‘But that was three months ago,’ said Diva.
‘– and he used my coal and my electric light as if they were his own, not to mention firing,’ said Elizabeth, going on exactly where she had left off, ‘and a whole row of beetroot.’
Diva was bursting to hear the story of the voyage. She knew that Georgie was dining with Lucia, and he would be telling everybody about it to-morrow, but if only Elizabeth would leave the beetroot alone and speak of the other she herself would be another focus of information instead of being obliged to listen to Georgie.
‘Dear Elizabeth,’ she said, ‘what does a bit of beetroot matter compared to what you’ve been through? When an old friend like you has had such marvellous experiences as I’m sure you must have, nothing else counts. Of course I’m sorry about your beetroot: most annoying, but I do want to hear about your adventures.’
‘You’ll hear all about them soon,’ said Elizabeth, ‘for to-morrow I’m going to begin a full history of it all. Then, as soon as it’s finished, I shall have a big tea-party, and instead of bridge afterwards I shall read it to you. That’s absolutely confidential, Diva. Don’t say a word about it, or Lucia may steal my idea or do it first.’
‘Not a word,’ said Diva. ‘But surely you can tell me some bits.’
‘Yes, there is a certain amount which I shan’t mention publicly,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Things about Lucia which I should never dream of stating openly.’
‘Those are just the ones I should like to hear about most,’ said Diva. ‘Just a few little titbits.’
Elizabeth reflected a moment.
‘I don’t want to be hard on her,’ she said, ‘for after all we were together, and what would have happened if I had not been there, I can’t think. A little off her head perhaps with panic: that is the most charitable explanation. As we swept by the town on our way out to sea she shrieked out – “Au reservoir: just wait till we come back.” Diva, I am not easily shocked, but I must say I was appalled. Death stared us in the face and all she could do was to make jokes! There was I sitting quiet and calm, preparing myself to meet the solemn moment as a Christian should, with this screaming hyena for my companion. Then out we went to sea, in that blinding fog, tossing and pitching on the waves, till we went crash into the side of a ship which was invisible in the darkness.’
‘How awful!’ said Diva. ‘I wonder you didn’t upset.’
‘Certainly it was miraculous,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We were battered about, the blows against the table were awful, and if I hadn’t kept my head and clung on to the ship’s side, we must have upset. They had heard our calls by then, and I sprang on to the rope-ladder they put down, without a moment’s pause, so as to lighten the table for Lucia, and then she came up too.’
Elizabeth paused a moment.
‘Diva, you will bear me witness that I always said, in spite of Amelia Faraglione, that Lucia didn’t know a word of Italian, and it was proved I was right. It was an Italian boat, and our great Italian scholar was absolutely flummoxed, and the Captain had to talk to us in English. There!’
‘Go on,’ said Diva breathlessly.
‘The ship was a fishing trawler bound for the Gallagher Banks, and we were there for two months, and then we found another trawler on its way home to Tilling, and it was from that we landed this morning. But I shan’t tell you of our life and adventures, for I’m reserving that for my reading to you.’
‘No, never mind then,’ said Diva. ‘Tell me intimate things about Lucia.’
Elizabeth sighed.
‘We mustn’t judge anybody,’ she said, ‘and I won’t: but oh, the nature that revealed itself! The Italians were a set of coarse, lascivious men of the lowest type, and Lucia positively revelled in their society. Every day she used to walk about the deck, often with bare feet, and skip and do her callisthenics, and learn a few words of Italian; she sat with this one or that, with her fingers actually entwined with his, while he pretended to teach her to tie a knot or a clove-hitch or something that probably had an improper meaning as well. Such flirtation (at her age too), such promiscuousness, I have never seen. But I don’t judge her, and I beg you won’t.’
‘But didn’t you speak to her about it?’ asked Diva.
