Works of E F Benson
Page 89
There followed that evening the third dinner-party when the Padre and wee wifie made the quartet. The Royce had called for him that day to take him to lunch in Porpoise Street (Lucia had seen it go by), and it was he who now introduced the subject of the proposed entertainment on behalf of the hospital, for he knew all about it and was ready to help in any way that Mistress Lucas might command. There were some Scottish stories which he would be happy to narrate, in order to fill up intervals between the tableaux, and he had ascertained that Miss Coles (dressed as usual as a boy) would give her most amusing parody of ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’, and that Mistress Diva said she thought that an orange or two might be procured. If not, a ripe tomato would serve the purpose. He would personally pledge himself for the services of the church choir to sing catches and glees and madrigals, whenever required. He suggested also that such members of the workhouse as were not bedridden might be entertained to tea, in which case the choir would sing grace before and after buns.
‘As to the expense of that, if you approve,’ he said, ‘put another baubee on the price of admission, and there’ll be none in Tilling to grudge the extra expense wi’ such entertainment as you and the other leddies will offer them.’
‘Dear me, how quickly it is all taking shape,’ said Lucia, finding that almost without effort on her part she had been drawn into the place of prime mover in all this, and that still a sort of conspiracy of silence prevailed with regard to Miss Mapp’s name, which hitherto had only been mentioned as a suitable provider of fruit for the refreshment department. ‘You must form a little committee, Padre, for putting all the arrangements in hand at once. There’s Mr Wyse who really thought of the idea, and you—’
‘And with yourself,’ broke in the Padre, ‘that will make three. That’s sufficient for any committee that is going to do its work without any argle-bargle.’
There flashed across Lucia’s mind a fleeting vision of what Elizabeth’s face would be like when she picked up, as she would no doubt do next morning, the news of all that was becoming so solid.
‘I think I had better not be on the committee,’ she said, quite convinced that they would insist on it. ‘It should consist of real Tillingites who take the lead among you in such things. I am only a visitor here. They will all say I want to push myself in.’
‘Ah, but we can’t get on wi’ out ye, Mistress Lucas,’ said the Padre. ‘You must consent to join us. An’ three, as I say, makes the perfect committee.’
Mrs Bartlett had been listening to all this with a look of ecstatic attention on her sharp but timid little face. Here she gave vent to a series of shrill minute squeaks which expressed a mouse-like merriment, quite unexplained by anything that had been actually said, but easily accounted for by what had not been said. She hastily drank a sip of water and assured Lucia that a crumb of something (she was eating a peach) had stuck in her throat and made her cough. Lucia rose when the peach was finished.
‘To-morrow we must start working in earnest,’ she said. ‘And to think that I planned to have a little holiday in Tilling! You and Mr Wyse are regular slave-drivers, Padre.’
Georgie waited behind that night after the others had gone, and bustled back to the garden-room after seeing them off.
‘My dear, it’s getting too exciting,’ he said. ‘But I wonder if you’re wise to join the committee.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Lucia, ‘but there really is no reason why I should refuse, because they won’t have Elizabeth. It’s not me, Georgie, who is keeping her out. But perhaps you’re right, and I think tomorrow I’ll send a line to the Padre and say that I am really too busy to be on the committee, and beg him to ask Elizabeth instead. It would be kinder. I can manage the whole thing just as well without being on the committee. She’ll hear all about the entertainment to-morrow morning, and know that she’s not going to be asked to do anything, except supply some fruit.’
‘She knows a good deal about it now,’ said Georgie. ‘She came to tea with me to-day.’
‘No! I didn’t know you had asked her.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Georgie. ‘She came.’
‘And what did she say about it?’
‘Not very much, but she’s thinking hard what to do. I could see that. I gave her the little sketch I made of the Landgate when we first came down here, and she wants me to send in another picture for the Tilling Art Exhibition. She wants you to send something too.’
‘Certainly she shall have my sketch of Mallards Cottage and the crooked chimney,’ said Lucia. ‘That will show good will. What else did she say?’
