Works of E F Benson Page 17

  Lucia leaned forward over the table, with her hands clasped.

  “There was display about it, Georgino, and you know how I hate display,” she said. “Shakespeare was content with the most modest scenery for his masterpieces, and it would be a great mistake if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by mere wasteful opulence. In all the years I have lived here, and contributed in my humble way to the life of the place, I have heard no complaints about my suppers or teas, nor about the quality of entertainment which I offer my guests when they are so good as to say ‘Si,’ to le mie invitazione. Art is not advanced by romping, and we are able to enjoy ourselves without two hundred caviare sandwiches being left over. And such wasteful cutting of the ham; I had to slice the chunk she gave me over and over again before I could eat it.”

  Georgie felt he could not quite let this pass.

  “Well, I had an excellent supper,” he said, “and I enjoyed it very much. Besides, I saw Peppino tucking in like anything. Ask him what he thought of it.”

  Lucia gave her silvery laugh.

  “Georgino, you are a boy,” she said artfully, “and ‘tuck in’ as you so vulgarly call it without thinking, I’m saying nothing against the supper, but I’m sure that Peppino and Colonel Boucher would have felt better this morning if they had been wiser last night. But that’s not the real point. I want to show Miss Bracely, and I’m sure she will be grateful for it, the sort of entertainment that has contented us at Riseholme for so long. I will frame it on her lines; I will ask all and sundry to drop in with just a few hours’ notice, as she did. Everything shall be good, and there shall be about it all something that I seemed to miss last night. There was a little bit — how shall I say it? — a little bit of the footlights about it all. And the footlights didn’t seem to me to have been extinguished at church-time this morning. The singing of that very fine aria was theatrical, I can’t call it less than theatrical.”

  She fixed Georgie with her black beady eye, and smoothed her undulated hair.

  “Theatrical,” she said again. “Now let us have our coffee in the music-room. Shall Lucia play a little bit of Beethoven to take out any nasty taste of gramophone? Me no likey gramophone at all. Nebber!”

  Georgie now began to feel himself able to sympathise with that surfeited swain who thought how happy he could be with either, were t’other dear charmer away. Certainly he had been very happy with Lucia all these years, before t’other dear charmer alighted in Riseholme, and now he felt that should Lucia decide, as she had often so nearly decided, to spend the winter on the Riviera, Riseholme would still be a very pleasant place of residence. He never was quite sure how seriously she had contemplated a winter on the Riviera, for the mere mention of it had always been enough to make him protest that Riseholme could not possibly exist without her, but today, as he sat and heard (rather than listened to) a series of slow movements, with a brief and hazardous attempt at the scherzo of the “Moonlight,” he felt that if any talk of the Riviera came up, he would not be quite so insistent as to the impossibility of Riseholme continuing to exist without her. He could, for instance, have existed perfectly well this Sunday afternoon if Lucia had been even at Timbuctoo or the Antipodes, for as he went away last night, Olga had thrown a casual intimation to him that she would be at home, if he had nothing better to do, and cared to drop in. Certainly he had nothing better to do but he had something worse to do….

  Peppino was sitting in the window-seat, with eyes closed, because he listened to music better so, and with head that nodded occasionally, presumably for the same reason. But the cessation of the slow movement naturally made him cease to listen, and he stirred and gave the sigh with which Riseholme always acknowledged the end of a slow movement. Georgie sighed too, and Lucia sighed; they all sighed, and then Lucia began again. So Peppino closed his eyes again, and Georgie continued his mental analysis of the situation.

  At present, so he concluded, Lucia did not mean war. She meant, as by some great armed demonstration, to exhibit the Riseholme spirit in its full panoply, and then crush into dazzled submission any potential rivalry. She meant also to exert an educational influence, for she allowed that Olga had great gifts, and she meant to train and refine those gifts so that they might, when exercised under benign but autocratic supervision, conduce to the strength and splendour of Riseholme. Naturally she must be loyally and ably assisted, and Georgie realized that the tableau of King Cophetua (his tableau as she had said) partook of the nature of a bribe, and, if that word was invidious, of a raising of his pay. It was equally certain that this prolonged recital of slow movements was intended to produce in his mind a vivid consciousness of the contrast between the romp last night and the present tranquil hour, and it did not fail in this respect.

