Lucia Rising Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LUCIA RISING

  Edward Frederic Benson was born in 1867 at Wellington College, where his father Edward White Benson (later Archbishop of Canterbury) was headmaster. He was educated at Marlborough and King's College, Cambridge. His main interests were classics and archaeology and from 1892 to 1895 he studied and worked at the British School of Archaeology in Athens.

  In 1893 his first novel Dodo had considerable success, and there followed a stream of novels and biographies, including his famous social comedies, the Lucia series, cult books since they were first published in the 1920s.

  Mayor of Rye from 1934 to 1937, E. F. Benson was awarded the OBE and made an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He died in 1940, having published over 100 books.

  LUCIA RISING

  QUEEN LUCIA

  MISS MAPP

  including The Male Impersonator

  LUCIA IN LONDON

  E. F. BENSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Queen Lucia first published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1920

  Miss Mapp first published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1922;

  ‘The Male Impersonator’ first published by Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1929

  Lucia in London first published by Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1927

  This collection first published under the title Lucia Rising by Penguin Books 1991

  16

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193160-9

  CONTENTS

  Queen Lucia

  Miss Mapp

  including The Male Impersonator

  Lucia in London

  Queen Lucia

  1

  Though the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred to cover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on her own feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly that her husband had ordered to meet her. After those four hours in the train a short walk would be pleasant; but, though she veiled it from her conscious mind, another motive, subconsciously entertained, prompted her action. It would, of course, be universally known to all her friends in Riseholme that she was arriving to-day by the 12.26, and at that hour the village street would be sure to be full of them, and they would see the fly with luggage draw up at the door of The Hurst, and nobody except her maid would get out.

  That would be an interesting thing for them: it would cause one of those little thrills of pleasant excitement and conjecture which daily supplied Riseholme with its emotional bread. They would all wonder what had happened to her, whether she had been taken ill at the very last moment before leaving town, and with her well-known fortitude and consideration for the feelings of others, had sent her maid on to assure her husband that he need not be anxious. That would clearly be Mrs Quantock's suggestion, for Mrs Quantock's mind, devoted as it was now to the study of Christian Science, and the determination to deny the existence of pain, disease and death as regards herself, was always full of the gloomiest views as regards her friends, and on the slightest excuse, conjectured that they, poor blind things, were suffering from false claims. Indeed, given that the fly had already arrived at The Hurst, and that its arrival had at this moment been seen by or reported to Daisy Quantock, the chances were vastly in favour of that lady's having already started in to give her absent treatment. Very likely Georgie Pillson had also seen the anticlimax of the fly's arrival, but he would hazard a much more probable though erroneous solution of her absence. He would certainly guess that she had sent her maid with her luggage on to the station to take her place for her, while she herself, oblivious of the passage of time, was spending her last half-hour in contemplation of the Italian masterpieces at the National Gallery, or the Greek bronzes at the British Museum. Certainly she would not be at the Royal Academy, for the culture of Riseholme, led by herself, rejected as valueless all artistic efforts later than the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a great deal of what went before… Her husband, on the other hand, with his firm grasp of the obvious, would be disappointingly capable, even before her maid confirmed his conjecture, of concluding that she had merely walked from the station.

  The motive, then, that made her send her cab on, though subconsciously generated, soon penetrated into her consciousness, and these guesses at what other people would think when they saw it arrive without her, sprang from the dramatic instincts that formed so large a part of her mentality, and made her always take, as by right divine, the leading part in the histrionic entertainments with which the cultured of Riseholme beguiled, or rather strenuously occupied, such moments that could be spared from their studies of art and literature, and their social engagements. Indeed, she did not usually stop at taking the leading part, but, if possible, doubled another character with it, as well as being stage-manager and adapter, if not designer of scenery. Whatever she did (and really she did an incredible deal), she did it with all the might of her dramatic perceptions – did it, in fact, with such earnestness that she had no time to have an eye to the gallery at all: she simply contemplated herself and her own strenuousness. When she played the piano, as she frequently did, reserving an hour for practice every day, she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who passed down the road outside her house might be thinking of the roulades that poured from her open window: she was simply Emmeline Lucas, absorbed in glorious Bach, or dainty Scarlatti, or noble Beethoven. The latter, perhaps, was her favourite composer, and many were the evenings when, with lights quenched, and only the soft effulgence of the moon pouring in through the uncurtained windows, she sat with her profile, cameo-like (or liker perhaps to the head on a postage-stamp), against the dark oak walls of her music-room, and entranced herself and her listeners, if there were people to dinner, with the exquisite pathos of the first movement of the ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Devotedly as she worshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her Steinway Grand, she could never bring herself to believe that the two succeeding movements were on the same astounding level as the first, and, besides, they ‘went’ very much faster. But she had seriously thought, as she came down in the train to-day, and planned her fresh activities at home, of trying to master them, so that she could get through their intricacies with tolerable accuracy. Until then, she would assuredly stop at the end of the first movement, in these moonlit séances, and say that the other two were more like morning and afternoon. Then with a sigh she would softly shut the piano-lid and, perhaps wiping a little genuine moisture from her eyes, would turn on the electric light, and taking up a book from the table, in which a paper-knife marked the extent of her penetration, say ‘Georgie, you must really promise me to read this life of Antonio Capo
relli the moment I have finished it. I never understood the rise of the Venetian School before. I can smell the salt tide creeping up over the lagoon, and see the campanile of dear Torcello.’

