Mulliner Nights (13 page)

Mervyn lowered
his shapely nose and gave a good hard sniff at the parcel. And, having done so,
he reeled where he stood once more.

A frightful
suspicion had shot through him.

It was not
that my cousins son was gifted beyond the ordinary in the qualities that go to
make a successful detective. You would not have found him deducing anything
much from footprints or cigar-ash. In fact, if this parcel had contained
cigar-ash, it would have meant nothing to him. But in the circumstances anybody
with his, special knowledge would have been suspicious.

For consider
the facts. His sniff had told him that beneath the outward wrapping of paper
lay strawberries. And the only person beside himself who knew that the girl
wanted strawberries was Oofy Prosser. About the only man in London able to buy
strawberries at that time of year was Oofy. And Oofy’s manner, he recalled,
when they were talking about the girl’s beauty and physique generally, had been
furtive and sinister.

To rip open
the paper, therefore, and take a look at the enclosed card was with Mervyn
Mulliner the work of a moment.

And, sure
enough, it was as he had foreseen. ‘Alexander C. Prosser’ was the name on the
card, and Mervyn tells me he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the C. didn’t stand
for ‘Clarence.

His first
feeling, he tells me, as he stood there staring at that card, was one of
righteous indignation at the thought that any such treacherous, double-crossing
hound as Oofy Prosser should have been permitted to pollute the air of London,
W.1, all these years. To refuse a fellow twenty quid with one hand, and then to
go and send his girl strawberries with the other, struck Mervyn as about as
low-down a bit of hornswoggling as you could want.

He burned with
honest wrath. And he was still burning when the last cocktail he had had at the
club, which had been lying low inside him all this while, suddenly came to life
and got action. Quite unexpectedly, he tells me, it began to frisk about like a
young lamb, until it leaped into his head and gave him the idea of a lifetime.

What, he asked
himself, was the matter with suppressing this card, freezing on to the berries,
and presenting them to the girl with a modest flourish as coming from M.
Mulliner, Esq? And, he answered himself, there was abso-bally-nothing the
matter with it. It was a jolly sound scheme and showed what three medium dry
Martinis could do.

He quivered
all over with joy and elation. Standing there in the hall, he felt that there
was a Providence, after all, which kept an eye on good men and saw to it that
they came out on top in the end. In fact, he felt so extremely elated that he
burst into song. And he had not got much beyond the first high note when he
heard Clarice Mallaby giving tongue from upstairs.

‘Stop it!’

‘What did you
say?’ said Mervyn.

‘I said “Stop
it!” The cat’s downstairs with a headache, trying to rest.’

‘I say,’ said
Mervyn, ‘are you going to be long?’

‘How do you
mean — long?’

‘Long
dressing. Because I’ve something I want to show you.

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing
much,’ said Mervyn carelessly. ‘Nothing par-ticular. Just a few assorted
strawberries.’

‘Eek!’ said
the girl. ‘You don’t mean you’ve really got them?’

‘Got them?’
said Mervyn. ‘Didn’t I say I would?’

‘I’ll be down
in just one minute,’ said the girl.

Well, you know
what girls are. The minute stretched into five minutes, and the five minutes
into a quarter of an hour, and Mervyn made the tour of the drawing-room, and
looked at the photograph of her late father, and picked up the album of Views
of Italy, and opened Indian Love Lyrics at page forty-three and shut it again,
and took up the cushion and gave his shoes another rub, and brushed his hat
once more, and still she didn’t come.

And so, by way
of something else to do, he started brooding on the strawberries for a space.

Considered
purely as strawberries, he tells me, they were a pretty rickety collection, not
to say spavined. They were an unhealthy whitish-pink in colour and looked as if
they had just come through a lingering illness which had involved a good deal
of blood-letting by means of leeches.

‘They don’t
look much,’ said Mervyn to himself.

Not that it
really mattered, of course, because all the girl had told him to do was to get
her strawberries, and nobody could deny that these were strawberries. C.3,
though they might be, they were genuine strawberries, and from that fact there
was no getting away.

Still, he did
not want the dear little soul to be disappointed.