  Lucia shut the piano-lid, and almost before they had given their sighs, spoke.

  “I think I will have a little dinner-party first,” she said. “I will ask Lady Ambermere. That will make us four, with you Georgie, and Miss Bracely and Mr Shuttleworth will make six. The rest I shall ask to come in at nine, for I know Lady Ambermere does not like late hours. And now shall we talk over our tableaux?”

  So even Lucia’s mind had not been wholly absorbed in Beethoven, though Georgie, as usual, told her she had never played so divinely.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN.

  The manoeuvres of the next week became so bewilderingly complicated that by Wednesday Georgie was almost thinking of going away to the seaside with Foljambe and Dicky in sheer despair, and in after years he could not without great mental effort succeed in straightening it all out, and the effort caused quite a buzzing in his head…. That Sunday evening Lucia sent an invitation to Lady Ambermere for “dinner and tableaux,” to which Lady Ambermere’s “people” replied by telephone on Monday afternoon that her ladyship was sorry to be unable. Lucia therefore gave up the idea of a dinner-party, and reverted to her original scheme of an evening party like Olga’s got up on the spur of the moment, with great care and most anxious preparation. The rehearsals for the impromptu tableaux meantime went steadily forward behind closed doors, and Georgie wrestled with twenty bars of the music of the “Awakening of Brunnhilde.” Lucia intended to ask nobody until Friday evening, and Olga should see what sort of party Riseholme could raise at a moment’s notice.

  Early on Tuesday morning the devil entered into Daisy Quantock, probably by means of subconscious telepathy, and she proceeded to go round the green at the morning parliament, and ask everybody to come in for a good romp on Saturday evening, and they all accepted. Georgie, Lucia and Olga were absentees, and so, making a house-to-house visitation she went first to Georgie. He with secret knowledge of the tableaux (indeed he was stitching himself a robe to be worn by King Cophetua at the time and hastily bundling it under the table) regretted that he was already engaged. This was rather mysterious, but he might have planned, for all Mrs Quantock knew, an evening when he would be “busy indoors,” and since those evenings were never to be pried upon, she asked no questions, but went off to Lucia’s to give her invitation there. There again she was met with a similarly mysterious refusal. Lucia much regretted that she and Peppino were unable to come, and she hoped Daisy would have a lovely party. Even as she spoke, she heard her telephone bell ringing, and hurried off to find that Georgie, faithful lieutenant, was acquainting her with the fact that Mrs Quantock was planning a party for Saturday; he did not know how far she had got. At that moment she had got just half-way to Old Place, walking at unusual speed. Lucia grasped the situation with amazing quickness, and cutting off Georgie with a snap, she abandoned all idea of her party being impromptu, and rang up Olga. She would secure her anyhow….

  The telephone was in the hall, and Olga, with her hat on, was just preparing to go out, when the bell sounded. The words of grateful acceptance were on her very lips when her front-door bell rang too, very long and insistently and had hardly left off when it began again. Olga opened the door herself and there was Mrs Quantock on the doorstep with her invitation for Satu
rday night. She was obliged to refuse, but promised to look in, if she was not very late in getting away from Mrs Lucas’s (and pop went the cat out of the bag). Another romp would be lovely.

  Already the evils of decentralisation and overlapping were becoming manifest. Lucia rang up house after house, only to find that its inhabitants were already engaged. She had got Olga and Georgie, and could begin the good work of education and the crushing of rivalry, not by force but by pure and refined example, but Mrs Quantock had got everybody else. In the old days this could never have happened for everything devolved round one central body. Now with the appearance of this other great star, all the known laws of gravity and attraction were upset.

  Georgie, again summoned to the telephone, recommended an appeal to Mrs Quantock’s better nature, which Lucia rejected, doubting whether she had one.

  “But what about the tableaux?” asked Georgie. “We three can’t very well do tableaux for Miss Olga to look at.”

  Then Lucia showed herself truly great.

  “The merit of the tableaux does not consist in the number of the audience,” she said.

  She paused a moment.

  “Have you got the Cophetua-robe to set properly?” she asked.

  “Oh, it’ll do,” said Georgie dejectedly.

