The Author of "Trixie"/Chapter 9
Since his marriage Dunkle, beyond correcting the proof-sheets of "Trixie," had not done a stroke of work. Not one. The poems which we have seen him offering to Messrs. Capper and Ironsides were things which he had written as a bachelor; failures, which had been rejected by all the magazines. Of course I don't mean all the magazines. Only those magazines which Dunkle considered worthy of his verse, The Metropolitan Hermes, for instance, The Annual Review, The Hebdomadary Monthly, Style, The Quill Pen, The Jukes Journal, The Aesthetic Quarterly, The Counterblast, Mixed Pickles and The Immondaine. The rebuffs he had suffered had not, you comprehend, been delivered by Hawkins's Weekly, let us say, or Snappets, or The Pigeon Fancier or Home Thoughts or The Flapper or The Hangman and Warder or The British Beanfeaster or Bulger's Magazine or Joy Bells.
No, Dunkle's output as a married man had been nil. On the other hand he had nothing with which to reproach himself where revelling is concerned. He had put the glowing hours behind him with astonishing rapidity and success; he had lived furiously every day from morning till night, and then from night till morning. Not once had his young wife known him to be engaged in literary composition; not once had she so much as caught him filling his fountain pen. Much Chloë cared. She had not married him for his poetry, which she didn't understand, but for his dancing and in order to get away from home.
Conceive then the surprise, not to say the chagrin it occasioned her to find that Dunkle was working again. She came down one afternoon, arrayed for Ranlingham (where the finals of the Naval and Military Pogo Races were to be jumped), and to her extreme annoyance did not find her husband ready in the hall. She screamed his name, but still be failed to appear. In twenty strides she was at the door of the room which was known (humorously) as The Study. She wrenched at its handle. The door was locked. "Bisham," she shrieked, "I'm waiting for you."
The door opened about two inches and Dunkle's nose became visible. "Go away," he said, "I'm working."
"Working!" she echoed. "What the devil do you mean, working?"
"I mean working," he said and shut the door. She heard the key turn. She raised her two hands to beat upon the door. It occurred to her that if she did this she would probably split her gloves. She lowered her two hands.
"All right," she yelled, "stay and work and be damned. But I tell you what, Bisham!"
"What?" he called.
"I shall flirt like billy-oh with Captain Yarborough."
The door opened and Dunkle's nose appeared again. "You wouldn't do that, Chloë," he said hoarsely.
"I would," she assured him, "and what's more I will. Now are you coming?"
"Old geyser," he said brokenly, "I can't. Honest-to-blazes I can't. I've got to work. It's only for you I'm doing it, Chloë. You know how broke we are. If I don't make some money soon we may have to go and live in a flat near Battersea Park. You don't want to have to go and do that, do you?"
"It isn't a question," she said, "of what I want to have to go and do; it's a question of what I want you to come and do and that's take me to Ranlingham. But, of course, if you prefer your old work!"
"I don't prefer it, Chloë. You know that. You know there's nothing I like so much as to go around with you. But when it comes to keeping the wolf from the door, a man's pleasure has to give way to his duty. And remember, it's for you I'm doing it. You'll have the spending of this money I'm going to make. It's not as if I was doing it for anyone else, now, is it?"
"I see," she said coldly, "that your mind's made up. Well, I'm a bit too wise to waste my time trying to get a man to do what he doesn't want to do. Stay and work, by all means; I leave you to your Muse. But, lord! how I shall flirt with the captain!"
With his hand he stifled a groan. "All I say is, it's dashed unkind of you, Chloë," he said. "That's all I say—it's dashed unkind of you. I don't say another word but that. What I mean, it's dashed unkind of you."
She had turned to leave him, but now she had a sudden thought and came back.
"And what," she inquired, "what might this precious work be?"
