LUCIA'S PROGRESS
PART 3
CHAPTER III
Confidence was restored between the young couple at Mallards next morning in a manner that the most ingenious could hardly have anticipated. Elizabeth heard Benjy go thumping downstairs a full five minutes before breakfast time, and peeping out from her bedroom door in high approval she called him a good laddie and told him to begin without her. Then suddenly she remembered something and made the utmost haste to follow. But she was afraid she would be too late.
Benjy went straight to the dining-room, and there on the table with the Times and Daily Mirror, were two copies of the Financial Post. He had ordered one himself for the sake of fuller information about Siriami, but what about the other? It seemed unlikely that the newsagent had sent up two copies when only one was ordered. Then hearing Elizabeth's foot on the stairs, he hastily sat down on one copy, which was all he was responsible for, and she entered.
"Ah, my Financial Post," she said. "I thought it would be amusing, dear, just to see what was happening to Lucia's gold mine. I take such an interest in it for her sake."
She turned over the unfamiliar pages, and clapped her hands in sympathetic delight.
"Oh, Benjy-boy, isn't that nice for her?" she cried. "Siriami has gone up another three shillings. Quite a fortune!"
Benjy was just as pleased as Elizabeth, though he marvelled at the joy that Lucia's enrichment had given her.
"No! That's tremendous," he said. "Very pleasant indeed."
"Lovely!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "The dear thing! And an article about West African mines. Most encouraging prospects, and something about the price of gold: the man expects to see it higher yet."
Elizabeth grew absorbed over this, and let her poached egg get cold.
"I see what it means!" she said. "The actual price of gold itself is going up, just as if it was coals or tobacco, so of course the gold they get out of the mine is worth more. Poor muddle-headed Diva, thinking that the number of shillings in a pound had something to do with it! And Diva will be pleased too. I know she bought some shares yesterday, after the rabbit, for she sent a telegram, and the clerk asked if a word was Siriami."
"Did she indeed?" asked Benjy. "How many?"
"I couldn't see. Ring the bell, dear, and don't shout Quai-hai. Withers has forgotten the pepper."
Exultant Benjy forgot about his copy of the Financial Post, on which he was sitting, and disclosed it.
"What? Another Financial Post?" cried Elizabeth. "Did you order one, too? Oh, Benjy, make a clean breast of it. Have you been buying Siriami as well as Lucia and Diva?"
"Well, Liz, I had a hundred pounds lying idle. And not such a bad way of using them after all. A hundred and fifty shares. Three times that in shillings. Pretty good."
"Secretive one!" said Elizabeth. "Naughty!"
Benjy had a brain-wave.
"And aren't you going to tell me how many you bought?" he asked.
Evidently it was no use denying the imputation. Elizabeth instinctively felt that he would not believe her, for her joy for Lucia's sake must already have betrayed her.
"Three hundred," she said. "Oh, what fun! And what are we to do next? They think gold will go higher. Benjy, I think I shall buy some more. What's the use of, say, a hundred pounds in War Loan earning three pound ten a year? I shouldn't miss three pound ten a year. . . . But I must get to my jobs. Not sure that I won't treat you to a woodcock to-night, if Susan allows me to have one."
In the growing excitement over Siriami, Elizabeth got quite indifferent as to whether the blinds were up or down in the windows of Georgie's house. During the next week the shares continued to rise, and morning after morning Benjy appeared with laudable punctuality at breakfast, hungry for the Financial Post. An unprecedented extravagance infected both him and Elizabeth: sometimes he took a motor out to the links, for what did a few shillings matter when Siriami was raining so many on him, and Elizabeth vied with Susan in luxurious viands for the table. Bridge at threepence a hundred, which had till lately aroused the wildest passions, failed to thrill, and next time the four gamblers, the Mapp-Flints and Diva and Lucia, met for a game, they all agreed to play double the ordinary stake, and even at that enhanced figure a recklessness in declaration, hitherto unknown, manifested itself. They lingered over tea discussing gold and the price of gold, the signification of which was now firmly grasped by everybody, and there were frightful searchings of heart on the part of the Mapp-Flints and Diva as to whether to sell out and realize their gains, or to invest more in hopes of a further rise. And never had Lucia shewn herself more nauseatingly Olympian. She referred to her "few shares" when everybody knew she had bought five hundred to begin with and had made one if not two more purchases since, and she held forth as if she was a City Editor herself.
"I was telephoning to my broker this morning," she began.
"What? A trunk call?" interrupted Diva. "Half-a-crown, isn't it?"
"Very likely: and put my view of the situation about gold before him. He agreed with me that the price of gold was very high already, and that if, as I suggested, America might come off the gold standard--however, that is a very complicated problem; and I hope to hear from him to-morrow morning about it. Then we had a few words about English rails. Undeniably there have been much better traffic returns lately, and I am distinctly of the opinion that one might do worse--"
Diva was looking haggard. She ate hardly any chocolates, and had already confessed that she was sleeping very badly.
"Don't talk to me about English rails," she said. "The price of gold is worrying enough."
Lucia spread her hands wide with a gesture of infinite capacity.
