He was aware of Annabelle standing beside him.
‘Eh?’ he said, starting.
‘I was saying: “Have you plenty of cigarettes?”’
‘Plentry, thank you.’
‘Good. And of course there will be a box in your room. Men always like to smoke in their bedrooms, don’t they? As a matter of fact, two boxes – Turkish and Virginian. Father put them there specially.’
‘Very kind of him,’ said Mordred mechanically.
He relapsed into a moody silence, and they drove off.
It would be agreeable (said Mr Mulliner) if, having shown you my nephew so gloomy, so apprehensive, so tortured with dark forebodings at this juncture, I were able now to state that the hearty English welcome of Sir Murgatroyd and Lady Sprockett-Sprockett on his arrival at the Hall cheered him up and put new life into him. Nothing, too, would give me greater pleasure than to say that he found, on encountering the dreaded Biffies and Guffies, that they were negligible little runts with faces incapable of inspiring affection in any good woman.
But I must adhere rigidly to the facts. Genial, even effusive, though his host and hostess showed themselves, their cordiality left him cold. And, so far from his rivals being weeds, they were one and all models of manly beauty, and the spectacle of their obvious worship of Annabelle cut my nephew like a knife.
And on top of all this there was Smattering Hall itself.
Smattering Hall destroyed Mordred’s last hope. It was one of those vast edifices, so common throughout the countryside of England, whose original founders seem to have budgeted for families of twenty-five or so and a domestic staff of not less than a hundred. ‘Home isn’t home,’ one can picture them saying to themselves, ‘unless you have plenty of elbow room.’ And so this huge, majestic pile had come into being. Romantic persons, confronted with it, thought of knights in armour riding forth to the Crusades. More earthy individuals felt that it must cost a packet to keep up. Mordred’s reaction on passing through the front door was a sort of sick sensation, a kind of settled despair.
How, he asked himself, even assuming that by some miracle he succeeded in fighting his way to her heart through all these Biffies and Guffies, could he ever dare to take Annabelle from a home like this? He had quite satisfactory private means, of course, and would be able, when married, to give up the bachelor flat and spread himself to something on a bigger scale – possibly, if sufficiently bijou, even a desirable residence in the Mayfair district. But after Smattering Hall would not Annabelle feel like a sardine in the largest of London houses?
Such were the dark thoughts that raced through Mordred’s brain before, during and after dinner. At eleven o’clock he pleaded fatigue after his journey, and Sir Murgatroyd accompanied him to his room, anxious, like a good host, to see that everything was comfortable.
‘Very sensible of you to turn in early,’ he said, in his bluff, genial way. ‘So many young men ruin their health with late hours. Now you, I imagine, will just get into a dressing-gown and smoke a cigarette or two and have the light out by twelve. You have plenty of cigarettes? I told them to see that you were well supplied. I always think the bedroom smoke is the best one of the day. Nobody to disturb you, and all that. If you want to write letters or anything, there is lots of paper, and here is the wastepaper basket, which is always so necessary. Well, good night, my boy, good night.’
The door closed, and Mordred, as foreshadowed, got into a dressing-gown and lit a cigarette. But though, having done this, he made his way to the writing-table, it was not with any idea of getting abreast of his correspondence. It was his purpose to compose a poem to Annabelle Sprockett-Sprockett. He had felt it seething within him all the evening, and sleep would be impossible until it was out of his system.
Hitherto, I should mention, my nephew’s poetry, for he belonged to the modern fearless school, had always been stark and rhymeless and had dealt principally with corpses and the smell of cooking cabbage. But now, with the moonlight silvering the balcony outside, he found that his mind had become full of words like ‘love’ and ‘dove’ and ‘eyes’ and ‘summer skies.’
Blue eyes, wrote Mordred . . .
Sweet lips, wrote Mordred . . .
Oh, eyes like skies of summer blue . . .
Oh, love . . .
Oh, dove . . .
Oh, lips . . .
