THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT

by H. G. Wells (1915)



CONTENTS


THE PRELUDE

ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY


THE STORY

  I.  THE BOY GROWS UP

 II.  THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN

III.  AMANDA

 IV.  THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON

  V.  THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY

 VI.  THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID




THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT




THE PRELUDE



ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY


1

The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was
led into adventure by an idea.  It was an idea that took possession
of his imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed
with him, it interwove at last completely with his being.  His story
is its story.  It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it was
manifestly present in his mind at the very last moment of his
adventurous life.  He belonged to that fortunate minority who are
independent of daily necessities, so that he was free to go about
the world under its direction.  It led him far.  It led him into
situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it made him ridiculous,
it came near to making him sublime.  And this idea of his was of
such a nature that in several aspects he could document it.  Its
logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record.

An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily
have something of the complication and protean quality of life
itself.  It is not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to
be rendered by an epigram.  As well one might show a man's skeleton
for his portrait.  Yet, essentially, Benham's idea was simple.  He
had an incurable, an almost innate persuasion that he had to live
life nobly and thoroughly.  His commoner expression for that
thorough living is "the aristocratic life."  But by "aristocratic"
he meant something very different from the quality of a Russian
prince, let us say, or an English peer.  He meant an intensity, a
clearness. . . .  Nobility for him was to get something out of his
individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
easier to understand than to say.

One might hesitate to call this idea "innate," and yet it comes soon
into a life when it comes at all.  In Benham's case we might trace
it back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring
already at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and
valiant dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal
sword.  We have most of us been at least as far as that with Benham.
And we have died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our
country, or we have perished at the stake or faced the levelled
muskets of the firing party--"No, do not bandage my eyes"--because
we would not betray the secret path that meant destruction to our
city.  But with Benham the vein was stronger, and it increased
instead of fading out as he grew to manhood.  It was less obscured
by those earthy acquiescences, those discretions, that saving sense
of proportion, which have made most of us so satisfactorily what we
are.  "Porphyry," his mother had discovered before he was seventeen,
"is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I begin to see, just a
little unbalanced."

The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is
that.

Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come
to terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams
and discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility,
we take refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on
a certain amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for
Benham that easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it
is did not occur.  He found his limitations soon enough; he was
perpetually rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the
spirit he rose again--remarkably.  When we others have decided that,
to be plain about it, we are not going to lead the noble life at
all, that the thing is too ambitious and expensive even to attempt,
we have done so because there were other conceptions of existence
that were good enough for us, we decided that instead of that
glorious impossible being of ourselves, we would figure in our own
eyes as jolly fellows, or sly dogs, or sane, sound, capable men or
brilliant successes, and so forth--practicable things.  For Benham,
exceptionally, there were not these practicable things.  He
blundered, he fell short of himself, he had--as you will be told--
some astonishing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for long.
He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility as a linnet
hatched in a cage will try to fly.

And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by
his friend at his elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not
the simple thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself
in a mood only slightly disconcerted to the discovery of Nobility.
When it dawned upon him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to
speak, IN VACUO, he set himself to discover a Noble Society.  He
began with simple beliefs and fine attitudes and ended in a
conscious research.  If he could not get through by a stride, then
it followed that he must get through by a climb.  He spent the
greater part of his life studying and experimenting in the noble
possibilities of man.  He never lost his absurd faith in that
conceivable splendour.  At first it was always just round the corner
or just through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little
way beyond the distant mountains.

For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT.
It was a real research, it was documented.  In the rooms in
Westhaven Street that at last were as much as one could call his
home, he had accumulated material for--one hesitates to call it a
book--let us say it was an analysis of, a guide to the noble life.
There after his tragic death came his old friend White, the
journalist and novelist, under a promise, and found these papers; he
found them to the extent of a crammed bureau, half a score of patent
files quite distended and a writing-table drawer-full, and he was
greatly exercised to find them.  They were, White declares, they are
still after much experienced handling, an indigestible aggregation.
On this point White is very assured.  When Benham thought he was
gathering together a book he was dreaming, White says.  There is no
book in it. . . .

Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought
the noble life a human possibility.  Perhaps man, like the ape and
the hyaena and the tapeworm and many other of God's necessary but
less attractive creatures, is not for such exalted ends.  That doubt
never seems to have got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at
times one might suppose it the basis of White's thought.  You will
find in all Benham's story, if only it can be properly told, now
subdued, now loud and amazed and distressed, but always traceable,
this startled, protesting question, "BUT WHY THE DEVIL AREN'T WE?"
As though necessarily we ought to be.  He never faltered in his
persuasion that behind the dingy face of this world, the earthy
stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself and all of us,
lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory, things
unspeakable.  At first it seemed to him that one had only just to
hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and
hammering, he was still convinced there was something, something in
the nature of an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than
one had supposed at first, a little more difficult to secure, but
still in that nature, which would suddenly roll open for mankind the
magic cave of the universe, that precious cave at the heart of all
things, in which one must believe.

And then life--life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
isn't. . . .



2


Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming
research.  He was not the prophet or preacher of his idea.  It was
too living and intricate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely
about.  It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have
shamed him.  He drew all sorts of reserves about him, he wore his
manifest imperfections turned up about him like an overcoat in
bitter wind.  He was content to be inexplicable.  His thoughts led
him to the conviction that this magnificent research could not be,
any more than any other research can be, a solitary enterprise, but
he delayed expression; in a mighty writing and stowing away of these
papers he found a relief from the unpleasant urgency to confess and
explain himself prematurely.  So that White, though he knew Benham
with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow who had renewed his
friendship, and had shared his last days and been a witness of his
death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise and with a
sense of added elucidation.

And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more
and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so
entirely unshaped for publication.  "But this will never make a
book," said White with a note of personal grievance.  His hasty
promise in their last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to
a task he now found impossible.  He would have to work upon it
tremendously; and even then he did not see how it could be done.

This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a
confession, not a diary.  It was--nothing definable.  It went into
no conceivable covers.  It was just, White decided, a proliferation.
A vast proliferation.  It wanted even a title.  There were signs
that Benham had intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that
he had tried at some other time the title of AN ESSAY ON
ARISTOCRACY.  Moreover, it would seem that towards the end he had
been disposed to drop the word "aristocratic" altogether, and adopt
some such phrase as THE LARGER LIFE.  Once it was LIFE SET FREE.  He
had fallen away more and more from nearly everything that one
associates with aristocracy--at the end only its ideals of
fearlessness and generosity remained.

Of all these titles THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like
a clue to White.  Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses,
his angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange
places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be pure
adventurousness, could all be put into system with that.  Before
White had turned over three pages of the great fascicle of
manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found the word "Bushido"
written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice
repeated.  "That was inevitable," said White with the comforting
regret one feels for a friend's banalities.  "And it dates . . .
[unreadable] this was early. . . ."

"Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy," he read presently, "has
still to be discovered and understood.  This is the necessary next
step for mankind.  As far as possible I will discover and understand
it, and as far as I know it I will be it.  This is the essential
disposition of my mind.  God knows I have appetites and sloths and
habits and blindnesses, but so far as it is in my power to release
myself I will escape to this. . . ."



3


White sat far into the night and for several nights turning over
papers and rummaging in untidy drawers.  Memories came back to him
of his dead friend and pieced themselves together with other
memories and joined on to scraps in this writing.  Bold yet
convincing guesses began to leap across the gaps.  A story shaped
itself. . . .

The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at
Minchinghampton School.

Benham had come up from his father's preparatory school at Seagate.
He had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and
manners, a boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes
that went dark and deep with excitement.  Several times White had
seen him excited, and when he was excited Benham was capable of
tensely daring things.  On one occasion he had insisted upon walking
across a field in which was an aggressive bull.  It had been put
there to prevent the boys taking a short cut to the swimming place.
It had bellowed tremendously and finally charged him.  He had dodged
it and got away; at the time it had seemed an immense feat to White
and the others who were safely up the field.  He had walked to the
fence, risking a second charge by his deliberation.  Then he had sat
on the fence and declared his intention of always crossing the field
so long as the bull remained there.  He had said this with white
intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, and then
suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence, struggled
with heaving shoulders, and been sick.

The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak
stomach had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.

On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same
rather screwed-up sort.  He showed it not only in physical but in
mental things.  A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious
discussion in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination,
professed an atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of
Shelley.  This brought him into open conflict with Roddles, the
History Master.  Roddles had discovered these theological
controversies in some mysterious way, and he took upon himself to
talk at Benham and Prothero.  He treated them to the common
misapplication of that fool who "hath said in his heart there is no
God."  He did not perceive there was any difference between the fool
who says a thing in his heart and one who says it in the dormitory.
He revived that delectable anecdote of the Eton boy who professed
disbelief and was at once "soundly flogged" by his head master.
"Years afterwards that boy came back to thank ----"

"Gurr," said Prothero softly.  "STEW--ard!"

"Your turn next, Benham," whispered an orthodox controversialist.

"Good Lord!  I'd like to see him," said Benham with a forced
loudness that could scarcely be ignored.

The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head.  From
it Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever.  "He said he
would certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would
certainly kill him if he did."

"And then?"

"He told me to go away and think it over.  Said he would preach
about it next Sunday. . . . Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing
anyhow.  But I would. . . .  There isn't a master here I'd stand a
thrashing from--not one. . . .  And because I choose to say what I
think! . . .  I'd run amuck."

For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a vain and ill-
concealed hope that the head might try it just to see if Benham
would.  It was tantalizingly within the bounds of possibility. . . .

These incidents came back to White's mind as he turned over the
newspapers in the upper drawer of the bureau.  The drawer was
labelled "Fear--the First Limitation," and the material in it was
evidently designed for the opening volume of the great unfinished
book.  Indeed, a portion of it was already arranged and written up.

As White read through this manuscript he was reminded of a score of
schoolboy discussions Benham and he and Prothero had had together.
Here was the same old toughness of mind, a kind of intellectual
hardihood, that had sometimes shocked his schoolfellows.  Benham had
been one of those boys who do not originate ideas very freely, but
who go out to them with a fierce sincerity.  He believed and
disbelieved with emphasis.  Prothero had first set him doubting, but
it was Benham's own temperament took him on to denial.  His youthful
atheism had been a matter for secret consternation in White.  White
did not believe very much in God even then, but this positive
disbelieving frightened him.  It was going too far.  There had been
a terrible moment in the dormitory, during a thunderstorm, a
thunderstorm so vehement that it had awakened them all, when Latham,
the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had suddenly challenged
Benham to deny his Maker.

"NOW say you don't believe in God?"

Benham sat up in bed and repeated his negative faith, while little
Hopkins, the Bishop's son, being less certain about the accuracy of
Providence than His aim, edged as far as he could away from Benham's
cubicle and rolled his head in his bedclothes.

"And anyhow," said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be
struck dead forthwith, "you show a poor idea of your God to think
he'd kill a schoolboy for honest doubt.  Even old Roddles--"

"I can't listen to you," cried Latham the humourist, "I can't listen
to you.  It's--HORRIBLE."

"Well, who began it?" asked Benham.

A flash of lightning lit the dormitory and showed him to White
white-faced and ablaze with excitement, sitting up with the bed-
clothes about him.  "Oh WOW!" wailed the muffled voice of little
Hopkins as the thunder burst like a giant pistol overhead, and he
buried his head still deeper in the bedclothes and gave way to
unappeasable grief.

Latham's voice came out of the darkness.  "This ATHEISM that you and
Billy Prothero have brought into the school--"

He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
silent, waiting for the thunder. . . .

But White remembered no more of the controversy because he had made
a frightful discovery that filled and blocked his mind.  Every time
the lightning flashed, there was a red light in Benham's eyes. . . .

It was only three days after when Prothero discovered exactly the
same phenomenon in the School House boothole and talked of cats and
cattle, that White's confidence in their friend was partially
restored. . . .



4


"Fear, the First Limitation"--his title indicated the spirit of
Benham's opening book very clearly.  His struggle with fear was the
very beginning of his soul's history.  It continued to the end.  He
had hardly decided to lead the noble life before he came bump
against the fact that he was a physical coward.  He felt fear
acutely.  "Fear," he wrote, "is the foremost and most persistent of
the shepherding powers that keep us in the safe fold, that drive us
back to the beaten track and comfort and--futility.  The beginning
of all aristocracy is the subjugation of fear."

At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.

"When I was a boy," he writes, "I thought I would conquer fear for
good and all, and never more be troubled by it.  But it is not to be
done in that way.  One might as well dream of having dinner for the
rest of one's life.  Each time and always I have found that it has
to be conquered afresh.  To this day I fear, little things as well
as big things.  I have to grapple with some little dread every day--
urge myself. . . .  Just as I have to wash and shave myself every
day. . . .  I believe it is so with every one, but it is difficult
to be sure; few men who go into dangers care very much to talk about
fear. . . ."

Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came even to dealings with
fear.  He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any
better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering
restraints it is man's duty to escape.  Discretion, he declared,
must remain; a sense of proportion, an "adequacy of enterprise," but
the discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail,
it has nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the
nerves.  "From top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad,
from panic fear at one extremity down to that mere disinclination
for enterprise, that reluctance and indolence which is its lowest
phase.  These are things of the beast, these are for creatures that
have a settled environment, a life history, that spin in a cage of
instincts.  But man is a beast of that kind no longer, he has left
his habitat, he goes out to limitless living. . . ."

This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities,
habits, customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him,
underlay all Benham's aristocratic conceptions.  And it was natural
that he should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it
indeed with ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that
lie beyond for those who will force themselves through its
remonstrances. . . .

Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes.
His fear of animals was ineradicable.  He had had an overwhelming
dread of bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's
irrational dread of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed
and in the evening shadows.  He confesses that even up to manhood he
could not cross a field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye
upon them--his bull adventure rather increased than diminished that
disposition--he hated a strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre
himself as soon as possible out of reach of the teeth or heels of a
horse.  But the peculiar dread of his childhood was tigers.  Some
gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly with a tiger in a cage in
the menagerie annexe of a circus.  "My small mind was overwhelmed."

"I had never thought," White read, "that a tiger was much larger
than a St. Bernard dog. . . .  This great creature! . . .  I could
not believe any hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth
and with weapons of enormous power. . . .

"He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and
looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away.
Every now and then he snarled.  The contempt of his detestable
indifference sank deeper and deeper into my soul.  I knew that were
the cage to vanish I should stand there motionless, his helpless
prey.  I knew that were he at large in the same building with me I
should be too terror-stricken to escape him.  At the foot of a
ladder leading clear to escape I should have awaited him paralyzed.
At last I gripped my nurse's hand.  ‘Take me away,' I whispered.

"In my dreams that night he stalked me.  I made my frozen flight
from him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a
panel as though it had been paper and clawed for me.  The paw got
longer and longer. . . .

"I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.

"I remember that he took me in his arms.

"‘It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said.  FELIS TIGRIS.
FELIS, you know, means cat.'

"But I knew better.  I was in no mood then for my father's
insatiable pedagoguery.

"‘And my little son mustn't be a coward.' . . .

"After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers
alone.

"For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind.
In my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it
rarely failed me.  On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch
of darkness beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and
sometimes the door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there
was a long buff and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman,
but by night--.  Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of
a passing candle?  Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and
so close that you could not even turn round upon it?  No!"



5


When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened
against his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account
of the killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had
escaped out of its stable.  The beast had careered across a field,
leapt a hedge and come upon its victim suddenly.  He had run a few
paces and stopped, trying to defend his head with the horse rearing
over him.  It beat him down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs,
one, two, lifted him up in its long yellow teeth and worried him as
a terrier does a rat--the poor old wretch was still able to make a
bleating sound at that--dropped him, trampled and kicked him as he
tried to crawl away, and went on trampling and battering him until
he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of clothes and mire.
For more than half an hour this continued, and then its animal rage
was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at a little
distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy remnant
of a man.  No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what was
happening. . . .

This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much
more than it tortured the teller of the tale.  It filled him with
shame and horror.  For three or four years every detail of that
circumstantial narrative seemed unforgettable.  A little lapse from
perfect health and the obsession returned.  He could not endure the
neighing of horses: when he saw horses galloping in a field with him
his heart stood still.  And all his life thereafter he hated horses.



6


A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due
to a certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable
places.  There he was more definitely balanced between the
hopelessly rash and the pitifully discreet.

He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and
a certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin.
This happened in his adolescence.  He had had a bad attack of
influenza and his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only
hotel it was in those days--at Montana in Valais.  There, later,
when he had picked up his strength, his father was to join him and
take him mountaineering, that second-rate mountaineering which is so
dear to dons and schoolmasters.  When the time came he was ready for
that, but he had had his experiences.  He had gone through a phase
of real cowardice.  He was afraid, he confessed, before even he
reached Montana; he was afraid of the steepness of the mountains.
He had to drive ten or twelve miles up and up the mountain-side, a
road of innumerable hairpin bends and precipitous banks, the horse
was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to shy, and he confesses he
clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated how he should jump
if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over. . . .

"And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices.  I made strides over
precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote
valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that
crumbled away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing."

The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which
bring water from some distant source to pastures that have an
insufficient or uncertain supply.  It is a little better known than
most because of a certain exceptional boldness in its construction;
for a distance of a few score yards it runs supported by iron
staples across the front of a sheer precipice, and for perhaps half
a mile it hangs like an eyebrow over nearly or quite vertical walls
of pine-set rock.  Beside it, on the outer side of it, runs a path,
which becomes an offhand gangway of planking at the overhanging
places.  At one corner, which gives the favourite picture postcard
from Montana, the rocks project so sharply above the water that the
passenger on the gangway must crouch down upon the bending plank as
he walks.  There is no hand-hold at all.

A path from Montana takes one over a pine-clad spur and down a
precipitous zig-zag upon the middle of the Bisse, and thither Benham
came, fascinated by the very fact that here was something of which
the mere report frightened him.  He had to walk across the cold
clear rush of the Bisse upon a pine log, and then he found himself
upon one of the gentler interludes of the Bisse track.  It was a
scrambling path nearly two feet wide, and below it were slopes, but
not so steep as to terrify.  At a vast distance below he saw through
tree-stems and blue haze a twisted strand of bright whiteness, the
river that joins the Rhone at Sion.  It looped about and passed out
of sight remotely beneath his feet.  He turned to the right, and
came to a corner that overhung a precipice.  He craned his head
round this corner and saw the evil place of the picture-postcards.

He remained for a long time trying to screw himself up to walk along
the jagged six-inch edge of rock between cliff and torrent into
which the path has shrunken, to the sagging plank under the
overhanging rock beyond.

He could not bring himself to do that.

"It happened that close to the corner a large lump of rock and earth
was breaking away, a cleft was opening, so that presently, it seemed
possible at any moment, the mass would fall headlong into the blue
deeps below.  This impending avalanche was not in my path along the
Bisse, it was no sort of danger to me, but in some way its
insecurity gave a final touch to my cowardice.  I could not get
myself round that corner."

He turned away.  He went and examined the planks in the other
direction, and these he found less forbidding.  He crossed one
precipitous place, with a fall of twoscore feet or less beneath him,
and found worse ahead.  There also he managed.  A third place was
still more disagreeable.  The plank was worn and thin, and sagged
under him.  He went along it supporting himself against the rock
above the Bisse with an extended hand.  Halfway the rock fell back,
so that there was nothing whatever to hold.  He stopped, hesitating
whether he should go back--but on this plank there was no going back
because no turning round seemed practicable.  While he was still
hesitating there came a helpful intervention.  Behind him he saw a
peasant appearing and disappearing behind trees and projecting rock
masses, and coming across the previous plank at a vigorous trot. . . .

Under the stimulus of a spectator Benham got to the end of this
third place without much trouble.  Then very politely he stood aside
for the expert to go ahead so that he could follow at his own pace.

There were, however, more difficulties yet to come, and a
disagreeable humiliation.  That confounded peasant developed a
parental solicitude.  After each crossing he waited, and presently
began to offer advice and encouragement.  At last came a place where
everything was overhanging, where the Bisse was leaking, and the
plank wet and slippery.  The water ran out of the leak near the brim
of the wooden channel and fell in a long shivering thread of silver.
THERE WAS NO SOUND OF ITS FALL.  It just fell--into a void.  Benham
wished he had not noted that.  He groaned, but faced the plank; he
knew this would be the slowest affair of all.

The peasant surveyed him from the further side.

"Don't be afraid!" cried the peasant in his clumsy Valaisian French,
and returned, returning along the plank that seemed quite
sufficiently loaded without him, extending a charitable hand.

"Damn!" whispered Benham, but he took the hand.

Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
French.  "Pas de peur," he said.  "Pas de peur.  Mais la tete, n'a
pas l'habitude."

The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was
no danger.

("Damn!")

Benham was led over all the other planks, he was led as if he was an
old lady crossing a glacier.  He was led into absolute safety, and
shamefacedly he rewarded his guide.  Then he went a little way and
sat down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and
plunging down towards Lens until he was out of sight.

"Now," said Benham to himself, "if I do not go back along the planks
my secret honour is gone for ever."

He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well,
that the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a
very good chance indeed of getting killed.  Then it came to him
suddenly as a clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain,
that it is better to get killed than go away defeated by such fears
and unsteadiness as his.  The change came into his mind as if a
white light were suddenly turned on--where there had been nothing
but shadows and darkness.  He rose to his feet and went swiftly and
intently the whole way back, going with a kind of temperate
recklessness, and, because he was no longer careful, easily.  He
went on beyond his starting place toward the corner, and did that
supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was falling away,
and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest.  Then he recrossed the
Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to the
crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.

After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but
instead he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear
above incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to
slippery footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the
middle and headed him down and down. . . .

The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those
dreams like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path
of the Bisse was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it
was an exercise for young ladies. . . .



7


In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret
and as a thing to be got rid of altogether.  It seemed to him that
to feel fear was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the
deep dreads and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the
business of its subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation.
But as he emerged from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize
that this was too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear,
and your true aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who
controls or ignores it.  Brave men are men who do things when they
are afraid to do them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and
he was frequently seasick, was still master of the sea.  Benham
developed two leading ideas about fear; one that it is worse at the
first onset, and far worse than any real experience, and the other
that fear is essentially a social instinct.  He set himself upon
these lines to study--what can we call it?--the taming of fear, the
nature, care, and management of fear. . . .

"Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent thing.  It
is superficial.  Just as a man's skin is infinitely more sensitive
than anything inside. . . .  Once you have forced yourself or have
been forced through the outward fear into vivid action or
experience, you feel very little.  The worst moment is before things
happen.  Rowe, the African sportsman, told me that he had seen
cowardice often enough in the presence of lions, but he had never
seen any one actually charged by a lion who did not behave well.  I
have heard the same thing of many sorts of dangers.

"I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping
down.  Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling
nothing of the sort.  I once saw the face of an old man who had
flung himself out of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed
instantly on the pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was
glad, exalted.  I suspect that when we have broken the shell of
fear, falling may be delightful.  Jumping down is, after all, only a
steeper tobogganing, and tobogganing a milder jumping down.  Always
I used to funk at the top of the Cresta run.  I suffered sometimes
almost intolerably; I found it almost impossible to get away.  The
first ten yards was like being slashed open with a sharp sword.  But
afterwards there was nothing but joyful thrills.  All instinct, too,
fought against me when I tried high diving.  I managed it, and began
to like it.  I had to give it up because of my ears, but not until I
had established the habit of stepping through that moment of
disinclination.

"I was Challoner's passenger when he was killed at Sheerness.  That
was a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony
of terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all.  At any rate,
I do not remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my
memory if ever it was there.  We were swimming high and fast, three
thousand feet or so, in a clear, sweet air over the town of
Sheerness.  The river, with a string of battleships, was far away to
the west of us, and the endless grey-blue flats of the Thames to the
north.  The sun was low behind a bank of cloud.  I was watching a
motor-car, which seemed to be crawling slowly enough, though, no
doubt, it was making a respectable pace, between two hedges down
below.  It is extraordinary how slowly everything seems to be going
when one sees it from such an height.

"Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams,
some wires whistled past my head, and one whipped off my helmet, and
then, with the seat slipping away from me, down we went.  I snatched
unavailingly for the helmet, and then gripped the sides.  It was
like dropping in a boat suddenly into the trough of a wave--and
going on dropping.  We were both strapped, and I got my feet against
the side and clung to the locked second wheel.

"The sensation was as though something like an intermittent electric
current was pouring through me.  It's a ridiculous image to use, I
can't justify it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light
squirted through every pore of my being.  There was an astonishment,
a feeling of confirmation.  ‘Of course these things do happen
sometimes,' I told myself.  I don't remember that Challoner looked
round or said anything at all.  I am not sure that I looked at
him. . . .

"There seemed to be a long interval of intensely excited curiosity,
and I remember thinking, ‘Lord, but we shall come a smash in a
minute!'  Far ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people
strolling about apparently unaware of our disaster.  There was a
sudden silence as Challoner stopped the engine. . . .

"But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid.
I was simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED. . . .

"There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and we were both tipped
forward, so that we were hanging forehead down by our straps, and it
looked as if the sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky,
then came another vast swerve, and we were falling sideways,
sideways. . . .

"I was altogether out of breath and PHYSICALLY astonished, and I
remember noting quite intelligently as we hit the ground how the
green grass had an effect of POURING OUT in every direction from
below us. . . .

"Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again.  I
was astonished by a tremendous popping--fabric, wires, everything
seemed going pop, pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a
flash of intense pain as my arm crumpled up.  It was quite
impersonal pain.  As impersonal as seeing intense colour.
SPLINTERS!  I remember the word came into my head instantly.  I
remember that very definitely.

"I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters.  Or perhaps of the
scraps and ends of rods and wires flying about us.  It is curious
that while I remember the word I cannot recall the idea. . . .

"When I became conscious again the chief thing present in my mind
was that all those fellows round were young soldiers who wouldn't at
all understand bad behaviour.  My arm was--orchestral, but still far
from being real suffering IN me.  Also I wanted to know what
Challoner had got.  They wouldn't understand my questions, and then
I twisted round and saw from the negligent way his feet came out
from under the engine that he must be dead.  And dark red stains
with bright red froth--

"Of course!

"There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity.  I wasn't
sorry for him any more than I was for myself.

"It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable,
vivid, but all right. . . ."



8


"But though there is little or no fear in an aeroplane, even when it
is smashing up, there is fear about aeroplanes.  There is something
that says very urgently, ‘Don't,' to the man who looks up into the
sky.  It is very interesting to note how at a place like Eastchurch
or Brooklands the necessary discretion trails the old visceral
feeling with it, and how men will hang about, ready to go up,
resolved to go up, but delaying.  Men of indisputable courage will
get into a state between dread and laziness, and waste whole hours
of flying weather on any excuse or no excuse.  Once they are up that
inhibition vanishes.  The man who was delaying and delaying half an
hour ago will now be cutting the most venturesome capers in the air.
Few men are in a hurry to get down again.  I mean that quite apart
from the hesitation of landing, they like being up there."

Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.

"Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler
of experience.  That is what I am driving at in all this.  The bark
of danger is worse than its bite.  Inside the portals there may be
events and destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door.  It
may be that when that old man was killed by a horse the child who
watched suffered more than he did. . . .

"I am sure that was so. . . ."



9


As White read Benham's notes and saw how his argument drove on, he
was reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham's
hardihood, and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow
those gallant intellectual leads.  If fear is an ancient instinctive
boundary that the modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to
ignore and transcend, may this not also be the case with pain?  We
do a little adventure into the "life beyond fear"; may we not also
think of adventuring into the life beyond pain?  Is pain any saner a
warning than fear?  May not pain just as much as fear keep us from
possible and splendid things?  But why ask a question that is
already answered in principle in every dentist's chair?  Benham's
idea, however, went much further than that, he was clearly
suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain pitch,
there might come pleasure again, an intensity of sensation that
might have the colour of delight.  He betrayed a real anxiety to
demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness of a man who is
sensible of dissentient elements within.  He hated the thought of
pain even more than he hated fear.  His arguments did not in the
least convince White, who stopped to poke the fire and assure
himself of his own comfort in the midst of his reading.

Young people and unseasoned people, Benham argued, are apt to
imagine that if fear is increased and carried to an extreme pitch it
becomes unbearable, one will faint or die; given a weak heart, a
weak artery or any such structural defect and that may well happen,
but it is just as possible that as the stimulation increases one
passes through a brief ecstasy of terror to a new sane world,
exalted but as sane as normal existence.  There is the calmness of
despair.  Benham had made some notes to enforce this view, of the
observed calm behaviour of men already hopelessly lost, men on
sinking ships, men going to execution, men already maimed and
awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part these were merely
references to books and periodicals.  In exactly the same way, he
argued, we exaggerate the range of pain as if it were limitless.  We
think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and so beyond
endurance to destruction.  It probably does nothing of the kind.
Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current.  At
a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and
convulses, at a still greater it kills.  But at enormous voltages,
as Tesla was the first to demonstrate, it does no injury.  And
following on this came memoranda on the recorded behaviour of
martyrs, on the self-torture of Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of
Red Indian prisoners.

