Fate Cannot Harm Me Read Online Free Page A

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—Iwas 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.
    â€œI 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.
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