Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “A corner of the Courtyard of Sheffield Castle,” she said. “Not come out very well. The Norman tower. The dining hall. The Duchess’s bedroom; wonderful Elizabethan bed. The picture gallery. She is standing looking out of the window with her Pekingese. Such a sweet. It jumped up on the window-seat just before I snapped. The Duchess at the tea-table—”

  “What a big cake!” interrupted Diva professionally. “Sugared, too. So she does eat something besides dressed crab. Hope she didn’t have much cake after her indigestion.”

  “But what a shabby court-yard,” said Evie. “I should have thought a Duke would have liked his Castle to look tidier. Why doesn’t he tell his gardener to weed it?”

  Elizabeth felt she would burst unless she put in a venomous word.

  “Dear Worship, when you write to thank her Grace for your pleasant visit, you must say, just in fun, of course, that you expect the court-yard to be tidied up before you come next.”

  Lucia was perfectly capable of dealing with such clumsy sarcasm.

  “What a good idea!” she said. “You always think of the right thing, Elizabeth. Certainly I will. Remind me, Georgie.”

  So the photographs did their work. Tilling could not doubt that Lucia had been wrapped in the Norman embrace of Sheffield Castle, and determined silently and sternly never again to allude to the painful subject.

  That suited Lucia admirably, for there were questions that might be asked about her visit which would involve regrettable admissions if she was to reply quite truthfully. Just as her friends were turning surfeited and sad from the album a step was heard outside and Olga appeared in the doorway. A white gown, high at the neck, reeking of Molyneux and simplicity. A scarlet girdle, and pearls as before.

  “Dear Lucia,” she cried, “I see I’m late. Forgive me.”

  “My own! I always forgive you as soon as I see you, only there is never anything to forgive,” said Lucia effusively. “Now I needn’t say who you are, but this is Mrs. Bartlett and our Padre, and here are Mr. and Mrs. Wyse, and this is Diva Plaistow, and here’s my beloved Mayoress, Elizabeth Mapp-Flint and Major Mapp-Flint—”

  Olga looked from Benjy to Elizabeth and back again.

  “But surely I recognise them,” she said. “That marvellous picture, which everybody raves about—”

  “Yes, little me,” said the beaming Elizabeth, “and my Benjy in the clouds. What an eye you’ve got, Miss Bracely!”

  “And this is my husband,” went on Lucia with airy humour, “who says he thinks he has met you before—”

  “I believe we did meet somewhere, but ages ago, and he won’t remember me,” said Olga. “Oh, Georgie, I mustn’t drink sherry, but as you’ve poured it out for me—”

  “Dinner,” said Grosvenor rather sternly.

  In the hard overhead light of the dining-room, the ladies of Tilling, novices in maquillage, looked strangely spurious, but the consciousness in each of her rejuvenated appearance, combined with Olga’s gay presence, made them feel exceptionally brilliant. All round the table conversation was bright and eager, and they all talked at her, striving to catch her attention. Benjy, sitting next her, began telling her one of his adventures with a tiger, but instantly Susan raised her voice and spoke of her tricycle. Her husband chipped in, and with an eye on Olga told Lucia that his sister the Contessa di Faraglione was a passionate student of the age of Lucrezia Borgia. Diva, longing to get Olga to come to ye olde tea-house, spoke loudly about her new recipe for sardine tartlets, but Lucia overrode so commercial a subject by the introduction of the Mayoral Motif coupled with slums. Olga herself chattered and laughed, the only person present who was not anxious to make a favourable impression. She lit a cigarette long before dinner was over, and though Elizabeth had once called that “a disgusting foreign habit” she lit one, too. Olga ate a cherry beginning with the end of the stalk and at once Benjy was trying to do the same, ejaculating, as it dropped into his finger bowl, “Not so easy, by Jove.” There was no Bridge to-night, but by incessant harping on antique dances, Lucia managed to get herself asked to tread a minuet with Georgie. Olga accompanied them, and as she rose from the piano, she became aware that they were all looking at her with the expectant air of dogs that hope to be taken out for a walk.

