Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “No, that’s by Schumann,” said Georgie, who was nettled by her tone, though he guessed what she was suffering.

  Lucia knew he was right, but had to uphold her own unfortunate mistake.

  “Schubert, I think,” she said. “Not that it matters. And so, as dear old Pepys said, and so to bed?”

  Georgie was certainly enjoying himself.

  “Oh no, we didn’t go to bed till terribly late,” he said. “But you would have hated to be there, for what we did next. We turned on the gramophone—”

  Lucia gave a little wince. Her views about gramophones as being a profane parody of music, were well known.

  “Yes, I should have run away then,” she said.

  “We turned on the gramophone and danced!” said Georgie firmly.

  This was the worst she had heard yet. Again she pictured what yesterday evening might have been. The idea of having popped in with her party after dinner, to hear Olga sing, and then dance impromptu with a prima-donna and a princess. . . . It was agonising: it was intolerable.

  She gave a dreadful little titter.

  “How very droll!” she said. “I can hardly imagine it. Mrs. Boucher in her bath-chair must have been an unwieldy partner, Georgie. Are you not very stiff this morning?”

  “No, Mrs. Boucher didn’t dance,” said Georgie with fearful literalness. “She looked on and wound up the gramophone. Just we four danced: Olga and the Princess and Colonel Boucher and I.”

  Lucia made a great effort with herself. She knew quite well that Georgie knew how she would have given anything to have brought her party across, and it only made matters worse (if they could be made worse) to be sarcastic about it and pretend to find it all ridiculous. Olga certainly had left her and her friends alone, just as she herself had left Riseholme alone, in this matter of her week-end party. Yet it was unwise to be withering about Colonel Boucher’s dancing. She had made it clear that she was busy with her party, and but for this unfortunate accident of Olga’s coming down, nothing else could have happened in Riseholme that day except by her dispensing. It was unfortunate, but it must be lived down, and if dear old Riseholme was offended with her, Riseholme must be propitiated.

  “Great fun it must have been,” she said. “How delicious a little impromptu thing like that is! And singing too: well, you had a nice evening, Georgie. And now let us make some delicious little plan for to-day. Pop in presently and have ‘ickle music and bit of lunch.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve just promised to lunch with Daisy,” said he.

  This again was rather ominous, for there could be no doubt that Daisy, having said she was engaged, had popped in here to effect an engagement.

  “How gay!” said Lucia. “Come and dine this evening then! Really, Georgie, you are busier than any of us in London.”

  “Too tarsome,” said Georgie, “because Olga’s coming in here.”

  “And the Princess?” asked Lucia before she could stop herself.

  “No, she went away this morning,” said Georgie.

  That was something, anyhow, thought Lucia. One distinguished person had gone away from Riseholme. She waited, in slowly diminishing confidence, for Georgie to ask her to dine with him instead. Perhaps he would ask Pepino too, but if not, Pepino would be quite happy with his telescope and his cross-words all by himself. But it was odd and distasteful to wait to be asked to dinner by anybody in Riseholme instead of everyone wanting to be asked by her.

  “She went away by the ten thirty,” said Georgie, after an awful pause.

  Lucia had already learned certain lessons in London. If you get a snub — and this seemed very like a snub — the only possible course was to be unaware of it. So, though the thought of being snubbed by Georgie nearly made her swoon, she was unaware of it.

  “Such a good train,” she said, magnificently disregarding the well-known fact that it stopped at every station, and crawled in between.

  “Excellent,” said Georgie with conviction. He had not the slightest intention of asking Lucia to dine, for he wanted his tête-à-tête with Olga. There would be such a lot to talk over, and besides it would be tiresome to have Lucia there, for she would be sure to gabble away about her wonderful life in London, and her music-room and her Chippendale chairs, and generally to lay down the law. She must be punished too, for her loathsome conduct in disregarding her old friends when she had her party from London, and be made to learn that her old friends were being much smarter than she was.

  Lucia kept her end up nobly.

  “Well, Georgie, I must trot away,” she said. “Such a lot of people to see. Look in, if you’ve got a spare minute. I’m off again to-morrow. Such a whirl of things in London this week.”

