Fate Cannot Harm Me Page 3

  W. WATSON

  I sat in my room among a pile of letters; all round me were scattered envelopes and torn paper; for three hours I had worked through the mass of correspondence which had been heaped up against my arrival. And as I opened the last envelope I was filled with a sense of relief, almost of ecstasy—for in all that pile there was no letter from Lady Dennison. An immense weight of foreboding seemed to be lifted from my mind—I repeated over and over again to myself the good news in order to make myself realize it. There is no letter from Lady Dennison! Once again I fancied myself under the mulberry tree at Critton, listening to her promise, holding her fragile hand. All the intervening months of hardship and tedium and anxiety had vanished; already they seemed to me to lie centuries in the past, whilst Critton and Cynthia and Lady Dennison were the realities of the immediate yesterday. This very week—the next day even, I might meet them both again. And Cynthia was still free! There was no letter from Lady Dennison! Momentarily a doubt obtruded itself. Was it not odd that, whatever the circumstances, she had not written? But no, quite surely I need have no qualms. She had promised, and I could trust her, that she would write if there were bad news to break, or even if there were danger in sight. She had not written, and Cynthia must still be free, as when I had seen her last. Once more I sang to myself my silent song of thanksgiving.

  It was hardly half-past ten on the following morning when I walked into my club. I still felt the sensation of well-being, but something of the intoxication of happiness of the night before had left me. I was in fact worried about my next step. Believe me, the sensation of being a Rip van Winkle is in many ways an unpleasant one. Ask anyone who has been in that situation to analyse his feelings and he will, if he be honest, give the same answer. One feels more than anything else the unflattering certainty of one’s own unimportance. I have lived so long in the social world, that its every phase seems part and parcel of my life; I am away for two years and more, and everything proceeds without me as though I had never been. How humiliating! What event had been changed one iota by my absence, what party had gone less well, what single individual really cared whether I had been in London or in the Antarctic? How right Lady Dennison had been! The life I had lived had been a poor thing. I had liked to think, with careless superiority, that I knew everyone in London whom I cared to know. My mantelpiece had always been crowded with invitations, this or that friend had always been ringing me up, my daily difficulty had been how to fit in my engagements, how to marshal my preferences between one party and another. And yet now, with so many nominal friends to choose from, I did not quite know where to turn. It was indeed the few real friends that I needed, not the friendly throng:

  O, damn the many, I want the few!

  Doubtless you’ll give us men a lot

  Better and happier: but not

  The men we knew, the men we knew!

  Yet somehow, and in spite of a sort of contempt both for myself and for the London life of the past, I felt that I must plunge into it once more. Temporarily, perhaps, but as soon as might be. I must know the social history of the last two and a half years, learn again the scandals and the romances, the excitements, the intrigues, the comedy, and even the tragedy of my London world. For it was Cynthia’s world, and I must speak to her in her own language, and not in the accents of the Antarctic. How was I to begin? I couldn’t hire someone to teach me the history of my own time, still less could I announce my return in the Press and hope for voluntary assistance. And yet I hated the thought of what I obviously had to do—of looking up one friend after another, to find that a majority of them were quite unaware that I had been away at all, and the rest entirely unmoved by either my absence or my return. Yes, frankly, it was all a little humiliating, and I felt actually nervous as, in clothes which felt unnatural to me, I walked that morning into my club.

  I walked into my club—and there again everything was wrong. Of course, the porter ought to have recognized me at once, and made me feel in five minutes that I was at home again. But it was not so. A new porter, whom I had never seen before, eyed me with suspicion; a new scheme of internal decoration had changed the whole aspect of the club, and I had to ask where I could hang up my hat and coat. It was not so much the homecoming of a veteran, as the gauche entry of a newcomer into a strange environment. That the club, at that hour of the day, should be sparsely filled I had expected, but I had counted on finding some one. There was nobody at all, and I sat down to read the papers in a state less of dejection than of irritation.