  On Tuesday afternoon Olga rang up Lucia again to say that her husband was arriving that day, so might she bring him on Saturday? To this Lucia cordially assented, but she felt that a husband and wife sitting together and looking at another husband and wife doing tableaux would be an unusual entertainment, and not characteristic of Riseholme’s best. She began to waver about the tableaux and to consider dinner instead. She also wondered whether she had been wronging dear Daisy, and whether she had a better nature after all. Perhaps Georgie might ascertain.

  Georgie was roused from a little fatigued nap by the telephone, for he had fallen asleep over King Cophetua’s robe. Lucia explained the situation and delicately suggested that it would be so easy for him to “pop in” to dear Daisy’s, and be very diplomatic. There was nobody like Georgie for tact. So with a heavy yawn he popped in.

  “You’ve come about this business on Saturday,” said Daisy unerringly. “Haven’t you?”

  Georgie remembered his character for tact.

  “How wonderful of you to guess that!” he said. “I thought we might see if we couldn’t arrange something, if we put our heads together. It’s such a pity to split up. We — I mean Lucia has got Miss Olga and her husband coming, and — —”

  “And I’ve got everybody else,” said Daisy brightly. “And Miss Bracely is coming over here, if she gets away early. Probably with such a small party she will.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t count on that,” said he. “We are having some tableaux, and they always take longer than you think. Dear me, I shouldn’t have said that, as they were to be impromptu, but I really believe my head is going. You know how thorough Lucia is; she is taking a great deal of trouble about them.”

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” said Mrs Quantock.

  She thought a moment.

  “Well; I don’t want to spoil Lucia’s evening,” she said, “for I’m sure nothing could be so ridiculous as three people doing tableaux for two others. And on the other hand, I don’t want her to spoil mine, for what’s to prevent her going on with the tableaux till church-time next morning if she wishes to keep Miss Bracely away from my house? I’m sure after the way she behaved about my Guru —— Well, never mind that. How would it be if we had the tableaux first at Lucia’s, and then came on here? If Lucia cares to suggest that to me, and my guests consent, I don’t mind doing that.”

  By six o’clock on Tuesday evening therefore all the telephone bells of Riseholme were merrily ringing again. Mrs Quantock stipulated that Lucia’s party should end at 10.45 precisely, if it didn’t end before, and that everyone should then be free to flock across to her house. She proposed a romp that should even outshine Olga’s, and was deep in the study of a manual of “Round Games,” which included “Hunt the Slipper.”…

  Georgie and Peppino took turns at the telephone, ringing up all Mrs Quantock’s guests, and informing them of the double pleasure which awaited them on Saturday. Since Georgie had let out the secret of the impromptu tableaux to Mrs Quantock there was no reason why the rest of Riseholme should not learn of this firsthand from The Hurst, instead of second-hand (with promises not to repeat it) from Mrs Quantock. It appeared that she had a better nature than Lucia credited her with, but to expect her not to tell everybody about the tableaux would be putting virtue to an unfair test.

  “So that’s all settled,” said Georgie, as he returned with the last acceptance, “and how fortunately it has happened after all. But what a day it has been. Nothing but telephoning from morning till night. If we go on like this the company will pay a dividend this year, and return us some of our own pennies.”

  Lucia had got a quantity of pearl beads and was stringing them for the tableau of Mary Queen of Scots.

  “Now that everyone knows,” she said, “we might allow ourselves a little more elaboration in our preparations. There is an Elizabethan axe at the Ambermere Arms which I might borrow for Peppino. Then about the Brunnhilde tableau. It is dawn, is it not? We might have the stage quite dark when the curtain goes up, and turn up a lamp very slowly behind the scene, so that it shines on my face. A lamp being turned up very slowly is wonderfully effective. It produces a perfect illusion. Could you manage that with one hand and play the music of the awakening with the other, Georgino?”

  “I’m quite sure I couldn’t,” said he.

  “Well then Peppino must do it before he comes on. We will have movement in this tableau; I think that will be quite a new idea. Peppino shall come in — just two steps — when he has turned the lamp up, and he will take off my shield and armour — —”

  “But the music will never last out,” cried Georgie. “I shall have to start earlier.”

