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

feel quite a different man. Further down the street was quaint Irene lounging at the door of her new studio (a converted coach-house), smoking a cigarette and dressed like a jockey.

“Hullo, Mapp,” she said. “Come and have a look round my new studio. You haven’t seen it yet. I shall give a house-warming next week. Bridge-party!”

Miss Mapp tried to steel herself for the hundredth time to appear quite unconscious that she was being addressed when Irene said “Mapp” in that odious manner. But she never could summon up sufficient nerve to be rude to so awful a mimic…

“Good morning, dear one,” she said sycophantically. “Shall I peep in for a moment?”

The decoration of the studio was even more appalling than might have been expected. There was a German stove in the corner made of pink porcelain, the rafters and roof were painted scarlet, the walls were of magenta[91] distemper and the floor was blue. In the corner was a very large orange-coloured screen. The walls were hung with specimens of Irene’s art, there was a stout female with no clothes on at all, whom it was impossible not to recognize as being Lucy; there were studies of fat legs and ample bosoms, and on the easel was a picture, evidently in process of completion, which represented a man. From this Miss Mapp instantly averted her eyes.

“Eve,” said Irene, pointing to Lucy.

Miss Mapp naturally guessed that the gentleman who was almost in the same costume was Adam, and turned completely away from him.

“And what a lovely idea to have a blue floor, dear,” she said. “How original you are. And that pretty scarlet ceiling. But don’t you find when you’re painting that all these bright colours disturb you?”

“Not a bit: they stimulate your sense of colour.”

Miss Mapp moved towards the screen.

“What a delicious big screen,” she said.

“Yes, but don’t go behind it, Mapp,” said Irene, “or you’ll see my model undressing.”

Miss Mapp retreated from it precipitately, as from a wasp’s nest, and examined some of the studies on the wall, for it was more than probable from the unfinished picture on the easel that Adam lurked behind the delicious screen. Terrible though it all was, she was conscious of an unbridled curiosity to know who Adam was. It was dreadful to think that there could be any man in Tilling so depraved as to stand to be looked at with so little on…

Irene strolled round the walls with her.

“Studies of Lucy,” she said.

“I see, dear,” said Miss Mapp. “How clever! Legs and things! But when you have your bridge-party,[92] won’t you perhaps cover some of them up, or turn them to the wall? We should all be looking at your pictures instead of attending to our cards. And if you were thinking of asking the Padre, you know…”

They were approaching the corner of the room where the screen stood, when a movement there as if Adam had hit it with his elbow made Miss Mapp turn round. The screen fell flat on the ground and within a yard of her stood Mr. Hopkins, the proprietor of the fish-shop just up the street. Often and often had Miss Mapp had pleasant little conversations with him, with a view to bringing down the price of flounders. He had little bathing-drawers on…

“Hullo, Hopkins, are you ready?” said Irene. “You know Miss Mapp, don’t you?”

Miss Mapp had not imagined that Time and Eternity combined could hold so embarrassing a moment. She did not know where to look, but wherever she looked, it should not be at Hopkins. But (wherever she looked) she could not be unaware that Hopkins raised his large bare arm and touched the place where his cap would have been, if he had had one.

“Good-morning, Hopkins,” she said. “Well, Irene darling, I must be trotting, and leave you to your——” she hardly knew what to call it—“to your work.”

She tripped from the room, which seemed to be entirely full of unclothed limbs, and redder than one of Mr. Hopkins’s boiled lobsters hurried down the street. She felt that she could never face him again, but would be obliged to go to the establishment in the High Street where Irene dealt, when it was fish she wanted from a fish-shop… Her head was in a whirl at the brazenness of mankind, especially womankind. How had Irene started the overtures[93] that led to this? Had she just said to Hopkins one morning: “Will you come to my studio and take off all your clothes?” If Irene had not been such a wonderful mimic, she would certainly have felt it her duty to go straight to the Padre, and, pulling down her veil, confide to him the whole sad story. But as that was out of the question, she went into Twenlow’s and ordered four pounds of dried apricots.

CHAPTER IV

The dyer, as Diva had feared, proved perfidious, and it was not till the next morning that her maid brought her the parcel containing the coat and skirt of the projected costume. Diva had already done her marketing, so that she might have no other calls on her time to interfere with the tacking on of the bunches of pink roses, and she hoped to have the dress finished in time for Elizabeth’s afternoon bridge-party next day, an invitation to which had just reached her. She had also settled to have a cold lunch to-day, so that her cook as well as her parlourmaid could devote themselves to the job.

She herself had taken the jacket for decoration, and was just tacking the first rose on to the collar, when she looked out of the window, and what she saw caused her needle to fall from her nerveless hand. Tripping along the opposite pavement was Elizabeth. She had on a dress, the material of which, after a moment’s gaze, Diva identified: it was that corn-coloured coat and skirt which she had worn so much last spring. But the collar, the cuffs, the waistband and the hem of the skirt were covered with staring red poppies. Next moment, she called to remembrance the chintz that had once covered Elizabeth’s sofa in the garden-room.

[94] Diva wasted no time, but rang the bell. She had to make certain.

“Janet,” she said, “go straight out into the High Street, and walk close behind Miss Mapp. Look very carefully at her dress; see if the poppies on it are of chintz.”

