by E. F. Benson
As if this conundrum was not sufficiently agonizing, nobody could ascertain where the happy pair were going for their honeymoon. They would be back in a week, for Lucia could not forsake her municipal duties for longer than that, but she had made concession enough to publicity, and this was kept a profound secret, for the mystery added to the cachet of the event. Elizabeth made desperate efforts to find out: she sprang all sorts of Jack-in-the-box questions on Lucia in the hope that she would startle her into revealing the unknown destination. Were there not very amusing plays going on in Paris? Was not the climate of Cornwall very agreeable in November? Had she ever seen a bull-fight? All no use: and completely foiled she expressed her settled conviction that they were not going away at all, but would immure themselves at Mallards, as if they had measles.
All was finished on the day before the wedding, and Georgie slept for the last time in the Cottage surrounded by the furniture from his future bedroom at Mallards, and clad in his frock-coat and fawn-coloured trousers had an early lunch, with a very poor appetite, in his unfamiliar sitting-room. He brushed his top-hat nervously from time to time, and broke into a slight perspiration when the church bells began to ring, yearning for the comfortable obscurity of a registry office, and wishing that he had never been born, or, at any rate, was not going to be married quite so soon. He tottered to the church.
The ceremony was magnificent, with cope and corporation and plenty of that astonishing tuba on the organ. Then followed the reception in the garden-room and the buffet in the dining-room, during which bride and bridegroom vanished, and appeared again in their go-away clothes, a brown Lucia with winter-dessert in her hat, and a bright mustard-coloured Georgie. The subterfuge, however, of starting from Porpoise Street via the back door was not necessary, since the street in front of Mallards was quite devoid of sightseers and confetti. So Georgie’s decoy motorcar retreated, and Grosvenor ordered up Lucia’s car from Porpoise Street. There was some difficulty in getting round that awkward corner, for there was a van in the way, and it had to saw backwards and forwards. The company crowded into the hall and on to the doorstep to see them off, and Elizabeth was quite certain that Lucia did not say a word to Cadman as she stepped in. Clearly then Cadman knew where they were going, and if she had only thought of that she might have wormed it out of him. Now it was too late: also her conviction that they were not going anywhere at all had broken down. She tried to persuade Diva that they were only going for a drive and would be back for tea, but Diva was pitilessly scornful.
“Rubbish!” she said. Or was all that luggage merely a blind? “You’re wrong as usual, Elizabeth.”
Lucia put the window half down: it was a warm afternoon.
“Darling, it all went off beautifully,” she said. “And what fun it will be to see dear Riseholme again. It was nice of Olga Bracely to lend us her house. We must have some little dinners for them all.”
“They’ll be thrilled,” said Georgie. “Do you like my new suit?”
CHAPTER XIII.
Lucia decided to take a rare half-holiday and spend this brilliant afternoon in mid May, in strolling about Tilling with Georgie, for there was a good deal she wanted to inspect. They went across the churchyard pausing to listen to the great blare of melodious uproar that poured out through the open south door, for the organist was practising on Lucia’s organ, and, after enjoying that, proceeded to the Norman Tower. The flight of steps down to the road below had been relaid from top to bottom, and a most elegant hand-rail put up. A very modest stone tablet at the side of the top step recorded in quite small letters the name of the person to whom Tilling owed this important restoration.
“They were only finished yesterday, Georgie,” said Lucia hardly glancing at the tablet, since she had herself chosen the lettering very carefully and composed the inscription, “and I promised the foreman to look at them. Nice, I think, and in keeping. And very evenly laid. One can walk down them without looking to one’s feet.”
Half-way down she stopped and pointed.
“Georgie,” she cried. “Look at the lovely blossom on my almond trees! They are in flower at last, after this cold spring. I was wise to get well-grown trees: smaller ones would never have flowered their first year. Oh, there’s Elizabeth coming up my steps. That old green skirt again. It seems quite imperishable.”
They met.
“Lovely new steps,” said Elizabeth very agreeably. “Quite a pleasure to walk up them. Thank you, dear, for them. But those poor almond trees. So sad and pinched, and hardly a blossom on them. Perhaps they weren’t the flowering sort. Or do you think they’ll get acclimatised after some years?”
“They’re coming out beautifully,” said Lucia in a very firm voice. “I’ve never seen such healthy trees in all my life. By next week they will be a blaze of blossom. Blaze.”
“I’m sure I hope you’ll be right, dear,” said Elizabeth, “but I don’t see any buds coming myself.” Lucia took no further notice of her, and continued to admire her almond trees in a loud voice to Georgie.
“And how gay the pink blossom looks against the blue sky, darling,” she said. “You must bring your paint-box here some morning and make a sketch of them. Such a feast for the eye.”
She tripped down the rest of the steps, and Elizabeth paused at the top to read the tablet.
“You know Mapp is really the best name for her,” said Lucia, still slightly bubbling with resentment. “Irene is quite right never to call her anything else. Poor Mapp is beginning to imitate herself: she says exactly the things which somebody taking her on would say.”
