Lucia in London quotes

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.”

Mrs. Quantock had lately grown rather stout owing to a diet of sour milk, which with plenty of sugar was not palatable;

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.

“Georgie, come to the fence a minute,” said Mrs. Quantock. “I want to speak to you.”

Georgie, longing for a little gossip, let go of the handle of his roller, which, suddenly released, gave a loud squeak and rapped him smartly on the elbow.

He went to the fence and, being tall, could look over it. There was Mrs. Quantock angrily poking Lucia’s note into the flower-bed she had been weeding.

Lucas, wife of Philip Lucas, and so Lucia), and though he could criticize her in his mind, when he was alone in his bed or his bath, he always championed her in the face of the criticism of others.

Whereas Daisy criticized everybody everywhere....

“Perhaps it means what it says,” he observed with the delicate sarcasm that never had any effect on his neighbour.

So naturally they say it’s a terrible blow. Wouldn’t do to be exultant. They must say it’s a terrible blow, to show they don’t care about the money.

The more they’re left, the sadder it is.

So natural. I blame myself for not having thought of it at once. Have you seen her since?”

Daisy was short-sighted, though she steadily refused to recognize that, and would never wear spectacles. In fact, Lucia had made an unkind little epigram about it at a time when there was a slight coolness between the two, and had said “

Dear Daisy is too short-sighted to see how short-sighted she is.

” Of course it was unkind, but very brilliant, and Georgie had read through “The Importance of Being Earnest” which Lucia had gone up to town to see, in the hopes of discovering it....

“I can’t imagine,” said Daisy. “She’s got everything she wants now. Perhaps they’ll just hoard it, in order that when Pepino dies we may all see how much richer he was than we ever imagined. That’s too posthumous for me.

Give me what I want now, and a pauper’s funeral afterward.

”

The door opened, and Mr. Quantock came in.

Robert was like a little round brown sarcastic beetle.

Georgie got up to greet him, and stood in the full blaze of the light. Robert certainly saw his trousers, for his eyes seemed unable to quit the spreading folds that lay round Georgie’s ankles:

“He’s talking about my new clothes,” he said, “and he’s being very naughty. Any news?”

“Any news?” was the general gambit of conversation in Riseholme. It could not have been bettered, for there always was news.

And there was now.

He was beginning to feel sure that Daisy’s cynical suggestion was correct, and that the stricken desolation of Pepino and Lucia cloaked a very substantial inheritance.

Bits of exultation kept peeping out, and Lucia kept poking them back.

“But where will you put all those lovely things, if you sell the house?” he asked. “Your house here is so perfect already.”

“Good heavens!” she said. “To think that I once thought that it was a quiet back-watery place where I could rest and do nothing but study. But it’s a whirl! There’s always something wildly exciting going on.

Oh, what fools people are not to take an interest in what they call little things.

Now go on about Lucia. It’s his aunt, isn’t it, and mad?”

“And don’t be long,” said Olga.

Georgie had no use for the society of his own sex unless they were young, which made him feel young too, or much older than himself, which had the same result.

But Pepino had an unpleasant habit of saying to him “When we come to our age” (which was an unreasonable assumption of juvenility), and Robert of sipping port with the sound of many waters for an indefinite period.

Olga turned a handle or a screw or something, and there was a short pause: the next item presumably had already been announced. And then, wonder of wonders, there came from the trumpet the first bars of the Moonlight Sonata.

Now the Moonlight Sonata (especially the first movement of it) had an almost sacred significance in Riseholme. It was Lucia’s tune, much as God Save the King is the King’s tune.

Whatever musical entertainment had been going on, it was certain that if Lucia was present she would sooner or later be easily induced to play the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

It was not the morsel of Stravinski alone that Lucia was practising (the performance though really improved might still be called practice): it was modern life, modern ideas on which she was engaged preparatory to her descent on London.

Though still in harbour at Riseholme, so to speak, it was generally felt that Lucia had cast off her cable, and was preparing to put to sea.

