It will have been deduced from the foregoing that Mr. Abbott was a bachelor—what wife would have allowed her husband to sit up till all hours for two nights running reading the manuscript of a novel? None.
Mr. Abbott was a bachelor; he lived at Hampstead Heath in a very pleasant little house with a small garden. A man and his wife—Rast was their name—“did” for Mr. Abbott and made him extremely comfortable. Their matrimonial differences were frequent and violent, but these were confined to the kitchen premises and were not allowed to interfere with their master’s comfort. A slate hung upon a hook on the kitchen dresser, and if the Rasts were not upon speaking terms they communicated with each other through the medium of a squeaky slate pencil. “Wake him 7:30” Rast would write, and Mrs. Rast would glance at the slate on her way to bed and appear at Mr. Abbott’s bedside at 7:30 precisely with a spotless tray of morning tea. Lucky Mr. Abbott!
The letter summoning John Smith was dispatched early on Monday—it was the first thing Mr. Abbott had seen to on his arrival at Brummel Street—and now here was Wednesday morning, and Mr. Abbott was expecting John Smith. There was the usual box of cigars on Mr. Abbott’s table and two boxes of cigarettes—Turkish and Virginian—so that whatever sort of man John Smith might be, his taste could be catered for with the least possible trouble or delay. Mr. Abbott was not quite his usual self this morning; he was excited, and the typist found him distrait. He was not giving his whole mind to the drawing up of a water-tight contract with Mr. Shillingsworth, who was a bestseller and quarreled with every publisher in turn, and it was important, nay, it was imperative, that Mr. Abbott’s whole mind should be given to the matter.
“I think you had better come back later,” Mr. Abbott was saying. “I must think it over carefully.”
At this moment there was a knock at the door and the small page boy announced hoarsely, “Miss Buncle to see you, sir. Shall I bring her up?”
“Buncle!” cried Mr. Abbott. “Buncle—who’s Buncle?”
“Says she’s got an appointment at twelve.”
Mr. Abbott stared at the imp while he rearranged his thoughts. Miss Buncle—John Smith—why hadn’t he thought that it might be a woman?
“Show her up,” he said sharply.
The typist gathered up her papers and departed with the swift silence of her tribe, and a few moments later Miss Buncle stood before the great man. She was trembling a little, partly from excitement and partly from fear.
“I got your letter,” she said in a soft voice, and showed it to him.
“So you are John Smith,” he announced with a humorous lift of his brows.
“It was the first name I thought of.”
“It is an easy name to think of,” he pointed out. “I rather thought it was too bad to be true.”
“I don’t mind changing it,” she told him hastily.
“I don’t want it changed,” said Mr. Abbott. “There’s nothing wrong with John Smith—but why not Buncle? A good name, Buncle.”
Her face blanched. “But I live there!” she cried breathlessly.
Mr. Abbott caught her meaning at once. (How quick he was, thought Miss Buncle. Lots of people would have said, “Where do you live?” or “What has that got to do with Buncle?” but this man grasped the point in a moment.)
“In that case,” he said, and raised his hands a little, palm upward—they both laughed.
Contact was now definitely established. Miss Buncle sat down and refused both kinds of cigarettes (he did not offer her the cigars, of course). Mr. Abbott looked at her and wondered. How had she felt when she wrote Chronicles? Was it a straight story or a satire? He was still in doubt. She was obviously a simple sort of person—shabbily dressed in a coat and skirt of blue flannel. Her hat was dreadful, her face was pale and rather thin, with a pointed chin and a nondescript nose, but on the other hand her eyes were good—dark blue with long lashes—and they twinkled a little when she laughed. Her mouth was good too, and her teeth—if they were real—magnificent.
Meeting Miss Buncle in the street, Mr. Abbott (who was rather a connoisseur of feminine charms) would not have looked twice at her. A thin, dowdy woman of forty—he would have said (erring on the unkind side in the matter of her age) and passed on to pastures new. But here, in his sanctum, with the knowledge that she had written an amusing novel, he looked at her with different eyes.
“Well,” he said, smiling at her in a friendly manner, “I’ve read your novel and I like it.”
She clasped her hands together and her eyes shone.
This made him add—quite against his principles—“I like it very much indeed.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed ecstatically. “Oh!”