‘I wonder if
they have any flavour at all?’ said Mervyn to himself.

Well, the first
one had not. Nor had the second. The third was rather better. And the fourth
was quite juicy. And the best of all, oddly enough, was the last one in the
basket.

He was just
finishing it when Clarice Mallaby came running in.

Well, Mervyn
tried to pass it off, of course. But his efforts were not rewarded with any
great measure of success. In fact, he tells me that he did not get beyond a
tentative ‘Oh, I say … ‘And the upshot of the whole matter was that the girl
threw him out into the winter evening without so much as giving him a chance to
take his hat.

Nor had he the
courage to go back and fetch it later, for Clarice Mallaby stated specifically
that if he dared to show his ugly face at the house again the butler had
instructions to knock him down and skin him, and the butler was looking forward
to it, as he had never liked Mervyn.

So there the
matter rests. The whole thing has been a great blow to my cousin’s son, for he
considers — and rightly, I suppose — that, if you really come down to it, he
failed in his quest. Nevertheless, I think that we must give him credit for the
possession of the old knightly spirit to which our friend here was alluding
just now.

He meant well.
He did his best. And even of a Mulliner more cannot be said than that.

5
THE
VOICE FROM THE PAST

A
t
the ancient and historic public-school which stands a mile or two up the river
from the Angler’s Rest there had recently been a change of headmasters, and our
little group in the bar-parlour, naturally interested, was discussing the new
appointment.

A grizzled
Tankard of Stout frankly viewed it with concern.

‘Benger!’ he
exclaimed. ‘Fancy making Benger a headmaster.’

‘He has a fine
record.’

‘Yes,
but,
dash it, he was at school with me.’

‘One lives
these things down in time,’ we urged.

The Tankard
said we had missed his point, which was that he could remember young Scrubby
Benger in an Eton collar with jam on it, getting properly cursed by the
Mathematics beak for bringing white mice into the form-room.

‘He was a
small, fat kid with a pink face,’ proceeded the Tankard. ‘I met him again only
last July, and he looked just the same. I can’t see him as a headmaster. I
thought they had to be a hundred years old and seven feet high, with eyes of
flame, and long white beards. To me, a headmaster has always been a sort of
blend of Epstein’s Genesis and something out of the Book of Revelations.’

Mr Mulliner
smiled tolerantly.

‘You left
school at an early age, I imagine?’

‘Sixteen. I
had to go into my uncle’s business.’

‘Exactly,’
said Mr Mulliner, nodding sagely. ‘You completed your school career, in other
words, before the age at which a boy, coming into personal relationship with
the man up top, learns to regard him as a guide, philosopher and friend. The
result is that you are suffering from the well-known Headmaster Fixation or
Phobia — precisely as my nephew Sacheverell did. A rather delicate youth, he
was removed by his parents from Harborough College shortly after his fifteenth
birthday and educated at home by a private tutor; and I have frequently heard
him assert that the Rev. J. G. Smethurst, the ruling spirit of Harborough, was
a man who chewed broken bottles and devoured his young.

‘I strongly
suspected my headmaster of conducting human sacrifices behind the fives-courts
at the time of the full moon, said the Tankard.

‘Men like
yourself and my nephew Sacheverell who leave school early,’ said Mr Mulliner, ‘never
wholly lose these poetic boyish fancies. All their lives, the phobia persists.
And sometimes this has curious results — as in the case of my nephew
Sacheverell.’

It was to the
terror inspired by his old headmaster (said Mr Mulliner) that I always
attributed my nephew Sacheverell’s extraordinary mildness and timidity. A
nervous boy, the years seemed to bring him no store of self-confidence. By the
time he arrived at man’s estate, he belonged definitely to the class of
humanity which never gets a seat on an underground train and is ill at ease in
the presence of butlers, traffic policemen, and female assistants in post
offices. He was the sort of young fellow at whom people laugh when the waiter
speaks to them in French.

