Meet Mr Mulliner (19 page)
“Hullo?”
“Are you good now?
“You bet I’m good.”
“Will you give Miss Jane a nice kiss?”
“I will do,” said Frederick Mulliner,
enthusiasm ringing in every syllable, “just that little thing!”
“Then you may come out,” said Nurse Wilks.
“I have boiled you two more eggs.”
Frederick paled, but only for an instant.
What did anything matter now? His lips were set in a firm line, and his voice,
when he spoke, was calm and steady.
“Lead me to them,” he said.
8
S
OMEBODY
had left a copy of an illustrated weekly paper in the bar-parlour
of the Anglers’ Rest; and, glancing through it, I came upon the ninth full-page
photograph of a celebrated musical comedy actress that I had seen since the
preceding Wednesday. This one showed her looking archly over her shoulder with
a rose between her teeth, and I flung the periodical from me with a stifled
cry.
“Tut, tut!” said Mr Mulliner, reprovingly.
“You must not allow these things to affect you so deeply. Remember, it is not
actresses’ photographs that matter, but the courage which we bring to them.”
He sipped his hot Scotch.
I wonder if you have ever reflected (he
said gravely) what life must be like for the men whose trade it is to make
these pictures? Statistics show that the two classes of the community which
least often marry are milkmen and fashionable photographers—milkmen because
they see women too early in the morning, and fashionable photographers because
their days are spent in an atmosphere of feminine loveliness so monotonous that
they become surfeited and morose. I know of none of the world’s workers whom I
pity more sincerely than the fashionable photographer; and yet—by one of those
strokes of irony which make the thoughtful man waver between sardonic laughter
and sympathetic tears—it is the ambition of every youngster who enters the
profession some day to become one.
At the outset of his career, you see, a
young photographer is sorely oppressed by human gargoyles: and gradually this
begins to prey upon his nerves.
“Why is it,” I remember my cousin Clarence
saying, after he had been about a year in the business, “that all these misfits
want to be photographed? Why do men with faces which you would have thought they
would be anxious to hush up wish to be strewn about the country on whatnots and
in albums? I started out full of ardour and enthusiasm, and my eager soul is
being crushed. This morning the Mayor of Tooting East came to make an
appointment. He is coming to-morrow afternoon to be taken in his cocked hat and
robes of office; and there is absolutely no excuse for a man with a face like
that perpetuating his features. I wish to goodness I was one of those fellows
who only take camera-portraits of beautiful women.”
His dream was to come true sooner than he
had imagined. Within a week the great test-case of Biggs v. Mulliner had raised
my cousin Clarence from an obscure studio in West Kensington to the position of
London’s most famous photographer.
You possibly remember the case? The events
that led up to it were, briefly, as follows:—
Jno. Horatio Biggs,
O.B.E
., the
newly-elected Mayor of Tooting East, alighted from a cab at the door of
Clarence Mulliner’s studio at four-ten on the afternoon of June the
seventeenth. At four-eleven he went in.
And at four-sixteen and a half he was
observed shooting out of a first-floor window, vigorously assisted by my
cousin, who was prodding him in the seat of the trousers with the sharp end of
a photographic tripod. Those who were in a position to see stated that Clarence’s
face was distorted by a fury scarcely human.
Naturally the matter could not be expected
to rest there. A week later the case of Biggs
v
. Mulliner had begun, the
plaintiff claiming damages to the extent of ten thousand pounds and a new pair
of trousers. And at first things looked very black for Clarence.
It was the speech of Sir Joseph Bodger,
K.C
., briefed for
the defence, that turned the scale.
“I do not,” said Sir Joseph, addressing
the jury on the second day, “propose to deny the charges which have been
brought against my client. We freely admit that on the seventeenth inst. we did
jab the defendant with our tripod in a manner calculated to cause alarm and
despondency. But, gentlemen, we plead justification. The whole case turns upon
one question. Is a photographer entitled to assault—either with or, as the case
may be, without a tripod—a sitter who, after being warned that his face is not
up to the minimum standard requirements, insists upon remaining in the chair
and moistening the lips with the tip of the tongue? Gentlemen, I say Yes!
“Unless you decide in favour of my client,
gentlemen of the jury, photographers —debarred by law from the privilege of
rejecting sitters—will be at the mercy of anyone who comes along with the price
of a dozen photographs in his pocket. You have seen the plaintiff. Biggs. You
have noted his broad, slab-like face, intolerable to any man of refinement and sensibility.
You have observed his walrus moustache, his double chin, his protruding eyes.
Take another look at him, and then tell me if my client was not justified in
chasing him with a tripod out of that sacred temple of Art and Beauty, his
studio.
“Gentlemen, I have finished. I leave my
client’s fate in your hands with every confidence that you will return the only
verdict that can conceivably issue from twelve men of your obvious intelligence,
your manifest sympathy, and your superb breadth of vision.”
Of course, after that there was nothing to
it. The jury decided in Clarence’s favour without leaving the box; and the
crowd waiting outside to hear the verdict carried him shoulder-high to his
house, refusing to disperse until he had made a speech and sung Photographers
never, never, never shall be slaves. And next morning every paper in England
came out with a leading article commending him for having so courageously
established, as it had not been established since the days of Magna Charta, the
fundamental principle of the Liberty of the Subject.
The effect of this publicity on Clarence’s
fortunes was naturally stupendous. He had become in a flash the best-known
photographer in the United Kingdom, and was now in a position to realise that
vision which he had of taking the pictures of none but the beaming and the
beautiful. Every day the loveliest ornaments of Society and the Stage flocked
to his studio; and it was with the utmost astonishment, therefore, that, calling
upon him one morning on my return to England after an absence of two years in
the East, I learned that Fame and Wealth had not brought him happiness.
