Mr Mulliner Speaking (14 page)

'What's all this?' he said.

Osbert came out of his thoughts with a start.

'You still here, my dear chap?'

'I am.'

'Want to see me about anything, dear boy? Something on your mind?'

'I just want a quiet five minutes alone with you, Mr Mulliner.'

'Certainly, my dear old fellow,' said Osbert. 'Certainly, certainly, certainly. Just wait till these policemen have gone and I will be at your disposal. We have had a little burglary.'

'Burg—,' Bashford Braddock was beginning, when there came out onto the steps a couple of policemen. They were supporting the burglar Harold, and were followed by others assisting the burglar Ernest. The sergeant, coming last, shook his head at Osbert a little gravely.

'You ought to be careful, sir,' he said. 'I don't say these fellows didn't deserve all you gave them, but you want to watch yourself. One of these days . . .'

'Perhaps I did overdo it a little,' admitted Osbert. 'But I am rather apt to see red on these occasions. One's fighting blood, you know. Well, good night, sergeant, good night. And now,' he said, taking Bashford Braddock's arm in a genial grip, 'what was it you wanted to talk to me about? Come into the house. We shall be all alone there. I gave the staff a holiday. There won't be a soul except ourselves.'

Bashford Braddock released his arm. He seemed embarrassed. His face, as the light of the street lamp shone upon it, was strangely pale.

'Did you—' He gulped a little. 'Was that really you?'

'Really me? Oh, you mean those two fellows. Oh, yes, I found them in my dining-room, eating my food and drinking my wine as cool as you please, and naturally I set about them. But the sergeant was quite right. I
do
get too rough when I lose my temper. I must remember,' he said, taking out his handkerchief and tying a knot in it, 'to cure myself of that. The fact is, I sometimes don't know my own strength. But you haven't told me what it is you want to see me about?'

Bashford Braddock swallowed twice in quick succession. He edged past Osbert to the foot of the steps. He seemed oddly uneasy. His face had now taken on a greenish tinge.

'Oh, nothing, nothing.'

'But, my dear fellow,' protested Osbert, 'it must have been something important to bring you round at this time of night.'

Bashford Braddock gulped.

'Well, it was like this. I – er – saw the announcement of your engagement in the paper this morning, and I thought— I – er – just thought I would look in and ask you what you would like for a wedding-present.'

'My dear chap! Much too kind of you.'

'So – er – so silly if I gave a fish-slice and found that everybody else had given fish-slices.'

'That's true. Well, why not come inside and talk it over?'

'No, I won't come in, thanks. I'd rather not come in. Perhaps you will write and let me know.
Poste Restante
, Bongo on the Congo, will find me. I am returning there immediately.'

'Certainly,' said Osbert. He looked down at his companion's feet. 'My dear old lad, what on earth are you wearing those extraordinary boots for?'

'Corns,' said Bashford Braddock.

'Why the spikes?'

'They relieve the pressure on the feet.'

'I see, well, good night, Mr Braddock.'

'Good night, Mr Mulliner.'

'Good night,' said Osbert.

'Good night,' said Bashford Braddock.

The poet who was spending the summer at the Angler's Rest had just begun to read us his new sonnet-sequence when the door of the bar-parlour opened and there entered a young man in gaiters. He came quickly in and ordered beer. In one hand he was carrying a double-barrelled gun, in the other a posy of dead rabbits. These he dropped squashily to the floor: and the poet, stopping in mid-sentence, took one long, earnest look at the remains. Then, wincing painfully, he turned a light green and closed his eyes. It was not until the banging of the door announced the visitor's departure that he came to life again.

Mr Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.

'You appear upset,' he said.

'A little,' admitted the poet. 'A momentary malaise. It may be a purely personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather more of their contents inside them.'

'Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views,' Mr Mulliner assured him. 'My niece Charlotte did.'

'It is my temperament,' said the poet. 'I dislike all dead things – particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they have so obviously, so – shall I say? – blatantly made the Great Change. Give me,' he went on, the greenish tinge fading from his face, 'life and joy and beauty.'

'Just what my niece Charlotte used to say.'

'Oddly enough, that thought forms the theme of the second sonnet in my sequence – which, now that the young gentleman with the portable Morgue has left us, I will . . .'

