The Complete Mapp & Lucia (137 page)

‘Get out!’ said Elizabeth, stamping her foot. ‘Thankfulness indeed! There’s a lot of thankfulness in your face! Go away! Shoo!’

Major Benjy had faced wounded tigers (so he said) in India, but then he had a rifle in his hand. He could not face his benefactress, and, with first one slipper and then the other dropping off his feet, he hurried down the few yards of pavement to his own house. The two ladies entered: Elizabeth banged the door and put up the chain.

‘So that’s that,’ she observed (and undoubtedly it was). ‘Ah, here’s Withers. Withers, we’ve come back, and though you ought never to have let the Major set foot in my house, I don’t blame you, for I feel sure he bullied you into it.’

‘Oh, miss!’ said Withers. ‘Is it you? Fancy! Well, that is a surprise!’

‘Now get Mrs Lucas and me a cup of tea,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and then she’s going back to Grebe. That wretch hasn’t been sleeping in my room, I trust?’

‘No, in the best spare bedroom,’ said Withers.

‘Then get my room ready, and I shall go to bed for a few hours. We’ve been up all night. Then, Withers, take all Major Benjy’s clothes and his horrid pipes, and all that belongs to him, and put them on the steps outside. Ring him up, and tell him where he will find them. But not one foot shall he set in
my
house again.’

Lucia went to the telephone and rang up Cadman’s cottage for her motor. She heard his exclamation of ‘My Gawd’, she heard (what she supposed was) Foljambe’s cry of astonishment, and then she rang up Georgie. He and his household were all a-bed and asleep when the telephone began its summons, but presently the persistent tinkle penetrated into his consciousness, and made him dream that he was again watching Lucia whirling down the flood on the kitchen-table and ringing an enormous dinner-bell as she swept by the steps. Then he became completely awake and knew it was only the telephone.

‘The tarsome thing!’ he muttered. ‘Who on earth can it be ringing one up at this time? Go on ringing then till you’re tired. I shall go to sleep again.’

In spite of these resolutions, he did nothing of the kind. So ceaseless was the summons that in a minute or two he got out of bed, and putting on his striped dressing-gown (blue and yellow) went down to his sitting-room.

‘Yes. Who is it? What do you want?’ he said crossly.

There came a little merry laugh, and then a voice, which he had thought was silent for ever, spoke in unmistakable accents.

‘Georgie!
Georgino mio!’
it said.

His heart stood still.

‘What? What?’ he cried.

‘Yes, it’s Lucia,’ said the voice. ‘Me’s tum home, Georgie.’

Eighty thousand pounds (less death duties) and Grebe seemed to sweep by him like an avalanche, and fall into the gulf of the things that might have been. But it was not the cold blast of that ruin that filled his eyes with tears.

‘Oh my dear!’ he cried. ‘Is it really you? Lucia, where are you? Where are you talking from?’

‘Mallards. Elizabeth and I—’

‘What, both of you?’ called Georgie. ‘Then—where’s Major Benjy?’

‘Just gone home,’ said Lucia discreetly. ‘And as soon as I’ve had a cup of tea I’m going to Grebe.’

‘But I must come round and see you at once,’ said Georgie. ‘I’ll just put some things on.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Lucia. ‘Presto, presto, Georgie.’

Careless of his reputation for being the best-dressed man in Tilling, he put on his dress trousers and a pullover, and his thick brown cape, and did not bother about his
toupet.
The front door of Mallards was open, and Elizabeth’s servants were laying out on the top step a curious collection of golf-clubs and tooth-brushes and clothes. From mere habit—everyone in Tilling had the habit—he looked up at the window of the garden-room as he passed below it, and was astonished to see two mariners in sou’wester caps and tarpaulin jackets kissing their hands to him. He had only just time to wonder who these could possibly be when he guessed. He flew into Lucia’s arms, then wondered if he ought to kiss Elizabeth too. But there was a slight reserve about her which caused him to refrain. He was not brilliant enough at so early an hour to guess that she had seen the smaller lettering in which her loving memory was recorded.