  Lucia, instead of proceeding to see lots of people, went back to her house and saw Pepino. He was sitting in the garden in very old clothes, smoking a pipe, and thoroughly enjoying the complete absence of anything to do. He was aware that officially he loved the bustle of London, but it was extremely pleasant to sit in his garden and smoke a pipe, and above all to be rid of those rather hectic people who had talked quite incessantly from morning till night all Sunday. He had given up the cross-word, and was thinking over the material for a sonnet on Tranquillity, when Lucia came out to him.

  “I was wondering, Pepino,” she said, “if it would not be pleasanter to go up to town this afternoon. We should get the cool of the evening for our drive, and really, now all our guests have gone, and we are going to-morrow, these hours will be rather tedious. We are spoilt, caro, you and I, by our full life up there, where any moment the telephone bell may ring with some delightful invitation. Of course in August we will be here, and settle down to our quaint old life again, but these little odds and ends of time, you know.”

  Pepino was reasonably astonished. Half an hour ago Lucia had set out, burning with enthusiasm to pick up the ‘old threads,’ and now all she seemed to want to do was to drop the old threads as quickly as possible. Though he knew himself to be incapable of following the swift and antic movements of Lucia’s mind, he was capable of putting two and two together. He had been faintly conscious all yesterday that matters were not going precisely as Lucia wished, and knew that her efforts to entice Olga and her guest to the house had been as barren as a fig-tree, but there must have been something more than that. Though not an imaginative man (except in thinking that words rhymed when they did not), it occurred to him that Riseholme was irritated with Lucia, and was indicating it in some unusual manner.

  “Why, my dear, I thought you were going to have people in to lunch and dinner,” he said, “and see about sending the spit to the Museum, and be tremendously busy all day.”

  Lucia pulled herself together. She had a momentary impulse to confide in Pepino and tell him all the ominous happenings of the last hour, how Daisy had said she was engaged for lunch and Mrs. Boucher had friends to lunch, and Georgie had Olga to dinner and had not asked her, and how the munificent gift of the spit was to be considered by the Museum committee before they accepted it. But to have done that would be to acknowledge not one snub but many snubs, which was contrary to the whole principle of successful attainment. Never must she confess, even to Pepino, that the wheels of her chariot seemed to drive heavily, or that Riseholme was not at the moment agape to receive the signs of her favour. She must not even confess it to herself, and she made a rapid and complete volte face.

  “It shall be as you like, caro,” she said. “You would prefer to spend a quiet day here, so you shall. As for me, you’ve never known me yet otherwise than busy, have you? I have a stack of letters to write, and there’s my piano looking, oh, so reproachfully at me, for I haven’t touched the dear keys since I came, and I must just glance through ‘Henry VIII,’ as we’re going to see it to-morrow. I shall be busy enough, and you will have your day in the sun and the air. I only thought you might prefer to run up to town to-day, instead of waiting till to-morrow. Now don’t keep me chatting here any longer.”

  Lucia proved her quality on t
hat dismal day. She played her piano with all her usual concentration, she read ‘Henry VIII,’ she wrote her letters, and it was not till the Evening Gazette came in that she allowed herself a moment’s relaxation. Hurriedly she turned the pages, stopping neither for cross-word nor record of international interests, till she came to Hermione’s column. She had feared (and with a gasp of relief she saw how unfounded her fears had been) that Hermione would have devoted his picturesque pen to Olga and the Princess, and given her and her party only the fag-end of his last paragraph, but she had disquieted herself in vain. Olga had taken no notice of him, and now (what could be fairer?) he took no notice of Olga. He just mentioned that she had a ‘pretty little cottage’ at Riseholme, where she came occasionally for week-ends, and there were three long sumptuous paragraphs about The Hurst, and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lucas who had Lord Limpsfield and the wife of the member, Mrs. Garroby-Ashton, and Mrs. Alingsby staying with them. Lady Ambermere and her party from the Hall had come to tea, and it was all glorious and distinguished. Hermione had proved himself a true friend, and there was not a word about Olga and the Princess going to lunch with Georgie, or about Daisy and her absurd weedj. . . . Lucia read the luscious lines through twice, and then, as she often did, sent her copy across to Georgie, in order to help him to readjust values. Almost simultaneously Daisy sent de Vere across to him with her copy, and Mrs. Boucher did the same, calling attention to the obnoxious paragraphs with blue and red pencil respectively, and a great many exclamation marks in both cases.

