Mulliner Nights (11 page)

And,
similarly, when the question confronting him is how to collect strawberries in
December, the best plan is obviously to seek out that one of his acquaintances
who has the most established reputation for giving expensive parties.

This, Mervyn
considered, was beyond a doubt Oofy Prosser. Thinking back, he could recall a
dozen occasions when he had met chorus-girls groping their way along the street
with a dazed look in their eyes, and when he had asked them what the matter was
they had explained that they were merely living over again the exotic delights
of the party Oofy Prosser had given last night. If anybody knew how to get
strawberries in December, it would be Oofy.

He called,
accordingly, at the latter’s apartment, and found him in bed, staring at the
ceiling and moaning in an undertone.

‘Hullo!’ said
Mervyn. ‘You look a bit red-eyed, old corpse.

‘I feel
red-eyed,’ said Oofy. ‘And I wish, if it isn’t absolutely necessary, that you
wouldn’t come charging in here early in the morning like this. By about ten o’clock
to-night, I imagine, if I take great care of myself and keep quite quiet, I
shall once more be in a position to look at gargoyles without wincing; but at
the moment the mere sight of your horrible face gives me an indefinable
shuddering feeling.’

‘Did you have
a party last night?’

‘I did.’

‘I wonder if
by any chance you had strawberries?’

Oofy Prosser
gave a g sort of quiver and shut his eyes. He seemed to be wrestling with some
powerful emotion. Then the spasm passed, and he spoke.

‘Don’t talk
about the beastly things,’ he said. ‘I never want to see strawberries again in
my life. Nor lobster, caviare, pâté de fois gras, prawns in aspic, or anything
remotely resembling Bronx cocktails, Martinis, Side-Cars, Lizard’s Breaths, All
Quiet on the Western Fronts, and any variety of champagne, whisky, brandy,
chartreuse, benedictine, and curaçoa.’

Mervyn nodded
sympathetically.

‘I know just
how you feel, old man,’ he said. ‘And I hate to have to press the point. But I
happen — for purposes which I will not reveal — to require about a dozen
strawberries.’

‘Then go and
buy them, blast you,’ said Oofy, turning his face to the wall.

‘Can
you
buy strawberries in December?’

‘Certainly.
Bellamy’s in Piccadilly have them.’

‘Are they
frightfully expensive?’ asked Mervyn, feeling in his pocket and fingering the
one pound, two shillings and three-pence which had got to last him to the end
of the quarter when his allowance came in. ‘Do they cost a fearful lot?’

‘Of course
not. They’re dirt cheap.’

Mervyn heaved
a relieved sigh.

‘I don’t
suppose I pay more than a pound apiece — or at most, thirty shillings — for
mine,’ said Oofy. ‘You can get quite a lot for fifty quid.’

Mervyn uttered
a hollow groan.

‘Don’t gargle,’
said Oofy. ‘Or, if you must gargle, gargle outside.’

‘Fifty quid?’
said Mervyn.

‘Fifty or a
hundred, I forget which. My man attends to these things.’

Mervyn looked
at him in silence. He was trying to decide whether the moment had arrived to
put Oofy into circulation.

In the matter
of borrowing money, my cousin’s son, Mervyn, was shrewd and level-headed. He
had vision. At an early date he had come to the conclusion that it would be
foolish to fritter away a fellow like Oofy in a series of ten bobs and quids.
The prudent man, he felt, when he has an Oofy Prosser on his list, nurses him
along till he feels the time is ripe for one of those quick
Send-me-two-hundred-by-messenger-old-man-or-my-head-goes-in-the-gas-oven
touches. For years accordingly, he had been saving Oofy up for some really big
emergency.

And the point
he had to decide was: Would there ever be a bigger emergency than this? That
was what he asked himself.

Then it came
home to him that Oofy was not in the mood. The way it seemed to Mervyn was
that, if Oofy’s mother had crept to Oofy’s bedside at this moment and tried to
mace him for as much as five bob, Oofy would have risen and struck her with the
bromo-seltzer bottle.

With a soft
sigh, therefore, he gave up the idea and oozed out of the room and downstairs
into Piccadilly.

