Fate Cannot Harm Me Page 5

  Monty’s brief interval of seriousness had left him.

  “For God’s sake,” he said, “if I may misquote Conan Doyle, for God’s sake don’t miss the caviare. It is, if I may say so in all humility, what caviare should be. The old sturgeon can’t do better than this.”

  He selected with care a thin slice of toast and delicately, almost lovingly, smeared it with caviare. And then, a little haltingly at first, as though he were marshalling his facts, he began to speak.

  “Paraday-Royne, Hedley. Hedley, Paraday-Royne. Their history is one; it’s a sort of double biography like Fox and Pitt or Gladstone and Dizzy. You can’t tell the story of one of them without telling the story of the other. Story? No, it’s more than a story, it’s a saga. That’s the word. A saga. No one, I suppose, has ever heard the whole thing from beginning to end, though every one has heard a chapter here and there. But I’m going to tell it you all to-night, partly because you asked for it, partly because I want to. Yes, the whole thing—for you won’t get the truth unless you hear it all. In a way I feel your question to be a sort of challenge. While you’ve been away I’ve written a good deal, articles, and stories—you can guess the sort of thing—and even a play, which had quite a decent run.”

  He smiled, and I murmured congratulations.

  “Oh, thank you, yes, they got across pretty well; not exactly Edgar Wallace sales or anything like that, but still all I could expect and a bit more. So you see I’ve become, among other things, a bit of a professional storyteller, and I feel in relating this saga that I’m on trial. There won’t be any ‘cutting of a long story short.’ Damnable phrase, and destructive of truth. To make a short story long—that’s the storyteller’s art. Not that this is a short story—far from it—it’s a saga. What I mean is that to get near to the truth we mustn’t hurry or compress too much. It’s the little things, the fine shades, the delicate changes, the slow growth of ideas and emotions that are so difficult to convey and which mean everything. Men don’t change from friends to enemies overnight, and I don’t believe that love comes suddenly very often. And yet in the books that’s how it appears to happen. Think of Peel repealing the Corn Laws. To cut a long story short, he was a leader of the Protectionists one day and the leader of the Free Trade host the next. What nonsense! Can’t you imagine to yourself how it really happened? The growth of doubt, the instinctive belief in the possibility of error, the arguments of others gradually making way in an open and receptive mind, the determination that no paltry considerations of party loyalty or personal consistency must be allowed to stand in the way of what was best for the country. And then the volte-face; sudden in appearance, in reality the fruit of long and anxious perturbation of mind. You follow me?”

  “Of course. You ought to be a don.”

  Monty laughed. “Forgive me; the reproof was deserved. But I do want you to realize that this is a saga, and that for you to understand it and appreciate it I must be discursive and—well, tentative, if you see what I mean. If I just gave you the bare outline of what had happened to Paraday-Royne and Hedley you’d know the so-called facts, but you’d be as far as you are now from understanding. I want to make it all into a story, and you’ll find as I go on that, however much it wanders and twists and turns, it has a central unity, and it does contain the elements of drama.

  “Is there a happy ending?” I asked.

  A slow smile lit up Monty’s face.

  “That’s asking, as the boys say. In life some always have to suffer a bit more than others, but in this case, from your point of view, yes. I feel quite confident that you’ll think the ending a very happy one. I look on it as supremely happy, and you will too.”

  He paused a moment, and his smile broadened. “In my story a young man called Monty Renshaw plays a part. The constant ‘I’ is tiresome, so I shall cast him in the third person; you’ve no objection?”

  “None in the world. I hope he is a hero of the saga.”

  “No, no. I can’t call him that. He does not exactly play lead, but the storyteller presents him in a most favourable light. The best remarks issue from his lips, the loftiest sentiments are attributed to him, even sometimes at the expense of exact historical truth. But then he is a young man for whom I have a profound and lifelong regard. And if I don’t praise him, who will? Yes, if he’s not quite the hero I’ll at least give him as good marks as any other character in my story. In fact, hang it all, I may as well go the whole way and make him the hero—when I’ve had a glass or two of wine I’ll have a pretty good shot at making him a devil of a fellow. It tickles my fancy to describe that chap Monty as I should like other people to see him. Now just one other thing. A storyteller, you know, is omniscient. You mustn’t ask me how I know this or that, or why I attribute this motive to Paraday-Royne or that thought to Hedley. The storyteller knows. That’s the convention. Agreed?”

