Meet Mr Mulliner (23 page)

Mr Gooch read the telegram.

“Written under the influence of some
strong mental excitement,” he agreed. “I wonder why he doesn’t come to the
office if he wants to see you so badly.”

“He’s working very hard, finishing that
novel for Prodder & Wiggs. Can’t leave it, I suppose. Well, it’s a nice
day. If you will look after things here I think I’ll motor down and let him
give me lunch.”

As Mr McKinnon’s car reached the
crossroads a mile from Honeysuckle Cottage, he was aware of a gesticulating
figure by the hedge. He stopped the car.

“Morning, Rodman.”

“Thank God, you’ve come!” said James. It
seemed to Mr McKinnon that the young man looked paler and thinner. “Would you
mind walking the rest of the way? There’s something I want to speak to you
about.”

Mr McKinnon alighted; and James, as he
glanced at him, felt cheered and encouraged by the very sight of the man. The
literary agent was a grim, hard-bitten person, to whom, when he called at their
offices to arrange terms, editors kept their faces turned so that they might at
least retain their back collar studs. There was no sentiment in Andrew
McKinnon. Editresses of society papers practised their blandishments on him in
vain, and many a publisher had waked screaming in the night, dreaming that he
was signing a McKinnon contract.

“Well, Rodman,” he said, “Prodder &
Wiggs have agreed to our terms. I was writing to tell you so when your wire
arrived. I had a lot of trouble with them, but it’s fixed at 20 per cent.,
rising to 25, and two hundred pounds advance royalties on day of publication.”

“Good!” said James absently. “Good!
McKinnon, do you remember my aunt, Leila J. Pinckney?”

“Remember her? Why, I was her agent all
her life.”

“Of course. Then you know the sort of
tripe she wrote.”

“No author,” said Mr McKinnon reprovingly,
“who pulls down a steady twenty thousand pounds a year writes tripe.”

“Well anyway, you know her stuff.”

“Who better?”

“When she died she left me five thousand
pounds and her house, Honeysuckle Cottage. I’m living there now. McKinnon, do
you believe in haunted houses?”

“No.”

“Yet I tell you solemnly that Honeysuckle
Cottage is haunted!”

“By your aunt?” said Mr McKinnon,
surprised.

“By her influence. There’s a malignant
spell over the place; a sort of miasma of sentimentalism. Everybody who enters
it succumbs.”

“Tut-tut! You mustn’t have these fancies.”

“They aren’t fancies.”

“You aren’t seriously meaning to tell me

“Well, how do you account for this? That
book you were speaking about, which Prodder & Wiggs are to publish—
The
Secret Nine
. Every time I sit down to write it a girl keeps trying to sneak
in.”

“Into the room?

“Into the story.”

“You don’t want a love interest in your
sort of book,” said Mr McKinnon, shaking his head. “It delays the action.”

“I know it does. And every day I have to
keep shooing this infernal female out. An awful girl, McKinnon. A soppy, soupy,
treacly, drooping girl with a roguish smile. This morning she tried to butt in
on the scene where Lester Gage is trapped in the den of the mysterious leper.”

“No!”

“She did, I assure you. I had to rewrite
three pages before I could get her out of it. And that’s not the worst. Do you
know, McKinnon, that at this moment I am actually living the plot of a typical
Leila May Pinckney novel in just the setting she always used! And I can see the
happy ending coming nearer every day! A week ago a girl was knocked down by a
car at my door and I’ve had to put her up, and every day I realise more clearly
that sooner or later I shall ask her to marry me.”

“Don’t do it,” said Mr McKinnon, a stout
bachelor. “You’re too young to marry.”

“So was Methuselah,’ said James, a
stouter. “But all the same I know I’m going to do it. It’s the influence of
this awful house weighing upon me. I feel like an eggshell in a maelstrom. I am
being sucked on by a force too strong for me to resist. This morning I found
myself kissing her dog!

“No!”

