Fate Cannot Harm Me (6 page)

A servant removed my hat and coat with the silent deftness of a screen butler; they left me without my feeling the parting. One moment they were there, the next they were gone. No tug displaced my coat, no hand seemed to touch me. They were not so much removed as spirited from me; I was lapped in the world of perfect waiting, I lay safe in the haven of luxurious good living. And there in the outer lounge was Monty, so deep in conversation that he had not noticed my entrance. Instinct told me that he was speaking to an archbishop, reason declared that he was engaged in profound discussion with the head waiter. Reason was right. Some deep matter connected with the temperature of wine engaged their whole attention. With all the earnestness at his command Monty impressed his view upon the other. The pseudo-archbishop bowed, if bowed be the right word. His legs remained stationary; his trunk was immovable; but his head, yes, his head, ever so slightly and ever so slowly, but quite perceptibly, inclined towards my host. It was the tribute of age and experience to knowledge and power, the homage of
a great man to a greater. “Very good, sir; it shall be as you wish,” he said. Slowly his head resumed its original position; slowly he turned away; slowly, with an air of royal inevitability, he moved (Oh! miserable word to describe his progress!) from the room. So, I supposed, might Czar or Emperor have taken his leave of the Queen Empress in the later days of the Victorian Age.

Monty looked up and saw me. He sprang to his feet, and the anxious consultant became the eager and welcoming host.

“Well met, Anthony,” he cried. “I'm delighted to see you, and Thank God for the man who sufficiently respects his dinner to arrive on the tick. Sit down here, and we'll have a glass of sherry.” He rang the bell and a waiter, a little younger, a little, but only a little, more mobile, a little less episcopal in his bearing, came in answer.

“A suffragan, I suppose,” I murmured half to myself.

“What!” said Monty.

“I'm sorry,” I said, smiling; “three years of loneliness have made me think aloud, I'm afraid. I was really only paying a private tribute to your staff. They certainly compel admiration.”

“Yes, they're good chaps. I choose them myself—most of them.” Meantime, the suffragan who had rightly interpreted a nod from my host had returned bearing a decanter of sherry.

“I want you to try this,” said Monty, “it's some that I bought for the club at old Lord Derrington's sale. When he died, the best cellar in London died with him, take it for all in all—but I collared the best of it for the Trufflers, and I've never made a better bargain. A good deed sufficient to give me absolution for a year if I'd been a boy scout. How do you find it?”

“Beyond praise. It's a long time since such liquor descended my unworthy gullet.”

Monty smiled contentedly. “I'm glad; the evening opens well. ‘A right impulse once given to the army, it is in a position to turn all events not calculated on, or miscalculated, to advantage.' You remember the passage; it's Hamley on the Jena campaign. Means that if you start right you can't go wrong. I foresee a successful evening, and a guest whom it will be a real pleasure to entertain. You know, Anthony, I can bear anything and anybody except the man who utterly refuses to be either pleased or impressed. You, now, find the straight way to my heart by gazing with obvious satisfaction at my club, by praising the servants and by admiring the wine. And yet you are conferring on me the richest of benefits. I've entertained a good few here at one time and another, but when did I ever have the chance of inviting a man who has been outside civilization for nearly three years, and who has, so to speak, not dined all that time? It's a priceless opportunity. In these peculiar circumstances, you combine, my dear Anthony, the training of a gourmet with the virgin palate of a youth; you make me feel that civilization itself is on trial. You are a Daniel come to judgment after three years in the wilderness—a mixed but suggestive metaphor. You are the ultimate court of appeal before which the Trufflers is to be tried. And last, but not least, you are my old and valued friend, whom I've not seen for a devil of a while, and who once pulled me out of the deuce of a scrape. I raise my glass, Anthony, and wish you all good things.”

I raised mine in reply, and smiled my thanks. Pleasant indeed it was to feel that I was welcome in the truest sense of the term. Monty, more than any of my friends, had always had the priceless gift of compelling belief in his sincerity. With him it never occurred to me to doubt that what he said he meant.

“I can't tell you how glad I am to be here,” I answered, “or how much I'm looking forward not only
to a dinner planned by you, but even more to your account of the last two and a half years. You've got a tough job ahead of you there, and a lot of talking to do if you're going to fulfil that promise.”

He waved an airy hand. “And who should do it better? You know, you elderly hypocrite, that I love talking and regard myself as supremely gifted in the art of narration. Besides, we have the evening before us. I shall spare neither time nor trouble; with the aid of good liquor I have no sort of doubt but that I shall succeed to admiration. Between the soup and the savoury, between the sherry and the brandy, the life of London with all its chances and mischances, its drama, its comedies, its tragedies shall be unrolled before you. Producer, Monty Renshaw; by special command for one night only; carriages at midnight. That kind of thing, what?”

I nodded, for I know by experience that Monty, once launched, needed no aid from me to keep the ball of conversation rolling.

“Let me see,” he went on, “did you say that you'd dined here before?”

“Yes. I came here once to dine with Basil Paraday-Royne just before I left England. He and his great pal Hedley, and, I think, another man whom I've forgotten. Do they come here much now? I remember that Basil was very enthusiastic about the place, and, I thought, a little too obviously pleased that he was a member and the others weren't.”

Monty looked at me with a curious, inquiring smile. When he spoke his voice had lost something of its irresponsible gaiety, and he seemed to choose his words.

“What is this magic that you have?” he asked.

“Magic? What do you mean?”

“I mean just this. You may come here this year and you won't see Paraday-Royne or Hedley; you may come next year—you won't see them then either. After
that”—he shrugged his shoulders—“who can tell? Time makes people forget, and one or other of them may return, but somehow I doubt it. Myself, I don't believe that either of them will ever sit in this room again. But here's the magic. You ask me to tell you, the returned exile, the history of London town during the last three years. I make no plan; I purpose just to prattle of this and that as fancy dictates to me. And then in your first sentence you mention two men, and at once I realize that round these two the whole history of my world—of our world—has centred all the time that you have been away. Yes. I'm going to keep my promise, but not quite in the manner you expected, or I had proposed. I'm going to tell you just exactly why you won't meet Paraday-Royne or Hedley in the Trufflers, and for that matter in any other London club. And when I've finished I think you'll agree that I've kept my part of the bargain. But come on, dinner is ready, and we'll start the story there. It's the door on your left; lead on.”

We entered the dining-room, and the archbishop himself motioned us to a table in an alcove—a little withdrawn from the rest of the room. His reverent gaze seemed to direct a benison upon us; an almost imperceptible gesture directed one of his satellites to attend to our unspoken wants. He withdrew; we were seated.

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.”

“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?'