'My niece Charlotte,' said Mr Mulliner, with quiet firmness, 'was one of those gentle, dreamy, wistful girls who take what I have sometimes felt to be a mean advantage of having an ample private income to write Vignettes in Verse for the artistic weeklies. Charlotte's Vignettes in Verse had a wide vogue among the editors of London's higher-browed but less prosperous periodicals. Directly these frugal men realized that she was willing to supply unstinted Vignettes gratis, for the mere pleasure of seeing herself in print, they were all over her. The consequence was that before long she had begun to move freely in the most refined literary circles: and one day, at a little luncheon at the Crushed Pansy (The Restaurant With A Soul), she found herself seated next to a godlike young man at the sight of whom something seemed to go off inside her like a spring.'

'Talking of Spring . . .' said the poet.

Cupid (proceeded Mr Mulliner), has always found the family to which I belong a ready mark for his bow. Our hearts are warm, our passions quick. It is not too much to say that my niece Charlotte was in love with this young man before she had finished spearing the first anchovy out of the hors-d'oeuvres dish. He was intensely spiritual-looking, with a broad, white forehead and eyes that seemed to Charlotte not so much eyes as a couple of holes punched in the surface of a beautiful soul. He wrote, she learned, Pastels in Prose: and his name, if she had caught it correctly at the moment of their introduction, was Aubrey Trefusis.

Friendship ripens quickly at the Crushed Pansy. The
poulet
rôti au cresson
had scarcely been distributed before the young man was telling Charlotte his hopes, his fears, and the story of his boyhood. And she was amazed to find that he sprang – not from a long line of artists but from an ordinary, conventional county family of the type that cares for nothing except hunting and shooting.

'You can readily imagine,' he said, helping her to Brussels sprouts, 'how intensely such an environment jarred upon my unfolding spirit. My family are greatly respected in the neighbourhood, but I personally have always looked upon them as a gang of blood-imbrued plug-uglies. My views on kindness to animals are rigid. My impulse, on encountering a rabbit, is to offer it lettuce. To my family, on the other hand, a rabbit seems incomplete without a deposit of small shot in it. My father, I believe, has cut off more assorted birds in their prime than any other man in the Midlands. A whole morning was spoiled for me last week by the sight of a photograph of him in the
Tatler
, looking rather severely at a dying duck. My elder brother Reginald spreads destruction in every branch of the animal kingdom. And my younger brother Wilfred is, I understand, working his way up to the larger fauna by killing sparrows with an air-gun. Spiritually, one might just as well live in Chicago as at Bludleigh Court.'

'Bludleigh Court?' cried Charlotte.

'The moment I was twenty-one and came into a modest but sufficient inheritance, I left the place and went to London to lead the life literary. The family, of course, were appalled. My uncle Francis, I remember, tried to reason with me for hours. Uncle Francis, you see, used to be a famous big-game hunter. They tell me he has shot more gnus than any other man who ever went to Africa. In fact, until recently he virtually never stopped shooting gnus. Now, I hear, he has developed lumbago and is down at Bludleigh treating it with Riggs's Super-fine Emulsion and sun-baths.'

'But is Bludleigh Court your home?'

'That's right. Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire.'

'But Bludleigh Court belongs to Sir Alexander Bassinger.'

'My name is really Bassinger. I adopted the pen-name of Trefusis to spare the family's feelings. But how do you come to know of the place?'

'I'm going down there next week for a visit. My mother was an old friend of Lady Bassinger.'

Aubrey was astonished. And, being, like all writers of Pastels in Prose, a neat phrase-maker, he said what a small world it was, after all.

'Well, well, well!' he said.

'From what you tell me,' said Charlotte, 'I'm afraid I shall not enjoy my visit. If there's one thing I loathe, it's anything connected with sport.'

'Two minds with but a single thought,' said Aubrey. 'Look here, I'll tell you what. I haven't been near Bludleigh for years, but if you're going there, why, dash it, I'll come too – aye, even though it means meeting my uncle Francis.'

'You will?'

'I certainly will. I don't consider it safe that a girl of your exquisite refinement and sensibility should be dumped down at an abattoir like Bludleigh Court without a kindred spirit to lend her moral stability.'

'What do you mean?'

'I'll tell you.' His voice was grave. 'That house exercises a spell.'

'A what?'

'A spell. A ghastly spell that saps the strongest humanitarian principles. Who knows what effect it might have upon you, should you go there without someone like me to stand by you and guide you in your hour of need?'

'What nonsense!'

'Well, all I can tell you is that once, when I was a boy, a high official of Our Dumb Brothers' League of Mercy arrived there latish on a Friday night, and at two-fifteen on the Saturday afternoon he was the life and soul of an informal party got up for the purpose of drawing one of the local badgers out of an upturned barrel.'

