THE PHILANDERERS
BY A.E.W. MASON
Author of 'The Courtship of Morrice Buckler'
1897
PROLOGUE
Five Englishmen were watching a camp fire in the centre of a forest
clearing in mid-Africa. They did not speak, but sat propped against logs,
smoking. One of the five knocked out the ashes of his pipe upon the
ground; a second, roused by the movement, picked up a fresh billet of
wood with a shiver and threw it on to the fire, and the light for a
moment flung a steady glow upon faces which were set with anxiety. The
man who had picked up the billet looked from one to the other of the
faces, then he turned and gazed behind him into the darkness. The floor
of the clearing was dotted with the embers of dying fires, but now and
again he would hear the crackle of a branch and see a little flame spirt
up and shine upon the barrels of rifles and the black bodies of the
sleeping troops. Round the edge of the clearing the trees rose massed and
dark like a cliff's face. He turned his head upwards.
'Look, Drake!' he cried suddenly, and pointed an arm eastwards. The man
opposite to him took his pipe from his mouth and looked in that
direction. The purple was fading out of the sky, leaving it livid.
'I see,' said Drake shortly, and, replacing his pipe, he rose to his
feet. His four companions looked quickly at each other and the eldest of
them spoke.
'Look here, Drake,' said he, 'I have been thinking about this business
all night, and the more I think of it the less I like it. Of course, we
only did what we were bound to do. We couldn't get behind that evidence;
there was no choice for us; but you're the captain, and there is a
choice for you.'
'No,' replied Drake quietly. 'I too have been thinking about it all
night, and there is no choice for me.'
'But you can delay the execution until we get back.'
'I can't even do that. A week ago there was a village here.'
'It's not the man I am thinking of. I haven't lived my years in Africa to
have any feeling left for scum like that. But also I haven't lived my
years in Africa without coming to know there's one thing above all others
necessary for the white man to do, and that's to keep up the prestige of
the white man. String Gorley up if you like, but not here--not before
these blacks.'
'But that's just what I am going to do,' answered Drake, 'and just for
your reason, too--the prestige of the white man. Every day something is
stolen by these fellows, a rifle, a bayonet, rations--something. When I
find the theft out I have to punish it, haven't I? Well, how can I punish
the black when he thieves, and let the white man off when he thieves and
murders? If I did--well, I don't think I could strike a harder blow at
the white man's prestige.'
'I don't ask you to let him off. Only take him back to the coast. Let him
be hanged there privately.'
'And how many of these blacks would believe that he had been hanged?'
Drake turned away from the group and walked towards a hut which stood
some fifty yards from the camp fire. Three sentries were guarding the
door. Drake pushed the door open, entered, and closed it behind him. The
hut was pitch dark since a board had been nailed across the only opening.
'Gorley!' he said.
There was a rustling of boughs against the opposite wall, and a voice
answered from close to the ground.
'Damn you, what do you want?'
'Have you anything you wish to say?'
'That depends,' replied Gorley after a short pause, and his voice changed
to an accent of cunning.
'There's no bargain to be made.'
The words were spoken with a sharp precision, and again there was
a rustling of leaves as though Gorley had fallen back upon his bed
of branches.
'But you can undo some of the harm,' continued Drake, and at that Gorley
laughed. Drake stopped on the instant, and for a while there was silence
between the pair. A gray beam of light shot through a chink between the
logs, and then another and another until the darkness of the hut changed
to a vaporous twilight. Then of a sudden the notes of a bugle sounded the
reveillé. Gorley raised himself upon his elbows and thrust forward his
head. Outside he heard the rattle of arms, the chatter of voices, all the
hum of a camp astir.
'Drake,' he whispered across to the figure standing against the door,
'there's enough gold dust to make two men rich, but you shall have it all
if you let me go. You can--easily enough. It wouldn't be difficult for a
man to slip away into the forest on the march back if you gave the nod to
the sentries guarding him. All I ask for is a rifle and a belt of
cartridges. I'd shift for myself then.'
He ended abruptly and crouched, listening to the orders shouted to the
troops outside. The men were being ranged in their companies. Then the
companies in succession were marched, halted, wheeled, and halted again.
