Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Diva intentionally arrived a full quarter of an hour on the hither side of punctuality, and was taken by Withers out into the garden-room, where tea was laid, and two card-tables were in readiness. She was, of course, the first of the guests, and the moment Withers withdrew to tell her mistress that she had come, Diva stealthily glided to the cupboard, from in front of which the bridge-table had been removed, feeling the shrill joy of some romantic treasure hunter. She found the catch, she pressed it, she pulled open the door and the whole of the damning profusion of provisions burst upon her delighted eyes. Shelf after shelf was crowded with eatables; there were tins of corned beef and tongues (that she knew already), there was a sack of flour, there were tubes of Bath Oliver biscuits, bottles of bovril, the yield of a thousand condensed Swiss cows, jars of prunes… All these were in the front row, flush with the door, and who knew to what depth the cupboard extended? Even as she feasted her eyes on this incredible store, some package on the top shelf wavered and toppled, and she had only just time to shut the door again, in order to prevent it falling out on to the floor. But this displacement prevented the door from wholly closing, and push and shove as Diva might, she could not get the catch to click home, and the only result of her energy and efforts was to give rise to a muffled explosion from within, just precisely as if something made of cardboard had burst. That mental image was so vivid that to her fevered imagination it seemed to be real. This was followed by certain faint taps from within against “Elegant Extracts” and “Astronomy.”

  Diva grew very red in the face, and said “Drat it” under her breath. She did not dare open the door again in order to push things back, for fear of an uncontrollable stream of “things” pouring out. Some nicely balanced equilibrium had clearly been upset in those capacious shelves, and it was impossible to tell, without looking, how deep and how extensive the disturbance was. And in order to look, she had to open the bookcase again… Luckily the pressure against the door was not sufficiently heavy to cause it to swing wide, so the best she could do was to leave it just ajar with temporary quiescence inside. Simultaneously she heard Miss Mapp’s step, and had no more than time to trundle at the utmost speed of her whirling feet across to the window, where she stood looking out, and appeared quite unconscious of her hostess’s entry.

  “Diva darling, how sweet of you to come so early!” she said. “A little cosy chat before the others arrive.”

  Diva turned round, much startled.

  “Hullo!” she said. “Didn’t hear you. Got Janet’s frock you see.”

  (“What makes Diva’s face so red?” thought Miss Mapp.)

  “So I see, darling,” she said. “Lovely rose-garden. How well it suits you, dear! Did Janet mind?”

  “No. Promised her a new frock at Christmas.”

  “That will be nice for Janet,” said Elizabeth enthusiastically. “Shall we pop into the garden, dear, till my guests come?”

  Diva was glad to pop into the garden and get away from the immediate vicinity of the cupboard, for though she had planned and looked forward to the exposure of Elizabeth’s hoarding, she had not meant it to come, as it now probably would, in crashes of tins and bursting of bovril bottles. Again she had intended to have opened that door quite casually and innocently while she was being dummy, so that everyone could see how accidental the exposure was, and to have gone poking about the cupboard in Elizabeth’s absence was a shade too professional, so to speak, for the usual detective work of Tilling. But the fuse was set now. Sooner or later the explosion must come. She wondered as they went out to commune with Elizabeth’s sweet flowers till the other guests arrived how great a torrent would be let loose. She did not repent her exploration — far from it — but her pleasurable anticipations were strongly diluted with suspense.

  Miss Mapp had found such difficulty in getting eight players together to-day, that she had transgressed her principles and asked Mrs. Poppit as well as Isabel, and they, with Diva, the two Bartletts, and the Major and the Captain, formed the party. The moment Mrs. Poppit appeared, Elizabeth hated her more than ever, for she put up her glasses, and began to give her patronizing advice about her garden, which she had not been allowed to see before.

  “You have quite a pretty little piece of garden, Miss Mapp,” she said, “though, to be sure, I fancied from what you said that it was more extensive. Dear me, your roses do not seem to be doing very well. Probably they are old plants and want renewing. You must send your gardener round — you keep a gardener? — and I will let you have a dozen vigorous young bushes.”