‘I used to try to screw myself up to it,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but her lightness positively repelled me. We shared a cabin about as big as a dog kennel, and oh, the sleepless nights when I used to be thrown from the shelf where I lay! Even then she wanted to instruct me, and show me how to wedge myself in. Always that dreadful superior attitude, that mania to teach everybody everything except Italian, which we have so often deplored. But that was nothing. It was her levity from the time when the flood poured into the kitchen at Grebe –’
‘Do tell me about that,’ cried Diva. ‘That’s almost the most interesting thing of all. Why had she taken you into the kitchen?’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘Dear thing!’ she said. ‘What a lovely appetite you have for details! You might as well expect me to remember what I had for breakfast that morning. She and I had both gone into the kitchen; there we were, and we were looking at the Christmas-tree. Such a tawdry tinselly tree! Rather like her. Then the flood poured in, and I saw that our only chance was to embark on the kitchen-table. By the way, was it ever washed up?’
‘Oh yes, without a scratch on it,’ said Diva, thinking of the battering it was supposed to have undergone against the side of the trawler …
Elizabeth had evidently not reckoned on its having come ashore, and rose.
‘I am surprised that it didn’t go to bits,’ she said. ‘But let us go into the garden-room. We must really talk about that wretched sponger next door. Is it true he’s bought a motor-car out of the money he hoped my death would bring him? And all that wine: bottles and bottles, so Withers told me. Oceans of champagne. How is he to pay for it all now with his miserable little income on which he used to pinch and scrape along before?’
‘That’s what nobody knows,’ said Diva. ‘An awful crash for him. So rash and hasty, as we all felt.’
They settled themselves comfortably by the fire, after Elizabeth had had one peep between the curtains.
‘I’m not the least sorry for having been a little severe with him this morning,’ she said. ‘Any woman would have done the same.’
Withers entered with a note. Elizabeth glanced at the handwriting, and turned pale beneath the tan acquired on the cod-banks.
‘From him,’ she said. ‘No answer, Withers.’
‘Shall I read it?’ said Elizabeth, when Withers had left the room, ‘or throw it, as it deserves, straight into the fire.’
‘Oh, read it,’ said Diva, longing to know what was in it. ‘You must see what he has to say for himself.’
Elizabeth adjusted her pince-nez and read it in silence.
‘Poor wretch,’ she said. ‘But very proper as far as it goes. Shall I read it you?’
‘Do, do, do,’ said Diva.
Elizabeth read:
‘My Dear Miss Elizabeth (if you will still permit me to call you so) –’
‘Very proper,’ said Diva.
‘Don’t interrupt, dear, or I shan’t read it,’ said Elizabeth.
‘– call you so. I want first of all to congratulate you with all my heart on your return after adventures and privations which I know you bore with Christian courage.
‘Secondly I want to tender you my most humble apologies for my atrocious conduct in your absence, which was unworthy of a soldier and Christian, and, in spite of all, a gentleman. Your forgiveness, should you be so gracious as to extend it to me, will much mitigate my present situation.
‘Most sincerely yours (if you will allow me to say so),
‘Benjamin Flint’
‘I call that very nice,’ said Diva. ‘He didn’t find that easy to write!’
‘And I don’t find it very easy to forgive him,’ retorted Elizabeth.
‘Elizabeth, you must make an effort,’ said Diva energetically. ‘Ti
lling society will all fly to smithereens if we don’t take care. You and Lucia have come back from the dead, so that’s a very good opportunity for showing a forgiving spirit and beginning again. He really can’t say more than he has said.’
‘Nor could he possibly, if he’s a soldier, a Christian and a gentleman, have said less,’ observed Elizabeth.
‘No, but he’s done the right thing.’
Elizabeth rose and had one more peep out of the window.
‘I forgive him,’ she said. ‘I shall ask him to tea to-morrow.’