"You should enlarge your horizon, Diva," she said. "You should take a broad, calm view of world-conditions. Look at the markets, gold, industrials, rails as from a mountain height; get a panoramic view. My few shares in Siriami have certainly given me a marvellous profit, and I am beginning to ask myself whether there is not more chance of capital-appreciation, if you follow me, elsewhere. Silver, for instance, is rising--nothing to do with the number of pennies in a shilling--one has to consider that. I feel very responsible, for Georgie has bought a little parcel--we call it--of Siriami on my advice. If one follows silver, I don't think one could do better--and my broker agrees--than to buy a few Burma Corporation. I am thinking seriously of clearing out of Siriami, and investing there. Wonderfully interesting, is it not?"
"It's so interesting that it keeps me awake," said Diva. "From one o'clock to two this morning, I thought I would buy more, and from six to seven I thought I would sell. I don't know which to do."
Elizabeth rose. Lucia's lecture was quite intolerable. Evidently she was constituting herself a central bureau for the dispensing of financial instruction. So characteristic of her: she must boss and direct everybody. There had been her musical parties at which all Tilling was expected to sit in a dim light and listen to her and Georgie play endless sonatas. There had been her gymnastic class, now happily defunct, for the preservation of suppleness and slimness in middle-age, and when Contract Bridge came in she had offered to hold classes in that. True, she had been the first cause of the enrichment of them all by the purchase of Siriami, but no one could go on being grateful for ever, and Elizabeth's notable independence of character revolted against the monstrous airs she exhibited, and inwardly she determined that she would do exactly the opposite of anything Lucia recommended.
"Thank you, dear," she said, "for all you've told us. Most interesting and instructive. How wonderfully you've grasped it all! Now do you think we may go back to our Bridge before it gets too late to begin another rubber? And I declare I haven't asked about notre pauvre ami, Mr. Georgie. One hasn't seen him about yet, though Foljambe always tells me he's much better. And such odd things happen at his house. One day all his blinds will be down, as if the house was empty, and the next there'll be Foljambe coming at eight in the morning as usual."
"No! What a strange thing!" said Lucia.
Diva managed to eat just one of those nougat chocolates of which she generally emptied the dish. It was lamentable how little pleasure it gave her, and how little she was thrilled by the mystery of those drawn blinds.
"I noticed that too," she said. "But then I forgot all about it."
"Not before you suggested he was dead, dear," said Elizabeth. "I only hope Foljambe looks after him properly."
"I saw him this morning," said Lucia. "He has everything he wants."
The Bridge was of a character that a week ago would have aroused the deepest emotions. Diva and Lucia played against the family and won three swift rubbers at these new dizzy points. There were neither vituperations between the vanquished nor crows of delight from the victors, and though at the end Diva's scoring, as usual, tallied with nobody's, she sacrificed a shilling without insisting that the others should add up again. There was no frenzy, there was no sarcasm even when Benjy doubled his adversaries out or when Elizabeth forgot he always played the club convention, and thought he had some. All was pale and passionless; the sense of the vast financial adventures going on made it almost a matter of indifference who won. Occasionally, at the end of a hand Lucia gave a short exposition of the psychic bid which had so flummoxed her opponents, but nobody cared.
Diva spent the evening alone without appetite for her tray. She took Paddy out for his stroll observing without emotion that someone, no doubt in allusion to him, had altered the notice of "No Parking" outside her house to "No Barking." It scarcely seemed worth while to erase that piece of wretched bad taste, and as for playing Patience to beguile the hour before bedtime, she could not bother to lay the cards out, but sat in front of her fire re-reading the City news in yesterday's and to-day's paper. She brooded over her note of purchase of Siriami shares: she made small addition sums in pencil on her blotting-paper: the greed of gold caused her to contemplate buying more: the instinct of prudence prompted her to write a telegram to her broker to sell out her entire holding. "Which shall I do? Oh, which shall I do?" she muttered to herself. Ten struck and eleven: it was long after her usual bedtime on solitary evenings, and eventually she fell into a doze. From that she passed into deep sleep and woke with her fire out and her clock on the stroke of midnight, but with her mind made up. "I shall sell two of my shares and keep the other three," she said aloud.
For the first time for many nights she slept beautifully till she was called, and woke fresh and eager for the day. There on her dressing-table lay the three half-crowns which she had taken from Elizabeth the evening before. They had seemed then but joyless and negligible tokens; now they gleamed with their accustomed splendour. "And to think that I won all that without really enjoying it," thought Diva, as she performed a few of those salubrious flexes and jerks which Lucia had taught her. Just glancing at the Financial Post she saw that Siriami had gone up another sixpence, but she did not falter in her prudent determination to secure some part of her profits.
The same crisis which, for Diva, had sucked all the sweetness out of life but supplied Lucia with grist for the Imitation of Dame Catherine Winterglass. Georgie, with a white pointed beard (that clever Foljambe had trimmed it for him, as neatly as if she had been a barber all her life) came down to breakfast for the first time this morning, and pounced on the Financial Post.
"My dear, another sixpence up!" he exclaimed. "What shall I do?"
Lucia already knew that: she had taken a swift glance at the paper before he came down, and had replaced it as if undisturbed. She shook a finger at him.
"Now, Georgie, what about my rule that we have no business talk at meals? How are you? That's much more important."
"Beautiful night," said Georgie, "except that I dreamt about a gold mine and the bottom fell out of it, and all the ore slid down to the centre of the earth."
