Mulliner Nights (6 page)

‘A blister,’
said Worple.

‘A boil and a
disease,’ said Scollop, summing up.

Lancelot
laughed hackingly.

‘You have
described her to a nicety. She stands for everything most alien to my artist
soul. She gives me a pain in the neck. I’m going to marry her.’

‘What!’ cried
Scollop.

‘But you’re
going to marry Gladys Bingley,’ said Worple.

‘Webster
thinks not,’ said Lancelot bitterly. ‘At their first meeting he weighed Gladys
in the balance and found her wanting. And the moment he saw Brenda
Carberry-Pirbright he stuck his tail up at right angles, uttered a cordial
gargle, and rubbed his head against her leg. Then, turning, he looked at me. I
could read that glance. I knew what was in his mind. From that moment he has
been doing everything in his power to arrange the match.’

‘But,
Mulliner,’ said Worple, always eager to point out the bright side, ‘why should
this girl want to marry a wretched, scrubby, hard-up footler like you? Have
courage, Mulliner. It is simply a question of time before you repel and sicken
her.’

Lancelot shook
his head.

‘No,’ he said.
‘You speak like a true friend, Worple, but you do not understand,. Old Ma
Carberry-Pirbright, this exhibit’s mother, who chaperons her at the sittings,
discovered at an early date my relationship to my Uncle Theodore, who, as you
know, has got it in gobs. She knows well enough that some day I shall be a rich
man. She used to know my Uncle Theodore when he was Vicar of St Botolph’s in
Knightsbridge, and from the very first she assumed towards me the repellent
chumminess of an old family friend. She was always trying to lure me to her At
Homes, her Sunday luncheons, her little dinners. Once she actually suggested
that I should escort her and her beastly daughter to the Royal Academy.’

He laughed
bitterly. The mordant witticisms of Lancelot Mulliner at the expense of the
Royal Academy were quoted from Tite Street in the south to Holland Park in the
north and eastward as far as Bloomsbury.

‘To all these
overtures,’ resumed Lancelot, ‘I remained firmly unresponsive. My attitude was
from the start one of frigid aloofness. I did not actually say in so many words
that I would rather be dead in a ditch than at one of her At Homes, but my
manner indicated it. And I was just beginning to think I had choked her off
when in crashed Webster and upset everything. Do you know how many times I have
been to that infernal house in the last week? Five. Webster seemed to wish it.
I tell you, I am a lost man.’

He buried his
face in his hands. Scollop touched Worple on the arm, and together the two men
stole silently out.

‘Bad!’ said
Worple.

‘Very bad,’
said Scollop.

‘It seems
incredible.’

‘Oh, no. Cases
of this kind are, alas, by no means uncommon among those who, like Mulliner,
possess to a marked degree the highly-strung, ultra-sensitive artistic
temperament. A friend of mine, a rhythmical interior decorator, once rashly
consented to put his aunt’s parrot up at his studio while she was away visiting
friends in the north of England. She was a woman of strong evangelical views,
which the bird had imbibed from her. It had a way of puffing its head on one
side, making a noise like some one drawing a cork from a bottle, and asking my
friend if he was saved. To cut a long story short, I happened to call on him a
month later and he had installed a harmonium in his studio and was singing
hymns, ancient and modern, in a rich tenor, while the parrot, standing on one
leg on its perch, took the bass. Avery sad affair. We were all much upset about
it.’

Worple
shuddered.

‘You appal me,
Scollop! Is there nothing we can do?’ Rodney Scollop considered for a moment. ‘We
might wire Gladys Bingley to come home at once. She might possibly reason with
the unhappy man. -A woman’s gentle influence… Yes, we could do that. Look in
at the post office on your way home and send Gladys a telegram. I’ll owe you
for my half of it.’

In the studio
they had left, Lancelot Mulliner was staring dumbly at a black shape which had
just entered the room. He had the appearance of a man with his back to the
wall.

‘No!’ he was
crying. ‘No! I’m dashed if I do!’ Webster continued to look at him.

‘Why should I?’
demanded Lancelot weakly. Webster’s gaze did not flicker.

‘Oh, all
right,’ said Lancelot sullenly.

