Mulliner Nights (20 page)

Ten minutes
later he had reached the conclusion that life without Evangeline Pembury would
be a blank.

And yet he had
hesitated before laying his heart at her feet. She looked all right. She seemed
all right. Quite possibly she
was
all right. But before proposing he had
to be sure. He had to make certain that there was no danger of her suddenly
producing a manuscript fastened in the top left corner with pink silk and
asking his candid opinion of it. Everyone has his pet aversion. Some dislike
slugs, others cockroaches. Egbert Mulliner disliked female novelists.

And so now, as
they stood together in the moonlight, he said:

‘Tell me, have
you ever written a
novel?’ She seemed surprised.

‘A novel? No.’

‘Short
stories, perhaps?’

‘No.’

Egbert lowered
his voice.

‘Poems?’ he
whispered, hoarsely.

‘No.’

Egbert
hesitated no longer. He produced his soul like a conjurer extracting a rabbit
from a hat and slapped it down before her. He told her of his love, stressing
its depth, purity, and lasting qualities. He begged, pleaded, rolled his eyes,
and clasped her little hand in his. And when, pausing for a reply, he found
that she had been doing a lot of thinking along the same lines and felt much
the same about him as he did about her, he nearly fell. over backwards. It
seemed to him that his cup of joy was full.

It is, odd how
love will affect different people. It caused Egbert next morning to go out on
the links and do the first mine in one over bogey. Whereas Evangeline, finding
herself filled with a strange ferment which demanded immediate outlet, sat down
at a little near-Chippendale table, ate five marshmallows, and began to write
a novel.

Three weeks of
the sunshine and ozone of Burwash Bay had toned up Egbert’s system to the point
where his medical adviser felt that it would be safe for him to go back to
London and resume his fearful trade. Evangeline followed him a month later. She
arrived home at four-fifteen on a sunny afternoon, and at
four-sixteen-and-a-half Egbert shot through the door with the love-light in his
eyes.

‘Evangeline!’

‘Egbert!’

But we will
not dwell on the ecstasies of the reunited lovers. We will proceed to the point
where Evangeline raised her head from Egbert’s shoulder and uttered a little
giggle. One would prefer to say that she gave a light laugh. But it was not a
light laugh. It was a giggle — a furtive, sinister, shamefaced giggle, which
froze Egbert’s blood with a nameless fear. He stared at her, and she giggled
again.

‘Egbert,’ she
said, ‘I want to tell you something.’

‘Yes?’ said
Egbert.

Evangeline
giggled once more.

‘I know it
sounds too silly for words,’ she said, ‘but—’

‘Yes? Yes?’

‘I’ve written
a novel, Egbert.’

In the old
Greek tragedies it was a recognized rule that any episode likely to excite the
pity and terror of the audience to too great an extent must be enacted behind
the scenes. Strictly speaking, therefore, this scene should be omitted. But the
modern public can stand more than the ancient Greeks, so it had better remain
on the records.

The room
stopped swimming before Egbert Mulliner’s tortured eyes. Gradually the piano,
the chairs, the pictures, and the case of stuffed birds on the mantelpiece
resumed their normal positions. He found speech.

‘You’ve
written a novel?’ he said, dully.

‘Well, I’ve
got to chapter twenty-four.’

‘You’ve got to
chapter twenty-four?’

‘And the rest
will be easy.

‘The rest will
be easy?’

Silence fell
for a space — a
silence broken only by Egbert’s laboured breathing. Then
Evangeline spoke impulsively.

‘Oh, Egbert!’
she cried. ‘I really do think some of it is rather good. I’ll read it to you
now.

How strange it
is, when some great tragedy has come upon us, to look back at the comparatively
mild beginnings of our misfortunes and remember how we thought then that Fate
had done its worst. Egbert, that afternoon, fancied that he had plumbed the
lowest depths of misery and anguish. Evangeline, he told himself, had fallen
from the pedestal on which he had set her. She had revealed herself as a secret
novel-writer. It was the limit, he felt, the extreme edge. It put the tin hat
on things.

It was, alas!
nothing of the kind. It bore the same resemblance to the limit that the first
drop of rain bears to the thunderstorm.

