Free Fate Cannot Harm Me by J. C. Masterman Page A

always to walk when he was alone. It would have seemed to him a waste of opportunity not to have stretched his legs that day, not to have seized an opportunity, however slight, of exercise.
    Listening to him I, too, saw him walking that May morning, for his walk expressed, clear for all to see, his character and his beliefs. Jaunty it was not. Odious word, redolent of the second-rate, of hats at impossible angles and clothes vulgarly insisting upon their smartness, word of pert familiarity and cocksureness, word native of pier and promenade, of music-hall and
palais de danse.
And not quite springy either. The ageing acrobat, descending in swift parabola from horizontal bar or trapeze can yet contrive to ape the springiness of his better years as he skips across the circus floor to receive the plaudits of the crowd—an artificial movement, and there was nothing artificial about Monty. Nor did he move with the mannered sinuous grace of the ball-room, nor yet with the feline certitude of the panther (was there not, as he himself had once put it, always something “Dago” about the movements of the cat tribe?—And Monty’s walk was pre-eminently Anglo-Saxon). No—if description must be positive rather than negative, and if words must here usurp the place of the plastic arts, his walk was that of the games-player, of the modern athlete. Watching him one forgot the commonplace,ridiculous clothes of the town-dweller, and saw instead bodies moving in the harmonious discord of athletic endeavour. In his walk were football grounds and wing three-quarters speeding along the touch-line; and cricket grounds under summer suns, with the slips poised over after over in tense immobility waiting to pounce, and the off-side field just and only just moving, yet ready at an instant to leap into flashing life as the shot is played; and golf-courses in the spring, when the natural seaside turf lifts the feet and the white ball winks its cheerful morning greeting; and the swimmer in the river or the buoyant sea, cutting clean through green water and white spray. All that was in Monty’s walk. Beautiful! Yes, to the understanding it was beautiful. Shall I ever forget sitting at a cricket match beside a learned man—a man, if I must particularize, whose knowledge of Greek vases had won for him a reputation beyond the confines of Europe and over the far-flung universities of America—and how one of England’s greatest batsmen jumped out in the manner of thirty years ago, and how the ball raced along the green turf at lightning speed past extra-cover to the boundary. “Beautiful,” I cried in involuntary admiration. And then turned to apologize for my use of a much-misused word. And how that great and learned man gravely reproved me—not for my exclamation but for my apology. “No, no,” said he, “beautiful is the right word, and you do well to use it. Here, as with my vases, is true œsthetic beauty” And so taught me a lesson which I have not forgotten
.
    Between Ebury Street and Wilton Crescent that day Monty’s mind was not fixed on cricket or golf, or even on horses, though usually he thought much about them. Instead he reflected uneasily on what he had just heard and seen. The girl of the photograph was known to him, though he had never previously associated her in hismind with Robin Hedley. It had been a surprise to see her picture there on the mantelpiece, but still more a surprise—even a shock—to hear the note of irritation and bitterness in Robin’s voice when he had spoken of Basil. Like everyone else in London, Monty had long regarded those two as inseparables—they were David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias; they visited the same houses, they played the same games, they followed the same profession; to mention Basil was to recall Robin to the mind; to meet Robin was to assume that Basil could not be far away. And their friendship had apparently,