“But small regard has human pain,
And wounded men unheeded fall;
A sick man’s suffering ne’er was known
To hurt a healthy man at all.”
That May morning left on Monty’s mind an indelible impression. It seemed to him as though he had been plunged suddenly into the middle of a drama; the characters had been presented to him with a clarity and suddenness which reminded him of a film. It was a well-worn theme, this triangle of persons, but none the less dramatic for that, and the fact that he knew them all gave the situation a poignancy which was always lacking for him in the vicarious interest of the stage or screen. He had only to close his eyes to see the photograph again; but sometimes it smiled at him from Hedley’s mantelpiece, sometimes it flashed its challenge from Paraday-Royne’s piano. Always it roused in him a disturbing sense of youth and life and fascination. Especially, and almost constantly, he thought of it when Pertinacity appeared in the autumn of 1933.
Monty paused and re-filled my glass.
“You’ve not read the book, I suppose?” he asked.
“How should I have? For three years I’ve read nothing. I’m a sort of Rip van Winkle, buried in 1932 and resurrected to-day.”
“Well, you will. Everyone reads it at some time. But I’ll have to say something about it, just to make things clear.
“‘Pertinacity’ was a good, almost a great novel—a far better book in fact than any of Robin Hedley’s friends had thought him capable of writing. It lifted him at once, and without question, into the first flight of British novelists. The critics began to couple his name with those of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, and the compliment was deserved. I needn’t describe it to you, but I think it’s true to say that it combined the wide appeal of the best-seller with the honest writing of a real literary craftsman—it was very well written, even if the style betrayed a certain angularity—without any taint of the highbrow. A real book. You felt, as you read it, that it had been lived as well as written. It had one fault, perhaps, and that was the ending. I’ll talk about that in a minute. I read the book like the rest of the world, and for me it had a very special and external interest. How would it affect that triangle? How would it change the betting in the Cynthia Stakes? How would Cynthia herself regard this new development, now that Hedley had, so to speak, soared above Basil in the literary firmament? ‘Even before this splendid orb was entirely set, and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his descending glory, on the opposite quarter of the Heavens rose another luminary, and, for his hour, became lord of the ascendant.’ You remember the passage? I thought of all that, and I wondered a whole lot. Well, how did Basil take it, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that his jealousy got the better of him, and that he just cut adrift from Hedley altogether.”
Monty raised his hands in mock horror.
“Then you suppose utterly wrongly. My dear man, have all my efforts at description been entirely wasted on you? Surely I’ve told you a dozen times that Basil, whatever else he was, was a very clever man? You can criticize him in all sorts of ways—call him foreign, suggest something feminine in his make-up, or even feline if you feel really critical; hint that he was not always absolutely reliable. I won’t quarrel with any remarks of that sort. But do remember that he was clever, indecently clever sometimes. Intuition, flair, finesse, he’d got them all. How can you suggest, then, that he’d make an elementary blunder like that? No, of course, he didn’t act like a stupid or a sulky child. But I suppose that I must dot the i’s and cross the t’s for you. I’ll go on with the yarn.”
Basil Paraday-Royne’s critical faculty was both true and cultivated, and he must have known in an hour that Hedley had written a book which was almost great. He could tell that it was too obviously good to be damned with faint praise, and that no niggling criticism was going to be able to keep it for long in the background. It deserved success, and would obtain it. What his private emotions were when he made that discovery Monty did not know, but he could make a shrewd guess. No sign of pique at a rival’s success was ever apparent—he was much too clever for that. Quite the contrary!
It was in fact Basil himself who wrote that review in the Sunday Survey which made Pertinacity a best seller within a week. Undeniably that review was a fine piece of work, enthusiastic, yet subtly discriminating, laudatory without the brazen tones of advertisement. It was a review that convinced you that a notable book had been written, and, more than that, that you must yourself read it. In its way a little masterpiece of the critic’s art. The usual pitfalls of the review were avoided with instinctive skill. You’ll remember Macaulay’s essay on Barère, and why it failed in its effect. Because every action, every thought, every notion, was made out pitchy black the general effect failed, by want of contrasts, to appal or to repel. “The excess of his rascality has spoiled my paper on him.” You know the passage, don’t you? “It is shade, unrelieved by a gleam of light.” Basil didn’t make the corresponding error. His review wasn’t all sugar to cloy the appetite. Of course what he wrote was a eulogy, but it was a eulogy tempered, and nicely tempered, with criticism. In particular he quarrelled with the tragic ending, which, in his view, marred the artistic unity of the book. In that criticism he was clearly right. The chief characters in Pertinacity were essentially sound and lovable people, and it was wantonly cruel to allow them to end, as the book does, in frustration and disillusionment. Monty, who believed that the world on the whole was a very happy place, felt that the ending of the book had cheated him of a legitimate pleasure, and applauded Basil’s comment. Better judges took the same line. Probably, thought Monty, Hedley had not been able to help himself. His own early life must have been more unpleasant than he allowed his friends to know; he had some sort of grudge against the world, and couldn’t quite bear to let creatures of his imagination live in happiness. But artistically he was in the wrong, and Basil in the right.
