Meet Mr Mulliner (17 page)

“Depressed?” said Frederick, outraged. “Me?
You don’t suppose I’m worrying myself about a girl like that, do you? I’ve
never been so happy in my life. I’m just bubbling over with cheerfulness.”

“Oh, is that what it is?” George looked at
his watch. “Well, you’d better be pushing along. It’ll take you about ten
minutes to get to Marazion Road.”

“How do I find the blasted house?”

“The name’s on the door.”

“What is the name?”

“Wee Holme.”

“My God!” said Frederick Mulliner. “It
only needed that!”

The view which he had had of it from his
brother’s window should, no doubt, have prepared Frederick for the hideous
loathsomeness of Bingley-on-Sea: but, as he walked along, he found it coming on
him as a complete surprise. Until now he had never imagined that a small town
could possess so many soul-searing features. He passed little boys, and thought
how repulsive little boys were. He met tradesmen’s carts, and his gorge rose at
the sight of them. He hated the houses. And, most of all, he objected to the
sun. It shone down with a cheeriness which was not only offensive but, it
seemed to Frederick Mulliner, deliberately offensive. What he wanted was
wailing winds and driving rain: not a beastly expanse of vivid blue. It was not
that the perfidy of Jane Oliphant had affected him in any way: it was simply
that he disliked blue skies and sunshine. He had a temperamental antipathy for
them, just as he had a temperamental fondness for tombs and sleet and
hurricanes and earthquakes and famines and pestilences and …

He found that he had arrived in Marazion Road.

Marazion Road was made up of two spotless
pavements stretching into the middle distance and flanked by two rows of neat little
red-brick villas. It smote Frederick like a blow. He felt as he looked at those
houses, with their little brass knockers and little white curtains, that they
were occupied by people who knew nothing of Frederick Mulliner and were content
to know nothing; people who were simply not caring a whoop that only a few
short months before the girl to whom he had been engaged had sent back his
letters and gone and madly got herself betrothed to a man named Dillingwater.

He found Wee Holme, and hit it a nasty
slap with its knocker. Footsteps sounded in the passage, and the door opened.

“Why, Master Frederick!” said Nurse Wilks.
“I should hardly have known you.”

Frederick, in spite of the natural gloom
caused by the blue sky and the warm sunshine, found his mood lightening
somewhat. Something that might almost have been a spasm of tenderness passed
through him. He was not a bad-hearted young man—he ranked in that respect, he
supposed, somewhere mid-way between his brother George, who had a heart of
gold, and people like the future Mrs Dillingwater, who had no heart at all—and
there was a fragility about Nurse Wilks that first astonished and then touched
him.

The images which we form in childhood are
slow to fade: and Frederick had been under the impression that Nurse Wilks was
fully six feet tall, with the shoulders of a weight-lifter and eyes that
glittered cruelly beneath beetling brows. What he saw now was a little old
woman with a wrinkled face, who looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away.

He was oddly stirred. He felt large and
protective. He saw his brother’s point now. Most certainly this frail old thing
must be humoured. Only a brute would refuse to humour her—yes, felt Frederick
Mulliner, even if it meant boiled eggs at five o’clock in the afternoon.

“Well, you are getting a big boy!” said
Nurse Wilks, beaming.

“Do you think so?” said Frederick, with
equal amiability.

“Quite the little man! And all dressed up.
Go into the parlour, dear, and sit down. I’m getting the tea.”

“Thanks.”

“W
IPE YOUR BOOTS
!”

The voice, thundering from a quarter
whence hitherto only soft cooings had proceeded, affected Frederick Mulliner a
little like the touching off of a mine beneath his feet. Spinning round he
perceived a different person altogether from the mild and kindly hostess of a
moment back. It was plain that there yet lingered in Nurse Wilks not a little
of the ancient fire. Her mouth was tightly compressed and her eyes gleamed
dangerously.

“Theideaofyourbringingyournastydirtybootsintomynicecleanhousewithoutwipingthem!”
said Nurse Wilks.

“Sorry!” said Frederick humbly.

He burnished the criticised shoes on the
mat, and tottered to the parlour. He felt much smaller, much younger and much
feebler than he had felt a minute ago. His morale had been shattered into
fragments.

And it was not pieced together by the
sight, as he entered the parlour, of Miss Jane Oliphant sitting in an armchair
by the window.

It is hardly to be supposed that the
reader will be interested in the appearance of a girl of the stamp of Jane
Oliphant—a girl capable of wantonly returning a good man’s letters and going
off and getting engaged to a Dillingwater: but one may as well describe her and
get it over. She had golden-brown hair; golden-brown eyes; golden-brown
eyebrows; a nice nose with one freckle on the tip; a mouth which, when it
parted in a smile, disclosed pretty teeth; and a resolute little chin.

At the present moment, the mouth was not
parted in a smile. It was closed up tight, and the chin was more than resolute.
It looked like the ram of a very small battleship. She gazed at Frederick as if
he were the smell of onions, and she did not say a word.

Nor did Frederick say very much. Nothing
is more difficult for a young man than to find exactly the right remark with
which to open conversation with a girl who has recently returned his letters.
(Darned good letters, too. Reading them over after opening the package, he had
been amazed at their charm and eloquence.)

Frederick, then, confined his observations
to the single word “Guk!” Having uttered this, he sank into a chair and stared
at the carpet. The girl stared out of window: and complete silence reigned in
the room till from the interior of a clock which was ticking on the mantelpiece
a small wooden bird suddenly emerged, said “Cuckoo,” and withdrew.

The abruptness of this bird’s appearance
and the oddly staccato nature of its diction could not but have their effect on
a man whose nerves were not what they had been. Frederick Mulliner, rising some
eighteen inches from his chair, uttered a hasty exclamation.

