Mulliner Nights

  When a column on ‘Myrtle Bootle Among Her Books’ was required, it was Egbert whom he sent out into the No Man’s Land of Bloomsbury. When young Eustace Johnson, a novice who ought never to have been entrusted with such a dangerous commission, was found walking round in circles and bumping his head against the railings of Regent’s Park after twenty minutes with Laura La Motte Grindlay, the great sex novelist, it was Egbert who was flung into the breach. And Egbert came through, wan but unscathed.

  It was during this period that he interviewed Mabelle Graingerson and Mrs Goole-Plank on the same afternoon — a feat which is still spoken of with bated breath in the offices of The Weekly Booklover. And not only in The Booklover offices. To this day ‘Remember Mulliner!’ is the slogan with which every literary editor encourages the faint-hearted who are wincing and hanging back.

  ‘Was Mulliner afraid?’ they say. ‘Did Mulliner quail?’

  And so it came about that when a ‘Chat with Evangeline Pembury’ was needed for the big Christmas Special Number, it was of Egbert that his editor thought first. He sent for him.

  ‘Ah, Mulliner!’

  ‘Well, chief?’

  ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,’ said the editor, ‘but it seems there was once an Irishman, a Scotsman, and a Jew—’

  Then, the formalities inseparable from an interview between editor and assistant concluded, he came down to business.

  ‘Mulliner,’ he said, in that kind, fatherly way of his which endeared him to all his staff, ‘I am going to begin by saying that it is in your power to do a big thing for the dear old paper. But after that I must tell you that, if you wish, you can refuse to do it. You have been through a hard time lately, and if you feel yourself unequal to this task, I shall understand. But the fact is, we have got to have a “Chat with Evangeline Pembury” for our Christmas Special.’

  He saw the young man wince, and nodded sympathetically.

  ‘You think it would be too much for you? I feared as much. They say she is the worst of the lot. Rather haughty and talks about uplift. Well, never mind. I must see what I can do with young Johnson. I hear he has quite recovered now, and is anxious to re-establish himself. Quite. I will send Johnson.’

  Egbert Mulliner was himself again now.

  ‘No, chief,’ he said. ‘I will go.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We shall need a column and a half.’

  ‘You shall have a column and a half’

  The editor turned away, to hide a not unmanly emotion.

  ‘Do it now, Mulliner,’ he said, ‘and get it over.’

  A strange riot of emotion seethed in Egbert Mulliner’s soul as he pressed the familiar bell which he had thought never to press again. Since their estrangement he had seen Evangeline once or twice, but only in the distance. Now he was to meet her face to face. Was he glad or sorry? He could not say. He only knew he loved her still.

  He was in the sitting-room. How cosy it looked, how impregnated with her presence. There was the sofa on which he had so often sat, his arm about her waist— A footstep behind him warned him that the time had come to don the mask. Forcing his features into an interviewer’s hard smile, he turned.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

  She was thinner. Either she had found success wearing, or she had been on the eighteen-day diet. Her beautiful face seemed drawn, and, unless he was mistaken, care-worn.

  He fancied that for an instant her eyes had lit up at the sight of him, but he preserved the formal detachment of a stranger.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Pembury,’ he said. ‘I represent The Weekly Book/over. I understand that my editor has been in communication with you and that you have kindly consented to tell us a few things which may interest our readers regarding your art and aims.’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘Will you take a seat, Mr—?’

  ‘Mulliner,’ said Egbert.

  ‘Mr Mulliner,’ said Evangeline. ‘Do sit down. Yes, I shall be glad to tell you anything you wish.’

  Egbert sat down.

  ‘Are you fond of dogs, Miss Pembury?’ he asked.

  ‘I adore them,’ said Evangeline.

  ‘I should like, a little later, if I may,’ said Egbert, ‘to secure a snapshot of you being kind to a dog. Our readers appreciate these human touches, you understand.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said Evangeline. ‘I will send out for a dog. I love dogs — and flowers.’

  ‘You are happiest among your flowers, no doubt?’

  ‘On the whole, yes.’

