Fate Cannot Harm Me (2 page)

Are these excuses also self-accusations? Is it really true that the proud man who disdains to explain himself is necessarily pursuing the wiser course? I do not know. But I dare to suggest—and this is sometimes less even than a submission—that there is something to be said on the other side. Granted that the majority of men are reasonable beings, it may surely be argued that to explain everything and to excuse everything is sounder advice than the conventional counsel to explain and excuse nothing.

I end this introduction on a note of doubt. Once on a warm June afternoon I met a professional friend hurrying in cap and gown along an Oxford street, asked him his errand, and was told that he went a-lecturing. “What,” said I, “at half past two on a summer afternoon?” “Why yes,” said he, “I always lecture then: it keeps the rotters away.” Such austerity may in professors be commendable; their salaries are not measured according to the size of their audiences. But God forbid that this introduction should rob me of a reader, for as Dr. Johnson remarked, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Does an introduction repel, rather than attract? I hope not, but I am not sure. That is the doubt.

“I sipped each flow'r, I changed ev'ry hour,
I sipped each flow'r, I changed ev'ry hour,
But here ev'ry flow'r is united.”

Beggar's Opera

The lawn at Critton is famous. It spreads out fanwise behind the house, an almost infinite sea of smooth greenness. Pointing due south a short wing, which contains the dining-room and conservatory, and which masks the kitchens and the stables, juts out from the main building. From the east wing the long line of French windows opens out of the drawing-room on to the lawn. On the left, beyond the conservatory, the ground rises, and is covered with trees and shrubs, but towards the southeast the lawn stretches out—on and on—till it seems to disappear into space. In fact it is bounded at length by a sunken ditch, beyond which again the ground drops away gradually, almost imperceptibly, into the valley far beneath. In the blaze of a summer day, it was an enchanted place, the finely triumphant expression of centuries of care and culture, a regal example of the gardener's art. But in the evening it appeared in a different guise. Then, to me at least, its grandeur became an eerie vastness, its smoothness treachery, its very beauty a mirage. Stepping on to it at dusk I felt as though I were a swimmer breasting a smooth sea and striking out towards the unknown—to swim perhaps hour after hour into a waste of waters, to sink at last exhausted, forgotten and alone. Yes, a smooth yet treacherous sea—so the lawn appeared. Beautiful, tempting, fascinating on its margin, yet hinting at unknown dangers and unplumbed depths for those who ventured into its further confines. A foolish fancy, yet a
fancy from which I could never rid myself, and least of all on that evening in late June, as I paced the broad gravel path—from the mulberry tree beyond the conservatory, planted, so legend said, by Charles II himself, along the side of the south wing, along the drawing-room front, and so back again to the mulberry tree once more.

It was half-past eight, but we were not to dine till nine that night, for Lady Dormansland had other guests arriving late. And so I had begged Lady Dennison to give me this half-hour before dinner that I might ask her a question and beg for her advice. On the edge of the great lawn I waited for her now.

A book may end with a confession; it often does. This book begins with one, which is contrary to all accepted canons. Yet I cannot avoid it, for unless I make confession I cannot explain why I paced up and down in a state of nervous perturbation, nor yet why the verdict of an old lady of sixty seemed to me at that moment more important than anything else in the world. For the hundredth time I reviewed my situation, and marshalled the arguments which I should shortly use. I was thirty-six, with no near relations, and far too much money. That, I suppose, was the determining factor. The war had found me still at school; I had left at once, of course, and done my share—with decent competence if not with special distinction. For, indeed, I had discovered before long that it was my part to follow rather than to lead; I think I was trustworthy, but it was not in me to be a leader of men. Decisions I have always liked to leave to others; perhaps to men of tougher fibre or greater confidence in themselves. For me the second place seemed always preferable to the first. And this second place I could adorn. “Tel brille au second qui s'éclipse au premier.” Yes, I was uncomfortably aware that initiative was not my strongest suit. Then, after the war, two happy years at Oxford, when I tried to recapture the irresponsible time of which the war had robbed my
generation. It is not for me to say how far that experiment answered; I was happy enough, but I left much as I had begun. And since then? Well, on the whole life had been, to all outward seeming, tolerably good. Money and friends, life and laughter. A good deal of travelling and a great deal of sport; cricket and shooting at home and abroad; good books to read and society, in the limited sense of the word, to fall back on for recreation and amusement. A full life in a way, and happy enough, too—and yet, and yet, curiously unsatisfying, unrestful, unpurposeful. A pretty selfish life, and an oddly lonely one. Spiritually lonely, I mean. I began to think that, perhaps, the Victorians had the root of the matter in them, and that family life and the ties of home and children and possibly even religion might be something more than the mere cramping fetters which my generation liked to think them. In the last resort the old-fashioned moralists were right, absolutely and completely right: life without a job, without the necessity for fulfilling a definite task, was fundamentally an unhappy life. Liberty was good, and holidays were good, but, my God, how they cloyed, when the one was unlimited and the second unending. And yet what could I do? I had toyed with business for a time, but how could I take that seriously when my investments brought me in my twelve to fifteen thousand a year as inevitably as the seasons changed? I had been on the Stock Exchange, but where was the excitement when I knew that my own income was always secure? Besides I had no gambler's instinct. To one with more initiative, or more ambition, or more crusading zeal, politics might have opened the door to useful work and true interest, but I had none of those gifts. No, mine was the tragedy of the rich young man, the too rich young man. I had indeed insufficient wants to balance my riches, too much money to leave room for all the perilous joys of uncertainty and experiment; I seemed to be drifting towards an old age which must be without
hope, full of disillusionment and boredom, useless to the world, tiresome to myself. And then the miracle had happened. Once more, as I reached the end of my promenade, I recalled the first time, early that same spring, that I had seen Cynthia. She was standing in a London ballroom, talking to Lady Dormansland and to a couple of men whom I did not know; I caught a glimpse of a head, crowned with auburn hair with a touch of Titian red where the lights rested on it—a head set proudly, almost challengingly, on a slim neck. I looked again and watched a smile dawn on her face, a smile that seemed to come from the eyes rather than from the mouth. To me she seemed the embodiment of youth and charm and beauty. Yet it was not exactly love at first sight. I remember, only too clearly, that my natural pessimism urged doubts even then. Approach her, it said, and you will soon learn the old lesson. Her hair, perhaps, on nearer view, will display those ugly tints which are so perilously near to the true auburn; or she will move and you will see that she moves clumsily and without grace (have you ever watched girls walking down a flight of stairs and noticed how few, how miserably few, can stand that test of movement?); or she will speak, and her voice will be harsh or feverish; or, worst of all, she will talk to you with a voice that is all music, and you will detect behind it the vacant and selfish mind. I remembered how often before I had thought myself attracted, and how often I had been disillusioned. In the search for perfection there are many disappointments, and half-successes at the best. Still rankling in my mind was the thought of another, who for a little time I had thought to be in love with me as I was with her—until gradually it was borne upon me that it was my money that drew her to me. With that thought I was within an ace of leaving the house without an introduction to Cynthia; why should I expose myself to a new discomfiture? But I could not. Even to a pessimist hope and
curiosity are the most powerful of human emotions. Half an hour later I sat by Lady Dormansland's side, and asked her for information.

