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The Philanderers written by A.E.W. Mason

A >> A.E.W. Mason >> The Philanderers




The notion of messages flashing hourly along these wires brought to mind
the existence of the _Meteor_. He sent out for a copy of each number
which had appeared since he had begun his voyage, and commencing on the
task whilst he was still at breakfast, read through every article written
concerning the Boruwimi expedition. He finished the last in the
smoking-room shortly after one o'clock, and rose from his investigation
with every appearance of relief. From the first to the final paragraph,
not so much as a mention of Gorley's name!

The reason for his relief lay in a promise which he had sent to Gorley's
father, that he would suppress the trouble as far as he could; and Drake
liked to keep his promises.

Gorley had come out to Matanga with a cloudy reputation winging close at
his heels. There were rumours of dishonesty in the office of a private
bank in Kent; his name became a sign for silence, and you were allowed to
infer that Gorley's relatives had made good the deficit and so avoided a
criminal prosecution. It was not surprising, then, that Gorley, on
hearing of Drake's intended march to Boruwimi, should wish to take
service under his command. He called upon Drake with that request, was
confronted with the current story, and invited to disprove it. Gorley
read his man shrewdly, and confessed the truth of the charge without an
attempt at mitigation. He asked frankly for a place in the troop, the
lowest, as his chance of redemption, or rather demanded it as a grace due
from man to man. Drake was taken by his manner, noticed his build, which
was tough and wiry, and conceded the request. Nor had he reason to regret
his decision on the march out. Gorley showed himself alert, and vigilant,
a favourite with the blacks, and obedient to his officers. He was
advanced from duty to duty; a week before the force began its homeward
march from Boruwimi he was sent out with a body of men to forage for
provisions. Three days later a solitary negro rushed into camp, one of
the few survivors of his tribe, he said. He told a story of food freely
given, a village plundered and burned for thanks, of gold-dust stolen and
the owners murdered that they might the better hold their tongues. He
signified Gorley as the culprit. Drake, guided by the negro, marched
towards the spot. He met Gorley and his company half-way between Boruwimi
and the village, carried him along with him, and proved the story true.
Against Gorley's troops no charge could be sustained; they had only
obeyed orders. But Gorley he court-martialled, and the result has been
described.

This was the incident which Drake was unwilling to commit to the
discretion of the editor of the _Meteor_. He had discovered Gorley's
relations in England, and had written to them a full account of the
affair, despatching with his letter a copy of the evidence given at the
court-martial. The reply came from the father, a heart-broken admission
of the justice of Drake's action, and a prayer that, for the sake of
those of the family who still lived, Gorley's crime should be as far as
possible kept secret. Drake gave the promise. So far he had kept it, he
realised, as he tossed aside the last copy of the _Meteor_.

At eight o'clock Sidney Mallinson arrived. He saw Drake at the top of
the flight of steps in the vestibule, and hesitated, perceiving that he
was alone.

'Hasn't Conway come?' he asked. 'I sent to him.'

'Not yet. It's barely eight.'

They shook hands limply and searched for topics of conversation.

'You look older than you did,' said Mallinson.

'Ah! Ten years, you know. You haven't changed much.'

Drake was looking at a face distinguished by considerable comeliness. The
forehead, however, overhung the features beneath it and gave to a mouth
and chin, which would otherwise have aroused no criticism, an appearance
of irresolution. The one noticeable difference in Mallinson was the
addition of an air of constraint. It was due partly to a question which
had troubled him since he had received the invitation. Had Drake read _A
Man of Influence_ and recognised himself?

'I got your telegram,' he said at length.

'Naturally, or you wouldn't be here.'

The answer was intended to be jocular; it sounded only _gauche_, as Drake
recognised, and the laugh which accompanied it positively rude.

'Shall I put my coat in the cloak-room?' suggested Mallinson.

'Oh yes, do!' replied Drake. He was inclined to look upon the proposal as
an inspiration, and his tone unfortunately betrayed his thought.

When Mallinson returned, he saw Conway entering the hotel. The latter
looked younger by some years than either of his companions, so that, as
the three men stood together at this moment, they might have been held to
represent three separate decades.

'Twenty minutes late, I'm afraid,' said Conway, and he shook Drake's hand
with a genuine cordiality.

'Five,' said Drake, looking at his watch.

'Twenty,' replied Conway. 'A quarter to, was the time Mallinson
wired me.'

'Was it?' asked Mallinson, with a show of surprise. 'I must have made
a mistake.'

