The Complete Mapp & Lucia Read Free

they had been cut by the forefinger of an impatient reader, so ragged and irregular were they, and they were bound in vellum, the titles of these two slim flowers of poetry, “Flotsam” and “Jetsam,” were printed in black letter type and the covers were further adorned with a sort of embossed seal and with antique looking tapes so that you could tie it all up with two bows when you had finished with Mr Lucas’s “Flotsam” for the time being, and turned to untie the “Jetsam.”
    Today the prose-poem of “Loneliness” had not been getting on very well, and Philip Lucas was glad to hear the click of the garden-gate, which showed that his loneliness was over for the present, and looking up he saw his wife’s figure waveringly presented to his eyes through the twisted and knotty glass of the parlour window, which had taken so long to collect, but which now completely replaced the plain, commonplace unrefracting stuff which was there before. He jumped up with an alacrity remarkable in so solid and well-furnished a person, and had thrown open the nail-studded front-door before Lucia had traversed the path of broken paving-stones, for she had lingered for a sad moment at Perdita’s empty border.
    “ Lucia mia !” he exclaimed. “ Ben arrivata ! So you walked from the station?”
    “ Si, Peppino, mio caro ,” she said. “ Sta bene ?”
    He kissed her and relapsed into Shakespeare’s tongue, for their Italian, though firm and perfect as far as it went, could not be considered as going far, and was useless for conversational purposes, unless they merely wanted to greet each other, or to know the time. But it was interesting to talk Italian, however little way it went.
    “ Molto bene ,” said he, “and it’s delightful to have you home again. And how was London?” he asked in the sort of tone in which he might have enquired after the health of a poor relation, who was not likely to recover. She smiled rather sadly.
    “Terrifically busy about nothing,” she said. “All this fortnight I have scarcely had a moment to myself. Lunches, dinners, parties of all kinds; I could not go to half the gatherings I was bidden to. Dear good South Kensington! Chelsea too!”
    “ Carissima , when London does manage to catch you, it is no wonder it makes the most of you,” he said. “You mustn’t blame London for that.”
    “No, dear, I don’t. Everyone was tremendously kind and hospitable; they all did their best. If I blame anyone, I blame myself. But I think this Riseholme life with its finish and its exquisiteness spoils one for other places. London is like a railway-junction: it has no true life of its own. There is no delicacy, no appreciation of fine shades. Individualism has no existence there; everyone gabbles together, gabbles and gobbles: am not I naughty? If there is a concert in a private house—you know my views about music and the impossibility of hearing music at all if you are stuck in the middle of a row of people—even then, the moment it is over you are whisked away to supper, or somebody wants to have a few words. There is always a crowd, there is always food, you cannot be alone, and it is only in loneliness, as Goethe says, that your perceptions put forth their flowers. No one in London has time to listen: they are all thinking about who is there and who isn’t there, and what is the next thing. The exquisite present, as you put it in one of your poems, has no existence there: it is always the feverish future.”
    “Delicious phrase! I should have stolen that gem for my poor poems, if you had discovered it before.”
    She was too much used to this incense to do more than sniff it in unconsciously, and she went on with her tremendous indictment.
    “It isn’t that I find fault with London for being so busy,” she said with strict impartiality, “for if being busy was a crime, I am sure there are few of us here who would escape hanging. But take my life here, or yours for that matter. Well,