  Ten minutes later Monty Renshaw walked into the room. If, half an hour before, I had been asked whom, in all London, I should most like to meet that morning I should certainly have answered “Monty Renshaw,” for he of all men represented for me the better side of my old world, would have the most to tell me, and would tell it best. Besides, his friendship was of old standing, and had even survived one crisis in which I had been able to do him a real and substantial service. But my temporary dejection was such that for a moment I hesitated, and I thought of Monsieur Poirier and his precious son-in-law. Would even Monty harbour, deep down, a dislike of me because I had once helped him out of a mess? And supposing that even he had barely noticed my absence, or was just bored by my return?

  The hesitation was only momentary. I lowered my protective newspaper, and spoke in a rather hesitating voice:

  “Hallo, Monty, how are you?”

  I need have had no qualms. He had seized my hand, and was shaking it warmly almost before the words had left my mouth.

  “My dear old Anthony, this is too good to be true. Why, you’ve been away for years, and London hasn’t been the same place without you. Can’t tell you how we’ve all missed you, I especially. Simply splendid to see you again. Antarctic, wasn’t it? By gad, you must have a thousand things to tell me; hang on while I order us a drink, and then weigh right in. I’m dying to hear all about it.”

  He put his finger on the bell, and then pulled up an arm-chair alongside mine. His smile of welcome restored me, as though by magic, to the happiness of the previous evening. My irritation left me; this was the sort of homecoming which I had visualized. Watching his eager face, with its little laughing lines running away from the corners of his eyes, his broad humorous mouth and his curly hair, I felt thankful that he of all my acquaintances should be the first to greet me.

  Monty, all his life, had contrived to achieve the almost impossible—he was everybody’s friend, although he had never lost his own personality. How many of the world’s good-natured men contrive to be just that and nothing more! Monty went much further. Where others made acquaintances he made friends, and no one better knew how to keep his friendships in repair. Searching for the secret of his success I used to tell myself that it lay in his intense enjoyment of life, of life in all its many aspects. He was that rare phenomenon, a truly happy man, blessed with the divine gift of making others happy with him. He believed, with Aristotle, that the nature of a man was that man fully developed and at his best, and since he judged every one at his best he was himself both a lover of mankind and in his turn beloved by his fellow-creatures. I used to think that if Talleyrand could have lived to know Monty Renshaw he would have been incapable of declaring that only those who had lived before the Revolution could know how pleasant life could be. Myself I saw him first at Oxford when I was staying for a week-end at my old college, St. Thomas’s. I had not, of course, been up with him, for he was eight years my junior, but I had been playing cricket on the Saturday against the college and, as it rained for the greater part of the day, I had spent an hour or two chatting with him in the pavilion. I noticed him again as I walked up Hall, for I was dining at High Table with Hargreaves,1 and I asked my host who he was.

  “Oh, that’s Renshaw,” he replied, “in his second year now, and the most popular man in Oxford.”

  I shouldn’t have paid much attention to that, but the next remark gave me a shock, for it came from Shirley,1 my neighbour on my other side.

 
“The most popular, and deservedly so.” Such a remark from Shirley was a portent, for rarely, indeed, did he allow himself to speak well of a fellow-creature. The moment that he had spoken he seemed ashamed of his own enthusiasm.

  “Of course,” he added, “he’s atrociously idle and will waste both his talents and his time. It’s sad, for he has parts.”

  That judgment had made me take a lively interest in Monty, and I had taken pains to get to know him better. From then onward I had counted him as a friend. His Oxford reputation was not founded on uninterrupted success, or overwhelming skill in athletic pursuits. In point of fact he failed to secure the cricket blue which was his most cherished ambition. He was a fine and exhilarating bat, but perhaps he enjoyed the game too much to be quite first-class. He would have a go at the ball outside his off-stump; the spirit of recklessness could not be crushed for long. And so, although he played many a fine innings for the ’Varsity, he acquired the reputation of not being quite sound. For three years successive captains, each a little overwhelmed by responsibility, decided that it wouldn’t be safe to play him. I watched the last match that he played for Oxford in his third year. It was the evening of the second day, and a very anxious captain was giving him a great many instructions. The gist of them, I gathered, was that there was an hour to go and that Monty was at all costs to sit on the splice and wait for the morrow. And then Monty, after a quiet start, began to hit at everything—as fine, though as reckless, a display as I’d seen for a long time. He sat beside me laughing at the close of play.

