Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  She put down her basket and went back into the garden-room. She must show Elizabeth though not by direct encounter, that she was happy and brilliant and busy. She went to her piano and began practising scales. Arpeggios and roulades of the most dazzling kind followed. Slightly exhausted by this fine display she crept behind the curtain and peered out. Elizabeth was still there, and, in order to continue the impression of strenuous artistic activity, Lucia put on a gramophone record of the Moonlight Sonata. At the conclusion of that she looked out again; Elizabeth had gone. It was something to have driven that baleful presence away from the immediate neighbourhood, but it had only taken its balefulness elsewhere. She remembered how Susanna had said with regard to the rejected portrait (which no longer seemed to matter an atom) “You can’t get people to like what they don’t like by telling them that they ought to”; and now a parallel aphorism suggested itself to Lucia’s harassed brain.

  “You can’t get people to believe what they won’t believe by telling them that it’s true,” she whispered to herself. “Yet Poppy did stay here: she did, she did! And it’s too unfair that I should lose more prestige over that, when I ought to have recovered all that I had lost . . . What is it, Grosvenor?”

  Grosvenor handed her a telegram.

  “Mr. Georgie won’t be back till Monday instead of Saturday,” said Lucia in a toneless voice. “Anything else?”

  “Shall Cook do the shopping, ma’am, if you’re not going out? It’s early closing.”

  “Yes. I shall be alone for lunch and dinner,” said Lucia, wishing that it were possible for all human affairs to shut down with the shops.

  She glanced at Georgie’s telegram again, amazed at its light-heartedness. “Having such fun,” it ran.

  “Olga insists I stop till Monday. Know you won’t mind. Devoted Georgie.”

  She longed for devoted Georgie, and fantastic ideas born of pure misery darted through her head. She thought of replying: “Come back at once and stand by me. Nobody believes that Poppy slept here.” She thought of asking the B.B.C. to broadcast an S.O.S.: “Will George Pillson last heard of to-day at Le Touquet, return at once to Tilling where his wife the Mayor—” No, she could not say she was dangerously ill. That would alarm him; besides he would find on arrival that she was perfectly well. He might even come by air, and then the plane might crash and he would be burned to death. She realised that such thoughts were of the most morbid nature, and wondered if a glass of sherry would disperse them. But she resisted. “I won’t risk becoming like Major Benjy,” she said to herself, “and I’ve got to stick it alone till Monday.”

  The hours crept dismally by: she had lunch, tea and dinner by herself. One fragment of news reached her through Grosvenor and that was not encouraging. Her cook had boasted to Elizabeth’s parlour-maid that she had cooked dinner for a Duchess, and the parlour-maid with an odd laugh, had advised her not to be so sure about that. Cook had returned in a state of high indignation, which possibly she had expressed by saturating Lucia’s soup with pepper, and putting so much mustard into her devilled chicken that it might have been used as a plaster for the parlour-maid. Perhaps these fiery substances helped to kindle Lucia again materially, and all day psychical stimulants were at work: pride which refused to surrender, the extreme boredom of being alone, and the consciousness of rectitude. So next morning, after making sure that Elizabeth was not lurking about, Lucia set forth with her market-basket. Irene was just coming out of her house, and met her with a grave and sympathetic face.

  “Darling, I am so sorry about it,” she said.

  Lucia naturally supposed that she was referring to the rejection of the portrait.

  “Don’t give it another thought,” she said. “It will be such a joy to have it at Mallards. They’re all Goths and Vandals and Elizabeths.”

  “Oh that!” said Irene. “Who cares? Just wait till I’ve touched up Elizabeth and Benjy for the Carlton Gallery. No, about this septic Duchess. Why did you do it? So unwise!”

  Lucia wondered if some fresh horror had ripened, and her mouth went dry.

  “Why did I do what?” she asked.

  “Say that she’d been to stay with you, when she didn’t even know you by sight. So futile!”

  “But she did stay with me!” cried Lucia.