“I did! And I loathe the little beast.
Yesterday I got up at dawn and plucked a nosegay of flowers for her, wet with
the dew.”

“Rodman!”

“It’s a fact. I laid them at her door and
went downstairs kicking myself all the way. And there in the hall was the
apple-cheeked housekeeper regarding me archly. If she didn’t murmur ‘Bless
their sweet young hearts!’ my ears deceived me.”

“Why don’t you pack up and leave?”

“If I do I lose the five thousand pounds.”

“Ah!” said Mr McKinnon.

“I can understand what has happened. It’s
the same with all haunted houses. My aunt’s subliminal ether vibrations have
woven themselves into the texture of the place, creating an atmosphere which
forces the ego of all who come in contact with it to attune themselves to it.
It’s either that or something to do with the fourth dimension.”

Mr McKinnon laughed scornfully.

“Tut-tut!” he said again. “This is pure
imagination. What has happened is that you’ve been working too hard. You’ll see
this precious atmosphere of yours will have no effect on me.”

“That’s exactly why I asked you to come
down. I hoped you might break the spell.”

“I will that,” said Mr McKinnon jovially.

The fact that the literary agent spoke little
at lunch caused James no apprehension. Mr McKinnon was ever a silent
trencherman. From time to time James caught him stealing a glance at the girl,
who was well enough to come down to meals now, limping pathetically; but he
could read nothing in his face. And yet the mere look of his face was a
consolation. It was so solid, so matter of fact, so exactly like an unemotional
coconut.

“You’ve done me good,” said James with a
sigh of relief, as he escorted the agent down the garden to his car after
lunch. “I felt all along that I could rely on your rugged common sense. The
whole atmosphere of the place seems different now.”

Mr McKinnon did not speak for a moment. He
seemed to be plunged in thought.

“Rodman,’ he said, as he got into his car,
“I’ve been thinking over that suggestion of yours of putting a love interest
into
The Secret Nine
. I think you’re wise. The story needs it. After
all, what is there greater in the world than love? Love—love—aye, it’s the
sweetest word in the language. Put in a heroine and let her marry Lester Gage.”

“If,” said James grimly, “she does succeed
in worming her way in she’ll jolly well marry the mysterious leper. But look
here, I don’t understand—”

“It was seeing that girl that changed me,”
proceeded Mr McKinnon. And as James stared at him aghast, tears suddenly filled
his hard-boiled eyes. He openly snuffled. “Aye, seeing her sitting there under
the roses, with all that smell of honeysuckle and all. And the birdies singing
so sweet in the garden and the sun lighting up her bonny face. The puir wee
lass!” he muttered, dabbing at his eyes. “The puir bonny wee lass! Rodman,” he
said, his voice quivering, “I’ve decided that we’re being hard on Prodder &
Wiggs. Wiggs has had sickness in his home lately. We mustn’t be hard on a man
who’s had sickness in his home, hey, laddie? No, no! I’m going to take back
that contract and alter it to a flat 12 per cent, and no advance royalties.”

“What!”

“But you shan’t lose by it, Rodman. No,
no, you shan’t lose by it, my manny. I am going to waive my commission. The
puir bonny wee lass!”

The car rolled off down the road. Mr
McKinnon, seated in the back, was blowing his nose violently.

“This is the end!” said James.

It is necessary at this point to pause and
examine James Rodman’s position with an unbiased eye. The average man, unless
he puts himself in James’s place, will be unable to appreciate it. James, he
will feel, was making a lot of fuss about nothing. Here he was, drawing daily
closer and closer to a charming girl with big blue eyes, and surely rather to
be envied than pitied.

But we must remember that James was one of
Nature’s bachelors. And no ordinary man, looking forward dreamily to a little
home of his own with a loving wife putting out his slippers and changing the
gramophone records, can realise the intensity of the instinct for
self-preservation which animates Nature’s bachelors in times of peril.

