“Oh, you mean Cynthia Hetherington,” she said. “My dear man, you show good taste; she’s quite charming and totally unspoiled. She’s just eighteen, but no one’s met her yet, because her father and mother both died about a year ago, and of course she’s been nowhere since. But I shall ask her to Critton this summer. (Lady Dormansland thought always in terms of guests, and divided the world into those who received her invitations and those who did not.) A very nice girl, her poor mother was a daughter of Lord Egeland. (Lady Dormansland’s standards of niceness were apt to be determined by considerations of birth.) Yes—she lives now with Lady Dennison, an aunt, you know. But I’ll introduce you.”
It began like that. I repeat that I advanced to meet her that first evening a little cynically, expecting disappointment, anticipating flaws and imperfections. And did not find them. Even so I went home telling myself that the first impression would all too certainly flatter to deceive. Let me know her, I thought, a little better, and I shall see the feet of clay. At thirty-six one is no longer swept off one’s feet. But it was not so. The weeks that followed were maddeningly, tantalizingly sweet to me. I went to parties on the slender hope that she might be there, and was plunged into gloom if she were not. I employed stratagems to meet her without seeming to arrange a meeting. And the better I came to know her the more triumphantly, so it seemed to me, did she answer my test. Her interests ran with mine, her mind matched her charm—and, above all, she had the enthusiasm and relish for life that had been slipping away from me. There came a time, when I knew beyond question that I was deeply, irrevocably in love. What words could say more? If I were a poet I might describe her, but I am not. I only know that to me she seemed the perfection that I had always sought. How can one define love or beauty or charm without vulgarizing and lowering them?
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might.
Yes, leave the mystery and the wonder undefined and unexplained. I loved her.
Whether she knew my feelings I could not tell. She was eighteen and in love with life—and that left her little time to think of bachelors of thirty-six. But in June I was to go to Critton, and she too. There I planned to put my fate to the touch.
At the last moment I hesitated. Not, indeed, that I doubted any longer my own desires, but because I trembled at the thought of her answer. And so, partly because I was afraid, and partly because of an old-fashioned scruple, I had made up my mind to speak first to Lady Dennison, and to beg her help.
There was the faint rustle of a skirt and I turned to see Lady Dennison by my side.
“Here I am, Mr. Newton, now what is this great secret which I am to share? But let us walk on the lawn.”
She was a lady of about sixty, slight, almost fragile in appearance, but dignified with the dignity which comes from a good life, spent in the service of others. Her husband had died twenty years ago in India, and both her sons had been killed in the war, yet she maintained a quiet cheerfulness, and never spoke of her own troubles. She lived for part of the year in London, and for the rest at her house on Southampton Water, busied constantly yet unostentatiously with good works and acts of kindness. To me she represented the stability and order and faintly pathetic charm of an older generation. I could ask no better confidante; she would by her nature be fair and sympathetic, yet prepared to speak the exact truth.
“No, please, Lady Dennison,” I answered, “will you humour me by strolling on the path—or sitting under the mulberry tree if it’s warm enough for you—somehow the lawn seems dangerous to-night. I mean, it’s treacherous, and …”
She smiled.
“What an odd idea. I love the lawn at Critton. But by all means let it be the mulberry tree. Now, what have you to ask me?”
“It’s about Cynthia.”
“I had guessed so much; tell me about it.”
She smiled once more, and for the first time I realized that she must once have been beautiful. Then, in a torrent of words I poured out my story, my hopes, and my fears.
I stopped quite suddenly, and looked at her. Her head was bent, and there was a long pause. Then she looked up.
“Why do you tell all this to me, Mr. Newton?”
“I thought perhaps that you might help me, that you might know what my chances were, that …”
“And was there nothing else besides?”
I hesitated, and she continued—very quietly and choosing her words:
“I mean, was there no doubt, no feeling in your mind that everything was not entirely right?”
“How could there be? Lady Dennison, I know that I love her, I’m sure that I always shall, I believe I can make her happy.”
“And yet you ask an old women like me to help you. In a matter like this we must be very honest with one another. Are you quite sure that you have no doubts?”
I hesitated again, and then I stumbled on.
“Of course, I’m thirty-six, but that’s no great age—and my record’s pretty clean. Are you saying that you don’t approve?”
She looked at me very steadily, and I thought there was a touch of pity as well as of understanding in her eyes. Then she spoke again, slowly and carefully.