And this was
particularly unfortunate, as he had recently become secretly affianced to
Muriel, only daughter of Lieut.-Colonel Sir Redvers Branksome, one of the
old-school type of squire and as tough an egg as ever said ‘Yoicks’ to a
fox-hound. He had met her while she was on a visit to an aunt in London, and
had endeared himself to her partly by his modest and diffident demeanour and
partly by doing tricks with a bit of string, an art at which he was highly
proficient.

Muriel was one
of those hearty, breezy girls who abound in the hunting counties of England.
Brought up all her life among confident young men who wore gaiters and smacked
them with riding-crops, she had always yearned subconsciously. for something
different: and Sacheverell’s shy, mild, shrinking personality seemed to wake
the maternal in her. He was so weak, so helpless, that her heart went out to
him. Friendship speedily ripened into love, with the result that one afternoon
my nephew found himself definitely engaged and faced with the prospect of
breaking the news to the old folks at home.

‘And if you
think you’ve got a picnic ahead of you,’ said Muriel, ‘forget it. Father’s a
gorilla. I remember when I was engaged to my cousin Bernard—’

‘When you were
what to your what?’ gasped Sacheverell.

‘Oh, yes,’
said the girl. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I was engaged once to my cousin Bernard, but
I broke it off because he tried to boss me. A little too much of the dominant
male there was about old B., and I handed him his hat. Though we’re still good
friends. But what I was saying was that Bernard used to gulp like a seal and
stand on one leg when father came along. And he’s in the Guards. That just
shows you. However, we’ll start the thing going. I’ll get you down to the
Towers for a week-end, and we’ll see what happens.’

If Muriel had
hoped that a mutual esteem would spring up between her father and her betrothed
during this week-end visit, she was doomed to disappointment. The thing was a
failure from the start. Sacheverell’s host did him extremely well, giving him
the star guest-room, the Blue Suite, and bringing out the oldest port for his
benefit, but it was plain that he thought little of the young man. The colonel’s
subjects were sheep (in sickness and in health), manure, wheat,
mangold-wurzels, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’: while Sacheverell was at his
best on Proust, the Russian Ballet, Japanese prints, and the Influence of James
Joyce on the younger Bloomsbury novelists. There was no fusion between these
men’s souls. Colonel Branksome did not actually bite Sacheverell in the leg,
but when you had said that you had said everything.

Muriel was
deeply concerned.

‘I’ll tell you
what it is, Dogface,’ she said, as she was seeing her loved one to his train on
the Monday, ‘we’ve got off on the wrong foot. The male parent may have loved
you at sight, but, if he did, he took another look and changed his mind.’

‘I fear we
were not exactly
en rapport,’
sighed Sacheverell. Apart from the fact
that the mere look of him gave me a strange, sinking feeling, my conversation
seemed to bore him.’

‘You didn’t
talk about the right things.’

‘I couldn’t. I
know so little of mangold-wurzels. Manure is a sealed book to me.

‘Just what I’m
driving at,’ said Muriel. ‘And all that must be altered. Before you spring the
tidings on father, there will have to be a lot of careful preliminary
top-dressing of the soil, if you follow what I mean. By the time the bell goes
for the second round and old Dangerous Dan McGrew comes out of his corner at
you, breathing fire, you must have acquired a good working knowledge of
Scientific Agriculture. That’ll tickle him pink.’

‘But how?’

‘I’ll tell you
how. I was reading a magazine the other day, and there was an advertisement in
it of a Correspondence School which teaches practically everything. You put a
cross against the course you want to take and clip out the coupon and bung it
in, and they do the rest. I suppose they send you pamphlets and things. So the
moment you get back to London, look up this advertisement — it was in the
Piccadilly
Magazine
— and write to these people and tell them to shoot the works.’

Sacheverell
pondered this advice during the railway journey, and the more he pondered it
the more clearly did he see how excellent it was. It offered the solution to
all his troubles. There was no doubt whatever that the bad impression he had
made on Colonel Branksome was due chiefly to his ignorance of the latter’s pet
subjects. If he were in a position to throw off a good thing from time to time
on Guano or the Influence of Dip on the Younger Leicestershire Sheep, Muriel’s
father would unquestionably view him with a far kindlier eye.