Fate Cannot Harm Me Read online

  “So you’ve heard that tale already. You don’t waste time, Monty. Yes, the great critic saw fit to praise my humble work.”

  He paused, and then suddenly he seemed to lose control and the words came tumbling out.

  “It’s damnable. I write a book, far the best I’ve ever written, probably the best I shall ever write. I toil over it. I—I dig it out of myself, and then when it’s finished that smooth-faced friend (he spat out the word as though it had been an obscenity) persuades half London that everything in it that’s worth while was his doing—that he was the good genius, the guiding light. How the hell he’s done it, God only knows, but there it is. And I have to listen to panegyrics of his disinterestedness and his taste and his unselfish friendship. It makes me sick. Monty, you’re a good sort, you know how. I worked at that book. And now everyone’s going about saying what a cad I am not to be grateful to him. I say it’s damnable. Why should he get as much credit, and more, from it than I do? Besides, there was someone, someone I specially wanted to like it, and to like it”—he paused a moment and then blurted it out—“to like it better than anything that he had ever written or could ever write.”

  Subconsciously Monty had always felt that Robin Hedley was in essence an unlovable man—Soames Forsyte he had once called him—yet now, watching the misery which he could not disguise, he felt a real pity. It was damnable. Why should he be robbed, and robbed so cunningly, of everything which he had struggled to secure? It wasn’t fair, and fairness was the creed of Monty’s world. But he had no wish to be made too much a confidant, especially in connection with Cynthia Hetherington, and he hastened to interject a remark.

  “I know, I know, my dear Robin,” he said, wondering to himself as he spoke whether it was pity, or a subconscious wish to sympathize, which made him, contrary to his custom, use the Christian name. “I heard something of that, and I don’t like it one bit. But tell me, just as a matter of hard fact, did Basil help you at all with it?”

  Hedley struck irritably with the end of his umbrella against the pavement.

  “Up to a point, yes,” he answered, rather unwillingly. “You see, I was always meeting him, and we’ve always talked a lot about our work: Besides, the fellow’s got real taste, and the critical faculty, and all those things. I always appreciated that, and I suppose I did make use of him—a bit anyhow. It’s that that make it impossible to deny his cursed hints and innuendoes. Besides”—again he hesitated, and again seemed to decide to plunge—“Cynthia Hetherington was always at his house, and it made a sort of excuse to go round there. Somehow, I didn’t like to think of her round there with him too much.”

  “Poor devil,” thought Monty, “he’s got it badly.” Aloud he said: “I see, that does make it a bit awkward, of course.”

  Hedley turned on him almost savagely.

  “Awkward? Only because he’s a cad. What was his help after all? A few suggestions, some criticisms of style, half a dozen phrases, and a plea for a kind of happy ending. What difference did they make to the book? It’s my book, I wrote it. Sometimes I almost wish I hadn’t.”

  “Then Cynthia, too, shares the prevailing opinion that Basil deserves half the credit,” thought Monty. “Poor wretched Robin—he’s pathetic.” For a few minutes they walked in silence, and then Monty spoke again.

  You know, Robin, I’m the last person to interfere, and I do think you’ve been rather hardly used, but honestly I think you ought to dissemble a bit. It’s all very well for you, or for me for that matter, because we know, but the world in general thinks that Basil helped you more than a bit, and that you aren’t being too generous in acknowledging the debt—and that’s hurting you. When you’ve written something as good as Pertinacity you can afford to be generous. It’s yours, it carries your name, and in ten years no one will remember that there was once a suggestion that Basil had a hand in it. You can’t be permanently robbed of the credit. Besides, you’ve got time; you’ll write more books, and he can’t claim them all. Honestly, in your place I’d try to keep on civil terms with him, and even flatter him a bit. You can afford to, and everyone will like you the better for it. And write another and a better book. Why not, after all?”

  For a moment Hedley appeared likely to burst into a stream of protest; but he calmed himself, and even mustered another curious and self-questioning smile.

  “I’ll take that from you, Monty, though I wouldn’t from anyone else,” he said at length. “Perhaps you’re right, though I don’t think so. And as a matter of fact I am writing another book—I started it last week.”

  “Good man. Think it over. I honestly believe it’s the best you can do. I think I’ll turn here and walk back to the club.”

  They parted, Monty not displeased with his attempt at conciliation, though he did not feel sanguine of its success.

  Monty paused in his tale, for the archbishop was advancing towards our table accompanied by one of his satellites. The latter placed a woodcock before each of us, the former, with a reverence which seemed to transcend the archiepiscopal, presented a bottle of Burgundy and its cork for Monty’s approbation.

