Miss Buncle's Book

by D. E. Stevenson

***

  This conversation with Sally Carter cheered Barbara on her way, and she needed cheering for it was a way strewn with boulders. Not only did the inhabitants of Silverstream discuss and vilify Disturber of the Peace, but people from all over the country wrote letters praising or blaming its author—curiously enough the praise was almost as disturbing as the blame, so entirely incomprehensible was it to the innocent and bewildered John Smith. Then there were the newspapers with their stupefying reviews. Mr. Abbott had advised Miss Buncle to contribute to a press cutting agency (she was lamentably ignorant in these matters), and Barbara, who was acquiring a habit of doing what Mr. Abbott told her, obediently contributed two guineas to one of these, hitherto unheard of, establishments.

  A shower of criticism immediately descended. There was scarcely a single day when the postman failed to bring words of praise or blame to Tanglewood Cottage. Barbara read them all with care, and rejoiced or sorrowed according to the meed which was measured unto her. Sometimes she was completely puzzled by the critics’ views upon her book and once or twice she was visited by the unworthy suspicion that the critic could not have studied Disturber of the Peace with the meticulous care it deserved before writing his considered opinion of it.

  “This book is uneven,” complained The Morning Mail. “The plot is good, but the characterization is poor. There never were such people as those depicted in Disturber of the Peace. Major Waterfoot is a type of retired officer which never existed except in the vivid imagination of our younger novelists. We would recommend John Smith to study life at first hand before attempting to write about it.”

  “We can thoroughly recommend Disturber of the Peace, by John Smith, to anyone who is feeling blue,” announced The Evening Clarion. “It is the funniest thing we have read for a long time. We hail a new writer to the ranks of Britain’s humorists.”

  “Brilliant Satire,” exclaimed The Daily Post. “Every page is a masterpiece of the most delicate ridicule. The characters are delineated with a sure hand. Mr. Smith is to be congratulated upon his first novel.”

  The Literary News was not so kind: “Disturber of the Peace, by John Smith (Abbott & Spicer 7s 6d),” it announced, “is one of those futile novels that behooves us to ask ourselves—as we lay it down with a sigh of relief—why it has ever been written. It is dull and prosy, the sentiment mawkish, the characters unconvincing. A dull Major living in a country village falls in love with his next-door neighbor, who is a widow of independent means, but nothing happens until the god of love descends from Olympus to rouse him from his lethargy—why the god of love should take the trouble is a matter which the author fails to explain, and indeed it would be exceedingly difficult of explanation. There is a preposterous love scene in the lady’s garden, the Major seduces her, and the book ends with the couple contemplating a honeymoon in Samarkand. There are some subsidiary characters and incidents dragged in to pad out the story, but this is the main theme and we do not feel that many of our readers will care to waste their time upon rubbish of this description.”

  “A Romantic Story of Love in a Village,” said The People’s Illustrated in capital letters. “Those of us who are weary of the so-called brilliant novel of modern life will enjoy the old-world fragrance of Copperfield. There is nothing in Disturber of the Peace to bring a blush to the most modest cheek. The characters are drawn with a loving and discriminate hand. We seem to know them quite well ere we lay down the book—to know them and to love them as we know and love our friends. It is to be hoped that Mr. Smith will give us more novels from his pen of this same elevating type.”

  “Who is John Smith?” inquired Mr. Snooks who wrote the literary column for The Weekly Guide. “He seems to be a young man of singular discernment. There is no muddled thinking in his novel; every sentence is clear and concise and relevant to the purpose. Mr. Smith is somewhat scornful of love; he writes of love with his tongue in his cheek—the result is exceedingly funny. I can heartily recommend the book to those with a sense of humor.”

  “The last novel on our list is Disturber of the Peace, by John Smith (Abbott & Spicer 7s 6d),” said The Morning Sun. “It is a type of novel we do not care to recommend to our readers, but no doubt it will gain large sales. It concerns itself chiefly with the description of characters under the influence of unbridled or perverted passions.”

