The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (16 page)

“They are noted for it over the way,” said Mr. Sproule. “And now,” he added, pushing away his plate, “we must talk business. In the event of our deciding to publish, with whom shall I communicate?”

“Oh, dear me,” said Lucy, “must you communicate? Couldn’t I just come and see you?”

“It would be a little difficult to make out cheques—always supposing there were any cheques—to Mrs. X,” said Sproule.

“Couldn’t you pay me in notes?” asked Lucy.

“It would be difficult and very unsatisfactory,” said Mr. Sproule. “Come, dear lady, you really can trust me, you know. Your name will remain unknown to every one but me, and your secret will be perfectly safe in my hands.”

“I’ll think it over,” said Lucy, “and I’ll come back in a week’s time and let you know.” She went out before he could prevent her.

“He spoke as if he knew I had a secret,” said Lucy. “Did you hear him?”

“I did, me dear,” said the captain. “Oh, Lucia, you are really very young for all your years, and very innocent.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lucy.

“Well, me dear,” replied the captain, “he obviously thought I was human and your lover——”

“Oh,” cried Lucy, “he can’t have thought such a thing—I’ll never go back there again—it’s disgusting, an old woman like me.”

“Old woman be damned,” said the captain. “You’re not fifty yet and that’s the age most actresses start playing Juliet.”

“I am not an actress,” said Lucy.

“No,” said the captain, “you damn well aren’t, but you’re an attractive woman, and I’m not in the least surprised at Mr. Sproule’s thoughts.”

“I’ll never speak to him again,” said Lucy.

“Oh, yes, you will,” said the captain, “for if you don’t I’ll visit him myself and then the fat will be in the fire.”

“Perhaps he won’t publish your old book anyway,” said Lucy.

“He’ll publish it,” said the captain complacently, “and it will be a best-seller, you mark my words.”

It was not for many months that Captain Gregg’s history was published, not until Lucy had had to sell out capital in order to meet her expenses, not until Anna was already earning money at the Sadlers Wells Theatre, not until Cyril had completed his theological course and become engaged to the Bishop’s daughter, who had been left a yearly income of a thousand pounds by her grandmother; not, indeed, until there was no pressing need for the income it brought in. For between the writing of the book by Captain Gregg and the publishing of it by Mr. Sproule, there appeared a deep rift of dissension, bridged indifferently by Lucy whose sympathies were mainly with Mr. Sproule. He maintained that these words must be altered and that incident toned down that the publishing firm of Tacket and Sproule might not be involved in expensive litigation or the book be banned by the censor.

“Tell the captain that for myself I wouldn’t have a sentence changed,” said Mr. Sproule on one of Lucy’s many visits to his office, “but we can’t risk it as it is.”

“Tell Sproule that this is a free country and I’ll write what I damn well please,” roared the captain when she returned to Gull Cottage.

“If only I could meet the man,” said Mr. Sproule.

“Let me talk to the fellow,” demanded Captain Gregg.

This Lucy refused to allow. She felt instinctively that if one person were to learn of her astonishing connection with the ghost of Captain Gregg, the whole world would soon hear of it, and there would be an end to all peace and privacy for her.

“And then there would be a real suicide at Gull Cottage,” she warned the captain, “for I couldn’t face the publicity.”

“And, indeed,” she said one evening, worn out after a day of particularly stormy meetings with the two men, “I’m not sure that I won’t take that way out anyway, for I am so tired.”

Which threat so alarmed the captain that he gave in ungracefully and with bitter complaints; and
Blood and Swash
was published and the first edition sold out and the film rights sold for a fabulous sum in the autumn, which also saw the marriage of Cyril to Celia Winstanley.

They were all discussing the book at the house party assembled for the wedding at which Lucy was an unwilling guest.

Seated at the Bishop’s right at the dinner party given the night before the ceremony, she felt so frozen with horror at the situation she found herself in that she was past blushing and beyond speech.

“A terrible book,” said the Bishop, who intoned his lightest remarks and sent this one ringing down the long table as if it were part of the commination service.

“What book is that?” asked old Lady Parminster, on the Bishop’s other side.

“Er
—Blood and Swash
, Lady Parminster,” replied the Bishop. “I cannot imagine how any decent firm could bring themselves to publish such a book.”