Basil’s review had a side to it which showed even a subtler skill, peculiarly his own. Very delicately, yet unmistakably, he introduced the personal factor into what he wrote. To all who were sensitive to impressions he made it perfectly clear, though more by implications than by statements, that Robin Hedley was his own close friend—and a friend in whose triumph he shared and gloried. And more, he insinuated, so deftly as to rob the suggestion of all suspicion of self-praise, that in the making of the book he, the intimate and trusted friend, had done his part—with advice and criticism and encouragement. Only in the ending, it seemed, had his advice been neglected. Oh yes. Basil’s review of Pertinacity was of its kind a masterpiece!
Basil wrote well, but he talked better. Who was it who once said of Charles James Fox that if he had used his, unrivalled social influence to further his political ends, he could have converted all England to his party, for above all other men he was in his day supreme in the social sphere? Basil, in a smaller way, and in a lesser age, could command almost unrivalled social influence, and he used it to the full. He talked brilliantly and he talked much—and that winter much of his conversation played round Pertinacity. So gradually, insensibly, an impression got abroad; it spread like water from the hills through a hundred little streams and rivulets. Or rather it was more like a bacillus in the blood stream—a bacillus that soon multiplied itself a million-fold till it permeated the whole stream. It’s truly wonderful how an idea, once started, finds its way from person to person, from drawing-room to drawing-room, from club to club. That Basil was himself the author and propagator of that idea Monty later on had no shadow of doubt, but perhaps no one else guessed. And the impression? It was simply this—that Basil himself had acted as a guide, philosopher and friend to Hedley all through the writing of Pertinacity—that to him, rather than to the ostensible author, much of its charm and merit was due—that without his aid and encouragement it would never have been written. It’s wonderful what can be done by talking to the right people in the right way at the right time. Yes, it was another masterpiece, a masterpiece of insinuation. But he never went an inch too far. When once at dinner Lady Dormansland smilingly called him the part author of Pertinacity he was down on her in a flash, deprecating almost fiercely any such idea. “My dear lady—don’t say that. Robin’s masterpiece is Robin’s masterpiece; it was a privilege to me to make a few very, very minor suggestions.” And then, after a pause, with a little half smile, “But I wish the dear old boy had ended it differently.”
The legend grew, as legends will. Monty was in America (where incidentally Pertinacity was the book of the month) and so he could not watch its growth; when he came home it had almost passed from the realm of legend to that of history. A night or two after his return he met by chance Sir Smedley Patteringham and Bobby Hawes at the Older Universities Club, and asked them about the book. He could hardly have pitched upon two more representative men, for Patteringham, that acute man, selfish, sour and sixty, had not been known to speak well of anyone or anything for the last thirty years, whereas Bobby at twenty-six, whilst priding himself on being in the know on all topics, was incapable of expressing any opinion save that which obtained in the circles in which he moved.
“It’s fundamentally dishonest,” sneered Patteringham, “like most successful novels, but allowing for that less abject than most.”
“What do you mean by dishonest? I thought it sincere, and true to life—too true perhaps.”
“Realism is not truth, but my suggestion was not intended to convey that. I meant two things. He doesn’t develop it to its natural conclusion, and I believe that Paraday-Royne, who’s really clever even though he is a butterfly, was responsible for the better part of it.”
