The hot weather had continued late into September and showed no signs of breaking yet, and it would be agreeable to her and acutely painful to others that just at the end of the summer she should appear in a perfectly new costume, before the days of jumpers and heavy skirts and large woollen scarves came in. She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses. The belt of the skirt would be similarly decorated, and so would the edge of it, if there were enough clean ones. The jacket and skirt had already gone to the dyer's, and would be back in a day or two, white no longer, but of a rich purple hue, and by that time she would have hundreds of these little pink roses ready to be tacked on. Perhaps a piece of the chintz, trellis and all, could be sewn over the belt, but she was determined to have single little bunches of roses peppered all over the collar and cuffs of the jacket, and, if possible, round the edge of the skirt. She had already tried the effect, and was of the opinion that nobody could possibly guess what the origin of these roses was. When carefully sewn on they looked as if they were a design in the stuff.
She let the circumcised roses fall on to the window-seat, and from time to time, when they grew numerous, swept them into a cardboard box. Though she worked with zealous diligence, she had an eye to the movements in the street outside, for it was shopping-hour, and there were many observations to be made. She had not anything like Miss Mapp's genius for conjecture, but her memory was appallingly good, and this was the third morning running on which Elizabeth had gone into the grocer's. It was odd to go to your grocer's every day like that: groceries twice a week was sufficient for most people. From here on the floor above the street she could easily look into Elizabeth's basket, and she certainly was carrying nothing away with her from the grocer's, for the only thing there was a small bottle done up in white paper with sealing wax, which, Diva had no need to be told, certainly came from the chemist's, and was no doubt connected with too many plums.
Miss Mapp crossed the street to the pavement below Diva's house, and precisely as she reached it, Diva's maid opened the door into the drawing-room, bringing in the second post, or rather not bringing in the second post, but the announcement that there wasn't any second post. This opening of the door caused a draught, and the bunches of roses which littered the window-seat rose brightly in the air. Diva managed to beat most of them down again, but two fluttered out of the window. Precisely then, and at no other time, Miss Mapp looked up, and one settled on her face, the other fell into her basket. Her trained faculties were all on the alert, and she thrust them both inside her glove for future consideration, without stopping to examine them just then. She only knew that they were little pink roses, and that they had fluttered out of Diva's window…
She paused on the pavement, and remembered that Diva had not yet expressed regret about the worsted, and that she still ‘popped’ as much as ever. Thus Diva deserved a punishment of some sort, and happily, at that very moment she thought of a subject on which she might be able to make her uncomfortable. The street was full, and it would be pretty to call up to her, instead of ringing her bell, in order to save trouble to poor overworked Janet. (Diva only kept two servants, though of course poverty was no crime.)
‘Diva darling!’ she cooed.
Diva's head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.
‘Hullo!’ she said. ‘Want me?’
‘May I pop up for a moment, dear?’ said Miss Mapp. ‘That's to say if you're not very busy.’
‘Pop away,’ said Diva. She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said ‘pop’ in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever. ‘I'll tell my maid to pop down and open the door.’
While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work-cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations. But in order to appear naturally employed, she pulled out the woollen scarf she was knitting for the autumn and winter, forgetting for the moment that the rose-madder stripe at the end on which she was now engaged was made of that fatal worsted which Miss Mapp considered to have been feloniously appropriated. That was the sort of thing Miss Mapp never forgot. Even among her sweet flowers. Her eye fell on it the moment she entered the room, and she tucked the two chintz roses more securely into her glove.
‘I thought I would just pop across from the grocer's,’ she said. ‘What a pretty scarf, dear! That's a lovely shade of rose-madder. Where can I have seen something like it before?’
This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony. Diva was no coward.
‘Couldn't say, I'm sure,’ she said.
Miss Mapp appeared to recollect, and smiled as far back as her wisdom teeth. (Diva couldn't do that.)
‘I have it,’ she said. ‘It was the wool I ordered at Heynes's, and then he sold it you, and I couldn't get any more.’
‘So it was,’ said Diva. ‘Upset you a bit. There was the wool in the shop. I bought it.’
‘Yes, dear; I see you did. But that wasn't what I popped in about. This coal-strike, you know.’
‘Got a cellar-full,’ said Diva.
‘Diva, you've not been hoarding, have you?’ asked Miss Mapp with great anxiety. They can take away every atom of coal you've got, if so, and fine you I don't know what for every hundredweight of it.’
‘Pooh!’ said Diva, rather forcing the indifference of this rude interjection.
‘Yes, love, pooh by all means, if you like poohing!’ said Miss Mapp. ‘But I should have felt very unfriendly if one morning I found you were fined – found you were fined – quite a play upon words – and I hadn't warned you.’
Diva felt a little less poohish.
‘But how much do they allow you to have?’ she asked.
‘Oh, quite a little: enough to go on with. But I daresay they won't discover you. I just took the trouble to come and warn you.’
Diva did remember something about hoarding; there had surely been dreadful exposures of prudent house-keepers in the papers which were very uncomfortable reading.
‘But all these orders were only for the period of the war,’ she said.
