Lucia’s Progress E-Book

E.F. Benson

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

„Lucia’s Progress”, previously published in the U.S. as „The Worshipful Lucia” is the fifth of E. F. Benson’s famous series, opening about a year after the previous story ended. In this volume both Lucia and Mapp stand for election to the Town Council, and Lucia speculates in gold shares. While re-decorating Miss Mapp’s house, Lucia discovers and hide the remains of a Roman Villa. Excitements ensue!

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Emmeline Lucas was walking briskly and elegantly up and down the cinder path which traversed her kitchen garden and was so conveniently dry underfoot even after heavy rain. This house of hers, called “Grebe,” stood some quarter of a mile outside the ancient and enlightened town of Tilling, on its hill away to the west; in front there stretched out the green pasture-land of the marsh, flat and featureless, as far as the line of sand-dunes along the shore. She had spent a busy morning divided about equally between practising a rather easy sonata by Mozart and reading a rather difficult play by Aristophanes. There was the Greek on one page and an excellent English translation on the page opposite, and the play was so amusing that to-day she had rather neglected the Greek and pursued the English. At this moment she was taking the air to refresh her after her musical and intellectual labours, and felt quite ready to welcome the sound of that tuneful set of little bells in the hall which would summon her to lunch.

The January morning was very mild and her keen bird-like eye noted that several imprudent and precocious polyanthuses (she spoke and even thought of them as “polyanthi”) were already in flower, and that an even more imprudent tortoiseshell butterfly had been tempted from its hybernating quarters and was flitting about these early blossoms. Presently another joined it, and they actually seemed to be engaged in a decrepit dalliance quite unsuitable to their faded and antique appearance. The tortoiseshells appeared to be much pleased with each other, and Lucia was vaguely reminded of two friends of hers, both of mature years, who had lately married and with whom she was to play Bridge this afternoon.

She inhaled the soft air in long breaths holding it in for five seconds according to the Yoga prescription and then expelling it all in one vigorous puff. Then she indulged in a few of those physical exercises, jerks and skippings and flexings which she found so conducive to health, pleased to think that a woman of her age could prance with such supple vigour. Another birthday would knock at her door next month, and if her birth certificate was correct (and there was no reason for doubting it) the conclusion was forced upon her that if for every year she had already lived, she lived another, she would then be a centenarian. For a brief moment the thought of the shortness of life and the all-devouring grave laid a chill on her spirit, as if a cold draught had blown round the corner of her house, but before she had time to shiver, her habitual intrepidity warmed her up again, and she resolved to make the most of the years that remained, although there might not be even fifty more in store for her. Certainly she would not indulge in senile dalliance, like those aged butterflies, for nothing made a woman so old as pretending to be young, and there would surely be worthier outlets for her energy than wantonness. Never yet had she been lacking in activity or initiative or even attack when necessary, as those ill-advised persons knew who from time to time had attempted to thwart her career, and these priceless gifts were still quite unimpaired.

It was a little over a year since the most remarkable adventure of her life so far had befallen her, when the great flood burst the river bank just across the road, and she and poor panic-stricken Elizabeth Mapp had been carried out to sea on the kitchen table. They had been picked up by a trawler in the Channel and had spent three weird but very interesting months with a fleet of cod-fishers on the Gallagher Bank. Lucia’s undefeated vitality had pulled them through, but since then she had never tasted cod. On returning home at grey daybreak on an April morning they had found that a handsome cenotaph had been erected to their memories in the churchyard, for Tilling had naturally concluded that they must be dead. But Tilling was wrong, and the cenotaph was immediately removed.

But since then, Lucia sometimes felt, she had not developed her undoubted horse-power to its full capacity. She had played innumerable duets on the piano with Georgie Pillson: she had constituted herself instructress in physical culture to the ladies of Tilling, until the number of her pupils gradually dwindled away and she was left to skip and flex alone: she had sketched miles of marsh and been perfectly willing to hold classes in Contract Bridge: she had visited the wards in the local hospital twice a week, till the matron complained to Dr. Dobbie that the patients were unusually restless for the remainder of the day when Mrs. Lucas had been with them, and the doctor tactfully told her that her vitality was too bracing for them (which was probably the case). She had sung in the church choir; she had read for an hour every Thursday afternoon to the inmates of the workhouse till she had observed for herself that, long before the hour was over, her entire audience was wrapt in profound slumber; she had perused the masterpieces of Aristophanes, Virgil and Horace with the help of a crib; she had given a lecture on the “Tendencies of Modern Fiction,” at the Literary Institute, and had suggested another on the “Age of Pericles,” not yet delivered, as, most unaccountably, a suitable date could not be arranged; but looking back on these multifarious activities, she found that they had only passed the time for her without really extending her. To be sure there was the constant excitement of social life in Tilling, where crises, plots and counterplots were endemic rather than epidemic, and kept everybody feverish and with a high psychical temperature, but when all was said and done (and there was always a great deal to do, and a great deal more to say) she felt this morning, with a gnawing sense of self-reproach, that if she had written down all the achievements which, since her return from the Gallagher Bank, were truly worthy of mention, the chronicle would be sadly brief.