“And I’m sure she wanted to be pleasant just now,” said Georgie, “but the moment she began to praise your steps she couldn’t bear it, and found herself obliged to crab something else of yours.”
“Very likely. I never knew a woman so terribly in the grip of her temperament. Look, Georgie: they’re playing cricket on my field. Let us go and sit in the pavilion for a little. It would be appreciated.”
“Darling, it’s so dull watching cricket,” said Georgie. “One man hits the ball away and another throws it back and all the rest eat daisies.”
“We’ll just go and show ourselves,” said Lucia. “We needn’t stop long. As President I feel I must take an interest in their games. I wish I had time to study cricket. Doesn’t the field look beautifully level now? You could play billiards on it.”
“Oh, by the way,” said Georgie, “I saw Mr. Woolgar in the town this morning. He told me he had a client, very desirable he thought, but he wasn’t at liberty to mention the name yet, enquiring if I would let the Cottage for three months from the end of June. Only six guineas a week offered, and I asked eight. But even at that a three months’ let would be pleasant.”
“The client’s name is Mapp,” said Lucia with decision. “Diva told me yesterday that the woman with the canaries had taken Grebe for three months from the end of June at twenty guineas a week.”
“That may be only a coincidence,” said Georgie.
“But it isn’t,” retorted Lucia. “I can trace the windings of her mind like the course of a river across the plain. She thinks she wouldn’t get it for six guineas if you knew she was the client, for she had let out that she was getting twenty for Grebe. Stick to eight, Georgie, or raise it to ten.”
“I’m going to have tea with Diva,” said Georgie, “and the Mapps will be there. I might ask her suddenly if she was going to take a bungalow again for the summer, and see how she looks.”
“Anyhow they can’t get flooded out of Mallards Cottage,” observed Lucia.
They had skirted the cricket ground and come to the pavilion, but since Tilling was fielding Lucia’s appearance did not evoke the gratification she had anticipated, since none of the visiting side had the slightest idea who she was. The Tilling bowling was being slogged all over the field, and the fieldsmen had really no time to eat daisies with this hurricane hitting going on. One ball crashed on to the wall of the pavilion just above Georgie’s head, and Lucia
willingly consented to leave her cricket field, for she had not known the game was so perilous. They went up into the High Street and through the churchyard again, and were just in sight of Mallards Cottage on which was a board: “To be let Furnished or Sold,” when the door opened, and Elizabeth came out, locking the door after her: clearly she had been to inspect it, or how could she have got the keys? Lucia knew that Georgie had seen her, and so did not even say “I told you so.”
“You must promise to do a sketch of my almond trees against the sky, Georgie,” she said. “They will be in their full beauty by next week. And we must really give one of our omnibus dinner-parties soon. Saturday would do: I have nothing on Saturday evening, I think. I will telephone all round now.”
Georgie went upstairs to his own sitting-room to get a reposeful half-hour, before going to his tea-party. More and more he marvelled at Lucia’s superb vitality: she was busier now than she had ever pretended to be, and her labours were but as fuel to feed her fires. This walk to-day, for instance, had for him necessitated a short period of quiescence before he set off again for fresh expenditure of force, but he could hear her voice crisp and vigorous as she rang up number after number, and the reason why she was not coming to Diva’s party was that she had a class of girl-guides in the garden-room at half-past four, and a meeting of the Governors of the Hospital at six. At 7.15 (for 7.30) she was to preside at the annual dinner of the cricket club. Not a very full day.
Lucia had been returned at the top of the poll in the last elections for the Town Council. Never did she miss a meeting, never did she fail to bring forward some fresh scheme for the employment of the unemployed, for the lighting of streets or the paving of roads or for the precedence of perambulators over pedestrians on the narrow pavements of the High Street. Bitter had been the conflict which called for a decision on that knotty question. Mapp, for instance, meeting two perambulators side by side had refused to step into the road and so had the nursery-maids. Instead they had advanced, chatting gaily together, solid as a phalanx and Mapp had been forced to retreat before them and turn up a side street. “What with Susan’s great bus,” she passionately exclaimed, “filling up the whole of the roadway, and perambulators sweeping all before them on the pavements, we shall have to do our shopping in aeroplanes.”
Diva, to whom she made this protest, had been sadly forgetful of recent events, which, so to speak, had not happened and replied:
“Rubbish, dear Elizabeth! If you had ever had occasion to push a perambulator, you wouldn’t have wheeled it on to the road to make way for the Queen.” . . . Then, seeing her error, Diva had made things worse by saying she hadn’t meant that, and the Bridge party to which Georgie was going this afternoon was to mark the reconciliation after the resultant coolness. The legislation suggested by Lucia to meet this traffic problem was a model of wisdom: perambulators had precedence on pavements, but they must proceed in single file. Heaps of room for everybody.