“Tell me all about it,” Mr. Abbott said. This interview was proceeding on quite different lines from what he had imagined, arranged, and decided; quite differently, in fact, from any other interview between an author and a publisher in which Mr. Abbott had ever participated.
“All about it!” echoed Miss Buncle helplessly.
“Why did you write it? How did you feel when you were writing it? Have you ever written anything before?” he explained.
“I wanted money,” said Miss Buncle simply.
Mr. Abbott chuckled. This was a new kind of author. Of course they all wanted money; everybody did. Johnson’s dictum that nobody but a donkey wrote for anything except money was as true today as it had ever been and always would be, but how few authors owned to the fact so simply! They either told you that something stronger than themselves compelled them to write, or else that they felt they had a message to give the world.
“Oh! I am quite serious,” said Miss Buncle, objecting to Mr. Abbott’s chuckle. “You see my dividends are so wretched this year. Of course I ought to have known they would be, after all the papers said, but somehow I didn’t. The dividends had always come in regularly and I thought—well, I never thought anything about it,” said Miss Buncle truthfully, “and then when they didn’t come in—or else came in only about half the usual amount—it gave me rather a shock.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Abbott. He could visualize Miss Buncle sitting there in the midst of a crashing world waiting with perfect confidence for her dividends to come in, and the dividends failing to come in, and Miss Buncle worried about it and realizing at last that her world was crashing as well as the outside world. He could visualize her lying awake at night with a cold sort of feeling in her heart and wondering what she had better do about it.
“So then you thought you would write a book,” suggested Mr. Abbott sympathetically.
“Well, not just at first,” replied the author. “I thought of lots of other things first—keeping hens for one thing. But I don’t care for hens much. I don’t like touching them; they are such fluttery things, aren’t they? And Dorcas doesn’t like them either. Dorcas is my maid.”
“Susan?” inquired Mr. Abbott with a smile and a motion of his hand toward the manuscript of Chronicles of an English Village, which lay between them on the table.
Miss Buncle blushed; she neither confirmed nor denied that Dorcas was Susan (or Susan, Dorcas). Mr. Abbott did not press the point.
“Well, so hens were definitely ruled out,” he prompted.
“Yes. Then I thought of paying guests, but there is already an establishment for paying guests in Silverstream.”
“You couldn’t take the bread out of Mrs. Turpin’s mouth.”
“Mrs. Dick,” corrected Miss Buncle quickly.
“Very ingenious,” commented Mr. Abbott, “and of course Susan—I mean Dorcas—wouldn’t have liked PGs either.”
“She didn’t like the idea at all,” Miss Buncle assured him.
“So then you thought of a book.”
“It was Dorcas really,” said Miss Buncle, giving honor where honor was due.
Mr. Abbott felt
like shaking her. Why couldn’t she tell him about the book like a human being instead of having to have everything dragged out of her by main force? Most authors were only too ready to discuss the inception of their books—only too ready. He looked at Miss Buncle, feeling that he wanted to shake her, and suddenly found himself wondering what her name was. She was Elizabeth in the book of course—Elizabeth Wade—but what was her real name—Jane? Margaret? Ann?
“And how does Dorcas like the book?” inquired Mr. Abbott.
“She hasn’t read it yet,” replied Miss Buncle. “She hasn’t much time for reading and I wasn’t very keen for her to read it. You see I don’t think she will like it much; she likes something exciting. My book’s not exciting is it? At least the first part isn’t. But life in Silverstream is rather dull and I can only write about what I know. At least—” she added, twisting her hands in her effort to explain her limitations as an author and be perfectly truthful about it all—”At least I can only write about people that I know. I can make them do things, of course.”
Somehow Mr. Abbott was sure that she was thinking of those passionate love scenes on the terrace in the light of the Harvest Moon. He was almost persuaded now that Chronicles of an English Village was a straight story—no satire intended—it did not matter in the least, of course, because nearly everybody would think otherwise, but he did want to be sure.
“How did you feel when you wrote it?” he asked her suddenly.