With a muttered ejaculation of chagrin he tore the sheet across and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
Blue eyes that burn into my soul,
Sweet lips that smile my heart away,
Pom-pom, pom-pom, pom something whole (Goal?)
And tiddly-iddly-umpty-ay (Gay? Say? Happy-day?)
Blue eyes into my soul that burn,
Sweet lips that smile away my heart,
Oh, something something turn or yearn
And something something something part.
You burn into my soul, blue eyes,
You smile my heart away, sweet lips,
Short long short long of summer skies
And something something something trips.
(Hips? Ships? Pips?)
He threw the sheet into the wastepaper basket and rose with a stifled oath. The wastepaper basket was nearly full now, and still his poet’s sense told him that he had not achieved perfection. He thought he saw the reason for this. You can’t just sit in a chair and expect inspiration to flow – you want to walk about and clutch your hair and snap your fingers. It had been his intention to pace the room, but the moonlight pouring in through the open window called to him. He went out on to the balcony. It was but a short distance to the dim, mysterious lawn. Impulsively he dropped from the stone balustrade.
The effect was magical. Stimulated by the improved conditions, his Muse gave quick service, and this time he saw at once that she had rung the bell and delivered the goods. One turn up and down the lawn, and he was reciting as follows:
TO ANNABELLE
Oh, lips that smile! Oh, eyes that shine
Like summer skies, or stars above!
Your beauty maddens me like wine,
Oh, umpty-pumpty-tumty love!
And he was just wondering, for he was a severe critic of his own work, whether that last line couldn’t be polished up a bit, when his eye was attracted by something that shone like summer skies or stars above and, looking more closely, he perceived that his bedroom curtains were on fire.
Now, I will not pretend that my nephew Mordred was in every respect that cool-headed man of action, but this happened to be a situation with which use had familiarized him. He knew the procedure.
‘Fire!’ he shouted.
A head appeared in an upstairs window. He recognized it as that of Captain Biffing.
‘Eh?’ said Captain Biffing.
‘Fire!’
‘What?’
‘Fire!’ vociferated Mordred. ‘F for Francis, I for Isabel . . .’
‘Oh, fire?’ said Captain Biffing. ‘Right ho.’
And presently the house began to discharge its occupants.
In the proceedings which followed, Mordred, I fear, did not appear to the greatest advantage. This is an age of specialization, and if you take the specialist off his own particular ground he is at a loss. Mordred’s genius, as we have seen, lay in the direction of starting fires. Putting them out called for quite different qualities, and these he did not possess. On the various occasions of holocausts at his series of flats, he had never attempted to play an active part, contenting himself with going downstairs and asking the janitor to step up and see what he could do about it. So now, though under the bright eyes of Annabelle Sprockett-Sprockett he would have given much to be able to dominate the scene, the truth is that the Biffies and Guffies simply played him off the stage.
His heart sank as he noted the hideous efficiency of these young men. They called for buckets. They formed a line. Freddie Boot leaped lissomely on to the balcony, and Algy Fripp, mounted on a wheel-barrow, handed up to him the necessary supplies. And after Mor
dred, trying to do his bit, had tripped up Jack Guffington and upset two buckets over Ted Prosser, he was advised in set terms to withdraw into the background and stay there.
It was a black ten minutes for the unfortunate young man. One glance at Sir Murgatroyd’s twisted face as he watched the operations was enough to tell him how desperately anxious the fine old man was for the safety of his ancestral home and how bitter would be his resentment against the person who had endangered it. And the same applied to Lady Sprockett-Sprockett and Annabelle. Mordred could see the anxiety in their eyes, and the thought that ere long those eyes must be turned accusingly on him chilled him to the marrow.
Presently Freddie Boot emerged from the bedroom to announce that all was well.
‘It’s out,’ he said, jumping lightly down. ‘Anybody know whose room it was?’
Mordred felt a sickening qualm, but the splendid Mulliner courage sustained him. He stepped forward, white and tense.
‘Mine,’ he said.
He became the instant centre of attention. The six young men looked at him.
‘Yours?’
