FATE CANNOT HARM ME
By
J. C. MASTERMAN
To
R. H. D.
WITH GRATITUDE
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.
Sydney Smith
Contents
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Footnotes
A Note on the Author
Introduction
“Whether you’re thinking of Aristotle or patent medicine, I’ll tell you all about technique in four words. Get on with it.”
DENIS MACKAIL
Or, otherwise expressed, cut out the introduction. Experience, personal or vicarious, gives her warning, candid friends shake candid heads, the critic raises his all too cocksure and upbraiding voice. Indeed, indeed, I know the time-honoured rules; I know that a story, if it is worth telling, should be told straightforwardly—that it should proceed, crescendo, to its climax, spurning by-ways, scorning side-issues. I know that it should conform to a type—to a type, that is, that success has blessed and time hallowed and the cash nexus stabilized; I know that art lies in the concealment of art, that excuses and explanations are accusations; I know that the reader’s attention is apt to flag if action and incident be too long delayed. My tale, such as it is, cares for none of these things. Better then, perhaps, to let it take its chance—to launch it without anticipatory defence, or, if you prefer the metaphor, to refrain from indicating to the Aeoli of criticism the shorn state of my literary lamb.
But sometimes temptation is too strong. “You put me in mind,” said Dr. Johnson to Miss Adams, who had suggested that the opposition of her parents might encourage her to marry a gentleman of licentious character, “you put me in mind of Dr. Barrowby, the physician, who was very fond of swine’s flesh. One day, when he was eating it, he said, ‘I wish I was a Jew.’—‘Why so?’ said somebody; ‘the Jews are not allowed to eat your favourite meat.’—‘Because,’ said he, ‘I should then have the gust of eating it, with the pleasure of sinning.’” The eighteenth century was not always over-nice in its choice of words or of illustrations, but it had a robust sense of truth in everyday affairs, and here, as on many other occasions, Johnson, in the after-dinner phrase of an eminent man, strikes, as it seems to me, “the happy nail upon its head.” For the plain truth is that breaking rules is fun, and the middle-aged and respectable have in this regard a capacity for innocent enjoyment at least as great as that of the youthful and rebellious. And if one rule, why not many? If hanging is the ultimate fate, then let the criminal have his money’s worth; that literary lamb might as well be a sheep. “As his colleague the Professor of Pastoral Theology had once finely quoted in his Luther Commemoration Lecture, ‘Si peccas, pecca fortiter!’” Many a man in the street will echo the sentiments of Mr. Belloc’s Professor.
This story, then, seems clean contrary to many of the accepted rules. The introduction is written—imprudently no doubt—not to conceal the faults of the story, but rather to suggest (beautiful thought) that the rules are sometimes wrong, or, alternatively, as the lawyer would put it, that they are made to be broken. Let me suggest the obvious criticisms, and then acting as advocatus diaboli, or, to be more accurate, as advocatus mei, I will suggest an answer in defence.
First, then, says the accuser, it is an impertinence to write an introduction which deals admittedly with the technique of writing a novel. Such things may be done by the established masters. Let them, if they will, blandly condescending, describe to lesser men how such things are done, how they weave their ingenious plots and mould their characters and how and why they choose and combine their imperishable words. But for you, beginner, tyro, novice, neophyte, decet silentium. Write if you must, but spare us at least the reasons for your indiscretions. To which I reply, with submission, No. I remember a hole on a golf course to the playing of which I devoted much earnest though vain thought. I needed length, for from tee to green was two hundred yards or more—I needed height, for the ground rose abruptly in front of the tee. At length I asked a great player how the problem was solved by him. “Oh,” he replied,” I just take a spoon and lay the ball like a poached egg by the hole.” Or again with which hand do you lift the bat? With top or bottom, or perchance with both? Over that major problem, I dare surmise, the young spend sleepless nights and anxious days. But do the great masters ever give it a thought? Not they; with nonchalance they play the fluent and majestic stroke, and the ball speeds to the boundary. No, a hundred times, no; problems of technique are not for the great—godlike they think of none of these things. To worry over technique, to discuss it, to argue over it—that is the part of humbler men; it is a phase agreeable, tantalizing, provocative, above all young.
Pass on. Can you rebut the major accusations? This story does not conform to type; if it is indeed intended as a novel, that is to say as a story with a love interest, why all these excursions and aberrations? Why this lengthy tale of a cricket match, wholly irrelevant to the main issue, why these stories within stories? What more tiresome than those boxes of Chinese workmanship, which when opened, and not too easily, are found to contain within themselves other boxes of similar kind—and they in their turn others within them, smaller still and yet more useless and irritating? Your tale is like that. And why this tortuous method? Could not this story have been told straightforwardly, instead of concealing itself within another story? And, above all, why all these explanations and excuses? Answer all these questions, advocate of the devil, answer them if you can!