"These things," Benham had written, "are much more horrible when one
considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair";--White gave
an assenting nod--"ARE THEY REALLY HORRIBLE AT ALL?  Is it possible
that these charred and slashed and splintered persons, those Indians
hanging from hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace, have had
glimpses through great windows that were worth the price they paid
for them?  Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so
important a restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and
distress and distort adult life? . . .

"The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
from danger were ultimate ends.  It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and
untestable forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares.  And so it
thinks the discovery of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of
civilization, and cosiness and innocent amusement, those ideals of
the nursery, the whole purpose of mankind. . . ."

"Mm," said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his
brows and shook his head.



10


But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached
through torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink
at anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of
fear that led gradually to something like a theory of control and
discipline.  The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is
an instinct arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be
a collective panic, but that there is no real individual fear.
Fear, Benham held, drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its
master, the wolf to the pack, and when it is felt that the danger is
pooled, then fear leaves us.  He was quite prepared to meet the
objection that animals of a solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit
fear.  Some of this apparent fear, he argued, was merely discretion,
and what is not discretion is the survival of an infantile
characteristic.  The fear felt by a tiger cub is certainly a social
emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs, to its mother and
the dark hiding of the lair.  The fear of a fully grown tiger sends
it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be "still
reminiscent of the maternal lair."  But fear has very little hold
upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
resentment and rage.

"Like most inexperienced people," ran his notes, "I was astonished
at the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were
exaggerated, and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy
of silence about their real behaviour.  But when on my way to visit
India for the third time I turned off to see what I could of the
fighting before Adrianople, I discovered at once that a thousand
casually selected conscripts will, every one of them, do things
together that not one of them could by any means be induced to do
alone.  I saw men not merely obey orders that gave them the nearly
certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding orders; I saw
men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot
through and smashed by a score of bullets.  I saw a number of
Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully
wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker,
some of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched
a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly
cheerful with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out
and lying still until every other man was down. . . .  Not one man
would have gone up that hill alone, without onlookers. . . ."

Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his
life had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was
alone.  Many times he had been in fearful situations in the face of
charging lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and
carried some distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had
fear demoralized him.  There was no question of his general pluck.
But on one occasion he was lost in rocky waterless country in
Somaliland.  He strayed out in the early morning while his camels
were being loaded, followed some antelope too far, and lost his
bearings.  He looked up expecting to see the sun on his right hand
and found it on his left.  He became bewildered.  He wandered some
time and then fired three signal shots and got no reply.  Then
losing his head he began shouting.  He had only four or five more
cartridges and no water-bottle.  His men were accustomed to his
going on alone, and might not begin to remark upon his absence until
sundown. . . .  It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted
the water-bottle he had left behind and organized a hunt for him.

Long before they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror.
The world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless
glare, each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the
last, each new valley into which he looked more hateful and
desolate, the cramped thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks
had a sinister lustre, and in every blue shadow about him the night
and death lurked and waited.  There was no hurry for them, presently
they would spread out again and join and submerge him, presently in
the confederated darkness he could be stalked and seized and slain.
Yes, this he admitted was real fear.  He had cracked his voice,
yelling as a child yells.  And then he had become afraid of his own
voice. . . .

"Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in
support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite
illusory, is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one
believed it to be an instinct which has become a misfit.  In the
ease of the soldier fear is so much a misfit that instead of saving
him for the most part it destroys him.  Raw soldiers under fire
bunch together and armies fight in masses, men are mowed down in
swathes, because only so is the courage of the common men sustained,
only so can they be brave, albeit spread out and handling their
weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle them they would be
infinitely safer and more effective. . . .

"And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a
thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back
from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary
shelters that are perhaps in the end no better than traps. . . ."

From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the
crowd can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some
substitute for that social backing can be made to serve the same
purpose in neutralizing fear.  He wrote with the calm of a man who
weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and with the zeal of a man
lost to every material consideration.  His writing, it seemed to
White, had something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, the
enthusiastic brightness of his eyes.  We can no more banish fear
from our being at present than we can carve out the fleshy pillars
of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain.  It is deep in our
inheritance.  As deep as hunger.  And just as we have to satisfy
hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy
the unconquerable importunity of fear.  We have to reassure our
faltering instincts.  There must be something to take the place of
lair and familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we
must carry with us into the lonely places.  For it is true that man
has now not only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a
phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in open order, to live
in open order. . . .

Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This
brings me to God."

"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.

"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so
long as we feel indeed alone.  An isolated man, an egoist, an
Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place.
There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast
universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be
extinguished to-morrow.  There can be no courage beyond social
courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in us
the sense of God.  But God is a word that covers a multitude of
meanings.  When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I defied
God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions and
pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
do still deny him and repudiate him.  That God I heard of first from
my nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the
nursemaids of mankind.  But there is another God than that God of
obedience, God the immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from
home and country, God scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in
a nail-pierced body out of death and came not to bring peace but a
sword."

With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
Benham's spirit.  They were written in pencil; they were unfinished
when he died.

 (Surely the man was not a Christian!)

"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you
cannot suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain
because you have identified your life with the honour of mankind and
the insatiable adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the
possible death is negligible and the possible achievement altogether
outweighs it." . . .

White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.

He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had
always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever.
But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it
seemed to him, a posthumous betrayal. . . .



11


One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon
Benham.  He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into
the jungle country in the hills above the Tapti.  He had been very
anxious to see something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had
snatched at the chance Kepple had given him.  But they had scarcely
started before the expedition was brought to an end by an accident,
Kepple was thrown by a pony and his ankle broken.  He and Benham
bandaged it as well as they could, and a litter was sent for, and
meanwhile they had to wait in the camp that was to have been the
centre of their jungle raids.  The second day of this waiting was
worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered much from the
pressure of this amateurish bandaging.  In the evening Benham got
cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the two men
dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big banyan,
and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to his
tent.  Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.

Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to
sleep.  He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.

He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan,
that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft
immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours
of the world.  It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it
stripped off the superficial reality of things.  The moon was full
and high overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed
from definition and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity
to a translucent and unsubstantial clearness.  The jungle that
bordered the little encampment north, south, and west seemed to have
crept a little nearer, enriched itself with blackness, taken to
itself voices.

(Surely it had been silent during the day.)

A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the
leaves.  In the day the air had been still.

Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of
peacocks in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets,
however, were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become
predominant, an industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took
his mind back to England, in midsummer.  It was like a watchman's
rattle--a nightjar!

So there were nightjars here in India, too!  One might have expected
something less familiar.  And then came another cry from far away
over the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry.  It was
repeated.  Was that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a
panther?--

"HUNT, HUNT"; that might be a deer.

Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite
close at hand.  A monkey? . . .

These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
bats. . . .

Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep.  This was its waking
hour.  Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears
creeping out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the
gullies, the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking
noiselessly from their lairs in the grass.  Countless creatures that
had hidden from the heat and pitiless exposure of the day stood now
awake and alertly intent upon their purposes, grazed or sought
water, flitting delicately through the moonlight and shadows.  The
jungle was awakening.  Again Benham heard that sound like the
belling of a stag. . . .

This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which
man did not go.  Here he was on the verge of a world that for all
the stuffed trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the
naturalist is still almost as unknown as if it was upon another
planet.  What intruders men are, what foreigners in the life of this
ancient system!

He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents,
one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in
an irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men.  One or
two turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--
low, monotonous--it must have been telling a tale.  Further, sighing
and stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great
pale space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well.
The clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango
trees, and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in.  One
might have fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders,
were it not for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets
and altogether swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the
deserted temples that are found rent asunder by the roots of trees
and the ancient embankments that hold water only for the drinking of
the sambur deer. . . .

Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again. . . .

He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the
ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new
civilization, that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether
before the dry advance of physical science and material
organization.  He was full of unsatisfied curiosities about its
fierce hungers and passions, its fears and cruelties, its instincts
and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet most precious
understandings.  He had long ceased to believe that the wild beast
is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for men. . . .

Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life
than he was now.

It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand
and so inaccessible. . . .

As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on
through the still circle of the hours, passed slowly over him.  The
lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and
a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest,
opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly
lengthened.  It opened out to him with a quality of invitation. . . .

There was the jungle before him.  Was it after all so inaccessible?

"Come!" the road said to him.

Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
motionless.

Was he afraid?

Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows,
watching with infinite still patience.  Kepple had told him how they
would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a
fire--and then crouch to advance.  Beneath the shrill overtone of
the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and
cracklings and creepings might there not be? . . .

Was he afraid?

That question determined him to go.

He hesitated whether he should take a gun.  A stick?  A gun, he
knew, was a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man.  No!  He would
go now, even as he was with empty hands.  At least he would go as
far as the end of that band of moonlight.  If for no other reason
than because he was afraid.  NOW!

For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to
lift and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible
figure, he strolled towards the cart-track.

Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of
the men.  No one would miss him.  They would think he was in his
tent.  He faced the stirring quiet ahead.  The cart-track was a
rutted path of soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly.
A bird squabbled for an instant in a thicket.  A great white owl
floated like a flake of moonlight across the track and vanished
without a sound among the trees.

Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he passed near trees
his footsteps became noisy with the rustle and crash of dead leaves.
The jungle was full of moonlight; twigs, branches, creepers, grass-
clumps came out acutely vivid.  The trees and bushes stood in pools
of darkness, and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine and
big rocks shining with an unearthly lustre.  Things seemed to be
clear and yet uncertain.  It was as if they dissolved or retired a
little and then returned to solidity.

A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black across the great
stars soared a flying squirrel and caught a twig, and ran for
shelter.  A second hesitated in a tree-top and pursued.  They chased
each other and vanished abruptly.  He forgot his sense of insecurity
in the interest of these active little silhouettes.  And he noted
how much bigger and more wonderful the stars can look when one sees
them through interlacing branches.

Ahead was darkness; but not so dark when he came to it that the
track was invisible.  He was at the limit of his intention, but now
he saw that that had been a childish project.  He would go on, he
would walk right into the jungle.  His first disinclination was
conquered, and the soft intoxication of the subtropical moonshine
was in his blood. . . .  But he wished he could walk as a spirit
walks, without this noise of leaves. . . .

Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
jungles for men to walk in.  Always there must be jungles. . . .

Some small beast snarled and bolted from under his feet.  He stopped
sharply.  He had come into a darkness under great boughs, and now he
stood still as the little creature scuttled away.  Beyond the track
emerged into a dazzling whiteness. . . .

In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again in the
distance, and then came a fuss of monkeys in a group of trees near
at hand.  He remained still until this had died away into
mutterings.

Then on the verge of movement he was startled by a ripe mango that
slipped from its stalk and fell out of the tree and struck his hand.
It took a little time to understand that, and then he laughed, and
his muscles relaxed, and he went on again.

A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.

He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a great shield of
light spread out above him.  All the world seemed swimming in its
radiance.  The stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue.

The track led him on across white open spaces of shrivelled grass
and sand, amidst trees where shadows made black patternings upon the
silver, and then it plunged into obscurities.  For a time it lifted,
and then on one hand the bush fell away, and he saw across a vast
moonlit valley wide undulations of open cultivation, belts of
jungle, copses, and a great lake as black as ebony.  For a time the
path ran thus open, and then the jungle closed in again and there
were more thickets, more levels of grass, and in one place far
overhead among the branches he heard and stood for a time perplexed
at a vast deep humming of bees. . . .

Presently a black monster with a hunched back went across his path
heedless of him and making a great noise in the leaves.  He stood
quite still until it had gone.  He could not tell whether it was a
boar or hyaena; most probably, he thought, a boar because of the
heaviness of its rush.

The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a ravine, ascended.
He passed a great leafless tree on which there were white flowers.
On the ground also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these
flowers; they were dropping noiselessly, and since they were visible
in the shadows, it seemed to him that they must be phosphorescent.
And they emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart the path.
Presently he passed another such tree.  Then he became aware of a
tumult ahead of him, a smashing of leaves, a snorting and
slobbering, grunting and sucking, a whole series of bestial sounds.
He halted for a little while, and then drew nearer, picking his
steps to avoid too great a noise.  Here were more of those white-
blossomed trees, and beneath, in the darkness, something very black
and big was going to and fro, eating greedily.  Then he found that
there were two and then more of these black things, three or four of
them.

Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.

Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, startlingly big, a
huge, black hairy monster with a long white nose on a grotesque
face, and he was stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth
with his curved fore claws.  He took not the slightest notice of the
still man, who stood perhaps twenty yards away from him.  He was too
blind and careless.  He snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, and
plunged into the shadows again.  Benham heard him root among the
leaves and grunt appreciatively.  The air was heavy with the reek of
the crushed flowers.

For some time Benham remained listening to and peering at these
preoccupied gluttons.  At last he shrugged his shoulders, and left
them and went on his way.  For a long time he could hear them, then
just as he was on the verge of forgetting them altogether, some
dispute arose among them, and there began a vast uproar, squeals,
protests, comments, one voice ridiculously replete and
authoritative, ridiculously suggestive of a drunken judge with his
mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance high above the others. . . .

The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left
the jungle to the incessant night-jars. . . .

For what end was this life of the jungle?

All Benham's senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about
him, and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of
that riddle.  Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man
must drain and clear away?  Or is it to have a use in the greater
life of our race that now begins?  Will man value the jungle as he
values the precipice, for the sake of his manhood?  Will he preserve
it?

Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce.  Will the jungle keep
him fierce?

For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity. . . .

He had missed the track. . . .

He was now in a second ravine.  He was going downward, walking on
silvery sand amidst great boulders, and now there was a new sound in
the air--.  It was the croaking of frogs.  Ahead was a solitary
gleam.  He was approaching a jungle pool. . . .

Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar.  "HONK!" cried
a great voice, and "HONK!"  There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild
rush--a rush as it seemed towards him.  Was he being charged?  He
backed against a rock.  A great pale shape leaped by him, an
antlered shape.  It was a herd of big deer bolting suddenly out of
the stillness.  He heard the swish and smash of their retreat grow
distant, disperse.  He remained standing with his back to the rock.

Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and goat-suckers resumed
possession of his consciousness.  But now some primitive instinct
perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him
meticulously noiseless.

He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the
drinking-place.  He came to a wide white place that was almost
level, and beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the
mirror surface of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-
like beast sat on its tail in the midst of this space, started
convulsively and went slinking into the undergrowth.  Benham paused
for a moment and then walked out softly into the light, and, behold!
as if it were to meet him, came a monster, a vast dark shape drawing
itself lengthily out of the blackness, and stopped with a start as
if it had been instantly changed to stone.

It had stopped with one paw advanced.  Its striped mask was light
and dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with
ruddiness; its mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of
viscous saliva shone vivid.  Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded
him stedfastly.  At last the nightmare of Benham's childhood had
come true, and he was face to face with a tiger, uncaged,
uncontrolled.

For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man.  They
stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment,
motionless and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes
all things like a dream.

Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted
together.  That confrontation had an interminableness that had
nothing to do with the actual passage of time.  Then some trickle of
his previous thoughts stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.

He spoke hoarsely.  "I am Man," he said, and lifted a hand as he
spoke.  "The Thought of the world."

His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved.  But the great beast
went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless
instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.

"Man," he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step
forward.

"Wough!"  With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak
that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees.  And then it
had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of
instantaneousness.

For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly
expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat
their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger
had passed among them and was gone. . . .

He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.

"I understand the jungle.  I understand. . . .  If a few men die
here, what matter?  There are worse deaths than being killed. . . .

"What is this fool's trap of security?

"Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled
from death. . . .

"Let men stew in their cities if they will.  It is in the lonely
places, in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still
observatories and the silent laboratories, in those secret and
dangerous places where life probes into life, it is there that the
masters of the world, the lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate
come to their own. . . .

"You sleeping away there in the cities!  Do you know what it means
for you that I am here to-night?

"Do you know what it means to you?

"I am just one--just the precursor.

"Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt
about you.  You must come out of them. . . ."

He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they came to him, and he
saw no more living creatures because they fled and hid before the
sound of his voice.  He wandered until the moon, larger now and
yellow tinged, was low between the black bars of the tree stems.
And then it sank very suddenly behind a hilly spur and the light
failed swiftly.

He stumbled and went with difficulty.  He could go no further among
these rocks and ravines, and he sat down at the foot of a tree to
wait for day.

He sat very still indeed.

A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped
about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him.  The corncrakes
had ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away,
the breeze had fallen.  A drowsing comfort took possession of him.
He grew more placid and more placid still.  He was enormously
content to find that fear had fled before him and was gone.  He
drifted into that state of mind when one thinks without ideas, when
one's mind is like a starless sky, serene and empty.



12


Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing
visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be
Lucifer rising amidst the black branches.  He was sitting upon a
rock at the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree.  He had been
asleep, and it was daybreak.  Everything was coldly clear and
colourless.

He must have slept soundly.

He heard a cock crow, and another answer--jungle fowl these must be,
because there could be no village within earshot--and then far away
and bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled
gardens, was the scream of peacocks.  And some invisible bird was
making a hollow beating sound among the trees near at hand.
TUNK. . . .  TUNK, and out of the dry grass came a twittering.

There was a green light in the east that grew stronger, and the
stars after their magnitudes were dissolving in the blue; only a few
remained faintly visible.  The sound of birds increased.  Through
the trees he saw towering up a great mauve thing like the back of a
monster,--but that was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep
hillside covered with woods of teak.

He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had
dreamed of a tiger.

He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night
wanderings.

A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and
then far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.

He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly
and thoughtfully.

Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of
water, and the ruins of an old embankment.  It was the ancient tank
of his overnight encounter.  The pool of his dream?

With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the
sandy level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last
found, and then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several
sorts of deer and the footprints of many biggish birds, first the
great spoor of the tiger and then his own.  Here the beast had
halted, and here it had leapt aside.  Here his own footmarks
stopped.  Here his heels had come together.

It had been no dream.

There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom
upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-
space wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine.  Then
the ground had looked like a floor of frosted silver.

And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just
as the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from
which he had strayed overnight.  It was, he found, a longer way back
to the camp than he remembered it to be.  Perhaps he had struck the
path further along.  It curved about and went up and down and
crossed three ravines.  At last he came to that trampled place of
littered white blossom under great trees where he had seen the
bears.

The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his
shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet.  The
dew had gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry
boots before he came back into the open space about the great banyan
and the tents.  And Kepple, refreshed by a night's rest and coffee,
was wondering loudly where the devil he had gone.



THE STORY


CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE BOY GROWS UP



1


Benham was the son of a schoolmaster.  His father was assistant
first at Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then
he became head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a
high-class preparatory school at Seagate.  He was extremely
successful for some years, as success goes in the scholastic
profession, and then disaster overtook him in the shape of a
divorce.  His wife, William Porphyry's mother, made the acquaintance
of a rich young man named Nolan, who was recuperating at Seagate
from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a gun accident in
Brazil.  She ran away with him, and she was divorced.  She was,
however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden only three
days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree absolute.
Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise and
sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
Marayne, the great London surgeon.

Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and
he left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs.
Benham and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed
himself to have injured.  With this and a husband already
distinguished, she returned presently to London, and was on the
whole fairly well received there.

It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
divorce fell.  There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that
a schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more
valuable proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in
England is against any association of a schoolmaster with
matrimonial irregularity.  And also Mr. Benham remarried.  It would
certainly have been better for him if he could have produced a
sister.  His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it only
hastened its decay.  Conceiving that he could now only appeal to the
broader-minded, more progressive type of parent, he became an
educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with
increasing frequency to the TIMES.  He expended a considerable
fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory and a
fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand
volumes, including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late
Lord Avebury, to the school equipment.  None of these things did
anything but enhance the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had
created in the limited opulent and discreet class to which his
establishment appealed.  One boy who, under the influence of the
Hundred Best Books, had quoted the ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but
influential grandfather, was withdrawn without notice or
compensation in the middle of the term.  It intensifies the tragedy
of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no essential respect
did his school depart from the pattern of all other properly-
conducted preparatory schools.

In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English
gentlemen.  He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened
by disregard and disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high
forehead.  His rather tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses.
He was an active man in unimportant things, with a love for the
phrase "ship-shape," and he played cricket better than any one else
on the staff.  He walked in wide strides, and would sometimes use
the tail of his gown on the blackboard.  Like so many clergymen and
schoolmasters, he had early distrusted his natural impulse in
conversation, and had adopted the defensive precaution of a rather
formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made a part of him.  His
general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up things that
might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping
up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was only too
manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
administration in a school that must not be too manifestly
impoverished, keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and
rather a flutterer of dovecots--with its method of manual training
for example--keeping up ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself
and every one about him, keeping up his affection for his faithful
second wife and his complete forgetfulness of and indifference to
that spirit of distracting impulse and insubordination away there in
London, who had once been his delight and insurmountable difficulty.
"After my visits to her," wrote Benham, "he would show by a hundred
little expressions and poses and acts how intensely he wasn't noting
that anything of the sort had occurred."

But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed
to keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his
son.

The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend
gentleman's life.  It is not improbable that his disposition to
monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate
disruption of his family.  It left so few initiatives within the
home to his wife.  He had been an early victim to that wave of
philoprogenitive and educational enthusiasm which distinguished the
closing decade of the nineteenth century.  He was full of plans in
those days for the education of his boy, and the thought of the
youngster played a large part in the series of complicated emotional
crises with which he celebrated the departure of his wife, crises in
which a number of old school and college friends very generously
assisted--spending weekends at Seagate for this purpose, and
mingling tobacco, impassioned handclasps and suchlike consolation
with much patient sympathetic listening to his carefully balanced
analysis of his feelings.  He declared that his son was now his one
living purpose in life, and he sketched out a scheme of moral and
intellectual training that he subsequently embodied in five very
stimulating and intimate articles for the SCHOOL WORLD, but never
put into more than partial operation.

"I have read my father's articles upon this subject," wrote Benham,
"and I am still perplexed to measure just what I owe to him.  Did he
ever attempt this moral training he contemplated so freely?  I don't
think he did.  I know now, I knew then, that he had something in his
mind. . . .  There were one or two special walks we had together, he
invited me to accompany him with a certain portentousness, and we
would go out pregnantly making superficial remarks about the school
cricket and return, discussing botany, with nothing said.

"His heart failed him.

"Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the
school pulpit.

"I think that my father did manage to convey to me his belief that
there were these fine things, honour, high aims, nobilities.  If I
did not get this belief from him then I do not know how I got it.
But it was as if he hinted at a treasure that had got very dusty in
an attic, a treasure which he hadn't himself been able to spend. . . ."

The father who had intended to mould his son ended by watching him
grow, not always with sympathy or understanding.  He was an
overworked man assailed by many futile anxieties.  One sees him
striding about the establishment with his gown streaming out behind
him urging on the groundsman or the gardener, or dignified,
expounding the particular advantages of Seagate to enquiring
parents, one sees him unnaturally cheerful and facetious at the
midday dinner table, one imagines him keeping up high aspirations in
a rather too hastily scribbled sermon in the school pulpit, or
keeping up an enthusiasm for beautiful language in a badly-prepared
lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and unjustifiably
exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his disadvantage
against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was storing up
all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one understands,
too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable emotion when
at last the time came for young Benham, "the one living purpose" of
his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in the
mysterious ascent of the English educational system.

Three times at least, and with an increased interval, the father
wrote fine fatherly letters that would have stood the test of
publication.  Then his communications became comparatively hurried
and matter-of-fact.  His boy's return home for the holidays was
always rather a stirring time for his private feelings, but he
became more and more inexpressive.  He would sometimes lay a hand on
those growing shoulders and then withdraw it.  They felt braced-up
shoulders, stiffly inflexible or--they would wince.  And when one
has let the habit of indefinite feelings grow upon one, what is
there left to say?  If one did say anything one might be asked
questions. . . .

One or two of the long vacations they spent abroad together.  The
last of these occasions followed Benham's convalescence at Montana
and his struggle with the Bisse; the two went to Zermatt and did
several peaks and crossed the Theodule, and it was clear that their
joint expeditions were a strain upon both of them.  The father
thought the son reckless, unskilful, and impatient; the son found
the father's insistence upon guides, ropes, precautions, the
recognized way, the highest point and back again before you get a
chill, and talk about it sagely but very, very modestly over pipes,
tiresome.  He wanted to wander in deserts of ice and see over the
mountains, and discover what it is to be benighted on a precipice.
And gradually he was becoming familiar with his father's repertory
of Greek quotations.  There was no breach between them, but each
knew that holiday was the last they would ever spend together. . . .

The court had given the custody of young William Porphyry into his
father's hands, but by a generous concession it was arranged that
his mother should have him to see her for an hour or so five times a
year.  The Nolan legacy, however, coming upon the top of this,
introduced a peculiar complication that provided much work for
tactful intermediaries, and gave great and increasing scope for
painful delicacies on the part of Mr. Benham as the boy grew up.

"I see," said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses
fixed on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer,
"I see more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not
yet at an end. . . .  In many respects he is like her. . . .  Quick.
Too quick. . . .  He must choose.  But I know his choice.  Yes,
yes,--I'm not blind.  She's worked upon him. . . .  I have done what
I could to bring out the manhood in him.  Perhaps it will bear the
strain. . . .  It will be a wrench, old man--God knows."

He did his very best to make it a wrench.



2


Benham's mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May,
because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination
far more than his father did.  She was now Lady Marayne, and a
prominent, successful, and happy little lady.  Her dereliction had
been forgiven quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was
very completely forgotten during the brief period of moral
kindliness which followed the accession of King Edward the Seventh.
It no doubt contributed to her social reinstatement that her former
husband was entirely devoid of social importance, while, on the
other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne's temporary monopoly of the caecal
operation which became so fashionable in the last decade of Queen
Victoria's reign as to be practically epidemic, created a strong
feeling in her favour.

She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving,
witty, given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved
handsome things, brave things, successful things, and the respect
and affection of all the world.  She did quite what she liked upon
impulse, and nobody ever thought ill of her.

Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country
people.  She had broken away from them before she was twenty to
marry Benham, whom she had idealized at a tennis party.  He had
talked of his work and she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work
in the world, him at his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna
surrounded by a troupe of Blessed Boys--all of good family, some of
quite the best.  For a time she had kept it up even more than he
had, and then Nolan had distracted her with a realization of the
heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.  She became sick with
desire for the forests of Brazil, and the Pacific, and--a peak in
Darien.  Immediately the school was frowsty beyond endurance, and
for the first time she let herself perceive how dreadfully a
gentleman and a scholar can smell of pipes and tobacco.  Only one
course lay open to a woman of spirit. . . .

For a year she did indeed live like a woman of spirit, and it was at
Nolan's bedside that Marayne was first moved to admiration.  She was
plucky.  All men love a plucky woman.

Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of antiseptic soap, but he
talked in a way that amused her, and he trusted as well as adored
her.  She did what she liked with his money, her own money, and her
son's trust money, and she did very well.  From the earliest
Benham's visits were to a gracious presence amidst wealthy
surroundings.  The transit from the moral blamelessness of Seagate
had an entirely misleading effect of ascent.

Their earlier encounters became rather misty in his memory; they
occurred at various hotels in Seagate.  Afterwards he would go,
first taken by a governess, and later going alone, to Charing Cross,
where he would be met, in earlier times by a maid and afterwards by
a deferential manservant who called him "Sir," and conveyed,
sometimes in a hansom cab and later in a smart brougham, by
Trafalgar Square, Lower Regent Street, Piccadilly, and streets of
increasing wealth and sublimity to Sir Godfrey's house in Desborough
Street.  Very naturally he fell into thinking of these discreet and
well-governed West End streets as a part of his mother's atmosphere.

The house had a dignified portico, and always before he had got down
to the pavement the door opened agreeably and a second respectful
manservant stood ready.  Then came the large hall, with its
noiseless carpets and great Chinese jars, its lacquered cabinets and
the wide staircase, and floating down the wide staircase, impatient
to greet him, light and shining as a flower petal, sweet and
welcoming, radiating a joyfulness as cool and clear as a dewy
morning, came his mother.  "WELL, little man, my son," she would cry
in her happy singing voice, "WELL?"

So he thought she must always be, but indeed these meetings meant
very much to her, she dressed for them and staged them, she
perceived the bright advantages of her rarity and she was quite
determined to have her son when the time came to possess him.  She
kissed him but not oppressively, she caressed him cleverly; it was
only on these rare occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed,
and she talked to his shy boyishness until it felt a more spirited
variety of manhood.  "What have you been doing?" she asked, "since I
saw you last."

She never said he had grown, but she told him he looked tall; and
though the tea was a marvellous display it was never an obtrusive
tea, it wasn't poked at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well
within reach of one's arm, like an agreeable accompaniment to their
conversation.

"What have you done?  All sorts of brave things?  Do you swim now?
I can swim.  Oh! I can swim half a mile.  Some day we will swim
races together.  Why not?  And you ride? . . .

"The horse bolted--and you stuck on?  Did you squeak?  I stick on,
but I HAVE to squeak.  But you--of course, No! you mustn't.  I'm
just a little woman.  And I ride big horses. . . ."

And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.

She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his
shoulders and look into his face.

"Clean eyes?" she would say.  "--still?"

Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last
his lips.  Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.

"GO," she would say.

That was the end.

It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
fairyland to this grey world again.