Georgie, resting and running over her activities in his mind, felt quite hot at the thought of them, and applied a little eau-de-cologne to his forehead. To-morrow she was taking all her girl-guides for a day by the sea at Margate: they were starting in a chartered bus at eight in the morning, but she expected to be back for dinner. The occupations of her day fitted into each other like a well-cut jigsaw puzzle, and not a piece was missing from the picture. Was all this activity merely the outpouring of her inexhaustible energy that spouted like the water from the rock when Moses smote it? Sometimes he wondered whether there was not an ulterior purpose behind it. If so, she never spoke of it, but drove relentlessly on in silence.
He grew a little drowsy; he dozed, but he was awakened by a step on the stairs and a tap at his door. Lucia always tapped, for it was his private room, and she entered with a note in her hand. Her face seemed to glow with some secret radiance which she repressed with difficulty: to mask it she wore a frown, and her mouth was working with thought.
“I must consult you, Georgie,” she said, sinking into a chair. “There is a terribly momentous decision thrust upon me.”
Georgie dismissed the notion that Mapp had made some violent assault upon the infant occupiers of the perambulators as inadequate.
“Darling, what has happened?” he asked.
She gazed out of the window without speaking.
“I have just received a note from the Mayor,” she said at length in a shaken voice. “While we were so light-heartedly looking at almond trees, a private meeting of the Town Council was being held.”
“I see,” said Georgie, “and they didn’t send you notice. Outrageous. Anyhow, I think I should threaten to resign. After all you’ve done for them, too!”
She shook her head.
“No: you mustn’t blame them,” she said. “They were right, for a piece of business was before them at which it was impossible I should be present.”
“Oh, something not quite nice?” suggested Georgie. “But I think they should have told you.”
Again she shook her head.
“Georgie, they decided to sound me as to whether I would accept the office of Mayor next year. If I refuse, they would have to try somebody else. It’s all private at present, but I had to speak to you about it, for naturally it will affect you very greatly.”
“Do you mean that I shall be something?” asked Georgie eagerly.
“Not officially, of course, but how many duties must devolve on the Mayor’s husband!”
“A sort of Mayoress,” said Georgie with the eagerness clean skimmed off his voice.
“A thousand times more than that,” cried Lucia. “You will have to be my right hand, Georgie. Without you I couldn’t dream of undertaking it. I should entirely depend on you, on your judgment and your wisdom. There will be hundreds of questions on which a man’s instinct will be needed by me. We shall be terribly hard-worked. We shall have to entertain, we shall have to take the lead, you and I, in everything, in municipal life as well as social life, which we do already. If you cannot promise to be always by me for my guidance and support, I can only give one answer. An unqualified negative.”
Lucia’s eloquence, with all the practice she had had at Town Councils, was most effective. Georgie no longer saw himself as a Mayoress, but as the Power behind the Throne; he thought of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, and bright images bubbled in his brain. Lucia, with a few sideways gimlet-glances saw the effect, and, wise enough to say no more, continued gazing out of the window. Georgie gazed too: they both gazed.
When Lucia thought that her silence had done as much as it could, she sighed, and spoke again.
“I understand. I will refuse then,” she said.
That, in common parlance, did the trick.
“No, don’t fuss me,” he said. “Me must fink.”
“Si, caro: pensa seriosamente,” said she. “But I must make up my mind now: it wouldn’t be fair on my colleagues not to. There are plenty of others, Georgie, if I refuse. I should think Mr. Twistevant would make an admirable Mayor. Very business-like. Naturally, I do not approve of his views about slums and, of course I should have to resign my place on the Town Council and some other bodies. But what does that matter?”
“Darling, if you put it like that,” said Georgie, “I must say that I think it your duty to accept. You would be condoning slums almost, if you didn’t.”
The subdued radiance in Lucia’s face burst forth like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“If you think it’s my duty, I must accept,” she said. “You would despise me otherwise. I’ll write at once.”
She paused at the door.
“I wonder what Elizabeth—” she began, then thought better of it, and tripped lightly downstairs.
Tilling had unanimously accepted Lucia’s invitation for dinner and Bridge on Saturday, and Georgie, going upstairs to dress heard himself called from Lucia’s bedroom.
He entered.
Her bed was paved with hats: it was a parterre of hats, of which the bo
xes stood on the floor, a rampart of boxes. The hats were of the most varied styles. There was one like an old-fashioned beaver hat with a feather in it. There was a Victorian bonnet with strings. There was a three-cornered hat, like that which Napoleon wore in the retreat from Moscow. There was a head-dress like that worn by nuns, and a beret made of cloth of gold. There was a hat like a full-bottomed wig with ribands in it, and a Stuart-looking head-dress like those worn by the ladies of the Court in the time of Charles I. Lucia sitting in front of her glass, with her head on one side was trying the effect of a green turban.
“I want your opinion, dear,” she said. “For official occasions as when the Mayor and Corporation go in state to church, or give a civic welcome to distinguished visitors, the Mayor, if a woman, has an official hat, part of her robes. But there are many semi-official occasions, Georgie, when one would not be wearing robes, but would still like to wear something distinctive. When I preside at Town Councils, for instance, or at all those committees of which I shall be chairman. On all those occasions I should wear the same hat: an undress uniform, you might call it. I don’t think the green turban would do, but I am rather inclined to that beret in cloth of gold.”