  And Georgie would put down the tambour on which he was working his copy drawn from a design on an Italian cope and sigh too.

  ‘You are too wonderful!’ he would say. ‘How do you find time for everything?’

  She rejoined with the apophthegm that made the rounds of Riseholme next day:

  ‘My dear, it is just busy people who have time for everything.’

  It might be thought that even such activities as have been here indicated would be enough to occupy anyone so busily that she would positively not have time for more, but such was far from being the case with Mrs Lucas. Just as the painter Rubens amused himself with being Ambassador to the Court of St James's (a sufficient career in itself for most busy men), so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of her pursuit of Art for Art's sake, with being not only an ambassador but a monarch. Riseholme might perhaps, according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, and imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds. The ruler of Riseholme, happier than he of Russia, had no need to fear the heady poison of Bolshevism, for there was not in the whole of that vat, which seethed so pleasantly with culture, one bubble of revolutionary ferment. Here there was neither poverty nor discontent nor muttered menace of any upheaval. Mrs Lucas, busy and serene, worked harder than any of her subjects, and exercised a control that was both popular and autocratic.

  Something of the consciousness of her sovereignty was in her mind, as she turned the last hot corner of the road and came in sight of the village street that constituted her kingdom. Indeed, it belonged to her, as treasure-trove belongs to the Crown, for it was she who had been the first to begin the transformation of this remote Elizabethan village into the palace of culture that was now reared on the spot where ten years ago an agricultural population had led their bovine and unilluminated lives in these grey stone or brick-and-timber cottages. Before that, while her husband amassed a fortune, respectable in amount as in origin, at the Bar, she had merely held up a small but unwavering lamp of culture in Onslow Gardens. But both her ambition and his had been to bask and be busy under artistic skies when the materialistic needs were provided for by sound investments. So when there were sufficient thousands of pounds in firm securities, she had easily persuaded him to buy three of these cottages that stood together in a low two-storeyed block, and had, by judicious removal of partition walls, transmuted them into a most comfortable dwelling, subsequently adding on a new wing running out at right-angles at the back, which was, if anything, a shade more blatantly Elizabethan than the stem on to which it was grafted, for here was situated the famous smoking-parlour, with rushes on the floor, a dresser ranged with pewter tankards, and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it was practically impossible to see out of them. It had a huge open fireplace framed in oak beams, with a seat on each side of the iron-backed hearth within the chimney, and an iron spit hung over the middle of the fire. Here, though in the rest of the house she had, for the sake of convenience, allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even to them reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a fanatically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often spent rare leisure moments there, playing on the virginal that stood in the window, or kippering herself in the smoke of the wood-fire as with streaming eyes she deciphered an Elzevir Horace, rather late for inclusion under the rule, but an undoubted bargain.

  The house stood at that end of the village which was nearest the station; and thus, when the panorama of her kingdom opened before her, she had but a few steps further to go. A yew-hedge, bought entire from a neighbouring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden from the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which it was cut, across the little lawn inside. Here, as was only right and proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare: indeed, it was called Shakespeare's garden, and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining-room was Ophelia's border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraught maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in a lunatic asylum. Mrs Lucas often reflected how lucky it was that such institutions were unknown in Elizabeth's day. Pansies, naturally, formed the chief decoration (though there were some very flourishing plants of rue), and Mrs Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when in flower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfully efficacious. Round the sundial, which was set in the middle of one of the squares of grass between which a path of broken paving-stones led to the front-door, was a circular border, now, in July, sadly vacant, for it harboured only the spring flowers enumerated by Perdita. But the first day every year when Perdita's border put forth its earliest blossom was a delicious anniversary, and the news of it spread like wildfire through Mrs Lucas's kingdom, and her subjects were very joyful, and came to salute the violet or daffodil, or whatever it was.

