Fate Cannot Harm Me (27 page)

A grim little smile appeared on his lips as he read the dedication: “To Basil Paraday-Royne, without whose help and encouragement this book could not have been written. In token of friendship. R. H.” Well, that was handsome enough even if it was rather conventionally phrased; no one could say this time that Robin had tried to conceal his indebtedness to Basil. Apparently the
book dealt with well-to-do people, moving in Society; that was as expected. Monty found himself wondering idly whether the author had drawn much on his friends for his studies of character. Then as he read on he began to smile, at first good-humouredly, then rather shamefacedly. After half an hour he ceased to smile at all. Once or twice he paused and emitted that peculiar sound known as a long drawn-out whistle. Perhaps it was as well that the carriage was, apart from himself, empty. If there had been another passenger, and if he had been able to submit without protest (an unlikely hypothesis) to a series of whistles, ejaculations of surprise, and even a few expletives, he would eventually have seen Monty fling the book on to the opposite seat, and exclaim with an air of the most profound conviction, “Well, I'm damned!”

Curiosity soon compelled him to pick it up again and continue his reading. It's wonderful how quickly you can read when you really want to find out what's in a book. Half an hour before the train reached Critton station Monty had read the last chapter of
Ladies' Lure
. He sat back and emitted a whistle more long drawn-out than any that he had previously exsibilated. “Well, I really
am
damned,” he commented at length. “Dash it all, there are limits, and this has passed them all. It's indecent, it's positively indecent.” He remembered suddenly that he had forgotten altogether to have any lunch, and that it was already four o'clock. It was too late to do anything about that now—never mind, he would be at Critton in a short time with all the better appetite for tea. Meantime he began to glance idly through his
Times
which had lain folded on the seat beside him ever since the train had left Paddington. To tell the truth he hardly noticed what he was reading, for his mind was still busy with
Ladies' Lure
, but his attention was suddenly caught by a name in the Social column.

“Mr. Robin Hedley, the well-known writer, sails tomorrow from Southampton in the
Gargantua
. He proposes
to go round the world, and will be absent from England for at least a year.”

That seemed to Monty the last straw; to cast this bombshell, and to run away before he could see its effects. “Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggardly Scotchman, to draw the trigger after his death!”
[You remember the passage? It's Samuel on Bolingbroke. You don't? No matter
.] Monty felt something of the great lexicographer's indignation as he contemplated the infamy of Robin Hedley.

I had been wrestling with my impatience for some time; now I could control it no longer
.

“For Heaven's sake, Monty, tell me what it was all about. Under great provocation I've sat quiet whilst you've talked round and over and under this book, and I can't even guess what all the fuss was. I'm all for your theory of making the short story long, but there are limits to the control of human curiosity. Tell me in plain English what horrid thing Robin had written? I ask you as man to man, ‘What was in that book?'”

Monty laughed
.

“Objection upheld. You have been very long-suffering and deserved better of me. Somehow I've got tied up in my own story. I think I wanted you to
arrive
at it—so to speak—as I did in that railway carriage. If you follow me, it only dawned on me gradually what the fellow had done, and, still more slowly, just why he had done it. So I'll carry on with the story in the same way—but I won't try to mystify you.”

All novelists, presumably, draw with some freedom on their friends and acquaintances when they are trying
to create fictitious characters. How otherwise could their puppets have the appearance of life and reality? A characteristic borrowed from this man, an idiosyncrasy from that, both, perhaps, superimposed on an idealized portrait of a third. That is how it is done. Sometimes the process is intentional; more often, no doubt, it is done subconsciously. And it stands to reason that a novel dealing with the life of to-day, and with that stratum of Society to which the author belongs, is more than usually likely to contain portraits, or partial portraits, of the author's friends and enemies. Monty had promised himself a good deal of amusement in trying to discover “likenesses” among the characters of the book; he fancied himself as an amateur detective in literary affairs. Possibly he might discover a much disguised Lady Dormansland, or a pale shadow of Sir Smedley Patteringham. And would it be possible to banish all trace of Cynthia from the make-up of the heroine, if heroine there were? He need not have troubled his mind with such forecasts. For the book was not, in the true sense of the word, a novel at all. No, it was not a novel, but an attack.

Yes, attack is the word. Of course the form of a novel was preserved—there was a plot and a love-story and all that, but no one who glanced at the book for a moment could doubt its real purpose. It was an attack on modern Society, savage, ruthless, at times almost venomous. Most people can afford to smile at an attack on their class from without; the popular preacher thundering at the sins and luxuries of the rich, the temperance fanatic ranting against the brewers, the anti-blood-sports enthusiast excoriating the hunting or the shooting fraternity, all such tend to excite as much ridicule for themselves as for their opponents. But Hedley's attack was not of that kind. He knew his world from within, and he could write. His was the stab of Brutus, the betrayal of Judas. Well might Monty whistle as he read!
It's alarming to think what a writer of Robin Hedley's calibre can do when he dips his pen in poison. Society with all its pettiness, its waste of time, its luxury, its lack of purpose, its selfishness and snobbery, has been indicted a hundred times, but never more bitterly nor more ably than in that book. Monty as he read felt naked; that was the expression he used to himself—he was nakedly exposed to the world's contempt.

