Meet Mr Mulliner (16 page)
William Mulliner stared dumbly. He knew,
of course, that it was an illusion. But what a perfect illusion! If he had not
had the special knowledge which he possessed, he would have stated without fear
of contradiction that there was a gap six feet wide above him and a mass of
dust and plaster on the carpet below.
And even as his eyes deceived him, so did
his ears. He seemed to be conscious of a babel of screams and shouts. The
corridor, he could have sworn, was full of flying feet. The world appeared to
be all bangs and crashes and thuds. A cold fear gripped at William’s heart. His
sense of hearing was playing tricks with him already.
His whole being recoiled from making the
final experiment, but he forced himself out of bed. He reached a finger towards
the nearest heap of plaster and drew it back with a groan. Yes, it was as he
feared, his sense of touch had gone wrong too. That heap of plaster, though
purely a figment of his disordered brain, had felt solid.
So there it was. One little moderately
festive evening at Mike’s Place, and the Curse of the Mulliners had got him.
Within an hour of absorbing the first drink of his life, it had deprived him of
his sight, his hearing, and his sense of touch. Quick service, felt William
Mulliner.
As he climbed back into bed, it appeared
to him that two of the walls fell out. He shut his eyes, and presently sleep,
which has been well called Tired Nature’s Sweet Restorer, brought oblivion. His
last waking thought was that he imagined he had heard another wall go.
William Mulliner was a sound sleeper, and
it was many hours before consciousness returned to him. When he awoke, he
looked about him in astonishment. The haunting horror of the night had passed;
and now, though conscious of a rather severe headache, he knew that he was
seeing things as they were.
And yet it seemed odd to think that what
he beheld was not the remains of some nightmare. Not only was the world
slightly yellow and a bit blurred about the edges, but it had changed in its
very essentials overnight. Where eight hours before there had been a wall, only
an open space appeared, with bright sunlight streaming through it. The ceiling
was on the floor, and almost the only thing remaining of what had been an
expensive bedroom in a first-class hotel was the bed. Very strange, he thought,
and very irregular.
A voice broke in upon his meditations.
“Why, Mr Mulliner!”
William turned, and being, like all the Mulliners,
the soul of modesty, dived abruptly beneath the bed-clothes. For the voice was
the voice of Myrtle Banks. And she was in his room!
“Mr Mulliner!”
William poked his head out cautiously. And
then he perceived that the proprieties had not been outraged as he had
imagined.
Miss Banks was not in his room, but in the
corridor. The intervening wall had disappeared. Shaken, but relieved, he sat up
in bed, the sheet drawn round his shoulders.
“You don’t mean to say you’re still in bed?”
gasped the girl.
“Why, is it awfully late?” said William.
“Did you actually stay up here all through
it?”
“Through what?”
“The earthquake.”
“What earthquake?”
“The earthquake last night.”
“Oh, that earthquake?” said William,
carelessly. “I did notice some sort of an earthquake. I remember seeing the
ceiling come down and saying to myself, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if that wasn’t an
earthquake.’ And then the walls fell out, and I said, ‘Yes, I believe it
is
an earthquake.’ And then I turned over and went to sleep.”
Myrtle Banks was staring at him with eyes
that reminded him partly of twin stars and partly of a snail’s.
“You must be the bravest man in the world!”
William gave a curt laugh.
“Oh, well,” he said, “I may not spend my
whole life persecuting unfortunate sharks with pocket-knives, but I find I
generally manage to keep my head fairly well in a crisis. We Mulliners are like
that. We do not say much, but we have the right stuff in us.”
He clutched his head. A sharp spasm had
reminded him how much of the right stuff he had in him at that moment.
“My hero!” breathed the girl, almost
inaudibly.
“And how is your fiancé this bright, sunny
morning?” asked William, nonchalantly. It was torture to refer to the man, but
he must show her that a Mulliner knew how to take his medicine.
She gave a little shudder.
“I have no fiancé,” she said.
“But I thought you told me you and
Franklyn …”
“I am no longer engaged to Mr Franklyn.
Last night, when the earthquake started, I cried to him to help me; and he with
a hasty ‘Some other time!’ over his shoulder, disappeared into the open like
something shot out of a gun. I never saw a man run so fast. This morning I
broke off the engagement.” She uttered a scornful laugh.
“Sharks and pocket-knives! I don’t believe
he ever killed a shark in his life.”
“And even if he did,” said William, “what
of it? I mean to say, how infrequently in married life must the necessity for killing
sharks with pocket-knives arise! What a husband needs is not some purely
adventitious gift like that—a parlour trick, you might almost call it—but a
steady character, a warm and generous disposition, and a loving heart.”
“How true!” she murmured, dreamily.
“Myrtle,” said William, “I would be a
husband like that. The steady character, the warm and generous disposition, and
the loving heart to which I have alluded are at your disposal. Will you accept
them?”
“I will,” said Myrtle Banks.
And that (concluded Mr Mulliner) is the story
of my Uncle William’s romance. And you will readily understand, having heard it,
how his eldest son, my cousin, J. S. F. E. Mulliner, got his name.
“J. S. F. E.?” I said.
“John San Francisco Earthquake Mulliner,”
explained my friend.
“There never was a San Francisco earthquake,”
said the Californian. “Only a fire.”
7
I
T
was with something of the relief of fogbound city-dwellers who at
last behold the sun that we perceived, on entering the bar-parlour of the
Anglers’ Rest, that Mr Mulliner was seated once more in the familiar chair. For
some days he had been away, paying a visit to an old nurse of his down in
Devonshire: and there was no doubt that in his absence the tide of intellectual
conversation had run very low.