  “No, no,” said Irene soothingly. “Don’t go on saying it. It wounds me. Naturally, you were vexed at her not recognising you. You had seen her before somewhere, hadn’t you?”

  “But this is preposterous!” cried Lucia. “You must believe me. We had dressed crab for dinner. She went to bed early. She slept in the spare room. She snored. We breakfasted at half-past-seven—”

  “Darling, we won’t talk about it any more,” said Irene. “Whenever you want me, I’ll come to you. Just send for me.”

  “I shall want you,” said Lucia with awful finality, “when you beg my pardon for not believing me.”

  Irene uttered a dismal cry, and went back into her house. Lucia with a face of stone went on to the High Street. As she was leaving the grocer’s her basket bumped against Diva’s, who was entering.

  “Sorry,” said Diva. “Rather in a hurry. My fault.”

  It was as if an iceberg, straight from the North Pole, had apologized. Mr. Wyse was just stepping on to the pavement, and he stood hatless as she hailed him.

  “Lovely weather, isn’t it?” she said. “Georgie writes to me that they’re having the same at Le Touquet. We must have some more Bridge parties when he gets back.”

  “You enjoy your Bridge so much, and play it so beautifully,” said Mr. Wyse with a bow. “And, believe me, I shall never forget your kindness over Susan’s budgerigar.”

  In Lucia’s agitated state, this sounded dreadfully like an assurance that, in spite of all, she hadn’t lost his friendship. Then with an accession of courage, she determined to stick to her guns.

  “The Duchess’s visit to me was at such short notice,” she said, “that there was literally not time to get a few friends together. She would so much have liked to see you and Susan.”

  “Very good of you to say so. I — I heard that she had spent the night under your hospitable roof. Ah! I see Susan beckoning to me.”

  Lucia’s shopping had not raised her spirits, and when she went up the street again towards Mallards, there was Elizabeth on the pavement opposite, at her easel. But now the sight of her braced Lucia. It flashed through her mind that her dear Mayoress had selected this subject for her sketch in order to keep an eye on her, to observe, as through a malicious microscope, her joyless exits and entrances and report to her friends how sad and wan she looked: otherwise Elizabeth would never have attempted anything which required the power to draw straight lines and some knowledge, however elementary, of perspective. All the more reason, then, that Lucia should be at her very best and brightest and politest and most withering.

  Elizabeth out of the corner of her eye saw her approaching and kissed the top end of her paint-brush to her.

  “Good morning, dear Worship,” she said. “Been shopping and chatting with all your friends? Any news?”

  “Good morning, sindaca mia,” she said. “That means Mayoress, dear. Oh, what a promising sketch! But have you quite got the mellow tone of the bricks in my garden-room? I should suggest just a touch of brown-madder.”

  Elizabeth’s paint-brush began to tremble.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “Brown-madder. I must remember that.”

  “Or a little rose-madder mixed with burnt sienna would do as well,” continued Lucia. “Just stippled on. You will find that will give the glowing effect you want.”

  Elizabeth wondered whether Lucia could have realised that nobody in Tilling believed that Poppy had ever stayed with her and yet remain so complacent and superior. She hoped to find an opportunity of introducing that topic. But she could find something to say on the subject of Art first.

  “So lovely for quaint Irene to have had this great success with her picture of me,” she said. “The Carl
ton Gallery, she tells me, and then perhaps an American purchaser. Such a pity that masterpieces have to leave the country. Luckily her picture of you is likely to remain here.”

  “That was a terrible set-back for Irene,” said Lucia, as glibly as if she had learned this dialogue by heart, “when your Committee induced the Council to reject it.”

  “Impossible to take any other view,” said Elizabeth. “A daub. We couldn’t have it in our beautiful Town Hall. And it didn’t do you justice, dear.”

  “How interesting that you should say that!” said Lucia. “Dear Irene felt just that about her picture of you. She felt she had not put enough character into your face. She means to make some little alterations in it before she sends it to the Carlton Galleries.”

  That was alarming: Elizabeth remembered the “little alterations” Irene had made before. But she did not allow that to unnerve her.