  “Yes, certainly if you want me to,” she said.

  She sat down at the piano again. And she sang.

  CHAPTER X.

  Though Tilling remained the same at heart, Olga’s brief visit had considerably changed the decorative aspect of its leading citizenesses. The use of powder on the face on very hot days when prominent features were apt to turn crimson, or on very cold ones, when prominent features were apt to turn mauve, had always been accepted, but that they should embellish themselves with rouge and lipstick and arched eyebrows was a revolution indeed. They had always considered such aids to loveliness as typical of women who shamelessly advertised their desire to capture the admiration of males, and that was still far from their intentions. But Diva found that arched eyebrows carefully drawn where there were none before gave her a look of high-bred surprise: Elizabeth that the rose-mantled cheeks she now saw in her looking-glass made her feel (not only appear) ten years younger: Susan that her corrugated hair made her look like a French marquise. Irene, who had been spending a fortnight of lionization in London, was amazed at the change when she returned, and expressed her opinion of it, by appearing in the High Street with the tip of her nose covered with green billiard-chalk.

  She at once got to work on the portrait which Lucia had commissioned. She had amplified Lucia’s biographical suggestion, and it represented her in full Mayoral robes and chain and a three-cornered hat playing the piano in the garden-room. Departmental boxes were piled in the background, a pack of cards and a paint-box lay on the lid of the piano, and her bicycle leaned against it.

  “Symbols, beloved,” said the artist, “indicating your marvellous many-sidedness. I know you don’t ride your bicycle in the garden-room, nor play cards on your piano, nor wear your robes when you’re at your music, but I group your completeness round you. Ah! Hold that expression of indulgent disdain for the follies of the world for a moment. Think of the Tilling hags and their rouge.”

  “Like that?” asked Lucia, curling her upper lip.

  “No, not at all like that. Try another. Be proud and calm. Think of spending an evening with your Duchess — darling, why are you such a snob? — or just think of yourself with all your faults and splendours. Perfect!”

  Irene stepped back from her easel.

  “And I’ve got it!” she cried. “There’s not a living artist and very few dead ones who could have seized that so unerringly. How monstrous that my work should be hated just because I am a woman!”

  “But your picture was the picture of the year,” said Lucia, “and all the critics cracked it up.”

  “Yes, but I felt the undercurrent of hostility. Men are such self-centred brutes. Wait till I publish my memoirs.”

  “But aren’t you rather young for that?”

  “No, I’m twenty-five, and by that age everyone has experienced all that matters, or anyhow has imagined it. Oh, tell me the truth about what all the painted hags are whispering. Georgie and Olga Bracely being alone here. What happened really? Did you arrange it all for them? How perfect of you! Nobody but you would be so modern and open-minded. And Tilling’s respect for Georgie has gone up enormously.”

  Lucia stared at her a moment, assimilating this monstrous suggestion, then sprang to her feet with a gasp of horror.

  “Oh, the poisonous tongues!” she cried. “Oh, the asps. And besides—”

  She stopped. She found herself entangled in the web she herself had woven, and never had any spider known to natural history so completely encircled itself. She had told Tilling that she was going to dine and sleep at Poppy’s Castle, and had shewn everybody those elegant photographs as tacit evidence that she had done so. Tilling therefore, had concluded that Olga and Georgie had spent the night alone at Mallards, a
nd here was Irene intolerably commending her for her open-mindedness not only in condoning but in promoting this assignation. The fair fame, the unsullied morality of herself and Georgie, not to mention Olga, was at stake, and (oh, how it hurt!) she would be forced to give the utmost publicity to the fact that she had come back to Tilling the same evening. That would be a frightful loss of prestige, but there was no choice. She laughed scornfully.

  “Foolish of me to have been indignant for a single moment at such an idea!” she said. “I never heard such rubbish. I found poor Poppy very unwell, so I just had tea with her, cheered her up and took some photographs and came home at once. Tilling is really beyond words!”

  “Darling, what a disappointment!” said Irene. “It would have been so colossal of you. And what a comedown for poor Georgie. Just an old maid again.”

