‘Lunching at the Poppits’ to-morrow?’ asked Major Flint.
‘Yes. Meet you there? Good. Bridge afterwards I suppose.’
‘Sure to be. Wish there was a chance of more red-currant fool. That was a decent tipple, all but the red currants. If I had had all the old brandy that was served for my ration in one glass, and all the champagne in another, I should have been better content.’
Captain Puffin was a great cynic in his own misogynistic way.
‘Camouflage for the fair sex,’ he said. ‘A woman will lick up half a bottle of brandy if it's called plum-pudding, and ask for more, whereas if you offered her a small brandy-and-soda, she would think you were insulting her.’
‘Bless them, the funny little fairies,’ said the Major.
‘Well, what I tell you is true, Major,’ said Puffin. ‘There's old Mapp. Teetotaller she calls herself, but she played a bo'sun's part in that red-currant fool. Bit rosy, I thought her, as we escorted her home.’
‘So she was,’ said the Major. ‘So she was. Said goodbye to us on her doorstep as if she thought she was a perfect Venus Ana – Ana something.’
‘Anno Domini,’ giggled Puffin.
‘Well, well, we all get long in the tooth in time,’ said Major Flint charitably. ‘Fine figure of a woman, though.’
‘Eh?’ said Puffin archly.
‘Now none of your sailor-talk ashore, Captain,’ said the Major, in high good humour. ‘I'm not a marrying man any more than you are. Better if I had been perhaps, more years ago than I care to think about. Dear me, my wound's going to trouble me to-night.’
‘What do you do for it, Major?’ asked Puffin.
‘Do for it? Think of old times a bit over my diaries.’
‘Going to let the world have a look at them some day?’ asked Puffin.
‘No, sir, I am not,’ said Major Flint. ‘Perhaps a hundred years hence – the date I have named in my will for their publication – someone may think them not so uninteresting. But all this toasting and buttering and grilling and frying your friends, and serving them up hot for all the old cats at a tea-table to mew over – Pah!’
Puffin was silent a moment in appreciation of these noble sentiments.
‘But you put in a lot of work over them,’ he said at length. ‘Often when I'm going up to bed, I see the light still burning in your sitting-room window.’
‘And if it comes to that,’ rejoined the Major, ‘I'm sure I've often dozed off when I'm in bed and woken again, and pulled up my blind, and what not, and there's your light still burning. Powerful long roads those old Romans must have made, Captain.’
The ice was not broken, but it was cracking in all directions under this unexampled thaw. The two had clearly indicated a mutual suspicion of each other's industrious habits after dinner… They had never got quite so far as this before: some quarrel had congealed the surface again. But now, with a desperate disagreement just behind them, and the unusual luxury of a taxi just in front, the vernal airs continued blowing in the most spring-like manner.
‘Yes, that's true enough,’ said Puffin. ‘Long roads they were, and dry roads at that, and if I stuck to them from after my supper every evening till midnight or more I should be smothered in dust.’
‘Unless you washed the dust down just once in a while,’ said Major Flint.
‘Just so. Brain-work's an exhausting process; requires a little stimulant now and again,’ said Puffin. ‘I sit in my chair, you understand, and perhaps doze for a bit after my supper, and then I'll get my maps out, and have them handy beside me. And then, if there's something interesting in the evening paper, perhaps I'll have a look at it, and bless me, if by that time it isn't already half-past ten or eleven, and it seems useless to tackle archaeology then. And I just – just while away the time till I'm sleepy. But there seems to be a sort of legend among the ladies here, that I'm a great student of local topography and Roman roads, and all sorts of truck, and I find it better to leave it at that. Tiresome to go into long explanations. In fact,’ added Puffin in a burst of confidence, ‘the study I've done on Roman roads these last six months wouldn't cover a threepenny piece.’
Major Flint gave a loud, choking guffaw and beat his fat leg.
