Fate Cannot Harm Me Page 4

  “Yes, it’s that club just off St. James’s, isn’t it? I dined there once or twice, I think.”

  “That’s right. It’s almost the smallest club in London, but in some ways the best; it exists for eating and drinking and for nothing else. We’ll make it eight o’clock. I’ll trot round this morning and plan my gastronomic campaign. We won’t waste to-night any of the gifts that the good God has showered on us.”

  I smiled at his enthusiasm. “Well, I shall enjoy it anyhow. I haven’t dressed for dinner since 1932.”

  “We shall both enjoy it. For once in a way we’ll be really greedy. But no running after strange gods in the meantime. Do you remember old Stanwood?”

  “Yes, I think so. An oldish, thin man, sour as vinegar.”

  “That’s the chap, one of those lean hungry-looking beggars who always enjoy their food. Greedy as hell, but dyspeptic too. Well, I once wanted to get him interested in a paper we were launching and I asked him to dinner. A lot of trouble I took to order a meal—damn, I mean a dinner—that would put him in the best of humours. Just by chance I came into the club at teatime, and he was drinking a cup of tea and eating a biscuit. But as luck would have it, the fellow next to him had ordered some crumpets, and crumpets were a thing that old Stanwood couldn’t resist. He had a look at them, and then he sent away his biscuits and ordered some for himself. By Jove, I can see him now! With the long bony fingers of one hand picking out the finest and most buttery specimen from his dish, holding it up, and delicately sprinkling it with salt and pepper. I can see him savouring it and praising it—‘instinct with rich juices’ is a phrase that sticks in my memory. I’ve never seen a greedy man much happier. And when he’d once started he couldn’t stop. So when dinner time came I had to entertain a bilious old dyspeptic, with about as much chance of getting him to back our new review as I had of flying to the moon. A wasted dinner!”

  “Anyhow you could enjoy your own dinner.”

  Monty chuckled. “That’s the saddest part of the tale. He looked so damned happy with his crumpets that I just couldn’t bear to be out of it. I ordered a dish for myself, and ate nearly as many as he did. At eight o’clock I wasn’t in much better shape than he was. So no incontinence of that kind for you to-day. I can’t have the best dinner of the year spoiled in that way.”

  He jumped up from his seat. “Half-past eleven, I must run. See you at the Trufflers at eight. And I’ll tell you the whole history of London since 1932. So long.”

  He was gone, and I had not dared to ask him about Cynthia. No matter—if I had waited for two and a half years I could wait till dinner-time that night.

  Chapter III

  “In an aristocratical institution like England, not trial by jury, but the dinner is the capital institution.”

  EMERSON

  It seemed odd to me to be dining out in London once more; odd, yet, in a way, strangely natural too. Odd because I had not dressed for dinner for three long years; natural because the old familiar sights and sounds and smells of London were around me again. A sort of excitement seized me as I walked down Piccadilly towards the Trufflers, and all the anxious crises of my life passed one after another before my mental vision. The first day at school, the news of the war, the day when I had joined my regiment, a lad of eighteen, in the first year of the great struggle. And then, more vividly still, my first sight of Oxford in the autumn of 1919, with ancient buildings vague and misty in the damp fog of an October evening; a long hot weary struggle in the schools; a cricket match or two, my first meeting with Cynthia. Certitude filled me and braced me; another crisis was near. I felt it, I prepared for it, but whether it betided well or ill I would not even guess. Some time soon I must know; in another hour or less Monty’s cheery voice would be mentioning her name, and I should know whether she was still the same to me as three years back. I loved her—that I knew—and, somehow, it seemed to me that, as I listened, I should know too whether she might learn to love me. Yes. I was filled with expectation, with hope, with a foreknowledge of events of importance looming in the near future. My mind seemed to cover years in the space of a few moments; all my past, and the present, and faintly, dimly, uncertainly, the future too.