Gorley traced a plan of their evolutions with his fingers upon the floor
of the hut. The companies were formed into a square.
'Drake,' he began again, and he crawled a little way across the hut;
'Drake, do you hear what I'm saying? There's a fortune for you, mind you,
all of it; and I am the only one who can tell you where it is. I didn't
trust those black fellows--no, no,' and he wagged his head with an
attempt at an insinuating laugh. 'I had it all gathered together, and I
buried it myself at night. You gave me a chance before with nothing to
gain. Give me another; you have everything to gain this time. Drake, why
don't you speak?'
'Because there's no bargain to be made between you and me,' replied
Drake. 'If you tell me where the gold dust's hid, it will be given back
to the people it belonged to, or rather to those of them you left
alive. You can do some good that way by telling me, but you won't save
your life.'
Steps were heard to approach the hut; there was a rap on the door.
'Well?' asked Drake.
Gorley raised himself from the floor.
'I am not making you rich and letting you kill me too,' he said; and
then, 'Who cares? I'm ready.'
Drake opened the door and stepped out. Gorley swaggered after him. He
stood for a moment on the threshold. Here and there a wisp of fog ringed
a tree-trunk or smoked upon the ground. But for the rest, the clearing,
littered with the charred debris of a native village, lay bare and
desolate in a cold morning light.
'It looks a bit untidy,' said Gorley, with a laugh. Two of the troopers
approached and laid their hands upon his shoulders. At first he made a
movement to shake them off. Then he checked the impulse and stood
quietly while they pinioned him. After they had finished he spat on the
ground, cast a glance at the square and the rope dangling from a branch
above it, and walked easily towards it. The square opened to receive him
and closed up again.
On the march back two of the Englishmen sickened of ague and died. Six
months later a third was killed in a punitive expedition. The fourth was
drowned off Walfisch Bay before another year had elapsed.
CHAPTER I
Hugh Fielding, while speculating upon certain obscure episodes in the
history of a life otherwise familiar to an applauding public, and at a
loss to understand them, caught eagerly at a simile. Now Fielding came
second to none in his scorn for the simile as an explanation, possibly
because he was so well acquainted with its convenience. 'A fairy lamp' he
would describe it, quite conscious of the irony in his method of
description, 'effective as an ornament upon a table-cloth, but a poor
light to eat your dinner by.'
Nevertheless Fielding hugged this particular simile, applying it as a
sort of skeleton key to the problem of Stephen Drake's career.
He compared Drake's career, or at all events that portion of it which was
closed, to the writing of a book. So many years represent the
accumulation of material, a deliberate accumulation; at a certain date
the book is begun with a settled design, _finis_ being clearly foreseen
from the first word of the preface. But once fairly started the book
throws the writer on one side and takes the lead, drags him, panting and
protesting, after it, flings him down by-ways out of sight of his main
road, tumbles him into people he had no thought of meeting, and finally
stops him dead, Heaven knows where--in front of a blank wall, most
likely, at the end of a _cul de sac_. He may sit down then and cry if he
likes, but to that point he has come in spite of his intentions.
The actual settling down to the work, with the material duly ticketed at
his elbow, in Drake's case Hugh Fielding dated back to a certain day
towards the close of October.
Upon that afternoon the _Dunrobin Castle_ from Cape Town steamed into
Plymouth Harbour, and amongst the passengers one man stepped from the
tender on to the quay and stood there absolutely alone. No one had gone
out to the ship to meet him; no one came forward now on the quay-side,
and it was evident from his indifference to the bystanders that he
expected no one. The more careless of these would have accounted him a
complete stranger to the locality, the more observant an absentee who had
just returned, for while his looks expressed isolation, one significant
gesture proved familiarity with the environments. As his eyes travelled
up the tiers of houses and glanced along towards the Hoe, they paused now
and again and rested upon any prominent object as though upon a
remembered landmark, and each such recognition he emphasised with a nod
of the head.
He turned his back towards the town, directing his glance in a circle.