He passed from
the room with leaden feet, and, proceeding upstairs, changed into morning
clothes and a top hat. Then, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, he made his way
to 11, Maxton Square, where Mrs Carberry-Pirbright was giving one of her
intimate little teas (‘just a few friends’) to meet Clara Throckmorton Stooge,
authoress of ‘A Strong Man’s Kiss’.

Gladys Bingley
was lunching at her hotel in Antibes when Worple’s telegram arrived. It
occasioned her the gravest concern.

Exactly what
it was all about, she was unable to gather, for emotion had made Bernard Worple
rather incoherent. There were moments, reading it, when she fancied that
Lancelot had met with a serious accident; others when the solution seemed to be
that he had sprained his brain to such an extent that rival lunatic asylums
were competing eagerly for his custom; others, again, when Worple appeared to
be suggesting that he had gone into partnership with his cat to start a harem. But
one fact emerged clearly. Her loved one was in serious trouble of some kind,
and his best friends were agreed that only her immediate return could save him.

Gladys did not
hesitate. Within half an hour of the receipt of the telegram she had packed her
trunk, removed a piece of asparagus from her right eyebrow, and was negotiating
for accommodation on the first train going north.

Arriving in
London, her first impulse was to go straight to Lancelot. But a natural
feminine curiosity urged her, before doing so, to call upon Bernard Worple and
have light thrown on some of the more abstruse passages in the telegram.

Worple, in his
capacity of author, may have tended towards obscurity, but, when confining
himself to the spoken word, he told a plain story well and clearly. Five
minutes of his society enabled Gladys to obtain a firm grasp on the salient
facts, and there appeared on her face that grim, tight-lipped expression which
is seen only on the faces of fiancées who have come back from a short holiday
to discover that their dear one has been straying in their absence from the
straight and narrow path.

‘Brenda
Carberry-Pirbright, eh?’ said Gladys, with ominous calm. ‘I’ll give him Brenda
Carberry-Pirbright! My gosh, if one can’t go off to Antibes for the merest
breather without having one’s betrothed getting it up his nose and starting to
act like a Mormon Elder, it begins to look a pretty tough world for a girl.’

Kind-hearted
Bernard Worple did his best.

‘I blame the
cat,’ he said. ‘Lancelot, to my mind,, is more sinned against than sinning. I
consider him to be acting under undue influence or duress.’

‘How like a
man!’ said Gladys. ‘Shoving it all off on to an innocent cat!’

‘Lancelot says
it has a sort of something in its eye.’

‘Well, when I
meet Lancelot,’ said Gladys, ‘he’ll find that I have a sort of something in my
eye.’

She went out,
breathing flame quietly through her nostrils. Worple, saddened, heaved a sigh
and resumed his neo-Vorticist sculpting.

It was some
five minutes later that Gladys, passing through Maxton Square on her way to
Bott Street, stopped suddenly in her tracks. The sight she had seen was enough
to make any fiancée do so.

Along the
pavement leading to Number Eleven two figures were advancing. Or three, if you
counted a morose-looking dog of a semi-Dachshund nature which preceded them,
attached to a leash. One of the figures was that of Lancelot Mulliner, natty in
grey herring-bone tweed and a new Homburg hat. It was he who held the leash.
The other Gladys recognized from the portrait which she had seen on Lancelot’s
easel as that modern Du Barry, that notorious wrecker of homes and breaker-up
of love-nests, Brenda Carberry-Pirbright.

The next
moment they had mounted the steps of Number Eleven, and had gone in to tea,
possibly with a little music.

It was perhaps
an hour and a half later that Lancelot, having wrenched himself with difficulty
from the lair of the Philistines, sped homeward in a swift taxi. As always
after an extended
tête-à-tête
with Miss Carberry-Pirbright, he felt
dazed and bewildered, as if he had been swimming in a sea of glue and had
swallowed a good deal of it. All he could think of dearly was that he wanted a
drink and that the materials for that drink were in the cupboard behind the
chesterfield in his studio.

He paid the
cab and charged in with his tongue rattling dryly against his front teeth. And
there before him was Gladys Bingley, whom he had supposed far, far away.

‘You!’
exclaimed Lancelot.

‘Yes, me!’
said Gladys.

Her long vigil
had not helped to restore the girl’s equanimity. Since arriving at the studio
she had had leisure to tap her foot three thousand, one hundred and forty-two
times on the carpet, and the number of bitter smiles which had flitted across
her face was nine hundred and eleven. She was about ready for the battle of the
century.