  The news was very soon known, and Tilling felt that Lucia and Georgie had let them down. Everything had been so exciting and ducal and compromising, and there was really nothing left of it. Elizabeth and Diva lost no time in discussing it in Diva’s tea-room next morning when marketing was done, and were severe.

  “The deceitfulness of it is what disgusts me most,” said the Mayoress. “Far worse than the snobbishness. Worship let it be widely known that she was staying the night with Poppy, and then she skulks back, doesn’t appear at all next morning to make us think that she was still away—”

  “And shows us all those photographs,” chimed in Diva, “as a sort of . . . what’s the word?”

  “Can’t say, dear,” said Elizabeth, regarding her rose-leaf cheeks with high approval in the looking-glass over the mantelpiece.

  “Affidavit, that’s it, as testifying that she had stayed with Poppy. Never told us she hadn’t.”

  “My simple brain can’t follow her conjuring tricks,” said Elizabeth, “and I should be sorry if it could. But I’m only too thankful she did come back. It will be a great relief to the Padre, I expect, to be told that. I wonder, if you insist on knowing what I think, whether Mr. Georgie somehow decoyed that lovely creature to Tilling, telling her that Lucia was here. That’s only my guess, and if so we must try to forgive him, for if anything is certain in this bad business, it is that he’s madly in love with her. I know myself how a man looks—”

  Diva gave a great gasp, but her eyebrows could not express any higher degree of astonishment.

  “Oh, Elizabeth!” she cried. “Was a man ever madly in love with you? Who was it? Do tell me!”

  “There are things one can’t speak of even to an old friend like you,” said Elizabeth. “Yes, he’s madly in love with her, and I think Worship knows it. Did you notice her demonstrations of affection to sweet Olga? She was making the best of it, I believe; putting on a brazen — no, let us say a brave face. How worn and anxious she looked the other night when we were all so gay. That pitiful little minuet! I’m sorry for her. When she married Mr. Georgie, she thought life would be so safe and comfortable. A sad awakening, poor thing . . . Oh, another bit of news. Quaint Irene tells me she is doing a portrait of Worship. Quite marvellous, she says, and it will be ready for our summer exhibition. After that Lucia means to present it to the Borough, and have it hung in the Town Hall. And Irene’s Academy picture of Benjy and me will be back in time for our exhibition, too. Interesting to compare them.”

  Lucia bore her loss of prestige with characteristic gallantry. Indeed, she seemed to be quite unconscious that she had lost any, and continued to let her album of snapshots remain open on the piano at the Sheffield Castle page, and airily talked about the Florentine mirror which just did not come into the photograph of Poppy’s bedroom. Occasionally a tiresome moment occurred, as when Elizabeth, being dummy at a Bridge-party in the garden-room, pored over the Castle page, and came back to her place, saying,

  “So clever of you, Worship, to take so many pretty photographs in so short a time.”

  Lucia was not the least disconcerted.

  “They were all very short exposures, dear,” she said. “I will explain that to you sometime.”

  Everybody thought that a very fit retort, for now the Poppy-crisis was no longer recent, and it was not the custom of Tilling to keep such incidents alive too long: it was not generous or kind, and besides, they grew stale. But Lucia paid her back in her own coin, for next day, when playing Bridge at the Mapp-Flints, she looked long and earnestly at Benjy’s tiger-whip, which now hung in its old place among bead-aprons and Malayan creases.

  “Is that the one he broke at his interesting lecture, dear Elizabeth,” she asked, “or the one he lost at Diva’s tea-rooms?”

  Evie continued to squeak in a disconcerting manner during the whole of the next hand, and the Poppy-crisis (for the present) was suffered to lapse.

  The annual Art Exhibition moved into the foreground of current excitements, and the Tilling artists sent in their contributions: Lucia her study of dahlias, entitled “Belli fiori “, and a sketch of the courtyard of Sheffield Castle, which she had weeded for purposes of Art. She called it “From Memory”, though it was really from her photograph, and, without specifying the Castle, she added the motto

  “The splendour falls on Castle walls.”