"That will never do, Georgie. You must not let money get on your mind. I'll attend to your interests when I get to work after breakfast. And are your face and neck better?"
"Terribly sore still. I don't know when I shall be able to shave."
Lucia gave him a glance with head a little tilted, as if he was a landscape she proposed to paint. That neat beard gave character and distinction to his face. It hid his plump second chin and concealed the slightly receding shape of the first: another week's growth would give it a greater solidity. There was something Stuart-like, something Vandyckish about his face. To be sure the colour of his beard contrasted rather strangely with his auburn hair and moustache, in which not the faintest hint of grey was manifest, but that could be remedied. It was not time, however, to say anything about that yet.
"Don't think about it then," she said. "And now for to-day. I really think you ought to get some air. It's so mild and sunny. Wrap up well and come for a drive with me before lunch."
"But they'll see me," said Georgie.
"Not if you lean well back till we're out of the town. I shall walk up there when I've gone into my affairs and yours, for I'm sure to have a telegram to send, and the car shall take you and Foljambe straight up to your house. I shall join you, so that we shall appear to be starting from there. Now I must get to work. I see there's a letter from my broker."
Lucia's voice had assumed that firm tone which Georgie knew well to betoken that she meant to have her way, and that all protest was merely a waste of nervous force. Off she went to the little room once known as the library, but now more properly to be called the Office. This was an inviolable sanctuary: Grosvenor had orders that she must never be disturbed there except under stress of some great emergency, such as a trunk-call from London. The table where Lucia used to sit with her Greek and Latin dictionaries and the plays of Aristophanes and the Odes of Horace with their English translations was now swept clean of its classical lore, and a ledger stood there, a bundle of prospectuses, some notes of purchase and a clip of communications from her broker. She opened the letter she had received this morning, and read it with great care. The rise in gold (and in consequence in gold mines) he thought had gone far enough and he repeated his suggestion that home-rails and silver merited attention. There lay the annual report of Burma Corporation, and a very confusing document she found it, for it dealt with rupees and annas instead of pounds and shillings, and she did not know the value of an anna or what relation it bore to a rupee: they might as well have been drachmas and obols. Then there was a statement about the earnings of the Great Western Railway (Lucia had no idea how many people went by train), and another about the Southern Railway shewing much improved traffics. Once more she referred to her broker's last two letters, and then, with the dash and decision of Dame Catherine, made up her mind. She would sell out her entire holding in Siriami, and Burma Corporation and Southern Rails Preferred should enact a judgment of Solomon on the proceeds and each take half. She felt that she was slighting that excellent line, the Great Western, but it must get on without her support. Then she wrote out the necessary telegram to her broker, and touched the bell on her table. Grosvenor, according to orders, only opened the door an inch or two, and Lucia sent for Georgie.
Like a client he pulled a high chair up to the table.
"Georgie, I've gone very carefully into the monetary situation," she said, "and I am selling all my Siriami. As you and others in Tilling followed me in your little purchases, I feel it my duty to tell you all what I am doing."
Georgie gave a sigh of relief, as when a very rapid movement in a piano duet came to an end.
"I shall sell, too, then," he said. "I'm very glad. I'm not up to the excitement after my shingles. It's been very pleasant because I've made fifty pounds, but I've had enough. Will you take a telegram for me when you go?"
Lucia closed her ledger, put a paper-weight on her prospectuses, and clipped Mammoncash's letter into its sheaf.
"I think--I say I think--that you're right, Georgie," she said. "The situation is becoming too difficult for me to advise about, and I am glad you have settled to clear out, so that I have no further responsibility. Now I shall walk up to Tilling--I find these great decisions very stimulating--and a quarter of an hour later, you will start in the car with Foljambe. I think--I say I think--that Mammoncash, my broker you know, telegraphic address, will approve my decision."
As he had already strongly recommended this course, it was probable he would do so, and Lucia walked briskly up to the High Street. Then, seeing Benjy and Elizabeth hanging about outside the post-office, she assumed a slower gait and a rapt, financial face.
"Bon jour, chérie," said Elizabeth, observing that she took two telegrams out of her bag. "Those sweet Siriamis. Up another sixpence."
Lucia seemed to recall her consciousness from an immense distance, and broke the transition in Italian.
"Ah, si, si! Buono piccolo Siriami! . . . So glad, dear Elizabeth and Major Benjy that my little pet has done well for you. But I've been puzzling over it this morning and I think the price of gold is high enough. That's my impression--"
Diva whizzed across the road from the greengrocer's. All her zest and brightness had come back to her.
"Such a relief to have made up my mind, Lucia," she said. "I've telegraphed to sell two-thirds of my Siriami shares, and I shall keep the rest."
"Very likely you're right, dear," said Lucia. "Very likely I'm wrong, but I'm selling all my little portfolio of them."
Diva's sunny face clouded over.
"Oh, but that's terribly upsetting," she said. "I wonder if I'm too greedy. Do tell me what you think."
Lucia had now come completely out of her remote financial abstraction, and addressed the meeting.
"Far be it from me to advise anybody," she said. "The monetary situation is too complicated for me to take the responsibility. But my broker admits--I must say I was flattered--that there is a great deal to be said for my view, and since you all followed my lead in your little purchases of Siriami, I feel bound to tell you what I am doing to-day. Not one share of Siriami am I keeping, and I'm reinvesting the whole--I beg of you all not to consider this advice in any way--in Burma Corporation and Southern Railway Preferred, Prefs as we call them. I have given some study to the matter, and while I don't think anyone would go far wrong in buying them, I should be sorry if any of you followed me blindly, without going into the matter for yourselves--"
Elizabeth simply could not stand it a moment longer.