“You mustn’t misunderstand me. I’m getting old, and you know that Cynthia is all I have left in the world. I can say, without straying from the exact truth, that her happiness is more precious to me than anything else. And how can I be sure that her happiness would be secured if she married you? Let me speak quite plainly. You are thirty-six, she is eighteen. You saw her first, I suppose, about two months ago. You may be sure of yourself, but what of her? Is it fair, is it right to tie her down now when she has scarcely opened her wings? Mayn’t she have her freedom a little longer? You are rich, you know the world; you might carry her off her feet. Believe me, girls of eighteen are young enough to make mistakes; they’re easily impressed, easily carried away. And then, suppose that she were to fall in love, really in love, with a boy of her own age. Could you forgive yourself in that case, or could I forgive myself? Surely, surely, you ought to wait and let her taste freedom first. And then—I hate to say it, but is your life quite the life that she should be asked to share? You know that you have not exactly a reputation for—how shall I put it?—for constancy. You might change your own mind, and even if you did not … Isn’t a life without a real occupation and filled, I suppose, with pleasure, a little—well—a little empty for a young wife? I don’t want to preach, but you know I lived all my life among men who had work to do, and who made that their first concern. Somehow, I don’t feel that Cynthia would be happy in the long run if life was only a perpetual party.”
“Aren’t you a little ruthless, a little hard on me?”
“Of course I’m ruthless; at my age one is, where those one loves are concerned. But oughtn’t you to be hard on yourself too? Please, please, give her her freedom a little longer. Don’t you feel yourself that I am right?”
Strange that this fragile old lady should be stronger than I was! I looked at her with a sort of admiration.
“But how can I wait, seeing her day by day, and yet hiding what I feel? It isn’t possible; one day I shall tell her everything, because I must.”
She gave a little sigh. I think she knew that she had won.
“Then you must go away. I’m a sentimental old woman, and in the sort of books I read men go away and shoot big game for a year, and then come back to marry.”
“You haven’t anything personally against me, then?”
“You foolish man, of course I haven’t. If you were ten years younger and much less rich and at work at a real job I should say, ‘Ask her to-night.’ But as things are, I say this. Go away for a year, then come back and find some work to do, and then, if you still think as you do now, marry my Cynthia, and be very happy.”
“But if I do that I’m throwing up the sponge.
Suppose some one else comes along and cuts me out?”
“You must trust me. I’ll write to you. It isn’t that I don’t want you to have your chance.”
“But it might be worse than that. Things happen so very quickly. Supposing—supposing she married some one else before I could come home; it takes time for letters to reach India or Africa or wherever it may be.”
“And if it did, don’t you think that perhaps it might be right? If she does fall in love with some one of her own age, ought we to try to stop her? You want her to be happy as much as I do. But one thing I promise you faithfully. I will write to you, wherever you are, whenever it may be, if I fancy that she ever thinks seriously of marriage. You shan’t come back unwarned. I promise you that.”
She held out her hand to me, and I grasped it. It was a token of her promise—and of my defeat.
“Write to the Older Universities Club,” I said, “that will always find me—in time.”
From somewhere inside the house, the gong boomed, and she got up from her chair.
“Give me your arm, please, Mr. Newton. Sometimes I feel my age. I’m very Victorian, I know, but I’m enough in the company of younger people to enjoy my cocktail before we go in to dinner.”
I noticed on her lips the same pathetic yet almost affectionate smile. An indomitable woman, and how immeasurably stronger in will than I! I knew that I had been worsted, and persuaded against my judgement, and yet it was always fatally easy for me to follow rather than to lead. With a certainty that at once irritated my pride and yet calmed me, I knew that I should follow her advice; had I ever followed my own inclinations when they clashed with the advice of others? I had not in me the power to decide for myself; I felt my weakness, I hated myself for it. Why should the Victorian ideals of conduct still have such a force? Did not the strength of the modern man lie in his inability to be shocked by departure from the normal? Perhaps—for I too was by nature a Victorian—the old-fashioned wish to do the right thing was my guiding principle. I knew it, I chafed under the necessity. Well, there was no more to say; she had twisted me round her fingers, those delicate fragile fingers, a little too thin now for the rings which she wore. I opened the French window and we passed into the lighted drawing-room.