  Elizabeth sent in “A misty morning on the Marsh”. She was fond of misty mornings, because the climatic conditions absolutely prohibited defined draughtsmanship. Georgie (without any notion of challenging her) contributed “A sunny morning on the Marsh”, with sheep and dykes and clumps of ragwort very clearly delineated: Mr. Wyse, one of his usual still-life studies of a silver tankard, a glass half-full of (probably) Capri wine, and a spray of nasturtiums: Diva another piece of still life, in pastel, of two buns and a tartlet (probably sardine) on a plate. This was perhaps an invasion of Mr. Wyse’s right to reproduce still life, but Diva had to be in the kitchen so much, waiting for kettles to boil and buns to rise, that she had very little leisure for landscape. Susan Wyse sent a mystical picture of a budgerigar with a halo above its head, and rays of orange light emanating from the primary feathers of its spread wings: “Lost Awhile” was the touching title. But in spite of these gems, the exhibition was really Irene’s show. She had been elected an honorary member of the hanging committee, and at their meetings she showed that she fully appreciated this fact.

  “My birth of Venus,” she stated, “must be hung quite by itself at one end of the room, with all the studies I made for it below. They are of vast interest. Opposite it, also by itself, must be my picture of Lucia. There were no studies for that; it was an inspiration, but none of your potty little pictures must be near it. Hang them where you like — oh, darling Lucia, you don’t mind your dahlias and your Castle walls being quite out of range, do you? But those are my terms, and if you don’t like them, I shall withdraw my pictures. And the walls behind them must be painted duck’s egg green. Take it or leave it. Now I can’t bother about settling about the rest, so I shall go away. Let me know what you decide.”

  There was no choice. To reject the picture of the year and that which Irene promised them should be the picture of next year was inconceivable. The end walls of the studio where the exhibition was held were painted duck’s egg green, a hydrangea and some ferns were placed beneath each, and in front of them a row of chairs. Lucia, as Mayor, opened the show and made an inaugural speech, tracing the history of pictorial Art from earliest times, and, coming down to the present, alluded to the pictures of all her friends, the poetical studies of the marsh, the loving fidelity of the still life exhibits, the spiritual uplift of the budgerigar. “Of the two great works of Miss Coles,” she concluded, “which will make our exhibition so ever-memorable, I need not speak. One has already acquired world-wide fame, and I hope it will not be thought egotistic of me if I confidently prophesy that the other will also. I am violating no secrets if I say that it will remain in Tilling in some conspicuous and public place, the cherished possession for ever of our historic town.”

  She bowed, she smiled, she accepted a special copy of the catalogue, which Georgie
had decorated with a blue riband, and, very tactfully, instead of looking at the picture of herself, sat down with him in front of that of Elizabeth and Benjy, audibly pointing out its beauties to him.

  “Wonderful brush-work,” she said, waving her catalogue as if it was a paintbrush. “Such life and movement! The waves. Venus’s button boots. Quite Dutch. But how Irene has developed since then! Presently we will look at the picture of me with this fresh in our minds.”

  Elizabeth and Benjy were compelled, by the force of Lucia’s polite example, to sit in front of her picture, and they talked quietly behind their catalogues.

  “Can’t make head or tail of it,” murmured Benjy. “I never saw such a jumble.”

  “A little puzzling at first,” said Elizabeth, “but I’m beginning to grasp it. Seated at her piano you see, to show how divinely she plays. Scarlet robe and chain, to show she’s Mayor. Cards littered about for her Bridge. Rather unkind. Bicycle leaning against the piano. Her paint-box because she’s such a great artist. A pity the whole thing looks like a jumble-sale, with Worship as auctioneer. And such a sad falling off as a work of Art. I’m afraid success has gone to Irene’s head.”

  “Time we looked at our own picture,” said Benjy. “Fancy this daub in the Town Hall, if that’s what she meant by some conspicuous and public place.”

  “It hasn’t got there yet,” whispered Elizabeth. “As a Councillor, I shall have something to say to that.”