Meet Mr Mulliner (11 page)
There entered a small boy in an Eton suit,
whose face seemed to the bishop vaguely familiar. It was a face that closely
resembled a ripe tomato with a nose stuck on it, but that was not what had
struck the bishop. It was something other than tomatoes that this lad reminded
him.
“Sir, please, sir,” said the boy.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said General Bloodenough
testily. “Run away, my boy, run away, run away. Can’t you see we’re busy?”
“But, sir, please, sir, it’s about the
statue.”
“What about the statue? What about it?
What about it?”
“Sir, please, sir, it was me.”
“What! What! What! What! What!”
The bishop, the general, and the
headmaster had spoken simultaneously: and the “Whats” had been distributed as
follows:
The Bishop 1
The General 3
The Headmaster 1
making five in all. Having uttered these ejaculations, they sat
staring at the boy, who turned a brighter vermilion.
“What are you saying?” cried the
headmaster. “You painted that statue?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“You?” said the bishop. Sir, yes, sir.”
You? You? You?” said the general. Sir,
yes, sir.”
There was a quivering pause. The bishop
looked at the headmaster. The headmaster looked at the bishop. The general
looked at the boy. The boy looked at the floor.
The general was the first to speak.
“Monstrous!” he exclaimed. “Monstrous,
Monstrous. Never heard of such a thing. This boy must be expelled, Headmaster.
Expelled. Ex—”
“No!” said the headmaster in a ringing
voice.
“Then flogged within an inch of his life.
Within an inch. An inch.”
“No!” A strange, new dignity seemed to
have descended upon the Rev. Trevor Entwhistle. He was breathing a little
quickly through his nose, and his eyes had assumed a somewhat prawn-like
aspect. “In matters of school discipline, general, I must with all deference
claim to be paramount. I will deal with this case as I think best. In my
opinion this is not an occasion for severity. You agree with me, bishop?”
The bishop came to himself with a start.
He had been thinking of an article which he had just completed for a leading
review on the subject of Miracles, and was regretting that the tone he had
taken, though in keeping with the trend of Modern Thought, had been tinged with
something approaching scepticism.
“Oh, entirely,” he said.
“Then all I can say,” fumed the general, “is
that I wash my hands of the whole business, the whole business, the whole
business. And if this is the way our boys are being brought up nowadays, no
wonder the country is going to the dogs, the dogs, going to the dogs.”
The door slammed behind him. The headmaster
turned to the boy, a kindly, winning smile upon his face.
“No doubt,” he said, “you now regret this
rash act?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“And you would not do it again?”
“Sir, no, sir.”
“Then I think,” said the headmaster
cheerily, “that we may deal leniently with what, after all, was but a boyish
prank, eh, bishop?”
“Oh, decidedly. Headmaster.”
“Quite the sort of thing—ha, ha!— that you
or I might have done—er—at his age?
“Oh, quite.”
“Then you shall write me twenty lines of
Virgil, Mulliner, and we will say no more about it.”
The bishop sprang from his chair.
“Mulliner! Did you say Mulliner?”
“Yes.”
“I have a secretary of that name. Are you,
by any chance, a relation of his, my lad?”
“Sir, yes, sir. Brother.”
“Oh!” said the bishop.
The bishop found Augustine in the garden,
squirting whale-oil solution on the rosebushes, for he was an enthusiastic
horticulturist. He placed an affectionate hand on his shoulder.
“Mulliner,” he said, “do not think that I
have not detected your hidden hand behind this astonishing occurrence.”
“Eh?” said Augustine. “What astonishing
occurrence?
“As you are aware, Mulliner, last night,
from motives which I can assure you were honourable and in accord with the
truest spirit of sound Churchmanship, the Rev. Trevor Entwhistle and I were
compelled to go out and paint old Fatty Hemel’s statue pink. Just now, in the
headmaster’s study, a boy confessed that he had done it. That boy, Mulliner,
was your brother.”
“Oh yes?”
“It was you who, in order to save me,
inspired him to that confession. Do not deny it, Mulliner.”
Augustine smiled an embarrassed smile.
“It was nothing, Bish, nothing at all.”
“I trust the matter did not involve you in
any too great expense. From what I know of brothers, the lad was scarcely likely
to have carried through this benevolent ruse for nothing.”
“Oh, just a couple of quid. He wanted
three, but I beat him down. Preposterous, I mean to say,” said Augustine
warmly. “Three quid for a perfectly simple, easy job like that? And so I told
him.”
“It shall be returned to you, Mulliner.”
“No, no, Bish.”
“Yes, Mulliner, it shall be returned to
you. I have not the sum on my person, but I will forward you a cheque to your
new address. The Vicarage, Steeple Mummery, Hants.”
Augustine’s eyes filled with sudden tears.
He grasped the other’s hand.
“Bish,” he said in a choking voice, “I don’t
know how to thank you. But—have you considered?”
“Considered?”
“The wife of thy bosom. Deuteronomy xiii.
6. What will she say when you tell her?”
The bishop’s eyes gleamed with a resolute
light.
“Mulliner,’ he said, “the point you raise
had not escaped me. But I have the situation well in hand. A bird of the air
shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Ecclesiastes x. 20. I shall inform her of my decision on the long-distance
telephone.”
5
T
HE
man in the corner took a sip of stout-and-mild, and proceeded to
point the moral of the story which he had just told us.
“Yes, gentlemen,” he said, “Shakespeare
was right. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”
We nodded. He had been speaking of a
favourite dog of his which, entered recently by some error in a local cat show,
had taken first prize in the class for short-haired tortoiseshells; and we all
thought the quotation well-chosen and apposite.