3


The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that
William Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair.  The
second Mrs. Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome
ability about her fitted her far more than her predecessor for the
onerous duties of a schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural
buoyancy she possessed was outweighed by an irrepressible conviction
derived from an episcopal grandparent that the remarriage of
divorced persons is sinful, and by a secret but well-founded doubt
whether her husband loved her with a truly romantic passion.  She
might perhaps have borne either of these troubles singly, but the
two crushed her spirit.

Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness.  She
had reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the
facility of other people's.  Her susceptibility to disagreeable
impressions was however very ample, and life was fenced about with
protections for her "feelings."  It filled young Benham with
inexpressible indignations that his sweet own mother, so gay, so
brightly cheerful that even her tears were stars, was never to be
mentioned in his stepmother's presence, and it was not until he had
fully come to years of reflection that he began to realize with what
honesty, kindness and patience this naturally not very happy lady
had nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered him.



4


As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his
mother's affection for him blossomed into a passion.  She made him
come down to London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went
about with him; she made him squire her to theatres and take her out
to dinners and sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she
had him with her at Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir
Godfrey had given her.  And always when they parted she looked into
his eyes to see if they were still clean--whatever she meant by
that--and she kissed his forehead and cheeks and eyes and lips.  She
began to make schemes for his career, she contrived introductions
she judged would be useful to him later.

Everybody found the relationship charming.  Some of the more
conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the
Reverend Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but
that was all.  As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way
he wasn't, either at Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the
TIMES.  But even the most conscientious of us are not obliged to go
to Seagate or read the Educational Supplement of the TIMES.

Lady Marayne's plans for her son's future varied very pleasantly.
She was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly
of the large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they
mentioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its
imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered
until a newer growth came to oust it.  She saw her son a diplomat, a
prancing pro-consul, an empire builder, a trusted friend of the
august, the bold leader of new movements, the saviour of ancient
institutions, the youngest, brightest, modernest of prime ministers--
or a tremendously popular poet.  As a rule she saw him unmarried--
with a wonderful little mother at his elbow.  Sometimes in romantic
flashes he was adored by German princesses or eloped with Russian
grand-duchesses!  But such fancies were HORS D'OEUVRE.  The modern
biography deals with the career.  Every project was bright, every
project had GO--tremendous go.  And they all demanded a hero,
debonnaire and balanced.  And Benham, as she began to perceive,
wasn't balanced.  Something of his father had crept into him, a
touch of moral stiffness.  She knew the flavour of that so well.  It
was a stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness.  She
tried not to admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it
was there.  But it was there.

"Tell me all that you are doing NOW," she said to him one afternoon
when she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington
Manor.  "How do you like Cambridge?  Are you making friends?  Have
you joined that thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden
speech?  If you're for politics, Poff, that's your game.  Have you
begun it?"

She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated
face warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like
little friendly heavens.  And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful,
sat at her feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that
now at last they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted
if it would be possible ever to love any other woman so much as he
did her.

He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the
undergraduate life he was leading, but he found it difficult.  All
sorts of things that seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of
drawing in the peculiar atmosphere she created about her.  All sorts
of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt
she wouldn't accept, couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her
to accept.  Before they could come before her they must wear a
bravery.  He couldn't, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero,
renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat
into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been
burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court.  He
couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and
high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours.
A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which
the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from
her.  What remained to tell was--attenuated.  He could not romance.
So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines.  She tried to inspire a
son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.

"You must make good friends," she said.  "Isn't young Lord Breeze at
your college?  His mother the other day told me he was.  And Sir
Freddy Quenton's boy.  And there are both the young Baptons at
Cambridge."

He knew one of the Baptons.

"Poff," she said suddenly, "has it ever occurred to you what you are
going to do afterwards.  Do you know you are going to be quite well
off?"

Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment.  "My father said
something.  He was rather vague.  It wasn't his affair--that kind of
thing."

"You will be quite well off," she repeated, without any complicating
particulars.  "You will be so well off that it will be possible for
you to do anything almost that you like in the world.  Nothing will
tie you.  Nothing. . . ."

"But--HOW well off?"

"You will have several thousands a year."

"Thousands?"

"Yes.  Why not?"

"But--Mother, this is rather astounding. . . .  Does this mean there
are estates somewhere, responsibilities?"

"It is just money.  Investments."

"You know, I've imagined--.  I've thought always I should have to DO
something."

"You MUST do something, Poff.  But it needn't be for a living.  The
world is yours without that.  And so you see you've got to make
plans.  You've got to know the sort of people who'll have things in
their hands.  You've got to keep out of--holes and corners.  You've
got to think of Parliament and abroad.  There's the army, there's
diplomacy.  There's the Empire.  You can be a Cecil Rhodes if you
like.  You can be a Winston. . . ."



5


Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made
her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life.  He did not
choose among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he
was going to be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days.  And he
talked VAGUELY of wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog.  A
boy of nearly nineteen ought to have at least the beginnings of
SAVOIR FAIRE.

Was he in the right set?  Was he indeed in the right college?
Trinity, by his account, seemed a huge featureless place--and might
he not conceivably be LOST in it?  In those big crowds one had to
insist upon oneself.  Poff never insisted upon himself--except quite
at the wrong moment.  And there was this Billy Prswer if it had not been for
the clash of their minds, was the chief topic of their conversation
for many months.  From Why be brave?  it spread readily enough to
Why be honest?  Why be clean?--all the great whys of life. . . .
Because one believes. . . .  But why believe it?  Left to himself
Benham would have felt the mere asking of this question was a thing
ignoble, not to be tolerated.  It was, as it were, treason to
nobility.  But Prothero putothero.  BILLY!
Like a goat or something.  People called William don't get their
Christian name insisted upon unless they are vulnerable somewhere.
Any form of William stamps a weakness, Willie, Willy, Will, Billy,
Bill; it's a fearful handle for one's friends.  At any rate Poff had
escaped that.  But this Prothero!

"But who IS this Billy Prothero?" she asked one evening in the
walled garden.

"He was at Minchinghampton."

"But who IS he?  Who is his father?  Where does he come from?"

Benham sought in his mind for a space.  "I don't know," he said at
last.  Billy had always been rather reticent about his people.  She
demanded descriptions.  She demanded an account of Billy's
furniture, Billy's clothes, Billy's form of exercise.  It dawned
upon Benham that for some inexplicable reason she was hostile to
Billy.  It was like the unmasking of an ambuscade.  He had talked a
lot about Prothero's ideas and the discussions of social reform and
social service that went on in his rooms, for Billy read at unknown
times, and was open at all hours to any argumentative caller.  To
Lady Marayne all ideas were obnoxious, a form of fogging; all ideas,
she held, were queer ideas.  "And does he call himself a Socialist?"
she asked.  "I THOUGHT he would."

"Poff," she cried suddenly, "you're not a SOCIALIST?"

"Such a vague term."

"But these friends of yours--they seem to be ALL Socialists.  Red
ties and everything complete."

"They have ideas," he evaded.  He tried to express it better.  "They
give one something to take hold of."

She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat.  She lifted her finger at
him, very seriously.  "I hope," she said with all her heart, "that
you will have nothing to do with such ideas.  Nothing.  SOCIALISM!"

"They make a case."

"Pooh!  Any one can make a case."

"But--"

"There's no sense in them.  What is the good of talking about
upsetting everything?  Just disorder.  How can one do anything then?
You mustn't.  You mustn't.  No.  It's nonsense, little Poff.  It's
absurd.  And you may spoil so much. . . .  I HATE the way you talk
of it. . . .  As if  it wasn't all--absolutely--RUBBISH. . . ."

She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.

Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends,
as she had always done?  This thinking about everything!  She had
never thought about anything in all her life for more than half an
hour--and it had always turned out remarkably well.

Benham felt baffled.  There was a pause.  How on earth could he go
on telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?

"I wish sometimes," his mother said abruptly, with an unusually
sharp note in her voice, "that you wouldn't look quite so like your
father."

"But I'm NOT like my father!" said Benham puzzled.

"No," she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer
reason, "so why should you go LOOKING like him?  That CONCERNED
expression. . . .

She jumped to her feet.  "Poff," she said, "I want to go and see the
evening primroses pop.  You and I are talking nonsense.  THEY don't
have ideas anyhow.  They just pop--as God meant them to do.  What
stupid things we human beings are!"

Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.



6


Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of Lady Marayne for all
that disappointed her in Benham.  He had to become the symbol,
because she could not think of complicated or abstract things, she
had to make things personal, and he was the only personality
available.  She fretted over his existence for some days therefore
(once she awakened and thought about him in the night), and then
suddenly she determined to grasp her nettle.  She decided to seize
and obliterate this Prothero.  He must come to Chexington and be
thoroughly and conclusively led on, examined, ransacked, shown up,
and disposed of for ever.  At once.  She was not quite clear how she
meant to do this, but she was quite resolved that it had to be done.
Anything is better than inaction.

There was a little difficulty about dates and engagements, but he
came, and through the season of expectation Benham, who was now for
the first time in contact with the feminine nature, was delighted at
the apparent change to cordiality.  So that he talked of Billy to
his mother much more than he had ever done before.

Billy had been his particular friend at Minchinghampton, at least
during the closing two years of his school life.  Billy had fallen
into friendship with Benham, as some of us fall in love, quite
suddenly, when he saw Benham get down from the fence and be sick
after his encounter with the bull.  Already Billy was excited by
admiration, but it was the incongruity of the sickness conquered
him.  He went back to the school with his hands more than usually in
his pockets, and no eyes for anything but this remarkable strung-up
fellow-creature.  He felt he had never observed Benham before, and
he was astonished that he had not done so.

Billy Prothero was a sturdy sort of boy, generously wanting in good
looks.  His hair was rough, and his complexion muddy, and he walked
about with his hands in his pockets, long flexible lips protruded in
a whistle, and a rather shapeless nose well up to show he didn't
care.  Providence had sought to console him by giving him a keen eye
for the absurdity of other people.  He had a suggestive tongue, and
he professed and practised cowardice to the scandal of all his
acquaintances.  He was said never to wash behind his ears, but this
report wronged him.  There had been a time when he did not do so,
but his mother had won him to a promise, and now that operation was
often the sum of his simple hasty toilet.  His desire to associate
himself with Benham was so strong that it triumphed over a defensive
reserve.  It enabled him to detect accessible moments, do
inobtrusive friendly services, and above all amuse his quarry.  He
not only amused Benham, he stimulated him.  They came to do quite a
number of things together.  In the language of schoolboy stories
they became "inseparables."

Prothero's first desire, so soon as they were on a footing that
enabled him to formulate desires, was to know exactly what Benham
thought he was up to in crossing a field with a bull in it instead
of going round, and by the time he began to understand that, he had
conceived an affection for him that was to last a lifetime.

"I wasn't going to be bullied by a beast," said Benham.

"Suppose it had been an elephant?" Prothero cried. . . .  "A mad
elephant? . . .  A pack of wolves?"

Benham was too honest not to see that he was entangled.  "Well,
suppose in YOUR case it had been a wild cat? . . .  A fierce
mastiff? . . .  A mastiff? . . .  A terrier? . . .  A lap dog?"

"Yes, but my case is that there are limits."

Benham was impatient at the idea of limits.  With a faintly
malicious pleasure Prothero lugged him back to that idea.

"We both admit there are limits," Prothero concluded.  "But between
the absolutely impossible and the altogether possible there's the
region of risk.  You think a man ought to take that risk--"  He
reflected.  "I think--no--I think NOT."

"If he feels afraid," cried Benham, seeing his one point.  "If he
feels afraid.  Then he ought to take it. . . ."

After a digestive interval, Prothero asked, "WHY?  Why should he?"

The discussion of that momentous question, that Why? which Benham
perhaps might never have dared ask himself, and which Prothero
perhaps might never have attempted to anit one afternoon in a way that
permitted
no high dismissal of their doubts.  "You can't build your honour on
fudge, Benham.  Like committing sacrilege--in order to buy a cloth
for the altar."

By that Benham was slipped from the recognized code and launched
upon speculations which became the magnificent research.

It was not only in complexion and stature and ways of thinking that
Billy and Benham contrasted.  Benham inclined a little to eloquence,
he liked very clean hands, he had a dread of ridiculous outlines.
Prothero lapsed readily into ostentatious slovenliness, when his
hands were dirty he pitied them sooner than scrubbed them, he would
have worn an overcoat with one tail torn off rather than have gone
cold.  Moreover, Prothero had an earthy liking for animals, he could
stroke and tickle strange cats until they wanted to leave father and
mother and all earthly possessions and follow after him, and he
mortgaged a term's pocket money and bought and kept a small terrier
in the school house against all law and tradition, under the
baseless pretence that it was a stray animal of unknown origin.
Benham, on the other hand, was shy with small animals and faintly
hostile to big ones.  Beasts he thought were just beasts.  And
Prothero had a gift for caricature, while Benham's aptitude was for
music.

It was Prothero's eyes and pencil that first directed Benham to the
poor indolences and evasions and insincerities of the masters.  It
was Prothero's wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled
absurdity of the vulgar theology.  But it was Benham who stood
between Prothero and that rather coarsely conceived epicureanism
that seemed his logical destiny.  When quite early in their
Cambridge days Prothero's revolt against foppery reached a nadir of
personal neglect, and two philanthropists from the rooms below him,
goaded beyond the normal tolerance of Trinity, and assisted by two
sportsmen from Trinity Hall, burnt his misshapen straw hat (after
partly filling it with gunpowder and iron filings) and sought to
duck him in the fountain in the court, it was Benham, in a state
between distress and madness, and armed with a horn-handled cane of
exceptional size, who intervened, turned the business into a blend
of wrangle and scuffle, introduced the degrading topic of duelling
into a simple wholesome rag of four against one, carried him off
under the cloud of horror created by this impropriety and so saved
him, still only slightly wetted, not only from this indignity but
from the experiment in rationalism that had provoked it.

Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he had thought and felt
about this hat.

Such was the illuminating young man whom Lady Marayne decided to
invite to Chexington, into the neighbourhood of herself, Sir
Godfrey, and her circle of friends.



7


He was quite anxious to satisfy the requirements of Benham's people
and to do his friend credit.  He was still in the phase of being a
penitent pig, and he inquired carefully into the needs and duties of
a summer guest in a country house.  He knew it was quite a
considerable country house, and that Sir Godfrey wasn't Benham's
father, but like most people, he was persuaded that Lady Marayne had
divorced the parental Benham.  He arrived dressed very neatly in a
brown suit that had only one fault, it had not the remotest
suggestion of having been made for him.  It fitted his body fairly
well, it did annex his body with only a few slight
incompatibilities, but it repudiated his hands and face.  He had a
conspicuously old Gladstone bag and a conspicuously new despatch
case, and he had forgotten black ties and dress socks and a hair
brush.  He arrived in the late afternoon, was met by Benham, in
tennis flannels, looking smartened up and a little unfamiliar, and
taken off in a spirited dog-cart driven by a typical groom.  He met
his host and hostess at dinner.

Sir Godfrey was a rationalist and a residuum.  Very much of him, too
much perhaps, had gone into the acquirement and perfect performance
of the caecal operation; the man one met in the social world was
what was left over.  It had the effect of being quiet, but in its
unobtrusive way knobby.  He had a knobby brow, with an air about it
of having recently been intent, and his conversation was curiously
spotted with little knobby arrested anecdotes.  If any one of any
distinction was named, he would reflect and say, "Of course,--ah,
yes, I know him, I know him.  Yes, I did him a little service--in
‘96."

And something in his manner would suggest a satisfaction, or a
dissatisfaction with confidential mysteries.

He welcomed Billy Prothero in a colourless manner, and made
conversation about Cambridge.  He had known one or two of the higher
dons.  One he had done at Cambridge quite recently.  "The inns are
better than they are at Oxford, which is not saying very much, but
the place struck me as being changed.  The men seemed younger. . . ."

The burden of the conversation fell upon Lady Marayne.  She looked
extraordinarily like a flower to Billy, a little diamond buckle on a
black velvet band glittered between the two masses of butter-
coloured hair that flowed back from her forehead, her head was
poised on the prettiest neck conceivable, and her shapely little
shoulders and her shapely little arms came decidedly but pleasantly
out of a softness and sparkle of white and silver and old rose.  She
talked what sounded like innocent commonplaces a little spiced by
whim, though indeed each remark had an exploratory quality, and her
soft blue eyes rested ever and again upon Billy's white tie.  It
seemed she did so by the merest inadvertency, but it made the young
man wish he had after all borrowed a black one from Benham.  But the
manservant who had put his things out had put it out, and he hadn't
been quite sure.  Also she noted all the little things he did with
fork and spoon and glass.  She gave him an unusual sense of being
brightly, accurately and completely visible.

Chexington, it seemed to Billy, was done with a large and costly and
easy completeness.  The table with its silver and flowers was much
more beautifully done than any table he had sat at before, and in
the dimness beyond the brightness there were two men to wait on the
four of them.  The old grey butler was really wonderfully good. . . .

"You shoot, Mr. Prothero?"

"You hunt, Mr. Prothero?"

"You know Scotland well, Mr. Prothero?"

These questions disturbed Prothero.  He did not shoot, he did not
hunt, he did not go to Scotland for the grouse, he did not belong,
and Lady Marayne ought to have seen that he did not belong to the
class that does these things.

"You ride much, Mr. Prothero?"

Billy conceived a suspicion that these innocent inquiries were
designed to emphasize a contrast in his social quality.  But he
could not be sure.  One never could be sure with Lady Marayne.  It
might be just that she did not understand the sort of man he was.
And in that case ought he to maintain the smooth social surface
unbroken by pretending as far as possible to be this kind of person,
or ought he to make a sudden gap in it by telling his realities.  He
evaded the shooting question anyhow.  He left it open for Lady
Marayne and the venerable butler and Sir Godfrey and every one to
suppose he just happened to be the sort of gentleman of leisure who
doesn't shoot.  He disavowed hunting, he made it appear he travelled
when he travelled in directions other than Scotland.  But the fourth
question brought him to bay.  He regarded his questioner with his
small rufous eye.

"I have never been across a horse in my life, Lady Marayne."

"Tut, tut," said Sir Godfrey.  "Why!--it's the best of exercise.
Every man ought to ride.  Good for the health.  Keeps him fit.
Prevents lodgments.  Most trouble due to lodgments."

"I've never had a chance of riding.  And I think I'm afraid of
horses."

"That's only an excuse," said Lady Marayne.  "Everybody's afraid of
horses and nobody's really afraid of horses."

"But I'm not used to horses.  You see--I live on my mother.  And she
can't afford to keep a stable."

His hostess did not see his expression of discomfort.  Her pretty
eyes were intent upon the peas with which she was being served.

"Does your mother live in the country?" she asked, and took her peas
with fastidious exactness.

Prothero coloured brightly.  "She lives in London."

"All the year?"

"All the year."

"But isn't it dreadfully hot in town in the summer?"

Prothero had an uncomfortable sense of being very red in the face.
This kept him red.  "We're suburban people," he said.

"But I thought--isn't there the seaside?"

"My mother has a business," said Prothero, redder than ever.

"O-oh!" said Lady Marayne.  "What fun that must be for her?"

"It's a real business, and she has to live by it.  Sometimes it's a
worry."

"But a business of her own!"  She surveyed the confusion of his
visage with a sweet intelligence.  "Is it an amusing sort of
business, Mr. Prothero?"

Prothero looked mulish.  "My mother is a dressmaker," he said.  "In
Brixton.  She doesn't do particularly badly--or well.  I live on my
scholarship.  I have lived on scholarships since I was thirteen.
And you see, Lady Marayne, Brixton is a poor hunting country."

Lady Marayne felt she had unmasked Prothero almost indecently.
Whatever happened there must be no pause.  There must be no sign of
a hitch.

"But it's good at tennis," she said.  "You DO play tennis, Mr.
Prothero?"

"I--I gesticulate," said Prothero.

Lady Marayne, still in flight from that pause, went off at a
tangent.

"Poff, my dear," she said, "I've had a diving-board put at the deep
end of the pond."

The remark hung unanswered for a moment.  The transition had been
too quick for Benham's state of mind.

"Do you swim, Mr. Prothero?" the lady asked, though a moment before
she had determined that she would never ask him a question again.
But this time it was a lucky question.

"Prothero mopped up the lot of us at Minchinghampton with his diving
and swimming," Benham explained, and the tension was relaxed.

Lady Marayne spoke of her own swimming, and became daring and
amusing at her difficulties with local feeling when first she swam
in the pond.  The high road ran along the far side of the pond--"And
it didn't wear a hedge or anything," said Lady Marayne.  "That was
what they didn't quite like.  Swimming in an undraped pond. . . ."

Prothero had been examined enough.  Now he must be entertained.  She
told stories about the village people in her brightest manner.  The
third story she regretted as soon as she was fairly launched upon
it; it was how she had interviewed the village dressmaker, when Sir
Godfrey insisted upon her supporting local industries.  It was very
amusing but technical.  The devil had put it into her head.  She had
to go through with it.  She infused an extreme innocence into her
eyes and fixed them on Prothero, although she felt a certain
deepening pinkness in her cheeks was betraying her, and she did not
look at Benham until her unhappy, but otherwise quite amusing
anecdote, was dead and gone and safely buried under another. . . .

But people ought not to go about having dressmakers for mothers. . . .

And coming into other people's houses and influencing their sons. . . .



8


That night when everything was over Billy sat at the writing-table
of his sumptuous bedroom--the bed was gilt wood, the curtains of the
three great windows were tremendous, and there was a cheval glass
that showed the full length of him and seemed to look over his head
for more,--and meditated upon this visit of his.  It was more than
he had been prepared for.  It was going to be a great strain.  The
sleek young manservant in an alpaca jacket, who said "Sir" whenever
you looked at him, and who had seized upon and unpacked Billy's most
private Gladstone bag without even asking if he might do so, and put
away and displayed Billy's things in a way that struck Billy as
faintly ironical, was unexpected.  And it was unexpected that the
brown suit, with its pockets stuffed with Billy's personal and
confidential sundries, had vanished.  And apparently a bath in a
bathroom far down the corridor was prescribed for him in the
morning; he hadn't thought of a dressing-gown.  And after one had
dressed, what did one do?  Did one go down and wander about the
house looking for the breakfast-room or wait for a gong?  Would Sir
Godfrey read Family Prayers?  And afterwards did one go out or hang
about to be entertained?  He knew now quite clearly that those
wicked blue eyes would mark his every slip.  She did not like him.
She did not like him, he supposed, because he was common stuff.  He
didn't play up to her world and her.  He was a discord in this rich,
cleverly elaborate household.  You could see it in the servants'
attitudes.  And he was committed to a week of this.

Billy puffed out his cheeks to blow a sigh, and then decided to be
angry and say "Damn!"

This way of living which made him uncomfortable was clearly an
irrational and objectionable way of living.  It was, in a cumbersome
way, luxurious.  But the waste of life of it, the servants, the
observances, all concentrated on the mere detail of existence?
There came a rap at the door.  Benham appeared, wearing an
expensive-looking dressing-jacket which Lady Marayne had bought for
him.  He asked if he might talk for a bit and smoke.  He sat down in
a capacious chintz-covered easy chair beside Prothero, lit a
cigarette, and came to the point after only a trivial hesitation.

"Prothero," he said, "you know what my father is."

"I thought he ran a preparatory school."

There was the profoundest resentment in Prothero' s voice.

"And, all the same, I'm going to be a rich man."

"I don't understand," said Prothero, without any shadow of
congratulation.

Benham told Prothero as much as his mother had conveyed to him of
the resources of his wealth.  Her version had been adapted to his
tender years and the delicacies of her position.  The departed Nolan
had become an eccentric godfather.  Benham's manner was apologetic,
and he made it clear that only recently had these facts come to him.
He had never suspected that he had had this eccentric godfather.  It
altered the outlook tremendously.  It was one of the reasons that
made Benham glad to have Prothero there, one wanted a man of one's
own age, who understood things a little, to try over one's new
ideas.  Prothero listened with an unamiable expression.

"What would you do, Prothero, if you found yourself saddled with
some thousands a year?"

"Godfathers don't grow in Brixton," said Prothero concisely.

"Well, what am I to do, Prothero?"

"Does all THIS belong to you?"

"No, this is my mother's."

"Godfather too?"

"I've not thought. . . .  I suppose so.  Or her own."

Prothero meditated.

"THIS life," he said at last, "this large expensiveness-- . . ."

He left his criticism unfinished.

"I agree.  It suits my mother somehow.  I can't understand her
living in any other way.  But--for me. . . ."

"What can one do with several thousands a year?"

Prothero's interest in this question presently swamped his petty
personal resentments.  "I suppose," he said, "one might have rather
a lark with money like that.  One would be free to go anywhere.  To
set all sorts of things going. . . .  It's clear you can't sell all
you have and give it to the poor.  That is pauperization nowadays.
You might run a tremendously revolutionary paper.  A real upsetting
paper.  How many thousands is it?"

"I don't know.  SOME."

Prothero's interest was growing as he faced the possibilities.

"I've dreamt of a paper," he said, "a paper that should tell the
brute truth about things."

"I don't know that I'm particularly built to be a journalist,"
Benham objected.

"You're not," said Billy. . . .  "You might go into Parliament as a
perfectly independent member. . . .  Only you wouldn't get in. . . ."

"I'm not a speaker," said Benham.

"Of course," said Billy, "if you don't decide on a game, you'll just
go on like this.  You'll fall into a groove, you'll--you'll hunt.
You'll go to Scotland for the grouse."

For the moment Prothero had no further suggestions.

Benham waited for a second or so before he broached his own idea.

"Why, first of all, at any rate, Billy, shouldn't one use one's
money to make the best of oneself?  To learn things that men without
money and leisure find it difficult to learn?  By an accident,
however unjust it is, one is in the position of a leader and a
privileged person.  Why not do one's best to give value as that?"

"Benham, that's the thin end of aristocracy!"

"Why not?"

"I hate aristocracy.  For you it means doing what you like.  While
you are energetic you will kick about and then you will come back to
this."

"That's one's own look-out," said Benham, after reflection.

"No, it's bound to happen."

Benham retreated a little from the immediate question.

"Well, we can't suddenly at a blow change the world.  If it isn't to
be plutocracy to-day it has to be aristocracy."

Prothero frowned over this, and then he made a sweeping proposition.

"YOU CANNOT HAVE ARISTOCRACY," he said, "BECAUSE, YOU SEE--ALL MEN
ARE RIDICULOUS.  Democracy has to fight its way out from under
plutocracy.  There is nothing else to be done."

"But a man in my position--?"

"It's a ridiculous position.  You may try to escape being
ridiculous.  You won't succeed."

It seemed to Benham for a moment as though Prothero had got to the
bottom of the question, and then he perceived that he had only got
to the bottom of himself.  Benham was pacing the floor.

He turned at the open window, held out a long forefinger, and
uttered his countervailing faith.

"Even if he is ridiculous, Prothero, a man may still be an
aristocrat.  A man may anyhow be as much of an aristocrat as he can
be."

Prothero reflected.  "No," he said, "it sounds all right, but it's
wrong.  I hate all these advantages and differences and
distinctions.  A man's a man.  What you say sounds well, but it's
the beginning of pretension, of pride--"

He stopped short.

"Better, pride than dishonour," said Benham, "better the pretentious
life than the sordid life.  What else is there?"

"A life isn't necessarily sordid because it isn't pretentious," said
Prothero, his voice betraying a defensive disposition.

"But a life with a large income MUST be sordid unless it makes some
sort of attempt to be fine. . . ."



9


By transitions that were as natural as they were complicated and
untraceable Prothero found his visit to Chexington developing into a
tangle of discussions that all ultimately resolved themselves into
an antagonism of the democratic and the aristocratic idea.  And his
part was, he found, to be the exponent of the democratic idea.  The
next day he came down early, his talk with Benham still running
through his head, and after a turn or so in the garden he was
attracted to the front door by a sound of voices, and found Lady
Marayne had been up still earlier and was dismounting from a large
effective black horse.  This extorted an unwilling admiration from
him.  She greeted him very pleasantly and made a kind of
introduction of her steed.  There had been trouble at a gate, he was
a young horse and fidgeted at gates; the dispute was still bright in
her.  Benham she declared was still in bed.  "Wait till I have a
mount for him."  She reappeared fitfully in the breakfast-room, and
then he was left to Benham until just before lunch.  They read and
afterwards, as the summer day grew hot, they swam in the nude pond.
She joined them in the water, splashing about in a costume of some
elaboration and being very careful not to wet her hair.  Then she
came and sat with them on the seat under the big cedar and talked
with them in a wrap that was pretty rather than prudish and entirely
unmotherly.  And she began a fresh attack upon him by asking him if
he wasn't a Socialist and whether he didn't want to pull down
Chexington and grow potatoes all over the park.

This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist
project and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.

The engagement thus opened was renewed with great energy at lunch.
Sir Godfrey had returned to London and the inmost aspect of his
fellow-creatures, but the party of three was supplemented by a vague
young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring
Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage.  Lady Marayne
insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the
first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would
be bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction.  "And
what good are all these proposals?  If you had the poor dear king
beheaded, you'd only get a Napoleon.  If you divided all the
property up between everybody, you'd have rich and poor again in a
year."

Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his
Socialism that would not involve uncivil contradictions--and nobody
ever contradicted Lady Marayne.

"But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and
injustice in the world?" he protested.

"There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way."

"But still, don't you think-- . . ."

It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these universal controversies
of our time.  The lunch-table and the dinner-table and the general
talk of the house drifted more and more definitely at its own level
in the same direction as the private talk of Prothero and Benham,
towards the antagonism of the privileged few and the many, of the
trained and traditioned against the natural and undisciplined, of
aristocracy against democracy.  At the week-end Sir Godfrey returned
to bring fresh elements.  He said that democracy was unscientific.
"To deny aristocracy is to deny the existence of the fittest.  It is
on the existence of the fittest that progress depends."

"But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?" asked Prothero.

"That is another question," said Benham.

"Exactly," said Sir Godfrey.  "That is another question.  But
speaking with some special knowledge, I should say that on the whole
the people who are on the top of things OUGHT to be on the top of
things.  I agree with Aristotle that there is such a thing as a
natural inferior."

"So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero," said Lady Marayne, "he
thinks that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the
superiors inferior.  It's quite simple. . . ."

It made Prothero none the less indignant with this, that there was
indeed a grain of truth in it.  He hated superiors, he felt for
inferiors.



10


At last came the hour of tipping.  An embarrassed and miserable
Prothero went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.

It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from
his mother. . . .

Lady Marayne felt he had escaped her.  The controversy that should
have split these two young men apart had given them a new interest
in each other.  When afterwards she sounded her son, very
delicately, to see if indeed he was aware of the clumsiness, the
social ignorance and uneasiness, the complete unsuitability of his
friend, she could get no more from him than that exasperating
phrase, "He has ideas!"

What are ideas?  England may yet be ruined by ideas.

He ought never to have gone to Trinity, that monster packet of
everything.  He ought to have gone to some little GOOD college, good
all through.  She ought to have asked some one who KNEW.



11


One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over
Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to
Drayton--they had been talking of Eugenics and the "family"--Benham
was almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord
Breeze.  "Whup there!" said Lord Breeze in a voice deliberately
brutal, and Benham, roused from that abstraction which is partly
fatigue, had to jump aside and stumbled against the parapet as the
gaunt pacer went pounding by.

Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers.  And passed.

"Damnation!" said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very
white.

Then presently.  "Any fool can do that who cares to go to the
trouble."

"That," said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, "that is
the feeling of democracy."

"I walk because I choose to," said Benham.

The thing rankled.

"This equestrianism," he began, "is a matter of time and money--time
even more than money.  I want to read.  I want to deal with ideas. . . .

"Any fool can drive. . . ."

"Exactly," said Prothero.

"As for riding, it means no more than the elaborate study and
cultivation of your horse.  You have to know him.  All horses are
individuals.  A made horse perhaps goes its round like an omnibus,
but for the rest. . . ."

Prothero made a noise of sympathetic assent.

"In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be
equestrian. . . ."

That night some malignant spirit kept Benham awake, and great
American trotters with vast wide-striding feet and long yellow
teeth, uncontrollable, hard-mouthed American trotters, pounded over
his angry soul.

"Prothero," he said in hall next day, "we are going to drive to-
morrow."

Next day, so soon as they had lunched, he led the way towards
Maltby's, in Crosshampton Lane.  Something in his bearing put a
question into Prothero's mind.  "Benham," he asked, "have you ever
driven before?"

"NEVER," said Benham.

"Well?"

"I'm going to now."

Something between pleasure and alarm came into Prothero's eyes.  He
quickened his pace so as to get alongside his friend and scrutinize
his pale determination.  "Why are you doing this?" he asked.

"I want to do it."

"Benham, is it--EQUESTRIAN?"

Benham made no audible reply.  They proceeded resolutely in silence.

An air of expectation prevailed in Maltby's yard.  In the shafts of
a high, bleak-looking vehicle with vast side wheels, a throne-like
vehicle that impressed Billy Prothero as being a gig, a very large
angular black horse was being harnessed.

"This is mine," said Benham compactly.

"This is yours, sir," said an ostler.

"He looks--QUIET."

"You'll find him fresh enough, sir."

Benham made a complicated ascent to the driver's seat and was handed
the reins.  "Come on," he said, and Prothero followed to a less
exalted seat at Benham's side.  They seemed to be at a very great
height indeed.  The horse was then led out into Crosshampton Lane,
faced towards Trinity Street and discharged.  "Check," said Benham,
and touched the steed with his whip.  They started quite well, and
the ostlers went back into the yard, visibly unanxious.  It struck
Prothero that perhaps driving was less difficult than he had
supposed.

They went along Crosshampton Lane, that high-walled gulley, with
dignity, with only a slight suggestion of the inaccuracy that was
presently to become apparent, until they met a little old bearded
don on a bicycle.  Then some misunderstanding arose between Benham
and the horse, and the little bearded don was driven into the narrow
pavement and had to get off hastily.  He made no comment, but his
face became like a gargoyle.  "Sorry," said Benham, and gave his
mind to the corner.  There was some difficulty about whether they
were to turn to the right or the left, but at last Benham, it
seemed, carried his point, and they went along the narrow street,
past the grey splendours of King's, and rather in the middle of the
way.

Prothero considered the beast in front of him, and how proud and
disrespectful a horse in a dogcart can seem to those behind it!
Moreover, unaccustomed as he was to horses, he was struck by the
strong resemblance a bird's-eye view of a horse bears to a fiddle, a
fiddle with devil's ears.

"Of course," said Prothero, "this isn't a trotter."

"I couldn't get a trotter," said Benham.

"I thought I would try this sort of thing before I tried a trotter,"
he added.

And then suddenly came disaster.

There was a butcher's cart on the right, and Benham, mistrusting the
intelligence of his steed, insisted upon an excessive amplitude of
clearance.  He did not reckon with the hand-barrow on his left,
piled up with dirty plates from the lunch of Trinity Hall.  It had
been left there; its custodian was away upon some mysterious errand.
Heaven knows why Trinity Hall exhibited the treasures of its
crockery thus stained and deified in the Cambridge streets.  But it
did--for Benham's and Prothero's undoing.  Prothero saw the great
wheel over which he was poised entangle itself with the little wheel
of the barrow.  "God!" he whispered, and craned, fascinated.  The
little wheel was manifestly intrigued beyond all self-control by the
great wheel; it clung to it, it went before it, heedless of the
barrow, of which it was an inseparable part.  The barrow came about
with an appearance of unwillingness, it locked against the great
wheel; it reared itself towards Prothero and began, smash, smash,
smash, to shed its higher plates.  It was clear that Benham was
grappling with a crisis upon a basis of inadequate experience.  A
number of people shouted haphazard things.  Then, too late, the
barrow had persuaded the little wheel to give up its fancy for the
great wheel, and there was an enormous crash.

"Whoa!" cried Benham.  "Whoa!" but also, unfortunately, he sawed
hard at the horse's mouth.

The animal, being in some perplexity, danced a little in the narrow
street, and then it had come about and it was backing, backing, on
the narrow pavement and towards the plate-glass window of a book and
newspaper shop.  Benham tugged at its mouth much harder than ever.
Prothero saw the window bending under the pressure of the wheel.  A
sense of the profound seriousness of life and of the folly of this
expedition came upon him.  With extreme nimbleness he got down just
as the window burst.  It went with an explosion like a pistol shot,
and then a clatter of falling glass.  People sprang, it seemed, from
nowhere, and jostled about Prothero, so that he became a peripheral
figure in the discussion.  He perceived that a man in a green apron
was holding the horse, and that various people were engaged in
simultaneous conversation with Benham, who with a pale serenity of
face and an awful calm of manner, dealt with each of them in turn.

"I'm sorry," he was saying.  "Somebody ought to have been in charge
of the barrow.  Here are my cards.  I am ready to pay for any
damage. . . .

"The barrow ought not to have been there. . . .

"Yes, I am going on.  Of course I'm going on.  Thank you."

He beckoned to the man who had held the horse and handed him half-a-
crown.  He glanced at Prothero as one might glance at a stranger.
"Check!" he said.  The horse went on gravely.  Benham lifted out his
whip.  He appeared to have clean forgotten Prothero.  Perhaps
presently he would miss him.  He went on past Trinity, past the
ruddy brick of St. John's.  The curve of the street hid him from
Prothero's eyes.

Prothero started in pursuit.  He glimpsed the dog-cart turning into
Bridge Street.  He had an impression that Benham used the whip at
the corner, and that the dog-cart went forward out of sight with a
startled jerk.  Prothero quickened his pace.

But when he got to the fork between the Huntingdon Road and the
Cottenham Road, both roads were clear.

He spent some time in hesitation.  Then he went along the Huntingdon
Road until he came upon a road-mender, and learnt that Benham had
passed that way.  "Going pretty fast ‘e was," said the road-mender,
"and whipping ‘is ‘orse.  Else you might ‘a thought ‘e was a boltin'
with ‘im."  Prothero decided that if Benham came back at all he
would return by way of Cottenham, and it was on the Cottenham Road
that at last he encountered his friend again.

Benham was coming along at that good pace which all experienced
horses when they are fairly turned back towards Cambridge display.
And there was something odd about Benham, as though he had a large
circular halo with a thick rim.  This, it seemed, had replaced his
hat.  He was certainly hatless.  The warm light of the sinking sun
shone upon the horse and upon Benham's erect figure and upon his
face, and gleams of fire kept flashing from his head to this rim,
like the gleam of drawn swords seen from afar.  As he drew nearer
this halo detached itself from him and became a wheel sticking up
behind him.  A large, clumsy-looking bicycle was attached to the
dog-cart behind.  The expression of Benham's golden face was still a
stony expression; he regarded his friend with hard eyes.

"You all right, Benham?" cried Prothero, advancing into the road.

His eye examined the horse.  It looked all right, if anything it was
a trifle subdued; there was a little foam about its mouth, but not
very much.

"Whoa!" said Benham, and the horse stopped.  "Are you coming up,
Prothero?"

Prothero clambered up beside him.  "I was anxious," he said.

"There was no need to be."

"You've broken your whip."

"Yes.  It broke. . . .  GET up!"

They proceeded on their way to Cambridge.

"Something has happened to the wheel," said Prothero, trying to be
at his ease.

"Merely a splinter or so.  And a spoke perhaps."

"And what is this behind?"

Benham made a half-turn of the head.  "It's a motor-bicycle."

Prothero took in details.

"Some of it is missing."

"No, the front wheel is under the seat."

"Oh!"

"Did you find it?" Prothero asked, after an interval.

"You mean?"

"He ran into a motor-car--as I was passing.  I was perhaps a little
to blame.  He asked me to bring his machine to Cambridge.  He went
on in the car. . . .  It is all perfectly simple."

Prothero glanced at the splinters in the wheel with a renewed
interest.

"Did your wheel get into it?" he asked.  Benham affected not to
hear.  He was evidently in no mood for story-telling.

"Why did you get down, Prothero?" he asked abruptly, with the note
of suppressed anger thickening his voice.

Prothero became vividly red.  "I don't know," he said, after an
interval.

"I DO," said Benham, and they went on in a rich and active silence
to Cambridge, and the bicycle repair shop in Bridge Street, and
Trinity College.  At the gate of Trinity Benham stopped, and
conveyed rather by acts than words that Prothero was to descend.  He
got down meekly enough, although he felt that the return to Maltby's
yard might have many points of interest.  But the spirit had gone
out of him.



12


For three days the two friends avoided each other, and then Prothero
went to Benham's room.  Benham was smoking cigarettes--Lady Marayne,
in the first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited his pipe--
and reading Webb's INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY.  "Hello!" he said coldly,
scarcely looking up, and continued to read that absorbing work.

"I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that damned dog-cart,"
said Prothero, without any preface.

"It didn't matter in the least," said Benham distantly.

"Oh!  ROT," said Prothero.  "I behaved like a coward."

Benham shut his book.

"Benham," said Prothero.  "You are right about aristocracy, and I am
wrong.  I've been thinking about it night and day."

Benham betrayed no emotion.  But his tone changed.  "Billy," he
said, "there are cigarettes and whiskey in the corner.  Don't make a
fuss about a trifle."

"No whiskey," said Billy, and lit a cigarette.  "And it isn't a
trifle."

He came to Benham's hearthrug.  "That business," he said, "has
changed all my views.  No--don't say something polite!  I see that
if one hasn't the habit of pride one is bound to get off a dogcart
when it seems likely to smash.  You have the habit of pride, and I
haven't.  So far as the habit of pride goes, I come over to the
theory of aristocracy."

Benham said nothing, but he put down Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and
reached out for and got and lit a cigarette.

"I give up ‘Go as you please.'  I give up the natural man.  I admit
training.  I perceive I am lax and flabby, unguarded, I funk too
much, I eat too much, and I drink too much.  And, yet, what I have
always liked in you, Benham, is just this--that you don't."

"I do," said Benham.

"Do what?"

"Funk."

"Benham, I believe that naturally you funk as much as I do.  You're
more a thing of nerves than I am, far more.  But you keep yourself
up to the mark, and I have let myself get flabby.  You're so right.
You're so utterly right.  These last nights I've confessed it--
aloud.  I had an inkling of it--after that rag.  But now it's as
clear as daylight.  I don't know if you mean to go on with me, after
what's happened, but anyhow I want you to know, whether you end our
friendship or not "

"Billy, don't be an old ass," said Benham.

Both young men paused for a moment.  They made no demonstrations.
But the strain was at an end between them.

"I've thought it all out," Billy went on with a sudden buoyancy.
"We two are both of the same kind of men.  Only you see, Benham, you
have a natural pride and I haven't.  You have pride.  But we are
both intellectuals.  We both belong to what the Russians call the
Intelligentsia.  We have ideas, we have imagination, that is our
strength.  And that is our weakness.  That makes us moral light-
weights.  We are flimsy and uncertain people.  All intellectuals are
flimsy and uncertain people.  It's not only that they are critical
and fastidious; they are weak-handed.  They look about them; their
attention wanders.  Unless they have got a habit of controlling
themselves and forcing themselves and holding themselves together."

"The habit of pride."

"Yes.  And then--then we are lords of the world."

"All this, Billy," said Benham, "I steadfastly believe."

"I've seen it all now," said Prothero.  "Lord! how clearly I see it!
The intellectual is either a prince or he is a Greek slave in a
Roman household.  He's got to hold his chin up or else he becomes--
even as these dons we see about us--a thing that talks appointments,
a toady, a port-wine bibber, a mass of detail, a conscious maker of
neat sayings, a growing belly under a dwindling brain.  Their
gladness is drink or gratified vanity or gratified malice, their
sorrow is indigestion or--old maid's melancholy.  They are the lords
of the world who will not take the sceptre. . . .  And what I want
to say to you, Benham, more than anything else is, YOU go on--YOU
make yourself equestrian.  You drive your horse against Breeze's,
and go through the fire and swim in the ice-cold water and climb the
precipice and drink little and sleep hard.  And--I wish I could do
so too."

"But why not?"

"Because I can't.  Now I admit I've got shame in my heart and pride
in my head, and I'm strung up.  I might do something--this
afternoon.  But it won't last.  YOU--you have pride in your bones.
My pride will vanish at a laugh.  My honour will go at a laugh.  I'm
just exalted by a crisis.  That's all.  I'm an animal of
intelligence.  Soul and pride are weak in me.  My mouth waters, my
cheek brightens, at the sight of good things.  And I've got a
lickerish tail, Benham.  You don't know.  You don't begin to
imagine.  I'm secretive.  But I quiver with hot and stirring
desires.  And I'm indolent--dirty indolent.  Benham, there are days
when I splash my bath about without getting into it.  There are days
when I turn back from a walk because there's a cow in the field. . . .
But, I spare you the viler details. . . .  And it's that makes me
hate fine people and try so earnestly to persuade myself that any
man is as good as any man, if not a trifle better.  Because I know
it isn't so. . . ."

"Billy," said Benham, "you've the boldest mind that ever I met."

Prothero's face lit with satisfaction.  Then his countenance fell
again.  "I know I'm better there," he said, "and yet, see how I let
in a whole system of lies to cover my secret humiliations.  There,
at least, I will cling to pride.  I will at least THINK free and
clean and high.  But you can climb higher than I can.  You've got
the grit to try and LIVE high.  There you are, Benham."

Benham stuck one leg over the arm of his chair.  "Billy," he said,
"come and be--equestrian and stop this nonsense."

"No."

"Damn it--you DIVE!"

"You'd go in before me if a woman was drowning."

"Nonsense.  I'm going to ride.  Come and ride too.  You've a
cleverer way with animals than I have.  Why! that horse I was
driving the other day would have gone better alone.  I didn't drive
it.  I just fussed it.  I interfered.  If I ride for ever, I shall
never have decent hands, I shall always hang on my horse's mouth at
a gallop, I shall never be sure at a jump.  But at any rate I shall
get hard.  Come and get hard too."

"You can," said Billy, "you can.  But not I!  Heavens, the TROUBLE
of it!  The riding-school!  The getting up early!  No!--for me the
Trumpington Road on foot in the afternoon.  Four miles an hour and
panting.  And my fellowship and the combination-room port.  And,
besides, Benham, there's the expense.  I can't afford the equestrian
order."

"It's not so great."

"Not so great!  I don't mean the essential expense.  But--the
incidentals.  I don't know whether any one can realize how a poor
man is hampered by the dread of minor catastrophes.  It isn't so
much that he is afraid of breaking his neck, Benham, as that he is
afraid of breaking something he will have to pay for.  For instance--.
Benham! how much did your little expedition the other day--?"

He stopped short and regarded his friend with round eyes and raised
eyebrows.

A reluctant grin overspread Benham's face.  He was beginning to see
the humour of the affair.

"The claim for the motor-bicycle isn't sent in yet.  The repair of
the mudguards of the car is in dispute.  Trinity Hall's crockery,
the plate-glass window, the whip-lash and wheel and so forth, the
hire of the horse and trap, sundry gratuities. . . .  I doubt if the
total will come very much under fifty pounds.  And I seem to have
lost a hat somewhere."

Billy regarded his toes and cleared his throat.

"Depending as I do on a widowed mother in Brixton for all the
expenditure that isn't covered by my pot-hunting--"

"Of course," said Benham, "it wasn't a fair sample afternoon."

"Still--"

"There's footer," said Benham, "we might both play footer."

"Or boxing."

"And, anyhow, you must come with me when I drive again.  I'm going
to start a trotter."

"If I miss another drive may I be--lost for ever," said Billy, with
the utmost sincerity.  "Never more will I get down, Benham, wherever
you may take me.  Short of muffing my fellowship I'm with you
always. . . .  Will it be an American trotter?"

"It will be the rawest, gauntest, ungainliest brute that ever scared
the motor-bicycles on the Northampton Road.  It will have the legs
and stride of an ostrich.  It will throw its feet out like dealing
cards.  It will lift its head and look the sun in the eye like a
vulture.  It will have teeth like the English spinster in a French
comic paper. . . .  And we will fly. . . ."

"I shall enjoy it very much," said Prothero in a small voice after
an interval for reflection.  "I wonder where we shall fly.  It will
do us both a lot of good.  And I shall insure my life for a small
amount in my mother's interest. . . .  Benham, I think I will, after
all, take a whiskey. . . .  Life is short. . . ."

He did so and Benham strolled to the window and stood looking out
upon the great court.

"We might do something this afternoon," said Benham.

"Splendid idea," reflected Billy over his whiskey.  "Living hard and
thinking hard.  A sort of Intelligentsia that is BLOODED. . . .  I
shall, of course, come as far as I can with you."



13


In one of the bureau drawers that White in this capacity of literary
executor was examining, there were two documents that carried back
right to these early days.  They were both products of this long
wide undergraduate argumentation that had played so large a part in
the making of Benham.  One recorded the phase of maximum opposition,
and one was the outcome of the concluding approach of the
antagonists.  They were debating club essays.  One had been read to
a club in Pembroke, a club called the ENQUIRERS, of which White also
had been a member, and as he turned it over he found the
circumstances of its reading coming back to his memory.  He had been
present, and Carnac's share in the discussion with his shrill voice
and stumpy gestures would alone have sufficed to have made it a
memorable occasion.  The later one had been read to the daughter
club of the ENQUIRERS, the SOCIAL ENQUIRERS, in the year after White
had gone down, and it was new to him.

Both these papers were folded flat and neatly docketed; they were
rather yellow and a little dog-eared, and with the outer sheet
pencilled over with puzzling or illegible scribblings, Benham's
memoranda for his reply.  White took the earlier essay in his hand.
At the head of the first page was written in large letters, "Go
slowly, speak to the man at the back."  It brought up memories of
his own experiences, of rows of gaslit faces, and of a friendly
helpful voice that said, "Speak up?"

Of course this was what happened to every intelligent contemporary,
this encounter with ideas, this restatement and ventilation of the
old truths and the old heresies.  Only in this way does a man make a
view his own, only so does he incorporate it.  These are our real
turning points.  The significant, the essential moments in the life
of any one worth consideration are surely these moments when for the
first time he faces towards certain broad ideas and certain broad
facts.  Life nowadays consists of adventures among generalizations.
In class-rooms after the lecture, in studies in the small hours,
among books or during solitary walks, the drama of the modern career
begins.  Suddenly a man sees his line, his intention.  Yet though we
are all of us writing long novels--White's world was the literary
world, and that is how it looked to him--which profess to set out
the lives of men, this part of the journey, this crucial passage
among the Sphinxes, is still done--when it is done at all--slightly,
evasively.  Why?

White fell back on his professionalism.  "It does not make a book.
It makes a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation."

But even as White said this to himself he knew it was wrong, and it
slid out of his thoughts again.  Was not this objection to the play
of ideas merely the expression of that conservative instinct which
fights for every old convention?  The traditional novel is a love
story and takes ideas for granted, it professes a hero but presents
a heroine.  And to begin with at least, novels were written for the
reading of heroines.  Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon
the contents of a man's head.  That is just the stuffing of the
doll.  Eyes and heart are her game.  And so there is never any more
sphinx in the story than a lady may impersonate.  And as inevitably
the heroine meets a man.  In his own first success, White reflected,
the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages, met a very pleasant
young woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket; the second opened
at once with a bicycle accident that brought two young people
together so that they were never afterwards disentangled; the third,
failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to be
rearranged.  The next--

White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before
him.



14


The first of Benham's early essays was written in an almost boyish
hand, it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to
definitions and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part
to part.  It was called TRUE DEMOCRACY.  Manifestly it was written
before the incident of the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had
been done after Prothero's visit to Chexington.  White could feel
that now inaudible interlocutor.  And there were even traces of Sir
Godfrey Marayne's assertion that democracy was contrary to biology.
From the outset it was clear that whatever else it meant, True
Democracy, following the analogy of True Politeness, True Courage,
True Honesty and True Marriage, did not mean democracy at all.
Benham was, in fact, taking Prothero's word, and trying to impose
upon it his own solidifying and crystallizing opinion of life.

They were not as yet very large or well-formed crystals.  The
proposition he struggled to develop was this, that True Democracy
did not mean an equal share in the government, it meant an equal
opportunity to share in the government.  Men were by nature and in
the most various ways unequal.  True Democracy aimed only at the
removal of artificial inequalities. . . .

It was on the truth of this statement, that men were by nature
unequal, that the debate had turned.  Prothero was passionately
against the idea at that time.  It was, he felt, separating himself
from Benham more and more.  He spoke with a personal bitterness.
And he found his chief ally in a rigorous and voluble Frenchman
named Carnac, an aggressive Roman Catholic, who opened his speech by
saying that the first aristocrat was the devil, and shocked Prothero
by claiming him as probably the only other sound Christian in the
room.  Several biologists were present, and one tall, fair youth
with a wearisome forefinger tried to pin Carnac with questions.

"But you must admit some men are taller than others?"

"Then the others are broader."

"Some are smaller altogether."

"Nimbler--it's notorious."

"Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others."

"Then they have better nightmares.  How can you tell?"

The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on
over his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.

A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the
dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of
men, but their relative inequalities.  Nobody was denying the equal
importance of everybody.  But there was a virtue of this man and a
virtue of that.  Nobody could dispute the equal importance of every
wheel in a machine, of every atom in the universe.  Prothero and
Carnac were angry because they thought the denial of absolute
equality was a denial of equal importance.  That was not so.  Every
man mattered in his place.  But politically, or economically, or
intellectually that might be a lowly place. . . .

At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence,
and a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.

He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not
in the least mean what he was saying. . . .


15


The second paper was an altogether maturer and more characteristic
production.  It was no longer necessary to answer Prothero.
Prothero had been incorporated.  And Benham had fairly got away with
his great idea.  It was evident to White that this paper had been
worked over on several occasions since its first composition and
that Benham had intended to make it a part of his book.  There were
corrections in pencil and corrections in a different shade of ink,
and there was an unfinished new peroration, that was clearly the
latest addition of all.  Yet its substance had been there always.
It gave the youth just grown to manhood, but anyhow fully grown.  It
presented the far-dreaming intellectualist shaped.

Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY.  But he was far away by now from
political aristocracy.

This time he had not begun with definitions and generalizations, but
with a curiously subjective appeal.  He had not pretended to be
theorizing at large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his
own life and as manifestly he was thinking of life as a matter of
difficulty and unexpected thwartings.

"We see life," he wrote, "not only life in the world outside us, but
life in our own selves, as an immense choice of possibilities;
indeed, for us in particular who have come up here, who are not
under any urgent necessity to take this line or that, life is
apparently pure choice.  It is quite easy to think we are all going
to choose the pattern of life we like best and work it out in our
own way. . . .  And, meanwhile, there is no great hurry. . . .

"I want to begin by saying that choice isn't so easy and so
necessary as it seems.  We think we are going to choose presently,
and in the end we may never choose at all.  Choice needs perhaps
more energy than we think.  The great multitude of older people we
can observe in the world outside there, haven't chosen either in the
matter of the world outside, where they shall go, what they shall
do, what part they shall play, or in the matter of the world within,
what they will be and what they are determined they will never be.
They are still in much the same state of suspended choice as we seem
to be in, but in the meanwhile THINGS HAPPEN TO THEM.  And things
are happening to us, things will happen to us, while we still
suppose ourselves in the wings waiting to be consulted about the
casting of the piece. . . .

"Nevertheless this immense appearance of choice which we get in the
undergraduate community here, is not altogether illusion; it is more
reality than illusion even if it has not the stable and complete
reality it appears to have.  And it is more a reality for us than it
was for our fathers, and much more a reality now than it was a few
centuries ago.  The world is more confused and multitudinous than
ever it was, the practicable world far wider, and ourselves far less
under the pressure of inflexible moulding forces and inevitable
necessities than any preceding generations.  I want to put very
clearly how I see the new world, the present world, the world of
novel choice to which our youth and inexperience faces, and I want
to define to you a certain selection of choices which I am going to
call aristocratic, and to which it is our manifest duty and destiny
as the elect and favoured sons of our race to direct ourselves.

"It isn't any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative
whether we will be, how shall I put it?--the bridegrooms of pleasure
or the bridegrooms of duty.  It is infinitely vaster and more subtly
moral than that.  There are a thousand good lives possible, of which
we may have one, lives which are soundly good, or a thousand bad
lives, if you like, lives which are thoroughly bad--that's the old
and perpetual choice, that has always been--but what is more evident
to me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are
nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral
definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call
them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives,
more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us,
a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness
so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to
either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.
Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill
the world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole
civilization, seems to me to re-echo this planlessness, this
indeterminate confusion of purpose.  Plain issues are harder and
harder to find, it is as if they had disappeared.  Simple living is
the countryman come to town.  We are deafened and jostled and
perplexed.  There are so many things afoot that we get nothing. . . .

"That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather
ourselves together much more than we think.  We have to clench
ourselves upon a chosen end.  We have to gather ourselves together
out of the swill of this brimming world.

"Or--we are lost. . . ."

("Swill of this brimming world," said White.  "Some of this sounds
uncommonly like Prothero."  He mused for a moment and then resumed
his reading.)

"That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an
attack upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an
attack that I expressed ill and failed to drive home.  That is what
I have come down now to do my best to make plainer.  This age of
confusion is Democracy; it is all that Democracy can ever give us.
Democracy, if it means anything, means the rule of the planless man,
the rule of the unkempt mind.  It means as a necessary consequence
this vast boiling up of collectively meaningless things.

"What is the quality of the common man, I mean of the man that is
common to all of us, the man who is the Standard for such men as
Carnac, the man who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat?
He is the creature of a few fundamental impulses.  He begins in
blind imitation of the life about him.  He lusts and takes a wife,
he hungers and tills a field or toils in some other way to earn a
living, a mere aimless living, he fears and so he does not wander,
he is jealous and stays by his wife and his job, is fiercely yet
often stupidly and injuriously defensive of his children and his
possessions, and so until he wearies.  Then he dies and needs a
cemetery.  He needs a cemetery because he is so afraid of
dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants a
place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to
the All that made him.  Our chief impression of long ages of mankind
comes from its cemeteries.  And this is the life of man, as the
common man conceives and lives it.  Beyond that he does not go, he
never comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens
about him; his passion for security, his gregarious self-
defensiveness, makes him accumulate upon himself until he congests
in cities that have no sense of citizenship and states that have no
structure; the clumsy, inconsecutive lying and chatter of his
newspapers, his hoardings and music-halls gives the measure of his
congested intelligences, the confusion of ugly, half empty churches
and chapels and meeting-halls gauge the intensity of his congested
souls, the tricks and slow blundering dishonesties of Diet and
Congress and Parliament are his statecraft and his wisdom. . . .