  “Yes, perhaps that would be better,” said Lucia calmly. “That real piece of chain-armour too, I am glad I remembered Peppino had that. Marshall is cleaning it now, and it will give a far finer effect than the tawdry stuff they use in opera. Then I sit up very slowly, and wave first my right arm and then my left, and then both. I should like to practise that now on the sofa!”

  Lucia had just lain down, when the telephone sounded again and Georgie got up.

  “That’s to announce a dividend,” he said, and tripped into the hall.

  “Is that Mrs Lucas’?” said a voice he knew.

  “Yes, Miss Olga,” he said, “and this is me.”

  “Oh, Mr Georgie, how fortunate,” she said. “You can give my message now to Mrs Lucas, can’t you? I’m a perfect fool, you know, and horribly forgetful.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Georgie faintly.

  “It’s about Saturday. I’ve just remembered that Georgie and I — not you, you know — are going away for the weekend. Will you tell Mrs Lucas how sorry I am?”

  Georgie went back to the music room, where Lucia had just got both her arms waving. But at the sight of his face she dropped them and took a firm hold of herself.

  “Well, what is it?” she said.

  Georgie gave the message, and she got off the sofa, rising to her feet, while her mind rose to the occasion.

  “I am sorry that Miss Bracely will not see our tableaux,” she said. “But as she was not acting in them I do not know that it makes much difference.”

  A deadly flatness, although Olga’s absence made no difference, descended on the three. Lucia did not resume her arm-work, for after all these years her acting might be supposed to be good enough for Riseholme without further practice, and nothing more was heard of the borrowing of the axe from the Ambermere Arms. But having begun to thread her pearl-beads, she finished them; Georgie, however, cared no longer whether the gold border of King Cophetua’s mantle went quite round the back or not, and having tacked on the piece he was working at, rolled it up. It was just
going to be an ordinary party, after all. His cup was empty.

  But Lucia’s was not yet quite full, for at this moment Miss Lyall’s pony hip-bath stopped at the gate, and a small stableboy presented a note, which required an answer. In spite of all Lucia’s self-control, the immediate answer it got was a flush of heightened colour.

  “Mere impertinence,” she said. “I will read it aloud.”

  “Dear Mrs Lucas,

  “I was in Riseholme this morning, and learn from Mrs Weston that Miss Bracely will be at your house on Saturday night. So I shall be enchanted to come to dinner after all. You must know that I make a rule of not going out in the evening, except for some special reason, but it would be a great pleasure to hear her sing again. I wonder if you would have dinner at 7:30 instead of 8, as I do not like being out very late.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Caro,” said Lucia, trembling violently, “perhaps you would kindly tell Miss Lyall that I do not expect Miss Bracely on Saturday, and that I do not expect Lady Ambermere either.”

  “My dear—” he began.

  “I will do it myself then,” she said.

  It was as Georgie walked home after the delivery of this message that he wanted to fly away and be at rest with Foljambe and Dicky. He had been frantically excited ever since Sunday at the idea of doing tableaux before Olga, and today in especial had been a mere feverish hash of telephoning and sewing which all ended in nothing at all, for neither tableaux nor romps seemed to hold the least attraction for him now that Olga was not going to be there. And then all at once it dawned on him that he must be in love with Olga, for why else should her presence or absence make such an astounding difference to him? He stopped dead opposite Mrs Quantock’s mulberry tree.

  “More misery! More unhappiness!” he said to himself. Really if life at Riseholme was to become a series of agitated days ending in devastating discoveries, the sooner he went away with Foljambe and Dicky the better. He did not quite know what it was like to be in love, for the nearest he had previously ever got to it was when he saw Olga awake on the mountain-top and felt that he had missed his vocation in not being Siegfried, but from that he guessed. This time, too, it was about Olga, not about her as framed in the romance of legend and song, but of her as she appeared at Riseholme, taking as she did now, an ecstatic interest in the affairs of the place. So short a time ago, when she contemplated coming here first, she had spoken of it as a lazy backwater. Now she knew better than that, for she could listen to Mrs Weston far longer than anybody else, and ask for more histories when even she had run dry. And yet Lucia seemed hardly to interest her at all. Georgie wondered why that was.