PAYING GUESTS. E. F. Benson
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dead for more than a year, and she had repeatedly urged Margaret to have it cut down while it was still sound, and had not degenerated into touchwood. But Mrs. Oxney had been very obstinate about it, weak but obstinate, for a green woodpecker had built in it and she said it would be such a shame to cut it down, and completely upset the poor dickie-bird's domestic arrangements. Then, when the woodpecker had quite finished with it, Colonel Chase said it made a first-rate hazard for the seventeenth and nineteenth holes (the long diagonals across the field) which meant that he was the only player who could loft his ball over it without going round, and it was not till yesterday that Mrs. Oxney had steeled herself to the destruction of this magnificent bunker. Now, of course, as Mrs. Bertram had woefully anticipated, the tree was no more than a great cracknell kept together by bark, and the Colonel might just as well have been left to go on soaring over it or hitting into it as before.
As she walked back to the house from this depressing expedition she heard the hoot of the motor-bus which brought back the patients from the baths, announcing its return. There were the usual three occupants (since Mrs. Holders had taken to walking up) Mr. Kemp and his down-trodden daughter Florence, both habitual guests at Wentworth, and Mr. Bullingdon who was paying his first visit to Bolton Spa. Though he was quite a young man, Mrs. Bertram felt sure that a bath chair would soon be his only mode of locomotion, but in spite of his poor knees, which made him move as if he was performing a cake-walk with his two sticks for a partner, he was full of jokes and gaiety. He laughed at himself in the most engaging manner, and said that he really wasn't sure that he wanted to get better, since he attracted so much flattering attention, wherever he went, by reason of his antics. Apart from these flippant allusions to his own afflictions, he never talked about arthritis at all, which was a great contrast to Mr. Kemp whose idea of pleasant conversation was to pin a listener into a corner from which escape was difficult, and, beginning with the 3rd of March, 1920, which was the date on which he first felt a throbbing in his left hip, recount the progress of his rheumatisms. He had visited Harrogate, Buxton, Bath, Droitwich, Aix and Marienbad, and none of these had really done him any good, but there was still a chance that Bolton in combination with some of the others and Bournemouth for the winter, might benefit him. Just as Mrs. Bertram reached the door, he was balanced on the step of the motor-bus, and warning Mr. Bullingdon about a certain malignant masseur at Aix.
"Don't let him touch your knees with the tips of his fingers," he said, "if you're thinking of going to Aix. I was getting on nicely there, as my daughter will tell you, when my doctor recommended me to have treatment at the hands of this villain. In a week or two he had undone all the good I had derived from Aix, and when I left I wasn't walking much better than you. What was his name, Florence?"
"Jean Cuissot," said Florence in a monotonous voice. She knew her father would ask her that.
"Nonsense: Jean Cuissot was the masseur I went to the year before. No, I believe you're right, it was Jean Cuissot. Judas Iscariot would be a better name for him. Give me your arm, please, unless you want me to stand on this step for the rest of my life. Ah, dear me, I've got a new pain in my ankle this morning. I woke in the night and felt it wasn't comfortable, and expected I should have trouble. Why, there's Mrs. Holders already. She has walked all the way up from the baths. I haven't been able to walk back after my bath since I was at Harrogate two seasons ago, and the hill there is neither so long nor so steep as this. But I used to think nothing of it then. What wouldn't I give to be able to walk up such a hill now!"
Mrs. Bertram who was lending a firm shoulder to Mr. Kemp while his daughter disentangled his sticks which had got muddled up in some inexplicable manner between his legs and the door of the bus, sighed heavily.
"Yes, indeed," she said. "We so seldom appreciate our blessings till they are taken from us, and then we haven't got them to appreciate. But Bolton may set you up yet, Mr. Kemp, you never can tell."
Mr. Bullingdon, now that the doorway of the bus was clear, performed a sort of mystic dance down the steps and on to the ground.