She rose and
faced him, all the woman in her flashing from her eyes.

‘Well, you
Casanova!’ she said.

‘You who?’
said Lancelot.

‘Don’t say “Yoo-hoo!”
to me!’ cried Gladys. ‘Keep that for your Brenda Carberry-Pirbrights. Yes, I
know all about it, Lancelot Don Juan Henry the Eighth Mulliner! I saw you with
her just now. I hear that you and she are inseparable. Bernard Worple says you
said you were going to marry her.’

‘You mustn’t
believe everything a neo-Vorticist sculptor tells you,’ quavered Lancelot.

‘I’ll bet you’re
going back to dinner there to-night,’ said Gladys.

She had spoken
at a venture, basing the charge purely on a possessive cock of the head which
she had noticed in Brenda Carberry-Pirbright at their recent encounter. There,
she had said to herself at the time, had gone a girl who was about to invite —
or had just invited — Lancelot Mulliner to dine quietly and take her to the
pictures afterwards. But the shot went home. Lancelot hung his head.

‘There was
some talk of it,’ he admitted.

‘Ah!’
exclaimed Gladys.

Lancelot’s
eyes were haggard.

‘I don’t want
to go,’ he pleaded. ‘Honestly I don’t. But Webster insists.’

‘Webster!’

‘Yes, Webster.
If I attempt to evade the appointment, he will sit in front of me and look at
me.’

‘Tchah!’

‘Well, he
will. Ask him for yourself.’

Gladys tapped
her foot six times in rapid succession on the carpet, bringing the total to
three thousand, one hundred and forty-eight. Her manner had changed and was now
dangerously calm.

‘Lancelot
Mulliner,’ she said, ‘you have your choice. Me, on the one hand, Brenda
Carberry-Pirbright on the other. I offer you a home where you will be able to
smoke in bed, spill the ashes on the floor, wear pyjamas and carpet-slippers
all day and shave only on Sunday mornings. From her, what have you to hope? A
house in South Kensington — possibly the Brompton Road — probably with her
mother living with you. A life that will be one long round of stiff collars and
tight shoes, of morning-coats and top hats.’

Lancelot
quivered, but she went on remorselessly.

‘You will be
at home on alternate Thursdays, and will be expected to hand the cucumber
sandwiches. Every day you will air the dog, till you become a confirmed
dog-airer. You will dine out in Bayswater and go for the summer to Bournemouth
or Dinard. Choose well, Lancelot Mulliner! I will leave you to think it over.
But one last word. If by seven-thirty on the dot you have not presented
yourself at 6A, Garbidge Mews ready to take me out to dinner at the Ham and
Beef, I shall know what to think and shall act accordingly.’

And brushing
the cigarette ashes from her chin, the girl strode haughtily from the room.

‘Gladys!’
cried Lancelot.

But she had
gone.

For some
minutes Lancelot Mulliner remained where he was, stunned. Then, insistently,
there came to him the recollection that he had not had that drink. He rushed to
the cupboard and produced the bottle. He uncorked it, and was pouring out a
lavish stream, when a movement on the floor below him attracted his attention.

Webster was
standing there, looking up at him. And in his eyes was that familiar expression
of quiet rebuke.

‘Scarcely what
I have been accustomed to at the Deanery,’ he seemed to be saying.

Lancelot stood
paralysed. The feeling of being bound hand and foot, of being caught in a snare
from which there was no escape, had become more poignant than ever. The bottle
fell from his nerveless fingers and rolled across the floor, spilling its
contents in an amber river, but he was too heavy in spirit to notice it. With a
gesture such as Job might have made on discovering a new boil, he crossed to
the window and stood looking moodily out.

Then, turning
with a sigh, he looked at Webster again — and, looking, stood spellbound.

The spectacle
which he beheld was of a kind to stun a stronger man than Lancelot Mulliner. At
first, he shrank from believing his eyes. Then, slowly, came the realization
that what he saw was no mere figment of a disordered imagination. This
unbelievable thing was actually happening.

Webster sat
crouched upon the floor beside the widening pool of whisky. But it was not
horror and disgust that had caused him to crouch. He was crouched because,
crouching, he could get nearer to the stuff and obtain crisper action. His
tongue was moving in and out like a piston.