  ‘You sometimes think they are the souls of little children who have died in their innocence?’

  ‘Frequently.’

  ‘And now,’ said Egbert, licking the tip of his pencil, ‘perhaps you would tell me something about your ideals. How are the ideals?’

  Evangeline hesitated.

  ‘Oh, they’re fine,’ she said.

  ‘The novel,’ said Egbert, ‘has been described as among this age’s greatest instruments for uplift? How do you check up on that?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Of course, there are novels and novels.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Are you contemplating a successor to “Parted Ways”?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Would it be indiscreet, Miss Pembury, to inquire to what extent it has progressed?’

  ‘Oh, Egbert!’ said Evangeline.

  There are some speeches before which dignity melts like ice in August, resentment takes the full count, and the milk of human kindness surges back into the aching heart as if the dam had burst. Of these, ‘Oh, Egbert!’, especially when accompanied by tears, is one of the most notable.’

  Evangeline’s ‘Oh, Egbert!’ had been accompanied by a Niagara of tears. She had flung herself on the sofa and was now chewing the cushion in an ecstasy of grief. She gulped like a bull-pup swallowing a chunk of steak. And, on the instant, Egbert Mulliner’s adamantine reserve collapsed as if its legs had been knocked from under it. He dived for the sofa. He clasped her hand. He stroked her hair. He squeezed her waist. He patted her shoulder. He massaged her spine.

  ‘Evangeline!’

  ‘Oh, Egbert!’

  The only flaw in Egbert Mulliner’s happiness, as he knelt beside her, babbling comforting words, was the gloomy conviction that Evangeline would certainly lift the entire scene, dialogue and all, and use it in her next novel. And it was for this reason that, when he could manage it, he censored his remarks to some extent.

  But, as he warmed to his work, he forgot caution altogether. She was clinging to him, whispering his name piteously. By the time he had finished, he had committed himself to about two thousand words of a nature calculated to send Mainprice and Peabody screaming with joy about their office.

  He refused to allow himself to worry about it. What of it? He had done his stuff, and if it sold a hundred thousand copies —well, let it sell a hundred thousand copies. Holding Evangeline in his arms, he did not care if he was copyrighted in every language, including the Scandinavian.

  ‘Oh, Egbert!’ said Evangeline.

  ‘My darling!’

  ‘Oh, Egbert, I’m in such trouble.’

  ‘My angel! What is it?’

  Evangeline sat up and tried to dry her eyes.

  ‘It’s Mr Banks.’

  A savage frown darkened Egbert Mulliner’s face. He told himself that he might have foreseen this. A man who wore a tie that went twice round the neck was sure, sooner or later, to inflict some hideous insult on helpless womanhood. Add tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, and you had what practically amounted to a fiend in human shape.

  ‘I’ll murder him,’ he said. ‘I ought to have done it long ago, but one keeps putting these things off. What has he done? Did he force his loathsome attentions on you? Has that tortoiseshell-rimmed satyr been trying to kiss you, or something?’

  ‘He has been fixing me up solid.’

  Egbert blinked.

&n
bsp; ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Fixing me up solid. With the magazines. He has arranged for me to write three serials and I don’t know how many short stories.’

  ‘Getting you contracts, you mean?’

  Evangeline nodded tearfully.

  ‘Yes. He seems to have fixed me up solid with almost everybody. And they’ve been sending me cheques in advance — hundreds of them. What am I to do? Oh, what am I to do?’

  ‘Cash them,’ said Egbert.

  ‘But afterwards?’

  ‘Spend the money.’

  ‘But after that?’

  Egbert reflected.

  ‘Well, it’s a nuisance, of course,’ he said, ‘but after that I suppose you’ll have to write the stuff.’

  Evangeline sobbed like a lost soul.

  ‘But I can’t! I’ve been trying for weeks, and I can’t write anything. And I never shall be able to write anything. I don’t want to write anything. I hate writing. I don’t know what to write about. I wish I were dead.’

  She clung to him.

  ‘I got a letter from him this morning. He has just fixed me up solid with two more magazines.

