Fate Cannot Harm Me (5 page)

How pitifully feeble is any description of a friend! I can describe his career, I can estimate his intellectual talents, I can criticize his acts or his writings. But the thousand bonds that unite us, the chance remarks, the jokes that we have shared, the common sympathies—and the common antipathies still more—the games and the laughter, the days in the sun and the evenings before the fire—how can they be analysed or described? Something of that kind I had once said, haltingly enough, to Monty himself.

He had smiled as he replied. “You mustn't try to describe that sort of pleasure. Don't you remember Johnson's letter to Boswell when Boswell had been a bit too enthusiastic? It's a good passage; how does
it go? To disappoint a friend is unpleasing: and he that forms expectations like yours must be disappointed. Think only when you see me, that you see a man who loves you, and is proud and glad that you love him.' You can't beat the eighteenth century for saying that kind of thing simply and well.”

“Now weigh right in, old friend, and tell me the whole history, omitting of course the immense scientific importance of your expedition, in which I have the profoundest disbelief.” That had been his command, and I had responded. But I didn't talk long about the Antarctic, for it was not that that filled my mind. He guessed, almost before I had told him, that my need was to pick up the threads of my old life.

“Good Lord, yes, how you must want to get into touch again,” he exclaimed. “Well, there's no sort of difficulty about that. I'll spread the word round that you're home again, and in a week you'll be starring as the returned explorer in all the drawing-rooms in London.”

“Yes, but there's something before that. I must know something about all that's happened whilst I've been away. I really haven't the slightest idea who's alive and who's dead, or who's married or engaged or divorced. I shall drop the most frightful bricks.”

Monty chuckled. “Oh, I'll put that right. I rather fancy myself as a social historian. To-night you must dine with me; we'll have our own private celebration of your return. And, by Jove, I'll make it a celebration that you'll remember. You'll come, won't you?”

“I'd love to; what time's the meal?”

“Meal, by God, the man talks about a meal,” he exclaimed with pretended horror. “My dear old Anthony, I'm ashamed of you. Don't you know that I regard myself as the best judge, weight for age, of food
or wine in the whole of London? I tell you this is an occasion, and we're going to have a great dinner. A meal's just what you take to keep the old body going, and a banquet—well, that means over-fed aldermen and tons of turtle—and an orgy means too many people and a head in the morning. What you've accepted is an invitation to the best dinner that London can produce. Dash it all, man, you must have lived on sardines and ship's biscuits and salt pork and every kind of tinned horror for the last two years. Now you're going to eat a dinner. At times a chop and a pint of beer go down well enough, but there are occasions—and this is one of them—when it's a duty to exhaust every artifice which civilization can suggest to construct a dinner as good as a dinner can be. Trust to me; I feel already the artist within me at work. I'll construct a dinner that you'll remember all your life. We'll go to the Trufflers; there's the best cook in London there, and I more or less control the cellar myself. You know it?”

“Yes, it's that club just off St. James's, isn't it? I dined there once or twice, I think.”

“That's right. It's almost the smallest club in London, but in some ways the best; it exists for eating and drinking and for nothing else. We'll make it eight o'clock. I'll trot round this morning and plan my gastronomic campaign. We won't waste to-night any of the gifts that the good God has showered on us.”

I smiled at his enthusiasm. “Well, I shall enjoy it anyhow. I haven't dressed for dinner since 1932.”

“We shall both enjoy it. For once in a way we'll be really greedy. But no running after strange gods in the meantime. Do you remember old Stanwood?”

“Yes, I think so. An oldish, thin man, sour as vinegar.”

