The Great Impersonation, E. Phillips Oppenheim [finding audrey TXT] 📗

sell them to him, I say, at par. Well, I need the money and it seems to me that I had given the shares a fair chance. Within five weeks⁠—five weeks, sir,” he repeated, struggling to attune his voice to his civilised surroundings, “those shares had gone from par to fourteen and a half. Today they stand at twenty. He gave me five thousand pounds for those shares. Today he could walk into your stock market and sell them for one hundred thousand. That is the way money is made in Africa, Mr. Mangan, where innocents like me are to be found every day.”

Dominey poured out a glass of wine and passed it to their visitor.

“Come,” he said, “we all have our ups and downs. Africa owes you nothing, Seaman.”

“I have done well in my small way,” Seaman admitted, fingering the stem of his wineglass, “but where I have had to plod, Sir Everard here has stood and commanded fate to pour her treasures into his lap.”

The lawyer was listening with a curious interest and pleasure to this half bantering conversation. He found an opportunity now to intervene.

“So you two were really friends in Africa?” he remarked, with a queer and almost inexplicable sense of relief.

“If Sir Everard permits our association to be so called,” Seaman replied. “We have done business together in the great cities⁠—in Johannesburg and Pretoria, in Kimberley and Cape Town⁠—and we have prospected together in the wild places. We have trekked the veldt and been lost to the world for many months at a time. We have seen the real wonders of Africa together, as well as her tawdry civilisation.”

“And you, too,” Mr. Mangan asked, “have you retired?”

Seaman’s smile was almost beatific.

“The same deal,” he said, “which brought Sir Everard’s fortune to wonderful figures brought me that modest sum which I had sworn to reach before I returned to England. It is true. I have retired from moneymaking. It is now that I take up again my real life’s work.”

“If you are going to talk about your hobby,” Dominey observed, “you had better order them to serve your lunch here.”

“I had finished my lunch before you came in,” his friend replied. “I drink another glass of wine with you, perhaps. Afterwards a liqueur⁠—who can say? In this climate one is favoured, one can drink freely. Sir Everard and I, Mr. Mangan, have been in places where thirst is a thing to be struggled against, where for months a little weak brandy and water was our chief dissipation.”

“Tell me about this hobby?” the lawyer enquired.

Dominey intervened promptly. “I protest. If he begins to talk of that, he’ll be here all the afternoon.”

Seaman held out his hands and rolled his head from side to side.

“But I am not so unreasonable,” he objected. “Just one word⁠—so? Very well, then,” he proceeded quickly, with the air of one fearing interruption. “This must be clear to you, Mr. Mangan. I am a German by birth, naturalised in England for the sake of my business, loving Germany, grateful to England. One third of my life I have lived in Berlin, one third at Forest Hill here in London, and in the city, one third in Africa. I have watched the growth of commercial rivalries and jealousies between the two nations. There is no need for them. They might lead to worse things. I would brush them all away. My aim is to encourage a league for the promotion of more cordial social and business relations between the people of Great Britain and the people of the German Empire. There! Have I wasted much of your time? Can I not speak of my hobby without a flood of words?”

“Conciseness itself,” Mangan admitted, “and I compliment you most heartily upon your scheme. If you can get the right people into it, it should prove a most valuable society.”

“In Germany I have the right people. All Germans who live for their country and feel for their country loathe the thought of war. We want peace, we want friends, and, to speak as man to man,” he concluded, tapping the lawyer upon the coat sleeve, “England is our best customer.”

“I wish one could believe,” the latter remarked, “that yours was the popular voice in your country.”

Seaman rose reluctantly to his feet.

“At half-past two,” he announced, glancing at his watch, “I have an appointment with a woollen manufacturer from Bradford. I hope to get him to join my council.”

He bowed ceremoniously to the lawyer, nodded to Dominey with the familiarity of an old friend, and made his bustling, good-humoured way out of the room.

“A sound business man, I should think,” was the former’s comment. “I wish him luck with his League. You yourself, Sir Everard, will need to develop some new interests. Why not politics?”

“I really expect to find life a little difficult at first,” admitted Dominey, with a shrug of his shoulders. “I have lost many of the tastes of my youth, and I am very much afraid that my friends over here will call me colonial. I can’t fancy myself doing nothing down in Norfolk all the rest of my days. Perhaps I shall go into Parliament.”

“You must forgive my saying,” his companion declared impulsively, “that I never knew ten years make such a difference in a man in my life.”

“The colonies,” Dominey pronounced, “are a kill or cure sort of business. You either take your drubbing and come out a stronger man, or you go under. I had the very narrowest escape from going under myself, but I just pulled together in time. Today I wouldn’t have been without my hard times for anything in the world.”

“If you will permit me,” Mr. Mangan said, with an inherited pomposity, “on our first meeting under the new conditions, I should like to offer you my hearty congratulations, not only upon what you have accomplished but upon what you have become.”

“And also, I hope,” Dominey rejoined, smiling a little seriously and with a curious glint in his eyes, “upon what I may