‘Oh, yours, was it?’
‘What happened?’
‘How did it start?’
‘Yes, how did it start?’
‘Must have started somehow, I mean,’ said Captain Biffing, who was a clear thinker. ‘I mean to say, must have, don’t you know, what?’
Mordred mastered his voice.
‘I was smoking, and I suppose I threw my cigarette into the wastepaper basket, and as it was full of paper . . .’
‘Full of paper? Why was it full of paper?’
‘I had been writing a poem.’
There was a stir of bewilderment.
‘A what?’ said Ted Prosser.
‘Writing a what?’ said Jack Guffington.
‘Writing a poem?’ asked Captain Biffing of Tommy Mainprice.
‘That’s how I got the story,’ said Tommy Mainprice, plainly shaken.
‘Chap was writing a poem,’ Freddie Boot informed Algy Fripp.
‘You mean the chap writes poems?’
‘That’s right. Poems.’
‘Well, I’m dashed!’
‘Well, I’m blowed!’
Their now unconcealed scorn was hard to bear. Mordred chafed beneath it. The word ‘poem’ was flitting from lip to lip, and it was only too evident that, had there been an ‘s’ in the word, those present would have hissed it. Reason told him that these men were mere clods, Philistines, fatheads who would not recognize the rare and the beautiful if you handed it to them on a skewer, but that did not seem to make it any better. He knew that he should be scorning them, but it is not easy to go about scorning people in a dressing-gown, especially if you have no socks on and the night breeze is cool around the ankles. So, as I say, he chafed. And finally, when he saw the butler bend down with pursed lips to the ear of the cook, who was a little hard of hearing, and after a contemptuous glance in his direction speak into it, spacing his syllables carefully, something within him seemed to snap.
‘I regret, Sir Murgatroyd,’ he said, ‘that urgent family business compels me to return to London immediately. I shall be obliged to take the first train in the morning.’
Without another word he went into the house.
In the matter of camping out in devastated areas my nephew had, of course, become by this time an old hand. It was rarely nowadays that a few ashes and cinders about the place disturbed him. But when he had returned to his bedroom one look was enough to assure him that nothing practical in the way of sleep was to be achieved here. Apart from the unpleasant, acrid smell of burned poetry, the apartment, thanks to the efforts of Freddie Boot, had been converted into a kind of inland sea. The carpet was awash, and on the bed only a duck could have made itself at home.
And so it came about that some ten minutes later Mordred Mulliner lay stretched upon a high-backed couch in the library, endeavouring by means of counting sheep jumping through a gap in a hedge to lull himself into unconsciousness.
But sleep refused to come. Nor in his heart had he really thought that it would. When the human soul is on the rack, it cannot just curl up and close its eyes and expect to get its eight hours as if nothing had happened. It was all very well for Mordred to count sheep, but what did this profit him when each sheep in turn assumed the features and lineaments of Annabelle Sprockett-Sprockett and, what was more, gave him a reproachful glance as it drew itself together for the spring?
Remorse gnawed him. He was tortured by a wild regret for what might have been. He was not saying that with all these Biffies and Guffies in the field he had ever had more than a hundred to eight chance of winning that lovely girl, but at least his hat had been in the ring. Now it was definitely out. Dreamy Mordred may have been – romantic – impractical – but he had enough sense to see that the very worst thing you can do when you are trying to make a favourable impression on the adored object is to set fire to her childhood home, every stick and stone of which she has no doubt worshipped since they put her into rompers.
He had reached this point in his meditations, and was about to send his two hundred and thirty-second sheep at the gap, when with a suddenness which affected him much as an explosion of gelignite would have done, the lights flashed on. For an instant, he lay quivering, then, cautiously poking his head round the corner of the couch, he looked to see who his visitors were.
It was a little party of three that had entered the room. First came Sir Murgatroyd, carrying a tray of sandwiches. He was followed by Lady Sprockett-Sprockett with a syphon and glasses. The rear was brought up by Annabelle, who was bearing a bottle of whisky and two dry ginger ales.