But that was not all—not even the worst. It was the individual characters in
Ladies' Lure
that shocked Monty most. For, with a kind of scorn for the decencies of behaviour, Hedley had portrayed one after another of his acquaintances. Even the names of the characters were hardly disguised at all; one by one Monty saw his friends stripped of their reputations. If you stress the worst side of every character, if you harp on the small meanness, the unworthy motive, the pretentious conceit, you can make an odious portrait which bears a likeness to the original, and is yet, for all that, the very negation of truth. To Monty, who liked to judge all men at their best, it seemed a travesty and an offence; but yet—and that was the disaster—it was done with terrible ability. Humour of a grim kind, malevolence, descriptive writing of a high order had all gone to the making of that book, but malevolence predominated. “Dash it all,” thought Monty as he considered the feelings of his hostess, “everyone knows that Daisy Dormansland is a bit of a snob, but why can't he remember that with all her faulty she's the most generous-hearted woman in England? But it's like that all through, he's made a vicious, distorted picture of each of us in turn, and, by gad, I'd rather have been described by Swift or Hervey than by him. How he must hate us all!”

His mind flew back to that morning in May, eighteen months before, when he had interrupted Robin Hedley in the writing of
Pertinacity
. How Robin had burst out then in a tirade against Society, its pretences and hollowness!
An inferiority complex, of course, but he had never dreamed that Robin could have felt so deeply, or hugged his grievance so long. “Well, he's got his own back now, I suppose, for all the little snubs and discomforts that he's put up with,” Monty thought, “but what a miserable time he must have had. And he's finished it all now. He just can't come back—they'll never forgive him. Perhaps that world cruise is rather a good scheme, after all.”

He sat back and considered, and then another idea forced him suddenly to sit bolt upright.

“Good Lord, there's Basil, how does he come into all this?” It was only then that the full understanding of what Robin Hedley had done came to him. Of course, of course, he saw it all now! This was revenge, and a revenge as subtle as it was complete. Basil had robbed him of much of the credit for
Pertinacity
, and robbed him in a manner which it was impossible for him openly to resent. Very well then, Basil should share also in the laurels of
Ladies' Lure
. It was Robin this time who had sedulously propagated the rumour that Basil was helping and advising him at every turn. And Basil had fallen into the trap! Of course he knew nothing really of the book, but he had not liked to say so. Instead he had admitted, not once but a hundred times, that he was advising and assisting his friend; he had maintained the legend that he was Robin's good angel, who kept him in the strait path of literary virtue. And what could he do now? If he accepted the responsibility for that book, he would be cut by all his friends and cold-shouldered in every club and drawing-room in London; but if he declared that he had had no share in it at all, if he repudiated the whole book, he would be convicted of acting an elaborate lie for the last year and more. Basil, who thought himself so much cleverer than Robin! Gad, he was fairly caught! And Monty, in spite of himself, laughed out loud.

“In all distresses of our friends,
Kind nature, ever bent to ease us,
Finds out some circumstance to please us.
How patiently we hear them groan!
How glad the case is not our own!”

As he drove up from the station Monty considered whether he should break his news to the party at Critton, or leave them to hear it later. His first impulse was to leave them in blissful ignorance at least until after Thursday's shoot, but on second thoughts he decided otherwise. On the whole it would be kinder to let them know how they had been treated, rather than to let them return to find half London laughing at them. Nor could he disguise from himself that he would derive a certain ghoulish pleasure in observing how they behaved when they read the accounts of themselves.

Most of the party, though not all, were gathered in the hall when Monty arrived just after five o'clock. It was the hour which of all others in the winter he liked best. Tea was still on the table; some had finished and were smoking, others were still eating and drinking; Sir Smedley Patteringham, who never risked spoiling his dinner by indulging in tea, was slowly imbibing a long whisky and soda. Every one was talking, every one seemed happy, comfortable and in thoroughly good conceit with himself and the world. Yet a single glance was sufficient to tell Monty that almost all of them appeared as characters more or less despicable in Robin's book. It seemed almost too cruel to disturb, as he soon would, their contentment and complacency. Perhaps each would forget some of his own annoyance in watching the distress of the rest. Luckily Lady Dormansland was not there; that was just as well.

A chorus of greetings met Monty as he came in. One of the many nieces pushed a chair up for him, and Emily Richards, who for years had been Lady Dormansland's secretary and companion, poured him out a cup of tea.

“Lady Dormansland will be down directly,” she said, “and the tea's quite fresh. A new pot has just come in.”

Monty inquired about the day's sport, and received an enthusiastic account from Bobby Hawes and Bertie Blenkinsop. Then Mrs. Hawes asked the fatal question.

“But you must have lots of news for us, Monty; you left town twenty-four hours after the rest of us. Tell us what's happened.”