Miss Buncle Married (21 page)

Arthur was wakened very early in the morning. He opened his eyes and beheld his wife's face leaning over him. The face wore an expression of anxiety and anticipation. It was just beginning to get light and the birds were singing like mad outside the window.

“What's the matter?” inquired Arthur, rising slowly from the waters of oblivion. He had been dreaming that Archie Cobbe was pursuing him with a boathook and demanding why Mr. Abbott had cut him off without a shilling. Mr. Abbott had been vaguely aware that the only hope for him was to get hold of Monkey. Monkey must do something about it; he must bring Lady Chevis Cobbe back to life and get her to alter her will. It was an extraordinarily vivid dream—a bit muddled, of course, as all dreams are, but extraordinarily vivid.

“Did I wake you?” Barbara asked anxiously. “I didn't mean to wake you.”

“No—at least I don't really know,” Arthur said. “I was dreaming.”

“I've been awake
for
ages
,” Barbara continued. “Simply
ages.
I've been longing to wake you up. What did you think of it, Arthur?”

“What!” exclaimed Arthur, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

“What did you think of the book?” repeated Barbara anxiously.

Arthur woke up properly. Most men would have been a little irritable at being awakened at dawn—especially if they had not got to bed until the small hours of the morning—but Arthur was not the least bit cross. He was really a very kind, nice husband, and his liver was in excellent order.

“It's good,” he said, “definitely good.”

“Oh, Arthur!—really?”

“Yes, excellent.”

“Oh, Arthur, I
am
glad. Tell me the bits you like.”

Arthur rolled over onto his back and gazed at the ceiling. He tried to visualize the book, to recapture the aroma of it, as it were.

“I like it all,” he said. “It's a well-written book—your writing has come on a lot—and it's very funny. You know you're funny now, don't you?”

“Yes,” said Barbara. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

“The people are awfully good,” continued Arthur thoughtfully. “It is amazing how you see people—how do you, Barbara?”

“I just watch them, I suppose,” said Barbara. “I don't really know I'm watching them, but I suppose I must. People are so funny, aren't they? I mean they're so interesting—and all different. They're all so busy living their own lives (if you know what I mean), and they're all so certain that they're frightfully important. And the queer thing is that the very busy, serious ones are much the funniest.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, wondering, a little, whether he came into the very busy, serious, and, therefore, funniest category.

“Tell me more,” Barbara adjured him, settling herself comfortably upon the pillows.

“The plot is excellent,” continued Arthur obediently. “The plot is really very neat indeed. I was particularly struck with the way you have blended fact with fiction.”

“I don't quite understand.”

“I mean the whole book is cohesive,” Arthur explained. “If I didn't happen to know that part of the book is fact and part fiction I should never have guessed it for a moment. Take a historical novel,” continued Arthur, trying to make his point clear, “take a historical novel as an example of what I mean. A historical novel is very difficult to write, not only because the atmosphere is difficult to achieve, and the small details of costume and manners are so apt to trip an author into anachronisms; but, also, and principally, because he has to blend fiction with fact. In nearly all historical novels you can see exactly where fact and fiction join—like a badly sewn seam—the book is very apt to be patchy. You can place your finger on the different patches and say: this is history, and this is imagination. Even Scott, an acknowledged master of the historical novel, is guilty of this patchiness in places.”

Barbara followed this with interest. “But my book isn't a historical novel,” she pointed out.

“It
is
,” said Arthur. “It really is, Barbara. It's a modern historical novel (don't you see) because a lot of it is fact. And that's why I said I admired the way you have blended fact with fiction. It all dovetails beautifully. Nobody could say: ‘
this
is fact, and
this
is fiction,' unless they happened to know—as I do—where the one ends and the other begins.”

Barbara saw exactly what he meant, but she still could not see how it applied to her book. Her book was all fact. She had voyaged into the future, of course, when she had described the death of Lady Savage Brette and the reading of her will, and the beautiful
finale
where Bob and Jennifer fell upon each other's necks, but that had been easy. It had needed no imagination—or very little—to envisage that ending to her tale.

