Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Whatever might be the state of affairs at Tilling, Riseholme during this month of July boiled and seethed with excitements. It was just like old times, and all circled, as of old, round Lucia. She had taken the plunge; she had come back (though just now for so brief a space before her entering upon Mallards) into her native centrality. Gradually, and in increasing areas, grey and white and violet invaded the unrelieved black in which she had spent the year of her widowhood; one day she wore a white belt, another there were grey panels in her skirt, another her garden-hat had a violet riband on it. Even Georgie, who had a great eye for female attire, could not accurately follow these cumulative changes: he could not be sure whether she had worn a grey cloak before, or whether she had had white gloves in church last Sunday. Then, instead of letting her hair droop in slack and mournful braids over her ears, it resumed its old polished and corrugated appearance, and on her pale cheeks (ashen with grief) there bloomed a little brown rouge, which made her look as if she had been playing golf again, and her lips certainly were ruddier. It was all intensely exciting, a series of subtle changes at the end of which, by the middle of July, her epiphany in church without anything black about her, and with the bloom of her vitality quite restored, passed almost unremarked.

  These outward and visible signs were duly representative of what had taken place within. Time, the great healer, had visited her sick-room, laid his hand on her languid brow, and the results were truly astonishing. Lucia became as good as new, or as good as old. Mrs Antrobus and her tall daughters, Piggy and Goosie, Georgie and Daisy and her husband, greedy Robert, Colonel Boucher and his wife, and the rest were all bidden to dinner at the Hurst once more, and sometimes Lucia played to them the slow movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, and sometimes she instructed them in such elements of Contract Bridge as she had mastered during the day. She sketched, she played the organ in church in the absence of the organist who had measles, she sang a solo, ‘O for the wings of a Dove’ when he recovered and the leading chorister got chicken-pox, she had lessons in book-binding at ‘Ye Signe of ye Daffodille’, she sat in Perdita’s garden, not reading Shakespeare, but Pope’s Iliad, and murmured half-forgotten fragments of Greek irregular verbs as she went to sleep. She had a plan for visiting Athens in the spring (“the violet-crowned”, is not that a lovely epithet, Georgie?’) and in compliment to Queen Anne regaled her guests with rich thick chocolate. The hounds of spring were on the winter traces of her widowhood, and snapped up every fragment of it, and indeed spring seemed truly to have returned to her, so various and so multi-coloured were the blossoms that were unfolding. Never at all had Riseholme seen Lucia in finer artistic and intellectual fettle, and it was a long time since she had looked so gay. The world, or at any rate Riseholme, which at Riseholme came to much the same thing, had become her parish again.

  Georgie, worked to the bone with playing duets, with consulting Foljambe as to questions of linen and plate (for it appeared that Isabel Poppit, in pursuance of the simple life, slept between blankets in the back-yard, and ate uncooked vegetables out of a wooden bowl like a dog), with learning Vanderbilt conventions, with taking part in Royal processions across the green, with packing his bibelots and sending them to the bank, with sketching, so that he might be in good form when he began to paint at Tilling with a view to exhibiting in the Art Society, wondered what was the true source of these stupendous activities of Lucia’s, whether she was getting fit, getting in training, so to speak, for a campaign at Tilling. Somehow it seemed likely, for she would hardly think it worth while to run the affairs of Riseholme with such energy, when she was about to disappear from it for three months. Or was she intending to let Riseholme see how dreadfully flat everything would become when she left them? Very likely both these purposes were at work; it was like her to kill two birds with one stone. Indeed, she was perhaps killing three birds with one stone, for multifarious as were the interests in which she was engaged there was one, now looming large in Riseholme, namely the Elizabethan fête, of which she seemed strangely unconscious. Her drive, her powers of instilling her friends with her own fervour, never touched that: she did not seem to know that a fête was being contemplated at all, though now a day seldom passed without a procession of some sort crossing the green or a Morris-dance getting entangled with the choristers practising madrigals, or a crowd of soldiers and courtiers being assembled near the front entrance of the Ambermere Arms, while Daisy harangued them from a chair put on the top of a table, pausing occasionally because she forgot her words, or in order to allow them to throw up their hats and cry ‘God Save the Queen’s Grace’, ‘To hell with Spain’, and other suitable ejaculations. Daisy, occasionally now in full dress, ruff and pearls and all, came across to the gate of the Hurst, to wait for the procession to join her, and Lucia sitting in Perdita’s garden would talk to her about Tilling or the importance of being prudent if you were vulnerable at contract, apparently unaware that Daisy was dressed up at all. Once Lucia came out of the Ambermere Arms when Daisy was actually mounting the palfrey that drew the milk-cart for a full-dress rehearsal, and she seemed to be positively palfrey-blind. She merely said ‘Don’t forget that you and Robert are dining with me to-night. Half-past seven, so that we shall get a good evening’s bridge,’ and went on her way . . . Or she would be passing the pond on which the framework of the Golden Hind was already constructed, and on which Georgie was even then kneeling down to receive the accolade amid the faint cheers of Piggy and Goosie, and she just waved her hand to Georgie and said: ‘Musica after lunch, Georgie?’ She made no sarcastic comments to anybody, and did not know that they were doing anything out of the ordinary.

