Mr. Mulliner Stories · Honeysuckle Cottage (1/3)

Honeysuckle Cottage

“Do you believe in ghosts?” asked Mr. Mulliner abruptly.

I weighed the question thoughtfully. I was a little surprised, for nothing in our previous conversation had suggested the topic.

“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?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, yes⁠—and no.”

“Let me put it another way,” said Mr. Mulliner, patiently. “Do you believe in haunted houses? Do you believe that it is possible for a malign influence to envelop a place and work a spell on all who come within its radius?”

I hesitated.

“Well, no⁠—and yes.”

Mr. Mulliner sighed a little. He seemed to be wondering if I was always as bright as this.

“Of course,” I went on, “one has read stories. Henry James’s Turn of the Screw.⁠ ⁠…”

“I am not talking about fiction.”

“Well, in real life⁠—Well, look here, I once, as a matter of fact, did meet a man who knew a fellow.⁠ ⁠…”

“My distant cousin James Rodman spent some weeks in a haunted house,” said Mr. Mulliner, who, if he has a fault, is not a very good listener. “It cost him five thousand pounds. That is to say, he sacrificed five thousand pounds by not remaining there. Did you ever,” he asked, wandering, it seemed to me, from the subject, “hear of Leila J. Pinckney?”

Naturally I had heard of Leila J. Pinckney. Her death some years ago has diminished her vogue, but at one time it was impossible to pass a bookshop or a railway bookstall without seeing a long row of her novels. I have never myself actually read any of them, but I knew that in her particular line of literature, the Squashily Sentimental, she had always been regarded by those entitled to judge as preeminent. The critics usually headed their reviews of her stories with the words:

Another Pinckney

or sometimes, more offensively:

Another Pinckney!!!

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?”

“She was James Rodman’s aunt.”

“Yes?”

“And when she died James found that she had left him five thousand pounds and the house in the country where she had lived for the last twenty years of her life.”

“A very nice little legacy.”

“Twenty years,” repeated Mr. Mulliner. “Grasp that, for it has a vital bearing on what follows. Twenty years, mind you, and Miss Pinckney turned out two novels and twelve short stories regularly every year besides a monthly page of Advice to Young Girls in one of the magazines. That is to say, forty of her novels and no fewer than two hundred and forty of her short stories were written under the roof of Honeysuckle Cottage.”

“A pretty name.”

“A nasty, sloppy name,” said Mr. Mulliner severely, “which should have warned my distant cousin James from the start. Have you a pencil and a piece of paper?” He scribbled for a while, poring frowningly over columns of figures. “Yes,” he said, looking up, “if my calculations are correct, Leila J. Pinckney wrote in all a matter of nine million one hundred and forty thousand words of glutinous sentimentality at Honeysuckle Cottage, and it was a condition of her will that James should reside there for six months in every year. Failing to do this, he was to forfeit the five thousand pounds.”

“It must be great fun making a freak will,” I mused. “I often wish I was rich enough to do it.”

“This was not a freak will. The conditions are perfectly understandable. James Rodman was a writer of sensational mystery stories, and his aunt Leila had always disapproved of his work. She was a great believer in the influence of environment, and the reason why she inserted that clause in her will was that she wished to compel James to move from London to the country. She considered that living in London hardened him and made his outlook on life sordid. She often asked him if he thought it quite nice to harp so much on sudden death and blackmailers with squints. Surely, she said, there were enough squinting blackmailers in the world without writing about them.

“The fact that Literature meant such different things to these two had, I believe, caused something of a coolness between them, and James had never dreamed that he would be remembered in his aunt’s will. For he had never concealed his opinion that Leila J. Pinckney’s style of writing revolted him, however dear it might be to her enormous public. He held rigid views on the art of the novel, and always maintained that an artist with a true reverence for his craft should not descend to gooey love stories, but should stick austerely to revolvers, cries in the night, missing papers, mysterious Chinamen, and dead bodies⁠—with or without gash in throat. 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 was making quite a decent income out of the three novels and eighteen short stories which he produced annually, but an author can always find a use for five thousand pounds. And, as for the cottage, he had actually been looking about for a little place in the country at the very moment when he received the lawyer’s letter. In less than a week he was installed at his new residence.”

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 Faërie. 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 horning 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 dinnertime.

“William!” bellowed James.

William looked courteously over his shoulder with eyes that beamed with the pure light of a life’s devotion, wagged the whiplike 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 corner 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 Masterton 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.