  “I think, sir, it could hardly be better,” he said in the slow and reverent accents of Lambeth.

  Gravely Monty nodded his agreement.

  “Now this, Anthony, should be true Nectar. If you don’t like it there’s no hope for you in this world, and little in the next. Burgundy is the grandest of all wines, and this is of a royal race. But you’ll only get one glass. Hargreaves4 taught me at Oxford that no half bottle is ever worth drinking, but it’s equally true that the first glass of a bottle is the best. One perfect glass for each of us, and then the bottle leaves us. That’s real luxury, and only possible on feast nights, like this.” Very carefully he poured out my glass and his own; slowly, appraisingly he raised it to his lips; more slowly still he sipped it—lingeringly he placed the glass beside him on the table. “A royal wine; Anthony, I wish you health and happiness. Enjoy life while you can—this is the culminating moment of your dinner; the other was only preparation for this. You like it?”

  I was fearful of offending him by lack of appreciation, or by an inappropriate comment. In sober truth Burgundy has never been my wine; it lies too heavily upon me. But not for worlds would I have said so to him.

  “And the story?” I suggested, when a few moments had passed in silent respect to the wine.

  “Ah yes. The story. Well, what effect do you suppose my little sermon had on Master Hedley?”

  I laughed. “How should I know? I’ve made one guess to-night and it was all wrong. Still; I’ll buy it again if it pleases you. I should rather fancy that he ignored it altogether, and probably had the deuce of a public row with Paraday-Royne.”

  Monty held up his hands in horror.

  “Anthony, you’re incorrigible. Again you’ve missed all the clues. I told you that Basil was clever, fiendishly clever, but that Robin Hedley was something more. Cleverness—what’s cleverness? ‘Aptitude without weight’—you remember the quotation? You don’t, but never mind. Cleverness is an over-rated word, and an over-rated gift. No. Hedley wasn’t clever in the sense that the other was—his mental reactions weren’t quite so quick, and perhaps not so subtle—but he wasn’t stupid at all. A public row—that would have been really stupid. No—he was an able man, a powerful man, and he could think. Besides, he laid his plans deep; yes, he was deep. And so he did just precisely the opposite of what you suggest. But I’ll go on with the tale.”

  He took another mouthful of the Burgundy, smiled contentedly, and continued.

  Monty watched them all that spring, and what he observed filled him at first with pleasure and then with uneasiness. For Hedley appeared to have taken his advice to heart, and to be carrying it, if anything, too far. He began to frequent Basil’s house again, to play games with him, to be seen much in his company. And, furthermore, he began to speak of him in very different tones. He referred, casually but often, to his debt to Basil; praised his taste and his generosit
y, and let it be known that he was in the habit of deferring to his literary judgment. In the gossip columns of the papers, too, and in literary circles, there began to be rumours of Hedley’s next book. It was to be a novel of society, and it was to be a real picture of the London Society of the day; it would probably, as one writer put it, “rank with the Forsyte Saga as a record of the life and ideas of one section of the England of our times.” Moreover, when Hedley and his new book were mentioned Basil’s name cropped up almost as a matter of course. “It is understood that that gifted critic, Paraday-Royne, is giving Hedley the benefit of his advice; it is rumoured that Paraday-Royne, who, as those in literary circles well know, did so much to make Pertinacity the success of the year, is actively collaborating with Hedley in the preparation of the latter’s forthcoming work”; “the friendship between these two well-known authors of the younger school, Hedley and Paraday-Royne, which to the initiated is one of the most pleasing features in the world of letters, will be apparent to all when the autumn publications appear.” And so on, and so forth.

  Monty, sniffing the breeze, was strangely uneasy. He felt himself the prophet whose advice has been taken, and was dissatisfied. A prophet who suggests calamity and proposes a remedy, but whose advice is not followed, is in a strong position. If the disaster does not occur his jeremiads are easily forgotten; if it does, he is solaced by the thought of his foresight, and his reputation is established. Of course, as he irritably reminded himself, he ought to have been pleased. Why, Hedley had done just what he had advised, but with a thoroughness which he had not dared to suggest. He had outdone himself in good will and generosity; he had surpassed any expectation. He might be said indeed to

  … have conceived a temple

  That shall dispyramid the Egyptian king.

