Wodehouse On Crime

by P. G. Wodehouse

  “Tut, tut!” said Mr. Mulliner, reprovingly. “You must not allow these things to affect you so deeply. Remember, it is not actresses’ photographs that matter, but the courage which we bring to them.”

  He sipped his hot Scotch.

  I wonder if you have ever reflected (he said gravely) what life must be like for the men whose trade it is to make these pictures? Statistics show that the two classes of the community which least often marry are milkmen and fashionable photographers — milkmen because they see women too early in the morning, and fashionable photographers because their days are spent in an atmosphere of feminine loveliness so monotonous that they become surfeited and morose. I know of none of the world’s workers whom I pity more sincerely than the fashionable photographer; and yet — by one of those strokes of irony which make the thoughtful man waver between sardonic laughter and sympathetic tears — it is the ambition of every youngster who enters the profession some day to become one.

  At the outset of his career, you see, a young photographer is sorely oppressed by human gargoyles; and gradually this begins to prey upon his nerves.

  “Why is it,” I remember my cousin Clarence saying, after he had been about a year in the business, “that all these misfits want to be photographed? Why do men with faces which you would have thought they would be anxious to hush up wish to be strewn about the country on whatnots and in albums? I started out full of ardour and enthusiasm, and my eager soul is being crushed. This morning the Mayor of Tooting East came to make an appointment. He is coming to-morrow afternoon to be taken in his cocked hat and robes of office; and there is absolutely no excuse for a man with a face like that perpetuating his features. I wish to goodness I was one of those fellows who only take camera portraits of beautiful women.”

  His dream was to come true sooner than he had imagined. Within a week the great test-case of Biggs v. Mulliner had raised my cousin Clarence from an obscure studio in West Kensington to the position of London’s most famous photographer.

  You possibly remember the case? The events that led up to it were, briefly, as follows: —

  Jno. Horatio Biggs, O.B.E., the newly-elected Mayor of Tooting East, alighted from a cab at the door of Clarence Mulliner’s studio at four-ten on the afternoon of June the seventeenth. At four-eleven he went in. And at four-sixteen and a half he was observed shooting out of a first-floor window, vigorously assisted by my cousin, who was prodding him in the seat of the trousers with the sharp end of a photographic tripod. Those who were in a position to see stated that Clarence’s face was distorted by a fury scarcely human.

  Naturally the matter could not be expected to rest there. A week later the case of Biggs v. Mulliner had begun, the plaintiff claiming damages to the extent of ten thousand pounds and a new pair of trousers. And at first things looked very black for Clarence.

  It was the speech of Sir Joseph Bodger, K.C., briefed for the defence, that turned the scale.

  “I do not,” said Sir Joseph, addressing the jury on the second day, “propose to deny the charges which have been brought against my client. We freely admit that on the seventeenth inst. we did jab the defendant with our tripod in a manner calculated to cause alarm and despondency. But, gentlemen, we plead justification. The whole case turns upon one question. Is a photographer entitled to assault — either with or, as the case may be, without a tripod — a sitter who, after being warned that his face is not up to the minimum standard requirements, insists upon remaining in the chair and moistening the lips with the tip of the tongue? Gentlemen, I say Yes!

  “Unless you decide in favour of my client, gentlemen of the jury, photographers — debarred by law from the privilege of rejecting sitters — will be at the mercy of anyone who comes along with the price of a dozen photographs in his pocket. You have seen the plaintiff, Biggs. You have noted his broad, slab-like face, intolerable to any man of refinement and sensibility. You have observed his walrus moustache, his double chin, his protruding eyes. Take another look at him, and then tell me if my client was not justified in chasing him with a tripod out of that sacred temple of Art and Beauty, his studio.

  “Gentlemen, I have finished. I leave my client’s fate in your hands with every confidence that you will return the only verdict that can conceivably issue from twelve men of your obvious intelligence, your manifest sympathy, and your superb breadth of vision.”

  Of course, after that there was nothing to it. The jury decided in Clarence’s favour without leaving the box; and the crowd waiting outside to hear the verdict carried him shoulder-high to his house, refusing to disperse until he had made a speech and sung Photographers never, never, never shall be slaves. And next morning every paper in England came out with a leading article commending him for having so courageously established, as it had not been established since the days of Magna Charta, the fundamental principle of the Liberty of the Subject.

  The effect of this publicity on Clarence’s fortunes was naturally stupendous. He had become in a flash the best-known photographer in the United Kingdom, and was now in a position to realise that vision which he had of taking the pictures of none but the beaming and the beautiful. Every day the loveliest ornaments of Society and the Stage flocked to his studio; and it was with the utmost astonishment, therefore, that, calling upon him one morning on my return to England after an absence of two years in the East, I learned that Fame and Wealth had not brought him happiness.

  I found him sitting moodily in his studio, staring with dull eyes at a camera-portrait of a well-known actress in a bathing-suit. He looked up listlessly as I entered.