  Under this pointed unconsciousness of hers, a species of blight spread over the scheme to which Riseholme ought to have been devoting its most enthusiastic energies. The courtiers were late for rehearsals, they did not even remove their cigarettes when they bent to kiss the Queen’s hand, Piggy and Goosie made steps of Morris-dances when they ought to have been holding up Elizabeth’s train, and Georgie snatched up a cushion, when the accolade was imminent, to protect his shoulder. The choir-boys droned their way through madrigals, sucking peppermints, there was no life, no keenness about it all, because Lucia, who was used to inspire all Riseholme’s activities, was unaware that anything was going on.

  One morning when only a fortnight of July was still to run, Drake was engaged on his croquet-lawn tapping the balls about and trying to tame his white satin shoes which hurt terribly. From the garden next door came the familiar accents of the Queen’s speech to her troops.

  ‘And though I am only a weak woman,’ declaimed Daisy who was determined to go through the speech without referring to her book. ‘Though I am only a weak woman, a weak woman—’ she repeated.

  ‘Yet I have the heart of a Prince,’ shouted Drake with the friendly intention of prompting her.

  ‘Thank you, Georgie. Or ought it to be Princess, do you think?’

  ‘No: Prince,’ said Georgie.

  ‘Prince,’ cried Daisy. ‘Though I am only a weak woman, yet I have the heart of a Prince . . . Let me see . . . Prince.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Georgie,’ said Daisy in her ordinary voice. ‘Do stop your croquet a minute and come to the paling. I want to talk.’

  ‘I’m trying to get used to these shoes,’ said Georgie. ‘They hurt frightfully. I shall have to take them to Tilling and wear them there. Oh, I haven’t told you, Lady Brixton came down yesterday evening—’

  ‘I know that,’ said Daisy.

  ‘ — and she thinks that her brother will take my house for a couple of months, as long as I don’t leave any servants. He’ll be here for the fête, if he does, so I wonder if you could put me up. How’s Robert’s cold?’

  ‘Worse,’ she said. ‘I’m worse too. I can’t remember half of what I knew by heart a week ago. Isn’t there some memory-system?’

  ‘Lots, I believe,’ said Georgie. ‘But it’s rather late. They don’t improve your memory all
in a minute. I really think you had better read your speech to the troops, as if it was the opening of Parliament.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Daisy, taking off her ruff. ‘I’ll learn it if it costs me the last breath of blood in my body — I mean drop.’

  ‘Well it will be very awkward if you forget it all,’ said Georgie. ‘We can’t cheer nothing at all. Such a pity, because your voice carries perfectly now. I could hear you while I was breakfasting.’

  ‘And it’s not only that,’ said Daisy. ‘There’s no life in the thing. It doesn’t look as if it was happening.’

  ‘No, that’s true,’ said Georgie. ‘These tarsome shoes of mine are real enough, though!’

  ‘I begin to think we ought to have had a producer,’ said Daisy. ‘But it was so much finer to do it all ourselves, like — like Oberammergau. Does Lucia ever say anything about it? I think it’s too mean for words of her to take no interest in it.’

  ‘Well, you must remember that you asked her only to be my wife,’ said Georgie. ‘Naturally she wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘She ought to help us instead of going about as if we were all invisible,’ exclaimed Daisy.

  ‘My dear, she did offer to help you. At least, I told you ages ago, that I felt sure she would if you asked her to.’