The afternoon, although toning to dusk, was kept bright by the scouring
of a keen wind, and he noted the guard-ship on his right at its old
moorings, the funnels rising like solid yellow columns from within a
stockade of masts; thence he looked across the water to the yellowing
woods of Mount Edgcumbe, watched for a moment or so the brown sails of
the fishing-smacks dancing a _chassez-croisez_ in the Sound, and turned
back to face the hill-side. A fellow-passenger, hustled past him by
half a dozen importunate children, extricated a hand to wave, and
shouted a cheery 'See you in town, Drake.' Drake roused himself with a
start and took a step in the same direction; he was confronted by a man
in a Norfolk jacket and tweed knickerbockers, who, standing by, had
caught the name.
'Captain Stephen Drake?'
'Yes. Why?'
The man mopped a perspiring face.
'I was afraid I had missed you. I should have gone out on the tender,
only I was late. Can you spare me a moment? You have time.'
'Certainly,' answered Drake, with a look of inquiry.
The man in the knickerbockers led the way along the quay until he came to
an angle between an unused derrick and a wall.
'We shall not be disturbed here,' he said, and he drew an oblong
note-book and a cedar-wood pencil from his pocket.
'I begin to understand,' said Drake, with a laugh.
'You can have no objection?'
There was the suavity of the dentist who holds the forceps behind his
back in the tone of the speaker's voice.
'On the contrary, a little notoriety will be helpful to me too.'
That word 'too' jarred on the reporter, suggesting a flippancy which he
felt to be entirely out of place. The feeling, however, was quickly
swallowed up in the satisfaction which he experienced at obtaining so
easily a result which had threatened the need of diplomacy.
'_O si sic omnes!_' he exclaimed, and made a note of the quotation upon
the top of the open leaf.
'Surely the quotation is rather hackneyed to begin with?' suggested Drake
with a perfectly serious inquisitiveness. The reporter looked at him
suspiciously.
'We have to consider our readers,' he replied with some asperity.
'By the way, what paper do you represent?'
The reporter hesitated a little.
'The _Evening Meteor_,' he admitted reluctantly, keeping a watchful eye
upon his questioner. He saw the lips join in a hard line, and began to
wonder whether, after all, the need for diplomacy had passed.
'I begin to appreciate the meaning of journalistic enterprise,' said
Drake. 'Your editor makes a violent attack upon me, and then sends a
member of his staff to interview me the moment I set foot in England.'
'You hardly take the correct view, if I may say so. Our chief when he
made the attacks acted under a sense of responsibility, and he thought it
only fair that you should have the earliest possible opportunity of
making your defence.'
'I beg your pardon,' replied Drake gravely. 'Your chief is the most
considerate of men, and I trust that his equity will leave him a margin
of profit, only I don't seem to feel that I need make any defence. I have
no objection to be interviewed, as I told you, but you must make it clear
that I intend nothing in the way of apology. Is that understood?'
The pressman agreed, and made a note of the proviso.
'There is another point. I have seen nothing of the paper necessarily for
the last few weeks. The _Meteor_ has, I suppose, continued its--crusade,
shall we call it?--but on what lines exactly I am, of course, ignorant.
It will be better, consequently, that you should put questions and I
answer them, upon this condition, however,--that all reference is omitted
to any point on which I am unwilling to speak.'
The reporter demurred, but, seeing that Drake was obdurate, he was
compelled to give way.
'The entire responsibility of the expedition rests with me,' Drake
explained, 'but there were others concerned in it. You might trench upon
private matters which only affect them.'
He watched the questions with the vigilance of a counsel on behalf of a
client undergoing cross-examination, but they were directed solely to the
elucidation of the disputed point whether Drake had or had not, while a
captain in the service of the Matanga Republic, attacked a settlement of
Arab slave-dealers within the zone of a British Protectorate. The editor
of the _Meteor_ believed that he had, and strenuously believed it--in the
interests of his shareholders. Drake, on the other hand, and the Colonial
Office, it should be added, were dispassionately indifferent to the
question, for the very precise reason that they knew it could never be
decided. There were doubts as to the exact sphere of British influence,
and the doubts favoured Drake for the most part. Insular prehensiveness,
at its highest flight, could do no more than claim Boruwimi as its
uttermost limit, and was aware it would be hard put to it to substantiate
the claim. The editor, nevertheless, persevered, bombarded its citizen
readers with warnings about trade fleeing from lethargic empires,
published a cartoon, and reluctantly took the blackest view of Drake's
character and aims.
