brother that William felt no diffidence about confiding in him. He
placed an elbow on the counter and a foot on the rail, and spoke with a
sob in his voice.
'Suppose the only girl you had ever loved had gone and got engaged to
another, what in your view would best meet the case?'
The gentlemanly bar-tender pondered for some moments.
'Well,' he replied at length, 'I advance it, you understand, as a
purely personal opinion, and I shall not be in the least offended
if you decide not to act upon it; but my suggestion--for what it is
worth--is that you try a Dynamite Dew-Drop.'
One of the crowd that had gathered sympathetically round shook his
head. He was a charming man with a black eye, who had shaved on the
preceding Thursday.
'Much better give him a Dreamland Special.'
A second man, in a sweater and a cloth cap, had yet another theory.
'You can't beat an Undertaker's Joy.'
They were all so perfectly delightful and appeared to have his
interests so unselfishly at heart that William could not bring himself
to choose between them. He solved the problem in diplomatic fashion
by playing no favourites and ordering all three of the beverages
recommended.
The effect was instantaneous and gratifying. As he drained the first
glass, it seemed to him that a torchlight procession, of whose
existence he had hitherto not been aware, had begun to march down his
throat and explore the recesses of his stomach. The second glass,
though slightly too heavily charged with molten lava, was extremely
palatable. It helped the torchlight procession along by adding to it a
brass band of singular power and sweetness of tone. And with the third
somebody began to touch off fireworks inside his head.
William felt better--not only spiritually but physically. He seemed to
himself to be a bigger, finer man, and the loss of Myrtle Banks had
somehow in a flash lost nearly all its importance. After all, as he
said to the man with the black eye, Myrtle Banks wasn't everybody.
'Now what do you recommend?' he asked the man with the sweater, having
turned the last glass upside down.
The other mused, one forefinger thoughtfully pressed against the side
of his face.
'Well, I'll tell you,' he said. 'When my brother Elmer lost his girl,
he drank straight rye. Yes, sir. That's what he drank--straight rye.
"I've lost my girl," he said, "and I'm going to drink straight rye."
That's what he said. Yes, sir, straight rye.'
'And was your brother Elmer,' asked William, anxiously, 'a man whose
example in your opinion should be followed? Was he a man you could
trust?'
'He owned the biggest duck-farm in the southern half of Illinois.'
'That settles it,' said William. 'What was good enough for a duck who
owned half Illinois is good enough for me. Oblige me,' he said to the
gentlemanly bar-tender, 'by asking these gentlemen what they will have,
and start pouring.'
The bar-tender obeyed, and William, having tried a pint or two of
the strange liquid just to see if he liked it, found that he did,
and ordered some. He then began to move about among his new friends,
patting one on the shoulder, slapping another affably on the back, and
asking a third what his Christian name was.
'I want you all,' he said, climbing on to the counter so that his voice
should carry better, 'to come and stay with me in England. Never in my
life have I met men whose faces I liked so much. More like brothers
than anything is the way I regard you. So just you pack up a few things
and come along and put up at my little place for as long as you can
manage. You particularly, my dear old chap,' he added, beaming at the
man in the sweater.
'Thanks,' said the man with the sweater.
'What did you say?' said William.
'I said, "Thanks".'
William slowly removed his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeves.
'I call you gentlemen to witness,' he said, quietly, 'that I have been
grossly insulted by this gentleman who has just grossly insulted me. I
am not a quarrelsome man, but if anybody wants a row they can have it.
And when it comes to being cursed and sworn at by an ugly bounder in a
sweater and a cloth cap, it is time to take steps.'
And with these spirited words William Mulliner sprang from the counter,
grasped the other by the throat, and bit him sharply on the right
ear. There was a confused interval, during which somebody attached
himself to the collar of William's waistcoat and the seat of William's
trousers, and then a sense of swift movement and rush of cool air.
William discovered that he was seated on the pavement outside the
saloon. A hand emerged from the swing door and threw his hat out. And
he was alone with the night and his meditations.
These were, as you may suppose, of a singularly bitter nature. Sorrow
and disillusionment racked William Mulliner like a physical pain.
That his friends inside there, in spite of the fact that he had been
all sweetness and light and had not done a thing to them, should have
thrown him out into the hard street was the saddest thing he had ever
heard of; and for some minutes he sat there, weeping silently.