"I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead for pride.  I say
here now to you and to High Heaven that THIS LIFE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH
FOR ME.  I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a
better life possible now.  I know it.  A better individual life and
a better public life.  If I had no other assurances, if I were blind
to the glorious intimations of art, to the perpetually widening
promise of science, to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form
and colour and the inaccessible mockery of the stars, I should still
know this from the insurgent spirit within me. . . .

"Now this better life is what I mean when I talk of Aristocracy.
This idea of a life breaking away from the common life to something
better, is the consuming idea in my mind.

"Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life of the farm and
the shop, the inn and the market, the street and the crowd, is
something that is not of the common life.  Its way of thinking is
Science, its dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind.
It is not the common thing.  But also it is not an unnatural thing.
It is not as common as a rat, but it is no less natural than a
panther.

"For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato
grower, it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek
explanations and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a
hut, or show kindness to a child.  It is a folly I will not even
dispute about, that man's only natural implement is the spade.
Imagination, pride, exalted desire are just as much Man, as are
hunger and thirst and sexual curiosities and the panic dread of
unknown things. . . .

"Now you see better what I mean about choice.  Now you see what I am
driving at.  We have to choose each one for himself and also each
one for the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common
life, whether we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings,
children of luck, steering our artful courses for mean success and
tawdry honours, or whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what
it amounts to, each one in the measure of his personal quality an
aristocrat, refusing to be restrained by fear, refusing to be
restrained by pain, resolved to know and understand up to the hilt
of his understanding, resolved to sacrifice all the common stuff of
his life to the perfection of his peculiar gift, a purged man, a
trained, selected, artificial man, not simply free, but lordly free,
filled and sustained by pride.  Whether you or I make that choice
and whether you or I succeed in realizing ourselves, though a great
matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small matter to the world.  But
the great matter is this, that THE CHOICE IS BEING MADE, that it
will continue to be made, and that all around us, so that it can
never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human
possibility. . . ."

(White could also see his dead friend's face with its enthusiastic
paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the
eyes.  On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE.
Temporary escape.  And thus would his hand have clutched the
reading-desk; thus would his long fingers have rustled these dry
papers.)

"Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him. . . .

"The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for
the new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are
all unprepared. . . .

"It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin
to realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to
mankind.  Every condition that once justified the rules and
imperatives, the manners and customs, the sentiments, the morality,
the laws and limitations which make up the common life, has been or
is being destroyed. . . .  Two or three hundred years more and all
that life will be as much a thing past and done with as the life
that was lived in the age of unpolished stone. . . .

"Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going out upon the
greatest adventure that ever was in space or time, he is doing it
now, he is doing it in us as I stand here and read to you."



CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN



1


The oldest novel in the world at any rate, White reflected, was a
story with a hero and no love interest worth talking about.  It was
the story of Tobias and how he came out from the shelters of his
youth into this magic and intricate world.  Its heroine was
incidental, part of the spoil, a seven times relict. . . .

White had not read the book of Tobit for many years, and what he was
really thinking of was not that ancient story at all, but
Botticelli's picture, that picture of the sunlit morning of life.
When you say "Tobias" that is what most intelligent people will
recall.  Perhaps you will remember how gaily and confidently the
young man strides along with the armoured angel by his side.
Absurdly enough, Benham and his dream of high aristocracy reminded
White of that. . . .

"We have all been Tobias in our time," said White.

If White had been writing this chapter he would have in all
probability called it THE TOBIAS STAGE, forgetful that there was no
Tobit behind Benham and an entirely different Sara in front of him.



2


From Cambridge Benham came to London.  For the first time he was to
live in London.  Never before had he been in London for more than a
few days at a time.  But now, guided by his mother's advice, he was
to have a flat in Finacue street, just round the corner from
Desborough Street, a flat very completely and delightfully furnished
under her supervision.  It had an admirable study, in which she had
arranged not only his books, but a number of others in beautiful old
leather bindings that it had amused her extremely to buy; it had a
splendid bureau and business-like letter-filing cabinets, a neat
little drawing-room and a dining-room, well-placed abundant electric
lights, and a man called Merkle whom she had selected very carefully
and who she felt would not only see to Benham's comfort but keep
him, if necessary, up to the mark.

This man Merkle seemed quite unaware that humanity "here and now"--
even as he was engaged in meticulously putting out Benham's clothes--
was ‘‘leaving its ancestral shelters and going out upon the
greatest adventure that ever was in space or time."  If he had been
told as much by Benham he would probably have said, "Indeed, sir,"
and proceeded accurately with his duties.  And if Benham's voice had
seemed to call for any additional remark, he would probably have
added, "It's ‘igh time, sir, something of the sort was done.  Will
you have the white wesket as before, sir, or a fresh one this
evening? . . .  Unless it's a very special occasion, sir. . . .
Exactly, sir.  THANK you, sir."

And when her son was properly installed in his apartments Lady
Marayne came round one morning with a large experienced-looking
portfolio and rendered an account of her stewardship of his estate
that was already some months overdue.  It was all very confused and
confusing, and there were inexplicable incidents, a heavy overdraft
at the bank for example, but this was Sir Godfrey's fault, she
explained.  "He never would help me with any of this business," she
said.  "I've had to add sometimes for HOURS.  But, of course, you
are a man, and when you've looked through it all, I know you'll
understand."

He did look through it enough to see that it was undesirable that he
should understand too explicitly, and, anyhow, he was manifestly
very well off indeed, and the circumstances of the case, even as he
understood them, would have made any businesslike book-keeping
ungracious.  The bankers submitted the corroborating account of
securities, and he found himself possessed of his unconditional six
thousand a year, with, as she put it, "the world at his feet."  On
the whole it seemed more wonderful to him now than when he had first
heard of it.  He kissed her and thanked her, and left the portfolio
open for Merkle's entirely honest and respectful but very exact
inspection, and walked back with her to Desborough Street, and all
the while he was craving to ask the one tremendous question he knew
he would never ask, which was just how exactly this beneficent Nolan
came in. . . .

Once or twice in the small hours, and on a number of other
occasions, this unspeakable riddle assumed a portentous predominance
in his mind.  He was forced back upon his inner consciousness for
its consideration.  He could discuss it with nobody else, because
that would have been discussing his mother.

Probably most young men who find themselves with riches at large in
the world have some such perplexity as this mixed in with the gift.
Such men as the Cecils perhaps not, because they are in the order of
things, the rich young Jews perhaps not, because acquisition is
their principle, but for most other intelligent inheritors there
must be this twinge of conscientious doubt.  "Why particularly am I
picked out for so tremendous an advantage?"  If the riddle is not
Nolan, then it is rent, or it is the social mischief of the
business, or the particular speculative COUP that established their
fortune.

"PECUNIA NON OLET," Benham wrote, "and it is just as well.  Or the
west-ends of the world would reek with deodorizers.  Restitution is
inconceivable; how and to whom?  And in the meanwhile here we are
lifted up by our advantage to a fantastic appearance of opportunity.
Whether the world looks to us or not to do tremendous things, it
ought to look to us.  And above all we ought to look to ourselves.
RICHESSE OBLIGE."



3


It is not to be supposed that Benham came to town only with a
general theory of aristocracy.  He had made plans for a career.
Indeed, he had plans for several careers.  None of them when brought
into contrast with the great spectacle of London retained all the
attractiveness that had saturated them at their inception.

They were all more or less political careers.  Whatever a democratic
man may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is
a public man.  He is made and protected in what he is by laws and
the state and his honour goes out to the state.  The aristocrat has
no right to be a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable
nonentity, or any such purely personal things.  Responsibility for
the aim and ordering of the world is demanded from him as
imperatively as courage.

Benham's deliberate assumption of the equestrian role brought him
into contact with a new set of acquaintances, conscious of political
destinies.  They were amiable, hard young men, almost affectedly
unaffected; they breakfasted before dawn to get in a day's hunting,
and they saw to it that Benham's manifest determination not to
discredit himself did not lead to his breaking his neck.  Their
bodies were beautifully tempered, and their minds were as flabby as
Prothero's body.  Among them were such men as Lord Breeze and Peter
Westerton, and that current set of Corinthians who supposed
themselves to be resuscitating the Young England movement and Tory
Democracy.  Poor movements which indeed have never so much lived as
suffered chronic resuscitation.  These were days when Tariff Reform
was only an inglorious possibility for the Tory Party, and Young
England had yet to demonstrate its mental quality in an anti-
socialist campaign.  Seen from the perspectives of Cambridge and
Chexington, the Tory party was still a credible basis for the
adventure of a young man with an aristocratic theory in his mind.

These were the days when the strain and extremity of a dangerous
colonial war were fresh in people's minds, when the quality of the
public consciousness was braced up by its recent response to
unanticipated demands.  The conflict of stupidities that had caused
the war was overlaid and forgotten by a hundred thousand devotions,
by countless heroic deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely
conceived and broadly handled.  The nation had displayed a belated
regard for its honour and a sustained passion for great unities.  It
was still possible for Benham to regard the empire as a splendid
opportunity, and London as the conceivable heart of the world.  He
could think of Parliament as a career, and of a mingling of
aristocratic socialism based on universal service with a civilizing
imperialism as a purpose. . . .

But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that. . . .

Already when Benham came to London he had begun to dream of
possibilities that went beyond the accidental states and empires of
to-day.  Prothero's mind, replete with historical detail, could find
nothing but absurdity in the alliances and dynasties and loyalties
of our time.  "Patched up things, Benham, temporary, pretentious.
All very well for the undignified man, the democratic man, to take
shelter under, all very well for the humourist to grin and bear, all
very well for the crowd and the quack, but not for the aristocrat--
No!--his mind cuts like steel and burns like fire.  Lousy sheds they
are, plastered hoardings . . . and such a damned nuisance too!  For
any one who wants to do honourable things!  With their wars and
their diplomacies, their tariffs and their encroachments; all their
humbugging struggles, their bloody and monstrous struggles, that
finally work out to no end at all. . . .  If you are going for the
handsome thing in life then the world has to be a united world,
Benham, as a matter of course.  That was settled when the railways
and the telegraph came.  Telephones, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes
insist on it.  We've got to mediatise all this stuff, all these
little crowns and boundaries and creeds, and so on, that stand in
the way.  Just as Italy had to be united in spite of all the rotten
little dukes and princes and republics, just as Germany had to be
united in spite of its scores of kingdoms and duchies and liberties,
so now the world.  Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and
politicians and court people and--douaniers; they may suit the loan-
mongers and the armaments shareholders, they may even be more
comfortable for the middle-aged, but what, except as an
inconvenience, does that matter to you or me?

Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires.  There
was always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.

"We've got to sweep them away, Benham," he said, with a wide gesture
of his arm.  "We've got to sweep them all away."

Prothero helped himself to some more whiskey, and spoke hastily,
because he was afraid some one else might begin.  He was never safe
from interruption in his own room.  The other young men present
sucked at their pipes and regarded him doubtfully.  They were never
quite certain whether Prothero was a prophet or a fool.  They could
not understand a mixed type, and he was so manifestly both.

"The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the
world-state ready.  For that we have to prepare an aristocracy--"

"Your world-state will be aristocratic?" some one interpolated.

"Of course it will be aristocratic.  How can uninformed men think
all round the globe?  Democracy dies five miles from the parish
pump.  It will be an aristocratic republic of all the capable men in
the world. . . ."

"Of course," he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey,
"it's a big undertaking.  It's an affair of centuries. . . ."

And then, as a further afterthought: "All the more reason for
getting to work at it. . . ."

In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the
tobacco smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent--and Part
Two in the Tripos a thing relatively remote.  He would talk until
the dimly-lit room about him became impalpable, and the young men
squatting about it in elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses
of cities that are still to be, bridges in wild places, deserts
tamed and oceans conquered, mankind no longer wasted by bickerings,
going forward to the conquest of the stars. . . .

An aristocratic world-state; this political dream had already taken
hold of Benham's imagination when he came to town.  But it was a
dream, something that had never existed, something that indeed may
never materialize, and such dreams, though they are vivid enough in
a study at night, fade and vanish at the rustle of a daily newspaper
or the sound of a passing band.  To come back again. . . .  So it
was with Benham.  Sometimes he was set clearly towards this world-
state that Prothero had talked into possibility.  Sometimes he was
simply abreast of the patriotic and socially constructive British
Imperialism of Breeze and Westerton.  And there were moods when the
two things were confused in his mind, and the glamour of world
dominion rested wonderfully on the slack and straggling British
Empire of Edward the Seventh--and Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr.
Chamberlain.  He did go on for a time honestly entertaining both
these projects in his mind, each at its different level, the greater
impalpable one and the lesser concrete one within it.  In some
unimaginable way he could suppose that the one by some miracle of
ennoblement--and neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German,
the American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater
part of mankind from the problem--might become the other. . . .

All of which is recorded here, without excess of comment, as it
happened, and as, in a mood of astonished reminiscences, he came
finally to perceive it, and set it down for White's meditative
perusal.



4


But to the enthusiasm of the young, dreams have something of the
substance of reality and realities, something of the magic of
dreams.  The London to which Benham came from Cambridge and the
disquisitions of Prothero was not the London of a mature and
disillusioned vision.  It was London seen magnified and distorted
through the young man's crystalline intentions.  It had for him a
quality of multitudinous, unquenchable activity.  Himself filled
with an immense appetite for life, he was unable to conceive of
London as fatigued.  He could not suspect these statesmen he now
began to meet and watch, of jaded wills and petty spites, he
imagined that all the important and influential persons in this
large world of affairs were as frank in their private lives and as
unembarrassed in their financial relationships as his untainted
self.  And he had still to reckon with stupidity.  He believed in
the statecraft of leader-writers and the sincerity of political
programmes.  And so regarded, what an avenue to Empire was
Whitehall!  How momentous was the sunrise in St. James's Park, and
how significant the clustering knot of listeners and speakers
beneath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to the windy sky!

For a time Benham was in love with the idea of London.  He got maps
of London and books about London.  He made plans to explore its
various regions.  He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious
picturesqueness of its garden suburbs to the factories of Croydon,
from the clerk-villadoms of Ealing to the inky streams of Bow.  In
those days there were passenger steamboats that would take one from
the meadows of Hampton Court past the whole spectacle of London out
to the shipping at Greenwich and the towed liners, the incessant
tugs, the heaving portals of the sea. . . .  His time was far too
occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these expeditions he had
planned, but he had many walks that bristled with impressions.
Northward and southward, eastward and westward a dreaming young man
could wander into a wilderness of population, polite or sombre,
poor, rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all
urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the drama of the
coming years.  He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is
injected and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily
workers, he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering
excitements of the late hours.  And he went out southward and
eastward into gaunt regions of reeking toil.  As yet he knew nothing
of the realities of industrialism.  He saw only the beauty of the
great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets,
and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that
burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of
strange and slovenly streets. . . .

And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon
which he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was
free to play whatever part he could.  This narrow turbid tidal river
by which he walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the
grey-blue clouds towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia,
which still seemed in those days so largely the Englishman's Asia.
And when you turned about at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the
round world was so upon you that you faced not merely Westminster,
but the icy Atlantic and America, which one could yet fancy was a
land of Englishmen--Englishmen a little estranged.  At any rate they
assimilated, they kept the tongue.  The shipping in the lower
reaches below the Tower there carried the flags of every country
under the sky. . . .  As he went along the riverside he met a group
of dusky students, Chinese or Japanese.  Cambridge had abounded in
Indians; and beneath that tall clock tower at Westminster it seemed
as though the world might centre.  The background of the
Englishman's world reached indeed to either pole, it went about the
earth, his background it was--for all that he was capable of doing.
All this had awaited him. . . .

Is it any wonder if a young man with an excitable imagination came
at times to the pitch of audible threats?  If the extreme indulgence
of his opportunity and his sense of ability and vigour lifted his
vanity at moments to the kingly pitch?  If he ejaculated and made a
gesture or so as he went along the Embankment?



5


In the disquisition upon choice that opened Benham's paper on
ARISTOCRACY, he showed himself momentarily wiser than his day-
dreams.  For in these day-dreams he did seem to himself to be
choosing among unlimited possibilities.  Yet while he dreamt other
influences were directing his movements.  There were for instance
his mother, Lady Marayne, who saw a very different London from what
he did, and his mother Dame Nature, who cannot see London at all.
She was busy in his blood as she is busy in the blood of most
healthy young men; common experience must fill the gaps for us; and
patiently and thoroughly she was preparing for the entrance of that
heroine, whom not the most self-centred of heroes can altogether
avoid. . . .

And then there was the power of every day.  Benham imagined himself
at large on his liberating steed of property while indeed he was
mounted on the made horse of Civilization; while he was speculating
whither he should go, he was already starting out upon the round.
One hesitates upon the magnificent plan and devotion of one's
lifetime and meanwhile there is usage, there are engagements.  Every
morning came Merkle, the embodiment of the established routine, the
herald of all that the world expected and required Benham to be and
do.  Usually he awakened Benham with the opening of his door and the
soft tinkle of the curtain rings as he let in the morning light.  He
moved softly about the room, gathering up and removing the crumpled
hulls of yesterday; that done he reappeared at the bedside with a
cup of admirable tea and one thin slice of bread-and-butter,
reported on the day's weather, stood deferential for instructions.
"You will be going out for lunch, sir.  Very good, sir.  White slips
of course, sir.  You will go down into the country in the afternoon?
Will that be the serge suit, sir, or the brown?"

These matters settled, the new aristocrat could yawn and stretch
like any aristocrat under the old dispensation, and then as the
sound of running water from the bathroom ceased, stick his toes out
of bed.

The day was tremendously indicated.  World-states and aristocracies
of steel and fire, things that were as real as coal-scuttles in
Billy's rooms away there at Cambridge, were now remoter than Sirius.

He was expected to shave, expected to bath, expected to go in to the
bright warmth and white linen and silver and china of his breakfast-
table.  And there he found letters and invitations, loaded with
expectation.  And beyond the coffee-pot, neatly folded, lay the
TIMES, and the DAILY NEWS and the TELEGRAPH all with an air of
requiring his attention.  There had been more fighting in Thibet and
Mr. Ritchie had made a Free Trade speech at Croydon.  The Japanese
had torpedoed another Russian ironclad and a British cruiser was
ashore in the East Indies.  A man had been found murdered in an
empty house in Hoxton and the King had had a conversation with
General Booth.  Tadpole was in for North Winchelsea, beating Taper
by nine votes, and there had been a new cut in the Atlantic
passenger rates.  He was expected to be interested and excited by
these things.

Presently the telephone bell would ring and he would hear the clear
little voice of his mother full of imperative expectations.  He
would be round for lunch?  Yes, he would be round to lunch.  And the
afternoon, had he arranged to do anything with his afternoon?  No!--
put off Chexington until tomorrow.  There was this new pianist, it
was really an EXPERIENCE, and one might not get tickets again.  And
then tea at Panton's.  It was rather fun at Panton's. . . .  Oh!--
Weston Massinghay was coming to lunch.  He was a useful man to know.
So CLEVER. . . .  So long, my dear little Son, till I see you. . . .

So life puts out its Merkle threads, as the poacher puts his hair
noose about the pheasant's neck, and while we theorize takes hold of
us. . . .

It came presently home to Benham that he had been down from
Cambridge for ten months, and that he was still not a step forward
with the realization of the new aristocracy.  His political career
waited.  He had done a quantity of things, but their net effect was
incoherence.  He had not been merely passive, but his efforts to
break away into creative realities had added to rather than
diminished his accumulating sense of futility.

The natural development of his position under the influence of Lady
Marayne had enormously enlarged the circle of his acquaintances.  He
had taken part in all sorts of social occasions, and sat and
listened to a representative selection of political and literary and
social personages, he had been several times to the opera and to a
great number and variety of plays, he had been attentively
inconspicuous in several really good week-end parties.  He had spent
a golden October in North Italy with his mother, and escaped from
the glowing lassitude of Venice for some days of climbing in the
Eastern Alps.  In January, in an outbreak of enquiry, he had gone
with Lionel Maxim to St. Petersburg and had eaten zakuska,
brightened his eyes with vodka, talked with a number of charming
people of the war that was then imminent, listened to gipsy singers
until dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent and stately of
capitals, and returned with Lionel, discoursing upon autocracy and
assassination, Japan, the Russian destiny, and the government of
Peter the Great.  That excursion was the most after his heart of all
the dispersed employments of his first year.  Through the rest of
the winter he kept himself very fit, and still further qualified
that nervous dislike for the horse that he had acquired from
Prothero by hunting once a week in Essex.  He was incurably a bad
horseman; he rode without sympathy, he was unready and convulsive at
hedges and ditches, and he judged distances badly.  His white face
and rigid seat and a certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle
earned him the singular nickname, which never reached his ears, of
the "Galvanized Corpse."  He got through, however, at the cost of
four quite trifling spills and without damaging either of the horses
he rode.  And his physical self-respect increased.

On his writing-desk appeared a few sheets of manuscript that
increased only very slowly.  He was trying to express his Cambridge
view of aristocracy in terms of Finacue Street, West.

The artistic and intellectual movements of London had made their
various demands upon his time and energies.  Art came to him with a
noble assumption of his interest and an intention that presently
became unpleasantly obvious to sell him pictures that he did not
want to buy and explain away pictures that he did.  He bought one or
two modern achievements, and began to doubt if art and aristocracy
had any necessary connection.  At first he had accepted the
assumption that they had.  After all, he reflected, one lives rather
for life and things than for pictures of life and things or pictures
arising out of life and things.  This Art had an air of saying
something, but when one came to grips with it what had it to say?
Unless it was Yah!  The drama, and more particularly the
intellectual drama, challenged his attention.  In the hands of Shaw,
Barker, Masefield, Galsworthy, and Hankin, it, too, had an air of
saying something, but he found it extremely difficult to join on to
his own demands upon life anything whatever that the intellectual
drama had the air of having said.  He would sit forward in the front
row of the dress-circle with his cheek on his hand and his brow
slightly knit.  His intentness amused observant people.  The drama
that did not profess to be intellectual he went to with Lady
Marayne, and usually on first nights.  Lady Marayne loved a big
first night at St. James's Theatre or His Majesty's.  Afterwards,
perhaps, Sir Godfrey would join them at a supper party, and all
sorts of clever and amusing people would be there saying keen
intimate things about each other.  He met Yeats, who told amusing
stories about George Moore, and afterwards he met George Moore, who
told amusing stories about Yeats, and it was all, he felt, great fun
for the people who were in it.  But he was not in it, and he had no
very keen desire to be in it.  It wasn't his stuff.  He had, though
they were nowadays rather at the back of his mind, quite other
intentions.  In the meanwhile all these things took up his time and
distracted his attention.

There was, as yet, no practicable aviation to beguile a young man of
spirit, but there were times when Benham found himself wondering
whether there might not be something rather creditable in the
possession and control of a motor-car of exceptional power.  Only
one might smash people up.  Should an aristocrat be deterred by the
fear of smashing people up?  If it is a selfish fear of smashing
people up, if it is nerves rather than pity?  At any rate it did not
come to the car.



6


Among other things that delayed Benham very greatly in the
development of his aristocratic experiments was the advice that was
coming to him from every quarter.  It came in extraordinary variety
and volume, but always it had one unvarying feature.  It ignored and
tacitly contradicted his private intentions.

We are all of us disposed to be propagandists of our way of living,
and the spectacle of a wealthy young man quite at large is enough to
excite the most temperate of us without distinction of age or sex.
"If I were you," came to be a familiar phrase in his ear.  This was
particularly the case with political people; and they did it not
only from the natural infirmity of humanity, but because, when they
seemed reluctant or satisfied with him as he was, Lady Marayne egged
them on.

There was a general assumption that he was to go into Parliament,
and most of his counsellors assumed further that on the whole his
natural sympathies would take him into the Conservative party.  But
it was pointed out to him that just at present the Liberal party was
the party of a young man's opportunity; sooner or later the swing of
the pendulum which would weed the Conservatives and proliferate
Liberals was bound to come, there was always more demand and
opportunity for candidates on the Liberal side, the Tariff Reformers
were straining their ministerial majority to the splitting point,
and most of the old Liberal leaders had died off during the years of
exile.  The party was no longer dominated; it would tolerate ideas.
A young man who took a distinctive line--provided it was not from
the party point of view a vexatious or impossible line--might go
very rapidly far and high.  On the other hand, it was urged upon him
that the Tariff Reform adventure called also for youth and energy.
But there, perhaps, there was less scope for the distinctive line--
and already they had Garvin.  Quite a number of Benham's friends
pointed out to him the value of working out some special aspect of
our national political interests.  A very useful speciality was the
Balkans.  Mr. Pope, the well-known publicist, whose very sound and
considerable reputation was based on the East Purblow Labour
Experiment, met Benham at lunch and proposed to go with him in a
spirit of instructive association to the Balkans, rub up their Greek
together, and settle the problem of Albania.  He wanted, he said, a
foreign speciality to balance his East Purblow interest.  But Lady
Beach Mandarin warned Benham against the Balkans; the Balkans were
getting to be too handy for Easter and summer holidays, and now that
there were several good hotels in Servia and Montenegro and Sofia,
they were being overdone.  Everybody went to the Balkans and came
back with a pet nationality.  She loathed pet nationalities.  She
believed most people loathed them nowadays.  It was stale: it was
GLADSTONIAN.  She was all for specialization in social reform.  She
thought Benham ought to join the Fabian Society and consult the
Webbs.  Quite a number of able young men had been placed with the
assistance of the Webbs.  They were, she said, "a perfect fount. . . ."
Two other people, independently of each other, pointed out to
Benham the helpfulness of a few articles in the half-crown
monthlies. . . .

"What are the assumptions underlying all this?" Benham asked himself
in a phase of lucidity.

And after reflection.  "Good God!  The assumptions!  What do they
think will satisfy me? . . ."

Everybody, however, did not point to Parliament.  Several people
seemed to think Travel, with a large T, was indicated.  One distant
cousin of Sir Godfrey's, the kind of man of the world who has long
moustaches, was for big game shooting.  "Get right out of all this
while you are young," he said.  "There's nothing to compare with
stopping a charging lion at twenty yards.  I've done it, my boy.
You can come back for all this pow-wow afterwards."  He gave the
diplomatic service as a second choice.  "There you are," he said,
"first-rate social position, nothing to do, theatres, operas, pretty
women, colour, life.  The best of good times.  Barring Washington,
that is.  But Washington, they say, isn't as bad as it used to be--
since Teddy has Europeanized ‘em. . . ."

Even the Reverend Harold Benham took a subdued but thoughtful share
in his son's admonition.  He came up to the flat--due precautions
were taken to prevent a painful encounter--he lunched at his son's
new club, and he was visibly oppressed by the contrast between the
young man's youthful fortunes and his own.  As visibly he bore up
bravely.  "There are few men, Poff, who would not envy you your
opportunities," he said.  "You have the Feast of Life spread out at
your feet. . . .  I hope you have had yourself put up for the
Athenaeum.  They say it takes years.  When I was a young man--and
ambitious--I thought that some day I might belong to the
Athenaeum. . . .  One has to learn. . . ."



7


And with an effect of detachment, just as though it didn't belong to
the rest of him at all, there was beginning a sort of backstairs and
underside to Benham's life.  There is no need to discuss how
inevitable that may or may not be in the case of a young man of
spirit and large means, nor to embark upon the discussion of the
temptations and opportunities of large cities.  Several ladies, of
various positions and qualities, had reflected upon his manifest
need of education.  There was in particular Mrs. Skelmersdale, a
very pretty little widow with hazel eyes, black hair, a mobile
mouth, and a pathetic history, who talked of old music to him and
took him to a Dolmetsch concert in Clifford's Inn, and expanded that
common interest to a general participation in his indefinite
outlook.  She advised him about his probable politics--everybody did
that--but when he broke through his usual reserve and suggested
views of his own, she was extraordinarily sympathetic.  She was so
sympathetic and in such a caressing way that she created a temporary
belief in her understanding, and it was quite imperceptibly that he
was drawn into the discussion of modern ethical problems.  She
herself was a rather stimulating instance of modern ethical
problems.  She told him something of her own story, and then their
common topics narrowed down very abruptly.  He found he could help
her in several ways.  There is, unhappily, a disposition on the part
of many people, who ought to know better, to regard a role played by
Joseph during his earlier days in Egypt as a ridiculous one.  This
point of view became very inopportunely dominant in Benham's mind
when he was lunching TETE A TETE with Mrs. Skelmersdale at her
flat. . . .

The ensuing intimacy was of an entirely concealed and respectable
nature, but a certain increased preoccupation in his manner set Lady
Marayne thinking.  He had as a matter of fact been taken by surprise.