"Sweet of you to tell us, dear," she said, "but pray don't make yourself uneasy about any responsibility for us. My Benjy and I have been studying too, and we've made up our minds to buy some more Siriami. So set your mind at ease."
Diva moaned.
"Oh, dear me! Must begin thinking about it all over again," she said, as Lucia, at this interruption from the meeting, went into the post-office.
Elizabeth waited till the swing-door had shut.
"I'm more and more convinced," she said, "that the dear thing has no more idea what she's talking about than when she makes psychic bids. I shall do the opposite of whatever she recommends."
"Most confusing," moaned Diva again. "I wish I hadn't begun to make money at all."
Elizabeth followed Lucia into the post-office, and Benjy went to catch the tram, while Diva, with ploughed and furrowed face, walked up and down the pavement in an agony of indecision as to whether to follow Lucia's example and sell her three remaining shares or to back Elizabeth and repurchase her two.
"Whatever I do is sure to be wrong," she thought to herself, and then her attention was switched off finance altogether. Along the High Street came Lucia's motor. Cadman turned to go up the street leading to the church and Mallards Cottage, but had to back again to let Susan's Royce come down. Foljambe was sitting by her husband on the box, and for an instant there appeared at the window of the car the face of a man curiously like Georgie. Yet it couldn't be he, for he had a neat white beard. Perhaps Lucia had a friend staying with her, but, if so, it was very odd that nobody had heard about him. "Most extraordinary," thought Diva. "Who can it possibly be?"
She got no second glimpse for the head was withdrawn in a great hurry, and Lucia came out of the post-office as calm as if she had been buying a penny stamp instead of conducting these vast operations.
"So that's done!" she said lightly, "and now I must go and see whether I can persuade Georgie to come out for a drive."
"Your car has just gone by," said Diva.
"Tante grazie. I must hurry."
Lucia went up to Mallards Cottage, and found Georgie had gone into his house, for fear that Elizabeth might peer into the car if she saw it standing there.
"And I was a little imprudent," he said, "for I simply couldn't resist looking out as we turned up from the High Street to see what was going on, and there was Diva standing quite close. But I don't think she could have recognised me."
In view of this contingency, however, the re-embarkation was delayed for a few minutes, and then conducted with great caution. This was lucky, for Diva had told Elizabeth of that puzzling apparition at the window of the car, and Elizabeth, after a brilliant and sarcastic suggestion that it was Mr. Montagu Norman who had come down to consult Lucia as to the right policy of the Bank of England in this world crisis, decided that the matter must be looked into at once. So the two ladies separated and Diva hurried up to the Church Square in case the car left Georgie's house by that route, while Elizabeth went up to Mallards, where, from the window of the garden-room she could command the other road of exit . . . So, before Georgie entered the car again, Foljambe reconnoitred this way and that, and came back with the alarming intelligence that Diva was lurking in Church Square, and that Elizabeth was in her usual lair behind the curtains. Cadman and Foljambe therefore stood as a screen on each side of Georgie's doorstep while he, bending double, stole into the car. They passed under the window of the garden-room, and Lucia, leaning far forward to conceal Georgie, kissed and waved her hand to the half-drawn curtains to show Elizabeth that she was perfectly aware who was in ambush behind them.
"That's thwarted them," she said, as she put down the window when danger-points were passed. "Poor Elizabeth couldn't have seen you, and Diva may hide in Church Square till Doomsday. Let's drive out past the golf links along the road by the sea and let the breeze blow away all these pettinesses."
She sighed.
"Georgie, how glad I am that I've taken up finance seriously," she said. "It gives me real work to do at last. It's time I had some, for I'm fifty next week. Of course I shall give a birthday party, and I shall have a cake with fifty-one candles on it, so as to prepare me for my next birthday. After all, it isn't the years that give the measure of one's age, but energy and capacity for enterprise. Achievement. Adventure."
"I'm sure you were as busy as any woman could be," said Georgie.
"Possibly, but about paltry things, scoring off Elizabeth when she was pushing and that genus omne. I shall give all that up. I shall dissociate myself from all the petty gossip of the place. I shall--"
"Oh, look," interrupted Georgie. "There's Benjy playing golf with the Padre. There! He missed the ball completely, and he's stamping with rage."
"No! So it is!" cried Lucia, wildly interested. "Pull up a minute, Cadman. There now he's hit it again into a sandpit, and the Padre's arguing with him. I wonder what language he's talking."
"That's the best of Tilling," cried Georgie enthusiastically, throwing prudence to the sea-winds, and leaning out of the window. "There's always something exciting going on. If it isn't one thing it's another, and very often both!"
Benjy dealt the sand-pit one or two frightful biffs and Lucia suddenly remembered that she had done with such paltry trifles.