Drake's march with a handful of men six hundred miles through a tangled
forest had been a handsome exploit, quickening British pride with the
spectacle of an Englishman at the head of it. Civilian blood tingled in
office and shop, claiming affinity with Drake's. It needed an Englishman
to bill-hook a path through that fretwork of branches, and fall upon his
enemy six weeks before he was expected--the true combination of daring
and endurance that stamps the race current coin across the world! Economy
also pleaded for Drake. But for him the country itself must have burned
out the hornets' nest, and the tax-payer paid, and paid dearly. For there
would have been talk of the expedition beforehand, the force would have
found an enemy prepared and fortified. The hornets could sting too!
Whereas Drake had burned them out before they had time to buzz. He need
not have said one word in exculpation of himself, and that indeed he
knew. But he had interests and ambitions of his own to serve; a hint of
them peeped out.
'As to your future plans?' asked the reporter. 'You mean to go back,
I presume.'
'No; London for me, if I can find a corner in it. I hold concessions
in Matanga.'
'The land needs development, of course.'
'Machinery too; capital most of all.'
At the bookstall upon the platform Drake bought a copy of the _Times_,
and whilst taking his change he was attracted by a grayish-green volume
prominently displayed upon the white newspapers. The sobriety of the
binding caught his fancy. He picked it up, and read the gold-lettered
title on the back--_A Man of Influence_. The stall-keeper recommended the
novel; he had read it himself; besides, it was having a sale. Drake
turned to the title-page and glanced at the author's name--Sidney
Mallinson. He flashed into enthusiasm.
'Selling, eh?'
'Very well indeed.'
'Has it been published long?'
'Less than three months.'
'I will take it, and everything else by the same author.'
'It is his first book.'
The stall-keeper glanced at his enthusiastic customer, and saw a sunburnt
face, eager as a boy's.
'Oh!' he said doubtfully, 'I don't know whether you will like it. It's
violently modern. Perhaps this,' and he suggested with an outstretched
forefinger a crimson volume explained by its ornamentation of a couple of
assegais bound together with a necklace of teeth. Drake laughed at the
application of the homoeopathic principle to the sale of books.
'No, I will take this,' he said, and, moving aside from the stall, stood
for a little turning the book over and over in his hands, feeling its
weight and looking incessantly at the title-page, wondering, you would
say, that the author had accomplished so much.
He had grounds for wonder, too. His thoughts went back across the last
ten years, and he remembered Mallinson's clamouring for a reputation; a
name--that had been the essential thing, no matter what the career in
which it was to be won. Work he had classified according to the
opportunities it afforded of public recognition; and his classification
varied from day to day. A _cause célèbre_ would suggest the Bar, a
published sermon the Church, a flaming poster persuade to the stage. In a
word, he had looked upon a profession as no more than a sounding-board.
It had always seemed to Drake that this fervid desire for fame, as a
thing apart in itself, not as a symbol of success won in a cherished
pursuit, argued some quality of weakness in the man, something unstable
which would make for failure. His surprise was increased by an inability
to recollect that Mallinson had ever considered literature as a means to
his end. Long sojourning in the wilderness, moreover, had given Drake an
exaggerated reverence for the printed page. He was inclined to set
Mallinson on a pinnacle, and scourge himself at the foot of it for his
earlier distrust of him. He opened the book again at the beginning, and
let the pages slip across beneath his thumb from cover to cover; 413 was
marked on the top corner of the last; 413 pages actually written and
printed and published; all consecutive too; something new on each page.
He turned to a porter.
'How long have I before the train starts?'
'Five minutes, sir.'
'Where is the telegraph office?'
The office was pointed out to him, and he telegraphed to Mallinson at the
address of his publishers. 'Have just reached England. Dine with me at
eight to-morrow at the Grand Hotel'; and he added after a moment's pause,
'Bring Conway, if you have not lost sight of him.--DRAKE.'
