The Complete Mapp & Lucia (160 page)

There were two workmen in the trench, the one with a pick, the other shovelling the earth into a basket to dump it on to the far corner of the potato-patch uprooted by Elizabeth. Georgie was glad of this diversion (whatever it might be) for it struck him that the stratum which Lucia had assigned to Cromwell was far above the air flue stratum, once pronounced to be Roman, but now dated
circa
1830… The digger had paused with his pickaxe poised in the air.

“Lovely bit of glass here, ma’am,” he said. “I nearly went crash into it!”

Lucia jumped back into the trench and became Erda again. It was a narrow escape indeed. The man’s next blow must almost certainly have shattered a large and iridescent piece of glass, which gleamed in the mould. Tenderly and carefully, taking off her gloves, Lucia loosened it.

“Georgie!” she said in a voice faint and ringing with emotion, “take it from me in both hands with the utmost caution. A wonderful piece of glass, with an inscription stamped on it.”

“Not Spencer again, I hope,” said Georgie.

Lucia passed it to him from the trench, and he received it in his cupped hands.

“Don’t move till I get out and take it from you,” said she. “Not another stroke for the present,” she called to her workman.

There was a tap for the garden-hose close by. Lucia let the water drip very gently, drop by drop, on to the trove. It was brilliantly iridescent, of a rich greenish colour below the oxydized surface, and of curved shape. Evidently it was a piece of some glass vessel, ewer or bottle. Tilting it this way and that to catch the light she read the letters stamped on it.

“A.P.O.L.” she announced.

“It’s like crosswords,” said Georgie. “All I can think of is ‘Apology’.”

Lucia sat down on a neighbouring bench, panting with excitement but radiant with triumph.

“Do you remember how I said that I suspected I should find the remains of a Roman temple?” she asked.

“Yes: or a villa,” said Georgie.

“I thought a temple more probable, and said so. Look at it, Georgie. Some sacrificial vessel—there’s a hint for you—some flask for libations dedicated to a God. What God?”

“Apollo!” cried Georgie. “My dear, how perfectly wonderful! I don’t see what else it could be. That makes up for all the Spencers. And it’s the lowest level of all, so that’s all right anyhow.”

Reverently holding this (quite large) piece of the sacrificial vessel in her joined hands, Lucia conveyed it to the garden-room, dried the water off it with blotting-paper, and put it in a tray by itself, since the objects in Tray D, once indubitably Roman, had been found to be Spenserian.

“All important to find the rest of it,” she said. “We must search with the utmost care. Let us go back and plan what is to be done. I think I had better lock the door of the garden-room.”

The whole system of digging was revised. Instead of the earth at the bottom of the trench being loosened with strong blows of the pick, Lucia, starting at the point where this fragment of a sacrificial vessel was found, herself dug with a trowel, so that no random stroke should crash into the missing pieces: when she was giddy with blood to the head from this stooping position, Georgie took her place. Then there was the possibility that missing pieces might have been already shovelled out of the trench, so the two workmen were set to turn over the mound of earth already excavated with microscopic diligence.

“It would be unpardonable of me,” said Lucia, “if I missed finding the remaining portions, for they must be here, Georgie. I’m so giddy: take the trowel.”

“Something like a coin, ma’am,” sang out one of the workmen on the dump. “Or it may be a button.”

Lucia vaulted out of the trench with amazing agility.

“A coin without doubt,” she said. “Much weathered, alas, but we may be able to decipher it. Georgie, would you kindly put it—you have the key of the garden-room—in the same tray as the sacrificial vessel?”

For the rest of the afternoon the search was rewarded by no further discovery. Towards sunset a great bank of cloud arose in the west, and all night long, the heavens streamed with torrential rain. The deluge disintegrated the dump, and the soil was swept over the newly-planted lettuces, and on to the newly gravelled garden-path. The water drained down into the trench from the surface of the asparagus bed, and next day work was impossible, for there was a foot of water in it, and still the rain continued. Driven to more mercenary pursuits, Lucia spent a restless morning in the office, considering the latest advice from Mammoncash. He was strongly of opinion that the rise in the Industrial market had gone far enough: he counselled her to take her profits, of which he enclosed a most satisfactory list, and again recommended gilt-edged stock. Prices there had dwindled a good deal since the Industrial boom began, and the next week or two ought to see a rise. Lucia gazed at the picture of Dame Catherine Winterglass for inspiration, and then rang up Mammoncash (trunk-call) and assented. In her enthusiasm for archæological discoveries, all this seemed tedious business: it required a great effort to concentrate on so sordid an aim as money-making, when further pieces of sacrificial vessels (or vessel) from a temple of Apollo must be lurking in the asparagus bed. But the rain continued and at present they were inaccessible below a foot or more of opaque water enriched with the manure she had dug into the surrounding plots.