‘Well, if that's not the best joke I've heard for many a long day,’ he said. ‘There I've been in the house opposite you these last two years, seeing your light burning late night after night, and thinking to myself: “There's my friend Puffin still at it! Fine thing to be an enthusiastic archaeologist like that. That makes short work of a lonely evening for him if he's so buried in his books or his maps – Mapps, ha! ha! – that he doesn't seem to notice whether it's twelve o'clock or one or two, maybe!” And all the time you've been sitting snoozing and boozing in your chair, with your glass handy to wash the dust down.’
Puffin added his falsetto cackle to this merriment.
‘And, often I've thought to myself,’ he said, ‘“There's my friend the Major in his study opposite, with all his diaries round him, making a note here, and copying an extract there, and conferring with the Viceroy one day, and reprimanding the Maharajah of Bombeboo another. He's spending the evening on India's coral strand, he is, having tiffin and shooting tigers and Gawd knows what –’
The Major's laughter boomed out again.
‘And I never kept a diary in my life!’ he cried. ‘Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues. You and I, you know, the students of Tilling! The serious-minded students who do a hard day's work when all the pretty ladies have gone to bed. Often and often has old – I mean has that fine woman, Miss Mapp, told me that I work too hard at night! Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning! Six and eight in the morning! That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at! Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties.’ Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face.
‘And you sitting up one side of the street,’ he gasped, ‘pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names. Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you bring your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next. Never drink alone – one of my maxims in life – if you can find someone to drink with you. And there were you within a few yards of me all the time sitting by your old solitary self, and there was I sitting by my old solitary self, and we each thought the other a serious-minded old buffer, busy on his life-work. I'm blessed if I ever heard of two such pompous old frauds as you and I, Captain! What a sight of hypocrisy there is in the world, to be sure! No offence – mind: I'm as bad as you, and you're as bad as me, and we're both as bad as each other. But no more solitary confinement of an evening for Benjamin Flint, as long as you're agreeable.’
The advent of the taxi was announced, and arm in arm they limped down the steep path together to the road. A little way off to the left was the great bunker which, primarily, was the cause of their present amity. As they drove by it, the Major waggled his red hand at it.
‘Au reservoir,’ he said. ‘Back again soon!’
It was late that night when Miss Mapp felt that she was physically incapable of tacking on a single poppy more to the edge of her skirt, and went to the window of the garden-room where she had been working, to close it. She glanced up at the top storey of her own house, and saw that the lights in the servants' rooms were out: she glanced to the right and concluded that her gardener had gone to bed: finally, she glanced down the street and saw with a pang of pleasure that the windows of the Major's house showed no sign of midnight labour. This was intensely gratifying: it indicated that her influence was at work in him, for in response to her wish, so often and so tactfully urged on him, that he would go to bed earlier and not work so hard at night, here was the darkened win
dow, and she dismissed as unworthy the suspicion which had been aroused by the red-currant fool. The window of his bedroom was dark too: he must have already put out his light, and Miss Mapp made haste over her little tidyings so that she might not be found a transgressor to her own precepts. But there was a light in Captain Puffin's house: he had a less impressionable nature than the Major and was in so many ways far inferior. And did he really find Roman roads so wonderfully exhilarating? Miss Mapp sincerely hoped that he did, and that it was nothing else of less pure and innocent allurement that kept him up… As she closed the window very gently, it did just seem to her that there had been something equally baffling in Major Flint's egoistical vigils over his diaries; that she had wondered whether there was not something else (she had hardly formulated what) which kept his lights burning so late. But she would now cross him – dear man – and his late habits, out of the list of riddles about Tilling which awaited solution. Whatever it had been (diaries or whatnot) that used to keep him up, he had broken the habit now, whereas Captain Puffin had not. She took her poppy-bordered skirt over her arm, and smiled her thankful way to bed. She could allow herself to wonder with a little more definiteness, now that the Major's lights were out and he was abed, what it could be which rendered Captain Puffin so oblivious to the passage of time, when he was investigating Roman roads. How glad she was that the Major was not with him… ‘Benjamin Flint!’ she said to herself as, having put her window open, she trod softly (so as not to disturb the slumberer next door) across her room on her fat white feet to her big white bed. ‘Good-night, Major Benjy,’ she whispered, as she put her light out.