Well, it is true, of course, that the man or woman who buys a book wishes within limits to know what he is buying. He wishes to be stimulated or harrowed or excited or amused and he chooses his novel accordingly. If, after he has purchased, he finds himself fobbed off with something unexpected—a detective novel, for example, which is only a psychological study, or a tragedy of modern industrialism which turns out to contain passages of humorous writing—he feels himself illused. It is as though he had bought Quaker Oats from a fruiterer, or nuts from a butcher—good enough foods but not what his stomach craved at the moment. But to that quite natural desire on the part of his public the novelist ought not—again with submission—to pander too much. For it is the function of the novelist to generalize experience, to hold a mirror to life, and life does not happen like that. Even the unfortunate, oppressed by some major disaster, does not spend his whole time contemplating the wreck of his fortunes or the infidelity of his wife; even the lover, though traditionally supposed to be occupied exclusively with the subject of his love, is, in fact, usually found on examination to be able to spare some moments for the perusal of the latest detective novel, for the solution of a crossword, for animadversion on Hitler or Mussolini, or for a discussion of the best pair to open England’s innings in the next Test match. And more, to the trivialities of life many apply themselves with even greater energy than to their work—and work better for doing so. No one can live permanently in the rarefied atmosphere of high endeavour or moral grandeur. Observe that statesman, charged with the destinies of millions—he is anxiously contemplating a graceful pirouette upon the ice; consider that business magnate, whose word affects the material fortunes of thousands—he dreams of the reduction of his golf handicap to a single figure; watch that professor, whose learning is world-famed—he chuckles over his latest mot. Can you blame h
im? His jeux d’esprit will be remembered when his learning is forgotten. If, then, a novel is to be true to life it must, so it seems to me, leave sometimes the main stream, rest awhile by the bank, explore even an occasional backwater.
In the matter of method, too, I am unrepentant. This story is told, most of it, by one man to another over a dinner table; it might have been told, I suppose, directly to the reader. There might have been but one tale, instead of two, one within the other. For this obliquity, for this tortuosity of method I make two excuses. First, I see it thus in my mind, and as I see it so I must describe it. I see the dinner table and taste the wine, I smell in the later chapters the smoke of the cigars. That is the atmosphere of the story, and, if the story is worth telling at all, it deserves its setting. And secondly, this oblique method gives me the advantage—why should I conceal the fact?—of being able at need to jog my readers, of being able to call their attention to some point of interest without undue sententiousness, and without exciting, I hope, their immediate suspicion. The older writers had an easy way out of the difficulty which I here suggest. They used, they sometimes abused, the expedient of the “gentle reader.” Gentle. “Used in polite or ingratiating address, obs: except in a playful archaism as in ‘gentle reader.’” I quote from the Oxford English Dictionary. And then the examples, dating from 1542 to 1844. What a tyranny, and how long it lasted! But useful, invaluable to the literary craftsman! A burglar’s jemmy could not be more essential to a burglar than his “gentle reader” to an Early Victorian author. With it he could direct the reader’s attention whither he would, could indicate this and underline that. “Consider, gentle reader, the emotions of our hero at this moment!” “Pause, gentle reader, and survey the panorama which unrolled itself before the delighted eyes of our heroine!” How easy it all must have been! And yet at length intolerable! I went once to the memorial service of a friend, prepared to think about him, to recapture some of the hours spent in his company, to recall his friendship and his charm. And before I could attune my mind to such thought, individual, personal, sad yet perhaps comforting, a bishop rose up and for twenty minutes told me and others what we ought to be thinking about the friend we had lost. Unbearable insensitive impertinence, against which every instinct rebelled! So, I surmise, somewhere about 1844 the reading public rebelled against the “gentle reader” and claimed to think its own thoughts. A tyranny was ended, but a need remained. Here I try to satisfy that need in some sort by the device of oblique relation.
And finally all these explanations and excuses. Once, a long time ago, I carried to my tutor at Oxford an essay, very lengthy and ingeniously planned. This I will do, wrote I, and so I will divide the subject, and thus I will proceed, and in such a way will I reach my conclusion. And the learned and wise man to whom I read it (for all Oxford tutors then were learned and some of them were wise) remarked at the end, “Too much scaffolding left up.” For an essay no advice could be better, but what of, say, a lecture? A different technique there. “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell it them, and then, most important of all, tell them what you have told them.” That is good advice too. A novel, as it seems to me, is in yet another category. As a character in this book remarks, nothing obscures the truth so much as the attempt to cut a long story short; the art of the novelist is to make a short story long. The plain tale unadorned gives too often a false impression; the devious, suggestive, allusive method, may, if it succeeds, create a true picture in the reader’s mind. But it must not be too difficult. After all, the primary wish of the reader is for recreation and amusement. Some of the scaffolding must be left standing, but not too much. Something must be left to the intelligence and ingenuity of the reader, but his powers of interpretation must not be fixed too high. (Are not the clues in a detective story often too subtle and too well concealed?) Unnecessary mystification is tiring as well as tiresome. I repeat, the chief end of the novel is to provide enjoyment, amusement, recreation for the reader, not to provide him with intellectual problems.
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.
Chapter I
“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.
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