Still he perceived that it is no excuse for a man that he has been
taken by surprise.  Surprises in one's own conduct ought not to
happen.  When they do happen then an aristocrat ought to stick to
what he had done.  He was now in a subtle and complicated
relationship to Mrs. Skelmersdale, a relationship in which her pride
had become suddenly a matter of tremendous importance.  Once he had
launched himself upon this affair, it was clear to him that he owed
it to her never to humiliate her.  And to go back upon himself now
would be a tremendous humiliation for her.  You see, he had helped
her a little financially.  And she looked to him, she wanted him. . . .

She wasn't, he knew, altogether respectable.  Indeed, poor dear, her
ethical problems, already a little worn, made her seem at times
anything but respectable.  He had met her first one evening at Jimmy
Gluckstein's when he was forming his opinion of Art.  Her manifest
want of interest in pictures had attracted him.  And that had led to
music.  And to the mention of a Clementi piano, that short, gentle,
sad, old, little sort of piano people will insist upon calling a
spinet, in her flat.

And so to this. . . .

It was very wonderful and delicious, this first indulgence of sense.

It was shabby and underhand.

The great god Pan is a glorious god.  (And so was Swinburne.)  And
what can compare with the warmth of blood and the sheen of sunlit
limbs?

But Priapus. . . .

She was the most subtle, delightful and tender of created beings.

She had amazing streaks of vulgarity.

And some astonishing friends.

Once she had seemed to lead the talk deliberately to money matters.

She loved him and desired him.  There was no doubt of it.

There was a curious effect about her as though when she went round
the corner she would become somebody else.  And a curious recurrent
feeling that round the corner there was somebody else.

He had an extraordinary feeling that his mother knew about this
business.  This feeling came from nothing in her words or acts, but
from some indefinable change in her eyes and bearing towards him.
But how could she know?

It was unlikely that she and Mrs. Skelmersdale would ever meet, and
it seemed to him that it would be a particularly offensive incident
for them to meet.

There were times now when life took on a grey and boring quality
such as it had never had before he met Mrs. Skelmersdale, and the
only remedy was to go to her.  She could restore his nervous
tranquillity, his feeling of solidity and reality, his pride in
himself.  For a time, that is.

Nevertheless his mind was as a whole pervaded by the feeling that he
ought not to have been taken by surprise.

And he had the clearest conviction in his mind that if now he could
be put back again to the day before that lunch. . . .

No! he should not have gone there to lunch.

He had gone there to see her Clementi piano.

Had he or had he not thought beforehand of any other possibility?

On a point so vital his memory was curiously unsure.



8


The worry and disorganization of Benham's life and thoughts
increased as the spring advanced.  His need in some way to pull
things together became overpowering.  He began to think of Billy
Prothero, more and more did it seem desirable to have a big talk
with Billy and place everything that had got disturbed.  Benham
thought of going to Cambridge for a week of exhaustive evenings.
Small engagements delayed that expedition. . . .

Then came a day in April when all the world seemed wrong to Benham.
He was irritable; his will was unstable; whatever presented itself
to be done presented itself as undesirable; he could settle to
nothing.  He had been keeping away from Mrs. Skelmersdale and in the
morning there came a little note from her designed to correct this
abstention.  She understood the art of the attractive note.  But he
would not decide to go to her.  He left the note unanswered.

Then came his mother at the telephone and it became instantly
certain to Benham that he could not play the dutiful son that
evening.  He answered her that he could not come to dinner.  He had
engaged himself.  "Where?"

"With some men."

There was a pause and then his mother's voice came, flattened by
disappointment.  "Very well then, little Poff.  Perhaps I shall see
you to-morrow."

He replaced the receiver and fretted back into his study, where the
notes on aristocracy lay upon his desk, the notes he had been
pretending to work over all the morning.

"Damned liar!" he said, and then, "Dirty liar!"  He decided to lunch
at the club, and in the afternoon he was moved to telephone an
appointment with his siren.  And having done that he was bound to
keep it.

About one o'clock in the morning he found himself walking back to
Finacue Street.  He was no longer a fretful conflict of nerves, but
if anything he was less happy than he had been before.  It seemed to
him that London was a desolate and inglorious growth.

London ten years ago was much less nocturnal than it is now.  And
not so brightly lit.  Down the long streets came no traffic but an
occasional hansom.  Here and there a cat halted or bolted in the
road.  Near Piccadilly a policeman hovered artfully in a doorway,
and then came a few belated prostitutes waylaying the passers-by,
and a few youths and men, wearily lust driven.

As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure that struck him as
familiar.  Surely!--it was Billy Prothero!  Or at any rate it was
astonishingly like Billy Prothero.  He glanced again and the
likeness was more doubtful.  The man had his back to Benham, he was
halting and looking back at a woman.

By some queer flash of intuition it came to Benham that even if this
was not Prothero, still Prothero did these things.  It might very
well be Prothero even, though, as he now saw, it wasn't.  Everybody
did these things. . . .

It came into Benham's head for the first time that life could be
tiresome.

This Bond Street was a tiresome place; with its shops all shut and
muffled, its shops where in the crowded daytime one bought costly
furniture, costly clothes, costly scent, sweets, bibelots, pictures,
jewellery, presents of all sorts, clothes for Mrs. Skelmersdale,
sweets for Mrs. Skelmersdale, presents for Mrs. Skelmersdale, all
the elaborate fittings and equipage of--THAT!

"Good night, dear," a woman drifted by him.

"I've SAID good night," he cried, "I've SAID good night," and so
went on to his flat.  The unquenchable demand, the wearisome
insatiability of sex!  When everything else has gone, then it shows
itself bare in the bleak small hours.  And at first it had seemed so
light a matter!  He went to bed, feeling dog-tired, he went to bed
at an hour and with a finished completeness that Merkle would have
regarded as entirely becoming in a young gentleman of his position.

And a little past three o'clock in the morning he awoke to a mood of
indescribable desolation.  He awoke with a start to an agony of
remorse and self-reproach.



9


For a time he lay quite still staring at the darkness, then he
groaned and turned over.  Then, suddenly, like one who fancies he
hears a strange noise, he sat up in bed and listened."Oh, God!" he
said at last.

And then: "Oh!  The DIRTINESS of life!  The dirty muddle of life!

"What are we doing with life?  What are we all doing with life?

"It isn't only this poor Milly business.  This only brings it to a
head.  Of course she wants money. . . ."

His thoughts came on again.

"But the ugliness!

"Why did I begin it?"

He put his hands upon his knees and pressed his eyes against the
backs of his hands and so remained very still, a blankness beneath
his own question.

After a long interval his mind moved again.

And now it was as if he looked upon his whole existence, he seemed
to see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted
days, the fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual
postponements that had followed his coming to London.  He saw it all
as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and
undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably
and weakly, that became steadily more crowded with ignoble and
trivial occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and
uncleanness.  He was overwhelmed by that persuasion, which only
freshly soiled youth can feel in its extreme intensity, that life
was slipping away from him, that the sands were running out, that in
a little while his existence would be irretrievably lost.

By some trick of the imagination he saw life as an interminable Bond
Street, lit up by night lamps, desolate, full of rubbish, full of
the very best rubbish, trappings, temptations, and down it all he
drove, as the damned drive, wearily, inexplicably.

WHAT ARE WE UP TO WITH LIFE!  WHAT ARE WE MAKING OF LIFE!

But hadn't he intended to make something tremendous of life?  Hadn't
he come to London trailing a glory? . . .

He began to remember it as a project.  It was the project of a great
World-State sustained by an aristocracy of noble men.  He was to
have been one of those men, too fine and far-reaching for the dull
manoeuvers of such politics as rule the world to-day.  The project
seemed still large, still whitely noble, but now it was unlit and
dead, and in the foreground he sat in the flat of Mrs. Skelmersdale,
feeling dissipated and fumbling with his white tie.  And she was
looking tired.  "God!" he said.  "How did I get there?"

And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the darkness and prayed
aloud to the silences.

"Oh, God!  Give me back my visions!  Give me back my visions!"

He could have imagined he heard a voice calling upon him to come out
into life, to escape from the body of this death.  But it was his
own voice that called to him. . . .



10


The need for action became so urgent in him, that he got right out
of his bed and sat on the edge of it.  Something had to be done at
once.  He did not know what it was but he felt that there could be
no more sleep, no more rest, no dressing nor eating nor going forth
before he came to decisions.  Christian before his pilgrimage began
was not more certain of this need of flight from the life of routine
and vanities.

What was to be done?

In the first place he must get away and think about it all, think
himself clear of all these--these immediacies, these associations
and relations and holds and habits.  He must get back to his vision,
get back to the God in his vision.  And to do that he must go alone.

He was clear he must go alone.  It was useless to go to Prothero,
one weak man going to a weaker.  Prothero he was convinced could
help him not at all, and the strange thing is that this conviction
had come to him and had established itself incontestably because of
that figure at the street corner, which had for just one moment
resembled Prothero.  By some fantastic intuition Benham knew that
Prothero would not only participate but excuse.  And he knew that he
himself could endure no excuses.  He must cut clear of any
possibility of qualification.  This thing had to be stopped.  He
must get away, he must get free, he must get clean.  In the
extravagance of his reaction Benham felt that he could endure
nothing but solitary places and to sleep under the open sky.

He wanted to get right away from London and everybody and lie in the
quiet darkness and stare up at the stars.

His plans grew so definite that presently he was in his dressing-
gown and turning out the maps in the lower drawer of his study
bureau.  He would go down into Surrey with a knapsack, wander along
the North Downs until the Guildford gap was reached, strike across
the Weald country to the South Downs and then beat eastward.  The
very thought of it brought a coolness to his mind.  He knew that
over those southern hills one could be as lonely as in the
wilderness and as free to talk to God.  And there he would settle
something.  He would make a plan for his life and end this torment.

When Merkle came in to him in the morning he was fast asleep.

The familiar curtain rings awakened Benham.  He turned his head
over, stared for a moment and then remembered.

"Merkle," he said, "I am going for a walking tour.  I am going off
this morning.  Haven't I a rucksack?"

"You ‘ave a sort of canvas bag, sir, with pockets to it," said
Merkle.  "Will you be needing the VERY ‘eavy boots with ‘obnails--
Swiss, I fancy, sir--or your ordinary shooting boots?"

"And when may I expect you back, sir?" asked Merkle as the moment
for departure drew near.

"God knows," said Benham, "I don't."

"Then will there be any address for forwarding letters, sir?"

Benham hadn't thought of that.  For a moment he regarded Merkle's
scrupulous respect with a transient perplexity.

 "I'll let you know, Merkle," he said.  "I'll let you know."

For some days at least, notes, telephone messages, engagements, all
this fuss and clamour about nothing, should clamour for him in
vain. . . .



11


"But how closely," cried White, in a mood of cultivated enthusiasm;
"how closely must all the poor little stories that we tell to-day
follow in the footsteps of the Great Exemplars!  A little while ago
and the springtime freshness of Tobias irradiated the page.  Now
see! it is Christian--."

Indeed it looked extremely like Christian as Benham went up across
the springy turf from Epsom Downs station towards the crest of the
hill.  Was he not also fleeing in the morning sunlight from the City
of Destruction?  Was he not also seeking that better city whose name
is Peace?  And there was a bundle on his back.  It was the bundle, I
think, that seized most firmly upon the too literary imagination of
White.

But the analogy of the bundle was a superficial one.  Benham had not
the slightest desire to lose it from his shoulders.  It would have
inconvenienced him very greatly if he had done so.  It did not
contain his sins.  Our sins nowadays are not so easily separated.
It contained a light, warm cape-coat he had bought in Switzerland
and which he intended to wrap about him when he slept under the
stars, and in addition Merkle had packed it with his silk pyjamas,
an extra pair of stockings, tooth-brush, brush and comb, a safety
razor. . . .  And there were several sheets of the Ordnance map.



12


The urgency of getting away from something dominated Benham to the
exclusion of any thought of what he might be getting to.  That
muddle of his London life had to be left behind.  First, escape. . .
.

Over the downs great numbers of larks were singing.  It was warm
April that year and early.  All the cloud stuff in the sky was
gathered into great towering slow-sailing masses, and the rest was
blue of the intensest.  The air was so clean that Benham felt it
clean in the substance of his body.  The chestnuts down the hill to
the right were flowering, the beeches were luminously green, and the
oaks in the valley foaming gold.  And sometimes it was one lark
filled his ears, and sometimes he seemed to be hearing all the larks
for miles about him.  Presently over the crest he would be out of
sight of the grand stand and the men exercising horses, and that
brace of red-jacketed golfers. . . .

What was he to do?

For a time he could think of nothing to do except to keep up and out
of the valley.  His whole being seemed to have come to his surfaces
to look out at the budding of the year and hear the noise of the
birds.  And then he got into a long road from which he had to
escape, and trespassing southward through plantations he reached the
steep edge of the hills and sat down over above a great chalk pit
somewhere near Dorking and surveyed all the tumbled wooded spaces of
the Weald. . . .  It is after all not so great a country this
Sussex, nor so hilly, from deepest valley to highest crest is not
six hundred feet, yet what a greatness of effect it can achieve!
There is something in those downland views which, like sea views,
lifts a mind out to the skies.  All England it seemed was there to
Benham's vision, and the purpose of the English, and his own purpose
in the world.  For a long time he surveyed the large delicacy of the
detail before him, the crests, the tree-protected houses, the fields
and farmsteads, the distant gleams of water.  And then he became
interested in the men who were working in the chalk pit down below.

They at any rate were not troubled with the problem of what to do
with their lives.



13


Benham found his mind was now running clear, and so abundantly that
he could scarcely, he felt, keep pace with it.  As he thought his
flow of ideas was tinged with a fear that he might forget what he
was thinking.  In an instant, for the first time in his mental
existence, he could have imagined he had discovered Labour and seen
it plain.  A little while ago and he had seemed a lonely man among
the hills, but indeed he was not lonely, these men had been with him
all the time, and he was free to wander, to sit here, to think and
choose simply because those men down there were not free.  HE WAS
SPENDING THEIR LEISURE. . . .  Not once but many times with Prothero
had he used the phrase RICHESSE OBLIGE.  Now he remembered it.  He
began to remember a mass of ideas that had been overlaid and
stifling within him.  This was what Merkle and the club servants and
the entertainments and engagements and his mother and the artistic
touts and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the elaboration
of games and--Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that had clustered thickly
round him in London had been hiding from him.  Those men below there
had not been trusted to choose their work; they had been given it.
And he had been trusted. . . .

And now to grapple with it!  Now to get it clear!  What work was he
going to do?  That settled, he would deal with his distractions
readily enough.  Until that was settled he was lax and exposed to
every passing breeze of invitation.

"What work am I going to do?  What work am I going to do?"  He
repeated it.

It is the only question for the aristocrat.  What amusement?  That
for a footman on holiday.  That for a silly child, for any creature
that is kept or led or driven.  That perhaps for a tired invalid,
for a toiler worked to a rag.  But able-bodied amusement!  The arms
of Mrs. Skelmersdale were no worse than the solemn aimlessness of
hunting, and an evening of dalliance not an atom more reprehensible
than an evening of chatter.  It was the waste of him that made the
sin.  His life in London had been of a piece together.  It was well
that his intrigue had set a light on it, put a point to it, given
him this saving crisis of the nerves.  That, indeed, is the chief
superiority of idle love-making over other more prevalent forms of
idleness and self-indulgence; it does at least bear its proper
label.  It is reprehensible.  It brings your careless honour to the
challenge of concealment and shabby evasions and lies. . . .

But in this pellucid air things took their proper proportions again.

And now what was he to do?

"Politics," he said aloud to the turf and the sky.

Is there any other work for an aristocratic man? . . .  Science?
One could admit science in that larger sense that sweeps in History,
or Philosophy.  Beyond that whatever work there is is work for which
men are paid.  Art?  Art is nothing aristocratic except when it is a
means of scientific or philosophical expression.  Art that does not
argue nor demonstrate nor discover is merely the craftsman's
impudence.

He pulled up at this and reflected for a time with some
distinguished instances in his mind.  They were so distinguished, so
dignified, they took their various arts with so admirable a gravity
that the soul of this young man recoiled from the verdicts to which
his reasoning drove him.  "It's not for me to judge them," he
decided, "except in relation to myself.  For them there may be
tremendous significances in Art.  But if these do not appear to me,
then so far as I am concerned they do not exist for me.  They are
not in my world.  So far as they attempt to invade me and control my
attitudes or my outlook, or to judge me in any way, there is no
question of their impudence.  Impudence is the word for it.  My
world is real.  I want to be really aristocratic, really brave,
really paying for the privilege of not being a driven worker.  The
things the artist makes are like the things my private dream-artist
makes, relaxing, distracting.  What can Art at its greatest be, pure
Art that is, but a more splendid, more permanent, transmissible
reverie!  The very essence of what I am after is NOT to be an
artist. . . ."

After a large and serious movement through his mind he came back to
Science, Philosophy or Politics as the sole three justifications for
the usurpation of leisure.

So far as devotion to science went, he knew he had no specific
aptitude for any departmentalized subject, and equally he felt no
natural call to philosophy.  He was left with politics. . . .

"Or else, why shouldn't I go down there and pick up a shovel and set
to work?  To make leisure for my betters. . . ."

And now it was that he could take up the real trouble that more than
anything else had been keeping him ineffective and the prey of every
chance demand and temptation during the last ten months.  He had not
been able to get himself into politics, and the reason why he had
not been able to do so was that he could not induce himself to fit
in.  Statecraft was a remote and faded thing in the political life
of the time; politics was a choice of two sides in a game, and
either side he found equally unattractive.  Since he had come down
from Cambridge the Tariff Reform people had gone far to capture the
Conservative party.  There was little chance of a candidature for
him without an adhesion to that.  And he could find nothing he could
imagine himself working for in the declarations of the Tariff Reform
people.  He distrusted them, he disliked them.  They took all the
light and pride out of imperialism, they reduced it to a shabby
conspiracy of the British and their colonies against foreign
industrialism.  They were violent for armaments and hostile to
education.  They could give him no assurance of any scheme of growth
and unification, and no guarantees against the manifest dangers of
economic disturbance and political corruption a tariff involves.
Imperialism without noble imaginations, it seemed to him, was simply
nationalism with megalomania.  It was swaggering, it was greed, it
was German; its enthusiasm was forced, its nobility a vulgar lie.
No.  And when he turned to the opposite party he found little that
was more attractive.  They were prepared, it seemed, if they came
into office, to pull the legislature of the British Isles to pieces
in obedience to the Irish demand for Home Rule, and they were
totally unprepared with any scheme for doing this that had even a
chance of success.  In the twenty years that had elapsed since
Gladstone's hasty and disastrous essay in political surgery they had
studied nothing, learnt nothing, produced no ideas whatever in the
matter.  They had not had the time.  They had just negotiated, like
the mere politicians they were, for the Nationalist vote.  They
seemed to hope that by a marvel God would pacify Ulster.  Lord
Dunraven, Plunkett, were voices crying in the wilderness.  The sides
in the party game would as soon have heeded a poet. . . .  But
unless Benham was prepared to subscribe either to Home Rule or
Tariff Reform there was no way whatever open to him into public
life.  He had had some decisive conversations.  He had no illusions
left upon that score. . . .

Here was the real barrier that had kept him inactive for ten months.
Here was the problem he had to solve.  This was how he had been left
out of active things, a prey to distractions, excitements, idle
temptations--and Mrs. Skelmersdale.

Running away to shoot big game or explore wildernesses was no
remedy.  That was just running away.  Aristocrats do not run away.
What of his debt to those men down there in the quarry?  What of his
debt to the unseen men in the mines away in the north?  What of his
debt to the stokers on the liners, and to the clerks in the city?
He reiterated the cardinal article of his creed: The aristocrat is a
privileged man in order that he may be a public and political man.

But how is one to be a political man when one is not in politics?

Benham frowned at the Weald.  His ideas were running thin.

He might hammer at politics from the outside.  And then again how?
He would make a list of all the things that he might do.  For
example he might write.  He rested one hand on his knee and lifted
one finger and regarded it.  COULD he write?  There were one or two
men who ran papers and seemed to have a sort of independent
influence.  Strachey, for example, with his SPECTATOR; Maxse, with
his NATIONAL REVIEW.  But they were grown up, they had formed their
ideas.  He had to learn first.

He lifted a second finger.  How to learn?  For it was learning that
he had to do.

When one comes down from Oxford or Cambridge one falls into the
mistake of thinking that learning is over and action must begin.
But until one perceives clearly just where one stands action is
impossible.

How is one with no experience of affairs to get an experience of
affairs when the door of affairs is closed to one by one's own
convictions?  Outside of affairs how can one escape being flimsy?
How can one escape becoming merely an intellectual like those wordy
Fabians, those writers, poseurs, and sham publicists whose wrangles
he had attended?  And, moreover, there is danger in the leisure of
your intellectual.  One cannot be always reading and thinking and
discussing and inquiring. . . .  WOULD IT NOT BE BETTER AFTER ALL TO
MAKE A CONCESSION, SWALLOW HOME RULE OR TARIFF REFORM, AND SO AT
LEAST GET HIS HANDS ON THINGS?

And then in a little while the party conflict would swallow him up?

Still it would engage him, it would hold him.  If, perhaps, he did
not let it swallow him up.  If he worked with an eye open for
opportunities of self-assertion. . . .

The party game had not altogether swallowed "Mr. Arthur." . . .

But every one is not a Balfour. . . .

He reflected profoundly.  On his left knee his left hand rested with
two fingers held up.  By some rapid mental alchemy these fingers had
now become Home Rule and Tariff Reform.  His right hand which had
hitherto taken no part in the controversy, had raised its index
finger by imperceptible degrees.  It had been raised almost
subconsciously.  And by still obscurer processes this finger had
become Mrs. Skelmersdale.  He recognized her sudden reappearance
above the threshold of consciousness with mild surprise.  He had
almost forgotten her share in these problems.  He had supposed her
dismissed to an entirely subordinate position. . . .

Then he perceived that the workmen in the chalk pit far below had
knocked off and were engaged upon their midday meal.  He understood
why his mind was no longer moving forward with any alacrity.

Food?

The question where he should eat arose abruptly and dismissed all
other problems from his mind.  He unfolded a map.Here must be the
chalk pit, here was Dorking.  That village was Brockham Green.
Should he go down to Dorking or this way over Box Hill to the little
inn at Burford Bridge.  He would try the latter.



14


The April sunset found our young man talking to himself for greater
emphasis, and wandering along a turfy cart-track through a
wilderness mysteriously planted with great bushes of rhododendra on
the Downs above Shere.  He had eaten a belated lunch at Burford
Bridge, he had got some tea at a little inn near a church with a
splendid yew tree, and for the rest of the time he had wandered and
thought.  He had travelled perhaps a dozen or fifteen miles, and a
good way from his first meditations above the Dorking chalk pit.

He had recovered long ago from that remarkable conception of an
active if dishonest political career as a means of escaping Mrs.
Skelmersdale and all that Mrs. Skelmersdale symbolized.  That would
be just louting from one bad thing to another.  He had to settle
Mrs. Skelmersdale clean and right, and he had to do as exquisitely
right in politics as he could devise.  If the public life of the
country had got itself into a stupid antagonism of two undesirable
things, the only course for a sane man of honour was to stand out
from the parties and try and get them back to sound issues again.
There must be endless people of a mind with himself in this matter.
And even if there were not, if he was the only man in the world, he
still had to follow his lights and do the right.  And his business
was to find out the right. . . .

He came back from these imaginative excursions into contemporary
politics with one idea confirmed in his mind, an idea that had been
indeed already in his mind during his Cambridge days.  This was the
idea of working out for himself, thoroughly and completely, a
political scheme, a theory of his work and duty in the world, a plan
of the world's future that should give a rule for his life.  The
Research Magnificent was emerging.  It was an alarmingly vast
proposal, but he could see no alternative but submission, a
plebeian's submission to the currents of life about him.

Little pictures began to flit before his imagination of the way in
which he might build up this tremendous inquiry.  He would begin by
hunting up people, everybody who seemed to have ideas and promise
ideas he would get at.  He would travel far--and exhaustively.  He
would, so soon as the ideas seemed to indicate it, hunt out facts.
He would learn how the world was governed.  He would learn how it
did its thinking.  He would live sparingly.  ("Not TOO sparingly,''
something interpolated.)  He would work ten or twelve hours a day.
Such a course of investigation must pass almost of its own accord
into action and realization.  He need not trouble now how it would
bring him into politics.  Inevitably somewhere it would bring him
into politics.  And he would travel.  Almost at once he would
travel.  It is the manifest duty of every young aristocrat to
travel.  Here he was, ruling India.  At any rate, passively, through
the mere fact of being English, he was ruling India.  And he knew
nothing of India.  He knew nothing indeed of Asia.  So soon as he
returned to London his preparations for this travel must begin, he
must plot out the men to whom he would go, and so contrive that also
he would go round the world.  Perhaps he would get Lionel Maxim to
go with him.  Or if Maxim could not come, then possibly Prothero.
Some one surely could be found, some one thinking and talking of
statecraft and the larger idea of life.  All the world is not
swallowed up in every day. . . .



15


His mind shifted very suddenly from these large proposals to an
entirely different theme.  These mental landslips are not unusual
when men are thinking hard and wandering.  He found himself holding
a trial upon himself for Presumptuousness, for setting himself up
against the wisdom of the ages, and the decisions of all the
established men in the world, for being in short a Presumptuous Sort
of Ass.  He was judge and jury and prosecutor, but rather
inexplicably the defence was conducted in an irregular and
undignified way by some inferior stratum of his being.

At first the defence contented itself with arguments that did at
least aim to rebut the indictment.  The decisions of all the
established men in the world were notoriously in conflict.  However
great was the gross wisdom of the ages the net wisdom was remarkably
small.  Was it after all so very immodest to believe that the
Liberals were right in what they said about Tariff Reform, and the
Tories right in their criticism of Home Rule?

And then suddenly the defence threw aside its mask and insisted that
Benham had to take this presumptuous line because there was no other
tolerable line possible for him.

"Better die with the Excelsior chap up the mountains," the defence
interjected.

Than what?

Consider the quality Benham had already betrayed.  He was manifestly
incapable of a decent modest mediocre existence.  Already he had
ceased to be--if one may use so fine a word for genteel abstinence--
virtuous.  He didn't ride well, he hadn't good hands, and he hadn't
good hands for life.  He must go hard and harsh, high or low.  He
was a man who needed BITE in his life.  He was exceptionally capable
of boredom.  He had been bored by London.  Social occasions
irritated him, several times he had come near to gross incivilities,
art annoyed him, sport was an effort, wholesome perhaps, but
unattractive, music he loved, but it excited him.  The defendant
broke the sunset calm by uttering amazing and improper phrases.

"I can't smug about in a state of falsified righteousness like these
Crampton chaps.

"I shall roll in women.  I shall rollick in women.  If, that is, I
stay in London with nothing more to do than I have had this year
past.

"I've been sliding fast to it. . . .

"NO!  I'M DAMNED IF I DO! . . .



16


For some time he had been bothered by a sense of something,
something else, awaiting his attention.  Now it came swimming up
into his consciousness.  He had forgotten.  He was, of course, going
to sleep out under the stars.

He had settled that overnight, that was why he had this cloak in his
rucksack, but he had settled none of the details.  Now he must find
some place where he could lie down.  Here, perhaps, in this strange
forgotten wilderness of rhododendra.

He turned off from the track and wandered among the bushes.  One
might lie down anywhere here.  But not yet; it was as yet barely
twilight.  He consulted his watch.  HALF-PAST SEVEN.

Nearly dinner-time. . . .

No doubt Christian during the earlier stages of his pilgrimage
noticed the recurrence of the old familiar hours of his life of
emptiness and vanity.  Or rather of vanity--simply.  Why drag in the
thought of emptiness just at this point? . . .

It was very early to go to bed.

He might perhaps sit and think for a time.  Here for example was a
mossy bank, a seat, and presently a bed.  So far there were only
three stars visible but more would come.  He dropped into a
reclining attitude.  DAMP!

When one thinks of sleeping out under the stars one is apt to forget
the dew.

He spread his Swiss cloak out on the soft thick carpeting of herbs
and moss, and arranged his knapsack as a pillow.  Here he would lie
and recapitulate the thoughts of the day.  (That squealing might be
a young fox.)  At the club at present men would be sitting about
holding themselves back from dinner.  Excellent the clear soup
always was at the club!  Then perhaps a Chateaubriand.  That--what
was that?  Soft and large and quite near and noiseless.  An owl!

The damp feeling was coming through his cloak.  And this April night
air had a knife edge.  Early ice coming down the Atlantic perhaps.
It was wonderful to be here on the top of the round world and feel
the icebergs away there.  Or did this wind come from Russia?  He
wasn't quite clear just how he was oriented, he had turned about so
much.  Which was east?  Anyhow it was an extremely cold wind.

What had he been thinking?  Suppose after all that ending with Mrs.
Skelmersdale was simply a beginning.  So far he had never looked sex
in the face. . . .

He sat up and sneezed violently.

It would be ridiculous to start out seeking the clue to one's life
and be driven home by rheumatic fever.  One should not therefore
incur the risk of rheumatic fever.

Something squealed in the bushes.

It was impossible to collect one's thoughts in this place.  He stood
up.  The night was going to be bitterly cold, savagely, cruelly
cold. . . .

