Portrait of a Disciplinarian
It was with something of the relief of fogbound city-dwellers who at last behold the sun that we perceived, on entering the bar-parlour of the Anglers’ Rest, that Mr. Mulliner was seated once more in the familiar chair. For some days he had been away, paying a visit to an old nurse of his down in Devonshire: and there was no doubt that in his absence the tide of intellectual conversation had run very low.
“No,” said Mr. Mulliner, in answer to a question as to whether he had enjoyed himself, “I cannot pretend that it was an altogether agreeable experience. 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.”
Mr. Mulliner winced slightly, as if the old wound still troubled him.
“It is curious,” he went on, after a thoughtful pause, “how little change the years bring about in the attitude of a real, genuine, crusted old family nurse towards one who in the early knickerbocker stage of his career has been a charge of hers. He may grow grey or bald and be looked up to by the rest of his world as a warm performer 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.”
We reassured him.
“Oh well, if you wish to hear the story. There is nothing much in it as a story, but it bears out the truth of what I have just been saying.”
I will begin (said Mr. Mulliner) at the moment when Frederick, having come down from London in response to an urgent summons from his brother, Dr. George Mulliner, stood in the latter’s consulting-room, looking out upon the Esplanade of that quiet little watering-place, Bingley-on-Sea.
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. On the pretext of wishing to discuss urgent business with me, you have dragged me down to this foul spot—seventy miles by rail in a compartment containing three distinct infants sucking sweets—merely to have tea with a nurse whom I have disliked since I was a child.”
“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.”
“She must be a hundred.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Good heavens! And it seems only yesterday that she shut me up in a cupboard for stealing jam.”
“She was a great disciplinarian,” agreed George. “You may find her a little on the autocratic side still. And I want to impress upon you, as her medical man, that you must not thwart her lightest whim. She will probably offer you boiled eggs and homemade cake. Eat them.”
“I will not eat boiled eggs at five o’clock in the afternoon,” said Frederick, with a strong man’s menacing calm, “for any woman on earth.”
“You will. And with relish. Her heart is weak. If you don’t humour her, I won’t answer for the consequences.”
“If I eat boiled eggs at five in the afternoon, I won’t answer for the consequences. And why boiled eggs, dash it? I’m not a schoolboy.”
“To her
