Sarah laughed softly, and Nell stirred in her sleep and raised her beautiful head.
“You know, Nell, you miss a lot by not being able to read,” Sarah told her. “These people are real live people—they are quite delicious.”
Nell wagged her feathery tail. It was good when the goddess descended from the clouds and spoke to you; it gave you a cozy safe feeling in your inside.
Sarah read on. You couldn’t help reading on. She read on till the fire died down and she had to rouse herself to mend it—dreadful if John returned cold and wet to find a half-dead fire! As she put on a piece of coal, her mind, freed from the witchery of the printed page, swept back over what she had read. It might be Silverstream, she thought. Copperfield—Silverstream—how queer! And Major Waterfoot is exactly like Colonel Weatherhead, and Mrs. Mildmay might easily be Dorothea Bold—
She knit her brows and turned back the pages, growing more and more suspicious that this was no mere coincidence of names and personalities. She was looking for that bit about the doctor who had been sent for by Mr. Gaymer. Here it was:
“Dr. Rider was a tall, broad-shouldered Scotsman with a whimsical mouth and a pair of shaggy eyebrows; he brought a cheery atmosphere of health and vigor into the most hopeless of sickrooms. Children loved him and he could do what he liked with the most unmanageable mother’s darling in Copperfield. But for those with imaginary ailments he had short shrift, and was apt to prescribe castor oil for malingerers, a peculiarity which did not endear him to their hearts.”
It was John to the life. Sarah lay back in her chair and laughed and laughed. Who on earth could have written this book? Somebody in Silverstream obviously; somebody who knew everybody in Silverstream; one of John’s patients. She turned to the cover and saw that the author called himself John Smith—it did not help her much, anybody might be John Smith. Well, she thought, let’s go over all the people in Silverstream who might have written it and eliminate the impossibles; there aren’t so very many people in Silverstream. Could it be Colonel Weatherhead? No, not his style at all, besides he could never have written such a true and penetrating description of himself. Could it be Mr. Dunn? Too old and dull. The new Vicar? Hardly, he was too busy with his saints, and besides he had not had the time to get to know the people of Silverstream as this man knew them. Mr. Fortnum? No, the book was too unkind to him. Mr. Snowdon? No again, and for the same reason. That left the military people and Mr. Featherstone Hogg. Sarah eliminated the military people, they were too taken up with themselves and their own affairs, they were birds of passage and scarcely knew Silverstream. Mr. Featherstone Hogg was far too much in awe of his wife to draw her as she was drawn in this amazing book, for Mrs. Horsley Downs was Mrs. Featherstone Hogg to the life. Her languid elegance and her assumption of superiority were touched in with inimitable skill. There was even a description of one of her musical evenings when all Copperfield had been bidden to listen to Brahms, and to partake of lukewarm coffee made of coffee essence and anchovy paste sandwiches—Mr. Featherstone Hogg would never have dared—
There was Stephen Bulmer, of course; everyone in Silverstream knew that Mr. Bulmer was engaged in writing a book about Henry the Fourth. But this book was not about Henry the Fourth, and Sarah was pretty sure that Stephen Bulmer had not written it. She visualized his long thin face and the unpleasant lines upon it—deep lines from the base of his nose to the corners of his cynical mouth, and deep vertical lines between his brows.
Horrid thing!—thought Sarah—horrid, selfish, bad-tempered thing! She felt very strongly about Stephen Bulmer because Margaret Bulmer was her friend, and Meg had been such a gay, pretty little creature before she married him, and now she was neither pretty nor gay. Meg was a loyal soul and said very little about Stephen—even to Sarah—but Sarah knew that she was unhappy. As for the children, they were like two little mice, unnaturally quiet and subdued. They came to tea with the twins, sometimes, and were alarmed by the noise these robust infants made. “We’re not allowed to play noisy games at home; it disturbs Daddy,” small Stephen had said. She had told John what he had said, and John had been quite violent about it—John adored children.
Sarah had now exhausted the masculine element in Silverstream. It might easily be a woman, she thought, perhaps if I read on I shall see—
She read on.