“Very pretty: I call that very pretty. Honk!” said Robert when the morsel was finished, “I call that music.”

“Yes, bless him. But the one who happens to be my husband. Georgie, I think I’m going to change my name and become what I really am, Mrs. George Shuttleworth.

Why should singers and actresses call themselves Madame Macaroni or Signora Semolina?

Yes, that’s my excuse, as I said when you interrupted me, and my reason is gowns. I’m going to have lots of new gowns.”

Georgie swallowed this letter at a gulp, and then, beginning again, took it in sips. At first it gave him an impression of someone wholly unlike her, but when sipped, every sentence seemed wonderfully characteristic.

She was not adapting herself to new circumstances, she was adapting new circumstances to herself with all her old ingenuity and success, and with all her invincible energy.

True, you had sometimes to read between the lines, and divide everything by about three in order to allow for exaggerations, and when Lucia spoke of not disappointing dearest Aggie, who had set her heart on presenting her at Court, or of Mrs.

Daisy gave him the directions.

Collectedness seemed to be a sort of mixture of intense concentration and complete vacuity of mind.

“You seem to have to concentrate your mind upon nothing at all,” said he after reading it.

Up till then, the sordid question of money had not really occurred to them: there was to be a museum which would make them busy again, and the committee was to run it.

They were quite willing to devote practically the whole of their time to it, for Riseholme was one of those happy places where the proverb that Time is money was a flat fallacy, for nobody had ever earned a penny with it.

But since Robert’s financial judgment argued that the Museum would be a profitable investment, the committee naturally wished to have a hand in it, and the three members each subscribed fifty pounds, and co-opted Robert to join the board and supply the rest.

He felt he had been quite wrong in ever supposing that Lucia had changed. She was just precisely the same, translated into a larger sphere.

She had expanded: strange though it seemed, she had only been in bud at Riseholme.

“I wonder what she’ll do?” thought Georgie as he settled himself into his stall. “She wants dreadfully to come.”

She had long straight hair which fell over her forehead, and sometimes got in her eyes, and she wore on her head a scarlet jockey-cap with an immense cameo in front of it.

She hated all art that was earlier than 1923, and a considerable lot of what was later.

In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning.

She hated all art that was earlier than 1923, and a considerable lot of what was later.

In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning.

But she had collected round her a group of interesting outlaws, of whom the men looked like women, and the women like nothing at all, and though nobody ever knew what they were talking about, they themselves were talked about.

In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning.

But she had collected round her a group of interesting outlaws, of whom the men looked like women, and the women like nothing at all, and though nobody ever knew what they were talking about, they themselves were talked about.

Lucia had been to a party of hers, where they all sat in a room with black walls, and listened to early Italian music on a spinet while a charcoal brazier on a blue hearth was fed with incense....

She went upstairs again, and after a little deep breathing and bathing her feet in alternate applications of hot and cold water in order to produce somnolence, found herself more widely awake than ever.

Her well-trained mind cantered about on scents that led nowhere, and she was unable to find any that seemed likely to lead anywhere.

Of Lucia nothing whatever was known except what was accessible to anybody who spent a penny on the Evening Gazette.

“Oh, just somebody whom she’s possibly bringing down,” he said, and rang off.

Lucia began to suspect a slight mystery, and she disliked mysteries, except when she made them herself.

Olga’s caretaker was “sure she couldn’t say,” and Georgie (Lucia was sure) wouldn’t.

Lucia felt perfectly certain in her own mind that Abfou had been saying things about her. But perhaps, as it was Daisy who had been operating, it was better not to ask what they were.

Ignorance was not bliss, but knowledge might be even less blissful.

And Georgie was not thawing: he was polite, he was reserved, but so far from chatting, he was talking with great care. She must get him in a more confidential mood.

Lucia had already learned certain lessons in London.

If you get a snub—and this seemed very like a snub—the only possible course was to be unaware of it.

So, though the thought of being snubbed by Georgie nearly made her swoon, she was unaware of it.

It had been a mistake to kick Riseholme down, a woeful mistake, and she would never do such a thing again.

