The Complete Mapp & Lucia (17 page)

His glass-case of treasures was not only open but empty. Gone was the Louis XVI snuff-box, gone was the miniature of Karl Huth, gone the piece of Bow China, and gone the Faberge cigarette case. Only the Queen Anne toy-porringer was there, and in the absence of the others, it looked to him, as no doubt it had looked to the burglar, indescribably insignificant.

Georgie gave a little low wailing cry, but did not tear his hair for obvious reasons. Then he rang the bell three times in swift succession, which was the signal to Foljambe that even if she was in her bath, she must come at once. In she came with one of Hermy’s horrid woolen jerseys that had been left behind, in her hand.

“Yes, sir, what is it?” she asked, in an agitated manner, for never could she remember Georgie having rung the bell three times except once when a fish-bone had stuck in his throat, and once again when a note had announced to him that Piggy was going to call and hoped to find him alone. For answer Georgie pointed to the rifled treasure-case. “Gone! Burgled!” he said. “Oh, my God!”

At that supreme moment the telephone bell sounded.

“See what it is,” he said to Foljambe, and put the Queen Anne toy-porringer in his pocket.

She came hurrying back.

“Mrs Lucas wants you to come around at once,” she said.

“I can’t,” said Georgie. “I must stop here and send for the police. Nothing must be moved,” and he hastily replaced the toy-porringer on the exact circle of pressed velvet where it had stood before.

“Yes, sir,” said Foljambe, but in another moment she returned.

“She would be very much obliged if you would come at once,” she said. “There’s been a robbery in the house.”

“Well, tell her there’s been one in mine,” said Georgie irritably. Then good-nature mixed with furious curiosity came to his aid.

“Wait here, then, Foljambe, on this very spot,” he said, “and see that nobody touches anything. I shall probably ring up the police from The Hurst. Admit them.”

In his agitation he put on his hat, instead of going bareheaded and was received by Lucia, who had clearly been looking out of the music-room window, at the door. She wore her Teacher’s Robe.

“Georgie,” she said, quite forgetting to speak Italian in her greeting, “someone broke into Philip’s safe last night, and took a hundred pounds in bank-notes. He had put them there only yesterday in order to pay in cash for that cob. And my Roman pearls.”

Georgie felt a certain pride of achievement.

“I’ve been burgled, too,” he said. “My Louis XVI snuff-box is worth more than that, and there’s the piece of Bow china, and the cigarette-case, and the Karl Huth as well.”

“My dear! Come inside,” said she. “It’s a gang. And I was feeling so peaceful and exalted. It will make a terrible atmosphere in the house. My Guru will be profoundly affected. An atmosphere where thieves have been will stifle him. He has often told me how he cannot stop in a house where there have been wicked emotions at play. I must keep it from him. I cannot lose him.”

Lucia had sunk down on a spacious Elizabethan settle in the hall. The humorous spider mocked them from the window, the humorous stone fruit from the plate beside the pot-pourri bowl. Even as she repeated, “I cannot lose him,” again, a tremendous rap came on the front door, and Georgie, at a sign from his queen, admitted Mrs Quantock.

“Robert and I have been burgled,” she said. “Four silver spoons—thank God, most of our things are plate—eight silver forks and a Georgian tankard. I could have spared all but the last.”

A faint sign of relief escaped Lucia. If the foul atmosphere of thieves permeated Daisy’s house, too, there was no great danger that her Guru would go back there. She instantly became sublime.

“Peace!” she said. “Let us have our class first, for it is ten already, and not let any thought of revenge or evil spoil that for us. If I sent for the police now I could not concentrate. I will not tell my Guru what has happened to any of us, but for poor Peppino’s sake I will ask him to give us rather a short lesson. I feel completely calm. Om.”

Vague nightmare images began to take shape in Georgie’s mind, unworthy suspicions based on his sisters’ information the evening before. But with Foljambe keeping guard over the Queen Anne porringer, there was nothing more to fear, and he followed Lucia, her silver cord with tassels gently swinging as she moved, to the smoking-parlour, where Peppino was already sitting on the floor, and breathing in a rather more agitated manner than was usual with the advanced class. There were fresh flowers on the table, and the scented morning breeze blew in from the garden. According to custom they all sat down and waited, getting calmer and more peaceful every moment. Soon there would be the tapping of slippered heels on the walk of broken paving-stones outside, and for the time they would forget all these disturbances. But they were all rather glad that Lucia was to ask the Guru to give them a shorter lesson than usual.

