Lucia in London

While she waited for this, Daisy Quantock was busy, like everybody else in the village on this beautiful afternoon of spring, with her garden, hacking about with a small but destructive fork in her flower-beds. She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour Georgie Pillson was rolling his strip of lawn, on which during the summer he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs. Quantock’s last question had been “What do you do with slugs, Georgie?” and George had panted out, “Pretend you don’t see them.”

The evening had turned chilly, and he put on his blue cape with the velvet collar to trot across to Lucia’s house. The parlour-maid received him with a faint haggard smile of recognition, and then grew funereal again, and preceding him, not at her usual brisk pace, but sadly and slowly, opened the door of the music-room and pronounced his name in a mournful whisper. It was a gay cheerful room, in the ordinary way; now only one light was burning, and from the deepest of the shadows, there came a rustling, and Lucia rose to meet him.

“Georgie, dear,” she said. “Good of you.”

Georgie held her hand a moment longer than was usual, and gave it a little extra pressure for the conveyance of sympathy. Lucia, to acknowledge that, pressed a little more, and Georgie tightened his grip again to show that he understood, until their respective finger-nails grew white with the conveyance and reception of sympathy. It was rather agonizing, because a bit of skin on his little finger had got caught between two of the rings on his third finger, and he was glad when they quite understood each other.

Of course it was not to be expected that in these first moments Lucia should notice his trousers. She herself was dressed in deep mourning, and Georgie thought he recognized the little cap she wore as being that which had faintly expressed her grief over the death of Queen Victoria. But black suited her, and she certainly looked very well.

Georgie found, when he arrived next afternoon in Brompton Square, that Olga had already had her early dinner, and that he was to dine alone at seven and follow her to the opera house.

“I’m on the point of collapse from sheer nerves,” she said. “I always am before I sing, and then out of desperation I pull myself together. If—I say ‘if’—I survive till midnight, we’re going to have a little party here. Cortese is coming, and Princess Isabel, and one or two other people. Georgie, it’s very daring of you to come here, you know, because my husband’s away, and I’m an unprotected female alone with Don Juan. How’s Riseholme? Talk to me about Riseholme. Are you engaged to Piggy yet? And is it broccoli or phlox in Daisy’s round bed? Your letter was so mysterious too. I know nothing about the Museum yet. What museum? Are you going to kill and stuff Lucia and put her in the hall? You simply alluded to the Museum as if I knew all about it. If you don’t talk to me, I shall scream.”

Georgie flung himself into the task, delighted to be thought capable of doing anything for Olga. He described at great length and with much emphasis the whole of the history of Riseholme from the first epiphany of Arabic and Abfou on the planchette-board down to the return of Simkinson. Olga lost herself in these chronicles, and when her maid came in to tell her it was time to start, she got up quite cheerfully.

Now from opposite, across the narrow space of the square, Lucia had seen the arrival of all these cars. In order to see them better she had gone on to the balcony of her drawing-room, and noted their occupants with her opera-glasses. There was Lord Limpsfield, and the Italian Ambassadress, and Mr. Garroby-Ashton, and Cortese, and some woman to whom Mr. Garroby-Ashton bowed and Mrs. Garroby-Ashton curtsied. Up they streamed. And there was the Duchess of Whitby, (Marcia, for Lucia had heard her called that) coming up the steps, and curtseying too, but as yet Olga and Georgie quite certainly had not come. It seemed strange that so many brilliant guests should arrive before their hostess, but Lucia saw at once that this was the most chic informality that it was possible to conceive. No doubt Mr. Shuttleworth was there to receive them, but how wonderful it all was!... And then the thought occurred to her that Olga would arrive, and with her would be Georgie, and she felt herself turning bright green all over with impotent jealousy. Georgie in that crowd! It was impossible that Georgie should be there, and not she, but that was certainly what would happen unless she thought of something. Georgie would go back to Riseholme and describe this gathering, and he would say that Lucia was not there: he supposed she had not been asked.

Lucia thought of something; she hurried downstairs and let herself out. Motors were still arriving, but perhaps she was not too late. She took up her stand in the central shadow of a gas-lamp close to Olga’s door and waited.

THIS delicious little luncheon-party had violently excited Adele Brixton: she was thrilled to the marrow at Lucia’s curtsey to the telephone.

“My dear, she’s marvellous,” she said to Aggie. “She’s a study. She’s cosmic. The telephone, the curtsey! I’ve never seen the like. But why in the name of wonder didn’t she tell us who the Highness was? She wasn’t shy of talking about the other folk she’d met. Alf and Marcelle and Marcia and Bertie. But she made a mistake over Bertie. She shouldn’t have said ‘Bertie.’ I’ve known Herbert Alton for years, and never has anybody called him anything but Herbert. ‘Bertie’ was a mistake, but don’t tell her. I adore your Lucia. She’ll go far, mark my words, and I bet you she’s talking of me as Adele this moment. Don’t you see how wonderful she is? I’ve been a climber myself and I know. But I was a snail compared to her.”

Aggie Sandeman was rather vexed at not being asked to the Alf party.

“You needn’t tell me how wonderful she is,” she observed with some asperity. “It’s not two months since she came to London first, and she didn’t know a soul. She dined with me the first night she came up, and since then she has annexed every single person she met at my house.”