  Yes, he’d been inconceivably, unnaturally generous. What more admirable? And yet Monty felt that all was not well. There was the disturbing factor of Cynthia. A picture of that May morning in the previous year flashed through Monty’s mind; he recollected the manner in which two men had glanced at two copies of the same photograph; and then another picture. Hedley in Piccadilly, and his teeth bared almost to a snarl as he spoke Basil’s name. No—it simply didn’t fit; there was something wrong somewhere, perhaps dangerously wrong. They weren’t men whose actions were easily predictable; one too clever, the other too deep and perhaps too vindictive for easy and straightforward emotions. It just didn’t fit.

  In July Monty found himself one evening sitting next to Bobby Hawes at Lord’s, and adroitly guided the conversation from cricket to Robin Hedley.

  “Yes, rather,” said Bobby, “we were all wrong about him. Even I, you know, who am usually pretty well posted, made a mistake about him. Why, I even thought a month or two ago that he wasn’t grateful to Basil for all that help Basil gave him with Pertinacity. Of course, Hedley’s not a forthcoming chap, and doesn’t express himself much, if you know what I mean, but really he’s as grateful as he can be. The two of them are as thick as thieves. And you know I can tell you, but it’s in confidence, of course, on the very best authority that Basil’s helping him no end with his new book—criticizing the style and reading it chapter by chapter as he writes it and all that sort of thing. I fancy Hedley will thank him pretty warmly in the preface. I must say that sort of friendship is a good show—and, of course, Basil’s got just what the other fellow hasn’t. I always think his taste, and gift for the right word …”

  A little irritably Monty got up and excused himself—it was later than he thought, and batsmen who overdid the two-eyed stance were so damned dull to watch. Truly he could not listen longer to second-hand opinions regurgitated by that empty-headed young idler. And it did not fit! They weren’t playing straight, but why not and for what purpose? Monty was frankly in a state of bewilderment, a state which he disliked and to which he was little accustomed.

  That was how matters stood in the drama of Hedley and Paraday-Royne in the summer of 1934.

  Chapter VII

  “Whoever would appreciate cricket rightly must have a sense, as he sits in the sun (there can be no real cricket without sunshine), that he is simply attending to one part, and just one part, of the pageant of summer as it slowly goes along, and yet a part as true to summer as villages in the Cotswolds, stretches of pleasing meadow-land, and pools in the hills. Cricket in high summer is played with the mind of the born lover of it conscious the whole time that all this happy English life is around him—that cricket is but a corner in the teeming garden of the year.”

  NEVILLE CARDUS

  Monty sank into a corner seat of his carriage with a sigh of relief and pleasure. It was a perfect August day; he was about to leave London; and best of all he was bound for George Appleby’s cricket week—or, to be more accurate, for the tail-end of that best of all summer functions. For George Appleby’s cricket week was in truth a function. In Monty’s calendar it was always a “date”—marking for him, as did the Derby and Wimbledon, Lord’s and Goodwood, a definite stage in the year’s programme. Since his undergraduate days he had never missed it, and of all the year’s pleasures it was the one from which he derived the most enjoyment.

  The “week” dated back to the days of old Tom Appleby, George’s father, and it was George’s boast that in all essentials it remained unchanged year after year. Country house cricket of the pre-war sort—the best type of the best of games—so the Fincham House week might be described. The programme was always the same. On the Monday there was a match against the local Hunt, which was in the nature of an appetiser, for the full strength of the house side was not, as a rule, assembled. On Tuesday and Wednesday came the Old Uptonians’ match. All the Applebys had been at Upton, and the Old Boys’ side had visited Fincham in their turn since the middle nineties. Thursday and Friday were sacred to the Free Foresters. But the first three matches were, in a sense, only preparatory to the Saturday match: that was the real test match, the match which to every one at Fincham transcended in importance not only the other matches of the week but all the cricket, of whatever kind, played in England that year. Yorkshire or Lancashire might win the County Championship, and George Appleby, who was firmly rooted in the south, and to whom cricket was a religion, would feel only a transitory, though acute, annoyance. Australia might secure the Ashes, and his complaints of the decadence of English cricket would be bitter but of short duration. But if the match against Sir Anstruther Oliver’s side, his “Saturday” match, was lost, George would be plunged into gloom for a week at least, whilst a victory in that annual Homeric contest made him happy for months on end. Sir Anstruther lived at Besterton, about fifteen miles away, and his cricket week ran contemporaneously with George’s. It was not so old established, for it had begun, as Fincham supporters were apt to point out, only a paltry thirty years back, but it was played in the same spirit. For both parties the Saturday match was of primary importance; it took place in alternate years at Fincham and at Besterton. This year was the Fincham turn.

