Mr. Mulliner Stories quotes

“Dreadful liars some men are,” he said genially.

“Fishermen,” I suggested, “are traditionally careless of the truth.”

“He wasn’t a fisherman,” said my companion. “That was our local doctor. He was telling me about his latest case of dropsy. Besides”—he tapped me earnestly on the knee—“you must not fall into the popular error about fishermen. Tradition has maligned them.

I could well believe it. He was a short, stout, comfortable man of middle age, and the thing that struck me first about him was the extraordinary childlike candour of his eyes. They were large and round and honest.

I would have bought oil stock from him without a tremor.

The door leading into the white dusty road opened, and a small man with rimless pince-nez and an anxious expression shot in like a rabbit and had consumed a gin and ginger-beer almost before we knew he was there.

The specialist explained.

He was a kindly man with moth-eaten whiskers and an eye like a meditative codfish.

“Many people,” he said, “who are unable to articulate clearly in ordinary speech find themselves lucid and bell-like when they burst into song.”

The more George thought about the advice he had been given, the less he liked it. He shivered in the cab that took him to the station to catch the train back to East Wobsley.

Like all shy young men, he had never hitherto looked upon himself as shy⁠—preferring to attribute his distaste for the society of his fellows to some subtle rareness of soul.

But now that the thing had been put squarely up to him, he was compelled to realize that in all essentials he was a perfect rabbit. The thought of accosting perfect strangers and forcing his conversation upon them sickened him.

“I uk-uk-asked you a sus-sus-civil quk-quk-quk,” he said, irascibly. “Are you d-d-d-d-deaf?”

All we Mulliners have been noted for our presence of mind.

To open his mouth, point to his tonsils, and utter a strangled gurgle was with George the work of a moment.

After all, he reflected, clothes do not make the man, and, judging from the other’s smile, a warm heart appeared to beat beneath that orange-and-mauve striped pyjama jacket.

“Glad you like it,” said the stranger. “I ordered it specially.”

George was a little puzzled by this remark, but he persevered.

This fact had already impressed itself with sickening clearness on the young man.

There are few spots in the civilized world more deserted than the platform of a small country station.

The sun shone on the smooth asphalt, on the gleaming rails, and on the machine which, in exchange for a penny placed in the slot marked “Matches,” would supply a package of wholesome butterscotch—but on nothing else.

With one last agonized look at him, she closed her eyes and sank back in her seat. Her lips had now turned a curious grey-blue colour, and they were moving feebly.

She reminded George, who, like myself, was a keen fisherman, of a newly-gaffed salmon.

George sat back in his corner, brooding. Rack his brain as he might, he could think of no topic which could be guaranteed to interest, elevate, and amuse. He looked out of the window with a sigh.

George swerved sharply to the right, casting a swift glance over his shoulder at his pursuers.

He disliked them all, but especially the man with the pitchfork.

It is impossible for one who was not an eyewitness to say how long the chase continued and how much ground was covered by the interested parties. I know the East Wobsley country well, and I have checked George’s statements;

“I will, I will,” said Susan. “And, George, by the way. What I really came here for was to ask you if you knew a hyphenated word of nine letters, ending in k and signifying an implement employed in the pursuit of agriculture.”

“Pitchfork, sweetheart,” said George. “But you may take it from me, as one who knows, that agriculture isn’t the only thing it is used in pursuit of.”

And since that day (concluded Mr. Mulliner) George, believe me or believe me not, has not had the slightest trace of an impediment in his speech. He is now the chosen orator at all political rallies for miles around;

“It’s very good,” said Miss Postlethwaite, our courteous and efficient barmaid, who is a prominent first-nighter.

“It’s about this mad professor who gets this girl into his toils and tries to turn her into a lobster.”

“Tries to turn her into a lobster?” echoed we, surprised.

“What we mean,” said we, “is why did the professor want to turn the girl into a lobster?”

“He had a grudge against her.”

This seemed plausible, and we thought it over for a while. Then one of the company shook his head disapprovingly.

“It’s such a pity,” said Miss Purdue, “that the sunburn fades so soon. I do wish I knew some way of keeping it.”

Even in his moments of holiest emotion Wilfred never forgot that he was a business man.

“You should try Mulliner’s Raven Gipsy Face-Cream,” he said. “It comes in two sizes—the small (or half-crown) jar and the large jar at seven shillings and sixpence. The large jar contains three and a half times as much as the small jar.

It is applied nightly with a small sponge before retiring to rest. Testimonials have been received from numerous members of the aristocracy and may be examined at the office by any bonafide inquirer.”

“I invented it,” said Wilfred, simply.

She looked at him adoringly.

Even in his brief visit to the grounds, Wilfred had noticed fully half a dozen places which seemed incomplete without a cross indicating spot where body was found by the police.