  Egbert kissed her tenderly. Before he had become an assistant editor, he, too, had been an author, and he understood. It is not the being paid money in advance that jars the sensitive artist: it is the having to work.

  ‘What shall I do?’ cried Evangeline.

  ‘Drop the whole thing,’ said Egbert. ‘Evangeline, do you remember your first drive at golf? I wasn’t there, but I bet it travelled about five hundred yards and you wondered what people meant when they talked about golf being a difficult game. After that, for ages, you couldn’t do anything right. And then, gradually, after years of frightful toil, you began to get the knack of it. It is just the same with writing. You’ve had your first drive, and it has been some smite. Now, if you’re going to stick to it, you’ve got to do the frightful toil. What’s the use? Drop it.’

  ‘And return the money?’

  Egbert shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said, firmly. ‘There you go too far. Stick to the money like glue. Clutch it with both hands. Bury it in the garden and mark the spot with a cross.’

  ‘But what about the stories? Who is going to write them?’

  Egbert smiled a tender smile.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Before I saw the light, I, too, used to write stearine bilge just like “Parted Ways”. When we are married, I shall say to you, if I remember the book of words correctly, “With all my worldly goods I thee endow.” They will include three novels I was never able to kid a publisher into printing, and at least twenty short stories no editor would accept. I give them to you freely. You can have the first of the novels to-night, and we will sit back and watch Mainprice and Peabody sell half a million copies.’

  ‘Oh, Egbert!’ said Evangeline.

  ‘Evangeline!’ said Egbert.

  8 STRYCHNINE IN THE SOUP

  From the moment the Draught Stout entered the bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest, it had been obvious that he was not his usual cheery self. His face was drawn and twisted, and he sat with bowed head in a distant corner by the window, contributing nothing to the conversation which, with Mr Mulliner as its centre, was in progress around the fire. From time to time he heaved a hollow sigh.

  A sympathetic Lemonade and Angostura, puffing down his glass, went across and laid a kindly hand on the sufferer’s shoulder.

  ‘What is it, old man?’ he asked. ‘Lost a friend?’

  ‘Worse,’ said the Draught Stout. A mystery novel. Got halfway through it on the journey down here, and left it in the train.’

  ‘My nephew Cyril, the interior decorator,’ said Mr Mulliner, ‘once did the very same thing. These mental lapses are not infrequent.’

  ‘And now,’ proceeded the Draught Stout, ‘I’m going to have a sleepless night, wondering who poisoned Sir Geoffrey Tuttle, Bart.’

  ‘The Bart was poisoned, was he?’

  ‘You never said a truer word. Personally, I think it was the Vicar who did him in. He was known to be interested in strange poisons.’

  Mr Mulliner smiled indulgently.

  ‘It was not the Vicar,’ he said. ‘I happen to have read “The Murglow Manor Mystery”. The guilty man was the plumber.’

  ‘What plumber?’

  ‘The one who comes in chapter two to mend the shower-bath. Sir Geoffrey had wronged his aunt in the year ‘96, so he fastened a snake in the nozzle of the shower-bath with glue; and when Sir Geoffrey turned on the stream the hot water melted the glue. This released the snake, which dropped through one of the holes, bit the Baronet in the leg, and disappeared down the waste-pipe.’

  ‘But that can’t be right,’ said the Draught Stout. ‘Between chapter two and the murder there was an interval of several days.’

  ‘The plumber forgot his snake and had to go back for it,’ explained Mr Mulliner. ‘I trust that this revelation will prove sedative.’

  ‘I feel a new man,’ said the Draught Stout. ‘I’d have lain awake worrying about that murder all night.’