•
It was not to be supposed that Diva would act on Miss Mapp's alarming hints that morning as to the fate of coal-hoarders, and give, say, a ton of fuel to the hospital at once, in lieu of her usual smaller Christmas contribution, without making further inquiries in the proper quarters as to the legal liabilities of having, so she ascertained, three tons in her cellar, and as soon as her visitor had left her this morning, she popped out to see Mr Wootten, her coal-merchant. She returned in a state of fury, for there were no regulations whatever in existence with regard to the amount of coal that any householder might choose to amass, and Mr Wootten complimented her on her prudence in having got in a reasonable supply, for he thought it quite probable that, if the coal-strike took place, there would be some difficulty in a month's time from now in replenishing cellars. ‘But we've had a good supply all the summer,’ added agreeable Mr Wootten, ‘and all my customers have got their cellars well stocked.’
Diva rapidly recollected that the perfidious Elizabeth was among them.
‘Oh, but, Mr Wootten,’ she said, ‘Miss Mapp popped – dropped in to see me just now. Told me she had hardly got any.’
Mr Wootten turned up his ledger. It was not etiquette to disclose the affairs of one client to another, but if there was a cantankerous customer, one who was never satisfied with prices and quality, that client was Miss Mapp…
He allowed a broad grin to overspread his agreeable face.
‘Well, ma'am, if in a month's time I'm short of coal, there are friends of yours in Tilling who can let you have plenty,’ he permitted himself to say…
It was idle to attempt to cut out bunches of roses while her hand was so feverish, and she trundled up and down the High Street to cool off. Had she not been so prudent as to make inquiries, as likely as not she would have sent a ton of coal that very day to the hospital, so strongly had Elizabeth's perfidious warning inflamed her imagination as to the fate of hoarders, and all the time Elizabeth's own cellars were glutted, though she had asserted that she was almost fuelless. Why, she must have in her possession more coal than Diva herself, since Mr Wootten had clearly implied that it was Elizabeth who could be borrowed from! And all because of a wretched piece of rose-madder worsted…
By degrees she calmed down, for it was no use attempting to plan revenge with a brain at fever-heat. She must be calm and icily ingenious. As the cooling process went on she began to wonder whether it was worsted alone that had prompted her friend's diabolical suggestion. It seemed more likely that another motive (one strangely Elizabethan) was the cause of it. Elizabeth might be taken for certain as being a coal-hoarder herself, and it was ever so like her to divert suspicion by pretending her cellar was next to empty. She had been equally severe on any who might happen to be hoarding food, in case transport was disarranged and supplies fell short, and with a sudden flare of authentic intuition, Diva's mind blazed with the conjecture that Elizabeth was hoarding food as well.
Luck ever attends the bold and constructive thinker: the apple, for instance, fell from the tree precisely when Newton's mind was groping after the law of gravity, and as Diva stepped into her grocer's to begin her morning's shopping (for she had been occupied with roses ever since breakfast) the attendant was at the telephone at the back of the shop. He spoke in a lucid telephone-voice.
‘We've only two of the big tins of corned beef,’ he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with attention as a satyr‘s. But she could only hear little hollow quacks from the other end.
‘Tongue as well. Very good. I'll send them up at once,’ he added, and came forward into the shop.
‘Good morning,’ said Diva. Her voice was tremulous with anxiety and investigation. ‘Got any big tins of corned beef? The ones that contain six pounds.’
‘Very sorry, ma'am. We've only got two, and they've just been ordered.’
‘A small pot of ginger then, please,’ said Diva recklessly. ‘Will you send it round immediately?’
