Lucia Victrix (42 page)

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 recognized 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 sand-pit, 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 Aeschylus – 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 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.'