Elizabeth carried up to bed with her quantities of food for thought and lay munching it till a very late hour. She had got rid of a good deal of spite against Lucia, which left her head the clearer, and she would be very busy tomorrow writing her account of the great adventure. But it was the thought of Major Benjy that most occupied her. Time had been when he had certainly come very near making honourable proposals to her which she always was more than ready to accept. They used to play golf together in those days before that firebrand Lucia descended on Tilling; he used to drop in casually, and she used to put flowers in his buttonhole for him. Tilling had expected their union, and Major Benjy had without doubt been on the brink. Now, she reflected, was the precise moment to extend to him a forgiveness so plenary that it would start a new chapter in the golden book of pardon. Though only this morning she had ejected his golf-clubs and his socks and his false teeth with every demonstration of contempt, this appeal of his revived in her hopes that had hitherto found no fruition. There should be fatted calves for him as for a prodigal son, he should find in this house that he had violated a cordiality and a welcome for the future and an oblivion of the past that could not fail to undermine his celibate propensities. Discredited owing to his precipitate occupation of Mallards, humiliated by his degrading expulsion from it, and impoverished by the imprudent purchase of wines, motor-car and steel-shafted drivers, he would surely take advantage of the wonderful opportunity which she presented to him. He might be timid at first, unable to believe the magnitude of his good fortune, but with a little tact, a proffering of saucers of milk, so to speak, as to a stray and friendless cat, with comfortable invitations to sweet Pussie to be fed and stroked, with stealthy butterings of his paws, and with, frankly, a sudden slam of the door when sweet Pussie had begun to make himself at home, it seemed that unless Pussie was a lunatic, he could not fail to wish to domesticate himself. ‘I think I can manage it,’ thought Elizabeth, ‘and then poor Lulu will only be a widow, and I a married woman with a well-controlled husband. How will she like that?’
Such sweet thoughts as these gradually lulled her to sleep.
It was soon evident that the return of the lost, an event in itself of the first magnitude, was instantly to cause a revival of those rivalries which during the autumn had rendered life at Tilling so thrilling a business. Georgie, walking down to see Lucia three days after her return, found a bill-poster placarding the High Street with notices of a lecture to be delivered at the Institute in two days’ time by Mrs Lucas, admission free and no collection of any sort before, during or after. ‘A modern Odyssey’ was the title of the discourse. He hurried on to Grebe, and found her busy correcting the typewritten manuscript which she had been dictating to her secretary all yesterday with scarcely a pause for meals.
‘Why, I thought it was to be just an after-dinner reading,’ he said, straight off, without any explanation of what he was talking about.
Lucia put a paper-knife in the page she was at, and turned back to the first.
‘My little room would not accommodate all the people who, I understand, are most eager to hear about what I went through,’ she said. ‘You see, Georgie, I think it is a duty laid upon those who have been privileged to pass unscathed through tremendous adventures to let others share, as far as is possible, their experiences. In fact that is how I propose to open my lecture. I was reading the first sentence. What do you think of it?’
‘Splendid,’ said Georgie. ‘So well expressed.’
‘Then I make some allusion to Nansen, and Stanley and Amundsen,’ said Lucia, ‘who have all written long books about their travels, and say that as I do not dream of comparing my adventure to theirs, a short verbal recital of some of the strange things that happened to me will suffice. I calculate that it will not take much more than two hours, or at most two and a half. I finished it about one o’clock this morning.’
‘Well, you have been quick about it,’ said Georgie. ‘Why, you’ve only been back three days.’
Lucia pushed the pile of typewritten sheets aside.
‘Georgie, it has been terrific work,’ she said, ‘but I had to rid myself of the incubus of these memories by writing them down. Aristotle, you know; the purging of the mind. Besides, I’m sure I’m right in hurrying up. It would be like Elizabeth to be intending to do something of the sort. I’ve hired the Institute anyhow –’
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Georgie. ‘Practically every time that I’ve passed Mallards during these last two days Elizabeth has been writing in the window of the garden-room. Frightfully busy: hardly looking up at all. I don’t know for certain that she is writing her Odyssey – such a good title – but she is writing something, and surely it must be that. And two of those times Major Benjy was sitting with her on the piano-stool and she was reading to him from a pile of blue foolscap. Of course I couldn’t hear the words, but there were her lips going on like anything. So busy that she didn’t see me, but I think he did.’