“I fear,” thought Lucia to herself, “that the Recording Angel will have next to nothing in his book about me this year. I’ve been vegetating. Molto cattiva!I’ve been content (yet not quite content: I will say that for myself) to be occupied with a hundred trifles. I’ve been frittering my energies away over them, drugging myself with the fallacy that they were important. But surely a woman in the prime of life like me could have done all I have done as mere relaxations in her career. I must do something more monumental (monumentum ære perennius,isn’t it?) in this coming year. I know I have the capacity for high ambition. What I don’t know is what to be ambitious about. Ah, there’s lunch at last.”

Lucia could always augur from the mode in which Grosvenor, her parlourmaid, played her prelude to food on those tuneful chimes, in what sort of a temper she was. There were six bells hung close together on a burnished copper frame, and they rang the first six notes of an ascending major scale. Grosvenor improvised on these with a small drumstick, and if she was finding life a harmonious business she often treated Lucia to charming dainty little tunes, quite a pleasure to listen to, though sometimes rather long. Now and then there was an almost lyrical outburst of melody, which caused Lucia a momentary qualm of anxiety, lest Grosvenor should have fallen in love, and would leave. But if she felt morose or cynical, she expressed her humour with realistic fidelity. To-day she struck two adjoining bells very hard, and then ran the drumstick up and down the peal, producing a most jangled effect, which meant that she was jangled too. “I wonder what’s the matter: indigestion perhaps,” thought Lucia, and she hurried indoors, for a jangled Grosvenor hated to be kept waiting.

“Mr. Georgie hasn’t rung up?” she asked, as she seated herself.

“No, ma’am,” said Grosvenor.

“Nor Foljambe?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Is there no tomato sauce with the macaroni?”

“No, ma’am.”

Lucia knew better than to ask if she ached anywhere, for Grosvenor would simply have said “No, ma’am” again, and, leaving her to stew in her own snappishness, she turned her mind to Georgie. For over a fortnight now he had not been to see her, and enquiries had only elicited the stark information that he was keeping the house, not being very well, but that there was nothing to bother about. With Georgie such a retirement might arise from several causes none of which need arouse anxiety. Some little contretemps, thought Lucia: perhaps there was dental trouble, and change must be made in the furnishings of his mouth. Or he might have a touch of lumbago, and did not want to be seen hobbling and bent, instead of presenting his usual spry and brisk appearance. It was merely tactless when he assumed these invisibilities to ask the precise cause: he came out of them again with his hair more auburn than ever, or wreathed in smiles which showed his excellent teeth, and so one could guess.

But a fortnight was an unprecedentedly long seclusion, and Lucia determined to have a word with Foljambe when she came home in the evening. Foljambe was Georgie’s peerless parlourmaid and also the wife of Lucia’s chauffeur. She gave Cadman his early breakfast in the morning, and then went up to Georgie’s house, Mallards Cottage, where she ministered all day to her master, returning home to her husband after she had served Georgie with his dinner. Like famous actresses who have married, she retained her maiden name, instead of becoming Mrs. Cadman (which she undoubtedly was in the sight of God) since her life’s work was Foljambizing to Georgie...Then Grosvenor brought in the tomato sauce of which there was quantities, after Lucia had almost finished her macaroni, and by way of expressing penitence for her mistake, became more communicative, though hardly less morose.

“Foljambe won’t say anything about Mr. Georgie, ma’am,” she observed, “except that he hasn’t been outside his front door for over a fortnight nor seen anybody. Dr. Dobbie has been in several times. You don’t think it’s something mental, ma’am, do you?”

“Certainly not,” said Lucia. “Why should I think anything of the kind?”

“Well, my uncle was like that,” said Grosvenor. “He shut himself up for about the same time as Mr. Georgie, and then they took him away to the County Asylum, where he’s thought himself to be the Prince of Wales ever since.”

Though Lucia poured scorn on this sinister theory, it made her more desirous of knowing what actually was the matter with Georgie. The news that the doctor had been to see him disposed of the theory that a new chestnut-coloured toupee was wanted, for a doctor would not have been needed for that, while if he had been paying a round of visits to the dentist, Foljambe would not have said that he had not been outside his own front door, and an attack of lumbago would surely have yielded to treatment before now. So, after telephoning to Georgie suggesting, as she had often done before, that she should look in during the afternoon, and receiving uncompromising discouragement, she thought she would walk into Tilling after lunch and find what other people made of this long retirement. It was Saturday and there would certainly be a good many friends popping in and out of the shops.