The book was doubly amusing now; she was always stopping to say, “It’s Miss King, of course—Miss King exactly. And this is Olivia Snowdon. Oh, what will she say when she reads it?” Stopping to laugh, or to clap her hands softly, or to reread some especially spicy description of a well-known person.
It was midnight when she finished the first part of the book, a complete picture of the village: quiet and uneventful, very busy in its own estimation, the people full of gossip and curiosity about the affairs of their neighbors. So far not a thing had happened in Copperfield that could not have happened quite easily in Silverstream. The book was as uneventful as that, and yet it had not been dull. The first part occupied two-thirds of the book and ended with the words, “And so the village of Copperfield slept beneath the stars.”
Sarah looked up at the clock; it was midnight, and John had not returned. She hoped there was nothing wrong. It was a first baby, of course, and first babies were apt to keep people waiting. Mrs. Sandeman was a nice little thing. Captain Sandeman was nice too. Quite young and very devoted to his wife—he would be having a wretched time, poor soul.
Sarah sighed, turned over the page, and read on.
“Down the path from the hills came a boy playing on a reed pipe. He was a tall slim youth, barefooted with a tattered goat-skin round his body. The sun shone upon his golden hair, and on the fine golden down which clothed his arms and legs. He came into Copperfield over the bridge. The clear notes of his pipe, mingled with the song of the river, came to the ears of Major Waterfoot, who was digging in his garden. He straightened his back and looked up. The clear notes stirred something in his heart, something deep and elemental that had been slumbering for years. Mrs. Mildmay—on the other side of the road—heard the music also. It was music only in the sense that bird-song is music. It was—if such a thing can be imagined—the essence of bird-song. There was in it the love song of the male bird courting his mate, showing off his voice and boasting of brave deeds; and there was the call to adventure and the violence of battle; and lastly there was the satisfaction of mating, and the joy of the first egg. Mrs. Mildmay felt that her life was very empty. She looked across the road at the chimneys of the Major’s house, which could be seen above the tree-tops, and she sighed.”
(Unlike Mrs. Mildmay, Sarah chuckled. She wondered if John Smith had meant her to chuckle—or not.)
The golden boy piped on through the High Street and up the hill, and then down again past the vicarage and the old church which slumbered quietly by the river. Wherever he went he left behind him unrest and strange disturbance. People woke up, cast aside the fetters of conventional behavior, and followed the primitive impulses of their hidden natures. In some hearts the clear sweet music woke ambition, in some it woke memories of other days and prompted kind actions. Some of its hearers were driven to acts of violence; in others, it kindled love.
At least John Smith said that the music kindled love, but Sarah Walker—who knew something about that commodity, something more, she suspected, than John Smith—would have said that the emotion which the boy’s pipe kindled in the hearts of its hearers was not love at all, but passion.
After this things began to happen in Copperfield—incredible things—Major Waterfoot discovered that he had loved Mrs. Mildmay for four years without ever having suspected it, so he rushed across the road and found Mrs. Mildmay in her garden, and proposed to her with a fervor which almost made Sarah’s eyebrows disappear into her hair. (It may be remarked in parenthesis that Sarah’s eyebrows were a distinctive feature, darker than her hair and beautifully arched.) This was the love
scene which had made such an impression upon Mr. Abbott. It was a passionate scene, and had either been written by somebody who knew very little about such matters or somebody who knew a great deal. It was either very innocent—or else it wasn’t.
