The Philanderers Part 24

'I'm to have one,' said she. 'I'm going down to stay with my uncle at Bentbridge in a week's time.'

'At Bentbridge?' asked Fielding sharply. 'For the election.'

She saw his lips tighten. 'My husband goes with me,' she replied quickly and stopped, flushing as she realised that she had meant and conveyed an apology.

'I should have thought that the Continent would have been more advisable as a change.'

'The Continent! I don't want to travel far. I am so tired.' She spoke in a tone of weariness which touched Fielding in spite of himself. He looked at her more closely. 'Yes,' he said gently, 'you look very tired. You have been doing too much.'

'No, it isn't that,' she replied. 'One thinks of things, that's all.' She bent her head and was silent for a little, tracing a pattern on the table-cloth with a finger absently. Then she added in a low voice, 'I suppose few women ever think at all until after they are married.'

The voice was low, and Fielding was conscious of something new in the tone of it, a deeper vibration, a sincerity different in kind from that surface frankness which he had always known in her. He wondered whether she had struck down from her pinchbeck sentimentality into something that rang solid in the depths of her nature. He looked at her again, her eyes were turned to his. With the shadows about them, they looked bigger, darker, more piteously appealing. She was no less a child to him, the child looked out of her eyes, sounded in the commonplace sentiment she had spoken, and the air of originality with which she had spoken it. But the child seemed beginning to learn the lesson of womanhood, and from the one mistress which could teach it her.

'But why think then?' he asked lightly. 'It ruins a complexion no less than before. Or does a complexion cease to count? Look!' He leaned forward. A pink carnation was in a gla.s.s in front of him, already withering from the heat. He touched the faded tips of the petals. 'That is the colour which conies from thinking.'

Clarice lifted her shoulders with more of sadness than impatience in the gesture. 'You believe,' she said, 'no woman at all has a right to dare to think.'

'I notice,' he answered with the same levity, 'that the woman who thinks generally thinks of what she ought not to.'

Later, in the drawing-room, he looked for her again, and looked unsuccessfully. The window, however, was open, and he advanced to it. Clarice was on the balcony alone, her elbows on the rail, a hand on either side of her cheek. Something in her att.i.tude made him almost pity her.

'Mrs. Mallinson,' he said, 'you will probably think me intrusive, but do you think your visit really wise?' Clarice turned towards him quickly with something of defiance in her manner. 'You are tired,' he went on, 'you want rest. Well, an election isn't a very restful time, even for the onlooker.'

Clarice did not reply for a moment, and when she did she replied with an impulsive frankness, to which his friendly tone had prompted her. 'To tell you the truth, I am not anxious to go. I don't want to, but Sidney wants to.'

'Your husband?'

'You don't believe me.'

'Of course I do.' He left her on the balcony, and went in search of Mallinson. 'So you go to Bentbridge for the election,' he said.

'Yes,' replied the other, lighting up. 'I am looking forward to it like a schoolboy to a football match. The prospect of activity exhilarates me--bodily activity, don't you know--a town humming with excitement.'

Fielding cut him short. 'My dear fellow, you're a d.a.m.ned fool,' he said.

CHAPTER XIII

Stephen Drake had decided to stay during the period of the election at a hotel in the centre of the town, rather than to accept an invitation from Captain Le Mesurier, who lived some miles beyond the outskirts. He travelled down to Bentbridge on the day that the dissolution was announced, and during the journey Mr. Burl gave him much sage advice.

'Keep the arguments for buildings; they're in place there. Ma.s.s-meetings in the open air want something different. Many a good man has lost his seat from not observing that rule. In the open air pitch out a fact or two--not too many--or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play--it's lost then--but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them laugh as he squirms round to pull it off. And, mind you, there'll be no walking over, you'll want all you know. The man's a Radical and a Lord!

The combination satisfies their democratic judgments and their sn.o.bbish instincts at the same time. People forget to count the sn.o.b in the democrat, but he's there all the same, as in most Englishmen. A veneer of sn.o.bbishness over solid independence. That's our characteristic. Lord Cranston! Can't you hear their tongues licking it? Luckily, there are things against him. He's a carpet-bagger like yourself, and he's been more than once separated from his wife. His fault, too--once it was an opera dancer. I've got up the facts. He only joined his wife again a few months ago--probably for the purpose of this election.'

Mr. Burl pulled out a pocket-book, and began to turn over the leaves in search of the d.a.m.ning details, when Drake interrupted him. 'You don't expect me to discuss the man's private life?'

'My dear Drake, do be practical. It's no use being finicking. The essential thing is to win the seat.'

'Whatever the price?'

'Look here; I am not asking you to do anything so crude as to make platform speeches about the man's disgraceful conduct to his wife.' Mr.

