Read Mr Mulliner Speaking for Free Online Page B

drew a deep breath and took up his tankard again.
     
'All this modern, advanced stuff you read about miracles not happening,' he said severely, 'is dashed poppycock. I disapprove of it. I resent it keenly. About how much?' he went on, pawing adoringly at Ignatius' sleeve. 'To about what, as it were, extent would you be prepared to go? A quid?'
     
Ignatius raised his eyebrows.
     
'A quid is not much, George,' he said with quiet reproach.
     
George made little gurgling noises.
     
'A fiver?'
     
Ignatius shook his head. The movement was a silent rebuke.
     
'Correct this petty, cheese-paring spirit, George,' he urged. 'Be big and broad. Think spaciously.'
     
'Not – a tenner?'
     
'I was about to suggest fifteen pounds,' said Ignatius. 'If you are sure that will be enough.'
     
'What ho!'
     
'You're positive you can manage with that? I know how many expenses you have.'
     
'What ho!'
     
'Very well, then. If you can get along with fifteen pounds, come round to my studio to-morrow morning and we'll fix it up.'
     
And, glowing with fervour, Ignatius slapped George's back in a hearty sort of way and withdrew.
     
'Something attempted, something done,' he said to himself, as he climbed into bed some hours later, 'has earned a night's repose.'
     
 
     
Like so many men who live intensely and work with their brains, my nephew Ignatius was a heavy sleeper. Generally, after waking to a new day, he spent a considerable time lying on his back in a sort of coma, not stirring till lured from his couch by the soft, appealing smell of frying bacon. On the following morning, however, he was conscious, directly he opened his eyes, of a strange alertness. He was keyed up to quite an extraordinary extent. He had, in short, reached the stage when the patient becomes a little nervous.
     
Yes, he felt, analysing his emotions, he was distinctly nervous. The noise of the cat stamping about in the passage outside caused him exquisite discomfort. He was just about to shout to Mrs Perkins, his charwoman, to stop the creature, when she rapped suddenly on the panel to inform him that his shaving-water lay without: and at the sound he immediately shot straight up to the ceiling in a cocoon of sheets and blankets, turned three complete somersaults in mid-air, and came down, quivering like a frightened mustang, in the middle of the floor. His heart was entangled with his tonsils, his eyes had worked round to the back of their sockets, and he wondered dazedly how many human souls besides himself had survived the bomb-explosion.
     
Reason returning to her throne, his next impulse was to cry quietly. Remembering after a while that he was a Mulliner, he checked the unmanly tears and, creeping to the bathroom, took a cold shower and felt a little better. A hearty breakfast assisted the cure, and he was almost himself again, when the discovery that there was not a pipe or a shred of tobacco in the place plunged him once more into an inky gloom.
     
For a long time Ignatius Mulliner sat with his face in his hands, while all the sorrows of the world seemed to rise before him. And then, abruptly, his mood changed again. A moment before, he had been pitying the human race with an intensity that racked him almost unendurably. Now, the realization surged over him that he didn't care a hoot about the human race. The only emotion the human race evoked in him was an intense dislike. He burned with an irritable loathing for all created things. If the cat had been present, he would have kicked it. If Mrs Perkins had entered, he would have struck her with a mahl-stick. But the cat had gone off to restore its tissues in the dust-bin, and Mrs Perkins was in the kitchen, singing hymns. Ignatius Mulliner boiled with baffled fury. Here he was, with all this concentrated hatred stored up within him, and not a living thing in sight on which to expend it. That, he told himself with a mirthless laugh, was the way things happened.
     
And just then the door opened, and