  Then my mood changed. I had not dressed for more than two years. Were my clothes all right? I fingered my tie like a nervous schoolboy; I restlessly agitated my shoulders within the unaccustomed stiff shirt. At least there would be no women; I couldn’t go wrong dining alone with Monty! Yet how different it would all be! I tasted again in retrospect the rude meals of the old Southern Light—and listened again to Christiansen’s unhurried speech as he opened one of the everlasting tins for our evening meal. How neatly, how deftly, he had always opened them; and how madly his very deftness and certainty had irritated me!

  “Look out, sir!”

  Unseeing I had walked into a match-seller who was standing by the kerb, and almost upset his miserable little stock of matches. I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out a half-crown, muttered “Sorry, good luck to you,” and hurried on before I should be overwhelmed by his torrent of thanks. I had given him a good moment, anyhow. The half-crown, instead of the copper which he had expected, would perhaps give him some moments of real happiness. It was all wrong, of course, to give indiscriminate charity, but after all, poor devil, he looked pretty well down and out, and then—

  “Can’t you look where the hell you’re going, confound you, sir?”

  Damn. I’d run into someone else. A retired soldier by the voice, and a rude one at that. All my worst instincts surged to the surface. Dash it all, if he’d only expostulated mildly, or made some effort to look tolerably pleasant instead of scowling at me as though I’d tried to hurt him. My mood changed to one of pride; if I didn’t own London after three years’ absence, who did? So my answer was not calculated to soothe him.

  “Indeed I can, and do when I wish. Have you any further observations to make?”

  For a moment I thought that, an apoplectic stroke would bring the conversation to a premature conclusion, but a perfect volley of spluttered “damns” brought, I suppose, the necessary relief. I raised my hat with studied politeness; murmured “Glad to have met you, sir,” and sauntered on. Really, Piccadilly was grand! Beautiful, too, in a sort of way in the lamp light—to a returned wanderer, at any rate. I’d never known a home, and this was as near the idea of a home atmosphere as I could well hope to recover. How many times in the past I had sauntered down here to dine with this friend or that, or to find my way to one theatre or another. And now I was bound on just such another errand—to the beginnings, perhaps, of a new life and a great deal of happiness. On such an evening all must surely turn out for the best. My castle in the air began to lift itself towards the heavens. To myself I rehearsed the conversation to come. I should not be the first to bring in Cynthia’s name, but sooner or later, as he told me of the doings of the last three years, Monty must surely mention her. He and she and I must have many friends in common. I began to think which of his set had known her best. I heard it all in imagination. “Cynthia Hetherington was there too. I forget, did you know her?” And I replying, nonchalantly—(yes, that was the form, nonchalantly)—“Yes, I remember her very well, though she was only just out when I left; very good-looking, and an awfully nice girl, too.” And Monty. “Yes, alpha plus, I wonder she doesn’t marry; there can’t be many to touch her, but …”

  Crash! I’d bumped into someone else. A cheerful “Achtung” told me that I had collided with a ski-er this time, and the cheerful grin which greeted my apology apprised me of the fact that no harm had been done. Perhaps his mind was away among the snows and the mountains, just as mine was ranging over the fields of fancy. But, really, I must pull myself together, and keep my mind from wandering; I didn’t want to have a real crash and arrive at the Trufflers with a muddy coat. I gave myself a mental shake, and tried to concentrate on steering a safe course along Piccadilly.

  Ah! there was the door of the club! I remembered its austere and almost
forbidding appearance, suggesting a dignity and a reticence foreign to the buildings alongside it. The obvious club building on its right, which would have seemed adequate and even imposing in other surroundings, was stamped with the cruel accusation of being a pot-house by the very propinquity of the Trufflers; the house opposite seemed faintly ostentatious in comparison with the sober majesty of my objective. A feeling of worth and well-being filled me as I mounted its shallow steps. I was a man to whom that door would open with warm yet majestic welcome. I was, in fact, no nonentity but someone in this great London world. I was fit to sample the best dinner in London; my palate was not unworthy to taste the choicest wines the Trufflers could provide. The door was discreetly closed; no uniformed menial advertised the nature of the edifice, no provoking page-boy scampered down the steps to hasten the removal of my hat and coat. Gravely, as befitted a great occasion, I mounted the steps and pressed the bell. Slowly, decorously, majestically the door swung back and I crossed the threshold. Threshold? Rubicon? I could not tell. I walked into the club.