Presently he heaved himself to his feet and, placing one foot with
infinite delicacy in front of the other, and then drawing the other one
up and placing it with infinite delicacy in front of that, he began to
walk back to his hotel.
At the corner he paused. There were some railings on his right. He clung
to them and rested awhile.
The railings to which William Mulliner had attached himself belonged
to a brown-stone house of the kind that seems destined from the
first moment of its building to receive guests, both resident and
transient, at a moderate weekly rental. It was, in fact, as he would
have discovered had he been clear-sighted enough to read the card over
the door, Mrs Beulah O'Brien's Theatrical Boarding-House ('A Home From
Home--No Cheques Cashed--This Means You').
But William was not in the best of shape for reading cards. A sort of
mist had obscured the world, and he was finding it difficult to keep
his eyes open. And presently, his chin wedged into the railings, he
fell into a dreamless sleep.
He was awakened by light flashing in his eyes; and, opening them,
saw that a window opposite where he was standing had become brightly
illuminated. His slumbers had cleared his vision; and he was able to
observe that the room into which he was looking was a dining-room. The
long table was set for the evening meal; and to William, as he gazed,
the sight of that cosy apartment, with the gaslight falling on the
knives and forks and spoons, seemed the most pathetic and poignant that
he had ever beheld.
A mood of the most extreme sentimentality now had him in its grip. The
thought that he would never own a little home like that racked him from
stem to stern with an almost unbearable torment. What, argued William,
clinging to the railings and crying weakly, could compare, when you
came right down to it, with a little home? A man with a little home is
all right, whereas a man without a little home is just a bit of flotsam
on the ocean of life. If Myrtle Banks had only consented to marry him,
he would have had a little home. But she had refused to marry him,
so he would never have a little home. What Myrtle Banks wanted, felt
William, was a good swift clout on the side of the head.
The thought pleased him. He was feeling physically perfect again now,
and seemed to have shaken off completely the slight indisposition from
which he had been suffering. His legs had lost their tendency to act
independently of the rest of his body. His head felt clearer, and he
had a sense of overwhelming strength. If ever, in short, there was a
moment when he could administer that clout on the side of the head to
Myrtle Banks as it should be administered, that moment was now.
He was on the point of moving off to find her and teach her what it
meant to stop a man like himself from having a little home, when
someone entered the room into which he was looking, and he paused to
make further inspection.
The new arrival was a coloured maid-servant. She staggered to the
head of the table beneath the weight of a large tureen containing,
so William suspected, hash. A moment later a stout woman with bright
golden hair came in and sat down opposite the tureen.
The instinct to watch other people eat is one of the most deeply
implanted in the human bosom, and William lingered, intent. There was,
he told himself, no need to hurry. He knew which was Myrtle's room in
the hotel. It was just across the corridor from his own. He could pop
in any time, during the night, and give her that clout. Meanwhile, he
wanted to watch these people eat hash.
And then the door opened again, and there filed into the room a little
procession. And William, clutching the railings, watched it with
bulging eyes.
The procession was headed by an elderly man in a check suit with a
carnation in his buttonhole. He was about three feet six in height,
though the military jauntiness with which he carried himself made him
seem fully three feet seven. He was followed by a younger man who wore
spectacles and whose height was perhaps three feet four. And behind
these two came, in single file, six others, scaling down by degrees
until, bringing up the rear of the procession, there entered a rather
stout man in tweeds and bedroom slippers who could not have measured
more than two feet eight.
They took their places at the table. Hash was distributed to all. And
the man in tweeds, having inspected his plate with obvious relish,
removed his slippers and, picking up his knife and fork with his toes,
fell to with a keen appetite.
William Mulliner uttered a soft moan, and tottered away.
It was a black moment for my Uncle William. Only an instant before he
had been congratulating himself on having shaken off the effects of his
first indulgence in alcohol after an abstinence of twenty-nine years;
but now he perceived that he was still intoxicated.
Intoxicated? The word did not express it by a mile. He was oiled,
boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled, and blotto. Only by the
exercise of the most consummate caution and address could he hope to
get back to his hotel and reach his bedroom without causing an open
scandal.