“That's the chap, one of those lean hungry-looking beggars who always enjoy their food. Greedy as hell, but dyspeptic too. Well, I once wanted to get him
interested in a paper we were launching and I asked him to dinner. A lot of trouble I took to order a meal—damn, I mean a dinner—that would put him in the best of humours. Just by chance I came into the club at teatime, and he was drinking a cup of tea and eating a biscuit. But as luck would have it, the fellow next to him had ordered some crumpets, and crumpets were a thing that old Stanwood couldn't resist. He had a look at them, and then he sent away his biscuits and ordered some for himself. By Jove, I can see him now! With the long bony fingers of one hand picking out the finest and most buttery specimen from his dish, holding it up, and delicately sprinkling it with salt and pepper. I can see him savouring it and praising it—‘instinct with rich juices' is a phrase that sticks in my memory. I've never seen a greedy man much happier. And when he'd once started he couldn't stop. So when dinner time came I had to entertain a bilious old dyspeptic, with about as much chance of getting him to back our new review as I had of flying to the moon. A wasted dinner!”

“Anyhow you could enjoy your own dinner.”

Monty chuckled. “That's the saddest part of the tale. He looked so damned happy with his crumpets that I just couldn't bear to be out of it. I ordered a dish for myself, and ate nearly as many as he did. At eight o'clock I wasn't in much better shape than he was. So no incontinence of that kind for you to-day. I can't have the best dinner of the year spoiled in that way.”

He jumped up from his seat. “Half-past eleven, I must run. See you at the Trufflers at eight. And I'll tell you the whole history of London since 1932. So long.”

He was gone, and I had not dared to ask him about Cynthia. No matter—if I had waited for two and a half years I could wait till dinner-time that night.

“In an aristocratical institution like England, not trial by jury, but the dinner is the capital institution.”

EMERSON

It seemed odd to me to be dining out in London once more; odd, yet, in a way, strangely natural too. Odd because I had not dressed for dinner for three long years; natural because the old familiar sights and sounds and smells of London were around me again. A sort of excitement seized me as I walked down Piccadilly towards the Trufflers, and all the anxious crises of my life passed one after another before my mental vision. The first day at school, the news of the war, the day when I had joined my regiment, a lad of eighteen, in the first year of the great struggle. And then, more vividly still, my first sight of Oxford in the autumn of 1919, with ancient buildings vague and misty in the damp fog of an October evening; a long hot weary struggle in the schools; a cricket match or two, my first meeting with Cynthia. Certitude filled me and braced me; another crisis was near. I felt it, I prepared for it, but whether it betided well or ill I would not even guess. Some time soon I must know; in another hour or less Monty's cheery voice would be mentioning her name, and I should know whether she was still the same to me as three years back. I loved her—that I knew—and, somehow, it seemed to me that, as I listened, I should know too whether she might learn to love me. Yes. I was filled with expectation, with hope, with a foreknowledge of events of importance looming in the near future. My mind seemed to cover years in the space of a few
moments; all my past, and the present, and faintly, dimly, uncertainly, the future too.

Then my mood changed. I had not dressed for more than two years. Were my clothes all right? I fingered my tie like a nervous schoolboy; I restlessly agitated my shoulders within the unaccustomed stiff shirt. At least there would be no women; I couldn't go wrong dining alone with Monty! Yet how different it would all be! I tasted again in retrospect the rude meals of the old Southern Light—and listened again to Christiansen's unhurried speech as he opened one of the everlasting tins for our evening meal. How neatly, how deftly, he had always opened them; and how madly his very deftness and certainty had irritated me!

“Look out, sir!”

Unseeing I had walked into a match-seller who was standing by the kerb, and almost upset his miserable little stock of matches. I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out a half-crown, muttered “Sorry, good luck to you,” and hurried on before I should be overwhelmed by his torrent of thanks. I had given him a good moment, anyhow. The half-crown, instead of the copper which he had expected, would perhaps give him some moments of real happiness. It was all wrong, of course, to give indiscriminate charity, but after all, poor devil, he looked pretty well down and out, and then—

“Can't you look where the hell you're going, confound you, sir?”

Damn. I'd run into someone else. A retired soldier by the voice, and a rude one at that. All my worst instincts surged to the surface. Dash it all, if he'd only expostulated mildly, or made some effort to look tolerably pleasant instead of scowling at me as though I'd tried to hurt him. My mood changed to one of pride; if I didn't own London after three years' absence, who did? So my answer was not calculated to soothe him.