  ***

  The writers of these criticisms would doubtless have been pleased if they could have seen John Smith poring over their words. Barbara tried in vain to arrive at some definite conclusion as to the merits of her book. But no sooner had one review plunged her into the depths of despair by saying that Disturber of the Peace was as dull as ditchwater, or perverted and immoral, and not fit for a respectable human being to read, than another cutting arrived, by the next post, informing all who cared to know that it was a charming book, clever, brilliant, elevating, or supremely funny. It was certainly very puzzling. Meantime the sales went up by leaps and bounds and Mr. Abbott sent her congratulatory notes and urged her to start another book at once on the same lines.

  Chapter Eleven

  Colonel Weatherhead and the Bishop

  Colonel Weatherhead was pulling up Bishop’s weed in his garden. He had a fearful tussle with the Bishop every autumn, for the Bishop was entrenched in a thorn hedge at the bottom of the garden near the river, and however much of him Colonel Weatherhead managed to eradicate there was always enough root left embedded in the thickest part of the hedge to start him off again next year.

  Colonel Weatherhead had a kind of sneaking admiration for the Bishop—here was an enemy, worthy of his steel. The Colonel went for him tooth and nail, he dug and tore and burned the Bishop, and the sweat poured off him in rivulets. Sometimes he stood up, and straightened his back, and felt himself round the waist, and wondered if that horrible two inches had diminished at all.

  He was in the thick of the fight, and his hair was standing on end, and his face and hands were scratched with thorns, and one of his brace buttons had flown off in the struggle—in fact he was as filthy and as completely happy as a little boy making mud pies—when he heard a car drive up to his front door. He peered through the bushes and saw that it was Mrs. Featherstone Hogg’s car, and there was Mrs. Featherstone Hogg herself, getting out of the car and going into his house.

  The Colonel swore a regrettable oath. He did not like Mrs. Featherstone Hogg at the best of times, but even supposing he had liked her immensely she would have been unwelcome just now. Colonel Weatherhead was in no condition to appear before a lady. He would be in no condition to appear before a lady until he had soaked himself in an extremely hot bath and changed all his clothes.

  The Colonel now perceived to his horror that Simmons was coming down the garden to find him—Simmons was the Colonel’s soldier servant, an excellent creature in his way, and thoroughly conscientious, but somewhat lacking in initiative. Colonel Weatherhead made a rapid reconnaissance of his position and sprinted for the toolshed. It was a dark musty place (as toolsheds so often are) filled with worn-out tools, and a wheelbarrow and a lawnmower, and festooned with spiders’ webs; but the Colonel was already as dirty as any man could be, so there was no need to be fastidious. He crawled underneath the wheelbarrow and pulled a piece of sacking over his legs. He was concerned to find that he was breathing heavily. It was partly the short sprint and partly the excitement, but it showed he was out of training. I must shorten the tobacco ration, he thought, regretfully.

  Simmons looked all round the garden faithfully. He even glanced into the toolshed, although it was unlikely that Colonel Weatherhead would be there, then he returned to the house and informed Mrs. Featherstone Hogg that the Colonel seemed to have gone out.

  “What do you mean?” inquired that lady haughtily. “You said Colonel Weatherhead was in the garden.”

  “I thought he was, ma’am,” replied Simmons.

  “Either the Colonel is out, or
else he is in,” said Mrs. Featherstone Hogg. “What do you mean by saying he seems to have gone out?”

  “Well, I can’t find him, ma’am,” Simmons returned, scratching his ear in perplexity, “and yet I’d take my affy davvy he’s somewhere about, for he wasn’t dressed to go out, so to speak.”

  “It’s most annoying,” Mrs. Featherstone Hogg said. “I suppose it is no use waiting for the Colonel—you don’t know when he will be in?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t—and that’s the truth. I don’t know where he’s gone, and I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  Mrs. Featherstone Hogg looked at him with disapproval, then she produced a brown paper parcel and laid it on the table. “You will give this parcel to Colonel Weatherhead directly he comes in,” she informed Simmons, “and tell him that I came down here specially to see him—you understand?”

  Simmons replied that he did.

  “It is very important,” said Mrs. Featherstone Hogg.