There was but time for a few ejaculations and a promise from Georgie to dine at Grebe that night, before Lucia’s motor arrived, and the imperturbable Cadman touched his cap and said to Lucia, ‘Very pleased to see you back, ma’am,’ as she picked her way between the growing deposits of socks and other more intimate articles of male attire which were now being ranged on the front steps. Georgie hurried back to Mallards Cottage to dress in a manner more worthy of his reputation, and Elizabeth up to her bedroom for a few hours’ sleep. Below her oil-skins she still wore the ragged remains of the clothes in which she had left Tilling on Boxing Day, and now she drew out of the pocket of her frayed and sea-stained jacket, a half-sheet of discoloured paper. She unfolded it and having once more read the mystic words ‘Take two hen lobsters’, she stowed it safely away for future use.

Meantime Major Benjy next door had been the prey of the most sickening reflections; whichever way he turned, fate gave him some stinging blow that set him staggering and reeling in another direction. Leaning out of an upper window of his own house, he observed his clothes and boots and articles of toilet being laid out like a bird’s breakfast on the steps of Mallards, and essaying to grind his teeth with rage he discovered that his upper dental plate must still be reposing in a glass of water in the best spare bedroom which he had lately quitted in such haste. To recover his personal property was the first necessity, and when from his point of observation he saw that the collection had grown to a substantial size, he crept up the pavement, seized a bundle of miscellaneous articles, as many as he could carry, then stole back again, dropping a nail-brush here and a sock-suspender there, and dumped them in his house. Three times he must go on these degrading errands, before he had cleared all the bird’s breakfast away; indeed he was an early bird feeding on the worms of affliction.

Tilling was beginning to awake now: the milkman came clattering down the street and, looking in amazement at his dishevelled figure, asked whether he wanted his morning supply left at his own house or at Mallards: Major Benjy turned on him so appalling a face that he left no milk at either and turned swiftly into the less alarming air of Porpoise Street. Again he had to make the passage of his Via Dolorosa to glean the objects which had dropped from his overburdened arms, and as he returned he heard a bumping noise behind him, and saw his new portmanteau hauled out by Withers rolling down the steps into the street. He emerged again when Withers had shut the door, put more gleanings into it and pulled it into his house. There he made a swift and sorry toilet, for there was business to be done which would not brook delay. Already the preparations for the sale of his furniture were almost finished; the carpet and hearth-rug in his sitting-room were tied up together and labelled Lot 1; the fire-irons and a fishing-rod and a rhinoceros-hide whip were Lot 2; a kitchen tray with packs of cards, a tobacco jar, a piece of chipped
cloisonné
ware and a roll of toilet paper formed an unappetizing Lot 3. The sale must be stopped at once and he went down to the auctioneer’s in the High Street and informed him that owing to circumstances over which he had no control he was compelled to cancel it. It was pointed out to him that considerable expense had already been incurred for the printing and display of the bills that announced it, for the advertisements in the local press, for the time and trouble already spent in arranging and marking the lots, but the Major bawled out: ‘Damn it all, the things are mine and I won’t sell one of them. Send me in your bill.’ Then he had to go to the house-agents’ and tell them to withdraw his house from the market and take down his board, and coming out of the office he ran into Irene, already on her way to Grebe, who cried out: ‘They’ve come back, old Benjywenjy. Joy! Joy!’

The most immediate need of having a roof over his head and a chair to sit on was now provided for, and as he had already dismissed his own servants, taking those of Mallards, he must go to another agency to find some sort of cook or charwoman till he could get his establishment together again. They promised to send an elderly lady, highly respectable though rather deaf and weak in the legs, tomorrow if possible. Back he came to his house with such cold comfort to cheer him, and observed on the steps of Mallards half a dozen bottles of wine. ‘My God, my cellar,’ muttered the Major, ‘there are dozens and dozens of my wine and my whisky in the house!’ Again he crept up to the abhorred door and, returning with the bottles, put a kettle on to boil, and began cutting the strings that held the lots together. Just then the church bells burst out into a joyful peal, and it was not difficult to conjecture the reason for their unseemly mirth. All this before breakfast…