  I walked into the club. Why could I not have set that down simply and spared all this long rigmarole, so unimportant to anyone but myself? I find it hard to explain, yet I felt that my state of mind that evening had some deep significance. To me that night the most trivial happening seemed to be charged with the gravest import. It was as though my whole life had reached its climax or rather its turning point. Was I to be raised to Heaven, or dashed down to Hell? Should I in a few short hours be returning home with all my castles in the air dissolved into nothingness, or should I be walking on air, ready to snatch the happiness which had hitherto eluded me? I was keyed up to the highest state of excitement; anxious, expectant, scenting the great event. And yet again—what nonsense! A simple dinner with an old friend; a talk about old times and old friends; too many drinks and perhaps a head in the morning. Why delude myself—and yet? Strongly, in spite of myself, the familiar feeling seized me that all this had happened before; that it was the prelude to some great event, some staggering dénouement. But did I face triumph or disaster? Of that I had no sort of idea.

  A servant removed my hat and coat with the silent deftness of a screen butler; they left me without my feeling the parting. One moment they were there, the next they were gone. No tug displaced my coat, no hand seemed to touch me. They were not so much removed as spirited from me; I was lapped in the world of perfect waiting, I lay safe in the haven of luxurious good living. And there in the outer lounge was Monty, so deep in conversation that he had not noticed my entrance. Instinct told me that he was speaking to an archbishop, reason declared that he was engaged in profound discussion with the head waiter. Reason was right. Some deep matter connected with the temperature of wine engaged their whole attention. With all the earnestness at his command Monty impressed his view upon the other. The pseudo-archbishop bowed, if bowed be the right word. His legs remained stationary; his trunk was immovable; but his head, yes, his head, ever so slightly and ever so slowly, but quite perceptibly, inclined towards my host. It was the tribute of age and experience to knowledge and power, the homage of a great man to a greater. “Very good, sir; it shall be as you wish,” he said. Slowly his head resumed its original position; slowly he turned away; slowly, with an air of royal inevitability, he moved (Oh! miserable word to describe his progress!) from the room. So, I supposed, might Czar or Emperor have taken his leave of the Queen Empress in the later days of the Victorian Age.

  Monty looked up and saw me. He sprang to his feet, and the anxious consultant became the eager and welcoming host.

  “Well met, Anthony,” he cried. “I’m delighted to see you, and Thank God for the man who sufficiently respects his dinner to arrive on the tick. Sit down here, and we’ll have a glass of sherry.” He rang the bell and a waiter, a little younger, a little, but only a little, more mobile, a little less episcopal in his bearing, came in answer.

  “A suffragan, I suppose,” I murmured half to myself.

  “What!” said Monty.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, smiling; “three years of loneliness have made me think aloud, I’m afraid. I was really only paying a private tribute to your staff. They certainly compel admiration.”

  “Yes, they’re good chaps. I choose them myself—most of them.” Meantime, the suffragan who had rightly interpreted a nod from my host had returned bearing a decanter of sherry.

  “I want you to try this,” said Monty, “it’s some that I bought for the club at old Lord Derrington’s sale. When he died, the best cellar in London died with him, take it for all in all—but I collared the best of it for the Trufflers, and I’ve never made a better bargain. A good deed sufficient to give me absolution for a year if I’d been a boy scout. How do you find it?”

  “Beyond praise. It’s a long time since such liquor descended my unworthy gullet.”