  The three cottages dexterously transformed into The Hurst, presented a charmingly irregular and picturesque front. Two were of the grey stone of the district, and the middle one, to the door of which led the paved path, of brick and timber. Latticed windows with stout mullions gave illumination to the room within, and to the original windows certain new lights had been added; these could be detected by the observant eye, for they had a markedly older appearance than the rest. The front-door, similarly, seemed amazingly antique, the fact being that the one which Mrs Lucas had found there was too dilapidated to be of the slightest service in keeping out wind and wet. She had therefore caused to be constructed an even older one made from oak planks in a dismantled barn, and had it studded with large iron nails of antique pattern fashioned by the village blacksmith. He had arranged some of them to look as if they spelled A.D. 1603. Over the door hung an inn-sign, and into the space where once the sign had swung was now inserted a lantern, in which was ensconced, well hidden from view by its patinated glass sides, an electric light. This was one of the necessary concessions to modern convenience, for no lamp nurtured on oil would pierce those genuinely opaque panes, and illuminate the path to the gate. Better to have an electric light than cause your guests to take a header into Perdita's border. By the side of this fortress-door hung a heavy iron bell-pull, ending in a mermaid. When Mrs Lucas had that first installed, it was a bell-pull in the sense that an extremely athletic man could, if he used both hands and planted his feet firmly, cause it to act, and a huge bronze bell swung in the servants’ passage, and eventually gave tongue (if the athlete continued pulling) with vibrations so sonorous that the whitewash from the ceiling fell down in flakes. She had therefore made another concession to the frailty of the present generation and the inconvenience of having whitewash falling into cold dishes on their way to the dining-room, and now at the back of the mermaid's tail was a little bone button, coloured black and practically invisible, and thus the bell-pull had been converted into an electric bell-push. In this way visitors could make their advent known without violent exertion, the mermaid lost no visible whit of her Elizabethan virginity, and the spirit of Shakespeare wandering in his garden would not notice any anachronism.

  Though Mrs Lucas's parents had bestowed the name of Emmeline on her, it was not to be wondered at that she was always known among the more intimate of her subjects as Lucia, pronounced, of course, in the Italian
mode (la Lucia, the wife of Lucas), and it was as Lucia mia that her husband hailed her as he met her at the door of The Hurst. He had been watching for her arrival through the panes of the parlour while he meditated upon one of the little prose-poems which formed so delectable a contribution to the culture of Riseholme; for though, as has been hinted, he had in practical life a firm grasp of the obvious, there were windows in his soul which looked out on to vague and ethereal prospects which so far from being obvious were only dimly intelligible. In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythm of Walt Whitman, but their smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever to the productions of that barbaric bard, for no one thought of Walt Whitman as anything but a crude, rude American. Already a couple of volumes of these prose-poems had been published, not of course in the hard, business-like establishments of London, but at ‘Ye Signe of Ye Daffodille’, on the village green, where type was set up by hand, and very little, but that of the best, was printed. The press had only been recently started at Mr Lucas's expense. But it had put forth a reprint of Shakespeare's sonnets already, as well as his own poems. They were printed in blunt type on thick yellowish paper, the edges of which seemed as if they had been cut by the forefinger of an impatient reader, so ragged and irregular were they, and they were bound in vellum. The titles of these two slim flowers of poetry, ‘Flotsam’ and ‘Jetsam’, were printed on the outside in black-letter type, and the covers were further adorned with a sort of embossed seal, and with antique-looking tapes, so that you could tie it all up with two bows when you had finished with Mr Lucas's ‘Flotsam’ for the time being, and turned to ‘Jetsam’.

  Today, the prose-poem on ‘Loneliness’ had not been getting on very well, and Philip Lucas was glad to hear the click of the garden-gate, which showed that his loneliness was over for the present, and, looking up, he saw his wife's figure waveringly presented to his eyes through the twisted and knotty glass of the parlour window, which had taken so long to collect, but which now completely replaced the plain, commonplace, un-refracting stuff which was there before. He jumped up with an alacrity remarkable in so solid and well-furnished a person, and had thrown open the nail-studded front-door long before Lucia had traversed the path of broken paving-stones, for she had lingered at Perdita's border.