Sarah read it twice and was still undecided about it. She left it and hastened on in the wake of the piping boy. Copperfield seethed with emotion. The very buns on Mrs. Silver’s spotless counter were charged with electricity. Mr. Horsley Downs, who had never been capable of saying boo to a goose, developed a superiority complex, and, not content with bullying his wife in private, actually went the length of inserting a notice in the Copperfield Times to say that he would not be responsible for his wife’s debts, and that she had been a chorus girl when he married her. Mrs. Nevis rose from her grave where she had been reposing peacefully for three years and turned up at her old home in the middle of a dinner party to the consternation of her husband and daughters (the Snowdons of course). She had always been a thorn in their flesh on account of her plain homely Yorkshire accent and habits, which she had never been able to eradicate on her elevation to a higher sphere of life. Her appearance at the feast, all smiles and affection after her three years’ absence, and the horror-stricken family and embarrassed guests, were drawn with the pen of a master. Then Edith Gaymer (Margaret Bulmer of course) eloped with old Mrs. Farmer’s son (Harry Carter of course), and Mr. Mason (who was obviously Mr. Fortnum) serenaded Mrs. Myrtle Coates, playing all night long on a mandolin in her garden, and breathing his last beneath the firmly closed windows of his cruel charmer. In fact everyone did something queer, even Miss King and Miss Pretty (they were called Earle and Darling in the book but Sarah had got beyond troubling her head with such details) were seized with the spirit of adventure and decided to start upon an expedition to Samarkand. They each ordered a pair of riding breeches from Sharrods, and the book closed—very suitably—on that high note.
Sarah heard John’s key in the front door as she raced through the last page.
***
“You don’t mean to say you waited up!” Dr. John exclaimed, filling the doorway of the study with his huge bulk. He was half annoyed with her for disobeying orders, and wholly pleased to find a smiling and wide-awake Sarah.
“Was he a tired, cold boy, then?” she inquired twining her arms round his neck and kissing the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
“He was, rather,” admitted John Walker laughing, but, strange to say, he felt—all at once—much less tired, and quite warm and comfortable.
He sat down by the fire, which, thanks to Sarah’s care, was full of leaping, warming, cheering flames, and listened to her light footsteps going down the passage to warm his Benger’s for him. What a blessed darling she was—thought Dr. John—and how lucky he was, and how unworthy of her dear warm love! There had been a time, after the twins were born, when he thought he might lose her. She seemed to be going downhill—down, down, down—and nothing that he could do, or think of, seemed to stop that steady decline. Not prayer, nor cod-liver oil, nor iron injections had seemed of the slightest avail, and he knew only too well where that hill ended. And then, quite suddenly and for no reason that he could see, she had begun to climb up again, and here she was, still with him; still spoiling him; still making him love her more and more and more every day.
He stretched his arms and yawned luxuriously—“Nice fire, Nell,” he said. Nell agreed fervently.
The steps were coming back now along the passage—not quite such light careless steps this time, for Sarah was carrying the tray, and there were three bowls of Benger’s on the tray and a tin of Marie biscuits—
“You don’t mean to say—” said Dr. John.
“I promised her,” replied Sarah gravely. She gave Nell her Benger’s and put down the tray in front of the fire on a small stool. The doctor took his and stirred it slowly.
“Have a biscuit,” Sarah said.
They sat in the two big chairs with their bowls of Benger’s and the tin of Marie biscuits between them, and he began to tell her about his case. She was completely trustworthy and tremendously interested in all his cases, and Dr. John had discovered long ago that it was not only a pleasure to talk to his wife about his work, but also that it was actually a help to him to put his difficulties and doubts before her. It helped to clear his mind and to make things plain to himself, and her intelligent questions often served to throw light upon puzzling problems. Sometimes Dr. John teased his wife about her interest in his work, and told her that she had picked his brains for five years, and that she thought she was as good a doctor as he was; and then, just to teach her, he would break into technicalities of medical jargon and Sarah would toss her head and say, “What’s the good of all those silly Latin names? It doesn’t help to cure people to call their diseases by names of five syllables. Of course you only do it to bamboozle the poor things and make them think that you are a great deal cleverer than you really are.”
Tonight he had a lot to tell Sarah, and Sarah listened with a little frown of concentration (she understood most of it, and wildly guessed at the rest, for she had read some of John’s books on the sly, so that she might follow with a reasonable amount of intelligence when John talked to her). He told her what a ghastly time he had had, and how anxious he had been, and how they had telephoned to London for a specialist to come at once, but the baby decided to come first, and to come in a very unusual manner—a very eccentric troublesome sort of baby it had been. But everything was all right now, except that the Sandemans would have to pay the specialist for coming down from London in the middle of the night, and looking at Mrs. Sandeman and saying, “You all right? That’s right,” and looking at the baby and saying, “Nice little chap—he’s all right,” and going home again in his car.