The mistake
was a pardonable one. The acute agony which he suffered that afternoon was more
than sufficient excuse for Egbert Mulliner’s blunder in supposing that he had
drained the bitter cup to the dregs. He writhed, as he listened to this thing
which she had entitled ‘Parted Ways’, unceasingly. It tied his very soul in
knots.

Evangeline’s
novel was a horrible, an indecent production. Not in the sense that it would be
likely to bring a blush to any cheek but his, but because she had put on paper
in bald words every detail of the only romance that had ever come under her
notice — her own. There it was, his entire courtship, including the first holy
kiss and not omitting the quarrel which they had had within two days of the
engagement. In the novel she had elaborated this quarrel, which in fact had
lasted twenty-three minutes, into a ten years’ estrangement — thus justifying
the title and preventing the story finishing in the first five thousand words.
As for his proposal, that was inserted
verbatim;
and, as he listened,
Egbert shuddered to think that he could have polluted the air with such
frightful horse-radish.

He marvelled,
as many a man has done before and will again, how women can do these things.
Listening to ‘Parted Ways’ made him, personally, feel as if he had suddenly
lost his trousers while strolling ‘along Piccadilly.

Something of
these feelings he would have liked to put into words, but the Mulliners are
famous for their chivalry. He would, he imagined, feel a certain shame if he
ever hit Evangeline or walked on her face in thick shoes; but that shame would
be as nothing to the shame he would feel if he spoke one millimetre of what he
thought about ‘Parted Ways’.

‘Great!’ he
croaked.

Her eyes were
shining.

‘Do you really
think so?’

‘Fine!’

He found it
easier to talk in monosyllables.

‘I don’t
suppose any publisher would buy it,’ said Evangeline. Egbert began to feel a
little better. Nothing, of course, could alter the fact that she had written a
novel; but it might be possible to hush it up.

‘So what I am
going to do is to pay the expenses of publication.’

Egbert did not
reply. He was staring into the middle distance and trying to light a
fountain-pen with an unlighted match.

And Fate
chuckled grimly, knowing that it had only just begun having fun with Egbert.

Once in every
few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great
heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public’s great purse is
emptied to secure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without
advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that
The Licensed
Victuallers’ Gazette
has stated in a two-line review that it is ‘readable’.

The rising
firm of Mainprice and Peabody published a first edition of three hundred copies
of ‘Parted Ways’. And when they found, to their chagrin, that Evangeline was
only going to buy twenty of these — somehow Mainprice, who was an optimist, had
got the idea that she was good for a hundred (‘You can sell them to your
friends’) their only interest in the matter was to keep an eye on the current
quotations for waste paper. The book they were going to make their money on was
Stultitia Bodwin’s ‘Offal’, in connection with which they had arranged in
advance for a newspaper discussion on ‘The Growing Menace of the Sex Motive in
Fiction: Is There to be no Limit?’

Within a month
‘Offal’ was off the map. The newspaper discussion raged before an utterly
indifferent public, which had made one of its quick changes and’ discovered
that it had had ‘enough of sex, and that what it wanted now was good, sweet,
wholesome, tender tales of the pure love of a
man for a maid, which you
could leave lying about and didn’t have to shove under the cushions of the
chesterfield every time you heard your growing boys coming along. And the particular
tale which it selected for its favour was Evangeline’s ‘Parted Ways’.

It is these
swift, unheralded changes of the public mind which make publishers stick straws
in their hair and powerful young novelists rush round to the wholesale grocery
firms to ask if the berth of junior clerk is still open. Up to the very moment
of the Great Switch, sex had been the one safe card. Publishers’ lists were
congested with scarlet tales of Men Who Did and Women Who Shouldn’t Have Done
but Who Took a Pop at It. And now the bottom had dropped out of the market
without a word of warning, and practically the only way in which readers could
gratify their new-born taste for the pure and simple was by fighting for copies
of ‘Parted Ways’.

