Meet Mr Mulliner (22 page)

James’s first impressions of Honeysuckle
Cottage were, he tells me, wholly favourable. He was delighted with the place.
It was a low, rambling, picturesque old house with funny little chimneys and a
red roof, placed in the middle of the most charming country. With its oak
beams, its trim garden, its trilling birds and its rose-hung porch, it was the
ideal spot for a writer. It was just the sort of place, he reflected
whimsically, which his aunt had loved to write about in her books. Even the
apple-cheeked old housekeeper who attended to his needs might have stepped
straight out of one of them.

It seemed to James that his lot had been
cast in pleasant places. He had brought down his books, his pipes and his golf
clubs, and was hard at work finishing the best thing he had ever done.
The
Secret Nine
was the title of it; and on the beautiful summer afternoon on
which this story opens he was in the study, hammering away at his typewriter,
at peace with the world. The machine was running sweetly, the new tobacco he
had bought the day before was proving admirable, and he was moving on all six
cylinders to the end of a chapter.

He shoved in a fresh sheet of paper,
chewed his pipe thoughtfully for a moment, then wrote rapidly:

“For an instant
Lester Gage thought that he must have been mistaken. Then the noise came again,
faint but unmistakable —a soft scratching on the outer panel.

“His mouth set in
a grim line. Silently, like a panther, he made one quick step to the desk’,
noiselessly opened a drawer, drew out his automatic. After that affair of the
poisoned needle, he was taking no chances. Still in dead silence, he tiptoed to
the door; then, flinging it suddenly open, he stood there, his weapon poised.

“On the mat stood
the most beautiful girl he had ever beheld. A veritable child of Faerie. She
eyed him for a moment with a saucy smile; then with a pretty, roguish look of
reproof shook a dainty forefinger at him.

“‘I believe you’ve
forgotten me, Mr Gage!’ she fluted with a mock severity which her eyes belied.”

James stared at the paper dumbly. He was
utterly perplexed. He had not had the slightest intention of writing anything like
this. To begin with, it was a rule with him, and one which he never broke, to
allow no girls to appear in his stories. Sinister landladies, yes, and
naturally any amount of adventuresses with foreign accents, but never under any
pretext what may be broadly described as girls. A detective story, he
maintained, should have no heroine. Heroines only held up the action and tried
to flirt with the hero when he should have been busy looking for clues, and
then went and let the villain kidnap them by some childishly simple trick. In
his writing, James was positively monastic.

And yet here was this creature with her
saucy smile and her dainty forefinger homing in at the most important point in
the story. It was uncanny.

He looked once more at his scenario. No,
the scenario was all right.

In perfectly plain words it stated that
what happened when the door opened was that a dying man fell in and after
gasping, “The beetle! Tell Scotland Yard that the blue beetle is—” expired on
the hearthrug, leaving Lester Gage not unnaturally somewhat mystified. Nothing
whatever about any beautiful girls.

In a curious mood of irritation, James
scratched out the offending passage, wrote in the necessary corrections and put
the cover on the machine. It was at this point that he heard William whining.

The only blot on this paradise which James
had so far been able to discover was the infernal dog, William. Belonging
nominally to the gardener, on the very first morning he had adopted James by
acclamation, and he maddened and infuriated James. He had a habit of coming and
whining under the window when James was at work. The latter would ignore this
as long as he could; then, when the thing became insupportable, would bound out
of his chair, to see the animal standing on the gravel, gazing expectantly up
at him with a stone in his mouth. William had a weak-minded passion for chasing
stones; and on the first day James, in a rash spirit of camaraderie, had flung
one for him. Since then James had thrown no more stones; but he had thrown any
number of other solids, and the garden was littered with objects ranging from
match boxes to a plaster statuette of the young Joseph prophesying before
Pharaoh. And still William came and whined, an optimist to the last.

The whining, coming now at a moment when
he felt irritable and unsettled, acted on James much as the scratching on the
door had acted on Lester Gage. Silently, like a panther, he made one quick step
to the mantelpiece, removed from it a china mug bearing the legend A Present
From Clacton-on-Sea, and crept to the window.

And as he did so a voice outside said, “Go
away, sir, go away!” and there followed a short, high-pitched bark which was
certainly not William’s. William was a mixture of Airedale, setter, bull
terrier, and mastiff; and when in vocal mood, favoured the mastiff side of his
family.

James peered out. There on the porch stood
a girl in blue. She held in her arms a small fluffy white dog, and she was
endeavouring to foil the upward movement toward this of the blackguard William.
William’s mentality had been arrested some years before at the point where he
imagined that everything in the world had been created for him to eat. A bone,
a boot, a steak, the back wheel of a bicycle—it was all one to William. If it
was there he tried to eat it. He had even made a plucky attempt to devour the
remains of the young Joseph prophesying before Pharaoh. And it was perfectly
plain now that he regarded the curious wriggling object in the girl’s arms
purely in the light of a snack to keep body and soul together till dinner-time.

“William!” bellowed James.

William looked courteously over his
shoulder with eyes that beamed with the pure light of a life’s devotion, wagged
the whip-like tail which he had inherited from his bull-terrier ancestor and
resumed his intent scrutiny of the fluffy dog.

“Oh, please!” cried the girl. “This great
rough dog is frightening poor Toto,”

The man of letters and the man of action
do not always go hand in hand, but practice had made James perfect in handling
with a swift efficiency any situation that involved William. A moment later
that canine moron, having received the present from Clacton in the short ribs,
was scuttling round the comer of the house, and James had jumped through the
window and was facing the girl.