  ‘I suppose you would. My nephew Cyril was just the same. Nothing in this modern life of ours,’ said Mr Mulliner, taking a sip of his hot Scotch and lemon, ‘is more remarkable than the way in which the mystery novel has gripped the public. Your true enthusiast, deprived of his favourite reading, will stop at nothing in order to get it. He is like a victim of the drug habit when withheld from cocaine. My nephew Cyril—’

  ‘Amazing the things people will leave in trains,’ said a Small Lager. ‘Bags… umbrellas … even stuffed chimpanzees, occasionally, I’ve been told. I heard a story the other day-’

  My nephew Cyril (said Mr Mulliner) had a greater passion for mystery stories than anyone I have ever met. I attribute this to the fact that, like so many interior decorators, he was a fragile, delicate young fellow, extraordinarily vulnerable to any ailment that happened to be going the rounds. Every time he caught mumps or influenza or German measles or the like, he occupied the period of convalescence in reading mystery stories. And, as the appetite grows by what it feeds on, he ‘had become, at the time at which this narrative opens, a confirmed addict. Not only did he devour every volume of this type on which he could lay his hands, but he was also to be found at any theatre which was offering the kind of drama where skinny arms come unexpectedly out of the chiffonier and the audience feels a mild surprise if the lights stay on for ten consecutive minutes.

  And it was during a performance of ‘The Grey Vampire’ at the St James’s that he found himself sitting next to Amelia Bassett, the girl whom he was to love with all the stored-up fervour of a man who hitherto had been inclined rather to edge away when in the presence of the other sex.

  He did not know her name was Amelia Bassett. He had never seen her before. All he knew was that at last he had met his fate, and for the whole of the first act he was pondering the problem of how he-was to make her acquaintance.

  It was as the lights went up for the first intermission that he was aroused from his thoughts by a sharp pain in the right leg. He was just wondering whether it was gout or sciatica when, glancing down, he perceived that what had happened was that his neighbour, absorbed by the drama, had absent-mindedly collected a handful of his flesh and was twisting it in an ecstasy of excitement.

  It seemed to Cyril a good point d’appui.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  The girl turned. Her eyes were glowing, and the tip of her nose still quivered.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘My leg,’ said Cyril. ‘Might I have it back, if you’ve finished with it?’

  The girl looked down. She started visibly.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she gasped.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Cyril. ‘Only too glad to have been of assistance.’

  ‘I got carried away.’

  ‘You are evidently fond of mystery plays.’

  ‘I love them.’

  ‘So do I. And mystery nove
ls?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  ‘Have you read “Blood on the Banisters”?’

  ‘Oh, yes! I thought it was better than “Severed Throats”.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Cyril. ‘Much better. Brighter murders, subtler detectives, crisper clues.., better in every way.’

  The two twin souls gazed into each other’s eyes. There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

  ‘My name is Amelia Bassett,’ said the girl.

  ‘Mine is Cyril Mulliner. Bassett?’ He frowned thoughtfully. ‘The name seems familiar.’

  ‘Perhaps you have heard of my mother. Lady Bassett. She’s rather a well-known big-game hunter and explorer. She tramps through jungles and things. She’s gone out to the lobby for a smoke. By the way’— she hesitated — ‘if she finds us talking, will you remember that we met at the Polterwoods’?’

  ‘I quite understand.’

  ‘You see, mother doesn’t like people who talk to me without a formal introduction. And, when mother doesn’t like anyone, she is so apt to hit them over the head with some hard instrument.

  ‘I see,’ said Cyril. ‘Like the Human Ape in “Gore by the Gallon”.’

  ‘Exactly. Tell me,’ said the girl, changing the subject, ‘if you were a millionaire, would you rather be stabbed in the back with a paper-knife or found dead without a mark on you, staring with blank eyes at some appalling sight?’

  Cyril was about to reply when, looking past her, he found himself virtually in the latter position. A woman of extraordinary formidableness had lowered herself into the seat beyond and was scrutinizing him keenly through a tortoiseshell lorgnette. She reminded Cyril of Wallace Beery.

  ‘Friend of yours, Amelia?’ she said.

  ‘This is Mr Mulliner, mother. We met at the Polterwoods’.’

  ‘Ah?’ said Lady Bassett.

  She inspected Cyril through her lorgnette.

  ‘Mr Mulliner,’ she said, ‘is a little like the chief of the Lower Isisi — though, of course, he was darker and had a ring through his nose. A dear, good fellow,’ she continued reminiscently, ‘but inclined to become familiar under the influence of trade gin. I shot him in the leg.’