Fate Cannot Harm Me Page 8

  For a moment this shock of hearing Cynthia’s name, thus suddenly plunged into Monty’s tale had overcome me. Not for a moment had I associated her with the lady of the photographs, nor thought of her as playing a part in the drama. And for a moment, too, an icy feeling of despair had gripped me. Cynthia was the cause of the jealousy of Paraday-Royne and Hedley; did that mean one or other had won her and married her? Was my whole edifice of hope in fragments before me? But almost instantaneously came the certainty of security. Lady Dennison had not written, and I trusted her; Monty had said that neither Paraday-Royne nor Hedley would be seen in London, and said too that this story would have a happy ending. That wouldn’t, couldn’t, fit in if one or other had married Cynthia. I breathed again, like a man coming up from deep water, and forced myself to answer in a voice of unconcern.

  “Yes. I knew her in 1932, and very charming she was”.

  “Charming’s no word for Cynthia. Why, all the painters in the world and all the poets too couldn’t have pictured her and done her justice; but I’ll go on with the tale”

  Cynthia stood framed in the doorway, and smiled her greetings to the two men. She might have served as a model for triumphant youth.

  “Good morning, Monty, good morning, Basil. What are you doing here, Monty, and Basil, dear, what are you doing in a dressing-gown at eleven o’clock on a heavenly day like this? And are you going to play golf with me this afternoon, and where shall we play, and where and when shall we lunch? Oh, and do let’s have some lobster, it’s so good now—and not at your club—I hate the ladies’ side at a man’s club. And you’ve not said a word about my dress, Basil dear, and I know you always notice those things. What do you think of it?”

  A smile of delighted welcome had lit up Basil’s face as Cynthia came in—now he tried to reply.

  “One question at a time, chérie, one question at a time. First, and most important of course, your dress is so pretty as to be almost worthy of you, but not quite. Lunch of course, and lots of lobster, and just wherever you will. Golf by all means; we’ll go to Walton Heath. I’d promised to play with Robin Hedley, but I’ll ’phone and put him off.”

  “Oh, no, you mustn’t do that. Why should poor Robin lose his game? Besides, you know I like him. We’ll have a foursome instead. Monty, why don’t you come and play with us? I never see anything of you now.”

  “Sorry, Cynthia, I only wish I could. But I’m reporting a match at Lord’s—I’m due there by twelve, too. You’ll have to find some one more lucky, or less hardworking.”

  “Yes, much better let me put Robin off,” said Basil. “I’ll give you a half, and present you with a new club if you beat me.”

  “Which I certainly should, Basil, as you well know. No. I’m not to be bribed, and I won’t have poor Robin chucked like that. You must ring up Pamela Grey, or one of the Montresors or someone like that and bring her along. It’s no good being the best-known ladies’ man in London if you can’t find the right girl to make up a foursome.”

  “Right,” said Basil, who was clearly not too well pleased. “I’ll get some one, or other, and we’ll lunch at the Berkeley about half past one. But anyhow you’ll play with me against the other two?”

  Cynthia smiled and relented. “Of course I will—and if you play very nicely you can take me somewhere to dine and dance this evening. I’ve nothing arranged for to-night. Au revoir. I’ve promised to go to a private view of Linkley’s and then I’ve got to change, and be at the Berkeley by lunch-time. I must rush. You’ll have to drive us down very fast, Basil, or we shan’t have time to get round.”

  She kissed her hand to Monty, and was gone as swiftly as she had come.

  “What about the French poets to-night?” said Monty dryly. Basil did not trouble to answer; his thoughts were elsewhere.

  “What a ruddy fool I was to mention Robin at all. I did it without thinking. I ought simply to have scratched him after she’d gone. Now I’ve got to comb London to get some wretched girl to spoil our game for us. Anyhow, I’ll get some one who’s not too good. It’ll annoy Robin to get well beaten—and do him good too.” He reached out his hand for the telephone.

  “Well, I must trot along,” said Monty. “Send that article when it’s ready.”