“Oh, you mean Cynthia Hetherington,” she said. “My dear man, you show good taste; she's quite charming and totally unspoiled. She's just eighteen, but no one's met her yet, because her father and mother both died about a year ago, and of course she's been nowhere since. But I shall ask her to Critton this summer. (Lady Dormansland thought always in terms of guests, and divided the world into those who received her invitations and those who did not.) A very nice girl, her poor mother was a daughter of Lord Egeland. (Lady Dormansland's standards of niceness were apt to be determined by considerations of birth.) Yes—she lives now with Lady Dennison, an aunt, you know. But I'll introduce you.”

It began like that. I repeat that I advanced to meet her that first evening a little cynically, expecting disappointment, anticipating flaws and imperfections. And did not find them. Even so I went home telling myself that the first impression would all too certainly flatter to deceive. Let me know her, I thought, a little better, and I shall see the feet of clay. At thirty-six one is no longer swept off one's feet. But it was not so. The weeks that followed were maddeningly, tantalizingly sweet to me. I went to parties on the slender hope that she might be there, and was plunged into gloom if she were not. I employed stratagems to meet her without seeming to arrange a meeting. And the better I came to know her the more triumphantly, so it seemed to me, did she answer my test. Her interests ran with mine, her mind matched her charm—and, above all, she had the enthusiasm and relish for life that had been slipping away from me. There came a time, when I knew beyond question that I was deeply, irrevocably in love. What words could say more? If I were a poet I might describe her, but I am not. I only know that to me she seemed
the perfection that I had always sought. How can one define love or beauty or charm without vulgarizing and lowering them?

Demand of lilies wherefore they are white
,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose
,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might
.

Yes, leave the mystery and the wonder undefined and unexplained. I loved her.

Whether she knew my feelings I could not tell. She was eighteen and in love with life—and that left her little time to think of bachelors of thirty-six. But in June I was to go to Critton, and she too. There I planned to put my fate to the touch.

At the last moment I hesitated. Not, indeed, that I doubted any longer my own desires, but because I trembled at the thought of her answer. And so, partly because I was afraid, and partly because of an old-fashioned scruple, I had made up my mind to speak first to Lady Dennison, and to beg her help.

There was the faint rustle of a skirt and I turned to see Lady Dennison by my side.

“Here I am, Mr. Newton, now what is this great secret which I am to share? But let us walk on the lawn.”

She was a lady of about sixty, slight, almost fragile in appearance, but dignified with the dignity which comes from a good life, spent in the service of others. Her husband had died twenty years ago in India, and both her sons had been killed in the war, yet she maintained a quiet cheerfulness, and never spoke of her own troubles. She lived for part of the year in London, and for the rest at her house on Southampton Water, busied constantly yet unostentatiously with good works and acts of kindness. To me she represented the stability and order and
faintly pathetic charm of an older generation. I could ask no better confidante; she would by her nature be fair and sympathetic, yet prepared to speak the exact truth.

“No, please, Lady Dennison,” I answered, “will you humour me by strolling on the path—or sitting under the mulberry tree if it's warm enough for you—somehow the lawn seems dangerous to-night. I mean, it's treacherous, and …”

She smiled.

“What an odd idea. I love the lawn at Critton. But by all means let it be the mulberry tree. Now, what have you to ask me?”

“It's about Cynthia.”

“I had guessed so much; tell me about it.”

She smiled once more, and for the first time I realized that she must once have been beautiful. Then, in a torrent of words I poured out my story, my hopes, and my fears.

I stopped quite suddenly, and looked at her. Her head was bent, and there was a long pause. Then she looked up.

“Why do you tell all this to me, Mr. Newton?”