  Riseholme settled back into its strenuous life again when Lucia departed next morning to resume her vapid existence in London. It was not annoyed with her any more, because it had ‘larned’ her, and was quite prepared to welcome her back if (and when) she returned in a proper spirit and behaved herself suitably. Moreover, even with its own perennial interests to attend to, it privately missed the old Lucia, who gave them a lead in everything, even though she domineered, and was absurd, and pretended to know all about everything, and put her finger into every pie within reach. But it did not miss the new shingled Lucia, the one who had come down with a party of fresh friends, and had laughed at the Museum, and had neglected her old friends altogether, till she found out that Olga and a Princess were in the place: the less seen of her the better. It was considered also that she had remained down here this extra day in order to propitiate those whom she had treated as pariahs, and condescend to take notice of them again, and if there was one thing that Riseholme could not stand, and did not mean to stand from anybody, it was condescension. It was therefore perfectly correct for Daisy and Mrs. Boucher to say they were engaged for lunch, and for Georgie to decline to ask her to dinner. . . . These three formed the committee of the Museum, and they met that morning to audit the accounts for the week and discuss any other business connected or unconnected with their office. There was not, of course, with so small and intimate a body, any need to have a chairman, and they all rapped the table when they wanted to be listened to.

  Mrs. Boucher was greedily counting the shillings which had been taken from the till, while Georgie counted the counterfoils of the tickets.

  “A hundred and twenty-three,” he said. “That’s nearly the best week we’ve had yet.”

  “And fifteen and four is nineteen,” said Mrs. Boucher, “and four is twenty-three which makes exactly six pounds three shillings. Well, I do call that good. And I hear we’ve had a wonderful bequest made. Most generous of our dear Olga. I think she ought not only to be thanked, but asked to join the committee. I always said—”

  Daisy rapped the table.

  “Abfou said just the same,” she interrupted. “I had a sitting this morning, and he kept writing ‘committee.’ I brought the paper along with me, because I was going to propose that myself. But there’s another thing first, and that’s about Insurance. Robert told me he was insuring the building and its contents separately for a thousand pounds each. We shall have to pay a premium, of course. Oh, here’s Abfou’s message. ‘Committee,’ you see ‘committee’ written three times. I feel quite sure he meant Olga.”

  “He spells it with only one ‘m,’” said Georgie, “but I expect he means that. There’s one bit of business that comes before that, for I have been offered another object for the Museum, and I said I would refer the offer to the Committee before I accepted it. Lucia came to see me yesterday morning and asked—”

  “The Elizabethan spit,” said Mrs. Boucher. “I don’t see what we want with it, for my part, and if I had to say what I thought, I should thank her most politely, and beg that she would keep it herself. Most kind of her, I’m sure. Sorry to refuse, which was just what I said when she asked me to lunch yesterday. There’d have been legs of cold chickens of which her friends from London had eaten wings.”

  “She asked me too,” said Daisy, “and I said ‘no.’ Did she leave this morning?”

  “Yes, about half past ten,” said Georgie. “She wanted me to ask her to dinner last night.”

  Daisy had been writing ‘committee’ again and again on her blotting paper. It looked very odd with two ‘m’s’ and she would certainly have spelt it with one herself.

  “I think Abfou is right about the way to spell ‘committee,’” she said, “and even if he weren’t the meaning is clear enough. But about the insurance. Robert only advises insurance against fire, for he says no burglar in his senses—”

  Mrs. Boucher rapped the table.

  “But there wasn’t the manuscript of ‘Lucrezia’ then,” she said. “And I should think that any burglar whether in his senses or out of them would think that worth taking. If it was a question of insuring an Elizabethan spit—”

  “Well, I want to know what the committee wishes me to say about that,” said Georgie. “Oh, by the way, when we have a new edition of the catalogue, we must bring it up to date. There’ll be the manuscript of ‘Lucrezia.’”

