The Philanderers Part 9

When after the five minutes had elapsed they entered the house, they found that Mrs. Willoughby had arrived.

Clarice introduced Stephen Drake to Mrs. Willoughby. He saw a woman apparently in the early twenties, tall, with a broad white forehead, under ma.s.ses of unruly black hair, and black eyebrows shadowing eyes of the colour of sea-shallows on an August morning. The eyes were hard, he noticed, and the lips pressed together; she bowed to him without a word.

Hostility was evidently to be expected, and Drake wondered at this, for he knew Mrs. Willoughby to be Clarice's chief friend and confidante. Mrs.

Willoughby fired the first shot of the combat as soon as they had sat down to lunch. She spoke of unscrupulous cruelty shown by African explorers, and appealed to Drake for correction, she said, but her tone implied corroboration.

'I have known cases,' he admitted, 'here and there. You can't always prevent it. The pioneer in a new country doesn't bring testimonials with him invariably. In fact, one case of the kind happened under my own eyes, I might almost say.'

Mrs. Willoughby seemed put out of countenance by Drake's reply. She had plainly expected a strenuous denial of her statement. Drake caught a look of reproof which Mr. Le Mesurier directed towards her, and set it down to his host's courtesy towards his guest. Clarice, however, noticed the look too.

'Indeed,' she said. 'Tell us about it, Mr. Drake. It will be a change from our usual frock-coat conversation.'

Mr. Le Mesurier imposed the interdict of paternal authority.

'I think, my dear, stories of that cla.s.s are, as a rule, a trifle crude.

Eh, Drake?'

Miss Le Mesurier on the instant became personified submission.

'Of course, papa,' she said, 'if you have reason for believing the story isn't suitable, I wouldn't think of asking Mr. Drake to tell it.'

Mr. Le Mesurier raised his hands in a gesture of despair, and looked again at Mrs. Willoughby. His glance said, unmistakably, 'Now see what you've done!' Fielding broke into an open laugh; and Clarice haughtily asked him to explain the joke, so that the others present might share in his amus.e.m.e.nt.

'I will,' said Fielding. 'In fact, I meant you to ask me to. I laughed, because I notice that whenever you are particularly obedient to Papa, then you are particularly resolved to have your own way.'

Miss Le Mesurier's foot tapped under the table.

'Of course,' she said, with a withering shrug of her shoulders, 'that's wit, Mr. Fielding.' Repartee was not her strong point.

'No,' he replied, 'merely rudeness. And what's the use of being a privileged friend of the family if you can't be rude?'

Drake came to the rescue. 'Mr. Le Mesurier is quite right,' said he.

'Incidents of the kind I mentioned are best left untold.'

'I don't doubt it,' said Fielding. 'A man loses all sight of humanitarian principles the moment he's beyond view of a fireside.'

'Oh, does he?' replied Drake. 'The man by the fireside is apt to confuse sentiment with humanitarian principles; and sentiment, I admit, you have to get rid of when you find yourself surrounded with savages.'

'Exactly! You become a.s.similated with the savages, and retain only one link between yourself and civilisation.'

'And that link?'

'Is a Maxim gun.'

'My dear fellow, that's nonsense,' Drake answered in some heat. 'It's easy enough to sit here and discuss humanitarian principles, but you need a pretty accurate knowledge of what they are, and what they are not, before you begin to apply them recklessly beyond the reach of civilisation. When I went first to Africa, I stayed for a time at Pretoria, and from Pretoria I went north in a pioneer company. You want to have been engaged in an expedition of that kind to quite appreciate what it means. We were on short rations a good part of the time, with a fair prospect of absolute starvation ahead, and doing forced marches all the while. When we camped of an evening, I have seen men who had eaten nothing since breakfast, and little enough then, just slip the saddles from the horses, and go fast asleep under the nearest tree, without bothering about their supper. Then, perhaps, an officer would shake them up, and they'd have to go collecting brushwood for fires. That's a pretty bad business in the dark, when you're dead tired with the day's tramp.

You don't much care whether you pick up a snake or a stick of wood. I remember, too,' and he gave a laugh at the recollection, 'we used to be allowed about a thimbleful of brandy a day. Well, I have noticed men walk twenty yards away from the camps to drink their tot, for fear some one might jog their elbows. And it was only one mouthful after all--you didn't need to water it. Altogether, that kind of expedition would be something considerably more than an average strain upon a man's endurance, if it was led through a friendly country. But add to your difficulties the continual presence of an enemy, outnumbering you incalculably, always on the alert for you to slacken discipline for a second, and remember you are not marching to safety, but from it. The odds against you are increasing all the time, and that not for one or two days, but for eighty and a hundred. I can a.s.sure you, one would hear a great deal less of the harmlessness of the black, if more people had experienced that grisly hour before daybreak, when they generally make their attacks. Your whole force--it's a mere handful--stands under arms at attention in the dark--and it can be dark on the veld, even in the open, on a starlight night. The veld seems to drink up and absorb the light, as though it was so much water trickling on the parched ground.

There you stand! You have thrown out scouts to search the country round you, but you know for certain that half of them are nodding asleep in their saddles. For all you know, you may be surrounded on all sides. The strain of that hour of waiting grows so intense that you actually long to see the flash of a scout's rifle, and so be certain they are coming, or to feel the ground shake under you, as they stamp their war-dance half a mile away. Their battle chant, too, makes an uncanny sound, when it swells across the veld in the night, but, upon my soul, you almost hear it with relief.'