“I thought it rather fine,” said a colonial bishop on Lucy’s right, a distant cousin of the Bishop’s, whom he had not seen for many years but who, being on leave and presenting Celia with a carved elephant tusk, had been invited to stay for the wedding.

“There are some wonderful descriptions in it,” he continued, “and the moral outlook is sound.”

“Pagan, I should call it,” said Cyril.

“Definitely,” agreed Celia, a fair-haired, well-groomed girl, so polished in appearance and manners that she gave Lucy the impression that she had been brought up in a glass cabinet, with no contact with humanity.

“Celia dear, I had no idea you had read that nasty book,” fluttered the Bishop’s wife from the farther end of the table, a little wren of a woman who always seemed to be trying vainly to catch up with the company she was in.

“There are no nice books written nowadays,” said Lady Parminster with a sigh, “not like
The Rosary
by dear Florence Barclay.”

“We don’t wish to blind ourselves to facts in these modern days,” boomed the Bishop, “but neither do we wish our literature plastered over with the mud of sordid details.”

“Personally,” said Sir Everard Parminster, “I never read anything but the
Times
and Thackeray.”

“And Dickens,” suggested Eva, who was also of the party, in pale pink satin and her amethysts.

“No, madam, not Dickens,” replied Sir Everard, “he wrote for the hoi-polloi, not for gentlemen.”

“Who wrote
Blood and Swash
?” asked Cyril. “Does anybody know?”

“The author prefers to remain anonymous,” intoned the Bishop, “and I for one am not surprised. The chapter on
Marseille is quite shocking. It would never surprise me if the book were withdrawn from publication. In fact I have written to the papers suggesting it should be withdrawn.”

“A sure way to increase its sales,” said the colonial bishop. “No doubt the author is deeply grateful to you, Herbert—always supposing the sales need increasing—I notice we all seem to have read the book.”

“I only skipped through it.”

“One must know before one can condemn.”

“I burned the book.”

“I scarcely glanced beyond the first page.”

A storm of shrill cries and protestations rose, like the cries of sea-gulls, thought Lucy, disturbed from their feeding to settle again on the Bishop’s sonorous finale.

“One of us at least would appear never to have opened the book. I refer to Mrs. Muir who has ventured no criticism.”

“Oh, mother never reads anything but Mrs. Beeton’s cookery book and
Home Chat
,” said Cyril with affectionate contempt, “though she did start to write a book herself once. What became of that great work, mother?”

“Don’t tease your mother, Cyril,” Celia reproved him. “Haven’t we all tried to put ourselves on paper?”

“They say every man and woman has one book in him,” said the colonial bishop. “I wrote mine when I was ten, ‘Black Ben’s Booty,’ it was called, and I wrote it in the Scripture classes at my prep school.”

“Daddy’s writing a book now,” said Celia, and the sea-gulls fluttered up once more in subdued cries.

“What is it about?”

“How marvellous!”

“Never rests.”

“So indefatigable.”

“I must say I should like to meet the author of
Blood and
Swash
,” pursued the colonial bishop. “I suppose his publisher knows who he is.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Eva, “a friend of mine has it on the best authority that the author is a cripple in Soho, who has never been to sea in his life.”

There was a curious booming sound as she finished speaking, and a rush of air swept through the room, blowing out the tall candles on the dinner table, slamming the door in the face of the butler, who was bringing in the port, so affecting Mrs. Muir that she cried out and, toppling sideways, fell onto the shoulder of the colonial bishop, apparently in a dead faint.

“How dared you—how dared you?” stormed Lucy as she lay on the sofa in her bedroom, to which haven she had been carried by the colonial bishop, and restored with smelling salts by Mrs. Winstanley, and left by her own request to recover. “You promised me that if I came here you wouldn’t say one word.”

“Nor did I,” said the captain, “but damn it, Lucy, that was too much, calling me a cripple who had never been to sea in his life—it was too much to bear after all that other bunk. And if you’d seen them all battening on the less savoury bits of the Marseille chapter in the privacy of their own rooms—all but the Bishop, and his wife who hasn’t read the book at all and thinks it’s that
Blood and Sand
work about bullfighters—blasted hypocrites!”

“Will you please go away?” said Lucy coldly.