Janet’s face fell.

“Why, ma’am, she’s never gone and——” she began.

“Quick!” said Diva in a strangled voice.

Diva watched from her window. Janet went out, looked this way and that, spied the quarry, and skimmed up the High Street on feet that twinkled as fast as her mistress’s. She came back much out of breath with speed and indignation.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “They’re chintz sure enough. Tacked on, too, just as you were meaning to do. Oh, ma’am——”

Janet quite appreciated the magnitude of the calamity and her voice failed.

“What are we to do, ma’am?” she added.

Diva did not reply for a moment, but sat with eyes closed in profound and concentrated thought. It required no reflection to decide how impossible it was to appear herself to-morrow in a dress which seemed to ape the costume which all Tilling had seen Elizabeth wearing to-day, and at first it looked as if there was nothing to be done with all those laboriously acquired bunches of rosebuds; for it was clearly out of the question to use them as the decoration for any costume, and idle to think of sewing them back into the snipped and gashed curtains. She looked at the purple skirt and coat that hungered for their flowers, and then she looked at Janet. Janet was a short, roundabout person; it was ill-naturedly supposed that she had much the same figure as her mistress…

[95] Then the light broke, dazzling and diabolical, and Diva bounced to her feet, blinded by its splendour.

“My coat and skirt are yours, Janet,” she said. “Get with the work both of you. Bustle. Cover it with roses. Have it finished to-night. Wear it to-morrow. Wear it always.”

She gave a loud cackle of laughter and threaded her needle.

“Lor, ma’am!” said Janet, admiringly. “That’s a teaser! And thank you, ma’am!”

“It was roses, roses all the way.” Diva had quite miscalculated the number required, and there were sufficient not only to cover collar, cuffs and border of the skirt with them but to make another line of them six inches above the hem. Original and gorgeous as the dress would be, it was yet a sort of parody of Elizabeth’s costume which was attracting so much interest and attention as she popped in and out of shops to-day. To-morrow that would be worn by Janet, and Janet (or Diva was much mistaken) should encourage her friends to get permission to use up old bits of chintz. Very likely chintz decoration would become quite a vogue among the servant maids of Tilling… How Elizabeth had got hold of the idea mattered nothing, but anyhow she would be surfeited with the idea before Diva had finished with her. It was possible, of course (anything was possible), that it had occurred to her independently, but Diva was loath to give so innocent an ancestry to her adoption of it. It was far more sensible to take for granted that she had got wind of Diva’s invention by some odious, underhand piece of spying. What that might be must be investigated (and probably determined) later, but at present the business of Janet’s roses eclipsed every other interest.

Miss Mapp’s shopping that morning was unusually[96] prolonged, for it was important that every woman in Tilling should see the poppies on the corn-coloured ground, and know that she had worn that dress before Diva appeared in some mean adaptation of it. Though the total cost of her entire purchases hardly amounted to a shilling, she went in and out of an amazing number of shops, and made a prodigious series of inquiries into the price of commodities that ranged from motor-cars to sealing-wax, and often entered a shop twice because (wreathed in smiling apologies for her stupidity) she had forgotten what she was told the first time. By twelve o’clock she was satisfied that practically everybody, with one exception, had seen her, and that her costume had aroused a deep sense of jealousy and angry admiration. So cunning was the handiwork of herself, Withers and Mary that she felt fairly sure that no one had the slightest notion of how this decoration of poppies was accomplished, for Evie had run round her in small mouse-like circles, murmuring to herself: “Very effective idea; is it woven into the cloth, Elizabeth? Dear me, I wonder where I could get some like it,” and Mrs. Poppit had followed her all up the street, with eyes glued to the hem of her skirt, and a completely puzzled face: “but then,” so thought Elizabeth sweetly “even members of the Order of the British Empire can’t have everything their own way.” As for the Major, he had simply come to a dead stop when he bounced out of his house as she passed, and said something very gallant and appropriate. Even the absence of that one inhabitant of Tilling, dear Diva, did not strike a jarring note in this pæan of triumph, for Miss Mapp was quite satisfied that Diva was busy indoors, working her fingers to the bone over the application of bunches of roses, and, as usual, she was perfectly correct in her conjecture. But dear[97] Diva would have to see the new frock to-morrow afternoon, at the latest, when she came to the bridge-party. Perhaps she would then, for the first time, be wearing the roses herself, and everybody would very pleasantly pity her. This was so rapturous a thought, that when Miss Mapp, after her prolonged shopping and with her almost empty basket, passed Mr. Hopkins standing outside his shop on her return home again, she gave him her usual smile, though without meeting his eye, and tried to forget how much of him she had seen yesterday. Perhaps she might speak to him to-morrow and gradually resume ordinary relations, for the prices at the other fish shop were as high as the quality of the fish was low… She told herself that there was nothing actually immoral in the human skin, however embarrassing it was.

Miss Mapp had experienced a cruel disappointment last night, though the triumph of this morning had done something to soothe it, for Major Benjy’s window had certainly been lit up to a very late hour, and so it was clear that he had not been able, twice in succession, to tear himself away from his diaries, or whatever else detained him, and go to bed at a proper time. Captain Puffin, however, had not sat up late; indeed