Drake stopped and looked round upon faces fixed intently on his own, faces which mirrored his own absorption in his theme. There was one exception, however; Mrs. Willoughby sat back in her chair constraining herself to an att.i.tude of indifference, and as Drake glanced at her, her lips seemed to be moving as though with the inward repet.i.tion of some word or phrase. Even Fielding was shaken out of his supermundane quietism.

For the first time he saw revealed the real quality in Drake; he saw visibly active that force of which, although it had lain hitherto latent, he had always felt the existence and understood why he had made friends so quickly, and compelled those friends so perpetually to count with him in their thoughts. It was not so much in the mere words that Drake expressed this quality as in the spirit which informed, the voice which launched them, and the looks which gave them point. His face flashed into mobility, enthusiasm dispelling its set habit of gravity, sloughing it, Fielding thought, or better still, burning through it as through a crust of lava; his eyes--eyes which listened, Fielding had not inaptly described them--now spoke, and spoke vigorously; enthusiasm, too, rode on his voice, deepening its tones--not enthusiasm of the febrile kind which sends the speech wavering up and down the scale, but enthusiasm with sobriety as its dominant note concentrated into a level flow of sound.

His description had all the freshness of an immediate occurrence.

Compared with the ordinary style of reminiscence it was the rose upon the tree to the dried leaves of a _potpourri_.

'But,' said Fielding, unconsciously resisting the influence which Drake exerted, 'I thought you took a whole army of blacks with you on these expeditions?'

'Not on the one I speak of. In Matanga a small force of them, yes! But even they were difficult to manage, and you could not depend upon them.

They would desert at the first opportunity, sell their guns, your peace-offerings of bra.s.s rods, and whatever they could lay their hands on, and straggle behind in the dusk until they got lost. It was no use sending back for them in the morning. One would only have found their bones, and their bones pretty well scoured too. I speak of them as a cla.s.s, of course. There were races loyal enough no doubt, the Zanzibari, for instance. But the difficulty with them was to prevent them fighting when there was no occasion. In fact the blacks who were loyal made up for their loyalty by a lack of common-sense.'

'Cause and effect, I should be inclined to call the combination,'

remarked Fielding, 'with the lack of common-sense as the cause.'

Mrs. Willoughby looked her grat.i.tude across the table, and again her lips moved. Drake chanced to catch her eye, and in spite of herself she rippled to a laugh. She had been defending herself by a repet.i.tion of the editor's comment of "filibuster."

But at the same moment that Drake's glance met hers she had just waked up to the humour of her conduct, and recognised it as a veritable child's device. She could not but laugh, and, laughing there into the eyes of the man, she lost her hostility to him. However, Mrs. Willoughby made an effort to recover it.

'Well, I don't see,' she said to Drake, 'what right you have got to marching into other people's countries even though they are black.'

'Ah!' Drake answered. 'That's precisely what I call, if I may say so, the fireside point of view. We obey a law of nature rather than claim a right. One can discuss the merits of a law of nature comfortably by a fireside. But out there one realises how academic the discussion is, one obeys it. The white man has always spread himself over the country of the black man, and we may take it he always will. He has the pioneer's hankering after the uttermost corners of the earth, and in addition to that the desire to prosper. He obeys both motives; they are of the essence of him. Besides, if it comes to a question of abstract right, I am not sure we couldn't set up a pretty good case. After all, a nation holds its country primarily to benefit itself, no doubt, but also in trust for the world; and the two things hang together. It benefits itself by observing that trust. Now the black man seals his country up, he doesn't develop it. In the first place he doesn't know how to, and in the second, if he did, he would forget as soon as he could. I suppose that it is impossible to estimate the extent of the good which the opening of Africa has done for an overcrowded continent like Europe; and what touches Europe touches the world, no doubt of that, is there? But I'm preaching,' and he came abruptly to an end.

'What I don't understand,' said Mr. Le Mesurier, and he voiced a question the others felt an impulse to ask, 'is, how on earth you are content to settle down as a business man in the City?'

Drake retired into himself and replied with some diffidence:

'Oh, the change is not as great perhaps as you think, I have always looked forward to returning here. One has ambitions of a kind.'

'You ought to go into Parliament,' Clarice said.

Drake laughed, thanking her with the laugh. 'It's rather too early to speak of that.'

Mrs. Willoughby observed that he actually blushed. A blus.h.i.+ng filibuster!

There was a contradiction of terms in the phrase, and he undoubtedly blushed. A question shot through her mind. Did he blush from modesty, or because Clarice made the suggestion?

Mrs. Willoughby asked Fielding for an answer as he stood by the door of her brougham, before she drove away from Beaufort Gardens.

'For both reasons, I should say,' he replied.

'You think, then, he's attracted? He hardly showed signs of it, except that once, and modesty alone might account for that.'

Mrs. Willoughby laid some insistence upon the possibility.

'I should have been inclined to agree with you,' answered Fielding, 'but Drake dragged me round the square before lunch to question me about Mallinson.'

'That makes for your view, certainly. What did you tell him?'

'I painted the portrait which I thought he wanted, picked out Mallinson's vices in clear colours and added a few which occurred to me at the moment. However, Drake closed my mouth with--"He's a hard worker, though."'

'I like the man for that!' cried Mrs. Willoughby, and checked herself suddenly.