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

very much less exciting than this. After one glance she put them back again, feeling vexed and disappointed with herself, for the[142] dénouement which they had so unerringly disclosed was one that had not entered her mind at all. In that moment she had seen that out of the tram there stepped three figures and no stretcher. One figure, it is true, limped, but in a manner so natural, that she scorned to draw any deductions from that halting gait. They proceeded, side by side, across the bridge over the river towards the town.

It is no use denying that the Cosmic Consciousness of the ladies of Tilling was aware of a disagreeable anti-climax to so many hopes and fears. It had, of course, hoped for the best, but it had not expected that the best would be quite as bad as this. The best, to put it frankly, would have been a bandaged arm, or something of that kind. There was still room for the more hardened optimist to hope that something of some sort had occurred, or that something of some sort had been averted, and that the whole affair was not, in the delicious new slang phrase of the Padre’s, which was spreading like wildfire through Tilling, a “wash-out.” Pistols might have been innocuously discharged for all that was known to the contrary. But it looked bad.

Miss Mapp was the first to recover from the blow, and took Diva’s podgy hand.

“Diva, darling,” she said, “I feel so deeply thankful. What a wonderful and beautiful end to all our anxiety!”

There was a subconscious regret with regard to the anxiety. The anxiety was, so to speak, a dear and beloved departed… And Diva did not feel so sure that the end was so beautiful and wonderful. Her grandfather, Miss Mapp had reason to know, had been a butcher, and probably some inherited indifference to slaughter lurked in her tainted blood.

[143] “There’s the portmanteau still,” she said hopefully. “Pistols in the portmanteau. Your idea, Elizabeth.”

“Yes, dear,” said Elizabeth; “but thank God I must have been very wrong about the portmanteau. The outside-porter told me that he brought it up from the station to Major Benjy’s house half an hour ago. Fancy your not knowing that! I feel sure he is a truthful man, for he attends the Padre’s confirmation class. If there had been pistols in it, Major Benjy and Captain Puffin would have gone away too. I am quite happy about that now. It went away and it has come back. That’s all about the portmanteau.”

She paused a moment.

“But what does it contain, then?” she said quickly, more as if she was thinking aloud than talking to Diva. “Why did Major Benjy pack it and send it to the station this morning? Where has it come back from? Why did it go there?”

She felt that she was saying too much, and pressed her hand to her head.

“Has all this happened this morning?” she said. “What a full morning, dear! Lovely autumn leaves! I shall go home and have my lunch and rest. Au reservoir, Diva.”

Miss Mapp’s eternal reservoirs had begun to get on Diva’s nerves, and as she lingered here a moment more a great idea occurred to her, which temporarily banished the disappointment about the duellists. Elizabeth, as all the world knew, had accumulated a great reservoir of provisions in the false book-case in her garden-room, and Diva determined that, if she could think of a neat phrase, the very next time Elizabeth said au reservoir to her, she would work in an allusion to Elizabeth’s own reservoir[144] of corned beef, tongue, flour, bovril, dried apricots and condensed milk. She would have to frame some stinging rejoinder which would “escape her” when next Elizabeth used that stale old phrase: it would have to be short, swift and spontaneous, and therefore required careful thought. It would be good to bring “pop” into it also. “Your reservoir in the garden-room hasn’t gone ‘pop’ again, I hope, darling?” was the first draft that occurred to her, but that was not sufficiently condensed. “Pop goes the reservoir,” on the analogy of the weasel, was better. And, better than either, was there not some sort of corn called pop-corn, which Americans ate?… “Have you any pop-corn in your reservoir?” That would be a nasty one…

But it all required thinking over, and the sight of the Padre and the duellists crossing the field below, as she still lingered on this escarpment of the hill, brought the duel back to her mind. It would have been considered inquisitive even at Tilling to put direct questions to the combatants, and (still hoping for the best) ask them point-blank “Who won?” or something of that sort; but until she arrived at some sort of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble. Elizabeth had already succumbed to these pangs of surmise and excitement, and had frankly gone home to rest, and her absence, the fact that for the next hour or two she could not, except by some extraordinary feat on the telephone, get hold of anything which would throw light on the whole prodigious situation, inflamed Diva’s brain to the highest pitch of inventiveness. She knew that she was Elizabeth’s inferior in point of reconstructive imagination,[145] and the present moment, while the other was recuperating her energies for fresh assaults on the unknown, was Diva’s opportunity. The one person who might be presumed to know more than anybody else was the Padre, but while he was with the duellists, it was as impossible to ask him what had happened as to ask the duellists who had won. She must, while Miss Mapp rested, get hold of the Padre without the duellists.

Even as Athene sprang full grown and panoplied from the brain of Zeus, so from Diva’s brain there sprang her plan complete. She even resisted the temptation to go on admiring autumn tints, in order to see how the interesting trio “looked” when, as they must presently do, they passed close to where she stood, and hurried home, pausing only to purchase, pay for, and carry away with her from the provision shop a large and expensively-dressed crab, a dainty of which the Padre was inordinately fond. Ruinous as this was, there was a note of triumph in her voice when, on arrival, she called loudly for Janet, and told her to lay another place at the luncheon table. Then putting a strong constraint on herself, she waited three minutes by her watch, in order to give the Padre time to get home, and then rang him up and reminded him that he had promised to lunch with her that day. It was no use asking him to lunch in such a way that he might refuse: she employed without remorse this pitiless force majeure.