“That’s absolutely true,” chimed in Bobby. “I happen to be in a position to say that Basil did everything for the book, short of writing it. And he begged Hedley not to end it, like that. Of course, Hedley did the actual donkey-work of writing, but the taste and the style and all that are enough for me—a lot of it’s pure Paraday-Royne. I should have thought that both their names ought to have been on the title-page. It’s really a damned shame in my opinion, and the worst of it is, Hedley’s so damned unsporting about it. You’d think he’d be only too glad to acknowledge how much he owes to Basil; instead of that he’s as sick as muck if anyone says anything about that side of it. Rather grubby, really. But he always was one drawer down, so to speak.”
So that was how the land lay. Bobby Hawes’s opinion was worth nothing, except as a symptom of the prevailing view, but Monty was frankly astonished that Patteringham, who was nothing if not astute, had swallowed what he instinctively felt to be an imposture. Really Basil’s cunning was almost superhuman; it compelled admiration. But to suggest such an explanation to men such as Patteringham and Bobby Hawes would have been time wasted. Monty finished his drink and strolled out of the club.
Still musing on what he had heard he bumped into Hedley, who was gazing into Hatchard’s window, and at once the demon of curiosity compelled him to stop and speak. He wanted to know how the victim regarded the legend—for so in his mind he had already christened it—and he wanted, much more, to know how Cynthia now distributed her favours between the two writers. That, however, might not be very easy to discover.
“Hullo, Hedley, how goes it?” he asked, and thought, as he spoke, how curiously difficult it was to address Hedley by his Christian name.
“Hullo, Monty. I’m all right. And you? I heard last night that you were back.”
Hedley’s tone was cordial, but his manner and appearance were not those of a man who had just achieved a great literary success. He looked sallow, irritable, and almost haggard.
“Oh, I’m grand. Where are you making for?”
“Ebury Street. I shall walk home.”
Monty turned. “I’ll come with you part of the way, anyhow. I’m wanting a walk. Too many fellows want to stand you drinks when you happen to have been away for a few months. And I’ve had no exercise all day. Well, you’ve had a great triumph, and I must congratulate you. America is Pertinacity mad, too. You must have done better with it than you could possibly have expected. I really am delighted.”
“Yes, thanks awfully. Yes, I’m sure you are.”
The answer came pat, but it was joyless. For a moment or two they walked in silence along Piccadilly.
Monty decided to take a risk—after all, he reflected, the fellow couldn’t bite him. “Basil Paraday-Royne liked it enormously, they tell me.”
For a moment Hedley’s lips tightened into something perilously near to a snarl; then they partially relaxed into the bitter semblance of a smile.
“So you’ve heard that tale already. You don’t waste time, Monty. Yes, the great critic saw fit to praise my humble work.”
He paused, and then suddenly he seemed to lose control and the words came tumbling out.
“It’s damnable. I write a book, far the best I’ve ever written, probably the best I shall ever write. I toil over it. I—I dig it out of myself, and then when it’s finished that smooth-faced friend (he spat out the word as though it had been an obscenity) persuades half London that everything in it that’s worth while was his doing—that he was the good genius, the guiding light. How the hell he’s done it, God only knows, but there it is. And I have to listen to panegyrics of his disinterestedness and his taste and his unselfish friendship. It makes me sick. Monty, you’re a good sort, you know how. I worked at that book. And now everyone’s going about saying what a cad I am not to be grateful to him. I say it’s damnable. Why should he get as much credit, and more, from it than I do? Besides, there was someone, someone I specially wanted to like it, and to like it”—he paused a moment and then blurted it out—“to like it better than anything that he had ever written or could ever write.”
Subconsciously Monty had always felt that Robin Hedley was in essence an unlovable man—Soames Forsyte he had once called him—yet now, watching the misery which he could not disguise, he felt a real pity. It was damnable. Why should he be robbed, and robbed so cunningly, of everything which he had struggled to secure? It wasn’t fair, and fairness was the creed of Monty’s world. But he had no wish to be made too much a confidant, especially in connection with Cynthia Hetherington, and he hastened to interject a remark.
“I know, I know, my dear Robin,” he said, wondering to himself as he spoke whether it was pity, or a subconscious wish to sympathize, which made him, contrary to his custom, use the Christian name. “I heard something of that, and I don’t like it one bit. But tell me, just as a matter of hard fact, did Basil help you at all with it?”
Hedley struck irritably with the end of his umbrella against the pavement.