“They won’t mind,” said Sarah wisely.
“Perhaps not, but I do,” replied the doctor.
“Why? Would you rather he had come and said they were all wrong?”
He laughed. It was no use arguing with Sarah; she always got the best of it. Her dancing brain could make circles round his big, sure, slow-moving mind—
“You were very naughty to wait up,” he told her, changing the subject. “I might have been there all night.”
“It was that book,” Sarah said. “I meant to sit up until twelve—and then I simply had to finish it. My dear, you are in it.”
“Me? Nonsense,” he said, smiling at her excitement.
“It’s not. You are,” she told him eagerly. “Everyone in Silverstream is in it. It’s all about Silverstream—”
“Well then, you are in it too, I suppose,” he replied, humoring her, but not believing that it was actually true. “I can’t be in it without you, or there would only be half of me—less than half of me—” he laughed comfortably.
“I’m not in it,” she said, wrinkling those eyebrows of hers, for it had not struck her until this moment that she was about the only person in Silverstream who did not figure in Disturber of the Peace. “But, of course, you are only mentioned once or twice—just as a doctor who goes about giving his malingering patients castor oil—”
He shouted with laughter at that, and she had to remind him that the twins were sleeping overhead.
“—But you must read it, and then you’ll see for yourself,” she added, when he had moderated and apologized for his unbridled mirth, “just you read it, Dr. John.”
He took the book in his hands and looked at it idly.
“Not now, for mercy’s sake,” she gasped, seizing it from him and hiding it behind her back. She had experienced the strange allure of Disturber of the Peace, and had no wish to see him start upon it at this hour of the morning.
“You silly kitten!” he exclaimed humorously, “you don’t really suppose I would sit up all night reading a novel? Tell me about it while I finish my Benger’s.”
She complied, knowin
g that it was good for him to take his mind off his work before he slept. He was such a conscientious old darling, worrying himself to death about every case, heartbroken if one of his patients slipped through his fingers, taking all the blame if things went wrong, and giving all the credit to Nature or nursing if things went right.
“Well, you’re Dr. Rider,” she told him, clasping her lovely hands round one knee, and looking up at him with a whimsical smile. “You’ve gone up in the world, you see. And Colonel Weatherhead is Major Waterfoot—so he’s come down. And Barbara Buncle is Elizabeth Wade—I can’t see the connection there, but she is—. And Dorcas is Susan—she’s frightfully good. And Miss King and Miss Pretty are Miss Earle and Miss Darling, and Mrs. Featherstone Hogg is Mrs. Horsley Downs—she is screamingly funny—. And the Bulmers are the Gaymers, and Mrs. Dick is Mrs. Turpin and Mr. Fortnum is Mr. Mason and the Sandemans—”
“Stop, stop!” cried the doctor.
She stopped and sat there smiling at him and swinging her foot a little.
“Is this all true?” he asked. The question was quite a legitimate one, for Sally had a puckish sense of humor, and more than once she had spun him tales of amazing events full of the most circumstantial details, and he had followed her, blundering along credulously in his elephantine way, only to be told at the end that the whole thing had been fabricated in her own busy head. So, tonight, the suspicion arose in his mind that this was merely one of Sally’s “take ins,” and that in a moment or two she would burst out laughing and tell him that he was a darling old donkey and that she had made it all up.
“It’s all true, honor bright,” Sally said, nodding at him gravely, too much taken up with the queerness of it all to resent the aspersions on her veracity.
“Well what do we do, then?” he asked, standing up and stretching himself. “It can’t be a very exciting book if it is all about Silverstream—Silverstream’s worst enemy couldn’t accuse it of being exciting. What happens in the book? What do we all do?”
Miss Buncle's Book Page 5