James Rodman had a congenital horror of
matrimony. Though a young man, he had allowed himself to develop a great many
habits which were as the breath of life to him; and these habits, he knew
instinctively, a wife would shoot to pieces within a week of the end of the
honeymoon.

James liked to breakfast in bed; and,
having breakfasted, to smoke in bed and knock the ashes out on the carpet. What
wife would tolerate this practice?

James liked to pass his days in a tennis
shirt, grey flannel trousers and slippers. What wife ever rests until she has
inclosed her husband in a stiff collar, tight boots and a morning suit and
taken him with her to
thés musicaux
?

These and a thousand other thoughts of the
same kind flashed through the unfortunate young man’s mind as the days went by,
and every day that passed seemed to draw him nearer to the brink of the chasm.
Fate appeared to be taking a malicious pleasure in making things as difficult
for him as possible. Now that the girl was well enough to leave her bed, she
spent her time sitting in a chair on the sun-sprinkled porch, and James had to
read to her—and poetry, at that; and not the jolly, wholesome sort of poetry
the boys are turning out nowadays, either—good, honest stuff about sin and gas
works and decaying corpses— but the old-fashioned kind with rhymes in it,
dealing almost exclusively with love. The weather, moreover, continued superb.
The honeysuckle cast its sweet scent on the gentle breeze; the roses over the
porch stirred and nodded; the flowers in the garden were lovelier than ever;
the birds sang their little throats sore. And every evening there was a
magnificent sunset. It was almost as if Nature were doing it on purpose.

At last James intercepted Doctor Brady as
he was leaving after one of his visits and put the thing to him squarely:

“When is that girl going?”

The doctor patted him on the arm.

“Not yet, Rodman,” he said in a low,
understanding voice. “No need to worry yourself about that. Mustn’t be moved
for days and days and days—I might almost say weeks and weeks and weeks.”

“Weeks and weeks!” cried James.

“And weeks,” said Doctor Brady. He prodded
James roguishly in the abdomen. “Good luck to you, my boy, good luck to you,”
he said.

It was some small consolation to James
that the mushy physician immediately afterward tripped over William on his way
down the path and broke his stethoscope. When a man is up against it like James
every little helps.

He was walking dismally back to the house
after this conversation when he was met by the apple-cheeked housekeeper.

“The little lady would like to speak to
you, sir,” said the apple-cheeked exhibit, rubbing her hands.

“Would she?” said James hollowly.

“So sweet and pretty she looks, sir—oh,
sir, you wouldn’t believe! Like a blessed angel sitting there with her dear
eyes all a-shining.”

“Don’t do it!” cried James with
extraordinary vehemence. “Don’t do it!”

He found the girl propped up on the
cushions and thought once again how singularly he disliked her. And yet, even
as he thought this, some force against which he had to fight madly was
whispering to him, “Go to her and take that little hand! Breathe into that little
ear the burning words that will make that little face turn away crimsoned with
blushes!” He wiped a bead of perspiration from his forehead and sat down.

“Mrs Stick-in-the-Mud—what’s her name?—says
you want to see me.”

The girl nodded.

“I’ve had a letter from Uncle Henry. I
wrote to him as soon as I was better and told him what had happened, and he is
coming here to-morrow morning.”

“Uncle Henry?”

“That’s what I call him, but he’s really
no relation. He is my guardian. He and daddy were officers in the same
regiment, and when daddy was killed, fighting on the Afghan frontier, he died
in Uncle Henry’s arms and with his last breath begged him to take care of me.”

James started. A sudden wild hope had
waked in his heart. Years ago, he remembered, he had read a book of his aunt’s
entitled
Rupert’s Legacy
, and in that book

“I’m engaged to marry him,” said the girl
quietly.

“Wow!” shouted James.

“What?” asked the girl, startled.

“Touch of cramp,” said James. He was
thrilling all over. That wild hope had been realised.

“It was daddy’s dying wish that we should
marry,” said the girl.