It was the sort of house where ravens croak in the front garden just before the death of the heir, and shrieks ring out from behind barred windows in the night.

Nor was its interior more cheerful. And, as for the personnel of the domestic staff, that was less exhilarating than anything else about the place.

But his relief was short-lived. What, after all, he asked himself, are cutlets to a girl who is imprisoned in a locked room of a sinister country-house and is being forced to marry a man she does not love? Practically nothing.

When the heart is sick, cutlets merely alleviate, they do not cure.

Fiercely Wilfred told himself that, come what might, few days should pass before he found the key to that locked door and bore away his love to freedom and happiness.

“I’ve been studying this matter closely,” he said, “and it’s one of the seven wonders of the world.

Have you ever seen a fat valet? Of course not. Nor has anybody else.

There is no such thing as a fat valet. And yet there is scarcely a moment during the day when a valet is not eating. He rises at six-thirty, and at seven is having coffee and buttered toast.

A silence followed his exit. The company seemed plunged in deep thought. Then somebody rose.

“Well, good night all,” he said.

It seemed to sum up the situation.

“Well, good night all,” he said.

It seemed to sum up the situation.

for when he went to Lower Briskett-in-the-Midden to assist the vicar, the Rev. Stanley Brandon, in his cure of souls, he was as meek and mild a young man as you could meet in a day’s journey.

He had flaxen hair, weak blue eyes, and the general demeanour of a saintly but timid codfish.

Precisely, in short, the sort of young curate who seems to have been so common in the eighties, or whenever it was that Gilbert wrote The Sorcerer.

Such was the Rev. Stanley Brandon. And yet it was to the daughter of this formidable man that Augustine Mulliner had permitted himself to lose his heart.

Truly, Cupid makes heroes of us all.

Jane was a very nice girl, and just as fond of Augustine as he was of her. But, as each lacked the nerve to go to the girl’s father and put him abreast of the position of affairs, they were forced to meet surreptitiously.

The medicine, he was glad to find, was not unpleasant to the taste.

It had a slightly pungent flavour, rather like old boot-soles beaten up in sherry.

Having taken the dose, he read for a while in a book of theological essays, and then went to bed.

It may be a civil, well-meaning egg. But if you think it is fit for human consumption, adjust that impression. Go back to your kitchen, woman; select another; and remember this time that you are a cook, not an incinerating machine.

Between an egg that is fried and an egg that is cremated there is a wide and substantial difference.

This difference, if you wish to retain me as a lodger in these far too expensive rooms, you will endeavour to appreciate.”

“And what, pray, do you mean by nice?

It may be an amiable egg. It may be a civil, well-meaning egg.

But if you think it is fit for human consumption, adjust that impression. Go back to your kitchen, woman; select another; and remember this time that you are a cook, not an incinerating machine.

It is not often in a place like Lower Briskett-in-the-Midden that you see a bishop at all; and when you do he is either riding in a stately car or pacing at a dignified walk.

This one was sprinting like a Derby winner, and Augustine paused to drink in the sight.

The bishop was a large, burly bishop, built for endurance rather than speed; but he was making excellent going. He flashed past Augustine in a whirl of flying gaiters:

His motive, Augustine readily divined, was to elude a rough, hairy dog which was toiling in his wake. The dog reached the tree a moment after his quarry had climbed it, and stood there, barking.

“Having a little trouble with the dumb friend, bish?” he asked, genially.

The bishop peered down from his eyrie.

“Is it?” The vicar laughed malevolently.

“Who put the white mouse in the French master’s desk?”

“Who put jam in the dormitory prefect’s bed?” he retorted.

“What do you mean by jumping through my window?” he thundered.

“Are you a curate or a harlequin?”

Augustine met his gaze with an unfaltering eye.

and this brave lad was but a curate. In another moment she would be looking at him through her lorgnette: and England was littered with the shrivelled remains of curates at whom the lady bishopess had looked through her lorgnette.

He had seen them wilt like salted slugs at the episcopal breakfast-table.

He held his breath. Augustine had reached the lady bishopess, and the lady bishopess was even now raising her lorgnette.

“All—all right?” faltered the bishop.

“Yes. She says you can go and change into the thin cashmere.”

“But—but—but what did you say to her? What arguments did you employ?”

“It’s all right,” he said, forcing a note of easy geniality into his voice.

“We’re a couple of cats.”

“Belonging to the cook,” prompted the bishop from below.

“It’s all right,” he said, forcing a note of easy geniality into his voice. “We’re a couple of cats.”

“Belonging to the cook,” prompted the bishop from below.

“Belonging to the cook,” added the headmaster.

“And what makes it still more mysterious is that they found your shovel-hat on the statue’s head.”

“Mulliner,” said the bishop, “leave me. I have one or two matters on which I wish to meditate.”