  “Sometimes I am afraid she will never rise to the level of her Venus again,” she sighed. “Her high-water mark. Her picture of you, for instance. It might have been out of Mr. Wyse’s pieces of still life: bicycle, piano, packs of cards.”

  “Some day when I can find time, I will explain to you the principles of symbolism,” Lucia promised.

  Elizabeth saw her way to the desired topic.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said fervently. “That would be a treat. But I know how busy you are with all your duties and all your entertaining. Have you had any more visitors to dine and sleep and go away very early next morning before they had seen anything of our lovely Tilling?”

  The blow was wholly unexpected and it shook Lucia. She pulled herself together.

  “Let me think,” she said. “Such a succession of people dropping in. No! I think the dear Duchess was my last guest.”

  “What a lovely evening you must have had,” said Elizabeth. “Two old friends together. How I love a tête-à-tête, just like what we’re having now with nobody to interrupt. Roaming over all sorts of subjects, like bees sipping at flowers. How much you always teach me, Worship. Rose-madder and burnt sienna to give luminousness—”

  Lucia clutched at the return of this topic, and surveyed Elizabeth’s sketch.

  “So glad to have given you that little tip,” she said. “Immense improvement, isn’t it? How the bricks glow now—”

  “I haven’t put any madder on yet, brown or rose,” cooed Elizabeth, “but so glad to know about it. And is poor Duchess’s memory really as bad as it seemed? How dreadful for you if she had forgotten her own name as well as yours.”

  Quite suddenly Lucia knew that she had no more force left in her. She could only just manage a merry laugh.

  “What a delicious social crisis that would be!” she said. “You ought to send it to some comic paper. And what a pleasant talk we have had! I could stay here all morning chatting, but alas, I have a hundred arrears to get through. Addio, cara sindaca.”

  She walked without hurrying up the steps to her door and tottered out into the garden-room. Presently she crept to the observation post behind the curtain and looked out. Benjy had joined the Mayoress, and something she said caused him to laugh very heartily . . . And even devoted Irene did not believe that Poppy had ever stayed here.

  Next day was Sunday. As Lucia listened to the joyful peal of the bells she wondered whether, without Georgie, she could meet the fresh ordeal that awaited her, when after the service Tilling society assembled outside the south porch of the church for the Sunday morning chat which took the place of the week-day shopping. To shirk that would be a tacit confession that she could not face her friends: she might just as well, from the social point of view, not go to church at all. But though the débâcle appeared so complete, she knew that her essential spirit was unbroken: it would be “given her,” she felt, to make that manifest in some convincing manner.

  She sang very loud in the hymns and psalms, she winced when the organist had a slight misunderstanding with the choir, she let ecclesiastical smiles play over her face when she found herself in sympathy with the doctrine of the curate’s sermon, she gave liberally to the offertory. When the service was over she waited outside the south porch. Elizabeth followed close behind, and behind Elizabeth were other familiar faces. Lucia felt irresistibly reminded of the hymn she had just been singing about the hosts of Midian who ‘prowled and prowled around’. . . . So much the worse for the hosts of Midian.

  “Good morning, dear,” said Elizabeth. “No Mr. Georgie in church? Not ill I hope?”

  “No, particularly well,” said Lucia, “and enjoying himself so much at Le Touquet that he’s staying till Monday.”

  “Sweet of you to allow him,” responded Elizabeth, “for you must be so lonely without him.”

  At that precise moment there took possession of Lucia an emotion to which hitherto she had been a stranger, namely sheer red rage. In all the numerous crises of her career her brain had always been occupied with getting what she wanted and with calm triumph when she got it, or with devising plans to extricate herself from tight places and with scaring off those who had laid traps for her. Now all such insipidities were swept away; rage at the injustice done her thrilled every fibre of her being, and she found the sensation delicious. She began rather gently.

  “Lonely?” she asked. “I don’t know the word. How could I be lonely with my books and my music and my work, above all with so many loving loyal friends like yourself, dear Elizabeth, so close about me?”