"Why, old knob," he said, "it might be addressing envelopes and it might be solving acrostics, but it isn't. As a matter of fact, I'm doing another burlesque novel on the lines of 'Trixie.' There's something in the neighbourhood of seventy thousand quid waiting for me to pick up, and what I say is, why not? Why ever not?"
"Ah!" she said icily. "Another burlesque. Another burlesque, eh?"
"What do you mean, another burlesque, eh?" he retorted. hotly. "Do you mean you don't believe 'Trixie' was one?"
"I don't think I want to tell you what I believe about 'Trixie,'" she said. "I only say that no one I know believes it to be a burlesque. I only say that. Nothing more. But I'll tell you this, Bisham. I was ready to allow you to publish one novel, seeing that it was, as you swore, a joke; but when it comes to your writing another, why, I find that a bit too thick. A reputable writer may be allowed one novel, if it's a pure jeu d'esprit; but a second one and in the same genre—no. That makes him a novelist, and not only a novelist but a self-plagiarist, than which there is no more despicable creature. I warn you, Bisham, that if you publish another of these so-called burlesque novels of yours, I shall be forced to look upon you as a sort of Thomas Hardy, rooted eternally in Wessex, or a kind of Henry James, for ever occupied with the psychology of the Continental American. I don't say that I will leave you, Bisham, for I should have nowhere to go except my father's house; but I'll be shot if I shall love you any longer, and I shall flirt like the devil with other men, and particularly with Captain Yarborough." She turned her back on him again and began to sweep down the hall.
He threw the door wide. "Come in," he said. "Rather than that, I'll give the Archdeacon away."
She halted as if she had been shot, only she didn't fall down! She turned and, "What do you mean, give the Archdeacon away?" she asked.
He stared at her stupidly. "By heck!" he thought, "what do I mean by it? I mean absolutely nothing by it. That's what I mean. There's not the faintest reason why I shouldn't tell her. With 'Trixie' it was different. Then he didn't want it to be known. But now he does want it to be known. It's I that don't want it to be known, not for the present, at any rate. But, by hock! if I tell her, she'll blab it all over Ranlingham this afternoon, as sure as eggs. I mustn't." He slammed the door in his wife's face.
"Oh!" she hissed through the keyhole. "How I shall flirt with Captain Yarborough!"
He flung the door open again, caught her by the wrist and dragged her in to the study. "I've said too much," he cried. "You've got to know all. You've got to. Look here!" He haled her across the room to his desk and pointed to a thick pile of manuscript which lay on it. "Look at that. Whose writing is it?"
She peered through her lorgnette. "It's father's," she said.
"Well," he shouted, "that's my new novel. He's just finished writing it."
"What do you mean, he's just finished writing it?" she cried.
"I mean what I say. He's just finished writing it. He wrote 'Trixie,' do you hear? Being an Archdeacon, it wouldn't have done for him to publish it under his own name. So I lent him mine. Like Bacon did for Shakespeare, do you see? And now he's written this other one, and I'm copying it out to send to the publishers! Do you understand me?"
"Yes," she said, "I understand you, Bisham. But what I don't and can't understand is why you consented to this infamy!"
"I did it for you!" he howled. "My price was your father's consent to our marrying. What do you suppose I cared for my position in the world of letters, where your happiness was at stake? If I hadn't done this thing—this infamy, as you call it—you and I would still be only engaged; whereas"
He broke off, for Chloë had fallen on his neck and a good deal of the heavy fur collar of her heavy fur coat had made its way into his open mouth.
"Oh, Bish!" she sobbed. "You did this for me! For me! You did! Oh, Bish! And to think that I believed you capable of writing a novel, even a burlesque one! Oh, Bish, can you forgive me?"
"Yes," he said, "that's quite all right, old chip, of course. You were bound to believe your husband, on your wedding-day, anyhow. It was inconceivable that I should lie to you on your wedding-day."
"Well, but" she said, "you did, you know, Bish."