He dressed hastily, his numbed fingers fumbling with his gaiters. It all came back to him now. Yes, he could remember putting the hat on the statue’s head. It had seemed a good thing to do at the time, and he had done it.

“That is what they imply. I shall be asked to hand in my resignation. And, if that happens, bim goes my chance of ever being a bishop.”

“Well, it’s not all jam being a bishop. You wouldn’t enjoy it, Catsmeat.”

“All very well for you to talk, Boko. You got me into this, you silly ass.”

“General Bloodenough,” announced the butler.

“Oh, that I had wings like a dove. Psalm 45:6,” muttered the bishop.

His desire to be wafted from that spot with all available speed could hardly be considered unreasonable.

… K.C.I.E., M.V.O., on retiring from the army, had been for many years, until his final return to England, in charge of the Secret Service in Western Africa, where his unerring acumen had won for him from the natives the sobriquet of Wah-nah-B’gosh-B’jingo—which, freely translated, means

Big Chief Who Can See Through The Hole In A Doughnut.

A man impossible to deceive. The last man the bishop would have wished to be conducting the present investigations.

The general stalked into the room. He had keen blue eyes, topped by bushy white eyebrows: and the bishop found his gaze far too piercing to be agreeable.

“Bad business, this,” he said. “Bad business. Bad business.”

“It is, indeed,” faltered the bishop.

“I fear I could not bring myself to commercialize my Muse.”

“Young man,” said Mr. Briggs, “if an onion with a head like yours came into my factory, I would refuse to pickle it.”

He stumped below, thoroughly incensed. But Lancelot merely uttered a light laugh. He was young; it was summer; the sky was blue; the sun was shining; and the things in the world that really mattered were not cucumbers and vinegar but Romance and Love.

She was leaning against the rail of a yacht that lay at its moorings some forty yards away; and, as he beheld her,

Lancelot’s heart leaped like a young gherkin in the boiling-vat.

In her face, it seemed to him, was concentrated all the beauty of all the ages. Confronted with this girl, Cleopatra would have looked like Nellie Wallace, and Helen of Troy might have been her plain sister.

and, as he beheld her, Lancelot’s heart leaped like a young gherkin in the boiling-vat. In her face, it seemed to him, was concentrated all the beauty of all the ages.

Confronted with this girl, Cleopatra would have looked like Nellie Wallace, and Helen of Troy might have been her plain sister.

He was still gazing at her in a sort of trance, when the bell sounded for luncheon and he had to go below.

Lancelot gave a short, amused laugh. He had had a good University education, and had not failed to profit by it.

He was a man who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.

“I am old Colonel Charleston’s favourite son,” he said, simply.

“You wouldn’t care for a scarf-pin? Any ties, collars, shirts? No? Then goodbye, Mr. Mulliner.”

“Fotheringay,” said Lord Biddlecombe, “throw Mr. Mulliner out.”

As Lancelot scrambled to his feet from the hard pavement of Berkeley Square, he was conscious of a rush of violent anger which deprived him momentarily of speech. He stood there, glaring at the house from which he had been ejected, his face working hideously.

A benevolent glow irradiated the other’s spectacles.

“Came the Dawn!” he murmured. “Came the Dawn!”

Mr. Mulliner rose with an old-world grace. We do not often get Americans in the bar-parlour of the Anglers’ Rest. When we do, we welcome them.

We make them realize that Hands Across the Sea is no mere phrase.

“Good evening, sir,” said Mr. Mulliner. “I wonder if you would care to join my friend and myself in a little refreshment?”

“California,” replied the other, baring his head. “California, the Jewel State of the Union. With its azure sea, its noble hills, its eternal sunshine, and its fragrant flowers, California stands alone. Peopled by stalwart men and womanly women. …”

“California would be all right,” said Mr. Mulliner, “if it wasn’t for the earthquakes.”

Our guest started as though some venomous snake had bitten him.

“What about the one in 1906?”

“That was not an earthquake. It was a fire.”

“An earthquake, I always understood,” said Mr. Mulliner. “My Uncle William was out there during it, and many a time has he said to me, ‘My boy, it was the San Francisco earthquake that won me a bride.’ ”

“There is a great glamour about Mr. Franklyn,” said Myrtle Banks. “We women admire men who do things.

A girl cannot help but respect a man who once killed three sharks with a Boy Scout pocketknife.

”

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.

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.

“J. S. F. E.?” I said.

“John San Francisco Earthquake Mulliner,” explained my friend.

“There never was a San Francisco earthquake,” said the Californian. “Only a fire.”

I was conscious throughout of a sense of strain. The poor old thing is almost completely deaf, and her memory is not what it was.

Moreover, it is a moot point whether a man of sensibility can ever be entirely at his ease in the presence of a woman who has frequently spanked him with the flat side of a hairbrush.