“You know, Lucy, me dear,” the captain went on, taking no notice of this request, “I think we’ve been wrong about the Bishop—I’ve never really listened into him before. Granted he looks like a camel and has the outlook
of an earthworm, but at least he’s genuine and would go to the stake for his convictions, which is more than you can say for his colonial cousin George, who has posed so long as a muscular Christian that his beliefs have become muscle-bound.”

“Will you please go away?” Lucy repeated. “And don’t come near me till after the wedding. I don’t trust you and I don’t like you; in fact I dislike you very much indeed—behaving like a whirlwind!”

“Winstanley is going to write to the papers about earthquakes,” said the captain, chuckling. “I’ve been called many things in my time but never an earthquake. I wish you could have seen all their faces—I haven’t had such a good laugh for years, and the butler spilled the port all down his shirtfront—who killed Cock Robin?”

“You talk about me being in the kindergarten,” said Lucy severely, “when I should say you weren’t past the crèche.”

“I know—I’m bad and don’t seem to get any better,” said the captain impenitently, “and I’m sorry I put you to all that trouble of pretending to faint.”

“I had to do something in order to be by myself and talk to you,” said Lucy.

“It was a bit hard on George having to haul you all the way upstairs,” said the captain.

“I weigh exactly one hundred and seven pounds,” said Lucy, “which isn’t very heavy.”

“Perhaps not on the flat for anyone in training as a weightlifter,” replied the captain, “but rather different upstairs after a rich dinner—George was puffing like a grampus. And talking of weight-lifters, did I ever tell you of the circus I took out to South America in the
Esmerelda
?”

“I have heard all I want to hear about your past,” said
Lucy. “It’s got me into a lot of trouble and will probably get me into a lot more. Will you please go away and let me rest?”

“Anyway, my past is going to bring you in a very handsome income,” said the captain.

“And I’ll leave all of it and Gull Cottage to Decayed Gentlewomen if you don’t go away and promise not to come back here,” said Lucy.

“God help us, I believe you would, too,” said the captain. “All right I’ll go—I’ll go,” and his voice vanished on a shrill whistle, leaving Lucy alone.

But not for long, for presently the door opened and Eva appeared. Closing her eyes, Lucy pretended to be asleep, but it took more than sleep to deter Eva on mercy bent. She straightened the pillow under Lucy’s head, tucked in the rug about her body, and pulled off her shoes with a ruthless hand that would have roused any genuine invalid to protest. Lucy, keeping her eyes firmly shut, gave a gentle snore and apparently slept on securely, and presently Eva tiptoed reluctantly away; and Lucy really did doze off.

The clock on the mantelpiece was striking eleven when she awoke to hear a tapping on her door.

“Come in,” she called drowsily, and, the door opening, Celia and Cyril came into the room with faces solemn enough to visit the mortally stricken.

“How are you feeling, mother?” asked Cyril in a hushed voice.

“Perfectly well, dear,” said Lucy, imperfectly awake.

“It’s like you to say so,” said Celia, “but don’t you think you had better see the doctor. Cyril has told me that he has never known you to faint before.”

“Faint!” said Lucy in astonishment. Then, coming
back to complete consciousness, she added hastily, “Oh, yes, of course—but I feel quite all right now. I had a lovely sleep.”

“You gave us quite a fright,” said Cyril, “and of course it was quite alarming the way all those candles blew out—the Bishop thinks it was some sort of an earth tremor.”

“A very earthy tremor,” said Lucy.

“If you really are feeling better, may we come in and have a little talk with you, madre—may I call you
madre
, Mrs. Muir?”

“Call me anything you like,” said Lucy and added, “dear,” in case she had appeared too abrupt.

“Thank you, madre,” said the girl. “And now,” she went on, pulling Cyril down on to the fender-seat with her, “let us sit down and be cosy.”

They might sit down on the fender-seat side by side, thought Lucy, but she doubted if they could be cosy. As soon expect the steel furniture that was coming into fashion to give ease as for Celia and Cyril to attain the intimate, padded state of comfort that the word cosy implied; but they were very well suited to each other. Perhaps she maligned them, but there was something synthetic about their very emotions, like the sham log fire that flickered with electric heat in the grate behind them. It was true that there was no dirt nor dust with an electric fire, but a turn of a switch would turn it into dead blackness, whereas a coal fire sent out a warm glow even in its dying embers.