‘No doubt you're right, dear,’ said Miss Mapp brightly. ‘I'm sure I hope you are. Only if the coal-strike comes on, I think you'll find that the regulations against hoarding are quite as severe as they ever were. Food hoarding, too. Twemlow – such a civil man – tells me that he thinks we shall have plenty of food, or anyhow sufficient for everybody for quite a long time, provided that there's no hoarding. Not been hoarding food, too, dear Diva? You naughty thing: I believe that great cupboard is full of sardines and biscuits and Bovril.’
‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Diva indignantly. ‘You shall see for yourself –’ and then she suddenly remembered that the cupboard was full of chintz curtains and little bunches of pink roses, neatly cut out of them, and a pair of nail scissors.
There was a perfectly perceptible pause, during which Miss Mapp noticed that there were no curtains over the window. There certainly used to be, and they matched with the chintz cover of the window-seat, which was decorated with little bunches of pink roses peeping through trellis. This was in the nature of a bonus: she had not up till then connected the chintz curtains with the little things that had fluttered down upon her and were now safe in her glove; her only real object in this call had been to instil a general uneasiness into Diva's mind about the coal-strike and the danger of being well provided with fuel. That she humbly hoped that she had accomplished. She got up.
‘Must be going,’ she said. ‘Such a lovely little chat! But what has happened to your pretty curtains?’
‘Gone to the wash,’ said Diva firmly.
‘Liar,’ thought Miss Mapp, as she tripped downstairs. ‘Diva would have sent the cover of the window-seat too, if that was the case. Liar,’ she thought again as she kissed her hand to
Diva, who was looking gloomily out of the window.
As soon as Miss Mapp had gained her garden-room, she examined the mysterious treasures in her left-hand glove. Without the smallest doubt Diva had taken down her curtains (and high time too, for they were sadly shabby), and was cutting the roses out of them. But what on earth was she doing that for? For what garish purpose could she want to use bunches of roses cut out of chintz curtains?
Miss Mapp had put the two specimens of which she had so providentially become possessed in her lap, and they looked very pretty against the navy-blue of her skirt. Diva was very ingenious: she used up all sorts of odds and ends in a way that did credit to her undoubtedly parsimonious qualities. She could trim a hat with a tooth-brush and a banana in such a way that it looked quite Parisian till you firmly analysed its component parts, and most of her ingenuity was devoted to dress: the more was the pity that she had such a round-about figure that her waistband always reminded you of the equator…
‘Eureka!’ said Miss Mapp aloud, and, though the telephone-bell was ringing, and the postulant might be one of the servants' friends ringing them up at an hour when their mistress was usually in the High Street, she glided swiftly to the large cupboard underneath the stairs which was full of the things which no right-minded person could bear to throw away: broken basket-chairs, pieces of brown paper, cardboard boxes without lids, and cardboard lids without boxes, old bags with holes in them, keys without locks and locks without keys and worn chintz covers. There was one - it had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room – covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out), and Miss Mapp dragged it dustily from its corner, setting in motion a perfect cascade of cardboard lids and some door-handles.
Withers had answered the telephone, and came to announce that Twemlow the grocer regretted he had only two large tins of corned beef, but –
‘Then say I will have the tongue as well, Withers,’ said Miss Mapp. ‘Just a tongue – and then I shall want you and Mary to do some cutting out for me.’
The three went to work with feverish energy, for Diva had got a start, and by four o'clock that afternoon there were enough poppies cut out to furnish, when in seed, a whole street of opium dens. The dress selected for decoration was, apart from a few mildew-spots, the colour of ripe corn, which was superbly appropriate for September. ‘Poppies in the corn,’ said Miss Mapp over and over to herself, remembering some sweet verses she had once read by Bernard Shaw or Clement Shorter or somebody like that about a garden of sleep somewhere in Norfolk…
‘No one can work as neatly as you, Withers,’ she said gaily, ‘and I shall ask you to do the most difficult part. I want you to sew my lovely poppies over the collar and facings of the jacket, just spacing them a little and making a dainty irregularity. And then Mary – won't you, Mary? – will do the same with the waistband while I put a border of them round the skirt, and my dear old dress will look quite new and lovely. I shall be at home to nobody, Withers, this afternoon, even if the Prince of Wales came and sat on my doorstep again. We'll all work together in the garden, shall we, and you and Mary must scold me if you think I'm not working hard enough. It will be delicious in the garden.’
Thanks to this pleasant plan, there was not much opportunity for Withers and Mary to be idle…
Just about the time that this harmonious party began their work, a far from harmonious couple were being just as industrious in the grand spacious bunker in front of the tee to the last hole on the golf-links. It was a beautiful bunker, consisting of a great slope of loose, steep sand against the face of the hill, and solidly shored up with timber. The Navy had been in better form to-day, and after a decisive victory over the Army in the morning and an indemnity of half a crown, its match in the afternoon, with just the last hole to play, was all square. So Captain Puffin, having the honour, hit a low, nervous drive that tapped loudly at the timbered wall of the bunker, and cuddled down below it, well-protected from any future assault.