"Yes, I did, but only because I had to. I'd promised your father to let not a soul into his secret. I had to keep faith with your father, Chloë. Had he not just given you to me at the altar—at least, wouldn't he have done so if he hadn't had lumbago? But I owed you to him. I simply had to keep faith with him. On our wedding-day, at any rate. So you must just forgive me for deceiving you. And really, if anyone is to blame, it's the Archdeacon, because he tempted me in the first instance with the offer of your hand. And, of course, that was irresistible."
She smiled and patted his cheek. "A compliment," she said. "How prettily you can pay them when you like, Bish. But tell me, why are you breaking faith with the Archdeacon, now?"
He told her, then, of her father's resolution to avow his authorship of "Trixie." He told her how (finding himself incapable of producing any sort of fiction) he had got another novel out of the Archdeacon in exchange for his promise to avow his non-authorship of "Trixie." In fact, he told her all about it.
"But, as you can see for yourself, old pill," he concluded, "it's of the utmost importance that nothing should transpire until this new book, this 'Edgar and Lilian,' shall have been on the market for a few months. Launched as my work, it will sell of itself and run straight off into quarter-million figures. Then, d'ye see? when it's well on its way to the half-million, we announce the Archdeacon as the author of both books and I confirm his claim. Sensation unparalleled since the invention of writing! The sales of 'Edgar and Lilian' bound up beyond the half-million in a week and on to the three-quarters in a month, and "Trixie" takes an entirely new lease of life, and you and I are absolutely swamped in royalties.
"But if it leaks out now, when 'Trixie' is beginning to be forgotten and before 'Edgar and Lilian' is published, the sensation it'll produce will be a comparatively mild one, and the sales of 'Edgar and Lilian' will actually suffer. People are mad to read a book about which a sensation is going on; but if the sensation is over and done with, there's no particular reason for them to read the book. In fact, they'd rather not read it.
"So I want you to promise me to keep your thumb on all this until I say the word. Will you?"
"Yes," she said, "I promise, of course. You don't suppose I'm exactly eager to let people know that my father wrote 'Trixie,' now that I know it wasn't a burlesque. It was quite bad enough to have it attributed to my husband when I believed it to be a waggery. However, I suppose the disgrace has got to be met. From what you tell me, it's clear that the Archdeak means to confess?"
"Yes," said Dunkle, "he means that all right."
"Well," she said, "I wish we could stop it. It'll be a horrid scandal. It'll blow his chances of a bishopric sky high, and that'll just about break mamma's heart. She does so want to be a bishopess. I believe that, for her sake, we ought to prevent the old gentleman from doing it. Look here, if you burn this manuscript after you've copied it, he'll have no evidence, will he?"
"Not a scrap!"
"Very well, then. And look here, Bish, if you can't write novels like 'Trixie,' I'll bet I can. Why not burn this 'Edgar and Lilian' thing and defy the Archdeak to prove he wrote it, and then let me write any more novels that may be wanted? You say the Archdeak is willing to let you have all the royalties on these two books as long as he has the fame of having written them. But will he go on like that? How can we be sure he won't turn greedy? Once he's known as the author of these books, he'll have no use for you any longer. Why should he let you have the royalties on the other books he'll write?) Obviously he won't. But if we burn this manuscript, we cut him right out of the game. You'll retain your reputation as the author of 'Trixie,' and I can, as I say, write your future books for you easily. I don't at all like the notion of the Archdeak grabbing all those royalties when we might be getting them. Of course, I see what a sensation we can make by owning up, and I see that it'll sell 'Edgar and Lilian' pretty heftily; but what I say is, let us take the long view. We've got a considerable time to live, I imagine, and every year we shall want more money. Well, as the author of 'Trixie,' I can make it as easy as shelling peas. But not if you've let the Archdeak acquire that valuable trade name."
"Chloë, old stub," said Dunkle, "it strikes me that you've degenerated a good deal in the last few minutes."