It was a mistake also to be sarcastic about anybody till you were sure they could not help you, and who could be sure of that?

Even poor dear Daisy with her ridiculous Abfou had proved such an attraction at Old Place, that Georgie had barely time to get back and dress for dinner, and a benignant Daisy instead of a militant and malignant Daisy would have helped.

Lucia’s little lunch-party that day consisted only of four people. Lunch, Lucia considered, was for intimes: you sat with your elbows on the table, and all talked together, and learned the news, just as you did on the Green at Riseholme.

There was something unwieldy about a large lunch-party; it was a distracted affair, and in the effort to assimilate more news than you could really digest, you forgot half of it.

To-day, therefore, there was only Aggie Sandeman who had been to the play last night with Pepino, and was bringing her cousin Adele Brixton (whom Lucia had not yet met, but very much wanted to know), and Stephen Merriall.

She explained the situation very good-naturedly to Lucia who rather rashly asked after her husband.

“In fact,” she said, “we blow kisses to each other from the decks of Atlantic liners going in opposite directions, if it’s calm, and if it’s rough, we’re sick into the same ocean.”

Now that would never have been said at Riseholme, or if it was, it would have been very ill thought of, and a forced smile followed by a complete change of conversation would have given it a chilly welcome.

‘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.

”

They professed not to know her and not to take the slightest interest in her, which showed, as Adele said, a deplorable narrowness of mind.

Types and striking characters like Lucia, who pursued undaunted and indefatigable their aim in life, were rare, and when they occurred should be studied with reverent affection....

Sometimes one of the old and original members of the Luciaphils discovered others, and if when Lucia’s name was mentioned an eager and a kindly light shone in their eyes, and they said in a hushed whisper “Did you hear who was there on Thursday?”

“Of course she may,” said Adele with a final spurt of ill-temper.

“What she’s not pardoned for is being found out.”

“Now you’re talking as everybody talked in that dreadful play I went to last night,” said Lucia. “Dear Olga was there: she is singing to-morrow, is she not? And you are assuming that Babs is guilty.

“Tony, trust me. Lucia has no more idea of keeping a real lover than of keeping a chimpanzee.

She’s as chaste as snow, a kiss would scorch her.

Besides, she hasn’t time. She asked Stephen there in order to show him to me, and to show him to you. It’s the most wonderful plan; and it’s wonderful of me to have understood it so quickly. You must go in:

“Ah, how can you say so? Such an experience!

I felt as if the woe of a thousand years had come upon me, some old anguish which I had forgotten.

With the effect, too, that I wanted to live more fully and vividly than ever, till the dusk closed round.”

… Lucia had disappeared after that week-end party, he had had a line from her once or twice, saying that they must really settle when he would come and spend a few days in London, but she had never descended to the sordid mention of dates.

A trunk-call, as far as he knew, could only be Lucia or Olga, and one would be interesting and the other delightful.

It proved to be the interesting one, and though rather difficult to understand because of the aforesaid mixture of baby-talk and Italian, it certainly conveyed the gist of the originator’s intention.

This was all rather splendid.

Lucia had a glorious way of completely disregarding the past, and pushing on ahead into the future.

“And have you been playing much lately?” she asked.

It seemed to Georgie that this was just the old Lucia, and so no doubt it was. She was intending to bag any employments that happened to be going about and claim them as her own.

It was larceny, intellectual and physical larceny, no doubt, but Lucia breathed life into those dead bones and made them interesting.

It was weary work to watch Daisy dabbing away with her putter and then trying to beat her score without caring the least whether you beat it or not. And Daisy even telephoned her more marvellous feats, and nobody cared how marvellous they were.

The minutes passed like seconds.... Lucia, outwardly composed, sat on a rug at the edge of the road, and tried unsuccessfully not to curse Almighty Providence.

The moon rose, like a gelatine lozenge.

She began to count the hours that intervened between the tragic present and, say, four o’clock in the morning, and she determined that whatever further disasters might befall, she would go to Whitby House, even if it was in a dustman’s cart, so long as …

“Angelic,” he said. “What fun we shall have.”

