Lucia Victrix (41 page)

The moment she had spoken she saw her mistake. The only way of putting it right was to take the street that led up to Mallards Cottage and then get back to Grebe by a circuitous course, else surely Elizabeth would get on Georgie's track. Even as it was Elizabeth watched her till she had disappeared up the correct turning.

‘So characteristic of the dear thing,' she said, ‘making a lot of money in Siriami, and then advising you not to touch it! I shouldn't the least wonder if she wants to get all the shares herself and be created Dame Lucia Siriami. And then her airs, as if she was a great financier! Her views of the world-situation!
Her broker who agrees with her about the rising price of gold! Why she hadn't the slightest idea what it meant, anyone could see that. Diva,
c'est trop
! I shall get on with my humble marketing instead of buying parcels of gold.'

But behind this irritation with Lucia, Elizabeth was burning with the desire to yield to the insidious temptation of which she had warned Diva, and buy some Siriami shares herself. Diva might suspect her design if she went straight into the post-office, and so she crossed the street to the butcher's to get her rabbit. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Susan Wyse's car slowing up to stop at the same shop, and so she stood firm and square in the doorway, determined that that sycophantic vendor of flesh-food should not sneak out to take Susan's order before she was served herself, and that should take a long time. She would spin the rabbit out.

‘Good morning, Mr Worthington,' she said in her most chatty manner. ‘I just looked in to see if you've got anything nice for me to give the Major for his dinner tonight. He'll be hungry after his golfing.'

‘Some plump young pheasants, ma'am,' said Mr Worthington. He was short, but by standing on tiptoe he could see that Susan's car had stopped opposite his shop, and that her large round face appeared at the window.

‘Well, that does sound good,' said Elizabeth. ‘But let me think. Didn't I give him a pheasant a couple of days ago?'

‘Excuse me, ma'am, one moment,' said this harassed tradesman. ‘There's Mrs Wyse –'

Elizabeth spread herself a little in the doorway with her basket to reinforce the barricade. Another car had drawn up on the opposite side of the street, and there was a nice congestion forming. Susan's chauffeur was hooting to bring Mr Worthington out and the car behind him was hooting because it wanted to get by.

‘You haven't got a wild duck, I suppose,' said Elizabeth, gloating on the situation. ‘The Major likes a duck now and then.'

‘No ma'am. Mallards, if you'll excuse me, is over.'

More hoots and then an official voice.

‘Move on, please,' said the policeman on point duty to Susan's chauffeur. ‘There's a block behind you and nothing in front.'

Elizabeth heard the purr of the Royce as it moved on, releasing the traffic behind. Half-turning she could see that it drew up twenty yards further on and the chauffeur came back and waited outside the doorway which she was blocking so efficiently.

‘Not much choice then,' said Elizabeth. ‘You'd better send me up a rabbit, Mr Worthington. Just a sweet little bunny, a young one mind –'

‘Brace of pheasants to Mrs Wyse,' shouted the chauffeur through the window, despairing of getting in.

‘Right-o,' called Mr Worthington. ‘One rabbit then, ma'am; thank you.'

‘Got such a thing as a woodcock?' called the chauffeur.

‘Not fit to eat to-day,' shouted Mr Worthington. ‘Couple of snipe just come in.'

‘I'll go and ask.'

‘Oh, Mr Worthington, why didn't you tell me you'd got a couple of snipe?' said Elizabeth. ‘Just what the Major likes. Well, I suppose they're promised now. I'll take my bunny with me.'

All this was cheerful work: she had trampled on Susan's self-assumed right to hold up traffic till she lured butchers out into the street to attend to her, and with her bunny in her basket she crossed to the post-office again. There was a row of little boxes like mangers for those who wanted to write telegrams, and she took one of these, putting her basket on the floor behind her. As she composed this momentous telegram for the purchase of three hundred Siriami shares and the denuding of the rainy-day fund, she heard a mixed indefinable hubbub at her back and looking round saw that Diva had come in with Paddy, and that Paddy had snatched bunny from the basket, and was playing with him very prettily. He tossed him in the air, and lay down with a paw on each side of him, growling in a menacing manner as he pretended to worry him. Diva who had gone to the counter opposite with a telegram in
her hand was commanding Paddy to drop it, but Paddy leaped up, squeezed himself through the swing-door and mounted guard over his prey on the pavement. Elizabeth and Diva rushed out after him and by dint of screaming ‘Trust, Paddy!' Diva induced her dog to drop bunny.

‘So sorry, dear Elizabeth,' she said, smoothing the rumpled fur. ‘Not damaged at all, I think.'

‘If you imagine I'm going to eat a rabbit mangled by your disgusting dog –' began Elizabeth.

‘You shouldn't have left it lying on the floor,' retorted Diva. ‘Public place. Not my fault.'

Mr Worthington came nimbly across the street, unaware that he was entering a storm-centre.