  “Perfectly, I’m only waiting for the tale to begin.”

  “Right, then take some of this sherry with your soup. It’s not the same as we drank outside—just a shade less dry, but it has merit. It ought to help to prepare your palate for the wine which follows it, and your mind for my story.”

  Chapter IV

  “There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule.”

  SAMUEL BUTLER

  “Have you ever read Pearsall Smith’s Trivia?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “That’s a pity—for you won’t realize all the implications which attach to the goat at Portsmouth. But I think I can recite the passage;

  “‘In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me—had I told them about this goat before? And then as I talked there gaped on me—abyss opening beneath abyss—a darker speculation: when goats are mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the goat at Portsmouth?’

  “Well, in a way, it’s like that with me. I don’t mean, of course, that I tell the story of Paraday-Royne and Hedley, but there’s the same sort of automatic association of ideas. Whenever I think of Paraday-Royne and Hedley I see them as I did that May morning of 1933, for I happened to call on them both, one after another, and each of them betrayed something to me of his real self—more perhaps than I had ever seen before. And I always talk about that morning. Still, it’s no matter; for you, anyhow, it will be new. But—oh bother!”

  Monty stopped with a jerk, and laughed a little ruefully. “I’ve forgotten my own technique already. I shall have to start again. You see, I’m in the third person. Forgive me. Now the story will really begin.” He waited whilst the waiter helped us to a sole vin blanc and poured out two glasses of hock. Then he began afresh.

  Whenever Monty Renshaw thought of Paraday-Royne or Hedley he saw them as they were that morning in the spring of 1933. Monty just then was, among other things, working on the New Scrutator, and his editor had told him the day before to find out how Paraday-Royne and Hedley were getting on with a couple of articles which had been promised for the next month’s number. It was somewhere about half past nine in the morning when he rang the bell of a first-floor flat in Ebury Street where Hedley lived.

