THE LITERARY MICROBE
“We are contagious,” Pauline announced honestly and courageously at the advent of every stranger, however interesting.
And Lynn, equally careful it has been seen, refused to hold any intercourse with the author at “Tenby” until the searching question, “Have you had whooping cough?” had been put to him.
Yet here was Hugh Kinross himself taking no precaution whatever to protect the neighbouring “Greenways” from contagion, and the result was that the literary microbe was wafted across the road in a surprisingly short space of time.
Miss Bibby certainly could not be said to be infected for the first time, though there was no doubt that since the new tenants had come to “Tenby” the disease had taken a much more aggravated form with her.
But Anna one afternoon made a solemn excursion to the store of Septimus Smith and [p157] purchased one exercise-book, one pen, one bottle of ink and one blotting-pad.
She had hitherto regarded the making of books as some occult art practised by certain persons, mostly as dead and as distant as one Shakespeare whose fame had faintly reached her.
But when there came into the unpretentious cottage across the road the actual author of a printed book that lay on a table in the drawing-room; and when this actual author was discovered on near view to be a rather stout man with a shockingly bad hat and creases all over his linen coats; and when the maid who dwelt in the same house with this actual author testified, during the course of a gossip, that he was in no wise different from other men—which is to say, he made no end of a fuss if the toast was not to his liking and threw his burnt matches down anywhere, and shouted angrily if there was no soap in the bathroom—why then, when all these things were discovered, Anna simply walked up to the store one fine afternoon and set herself up in the stock-in-trade of an author, marvelling that it had never before occurred to her to write a book.
But after she had done a very few chapters she craved a reading audience. Blake the gardener, she determined, was too surly for this office, and too sleepy; his day’s work [p158] so near to Nature’s heart and at such an altitude made him nod by seven o’clock in the evening. And one could hardly follow after him as he trundled about with his barrow in the daytime and read aloud to him how it was discovered that the lovely Annabell Deloitte, who was a nursery governess in a lord’s family, had been changed in the cradle and was really the Lady Florentine Trelawney.
And Miss Bibby, for all her gentleness, was too “stand-offish” for the position of listener. Anna at once rejected any idea of asking that lady to undertake the work.