Lucia looked at her engagement book, and scribbled “Mozart, Aristophanes,” as post-dated engagements for the morning of to-day. She was due to play Bridge at Mallards, next door to Mallards Cottage, this afternoon at half-past three with Major and Mrs. Mapp-Flint: tea would follow and then more Bridge. For the last year Contract had waged a deadly war with Auction, but the latter, like the Tishbites in King David’s campaigns, had been exterminated, since Contract gave so much more scope for violent differences of opinion about honour-tricks and declarations and doublings and strong twos and takings-out, which all added spleen and savagery to the game. There were disciples of many schools of thought: one played Culbertson, another one club, another two clubs, and Diva Plaistow had a new system called “Leeway,” which she could not satisfactorily explain to anybody, because she had not any clearness about it herself. So, before a couple of tables were started, there was always a gabble, as of priests of various denominations reciting the articles of their faith. Mrs. Mapp-Flint was “strong two,” but her husband was “one club.” Consequently when they cut together their opponents had to remember that when he declared one club, it meant that he had strong outside suits, but possibly no club at all, but that when his wife declared two clubs it meant that she certainly had good clubs and heaps of other honour-tricks as well. Lucia herself relied largely on psychic bids: in other words when she announced a high contract in any suit, her partner had to guess whether she held, say, a positive tiara of diamonds, or whether she was being psychic. If he guessed wrong, frightful disaster might result, and Elizabeth Mapp-Flint had once been justifiably sarcastic on the conclusion of one of these major debacles. “I see, dear,” she said, “when you declare four diamonds, it means you haven’t got any, and want to be taken out. So sorry: I shall know better another time.”

Lucia, as she walked up to Tilling, ran over in her head the various creeds of the rest of the players she was likely to meet. The Padre and his wife Evie Bartlett were sure to be there: he was even more psychic than herself, and almost invariably declared his weakest suit first, just to show he had not got any. Evie, his wife, was obliging enough to play any system desired by her partner, but she generally forgot what it was. Then Algernon and Susan Wyse would certainly be there: they need not be reckoned with, as they only declared what they thought they could get and meant what they said. The eighth would probably be Diva with her “Leeway,” of which, since she invariably held such bad cards, there was always a great deal to make up.

Lucia passed these systems in review, and then directed her stream of consciousness to her hostess, who, as Elizabeth Mapp, had been her timorous partner in the great adventure on the kitchen table a year ago. She, at any rate, had not vegetated since their return, for she had married Major Benjamin Flint, and since he had only an Army Pension, and she was a woman of substance in every sense of the word, and owner of Mallards, it was only proper that she should hyphenate her surname with his. The more satirical spirits of Tilling thought she would have preferred to retain her maiden name like Foljambe and famous actresses. At the marriage service she had certainly omitted the word “obey” when she defined what sort of wife she would make him. But the preliminary exhortation had been read in full, though the Padre had very tactfully suggested to the bride that the portion of it which related to children need not be recited: Elizabeth desired to have it all.

Immediately after the marriage the “young couple” had left Tilling, for Elizabeth had accepted the offer of a very good let for Mallards for the summer and autumn months, and they had taken a primitive and remote bungalow close to the golf links two miles away, where they could play golf and taste romance in solitude. Mr. and Mrs. Wyse had been there to lunch occasionally and though Mr. Wyse (such a gentleman) always said it had been a most enjoyable day, Susan was rather more communicative and let out that the food was muck and that no alcoholic beverage had appeared at table. On wet days the Major had occasionally come into Tilling by bus, on some such hollow pretext of having his hair cut, or posting a letter, and spent most of the afternoon at the Club where there was a remarkably good brand of port. Then Elizabeth’s tenants had been so delighted with Mallards that they had extended their lease till the end of November, after which the Mapp-Flints, gorged with the gold of their rent-roll, had gone to the Riviera for the month of December, and had undoubtedly been seen by Mr. Wyse’s sister, the Contessa Fariglione, at the Casino at Monte Carlo. Thus their recent return to Tilling was a very exciting event, for nothing was really known as to which of them had established supremacy. Teetotalism at the bungalow seemed “one up” to Elizabeth, for Benjy, as all Tilling knew, had a strong weakness in the opposite direction: on the other hand Mrs. Wyse had hinted that the bride exhibited an almost degrading affection for him. Then which of them was the leading spirit in those visits to the Casino? Or were they both gamblers at heart? Altogether it was a most intriguing situation: the ladies of Tilling were particularly interested in the more intimate and domestic side of it, and expressed themselves with great delicacy.