  Robin Hedley was a man who arranged his own life. That is to say he had never drifted, or allowed things to happen to him—always he had made up his mind, planned, chosen his path, pursued it with unchanging purpose. And, at the age of twenty-nine, he had achieved more than a fair measure of success. The only son of a doctor in the Midlands, he had been educated at the local grammar school. His mother had died during his early childhood, and his father, partly as a result of financial stringency, partly because of a difficult and unadaptable nature, had never achieved either the success or the happiness to which his abilities entitled him. His wealthier neighbours had fought shy of him because of the brusqueness of his manners and because
he was an uncompromising Radical in politics; and so he had lived his life as a general practitioner with a small and not very remunerative practice, growing a little sourer and a little more contemptuous of his fellowmen as he grew older. Of his home life and of his school Robin Hedley never spoke; he had, so far as possible, pushed them into the background. Early he had aimed at Oxford, and, after a series of failures, he had at length succeeded in winning, perhaps more by resolution and industry than by natural brilliance, a scholarship at St. Thomas’s. There he had fallen under the influence of Shirley,2 who was his tutor, and he had developed amazingly. The two men disliked each other profoundly, yet each saw and appreciated the other’s powers. Shirley, who had elected him to his scholarship against the advice of his fellow-examiners, recognized his strength of purpose and his power of going to the root of the matter; Hedley, wincing before the sarcasm of his tutor, yet could not fail to appreciate his brilliant scholarship and his intellectual gifts. And so, characteristically, he had concealed his antipathy and set himself to profit from all that Shirley had to give. The result had been a first in Honour Moderations and a first in Greats—neither of them brilliant, both of them secure. Shirley in a characteristic private letter had summed up his pupil towards the end of his University career. “I don’t like this man, he wants too much and will give too little. But he has ability and force, though not cleverness, and he’s marked out for success. He won’t enjoy it when it comes, because he’ll always want something more.” Among his contemporaries Hedley’s stock stood higher. He was not greatly liked, but he was respected, and he had the reputation of always pulling his weight. His abilities secured consideration for him; he took trouble to get on with his fellows, and he was a keen, though not especially distinguished, athlete. Monty, who was a year junior to him at St. Thomas’s, summed up the prevailing impression when he declared that it was much pleasanter to play with him than against him. There was, indeed, in all that he did a ruthless determination, a desire for victory, that made him a good ally but an unpleasant opponent. Still, on the whole, he could not be denied the reputation of being a sound man; not lovable, not really companionable, but at least powerful and successful. After all, the charitable view of him was probably also the true view, for his virtues were his own, but his shortcomings were the fruit of his upbringing—of a lack of love and understanding and encouragement. From St. Thomas’s he had passed into the Civil Service, which seemed indeed his natural destiny; but he had adorned a desk at Whitehall for only a couple of years—to be exact, until his father died. Then he had taken a decision which was in its way courageous, for he determined to take up writing as a profession. Shirley had taught him the value of words; he had ideas and a touch of that missionary zeal which made him anxious to express them. His father had left him a small but sufficient sum of money to make the risk worth taking. Already at Oxford and in London he had written articles and stories with an encouraging measure of success. He reviewed the situation, and balanced the pros and cons; took the decision; resigned from his office, and devoted himself to the world of letters. The event justified him; both as a free-lance journalist and as a writer of more serious literature his reputation grew year by year. The high-class reviews accepted his work with gratifying alacrity, publishers accepted his books with the minimum of hesitation. He was referred to in literary articles and reviews—always with respect, often in terms of eulogy. In a word, he was established. Socially, too, he was successful. His invariable habit of diagnosing correctly his own interests had led him to court the fashionable world. Oxford friends had helped him; Basil Paraday-Royne had taken him up and made him a social figure. How much he was really at home in that world it is difficult to say; some taint of the arriviste clung to him; a hint of an inferiority complex dating from his youth made him quick to resent any suggestion of patronage. But he seldom betrayed his feelings. Probably in his inmost heart he despised the social ladder, but indubitably he grasped the rungs.

  The room in which he was sitting that May morning was large and comfortable, though it only fluttered on the margin of luxury. The leather arm-chairs by the fireplace were capacious and suggested opulence, but the carpet was ugly though subdued in colour and design, the few pictures on the walls—etchings for the most part—excellent but unobtrusive. But the predominant note of the room was that of a literary workman; books in open wooden cases filled almost all the wall-space, and a vast yet unpretentious writing-table stood foursquare in the middle of the room. Of the proverbial disarray of the author’s study there was no trace. Everything stood in its place—the works of reference, the dictionaries, the papers; everything spoke of order, method, purpose; even Hedley’s pipes were in a rack by the mantelpiece instead of being strewn haphazard about the room. One object alone seemed vaguely alien to its surroundings, a new-comer amongst a company of old acquaintances; a challenging, disturbing, confident, almost conquering rebel in a too-orderly and too-settled community. It was a large photograph of a young and beautiful girl, and it stood on the mantelpiece among a sheaf of cards and invitations. In every way the photograph was a triumph of art, not a dull record of a lay figure. Somehow the photographer, or the artist, for so he deserved to be called, had contrived to give to his sitter the poetry of life and motion. She was leaning forward, light in her eyes, words trembling on her laughing lips. It seemed as though in the next instant she must move her hands, must shake back her rebellious hair, must plunge into the conversation with a laugh and jest. A wonderful photograph, full of life and sunshine. In a way out of place in that essentially male work-room, yet good enough to impose itself upon its surroundings, and to dominate where assimilation was impossible. It caught Monty’s eye at once, and held it; all the setting of that room was familiar to him, but this was something new, something which changed all the rest, and changed Robin Hedley too. He murmured to himself some well-remembered lines of Samuel Rogers:

  “Enter the house—pry thee, forget it not—

  And look awhile upon a picture there.