  Sitting in his carriage Monty let his mind dwell on earlier visits. How well he remembered his first appearance in the “test match.” It was in his freshman year at Oxford; he had been asked at the last moment to fill a gap, and had captured his host’s heart for ever by holding two difficult catches in the slips at the crisis of the match. Since then he had never missed a year, but this time he had been so busy that he had had to refuse the invitation for the earlier matches, and was now journeying down on Friday afternoon for the last game only. No excuse was conceivable which would keep him away from Fincham on the second Saturday in August. A kindly smile flitted across his face as he thought of his host. George Appleby, at the age of fifty, was a widower with a family of unmarried sons and daughters, but he was still a schoolboy himself in his keenness and enthusiasm. Hospitable, generous and kind almost to the verge of folly, he gave to cricket, and to his cricket week, a devotion which he denied to the other activities of his life. He was a tolerant and easy-going landlord—too easy-going for
his own interests. He could forgive a failure on the part of a tenant to pay his rent with far greater equanimity than he would pardon a dropped catch by one of his side. It stood to reason that he was slightly ridiculous, as all men are whose standards of values are abnormal, but, though every one smiled at him, all loved him too. To Monty he was in character a kind of Dr. Syntax.

  Among the high, or with the low,

  Syntax had never made a foe;

  And, though the jest of all he knew,

  Yet, while they laugh’d they lov’d him too.

  He was himself, as might have been expected, a very moderate cricketer, for your wild enthusiast is hardly ever a highly successful performer. But application and enthusiasm had made him a useful member of his side. As a bowler he was both expensive and destructive; his innocuous slows, which seldom deviated from either the off or leg, and which maintained a steady length (everlasting half-volleys, thought Monty) took more wickets than they deserved. With three carefully chosen fieldsmen in the deep he lured many batsmen to their destruction. Caution was not encouraged in Fincham cricket, and an opponent who had hit George Appleby for a couple of sixes in his first over was not unlikely to be caught in the deep in the second. Monty always declared that George traded on the lack of stamina amongst his opponents. “You hit him for sixes till your arms get tired and then you’re caught.” Incessant practice had made him, too, a difficult batsman to dislodge, though he had few scoring strokes—and going in ten or eleven he had saved many matches for his side. If he scored fifteen or twenty runs he was in the seventh heaven of delight—more pleased by far than many players would have been after completing a century. Yes, thought Monty, he was indeed one of the world’s enthusiasts—a boy at heart, engaging, lovable, a trifle ridiculous. There was nothing at Fincham which did not bear witness to the owner’s prevailing passion; the library which contained one of the most complete collections of cricket books in the country, the cricket pictures, the bound score-books which lay on the library table. Even the years were dated by reference to past triumphs. “Was that in the year that Coronach won the Derby?” an incautious guest had once remarked. “You mean the year that Monty Renshaw made a hundred and forty against, the Old Uptonians,” George had replied in a tone of reproof. There was a legend, zealously propagated by Monty, that George had, somewhere about 1921, referred to the Germans as “those chaps who stopped my cricket week for five years,” but the most assiduous and crafty conversational leads had never succeeded in making him repeat the phrase. And then the great year, 1924! It was 1924 no doubt in the history books, but no one would have referred to it in that manner at Fincham. There it was the year that George won the “Saturday” match, or, more simply, “George’s year.” In sober fact he had, on that famous occasion, made twenty-five runs not out, batting number eleven, and so turned a certain defeat into a glorious victory. It is true that another member of his side had on the same occasion played an almost chanceless innings of one hundred and thirteen, but that was seldom mentioned. 1924 was, for ever, George’s year, the annus mirabilis. That the feat had been performed in the Saturday match gave it, of course, an added value, for that match had an importance and a ritual all its own. Indeed so many conventions had grown up around it that it almost deserved a set of rules for itself. Play began always punctually at 11.30, and continued, whatever the state of the game, until 7. The luncheon interval was never a moment longer than three-quarters of an hour. In the composition of the sides, too, certain well-established precedents were maintained. Sir Anstruther Oliver had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and George Appleby would therefore have considered it an act of very doubtful sportsmanship to include a representative of either of these two seminaries in his eleven. Otherwise both captains were always casting their nets for fresh recruits of merit. But one rule was never broken. Anyone who had played in the match for either Fincham or Besterton was held to have committed himself for life; for good or evil he had chosen his part—never after that could he play for the other side. It would have been easier by far for a great player to have assisted England in one season and Australia in the next than for a lesser player to have given his services first to Fincham and then to Besterton.