  “And if you ask me,” said Mrs. Boucher, “she only wanted to get rid of the spit because it makes her chimney smoke. Tell her to get her chimney swept and keep the spit.”

  “There’s a portrait of her in the music-room,” said Georgie, “by Sigismund. It looks like nothing at all—”

  “Of course everybody has a right to have their hair shingled,” said Mrs. Boucher, “whatever their age, and there’s no law to prevent you.”

  Daisy rapped the table.

  “We were considering as to whether we should ask Mrs. Shuttleworth to join the committee,” she said.

  “She sang too, beautifully, on Sunday night,” said Georgie, “and what fun we had dancing. Oh, and Lucia asked for the Princess’s book to sign her name in, and the only book she had brought was a book of cross-word puzzles.”

  “No!” said both ladies together.

  “She did, because Olga’s parlour-maid told Foljambe, and—”

  “Well I never!” said Daisy. “That served her out. Did she write Lucia across, and Pepino down?”

  “I’m sure I’ve nothing to say against her,” said Mrs. Boucher, “but people usually get what they deserve. Certainly let us have the Museum insured if that’s the right thing to do, and as for asking Olga to be on the committee, why we settled that hours ago, and I have nothing more to say about the spit. Have the spit if you like, but I would no more think of insuring it, than insuring a cold in the head. I’ve as much use for one as the other. All that stuff too about the gracious chatelaine at The Hurst in the Evening Gazette! My husband read it, and what he said was ‘Faugh!’ Tush and faugh, was what he said.”

  Public opinion was beginning to boil up again about Lucia, and Georgie intervened.

  “I think that’s all the business before the meeting,” he said, “and so we accept the manuscript of’ ‘Lucrezia’ and decline the spit. I’m sure it was very kind of both the donors. And Olga’s to be asked to join the committee. Well, we have got through a good morning’s work.”

  Lucia meanwhile was driving back to London, where she intended to make herself a busy week.
There would be two nights at the opera, on the second of which Olga was singing in “The Valkyrie,” and so far from intending to depreciate her singing, or to refrain from going, by way of revenge for the slight she had suffered, she meant, even if Olga sang like a screech-owl and acted like a stick, to say there had never been so perfect a presentation of Brunhilde. She could not conceive doing anything so stupid as snubbing Olga because she had not come to her house or permitted her to enter Old Place: that would have been the height of folly.

  At present, she was (or hoped to be) on the upward road, and the upward road could only be climbed by industry and appreciation. When she got to the top, it would be a different matter, but just now it was an asset, a score to allude to dear Olga and the hoppings in and out that took place all day at Riseholme: she knew too, a good deal that Olga had done on Sunday and that would all be useful. “Always appreciate, always admire,” thought Lucia to herself as she woke Pepino up from a profound nap on their arrival at Brompton Square. “Be busy: work, work, work.”

  She knew already that there would be hard work in front of her before she got where she wanted to get, and she whisked off like a disturbing fly which impeded concentration the slight disappointment which her weekend had brought. If you meant to progress, you must never look back (the awful example of Lot’s wife!) and never, unless you are certain it is absolutely useless, kick down a ladder which has brought you anywhere, or might in the future bring you anywhere. Already she had learned a lesson about that, for if she had only told Georgie that she had been coming down for a weekend, and had bidden him to lunch and dinner and anything else he liked, he would certainly have got Olga to pop in at The Hurst, or have said that he couldn’t dine with Olga on that fateful Sunday night because he was dining with her, and then no doubt Olga would have asked them all to come in afterwards. It had been a mistake to kick Riseholme down, a woeful mistake, and she would never do such a thing again. It was a mistake also to be sarcastic about anybody till you were sure they could not help you, and who could be sure of that? Even poor dear Daisy with her ridiculous Abfou had proved such an attraction at Old Place, that Georgie had barely time to get back and dress for dinner, and a benignant Daisy instead of a militant and malignant Daisy would have helped. Everything helps, thought Lucia, as she snatched up the tablets which stood by the telephone and recorded the ringings up that had taken place in her absence.