I found him sitting moodily in his studio,
staring with dull eyes at a camera-portrait of a well-known actress in a
bathing-suit. He looked up listlessly as I entered.
“Clarence!” I cried, shocked at his
appearance, for there were hard hues about his mouth and wrinkles on a forehead
that once had been smooth as alabaster. “What is wrong?”
“Everything,” he replied, “I’m fed up.”
“What with?”
“Life. Beautiful women. This beastly
photography business.”
I was amazed. Even in the East rumours of
his success had reached me, and on my return to London I found that they had
not been exaggerated. In every photographers’ club in the Metropolis, from the
Negative and Solution in Pall Mall to the humble public-houses frequented by
the men who do your pictures while you wait on the sands at seaside resorts, he
was being freely spoken of as the logical successor to the Presidency of the
Amalgamated Guild of Bulb-Squeezers.
“I can’t stick it much longer,” said
Clarence, tearing the camera-portrait into a dozen pieces with a dry sob and
burying his face in his hands. “Actresses nursing their dolls! Countesses
simpering over kittens! Film stars among their books! In ten minutes I go to
catch a train at Waterloo. I have been sent for by the Duchess of Hampshire to
take some studies of Lady Monica Southbourne in the castle grounds.”
A shudder ran through him. I patted him on
the shoulder. I understood now.
“She has the most brilliant smile in
England,” he whispered.
“Come, come!”
“Coy yet roguish, they tell me.”
“It may not be true.”
“And I bet she will want to be taken
offering a lump of sugar to her dog, and the picture will appear in the
Sketch
and
Tatler
as ‘Lady Monica Southbourne and Friend.’”
“Clarence, this is morbid.”
He was silent for a moment.
“Ah, well,” he said, pulling himself together
with a visible effort, “I have made my sodium sulphite, and I must lie in it.”
I saw him off in a cab. The last view I
had of him was of his pale, drawn profile. He looked, I thought, like an
aristocrat of the French Revolution being borne off to his doom on a tumbril.
How little he guessed that the only girl in the world lay waiting for him round
the corner.
No, you are wrong. Lady Monica did not
turn out to be the only girl in the world. If what I said caused you to expect
that, I misled you. Lady Monica proved to be all his fancy had pictured her. In
fact even more. Not only was her smile coy yet roguish, but she had a sort of
coquettish droop of the left eyelid of which no one had warned him. And, in
addition to her two dogs, which she was portrayed in the act of feeding with
two lumps of sugar, she possessed a totally unforeseen pet monkey, of which he
was compelled to take no fewer than eleven studies.
No, it was not Lady Monica who captured
Clarence’s heart, but a girl in a taxi whom he met on his way to the station.
It was in a traffic jam at the top of
Whitehall that he first observed this girl. His cab had become becalmed in a
sea of omnibuses, and, chancing to look to the right, he perceived within a few
feet of him another taxi, which had been heading for Trafalgar Square. There
was a face at its window. It turned towards him, and their eyes met.
To most men it would have seemed an
unattractive face. To Clarence, surfeited with the coy, the beaming, and the delicately-chiselled,
it was the most wonderful thing he had ever looked at. All his life, he felt,
he had been searching for something on these lines. That snub nose—those
freckles—that breadth of cheek-bone—the squareness of that chin. And not a
dimple in sight. He told me afterwards that his only feeling at first was one
of incredulity. He had not believed that the world contained women like this.
And then the traffic jam loosened up and he was carried away.
It was as he was passing the Houses of
Parliament that the realisation came to him that the strange bubbly sensation
that seemed to start from just above the lower left side-pocket of his
waistcoat was not, as he had at first supposed, dyspepsia, but love. Yes, love
had come at long last to Clarence Mulliner; and for all the good it was likely
to do him, he reflected bitterly, it might just as well have been the dyspepsia
for which he had mistaken it. He loved a girl whom he would probably never see
again. He did not know her name or where she lived or anything about her. All
he knew was that he would cherish her image in his heart for ever, and that the
thought of going on with the old dreary round of photographing lovely women
with coy yet roguish smiles was almost more than he could bear.
However, custom is strong; and a man who
has once allowed the bulb-squeezing habit to get a grip of him cannot cast it
off in a moment. Next day Clarence was back in his studio, diving into the
velvet nose-bag as of yore and telling peeresses to watch the little birdie
just as if nothing had happened. And if there was now a strange, haunting look
of pain in his eyes, nobody objected to that. Indeed, inasmuch as the grief
which gnawed at his heart had the effect of deepening and mellowing his
camera-side manner to an almost sacerdotal unctuousness, his private sorrows
actually helped his professional prestige. Women told one another that being
photographed by Clarence Mulliner was like undergoing some wonderful spiritual
experience in a noble cathedral; and his appointment-book became fuller than
ever.
So great now was his reputation that to
anyone who had had the privilege of being taken by him, either full face or in
profile, the doors of Society opened automatically. It was whispered that his
name was to appear in the next Birthday Honours List; and at the annual banquet
of the Amalgamated Bulb-Squeezers, when Sir Godfrey Stooge, the retiring
President, in proposing his health, concluded a glowingly eulogistic speech
with the words, “Gentlemen, I give you my destined successor, Mulliner the
Liberator!” five hundred frantic photographers almost shivered the glasses on
the table with their applause.
And yet he was not happy. He had lost the
only girl he had ever loved, and without her what was Fame? What was Affluence?
What were the Highest Honours in the Land?