It occurred, however, to Drake that the mistake might have been
purposely made from a prevision of the awkwardness of the meeting. The
dinner, prefaced inauspiciously, failed to remove the awkwardness, since
the reticence under which Drake and Mallinson laboured, gradually spread
and enveloped Conway. A forced conversation of a curiously impersonal
sort dragged from course to course. Absolute strangers would have
exhibited less restraint; for the ghost of an old comradeship made the
fourth at the feast and prated to them in exiguous voice of paths that
had diverged. Drake noticed, besides, an undercurrent of antagonism
between Conway and Mallinson. He inquired what each had been doing
during his absence.

'Mallinson,' interposed Conway, 'has been absorbed in the interesting
study of his own personality.'

'I am not certain that pursuit is not preferable to revolving
unsuccessfully through a cycle of professions,' said Mallinson in
slow sarcasm.

The flush was upon Conway's cheek now. He set his wine glass deliberately
upon the table and leaned forward on an elbow.

'My dear good Sidney,' he began with elaborate affection, plainly
intended as the sugar coating of an excessively unpleasant pill. Drake
hastily interrupted with an anecdote of African experiences. It sounded
bald and monstrously long, but it served its purpose as peace-maker.
Literary acquisitiveness drew Mallinson on to ask for more of the same
kind. Drake mentioned a race of pigmies and described them, speculating
whether they might be considered the originals of the human race.

'My dear fellow, don't!' said Mallinson; 'I loathe hearing about them.
It's so degrading to us to think we sprang from them.'

The peculiar sensitiveness of a mind ever searching, burrowing in, and
feeding upon itself struck a jarring note upon its healthier companion.

'Why, what on earth does it matter?' asked Drake.

'Ah! Perhaps you wouldn't understand.'

Conway gave a shrug of the shoulder and laughed to Drake across the
table. The latter looked entreaty in reply and courageously started a
different topic. He spoke of their boyhood in the suburb on the heights
six miles to the south of London, and in particular of a certain hill,
Elm-tree Hill they called it, a favourite goal for walks and the spot
where the three had last met on the night before Drake left England.
London had lain beneath it roped with lights.

'The enchanted city,' said Conway, catching back some flavour of those
times. 'It seemed distant as El Dorado, and as desirable.'

Mallinson responded with the gentle smile with which a man recognises and
pities a childishness he has himself outgrown.

Drake ordered port, having great faith in its qualities, as inducive of a
cat-like content and consequent good-fellowship. Mallinson, however,
never touched port; nothing but the lightest of French burgundies after
dinner for him. The party withdrew to the smoking-room.

'By the way, Drake,' asked Mallinson, 'have you anything to do to-night?'

'No, why?'

'I was asked to take you to a sort of party.'

Conway looked up sharply in surprise.

'You were asked to take me!' exclaimed Drake. 'Who asked you?'

'Oh, nobody whom you know.' He hesitated for a second, then added with
studied carelessness, 'A Miss Le Mesurier. Her mother's dead,' he
explained, noticing the look of surprise on Drake's face, 'so she keeps
house for her father. There's an aunt to act as chaperon, but she doesn't
count. I got a note from Miss Le Mesurier just before I came here asking
me to bring you.'

'But what does she know of me?'

'Oh, I may have mentioned your name,' he explained indifferently, and
Conway smiled.

'Besides,' said Conway, 'the _Meteor_ has transformed you into a public
character. One knows of your movements.'

'What I don't see is how Miss Le Mesurier could have known that you had
landed yesterday,' commented Mallinson.

'I was interviewed by the _Meteor_ on Plymouth Quay. You received the
note, you say, this evening. She may have seen the interview.'

Drake called to a waiter and ordered him to bring a copy of the paper.
Conway took it and glanced at the first page.

'Yes, here it is.'

He read a few lines to himself, and burst into a laugh.

'Guess how it begins?'

'I know,' said Drake.

'A sovereign you don't.'

Drake laid a sovereign on the table. Conway followed his example.

'It begins,' said Drake, 'with a Latin quotation, _O si sic omnes_!'

'It begins,' corrected Conway, pocketing the money, 'with very downright
English'; and he read, 'Drake, with the casual indifference of the
hardened filibuster, readily accorded an interview to our representative
on landing from the _Dunrobin Castle_ yesterday afternoon!'