  Miss Mapp licked her dry lips. She kept a kind of gardener: two days a week.

  “Too good of you,” she said, “but that rose-bed is quite sacred, dear Mrs. Poppit. Not all the vigorous young bushes in the world would tempt me. It’s my ‘Friendship’s Border:’ some dear friend gave me each of my rose-trees.”

  Mrs. Poppit transferred her gaze to the wistaria that grew over the steps up to the garden-room. Some of the dear friends she thought must be centenarians.

  “Your wistaria wants pruning sadly,” she said. “Your gardener does not understand wistarias. That corner there was made, I may say, for fuchsias. You should get a dozen choice fuchsias.”

  Miss Mapp laughed.

  “Oh, you must excuse me,” she said with a glance at Mrs. Poppit’s brocaded silk. “I can’t bear fuchsias. They always remind me of over-dressed women. Ah, there’s Mr. Bartlett. How de do, Padre. And dear Evie!”

  Dear Evie appeared fascinated by Diva’s dress.

  “Such beautiful rosebuds,” she murmured, “and what lovely shade of purple. And Elizabeth’s poppies too, quite a pair of you. But surely this morning, Diva, didn’t I see your good Janet in just such another dress, and I thought at the time how odd it was that — —”

  “If you saw Janet this morning,” said Diva quite firmly, “you saw her in her print dress.”

  “And here’s Major Benjy,” said Miss Mapp, who had made her slip about his Christian name yesterday, and had been duly entreated to continue slipping. “And Captain Puffin. Well, that is nice! Shall we go into my little garden shed, dear Mrs. Poppit, and have our tea?”

  Major Flint was still a little lame, for his golf to-day had been of the nature of gardening, and he hobbled up the steps behind the ladies, with that little cock-sparrow sailor following him and telling the Padre how badly and yet how successfully he himself had played.

  “Pleasantest room in Tilling, I always say, Miss Elizabeth,” said he, diverting his mind from a mere game to the fairies.

  “My dear little room,” said Miss Mapp, knowing that it was much larger than anything in Mrs. Poppit’s house. “So tiny!”

  “Oh, not a bad-sized little room,” said Mrs. Poppit encouragingly. “Much the same proportions, on a very small scale, as the throne-room at Buckingham Palace.”

  “That beautiful throne-room!” exclaimed Miss Mapp. “A cup of tea, dear Mrs. Poppit? None of that naughty red-currant fool, I am afraid. And a little chocolate-cake?”

  These substantial chocolate cakes soon did their fell work of producing the sense of surfeit, and presently Elizabeth’s guests dropped off gorged from the tea-table. Diva fortunately remembered their consistency in time, and nearly cleared a plate of jumbles instead, which the hostess had hoped would form a pleasant accompaniment to her dessert at her supper this evening, and was still crashingly engaged on them when the general drifting movement towards the two bridge-tables set in. Mrs. Poppit, with her glasses up, followed by Isabel, was employed in making a tour of the room, in case, as Miss Mapp had already determined, she never saw it again, examining the quality of the carpet, the curtains, the chair-backs with the air of a doubtful purchaser.

  “And quite a quantity of books, I see,” she announced as she came opposite the fatal cupboard. “Look, Isabel, what a quantity of books. There is something strange about them, though; I do not believe they are real.”

  She put out her hand and pulled at the back of one of the volumes of �
��Elegant Extracts.” The door swung open, and from behind it came a noise of rattling, bumping and clattering. Something soft and heavy thumped on to the floor, and a cloud of floury dust arose. A bottle of bovril embedded itself quietly there without damage, and a tin of Bath Oliver biscuits beat a fierce tattoo on one of corned beef. Innumerable dried apricots from the burst package flew about like shrapnel, and tapped at the tins. A jar of prunes, breaking its fall on the flour, rolled merrily out into the middle of the floor.