"Not at all," she said. "I'm only being frank about it now. Posing as a despiser of fiction is all very well so long as it costs one nothing. But I'm not going to let the Archdeak lay his claws on any fifty thousand a year in royalties that I know I can persuade to come my way, particularly when by doing so he'll make my darling Mumsie unhappy. So take it from me, Bish, that when you've copied out this 'Edgar and Lilian' stuff the next thing you'll do is to put it on the fire; and I'm the lady who's going to stand by and see it done. And now," she concluded, "I must leave you to your task, you poor old lobster; but you can perform it with an easy mind. I shan't do any flirting with Captain Yarborough this afternoon. He may leer his damnedest and not so much as an œillade shall reward him for his trouble. My thought will be all for my Bishie."
"I suppose," he said, "you wouldn't like to stay here and read your father out loud to me while I write him down? It would be the deuce of a help, Chloë."
"Not necessary, dear old tuft," she said. "There's no such blinking hurry as all that. If you stick to it, you'll get that pile all copied out in a fortnight or three weeks. But I'll help you when it comes to suppressing the evidence of the Archdeak's authorship. Yes, you can count on me there absolutely."
She kissed him on his parting and flitted down the hall. A moment, and the waiting Bournville was speeding with her in a westerly direction.
A fortnight later the Archdeacon received a bundle of fifty-three press cuttings, all couched in exactly the same language. They said: "Messrs. Capper and Ironsides have just received from Mr. Bisham Dunkle the manuscript of his new novel, 'Edgar and Lilian.' All they need say about it is that it is better, if possible, than 'Trixie.' The first edition of a hundred and forty-five thousand will be published at the earliest possible moment."
Dunkle and Chloë dined that evening at the Vicarage. After dinner the Archdeacon, passing the port, said:
"Well, Bisham, I see that the new novel is in the hands of the publishers. So I'll be glad if you'll let me have my original manuscript back to-morrow. I must confess that I have a sort of sentimental attachment to that manuscript. I want to feel that after my death it may be treasured by my descendants, unless, of course, I decide to bequeath it to the Library of the British Museum."
"My goodness, Archdeacon!" said Dunkle, "I wish you'd told me you wanted that manuscript back. For, do you know, I've burnt it. I'm awfully sorry, but we burnt the other, you'll remember, and I suppose I acted from force of habit. I was rather brain-weary after a fortnight's almost uninterrupted copying, and I suppose I didn't quite realise what I was doing. Why ever didn't you tell me you wanted the thing back? I shall never forgive myself for this."
The Archdeacon smiled indulgently. "Well, well," he said, "no matter. If it's burnt, it's burnt, and there's an end of it. But it's of no consequence, and you mustn't distress yourself, my dear boy. The thing would have come in rather handily, of course, in the event of your declining to keep your promise to admit my authorship of 'Trixie' and this new book, for I could have produced it in support of my claim, eh? But of course"
Dunkle's face darkened. "You needn't be afraid," he said stiffly. "I shan't let you down."
"My dear fellow," cried the Archdeacon, "you don't imagine I spoke seriously, I hope? If so, pray disabuse your mind of any such monstrous notion. I haven't the slightest doubt that you will keep faith with me. For let me tell you, Bisham that before giving you that manuscript to copy out, I made a copy of it in my own handwriting, and placed it in the Sloane Street Safe Deposit, sealed and dated and entered in the books of that institution. I have, therefore, irrefragable proof of my authorship of, at any rate, 'Edgar and Lilian,' and, since I can explode your claim to have written my second book, I do not believe that you will think it worth your while to dispute my assertion, when I make it, that I wrote the first. In other words, I know that you will keep faith with me, because for you to do anything else will be futile." He leaned back in his chair, put his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, spread his fingers wide and beamed benevolently upon his son-in-law.