‘She’s getting up a jumble-sale in aid of the hospital,’ said Georgie. ‘She’s busy, too.’
‘Georgie, that’s copied from us.’
‘Of course it is; she wants to have a show of her own, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. And she knows all about your three dinner-parties.’
Lucia nodded. ‘That’s all right then,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask her to the next. We’ll have some duets that night, Georgie. Not bridge I think, for they all say she’s a perfect terror at cards. But it’s time to be kind to her.’
Lucia rose.
‘Georgie, it’s becoming a frightful rush already,’ she said. ‘This entertainment which they insist on my managing will make me very busy, but when one is appealed to like that, one can’t refuse. Then there’s my music, and sketching, and I haven’t begun to rub up my Greek . . . And don’t forget to send for your Drake clothes. Good night, my dear. I’ll call to you over the garden-paling to-morrow if anything happens.’
‘I feel as if it’s sure to,’ said Georgie with enthusiasm.
CHAPTER 5.
Lucia was writing letters in the window of the garden-room next morning. One, already finished, was to Adele Brixton asking her to send to Mallards the Queen Elizabeth costume for the tableaux: a second, also finished, was to the Padre, saying that she found she would not have time to attend committees for the hospital fête, and begging him to co-opt Miss Mapp. She would, however, do all in her power to help the scheme, and make any little suggestions that occurred to her. She added that the chance of getting fruit gratis for the refreshment department would be far brighter if the owner of it was on the board.
The third letter, firmly beginning ‘Dearest Liblib’ (and to be signed very large, LUCIA), asking her to dine in two days’ time, was not quite done when she saw dearest Liblib, with a fixed and awful smile, coming swiftly up the street. Lucia, sitting sideways to the window, could easily appear absorbed in her letter and unconscious of Elizabeth’s approach, but from beneath half-lowered eyelids she watched her with the intensest interest. She was slanting across the street now, making a bee-line for the door of Mallards (‘and if she tries to get in without ringing the bell, she’ll find the chain on the door,’ thought Lucia).
The abandoned woman, disdaining the bell, turned the handle and pushed. It did not yield to her intrusion, and she pushed more strongly. There was the sound of jingling metal, audible even in the garden-room, as the hasp that held the end of the chain gave way; the door flew open wide, and with a few swift and nimble steps she just saved herself from falling flat on the floor of the hall.
Lucia, pale with fury, laid down her pen and waited for the situation to develop. She hoped she would behave like a lady, but was quite sure it would be a firm sort of lady. Presently up the steps to the garden-room came that fairy tread, the door was opened an inch, and that odious voice said:
‘May I come in, dear?’
‘Certainly,’ said Lucia brightly.
‘Lulu dear,’ said Elizabeth, tripping across the room with little brisk steps. ‘First I must apologize: so humbly. Such a stupid accident. I tried to open your front door, and gave it a teeny little push and your servants had forgotten to take the chain down. I am afraid I broke something. The hasp must have been rusty.’
Lucia looked puzzled.
‘But didn’t Grosvenor come to open the door when you rang?’ she asked.
Lucia got up.
‘Let us first see what damage you have done,’ she said with an icy calmness, and marched straight out of the room, followed by Elizabeth. The sound of the explosion had brought Grosvenor out of the dining-room, and Lucia picked up the dangling hasp and examined it.
‘No, no sign of rust,’ she said. ‘Grosvenor, you must go down to the ironmonger and get them to come up and repair this at once. The chain must be made safer and you must remember always to put it on, day and night. If I am out, I will ring.’
‘So awfully sorry, dear Lulu,’ said Elizabeth, slightly cowed by this firm treatment. ‘I had no idea the chain could be up. We all keep our doors on the latch in Tilling. Quite a habit.’
‘I always used to in Riseholme,’ said Lucia. ‘Let us go back to the garden-room, and you will tell me what you came to talk about.’