  The din was succeeded by complete silence. The Padre had said “What ho, i’ fegs?” during the tumult, but his voice had been drowned by the rattling of the dried apricots. The Member of the Order of the British Empire stepped free of the provisions that bumped round her, and examined them through her glasses. Diva crammed the last jumble into her mouth and disposed of it with the utmost rapidity. The birthday of her life had come, as Miss Rossetti said.

  “Dear Elizabeth!” she exclaimed. “What a disaster! All your little stores in case of the coal strike. Let me help to pick them up. I do not think anything is broken. Isn’t that lucky?”

  Evie hurried to the spot.

  “Such a quantity of good things,” she said rapidly under her breath. “Tinned meats and bovril and prunes, and ever so many apricots. Let me pick them all up, and with a little dusting… Why, what a big cupboard, and such a quantity of good things.”

  Miss Mapp had certainly struck a streak of embarrassments. What with naked Mr. Hopkins, and Janet’s frock and this unveiling of her hoard, life seemed at the moment really to consist of nothing else than beastly situations. How on earth that catch of the door had come undone, she had no idea, but much as she would have liked to suspect foul play from somebody, she was bound to conclude that Mrs. Poppit with her prying hands had accidentally pressed it. It was like Diva, of course, to break the silence with odious allusions to hoarding, and bitterly she wished that she had not started the topic the other day, but had been content to lay in her stores without so pointedly affirming that she was doing nothing of the kind. But this was no time for vain laments, and restraining a natural impulse to scratch and beat Mrs. Poppit, she exhibited an admirable inventiveness and composure. Though she knew it would deceive nobody, everybody had to pretend he was deceived.

  “Oh, my poor little Christmas presents for your needy parishioners, Padre,” she said. “You’ve seen them before you were meant to, and you must forget all about them. And so little harm done, just an apricot or two. Withers will pick them all up, so let us get to our bridge.”

  Withers entered the room at this moment to clear away tea, and Miss Mapp explained it all over again.

  “All our little Christmas presents have come tumbling out, Withers,” she said. “Will you put as many as you can back in the cupboard and take the rest indoors? Don’t tread on the apricots.”

  It was difficult to avoid doing this, as the apricots were everywhere, and their colour on the brown carpet was wonderfully protective. Miss Mapp herself had already stepped on two, and their adhesive stickiness was hard to get rid of. In fact, for the next few minutes the coal-shovel was in strong request for their removal from the soles of shoes, and the fender was littered with their squashed remains… The party generally was distinctly thoughtful as it sorted itself out into two tables, for every single member of it was trying to assimilate the amazing proposition that Miss Mapp had, half-way through September, loaded her cupboard with Christmas presents on a scale that staggered belief. The feat required thought: it required a faith so childlike as to verge on the imbecile. Conversation during deals had an awkward tendency towards discussion of the coal strike. As often as it drifted there the subject was changed very abruptly, just as if there was some occult reason for not speaking of so natural a topic. It concerned everybody, but it was rightly felt to concern Miss Mapp the most…

  CHAPTER V.

  It was the Major’s turn to entertain his friend, and by half-past nine, on a certain squally October evening, he and Puffin were seated by the fire in the diary-room, while the rain volleyed at the windows and occasional puffs of stinging smoke were driven down the chimney by the gale that squealed and buffeted round the house. Puffin, by way of keeping up the comedy of Roman roads, had brought a map of the district across from his house, but the more essential part of his equipment for this studious evening was a bottle of whisky. Originally the host had provided whisky for himself and his guest at these pleasant chats, but there were undeniable objections to this plan, because the guest always proved unusually thirsty, which tempted his host to keep pace with him, while if they both drank at their own expense, the causes of economy and abstemiousness had a better chance. Also, while the Major took his drinks short and strong in a small tumbler, Puffin enriched his with lemons and sugar in a large one, so that nobody could really tell if equality as well as fraternity was realized. But if each brought his own bottle…