  Colonel Weatherhead waited until he heard the car drive off before he emerged from his lair. He was even dirtier than he had been. There were spiders’ webs in his hair, his face was streaked with soil, and he had torn a jagged rent in his trousers with a nail. His language might have set fire to the toolshed if it had not been so damp—

  Should he have another go at the Bishop, or should he return to the house and bathe? That was the question. He consulted his watch and found that there was half an hour before tea. He took up the fork and hesitated—bath or Bishop? A spider chose the moment to crawl over the Colonel’s ear.

  “Ugh, damn and blast!” he cried, rubbing his ear with a thoroughly grimy hand, and decided for a bath. The decision had been made for him by a spider (not for the first time had this intelligent insect helped a gallant soldier to make an important decision at a critical moment. It will be remembered that Robert the Bruce was similarly guided). Robert Weatherhead put the fork into the toolshed and went up to the house.

  Simmons was waiting for him when he emerged from the bathroom clean and pink as a newly washed baby.

  “Mrs. Featherstone ’ogg was here, sir, and I was to say she came down special to see you, sir, and this parcel’s very important,” he recited glibly.

  The Colonel slapped on his braces and grunted.

  “I looked everywhere for you, sir.”

  The Colonel grunted again.

  Simmons laid the parcel on the dressing-table with reverent care and departed to the kitchen. He had shifted the responsibility of the parcel; his conscience was clear.

  “I wonder where the old codger was,” he said to his wife as he sat down to his tea, and spread his bread with a liberal helping of butter and stretched out his arm for the jam.

  “’Iding,” suggested Mrs. Simmons promptly.

  “But I looked all over the place—I looked in the toolshed even—”

  “More fool you!” retorted his better half scornfully. “If ’e ’ad bin in the toolshed it would ’ave meant ’e didn’t want to be found. What call ’ad you to be ’unting for the pore gentleman in the toolshed? None. If ’e didn’t want to be found it was yore place not to find ’im—see?”

  Simmons saw. “You are a one!” he said in awed tones.

  Colonel Weatherhead glanced at the mysterious parcel as he put on his collar and struggled with his stud—it looked like a book. He put out one hand and felt it—yes, it was a book; he could feel the hard edges of the cover through the brown paper. Why had Mrs. Featherstone Hogg sent him a book? What kind of a book would it be? Colonel Weatherhead was pretty certain that Mrs. Featherstone Hogg’s taste in literature was different from his—it would be one of those high-brow books, deadly dull. He left it on the dressing-table and went downstairs to have his tea. There was a novel of Buchan’s waiting for him to read; it had just come from the library—much more his style.

  The Colonel drank his tea and read his Buchan. He was very comfortable after his exercise and his bath. He ate two crumpets. They were fattening, of course, but he felt entitled to them after his strenuous work.

  At seven o’clock the telephone bell rang, and Simmons came to report that Mrs. Featherstone Hogg was on the line and wished to speak to him. Colonel Weatherhead lifted the receiver and heard a voice say—

  “Have you read it?”

  “Read what?”

  “The book I left for you, of course.”

  “Oh, yes. No, I haven’t read it yet. Been awfully busy, you know.”

  “Read it,” said the voice that purported to be the voice of Mrs. Featherstone Hogg but did not sound like hers. “Read it immediately.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed the Colonel.

  “I’m going to London on important business, but I shall be home on Saturday. I want to hear exactly what you think of it.”

  “Yes, yes. All right, my dear lady,” soothed Colonel Weatherhead to the excited voice at the other end of the telephone, so unlike the usual languid, die-away tones of Mrs. Featherstone Hogg.

  Something must have stung the old girl properly, he thought, as he returned to John Buchan and his comfortable fire.

  That was Wednesday. It was not until Friday morning that he undid the wrappings of the book sent to him by Mrs. Featherstone Hogg, and looked at it curiously. He was sufficiently in awe of Mrs. Featherstone Hogg to feel that it would be wise to have read the book before she returned from London (or at any rate glanced through the thing). She would probably ring him up and ask him if he had done so. It was too much to hope that she would have forgotten all about it. Most people in Silverstream did what Mrs. Featherstone Hogg told them to do; it was easier in the long run, they found.

