Nor I also. It has come as smooth as margarine,” said Cortese, who had been enjoined by Madame to learn English with all speed, and never to dare to speak Italian in her presence. “And such an aria for you. When you hear it, you will jump for joy. I jump, you jumps, they jumpino. Dam’ good.”

  Madame returned from the telephone.

  “Poppy asked more questions in half a minute than were ever asked before in that time,” she said. “I took the first two or three and told her to wait. First, will we go to her awful old Castle to-morrow, to dine and stay the night. Second: who is here. Olga, I told her, and Cortese, and Mr. Pillson of Tilling. ‘Why, of course I know him,’ said Poppy. ‘He’s the Mayor of Tilling, and I met him at Lucrezia, and at lunch at the Ritz. Such a lovely beard’. Thirdly—”