“I beg your pardon?” said Jane Oliphant,
raising her eyebrows.

“Well, how was I to know it was going to
do that?” said Frederick defensively.

Jane Oliphant shrugged her shoulders. The
gesture seemed to imply supreme indifference to what the sweepings of the
Underworld knew or did not know.

But Frederick, the ice being now in a
manner broken, refused to return to the silence.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“I have come to have tea with Nanna.”

“I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“Oh?”

“If I’d known that you were going to be
here …”

“You’ve got a large smut on your nose.”

Frederick gritted his teeth and reached
for his handkerchief.

“Perhaps I’d better go,” he said.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” said
Miss Oliphant sharply. “She is looking forward to seeing you. Though why …”

“Why?” prompted Frederick coldly.

“Oh, nothing.”

In the unpleasant silence which followed,
broken only by the deep breathing of a man who was trying to choose the rudest
out of the three retorts which had presented themselves to him, Nurse Wilks
entered.

“It’s just a suggestion,” said Miss Oliphant
aloofly, “but don’t you think you might help Nanna with that heavy tray?”

Frederick, roused from his preoccupation,
sprang to his feet, blushing the blush of shame.

“You might have strained yourself, Nanna,”
the girl went on, in a voice dripping with indignant sympathy.

“I was going to help her,” mumbled
Frederick.

“Yes, after she had put the tray down on
the table. Poor Nanna! How very heavy it must have been.”

Not for the first time since their
acquaintance had begun, Frederick felt a sort of wistful wonder at his
erstwhile fiancée’s uncanny ability to put him in the wrong. His emotions now
were rather what they would have been if he had been detected striking his
hostess with some blunt instrument.

“He always was a thoughtless boy,” said
Nurse Wilks tolerantly. “Do sit down, Master Frederick, and have your tea. I’ve
boiled some eggs for you. I know what a boy you always are for eggs.”

Frederick, starting, directed a swift
glance at the tray. Yes, his worst fears had been realised. Eggs—and large
ones. A stomach which he had fallen rather into the habit of pampering of late
years gave a little whimper of apprehension.

“Yes,” proceeded Nurse Wilks, pursuing the
subject, “you never could have enough eggs. Nor cake. Dear me, how sick you
made yourself with cake that day at Miss Jane’s birthday party.”

“Please!” said Miss Oliphant, with a
slight shiver.

She looked coldly at her fermenting
fellow-guest, as he sat plumbing the deepest abysses of self-loathing.

“No eggs for me, thank you,” he said.

“Master Frederick, you will eat your nice
boiled eggs,” said Nurse Wilks. Her voice was still amiable, but there was a
hint of dynamite behind it.

“I don’t want any eggs.”

“Master Frederick!” The dynamite exploded.
Once again that amazing transformation had taken place, and a frail little old
woman had become an intimidating force with which only a Napoleon could have
reckoned. “I will not have this sulking.”

Frederick gulped.

“I’m sorry,” he said, meekly. “I should
enjoy an egg.”

“Two eggs,” corrected Nurse Wilks.

“Two eggs,” said Frederick.

Miss Oliphant twisted the knife in the
wound.

“There seems to be plenty of cake, too.
How nice for you! Still, I should be careful, if I were you. It looks rather
rich. I never could understand,” she went on, addressing Nurse Wilks in a voice
which Frederick, who was now about seven years old, considered insufferably
grown-up and affected, “why people should find any enjoyment in stuffing and
gorging and making pigs of themselves.”

“Boys will be boys,” argued Nurse Wilks.

“I suppose so,” sighed Miss Oliphant. “Still,
it’s all rather unpleasant.”

A slight but well-defined glitter appeared
in Nurse Wilks’ eyes. She detected a tendency to hoighty-toightiness in her
young guest’s manner, and hoighty-toightiness was a thing to be checked.

“Girls,” she said, “are by no means
perfect.”

“Ah!” breathed Frederick, in rapturous
adhesion to the sentiment.

“Girls have their little faults. Girls are
sometimes inclined to be vain. I know a little girl not a hundred miles from
this room who was so proud of her new panties that she ran out in the street in
them.”

“Nanna!” cried Miss Oliphant pinkly.

“Disgusting!” said Frederick.

He uttered a short laugh: and so full was
this laugh, though short, of scorn, disdain, and a certain hideous masculine
superiority, that Jane Oliphant’s proud spirit writhed beneath the infliction.
She turned on him with blazing eyes.

“What did you say?”

“I said ‘Disgusting!’”

“Indeed?”

“I cannot,” said Frederick judicially, “imagine
a more deplorable exhibition, and I hope you were sent to bed without any
supper.”

“If you ever had to go without your
supper,” said Miss Oliphant, who believed in attack as the best form of defence,
“it would kill you.”

“Is that so?” said Frederick.

“You’re a beast, and I hate you,” said
Miss Oliphant.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”

“Now, now, now,” said Nurse Wilks. “Come,
come, come!”

She eyed the two with that comfortable
look of power and capability which comes naturally to women who have spent half
a century in dealing with the young and fractious.

“We will have no quarrelling,” she said. “Make
it up at once. Master Frederick, give Miss Jane a nice kiss.”

The room rocked before Frederick’s bulging
eyes.

“A what?” he gasped.

“Give her a nice big kiss and tell her you’re
sorry you quarrelled with her.”

“She quarrelled with me.”

“Never mind. A little gentleman must
always take the blame.”

Frederick, working desperately, dragged to
the surface a sketchy smile.

“I apologise,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” said Miss Oliphant.

“Kiss her,” said Nurse Wilks.

“I won’t!” said Frederick.

“What!”