  He nodded good-bye, and strolled out into the sunshine. His thoughts as he turned down Knightsbridge were not entirely pleasing. The “Basil, dear,” with which Cynthia had addressed his host had jarred on him. Men, he considered, who were on terms of intimacy with some one so wholly adorable as Cynthia ought not to have that indefinable, disturbing streak. And there was a lack of generosity in Basil’s attitude to his literary rival which offended Monty’s instincts of sportsmanship. Literary rival—or rival in a more serious sense? The two photographs obtruded themselves upon his mental vision. Yes, undoubtedly there was real rivalry there—whether the protagonists were conscious of it or not. With a sour little smile Monty began to estimate the odds. “Five to two Pertinacity, two to one Sweet Basil, evens the field,” he murmured to himself. “Which reminds me that I’ve not had a bet to-day.” He plunged into a post office and after a little anxious thought wired to his bookmaker. Whistling a taxi, with the consciousness of work well done he told the driver to take him along to Lord’s.

  Chapter VI

  “But small regard has human pain,

  And wounded men unheeded fall;

  A sick man’s suffering ne’er was known

  To hurt a healthy man at all.”

  That May morning left on Monty’s mind an indelible impression. It seemed to him as though he had been plunged suddenly into the middle of a drama; the characters had been presented to him with a clarity and suddenness which reminded him of a film. It was a well-worn theme, this triangle of persons, but none the less dramatic for that, and the fact that he knew them all gave the situation a poignancy which was always lacking for him in the vicarious interest of the stage or screen. He had only to close his eyes to see the photograph again; but sometimes it smiled at him from Hedley’s mantelpiece, sometimes it flashed its challenge from Paraday-Royne’s piano. Always it roused in him a disturbing sense of youth and life and fascination. Especially, and almost constantly, he thought of it when Pertinacity appeared in the autumn of 1933.

  Monty paused and re-filled my glass.

  “You’ve not read the book, I suppose?” he asked.

  “How should I have? For three years I’ve read nothing. I’m a sort of Rip van Winkle, buried in 1932 and resurrected to-day.”

  “Well, you will. Everyone reads it at some time. But I’ll have to say something about it, just to make things clear.

  “‘Pertinacity’ was a good, almost a great novel—a far better book in fact than any of Robin Hedley’s friends had thought him capable of writing. It lifted him at once, and without question, into the first flight of British novelists. The critics began to couple his name with those of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, and the compliment was deserved. I needn’t describe it to you, but I think it’s true to say that it combined the wide appeal of the best-seller with the honest writing of a real literary craftsman—it was very well written, even if the style betrayed a certain angularity—without any taint of the highbrow. A real book. You felt, as you read it, that it had been lived as well as written. It had one fault, perhaps, and that was the ending. I’ll talk about that in a minute. I read the book like the rest of the world, and for me it had a very special and external interest. How would it affect that triangle? How would it change the betting in the Cynthia Stakes? How would Cynthia herself regard this new development, now that Hedley had, so to speak, soared above Basil in the literary firmament? ‘Even before this splendid orb was entirely set, and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his descending glory, on the opposite quarter of the Heavens rose another luminary, and, for his hour, became lord of the ascendant.’ You remember the passage? I thought of all that, and I wondered a whole lot. Well, how did Basil take it, do you think?”

  “I don’t kno
w. I suppose that his jealousy got the better of him, and that he just cut adrift from Hedley altogether.”

  Monty raised his hands in mock horror.

  “Then you suppose utterly wrongly. My dear man, have all my efforts at description been entirely wasted on you? Surely I’ve told you a dozen times that Basil, whatever else he was, was a very clever man? You can criticize him in all sorts of ways—call him foreign, suggest something feminine in his make-up, or even feline if you feel really critical; hint that he was not always absolutely reliable. I won’t quarrel with any remarks of that sort. But do remember that he was clever, indecently clever sometimes. Intuition, flair, finesse, he’d got them all. How can you suggest, then, that he’d make an elementary blunder like that? No, of course, he didn’t act like a stupid or a sulky child. But I suppose that I must dot the i’s and cross the t’s for you. I’ll go on with the yarn.”