"Drive on, Cadman," she said. "Georgie, I'm afraid Major Benjy's nature has not been broadened and enriched by marriage. Marriage, one hoped, might have brought that about, but I don't see the faintest sign of it. Indeed I can't make up my mind about their marriage at all. They dab and stroke each other, and they're Benjy-boy and Girlie, but is it more than lip-service and finger-tips? Some women, I know, have had their greatest triumphs when youth was long, long past: Diane de Poictiers was fifty, was she not, when she became the King's mistress, but she was an enchantress, and you could not reasonably call Elizabeth an enchantress. Of course you haven't seen them together yet, but you will at my birthday party."
Georgie gingerly fingered the portion of beard on the ailing side of his face.
"Not much chance of it," he said. "I don't suppose I shall get rid of this by then. Too tarsome."
Lucia looked at him again with a tilted head.
"Well, we shall see," she said. "My dear, the sun glinting on the sea! Is that what Homer--or was it Æschylus?--meant by the 'numberless laughter of ocean?' An immortal phrase."
"I shouldn't wonder if it was," said Georgie. "But about Benjy and Elizabeth. I can't see how you could expect anybody to be broadened and enriched by marrying Elizabeth. Nor by marrying Benjy for that matter."
"Perhaps I was too sanguine. I hope they won't come to grief over their speculations. They're ignorant of the elements of finance. I told them both this morning what I was going to do. So they went and did exactly the opposite."
"It's marvellous the way you've picked it up," said Georgie. "I'm fifty pounds richer by following your advice--"
"No, Georgie, not advice. My lead, if you like."
"Lead then. I'm not sure I shan't have another go."
"I wouldn't," said she. "It began to get on your mind: you dreamed about gold mines. Don't get like Diva: she was wringing her hands on the pavement in agony as to what she should do."
"But how can you help thinking about it?"
"I do think about it," she said, "but calmly, as if finance was a science, which indeed it is. I study, I draw my conclusions, I act. By the way, do you happen to know how much a rupee is worth?"
"No idea," said Georgie, "but not very much, I believe. If you have a great many of them, they make a lakh. But I don't know how many it takes, nor what a lakh is when they've made it."
No startling developments occurred during the next week. Siriami shares remained steady, but the continued strain so told on Diva that, having bought seven more because the Mapp-Flints were making further purchases she had a nervous crisis one morning when they went down sixpence, sold her entire holding (ten shares) and with the help of a few strychnine pills regained her impaired vitality. But she watched with the intensest interest the movements of the market, for once again, as so often before, a deadly duel was in progress between Elizabeth and Lucia, but now it was waged as on some vast battlefield consisting of railway lines running between the shafts of gold mines. Lucia, so to speak, on the footboard of an engine on the Southern railway shrieked by, drawing a freight of Burma Corporation, while Elizabeth put lumps of ore from Siriami on the metals to wreck her train. For Southern Railway Prefs began to move: one morning they were one point up, another morning they were three, and at Mallards the two chagrined operators snatched up their copies of the Financial Post and ate with a poor appetite. It was known all over Tilling that this fierce fight was in progress, and when, next Sunday morning, the sermon was preached by a missionary who had devoted himself to the enlightenment of the heathen both in Burma and West Africa, Lucia, sitting among the auxiliary choir on one side of the church and the Mapp-Flints on the other seemed indeed to be the incarnations of those dark countries. Mr. Wyse, attending closely to the sermon thought that was a most extraordinary coincidence: even missionary work in foreign lands seemed to be drawn into the vortex.
Next morning on the breakfast table at Mallards was Lucia's invitation to the Mapp-Flints to honour her with their presence at dinner on Friday next, the occasion of her Jubilee. Southern Prefs had gone up again and Siriami down, but, so Elizabeth surmised, "all Tilling" would be there, and if she and Benjy refused, which seemed the proper way to record what they felt about it, all Tilling would certainly conclude that they had not been asked.
"It's her ways that I find it so hard to bear," said Elizabeth, cracking the top of her boiled egg with such violence that the rather under-cooked contents streamed on to her plate. "Her airs, her arrogance. Even if she says nothing about Siriami I shall know she's pitying us for not having followed her lead, and buying those wild-cat shares of hers. What has Bohemian Corporation, or whatever it is, been doing? I didn't look."
"Up sixpence," said Benjy, gloomily.
Elizabeth moistened her lips.
"I suspected as much, and you see I was right. But I suppose we had better go to her Jubilee, and perhaps we shall learn something of this mystery about Georgie. I'm sure she's keeping something dark: I feel it in my bones. Women of a certain age are like that. They know that they are getting on in years and have become entirely unattractive, and so they make mysteries in order to induce people to take an interest in them a little longer, poor things. There was that man with a beard whom Diva saw in her car; there's a mystery which has never been cleared up. Probably it was her gardener, who has a beard, dressed up, and she hoped we might think she had someone staying with her whom we were to know nothing about. Just a mystery."
"Well, she made no mystery about selling Siriami and buying those blasted Prefs," said Benjy.
"My fault then, I suppose," said Elizabeth bitterly, applying the pepper pot to the pool of egg on her plate, and scooping it up with her spoon. "I see: I ought to have followed Lucia's lead, and have invested my money as she recommended. And curtsied, and said 'Thank your gracious Majesty.' Quite."
"I didn't say you ought to have done anything of the kind," said Benjy.
Elizabeth had applied pepper with too lavish a hand, and had a frightful fit of sneezing before she could make the obvious rejoinder.
"No, but you implied it, Benjy, which, if anything, is worse," she answered hoarsely.