"There we are," he said cheerfully. "You know they ought to engage Mrs. Holders and Mr. Kemp and me for a short turn at a music-hall. It would have an immense success: screams of laughter. There would be a glass of champagne on one side of the stage, and we three toeing the mark on the other. Then at the word 'go', we would start off and see who could grab it first. Mrs. Holders would have to be handicapped though, you and I wouldn't stand a chance against her, Mr. Kemp."
Mr. Kemp was inclined to be offended at the suggestion of his appearing at a music-hall, and his daughter and Mrs. Bertram closed in behind him and propelled him into the house. Besides, as everybody ought to know, champagne was poison to him: you might as well expect him to race for a glass of prussic acid.
With the dispersal of the passengers by the ambulance waggon (as Mr. Bullingdon always flippantly called the bus) to their rooms to rest before lunch, the house was quiet again till the arrival of Miss Howard with her satchel and her camp-stool. The twilight scene on which she had been engaged this sunny morning had been giving her a great deal of trouble, for the dusk, even to her indulgent eye was of a strange soupy quality, as if some dark viscous fluid had been emitted from an unknown source (for she had not intended it) on to the landscape, and the lights from the cottages looked like some curious eruption of orange spots. It was very disappointing, for she had hoped great things from this sketch, but now when she put it up on the chimney-piece of the lounge, the effect was puzzling rather than pleasing. Luckily however, she found that a small flat parcel had arrived for her; this she knew could be nothing else than Evening Bells, which she had sent a week ago to be framed by Mr. Bowen. That, up till now, was certainly her chef-d'œuvre: Mrs. Oxney had declared that she could positively hear the bells, and so Miss Howard had caused to be printed on the mount of this masterpiece, 'The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells'. There was the tower of St. Giles' church reflected in the river, which had caused that pretty thought to come into Mrs. Oxney's mind, and Miss Howard was sure that everybody would like to see 'Evening Bells' again in its gilt frame. So she replaced the soupy twilight in her satchel, and determined to put it under the tap when she went upstairs to see if a thorough washing-down would not render it more translucent. There was half an hour yet before lunch-time, and she tripped into the drawing-room to get a good practise on the mellow but elderly piano.
Miss Alice Howard was a pathetic person, though she would have been very much surprised if anyone had told her so. She had been an extremely pretty girl, lively and intelligent and facile, but by some backhanded stroke of fate she had never married, and now at the age of forty, though she had parted with her youth, she had relinquished no atom of her girlishness. She hardly ever walked, but tripped, she warbled little snatches of song when she thought that anyone might be within hearing in order to refresh them with her maidenly brightness, and sat on the hearth-rug in front of the fire, even though there was a far more comfortable seat ready. It was not that she felt any profound passion for tripping, warbling and squatting, but from constantly telling herself that she was barely out of her teens she had got to believe in her girlishness and behaved accordingly. Her imagination (here was the root of the matter) was incessantly exercised on herself, and she imagined all sorts of things about herself that had little or no foundation in fact. She could scarcely have told you how or when, for instance, she began to believe that she was closely connected with a noble house, but certainly all Wentworth believed it now. They could have had no other informant but her, and Miss Howard very nearly believed it, too, so constantly had she made rich little allusions which implied it. She had a commodious semi-detached villa of her own, conveniently close to the station at Tunbridge Wells, but it was lonely work to live there by herself, and she had let it furnished for the last year, and hoped to do so again for the next. The occupant was a gentleman on the Stock Exchange called Mr. Gradge, who lived there with his sister, but she always referred to them as "my tenants," and to the semi-detached villa as 'my little place' in Kent. She thus contrived to produce the impression that the villa was a small ancestral manor-house, and sometimes lamented that the monstrously swollen taxes of late years had caused so many country houses to be shut up or let: she thought herself very lucky to be able to let her little place in Kent near (though it really was 'at') Tunbridge Wells. Miss Howard, in fact, though girlish, suffered from the essentially middle-aged disease of fabrication, and whether she looked at her physical image in the tall looking-glass in her bedroom, or contemplated herself in the mirror of her