No.  There was no thinking to be done here, no thinking at all.  He
would go on along the track and presently he would strike a road and
so come to an inn.  One can solve no problems when one is engaged in
a struggle with the elements.  The thing to do now was to find that
track again. . . .

It took Benham two hours of stumbling and walking, with a little
fence climbing and some barbed wire thrown in, before he got down
into Shere to the shelter of a friendly little inn.  And then he
negotiated a satisfying meal, with beef-steak as its central fact,
and stipulated for a fire in his bedroom.

The landlord was a pleasant-faced man; he attended to Benham himself
and displayed a fine sense of comfort.  He could produce wine, a
half-bottle of Australian hock, Big Tree brand No.  8, a virile
wine, he thought of sardines to precede the meal, he provided a
substantial Welsh rarebit by way of a savoury, he did not mind in
the least that it was nearly ten o'clock.  He ended by suggesting
coffee.  "And a liqueur?"

Benham had some Benedictine!

One could not slight such sympathetic helpfulness.  The Benedictine
was genuine.  And then came the coffee.

The cup of coffee was generously conceived and honestly made.

A night of clear melancholy ensued. . . .



17


Hitherto Benham had not faced in any detail the problem of how to
break with Mrs. Skelmersdale.  Now he faced it pessimistically.  She
would, he knew, be difficult to break with.  (He ought never to have
gone there to lunch.)  There would be something ridiculous in
breaking off.  In all sorts of ways she might resist.  And face to
face with her he might find himself a man divided against himself.
That opened preposterous possibilities.  On the other hand it was
out of the question to do the business by letter.  A letter hits too
hard; it lies too heavy on the wound it has made.  And in money
matters he could be generous.  He must be generous.  At least
financial worries need not complicate her distresses of desertion.
But to suggest such generosities on paper, in cold ink, would be
outrageous.  And, in brief--he ought not to have gone there to
lunch.  After that he began composing letters at a great rate.
Delicate--explanatory.  Was it on the whole best to be
explanatory? . . .

It was going to be a tremendous job, this breaking with her.  And it
had begun so easily. . . .

There was, he remembered with amazing vividness, a little hollow he
had found under her ear, and how when he kissed her there it always
made her forget her worries and ethical problems for a time and turn
to him. . . .

"No," he said grimly, "it must end," and rolled over and stared at
the black. . . .

Like an insidious pedlar, that old rascal whom young literary
gentlemen call the Great God Pan, began to spread his wares in the
young man's memory. . . .

After long and feverish wanderings of the mind, and some talking to
himself and walking about the room, he did at last get a little away
from Mrs. Skelmersdale.

He perceived that when he came to tell his mother about this journey
around the world there would be great difficulties.  She would
object very strongly, and if that did not do then she would become
extremely abusive, compare him to his father, cry bitterly, and
banish him suddenly and heartbrokenly from her presence for ever.
She had done that twice already--once about going to the opera
instead of listening to a lecture on Indian ethnology and once about
a week-end in Kent. . . .  He hated hurting his mother, and he was
beginning to know now how easily she was hurt.  It is an abominable
thing to hurt one's mother--whether one has a justification or
whether one hasn't.

Recoiling from this, he was at once resumed by Mrs. Skelmersdale.
Who had in fact an effect of really never having been out of the
room.  But now he became penitent about her.  His penitence expanded
until it was on a nightmare scale.  At last it blotted out the
heavens.  He felt like one of those unfortunate victims of religious
mania who are convinced they have committed the Sin against the Holy
Ghost.  (Why had he gone there to lunch?  That was the key to it.
WHY had he gone there to lunch?) . . .  He began to have remorse for
everything, for everything he had ever done, for everything he he give in to
sex.
It's the same thing really.  The misleading of instinct."

This set the key of his thought throughout the afternoon--until
Amanda happened to him.



CHAPTER THE THIRD

AMANDA



1


Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.

From Haslemere he had gone on to further heaths and gorse beyond
Liphook, and thence he had wandered into a pretty district beset
with Hartings.  He had foh socialistic art as
bookbinding.  They were clearly ‘advanced' people.  And Amanda was
tremendously important to them, she was their light, their pride,
their most living thing.  They focussed on her.  When he talked to
them all in general he talked to her in particular.  He felt that
some introduction of himself was due to these welcoming people.  He
tried to give it mixed with an itinerary and a sketch of his
experiences.  He praised the heather country and Harting Coombe and
the Hartings.  He told them that London had suddenly become
intolerable--"In the spring sunshine."

"You live in London?" said Mrs. Wilder.

Yes. ad
ever not done, for everything in the world.  In a moment of lucidity
he even had remorse for drinking that stout honest cup of black
coffee. . . .

And so on and so on and so on. . . .

When daylight came it found Benham still wide awake.  Things crept
mournfully out of the darkness into a reproachful clearness.  The
sound of birds that had been so delightful on the yesterday was now
no longer agreeable.  The thrushes, he thought, repeated themselves
a great deal.

He fell asleep as it seemed only a few minutes before the landlord,
accompanied by a great smell of frying bacon, came to call him.



18


The second day opened rather dully for Benham.  There was not an
idea left in his head about anything in the world.  It was--SOLID.
He walked through Bramley and Godalming and Witley and so came out
upon the purple waste of Hindhead.  He strayed away from the road
and found a sunny place of turf amidst the heather and lay down and
slept for an hour or so.  He arose refreshed.  He got some food at
the Huts Inn on the Hindhead crest and went on across sunlit
heathery wildernesses variegated by patches of spruce and fir and
silver birch.  And then suddenly his mental inanition was at an end
and his thoughts were wide and brave again.  He was astonished that
for a moment he could have forgotten that he was vowed to the
splendid life.

"Continence by preoccupation;" he tried the phrase. . . .

"A man must not give in to fear; neither must hund himself upon a sandy ridge
looking very
beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt was Harting
Coombe; he had been through a West Harting and a South Harting and
read finger-posts pointing to others of the clan; and in the
evening, at the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat
down to consider whether he should go back and spend the night in
one of the two kindly-looking inns of the latter place or push on
over the South Downs towards the unknown luck of Singleton or
Chichester.  As he sat down two big retrievers, black and brown,
came headlong down the road.  The black carried a stick, the brown
disputed and pursued.  As they came abreast of him the foremost a
little relaxed his hold, the pursuer grabbed at it, and in an
instant the rivalry had flared to rage and a first-class dogfight
was in progress.

Benham detested dog-fights.  He stood up, pale and distressed.  "Lie
down!" he cried.  "Shut up, you brutes!" and was at a loss for
further action.

Then it was Amanda leapt into his world, a light, tall figure of a
girl, fluttering a short petticoat.  Hatless she was, brown,
flushed, and her dark hair tossing loose, and in a moment she had
the snarling furious dogs apart, each gripped firmly by its collar.
Then with a wriggle black was loose and had closed again.  Inspired
by the best traditions of chivalry Benham came to her assistance.
He was not expert with dogs.  He grasped the black dog under its
ear.  He was bitten in the wrist, rather in excitement than malice,
and with a certain excess of zeal he was strangling the brute before
you could count ten.

Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held,
reasonably but effectively until its yelps satisfied her.  "There!"
she said pitching her victim from her, and stood erect again.  She
surveyed the proceedings of her helper for the first time.

"You needn't," she said, "choke Sultan anymore."

"Ugh!" she said, as though that was enough for Sultan.  And peace
was restored.

"I'm obliged to you.  But-- . . .  I say!  He didn't bite you, did
he?  Oh, SULTAN!"

Sultan tried to express his disgust at the affair.  Rotten business.
When a fellow is fighting one can't be meticulous.  And if people
come interfering.  Still--SORRY!   So Sultan by his code of eye and
tail.

"May I see? . . .  Something ought to be done to this. . . ."

She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came
within a foot of his face.

Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite
accurately, that she was nineteen. . . .



2


She had an eyebrow like a quick stroke of a camel's-hair brush, she
had a glowing face, half childish imp, half woman, she had honest
hazel eyes, a voice all music, a manifest decision of character.
And he must have this bite seen to at once.  She lived not five
minutes away.  He must come with her.

She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and a mother who behaved
like a genteel visitor, and they both agreed with Amanda that
although Mr. Walter Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did
seem to have stamped out rabies, yet you couldn't be too careful
with a dog bite.  A dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of
ways--particularly Sultan's bite.  He was, they had to confess, a
dog without refinement, a coarse-minded omnivorous dog.  Both the
elder ladies insisted upon regarding Benham's wound as clear
evidence of some gallant rescue of Aman And he had wanted to think things out.
In London one could do
no thinking--

"Here we do nothing else," said Amanda.

"Except dog-fights," said the elder cousin.

"I thought I would just wander and think and sleep in the open air.
Have you ever tried to sleep in the open air?"

"In the summer we all do," said the younger cousin.  "Amanda makes
us.  We go out on to the little lawn at the back."

"You see Amanda has some friends at Limpsfield.  And there they all
go ouda from imminent danger--
"she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs," as though Amanda was not
manifestly capable of taking care of herself; and when he had been
Listerined and bandaged, they would have it that he should join them
at their supper-dinner, which was already prepared and waiting.
They treated him as if he were still an undergraduate, they took his
arrangements in hand as though he was a favourite nephew.  He must
stay in Harting that night.  Both the Ship and the Coach and Horses
were excellent inns, and over the Downs there would be nothing for
miles and miles. . . .

The house was a little long house with a verandah and a garden in
front of it with flint-edged paths; the room in which they sat and
ate was long and low and equipped with pieces of misfitting good
furniture, an accidental-looking gilt tarnished mirror, and a
sprinkling of old and middle-aged books.  Some one had lit a fire,
which cracked and spurted about cheerfully in a motherly fireplace,
and a lamp and some candles got lit.  Mrs. Wilder, Amanda's aunt, a
comfortable dark broad-browed woman, directed things, and sat at the
end of the table and placed Benham on her right hand between herself
and Amanda.  Amanda's mother remained undeveloped, a watchful little
woman with at least an eyebrow like her daughter's.  Her name, it
seemed, was Morris.  No servant appeared, but two cousins of a vague
dark picturesqueness and with a stamp of thirty upon them, the first
young women Benham had ever seen dressed in djibbahs, sat at the
table or moved about and attended to the simple needs of the
service.  The reconciled dogs were in the room and shifted inquiring
noses from one human being to another.

Amanda's people were so easy and intelligent and friendly, and
Benham after his thirty hours of silence so freshly ready for human
association, that in a very little while he could have imagined he
had known and trusted this household for years.  He had never met
such people before, and yet there was something about them that
seemed familiar--and then it occurred to him that something of their
easy-going freedom was to be found in Russian novels.  A
photographic enlargement of somebody with a vegetarian expression of
face and a special kind of slouch hat gave the atmosphere a flavour
of Socialism, and a press and tools and stamps and pigments on an
oak table in the corner suggested some suct and camp and sleep in the woods."

"Of course," reflected Mrs. Wilder, "in April it must be different."

"It IS different," said Benham with feeling; "the night comes five
hours too soon.  And it comes wet."  He described his experiences
and his flight to Shere and the kindly landlord and the cup of
coffee.  "And after that I thought with a vengeance."

"Do you write things?" asked Amanda abruptly, and it seemed to him
with a note of hope.

"No.  No, it was just a private puzzle.  It was something I couldn't
get straight."

"And you have got it straight?" asked Amanda.

"I think so."

"You were making up your mind about something?"

"Amanda DEAR!" cried her mother.

"Oh! I don't mind telling you," said Benham.

They seemed such unusual people that he was moved to unusual
confidences.  They had that effect one gets at times with strangers
freshly met as though they were not really in the world.  And there
was something about Amanda that made him want to explain himself to
her completely.

"What I wanted to think about was what I should do with my life."

"Haven't you any WORK--?" asked the elder cousin.

"None that I'm obliged to do."

"That's where a man has the advantage," said Amanda with the tone of
profound reflection.  "You can choose.  And what are you going to do
with your life?"

"Amanda," her mother protested, "really you mustn't!"

"I'm going round the world to think about it," Benham told her.

"I'd give my soul to travel," said Amanda.

She addressed her remark to the salad in front of her.

"But have you no ties?" asked Mrs. Wilder.

"None that hold me," said Benham.  "I'm one of those unfortunates
who needn't do anything at all.  I'm independent.  You see my
riddles.  East and west and north and south, it's all my way for the
taking.  There's not an indication."

"If I were you," said Amanda, and reflected.  Then she half turned
herself to him.  "I should go first to India," she said, "and I
should shoot, one, two, three, yes, three tigers.  And then I would
see Farukhabad Sikri--I was reading in a book about it yesterday--
where the jungle grows in the palaces; and then I would go right up
the Himalayas, and then, then I would have a walking tour in Japan,
and then I would sail in a sailing ship down to Borneo and Java and
set myself up as a Ranee-- . . .  And then I would think what I
would do next."

"All alone, Amanda?" asked Mrs. Wilder.

"Only when I shoot tigers.  You and mother should certainly come to
Japan."

"But Mr. Benham perhaps doesn't intend to shoot tigers, Amanda?"
said Amanda's mother.

"Not at once.  My way will be a little different.  I think I shall
go first through Germany.  And then down to Constantinople.  And
then I've some idea of getting across Asia Minor and Persia to
India.  That would take some time.  One must ride."

"Asia Minor ought to be fun," said Amanda.  "But I should prefer
India because of the tigers.  It would be so jolly to begin with the
tigers right away."

"It is the towns and governments and peoples I want to see rather
than tigers," said Benham.  "Tigers if they are in the programme.
But I want to find out about--other things."

"Don't you think there's something to be found out at home?" said
the elder cousin, blushing very brightly and speaking with the
effort of one who speaks for conscience' sake.

"Betty's a Socialist," Amanda said to Benham with a suspicion of
apology.

"Well, we're all rather that," Mrs. Wilder protested.

"If you are free, if you are independent, then don't you owe
something to the workers?"  Betty went on, getting graver and redder
with each word.

"It's just because of that," said Benham, "that I am going round the
world."



3


He was as free with these odd people as if he had been talking to
Prothero.  They were--alert.  And he had been alone and silent and
full of thinking for two clear days.  He tried to explain why he
found Socialism at once obvious and inadequate. . . .

Presently the supper things got themselves put away and the talk
moved into a smaller room with several armchairs and a fire.  Mrs.
Wilder and the cousins and Amanda each smoked a cigarette as if it
were symbolical, and they were joined by a grave grey-bearded man
with a hyphenated name and slightly Socratic manner, dressed in a
very blue linen shirt and collar, a very woolly mustard-coloured
suit and loose tie, and manifestly devoted to one of those branches
of exemplary domestic decoration that grow upon Socialist soil in
England.  He joined Betty in the opinion that the duty of a free and
wealthy young man was to remain in England and give himself to
democratic Socialism and the abolition of "profiteering."  "Consider
that chair," he said.  But Benham had little feeling for the
craftsmanship of chairs.

Under cross-examination Mr. Rathbone-Sanders became entangled and
prophetic.  It was evident he had never thought out his
"democratic," he had rested in some vague tangle of idealism from
which Benham now set himself with the zeal of a specialist to rout
him.  Such an argument sprang up as one meets with rarely beyond the
happy undergraduate's range.  Everybody lived in the discussion,
even Amanda's mother listened visibly.  Betty said she herself was
certainly democratic and Mrs. Wilder had always thought herself to
be so, and outside the circle round the fire Amanda hovered
impatiently, not quite sure of her side as yet, but eager to come
down with emphasis at the first flash of intimation.

She came down vehemently on Benham's.

And being a very clear-cutting personality with an instinct for the
material rendering of things, she also came and sat beside him on
 by the
lamp and read the REPUBLIC very intently and very thoughtfully,
occasionally turning over a page.



5


When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to
perform his social obligations to the utmost.

So soon as he had had some dinner at his club he wrote his South
Harting friends a most agreeable letter of thanks for their kindness
to him.  In a little while he hoped he should see them again.  His
mother, too, was most desirous to meet them. . . .  That done, he
went on to his flat and to various aspects of life for which he was
quite unprepared.

But here we may note that Amanda answered him.  Her reply came some
four days later.  It was written in a square schoolgirl hand, it
covered three sheets of notepaper, and it was a very intelligent
essay upon the REPUBLIC of Plato.  "Of course," she wrote, "the
Guardians are inhumanthe little square-cornered sofa.

"Of course, Mr. Rathbone-Sanders," she said, "of course the world
must belong to the people who dare.  Of course people aren't all
alike, and dull people, as Mr. Benham says, and spiteful people, and
narrow people have no right to any voice at all in things. . . .



4


In saying this she did but echo Benham's very words, and all she
said and did that evening was in quick response to Benham's earnest
expression of his views.  She found Benham a delightful novelty.
She liked to argue because there was no other talk so lively, and
she had perhaps a lurking intellectual grudge against Mr. Rathbone-
Sanders that made her welcome an ally.  Everything from her that
night that even verges upon the notable has been told, and yet it
sufficed, together with something in the clear, long line of her
limbs, in her voice, in her general physical quality, to convince
Benham that she was the freest, finest, bravest spirit that he had
ever encountered.

In the papers he left behind him was to be found his perplexed
endeavours to explain this mental leap, that after all his efforts
still remained unexplained.  He had been vividly impressed by the
decision and courage of her treatment of the dogs; it was just the
sort of thing he could not do.  And there was a certain
contagiousness in the petting admiration with which her family
treated her.  But she was young and healthy and so was he, and in a
second mystery lies the key of the first.  He had fallen in love
with her, and that being so whatever he needed that instantly she
was.  He needed a companion, clean and brave and understanding. . . .

In his bed in the Ship that night he thought of nothing but her
before he went to sleep, and when next morning he walked on his way
over the South Downs to Chichester his mind was full of her image
and of a hundred pleasant things about her.  In his confessions he
wrote, "I felt there was a sword in her spirit.  I felt she was as
clean as the wind."

Love is the most chastening of powers, and he did not even remember
now that two days before he had told the wind and the twilight that
he would certainly "roll and rollick in women" unless there was work
for him to do.  She had a peculiarly swift and easy stride that went
with him in his thoughts along the turf by the wayside halfway and
more to Chichester.  He thought always of the two of them as being
side by side.  His imagination became childishly romantic.  The open
down about him with its scrub of thorn and yew became the wilderness
of the world, and through it they went--in armour, weightless
armour--and they wore long swords.  There was a breeze blowing and
larks were singing and something, something dark and tortuous dashed
suddenly in headlong flight from before their feet.  It was an
ethical problem such as those Mrs. Skelmersdale nursed in her bosom.
But at the sight of Amanda it had straightened out--and fled. . . .

And interweaving with such imaginings, he was some day to record,
there were others.  She had brought back to his memory the fancies
that had been aroused in his first reading of Plato's REPUBLIC; she
made him think of those women Guardians, who were the friends and
mates of men.  He wanted now to re-read that book and the LAWS.  He
could not remember if the Guardians were done in the LAWS as well as
in the REPUBLIC.  He wished he had both these books in his rucksack,
but as he had not, he decided he would hunt for them in Chichester.
When would he see Amanda again?  He would ask his mother to make the
acquaintance of these very interesting people, but as they did not
come to London very much it might be some time before he had a
chance of seeing her again.  And, besides, he was going to America
and India.  The prospect of an exploration of the world was still
noble and attractive; but he realized it would stand very much in
the way of his seeing more of Amanda.  Would it be a startling and
unforgivable thing if presently he began to write to her?  Girls of
that age and spirit living in out-of-the-way villages have been
known to marry. . . .

Marriage didn't at this stage strike Benham as an agreeable aspect
of Amanda's possibilities; it was an inconvenience; his mind was
running in the direction of pedestrian tours in armour of no
particular weight, amidst scenery of a romantic wildness. . . .

When he had gone to the house and taken his leave that morning it
had seemed quite in the vein of the establishment that he should be
received by Amanda alone and taken up the long garden before anybody
else appeared, to see the daffodils and the early apple-trees in
blossom and the pear-trees white and delicious.

Then he had taken his leave of them all and made his social
tentatives.  Did they ever come to London?  When they did they must
let his people know.  He would so like them to know his mother, Lady
Marayne.  And so on with much gratitude.

Amanda had said that she and the dogs would come with him up the
hill,, but it was a glorious sort of inhumanity.
They had a spirit--like sharp knives cutting through life."

It was her best bit of phrasing and it pleased Benham very much.
But, indeed, it was not her own phrasing, she had culled it from a
disquisition into which she had led Mr. Rathbone-me from going to pieces--and
wasting
existence.  It's rather difficult sometimes to tell what one thinks
and feels--"

She had not really listened to him.

"Who is that woman," she interrupted sudd she had said it exactly as a boy
might have said it, she had
brought him up to the corner of Up Park and had sat down there on a
heap of stones and watched him until he was out of sight, waving to
him when he looked back.  "Come back again," she had cried.

In Chichester he found a little green-bound REPUBLIC in a second-
hand book-shop near the Cathedral, but there was no copy of the LAWS
to be found in the place.  Then he was taken with the brilliant idea
of sleeping the night in Chichester and going back next day via
Harting to Petersfield station and London.  He carried out this
scheme and got to South Harting neatly about four o'clock in the
afternoon.  He found Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Amanda and the
dogs entertaining Mr. Rathbone-Sanders at tea, and they all seemed a
little surprised, and, except Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, they all seemed
pleased to see him again so soon.  His explanation of why he hadn't
gone back to London from Chichester struck him as a little
unconvincing in the cold light of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders' eye.  But
Amanda was manifestly excited by his return, and he told them his
impressions of Chichester and described the entertainment of the
evening guest at a country inn and suddenly produced his copy of the
REPUBLIC.  "I found this in a book-shop," he said, "and I brought it
for you, because it describes one of the best dreams of aristocracy
there has ever been dreamt."

At first she praised it as a pretty book in the dearest little
binding, and then realized that there were deeper implications, and
became grave and said she would read it through and through, she
loved such speculative reading.

She came to the door with the others and stayed at the door after
they had gone in again.  When he looked back at the corner of the
road to Petersfield she was still at the door and waved farewell to
him.

He only saw a light slender figure, but when she came back into the
sitting-room Mr. Rathbone-Sanders noted the faint flush in her cheek
and an unwonted abstraction in her eye.

And in the evening she tucked her feet up in the armchairSanders, and she
had sent it to Benham as she might have sent him a flower.



6


Benham re-entered the flat from which he had fled so precipitately
with three very definite plans in his mind.  The first was to set
out upon his grand tour of the world with as little delay as
possible, to shut up this Finacue Street establishment for a long
time, and get rid of the soul-destroying perfections ofenly, "Mrs.
Fly-by-Night,
or some such name, who rings you up on the telephone?"

Benham hesitaon't start saying things like a
moral windmill in a whirlwind.  It's all a muddle.  I suppose every
one in London is getting in or out of these entanglements--or
something of the sort.  And this seems a comparatively slight one.
I wish it hadn't happened.  They do happen."

An expression of perplexity came into her face.  She looked at him.
"Why do you want to throw her over?"

"I WANT to throw her over," said Benham.

He stood up and went to the hearthrug, and his mother reflected that
this was exactly what all men did at just this phase of a
discussion.  Then things ceased to be sensible.

From overhead he said to her: "I want to get away from this
complication, this servitude.  I want to do some--some work.  I want
to get my mind clear and my hands clear.  I want to study government
and the big business of the world."

"And she's in the way?"

He assented.

"You men!" said Lady Marayne after a little pause.  "What queer
beasts you are!  Here is a woman who is kind to you.  She's fond of
you.  I could tell she's fond of you directly I heard her.  And you
amuse yourself with her.  And then it's Gobble, Gobble, Gobble,
Great Work, Hands Clear, Big Business of the World.  Why couldn't
you think of that before, Poff?  Why did you begin with her Merkle.  The
second was to end his ill-advised intimacy with little Mrs.
Skelmersdale as generously and cheerfully as possible.  The third
was to bring Lady Marayne into social relations with the Wilder and
Morris MENAGE at South Harting.  It did not strike him that there
was any incompatibility among these projects or any insurmountable
difficulty in any of them until he was back in his flat.

The accumulation of letters, packages and telephone memoranda upon
his desk included a number of notes and slips to remind him that
both Mrs. Skelmersdale and his mother were ladies of some
determination.  Even as he stood turning over the pile of documents
the mechanical vehemence of the telephone filled him with a restored
sense of the adverse will in things.  "Yes, mam," he heard Merkle's
voice, "yes, mam.  I will tell him, mam.  Will you keep possession,
mam."  And then in the doorway of the study, "Mrs. Skelmersdale,
sir.  Upon the telephone, sir."

Benham reflected with various notes in his hand.  Then he went to
the telephone.

"You Wicked Boy, where have you been hiding?"

"I've been away.  I may have to go away again."

"Not before you have seen me.  Come round and tell me all about it."

Benham lied about an engagement.

"Then to-morrow in the morning." . . .  Impossible.

"In the afternoon.  You don't WANT to see me."  Benham did want to
see her.

"Come round and have a jolly little evening to-morrow night.  I've
got some more of that harpsichord music.  And I'm dying to see you.
Don't you understand?"

Further lies.  "Look here," said Benham, "can you come and have a
talk in Kensington Gardens?  You know the place, near that Chinese
garden.  Paddington Gate. . . ."

The lady's voice fell to flatness.  She agreed.  "But why not come
to see me HERE?" she asked.

Benham hung up the receiver abruptly.

He walked slowly back to his study.  "Phew!" he whispered to
himself.  It was like hitting her in the face.  He didn't want to be
a brute, but short of being a brute there was no way out for him
from this entanglement.  Why, oh! why the devil had he gone there to
lunch? . . .

He resumed his examination of the waiting letters with a ruffled
mind.  The most urgent thing about them was the clear evidence of
gathering anger on the part of his mother.  He had missed a lunch
party at Sir Godfrey's on Tuesday and a dinner engagement at Philip
Magnet's, quite an important dinner in its way, with various
promising young Liberals, on Wednesday evening.  And she was furious
at "this stupid mystery.  Of course you're bound to be found out,
and of course there will be a scandal." . . .  He perceived that
this last note was written on his own paper.  "Merkle!" he cried
sharply.

"Yessir!"

Merkle had been just outside, on call.

"Did my mother write any of these notes here?" he asked.

"Two, sir.  Her ladyship was round here three times, sir."

"Did she see all these letters?"

"Not the telephone calls, sir.  I ‘ad put them on one side.
But. . . .  It's a little thing, sir."

He paused and came a step nearer.  "You see, sir," he explained with
the faintest flavour of the confidential softening his mechanical
respect, "yesterday, when ‘er ladyship was ‘ere, sir, some one rang
up on the telephone--"

"But you, Merkle--"

"Exactly, sir.  But ‘er ladyship said ‘I'LL go to that, Merkle,' and
just for a moment I couldn't exactly think ‘ow I could manage it,
sir, and there ‘er ladyship was, at the telephone.  What passed,
sir, I couldn't ‘ear.  I ‘eard her say, ‘Any message?'  And I FANCY,
sir, I ‘eard ‘er say, ‘I'm the ‘ousemaid,' but that, sir, I think
must have been a mistake, sir."

"Must have been," said Benham.  "Certainly--must have been.  And the
call you think came from--?"

"There again, sir, I'm quite in the dark.  But of course, sir, it's
usually Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir.  Just about her time in the
afternoon.  On an average, sir. . . ."



7


"I went out of London to think about my life."

It was manifest that Lady Marayne did not believe him.

"Alone?" she asked.

"Of course alone."

"STUFF!" said Lady Marayne.

She had taken him into her own little sitting-room, she had thrown
aside gloves and fan and theatre wrap, curled herself comfortably
into the abundantly cushioned corner by the fire, and proceeded to a
mixture of cross-examination and tirade that he found it difficult
to make head against.  She was vibrating between distressed
solicitude and resentful anger.  She was infuriated at his going
away and deeply concerned at what could have taken him away.  "I was
worried," he said.  "London is too crowded to think in.  I wanted to
get myself alone."

"And there I was while you were getting yourself alone, as you call
it, wearing my poor little brains out to think of some story to tell
people.  I had to stuff them up you had a sprained knee at
Chexington, and for all I knew any of them might have been seeing
you that morning.  Besides what has a boy like you to worry about?
It's all nonsense, Poff."

She awaited his explanations.  Benham looked for a moment like his
father.

"I'm not getting on, mother," he said.  "I'm scattering myself.  I'm
getting no grip.  I want to get a better hold upon life, or else I
do not see what is to keep ted, blushed, and regretted it.

"Mrs. Skelmersdale," he said after a little pause.

"It's all the same.  Who is she?"

"She's a woman I met at a studio somewhere, and I went with her to
one of those Dolmetsch concerts."

He stopped.

Lady Marayne considered him in silence for a little while.  "All
men," she said at last, "are alike.  Husbands, sons and brothers,
they are all alike.  Sons!  One expects them to be different.  They
aren't different.  Why should they be?  I suppose I ought to be
shocked, Poff.  But I'm not.  She seems to be very fond of you."

"She's--she's very good--in her way.  She's had a difficult life. . . ."

"You can't leave a man about for a moment," Lady Marayne reflected.
"Poff, I wish you'd fetch me a glass of water."