  ’Tis of a lady in her earliest youth.

  She sits inclining forward as to speak,

  Her lips half open, and her finger up,

  As though she said—‘Beware!’”

  Hedley himself, though it was barely ten o’clock, was already at work at his desk. A half-smoked pipe lay beside him, his pen moved steadily over the paper. As Monty entered he nodded, finished without haste the sentence he was writing, and then ensconced himself in one of the arm-chairs opposite his visitor.

  “Morning, Monty. How goes it?”

  “Well. It usually goes well with me. And yourself? It’s ‘always scribble, scribble, I suppose,’ as George III said to Gibbon.”

  Hedley smiled. “Oh, not so bad as all that. I always start early and do a good steady average in the morning. You can get through a lot if you’re methodical and if you stick to it. But what brings you in to-day?”

  “New Scrutator. Editor considering next number. Will Mr. Robin Hedley’s promised article on ‘The Literature of Modern Socialism’ be ready up to time? Send Mr. Renshaw round to enquire. Tactful fellow, and always delivers the goods. Me voici.”

  “Your editor’s an ass. He knows as well as you do that what I promise I always carry out. That article’s not due till the end of the week, and at the end of the week he will get it. It’s written as a matter of fact, and I could give it you now, but I’m dashed if I do. Your editor will get it just exactly when I undertook to deliver it, and not before.”

  Hedley was plainly irritated that even a suggestion of doubt should have been cast upon his reliability; but Monty chuckled appreciatively.

  “Lucky fellow to be able to treat editors on terms of equality. I wish I could. Well, I shall tell the great man that no falls of governments, no fires or earthquakes or other acts of God, no changes or chances of this mortal life can prevent your article from appearing on his table at the promised hour. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and tell him too that h
e’s an ass to fuss as he always does, and rather a pompous ass too.”

  “That part of your message I shall contrive to forget to deliver, thereby preserving my reputation for tact at the expense of that for being the perfect messenger. Not but what I deprive myself of a real pleasure by my abstinence. Well, that’s the end of my business, so forget your work for ten minutes and tell me how the world’s using you. I don’t see Sir Thomas’s men too often up in London. Been down to Oxford lately?”

  Hedley re-lit his pipe, and, with a half-regretful look at the manuscript on his desk, settled himself down to chat to Monty. He knew that if the latter intended to talk it would not be easy to stop him.

  “Well, I went there last term. I was asked to read a paper to one of their literary societies—you see, I’m supposed to be something of a literary pundit nowadays. The usual sort of thing—I read my paper which was supposed to be provocative and then a lot of rather half-baked undergraduates talked and argued interminably about matters which were only by the longest stretch of imagination to be considered as relevant to what I had said. A great deal of argument, and very little truth. What a talkative, argumentative, cocksure crowd undergraduates are!”

  “Quorum pars magna we both were in our day, my dear Robin. Don’t get pompous before your time, or they’ll appoint you editor of the New Scrutator. You know you enjoyed it, and that you fairly lapped up all the compliments about being a real force in modern literature and a coming man and all the rest of it. A very healthy enjoyment too; I can’t think why any sane man pretends that he doesn’t like the butter being laid on, especially in public. Either you can pretend to yourself that it’s all true, or else you can feel your tongue nestling in your cheek, and think what a fine fellow you are to see through all the flummery. Either way you get a grand feeling of superiority. Besides, in your case you can almost have your cake and eat it as well. You really have done some good work, and preserved your critical faculty as well. So you can take almost half the compliments as deserved, and still preserve your sovereign contempt for the exaggeration. You’re a very lucky man, you know. Now tell me about the social whirl; I didn’t think of you as a society pet in the old days, but they tell me nowadays that no duchess can have a party without you. You’re almost as much in the limelight as Basil Paraday-Royne, whom, by the way, I’ve got to go and see later on.”