“There is, indeed,” said Mr Mulliner. “A
rather similar thing happened to my nephew Lancelot.”
In the nightly reunions in the bar-parlour
of the Anglers’ Rest we have been trained to believe almost anything of Mr
Mulliner’s relatives, but this, we felt, was a little too much.
“You mean to say your nephew Lancelot took
a prize at a cat show?”
“No, no,” said Mr Mulliner hastily. “Certainly
not. I have never deviated from the truth in my life, and I hope I never shall.
No Mulliner has ever taken a prize at a cat show. No Mulliner, indeed, to the
best of my knowledge, has even been entered for such a competition. What I
meant was that the fact that we never know what the future holds in store for
us was well exemplified in the case of my nephew Lancelot, just as it was in
the case of this gentleman’s dog which suddenly found itself transformed for
all practical purposes into a short-haired tortoise-shell cat. It is rather a
curious story, and provides a good illustration of the adage that you never can
tell and that it is always darkest before the dawn.”
At the time at which my story opens (said Mr
Mulliner) Lancelot, then twenty-four years of age and recently come down from Oxford,
was spending a few days with old Jeremiah Briggs, the founder and proprietor of
the famous Briggs’s Breakfast Pickles, on the latter’s yacht at Cowes.
This Jeremiah Briggs was Lancelot’s uncle
on the mother’s side, and he had always interested himself in the boy. It was
he who had sent him to the University; and it was the great wish of his heart
that his nephew, on completing his education, should join him in the business.
It was consequently a shock to the poor old gentleman when, as they sat
together on deck on the first morning of the visit, Lancelot, while expressing
the greatest respect for pickles as a class, firmly refused to start in and
learn the business from the bottom up.
“The fact is, uncle,” he said, “I have
mapped out a career for myself on far different lines. I am a poet.”
“A poet? When did you feel this coming on?”
“Shortly after my twenty-second birth-day.”
“Well,” said the old man, overcoming his
first natural feeling of repulsion, “I don’t see why that should stop us
getting together. I use quite a lot of poetry in my business.”
“I fear I could not bring myself to
commercialise my Muse.”
“Young man,” said Mr Briggs, “if an onion
with a head like yours came into my factory, I would refuse to pickle it.”
He stumped below, thoroughly incensed. But
Lancelot merely uttered a light laugh. He was young; it was summer; the sky was
blue; the sun was shining; and the things in the world that really mattered
were not cucumbers and vinegar but Romance and Love. Oh, he felt, for some
delightful girl to come along on whom he might lavish all the pent-up fervour
which had been sizzling inside him for weeks!
And at this moment he saw her. She was
leaning against the rail of a yacht that lay at its moorings some forty yards
away; and, as he beheld her, Lancelot’s heart leaped like a young gherkin in
the boiling-vat. In her face, it seemed to him, was concentrated all the beauty
of all the ages. Confronted with this girl, Cleopatra would have looked like Nellie
Wallace, and Helen of Troy might have been her plain sister. He was still
gazing at her in a sort of trance, when the bell sounded for luncheon and he
had to go below.
All through the meal, while his uncle
spoke of pickled walnuts he had known, Lancelot remained in a reverie. He was
counting the minutes until he could get on deck and start goggling again.
Judge, therefore, of his dismay when, on bounding up the companion-way, he
found that the other yacht had disappeared. He recalled now having heard a sort
of harsh, grating noise towards the end of luncheon; but at the time he had
merely thought it was his uncle eating celery. Too late he realised that it
must have been the raising of the anchor-chain.
Although at heart a dreamer, Lancelot Mulliner
was not without a certain practical streak. Thinking the matter over, he soon
hit upon a rough plan of action for getting on the track of the fair unknown
who had flashed in and out of his life with such tragic abruptness. A girl like
that—beautiful, lissom, and—as far as he had been able to tell at such long
range—gimp, was sure to be fond of dancing. The chances were, therefore, that
sooner or later he would find her at some night club or other.
He started, accordingly, to make the round
of the night clubs. As soon as one was raided, he went on to another. Within a
month he had visited the Mauve Mouse, the Scarlet Centipede, the Vicious
Cheese, the Gay Fritter, the Placid Prune, the Cafe de Bologna, Billy’s, Milly’s,
Ike’s, Spike’s, Mike’s, and the Ham and Beef. And it was at the Ham and Beef
that at last he found her.
He had gone there one evening for the
fifth time, principally because at that establishment there were a couple of speciality
dancers to whom he had taken a dislike shared by virtually every thinking man
in London. It had always seemed to him that one of these nights the male member
of the team, while whirling his partner round in a circle by her outstretched
arms, might let her go and break her neck; and though constant disappointment
had to some extent blunted the first fine enthusiasm of his early visits, he
still hoped.
On this occasion the speciality dancers
came and went unscathed as usual, but Lancelot hardly noticed them. His whole attention
was concentrated on the girl seated across the room immediately opposite him.
It was beyond a question she.
Well, you know what poets are. When their
emotions are stirred, they are not like us dull, diffident fellows. They
breathe quickly through their noses and get off to a flying start. In one bound
Lancelot was across the room, his heart beating till it sounded like a
by-request solo from the trap-drummer.
“Shall we dance?” he said.
“Can you dance?” said the girl.
Lancelot gave a short, amused laugh. He
had had a good University education, and had not failed to profit by it. He was
a man who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.