A cup of hot strong tea without any milk restored not only his physical stability but also his mental capacity for suffering, and he sat down to think. There was the financial side of the disaster first of all, a thing ghastly to contemplate. He had bought (but not yet paid for) a motor, some dozens of wine, a suit of new clothes, as well as the mourning habiliments in which he had attended the memorial service, quantities of stationery with the Mallards stamp on it, a box of cigars and other luxuries too numerous to mention. It was little comfort to remember that he had refused to contribute to the cenotaph; a small saving like that did not seem to signify. Then what view, he wondered, would his benefactress, when she knew all, take of his occupation of Mallards? She might find out (indeed being who she was, she would not fail to do so) that he had tried to let it at ten guineas a week and she might therefore send him in a bill on that scale for the fortnight he had spent there, together with that for her servants’ wages, and for garden-produce and use of her piano. Luckily he had only eaten some beetroot out of the garden, and he had had the piano tuned. But of all these staggering expenses, the only items which were possibly recoverable were the wages he had paid to the staff of Mallards between Boxing Day and the date of his tenancy: these Elizabeth might consent to set against the debits. Not less hideous than this financial débâcle that stared him in the face, was the loss of prestige in Tilling. Tilling, he knew, had disapproved of his precipitancy in entering into Mallards, and Tilling, full, like Irene, of joy, joy for the return of the lost, would simply hoot with laughter at him. He could visualize with awful clearness the chatting groups in the High Street which would vainly endeavour to suppress their smiles as he approached. The day of swank was past and done, he would have to be quiet and humble and grateful to anybody who treated him with the respect to which he had been accustomed.

He unrolled a tiger-skin to lay down again in his hall: a cloud of dust and deciduous hair rose from it, pungent like snuff, and the remaining glass eye fell out of the socket. He bawled
‘Quai-hai’
before he remembered that till tomorrow at least he would be alone in the house, and that even then his attendant would be deaf. He opened his front door and looked out into the street again, and there on the doorstep of Mallards was another dozen or so of wine and a walking-stick. Again he stole out to recover his property with the hideous sense that perhaps Elizabeth was watching him from the garden-room. His dental plate—thank God—was there too on the second step, all by itself, gleaming in the sun, and seeming to grin at him in a very mocking manner. After that throughout the morning he looked out at intervals as he rested from the awful labour of laying carpets and putting beds together, and there were usually some more bottles waiting for him, with stray golf-clubs, bridge-markers and packs of cards. About one o’clock just as he was collecting what must surely be the last of these bird-breakfasts, the door of Mallards opened and Elizabeth stepped carefully over his umbrella and a box of cigars. She did not appear to see him. It seemed highly probable that she was going to revoke her will.

Georgie, as well as Major Benjy, had to do a little thinking, when he returned from his visit at dawn to Mallards. It concerned two points, the cenotaph and the kitchen-table. The cenotaph had not been mentioned in those few joyful ejaculations he had exchanged with Lucia, and he hoped that the ladies had not seen it. So after breakfast he went down to the stonemason’s and begged him to send a trolley and a hefty lot of men up to the churchyard at once, and remove the monument to the backyard of Mallards Cottage, which at present was chiefly occupied by the kitchen-table under a tarpaulin. But Mr Marble (such was his appropriate name) shook his head over this: the cenotaph had been dedicated, and he felt sure that a faculty must be procured before it could be removed. That would never do: Georgie could not wait for a faculty, whatever that was, and he ordered that the inscription, anyhow, should be effaced without delay: surely no faculty was needed to destroy all traces of a lie. Mr Marble must send some men up to chip, and chip and chip for all they were worth till those beautiful lead letters were detached and the surface of the stone cleared of all that erroneous information.

‘And then I’ll tell you what,’ said Georgie, with a sudden splendid thought, ‘why not paint on to it (I can’t afford any more cutting) the inscription that was to have been put on it when that man went bankrupt and I bought the monument instead? He’ll get his monument for nothing, and I shall get rid of mine, which is just what I want… That’s beautiful. Now you must send a trolley to my house and take a very big kitchen-table,
the
one in fact, back to Grebe. It must go in through the door of the kitchen-garden and be put quietly into the kitchen. And I particularly want it done to-day.’

All went well with these thoughtful plans. Georgie saw with his own eyes the last word of his inscription disappear in chips of marble; and he carried away all the lead letters in case they might come in useful for something, though he could not have said what: perhaps he would have ‘Mallards Cottage’ let into the threshold of his house for that long inscription would surely contain the necessary letters. Rather a pretty and original idea. Then he ascertained that the kitchen-table had been restored to its place while Lucia slept, and he drove down at dinner-time feeling that he had done his best. He wore his white waistcoat with onyx buttons for the happy occasion.