“Indeed I can, and do when I wish. Have you any further observations to make?”

For a moment I thought that, an apoplectic stroke would bring the conversation to a premature conclusion, but a perfect volley of spluttered “damns” brought, I suppose, the necessary relief. I raised my hat with studied politeness; murmured “Glad to have met you, sir,” and sauntered on. Really, Piccadilly was grand! Beautiful, too, in a sort of way in the lamp light—to a returned wanderer, at any rate. I'd never known a home, and this was as near the idea of a home atmosphere as I could well hope to recover. How many times in the past I had sauntered down here to dine with this friend or that, or to find my way to one theatre or another. And now I was bound on just such another errand—to the beginnings, perhaps, of a new life and a great deal of happiness. On such an evening all must surely turn out for the best. My castle in the air began to lift itself towards the heavens. To myself I rehearsed the conversation to come. I should not be the first to bring in Cynthia's name, but sooner or later, as he told me of the doings of the last three years, Monty must surely mention her. He and she and I must have many friends in common. I began to think which of his set had known her best. I heard it all in imagination. “Cynthia Hetherington was there too. I forget, did you know her?” And I replying, nonchalantly—(yes, that was the form, nonchalantly)—“Yes, I remember her very well, though she was only just out when I left; very good-looking, and an awfully nice girl, too.” And Monty. “Yes, alpha plus, I wonder she doesn't marry; there can't be many to touch her, but …”

Crash! I'd bumped into someone else. A cheerful “Achtung” told me that I had collided with a ski-er this time, and the cheerful grin which greeted my apology apprised me of the fact that no harm had been done. Perhaps his mind was away among the snows and the
mountains, just as mine was ranging over the fields of fancy. But, really, I must pull myself together, and keep my mind from wandering; I didn't want to have a real crash and arrive at the Trufflers with a muddy coat. I gave myself a mental shake, and tried to concentrate on steering a safe course along Piccadilly.

Ah! there was the door of the club! I remembered its austere and almost forbidding appearance, suggesting a dignity and a reticence foreign to the buildings alongside it. The obvious club building on its right, which would have seemed adequate and even imposing in other surroundings, was stamped with the cruel accusation of being a pot-house by the very propinquity of the Trufflers; the house opposite seemed faintly ostentatious in comparison with the sober majesty of my objective. A feeling of worth and well-being filled me as I mounted its shallow steps. I was a man to whom that door would open with warm yet majestic welcome. I was, in fact, no nonentity but someone in this great London world. I was fit to sample the best dinner in London; my palate was not unworthy to taste the choicest wines the Trufflers could provide. The door was discreetly closed; no uniformed menial advertised the nature of the edifice, no provoking page-boy scampered down the steps to hasten the removal of my hat and coat. Gravely, as befitted a great occasion, I mounted the steps and pressed the bell. Slowly, decorously, majestically the door swung back and I crossed the threshold. Threshold? Rubicon? I could not tell. I walked into the club.

I walked into the club. Why could I not have set that down simply and spared all this long rigmarole, so unimportant to anyone but myself? I find it hard to explain, yet I felt that my state of mind that evening had some deep significance. To me that night the most trivial happening seemed to be charged with the gravest import. It was as though my whole life had reached its
climax or rather its turning point. Was I to be raised to Heaven, or dashed down to Hell? Should I in a few short hours be returning home with all my castles in the air dissolved into nothingness, or should I be walking on air, ready to snatch the happiness which had hitherto eluded me? I was keyed up to the highest state of excitement; anxious, expectant, scenting the great event. And yet again—what nonsense! A simple dinner with an old friend; a talk about old times and old friends; too many drinks and perhaps a head in the morning. Why delude myself—and yet? Strongly, in spite of myself, the familiar feeling seized me that all this had happened before; that it
was
the prelude to some great event, some staggering dénouement. But did I face triumph or disaster? Of that I had no sort of idea.