Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Don’t be so unkind,” said Adele. “Besides, you’ll meet her down at my house only a few days afterwards, and it will be awkward. Everybody else will have been.”

  “Well, then she can pretend she has been exclusive,” said Marcia snappily, “and she’ll like that. . . .”

  The rumours solidified into fact, and soon Lucia was forced to the dreadful conclusion that Marcia’s ball was to take place without her. That was an intolerable thought, and she gave Marcia one more chance by ringing her up and inviting her to dinner on that night (so as to remind her she knew nothing about the ball), but Marcia’s stony voice replied that most unfortunately she had a few people to dinner herself. Wherever she went (and where now did Lucia not go?) she heard talk of the ball, and the plethora of Princes and Princesses that were to attend it.

  For a moment the thought of Princesses lightened the depression of this topic. Princess Isabel was rather seriously ill with influenza, so Lucia, driving down Park Lane, thought it would not be amiss to call and enquire how she was, for she had noticed that sometimes the papers recorded the names of enquirers. She did not any longer care in the least how Princess Isabel was; whether she died or recovered was a matter of complete indifference to her in her present embittered frame of mind, for the Princess had not taken the smallest notice of her all these weeks. However, there was the front-door open, for there were other enquirers on the threshold, and Lucia joined them. She presented her card, and asked in a trembling voice what news there was, and was told that the Princess was no better. Lucia bowed her head in resignation, and then, after faltering a moment in her walk, pulled herself together, and with a firmer step went back to her motor.

  After this interlude her mind returned to the terrible topic. She was due at a drawing-room meeting at Sophy Alingsby’s house to hear a lecture on psycho-analysis, and she really hardly felt up to it. But there would certainly be a quantity of interesting people there, and the lecture itself might possibly be of interest, and so before long she found herself in the black dining-room, which had been cleared for the purpose. With the self-effacing instincts of the English the audience had left the front row chairs completely unoccupied, and she got a very good place. The lecture had just begun, and so her entry was not unmarked. Stephen was there, and as she seated herself, she nodded to him, and patted the empty chair by her side with a beckoning gesture. Her lover, therefore, sidled up to her and took it.

  Lucia whistled her thoughts away from such ephemeral and frivolous subjects as dances, and tried to give Professor Bonstetter her attention. She felt that she had been living a very hectic life lately; the world and its empty vanities had been too much with her, and she needed some intellectual tonic. She had seen no pictures lately, except Bobbie (or was it Bertie?) Alton’s, she had heard no music, she had not touched the piano herself for weeks, she had read no books, and at the most had skimmed the reviews of such as had lately appeared in order to be up to date and be able to reproduce a short but striking criticism or two if the talk became literary. She must not let the mere froth of living entirely conceal by its winking headiness of foam the true beverage below it. There was Sophy, with her hair over her eyes and her chin in her hand, dressed in a faded rainbow, weird beyond description, but rapt in concentration, while she herself was letting the notion of a dance to which she had not been asked and was clearly not to be asked, drive like a mist between her and these cosmic facts about dreams and the unconscious self. How curious that if you dreamed about boiled rabbit, it meant that sometime in early childhood you had been kissed by a poacher in a railway-carriage, and had forgotten all about it! What a magnificent subject for excited research psycho-analysis would have been in those keen intellectual days at Riseholme. . . . She thought of them now with a vague yearning for their simplicity and absorbing earnestness; of the hours she had spent with Georgie over piano-duets, of Daisy Quantock’s ouija-board and planchette, of the museum with its mittens. Riseholme presented itself now as an abode of sweet peace, where there were no disappointments or heart-burnings, for sooner or later she had always managed to assert her will and constitute herself priestess of the current interests. . . . Suddenly the solution of her present difficulty flashed upon her. Riseholme. She would go to Riseholme: that would explain her absence from Marcia’s stupid ball.

  The lecture came to an end, and with others she buzzed for a little while round Professor Bonstetter, and had a few words with her hostess.