‘Mrs Wyse doesn't need that couple of snipe, ma'am,' he said to Elizabeth. ‘Shall I send them up to Mallards?'

‘I'm surprised at your offering me Mrs Wyse's leavings,' said Elizabeth. ‘And charge the rabbit I bought just now to Mrs Plaistow.'

‘But I don't want a rabbit,' said Diva. ‘As soon eat rats.'

‘All I can say is that it's not mine,' said Elizabeth.

Diva thought of something rather neat.

‘Oh, well, it'll do for the kitchen,' she said, putting it in her basket.

‘Diva dear, don't let your servants eat it,' said Elizabeth. ‘As likely as not it would give them hydrophobia.'

‘Pooh!' said Diva. ‘Bet another dog carried it when it was shot. Oh, I forgot my telegram.'

‘I'll pick out a nice young plump one for you, ma'am, shall I?' said Mr Worthington to Elizabeth.

‘Yes, and mind you only charge one to me.'

The two ladies went back into the post-office with Paddy and the rabbit to finish the business which had been interrupted by that agitating scene on the pavement. Elizabeth's handwriting was still a little ragged with emotion when she handed her telegram in, and it was not (except the address which had been written before) very legible. In fact the young lady could not be certain about it.

‘Buy “thin bunkered Simiawi” is it?' she asked.

‘No, three hundred Siriami,' said Elizabeth, and Diva heard. Simultaneously Diva's young lady asked: ‘Is it Siriami?' and Elizabeth heard. So both knew.

They walked back together very amicably as far as Diva's house, quite resolved not to let a rabbit wreck or even threaten so long-standing a friendship. Indeed there was no cause for friction any more, for Diva had no objection to an occasional rabbit for the kitchen, and Elizabeth saw that her bunny was far the plumper of the two. As regards Siriami, Diva had a distinct handle against her friend, in case of future emergencies, for she knew that Elizabeth had solemnly warned her not to buy them and had done so herself: she knew, too, how many Elizabeth had bought, in case she swanked about her colossal holding, whereas nobody but the young lady to whom she handed her telegram, knew how many she had bought. So they both quite looked forward to meeting that afternoon for bridge at Susan Wyse's.

Marketing had begun early this morning, and though highly sensational, had been brief. Consequently, when Elizabeth turned up the street towards Mallards, she met her Benjy just starting to catch the eleven o'clock tram for the golf-links. He held a folded piece of paper in his hand, which, when he saw her, he thrust into his pocket.

‘Well, boy o' mine, off to your game?' she asked. ‘Look, such a plump little bunny for dinner. And news. Lucia has become a great financier. She bought Siriami yesterday and again to-day.'

Should she tell him she had bought Siriami too? On the whole, not. It was her own private rainy-day fund she had raided, and if, by some inscrutable savagery of Providence, the venture did not prosper, it was better that he should not know. If, on the other hand, she made money, it was wise for a married woman to have a little unbeknownst store tucked away.

‘Dear me, that's a bit of luck for her, Liz,' he said.

Elizabeth gave a gay little laugh.

‘No, dear, you're quite wrong,' she said. ‘It's inductive reasoning, it's study of the world-situation. How pleasant for her to have all the gifts. Bye-bye.'

She went into the garden-room, still feeling very sardonic about Lucia's gifts, and wondering in an undercurrent why Benjy had looked self-conscious. She could always tell when he was self-conscious, for instead of having a shifty eye, he had quite the opposite kind of eye; he looked at her, as he had done just now, with a sort of truculent innocence, as if challenging her to suspect anything. Then that piece of paper which he had thrust into his pocket, linked itself up. It was rather like a telegraph form, and instantly she wondered if he had been buying Siriami, too, out of his exiguous income. Very wrong of him, if he had, and most secretive of him not to have told her so. Sometimes she felt that he did not give her his full confidence, and that saddened her. Of course it was not actually proved yet that he had bought Siriami, but cudgel her brains as she might, she could think of nothing else that he could have been telegraphing about. Then she calculated afresh what she stood to win if Siriami went up another three shillings, and sitting down on the hot-water pipes in the window which commanded so wide a prospect, she let her thoughts stray back to Georgie. Even as she looked out she saw Foljambe emerge from his door, and without a shadow of doubt she locked it after her.

The speed with which Elizabeth jumped up was in no way due to the heat of the pipes. A flood of conjectures simply swept her off them. Lucia had gone up to see Georgie less than half an hour ago, so had Foljambe locked her and Georgie up together? Or had Foljambe (in case Lucia had already left) locked Georgie up alone with his cook? She hurried out for the second time that morning to have a look at the front of the house. All blinds were down.

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 shown 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 papers. She brooded over her note of purchase of Siriami shares: she made small addition sums in pencil on her blotting-paper: the greed for 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 showing 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.