  Basil Paraday-Royne’s critical faculty was both true and cultivated, and he must have known in an hour that Hedley had written a book which was almost great. He could tell that it was too obviously good to be damned with faint praise, and that no niggling criticism was going to be able to keep it for long in the background. It deserved success, and would obtain it. What his private emotions were when he made that discovery Monty did not know, but he could make a shrewd guess. No sign of pique at a rival’s success was ever apparent—he was much too clever for that. Quite the contrary!

  It was in fact Basil himself who wrote that review in the Sunday Survey which made Pertinacity a best seller within a week. Undeniably that review was a fine piece of work, enthusiastic, yet subtly discriminating, laudatory without the brazen tones of advertisement. It was a review that convinced you that a notable book had been written, and, more than that, that you must yourself read it. In its way a little masterpiece of the critic’s art. The usual pitfalls of the review were avoided with instinctive skill. You’ll remember Macaulay’s essay on Barère, and why it failed in its effect. Because every action, every thought, every notion, was made out pitchy black the general effect failed, by want of contrasts, to appal or to repel. “The excess of his rascality has spoiled my paper on him.” You know the passage, don’t you? “It is shade, unrelieved by a gleam of light.” Basil didn’t make the corresponding error. His review wasn’t all sugar to cloy the appetite. Of course what he wrote was a eulogy, but it was a eulogy tempered, and nicely tempered, with criticism. In particular he quarrelled with the tragic ending, which, in his view, marred the artistic unity of the book. In that criticism he was clearly right. The chief characters in Pertinacity were essentially sound and lovable people, and it was wantonly cruel to allow them to end, as the book does, in frustration and disillusionment. Monty, who believed that the world on the whole was a very happy place, felt that the ending of the book had cheated him of a legitimate pleasure, and applauded Basil’s comment. Better judges took the same line. Probably, thought Monty, Hedley had not been able to help himself. His own early life must have been more unpleasant than he allowed his friends to know; he had some sort of grudge against the world, and couldn’t quite bear to let creatures of his imagination live in happiness. But artistically he was in the wrong, and Basil in the right.

  Basil’s review had a side to it which showed even a subtler skill, peculiarly his own. Very delicately, yet unmistakably, he introduced the personal factor into what he wrote. To all who were sensitive to impressions he made it perfectly clear, though more by implications than by statements, that Robin Hedley was his own close friend—and a friend in whose triumph he shared and gloried. And more, he insinuated, so deftly as to rob the suggestion of all suspicion of self-praise, that in the making of the book he, the intimate and trusted friend, had done his part—with advice and criticism and encouragement. Only in the ending, it seemed, had his advice been neglected. Oh yes. Basil’s review of Pertinacity was of its kind a masterpiece!

  Basil wrote well, but he talked better. Who was it who once said of Charles James Fox that if he had used his, unrivalled social influence to further his political ends, he could have converted all England to his party, for above all other men he was in his day supreme in the social sphere? Basil, in a smaller way, and in a lesser age, could command almost unrivalled social influence, and he used it to the full. He talked brilliantly and he talked much—and that winter much of his conversation played round Pertinacity. So gradually, insensibly, an impression got abroad; it spread like water from the hills through a hundred little streams and rivulets. Or rather it was more like a bacillus in the blood stream—a bacillus that soon multiplied itself a million-fold till it permeated the whole stream. It’s truly wonderful how an idea, once started, finds its way from person to person, from drawing-room to drawing-room, from club to club. That Basil was himself the author and propagator of that idea Monty later on had no shadow of doubt, but perhaps no one else guessed. And the impression? It was simply this—that Basil himself had acted as a guide, philosopher and friend to Hedley all through the writing of Pertinacity—that to him, rather than to the ostensible author, much of its charm and merit was due—that without his aid and encouragement it would never have been written. It’s wonderful what can be done by talking to the right people in the right way at the right time. Yes, it was another masterpiece, a masterpiece of insinuation. But he never went an inch too far. When once at dinner Lady Dormansland smilingly called him the part author of Pertinacity he was down on her in a flash, deprecating almost fiercely any such idea. “My dear lady—don’t say that. Robin’s masterpiece is Robin’s masterpiece; it was a privilege to me to make a few very, very minor suggestions.” And then, after a pause, with a little half smile, “But I wish the dear old boy had ended it differently.”

