"_You_," I italicised. It struck me as phenomenal and rather absurd that everybody that I came across should, in some way or other, be mixed up with this portentous philanthropist. It was as if a fisherman were drawing in a ground line baited with hundreds of hooks. He had a little offended air.
"He, or, I should say, a number of people interested in a philanthropic society, have asked me to go to Greenland."
"Do they want to get rid of you?" I asked, flippantly. I was made to know my place.
"My dear fellow," Callan said, in his most deliberate, most Olympian tone. "I believe you"re entirely mistaken, I believe ... I"ve been informed that the Systeme Groenlandais is one of the healthiest places in the Polar regions. There are interested persons who...."
"So I"ve heard," I interrupted, "but I can a.s.sure you I"ve heard nothing but good of the Systeme and the ... and its philanthropists. I meant nothing against them. I was only astonished that you should go to such a place."
"I have been asked to go upon a mission," he explained, seriously, "to ascertain what the truth about the Systeme really is. It is a new country with, I am a.s.sured, a great future in store. A great deal of English money has been invested in its securities, and naturally great interest is taken in its affairs."
"So it seems," I said, "I seem to run upon it at every hour of the day and night."
"Ah, yes," Callan rhapsodised, "it has a great future in store, a great future. The Duke is a true philanthropist. He has taken infinite pains--infinite pains. He wished to build up a model state, _the_ model protectorate of the world, a place where perfect equality shall obtain for all races, all creeds, and all colours. You would scarcely believe how he has worked to ensure the happiness of the native races. He founded the great society to protect the Esquimaux, the Society for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions--the S.R.A.R.--as you called it, and now he is only waiting to accomplish his greatest project--the Trans-Greenland railway. When that is done, he will hand over the Systeme to his own people. That is the act of a great man."
"Ah, yes," I said.
"Well," Callan began again, but suddenly paused. "By-the-bye, this must go no farther," he said, anxiously, "I will let you have full particulars when the time is ripe."
"My dear Callan," I said, touchily, "I can hold my tongue."
He went off at tangent.
"I don"t want you to take my word--I haven"t seen it yet. But I feel a.s.sured about it myself. The most distinguished people have spoken to me in its favour. The celebrated traveller, Aston, spoke of it with tears in his eyes. He was the first governor-general, you know. Of course I should not take any interest in it, if I were not satisfied as to that.
It is percisely because I feel that the thing is one of the finest monuments of a grand century that I am going to lend it the weight of my pen."
"I quite understand," I a.s.sured him; then, solicitously, "I hope they don"t expect you to do it for nothing."
"Oh, dear, no," Callan answered.
"Ah, well, I wish you luck," I said. "They couldn"t have got a better man to win over the National conscience. I suppose it comes to that."
Callan nodded.
"I fancy I have the ear of the public," he said. He seemed to get satisfaction from the thought.
The train entered Folkestone Harbour. The smell of the sea and the easy send of the boat put a little heart into me, but my spirits were on the down grade. Callan was a trying companion. The sight of him stirred uneasy emotions, the sound of his voice jarred.
"Are you coming to the Grand?" he said, as we pa.s.sed St. Denis.
"My G.o.d, no," I answered, hotly, "I"m going across the river."
"Ah," he murmured, "the Quartier Latin. I wish I could come with you.
But I"ve my reputation to think of. You"d be surprised how people get to hear of my movements. Besides, I"m a family man."
I was agitatedly silent. The train steamed into the glare of the electric lights, and, getting into a fiacre, I breathed again. I seemed to be at the entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise, during that drive across the night city. In London one is always a pa.s.senger, in Paris one has reached a goal. The crowds on the pavements, under the plane-trees, in the black shadows, in the white glare of the open s.p.a.ces, are at leisure--they go nowhere, seek nothing beyond.
We crossed the river, the unwinking towers of Notre Dame towering pallidly against the dark sky behind us; rattled into the new light of the resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and came to a halt before a half-familiar shut door. You know how one wakes the sleepy concierge, how one takes one"s candle, climbs up hundreds and hundreds of smooth stairs, following the slipshod footfalls of a half-awakened guide upward through Rembrandt"s own shadows, and how one"s final sleep is sweetened by the little inconveniences of a strange bare room and of a strange hard bed.
CHAPTER TEN
Before noon of the next day I was ascending the stairs of the new house in which the Duc had his hermitage. There was an air of secrecy in the broad publicity of the carpeted stairs that led to his flat; a hush in the atmosphere; in the street itself, a glorified _cul de sac_ that ran into the bustling life of the Italiens. It had the sudden sluggishness of a back-water. One seemed to have grown suddenly deaf in the midst of the rattle.
There was an incredible suggestion of silence--the silence of a private detective--in the mien of the servant who ushered me into a room. He was the English servant of the theatre--the English servant that foreigners affect. The room had a splendour of its own, not a cheaply vulgar splendour, but the vulgarity of the most lavish plush and purple kind.
The air was heavy, killed by the scent of exotic flowers, darkened by curtains that suggested the voluminous velvet backgrounds of certain old portraits. The Duc de Mersch had carried with him into this place of retirement the taste of the New Palace, that show-place of his that was the stupefaction of swarms of honest tourists.
I remembered soon enough that the man was a philanthropist, that he might be an excellent man of heart and indifferent of taste. He must be.
But I was p.r.o.ne to be influenced by things of this sort, and felt depressed at the thought that so much of royal excellence should weigh so heavily in the wrong scale of the balance of the applied arts. I turned my back on the room and gazed at the blazing white decorations of the opposite house-fronts.