  ‘I feel inclined to chuck the whole thing,’ said Daisy.

  ‘But you can’t. Masses of tickets have been sold. And who’s to pay for the Golden Hind and the roast sheep and all the costumes?’ asked Georgie. ‘Not to mention all our trouble. Why not ask her to help, if you want her to?’

  ‘Georgie, will you ask her?’ said Daisy.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Georgie very firmly. ‘You’ve been managing it from the first. It’s your show. If I were you, I would ask her at once. She’ll be over here in a few minutes, as we’re going to have a music. Pop in.’

  A melodious cry of ‘Georgino mio!’ resounded from the open window of Georgie’s drawing-room, and he hobbled away down the garden walk. Ever since that beautiful understanding they had arrived at, that both of them shrank, as from a cup of hemlock, from the idea of marriage, they had talked Italian or baby-language to a surprising extent from mere lightness of heart.

  ‘Me tummin’,’ he called. ‘‘Oo very good girl, Lucia. ‘Oo molto punctuale.’

  (He was not sure about that last word, nor was Lucia, but she understood it.)

  ‘Georgino! Che curiose scalpe!’ said Lucia, leaning out of the window.

  ‘Don’t be so cattiva. They are cattivo enough,’ said Georgie. ‘But Drake did have shoes exactly like these.’

  The mere mention of Drake naturally caused Lucia to talk about something else. She did not understand any allusion to Drake.

  ‘Now for a good practice,’ she said, as Georgie limped into the drawing-room. ‘Foljambe beamed at me. How happy it all is! I hope you said you were at home to nobody. Let us begin at once. Can you manage the sostenuto pedal in those odd shoes?’

  Foljambe entered.

  ‘Mrs Quantock, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Daisy darling,’ said Lucia effusively. ‘Come to hear our little practice? We must play our best, Georgino.’

  Daisy was still in queenly costume, except for the ruff. Lucia seemed as usual to be quite unconscious of it.

  ‘Lucia, before you begin—’ said Daisy.

  ‘So much better than interrupting,’ said Lucia. ‘Thank you, dear. Yes?’

  ‘About this fête. Oh, for gracious sake don’t go on seeming to know nothing about it. I tell you there is to be one. And it’s all nohow. Can’t you help us?’

  Lucia sprang from the music-stool. She had been waiting for this moment, not impatiently, but ready for it if it came, as she knew it must, without any scheming on her part. She had been watching from Perdita’s garden the straggling procession smoking cigarettes, the listless halberdiers not walking in step, the courtiers yawning in Her Majesty’s face, the languor and the looseness arising from the lack of an inspiring mind. The scene on the Golden Hind, and that of Elizabeth’s speech to her troops were equally familiar to her, for though she could not observe them from under her garden-hat close at hand, her husband had been fond of astronomy and there were telescopes great and small, which brought these scenes quite close. Moreover, she had that speech which poor Daisy found so elusive by heart. So easy to learn, just the sort of cheap bombast that Elizabeth would indulge in: she had found it in a small history of England, and had committed it to memory, just in case . . .

  ‘But I’ll willingly help you, dear Daisy,’ she said. ‘I seem to remember you told me something about it. You as Queen Elizabeth, was it not, a roast sheep on the Golden Hind, a speech to the troops, Morris-dances, bear-baiting, no, not bear-baiting. Isn’t it all going beautifully?’

  ‘No! It isn’t,’ said Daisy in a lamentable voice. ‘I want you to help us, will you? It’s all like dough.’

  Great was Lucia. There was no rubbing in: there was no hesitation, there was nothing but helpful sunny cordiality in response to this SOS.

  ‘How you all work me!’ she said, ‘but I’ll try to help you if I can. Georgie, we must put off our practice, and get to grips with all this, if the fête is to be a credit to Riseholme. Addio, caro Mozartino for the present. Now begin, Daisy, and tell me all the trouble.’

  For the next week Mozartino and the Symposium and Contract Bridge were non-existent and rehearsals went on all day. Lucia demonstrated to Daisy how to make her first appearance, and, when the trumpeters blew a fanfare, she came out of the door of the Hurst, and without the slightest hurry majestically marched down the crazy pavement. She did not fumble at the gate as Daisy always did, but with a swift imperious nod to Robert Quantock, which made him pause in the middle of a sneeze, she caused him to fly forward, open it, and kneel as she passed through. She made a wonderful curtsey to her lieges and motioned them to close up in front of her. And all this was done in the clothes of today, without a ruff or a pearl to help her.

