Trouble for Lucia - ebook

CHAPTER I

Lucia Pillson, the Mayor-Elect of Tilling and her husband Georgie were talking together one October afternoon in the garden-room at Mallards. The debate demanded the exercise of their keenest faculties. Viz:

Should Lucia, when next month she entered on the supreme Municipal Office, continue to go down to the High Street every morning after breakfast with her market-basket, and make her personal purchases at the shops of the baker, the grocer, the butcher and wherever else the needs of the day’s catering directed? There were pros and cons to be considered, and Lucia had been putting the case for both sides with the tedious lucidity of opposing counsel addressing the Court. It might be confidently expected that, when she had finished exploring the entire territory, she would be fully competent to express the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge. In anticipation of the numerous speeches she would soon be called upon to make as Mayor, she was cultivating, whenever she remembered to do so, a finished oratorical style, and a pedantic Oxford voice.

“I must be very careful, Georgie,” she said. “Thoroughly democratic as you know I am in the truest sense of the word, I shall be entrusted, on the ninth of November next, with the duty of upholding the dignity and tradition of my high office. I’m not sure that I ought to go popping in and out of shops, as I have hitherto done, carrying my market-basket and bustling about just like anybody else. Let me put a somewhat similar case to you. Supposing you saw a newly-appointed Lord Chancellor trotting round the streets of Westminster in shorts, for the sake of exercise. What would you feel about it? What would your reactions be?”

“I hope you’re not thinking of putting on shorts, are you?” asked Georgie, hoping to introduce a lighter tone.

“Certainly not,” said Lucia. “A parallel case only. And then there’s this. It would be intolerable to my democratic principles that, if I went into the grocer’s to make some small purchase, other customers already there should stand aside in order that I might be served first. That would never do. Never!”

Georgie surveyed with an absent air the pretty piece of needlework on which he was engaged. He was embroidering the Borough arms of Tilling in coloured silks on the back of the white kid gloves which Lucia would wear at the inaugural ceremony, and he was not quite sure that he had placed the device exactly in the middle.

“How tar’some,” he said. “Well, it will have to do. I daresay it will stretch right. About the Lord Chancellor in shorts. I don’t think I should mind. It would depend a little on what sort of knees he had. As for other customers standing aside because you were the Mayor, I don’t think you need be afraid of that for a moment. Most unlikely.”

Lucia became violently interested in her gloves.

“My dear, they look too smart for anything,” she said. “Beautiful work, Georgie. Lovely. They remind me of the jewelled gloves you see in primitive Italian pictures on the hands of kneeling Popes and adoring Bishops.”

“Do you think the arms are quite in the middle?” he asked.

“It looks perfect. Shall I try it on?”

Lucia displayed the back of her gloved hand, leaning her forehead elegantly against the finger-tips.

“Yes, that seems all right,” said Georgie. “Give it me back. It’s not quite finished. About the other thing. It would be rather marked if you suddenly stopped doing your marketing yourself, as you’ve done it every day for the last two years or so. Except Sundays. Some people might say that you were swanky because you were Mayor. Elizabeth would.”

“Possibly. But I should be puzzled, dear, to name off-hand anything that mattered less to me than what Elizabeth Mapp-Flint said, poor woman. Give me your opinion, not hers.”

“You might drop the marketing by degrees, if you felt it was undignified,” said Georgie yawning. “Shop every day this week, and only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday next week–”

“No, dear,” interrupted Lucia. “That would be hedging, and I never hedge. One thing or the other.”

“A hedge may save you from falling into a ditch,” said Georgie brilliantly.

“_Georgino,_how epigrammatic! What does it mean exactly? What ditch?”

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