When the train started Drake settled himself to the study of _A Man of
Influence_. The commentary of the salesman had prepared him for some
measure of perplexity. There would be hinted references and suggestions,
difficult of comprehension to the traveller out of touch with modern
developments. These, however, would only be the ornaments, but the flesh
and blood of the story would be perceptible enough. It was just, however,
this very flesh and blood which eluded him; he could not fix it in a
definite form. He did not hold the key to the author's intention.
Drake's _vis-à-vis_ in the carriage saw him produce the book with
considerable surprise, conscious of an incongruity between the reader and
what he read. His surprise changed to amusement as he noticed Drake's
face betray his perplexity and observed him turn now and again to the
title upon the cover as though doubtful whether he had not misread it. He
gave an audible chuckle.
Drake looked up and across the carriage at a man of about fifty years of
age with a large red face and a close-cropped pointed beard. The chuckle
swelled to a laugh.
'You find that a hard nut to crack?' Drake noticed a thickness in the
articulation.
'I have been some years abroad. I hardly catch its drift,' explained
Drake, and then with an effort at praise:
'It seems a clever satire.'
'Satire!' guffawed the other. 'Well, that's rich! Satire? Why, it's a
manifesto. Gad, sir, it's a creed. I believe in my duty to my senses and
the effectuation of me for ever and ever, Amen. The modern jargon! Topsy
Turvydom! Run the world on the comic opera principle, but be flaming
serious about it. Satire, good Lord!'
He flung himself back on his cushions with a snort of contempt.
'Look you, I'm not a pess--' he checked at the word and then took it at a
run, 'a pessimist, but, as things are going on--well, you have been out
of the country and--and you can't help it, I suppose. You may laugh!
P'raps you haven't got daughters--not that I have either, praise glory!
But nieces, if the father's a fool, wear you out very little less.
Satire, ho! ho!'
The semi-intoxicated uncle of nieces relapsed vindictively into his
corner and closed his eyes. Occasionally Drake would hear a muffled
growl, and, looking in that direction, would see one inflamed eye peering
from a mountain of rugs.
'Satire!' and a husky voice would address the passengers
indiscriminately. 'Satire! and the man's not a day under forty either.'
Drake joined in the laugh and lit his pipe. He was not sensitive to
miscomputations of his years, and felt disinclined to provoke further
outbursts of family confidences.
Instead, he pursued his acquaintance with _A Man of Influence_, realising
now that he must take him seriously and regard him stamped with
Mallinson's approval, a dominating being. He found the task difficult.
The character insisted upon reminding him of the nursery-maid's ideal,
the dandified breaker of hearts and bender of wills; an analytical hero
too, who traced the sentence through the thought to the emotion, which
originally prompted it; whence his success and influence. But for his
strength, plainly aimed at by the author, and to be conceded by the
reader, if the book was to convince? Drake compared him to scree and
shingle as against solid granite. Lean on him and you slip!
The plot was the time-worn, imperishable story of the married couple and
the amorous interloper, the Influential Man, of course, figuring as the
latter, and consequently glorified. The husband was pelted with ridicule
from the first chapter to the last, though for what particular fault
Drake could not discover, unless it were for that of being a husband at
all; so that the interloper in robbing him of his wife was related to
have secured not merely the _succès d'estime_ which accompanies such
enviable feats, but the unqualified gratitude of all married women and
most unmarried men.
There were, no doubt, redeeming qualities; Drake gave them full credit,
and perhaps more than they deserved. He noticed a glitter in the
dialogue, whether of foil or gold he refused to consider, and a lively
imagination in the interweaving of the incidents. But altogether the book
left with him a feeling of distaste, which was not allayed by the
perception that he himself was caricatured in the picture of befooled
husband, while Mallinson figured as the successful deceiver. After all,
he thought, Mallinson and he were friends, and he disliked the mere
imagining of such a relationship between them.
Drake summed up his impressions as his hansom turned into the Bayswater
Road. The day was just beginning to break; the stems of the trees
bordering the park were black bars against the pure, colourless light,
and their mingling foliage a frayed black ribbon stretched across the
sky. One might have conceived the picture the original of a black and
white drawing by a pre-Raphaelite artist.
Drake drew in a long breath of the keen, clear air.
'I am glad I asked him to bring Conway,' he said to himself.