A door behind me must have opened, for I heard the sounds of a concluding tirade in a high-pitched voice.
"_Et quant a un duc de farce, je ne m"en fiche pas mal, moi_," it said in an accent curiously compounded of the foreign and the _coulisse_. A muttered male remonstrance ensued, and then, with disconcerting clearness:
"_Gr-r-rangeur--Eschingan--eh bien--il entend. Et moi, j"entends, moi aussi. Tu veux me jouer contre elle. La Grangeur--pah! Consoles-toi avec elle, mon vieux. Je ne veux plus de toi. Tu m"as donne de tes sales rentes Groenlandoises, et je n"ai pas pu les vendre. Ah, vieux farceur, tu vas voir ce que j"en vais faire._"
A glorious creature--a really glorious creature--came out of an adjoining room. She was as frail, as swaying as a garden lily. Her great blue eyes turned irefully upon me, her bowed lips parted, her nostrils quivered.
"_Et quant a vous, M. Grangeur Eschingan,_" she began, "_je vais vous donner mon idee a moi ..._"
I did not understand the situation in the least, but I appreciated the awkwardness of it. The world seemed to be standing on its head. I was overcome; but I felt for the person in the next room. I did not know what to do. Suddenly I found myself saying:
"I am extremely sorry, madam, but I don"t understand French." An expression of more intense vexation pa.s.sed into her face--her beautiful face. I fancy she wished--wished intensely--to give me the benefit of her "_idee a elle_." She made a quick, violent gesture of disgusted contempt, and turned toward the half-open door from which she had come.
She began again to dilate upon the little weaknesses of the person behind, when silently and swiftly it closed. We heard the lock click.
With extraordinary quickness she had her mouth at the keyhole: "_Peeg, peeg_," she enunciated. Then she stood to her full height, her face became calm, her manner stately. She glided half way across the room, paused, looked at me, and pointed toward the unmoving door.
"_Peeg, peeg_," she explained, mysteriously. I think she was warning me against the wiles of the person behind the door. I gazed into her great eyes. "I understand," I said, gravely. She glided from the room. For me the incident supplied a welcome touch of comedy. I had leisure for thought. The door remained closed. It made the Duc a more real person for me. I had regarded him as a rather tiresome person in whom a pompous philanthropism took the place of human feelings. It amused me to be called _Le Grangeur_. It amused me, and I stood in need of amus.e.m.e.nt.
Without it I might never have written the article on the Duc. I had started out that morning in a state of nervous irritation. I had wanted more than ever to have done with the thing, with the _Hour_, with journalism, with everything. But this little new experience buoyed me up, set my mind working in less morbid lines. I began to wonder whether de Mersch would funk, or whether he would take my non-comprehension of the woman"s tirades as a thing a.s.sured.
The door at which I had entered, by which she had left, opened.
He must have impressed me in some way or other that evening at the Churchills. He seemed a very stereotyped image in my memory. He spoke just as he had spoken, moved his hands just as I expected him to move them. He called for no modification of my views of his person. As a rule one cla.s.ses a man so-and-so at first meeting, modifies the cla.s.sification at each subsequent one, and so on. He seemed to be all affability, of an adipose turn. He had the air of the man of the world among men of the world; but none of the unconscious reserve of manner that one expects to find in the temporarily great. He had in its place a kind of sub-sulkiness, as if he regretted the pedestal from which he had descended.
In his slow commercial English he apologised for having kept me waiting; he had been taking the air of this fine morning, he said. He mumbled the words with his eyes on my waistcoat, with an air that accorded rather ill with the semblance of portentous probity that his beard conferred on him. But he set an eye-gla.s.s in his left eye immediately afterward, and looked straight at me as if in challenge.
With a smiling "Don"t mention," I tried to demonstrate that I met him half way.
"You want to interview me," he said, blandly. "I am only too pleased. I suppose it is about my Arctic schemes that you wish to know. I will do what I can to inform you. You perhaps remember what I said when I had the pleasure of meeting you at the house of the Right Honourable Mr.
Churchill. It has been the dream of my life to leave behind me a happy and contented State--as much as laws and organisation can make one. This is what I should most like the English to know of me." He was a dull talker. I supposed that philanthropists and state founders kept their best faculties for their higher pursuits. I imagined the low, receding forehead and the pink-nailed, fleshy hands to belong to a new Solon, a latter-day aeneas. I tried to work myself into the properly enthusiastic frame of mind. After all, it was a great work that he had undertaken. I was too much given to dwell upon intellectual gifts. These the Duc seemed to lack. I credited him with having let them be merged in his one n.o.ble idea.
He furnished me with statistics. They had laid down so many miles of railways, used so many engines of British construction. They had taught the natives to use and to value sewing-machines and European costumes.
So many hundred of English younger sons had gone to make their fortunes and, incidentally, to enlighten the Esquimaux--so many hundreds of French, of Germans, Greeks, Russians. All these lived and moved in harmony, employed, happy, free labourers, protected by the most rigid laws. Man-eating, fetich-worship, slavery had been abolished, stamped out. The great international society for the preservation of Polar freedom watched over all, suggested new laws, modified the old. The country was unhealthy, but not to men of clean lives--_hominibus bonae voluntatis_. It asked for no others.
"I have had to endure much misrepresentation. I have been called names," the Duc said.
The figure of the lady danced before my eyes, lithe, supple--a statue endued with the motion of a serpent. I seemed to see her sculptured white hand pointing to the closed door.