Lucia came up the steep rise into the High Street and soon found some nice food for constructive observation. There was Foljambe just going into the chemist’s, and Lucia, remembering that she really wanted a toothbrush, followed her in, to hear what she ordered, for that might throw some light on the nature of Georgie’s mysterious indisposition. But a packet of lint was vague as a clue, though it disposed of Grosvenor’s dark suggestion that his illness was mental: lint surely never cured lunacy. A little further on there was quaint Irene Coles in trousers and a scarlet pullover, with her easel set up on the pavement, so that foot passengers had to step on to the roadway, making a highly impressionistic sketch of the street. Irene had an almost embarrassing schwärmfor Lucia, and she flung her arms round her and upset her easel; but she had no news of Georgie, and her conjecture that Foljambe had murdered him and was burying him below the brick-pillar in his back garden had nothing to support it.

“But it might be so, beloved,” she said. “Such things do happen, and why not in Tilling? Think of Crippen and Belle Elmore. Let’s suppose Foljambe gets through with the burial to-day and replaces the pillar, then she’ll go up there to-morrow morning just as usual and tell the police that Georgie has disappeared. Really I don’t see what else it can be.”

Diva Plaistow scudded across the street to them. She always spoke in the style of a telegram, and walked so fast that she might be mistaken for a telegram herself. “All too mysterious,” she said, taking for granted what they were talking about. “Not seen since yesterday fortnight. Certainly something infectious. Going to the Mapp-Flints, Lucia? Meet again then,” and she whizzed away.

These monstrous suggestions did not arouse the least anxiety in Lucia, but they vastly inflamed her curiosity. If Georgie’s ailment had been serious, she knew he would have told so old a friend as herself: it must simply be that he did not want to be seen. But it was time to go to the Bridge party, and she retraced her steps a few yards (though with no definite scheme in her mind) and turned up from the High Street towards the church: this route, only a few yards longer, would lead her past Mallards Cottage, where Georgie lived. It was dusk now, and just as she came opposite that gabled abode, a light sprang up in his sitting-room which looked on to the street. There was no resisting so potent a temptation, and crossing the narrow cobbled way she peered stealthily in. Foljambe was drawing the curtains of the other window, and there was Georgie sitting by the fire, fully dressed, with his head turned a little away, doing his petit-point.At that very moment he shifted in his chair, and Lucia saw to her indescribable amazement that he had a short grey beard: in fact it might be called white. Just one glimpse she had, and then she must swiftly crouch down, as Foljambe crossed the room and rattled the curtains across the window into which she was looking. Completely puzzled but thrilled to the marrow, Lucia slid quietly away. Was he then in retirement only in order to grow a beard, feigning illness until it had attained comely if not venerable proportions? Common sense revolted at the notion, but common sense could not suggest any other theory.

Lucia rang the bell at Mallards, and was admitted into its familiar white-panelled hall which wanted painting so badly. On her first visit to Tilling, which led to her permanent residence here, she had taken this house for several months from Elizabeth Mapp and had adored it. Grebe, her own house, was very agreeable, but it had none of the dignity and charm of Mallards with its high-walled garden, its little square parlours, and, above all, with its entrancing garden-room, built a few yards away from the house itself, and commanding from its bow-window that unique view of the street leading down to the High Street, and, in the other direction, past Mallards Cottage to the church. The owner of Mallards ought not to let it for month after month and pig it in a bungalow for the sake of the rent. Mallards ought to be the centre of nodal life in Tilling. Really Elizabeth was not worthy of it: year after year she let it for the sake of the rent it brought her, and even when she was there she entertained very meagrely. Lucia felt very strongly that she was not the right person to live there, and she was equally strongly convinced as to who the right person was.

With a sigh she followed Withers out into the garden and up the eight steps into the garden-room. She had not seen the young couple since the long retirement of their honeymoon to the bungalow and to the garishness of Monte Carlo, and now even that mysterious phenomenon of Georgie with a grey, nearly white, beard faded out before the intense human interest of observing how they had adjusted themselves to matrimony..."Chérie!”cried Mrs. Elizabeth. “Too lovely to see you again! My Benjy-boy and I only got back two days ago, and since then it’s been ‘upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber,’ all day, in order to get things shipshape and comfy and comme il fautagain. But now we’re settled in, n’est ce pas?”