"No I didn't. No question of 'ought' about it. But I wish to God I had done as she suggested. Southern Prefs have risen ten points since she told us."
"We won't discuss it any further, please," said Elizabeth.
Everyone accepted the invitation to the Jubilee, and now Lucia thought it time to put into action her scheme for getting Georgie to make his re-entry into the world of Tilling. He was quite himself again save for the pointed white beard which Foljambe had once more trimmed very skilfully, his cook was returning from her holiday next day, and he would be going back to shut himself up in his lonely little house until he could present his normal face to his friends. On that point he was immovable: nobody should see him with a little white beard, for it would be the end of his jeune premiership of Tilling: no jeune premier ever had a white beard, however little. And Dr. Dobbie had told him not to think of "irritating the nerve-ends" with the razor until they were incapable of resentment. In another three weeks or so, Dr. Dobbie thought. This verdict depressed Georgie: there would be three weeks more of skulking out in his motor, heavily camouflaged, and of return to his dreary solitude in the evening. He wanted to hear the Padre mingle Irish with Scotch, he wanted to see Diva with her Eton crop, he wanted to study the effect of matrimony on Mapp and Flint, and what made him miss this daily bread the more was that Lucia was very sparing in supplying him with it, for she was rather strict in her inhuman resolve to have done with petty gossip. Taken unawares, she could still manifest keen interest in seeing Benjy hit a golf ball into a bunker, but she checked herself in an annoying manner and became lofty again. Probably her inhumanity would wear off, but it was tarsome that when he so particularly thirsted for local news, she should be so parsimonious with it.
However, they dined very comfortably that night, though she had many far-away glances, as if at distant blue hills, which indicated that she was thinking out some abstruse problem: Georgie supposed it was some terrific financial operation of which she would not speak at meals. Then she appeared to have solved it, for the blue-hill-look vanished, she riddled him with several gimlet-glances, and suddenly gabbled about the modern quality of the Idylls of Theocritus. "Yet perhaps modern is the wrong word," she said. "Let us call it the timeless quality, Georgie, senza tempo in fact. It is characteristic, don't you think of all great artists: Vandyck has it pre-eminently. What timeless distinction his portraits have! His Lady Castlemaine, the Kéroualle, Nell Gwynn--"
"But surely Vandyck was dead before their time," began Georgie. "Charles I, you know, not Charles II."
"That may be so, possibly you are right," said Lucia with her habitual shamelessness. "But my proposition holds. Vandyck is timeless, he shows the dignity, the distinction which can be realized in every age. But I always maintain--I wonder if you will agree with me--that his portraits of men are far, far finer than his women. More perception: I doubt if he ever understood women really. But his men! That coloured print I have of his Gelasius in the next room by the piano. Marvellous! Have you finished your coffee? Let us go."
Lucia strolled into the drawing-room, glanced at a book on the table, and touched a few notes on the piano as if she had forgotten all about Gelasius.
"Shall we give ourselves a holiday to-night, Georgie, and not tackle that dwefful diffy Brahms?" she asked. "I shall have to practise my part before I am fit to play it with you. Wonderful Brahms! As Pater says of something else, 'the soul with all its maladies' has entered into his music."
She closed the piano, and casually pointed to a coloured print that hung on the wall above it beside a false Chippendale mirror.
"Ah, there's the Gelasius I spoke of," she said. "Rather a dark corner. I must find a worthier place for him."
Georgie came across to look at it. Certainly it was a most distinguished face: high eye-browed with a luxuriant crop of auburn hair and a small pointed beard. A man in early middle life, perhaps forty at the most. Georgie could not remember having noticed it before, which indeed was not to be wondered at, since Lucia had bought it that very afternoon. She had seen the great resemblance to Georgie, and her whole magnificent scheme had flashed upon her.
"Dear me, what a striking face," he said. "Stupid of me never to have looked at it before."
Lucia made no answer, and turning, he saw that she was eagerly glancing first at the picture and then at him, and then at the picture again. Then she sat down on the piano stool and clasped her hands.
"Absolutely too straordinario," she said as if speaking to herself.
"What is?" asked Georgie.
"Caro, do not pretend to be so blind! Why it's the image of you. Take a good look at it, then move a step to the right and look at yourself in the glass."
Georgie did as he was told, and a thrill of rapture tingled in him. For years he had known (and lamented) that his first chin receded and that a plump second chin was advancing from below, but now his beard completely hid these blemishes.
"Well, I do see what you mean," he said.
"Who could help it? Georgie, you are Gelasius, which I've always considered Vandyck's masterpiece. And it's your beard that has done it. Unified! Harmonised! And to think that you intend to shut yourself up for three weeks more and then cut it off! It's murder. Artistic murder!"
Georgie cast another look at Gelasius and then at himself. All these weeks he had taken only the briefest and most disgusted glances into his looking-glass because of the horror of his beard, and had been blind to what it had done for him. He felt a sudden stab of longing to be a permanent Gelasius, but there was one frightful snag in the way, irrespective of the terribly shy-making moment when he should reveal himself to Tilling so radically altered. The latter, with such added distinction to shew them, he thought he could tone himself up to meet. But--
"Well?" asked Lucia rather impatiently. She had her part ready.