  “Too interesting: marvellous, was it not, dear Sophy? Boiled rabbit! How curious! And the outcropping of the unconscious in dreams. Explains so much about phobias: people who can’t go in the tube. So pleased to have heard it. Ah, there’s Aggie. Aggie darling! What a treat, wasn’t it? Such a refreshment from our bustlings and runnings-about to get back into origins. I’ve got to fly, but I couldn’t miss this. Dreadful overlapping all this afternoon, and poor Princess Isabel is no better. I just called on my way here, but I wasn’t allowed to see her. Stephen, where is Stephen? See if my motor is there, dear. Au revoir! dear Sophy. We must meet again very soon. Are you going to Adele’s next week? No? How tiresome! Wonderful lecture! Calming!”

  Lucia edged herself out of the room with these very hurried greetings, for she was really eager to get home. She found Pepino there, having tea peacefully all by himself, and sank exhausted in a chair.

  “Give me a cup of tea, strong tea, Pepino,” she said. “I’ve been racketing about all day, and I feel done for. How I shall get through these next two or three days I really don’t know. And London is stifling. You look worn out too, my dear.”

  Pepino acknowledged the truth of this. He had hardly had time even to go to his club this last day or two, and had been reflecting on the enormous strength of the weaker sex. But for Lucia to confess herself done for was a portentous thing: he could not remember such a thing happening before.

  “Well, there are not many more days of it,” he said. “Three more this week, and then Lady Brixton’s party.”

  He gave several loud sneezes.

  “Not a cold?” asked Lucia.

  “Something extraordinarily like one,” said he.

  Lucia became suddenly alert again. She was sorry for Pepino’s cold, but it gave her an admirable gambit for what she had made up her mind to do.

  “My dear, that’s enough,” she said. “I won’t have you flying about London with a bad cold coming on. I shall take you down to Riseholme to-morrow.”

  “Oh, but you can’t, my dear,” said he. “You’ve got your engagement-book full for the next three days.”

  “Oh, a lot of stupid things,” said she. “And really, I tell you quite honestly, I’m fairly worn out. It’ll do us both good to have a rest for a day or two. Now don’t make objections. Let us see what I’ve got to do.”

  The days were pretty full (though, alas, Thursday evening was deplorably empty) and Lucia had a brisk half-hour at the telephone. To those who had been bidden here, and to those to whom she had been bidden, she gave the same excuse, namely, that she had been advised (by herself) two or three days complete rest.

  She rang up The Hurst, to say that they were coming down to-morrow, and would bring the necessary attendants, she rang up Georgie (for she was not going to fall into that error again) and in a mixture of baby language and Italian, which he found very hard to understand, asked him to dine to-morrow night, and finally she scribbled a short paragraph to the leading morning papers to say that Mrs. Philip Lucas had been ordered to leave London for two or three days’ complete rest. She had hesitated a moment over the wording of that, for it was Pepino who was much more in need of rest than she, but it would have been rather ludicrous to say that Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lucas were in need of a complete rest. . . . These announcements she sent by hand so that there might be no miscarriage in their appearance to-morrow morning. And then, as an afterthought, she rang up Daisy Quantock and asked her and Robert to lunch to-morrow.

  She felt much happier. She would not be at the fell Marcia�
�s ball, because she was resting in the country.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  A few minutes before Lucia and Pepino drove off next morning from Brompton Square, Marcia observed Lucia’s announcement in the Morning Post. She was a good-natured woman, but she had been goaded, and now that Lucia could goad her no more for the present, she saw no objection to asking her to her ball. She thought of telephoning, but there was the chance that Lucia had not yet started, so she sent her a card instead, directing it to 25 Brompton Square, saying that she was At Home, dancing, to have the honour to meet a string of exalted personages. If she had telephoned, no one knows what would have happened, whether Daisy would have had any lunch that day or Georgie any dinner that night, and what excuse Lucia would have made to them. . . . Adele and Tony Limpsfield, the most adept of all the Luciaphils, subsequently argued the matter out with much heat, but never arrived at a solution that they felt was satisfactory. But then Marcia did not telephone. . . .