There was a short silence. Dunkle was a gentleman, and it was a prime article of his social code never to swear in the presence of a clergyman. He held fast the barrier of his teeth against a whole regiment of curses, and presently was in command of himself.
"Why, Archdeacon," he said, "this is delightful news, and I can't tell you how it has relieved my mind. Another copy, you say? Splendid! Truly a most wise precaution. Here is proof of your authorship which must convince the most sceptical."
"Yes," said the Archdeacon, "isn't it?"
"Chloë," said Dunkle, as they drove away from the Vicarage in the Bournville limousine, "Chloë, my dear old root, I regret to inform you that your venerable father has this night shown himself to be the slimiest kind of a snake in the grass. A foxy old clerical if ever there was one—that's him. You wouldn't believe how far-sighted and execrable he's been. Now, listen," and he told her plainly what the Archdeacon had told him he had done.
Chloë screamed with rage. "What a vile mind he must have!" she exclaimed. "No one but a very evil old fellow would have thought of safeguarding himself in such a way. Show me a man who fears treachery and I will show you a traitor; and father must be as treacherous as Judas Iscariot to have imagined that you could mean to do him down, Bish. Why, as you and I know perfectly well, nothing was farther from your thoughts than to deny his authorship. It was only because I don't want my mother to be worried and humiliated and disappointed that we burnt that manuscript of the Archdeak's and put it out of his power, as we thought, to dish his chances of wearing lawn sleeves. And all the time the old iniquity had got another script laid down in cold storage to back up his claim to be the author of 'Trixie.' Well, what I say is, it's not decent for a clergyman to be so sharp."
"That's all perfectly correct," said Dunkle, "but it doesn't get us any forwarder, old tick. What, for example, do you suggest we should do? It's quite obvious that your father means to come out as the author of 'Trixie' unless we can stop him. The point is, can we? It's impossible for us to get that manuscript out of the Safe Deposit. Burgling's not a bit in my line, and we don't number a single cracksman among our acquaintances. From the only other alternative—murdering your father—I confess I shrink."
"No," she said, "there's another, a better way than that."
"What is it?."
"To find out some dark secret of his past life, and threaten to put the police on him unless he chucks this idea of his."
"But," said Dunkle, "suppose he hasn't got any dark secret?"
"You needn't tell me," said Chloë, "that a man of his age, with whiskers like his whiskers, hasn't got something in his past that he can't afford to have dug up and brought into the light of day. Depend upon it, the Archdeak's tendon Achilles is no more invulnerable than anyone else's. I propose we put Hanky Pankhurst on his track to-morrow."
"Who's he?"
"He's the smartest private inquiry man in London," she explained. "He's the Questing Beast brought right down to date. There's not his equal for nosing out the buried indiscretions of the blameless. It's his speciality, in fact, though of course he does an immense business in connection with ordinary miserable sinners. We've only got to put Pankhurst on the Archdeak's trail, and it won't be much more than a couple of weeks before he roots up something that'll enable us to bring the old gentleman to his senses."
"I say, old scream," said Dunkle, "do you really believe that it'll be quite the thing for you to start stirring up your own father's horrid past. What about decency and all that sort of rot?"
"Well," she said, "what about it? If it comes to that, I regard it as pretty indecent of a man in my father's position to want to announce himself as the author of a mushy Best Seller. A dignitary of the Church of England isn't free to act just as he pleases. He's got to remember that there are millions of people about who are only too ready to seize on anything that will discredit the Church of England—Atheists and Nonconformists and Bolshevists, and people like that. But what I'm principally thinking of is dear mother's disappointment if father goes and cuts himself out of the running for a bishopric. I say it'll be a worthy and righteous action, Bish, to prevent him from making an addled egg of himself like this, and how we do it doesn't matter a monkey's damn."
"All right," said Dunkle with a sigh, "I expect you're right, and after all, he's your father. But here's our dancing hell."
Five minutes later they were taking the floor in Sismondi's Club.