They waited. Presently the hands of the Cromwellian timepiece which was the nearest approach to an Elizabethan clock that Lucia had been able at present to obtain, pointed to a quarter past ten.

“My Guru is a little late,” said she.

Two minutes afterwards, Peppino sneezed. Two minutes after that Daisy spoke, using irony.

“Would it not be well to see what has happened to your Guru, dear?” she asked. “Have you seen your Guru this morning?”

“No, dear,” said Lucia, not opening her eyes, for she was “concentrating,” “he always meditates before a class.”

“So do I,” said Daisy, “but I have meditated long enough.”

“Hush!” said Lucia. “He is coming.”

That proved to be a false alarm, for it was nothing but Lucia’s Persian cat, who had a quarrel with some dead laurel leaves. Lucia rose.

“I don’t like to interrupt him,” she said, “but time is getting on.”

She left the smoking-parlour with the slow supple walk that she adopted when she wore her Teacher’s Robes. Before many seconds had passed, she came back more quickly and with no suppleness.

“His door is locked”, she said; “and yet there’s no key in it.”

“Did you look through the keyhole,
Lucia mia
?” asked Mrs Quantock, with irrepressible irony.

Naturally Lucia disregarded this.

“I knocked,” she said, “and there was no reply. I said, ‘Master, we are waiting,’ and he didn’t answer.”

Suddenly Georgie spoke, as with the report of a cork flying out of a bottle.

“My sisters told me last night that he was the curry-cook at the Calcutta restaurant,” he said. “They recognised him, and they thought he recognised them. He comes from Madras, and is no more a Brahmin than Foljambe.”

Peppino bounded to his feet.

“What?” he said. “Let’s get a poker and break in the door! I believe he’s gone and I believe he’s the burglar. Ring for the police.”

“Curry-cook, is he?” said Daisy. “Robert and I were right after all. We knew what your Guru was best fitted for, dear Lucia, but then of course you always know best, and you and he have been fooling us finely. But you didn’t fool me. I knew when you took him away from me, what sort of a bargain you had made. Guru, indeed! He’s the same class as Mrs Eddy, and I saw through her fast enough. And now what are we to do? For my part, I shall just get home, and ring up for the police, and say that the Indian who has been living with you all these weeks has stolen my spoons and forks and my Georgian tankard. Guru, indeed! Burglaroo, I call him! There!”

Her passion, like Hyperion’s, had lifted her upon her feet, and she stood there defying the whole of the advanced class, short and stout and wholly ridiculous, but with some revolutionary menace about her. She was not exactly “terrible as an army with banners,” but she was terrible as an elderly lady with a long-standing grievance that had been accentuated by the loss of a Georgian tankard, and that was terrible enough to make Lucia adopt a conciliatory attitude. Bitterly she repented having stolen Daisy’s Guru at all, if the suspicions now thickening in the air proved to be true, but after all they were not proved yet. The Guru might still walk in from the arbor on the laburnum alley which they had not yet searched, or he might be levitating with the door key in his pocket. It was not probable but it was possible, and at this crisis possibilities were things that must be clung to, for otherwise you would simply have to submerge, like those U-boats.

They searched all the garden, but found no trace of the curry-cook: they made guarded enquiries of the servants as to whether he had been seen, but nothing whatever could be learned about him. So when Peppino took a ponderous hammer and a stout chisel from his tool chest and led the way upstairs, they all knew that the decisive moment had come. Perhaps he might be meditating (for indeed it was likely that he had a good deal to meditate about), but perhaps—Peppino called to him in his most sonorous tones, and said that he would be obliged to break his lock if no answer came, and presently the house resounded with knockings as terrible as those in Macbeth, and much louder. Then suddenly the lock gave, and the door was open.