I did not go to shoot lions in Africa or tigers in India after all. It is true that I began to make my arrangements—even that I tentatively asked a couple of friends if they would go with me. But I got no further, for it was still early in June when Christiansen walked into my room. He had been recommended to me by friends—I was known to be interested in travel and exploration. Could he perhaps interest me in his Antarctic expedition? I see him now standing squarely before me—speaking with the deliberation and the clumsiness of the naturally taciturn; his blue eyes a little staring as though a room was too small a space for him to focus them properly; I see his square-cut double-breasted blue coat, his sturdy frame, his face weather-beaten, yet still youthful, redolent of the sea. I knew too with a clarity which was beyond the possibility of error that he wanted me only because of the money which I might be expected to contribute, and that he instinctively despised me as a soft-living man of leisure. He had brought himself to parley with me because time was very short, and his need of money extreme, but he hated the necessity and contemned the patron. I knew too that the scientific objects which he laboriously explained were three-parts eyewash; he cared little or nothing for them—for him the primary need was to move once more in unexplored lands and unchartered seas. When he spoke of earlier expeditions, of Scott and Shackleton, of Mawson and Amundsen, then indeed his rough speech had a kind of eloquence. I knew also, and again my clarity of mind surprised myself, that I should find many of my companions on the voyage unsympathetic, if not actually repellent. For my companions they would be! In the first few moments of the interview my decision had been made. I would do more than interest myself in the expedition, I would go with it. It was my heaven-sent opportunity, and I must grasp it with both hands. It satisfied my wish to resign myself to the leadership of others; once committed, I must be absent from England for a time which would satisfy even Lady Dennison, and I should be spared what I had most dreaded—the daily struggle not to break my promise and speed back to London and to Cynthia. Was it chivalry or weakness or folly? I don’t know—perhaps something of all three.
Christiansen stopped speaking and looked at me. I think my answer shook even his phlegm.
“I want to go with you,” I said. “When do we start, what kit do I need? How much money shall I put into it?”
Laboriously, clumsily he adjusted himself to the new situation. I could almost see his mind at work, creaking like an insufficiently oiled machine. All the arguments which he had prepared to persuade me to help him and to secure my money were superfluous. He abandoned them with obvious regret; they had, I shrewdly suspected, cost him time and trouble to prepare, and, like all tenacious men, he resented unexpected change in a preconceived plan. He named a sum, and then, when I agreed to it without demur, quite obviously upbraided himself for not having made it larger. He gave me the information which I asked for; in ten minutes everything was arranged. A fortnight later I started for Australia to join the ship. We were to be away for just over eighteen months.
To describe that expedition is no part of this tale. It has its place in the annals of the Antarctic. For me it is a welter of impressions—the immensity of ice and snow, the howling and timeless blizzards, the seemingly endless Antarctic nights, the everlasting contrast between the puniness of man and the power of nature. Put down like that, how distant and unreal it all sounds! The captions of a film carry as much or as little conviction. But I cannot express it otherwise, for indeed for me the impressions seem remote and dreamlike, as though they belonged to another world and another life. In such circumstances one grows to love or to hate one’s fellows. For my part, by slow degrees I came to love Christiansen, and to admire him as I admired no other human being. At any moment I can conjure a vision of him before my eyes—gazing out with his blue eyes over the frozen wastes with the calm strength of a man always equal to his purpose, unswerving, strong as fate itself. Or I see him about the tasks of his day, issuing the orders, navigating the ship—or, still more vividly, I see him engaged in the little jobs of the daily round, jobs which he performed with an efficiency and a skill which seemed to give to each a special significance. Most often of all I see him seated in his hut, opening with a swift deftness which bordered on artistry, those everlasting tins.
We left Melbourne in November of 1932. Had all gone well I should have sailed for England in April 1934. But it did not. In the very last lap, when all the terrors of storm and tempest, semi-starvation and frostbite had been overcome, I contrived to break my leg. On top of that I collapsed. All that, again, is no part of this story. So they left me on the furthermost margin of the known world, on the edge of the land of perpetual night, and there slowly I struggled back to life. That is how it was that I shipped aboard a tramp in the autumn of 1934, and that is how it came about that it was not until February 1935 that I landed at long last in the port of London.
Chapter II
“And not uncrowned with honours ran
My days, and not without a boast shall end!
For I was Shakespeare’s countryman;
And wert thou not my friend?”
Fate Cannot Harm Me Page 2