  ‘Something like that, do you think, dear Daisy, for the start of the procession?’ she said to her. ‘Will you try it like that and see how it goes? And a little more briskness, gentlemen, from the halberdiers. Would you form in front of me now, while Mrs Quantock goes into the house . . . Ah, that has more snap, hasn’t it? Excellent. Quite like guardsmen. Piggy and Goosie, my dears, you must remember that you are Elizabethan Countesses. Very stately, please, and Countesses never giggle. Sweep two low curtsies, and while still down pick up the Queen’s train. You opened the gate very properly, Robert. Very nice indeed. Now may we have that all over again. Queen, please,’ she called to Daisy.

  Daisy came out of the house in all the panoply of Majesty, and with the idea of not hurrying came so slowly that her progress resembled that of a queen following a hearse. (‘A little quicker, dear,’ called Lucia encouragingly. ‘We’re all ready.’) Then she tripped over a piece of loose crazy pavement. Then she sneezed, for she had certainly caught Robert’s cold. Then she forgot to bow to her lieges, until they had closed up in procession in front of her, and then bobbed to their backs.

  ‘Hey ho, nonny, nonny,’ sang Lucia to start the chorus. ‘Off we go! Right, left — I beg your pardon, how stupid of me — Left, right. Crescendo, choir. Sing out, please. We’re being Merrie England. Capital!’

  Lucia walked by the side of the procession across the green, beating time with her parasol, full of encouragement and enthusiasm. Sometimes she ran on in front and observed their progress, sometimes she stood still to watch them go by.

  ‘Open out a little, halberdiers,’ she cried, ‘so that we can get a glimpse of the Queen from in front. Hey nonny! Hold that top G, choir-boys! Queen, dear, don’t attempt to keep step with the halberdiers. Much more royal to walk as you choose. The train a little higher, Piggy and Goosie. Hey nonny, nonny HEY!’

  She looked round as they got near the Golden Hind, to see if the cooks were basting the bolster that did duty for the sheep, and that Drake’s sailors were dancing their
hornpipes.

  ‘Dance, please, sailors,’ she shrieked. ‘Go on basting, cooks, until the procession stops, and then begins the chorus of sailors on the last “nonny Hey”. Cooks must join in, too, or we shan’t get enough body of sound. Open out, halberdiers, leave plenty of room for the Queen to come between you. Slowly, Elizabeth! “When the storm winds blow and the surges sweep.” Louder! Are you ready, Georgie? No; don’t come off the Golden Hind. You receive the Queen on the deck. A little faster, Elizabeth, the chorus will be over before you get here.’

  Lucia clapped her hands.

  ‘A moment, please,’ she said. ‘A wonderful scene. But just one suggestion. May I be Queen for a minute and show you the effect I want to get, dear Daisy? Let us go back, procession, please, twenty yards. Halberdiers still walking in front of Queen. Sailors’ chorus all over again. Off we go! Now, halberdiers, open out. Half right and left turn respectively. Two more steps and halt, making an avenue.’

  It was perfectly timed. Lucia moved forward up the avenue of halberdiers, and just as the last ‘Yo ho’ was yelled by cooks, courtiers and sailors, she stepped with indescribable majesty on to the deck of the Golden Hind. She stood there a moment quite still, and whispered to Georgie, ‘Kneel and kiss my hand, Georgie. Now, everybody together! “God save the Queen”. “Hurrah”. Hats in the air. Louder, louder! Now die away! There!’

  Lucia had been waving her own hat, and shrilly cheering herself, and now she again clapped her hands for attention, as she scrutinized the deck of the Golden Hind.

  ‘But I don’t see Drake’s wife,’ she said. ‘Drake’s wife, please.’

  Drake’s wife was certainly missing. She was also the grocer’s wife, and as she had only to come forward for one moment, curtsey and disappear, she was rather slack at her attendance of rehearsals.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Lucia. ‘I’ll take Drake’s wife, just for this rehearsal. Now we must have that over again. It’s one of the most important moments, this Queen’s entry on to the Golden Hind. We must make it rich in romance, in majesty, in spaciousness. Will the procession, please, go back, and do it over again?’