The room was empty, and as they had all conjectured by now, the bed was unslept in. They opened the drawers of the wardrobe and they were as empty as the room. Finally, Peppino unlocked the door of a large cupboard that stood in the corner, and with a clinking and crashing of glass there poured out a cataract of empty brandy bottles. Emptiness: that was the key-note of the whole scene, and blank consternation its effect.

“My brandy!” said Mrs Quantock in a strangled voice. “There are fourteen or fifteen bottles. That accounts for the glazed look in his eyes which you, dear Lucia, thought was concentration. I call it distillation.”

“Did he take it from your cellar?” asked Lucia, too shattered to feel resentment, but still capable of intense curiosity.

“No: he had a standing order from me to order any little things he might want from my tradesmen. I wish I had my bills sent in every week.”

“Yes, dear,” said Lucia.

Georgie’s eyes sought hers.

“I saw him buy the first bottle,” he said. “I remember telling you about it. It was at Rush’s”

Peppino gathered up his hammer and chisel.

“Well, it’s no use sitting here and thinking of old times,” he observed. “I shall ring up the police-station and put the whole matter into their hands, as far as I am concerned. They’ll soon lay hands on him, and he can do his postures in prison for the next few years.”

“But we don’t know that it was he who committed all these burglaries yet,” said Lucia.

No one felt it was worth answering this, for the others had all tried and convicted him already.

“I shall do the same,” said Georgie.

“My tankard,” said Mrs Quantock. Lucia got up.

“Peppino mio,”
she said, “and you, Georgie, and you, Daisy, I want you before you do anything at all to listen to me for five minutes. Just consider this. What sort of figure shall we all cut if we put the matter into the hands of the police? They will probably catch him, and it will all come out that we have been the dupes of a curry-cook. Think what we have all been doing for this last month, think of our classes, our exercises, our—everything. We have been made fools of, but for my part, I simply couldn’t bear that everybody should know I had been made a fool of. Anything but that. What’s a hundred pounds compared to that, or a tankard—”

“My Louis XVI snuff-box was worth at least that without the other things,” said Georgie, still with a secret satisfaction in being the greatest sufferer.

“And it was my hundred pounds, not yours,
carissima,”
said Peppino. But it was clear that Lucia’s words were working within him like leaven.

“I’ll go halves with you,” she said. I’ll give you a cheque for fifty pounds.”

“And who would like to go halves in my tankard?” said Daisy with bitter irony. “I want my tankard.”

Georgie said nothing, but his mind was extremely busy. There was Olga soon coming to Riseholme, and it would be awful if she found it ringing with the tale of the Guru, and glancing across to Peppino, he saw a thoughtful and sympathetic look in his eyes, that seemed to indicate that his mind was working on parallel lines. Certainly Lucia had given them all something to meditate upon. He tried to imagine the whole story being shouted into Mrs Antrobus’s ear-trumpet on the village-green, and could not endure the idea. He tried to imagine Mrs Weston ever ceasing to talk about it, and could not picture her silence. No doubt they had all been taken in, too, but here in this empty bedroom were the original dupes, who encouraged the rest.

After Mrs Quantock’s enquiry a dead silence fell.

“What do you propose, then?” asked Peppino, showing signs of surrender.

Lucia exerted her utmost wiles.

“Caro!”
she said. “I want ‘oo to propose. Daisy and me, we silly women, we want ‘oo and Georgie to tell us what to do. But if Lucia must speak, I fink—”

She paused a moment, and observing strong disgust at her playfulness on Mrs Quantock’s face, reverted to ordinary English again.

“I should do something of this sort,” she said. “I should say that dear Daisy’s Guru had left us quite suddenly, and that he has had a call somewhere else. His work here was done; he had established our classes, and set all our feet upon the Way. He always said that something of the sort might happen to him–-“

“I believe he had planned it all along,” said Georgie. “He knew the thing couldn’t last for ever, and when my sisters recognised him, he concluded it was time to bolt.”

“With all the available property he could lay hands on,” said Mrs Quantock.

Lucia fingered her tassel.

“Now about the burglaries,” she said. “It won’t do to let it be known that three burglaries were committed in one night, and that simultaneously Daisy’s Guru was called away—”

“My Guru, indeed!” said Mrs Quantock, fizzing with indignation at the repetition of this insult.