  “I’m a fool, Anthony, but I just couldn’t help it. That bowling just wanted hitting. Well, I’m not out, and tomorrow I’ll do what I’m told. But Charles won’t like it; you watch out. He’ll talk it all over for a couple of hours, and decide that I’m not safe. And he’ll say he’s awfully sorry, and will I come as twelfth man to Lord’s.” That is precisely what “Charles,” who captained the Oxford side, did do ten days later, though I believe that every one in Oxford was sorry, and that many besides myself thought that a rather unenterprising ’Varsity side would have been about fifty per cent better if room had been found for Monty’s daring and enterprise.

  Not that he was simply a good-natured athlete, hail-fellow-well-met with all his sporting friends. He had brains and taste too. Shirley did him less than justice in dubbing him idle, though it is true that his work at Oxford did not always follow the orthodox lines. He had read modern history, and had become passionately interested in the latter periods of his subject. I think it was the personal side, the study of man, that attracted him. He read voraciously in the memoirs and biographies and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and every prominent person in those crowded times seemed to live again for him. Hervey and Boswell, Wraxall, Greville and Creevey were his companions; he would quote from them—or, for the matter of that, from the speeches of Fox or Peel or Disraeli—with astonishing facility and quite amazing accuracy. I used often to think that it was the surest proof of Monty’s personal charm that he could quote constantly without causing the least irritation to his hearer. His cheerful “you know the passage, don’t you?” was only a signal of something good to come, and never a parade of superior knowledge.

  But, with all his knowledge and appreciation of what was good, he could unfortunately never bring himself to work at subjects which seemed to him remote from his own life and experiences. A fellow-victim in the schools, waiting for his own viva, gave afterwards a highly coloured, but not perhaps quite untrue, account of Monty’s last tussle with the examiners. For some twenty minutes, apparently, a little hard-faced man questioned him ruthlessly on the constitutional history of the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, and proved to his own complete satisfaction what indeed Monty would cheerfully have admitted without his interrogation—that the candidate knew nothing about the subject whatever. Then an older man began to ask about some obscure eighteenth-century literary persons, and in three minutes the interrogatory became a conversation—a rapid interchange of views and ideas between two enthusiasts. “By Jove, Monty seemed to know as much about all that as anyone on the other side of the table,” the reporter of this strange scene would exclaim. “He fairly danced through it all. And at the end I thought the elderly pundit who sat in the middle was going to burst into tears. ‘It’s a great pity, Mr. Renshaw,’ he said, ‘you know so much about this, and you write on some subjects extremely well. Really you might have secured the highest honours—the very highest honours—but you see you haven’t done anything at all about your mediaeval history, or your constitutional documents.’ And Monty, who could get on with all the world, even examiners, just smiled and said ‘Well, Sir, you really mustn’t mind having to give me a third.’ I thought for a minute he was going to pat the old gentleman on the back.” He read widely too in modern literature, but then I could never tell what he would like, and what not, for his taste was capricious. I remember asking him once whom he really enjoyed to read, who were his literary idols among the moderns.

  “Well,” he said, “Max Beerbohm of course, he has the greatest descriptive power of them all, and then, but longo intervallo, P. G. Wodehouse, and Dickens when I have time, and William Watson and Stevenson and Rupert Brooke and Flecker, and George Moore and Hemingway, oh, and hosts of others. Not a very highbrow list, but you didn’t give me notice of the question.”

  Looking back on it all—and, believe me, two years in the Antarctic gives a man time to rearrange his views and his impressions—I feel sure that it wasn’t Monty’s skill or talents that made him what he was. No, it was his immense zest for life, his enjoyment of every hour, his power of making others feel always the better for his company. Every party went well if he was there; no show, somehow, was ever a failure if he was in the audience.