Piccadilly
looked pretty mouldy to Mervyn. It was full, he tells me, of people and other
foul things. He wandered along for a while in a distrait way, and then suddenly
out of the corner of his eye he became aware that he was in the presence of
fruit. A shop on the starboard side was full of it, and he discovered that he
was standing outside Bellamy’s.

And what is
more, there, nestling in a basket in the middle of a lot of cotton-wool and
blue paper, was a platoon of strawberries.

And, as he
gazed at them, Mervyn began to see how this thing could be worked with the
minimum of discomfort and the maximum of profit to all concerned. He had just
remembered that his maternal uncle Joseph had an account at Bellamy’s.

The next
moment he had bounded through the door and was in conference with one of the
reduced duchesses who do the fruit-selling at this particular emporium. This
one, Mervyn tells me, was about six feet high and looked down at him with
large, haughty eyes in a derogatory manner — being, among other things, dressed
from stem to stern in black satin. He was conscious of a slight chill, but he
carried on according to plan.

‘Good morning,’
he said, switching on a smile and then switching it off again as he caught her
eye. ‘Do you sell fruit?’

If she had
answered ‘No,’ he would, of course, have been nonplussed. But she did not. She
inclined her head proudly.

‘Quate,’ she
said.

‘That’s fine,’
said Mervyn heartily. ‘Because fruit happens to be just what I’m after.’

‘Quate.’

‘I want that
basket of strawberries in the window.’

‘Quate.’

She reached
for them and started to wrap them up. She did not seem to enjoy doing it. As
she tied the string, her brooding look deepened. Mervyn thinks she may have had
some great love tragedy in her life.

‘Send them to
the Earl of Blotsam, 66A, Berkeley Square, ‘said Mervyn, alluding to his
maternal uncle Joseph.

‘Quate.’

‘On second
thoughts,’ said Mervyn, ‘no. I’ll take them with me. Save trouble. Hand them
over, and send the bill to Lord Blotsam.’

This,
naturally, was the crux or nub of the whole enterprise. And to Mervyn’s
concern, his suggestion did not seem to have met with the ready acceptance for
which he had hoped. He had looked for the bright smile, the courteous
inclination of the head. Instead of which, the girl looked doubtful.

‘You desi-ah
to remove them in person?’

‘Quate,’ said
Mervyn.

‘Podden me,’
said the girl, suddenly disappearing.

She was not
away long. In fact, Mervyn, roaming hither and thither about the shop, had
barely had time to eat three or four dates and a custard apple, when she was
with him once more.

And now she
was wearing a look of definite disapproval, like a duchess who has found half a
caterpillar in the castle salad.

‘His lordship
informs me that he desi-ahs no strawberries.’

‘Eh?’

‘I have been
in telephonic communication with his lordship and he states explicitly that he
does not desi-ah strawberries.’

Mervyn gave a
little at the knees, but he came back stoutly.

‘Don’t you
listen to what he says,’ he urged. ‘He’s always kidding. That’s the sort of
fellow he is. Just a great big happy schoolboy. Of course he desi-ahs
strawberries. He told me so himself. I’m his nephew.’

Good stuff, he
felt, but it did not seem to be getting over. He caught a glimpse of the girl’s
face, and it was definitely cold and hard and proud. However, he gave a
careless laugh, just to show that his heart was in the right place, and seized
the basket.

‘Ha, ha!’ he
tittered lightly, and started for the street at something midway between a
saunter and a gallop.

And he had not
more than reached the open spaces when he heard the girl give tongue behind
him.

‘EEEE — EEEE —
EEEE — EEEE — EEEEEEEEEEE!’ she said, in substance.

Now, you must
remember that all this took place round about the hour of noon, when every
young fellow is at his lowest and weakest and the need for the twelve o’clock
bracer has begun to sap his morale pretty considerably. With a couple of quick
cold ones under his vest, Mervyn would, no doubt, have faced the situation and
carried it off with an air. He would have raised his eyebrows. He would have
been nonchalant and lit a Murad. But, coming on him in his reduced condition,
this fearful screech unnerved him completely.

The duchess
had now begun to cry ‘Stop thief!’ and Mervyn, most injudiciously, instead of
keeping his head and leaping carelessly into a passing taxi, made the grave
strategic error of picking up his feet with a jerk and starting to run along
Piccadilly.