Of course, if his walk that night had taken him a few yards farther
down the street than the door of Mike's Place, he would have seen that
there was a very simple explanation of the spectacle which he had
just witnessed. A walk so extended would have brought him to the San
Francisco Palace of Varieties, outside which large posters proclaimed
the exclusive engagement for two weeks of
MURPHY'S MIDGETS
BIGGER AND BETTER THAN EVER
But of the existence of these posters he was not aware; and it is not
too much to say that the iron entered into William Mulliner's soul.
That his legs should have become temporarily unscrewed at the joints
was a phenomenon which he had been able to bear with fortitude. That
his head should be feeling as if a good many bees had decided to use
it as a hive was unpleasant, but not unbearably so. But that his brain
should have gone off its castors and be causing him to see visions was
the end of all things.
William had always prided himself on the keenness of his mental powers.
All through the long voyage on the ship, when Desmond Franklyn had
related anecdotes illustrative of his prowess as a man of Action,
William Mulliner had always consoled himself by feeling that in the
matter of brain he could give Franklyn three bisques and a beating
any time he chose to start. And now, it seemed, he had lost even this
advantage over his rival. For Franklyn, dull-witted clod though he
might be, was not such an absolute minus quantity that he would imagine
he had seen a man of two feet eight cutting up hash with his toes. That
hideous depth of mental decay had been reserved for William Mulliner.
Moodily he made his way back to his hotel. In a corner of the Palm Room
he saw Myrtle Banks deep in conversation with Franklyn, but all desire
to give her a clout on the side of the head had now left him. With his
chin sunk on his breast, he entered the elevator and was carried up to
his room.
Here as rapidly as his quivering fingers would permit, he undressed;
and, climbing into the bed as it came round for the second time, lay
for a space with wide-open eyes. He had been too shaken to switch his
light off, and the rays of the lamp shone on the handsome ceiling which
undulated above him. He gave himself up to thought once more.
No doubt, he felt, thinking it over now, his mother had had some very
urgent reason for withholding him from alcoholic drink. She must
have known of some family secret, sedulously guarded from his infant
ears--some dark tale of a fatal Mulliner taint. 'William must never
learn of this!' she had probably said when they told her the old legend
of how every Mulliner for centuries back had died a maniac, victim at
last to the fatal fluid. And tonight, despite her gentle care, he had
found out for himself.
He saw now that this derangement of his eyesight was only the first
step in the gradual dissolution which was the Mulliner Curse. Soon his
sense of hearing would go, then his sense of touch.
He sat up in bed. It seemed to him that, as he gazed at the ceiling, a
considerable section of it had parted from the parent body and fallen
with a crash to the floor.
William Mulliner stared dumbly. He knew, of course, that it was an
illusion. But what a perfect illusion! If he had not had the special
knowledge which he possessed, he would have stated without fear of
contradiction that there was a gap six feet wide above him and a mass
of dust and plaster on the carpet below.
And even as his eyes deceived him, so did his ears. He seemed to be
conscious of a babel of screams and shouts. The corridor, he could have
sworn, was full of flying feet. The world appeared to be all bangs and
crashes and thuds. A cold fear gripped at William's heart. His sense of
hearing was playing tricks with him already.
His whole being recoiled from making the final experiment, but he
forced himself out of bed. He reached a finger towards the nearest heap
of plaster and drew it back with a groan. Yes, it was as he feared, his
sense of touch had gone wrong too. That heap of plaster, though purely
a figment of his disordered brain, had felt solid.
So there it was. One little moderately festive evening at Mike's Place,
and the Curse of the Mulliners had got him. Within an hour of absorbing
the first drink of his life, it had deprived him of his sight, his
hearing, and his sense of touch. Quick service, felt William Mulliner.
As he climbed back into bed, it appeared to him that two of the walls
fell out. He shut his eyes, and presently sleep, which has been well
called Tired Nature's Sweet Restorer, brought oblivion. His last waking
thought was that he imagined he had heard another wall go.
William Mulliner was a sound sleeper, and it was many hours before
consciousness returned to him. When he awoke, he looked about him in
astonishment. The haunting horror of the night had passed; and now,
though conscious of a rather severe headache, he knew that he was
seeing things as they were.