‘Several things,’ said Elizabeth when they had settled themselves. ‘First, I am starting a little jumble-sale for the hospital, and I wanted to look out some old curtains and rugs, laid away in cupboards, to give to it. May I just go upstairs and downstairs and poke about to find them?’
‘By all means,’ said Lucia. ‘Grosvenor shall go round with you as soon as she has come back from the ironmonger’s.’
‘Thank you, dear,’ said Elizabeth, ‘though there’s no need to trouble Grosvenor. Then another thing. I persuaded Mr Georgie to send me a sketch for our picky exhibition. Promise me that you’ll send me one too. Wouldn’t be complete without something by you. How you get all you do into the day is beyond me; your sweet music, your sketching, and your dinner-parties every evening.’
Lucia readily promised, and Elizabeth then appeared to lose herself in reverie.
‘There is one more thing,’ she said at last. ‘I have heard a little gossip in the town both to-day and yesterday about a fête which it is proposed to give in my garden. I feel sure it is mere tittle-tattle, but I thought it would be better to come up here to know from you that there is no foundation for it.’
‘But I hope there is a great deal,’ said Lucia. ‘Some tableaux, some singing, in order to raise funds for the hospital. It would be so kind of you if you would supply the fruit for the refreshment booth from your garden. Apropos I should be so pleased to buy some of it every day myself. It would be fresher than if, as at present, it is taken down to the greengrocer and brought up again.’
‘Anything to oblige you, dear Lulu,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But that would be difficult to arrange. I have contracted to send all my garden-produce to Twistevant’s — such a quaint name, is it not? — for these months, and for the same reason I should be unable to supply this fête which I have heard spoken of. The fruit is no longer mine.’
Lucia had already made up her mind that, after this affair of the chain, nothing would induce her to propose that Elizabeth should take her place on the committee. She would cling to it through storm and tempest.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Perhaps then you could let us have some fruit from Diva’s garden, unless you have sold that also.’
Elizabeth came to the point, disregarding so futile a suggestion.
‘The fête itself, dear one,’ she said, ‘is what I must speak about. I cannot possibly permit it to take place in my garden. The rag-tag and bob-tail of Tilling passing through my hall and my sweet little sitting-room and spending the afternoon in my garden! All my carpets soiled and my flower-beds trampled on! And how do I know that they will not steal upstairs and filch what they can find?’
Lucia’s blood had begun to boil: nobody could say that she was preserving a benevolent neutrality. In consequence she presented an icy demeanour, and if her voice trembled at all, it was from excessive cold.
‘There will be no admission to the rooms in the house,’ she said. ‘I will lock all the doors, and I am sure that nobody in Tilling will be so ill bred as to attempt to force them open.’
That was a nasty one. Elizabeth recoiled for a moment from the shock, but rallied. She opened her mouth very wide to begin again, but Lucia got in first.
‘They will pass straight from the front door into the garden,’ she said, ‘where we undertake to entertain them, presenting their tickets of admission or paying at the door. As for the carpet in your sweet little sitting-room, there isn’t one. And I have too high an opinion of the manners of Tilling in general to suppose that they will trample on your flowerbeds.’
‘Perhaps you would like to hire a menagerie,’ said Elizabeth, completely losing her self-control, ‘and have an exhibition of tigers and sharks in the garden-room.’
‘No: I should particularly dislike it,’ said Lucia earnestly. ‘Half of the garden-room would have to be turned into a sea-water tank for the sharks and my piano would be flooded. And the rest would have to be full of horse-flesh for the tigers. A most ridiculous proposal, and I cannot entertain it.’
Elizabeth gave a dreadful gasp as if she was one of the sharks and the water had been forgotten. She adroitly changed the subject.
‘Then again, there’s the rumour — of course it’s only rumour — that there is some idea of entertaining such inmates of the workhouse as are not bedridden. Impossible.’
‘I fancy the Padre is arranging that,’ said Lucia. ‘For my part, I’m delighted to give them a little treat.’