Drake snatched the paper out of Conway's hand, and ran his eye down the
column to see whether his words had been similarly transmuted by the
editorial alchemy. They were printed, however, as they had been spoken,
but interspersed with comments. The editor had contented himself with
stamping his own device upon the coin; he had not tried to change its
metal. Drake tossed the paper on one side. 'The man goes vitriol-throwing
with vinegar,' he said.

Conway picked up the _Meteor_.

'You are a captain, aren't you?' he asked. 'The omission of the title
presumes you a criminal.'

'I don't object to the omission,' replied Drake. 'I suppose the title
belongs to me by right. But, after all, a captain in Matanga! There are
more honourable titles.'

Mallinson looked at him suddenly, as though some fresh idea had shot into
his brain.

'Well, will you come?' he asked carelessly.

'I hardly feel inclined to move.'

'I didn't imagine you would.' There was evidence of distinct relief in
the brisk tone of Mallinson's voice. He turned to Conway, 'We ought to be
starting, I fancy.'

'I shall stay with Drake,' Conway answered, despondently to Drake's
thinking, and he lapsed into silence after Mallinson's departure, broken
by intervals of ineffective sarcasm concerning women, ineffectively
accentuated by short jerks of laughter. He roused himself in a while and
carried Drake off to his club, where he found Hugh Fielding pulling his
moustache over the _Meteor_. He introduced Drake, and left them together.

'I was reading a list of your sins,' said Fielding, and he waved the
newspaper.

Drake laughed in reply.

'The vivisectionists,' said Fielding, 'may cite you as proof of the
painlessness of their work.'

'It is my character that suffers the knife. I fancy the editor would
prefer to call the operation a _post-mortem_.'

Fielding warmed to his new acquaintance. Whisky and potass helped them to
discover common friends, about whom Fielding supplied information with a
flavour of acid in his talk which commended him to Drake; it bit without
malice. Mallinson's name was mentioned.

'You have read his autobiography?' asked Fielding.

'No; but I have read his novel.'

'That's what I mean. Most men wait till they have achieved a career
before they write their autobiographies. He anticipates his. It's rather
characteristic of the man, I think.'

They drove from the club together in a hansom. Opposite to his rooms in
St. James's Street Fielding got out.

'Good-night,' he said, and took a step towards the door.

A lukewarm curiosity which had been stirring in Drake during the latter
part of the evening prompted him to a question now that he saw the
opportunity to satisfy it disappearing.

'You know the Le Mesuriers?' he asked.

Fielding laughed. 'Already?' he said.

'I don't understand.'

'Then you are not acquainted with the lady?'

'No; that's what I'm asking. What is Miss Le Mesurier like?'

'She is more delightfully surprising than even I had imagined. Otherwise
she's difficult to describe; a bald enumeration of features would be rank
injustice.'

Drake's curiosity responded to the flick.

'One might fit them together with a little trouble,' he suggested.

'The metaphor of a puzzle is not inapt,' replied Fielding, as he opened
his door. 'Good-night!' and he went in.

Half-way down Pall Mall Drake was smitten by a sudden impulse. The
fog had cleared from the streets; he looked up at the sky. The night
was moonless but starlit, and very clear. He lifted the trap, spoke
to the cabman, and in a few minutes was driving southwards across
Westminster Bridge.

It was the chance recollection of a phrase dropped by Conway during
dinner which sent him in this untimely scurry to Elm-tree Hill. 'As
distant as El Dorado, and as desirable.' The sentence limned with
precision the impression which London used to produce upon Drake. The
sight of it touched upon some single chord of fancy in a nature otherwise
prosaic, of which the existence was unsuspected by his few companions and
unrealised by himself.

Working in that tower which you could see from the summit of the Elm-tree
Hill topping the sky-line to the west, in order to complete his education
as an engineer before his meagre capital was exhausted, Drake had enjoyed
little opportunity of acquiring knowledge of London; and those
acquaintances of his who travelled thither with their shiny black bags
every morning, seemed to him to know even less than he did. There were
but two points of view from which the town was regarded in the suburb,
and the inhabitants chose this view according to their sex. To the men
London was a counting-house, and certainly some miles of yellow brick
mansions and flashing glasshouses testified that the view was a
profitable one. To the women it was the alluringly wicked abode of
society, and they held their hands before their faces when they mentioned
it, to hide their yearning. Occasionally they imagined they caught a
glimpse into it, when a minister from one of the states in the Balkan
Peninsula strayed down to shed a tallow-candle lustre over a garden
party. To both these views Drake had listened with the air of a man
listening to an impertinence, and his attitude towards the former view
showed particularly the strength of the peculiar impression which London
made on him, since he always placed the acquisition of a fortune as an
aim before himself.

