Here it must not be forgotten that Captain Puffin always limped, and the Major occasionally. Miss Mapp did not forget it.
- IV. The Padre might arrive with a stretcher. Query—Whose?
- V. The Padre might arrive with two stretchers.
- VI. Three stretchers might arrive from the shining sands, at the town where the women were weeping and wringing their hands.
In that case Miss Mapp saw herself busily employed in strengthening poor Evie, who now was running about like a mouse from group to group picking up crumbs of Cosmic Consciousness.
Miss Mapp had got as far as sixthly, though she was aware she had not exhausted the possibilities, when the tram stopped. She furtively took out from her pocket (she had focussed them before she put them in) the opera-glasses through which she had watched the station-yard on a day which had been very much less exciting than this. After one glance she put them back again, feeling vexed and disappointed with herself, for the dénouement which they had so unerringly disclosed was one that had not entered her mind at all. In that moment she had seen that out of the tram there stepped three figures and no stretcher. One figure, it is true, limped, but in a manner so natural, that she scorned to draw any deductions from that halting gait. They proceeded, side by side, across the bridge over the river towards the town.
It is no use denying that the Cosmic Consciousness of the ladies of Tilling was aware of a disagreeable anti-climax to so many hopes and fears. It had, of course, hoped for the best, but it had not expected that the best would be quite as bad as this. The best, to put it frankly, would have been a bandaged arm, or something of that kind. There was still room for the more hardened optimist to hope that something of some sort had occurred, or that something of some sort had been averted, and that the whole affair was not, in the delicious new slang phrase of the Padre’s, which was spreading like wildfire through Tilling, a “wash-out.” Pistols might have been innocuously discharged for all that was known to the contrary. But it looked bad.
Miss Mapp was the first to recover from the blow, and took Diva’s podgy hand.
“Diva, darling,” she said, “I feel so deeply thankful. What a wonderful and beautiful end to all our anxiety!”
There was a subconscious regret with regard to the anxiety. The anxiety was, so to speak, a dear and beloved departed… And Diva did not feel so sure that the end was so beautiful and wonderful. Her grandfather, Miss Mapp had reason to know, had been a butcher, and probably some inherited indifference to slaughter lurked in her tainted blood.
“There’s the portmanteau still,” she said hopefully. “Pistols in the portmanteau. Your idea, Elizabeth.”
“Yes, dear,” said Elizabeth; “but thank God I must have been very wrong about the portmanteau. The outside-porter told me that he brought it up from the station to Major Benjy’s house half an hour ago. Fancy your not knowing that! I feel sure he is a truthful man, for he attends the Padre’s confirmation class. If there had been pistols in it, Major Benjy and Captain Puffin would have gone away too. I am quite happy about that now. It went away and it has come back. That’s all about the portmanteau.”