“It all dovetails beautifully,” said Arthur. “The true parts about the Wandlebury people, and the imaginative parts about the will. You can never say you haven't got an imagination again,” he added in his “smiling voice.”

Barbara was silent. She was in rather a quandary. She saw now exactly what Arthur meant. She hated to deceive Arthur, but, if she was to keep her promise to Mr. Tyler, she must let Arthur continue in his delusion. She must let him think she had made up all that about the will—about Mrs. Nun seeing it by mistake, and all that. She felt very uncomfortable about it because she was naturally extremely truthful—but I
can't
break my promise, she thought, at least not until Lady Chevis Cobbe dies and the will is read. Then, of course, everybody will know, and I can tell Arthur all about it. Meantime (thought Barbara) I must just let him think I've got an imagination. It was sailing under false colors, and Barbara disliked it, but there was absolutely no help for it as far as she could see.

Arthur noticed her silence. He rolled over in bed and gazed at her in astonishment. “You don't mean to tell me it's
true
?” he inquired incredulously. “All that part about the will—you don't mean to tell me you actually saw the will?”

“No,” said Barbara firmly. “No, Arthur.”

It's
not
a lie, she thought, because, of course, I didn't mean to tell him. (This Jesuitical quibble was unlike Barbara's straightforward nature, but she was in a hole, and there was no other way out.)

Barbara's denial convinced Arthur at once, for habitually truthful people are always believed when they prevaricate, just as habitually untruthful people are often disbelieved when they tell the truth. Arthur was satisfied with Barbara's “No” because she had never lied to him, and also, of course, because he was prejudiced beforehand. All that about Mrs. Nun seeing the will at the lawyer's office was much more like fiction than fact. Things like that didn't happen in the ordinary everyday world which Mr. Abbott inhabited.

“No, I thought not,” he agreed. “And that's what I meant—don't you see—when I said you had blended fact and fiction so well. Because, of course, I realize that a great deal of the book is fact. All the characters are real people, and the clerk showing you over the house, and the Musical Evening, and the Marvells' dinner party and all that.”

“Yes, of course,” said Barbara who was thankful that the conversation had taken a safer turn.

“The people really
are
good,” continued Arthur, chuckling a little. “They really are splendid—so
real,
I couldn't quite make out how you had got their names. I meant to ask you about that. Why has Mr. Marvell become Mr. Colin Rhodes, for instance?”

“Well, you see it was the names that got me into trouble before,” Barbara explained. “So this time I didn't alter the names. I didn't think of their real names at all when I was choosing names for them. I just thought of what they were like, or of what they happened to be doing when I saw them. Mr. Marvell was easy—he's the biggest person I've ever seen, so I thought of the Colossus of Rhodes.”

Arthur chortled happily.

“And Lady Chevis Cobbe was easy, too, because of her Musical Evening. ‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,'” explained Barbara seriously. “I just changed it a tiny bit and called her Lady Savage Brette. It sounded rather grand, I thought.”

“Excellent,” agreed Arthur, “go on, Barbara.”

“Well then, there was Mrs. Thane. She was planting bulbs one day when I went to see her, so I called her Mrs. Philpotts. And Mr. Tyler was Mr. Reade because he kept on giving me papers to read and telling me to read them.”

Arthur was enjoying himself immensely. “Why did you call Wandlebury ‘Church End'?” he inquired.

“It was really Search End,” she told him. “Because my search ended when I found Wandlebury, but I thought Church End looked better.”

“And what about Mrs. Dance? Why did you call her Sittingbourne?”

“Oh, that really was rather funny,” said Barbara, giggling a little at the recollection of the manner in which she had named the vicar's wife. “That really
was
rather funny. You see, the day she called we had to sit on the stairs—there was nowhere else to sit—and it was frightfully hard and uncomfortable—I felt exactly as if my spine was coming
through—
and, all the time, I was longing for her to go, because I had such lots of things I wanted to do—I could hardly
bear
it—”

“Sittingbourne,” said Arthur, laughing heartily.

“Yes,” agreed Barbara, “it just sort of
came
to me.”

“It was an inspiration,” said Arthur (when he could speak).