And it is probable that Nemesis at that precise moment licked her dry lips.

“Fun!” thought Nemesis.

“No, you mustn’t feel that,” said Adele. “

You mustn’t laugh at her ever. You must just richly enjoy her.

”

so are we all,” said Adele. “We all run after distinguished people like—like Alf and Marcelle. The difference between you and Lucia is entirely in her favour, for you pretend you’re not a snob, and she is perfectly frank and open about it.

Besides, what is a duchess like you for except to give pleasure to snobs?

That’s your work in the world, darling; that’s why you were sent here. Don’t shirk it, or when you’re old you will suffer agonies of remorse. And you’re a snob too. You like having seven—or was it seventy?—Royals at your dance.”

Oh, and I must remember to tell her that Archie Singleton is Babs’s brother, or she may say something dreadful. And then there are lots who will revel in Lucia, and I the foremost. I’m devoted to her; I am really, Marcia.

She’s got character, she’s got an iron will, and I like strong talkative women so much better than strong silent men.

”

I go there on Tuesday, and there I remain. But it’s true, I do adore it. No balls, no parties, and such dear Arcadians. You couldn’t believe in them without seeing them. Life at its very simplest, dears.”

“It can’t be simpler than Scotland,” said Marcia. “In Scotland you kill birds and fish all day, and eat them at night. That’s all.”

Lucia through these months of strenuous effort had never perhaps felt herself so amply rewarded as she was at this moment.

“My dear, you know,” she said. “

All our runnings-about, all our gaieties are symbols of affection: we love to see each other because we partake of each other.

Interesting people, distinguished people, obscure people, ordinary people, we long to bring them all into our lives in order to widen our horizons. We learn, or we try to learn of other interests besides our own.

Surely you know me well enough to do that. Yes, Marcelle, a cinema-artist. A fresh horizon, a fresh attitude toward life. So good for me: it helps me not to be narrow. Dio mio! how I pray I shall never be narrow.

To be shocked, too! How shocking to be shocked.

If you all had fifty lovers apiece, I should merely think it a privilege to know about them all.”

Also she had the idea of golf. But she doesn’t carry her ideas out in a vivid manner that excites interest and keeps people on the boil.

On the boil! That’s what we all ought to be, with a thousand things to do that seem immensely important and which are important because they seem so.

You want a certain touch to give importance to things, which dear Daisy hasn’t got. Whatever poor Daisy does seems trivial. But they shall see that I’ve come home.

Riseholme had deposed her, Riseholme was not intending to be managed by her from Brompton Square. The throne was vacant, for poor Daisy, and for the matter of that poor Georgie, were not the sort of people who could occupy thrones at all.

She longed to queen it there again, and though she was aware that her utmost energies would be required, what were energies for except to get you what you wanted?

Just now she was nothing in Riseholme:

… was intensely grateful for the promised removal of Pug, and it was much more amusing to play golf with Lucia than to be dragooned round by Daisy who told him after every stroke what he ought to have done and could never do it herself.

A game should not be a lecture.

Lucia thought it was time to confide in him about the abandoning of Brompton Square. Georgie would love knowing what nobody else knew yet. She waited till he had failed to hole a short putt, and gave him the subsequent one, which Daisy never did.

There were some rapid and silent calculations made. It seemed rather hard that Robert should get such a lot.

Business always seemed to favour the rich.

But Robert didn’t seem the least ashamed of that. He treated it as a perfect matter of course.

“Difficult to know what to do,” he said. “

I don’t know of any standard of valuation for the old clothes of deceased queens.

”

“Two,” said Mrs. Boucher, continuing the auction, “and that’s a fancy price. What would Pug have been, I wonder, if we’re asked fifty pounds for two old mittens. A pound each, I say, and that’s a monstrous price.

And if you want to know who suggested to Lady Ambermere to ask fifty, I can tell you, and her name was Cornelia Ambermere.

”