Fate Cannot Harm Me (7 page)

“Well, in a way, it's like that with me. I don't mean, of course, that I tell the story of Paraday-Royne and Hedley, but there's the same sort of automatic association of ideas. Whenever I think of Paraday-Royne and Hedley I see them as I did that May morning of 1933, for I happened to call on them both, one after another, and each of them betrayed something to me of his real self—more perhaps than I had ever seen before. And I always talk about that morning. Still, it's no matter; for you, anyhow, it will be new. But—oh bother!”

Monty stopped with a jerk, and laughed a little ruefully. “I've forgotten my own technique already. I shall have to start again. You see, I'm in the third person. Forgive me. Now the story will really begin.” He waited whilst the waiter helped us to a sole vin blanc and poured out two glasses of hock. Then he began afresh
.

Whenever Monty Renshaw thought of Paraday-Royne or Hedley he saw them as they were that morning in the spring of 1933. Monty just then was, among other things, working on the
New Scrutator
, and his editor had told him the day before to find out how Paraday-Royne and Hedley were getting on with a couple of articles which had been promised for the next month's number. It was somewhere about half past nine in the morning when he rang the bell of a first-floor flat in Ebury Street where Hedley lived.

Robin Hedley was a man who arranged his own life. That is to say he had never drifted, or allowed things to happen to him—always he had made up his mind, planned, chosen his path, pursued it with unchanging purpose. And, at the age of twenty-nine, he had achieved more than a fair measure of success. The only son of a doctor in the Midlands, he had been educated at the local grammar school. His mother had died during his early childhood, and his father, partly as a result of financial stringency, partly because of a difficult and unadaptable nature, had never achieved either the success or the happiness to which his abilities entitled him. His wealthier neighbours had fought shy of him because of the brusqueness of his manners and because he was an uncompromising Radical in politics; and so he had lived his life as a general practitioner with a small and not very remunerative practice, growing a little sourer and a little more contemptuous of his fellowmen as he grew older. Of his home life and of his school Robin Hedley never spoke; he had, so far as possible, pushed them into the background. Early he had aimed at Oxford, and, after a series of failures, he had at length succeeded in winning, perhaps more by resolution and industry than by natural brilliance, a scholarship at St. Thomas's. There he had fallen under the influence of Shirley,
²
who was his tutor, and he had
developed amazingly. The two men disliked each other profoundly, yet each saw and appreciated the other's powers. Shirley, who had elected him to his scholarship against the advice of his fellow-examiners, recognized his strength of purpose and his power of going to the root of the matter; Hedley, wincing before the sarcasm of his tutor, yet could not fail to appreciate his brilliant scholarship and his intellectual gifts. And so, characteristically, he had concealed his antipathy and set himself to profit from all that Shirley had to give. The result had been a first in Honour Moderations and a first in Greats—neither of them brilliant, both of them secure. Shirley in a characteristic private letter had summed up his pupil towards the end of his University career. “I don't like this man, he wants too much and will give too little. But he has ability and force, though not cleverness, and he's marked out for success. He won't enjoy it when it comes, because he'll always want something more.” Among his contemporaries Hedley's stock stood higher. He was not greatly liked, but he was respected, and he had the reputation of always pulling his weight. His abilities secured consideration for him; he took trouble to get on with his fellows, and he was a keen, though not especially distinguished, athlete. Monty, who was a year junior to him at St. Thomas's, summed up the prevailing impression when he declared that it was much pleasanter to play with him than against him. There was, indeed, in all that he did a ruthless determination, a desire for victory, that made him a good ally but an unpleasant opponent. Still, on the whole, he could not be denied the reputation of being a sound man; not lovable, not really companionable, but at least powerful and successful. After all, the charitable view of him was probably also the true view, for his virtues were his own, but his shortcomings were the fruit of his upbringing—of a lack of love and understanding and encouragement. From St. Thomas's he had passed into
the Civil Service, which seemed indeed his natural destiny; but he had adorned a desk at Whitehall for only a couple of years—to be exact, until his father died. Then he had taken a decision which was in its way courageous, for he determined to take up writing as a profession. Shirley had taught him the value of words; he had ideas and a touch of that missionary zeal which made him anxious to express them. His father had left him a small but sufficient sum of money to make the risk worth taking. Already at Oxford and in London he had written articles and stories with an encouraging measure of success. He reviewed the situation, and balanced the pros and cons; took the decision; resigned from his office, and devoted himself to the world of letters. The event justified him; both as a free-lance journalist and as a writer of more serious literature his reputation grew year by year. The high-class reviews accepted his work with gratifying alacrity, publishers accepted his books with the minimum of hesitation. He was referred to in literary articles and reviews—always with respect, often in terms of eulogy. In a word, he was established. Socially, too, he was successful. His invariable habit of diagnosing correctly his own interests had led him to court the fashionable world. Oxford friends had helped him; Basil Paraday-Royne had taken him up and made him a social figure. How much he was really at home in that world it is difficult to say; some taint of the
arriviste
clung to him; a hint of an inferiority complex dating from his youth made him quick to resent any suggestion of patronage. But he seldom betrayed his feelings. Probably in his inmost heart he despised the social ladder, but indubitably he grasped the rungs.