Several days elapsed before digging could be resumed, and Tilling rang with the most original reports about Lucia’s discoveries. She herself was very cautious in her admissions, for before the complete “Spencer” tile was unearthed, she had, on the evidence of the broken “S.P.” tile, let it be known that she had found Roman remains, part of a villa or a temple, in the asparagus bed, and now this evidence was not quite so conclusive as it had been. The Apolline sacrificial vessel, it is true, had confirmed her original theory, but she must wait for more finds, walls or tesselated pavement, before it was advisable to admit sightseers to the digging, or make any fresh announcement. Georgie was pledged to secrecy, all the gardener knew was that she had spoiled his asparagus bed, and as for the coin (for coin it was and no button) the most minute scrutiny could not reveal any sort of image or superscription on its corroded surface: it might belong to the age of Melchizedeck or Hadrian or Queen Victoria. So since Tilling could learn nothing from official quarters, it took the obvious course, sanctified by tradition, of inventing discoveries for itself: a statue was hinted at and a Roman altar. All this was most fortunate for Elizabeth, for the prevailing excitement about the ancient population of Tilling following on the gas and sewer affair, had rendered completely obsolete its sense of having been cheated when it was clear that she was not about to add to the modern population, and her appearance in the High Street alert and active as usual ceased to rouse any sort of comment. To make matters square between the late and the present owner of Mallards, it was only right that, just as Lucia had never believed in Elizabeth’s baby, so now Elizabeth was entirely incredulous about Lucia’s temple.

Elizabeth, on one of these days of April tempest when digging was suspended, came up from Grebe for her morning’s marketing in her raincloak and Russian boots. The approach of a violent shower had driven her to take shelter in Diva’s house, who could scarcely refuse her admittance, but did not want her at all. She put down her market-basket, which for the best of reasons smelt of fish, where Paddy could not get at it.

“Such a struggle to walk up from Grebe in this gale,” she said. “Diva, you could hardly believe the monstrous state of neglect into which the kitchen garden there has fallen. Not a vegetable. A sad change for me after my lovely garden at Mallards where I never had to buy even a bit of parsley. But beggars can’t be choosers, and far be it from me to complain.”

“Well, you took every potato out of the ground at Mallards before you left,” said Diva. “That will make a nice start for you.”

“I said I didn’t complain, dear,” said Elizabeth sharply. “And how is the Roman Forum getting on? Any new temples? Too killing! I don’t believe a single word about it. Probably poor Lucia has discovered the rubbish-heap of odds and ends I threw away when I left my beloved old home for ever.”

“Did you bury them in the ground where the potatoes had been?” asked Diva, intensely irritated at this harping on the old home.

Elizabeth, as was only dignified, disregarded this harping on potatoes.

“I’m thinking of digging up two or three old apple-trees at Grebe which can’t have borne fruit for the last hundred years,” she said, “and telling everybody that I’ve found the Ark of the Covenant or some Shakespeare Folios among their roots. Nobody shall see them, of course. Lucia finds it difficult to grow old gracefully: that’s why she surrounds herself with mysteries, as I said to Benjy the other day. At that age nobody takes any further interest in her for herself, and so she invents Roman Forums to kindle it again. Must be in the limelight. And the fortune she’s supposed to have made, the office, the trunk-calls to London. More mystery. I doubt if she’s made or lost more than half-a-crown.”

“Now that’s jealousy,” said Diva. “Just because you lost a lot of money yourself, and can’t bear that she should have made any. You might just as well say that I didn’t make any.”