‘No!’ said Lucia, forgetting her lecture for the moment. ‘Has she made it up with him then?’
‘She must have. He dined there once, for I saw him going in, and he lunched there once, for I saw him coming out, and then there was tea, when she was reading to him, and I passed them just now in his car. All their four hands were on the wheel, and I think he was teaching her to drive, or perhaps learning himself.’
‘And fancy his forgiving all the names she called him, and putting his teeth on the doorstep,’ said Lucia. ‘I believe there’s more than meets the eye.’
‘Oh, much more,’ said he. ‘You know she wanted to marry him and nearly got him, Diva says, just before we came here. She’s having another go.’
‘Clever of her,’ said Lucia appreciatively. ‘I didn’t think she had so much ability. She’s got him on the hop, you see, when he’s ever so grateful for her forgiving him. But cunning, Georgie, rather low and cunning. And it’s quite evident she’s writing our adventures as hard as she can. It’s a good thing I’ve wasted no time.’
‘I should like to see her face when she comes back from her drive,’ said Georgie. ‘They were pasting the High Street with you, as I came. Friday afternoon, too: that’s a good choice because it’s early closing.’
‘Yes, of course, that’s why I chose it,’ said Lucia. ‘I don’t think she can possibly be ready a whole day before me, and if she hires the Institute the day after me, nobody will go, because I shall have told them everything already. Then she can’t have hired the Institute on the same day as I, because you can’t have two lectures, especially on the same subject, going on in the same room simultaneously. Impossible.’
Grosvenor came in with the afternoon post.
‘And one by hand, ma’am,’ she said.
Lucia, of course, looked first at the one by hand. Nothing that came from outside Tilling could be as urgent as a local missive.
‘Georgie!’ she cried. ‘Delicious complication! Elizabeth asks me – me – to attend her reading in the garden-room called “Lost to Sight”, at three o’clock on Friday afternoon. Major Benjamin Flint has kindly consented to take the chair. At exactly that hour the Padre will be taking the chair at the Institute for me. I know what I shall do. I shall send a special invitation to Elizabeth to sit on the platform at my lecture, and I shall send another note to her two hours later as if I had only just received hers, to say that as I am lecturing myself that afternoon at the Institute, I much regret that, etc. Then she c
an’t say I haven’t asked her.’
‘And when they come back from their drive this afternoon, she and Major Benjy,’ cried Georgie, ‘they’ll see the High Street placarded with your notices. I’ve never been so excited before except when you came home.’
The tension next day grew very pleasant. Elizabeth, hearing that Lucia had taken the Institute, did her best to deprive her of an audience, and wrote personal notes not only to her friends of the immediate circle, but to chemists and grocers and auctioneers and butchers to invite them to the garden-room at Mallards at three o’clock on the day of battle in order to hear a true (underlined) account of her adventure. Lucia’s reply to that was to make a personal canvass of all the shops, pay all her bills, and tell everyone that in the interval between the two sections of her lecture, tea would be provided gratis for the audience. She delayed this manoeuvre till Friday morning, so that there could scarcely be a counter-attack.
That same morning, the Padre, feeling that he must do his best to restore peace after the engagement that was now imminent, dashed off two notes to Lucia and Elizabeth, saying that a few friends (this was a lie because he had thought of it himself) had suggested to him how suitable it would be that he should hold a short service of thanksgiving for their escape from the perils of the sea and of cod-fisheries. He proposed therefore that this service should take place directly after the baptisms on Sunday afternoon. It would be quite short, a few prayers, the general thanksgiving, a hymn (‘Fierce raged the tempest o’er the deep’), and a few words from himself. He hoped the two ladies would sit together in the front pew which had been occupied at the memorial service by the chief mourners. Both of them were charmed with the idea, for neither dared refuse for fear of putting herself in the wrong. So after about three forty-five on Sunday afternoon (and it was already two forty-five on Friday afternoon) there must be peace, for who could go on after that joint thanksgiving?