‘And for my part,’ said Miss Mapp, rising (she had become Miss Mapp again in Lucia’s mind), ‘I will not have my little home-sanctuary invaded by the rag-tag—’
‘The tickets will be half a crown,’ interposed Lucia.
‘ — and bob-tail of Tilling,’ continued Miss Mapp.
‘As long as I am tenant here,’ said Lucia, ‘I shall ask here whom I please, and when I please, and — and how I please. Or do you wish me to send you a list of the friends I ask to dinner for your sanction?’
Miss Mapp, trembling very much, forced her lips to form the syllables:
‘But, dear Lulu—’
‘Dear Elizabeth, I must beg you not to call me Lulu,’ she said. ‘Such a detestable abbreviation—’
Grosvenor had appeared at the door of the garden-room.
‘Yes, Grosvenor, what is it?’ asked Lucia in precisely the same voice.
‘The ironmonger is here, ma’am,’ she said, ‘and he says that he’ll have to put in some rather large screws, as they’re pulled out—’
‘Whatever is necessary to make the door safe,’ said Lucia. ‘And Miss Mapp wants to look into cupboards and take some things of her own away. Go with her, please, and give her every facility.’
Lucia, quite in the grand style, turned to look out of the window in the direction of Mallards Cottage, in order to give Miss Mapp the opportunity of a discreet exit. She threw the window open.
‘Georgino! Georgino!’ she called, and Georgie’s face appeared above the paling.
‘Come round and have ickle talk, Georgie,’ she said. ‘Sumfin’ I want to tell you. Presto!’
She kissed her hand to Georgie and turned back into the room. Miss Mapp was still there, but now invisible to Lucia’s eye. She hummed a gay bar of Mozartino, and went back to her table in the bow-window where she tore up the letter of resignation and recommendation she had written to the Padre, and the half-finished note to Miss Mapp, which so cordially asked her to dinner, saying that it was so long since they had met, for they had met again now. When she looked up she was alone, and there was Georgie tripping up the steps by the front door. Though it was standing open (for the ironmonger was already engaged on the firm restoration of the chain) he very properly rang the bell and was admitted.
‘There you are,’ said Lucia brightly as he came in. ‘Another lovely day.’
‘Perfect. What has happened to your front door?’
Lucia laughed.
/> ‘Elizabeth came to see me,’ she said gaily. ‘The chain was on the door, as I have ordered it always shall be. But she gave the door such a biff that the hasp pulled out. It’s being repaired.’
‘No!’ said Georgie, ‘and did you give her what for?’
‘She had several things she wanted to see me about,’ said Lucia, keeping an intermittent eye on the front door. ‘She wanted to get out of her cupboards some stuff for the jumble-sale she is getting up in aid of the hospital, and she is at it now under Grosvenor’s superintendence. Then she wanted me to send a sketch for the picture exhibition, I said I would be delighted. Then she said she could not manage to send any fruit for our fête here. She did not approve of the fête at all, Georgie. In fact, she forbade me to give it. We had a little chat about that.’
‘But what’s to be done then?’ asked Georgie.
‘Nothing that I know of, except to give the fête,’ said Lucia. ‘But it would be no use asking her to be on the committee for an object of which she disapproved, so I tore up the letter I had written to the Padre about it.’
Lucia suddenly focused her eyes and her attention on the front door, and a tone of warm human interest melted the deadly chill of her voice.
‘Georgie, there she goes,’ she said. ‘What a quantity of things! There’s an old kettle and a boot-jack, and a rug with a hole in it, and one stair-rod. And there’s a shaving from the front door where they are putting in bigger screws, stuck to her skirt . . . And she’s dropped the stair-rod . . . Major Benjy’s picking it up for her.’
Georgie hurried to the window to see these exciting happenings, but Miss Mapp, having recovered the stair-rod, was already disappearing.
‘I wish I hadn’t given her my picture of the Landgate,’ said he. ‘It was one of my best. But aren’t you going to tell me all about your interview? Properly, I mean: everything.’