The engagement was short and brisk. He pleaded that not even now could he remember even having been asked (which was not surprising), and said that he and wee wifie had begun lunch. On which Diva unmasked her last gun, and told him that she had ordered a crab on purpose. That silenced further argument, and he said that he and[146] wee wifie would be round in a jiffy, and rang off. She did not particularly want wee wifie, but there was enough crab.

Diva felt that she had never laid out four shillings to better purpose, when, a quarter of an hour later, the Padre gave her the full account of his fruitless search among the sand-dunes, so deeply impressive was his sense of being buoyed up to that incredibly fatiguing and perilous excursion by some Power outside himself. It never even occurred to her to think that it was an elaborate practical joke on the part of the Power outside himself, to spur him on to such immense exertions to no purpose at all. He had only got as far as this over his interrupted lunch with wee wifie, and though she, too, was in agonized suspense as to what happened next, she bore the repetition with great equanimity, only making small mouse-like noises of impatience which nobody heard. He was quite forgetting to speak either Scotch or Elizabethan English, so obvious was the absorption of his hearers, without these added aids to command attention.

“And then I came round the corner of the club-house,” he said, “and there were Captain Puffin and the Major finishing their match on the eighteenth hole.”

“Then there’s been no duel at all,” said Diva, scraping the shell of the crab.

“I feel sure of it. There wouldn’t have been time for a duel and a round of golf, in addition to the impossibility of playing golf immediately after a duel. No nerves could stand it. Besides, I asked one of their caddies. They had come straight from the tram to the club-house, and from the club-house to the first tee. They had not been alone for a moment.”

“Wash-out,” said Diva, wondering whether this had been worth four shillings, so tame was the conclusion.

[147] Mrs. Bartlett gave a little squeak which was her preliminary to speech.

“But I do not see why there may not be a duel yet, Kenneth,” she said. “Because they did not fight this morning—excellent crab, dear Diva, so good of you to ask us—there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a duel this afternoon. O dear me, and cold beef as well: I shall be quite stuffed. Depend upon it a man doesn’t take the trouble to write a challenge and all that, unless he means business.”

The Padre held up his hand. He felt that he was gradually growing to be the hero of the whole affair. He had certainly looked over the edge of numberless hollows in the sand-dunes with vivid anticipations of having a bullet whizz by him on each separate occasion. It behoved him to take a sublime line.

“My dear,” he said, “business is hardly a word to apply to murder. That within the last twenty-four hours there was the intention of fighting a duel, I don’t deny. But something has decidedly happened which has averted that deplorable calamity. Peace and reconciliation is the result of it, and I have never seen two men so unaffectedly friendly.”

Diva got up and whirled round the table to get the port for the Padre, so pleased was she at a fresh idea coming to her while still dear Elizabeth was resting. She attributed it to the crab.

“We’ve all been on a false scent,” she said. “Peace and reconciliation happened before they went out to the sand-dunes at all. It happened at the station. They met at the station, you know. It is proved that Major Flint went there. Major wouldn’t send portmanteau off alone. And it’s proved that Captain Puffin went there[148] too, because the note which his housemaid found on the table before she saw the challenge from the Major, which was on the chimney-piece, said that he had been called away very suddenly. No: they both went to catch the early train in order to go away before they could be stopped, and kill each other. But why didn’t they go? What happened? Don’t suppose the outside porter showed them how wicked they were, confirmation-class or no confirmation-class. Stumps me. Almost wish Elizabeth was here. She’s good at guessing.”

The Padre’s eye brightened. Reaction after the perils of the morning, crab and port combined to make a man of him.

“Eh, ’tis a bonny wee drappie of port whatever, Mistress Plaistow,” he said. “And I dinna ken that ye’re far wrang in jaloosing that Mistress Mapp might have a wee bitty word to say aboot it a’, ’gin she had the mind.”

“She was wrong about the portmanteau,” said Diva. “Confessed she was wrong.”

“Hoots! I’m not mindin’ the bit pochmantie,” said the Padre.

“What else does she know?” asked Diva feverishly.

There was no doubt that the Padre had the fullest attention of the two ladies again, and there was no need to talk Scotch any more.

“Begin at the beginning,” he said. “What do we suppose was the cause of the quarrel?”

“Anything,” said Diva. “Golf, tiger-skins, coal-strike, summer-time.”

He shook his head.

“I grant you words may pass on such subjects,” he said. “We feel keenly, I know, about summer-time in Tilling, though we shall all be reconciled over that next[149] Sunday, when real time, God’s time, as I am venturing to call it in my sermon, comes in again.”

Diva had to bite her tongue to prevent herself bolting off on this new scent. After all, she had invested in crab to learn about duelling, not about summer-time.

“Well?” she said.

“We may have had words on that subject,” said the Padre, booming as if he was in the pulpit already, “but