“Up to a point, yes,” he answered, rather unwillingly. “You see, I was always meeting him, and we’ve always talked a lot about our work: Besides, the fellow’s got real taste, and the critical faculty, and all those things. I always appreciated that, and I suppose I did make use of him—a bit anyhow. It’s that that make it impossible to deny his cursed hints and innuendoes. Besides”—again he hesitated, and again seemed to decide to plunge—“Cynthia Hetherington was always at his house, and it made a sort of excuse to go round there. Somehow, I didn’t like to think of her round there with him too much.”
“Poor devil,” thought Monty, “he’s got it badly.” Aloud he said: “I see, that does make it a bit awkward, of course.”
Hedley turned on him almost savagely.
“Awkward? Only because he’s a cad. What was his help after all? A few suggestions, some criticisms of style, half a dozen phrases, and a plea for a kind of happy ending. What difference did they make to the book? It’s my book, I wrote it. Sometimes I almost wish I hadn’t.”
“Then Cynthia, too, shares the prevailing opinion that Basil deserves half the credit,” thought Monty. “Poor wretched Robin—he’s pathetic.” For a few minutes they walked in silence, and then Monty spoke again.
You know, Robin, I’m the last person to interfere, and I do think you’ve been rather hardly used, but honestly I think you ought to dissemble a bit. It’s all very well for you, or for me for that matter, because we know, but the world in general thinks that Basil helped you more than a bit, and that you aren’t being too generous in acknowledging the debt—and that’s hurting you. When you’ve written something as good as Pertinacity you can afford to be generous. It’s yours, it carries your name, and in ten years no one will remember that there was once a suggestion that Basil had a hand in it. You can’t be permanently robbed of the credit. Besides, you’ve got time; you’ll write more books, and he can’t claim them all. Honestly, in your place I’d try to keep on civil terms with him, and even flatter him a bit. You can afford to, and everyone will like you the better for it. And write another and a better book. Why not, after all?”
For a moment Hedley appeared likely to burst into a stream of protest; but he calmed himself, and even mustered another curious and self-questioning smile.
“I’ll take that from you, Monty, though I wouldn’t from anyone else,” he said at length. “Perhaps you’re right, though I don’t think so. And as a matter of fact I am writing another book—I started it last week.”
“Good man. Think it over. I honestly believe it’s the best you can do. I think I’ll turn here and walk back to the club.”
They parted, Monty not displeased with his attempt at conciliation, though he did not feel sanguine of its success.
Monty paused in his tale, for the archbishop was advancing towards our table accompanied by one of his satellites. The latter placed a woodcock before each of us, the former, with a reverence which seemed to transcend the archiepiscopal, presented a bottle of Burgundy and its cork for Monty’s approbation.
“I think, sir, it could hardly be better,” he said in the slow and reverent accents of Lambeth.
Gravely Monty nodded his agreement.
“Now this, Anthony, should be true Nectar. If you don’t like it there’s no hope for you in this world, and little in the next. Burgundy is the grandest of all wines, and this is of a royal race. But you’ll only get one glass. Hargreaves4 taught me at Oxford that no half bottle is ever worth drinking, but it’s equally true that the first glass of a bottle is the best. One perfect glass for each of us, and then the bottle leaves us. That’s real luxury, and only possible on feast nights, like this.” Very carefully he poured out my glass and his own; slowly, appraisingly he raised it to his lips; more slowly still he sipped it—lingeringly he placed the glass beside him on the table. “A royal wine; Anthony, I wish you health and happiness. Enjoy life while you can—this is the culminating moment of your dinner; the other was only preparation for this. You like it?”
I was fearful of offending him by lack of appreciation, or by an inappropriate comment. In sober truth Burgundy has never been my wine; it lies too heavily upon me. But not for worlds would I have said so to him.
“And the story?” I suggested, when a few moments had passed in silent respect to the wine.
“Ah yes. The story. Well, what effect do you suppose my little sermon had on Master Hedley?”
I laughed. “How should I know? I’ve made one guess to-night and it was all wrong. Still; I’ll buy it again if it pleases you. I should rather fancy that he ignored it altogether, and probably had the deuce of a public row with Paraday-Royne.”
Monty held up his hands in horror.
“Anthony, you’re incorrigible. Again you’ve missed all the clues. I told you that Basil was clever, fiendishly clever, but that Robin Hedley was something more. Cleverness—what’s cleverness? ‘Aptitude without weight’—you remember the quotation? You don’t, but never mind. Cleverness is an over-rated word, and an over-rated gift. No. Hedley wasn’t clever in the sense that the other was—his mental reactions weren’t quite so quick, and perhaps not so subtle—but he wasn’t stupid at all. A public row—that would have been really stupid. No—he was an able man, a powerful man, and he could think. Besides, he laid his plans deep; yes, he was deep. And so he did just precisely the opposite of what you suggest. But I’ll go on with the tale.”