He thought of London, in fact, as a countryman might, with all a
countryman's sense of its mystery and romance, intensified in him by the
daily sight of its domes and spires. He saw it clothed by the changing
seasons, now ringed in green, now shrouded in white; on summer mornings,
when it lay clearly defined like a finished model and the sun sparkled on
the vanes, set the long lines of windows ablaze in the Houses of
Parliament, and turned the river into a riband of polished steel; or,
again, when the cupola of St. Paul's and the Clock Tower at Westminster
pierced upwards through a level of fog, as though hung in the mid-air; or
when mists, shredded by a south wind, swirled and writhed about the
rooftops until the city itself seemed to take fantastic shapes and melt
to a substance no more solid than the mists themselves.

These pictures, deeply impressed upon him at the moment of actual vision,
remained with Drake during the whole period of his absence, changing a
little, no doubt, as his imagination more and more informed them, but
losing nothing of vividness, rather indeed waxing in it with the gradual
years. One may think of him as he marched on expeditions against hostile
tribes, dwelling upon these recollections as upon the portrait of an
inherited homestead. London, in fact, became to him a living motive, a
determining factor in any choice of action. Whatsoever ambitions he
nourished presumed London as their starting-point. It was then after all
not very singular that on this first night of his return he should make a
pilgrimage to the spot whence he had drawn such vital impressions. For a
long time he stood looking down the grass slope ragged with brambles and
stunted trees, and comprehending the whole lighted city in his glance.

On the way home his mind, which soon tired of a plunge into sentiment,
reverted to the thought of Miss Le Mesurier, and he speculated
unsuccessfully on the motive which had prompted her to send him so
immediate an invitation. The enigmatic interest which she took in him,
gave to him in fact a very definite interest in her. He wondered again
what she was like. Fielding's description helped to pique his curiosity.
All that he knew of her was her surname, and he found it impossible to
infer a face or even a figure from this grain of knowledge. By the time
he reached the Grand Hotel, he was regretting that he had not accepted
her invitation.




CHAPTER III


Drake repeated his question to Fielding two days later, after a dinner
with Conway at his club, but in a tone of languid interest.

'Why don't you ask Mallinson?' said Fielding. 'He knows her better
than I do.'

Conway contested the assertion with some heat.

'Besides,' added Drake, 'his imagination may have been at work. About
women, I prefer the estimate of a man of the world.'

The phrase was distasteful to a gentleman whose ambition it was to live
and to be recognised as living within view of, but outside the world, say
just above it in a placid atmosphere of his own creation. Fielding leaned
back in his chair to mete out punishment, joining the finger-tips with an
air of ordering a detailed statement.

'The inhabitants of Sark,' he began, 'were from immemorial times notable
not merely for their predatory instincts, but for the stay-at-home
fashion in which they gave those instincts play. They did not scour the
seas for their victims, neither did they till their island. There was no
need for so much exertion. They lay supine upon their rocks and waited
until a sail appeared above the horizon. Even then they did not stir till
nightfall. But after it was dark, they lighted bonfires upon suitable
promontories, especially towards Brecqhou and the Gouliot channel, where
snags are numerous, and gathered in their harvest in the morning.

'But,' Drake interrupted, 'what on earth has that to do with--'

'Miss Le Mesurier? A great deal, as you will see if you listen patiently.
Lloyd's at that time had not been invented, and the Sarkese were
consequently unpopular with the trading community, and in the reign of
Henry the--well, the particular Henry is immaterial--an irate band of
merchants sailed from Winchelsea on a trip. They depopulated Sark in a
single night, as they thought. But they were mistaken. One family escaped
their attention,--the Le Mesuriers, who were the custodians of the silver
mines--' At this point Conway broke in with an impatient laugh. Fielding
turned a quiet eye upon him and repeated in an even voice, 'Who were the
custodians of the silver mines, and lived under the shelter of a little
cliff close by the main shaft. When Helier de Carteret, who, you know,'
and he inclined suavely towards Conway, 'was Seigneur of somewhere or
other in Jersey, came a few years later to colonise Sark, he found the Le
Mesuriers in possession, and while he confiscated the mines, he allowed
them to retain their ancient dignity of custodians.'