  The legend grew, as legends will. Monty was in America (where incidentally Pertinacity was the book of the month) and so he could not watch its growth; when he came home it had almost passed from the realm of legend to that of history. A night or two after his return he met by chance Sir Smedley Patteringham and Bobby Hawes at the Older Universities Club, and asked them about the book. He could hardly have pitched upon two more representative men, for Patteringham, that acute man, selfish, sour and sixty, had not been known to speak well of anyone or anything for the last thirty years, whereas Bobby at twenty-six, whilst priding himself on being in the know on all topics, was incapable of expressing any opinion save that which obtained in the circles in which he moved.

  “It’s fundamentally dishonest,” sneered Patteringham, “like most successful novels, but allowing for that less abject than most.”

  “What do you mean by dishonest? I thought it sincere, and true to life—too true perhaps.”

  “Realism is not truth, but my suggestion was not intended to convey that. I meant two things. He doesn’t develop it to its natural conclusion, and I believe that Paraday-Royne, who’s really clever even though he is a butterfly, was responsible for the better part of it.”

  “That’s absolutely true,” chimed in Bobby. “I happen to be in a position to say that Basil did everything for the book, short of writing it. And he begged Hedley not to end it, like that. Of course, Hedley did the actual donkey-work of writing, but the taste and the style and all that are enough for me—a lot of it’s pure Paraday-Royne. I should have thought that both their names ought to have been on the title-page. It’s really a damned shame in my opinion, and the worst of it is, Hedley’s so damned unsporting about it. You’d think he’d be only too glad to acknowledge how much he owes to Basil; instead of that he’s as sick as muck if anyone says anything about that side of it. Rather grubby, really. But he always was one drawer down, so to speak.”

  So that was how the land lay. Bobby Hawes’s opinion was worth nothing, except as a symptom of the prevailing view, but Monty was frankly astonished that Patteringham, who was nothing if not astute, had swallowed what he instinctively felt to be an imposture. Really Basil’s cunning was almost superhuman; it compelled admiration. But to suggest such an explanation
to men such as Patteringham and Bobby Hawes would have been time wasted. Monty finished his drink and strolled out of the club.

  Still musing on what he had heard he bumped into Hedley, who was gazing into Hatchard’s window, and at once the demon of curiosity compelled him to stop and speak. He wanted to know how the victim regarded the legend—for so in his mind he had already christened it—and he wanted, much more, to know how Cynthia now distributed her favours between the two writers. That, however, might not be very easy to discover.

  “Hullo, Hedley, how goes it?” he asked, and thought, as he spoke, how curiously difficult it was to address Hedley by his Christian name.

  “Hullo, Monty. I’m all right. And you? I heard last night that you were back.”

  Hedley’s tone was cordial, but his manner and appearance were not those of a man who had just achieved a great literary success. He looked sallow, irritable, and almost haggard.

  “Oh, I’m grand. Where are you making for?”

  “Ebury Street. I shall walk home.”

  Monty turned. “I’ll come with you part of the way, anyhow. I’m wanting a walk. Too many fellows want to stand you drinks when you happen to have been away for a few months. And I’ve had no exercise all day. Well, you’ve had a great triumph, and I must congratulate you. America is Pertinacity mad, too. You must have done better with it than you could possibly have expected. I really am delighted.”

  “Yes, thanks awfully. Yes, I’m sure you are.”

  The answer came pat, but it was joyless. For a moment or two they walked in silence along Piccadilly.

  Monty decided to take a risk—after all, he reflected, the fellow couldn’t bite him. “Basil Paraday-Royne liked it enormously, they tell me.”

  For a moment Hedley’s lips tightened into something perilously near to a snarl; then they partially relaxed into the bitter semblance of a smile.