  It had been a trying day, and the Major was very lame. A drenching storm had come up during their golf, while they were far from the club-house, and Puffin, being three up, had very naturally refused to accede to his opponent’s suggestion to call the match off. He was perfectly willing to be paid his half-crown and go home, but Major Flint, remembering that Puffin’s game usually went to pieces if it rained, had rejected this proposal with the scorn that it deserved. There had been other disagreeable incidents as well. His driver, slippery from rain, had flown out of the Major’s hands on the twelfth tee, and had “shot like a streamer of the northern morn,” and landed in a pool of brackish water left by an unusually high tide. The ball had gone into another pool nearer the tee. The ground was greasy with moisture, and three holes further on Puffin had fallen flat on his face instead of lashing his fifth shot home on to the green, as he had intended. They had given each other stimies, and each had holed his opponent’s ball by mistake; they had wrangled over the correct procedure if you lay in a rabbit-scrape or on the tram lines; the Major had lost a new ball; there was a mushroom on one of the greens between Puffin’s ball and the hole… All these untoward incidents had come crowding in together, and from the Major’s point of view, the worst of them all had been the collective incident that Puffin, so far from being put off by the rain, had, in spite of mushroom and falling down, played with a steadiness of which he was usually quite incapable. Consequently Major Flint was lame and his wound troubled him, while Puffin, in spite of his obvious reasons for complacency, was growing irritated with his companion’s ill-temper, and was half blinded by wood-smoke.

  He wiped his streaming eyes.

  “You should get your chimney swept,” he observed.

  Major Flint had put his handkerchief over his face to keep the wood-smoke out of his eyes. He blew it off with a loud, indignant puff.

  “Oh! Ah! Indeed!” he said.

  Puffin was rather taken aback by the violence of these interjections; they dripped with angry sarcasm.

  “Oh, well! No offence,” he said.

  “A man,” said the Major impersonally, “makes an offensive remark, and says ‘No offence.’ If your own fireside suits you better than mine, Captain Puffin, all I can say is that you’re at liberty to enjoy it!”

  This was all rather irregular: they had indulged in a good stiff breeze this afternoon, and it was too early to ruffle the calm again. Puffin plucked and proffered an olive-branch.

  “There’s your handkerchief,” he said, picking it up. “Now let’s have one of our comfortable talks. Hot glass of grog and a chat over the fire: that’s the best thing after such a wetting as we got this afternoon. I’ll take a slice of lemon, if you’ll be so good as to give it me, and a lump of sugar.”

  The Major got up and limped to his cupboard. It struck him precisely at that moment that Puffin scored considerably over lemons and sugar, because he was supplied with them gratis every other night; whereas he himself, when Puffin’s guest, took nothing off his host but hot water. He determined to ask for some biscuits, anyhow, to-morrow…

  �
��I hardly know whether there’s a lemon left,” he grumbled. “I must lay in a store of lemons. As for sugar — —”

  Puffin chose to disregard this suggestion.

  “Amusing incident the other day,” he said brightly, “when Miss Mapp’s cupboard door flew open. The old lady didn’t like it. Don’t suppose the poor of the parish will see much of that corned beef.”

  The Major became dignified.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “When an esteemed friend like Miss Elizabeth tells me that certain provisions are destined for the poor of the parish, I take it that her statement is correct. I expect others of my friends, while they are in my presence, to do the same. I have the honour to give you a lemon, Captain Puffin, and a slice of sugar. I should say a lump of sugar. Pray make yourself comfortable.”

  This dignified and lofty mood was often one of the after-effects of an unsuccessful game of golf. It generally yielded quite quickly to a little stimulant. Puffin filled his glass from the bottle and the kettle, while his friend put his handkerchief again over his face.

  “Well, I shall just have my grog before I turn in,” he observed, according to custom. “Aren’t you going to join me, Major?”

  “Presently, sir,” said the Major.

  Puffin knocked out the consumed cinders in his pipe against the edge of the fender. Major Flint apparently was waiting for this, for he withdrew his handkerchief and closely watched the process. A minute piece of ash fell from Puffin’s pipe on to the hearthrug, and he jumped to his feet and removed it very carefully with the shovel.