Lucia could not quite make up her mind whether these pretty Gallicisms were the automatic result of Elizabeth’s having spent a month in France, or whether they were ironically allusive to her own habit of using easy Italian phrases in her talk. But she scarcely gave a thought to that, for the psychological balance between the two was so much more absorbing. Certainly Elizabeth and her Benjy-boy seemed an enamoured couple. He called her Liz and Girlie and perched himself on the arm of her chair as they waited for the rest of the gamblers to gather, and she patted his hand and pulled his cuff straight. Had she surrendered to him, Lucia wondered, had matrimony wrought a miraculous change in this domineering woman? The change in the room itself seemed to support the astounding proposition. It was far the biggest and best room in Mallards, and in the days of Elizabeth’s virginity it had dripped with feminine knick-knacks, vases and china figures, and Tilling crockery pigs, screens set at angles, muslin blinds and riband-tied curtains behind which she sat in hiding to observe the life of the place. Here had been her writing-table close to the hot water pipes and here her cosy corner by the fire with her work-basket. But now instead of her water-colours on the walls were heads of deer and antelopes, the spoil of Benjy’s sporting expeditions in India, and a trophy consisting of spears and arrows and rhinoceros-hide whips and an apron made of shells, and on the floor were his moth-eaten tiger-skins. A stern business table stood in the window, a leather chair like a hipbath in her cosy corner, a gun stand with golf clubs against the wall, and the room reeked of masculinity and stale cigar smoke. In fact, all it had in common with its old aspect was the big false bookcase in the wall which masked the cupboard, in which once, for fear of lack of food during a coal strike, the prudent Elizabeth had stored immense quantities of corned beef and other nutritious provisions. All this change looked like surrender: Girlie Mapp had given up her best room to Benjy-boy Flint. Their little pats and tweaks at each other might have been put on merely as Company-manners suitable to a newly-married couple, but the room itself furnished more substantial evidence.

The party speedily assembled: the Wyses’ huge Rolls-Royce from their house fifty yards away hooted at the front door and Susan staggered in under the weight of her great sable coat, and the odour of preservatives from moth gradually overscored that of cigars. Algernon followed and made a bow and a polite speech to everybody. The Padre and Mrs. Bartlett arrived next: he had been to Ireland for his holiday, and had acquired a touch of brogue which he grafted on to his Highland accent, and the effect was interesting, as if men of two nationalities were talking together of whom the Irishman only got in a word or two edgeways. Diva Plaistow completed the assembly and tripped heavily over the head of a one-eyed tiger. The other eye flew out at the shock of the impact and she put it, with apologies, on the chimneypiece.

The disposition of the players was easily settled, for there were three married couples to be separated, and Diva and Lucia made the fourth at each of the tables. Concentration settled down on the room like the grip of some intense frost, broken, at the end of each hand, as if by a sudden thaw, by torrential postmortems. At Lucia’s table, she and Elizabeth were partners against Mr. Wyse and the Padre. “Begorra,” said he, “the bhoys play the lassies. Eh, mon, there’s a sair muckle job for the puir wee laddies agin the guid wives o’ Tilling, begob.”

Though Elizabeth seemed to have surrendered to her Benjy-boy, it was clear that she had no thoughts of doing so to the other wee laddies, who, though vulnerable after the first hand were again and again prevented from winning the rubber by preposterously expensive bids on Elizabeth’s part.

“Yes, dear Lucia,” she said, “three hundred down I’m afraid, but then it’s worth six hundred to prevent the adversary from going out. Let me see, qui donne?”

“Key what?” asked the Padre.

“Who gives: I should say, who deals?”

“You do, dear Elizabeth,” said Lucia, “but I don’t know if it’s worth quite so many three hundreds. What do you think?”

Lucia picked up a hand gleaming with high honours, but psychic silences were often as valuable as psychic declarations. The laddies, flushed with untold hundreds above would be sure to declare something in order to net so prodigious a rubber, and she made no bid. Far more psychic to lure them on by modest overbidding and then crush them under a staggering double. But the timorous laddies held their tongues, the hands were thrown in and though Lucia tried to mingle hers with the rest of the pack, Elizabeth relentlessly picked it out and conducted a savage post-mortem as if on the corpse of a regicide.

The rubber had to be left for the present, for it was long after tea-time. At tea a most intriguing incident took place, for it had been Major Benjy’s invariable custom at these gatherings to have a whisky and soda or two instead of the milder refreshment. But to-day, to the desperate interest of those who, like Lucia, were intent on observing the mutual adjustments of matrimony, a particularly large cup was provided for him which, when everybody else was served, was filled to the brim by Elizabeth and passed to him. Diva noticed that, too, and paused in her steady consumption of nougat chocolates.

“And so tristeabout poor Mr. Georgie,” said Elizabeth. “I asked him to come in this afternoon, and he telephoned that he was too unwell: hadn’t been out of his maisonfor more than a fortnight. What’s the matter with him? You’ll know, Lucia.”

