Miss Mapp quotes

but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body, which fully accounted for the comparative adolescence with which she would have been credited anywhere except in the charming little town which she had inhabited so long.

Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.

She sat, on this hot July morning, like a large bird of prey at the very convenient window of her garden-room, the ample bow of which formed a strategical point of high value.

“Baffling,” in fact, was a word that constantly made short appearances in Miss Mapp’s vocabulary, though its retention for a whole year over one subject was unprecedented.

But never yet had “baffled” sullied her wells of pure undefiled English.

Movement had begun; Mrs.

but it argued, so thought Miss Mapp, an unprecedented egoism on the part of Major Flint, and an equally unprecedented love of antiquities on the part of Captain Puffin, that they should prosecute their studies (with gas at the present price) till such hours.

No; Miss Mapp knew better than that, but she had not made up her mind exactly what it was that she knew.

She mentally rejected the idea that egoism (even in these days of diaries and autobiographies) and antiquities accounted for so much study, with the same healthy intolerance with which a vigorous stomach rejects unwholesome food, and did not allow herself to be insidiously poisoned by …

They were comparatively new inhabitants of Tilling, having settled here only two or three years ago, and Tilling had not yet quite ceased to regard them as rather suspicious characters.

Suspicion smouldered, though it blazed no longer.

They were certainly rich, and Miss Mapp suspected them of being profiteers. They kept a butler, of whom they were both in considerable awe, who used almost to shrug his shoulders when Mrs. Poppit gave him an order: they kept a motor-car to which Mrs.

She actually drafted the letter, when Mrs. Poppit’s name appeared, and diligently waded through column after column of subsequent lists, to make sure that she, the originator of the Tilling Working Club, had not been the victim of a similar insult.

Mrs. Poppit was a climber: that was what she was, and Miss Mapp was obliged to confess that very nimble she had been.

The butler and the motor-car (so frequently at the disposal of Mrs. Poppit’s friends) and the incessant lunches and teas had done their work;

… with an icy countenance and say “Good morning for ever,” or words to that effect, unless the proprietor instantly produced the—the article of clothing which had been lost in the wash (like King John’s treasures), or refunded an ample sum for the replacing of it.

All these quarrelsome errands were meat and drink to Miss Mapp: Tuesday morning, the day on which she paid and disputed her weekly bills, was as enjoyable as Sunday mornings when, sitting close under the pulpit, she noted the glaring inconsistencies and grammatical errors in the discourse.

After the bills were paid and business was done, there was pleasure to follow, for there was a fitting-on at the dress-maker’s, the fitting-on of a tea-gown, to be worn at winter-evening bridge-parties, which, unless Miss Mapp was sadly mistaken, would astound and agonize by …

“Not a penny of that will the poor ever see,” was the gist of her reflections when on disastrous days she paid him seven-and-ninepence.

She always called him “Padre,” and had never actually caught him looking over his adversaries' hands.

“Good morning, Padre,” she said as soon as she perceived him. “What a lovely day! The white butterflies were enjoying themselves so in the sunshine in my garden. And the swallows!”

Miss Mapp found it extremely difficult to bear this obviously insolent form of address without a spasm of rage. Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles.

She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans.

Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as “quaint Irene,” but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.

Miss Mapp gave a little squeal and bolted into her dressmaker’s.

She always felt battered after a conversation with Irene, and needed kingfisher blue to restore her.

There is not in all England a town so blatantly picturesque as Tilling, nor one, for the lover of level marsh land, of tall reedy dykes, of enormous sunsets and rims of blue sea on the horizon, with so fortunate an environment.

“Mamma had to go to town this morning. She won’t be back till close on dinner-time.”

Miss Mapp’s smile closed up like a furled umbrella.

The trap had snapped behind her: it was impossible now to scriggle away. She had completed, instead of spoiling, the second table.

There now existed between the four players that state of violent animosity which was the usual atmosphere towards the end of a rubber. But it would have been a capital mistake to suppose that they were not all enjoying themselves immensely.

Emotion is the salt of life, and here was no end of salt.

Everyone was overbidding his hand, and the penalty tricks were a glorious cause of vituperation, scarcely veiled, between the partners who had failed to make good, and caused epidemics of condescending sympathy from the adversaries which produced a passion in the losers far keener than …

“I thought I would just pop across from the grocer’s,” she said. “What a pretty scarf, dear! That’s a lovely shade of rose-madder. Where can I have seen something like it before?”

This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony. Diva was no coward.

“Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” she said.

After the Major’s rudeness in the matter of the half-crown, it was impossible for any sailor of spirit to take the first step towards reconciliation.

Thirst is a great leveller.

By the time the refreshed Puffin had penetrated half-way down his glass, the Major found it impossible to be proud and proper any longer.

Puffin gave his alto cackling laugh.