And yet it seemed odd to think that what he beheld was not the remains
of some nightmare. Not only was the world slightly yellow and a bit
blurred about the edges, but it had changed in its very essentials
overnight. Where eight hours before there had been a wall, only an open
space appeared, with bright sunlight streaming through it. The ceiling
was on the floor, and almost the only thing remaining of what had been
an expensive bedroom in a first-class hotel was the bed. Very strange,
he thought, and very irregular.
A voice broke in upon his meditations.
'Why, Mr Mulliner!'
William turned, and being, like all the Mulliners, the soul of modesty,
dived abruptly beneath the bed-clothes. For the voice was the voice of
Myrtle Banks. And she was in his room!
'Mr Mulliner!'
William poked his head out cautiously. And then he perceived that
the proprieties had not been outraged as he had imagined. Miss Banks
was not in his room, but in the corridor. The intervening wall had
disappeared. Shaken, but relieved, he sat up in bed, the sheet drawn
round his shoulders.
'You don't mean to say you're still in bed?' gasped the girl.
'Why, is it awfully late?' said William.
'Did you actually stay up here all through it?'
'Through what?'
'The earthquake.'
'What earthquake?'
'The earthquake last night.'
'Oh, that earthquake?' said William, carelessly. 'I did notice some
sort of an earthquake. I remember seeing the ceiling come down and
saying to myself, "I shouldn't wonder if that wasn't an earthquake."
And then the walls fell out, and I said, "Yes, I believe it _is_
an earthquake." And then I turned over and went to sleep.'
Myrtle Banks was staring at him with eyes that reminded him partly of
twin stars and partly of a snail's.
'You must be the bravest man in the world!'
William gave a curt laugh.
'Oh, well,' he said, 'I may not spend my whole life persecuting
unfortunate sharks with pocket-knives, but I find I generally manage
to keep my head fairly well in a crisis. We Mulliners are like that. We
do not say much, but we have the right stuff in us.'
He clutched his head. A sharp spasm had reminded him how much of the
right stuff he had in him at that moment.
'My hero!' breathed the girl, almost inaudibly.
'And how is your fiancé this bright, sunny morning?' asked William,
nonchalantly. It was torture to refer to the man, but he must show her
that a Mulliner knew how to take his medicine.
She gave a little shudder.
'I have no fiancé,' she said.
'But I thought you told me you and Franklyn....'
'I am no longer engaged to Mr Franklyn. Last night, when the earthquake
started, I cried to him to help me; and he with a hasty "Some other
time!" over his shoulder, disappeared into the open like something shot
out of a gun. I never saw a man run so fast. This morning I broke off
the engagement.' She uttered a scornful laugh.
'Sharks and pocket-knives! I don't believe he ever killed a shark in
his life.'
'And even if he did,' said William, 'what of it? I mean to say, how
infrequently in married life must the necessity for killing sharks
with pocket-knives arise! What a husband needs is not some purely
adventitious gift like that--a parlour trick, you might almost call
it--but a steady character, a warm and generous disposition, and a
loving heart.'
'How true!' she murmured, dreamily.
'Myrtle,' said William, 'I would be a husband like that. The steady
character, the warm and generous disposition, and the loving heart to
which I have alluded are at your disposal. Will you accept them?'
'I will,' said Myrtle Banks.
* * * * *
And that (concluded Mr Mulliner) is the story of my Uncle William's
romance. And you will readily understand, having heard it, how his
eldest son, my cousin, J. S. F. E. Mulliner, got his name.
'J. S. F. E.?' I said.
'John San Francisco Earthquake Mulliner,' explained my friend.
'There never was a San Francisco earthquake,' said the Californian.
'Only a fire.'
7
PORTRAIT OF A DISCIPLINARIAN
It was with something of the relief of fog-bound city-dwellers who at
last behold the sun that we perceived, on entering the bar-parlour
of the Anglers' Rest, that Mr Mulliner was seated once more in the
familiar chair. For some days he had been away, paying a visit to an
old nurse of his down in Devonshire: and there was no doubt that in his
absence the tide of intellectual conversation had run very low.
'No,' said Mr Mulliner, in answer to a question as to whether he had
enjoyed himself, 'I cannot pretend that it was an altogether agreeable
experience. I was conscious throughout of a sense of strain. The poor
old thing is almost completely deaf, and her memory is not what it was.