  On first inspection the book seemed quite an ordinary sort of novel—not at all the high-brow stuff that he had expected. He started on it about eleven o’clock on Friday morning, for it was raining hard, and much too wet to go out and dig; besides he was somewhat stiff after a last struggle with the Bishop which had absorbed the major part of Thursday.

  Disturber of the Peace amused him—“Damned good,” he commented as he read the description of Major Waterfoot, “not unlike that feller in the Dragoons.” At one o’clock he laid it on the table, open and face downward to keep his place, and went in to his solitary lunch. At one-thirty he was back in his chair, reading.

  The rain fell steadily all afternoon and the Colonel read on. He chuckled once or twice and decided that the people were very real; it might almost be Silverstream. Simmons brought in his tea, and he continued to read.

  Colonel Weatherhead finished the book about seven o’clock and sat and thought about it for a bit. It was an amusing and interesting book—he liked it—but he couldn’t see, for the life of him, why Mrs. Featherstone Hogg had been so excited about it. He would never have supposed that it was her style at all. The people in the book appealed to him; they were real live people, just the sort of people you met every day. Copperfield was a typical English village, and the people were typical English people. They were quite contented with their lot; they went on day after day doing the same things and saying the same things—a bit futile, wasn’t it? They never got anywhere; nothing ever happened to them except that they grew old. And then suddenly that Golden Boy came along with his pipes and stirred them all up. Fancy if a Golden Boy came to Silverstream and stirred us all up! Colonel Weatherhead thought. He reviewed his own life; it was pretty futile, pretty empty and lonely. It would become even more so as time went on and he got older and couldn’t do all the things he liked doing, such as walking, and digging, and fighting with the Bishop. Gradually all these things would desert him and he would be nothing but an old crusty crock. It was a horrible thought. He poked the fire fiercely, and went up to dress for his solitary dinner.

  The evening stretched before him like a desert. Damn that book, he thought, it’s upset me. It’s upset me frightfully. Something quee
r about that book to upset me like this—

  As he sipped his coffee he noticed that the rain was no longer beating against the windows. He pulled aside the blind and looked out; it was fine. The moon sailed like a silver crescent in a cloudless sky; the stars were brilliant.

  “I shall go out, Simmons,” said the Colonel. “Bring my galoshes, will you?”

  Simmons brought his galoshes and he went out. The air was very sweet after the rain. The moon silvered the leaves of the evergreens, the bushes dripped heavily, the hedge was a mass of diamonds. The moon turned the flooded paths to silvery streams.

  “Dashed pretty!” said Colonel Weatherhead. It made him feel quite poetical. But all the same it was a sad eerie sort of scene, not the sort of scene to cheer you up when you were feeling a bit blue, not the sort of scene to be out in all by yourself. The gorgeous moonlight reminded the Colonel of that love scene he had just been reading about, when Major Waterfoot had proposed in such a dashing manner to the pretty Mrs. Mildmay. He had thought it “dashed good” at the time. It had made him feel quite young and ardent. That’s the way to propose to a woman, by Jove it is! he had thought. That fellow knows what he is writing about. But, unfortunately, thinking of it now, made the Colonel feel even lonelier than before.

  He splashed along the drive in his galoshes and went through the gates on to the road; it would be cleaner on the road. Mrs. Bold’s small house was just opposite, he could see the lighted windows of her dressing-room through the—now almost bare—branches of the trees. The pink curtains which were drawn across the windows gave it a particularly cozy appearance.

  “I haven’t seen her for days,” he said to himself, hesitating before the gate of Cozy Neuk. “Hope she’s not ill or anything. Nice sensible little woman—pretty too—perhaps it would be neighborly to inquire.”

  He pushed the gate open and went in.

  Mrs. Bold was sitting on a sofa by the fire making herself a “nightie” of peach-colored crêpe-de-chine. She huddled it into her work basket as the Colonel was announced and looked up, a trifle flustered.