Burl a.s.sumed the look of a Rhadamanthus. 'But'--and again he relaxed into the tactician--'you might take a strong social line on morals generally, and the domestic hearth, and that sort of thing.' He looked critically at Drake. 'You're one of the few chaps I know who look as if they could do that and make people believe they really mean it.'

He finally discredited his advice by adding impressibly, 'You needn't go into the instance at all, you know. They'll understand what you're alluding to, never fear'; and Drake flatly refused to dance into Parliament to that tune, however persuasively Mr. Burl played upon the pipes.

The hotel at which Drake put up was situated in a short broad street which ran from the Market Square. From the balcony of his sitting-room on the first floor he could see the market sheds at the end of the street to his left. The opposite end was closed in by the Town Hall, which was built upon an ancient gate of the town. From Drake's windows you got a glimpse through the archway of green fields and trees. Almost facing him was a second hotel on the opposite side of the street, the 'Yellow Boar.'

It was tricked out, he noticed, with the colours of his opponent. While he was standing at the window an open carriage turned out of the market-place, and drove up to the 'Yellow Boar.' Lord Cranston got down from it, and a lady. The candidate was of a short and slight build; a pencil--line of black moustache crossed a pallid and indecisive face, and he seemed a year or two more than thirty. The lady looked the younger, and was certainly the taller of the two. Drake was impressed by her face, which bore womanly gentleness, stamped on features of a marked intellectuality. The couple disappeared into the hall, and appeared again in a large room with big windows upon the first floor. From where he stood Drake could see every corner of the room. Lord and Lady Cranston, the land-lord informed him, were staying at the 'Yellow Boar.' The two candidates overlooked each other.

In this street, morning and evening, they met for a moment or two, and took a breath of friendly intercourse. Drake was introduced to Lady Cranston, but she would have none of the truce. To her he was the enemy, and to be treated as such consistently, with a heart-and-soul hostility, until he confessed himself beaten. Drake liked her all the better for her att.i.tude. Meanwhile he made headway in the const.i.tuency. He was in earnest, with a big theme to descant upon--the responsibility of the const.i.tuency to the empire. His fervour brought it home to his audiences as a fact; he set the recognition of that responsibility forwards as the prime duty of the citizen, sneering at the parochial notion of politics.

Mr. Burl shook his head over Drake's method of fighting the battle, and hinted more than once at the necessity of that lecture upon morals. Drake not only refused to reconsider it, but flatly forbade Mr. Burl to allude to the subject in any speech which he might make. Burl shrugged his shoulders and confided his doubts to Captain Le Mesurier. Said the Captain, 'I think he's wise; a speech might offend. What's wanted is an epigram--a good stinging epigram. We could set it about, and, if it's sharp enough, no need to fear it won't travel.' He paused dubiously.

'After all, though, it's a bit unfair on Cranston. Hang it, I've been a married man myself,' and he chuckled in unregenerate enjoyment. 'However, the seat's got to be won. Let's think of an epigram,' and he scratched his head and slapped his thigh. It was the Captain's way of thinking. The satisfactory epigram would not emerge. He could fashion nothing better as a description of Cranston than, 'A refreshment-room sandwich; two great chunks of sin and a little slice of repentance between.' Mr. Burl condemned it as crude, and for the moment the epigram was dropped.

The Mallinsons arrived a week after the contest had begun. Captain Le Mesurier welcomed Clarice with boisterous effusion, and her husband with quarter-deck dignity. 'You look ill,' he said to Clarice. 'It's your husband worrying you. Ah, I know, I know! Those writing chaps!'

To Mallinson, however, he suddenly showed excessive friendliness, and took the opportunity of saying to him loudly in a full room, 'There's something I must tell you. I know it'll make you laugh. It does me whenever I think of it. You know Drake? Well, we travelled up from Plymouth together when he came back from Africa. He bought your book at the bookstall, and sat opposite me reading it. What was it called? I know, _A Man of Influence_. You should have seen Drake's face. Lord, he couldn't make head or tail of it. How should he? I asked him what he thought of it, and imagine what he answered! You can't, though. It's the funniest thing I ever heard. He said it was a very clever satire. Satire!

Good Lord, I almost rolled off the seat. It is funny, isn't it?'

Mallinson, with a wry face, agreed that the story was funny.

'I knew you would think so,' pursued the Captain relentlessly.

'Everybody does I have told it to, and that's everybody I know. Satire!

Lord help us!' and he shook with laughter and clapped Mallinson in the small of the back.

Mallinson felt the fool that he was intended to look, with the result that his dormant resentment against Drake sprang again into activity.