Lucia and everybody else wondered which of them would have been left out if Georgie had come, or whether Elizabeth had asked him at all. Probably she had not.

“But indeed I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody knows. It’s all very puzzling.”

“And haven’t even you seen him? Fancy!” said Elizabeth. “He must be terribly ill.”

Lucia did not say that actually she had seen him, nor did she mention his beard. She intended to find out what that meant before she disclosed it.

“Oh, I don’t think that,” she said. “But men like to be left quite alone when they’re not the thing.”

Elizabeth kissed her finger-tips across the table to her husband. Really rather sickening.

“That’s not the way of my little Benjy-boy,” she said. “Why, he had a touch of chill out at Monte, and pas un momentdid I get to myself till he was better. Wasn’t it so, mischief?”

Major Benjy wiped his great walrus-moustache which had been dipped in that cauldron of tea.

“Girlie is a wizard in the sick-room,” he said. “Bucks a man up more than fifty tonics. Ring Georgie up, Liz: say you’ll pop in after dinner and sit with him.”

Lucia waited for the upshot of this offer with some anxiety. Georgie would certainly be curious to see Elizabeth after her marriage and it would be too shattering if he accepted this proposal after having refused her own company. Luckily nothing so lamentable happened. Elizabeth returned from the telephone in a very short space of time, a little flushed, and, for the moment, forgetting to talk French.

“Not up to seeing people,” she said, “so Foljambe told me. A rude woman I’ve always thought: I wonder Mr. Georgie can put up with her. Diva, dear, more chocolates? I’m sure there are plenty more in the cupboard. More tea, anybody? Benjy, dear, another cup? Shall we get back to our rubbers then? All so exciting!”

The wee laddies presently began to get as incautious as the guid wives. It was maddening to be a game up and sixty, and not to be allowed to secure one of the fattest scores above ever known in Sussex. Already it reached nearly to the top of the scoring-sheet, but now owing to penalties from their own overbidding, a second sky-scraper was mounting rapidly beside the first. Then the guid wives got a game, and the deadly process began again.

“Très amusant!”exclaimed Elizabeth, sorting her hand with a fixed smile, because it was so amusing, and a trembling hand because it was so agonizing. “Now let me see; que faire?”

“Hold your hand a wee bitty higher, Mistress Mapp-Flint,” said the Padre, “or sure I can’t help getting a keek o’t.”

“Monsieur,the more you keeked the less you’d like it,” said Elizabeth, scanning a hand of appalling rubbish. Quite legitimate to say that.

At this precise moment when Elizabeth was wondering whether it might not pay to be psychic for once, Major Benjy at the other table laid down his hand as dummy, and cast just one glance, quick as a lizard at the knotted face of his wife. “Excuse me,” he said and quietly stole from the room. Elizabeth, so thought Diva, had not noticed his exit, but she certainly noticed his return, though she had got frightfully entangled in her hand, for Lucia had been psychic, too, and God knew what would happen...

“Not kept you waiting, I hope,” said Benjy stealing back. “Just a telephone message. Ha, we seem to be getting on, partner. Well, I must say, beautifully played.”

Diva thought these congratulations had a faint odour about them as if he had been telephoning to a merchant who dealt in spirituous liquors...

It was not till half-past seven that the great tussle came to an end, resulting in a complete wash-out, and the whole party, marvelling at the lateness of the hour left in a great hurry so as not to keep dinner (or a tray) waiting. Mr. Wyse vainly begged Lucia and Diva to be taken home in the Royce: it was such a dark night, he observed, but saw that there was a full moon, and it would be so wet underfoot, but he became aware that the pavements were bone-dry. So after a phrase or two in French from Elizabeth, in Italian from Lucia, in Scotch and Irish from the Padre, so that the threshold of Mallards resembled the Tower of Babel, Diva and Lucia went briskly down towards the High Street, both eager for a communing about the balance of the matrimonial equation.

“What a change, Diva!” began Lucia. “It’s quite charming to see what matrimony has done for Elizabeth. Miraculous, isn’t it? At present there does not seem to be a trace left of her old cantankerousness. She seems positively to dote on him. Those little tweaks and dabs, and above all her giving up the garden-room to him: that shows there must be something real and heartfelt, don’t you think? Fond eyes following him–”

“Not so sure about the fond eyes,” said Diva. “Pretty sharp they looked when he came back from telephoning. Another kind of cup of tea was what he was after. That I’ll swear to. Reeked!”

“No!” said Lucia. “You don’t say so!”

“Yes, I do. Teetotal lunches at the bungalow indeed! Rubbish. Whisky bottles, I bet, buried all over the garden.”

“Dear Diva, that’s pure imagination,” said Lucia very nobly. “If you say such things you’ll get to believe them.”