The room in which he was sitting that May morning was large and comfortable, though it only fluttered on the margin of luxury. The leather arm-chairs by the fireplace were capacious and suggested opulence, but the
carpet was ugly though subdued in colour and design, the few pictures on the walls—etchings for the most part—excellent but unobtrusive. But the predominant note of the room was that of a literary workman; books in open wooden cases filled almost all the wall-space, and a vast yet unpretentious writing-table stood foursquare in the middle of the room. Of the proverbial disarray of the author's study there was no trace. Everything stood in its place—the works of reference, the dictionaries, the papers; everything spoke of order, method, purpose; even Hedley's pipes were in a rack by the mantelpiece instead of being strewn haphazard about the room. One object alone seemed vaguely alien to its surroundings, a new-comer amongst a company of old acquaintances; a challenging, disturbing, confident, almost conquering rebel in a too-orderly and too-settled community. It was a large photograph of a young and beautiful girl, and it stood on the mantelpiece among a sheaf of cards and invitations. In every way the photograph was a triumph of art, not a dull record of a lay figure. Somehow the photographer, or the artist, for so he deserved to be called, had contrived to give to his sitter the poetry of life and motion. She was leaning forward, light in her eyes, words trembling on her laughing lips. It seemed as though in the next instant she must move her hands, must shake back her rebellious hair, must plunge into the conversation with a laugh and jest. A wonderful photograph, full of life and sunshine. In a way out of place in that essentially male work-room, yet good enough to impose itself upon its surroundings, and to dominate where assimilation was impossible. It caught Monty's eye at once, and held it; all the setting of that room was familiar to him, but this was something new, something which changed all the rest, and changed Robin Hedley too. He murmured to himself some well-remembered lines of Samuel Rogers:

“Enter the house—pry thee, forget it not—
And look awhile upon a picture there
.
'Tis of a lady in her earliest youth
.
She sits inclining forward as to speak
,
Her lips half open, and her finger up
,
As though she said—‘Beware!'”

Hedley himself, though it was barely ten o'clock, was already at work at his desk. A half-smoked pipe lay beside him, his pen moved steadily over the paper. As Monty entered he nodded, finished without haste the sentence he was writing, and then ensconced himself in one of the arm-chairs opposite his visitor.

“Morning, Monty. How goes it?”

“Well. It usually goes well with me. And yourself? It's ‘always scribble, scribble, I suppose,' as George III said to Gibbon.”

Hedley smiled. “Oh, not so bad as all that. I always start early and do a good steady average in the morning. You can get through a lot if you're methodical and if you stick to it. But what brings you in to-day?”