He took another mouthful of the Burgundy, smiled contentedly, and continued.
Monty watched them all that spring, and what he observed filled him at first with pleasure and then with uneasiness. For Hedley appeared to have taken his advice to heart, and to be carrying it, if anything, too far. He began to frequent Basil’s house again, to play games with him, to be seen much in his company. And, furthermore, he began to speak of him in very different tones. He referred, casually but often, to his debt to Basil; praised his taste and his generosity, and let it be known that he was in the habit of deferring to his literary judgment. In the gossip columns of the papers, too, and in literary circles, there began to be rumours of Hedley’s next book. It was to be a novel of society, and it was to be a real picture of the London Society of the day; it would probably, as one writer put it, “rank with the Forsyte Saga as a record of the life and ideas of one section of the England of our times.” Moreover, when Hedley and his new book were mentioned Basil’s name cropped up almost as a matter of course. “It is understood that that gifted critic, Paraday-Royne, is giving Hedley the benefit of his advice; it is rumoured that Paraday-Royne, who, as those in literary circles well know, did so much to make Pertinacity the success of the year, is actively collaborating with Hedley in the preparation of the latter’s forthcoming work”; “the friendship between these two well-known authors of the younger school, Hedley and Paraday-Royne, which to the initiated is one of the most pleasing features in the world of letters, will be apparent to all when the autumn publications appear.” And so on, and so forth.
Monty, sniffing the breeze, was strangely uneasy. He felt himself the prophet whose advice has been taken, and was dissatisfied. A prophet who suggests calamity and proposes a remedy, but whose advice is not followed, is in a strong position. If the disaster does not occur his jeremiads are easily forgotten; if it does, he is solaced by the thought of his foresight, and his reputation is established. Of course, as he irritably reminded himself, he ought to have been pleased. Why, Hedley had done just what he had advised, but with a thoroughness which he had not dared to suggest. He had outdone himself in good will and generosity; he had surpassed any expectation. He might be said indeed to
… have conceived a temple
That shall dispyramid the Egyptian king.
Yes, he’d been inconceivably, unnaturally generous. What more admirable? And yet Monty felt that all was not well. There was the disturbing factor of Cynthia. A picture of that May morning in the previous year flashed through Monty’s mind; he recollected the manner in which two men had glanced at two copies of the same photograph; and then another picture. Hedley in Piccadilly, and his teeth bared almost to a snarl as he spoke Basil’s name. No—it simply didn’t fit; there was something wrong somewhere, perhaps dangerously wrong. They weren’t men whose actions were easily predictable; one too clever, the other too deep and perhaps too vindictive for easy and straightforward emotions. It just didn’t fit.
In July Monty found himself one evening sitting next to Bobby Hawes at Lord’s, and adroitly guided the conversation from cricket to Robin Hedley.
“Yes, rather,” said Bobby, “we were all wrong about him. Even I, you know, who am usually pretty well posted, made a mistake about him. Why, I even thought a month or two ago that he wasn’t grateful to Basil for all that help Basil gave him with Pertinacity. Of course, Hedley’s not a forthcoming chap, and doesn’t express himself much, if you know what I mean, but really he’s as grateful as he can be. The two of them are as thick as thieves. And you know I can tell you, but it’s in confidence, of course, on the very best authority that Basil’s helping him no end with his new book—criticizing the style and reading it chapter by chapter as he writes it and all that sort of thing. I fancy Hedley will thank him pretty warmly in the preface. I must say that sort of friendship is a good show—and, of course, Basil’s got just what the other fellow hasn’t. I always think his taste, and gift for the right word …”
A little irritably Monty got up and excused himself—it was later than he thought, and batsmen who overdid the two-eyed stance were so damned dull to watch. Truly he could not listen longer to second-hand opinions regurgitated by that empty-headed young idler. And it did not fit! They weren’t playing straight, but why not and for what purpose? Monty was frankly in a state of bewilderment, a state which he disliked and to which he was little accustomed.
That was how matters stood in the drama of Hedley and Paraday-Royne in the summer of 1934.