Charlotte laughed merrily.

'The spell will not affect me,' she said.

'Nor me, of course,' said Aubrey. 'But all the same, I would prefer to be by your side, if you don't mind.'

'Mind, Mr Bassinger!' breathed Charlotte softly, and was thrilled to note that at the words and the look with which she accompanied them this man to whom – for, as I say, we Mulliners are quick workers – she had already given her heart, quivered violently. It seemed to her that in those soulful eyes of his she had seen the love-light.

Bludleigh Court, when Charlotte reached it some days later, proved to be a noble old pile of Tudor architecture, situated in rolling parkland and flanked by pleasant gardens leading to a lake with a tree-fringed boathouse. Inside, it was comfortably furnished and decorated throughout with groves of glass cases containing the goggle-eyed remnants of birds and beasts assassinated at one time or another by Sir Alexander Bassinger and his son, Reginald. From every wall there peered down with an air of mild reproach selected portions of the gnus, moose, elks, zebus, antelopes, giraffes, mountain goats and wapiti which had had the misfortune to meet Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake before lumbago spoiled him for the chase. The cemetery also included a few stuffed sparrows, which showed that little Wilfred was doing his bit.

The first two days of her visit Charlotte passed mostly in the society of Colonel Pashley-Drake, the uncle Francis to whom Aubrey had alluded. He seemed to have taken a paternal fancy to her: and, lithely though she dodged down back-stairs and passages, she generally found him breathing heavily at her side. He was a red-faced, almost circular man, with eyes like a prawn's, and he spoke to her freely of lumbago, gnus and Aubrey.

'So you're a friend of my young nephew?' he said, snorting twice in a rather unpleasant manner. It was plain that he disapproved of the pastel-artist. 'Shouldn't see too much of him, if I were you. Not the sort of fellow I'd like any daughter of mine to get friendly with.'

'You are quite wrong,' said Charlotte warmly. 'You have only to gaze into Mr Bassinger's eyes to see that his morals are above reproach.'

'I never gaze into his eyes,' replied Colonel Pashley-Drake. 'Don't like his eyes. Wouldn't gaze into them if you paid me. I maintain his whole outlook on life is morbid and unwholesome. I like a man to be a clean, strong, upstanding Englishman who can look his gnu in the face and put an ounce of lead in it.'

'Life,' said Charlotte coldly, 'is not all gnus.'

'You imply that there are also wapiti, moose, zebus and mountain goats?' said Sir Francis. 'Well, maybe you're right. All the same, I'd give the fellow a wide berth, if I were you.'

'So far from doing so,' replied Charlotte proudly, 'I am about to go for a stroll with him by the lake at this very moment.'

And, turning away with a petulant toss of her head, she moved off to meet Aubrey, who was hurrying towards her across the terrace.

'I am so glad you came, Mr Bassinger,' she said to him as they walked together in the direction of the lake. 'I was beginning to find your uncle Francis a little excessive.'

Aubrey nodded sympathetically. He had observed her in conversation with his relative and his heart had gone out to her.

'Two minutes of my uncle Francis,' he said, 'is considered by the best judges a good medium dose for an adult. So you find him trying, eh? I was wondering what impression my family had made on you.'

Charlotte was silent for a moment.

'How relative everything is in this world,' she said pensively. 'When I first met your father, I thought I had never seen anybody more completely loathsome. Then I was introduced to your brother Reginald, and I realized that, after all, your father might have been considerably worse. And, just as I was thinking that Reginald was the furthest point possible, along came your uncle Francis, and Reginald's quiet charm seemed to leap out at me like a beacon on a dark night. Tell me,' she said, 'has no one ever thought of doing anything about your uncle Francis?'

Aubrey shook his head gently.

'It is pretty generally recognized now that he is beyond the reach of human science. The only thing to do seems to be to let him go on till he eventually runs down.'

They sat together on a rustic bench overlooking the water. It was a lovely morning. The sun shone on the little wavelets which the sighing breeze drove gently to the shore. A dreamy stillness had fallen on the world, broken only by the distant sound of Sir Alexander Bassinger murdering magpies, of Reginald Bassinger encouraging dogs to eviscerate a rabbit, of Wilfred busy among the sparrows, and a monotonous droning noise from the upper terrace, which was Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake telling Lady Bassinger what to do with the dead gnu.

Aubrey was the first to break the silence.

'How lovely the world is, Miss Mulliner.'