She was an extraordinarily pretty girl
Very sweet and fragile she looked as she stood there under the honeysuckle with
the breeze ruffling a tendril of golden hair that strayed from beneath her
coquettish little hat. Her eyes were very big and very blue, her rose-tinted
face becomingly flushed. All wasted on James, though. He disliked all girls,
and particularly the sweet, droopy type.

“Did you want to see somebody?” he asked
stiffly.

“Just the house,” said the girl, “if it
wouldn’t be giving any trouble. I do so want to see the room where Miss Pinckney
wrote her books. This is where Leila J. Pinckney used to live, isn’t it?”

“Yes; I am her nephew. My name is James
Rodman.”

“Mine is Rose Maynard.”

James led the way into the house, and she
stopped with a cry of delight on the threshold of the morning room.

“Oh, how too perfect!” she cried. “So this
was her study?”

“Yes.”

“What a wonderful place it would be for
you to think in if you were a writer too.”

James held no high opinion of women’s
literary taste, but nevertheless he was conscious of an unpleasant shock.

“I am a writer,” he said coldly. “I write
detective stories.”

“I—I’m afraid “—she blushed—” I’m afraid I
don’t often read detective stories.”

“You no doubt prefer,” said James, still
more coldly, “the sort of thing my aunt used to write.”

“Oh, I love her stories!” cried the girl,
clasping her hands ecstatically. “Don’t you?”

“I cannot say that I do.”

“What?”

“They are pure apple sauce,” said James
sternly; “just nasty blobs of sentimentality, thoroughly untrue to life.”

The girl stared.

“Why, that’s just what’s so wonderful
about them, their trueness to life! You feel they might all have happened. I
don’t understand what you mean.”

They were walking down the garden now.
James held the gate open for her and she passed through into the road.

“Well, for one thing,” he said, “I decline
to believe that a marriage between two young people is invariably preceded by
some violent and sensational experience in which they both share.”

“Are you thinking of
Scent o’ the Blossom
,
where Edgar saves Maud from drowning?”

“I am thinking of every single one of my
aunt’s books,’ He looked at her curiously. He had just got the solution of a
mystery which had been puzzling him for some time. Almost from the moment he
had set eyes on her she had seemed somehow strangely familiar. It now suddenly
came to him why it was that he disliked her so much. “Do you know,” he said, “you
might be one of my aunt’s heroines yourself? You’re just the sort of girl she
used to love to write about.”

Her face lit up.

“Oh, do you really think so?” She
hesitated. “Do you know what I have been feeling ever since I came here? I’ve
been feeling that you are exactly like one of Miss Pinckney’s heroes.”

“No, I say, really!” said James, revolted.

“Oh, but you are! When you jumped through
that window it gave me quite a start. You were so exactly like Claude Masterson
in
Heather o’ the Hills
.”

“I have not read
Heather o’ the Hills
,”
said James, with a shudder.

“He was very strong and quiet, with deep,
dark, sad eyes.”

James did not explain that his eyes were
sad because her society gave him a pain in the neck. He merely laughed
scornfully.

“So now, I suppose,” he said, “a car will
come and knock you down and I shall carry you gently into the house and lay you
Look out!” he cried.

It was too late. She was lying in a little
huddled heap at his feet. Round the comer a large automobile had come bowling,
keeping with an almost affected precision to the wrong side of the road. It was
now receding into the distance, the occupant of the tonneau, a stout red-faced
gentleman in a fur coat, leaning out over the back. He had bared his head—not,
one fears, as a pretty gesture of respect and regret, but because he was using
his hat to hide the number plate.

The dog Toto was unfortunately uninjured.

James carried the girl gently into the
house and laid her on the sofa in the morning-room. He rang the bell and the
apple-cheeked housekeeper appeared.

“Send for the doctor,” said James. “There
has been an accident.”

The housekeeper bent over the girl.

“Eh, dearie, dearie!” she said. “Bless her
sweet pretty face!”

The gardener, he who technically owned William,
was routed out from among the young lettuces and told to fetch Doctor Brady. He
separated his bicycle from William, who was making a light meal off the left
pedal, and departed on his mission. Doctor Brady arrived and in due course he
made his report.

“No bones broken, but a number of nasty
bruises. And, of course, the shock. She will have to stay here for some time,
Rodman. Can’t be moved.”

“Stay here! But she can’t! It isn’t
proper.”

“Your housekeeper will act as a chaperon.”

The doctor sighed. He was a stolid-looking
man of middle age with side whiskers.

“A beautiful girl, that, Rodman,” he said.

“I suppose so,” said James.

“A sweet, beautiful girl. An elfin child.”

“A what?” cried James, starting.

This imagery was very foreign to Doctor
Brady as he knew him. On the only previous occasion on which they had had any
extended conversation, the doctor had talked exclusively about the effect of
too much protein on the gastric juices.

“An elfin child; a tender, fairy creature.
When I was looking at her just now, Rodman, I nearly broke down. Her little
hand lay on the coverlet like some white lily floating on the surface of a
still pool, and her dear, trusting eyes gazed up at me.”

He pottered off down the garden, still
babbling, and James stood staring after him blankly. And slowly, like some
cloud athwart a summer sky, there crept over James’s heart the chill shadow of
a nameless fear.

It was about a week later that Mr Andrew
McKinnon, the senior partner in the well-known firm of literary agents,
McKinnon & Gooch, sat in his office in Chancery Lane, frowning thoughtfully
over a telegram. He rang the bell.

“Ask Mr Gooch to step in here.” He resumed
his study of the telegram. “Oh, Gooch,” he said when his partner appeared, “I’ve
just had a curious wire from young Rodman. He seems to want to see me very
urgently.”