So evident was it that they were assembling here for purposes of a family council that, but for one circumstance, Mordred, to whom anything in the nature of eavesdropping was as repugnant as it has always been to all the Mulliners, would have sprung up with a polite ‘Excuse me’ and taken his blanket elsewhere. This circumstance was the fact that on lying down he had kicked his slippers under the couch, well out of reach. The soul of modesty, he could not affront Annabelle with the spectacle of his bare toes.
So he lay there in silence, and silence, broken only by the swishing of soda-water and the whoosh of opened ginger-ale bottles, reigned in the room beyond.
Then Sir Murgatroyd spoke.
‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, bleakly.
There was a gurgle as Lady Sprockett-Sprockett drank ginger ale. Then her quiet, well-bred voice broke the pause.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is the end.’
‘The end,’ agreed Sir Murgatroyd heavily. ‘No good trying to struggle on against luck like ours. Here we are and here we have got to stay, mouldering on in this blasted barrack of a place which eats up every penny of my income when, but for the fussy interference of that gang of officious, ugly nitwits, there would have been nothing left of it but a pile of ashes, with a man from the Insurance Company standing on it with his fountain-pen, writing cheques. Curse those imbeciles! Did you see that young Fripp with those buckets?’
‘I did, indeed,’ sighed Lady Sprockett-Sprockett.
‘Annabelle,’ said Sir Murgatroyd sharply.
‘Yes, Father?’
‘It has seemed to me lately, watching you with a father’s eye, that you have shown signs of being attracted by young Algernon Fripp. Let me tell you that if ever you allow yourself to be ensnared by his insidious wiles, or by those of William Biffing, John Guffington, Edward Prosser, Thomas Mainprice or Frederick Boot, you will do so over my dead body. After what occurred tonight, those young men shall never darken my door again. They and their buckets! To think that we could have gone and lived in London . . .’
‘In a nice little flat . . .’ said Lady Sprockett-Sprockett.
‘Handy for my club . . .’
‘Convenient for the shops . . .’
‘Within a stone’s throw of the theatres . . .’
‘Seeing all our friends . . .’
&nb
sp; ‘Had it not been,’ said Sir Murgatroyd, summing up, ‘for the pestilential activities of these Guffingtons, these Biffings, these insufferable Fripps, men who ought never to be trusted near a bucket of water when a mortgaged country-house has got nicely alight. I did think,’ proceeded the stricken man, helping himself to a sandwich, ‘that when Annabelle, with a ready intelligence which I cannot overpraise, realized this young Mulliner’s splendid gifts and made us ask him down here, the happy ending was in sight. What Smattering Hall has needed for generations has been a man who throws his cigarette-ends into wastepaper baskets. I was convinced that here at last was the angel of mercy we required.’
‘He did his best, Father.’
‘No man could have done more,’ agreed Sir Murgatroyd cordially. ‘The way he upset those buckets and kept getting entangled in people’s legs. Very shrewd. It thrilled me to see him. I don’t know when I’ve met a young fellow I liked and respected more. And what if he is a poet? Poets are all right. Why, dash it, I’m a poet myself. At the last dinner of the Loyal Sons of Worcestershire I composed a poem which, let me tell you, was pretty generally admired. I read it out to the boys over the port, and they cheered me to the echo. It was about a young lady of Bewdley, who sometimes behaved rather rudely . . .’
‘Not before Mother, Father.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. Well, I’m off to bed. Come along, Aurelia. You coming, Annabelle?’
‘Not yet, Father. I want to stay and think.’
‘Do what?’
‘Think.’
‘Oh, think? Well, all right.’
‘But, Murgatroyd,’ said Lady Sprockett-Sprockett, ‘is there no hope? After all, there are plenty of cigarettes in the house, and we could always give Mr Mulliner another wastepaper basket . . .’
‘No good. You heard him say he was leaving by the first train tomorrow. When I think that we shall never see that splendid young man again . . . Why, hullo, hullo, hullo, what’s this? Crying, Annabelle?’