  “Clarence!” I cried, shocked at his appearance, for there were hard lines about his mouth and wrinkles on a forehead that once had been smooth as alabaster. “What is wrong?’’

  “Everything,” he replied, “I’m fed up.”

  “What with?”

  “Life. Beautiful women. This beastly photography business.”

  I was amazed. Even in the East rumours of his success had reached me, and on my return to London I found that they had not been exaggerated. In every photographers’ club in the Metropolis, from the Negative and Solution in Pall Mall to the humble public-houses frequented by the men who do your pictures while you wait on the sands at seaside resorts, he was being freely spoken of as the logical successor to the Presidency of the Amalgamated Guild of Bulb-Squeezers.

  “I can’t stick it much longer,” said Clarence, tearing the camera-portrait into a dozen pieces with a dry sob and burying his face in his hands. “Actresses nursing their dolls! Countesses simpering over kittens! Film stars among their books! In ten minutes I go to catch a train at Waterloo. I have been sent for by the Duchess of Hampshire to take some studies of Lady Monica Southbourne in the castle grounds.”

  A shudder ran through him. I patted him on the shoulder. I understood now.

  “She has the most brilliant smile in England,” he whispered.

  “Come, come!”

  “Coy yet roguish, they tell me.”

  “It may not be true.”

  “And I bet she will want to be taken offering a lump of sugar to her dog, and the picture will appear in The Sketch and Tatler as ‘Lady Monica Southbourne and Friend.”

  “Clarence, this is morbid.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “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. How little he guessed that the only girl in the world lay waiting for him round the corner.

  No, you are wrong. Lady Monica did not turn out to be the only girl in the world. If what I said caused you to expect that, I misled you. Lady Monica proved to be all his fancy had pictured her. In fact even more. Not only was her smile coy yet roguish, but she had a sort of coquettish droop of the left eyelid
of which no one had warned him. And, in addition to her two dogs, which she was portrayed in the act of feeding with two lumps of sugar, she possessed a totally unforeseen pet monkey, of which he was compelled to take no fewer than eleven studies.

  No, it was not Lady Monica who captured Clarence’s heart, but a girl in a taxi whom he met on his way to the station.

  It was in a traffic jam at the top of Whitehall that he first observed this girl. His cab had become becalmed in a sea of omnibuses, and, chancing to look to the right, he perceived within a few feet of him another taxi,* which had been heading for Trafalgar Square. There was a face at its window. It turned towards him, and their eyes met.

  To most men it would have seemed an unattractive face. To Clarence, surfeited with the coy, the beaming, and the delicately-chiselled, it was the most wonderful thing he had ever looked at. All his life, he felt, he had been searching for something on these lines. That snub nose — those freckles — that breadth of cheek-bone — the squareness of that chin. And not a dimple in sight. He told me afterwards that his only feeling at first was one of incredulity. He had not believed that the world contained women like this. And then the traffic jam loosened up and he was carried away.

  It was as he was passing the Houses of Parliament that the realisation came to him that the strange bubbly sensation that seemed to start from just above the lower left sidepocket of his waistcoat was not, as he had at first supposed, dyspepsia, but love. Yes, love had come at long last to Clarence Mulliner; and for all the good it was likely to do him, he reflected bitterly, it might just as well have been the dyspepsia for which he had mistaken it. He loved a girl whom he would probably never see again. He did not know her name or where she lived or anything about her. All he knew was that he would cherish her image in his heart for ever, and that the thought of going on with the old dreary round of photographing lovely women with coy yet roguish smiles was almost more than he could bear.

  However, custom is strong; and a man who has once allowed the bulb-squeezing habit to get a grip of him cannot cast it off in a moment. Next day Clarence was back in his studio, diving into the velvet nose-bag as of yore and telling peeresses to watch the little birdie just as if nothing had happened. And if there was now a strange haunting look of pain in his eyes, nobody objected to that. Indeed, inasmuch as the grief which gnawed at his heart had the effect of deepening and mellowing his camera-side manner to an almost sacerdotal unctuousness, his private sorrows actually helped his professional prestige. Women told one another that being photographed by Clarence Mulliner was like undergoing some wonderful spiritual experience in a noble cathedral; and his appointment-book became fuller than ever.

  So great now was his reputation that to anyone who had had the privilege of being taken by him, either full face or in profile, the doors of Society opened automatically. It was whispered that his name was to appear in the next Birthday Honours List and at the annual banquet of the Amalgamated Bulb-Squeezers, when Sir Godfrey Stooge, the retiring President, in proposing his health, concluded a glowingly eulogistic speech with the words, “Gentlemen, I give you my destined successor, Mulliner the Liberator!” five hundred frantic photographers almost shivered the glasses on the table with their applause.

  And yet he was not happy. He had lost the only girl he had ever loved and without her what was Fame? What was Affluence? What were the highest Honours in the Land?

  These were the questions he was asking himself one night as he sat in his library, sombrely sipping a final whisky-and-soda before retiring. He had asked them once and was going to ask them again, when he was interrupted by the sound of some one ringing at the front-door bell.