  In London it was the same. He knew everyone, and had a charitable explanation of the doings of them all. His work was journalism—about that he had never had a doubt—and there were not many aspects of the precarious existence of the journalist that he did not sample. His writing was good, for he could bring life into common things, and sometimes, when he touched on historical or literary subjects, it was distinguished. No doubt he was helped by being spared the harder trials of his profession, for he had a little money of his own, though not much, and, so I understood, considerable expectations from some aged relatives. He could, therefore, afford—and he made free use of the opportunity—to enjoy himself, and to be a little fastidious in his choice of topics. But though he was, in a sense, fairly well off, he was a generous and sometimes a reckless spender, and therefore not infrequently in a state of financial embarrassment. It was from one of his crises that I had been able to rescue him by the loan of a couple of hundred pounds. I remember well the difficulty I had in inducing him to take a sum which meant nothing to me; I remember still more vividly my pleasure when he repaid me precisely on the date which he had himself chosen—for I had been oppressed by a nervous dread that a sense of obligation on his side would mar our friendship.

  How pitifully feeble is any description of a friend! I can describe his career, I can estimate his intellectual talents, I can criticize his acts or his writings. But the thousand bonds that unite us, the chance remarks, the jokes that we have shared, the common sympathies—and the common antipathies still more—the games and the laughter, the days in the sun and the evenings before the fire—how can they be analysed or described? Something of that kind I had once said, haltingly enough, to Monty himself.

  He had smiled as he replied. “You mustn’t try to describe that sort of pleasure. Don’t you remember Johnson’s letter to Boswell when Boswell had been a bit too enthusiastic? It’s a good passage; how does it go? To disappoint a friend is unpleasing: and he that forms expectations like yours must be disappointed. Think only when you see me, that you see a man who loves you, and is proud and glad that you love him.’ You can’t beat the eighteenth century for saying that kind of thing simply and well.”

  “Now weigh right in, old
friend, and tell me the whole history, omitting of course the immense scientific importance of your expedition, in which I have the profoundest disbelief.” That had been his command, and I had responded. But I didn’t talk long about the Antarctic, for it was not that that filled my mind. He guessed, almost before I had told him, that my need was to pick up the threads of my old life.

  “Good Lord, yes, how you must want to get into touch again,” he exclaimed. “Well, there’s no sort of difficulty about that. I’ll spread the word round that you’re home again, and in a week you’ll be starring as the returned explorer in all the drawing-rooms in London.”

  “Yes, but there’s something before that. I must know something about all that’s happened whilst I’ve been away. I really haven’t the slightest idea who’s alive and who’s dead, or who’s married or engaged or divorced. I shall drop the most frightful bricks.”

  Monty chuckled. “Oh, I’ll put that right. I rather fancy myself as a social historian. To-night you must dine with me; we’ll have our own private celebration of your return. And, by Jove, I’ll make it a celebration that you’ll remember. You’ll come, won’t you?”

  “I’d love to; what time’s the meal?”

  “Meal, by God, the man talks about a meal,” he exclaimed with pretended horror. “My dear old Anthony, I’m ashamed of you. Don’t you know that I regard myself as the best judge, weight for age, of food or wine in the whole of London? I tell you this is an occasion, and we’re going to have a great dinner. A meal’s just what you take to keep the old body going, and a banquet—well, that means over-fed aldermen and tons of turtle—and an orgy means too many people and a head in the morning. What you’ve accepted is an invitation to the best dinner that London can produce. Dash it all, man, you must have lived on sardines and ship’s biscuits and salt pork and every kind of tinned horror for the last two years. Now you’re going to eat a dinner. At times a chop and a pint of beer go down well enough, but there are occasions—and this is one of them—when it’s a duty to exhaust every artifice which civilization can suggest to construct a dinner as good as a dinner can be. Trust to me; I feel already the artist within me at work. I’ll construct a dinner that you’ll remember all your life. We’ll go to the Trufflers; there’s the best cook in London there, and I more or less control the cellar myself. You know it?”