“Oh, that’s all right, Major,” he said. “I know it’s awfully hard to lose like a gentleman.”

He let this sink in, then added:

“Well, thank ye, thank ye,” he said. “Now where’s that soda water you offered me just now?” he shouted to the steward.

The speed and completeness of the reconciliation was in no way remarkable, for when two men quarrel whenever they meet, it follows that they make it up again with corresponding frequency, else there could be no fresh quarrels at all.

This one had been a shade more acute than most, and the drop into amity again was a shade more precipitous.

“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.

”

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 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.

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 …

… either of them, for if quarrels were permanent in Tilling, nobody would be on speaking terms any more with anyone else in a day or two, and (hardly less disastrous) there could be no fresh quarrels with anybody, since you could not quarrel without words.

There might be songs without words, as Mendelssohn had proved, but not rows without words.

By what formula could this deadly antagonism be bridged without delay?

“Oh, how wonderful of you to have thought of that, Diva,” she said. “But how shall we explain it all to everybody?”

Diva clung to her rights. Though clearly Christian, she was human.

“Say I thought of tacking chintz on and told you,” she said.

“Ho! ho! Fifty, indeed!” said the Major, thinking to himself that a dried-up little man like Puffin might be as old as an Egyptian mummy.

Who can tell the age of a kipper?…

“Not a day less, Major. ‘Retired Captain, aged fifty, who’ll take on all comers of forty-two and over, at a steeplechase, round of golf, billiard match, hopping match, gymnastic competition, swinging Indian clubs——’ No objection, gentlemen? Then carried nem. con.”

But his smile faded, and by some sort of telepathic perception he realized how much more decorous it was to say (or, better, to indicate) good-night in a dignified manner than to throw lemons about.

He walked in dots and dashes like a Morse code out of the room, bestowing a naval salute on the Major as he passed.

The latter returned it with a military salute and a suppressed hiccup. Not a word passed.

Then, as with a crash of cymbals and the beating of a drum in his brain, the events of the evening before leaped into reality and significance. In a few hours now arrangements would have been made for a deadly encounter.

His anger was gone, his whisky was gone, and in particular his courage was gone.

He expressed all this compendiously by moaning “Oh, God!”

Now they wore a glamour and a preciousness that was bound up with life itself.

He starved for more of them, not knowing while they were his how sweet they were.

The house was not yet astir, when ten minutes later he came downstairs with his bag.

… disquieting circumstances, it was difficult to be optimistic and he purchased a first-class single, for on such a morning, and on such a journey, he must get what comfort he could from looking-glasses, padded seats and coloured photographs of places of interest on the line.

He formed no vision at all of the future: that was a dark well into which it was dangerous to peer.

There was no bright speck in its unplumbable depths:

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.

“Passion!” said the Padre, in those full, deep tones in which next Sunday he would allude to God’s time.

“I do not mean anger, but the flame that exalts man to heaven or—or does exactly the opposite!”

“But whomever for?” asked Diva, quite thrown off her bearings. Such a thing had never occurred to her, for, as far as she was aware, passion, except in the sense of temper, did not exist in Tilling. Tilling was far too respectable.

Wyse’s cook quarrelled so violently before they got to business that Mr. Figgis had to calm the cook and Withers to complain to Miss Mapp… This, in brief, was the general reason why Tilling sent notes to Mr. Wyse.

As for chatting through the telephone, which was the main use of telephones, the thing was quite out of the question.

Miss Mapp revived a little as she made this piercing analysis of Mr. Wyse, and the warmth of the central heating pipes, on this baffling day of autumn tints, was comforting… No one could say that Mr.

“Something,” thought Miss Mapp, as she stood quite alone in the High Street, with Mrs. Poppit labouring up the hill, and Diva already a rose-madder speck in the distance, “has got to be done,” and it only remained to settle what.

Fury with the dear Padre for having hinted precisely what she meant, intended and designed that he should hint, was perhaps the paramount emotion in her mind; fury with everybody else for not respectfully believing what she did not believe herself made an important pendant.

“What am I to do?” said Miss Mapp aloud, and had to explain to Mr. Hopkins, who had all his clothes on, that she had not spoken to him. Then she caught sight again of Mrs.

“But they laugh at it, too,” said Mrs. Poppit.

That would have been baffling for anyone who allowed herself to be baffled, but that was not Miss Mapp’s way.

“Oh, that bitter laughter!” she said. “It hurt me to hear it. It was envious laughter, dear, scoffing, bitter laughter. I heard! I cannot bear that the dear things should feel like that.

“A letter,” he said impressively, “without an address is an uncommonly dangerous thing. Hic! Can’t tell into whose hands it may fall.

I would sooner go ’bout with a loaded pistol than with a letter without any address.

Send it to the bank for safety. Send for the police. Follow my advice and send for the p’lice. Police!”