“New Scrutator
. Editor considering next number. Will Mr. Robin Hedley's promised article on ‘The Literature of Modern Socialism' be ready up to time? Send Mr. Renshaw round to enquire. Tactful fellow, and always delivers the goods.
Me voici.”

“Your editor's an ass. He knows as well as you do that what I promise I always carry out. That article's not due till the end of the week, and at the end of the week he will get it. It's written as a matter of fact, and I could give it you now, but I'm dashed if I do. Your editor will get it just exactly when I undertook to deliver it, and not before.”

Hedley was plainly irritated that even a suggestion of doubt should have been cast upon his reliability; but Monty chuckled appreciatively.

“Lucky fellow to be able to treat editors on terms of
equality. I wish I could. Well, I shall tell the great man that no falls of governments, no fires or earthquakes or other acts of God, no changes or chances of this mortal life can prevent your article from appearing on his table at the promised hour. That's it, isn't it?”

“Yes, and tell him too that he's an ass to fuss as he always does, and rather a pompous ass too.”

“That part of your message I shall contrive to forget to deliver, thereby preserving my reputation for tact at the expense of that for being the perfect messenger. Not but what I deprive myself of a real pleasure by my abstinence. Well, that's the end of my business, so forget your work for ten minutes and tell me how the world's using you. I don't see Sir Thomas's men too often up in London. Been down to Oxford lately?”

Hedley re-lit his pipe, and, with a half-regretful look at the manuscript on his desk, settled himself down to chat to Monty. He knew that if the latter intended to talk it would not be easy to stop him.

“Well, I went there last term. I was asked to read a paper to one of their literary societies—you see, I'm supposed to be something of a literary pundit nowadays. The usual sort of thing—I read my paper which was supposed to be provocative and then a lot of rather half-baked undergraduates talked and argued interminably about matters which were only by the longest stretch of imagination to be considered as relevant to what I had said. A great deal of argument, and very little truth. What a talkative, argumentative, cocksure crowd undergraduates are!”

“Quorum pars magna
we both were in our day, my dear Robin. Don't get pompous before your time, or they'll appoint you editor of the
New Scrutator
. You know you enjoyed it, and that you fairly lapped up all the compliments about being a real force in modern literature and a coming man and all the rest of it. A very healthy enjoyment too; I can't think why any sane
man pretends that he doesn't like the butter being laid on, especially in public. Either you can pretend to yourself that it's all true, or else you can feel your tongue nestling in your cheek, and think what a fine fellow you are to see through all the flummery. Either way you get a grand feeling of superiority. Besides, in your case you can almost have your cake and eat it as well. You really have done some good work, and preserved your critical faculty as well. So you can take almost half the compliments as deserved, and still preserve your sovereign contempt for the exaggeration. You're a very lucky man, you know. Now tell me about the social whirl; I didn't think of you as a society pet in the old days, but they tell me nowadays that no duchess can have a party without you. You're almost as much in the limelight as Basil Paraday-Royne, whom, by the way, I've got to go and see later on.”

Hedley flushed faintly and looked a trifle embarrassed. “Damn you, Monty—you know too much about everybody. I don't pretend to like this Society racket—I think I rather despise it—but a writer must consider his public. Agents and reviews and all that do a great deal, but not half as much as gossip. If you want to sell your stuff you must be talked about, and talked about by the right people. Laurels wither just as quickly in London as they used to do in Paris; you've got to be seen and discussed all the time or you get forgotten. So, though I'm pretty feeble at small talk, and though I hate all the pretence and snobbery, I do go about a good bit. But one day …”—He paused and a touch of bitterness came into his voice—“Yes, one day, when I'm a big enough man, I'll cut loose and say what I think about the whole pack of these Society idlers,”

Monty grinned, and his eyes strayed towards the invitations and the photograph on the mantelpiece.

“Every one sneers at Society, and every one, or almost every one, is prepared to give his ears to move in it,”
he remarked platitudinously. “I shall look forward to your grand show-up of all its frivolities. Meantime you seem to be spoiling the Egyptians pretty successfully. If you go to half those functions you won't have time for much else.”