  The news that the two were coming down was, of course, all over Riseholme a few minutes after Lucia had rung Georgie up. He was in his study when the telephone bell rang, in the fawn-coloured Oxford trousers, which had been cut down from their monstrous proportions and fitted quite nicely, though there had been a sad waste of stuff. Robert Quantock, the wag who had danced a hornpipe when Georgie had appeared in the original voluminousness, was waggish again, when he saw the abbreviated garments, and à propos of nothing in particular had said “Home is the sailor, home from sea,” and that was the epitaph on the Oxford trousers.

  Georgie had been busy indoors this afternoon, for he had been attending to his hair, and it was not quite dry yet, and the smell of the auburn mixture still clung to it. But the telephone was a trunk-call, and, whether his hair was dry or not, it must be attended to. Since Lucia had disappeared after that week-end party, he had had a line from her once or twice, saying that they must really settle when he would come and spend a few days in London, but she had never descended to the sordid mention of dates.

  A trunk-call, as far as he knew, could only be Lucia or Olga, and one would be interesting and the other delightful. It proved to be the interesting one, and though rather difficult to understand because of the aforesaid mixture of baby-talk and Italian, it certainly conveyed the gist of the originator’s intention.

  “Me so tired,” Lucia said, “and it will be divine to get to Riseholme again. So come to ‘ickle quiet din-din with me and Pepino to-morrow, Georgino. Shall want to hear all novelle—”

  “What?” said Georgie.

  “All the news,” said Lucia.

  Georgie sat in the draught — it was very hot to-day — until the auburn mixture dried. He knew that Daisy Quantock and Robert were playing clock-golf on the other side of his garden paling, for their voices had been very audible. Daisy had not been weeding much lately but had taken to golf, and since all the authorities said that matches were entirely won or lost on the putting-green, she with her usual wisdom devoted herself to the winning factor in the game. Presently she would learn to drive and approach and niblick and that sort of thing, and then they would see. . . . She wondered how good Miss Wethered really was.

  Georgie, now dry, tripped out into the garden and shouted “May I come in?” That meant, of course, might he look over the garden-paling and talk.

  Daisy missed a very short putt, owing to the interruption.

  “Yes, do,” she said icily. “I supposed you would give me that, Robert.”

  “You supposed wrong,” said Robert, who was now two up.

  Georgie stepped on a beautiful pansy.

  “Lucia’s coming down to-morrow,” he said.

  Daisy dropped her putter.

  “No!” she exclaimed.

  “And Pepino,” went on Georgie. “She says she’s very tired.”

  “All those duchesses,” said Daisy. Robert Alton’s cartoon had been reproduced in an illustrated weekly, but Riseholme up to this moment had been absolutely silent about it. It was beneath notice.

  “And she’s asked me to dinner to-morrow,” said Georgie.

  “So she’s not bringing down a party?” said Daisy.

  “I don’t know,” remarked Robert, “if you are going on putting, or if you give me the match.”

  “Pouf!” said Daisy, just like that. “But tired, Georgie? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Georgie, “but that’s what she said.”

  “It means something else,” said Daisy, “I can’t tell you what, but it doesn’t mean that. I suppose you’ve said you’re engaged.”

  “No I haven’t,” said Georgie.

  De Vere came out from the house. In this dry weather her heels made no indentations on the lawn.

  “Trunk-call, ma’am,” she said to Daisy.

  “These tiresome interruptions,” said Daisy, hurrying indoors with great alacrity.

  Georgie lingered. He longed to know what the trunk-call was, and was determined to remain with his head on the top of the paling till Daisy came back. So he made conversation.

  “Your lawn is better than mine,” he said pleasantly to Robert.

  Robert was cross at this delay.

  “That’s not saying much,” he observed.

  “I can’t say any more,” said Georgie, rather nettled. “And there’s the leather-jacket grub I see has begun on yours. I daresay there won’t be a blade of grass left presently.”