”

… on the Stock Exchange or a devil of a fellow in the sphere of Politics or the Arts, but to his old Nanna he will still be the Master James or Master Percival who had to be hounded by threats to keep his face clean.

Shakespeare would have cringed before his old nurse.

So would Herbert Spencer, Attila the Hun, and the Emperor Nero. My nephew Frederick … but I must not bore you with my family gossip.”

George’s consulting-room, facing west, had the advantage of getting the afternoon sun: and this afternoon it needed all the sun it could get, to counteract Frederick’s extraordinary gloom.

The young man’s expression, as he confronted his brother, was that which a miasmic pool in some dismal swamp in the Bad Lands might have worn if it had had a face.

“Then the position, as I see it,” he said in a low, toneless voice, “is this.

“You have contributed to her support for many years,” George reminded him.

“Naturally, when the family were clubbing together to pension off the old blister, I chipped in with my little bit,” said Frederick. “Noblesse oblige.”

“Well, noblesse obliges you to go and have tea with her when she invites you. Wilks must be humoured. She is not so young as she was.”

Spinning round he perceived a different person altogether from the mild and kindly hostess of a moment back. It was plain that there yet lingered in Nurse Wilks not a little of the ancient fire. Her mouth was tightly compressed and her eyes gleamed dangerously.

“Theideaofyourbringingyournastydirtybootsintomynicecleanhousewithoutwipingthem!”

said Nurse Wilks.

At the present moment, the mouth was not parted in a smile. It was closed up tight, and the chin was more than resolute. It looked like the ram of a very small battleship.

She gazed at Frederick as if he were the smell of onions, and she did not say a word.

Nor did Frederick say very much. Nothing is more difficult for a young man than to find exactly the right remark with which to open conversation with a girl who has recently returned his letters. (Darned good letters, too.

(Darned good letters, too. Reading them over after opening the package, he had been amazed at their charm and eloquence.)

Frederick, then, confined his observations to the single word “Guk!”

Having uttered this, he sank into a chair and stared at the carpet. The girl stared out of the window:

“Are you insinuating that I am the sort of man who turns lightly from one woman to another—a mere butterfly who flits from flower to flower, sipping … ?”

“Yes, if you want to know, I think you are a born sipper.”

Frederick started. The charge was monstrous.

Frederick started. The charge was monstrous.

“I have never sipped. And, what’s more, I have never flitted.”

“You appear to have a very keen sense of humour,” said Frederick weightily. “It amuses you to be shut up in cupboards. It amuses you to hear me say. …”

“I was kicking about to discourage the mice.”

“Only a trifle more than blazes, thank you for inquiring.”

“Anyway, it would have given a mouse a nasty jar, if it had been one, wouldn’t it?”

He splashed himself to the eyebrows. And just after that I found that he had a trick of making a sort of funny noise when he drank coffee.

I would sit on the other side of the breakfast table, looking at him and saying to myself ‘Now comes the funny noise!’ and when I thought of doing that all the rest of my life I saw that the scheme was impossible.

So I broke off the engagement.”

“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.

“Then I can speak freely. No doubt you are aware, Mr. Mulliner, that for some time past this country and a certain rival Power have been competing for the friendship and alliance of a certain other Power?”

“No,” said Clarence, “they didn’t tell me that.”

“Such is the case. And the President of this Power—”

In the eyes of all Europe—and when I say all Europe I refer particularly to Powers C, D, and E—this nation would sink to the rank of a fourth-class Power.”

“Call it Power F,” said Clarence.

“It rests with you, Mr. Mulliner, to save England.”

“Flee, father,” corrected the girl, faintly.

“Flea or fly⁠—this is no time for arguing about insects. Let me tell you⁠—”

“What do you mean,” he cried, “by saying that she took after you?”

“Well,” I replied, “I don’t like them, if that’s what you mean. I was once butted by one as a child.”

“Ghosts. Not goats.”

“Oh, ghosts? Do I believe in ghosts?”

The critics usually headed their reviews of her stories with the words:

And once, dealing with, I think, The Love Which Prevails, the literary expert of the Scrutinizer had compressed his entire critique into the single phrase “Oh, God!”

“Of course,” I said. “But what about her?”

And not even the thought that his aunt had dandled him on her knee as a baby could induce him to stifle his literary conscience to the extent of pretending to enjoy her work.

First, last, and all the time, James Rodman had held the opinion⁠—and voiced it fearlessly⁠—that Leila J. Pinckney wrote bilge.

“It was a surprise to him, therefore, to find that he had been left this legacy. A pleasant surprise, of course.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.

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 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 Dr. Brady as he was leaving after one of his visits and put the thing to him squarely:

“Yes, you are brave—brave,” the girl whispered.

“I am wet⁠—wet,” said James, and went upstairs to change his clothes.

When he came down for lunch, he found to his relief that the girl had decided not to join them, and Colonel Carteret was silent and preoccupied.