“It's the only kind of inspiration I ever get,” Barbara told him. “I mean I have to have something to help me. I never get an inspiration straight out of the blue. I've got to have a kind of jumping-board before I can jump at all—if you know what I mean—otherwise my feet remain fixed to the ground. Other authors,” she continued, rather enviously, “other authors seem to be able to jump off the ground of their own accord. I mean they can imagine things without any help, but I'm not like that.”

“I like the name,” said Arthur, trying to change the subject and take her mind off her disability. “I like the name of the book very much indeed. It goes very well with
The
Pen
Is
Mightier—
and is quite in the ‘John Smith' tradition. You will make a lot of money out of the book, Barbara.”

“But it mustn't be published!” cried Barbara, sitting bolt-upright in bed and gazing at him with horror-stricken eyes. “I never meant it to
be
published,
Arthur.”

“Not published!” exclaimed her publisher in amazement.

“No, no,
no—
how could you think it, Arthur?”

“But why—”

“Because we should have to leave Wandlebury—and I couldn't—I simply couldn't. You don't
want
to leave here, do you?”

“No, of course not, but—”

“We should
have
to,” Barbara assured him. “We should have to leave The Archway House, and it would break my heart.”

“But why did you—”

“Because I
had
to,” said Barbara earnestly. “Because I couldn't help it. I had to write the book because it was all inside me, simply bursting to come out, but I never meant it to be published—not for one moment.”

“Why were you so anxious for me to like it, then?” inquired Arthur, in a bewildered voice. He had never yet met an author who did not want his—or her—book to be published.

“Because I wanted it to be good,” Barbara told him. “I wanted it to be good, and I wanted you to like it. I should have been frightfully disappointed if you had thought it rubbish.”

“It
is
good, and I like it immensely,” said Arthur. “It seems a pity—”

“No, no,
no
,” she cried again. “They would recognize themselves, and we should have to leave. And, even if they didn't, I should always be thinking that they were going to, and I should never have another peaceful moment. You've no idea what it was like at Silverstream—the strain nearly wore me out. It was ghastly.”

“We might alter it a little,” suggested Arthur, whose soul was torn in twain. He saw Barbara's point of view, and he would have been extremely sorry to leave The Archway House, but all the publisher in him (and, naturally, there was a good deal of the publisher in his makeup) wanted to publish
There's Many a Slip—
by John Smith. It was so satisfactory to publish a book that you
knew
would sell like hotcakes, and there was no doubt that this one would. The other two books had been amazingly successful, and this one was of the same ilk—only better. John Smith's name alone would sell a couple of editions straight off—no wonder poor Arthur was torn in twain. “Couldn't we alter it a little, Barbara?” he inquired anxiously.

“I should be terrified,” said Barbara with a shudder.

“It seems such a pity,” Arthur pointed out, “and I really think it would be quite safe if we were to alter the people a little and—”

“But how could we?” inquired the author. “I mean, the people are themselves—how could we
alter
them?”

They discussed the matter carefully (argued would be too strong a word), but they could come to no decision. They could not really understand each other's point of view. This was Barbara's fault, of course; she was extremely bad at explaining what she felt, and when she felt very deeply about anything, she became even more incoherent and inarticulate than usual. Arthur pointed out that the people in Barbara's book could be made to look quite different without interfering in the least with the main theme, and that, if this were done, the book could be published with perfect safety. It was quite a reasonable suggestion, and Arthur was rather proud of it, but, to Barbara, the suggestion was impracticable, not to say absurd. Barbara saw the matter from the author's standpoint, and, although she could not explain it in plain English, she knew that it was impossible to alter the appearance of her characters; for an author does not consciously create his characters, they come to him readymade with all their characteristics firmly fixed, and the author can do nothing with his character but accept or reject him. He cannot change or modify the personality that has arisen without making him unreal. If Arthur had suggested that Barbara, herself, should suddenly become small and blonde with a complexion of milk and roses, the suggestion would have seemed to Barbara no more ridiculous and impossible than his suggestion that she should alter the appearance of the people in her book. She felt all this very strongly indeed, but she could not put it into words.