‘Phew! That about settles it,’ said Major Flint boisterously. ‘Bad place to top a ball! Give me the hole?’
This insolent question needed no answer, and Major Flint drove, skying the ball to a prodigious height. But it had to come to earth sometime, and it fell like Lucifer, son of the morning, in the middle of the same bunker… So the Army played three more, and, sweating profusely, got out. Then it was the Navy's turn, and the Navy had to lie on its keel above the boards of the bunker, in order to reach its ball at all, and missed it twice.
‘Better give it up, old chap,’ said Major Flint. ‘Unplayable.’
‘Then see me play it,’ said Captain Puffin, with a chewing motion of his jaws.
‘We shall miss the tram,’ said the Major, and, with the intention of giving annoyance, he sat down in the bunker with his back to Captain Puffin, and lit a cigarette. At his third attempt nothing happened; at the fourth the ball flew against the boards, rebounded briskly again into the bunker, trickled down the steep, sandy slope and hit the Major's boot.
‘Hit you, I think,’ said Captain Puffin. ‘Ha! So it's my hole, Major!’
Major Flint had a short fit of aphasia. He opened and shut his mouth and foamed. Then he took a half-crown from his pocket.
‘Give that to the Captain,’ he said to his caddie, and without looking round, walked away in the direction of the tram. He had not gone a hundred yards when the whistle sounded, and it puffed away homewards with ever-increasing velocity.
Weak and trembling from passion, Major Flint found that after a few tottering steps in the direction of Tilling he would be totally unable to get there unless fortified by some strong stimulant, and turned back to the club-house to obtain it. He always went dead-lame when beaten at golf, while Captain Puffin was lame in any circumstances, and the two, no longer on speaking terms, hobbled into the club-house, one after the other, each unconscious of the other's presence. Summoning his last remaining strength Major Flint roared for whisky, and was told that, according to regulation, he could not be served until six. There was lemonade and stone ginger-beer… You might as well have offered a man-eating tiger bread and milk. Even the threat that he would instantly resign his membership unless provided with drink produced no effect on a polite steward, and he sat down to recover as best he might with an old volume of Punch. This seemed to do him little good. His forced abstemiousness was rendered the more intolerable by the fact that Captain Puffin, hobbling in immediately afterwards, fetched from his locker a large flask of the required elixir, and proceeded to mix himself a long, strong tumblerful. After the Major's rudeness in the matter of the half-crown, it was impossible for any sailor of spirit to take the first step towards reconciliation.
Thirst is a great leveller. By the time the refreshed Puffin had penetrated half-way down his glass, the Major found it impossible to be proud and proper any longer. He hated saying he was sorry (no man more) and he wouldn't have been sorry if he had been able to get a drink. He twirled his moustache a great many times and cleared his throat – it wanted more than that to clear it – and capitulated.
‘Upon my word, Puffin, I'm ashamed of myself for – ha! – for not taking my defeat better,’ he said. ‘A man's no business to let a game ruffle him.’
Puffin gave his alto cackling laugh.
‘Oh, that's all right, Major,’ he said. ‘I know it's awfully hard to lose like a gentleman.’
He let this sink in, then added:
‘Have a drink, old chap?’
Major Flint flew to his feet.
‘Well, thank ye, thank ye,’ he said. ‘Now where's that soda water you offered me just now?’ he shouted to the steward.
The speed and completeness of the reconciliation was in no way remarkable, for when two men quarrel whenever they meet, it follows that they make it up again with corresponding frequency, else there could be no fresh quarrels at all. This one had been a shade more acute than most, and the drop into amity again was a shade more precipitous.
Major Flint in his eagerness had put most o
f his moustache into the life-giving tumbler, and dried it on his handkerchief.
‘After all, it was a most amusing incident,’ he said. ‘There was I with my back turned, waiting for you to give it up, when your bl – wretched little ball hit my foot. I must remember that. I'll serve you with the same spoon some day, at least I would if I thought it sportsmanlike. Well, well, enough said. Astonishing good whisky, that of yours.’
Captain Puffin helped himself to rather more than half of what now remained in the flask.
‘Help yourself, Major,’ he said.
‘Well, thank ye, I don't mind if I do,’ he said, reversing the flask over the tumbler. ‘There's a good tramp in front of us now that the last tram has gone. Tram and tramp! Upon my word, I've half a mind to telephone for a taxi.’
This, of course, was a direct hint. Puffin ought clearly to pay for a taxi, having won two half-crowns to-day. This casual drink did not constitute the usual drink stood by the winner, and paid for with cash over the counter. A drink (or two) from a flask was not the same thing… Puffin naturally saw it in another light. He had paid for the whisky which Major Flint had drunk (or owed for it) in his wine-merchant's bill. That was money just as much as a florin pushed across the counter. But he was so excessively pleased with himself over the adroitness with which he had claimed the last hole, that he quite over-stepped the bounds of his habitual parsimony.
‘Well, you trot along to the telephone and order a taxi,’ he said, ‘and I'll pay for it.’
‘Done with you,’ said the other.
Their comradeship was now on its most felicitous level again, and they sat on the bench outside the club-house till the arrival of their unusual conveyance.