'Fudge!' said Conway rudely. Fielding waved a deprecating hand and
continued:

'Living where they did, it is not to be wondered at that the Le Mesuriers
became gradually rich, and the De Carterets gradually poor, so that when
the latter family was compelled to place the Seigneurie of Sark upon the
market, the Le Mesuriers were the highest bidders. The Le Mesuriers thus
became Seigneurs of Sark. But with their position they reversed their
conduct, and, instead of taking other people's money out of mines, they
put their own in, with the result that they sustained embarrassing
losses. I mention these details incidentally to show that Miss Le
Mesurier of to-day is directly descended from ancestors of predatory
instincts, who did not go a-hunting for victims, but unobtrusively
attracted them in a passive, lazy way which was none the less effectual.'

Conway's patience was exhausted at this period of the disquisition.

'I never heard such a hotch-potch of nonsense in my life,' he said.

'I admit,' returned Fielding with unruffled complacency, 'that I aimed at
an allegory rather than a pedantic narrative of facts. I was endeavouring
to explain Clarice Le Mesurier on the fashionable principle of heredity.'

It flashed across Drake that if Fielding had described, though with some
exaggeration, an actual phase of Miss Le Mesurier's character, she must
have been driven to make the first advance towards his acquaintance by a
motive of unusual urgency. The notion, however, did but flash and flicker
out. He had no mental picture of the girl to fix her within his view; he
knew not, in fact, whether she was girl or woman. She was to him just an
abstraction, and Drake was seldom inclined for the study of abstractions.
His curiosity might, perhaps, have been stronger had Mallinson related to
him the way in which he had been received at the house of the Le
Mesuriers after his dinner with Drake. When he arrived he found the
guests staring hard at each other silently, with the vacant expression
which comes of an effort to understand a recitation in a homely dialect
from the north of the Tweed. He waited in the doorway and suddenly saw
Miss Le Mesurier rise from an embrasure in the window and take half a
step towards him. Then she paused and resumed her seat.

'That's because I come alone,' he thought, and something more than his
vanity was hurt.

The recitation reached its climax. Darby and Joan, quarrelling through
nineteen stanzas as to whether they had been disturbed by a rat or a
mouse, discovered in the twentieth that the animal was a ball of wool.
The company sighed their relief in a murmur of thanks, and Mallinson
crossed the room to the window.

'And Captain Drake?' Clarice asked as she gave him her hand. The
disappointment in her voice irritated him, and he answered with a sharp
petulance.

'He's not a captain really, you know.'

The girl glanced at him in surprise.

'I mean,' he went on, answering the glance, 'Of course he held the rank
over there. But a captain in Matanga!' He shrugged his shoulders. 'There
are more honourable titles.'

'Still I asked you to bring him. You got my note, I suppose?' Her manner
signified a cold request for an explanation.

'I couldn't,' he replied shortly.

'You mean you did not think it worth while to take enough trouble to
find him.'

'No; that's not the reason. In fact I dined with him to-night, but I saw
that I couldn't bring him here.'

'Why?'

'Well, he's changed.'

'In what way?'

'He has grown so hopelessly bourgeois.'

The epithet was a light to Clarice. She knew it for the superlative in
Mallinson's grammar of abuse. Bourgeois! The term was the palm of a hand
squashed upon a lighted candle; it snuffed you out. Convicted of
bourgeoisie, you ought to tinkle a bell for the rest of your life, or at
the easiest be confined east of Temple Bar. Applied to Drake the word
connoted animosity pure and simple, animosity suddenly conceived too, for
it was not a week since Mallinson had been boasting of his friendship
with the man. What was the reason of that animosity? Clarice lowered her
eyelashes demurely and smiled.

'I fancied he was your friend,' she said with inquiring innocence.

'I believe I remarked that he was changed.' Mallinson looked up at a
corner of the ceiling as he spoke, and the exasperation was more than
ever pronounced in his voice.

'Mr. Drake,' she went on, and she laid the slightest possible emphasis on
the prefix, 'Mr. Drake has travelled among the natives a good deal, I
think you told me?'

'Yes.'

'It's funny that that should make a man bourgeois.'

Mallinson became flippant.

'I am not so sure,' he said. 'The natives, I should think, are
essentially bourgeois. They love beads, and that's typical of the class.
Evil communications, you know,' and he laughed, but awkwardly and without
merriment.

'Really?' asked Clarice, looking straight at him with grave eyes. She
seemed to be seriously deliberating the truth of his remark. Mallinson's
laughter stopped short. 'There's my aunt beckoning to you,' she said.