Meet Mr Mulliner (15 page)

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 fore-finger
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 comer 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 some one entered the room into which he was looking, and he paused
to make further inspection.

The new arrival was a coloured
maidservant. 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 to-night, 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.