“Ho! I believe them already,” said Diva. “There’ll be developments yet.”

“I hope they’ll be happy ones, anyhow,” said Lucia. “Of course, as the Padre would say, Major Benjy was apt to lift the elbow occasionally, but I shall continue to believe that’s all done with. Such an enormous cup of tea: I never saw such a cup, and I think it’s a perfect marriage. Perfect! I wonder–”

Diva chipped in.

“I know what you mean. They sleep in that big room overlooking the street. Withers told my cook. Dressing-room for Major Benjy next door; that slip of a room. I’ve seen him shaving at the window myself.”

Lucia walked quickly on after Diva turned into her house in the High Street. Diva was a little coarse sometimes, but in fairness Lucia had to allow that when she said “I wonder,” Diva had interpreted what she wondered with absolute accuracy. If she was right about the precise process of Major Benjy’s telephoning, it would look as if matrimony had not wrought so complete a change in him as in his bride, but perhaps Diva’s sense of smell had been deranged by her enormous consumption of chocolates.

Then like a faint unpleasant odour the thought of her approaching fiftieth birthday came back to her. Only this morning she had resolved to make a worthy use of the few years that lay in front of her and of the energy that boiled inside her, and to couple the two together and achieve something substantial. Yet, even while that resolve was glowing within her, she had frittered four hours away over tea and Bridge, with vast expenditure of nervous force and psychic divination, and there was nothing to shew for it except weariness of the brain, a few dubious conclusions as to the effect of matrimony on the middle-aged and a distaste for small cards...Relaxation, thought Lucia in this sharp attack of moralizing, should be in itself productive. Playing duets with Georgie was productive because their fingers in spite of occasional errors, evoked the divine harmonies of Mozartino and Beethoven: when she made sketches of the twilight marsh her eye drank in the loveliness of Nature, but these hours of Bridge, however strenuous, had not really enriched or refreshed her, and it was no use pretending that they had.

“I must put up in large capital letters over my bed ‘I am fifty’,” she thought as she let herself into her house, “and that will remind me every morning and evening that I’ve done nothing yet which will be remembered after I am gone. I’ve been busy (I will say that for myself) but beyond giving others a few hours of enchantment at the piano, and helping them to keep supple, I’ve done nothing for the world or indeed for Tilling. I must take myself in hand.”

The evening post had come in but there was nothing for her except a packet covered with seals which she knew must be her pass-book returned from the bank. She did not trouble to open it, and after a tray (for she had made a substantial tea) she picked up the evening paper, to see if she could find any hints about a career for a woman of fifty. Women seemed to be much to the fore: there was one flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, but Lucia felt it was a little late for her to take up flying: probably it required an immense amount of practice before you could, with any degree of confidence, start for New York alone, two or three thousand feet up in the air.

Then eight others were making a tour of pavilions and assembly rooms in towns on the South Coast, and entrancing everybody by their graceful exhibitions (in tights, or were their legs bare?) of physical drill; but on thinking it over, Lucia could not imagine herself heading a team of Tilling ladies, Diva and Elizabeth and Susan Wyse, with any reasonable hope of entrancing anybody. The pages of reviews of books seemed to deal entirely with novels by women, all of which were works of high genius. Lucia had long felt that she could write a marvellous novel, but perhaps there were enough geniuses already. Then there was a woman who, though it was winter, was in training to swim the Channel, but Lucia hated sea-bathing and could not swim. Certainly women were making a stir in the world, but none of their achievements seemed suited to the ambitions of a middle-aged widow.

Lucia turned the page. Dame Catherine Winterglass was dead at the age of fifty-five, and there was a long obituary notice of this remarkable spinster. For many years she had been governess to the children of a solicitor who lived at Balham, but at the age of forty-five she had been dismissed to make way for somebody younger. She had a capital of £500, and had embarked on operations on the Stock Exchange, making a vast fortune. At the time of her death she had a house in Grosvenor Square where she entertained Royalty, an estate at Mocomb Regis in Norfolk for partridge shooting, a deer forest in Scotland, and a sumptuous yacht for cruising in the Mediterranean; and from London, Norfolk, Ross-shire and the Riviera she was always in touch with the centres of finance. An admirable woman, too: hospitals, girl-guides, dogs’ homes, indigent parsons, preventions of cruelty and propagations of the Gospel were the recipients of her noble bounty. No deserving case (and many undeserving) ever appealed to her in vain and her benefactions were innumerable. Right up to the end of her life, in spite of her colossal expenditure, it was believed that she grew richer and richer.