“Diva, I ask you.
Did
you make any?” said Elizabeth, suddenly giving tongue to a suspicion that had long been a terrible weight on her mind.

“Yes. I did,” said Diva with great distinctness, turning a rich crimson as she spoke. “And if you want to know how much, I tell you it’s none of your business.”

“
Chérie
—I mean Diva,” said Elizabeth very earnestly, “I warn you for your good, you’re becoming a
leetle
mysterious, too. Don’t let it grow on you. Let us be open and frank with each other always. No one would be more delighted than me if Lucia turns out to have found the Parthenon in the gooseberry bushes, but why doesn’t she let us see anything? It is these hints and mysteries which I deprecate. And the way she talks about finance, as if she was a millionaire. Pending further evidence, I say ‘Bunkum’ all round.”

The superb impudence of Elizabeth of all women giving warnings against being mysterious and kindling waning interest by hinting at groundless pretensions, so dumbfounded Diva that she sat with open mouth staring at her. She did not trust herself to speak for fear she might say, not more than she meant but less. It was better to say nothing than not be adequate and she changed the subject.

“How’s the tiger-skirt?” she asked. “And collar.”

Elizabeth rather mistakenly thought that she had quelled Diva over this question of middle-aged mysteriousness. She did not want to rub it in, and adopted the new subject with great amiability.

“Sweet of you to ask, dear, about my new little frock,” she said. “Everybody complimented me on it, except you, and I was a little hurt. But I think—so does Benjy—that it’s a wee bit smart for our homely Tilling. How I hate anybody making themselves conspicuous.”

Diva could trust herself to speak on this subject without fear of saying too little.

“Now Elizabeth,” she said, “you asked me as a friend to be open and frank with you, and so I tell you that that’s not true. The hair was coming off your new little frock—it was the old green skirt anyway—in handfuls. That day you lunched with Lucia and hit your foot against the table-rail it flew about. Grosvenor had to sweep the carpet afterwards. I might as well trim my skirt with strips of my doormat and then say it was too smart for Tilling. You’d have done far better to have buried that mangy tiger-skin and the eye I knocked out of it with the rest of your accumulations in the potato-patch. I should be afraid of getting eczema if I wore a thing like that, and I don’t suppose that at this minute there’s a single hair left on it. There!”

It was Elizabeth’s turn to be dumbfounded at the vehemence of these remarks. She breathed through her nose and screwed her face up into amazing contortions.

“I never thought to have heard such words from you,” she said.

“And I never thought to be told that strips from a mangy tiger-skin were too smart to wear in Tilling,” retorted Diva. “And pray, Elizabeth, don’t make a face as if you were going to cry. Do you good to hear the truth. You think everybody else is being mysterious and getting into deceitful ways just because you’re doing so yourself. All these weeks you’ve been given honey and driven in Susan’s Royce and nobody’s contradicted you because—oh, well, you know what I mean, so leave it at that.”

Elizabeth whisked up her market-basket and the door banged. Diva opened the window to get rid of that horrid smell of haddock.

“I’m not a bit sorry,” she said to herself. “I hope it may do her good. It’s done me good, anyhow.”

The weather cleared, and visiting the flooded trench one evening Lucia saw that the water had soaked away and that digging could be resumed. Accordingly she sent word to her two workmen to start their soil-shifting again at ten next morning. But when, awaking at seven, she found the sun pouring into her room from a cloudless sky, she could not resist going out to begin operations alone. It was a sparkling day, thrushes were scudding about the lawn listening with cocked heads for the underground stir of worms and then rapturously excavating for their breakfast: excavation, indeed, seemed like some beautiful law of Nature which all must obey. Moreover she wanted to get on with her discoveries as quickly as possible, for to be quite frank with herself, the unfortunate business of the Spencer tile had completely exploded, sky-high, all her evidence, and in view of what she had already told the reporter from the
Hastings Chronicle,
it would give a feeling of security to get some more. To-day was Friday, the
Hastings Chronicle
came out on Saturday, and, with the earth soft for digging, with the example of the thrushes on the lawn and the intoxicating tonic of the April day, she had a strong presentiment that she would find the rest of that sacred bottle with the complete dedication to Apollo in time to ring up the
Hastings Chronicle
with this splendid intelligence before it went to press.