  He rose, surprised. It was late for callers. The domestic staff had gone to bed, so he went to the door and opened it. A shadowy figure was standing on the steps.

  “Mr. Mulliner?”

  “I am Mr. Mulliner.”

  The man stepped past him into the hall. And, as he did so, Clarence saw that he was wearing over the upper half of his face a black velvet mask.

  “I must apologise for hiding my face, Mr. Mulliner,” the visitor said, as Clarence led him to the library.

  “Not at all,” replied Clarence, courteously. “No doubt it is all for the best.”

  “Indeed?” said the other, with a touch of asperity. “If you really want to know, I am probably as handsome a man as there is in London. But my mission is one of such extraordinary secrecy that I dare not run the risk of being recognised.” He paused, and Clarence saw his eyes glint through the holes in the mask as he directed a rapid gaze into each corner of the library. “Mr. Mulliner, have you any acquaintance with the ramifications of international secret politics?”

  “I have.”

  “And you are a patriot?”

  I am.

  “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 — ”

  “Which one?”

  “The second one.”

  “Call it B.”

  “The President of Power B. is now in London. He arrived incognito, travelling under the assumed name of J. J. Shubert: and the representatives of Power A., to the best of our knowledge, are not yet aware of his presence. This gives us just the few hours necessary to clinch this treaty with Power B. before Power A. can interfere. I ought to tell you, Mr. Mulliner, that if Power B. forms an alliance with this country, the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race will be secured for hundreds of years. Whereas if Power A. gets hold of Power B., civilisation will be thrown into the melting-pot. 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.”

  “Great Britain,” corrected Clarence. He was half Scotch on his mother’s side. “But how? What can I do about it?”

  “The position is this. The President of Power B. has an overwhelming desire to have his photograph taken by Clarence Mulliner. Consent to take it, and our difficulties will be at an end. Overcome with gratitude, he will sign the treaty, and the Anglo-Saxon race will be safe.”

  Clarence did not hesitate. Apart from the natural gratification that he was doing the Anglo-Saxon race a bit of good, business was business; and if the President took a dozen of the large size finished in silver wash it would mean a nice profit.

  “I shall be delighted,’ he said.

  “Your patriotism,” said the visitor, “will not go unrewarded. It will be gratefully noted in the Very Highest Circles.”

  Clarence reached for his appointment-book.

  “Now, let me see. Wednesday? — No, I’m full up Wednesday. Thursday? — No. Suppose the President looks in at my studio between four and five on Friday?”

  The visitor uttered a gasp.

  “Good heavens, Mr. Mulliner,” he exclaimed, “surely you do not imagine that, with the vast issues at stake, these things can be done openly and in daylight? If the devils in the pay of Power A. were to learn that the President intended to have his photograph taken by you, I would not give a straw for your chances of living an hour.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  “You must accompany me now to the President’s suite at the Milan Hotel. We shall travel in a closed car, and God send that these fiends did not recognise me as I came here. If they did, we shall never reach that car alive. Have you, by any chance, while we have been talking, heard the hoot of an owl?”

  “No,” said Clarence. “No owls.”

  “Then perhaps they are nowhere near. The fiends always imitate the hoot of an owl.”

  “A thing,” said Clarence, “which I tried to do when I was a
small boy and never seemed able to manage. The popular idea that owls say Tu-whit, tu-whoo’ is all wrong. The actual noise they make is something far more difficult and complex, and it was beyond me.”

  “Quite so.” The visitor looked at his watch. “However, absorbing as these reminiscences of your boyhood days are, time is flying. Shall we be making a start?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then follow me.”

  It appeared to be holiday-time for fiends, or else the night shift had not yet come on, for they reached the car without being molested. Clarence stepped in, and his masked visitor, after a keen look up and down the street, followed him.

  “Talking of my boyhood — ” began Clarence.

  The sentence was never completed. A soft wet pad was pressed over his nostrils: the air became a-reek with the sickly fumes of chloroform: and Clarence knew no more.

  When he came to, he was no longer in the car. He found himself lying on a bed in a room in a strange house. It was a medium-sized room with scarlet wall-paper, simply furnished with a wash-hand stand, a chest of drawers, two cane-bottomed chairs, and a “God Bless Our Home” motto framed in oak. He was conscious of a severe headache, and was about to rise and make for the water-bottle on the wash-stand when, to his consternation, he discovered that his arms and legs were shackled with stout cord.

  As a family, the Mulliners have always been noted for their reckless courage; and Clarence was no exception to the rule. But for an instant his heart undeniably beat a little faster. He saw now that his masked visitor had tricked him. Instead of being a representative of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service (a most respectable class of men), he had really been all along a fiend in the pay of Power A.

  No doubt he and his vile associates were even now chuckling at the ease with which their victim had been duped. Clarence gritted his teeth and struggled vainly to loose the knots which secured his wrists. He had fallen back exhausted when he heard the sound of a key turning and the door opened. Somebody crossed the room and stood by the bed, looking down on him.