They fought
like tigers. The offices of Mainprice and Peabody hummed like a hive. Printing
machines worked day and night. From the Butes of Kyle to the rock-bound coasts
of Cornwall, a great cry went up for ‘Parted Ways’. In every home in Ealing
West ‘Parted Ways’ was found on the whatnot, next to the aspidistra and the
family album. Clergymen preached about it, parodists parodied it, stockbrokers
stayed away from Cochran’s Revue to sit at home and cry over it.

Numerous
paragraphs appeared in the Press concerning its probable adaptation into a
play, a musical comedy, and a talking picture. Nigel Playfair was stated to
have bought it for Sybil Thorndike, Sir Alfred Butt for Nellie Wallace. Laddie
Cliff was reported to be planning a musical play based on it, starring Stanley
Lupino and Leslie Henson. It was rumoured that Camera was considering the part
of ‘Percy’, the hero.

And on the
crest of this wave, breathless but happy, rode Evangeline.

And Egbert?
Oh, that’s Egbert, spluttering down in the trough there. We can’t be bothered
about Egbert now.

Egbert,
however, found ample time to be bothered about himself. He passed the days in a
frame of mind which it would be ridiculous to call bewilderment. He was
stunned, overwhelmed, sandbagged. Dimly he realized that considerably more
than a hundred thousand perfect strangers were gloating over the most sacred
secrecies of his private life, and that the exact words of his proposal of
marriage were engraven on considerably over a hundred thousand minds. But,
except that it made him feel as if he were being tarred and feathered in front
of a large and interested audience, he did not mind that so much. What really
troubled him was the alteration in Evangeline.

The human mind
adjusts itself readily to prosperity. Evangeline’s first phase, when celebrity
was new and bewildering, soon passed. The stammering reception of the first
reporter became a memory. At the end of two weeks she was talking to the Press
with the easy nonchalance of a prominent politician, and coming back at
note-book-bearing young men with words which they had to look up in the office
Webster. Her art, she told them, was rhythmical rather than architectural, and
she inclined, if anything, to the school of the surrealists.

She had soared
above Egbert’s low-browed enthusiasms.

When he suggested
motoring out to Addington and putting in a
few holes of golf, she
excused herself. She had letters to answer.

People would
keep writing to her, saying how much ‘Parted Ways’ had helped them, and one had
to be civil to one’s public. Autographs, too. She really could not spare a
moment.

He asked her
to come with him to the Amateur Championship. She shook her head. The date,
she said, clashed with her lecture to the East Dulwich Daughters of Minerva
Literary and Progress Club on ‘Some Tendencies of Modern Fiction’.

All these
things Egbert might have endured, for, despite the fact that she could speak so
lightly of the Amateur Championship, he still loved her dearly. But at this
point there suddenly floated into his life like a cloud of poison-gas the
sinister figure of Jno. Henderson Banks.

‘Who,’ he
asked, suspiciously, one day, as she was giving him ten minutes before hurrying
off to address the Amalgamated Mothers of Manchester on ‘The Novel: Should It
Teach?’ — ‘was that man I saw you coming down the street with?’

‘That wasn’t a
man,’ replied Evangeline. ‘That was my literary agent.’

And so it
proved. Jno. Henderson Banks was now in control of Evangeline’s affairs. This
outstanding blot on the public weal was a sort of human
charlotte russe
with
tortoiseshell-rimmed eye-glasses and a
cooing, reverential manner
towards his female clients. He had a dark, romantic face, a lissom figure, one
of those beastly cravat things that go twice round the neck, and a habit of
beginning his remarks with the words ‘Dear lady’. The last man, in short, whom
a fiancé would wish to have hanging about his betrothed. If Evangeline had to
have a literary agent, the sort of literary agent Egbert would have selected
for her would have been one of those stout, pie-faced literary agents who chew
half-smoked cigars and wheeze as they enter the editorial sanctum.

A jealous
frown flitted across his face.

‘Looked a bit
of a Gawd-help-us to me,’ he said, critically.

‘Mr Banks,’
retorted Evangeline, ‘is a superb main of business.’

‘Oh, yeah?’
said Egbert, sneering visibly. And there for a time the matter rested.

But not for
long. On the following Monday morning Egbert called Evangeline up on the
telephone and asked her to lunch.