That resentment became intensified, as the date of the election drew nearer, by an unconfessed jealousy. They both made speeches, but Mallinson chiefly at the smaller meetings. And when they stood upon the same platform he was continually forced to compare the difference in the acclamation with which their speeches were severally received. As a matter of fact, Drake spoke from a fire of conviction, and the conviction not merely burnt through his words, but minted them for him, gave him spontaneously the short homely phrase which sank his meaning into the minds of his hearers. Mallinson took refuge in a criticism of Drake's speeches from the standpoint of literary polish. He recast them in his thoughts, turning this sentence more deftly, whittling that repartee to a finer point. The process consoled him for Drake's misreckoning of his purpose in the matter of _A Man of Influence_, since it pointed to a certain lack of delicacy, say at once to cra.s.sness in the man's intellect.

Mallinson began immediately to imagine himself in Drake's position, the candidate for whom bra.s.s bands played, and hats went spinning into the air. And it needed no conscious effort for one so agile in egotistical leaps to spring thence to the fancy that Drake was a kind of vicarious subst.i.tute for himself, doing his work, too, not without blemishes.

Ten days before the polling-day Fielding ran down from town, and attended a meeting at the Town Hall, at which both Drake and Mallinson were to speak. He sat on the platform by Clarice's side and paid some attention to her manner during the evening. He noticed the colour mount in her cheeks and her eyes kindle, as on first entering the room she looked down upon the crowded floor. The chairs had been removed, and the audience stood packed beneath the flaring gas-jets--artificers for the most part, their white faces smeared and stained with the grime of their factories.

The roar of applause as Drake rose by the table swelled up to three cheers in consonance, and a subsequent singing of 'For he's a jolly good fellow' stirred even Fielding to enthusiasm. He noted that feeling of enthusiasm as strange in himself, and had a thought in consequence that such scenes were hardly of the kind to help Clarice to the rest she needed. The hall for a moment became a sea of tossing handkerchiefs. He took a glance at Clarice. She sat bent forward with parted lips and a bosom that heaved. Fielding turned on his cold-water tap of flippancy.

'It's a bad omen,' said he, with a nod towards the waving handkerchiefs.

'They hang out flags of surrender.'

'Hardly,' she replied, with a smile. 'I can't recognise that the flags are white'; and she added, 'I should like it less if they were. These men are the workers.'

'The workers.' Fielding could hear Drake uttering the word in just the same tone, and his compa.s.sion for Clarice deepened. Why? he asked himself. The girl was undergoing not a jot more punishment than a not over-rigid political justice would have meted out to her. The question inexplicably raised to view a pair of the clearest blue eyes, laughing from between the blackest of eyelashes. He promptly turned his attention to the speaker at the table.

Drake commenced that night with an apology. It was necessary that he should speak about himself. An utterly baseless story had, within the last few days, and doubtless with a view to this election, been revived by the London evening paper which originally made it. He regretted also to notice that his opponent had accepted the story, and was making use of it to prejudice him in the eyes of the electors. Accordingly he felt bound to put the facts simply and briefly before his audience, although the indifference of the Colonial Office to what, if true, was a crime committed by an Englishman on English soil, and against practically English subjects, in effect acquitted him of the charge.

Drake thereupon proceeded to describe his march to Boruwimi. The story, modestly recited in simple nervous English, did more to forward his candidature than all the political speeches he could have made during a twelvemonth. It came pat at the right time, when arguments were growing stale. His listeners hung upon the words; in the intense silence Fielding could feel the sympathy between speaker and audience flowing to and fro between them like a current. Drake instinctively lowered his voice; it thrilled through the hall the more convincingly. There was a perceptible sway of heads forwards, which started at the back and ran from line to line towards the platform like a quick ripple across a smooth sea. It was as though this crowded pack of men and women was drawn to move towards the speaker, where indeed there was no room at all to move.

And in truth the subject was one to stir the blood. Drake prefaced his account by a description of the geography of Boruwimi; he instanced briefly the iniquities of the Arab slave-dealers whom he was attacking.

Thereupon he contrasted the numbers of his little force with the horde of his enemies, and dwelt for a second upon their skill as marksmen; so that his auditors, following him as he hewed his path through the tangle of an untrodden forest, felt that each obstacle he stopped at might mean not merely failure to the expedition, but death to all who shared in it.

Success and life were one and the same thing, and the condition of that thing was speed. He must fall upon the Arabs unawares, like a bolt from the blue. They forgot that he who led that expedition was speaking to them now; they were with him in the obscure depths of the undergrowth, surging against gigantic barriers of fallen tree-trunks, twenty, thirty feet high; they were marching behind him, like him at grips with nature in a six-weeks' struggle of life and death; and when finally he burst into the clearing on the river's bank the ripple went backwards across the hall, and a cheer of relief rang out, as though their lives, too, were saved.