… another duel for this insolent suggestion, but he did nothing of the kind, and his silence, which had some awful quality of consent about it, chilled her mind, even as the sea-mist, now thick and cold, made her certain that her nose was turning red.

She still boiled with rage, but her mind grew cold with odious apprehensions: she was like an ice-pudding with scalding sauce…

There they all stood, veiled in vapours, and outlined by the red light that streamed from the still-open door of the intoxicated Puffin, getting colder every moment.

Evie would squeak, quaint Irene would certainly burst into hoarse laughter when she heard the story.

It was very inconvenient that honesty should be the best policy.

Her brain still violently active switched off for a moment on to the eternal problem of the portmanteau. Why, so she asked herself for the hundredth time, if the portmanteau contained the fatal apparatus of duelling, did not the combatants accompany it?

“But we’re not,” said the Major. “

We’re detected frauds! That’s not the same as being a fraud; far from it.

And who’s going to rub it in, my friend? Who’s been rubbing away for all she’s worth? Miss Mapp, to whom, if I may say so without offence, you behaved like a cur last night.”

“Mapp’s a cat,” he said. “

Stroke a cat and you’ll get scratched. Shy a brick at a cat, and she’ll spit at you and skedaddle.

You’re poor company to-night, Major, with all these qualms.”

She hummed a little song as she mounted the few steps to the garden-room, and stopped just after she had opened the door. She did not offer to shake hands.

“You wish to see me, Major Flint?” she said, in such a voice as icebergs might be supposed to use when passing each other by night in the Arctic seas.

Major Flint certainly looked as if he hated seeing her, instead of wishing it, for he backed into a corner of the room and dropped his hat.

Never had there been such a shopping! It was nearly lunch-time when, at her front door, Major Flint finally stripped himself of her parcels and her companionship and hobbled home, profusely perspiring, and lame from so much walking on pavements in tight patent-leather shoes.

He was weary and footsore; he had had no golf, and, though forgiven, was but a wreck.

She had made him ridiculous all the morning with his frock-coat and top-hat and his porterages, and if forgiveness entailed any more of these nightmare sacraments of friendliness, he felt that he would be unable to endure the fatiguing accessories of the regenerate state.

“Did you say you couldn’t do ‘more,’” said Miss Mapp with an air of great interest.

“How curious! I should have thought you couldn’t have done less.”

“Well, what more can I do?” asked he.

“But they might not have been engaged at all,” said Diva with a brightened eye.

“Man doesn’t always marry a woman he kisses!”

Diva had betrayed the lowness of her mind now by hazarding that which had for days dwelt in Miss Mapp’s mind as almost certain. She drew in her breath with a hissing noise as if in pain.

She would not evince the slightest interest in it all; she would cover it with spadefuls of oblivion, and when next she met Mr. Wyse she would, whatever she might feel, behave exactly as usual.

She plumed herself on this dignified resolution, and walked so fast that the hedge-rows became quite transparent.

That was the proper thing to do; she had been grossly slighted, and, like a true lady, would be unaware of that slight; whereas poor Elizabeth, under such circumstances, would have devised a hundred petty schemes for rendering Mr. Wyse’s life a burden to him.

“There, that odious king gets in my way,” she said. “

So like a man to poke himself in where he isn’t wanted.

Bacco! No, not that: I have a cigarette. I hear all you ladies are terrific bridge-players: we will have a game presently, and I shall sink into the earth with terror at your Camorra! Dio!

“My crab, my steak,” she said. “And where does your nice Captain, no, Major Flint live? I have a note to leave on him, for he has asked me to tea all alone, to see his tiger skins.

He is going to be my flirt while I am in Tilling, and when I go he will break his heart, but I will have told him who can mend it again.

”

By daylight the dear Contessa was undeniably plain: that was something, but in these short days, tea would be conducted by artificial light, and by artificial light she was not so like a rabbit.

What was worse was that by any light she had a liveliness which might be mistaken for wit, and a flattering manner which might be taken for sincerity.

She hoped men were not so easily duped as that, and was sadly afraid that they were. Blind fools!

But fair and calm as was the exterior of that envelope, none could tell how agitated was the hand that carried it backwards and forwards until the edges got crumpled and the inscription clouded with much fingering.

Indeed, of all the tricks that Miss Mapp had compassed for others, none was so sumptuously contrived as that in which she had now entangled herself.

For these December days were dark, and in consequence not only would the Contessa be looking her best (such as it was) at tea-time, but from Miss Mapp’s window it was impossible to tell whether she had gone to tea with him on any particular …

The Padre had once openly stated that Shakespeare was good enough for him, and that Shakespeare was guilty of many split infinitives. On that occasion there had nearly been a breach between him and Mistress Mapp, for Mistress Mapp had said,

“But then you are not Shakespeare, dear Padre.”

And he could find nothing better to reply than “Hoots!”… There was nothing more of interest about the sermon.