“Well,” she replied after a moment’s thought, “it was difficult to start, and then it went on by itself like a snowball rolling down a hill. I began to look at people with different eyes, and they all seemed more interesting. Then, after a bit, I began to get quite frightened because it was all mixed up in my mind—Silverstream and Copperfield—and some days I didn’t know which was which. And when I walked down to the village to do my shopping it was sometimes Copperfield and sometimes Silverstream, and when I met Colonel Weatherhead I couldn’t remember whether he had really proposed to Dorothea Bold or not—and I thought I must be going mad or something.”
Mr. Abbott had heard this kind of talk before and it had never impressed him very much. Miss Buncle did impress him because she wasn’t trying to; she was simply answering his questions to the best of her ability and with the utmost truthfulness.
“Copperfïeld is actually Silverstream?” inquired Mr. Abbott.
“Yes—you see I have no imagination at all,” said Miss Buncle sadly.
“But the second part—surely the second part is not all true?” gasped Mr. Abbott.
Miss Buncle admitted that it was not. “That was just an idea that came to me suddenly,” she said modestly. “They all seemed so smug and settled, I thought it would be fun to wake them up.”
“It must have been fun,” he agreed.
From this point they went on to discuss the name, and Mr. Abbott explained his ideas on the subject. The title was a trifle dull, not a good selling title. He suggested Disturber of the Peace. Miss Buncle was only too ready to bow to his superior knowledge of such things.
“And now for the contract,” said Mr. Abbott cheerfully. He rang the bell; the contract was brought and with it came Mr. Spicer and two clerks to witness the signatures. Mr. Abbott could have cheated Miss Buncle quite easily if he had wanted to; fortunately for her he didn’t want to, it was not his way. You make friends with the goose and treat it decently and it continues to lay golden eggs. In his opinion Disturber of the Peace was a golden egg, but whether Miss Goose Buncle would lay anymore was beyond the power of man to tell. She said herself that she could only write about what she knew—or rather (and wasn’t this an important distinction) about people she knew. It was an admission made by no author that Mr. Abbott had ever met before—a staggering admission. But to take it at its worst there was no reason to suppose that Miss Buncle had exhausted the whole essence of Copperfield in one book. Mr. Abbott wanted other books from Miss Buncle, books about Copperfield or any other place provided that they had the same flavor.
This being so, Miss Buncle was asked to sign a very fair contract with Abbott & Spicer Ltd, in which she promised the first option of three more novels to the firm.
“Of course I may not write anymore,” she protested, aghast at this mountain of work which had reared itself so suddenly in her path.
Mr. Spicer looked somewhat alarmed at this admission of sterility, but Mr. Abbott was all smiles.
“Of course you may not,” he comforted her. “Sign your name just there—but somehow or other I think you will.”
So she signed her name—Barbara Buncle—very neatly, exactly where she was told, with Mr. Abbott’s very fat fountain pen, and the others put on their spectacles—at least Messrs Abbott & Spicer did, the clerks were too young to require any artificial aid—and signed too, in a very business-like way, and soon after this Barbara Buncle found herself in the street, slightly dazed and exceedingly hungry for it was long past her usual hour for lunch and she had breakfasted early.
Brummel Street was crowded and noisy; Miss Buncle was jostled by newsboys selling afternoon editions of various papers and by business men hurrying to unknown but obviously important appointments. Nobody took any notice of Miss Buncle except to say “Sorry” or “Pardon me” when they nearly bumped her into the road.
The open door of a small restaurant seemed a refuge; she found a table and ordered coffee and buns and chocolate éclairs for she had an unsophisticated palate and a good digestion. Then, laying her handbag with the copy of the contract on the table beside her plate, she considered herself and the strange sequence of events which had brought her to this pass.
“I’m an author,” she said to herself. “How very odd!”
***
Colonel Weatherhead was on the Silverstream train—he had been in town paying a visit to his tailor—and waved his paper at Miss Buncle as she came along the platform.
“Come along, come along,” he said, quite unnecessarily, for Miss Buncle was coming along very well, and the train was not thinking of starting.
“I didn’t know you were in town,” said Miss Buncle as the Colonel took her umbrella and placed it on the rack.
“And I didn’t know you were,” he replied. “You have had a successful day, I trust.”
Colonel Weatherhead had a gallant and slightly jocular manner with the fair sex which had come out very successfully in Disturber of the Peace. In spite of this he was really a very nice man, Miss Buncle thought. She had not been too unkind to him, she had merely drawn him as he was—and after all she had given him a very nice wife; Dorothea Bold was a dear.