Lucia forgot all about nocturnal arrangements at Mallards, and read this account through again. What an extraordinary power money had! It enabled you not only to have everything you could possibly want yourself, but to do so much good, to relieve suffering, to make the world (as the Padre had said last Sunday) “a better place.” Hitherto she had taken very little interest in money, being quite content every six months or so to invest a few hundred pounds from her constantly accruing balance in some gilt-edged security, the dividends from which added some negligible sum to her already ample income. But here was this woman who, starting with a total capital of a paltry five hundred pounds, had for years lived in Sybaritic luxury and done no end of good as well. “To be sure,” thought Lucia, “she had the start of me by five years, for she was only forty-five when she began, but still...”

Grosvenor entered.

“Foljambe’s back from Mr. Georgie’s ma’am,” she said. “You told me you wanted to see her.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Lucia, deep in meditation about Dame Catherine. “To-morrow will do.”

She let the paper drop, and fixed her gimlet eyes on the bust of Beethoven, for this conduced to concentration. She did not covet yachts and deer forests, but there were many things she would like to do for Tilling: a new organ was wanted at the church, a new operating theatre was wanted at the hospital and she herself wanted Mallards. She intended to pass the rest of her days here, and it would be wonderful to be a great benefactress to the town, a notable figure, a civic power and not only the Queen (she had no doubt about that) of its small social life. These benefactions and the ambitions for herself, which she had been unable to visualize before, outlined themselves with distinctness and seemed wreathed together: the one twined round the other. Then the parable of the talents occurred to her. She had been like the unprofitable servant who, distrusting his financial ability, had wrapped it up in a napkin, for really to invest money in Government Stock was comparable with that, such meagre interest did it produce.

She picked up her paper again and turned to the page of financial news, and strenuously applied her vigorous mind to an article on the trend of markets by the City Editor. Those tedious gilt-edged stocks had fallen a little (as he had foreseen) but there was great activity in Industrials and in gold shares. Then there was a list of the shares which the City Editor had recommended to his readers a month ago. All of them (at least all that he quoted) had experienced a handsome rise: one had doubled in price. Lucia ripped open the sealed envelope containing her pass-book and observed with a pang of retrospective remorse that it revealed that she had the almost indecent balance of twelve hundred pounds. If only, a month ago, she had invested a thousand of it in that share recommended by this clever City Editor each pound would have made another pound!

But it was no use repining, and she turned to see what the wizard recommended now. Goldfields of West Africa were very promising, notably Siriami, and the price was eight to nine shillings. She did not quite know what that meant: probably there were two grades of shares, the best costing nine shillings, and a slightly inferior kind costing eight. Supposing she bought five hundred shares of Siriami and they behaved as those others had done, she would in a month’s time have doubled the sum she had invested.

“I’m beginning to see my way,” she thought, and the way was so absorbing that she had not heard the telephone bell ring, and now Grosvenor came in to say that Georgie wanted to speak to her. Lucia wondered whether Foljambe had seen her peeping in at his window this afternoon and had reported this intrusion, and was prepared, if this was the case and Georgie resented it, not exactly to lie about it, but to fail to understand what he was talking about until he got tired of explaining. She adopted that intimate dialect of baby-language with a peppering of Italian words in which they often spoke together.

“Is zat ‘oo, Georgino mio?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Georgie in plain English.

“Lubly to hear your voice again. Come sta?Better I hope.”

“Yes, going on all right, but very slow. All too tarsome. And I’m getting dreadfully depressed seeing nobody and hearing nothing.”

Lucia dropped dialect.

“But, my dear, why didn’t you let me come and see you before? You’ve always refused.”

“I know.”

There was a long pause. Lucia with her psychic faculties alert after so much Bridge felt sure he had something more to say, and like a wise woman she refrained from pressing him. Clearly he had rung her up to tell her something, but found it difficult to bring himself to the point.

At last it came.

“Will you come in to-morrow then?”

“Of course I will. Delighted. What time?”

“Any time is the same to me,” said Georgie gloomily. “I sit in this beastly little room all day.”

“About twelve then, after church?” she asked.

“Do. And I must warn you that I’m very much changed.”

(“That’s the beard,” thought Lucia.) She made her voice register deep concern.

“My dear, what do you mean?” she asked with a clever tremolo.

“Nothing to be anxious about at all, though it’s frightful. I won’t tell you because it’s so hard to explain it all. Any news?”

That sounded better: in spite of this frightful change Georgie had his human interests alive.

“Lots: quantities. For instance, Elizabeth says n’est ce pasand chérie,because she’s been to France.”

“No!” said Georgie with a livelier inflexion. “We’ll have a good talk: lots must have happened. But remember there’s a shocking change.”

“It won’t shock me,”said Lucia. “Twelve then, to-morrow. Good night, Georgino.”

“Buona notte,”said he.