‘Yes, ma'am. The boy's just going out.’
That was luck. Diva hurried into the street, and was absorbed by the headlines of the news outside the stationer's. This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny… She had not got to wait long, for almost immediately the grocer's boy came out of the shop with a heavy basket on his arm, delivered the small pot of ginger at her own door, and proceeded along the street. He was, unfortunately, a popular and a conversational youth, who had a great deal to say to his friends, and the period of waiting to see if he would turn up the steep street that led to Miss Mapp's house was very protracted. At the corner he deliberately put down the basket altogether and lit a cigarette, and never had Diva so acutely deplored the spread of the tobacco-habit among the juvenile population.
Having refreshed himself he turned up the steep street. He passed the fishmonger's and the fruiterer‘s; he did not take the turn down to the dentist's and Mr Wyse's. He had no errand to the Major's house or to the Captain's. Then, oh then, he rang the bell at Miss Mapp's back-door. All the time Diva had been following him, keeping her head well down so as to avert the possibility of observation from the window of the garden-room, and walking so slowly that the motion of her feet seemed not circular at all… Then the bell was answered, and he delivered into Withers's hands one, two tins of corned beef and a round ox-tongue. He put the basket on his head and came down the street again, shrilly whistling. If Diva had had any reasonably small change in her pocket, she would assuredly have given him some small share in it. Lacking this, she trundled home with all speed, and began cutting out roses with swift and certain strokes of the nail scissors.
Now she had already noticed that Elizabeth had paid visits to the grocer's on three consecutive days (three consecutive days: think of it!), and given that her purchases on other occasions had been on the same substantial scale as to-day, it became a matter of thrilling interest as to where she kept these stores. She could not keep them in the coal-cellar, for that was already bursting with coal, and Diva, who had assisted her (the base one) in making a prodigious quantity of jam that year from her well-stocked garden, was aware that the kitchen cupboards were like to be as replete as the coal-cellar, before those hoardings of dead oxen began. Then there w
as the big cupboard under the stairs, but that could scarcely be the site of this prodigious cache, for it was full of cardboard and curtains and carpets and all the rubbishy accumulations which Elizabeth could not bear to part with. Then she had large cupboards in her bedroom and spare-rooms full to overflowing of mouldy clothes, but there was positively not another cupboard in the house that Diva knew of, and she crushed her temples in her hands in the attempt to locate the hiding-place of the hoard.
Diva suddenly jumped up with a happy squeal of discovery, and in her excitement snapped her scissors with so random a stroke that she completely cut in half the bunch of roses that she was engaged on. There was another cupboard, the best and biggest of all and the most secret and the most discreet. It lay embedded in the wall of the garden-room, cloaked and concealed behind the shelves of a false bookcase, which contained no more than the simulacra of books, just books with titles that had never yet appeared on any honest book. There were twelve volumes of ‘The Beauties of Nature’, a shelf full of ‘Elegant Extracts’, there were volumes simply called ‘Poems’, there were ‘Commentaries’, there were ‘Travels’ and ‘Astronomy’ and the lowest and tallest shelf was full of ‘Music’. A card-table habitually stood in front of this false repository of learning, and it was only last week that Diva, prying casually round the room while Elizabeth had gone to take off her gardening-gloves, had noticed a modest catch let into the woodwork. Without doubt, then, the bookcase was the door of the cupboard, and with a stroke of intuition, too sure to be called a guess, Diva was aware that she had correctly inferred the storage of this nefarious hoard. It only remained to verify her conclusion, and, if possible, expose it with every circumstance of public ignominy. She was in no hurry: she could bide her time, aware that, in all probability, every day that passed would see an addition to its damning contents. Some day, when she was playing bridge and the card-table had been moved out, in some rubber when she herself was dummy and Elizabeth greedily playing the hand, she would secretly and accidentally press the catch which her acute vision had so providentially revealed to her…