"What's so frightfully tarsome is that my beard's so grey that you might call it white," he said. "There's really not a grey hair on my head or in my moustache, and the stupid thing has come out this colour. No colour at all, in fact. Do you think it's because I'm run down?"
Lucia pounced on this: it was a brilliant thought of Georgie's, and made her part easier.
"Of course that's why," she said. "As you get stronger, your beard will certainly get its colour back. Just a question of time. I think it's beginning already."
"But what am I to do till then?" asked Georgie. "Such an odd appearance."
She laughed.
"Fancy asking a woman that!" she said. "Dye it, Georgino. Temporarily of course, just anticipating Nature. There's that barber in Hastings you go to. Drive over there to-morrow."
Actually, Georgie had got a big bottle upstairs of the precise shade, and had been touching up with it this morning. But Lucia's suggestion of Hastings was most satisfactory. It implied surely that she had no cognizance of these hidden practices.
"I shouldn't quite like to do that," said he.
Lucia had by now developed her full horse-power in persuasiveness. She could quite understand (knowing Georgie) why he intended to shut himself up for another three weeks, sooner than shew himself to Tilling with auburn hair and a white beard (and indeed, though she personally had got used to it, he was a very odd object). Everyone would draw the inevitable conclusion that he dyed his hair, and though they knew it perfectly well already, the public demonstration of that fact would be intolerable to him, for the poor lamb evidently thought that this was a secret shared only by his bottle of hair-dye. Besides, she had now for over a fortnight concealed him like some Royalist giving a hiding place to King Charles, and while he had been there, she had not been able to ask a single one of her friends to the house, for fear they should catch a glimpse of him. Her kindliness revolted at the thought of his going back to his solitude, but she had had enough of his undiluted company. He had been a charming companion: she had even admitted to herself that it would be pleasant to have him always here, but not at the price of seeing nobody else. . . . She opened the throttle.
"But how perfectly unreasonable," she cried. "Dyeing it is only a temporary measure till it resumes its colour. And the improvement! My dear, I never saw such an improvement. Diva's not in it! And how can you contemplate going back to solitary confinement, for indeed it's that, for weeks and weeks more, and then at the end to scrap it? The distinction, Georgie, the dignity, and, to be quite frank, the complete disappearance of your chin, which was the one weak feature in your face. And it's in your power to be a living Vandyck masterpiece, and you're hesitating whether you shall madly cast away, as the hymn says, that wonderful chance. Hastings to-morrow, directly after breakfast, I implore you. It will be dry by lunch-time, won't it? Why, a woman with the prospect of improving her appearance so colossally would be unable to sleep a wink to-night from sheer joy. Oh, amico mio," she said, lapsing into the intimate dialect, "Oo will vex povera Lucia vewy, vewy much if you shave off vostra bella barba. Di grazia! Georgie."
"Me must fink," said Georgie. He left his chair and gazed once more at Gelasius and then at himself, and wondered if he had the nerve to appear without warning in High Street even if his beard was auburn.
"I believe you're right," he said at length. "Fancy all this coming out of my shingles. But it's a tremendous step to take . . . Yes, I'll do it. And I shall be able to come to your birthday party after all."
"It wouldn't be a birthday party without you," said Lucia warmly.
Georgie's cook having returned, he went back to his own house after the operation next morning. He had taken a little hand-glass with him to Hastings, and all the way home he had constantly consulted it in order to get used to himself, for he felt as if a total stranger with a seventeenth century face was sharing the car with him, and his agitated consciousness suggested that anyone looking at him at all closely would conclude that this lately discovered Vandyck (like the Carlisle Holbein) was a very doubtful piece. It might be after Vandyck, but assuredly a very long way after. Foljambe opened the door of Mallards Cottage to him, and she considerably restored his shattered confidence. For the moment her jaw dropped, as if she had been knocked out, at the shock of this transformation, but then she recovered completely, and beamed up at him.
"Well, that is a pleasant change, sir," she said, "from your white beard, if you'll pardon me," and Georgie hurried upstairs to get an ampler view of himself in the big mirror in his bedroom than the hand-glass afforded. He then telephoned to Lucia to say that the operation was safely over and she promised to come up directly after lunch and behold.
The nerve-strain had tired him and so did the constant excursions upstairs to get fresh impressions of himself. Modern costume was a handicap, but a very pretty little cape of his with fur round the neck had a Gelasian effect, and when Lucia arrived he came down in this. She was all applause: she walked slowly round him to get various points of view, ejaculating, "My dear, what an improvement," or "My dear, what an improvement," to which Georgie replied, "Do you really like it?" until her iteration finally convinced him that she was sincere. He settled to rest for the remainder of the day after these fatigues, and to burst upon all Tilling at the marketing hour next morning.
"And what do you seriously think they'll all think?" he asked. "I'm terribly nervous as you may imagine. It would be good of you if you'd pop in to-morrow morning, and walk down with me. I simply couldn't pass underneath the garden-room window, with Elizabeth looking out, alone."
"Ten forty-five, Georgie," she said. "What an improvement!"