Miss Buncle said she had had a very successful day.
“Hats or the dentist?” inquired the Colonel naming the two reasons which usually brought the inhabitants of Silverstream to town.
Miss Buncle said it was neither, and blushed. She was feeling a little guilty over her enormous secret.
“Aha—I see I must not inquire further,” said the Colonel archly. “Some fellers have all the luck—by Jove they have!”
Miss Buncle looked down and smiled; she would not be drawn. If Colonel Weatherhead liked to think she had gone to London to meet a man he must just continue to think so. And of course I did, thought Miss Buncle to herself, but not in the way he thinks—or pretends to think, for of course he doesn’t really think I went to meet a man, but he thinks that I would like him to think so.
It was rather muddled put like that, but Miss Buncle knew what she meant herself, which was the main thing.
The train started without anyone else invading their solitude.
“Would you like the window up or down?” asked Colonel Weatherhead attentively. “This one up and that one down? How pleasant to get a little fresh air. I can’t think how anyone can live in London and breathe.”
Miss Buncle agreed, and added that it was the noise she
disliked.
“Dreadful!” said the Colonel. “Dreadful!”
Part of her hoped that Colonel Weatherhead would now settle down comfortably to the perusal of his papers and leave her in peace, but the other part hoped that he would continue to talk. He was such excellent copy, and, although Disturber of the Peace (such an excellent name suggested by that nice clever Mr. Abbott) was finished and done with, she had got into the habit of watching people and listening to them. It had become second nature to her.
Colonel Weatherhead did not continue to produce copy for Miss Buncle; he took up a paper and scanned it but without seeing anything to interest him. The visit to his tailor had disturbed him, and he was still smarting under the disclosures of the tape. Two inches round the waist since January—quite horrible! An hour’s digging in the garden before lunch might help, and perhaps an extra ten minutes’ physical jerks before breakfast.
Miss Buncle was also immersed in secret thoughts, but hers were pleasant. The houses sped by and were gradually replaced by orchards and fields.
Chapter Three
Mrs. Greensleeves
Mrs. Greensleeves lay in bed enjoying her breakfast and looking at her correspondence. She was a pretty woman and she liked pretty things. The pink satin quilt, the frilled pillows with their pink silk bows, the breakfast tray with its white cloth and pink china were all carefully chosen. Mrs. Greensleeves liked to think that they expressed her personality, and perhaps they did. Nobody saw her in bed except her maid—for Mr. Greensleeves had departed from this cold and weary world some years ago—but the mirror was adjusted so that she could see herself and she enjoyed the picture.
On this particular summer’s morning Mrs. Greensleeves’ correspondence consisted of two horrible bills—which she didn’t see how she could possibly pay—and a chatty letter from her greatest friend, Iris Stratton.
“My dearest one,” Iris had written, “Fancy that Ernest Hathaway appearing at Silverstream! Too intriguing! I’ve been making inquiries as you asked me—you know I’d do anything for my beloved Vivian—my dear, the man is rolling. He was at Oxford with Bob and Bob knows all about him. You can take it from your little Iris that he’s full of ill-gotten gains. His father was in oil, or something, anyway he left thousands. His mother’s dead too and Ernest was brought up by an old uncle, a clergyman in the north. Bob doesn’t know why he has gone and buried himself at Silverstream unless he is writing a book—he’s brainy, of course, and frightfully serious and goody-goody.—Not Bob’s style at all and not yours either—what? Bob’s still crazy about you. I’ve trotted out some nice girls for him but he won’t look at them. He’s very jealous of you taking an interest in EH. I wish you would think seriously of Bob; you know I would like you as a sister-in-law. I believe you quite like Bob only he hasn’t enough money for you—nasty little treasure-hunter that you are!—I bet you would be happier with Bob on twopence-halfpenny than buried with EH in a country parish. I don’t see you in a country parish taking round soup and blankets to the sick and the needy. Perhaps you think you could dig him out of it. Tell me what he’s like when you write and whether you are really interested in the creature: Why don’t you come up to town and have a binge; you must be getting positively moldy at Silverstream. There’s nothing much on just now, of course, but it would be fun. —IRIS.”
Miss Buncle's Book Page 2