The Philanderers | Page 9

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,