Moreover, it is a moot point whether a man of sensibility can ever be
entirely at his ease in the presence of a woman who has frequently
spanked him with the flat side of a hair-brush.'
Mr Mulliner winced slightly, as if the old wound still troubled him.
'It is curious,' he went on, after a thoughtful pause, 'how little
change the years bring about in the attitude of a real, genuine,
crusted old family nurse towards one who in the early knickerbocker
stage of his career has been a charge of hers. He may grow grey or bald
and be looked up to by the rest of his world as a warm performer on the
Stock Exchange or a devil of a fellow in the sphere of Politics or the
Arts, but to his old Nanna he will still be the Master James or Master
Percival who had to be hounded by threats to keep his face clean.
Shakespeare would have cringed before his old nurse. So would Herbert
Spencer, Attila the Hun, and the Emperor Nero. My nephew Frederick ...
but I must not bore you with my family gossip.'
We reassured him.
'Oh well, if you wish to hear the story. There is nothing much in it as
a story, but it bears out the truth of what I have just been saying.'
* * * * *
I will begin (said Mr Mulliner) at the moment when Frederick, having
come down from London in response to an urgent summons from his
brother, Dr George Mulliner, stood in the latter's consulting-room,
looking out upon the Esplanade of that quiet little watering-place,
Bingley-on-Sea.
George's consulting-room, facing west, had the advantage of getting
the afternoon sun: and this afternoon it needed all the sun it could
get, to counteract Frederick's extraordinary gloom. The young man's
expression, as he confronted his brother, was that which a miasmic pool
in some dismal swamp in the Bad Lands might have worn if it had had a
face.
'Then the position, as I see it,' he said in a low, toneless voice, 'is
this. On the pretext of wishing to discuss urgent business with me,
you have dragged me down to this foul spot--seventy miles by rail in a
compartment containing three distinct infants sucking sweets--merely to
have tea with a nurse whom I have disliked since I was a child.'
'You have contributed to her support for many years,' George reminded
him.
'Naturally, when the family were clubbing together to pension off
the old blister, I chipped in with my little bit,' said Frederick.
'Noblesse oblige.'
'Well, noblesse obliges you to go and have tea with her when she
invites you. Wilks must be humoured. She is not so young as she was.'
'She must be a hundred.'
'Eighty-five.'
'Good heavens! And it seems only yesterday that she shut me up in a
cupboard for stealing jam.'
'She was a great disciplinarian,' agreed George. 'You may find her a
little on the autocratic side still. And I want to impress upon you, as
her medical man, that you must not thwart her lightest whim. She will
probably offer you boiled eggs and home-made cake. Eat them.'
'I will not eat boiled eggs at five o'clock in the afternoon,' said
Frederick, with a strong man's menacing calm, 'for any woman on earth.'
'You will. And with relish. Her heart is weak. If you don't humour her,
I won't answer for the consequences.'
'If I eat boiled eggs at five in the afternoon, I won't answer for the
consequences. And why boiled eggs, dash it? I'm not a schoolboy.'
'To her you are. She looks on all of us as children still. Last
Christmas she gave me a copy of _Eric, or Little by Little_.'
Frederick turned to the window, and scowled down upon the noxious and
depressing scene below. Sparing neither age nor sex in his detestation,
he regarded the old ladies reading their library novels on the seats
with precisely the same dislike and contempt which he bestowed on the
boys' school clattering past on its way to the bathing-houses.
'Then, checking up your statements,' he said, 'I find that I am
expected to go to tea with a woman who, in addition, apparently, to
being a blend of Lucretia Borgia and a Prussian sergeant-major, is a
physical wreck and practically potty. Why? That is what I ask. Why? As
a child, I objected strongly to Nurse Wilks: and now, grown to riper
years, the thought of meeting her again gives me the heeby-jeebies. Why
should I be victimized? Why me particularly?'
'It isn't you particularly. We've all been to see her at intervals, and
so have the Oliphants.'
'The Oliphants!'
The name seemed to affect Frederick oddly. He winced, as if his brother
had been a dentist instead of a general practitioner and had just drawn
one of his back teeth.