  “That’s the stuff to give her. That made her wince,” she thought, and opening the furnace doors she turned to the group of loving loyal friends, who had emerged from church, and were close about her.

  “I’m still the deserted wife, you see,” she said gaily. “My Georgie can’t tear himself away from the sirens at Le Touquet, Olga and Poppy and the rest. Oh, Mr. Wyse, what a cold you’ve got! You must take care of yourself: your sister the Contessa Amelia di Faraglione would never have allowed you to come out! Dear Susan! No Royce? Have you actually walked all the way from Porpoise Street? You mustn’t overdo it! Diva, how is Paddy? He’s not been sick again, I hope, after eating one of your delicious sardine tartlets. Yes, Georgie’s not back yet. I am thinking of going by aeroplane to Le Touquet this afternoon, just to dine and sleep — like Poppy — and return with him tomorrow. And Susanna! I hear you’ve been so busy with your new story about Tilling. I do hope you will get someone to publish it when it’s finished. Dear Diva, what a silly mistake I’ve made: of course it was the recipe for cream-wafers which Susanna’s chef gave you which made Paddy so unwell. Irene? You in church? Was it not a lovely sermon, all about thinking evil of your friends? Good morning, Major Benjy. You must get poor Mr. Wyse to try your favourite cure for colds. A tumbler of whisky, isn’t it, every two hours with a little boiling water according to taste. Au revoir, dear ones. See you all to-morrow I hope.”

  She smiled and kissed her hand, and walked off without turning her head, a little out of breath with this shattering eloquence, but rejoicing and rejuvenated.

  “That was a pleasure,” she said to herself, “and to think that I was ever terrified of meeting them! What a coward! I don’t think I left anybody out: I insulted each one in the presence of all the rest. That’s what they get for not believing that Poppy stayed here, and for thinking that I was down and out. I’ve given them something else to think about. I’ve paid them back, thank God, and now we’ll see what will happen next.”

  Lucia, of course, had no intention of flying to Le Touquet, but she drove to Seaport next morning to meet Georgie. He was wearing a new French yachting costume with a double-breasted jacket and brass buttons.

  “My dear, how delightful of you to come and meet me!” he said. “Quite a smooth crossing. Do you like my clothes?”

  “Too smart for anything, Georgie, and I am so glad to see you again. Such a lot to tell you which I couldn’t write.”

  “Elizabeth been behaving well?” he asked.

  “Fiendishly. A real crisis, Georgie, and you’ve come into the
middle of it. I’ll tell you all about it as we go.”

  Lucia gave an unbiassed and lucid sketch of what had happened, peppered by indignant and excited comments from him:

  “Poppy’s imbecile — yes I call her Poppy to her face, she asked me to — Fancy her forgetting you: just the sort of thing for that foul Mapp to make capital of — And so like her to get the Council to reject the picture of you — My dear, you cried? What a shame, and how very unlike you — And they don’t believe Poppy stayed with you? Why of course she did! She talked about it — Even Irene? — How utterly poisonous of them all! — Hurrah, I’m glad you gave it them hot after church. Capital! We’ll do something stunning, now that we can put our heads together about it. I must hear it all over again bit by bit. And here we are in the High Street. There’s Mapp, grinning like a Cheshire cat. We’ll cut her anyhow, just to make a beginning: we can’t go wrong over that.”

  Georgie paused a moment.

  “And, do you know, I’m very glad to be back,” he said. “Olga was perfectly sweet, as she always is, but there were other things. It would have been far better if I’d come home on Saturday.”

  “Georgie, how thrilling!” cried Lucia, forgetting her own crisis for a brief second. “What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you afterwards. Hullo, Grosvenor, how are you? Yes, I think I’ll have a warm bath after my journey and then rest till tea-time.”

  They had tea in his sitting-room after he had rested, where he was arranging his bibelots, for Grosvenor had not put them back, after dusting them, exactly as he wished. This done, he took up his needle-work and his narration.