  Monty smiled contentedly. “I’m glad; the evening opens well. ‘A right impulse once given to the army, it is in a position to turn all events not calculated on, or miscalculated, to advantage.’ You remember the passage; it’s Hamley on the Jena campaign. Means that if you start right you can’t go wrong. I foresee a successful evening, and a guest whom it will be a real pleasure to entertain. You know, Anthony, I can bear anything and anybody except the man who utterly refuses to be either pleased or impressed. You, now, find the straight way to my heart by gazing with obvious satisfaction at my club, by praising the servants and by admiring the wine. And yet you are conferring on me the richest of benefits. I’ve entertained a good few here at one time and another, but when did I ever have the chance of inviting a man who has been outside civilization for nearly three years, and who has, so to speak, not dined all that time? It’s a priceless opportunity. In these peculiar circumstances, you combine, my dear Anthony, the training of a gourmet with the virgin palate of a youth; you make me feel that civilization itself is on trial. You are a Daniel come to judgment after three years in the wilderness—a mixed but suggestive metaphor. You are the ultimate court of appeal before which the Trufflers is to be tried. And last, but not least, you are my old and valued friend, whom I’ve not seen for a devil of a while, and who once pulled me out of the deuce of a scrape. I raise my glass, Anthony, and wish you all good things.”

  I raised mine in reply, and smiled my thanks. Pleasant indeed it was to feel that I was welcome in the truest sense of the term. Monty, more than any of my friends, had always had the priceless gift of compelling belief in his sincerity. With him it never occurred to me to doubt that what he said he meant.

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to be here,” I answered, “or how much I’m looking forward not only to a dinner planned by you, but even more to your account of the last two and a half years. You’ve got a tough job ahead of you there, and a lot of talking to do if you’re going to fulfil that promise.”

  He waved an airy hand. “And who should do it better? You know, you elderly hypocrite, that I love talking and regard myself as supremely gifted in the art of narration. Besides, we have the evening before us. I shall spare neither time nor trouble; with the aid of good liquor I have no sort of doubt but that I shall succeed to admiration. Between the soup and the savoury, between the sherry and the brandy, the life of London with all its chances and mischances, its drama, its comedies, its tragedies shall be unrolled before you. Producer, Monty Renshaw; by special command for one night only; carriages at midnight. That kind of thing, what?”

  I nodded, for I know by experience that Monty, once launched, needed no aid from me to keep the ball of conversation rolling.

  “Let me see,” he went on, “did you say that you’d dined here before?”

  “Yes. I came here once to dine with Basil Paraday-Royne just before I left England. He and his great pal Hedley, and, I think, another man whom I’ve forgotten. Do they come here much now? I remember that Basil was very enthusiastic about the place, and, I thought, a little too obviously pleased that he was a member and the others weren’t.”

&nbs
p; Monty looked at me with a curious, inquiring smile. When he spoke his voice had lost something of its irresponsible gaiety, and he seemed to choose his words.

  “What is this magic that you have?” he asked.

  “Magic? What do you mean?”

  “I mean just this. You may come here this year and you won’t see Paraday-Royne or Hedley; you may come next year—you won’t see them then either. After that”—he shrugged his shoulders—“who can tell? Time makes people forget, and one or other of them may return, but somehow I doubt it. Myself, I don’t believe that either of them will ever sit in this room again. But here’s the magic. You ask me to tell you, the returned exile, the history of London town during the last three years. I make no plan; I purpose just to prattle of this and that as fancy dictates to me. And then in your first sentence you mention two men, and at once I realize that round these two the whole history of my world—of our world—has centred all the time that you have been away. Yes. I’m going to keep my promise, but not quite in the manner you expected, or I had proposed. I’m going to tell you just exactly why you won’t meet Paraday-Royne or Hedley in the Trufflers, and for that matter in any other London club. And when I’ve finished I think you’ll agree that I’ve kept my part of the bargain. But come on, dinner is ready, and we’ll start the story there. It’s the door on your left; lead on.”

  We entered the dining-room, and the archbishop himself motioned us to a table in an alcove—a little withdrawn from the rest of the room. His reverent gaze seemed to direct a benison upon us; an almost imperceptible gesture directed one of his satellites to attend to our unspoken wants. He withdrew; we were seated.