  Robert changed the conversation: there were bare patches. “The Museum insurance,” he said. “I got the fire-policy this morning. The contents are the property of the four trustees, me and you and Daisy and Mrs. Boucher. The building is Colonel Boucher’s, and that’s insured separately. If you had a spark of enterprise about you, you would take a match, set light to the mittens, and hope for the best.”

  “You’re very tarsome and cross,” said Georgie. “I should like to take a match and set light to you.”

  Georgie hated rude conversations like this, but when Robert was in such a mood, it was best to be playful. He did not mean, in any case, to cease leaning over the garden paling till Daisy came back from her trunk-call.

  “Beyond the mittens,” began Robert, “and, of course, those three sketches of yours, which I daresay are masterpieces—”

  Daisy bowled out of the dining-room and came with such speed down the steps that she nearly fell into the circular bed where the broccoli had been. (The mignonette there was poorish.)

  “At half-past one or two,” said she, bursting with the news and at the same time unable to suppress her gift for withering sarcasm. “Lunch to-morrow. Just a picnic, you know, as soon as she happens to arrive. So kind of her. More notice than she took of me last time.”

  “Lucia?” asked Georgie.

  “Yes. Let me see, I was putting, wasn’t I?”

  “If you call it putting,” said Robert. He was not often two up and he made the most of it.

  “So I suppose you said you were engaged,” said Georgie.

  Daisy did not trouble to reply at all. She merely went on putting. That was the way to deal with inquisitive questions.

  This news, therefore, was very soon all over Riseholme, and next morning it was supplemented by the amazing announcement in The Times, Morning Post, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail that Mrs. Philip Lucas had left London for two or three days’ complete rest. It sounded incredible to Riseholme, but of course it might be true and, as Daisy had said, that the duchesses had been too much for her. (This was nearer the mark than the sarcastic Daisy had known, for it was absolutely and literally true that one Duchess had been too much for her. . . .) In any case, Lucia was coming back to them again, and though Riseholme was still a little dignified and reticent, Georgie’s acceptance of his dinner-invitation, and Daisy’s of her lunch invitation, were symptomatic of Riseholme’s feelings. Lucia had foully deserted them, she had been down here only once since that fatal accession to fortune, and on that occasion had evidently intended to see nothing of her old friends while that Yahoo
party (“Yahoo” was the only word for Mrs. Alingsby) was with her; she had laughed at their Museum, she had courted the vulgar publicity of the press to record her movements in London, but Riseholme was really perfectly willing to forget and forgive if she behaved properly now. For, though no one would have confessed it, they missed her more and more. In spite of all her bullying monarchical ways, she had initiative, and though the excitement of the Museum and the Sagas from Abfou had kept them going for a while, it was really in relation to Lucia that these enterprises had been interesting. Since then, too, Abfou had been full of vain repetitions, and no one could go on being excited by his denunciation of Lucia as a snob, indefinitely. Lucia had personality, and if she had been here and had taken to golf Riseholme would have been thrilled at her skill, and have exulted over her want of it, whereas Daisy’s wonderful scores at clock-golf (she was off her game to-day) produced no real interest. Degrading, too, as were the records of Lucia’s movements in the columns of Hermione, Riseholme had been thrilled (though disgusted) by them, because they were about Lucia, and though she was coming down now for complete rest (whatever that might mean), the mere fact of her being here would make things hum. This time too she had behaved properly (perhaps she had learned wisdom) and had announced her coming, and asked old friends in.

  Forgiveness, therefore, and excitement were the prevalent emotions in the morning parliament on the Green next day. Mrs. Boucher alone expressed grave doubts on the situation.

  “I don’t believe she’s ill,” she said. “If she’s ill, I shall be very sorry, but I don’t believe it. If she is, Mr. Georgie, I’m all for accepting her gift of the spit to the Museum, for it would be unkind not to. You can write and say that the Committee have reconsidered it and would be very glad to have it. But let’s wait to see if she’s ill first. In fact, wait to see if she’s coming at all, first.”