“No,” said Mr Mulliner, in answer to a
question as to whether he had enjoyed himself, “I cannot pretend that it was an
altogether agreeable experience. I was conscious throughout of a sense of
strain. The poor old thing is almost completely deaf, and her memory is not
what it was. Moreover, it is a moot point whether a man of sensibility can ever
be entirely at his ease in the presence of a woman who has frequently spanked
him with the flat side of a hairbrush.”
Mr Mulliner winced slightly, as if the old
wound still troubled him.
“It is curious,” he went on, after a
thoughtful pause, “how little change the years bring about in the attitude of a
real, genuine, crusted old family nurse towards one who in the early
knickerbocker stage of his career has been a charge of hers. He may grow grey
or bald and be looked up to by the rest of his world as a warm performer on the
Stock Exchange or a devil of a fellow in the sphere of Politics or the Arts,
but to his old Nanna he will still be the Master James or Master Percival who
had to be hounded by threats to keep his face clean. Shakespeare would have
cringed before his old nurse. So would Herbert Spencer, Attila the Hun, and the
Emperor Nero. My nephew Frederick … but I must not bore you with my family
gossip.”
We reassured him.
“Oh well, if you wish to hear the story.
There is nothing much in it as a story,
but it bears out the truth of what I have just been saying.”
I will begin (said Mr Mulliner) at the
moment when Frederick, having come down from London in response to an urgent
summons from his brother. Doctor George Mulliner, stood in the latter’s
consulting-room, looking out upon the Esplanade of that quiet little
watering-place, Bingley-on-Sea.
George’s consulting-room, facing west, had
the advantage of getting the afternoon sun: and this afternoon it needed all
the sun it could get, to counteract Frederick’s extraordinary gloom. The young
man’s expression, as he confronted his brother, was that which a miasmic pool
in some dismal swamp in the Bad Lands might have worn if it had had a face.
“Then the position, as I see it,” he said
in a low, toneless voice, “is this. On the pretext of wishing to discuss urgent
family business with me, you have dragged me down to this foul spot—seventy
miles by rail in a compartment containing three distinct infants sucking
sweets—merely to have tea with a nurse whom I have disliked since I was a
child.”
“You have contributed to her support for
many years,” George reminded him.
“Naturally, when the family were clubbing
together to pension off the old blister, I chipped in with my little bit,” said
Frederick. “Noblesse oblige.”
“Well, noblesse obliges you to go and have
tea with her when she invites you. Wilks must be humoured. She is not so young
as she was.”
“She must be a hundred.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Good heavens! And it seems only yesterday
that she shut me up in a cupboard for stealing jam.”
“She was a great disciplinarian,” agreed
George. “You may find her a little on the autocratic side still. And I want to
impress upon you, as her medical man, that you must not thwart her lightest
whim. She will probably offer you boiled eggs and homemade cake. Eat them.”
“I will not eat boiled eggs at five o’clock
in the afternoon,” said Frederick, with a strong man’s menacing calm, “for any
woman on earth.”
“You will. And with relish. Her heart is
weak. If you don’t humour her, I won’t answer for the consequences.”
“If I eat boiled eggs at five in the
afternoon, I won’t answer for the consequences. And why boiled eggs, dash it? I’m
not a schoolboy.”
“To her you are. She looks on all of us as
children still. Last Christmas she gave me a copy of
Eric, or Little by
Little
.”
Frederick turned to the window, and
scowled down upon the noxious and depressing scene below. Sparing neither age
nor sex in his detestation, he regarded the old ladies reading their library
novels on the seats with precisely the same dislike and contempt which he
bestowed on the boys’ school clattering past on its way to the bathing-houses.
“Then, checking up your statements,” he
said, “I find that I am expected to go to tea with a woman who, in addition,
apparently, to being a blend of Lucretia Borgia and a Prussian sergeant-major,
is a physical wreck and practically potty. Why? That is what I ask. Why? As a
child, I objected strongly to Nurse Wilks: and now, grown to riper years, the
thought of meeting her again gives me the heeby-jeebies. Why should I be
victimised? Why me particularly?”
“It isn’t you particularly. We’ve all been
to see her at intervals, and so have the Oliphants.”
“The Oliphants!”
The name seemed to affect Frederick oddly.
He winced, as if his brother had been a dentist instead of a general
practitioner and had just drawn one of his back teeth.
“She was their nurse after she left us.
You can’t have forgotten the Oliphants. I remember you at the age of twelve
climbing that old elm at the bottom of the paddock to get Jane Oliphant a rook’s
egg.”
Frederick laughed bitterly.
“I must have been a perfect ass. Fancy
risking my life for a girl like that! Not,” he went on, “that life’s worth
much. An absolute wash-out, that’s what life is. However, it will soon be over.
And then the silence and peace of the grave. That,” said Frederick, “is the
thought that sustains me.”
“A pretty kid, Jane. Some one told me she
had grown up quite a beauty.”
“Without a heart.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Merely this. She pretended to love me,
and then a few months ago she went off to the country to stay with some people
named Ponderby and wrote me a letter breaking off the engagement. She gave no
reasons, and I have not seen her since. She is now engaged to a man named
Dillingwater, and I hope it chokes her.”
“I never heard about this. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. Merciful release is the way I
look at it.”
“Would he be one of the Sussex Dillingwaters?”
“I don’t know what county the family
infests. If I did, I would avoid it.”
“Well, I’m sorry. No wonder you’re
depressed.”