Miss Mapp, E. F. Benson [chromebook ebook reader txt] 📗

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 overstepped 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[77] again, and they sat on the bench outside the club-house till the arrival of their unusual conveyance.

“Lunching at the Poppits’ to-morrow?” asked Major Flint.

“Yes. Meet you there? Good. Bridge afterwards, 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 good-bye 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,[78] 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 springlike manner.

“Yes, that’s true enough,” said Puffin. “Long roads they were, and dry roads at that, and if I stuck to them[79] from after my supper every evening till midnight or more, 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 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 archæology 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 archæologist 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.”

[80] 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 Bom-be-boo 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[81] 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 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 story 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 window, and she dismissed as unworthy the suspicion which had been aroused by the red-currant fool. The window of his bedroom was dark[82] 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 what not) 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,[83] 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 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.

“O but, Mr. Wootten,” she said, “Miss Mapp popped—dropped in to see me just now. Told me she had hardly got any.”

Mr. Wootten