Well,
naturally, that did him no good at all. Eight hundred people appeared from
nowhere, willing hands gripped his collar and the seat of his trousers, and the
next thing he knew he was cooling off in Vine Street Police Station.

After that,
everything was more or less of a blur. The scene seemed suddenly to change to a
police-court, in which he was confronted by a magistrate who looked like an owl
with a dash of weasel blood in him.

A dialogue
then-took place, of which all he recalls is this:

POLICEMAN
: ‘Earing cries of ‘Stop thief!’ your
worship, and observing the accused running very ‘earty, I apprehended ‘im.

MAGISTRATE
: How did he appear, when
apprehended?

POLICEMAN
: Very apprehensive, your worship.

MAGISTRATE
: You mean he had a sort of pinched
look?

(Laughter in
court.)

POLICEMAN
: It then transpired that ‘e ‘ad been
attempting to purloin strawberries.

MAGISTRATE
: He seems to have got the raspberry.

(Laughter in
court.)

Well, what
have you to say, young man?

MERVYN
: Oh, ah!

MAGISTRATE
: More ‘owe’ than ‘ah’, I fear.

(Laughter in
court, in which his worship joined.)

Ten pounds or
fourteen days.

Well, you can
see how extremely unpleasant this must have been for my cousin’s son.
Considered purely from the dramatic angle, the magistrate had played him right
off the stage, hogging all the comedy and getting the sympathy of the audience
from the start; and, apart from that, here he was, nearing the end of the
quarter, with all his allowance spent except one pound, two and threepence,
suddenly called upon to pay ten pounds or go to durance Vile for a matter of
two weeks.

There was only
one course before him. His sensitive soul revolted at the thought of
languishing in a dungeon for a solid fortnight, so it was imperative that he
raise the cash somewhere. And the only way of raising it that he could think of
was to apply to his uncle, Lord Blotsam.

So he sent a
messenger round to Berkeley Square, explaining that he was in jail and hoping
his uncle was the same, and presently a letter was brought back by the butler,
containing ten pounds in postal orders, the Curse of the Blotsams, a third-class
ticket to Blotsarn Regis in Shropshire and instructions that, as soon as they
smote the fetters from his wrists, he was to take the first train there and go
and stay at Blotsam Castle till further notice.

Because at the
castle, his uncle said in a powerful passage, even a blasted pimply pop-eyed
good-for-nothing scallywag and nincompoop like his nephew couldn’t get into
mischief and disgrace the family name.

And in this,
Mervyn tells me, there was a good deal of rugged sense. Blotsam Castle, a noble
pile, is situated at least half a dozen miles from anywhere, and the only time
anybody ever succeeded in disgracing the family name, while in residence, was
back in the reign of Edward the Confessor, when the then Earl of Blotsam,
having lured a number of neighbouring landowners into the banqueting hall on
the specious pretence of standing them mulled sack, had proceeded to murder one
and all with a baffle-axe — subsequently cutting their heads off and — un
rather loud taste — sticking them on spikes along the outer battlements.

So Mervyn went
down to Blotsam Regis and started to camp at the castle, and it was not long,
he tells me, before he began to find the time hanging a little heavy on his
hands. For a couple of days he managed to endure the monotony, occupying
himself in carving the girl’s initials on the immemorial elms with a heart
round them. But on the third morning, having broken his Boy Scout pocket-knife,
he was at something of a loose end. And to fill in the time he started on a
moody stroll through the messuages and pleasances, feeling a good deal cast
down.

After pacing
hither and thither for a while, thinking of the girl Clarice, he came to a
series of hothouses. And, it being extremely cold, with an east wind that went
through his plus-fours like a javelin, he thought it would make an agreeable
change if he were to go inside where it was warm and smoke two or perhaps three
cigarettes.

And, scarcely
had he got past the door, when he found he was almost entirely surrounded by strawberries.
There they were, scores of them, all hot and juicy.

For a moment,
he tells me, Mervyn had a sort of idea that a miracle had occurred. He seemed
to remember a similar thing having happened to the Israelites in the desert —
that time, he reminded me, when they were all saying to each other how well a
spot of manna would go down and what a dashed shame it was they hadn’t any
manna and that was the slipshod way the commissariat department ran things and
they wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a case of graft in high places, and
then suddenly out of a blue sky all the manna they could do with and enough
over for breakfast next day.