The afternoon and evening dragged after she was gone. It was pleasant to see his bibelots again, but he missed Lucia's companionship. Intimate as they had been for many years, they had never before had each other's undivided company for so long. A book, and a little conversation with Foljambe made dinner tolerable, but after that she went home to her Cadman, and he was alone. He polished up the naughty snuffbox, he worked at his petit-point shepherdess. He had stripped her nakeder than Eve, and replaced her green robe with pink, and now instead of looking like a stick of asparagus she really might have been a young lady who, for reasons of her own, preferred to tend her sheep with nothing on; but he wanted to show her to somebody and he could hardly discuss her with his cook. Or a topic of interest occurred to him, but there was no one to share it with, and he played beautifully on his piano, but nobody congratulated him. It was dreary work to be alone, though no doubt he would get used to it again, and dreary to go up to bed with no chattering on the stairs. Often he used to linger with Lucia at her bedroom door, finishing their talk, and even go in with her by express invitation. To-night he climbed up stairs alone, and heard his cook snoring.
Lucia duly appeared next morning, and they set off under the guns of the garden-room window. Elizabeth was there as usual, and after fixing on them for a moment her opera glass which she used for important objects at a distance, she gave a squeal that caused Benjy to drop the Financial Post which recorded the ruinous fall of two shillings in Siriami.
"Mr. Georgie's got a beard," she cried, and hurried to get her hat and basket and follow them down to the High Street. Diva, looking out of her window was the next to see him, and without the hint Elizabeth had had of observing his exit from his own house quite failed to recognise him at first. She had to go through an addition sum in circumstantial evidence before she arrived at his identity: he was with Lucia, he was of his own height and build, the rest of his face was the same and he had on the well-known little cape with the fur collar. Q.E.D. She whistled to Pat, she seized her basket, and taking a header into the street ran straight into Elizabeth who was sprinting down from Mallards.
"He's come out. Mr. Georgie. A beard," she said.
Elizabeth was out of breath with her swift progress.
"Oh yes, dear," she panted. "Didn't you know? Fancy! Where have they gone?"
"Couldn't see. Soon find them. Come on."
Elizabeth, chagrined at not being able to announce the news to Diva, instantly determined to take the opposite line, and not shew the slightest interest in this prodigious transformation.
"But why this excitement, dear?" she said. "I cannot think of anything that matters less. Why shouldn't Mr. Georgie have a beard? If you had one now--"
A Sinaitic trumpet-blast from Susan's Royce made them both leap on to the pavement, as if playing Tom Tiddler's ground.
"But don't you remember--" began Diva almost before alighting--"there we're safe--don't you remember the man with a white beard whom I saw in Lucia's car? Must be same man. You said it was Mr. Montagu Norman first and then Lucia's gardener disguised. The one we watched for, you at your window and me in Church Square."
"Grammar, dear Diva. 'I' not 'me'," interrupted Elizabeth to gain time, while she plied her brain with crucial questions. For if Diva was right, and the man in Lucia's car had been Georgie (white beard), he must have been driving back to Mallards Cottage in Lucia's car from somewhere. Could he have been living at Grebe all the time while he pretended (or Lucia pretended for him) to have been at home too ill to see anybody? But if so, why, on some days, had his house appeared to be inhabited, and on some days completely deserted? Certainly Georgie (auburn beard) had come out of it this morning with Lucia. Had they been staying with each other alternately? Had they been living in sin? . . . Poor shallow Diva had not the slightest perception of these deep and probably grievous matters. Her feather-pated mind could get no further that the colour of beards. Before Diva could frame an adequate reply to this paltry grammatical point a positive eruption of thrills occurred. Lucia and Georgie came out of the post office, Paddy engaged in a dog fight, and the Padre and Evie Bartlett emerged from the side street opposite, and, as if shot from a catapult, projected themselves across the road just in front of Susan's motor.
"Oh, dear me, they'll be run over!" cried Diva. "PADDY! And there are Mr. Georgie and Lucia. What a lot of things are happening this morning!"
"Diva, you're a little overwrought," said Elizabeth with kindly serenity. "What with white beards and brown beards and motor accidents . . . Oh, voilà! There's Susan actually got out of her car, and she's almost running across the road to speak to Mr. Georgie, and quaint Irene in shorts. What a fuss! For goodness sake let's be dignified and go on with our shopping. The whole thing has been staged by Lucia, and I won't be a super."
"But I must go and say I'm glad he's better," said Diva.
"Certainement, dear, if you happen to think he's been ill. I believe it's all a hoax."
But she spoke to the empty air for Diva had thumped Paddy in the ribs with her market-basket and was whizzing away to the group on the pavement where Georgie was receiving general congratulations on his recovery and his striking appearance. The verdict was most flattering, and long after his friends had gazed their fill he continued to walk up and down the High Street and pop into shops where he wanted nothing, in order that his epiphany which he had been so nervous about, and which he found purely enjoyable, might be manifest to all. For a long time Elizabeth, determined to take no part in a show which she was convinced was run by Lucia, succeeded in avoiding him, but at last he ran her to earth in the greengrocer's. She examined the quality of the spinach till her back ached, and then she had to turn round and face him.
"Lovely morning, isn't it, Mr. Georgie," she said. "So pleased to see you about again. Sixpennyworth of spinach, please, Mr. Twistevant. Looks so good!" and she hurried out of the shop, still unconscious of his beard.
"Tarsome woman," thought Georgie. "If there is a fly anywhere about she is sure to put it in somebody's ointment . . ." But there had been so much ointment on the subject that he really didn't much mind about Elizabeth's fly.
To be continued
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