Read Online The Complete Mapp & Lucia by E. F. Benson - Free Book Online

particular hard firm smile which was an heirloom inherited from her last rule of life.
    “No one knows,” she said brightly. “Even the Guides can’t tell where and when a Guru may he called.”
    “Then do you propose he should stop here till he’s called somewhere else?”
    She continued smiling.
    “I don’t propose anything,” she said. “It’s not in my hands.”
    Under the calming influence of the fish curry, Robert remained still placid.
    “He’s a first-rate cook anyhow,” he said. “Can’t you engage him as that? Call to the kitchen, you know.”
    “Darling!” said Mrs Quantock, sending out more love. But she had a quick temper, and indeed the two were outpoured together, like hot and cold taps turned on in a bath. The pellucid stream of love served to keep her temper moderately cool.
    “Well, ask him,” suggested Mr Quantock, “as you say, you never can tell where a Guru may be called. Give him forty pounds a year and beer money.”
    “Beer!” began Mrs Quantock, when she suddenly remembered Georgie’s story about Rush and the Guru and the brandy-bottle, and stopped.
    “Yes, dear, I said ‘beer,’” remarked Robert a little irritably, “and in any case I insist that you dismiss your present cook. You only took her because she was a Christian Scientist, and you’ve left that little sheep-fold now. You used to talk about false claims I remember. Well her claim to be a cook is the falsest I ever heard of. I’d sooner take my chance with an itinerant organ grinder. But that fish-curry tonight and that other thing last night, that’s what I mean by good eating.”
    The thought even of good food always calmed Robert’s savage breast; it blew upon him as the wind on an AEolian harp hung in the trees, evoking faint sweet sounds.
    “I’m sure, my dear,” he said, “that I shall be willing to fall in with any pleasant arrangement about your Guru, but it really isn’t unreasonable in me to ask what sort of arrangement you propose. I haven’t a word to say against him, especially when he goes to the kitchen; I only want to know if he is going to stop here a night or two or a year or two. Talk to him about it tomorrow with my love. I wonder if he can make bisque soup.”
    Daisy Quantock carried quite a quantity of material for reflection upstairs with her, then she went to bed, pausing a moment opposite the Guru’s door, from inside of which came sounds of breathing so deep that it sounded almost like snoring. But she seemed to detect a timbre of spirituality about it which convinced her that he was holding high communion with the Guides. It was round him that her thoughts centred, he was the tree through the branches of which they scampered chattering.
    Her first and main interest in him was sheer Guruism, for she was one of those intensely happy people who pass through life in ecstatic pursuit of some idea which those who do not share it call a fad. Well might poor Robert remember the devastation of his home when Daisy, after the perusal of a little pamphlet which she picked up on a book-stall called “The Uric Acid Monthly,” came to the shattering conclusion that her buxom frame consisted almost entirely of waste-products which must be eliminated. For a greedy man the situation was frankly intolerable, for when he continued his ordinary diet (this was before the cursed advent of the Christian Science cook) she kept pointing to his well-furnished plate, and told him that every atom of that beef or mutton and potatoes, turned from the moment he swallowed it into chromogens and toxins, and that his apparent appetite was merely the result of fermentation. For herself her platter was an abominable mess of cheese and protein-powder and apples and salad-oil, while round her, like saucers of specimen seeds were ranged little piles of nuts and pine-branches, which supplied body-building material, and which she weighed out with scrupulous accuracy, in accordance with the directions of the “Uric