When he returned she was looking very fixedly into the fire.  "Put
it down," she said, "anywhere.  Poff! is this Mrs. Helter-Skelter a
discreet sort of woman?  Do you like her?"  She asked a few
additional particulars and Benham made his grudging admission of
facts.  "What I still don't understand, Poff, is why you have been
away."

"I went away," said Benham, "because I want to clear things up."

"But why?  Is there some one else?"

"No."

"You went alone?  All the time?"

"I've told you I went alone.  Do you think I tell you lies, mother?"

"Everybody tells lies somehow," said Lady Marayne.  "Easy lies or
stiff ones.  Don't FLOURISH, Poff.  D?"

"It was unexpected. . . ."

"STUFF!" said Lady Marayne for a second time.  "Well," she said,
"well.  Your Mrs. Fly-by-Night,--oh it doesn't matter!--whatever she
calls herself, must look after herself.  I can't do anything for
her.  I'm not supposed even to know about her.  I daresay she'll
find her consolations.  I suppose you want to go out of London and
get away from it all.  I can help you there, perhaps.  I'm tired of
London too.  It's been a tiresome season.  Oh! tiresome and
disappointing!  I want to go over to Ireland and travel about a
little.  The Pothercareys want us to come.  They've asked us
twice. . . ."

Benham braced himself to face fresh difficulties.  It was amazing
how different the world could look from his mother's little parlour
and from the crest of the North Downs.

"But I want to start round the world," he cried with a note of acute
distress.  "I want to go to Egypt and India and see what is
happening in the East, all this wonderful waking up of the East, I
know nothing of the way the world is going-- . . ."

"India!" cried Lady Marayne.  "The East.  Poff, what is the MATTER
with you?  Has something happened--something else?  Have you been
having a love affair? --a REAL love affair?"

"Oh, DAMN love affairs!" cried Benham.  "Mother!--I'm sorry, mother!
But don't you see there's other things in the world for a man than
having a good time and making love.  I'm for something else than
that.  You've given me the splendidest time-- . . ."

"I see," cried Lady Marayne, "I see.  I've bored you.  I might have
known I should have bored you."

"You've NOT bored me!" cried Benham.

He threw himself on the rug at her feet.  "Oh, mother!" he said,
"little, dear, gallant mother, don't make life too hard for me.
I've got to do my job, I've got to find my job."

"I've bored you," she wept.

Suddenly she was weeping with all the unconcealed distressing grief
of a disappointed child.  She put her pretty be-ringed little hands
in front of her face and recited the accumulation of her woes.

"I've done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for
you and I've BORED you."

"Mother!"

"Don't come near me, Poff!  Don't TOUCH me!  All my plans.  All my
ambitions.  Friends--every one.  You don't know all I've given up
for you. . . ."

He had never seen his mother weep before.  Her self-abandonment
amazed him.  Her words were distorted by her tears.  It was the most
terrible and distressing of crises. . . .

"Go away from me!  How can you help me?  All I've done has been a
failure!  Failure!  Failure!"



8


That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham's voice
again.  "I must do my job," he was repeating, "I must do my job.
Anyhow. . . ."

And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little
unsurely: "Aristocracy. . . ."

The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt of a second
ordeal.  Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved beautifully and this made
everything tormentingly touching and difficult.  She convinced him
she was really in love with him, and indeed if he could have seen
his freshness and simplicity through her experienced eyes he would
have known there was sound reason why she should have found him
exceptional.  And when his clumsy hints of compensation could no
longer be ignored she treated him with a soft indignation, a tender
resentment, that left him soft and tender.  She looked at him with
pained eyes and a quiver of the lips.  What did he think she was?
And then a little less credibly, did he think she would have given
herself to him if she hadn't been in love with him?  Perhaps that
was not altogether true, but at any rate it was altogether true to
her when she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for a
moment intend him to have the cheap consolation of giving her money.
But, and that seemed odd to Benham, she would not believe, just as
Lady Marayne would not believe, that there was not some other woman
in the case.  He assured her and she seemed reassured, and then
presently she was back at exactly the same question.  Would no woman
ever understand the call of Asia, the pride of duty, the desire for
the world?

One sort of woman perhaps. . . .

It was odd that for the first time now, in the sunshine of
Kensington Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that
thirty years and more have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of
the eyelids, a little hardening of the mouth.  How slight it is, how
invisible it has been, how suddenly it appears!  And the sunshine of
the warm April afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined
unmercenary pose, betrayed too the faintest hint of shabbiness in
her dress.  He had never noticed these shadows upon her or her
setting before and their effect was to fill him with a strange
regretful tenderness. . . .

Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and
admire.  He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and
feared she might set herself to stir his senses, and both these
expectations had been unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her
beside him, a brave, rather ill-advised and unlucky little
struggler, stung and shamed.  He forgot the particulars of that
first lunch of theirs together and he remembered his mother's second
contemptuous "STUFF!"

Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected.  Why hadn't he left
this little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone?
And since he hadn't done so, what right had he now to back out of
their common adventure?  He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs.
Skelmersdale, in a mood between remorse and love and self-
immolation, and then a sunlit young woman with a leaping stride in
her paces, passed across his heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia
and forbidding even another thought of the banns. . . .

"You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?" said Mrs.
Skelmersdale, brimming over.  "You will do that."

He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders.  And as their
lips touched he suddenly found himself weeping also. . . .

His spirit went limping from that interview.  She chose to stay
behind in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned
back she was sitting in the same attitude looking at him as he
receded, and she had one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn up
to it.  The third time he waved his hat clumsily, and she started
and then answered with her hand.  Then the trees hid her. . . .

This sex business was a damnable business.  If only because it made
one hurt women. . . .

He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed
his mother.  Was he a brute?  Was he a cold-blooded prig?  What was
this aristocracy?  Was his belief anything more than a theory?  Was
he only dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners,
to the men in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields?  And
while he dreamt he wounded and distressed real living creatures in
the sleep-walk of his dreaming. . . .

So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face
absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with
women.

Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened
and tempered, who would understand.



9


So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into
a tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory.  But
mothers are not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a
mother whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary
persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over.  Nolan was
inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be
mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy
cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon
Benham's outlook.  His resolution to go round the world carried on
his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his
mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in
him.  It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the
importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little
lady's happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he
wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn't; the mere act of making it
would produce so entirely catastrophic a revulsion.  He could as
soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington
church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly
and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.

There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that
it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the
remorses of this period of Benham's life were too complicated and
scattered for a cumulative effect.  In the background of his mind
and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his
promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady
Marayne.  They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite
acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay.  Lady
Marayne's moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no
occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the
occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons
for regretting it.

"Ah!" she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: "you told me
you were alone!" . . .

Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all
that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from
London.  They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.

"When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry," she
remembered with a flash.  "You said, ‘Do I tell lies?'"

"I WAS alone.  Until--  It was an accident.  On my walk I was
alone."

But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant,
forefinger.

From the instant she heard of them she hated these South Harting
people unrestrainedly.  She made no attempt to conceal it.  Her
valiant bantam spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the
rare and uncongenial ache of his secession.  "And who are they?
What are they?  What sort of people can they be to drag in a passing
young man?  I suppose this girl of theirs goes out every evening--
Was she painted, Poff?"

She whipped him with her questions as though she was slashing his
face.  He became dead-white and grimly civil, answering every
question as though it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry.

"Of course I don't know who they are.  How should I know?  What need
is there to know?"

"There are ways of finding out," she insisted.  "If I am to go down
and make myself pleasant to these people because of you."

"But I implore you not to."

"And five minutes ago you were imploring me to!  Of course I shall."

"Oh well!--well!"

"One has to know SOMETHING of the people to whom one commits
oneself, surely."

"They are decent people; they are well-behaved people."

"Oh!--I'll behave well.  Don't think I'll disgrace your casual
acquaintances.  But who they are, what they are, I WILL know. . . ."

On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost
expectations.

"Come round," she said over the telephone, two mornings later.
"I've something to tell you."

She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him.  When it came to
telling him, she failed from her fierceness.

"Poff, my little son," she said, "I'm so sorry I hardly know how to
tell you.  Poff, I'm sorry.  I have to tell you--and it's utterly
beastly."

"But what?" he asked.

"These people are dreadful people."

"But how?"

"You've heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the
Marlborough Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?"

"Vaguely.  But what has that to do with them?"

"That man Morris."

She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.

"Her father," said Lady Marayne.

"But who was Morris?  Really, mother, I don't remember."

"He was sentenced to seven years--ten years--I forget.  He had done
all sorts of dreadful things.  He was a swindler.  And when he went
out of the dock into the waiting-room--  He had a signet ring with
prussic acid in it-- . . ."

"I remember now," he said.

A silence fell between them.

Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard
at the little volume of Henley's poetry that lay upon the table.

He cleared his throat presently.

"You can't go and see them then," he said.  "After all--since I am
going abroad so soon-- . . .  It doesn't so very much matter."



10


To Benham it did not seem to be of the slightest importance that
Amanda's father was a convicted swindler who had committed suicide.
Never was a resolved and conscious aristocrat so free from the
hereditary delusion.  Good parents, he was convinced, are only an
advantage in so far as they have made you good stuff, and bad
parents are no discredit to a son or daughter of good quality.
Conceivably he had a bias against too close an examination of
origins, and he held that the honour of the children should atone
for the sins of the fathers and the questionable achievements of any
intervening testator.  Not half a dozen rich and established
families in all England could stand even the most conventional
inquiry into the foundations of their pride, and only a universal
amnesty could prevent ridiculous distinctions.  But he brought no
accusation of inconsistency agt of you I knew that. . . ."

They embraced--alertly furtive.

Then they stood a little apart.  Some one was coming towards them.
Amanda's bearing changed swiftly.  She put up her little face to
his, confidently and intimately.

"Don't TELL any one," she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to
emphasize her words.  "Don't tell any one--not yet.  Not for a few
days. . . ."

She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty
appeared in a little path between the artichokes and raspberry
canes.

"Listening to the nightingales?" cried Betty.

"Yes, aren't they?" said Amanda inconsecutively.

"That's our very own nightingale!" cried Betty advancing.  "Do you
hear it, Mr. Benham?  No, not that one.  That is a quite inferior
bird that performs in the vicarage trees. . . ."



11


When a man has found and won his mate then the best traditions
demainst his mother.  She looked at
things with a lighter logic and a kind of genius for the acceptance
of superficial values.  She was condoned and forgiven, a rescued
lamb, re-established, notoriously bright and nice, and the Morrises
were damned.  That was their status, exclusion, damnation, as fixed
as colour in Georgia or caste in Bengal.  But if his mother's mind
worked in that way there was no reason why his should.  So far as he
was concerned, he told himself, it did not matter whether Amanda was
the daughter of a swindler or the daughter of a god.  He had no
doubt that she herself had the spirit and quality of divinity.  He
had seen it.

So there was nothing for it in the failure of his mother's
civilities but to increase his own.  He would go down to Harting and
take his leave of these amiable outcasts himself.  With a certain
effusion.  He would do this soon because he was now within sight of
the beginning of his world tour.  He had made his plans and prepared
most of his equipment.  Little remained to do but the release of
Merkle, the wrappering and locking up of Finacue Street, which could
await him indefinitely, and the buying of tickets.  He decided to
take the opportunity afforded by a visit of Sir Godfrey and Lady
Marayne to the Blights, big iron people in the North of England of
so austere a morality that even Benham was ignored by it.  He
announced his invasion in a little note to Mrs. Wilder.  He parted
from his mother on Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived,
a little reconciled to his project of going abroad; and contrived
his arrival at South Harting for that sunset hour which was for his
imagination the natural halo of Amanda.

"I'm going round the world," he told them simply.  "I may be away
for two years, and I thought I would like to see you all again
before I started."

That was quite the way they did things.

The supper-party included Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, who displayed a
curious tendency to drift in between Benham and Amanda, a literary
youth with a Byronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of
extraordinarily mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty's who had
cycled down from London, and who it appeared maintained herself at
large in London by drawing for advertisements, and a silent
colourless friend of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders.  The talk lit by Amanda's
enthusiasm circled actively round Benham's expedition.  It was clear
that the idea of giving some years to thinking out one's possible
work in the world was for some reason that remained obscure highly
irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and the Byronic youth.
Betty too regarded it as levity when there was "so much to be done,"
and the topic whacked about and rose to something like a wrangle,
and sat down and rested and got up again reinvigorated, with a
continuity of interest that Benham had never yet encountered in any
London gathering.  He made a good case for his modern version of the
Grand Tour, and he gave them something of his intellectual
enthusiasm for the distances and views, the cities and seas, the
multitudinous wide spectacle of the world he was to experience.  He
had been reading about Benares and North China.  As he talked
Amanda, who had been animated at first, fell thoughtful and silent.
And then it was discovered that the night was wonderfully warm and
the moon shining.  They drifted out into the garden, but Mr.
Rathbone-Sanders was suddenly entangled and drawn back by Mrs.
Wilder and the young woman from London upon some technical point,
and taken to the work-table in the corner of the dining-room to
explain.  He was never able to get to the garden.

Benham found himself with Amanda upon a side path, a little isolated
by some swaggering artichokes and a couple of apple trees and so
forth from the general conversation.  They cut themselves off from
the continuation of that by a little silence, and then she spoke
abruptly and with the quickness of a speaker who has thought out
something to say and fears interruption: "Why did you come down
here?"

"I wanted to see you before I went."

"You disturb me.  You fill me with envy."

"I didn't think of that.  I wanted to see you again."

"And then you will go off round the world, you will see the Tropics,
you will see India, you will go into Chinese cities all hung with
vermilion, you will climb mountains.  Oh! men can do all the
splendid things.  Wnd a lyrical interlude.  It should be possible to tell, in
that
ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost
uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring
that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy
lover.  This at any rate was what White had always done in his
novels hitherto, and what he hy do you come here to remind me of it?  I have
never been anywhere, anywhere at all.  I never shall go anywhere.
Never in my life have I seen a mountain.  Those Downs there--look at
them!--are my highest.  And while you are travelling I shall think
of you--and think of you. . . ."

"Would YOU like to travel?" he asked as though that was an
extraordinary idea.

"Do you think EVERY girl wants to sit at home and rock a cradle?"

"I never thought YOU did."

"Then what did you think I wanted?"

"What DO you want?"

She held her arms out widely, and the moonlight shone in her eyes as
she turned her face to him.

"Just what you want," she said; "--THE WHOLE WORLD!

"Life is like a feast," she went on; "it is spread before everybody
and nobody must touch it.  What am I?  Just a prisoner.  In a
cottage garden.  Looking for ever over a hedge.  I should be happier
if I couldn't look.  I remember once, only a little time ago, there
was a cheap excursion to London.  Our only servant went.  She had to
get up at an unearthly hour, and I--I got up too.  I helped her to
get off.  And when she was gone I went up to my bedroom again and
cried.  I cried with envy for any one, any one who could go away.
I've been nowhere--except to school at Chichester and three or four
times to Emsworth and Bognor--for eight years.  When you go"--the
tears glittered in the moonlight--"I shall cry.  It will be worse
than the excursion to London. . . .  Ever since you were here before
I've been thinking of it."

It seemed to Benham that here indeed was the very sister of his
spirit.  His words sprang into his mind as one thinks of a repartee.
"But why shouldn't you come too?" he said.

She stared at him in silence.  The two white-lit faces examined each
other.  Both she and Benham were trembling.

"COME TOO?" she repeated.

"Yes, with me."

"But--HOW?"

Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that is teased; her
troubled eyes looked out from under puckered brows.  "You don't mean
it," she said.  "You don't mean it."

And then indeed he meant it.

"Marry me," he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at
the end of the garden.  "And we will go together."

He seized her arm and drew her to him.  "I love you," he said.  "I
love your spirit.  You are not like any one else."

There was a moment's hesitation.

Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.

Then they turned their dusky faces to each other.  He drew her still
closer.

"Oh!" she said, and yielded herself to be kissed.  Their lips
touched, and for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.

"I wantn you," he whispered close to her.  "You are my mate.  From
the first sighawould certainly have done at this point
had he had the telling of Benham's story uncontrolledly in his
hands.  But, indeed, indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart
has not this simplicity.  Only the heroes of romance, and a few
strong simple clean-shaven Americans have that much emotional
integrity.  (And even the Americans do at times seem to an observant
eye to be putting in work at the job and keeping up their gladness.)
Benham was excited that night, but not in the proper bright-eyed,
red-cheeked way; he did not dance down the village street of Harting
to his harbour at the Ship, and the expression in his eyes as he sat
on the edge of his bed was not the deep elemental wonder one could
have wished there, but amazement.  Do not suppose that he did not
love Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not triumphantly
glad to have won her, that the image of the two armour-clad lovers
was not still striding and flourishing through the lit wilderness of
his imagination.  For three weeks things had pointed him to this.
They would do everything together now, he and his mate, they would
scale mountains together and ride side by side towards ruined cities
across the deserts of the World.  He could have wished no better
thing.  But at the same time, even as he felt and admitted this and
rejoiced at it, the sky of his mind was black with consternation. . . .

It is remarkable, White reflected, as he turned over the abundant
but confused notes upon this perplexing phase of Benham's
development that lay in the third drawer devoted to the Second
Limitation, how dependent human beings are upon statement.  Man is
the animal that states a case.  He lives not in things but in
expressed ideas, and what was troubling Benham inordinately that
night, a night that should have been devoted to purely blissful and
exalted expectations, was the sheer impossibility of stating what
had happened in any terms that would be tolerable either to Mrs.
Skelmersdale or Lady Marayne.  The thing had happened with the
suddenness of a revelation.  Whatever had been going on in the less
illuminated parts of his mind, his manifest resolution had been
merely to bid South Harting good-bye--  And in short they would
never understand.  They would accuse him of the meanest treachery.
He could see his mother's face, he could hear her voice saying, "And
so because of this sudden infatuation for a swindler's daughter, a
girl who runs about the roads with a couple of retrievers hunting
for a man, you must spoil all my plans, ruin my year, tell me a lot
of pretentious stuffy lies. . . ."  And Mrs. Skelmersdale too would
say, "Of course he just talked of the world and duty and all that
rubbish to save my face. . . ."

It wasn't so at all.

But it looked so frightfully like it!

Couldn't they realize that he had fled out of London before ever he
had seen Amanda?  They might be able to do it perhaps, but they
never would.  It just happened that in the very moment when the
edifice of his noble resolutions had been ready, she had stepped
into it--out of nothingness and nowhere.  She wasn't an accident;
that was just the point upon which they were bound to misjudge her;
she was an embodiment.  If only he could show her to them as she had
first shown herself to him, swift, light, a little flushed from
running but not in the least out of breath, quick as a leopard upon
the dogs. . . .  But even if the improbable opportunity arose, he
perceived it might still be impossible to produce the Amanda he
loved, the Amanda of the fluttering short skirt and the clear
enthusiastic voice.  Because, already he knew she was not the only
Amanda.  There was another, there might be others, there was this
perplexing person who had flashed into being at the very moment of
their mutual confession, who had produced the entirely disconcerting
demand that nobody must be told.  Then Betty had intervened.  But
that sub-Amanda and her carneying note had to be dealt with on the
first occasion, because when aristocrats love they don't care a rap
who is told and who is not told.  They just step out into the light
side by side. . . .

"Don't tell any one," she had said, "not for a few days. . . ."

This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning again, flitting about
in the background of a glad and loving adventuress, a pre-occupied
Amanda who had put her head down while the real Amanda flung her
chin up and contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, and who was
apparently engaged in disentangling something obscure connected with
Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that ought never to have been entangled. . . .

"A human being," White read, "the simplest human being, is a
clustering mass of aspects.  No man will judge another justly who
judges everything about him.  And of love in particular is this
true.  We love not persons but revelations.  The woman one loves is
like a goddess hidden in a shrine; for her sake we live on hope and
suffer the kindred priestesses that make up herself.  The art of
love is patience till the gleam returns. . . ."

Sunday and Monday did much to develop this idea of the intricate
complexity of humanity in Benham's mind.  On Monday morning he went
up from the Ship again to get Amanda alone and deliver his ultimatum
agaist a further secrecy, so that he could own her openly and have
no more of the interventions and separations that had barred him
from any intimate talk with her throughout the whole of Sunday.  The
front door stood open, the passage hall was empty, but as he
hesitated whether he should proclaim himself with the knocker or
walk through, the door of the little drawing-room flew open and a
black-clad cylindrical clerical person entirely unknown to Benham
stumbled over the threshold, blundered blindly against him, made a
sound like "MOO" and a pitiful gesture with his arm, and fled
forth. . . .

It was a curate and he was weeping bitterly. . . .

Benham stood in the doorway and watched a clumsy broken-hearted
flight down the village street.

He had been partly told and partly left to infer, and anyhow he was
beginning to understand about Mr. Rathbone-Sanders.  That he could
dismiss.  But--why was the curate in tears?



12


He found Amanda standing alone in the room from which this young man
had fled.  She had a handful of daffodils in her hand, and others
were scattered over the table.  She had been arranging the big bowl
of flowers in the centre.  He left the door open behind him and
stopped short with the table between them.  She looked up at him--
intelligently and calmly.  Her pose had a divine dignity.

"I want to tell them now," said Benham without a word of greeting.

"Yes," she said, "tell them now."

They heard steps in the passage outside.  "Betty!" cried Amanda.

Her mother's voice answered, "Do you want Betty?"

"We want you all," answered Amanda.  "We have something to tell
you. . . ."

"Carrie!" they heard Mrs. Morris call her sister after an interval,
and her voice sounded faint and flat and unusual.  There was the
soft hissing of some whispered words outside and a muffled
exclamation.  Then Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Betty came into
the room.  Mrs. Wilder came first, and Mrs. Morris with an alarmed
face as if sheltering behind her.  "We want to tell you something,"
said Amanda.

"Amanda and I are going to marry each other," said Benham, standing
in front of her.

For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.

"BUT DOES HE KNOW?" Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.

Amanda turned her eyes to her lover.  She was about to speak, she
seemed to gather herself for an effort, and then he knew that he did
not want to hear her explanation.  He checked her by a gesture.

"I KNOW," he said, and then, "I do not see that it matters to us in
the least."

He went to her holding out both his hands to her.

She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful
gravity of her face broke into soft emotion.  "Oh!" she cried and
seized his face between her hands in a passion of triumphant love
and kissed him.

And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.

She kissed him thrice, with solemnity, with thankfulness, with
relief, as if in the act of kissing she transferred to him precious
and entirely incalculable treasures.



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON



1


It was a little after sunrise one bright morning in September that
Benham came up on to the deck of the sturdy Austrian steamboat that
was churning its way with a sedulous deliberation from Spalato to
Cattaro, and lit himself a cigarette and seated himself upon a deck
chair.  Save for a yawning Greek sailor busy with a mop the first-
class deck was empty.

Benham surveyed the haggard beauty of the Illyrian coast.  The
mountains rose gaunt and enormous and barren to a jagged fantastic
silhouette against the sun; their almost vertical slopes still
plunged in blue shadow, broke only into a little cold green and
white edge of olive terraces and vegetation and houses before they
touched the clear blue water.  An occasional church or a house
perched high upon some seemingly inaccessible ledge did but
accentuate the vast barrenness of the land.  It was a land desolated
and destroyed.  At Ragusa, at Salona, at Spalato and Zara and Pola
Benham had seen only variations upon one persistent theme, a
dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst the giant ruins of
preceding times, as worms live in the sockets of a skull.  Forward
an unsavoury group of passengers still slumbered amidst fruit-peel
and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid brigands armed with
preposterous red umbrellas, a group of curled-up human lumps brooded
over by an aquiline individual caparisoned with brass like a horse,
his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl.  Benham surveyed these
last products of the "life force" and resumed his pensive survey of
the coast.  The sea was deserted save for a couple of little lateen
craft with suns painted on their gaudy sails, sea butterflies that
hung motionless as if unawakened close inshore. . . .

The travel of the last few weeks had impressed Benham's imagination
profoundly.  For the first time in his life he had come face to face
with civilization in defeat.  From Venice hitherward he had marked
with cumulative effect the clustering evidences of effort spent and
power crumbled to nothingness.  He had landed upon the marble quay
of Pola and visited its deserted amphitheatre, he had seen a weak
provincial life going about ignoble ends under the walls of the
great Venetian fortress and the still more magnificent cathedral of
Zara; he had visited Spalato, clustered in sweltering grime within
the ample compass of the walls of Diocletian‘s villa, and a few
troublesome sellers of coins and iridescent glass and fragments of
tessellated pavement and such-like loot was all the population he
had found amidst the fallen walls and broken friezes and columns of
Salona.  Down this coast there ebbed and flowed a mean residual
life, a life of violence and dishonesty, peddling trades, vendettas
and war.  For a while the unstable Austrian ruled this land and made
a sort of order that the incalculable chances of international
politics might at any time shatter.  Benham was drawing near now to
the utmost limit of that extended peace.  Ahead beyond the mountain
capes was Montenegro and, further, Albania and Macedonia, lands of
lawlessness and confusion.  Amanda and he had been warned of the
impossibility of decent travel beyond Cattaro and Cettinje but this
had but whetted her adventurousness and challenged his spirit.  They
were going to see Albania for themselves.

The three months of honeymoon they had been spending together had
developed many remarkable divergences of their minds that had not
been in the least apparent to Benham before their marriage.  Then
their common resolve to be as spirited as possible had obliterated
all minor considerations.  But that was the limit of their
unanimity.  Amanda loved wild and picturesque things, and Benham
strong and clear things; the vines and brushwood amidst the ruins of
Salona that had delighted her had filled him with a sense of tragic
retrogression.  Salona had revived again in the acutest form a
dispute that had been smouldering between them throughout a fitful
and lengthy exploration of north and central Italy.  She could not
understand his disgust with the mediaeval colour and confusion that
had swamped the pride and state of the Roman empire, and he could
not make her feel the ambition of the ruler, the essential
discipline and responsibilities of his aristocratic idea.  While his
adventurousness was conquest, hers, it was only too manifest, was
brigandage.  His thoughts ran now into the form of an imaginary
discourse, that he would never deliver to her, on the decay of
states, on the triumphs of barbarians over rulers who will not rule,
on the relaxation of patrician orders and the return of the robber
and assassin as lordship decays.  This coast was no theatrical
scenery for him; it was a shattered empire.  And it was shattered
because no men had been found, united enough, magnificent and
steadfast enough, to hold the cities, and maintain the roads, keep
the peace and subdue the brutish hates and suspicions and cruelties
that devastated the world.

And as these thoughts came back into his mind, Amanda flickered up
from below, light and noiseless as a sunbeam, and stood behind his
chair.

Freedom and the sight of the world had if possible brightened and
invigorated her.  Her costume and bearing were subtly touched by the
romance of the Adriatic.  There was a flavour of the pirate in the
cloak about her shoulders and the light knitted cap of scarlet she
had stuck upon her head.  She surveyed his preoccupation for a
moment, glanced forward, and then covered his eyes with her hands.
In almost the same movement she had bent down and nipped the tip of
his ear between her teeth.

"Confound you, Amanda!"

"You'd forgotten my existence, you star-gazing Cheetah.  And then,
you see, these things happen to you!"

"I was thinking."

"Well--DON'T. . . .  I distrust your thinking.  This coast is wilder
and grimmer than yesterday.  It's glorious. . . ."

She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her.

"Is there nothing to eat?" she asked abruptly.

"It is too early."



2


"This coast is magnificent," she said presently.

"It's hideous," he answered.  "It's as ugly as a heap of slag."

"It's nature at its wildest."

"That's Amanda at her wildest."

"Well, isn't it?"

"No!  This land isn't nature.  It's waste.  Not wilderness.  It's
the other end.  Those hills were covered with forests; this was a
busy civilized coast just a little thousand years ago.  The
Venetians wasted it.  They cut down the forests; they filled the
cities with a mixed mud of population, THAT stuff.  Look at it"!--he
indicated the sleepers forward by a movement of his head.

"I suppose they WERE rather feeble people," said Amanda.

"Who?"

"The Venetians."

"They were traders--and nothing more.  Just as we are.  And when
they were rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested.
Much as we do."

Amanda surveyed him.  "We don't rest."

"We idle."

"We are seeing things."

"Don't be a humbug, Amanda.  We are making love.  Just as they did.
And it has been--ripping.  In Salona they made love tremendously.
They did nothing else until the barbarians came over the
mountains. . . ."

"Well," said Amanda virtuously, "we will do something else."

He made no answer and her expression became profoundly thoughtful.
Of course this wandering must end.  He had been growing impatient
for some time.  But it was difficult, she perceived, to decide just
what to do with him. . . .

Benham picked up the thread of his musing.

He was seeing more and more clearly that all civilization was an
effort, and so far always an inadequate and very partially
successful effort.  Always it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in
the sense that it was the work of minorities, who took power, who
had a common resolution against the inertia, the indifference, the
insubordination and instinctive hostility of the mass of mankind.
And always the set-backs, the disasters of civilization, had been
failures of the aristocratic spirit.  Why had the Roman purpose
faltered and shrivelled?  Every order, every brotherhood, every
organization carried with it the seeds of its own destruction.  Must
the idea of statecraft and rule perpetually reappear, reclothe
itself in new forms, age, die, even as life does--making each time
its almost infinitesimal addition to human achievement?  Now the
world is crying aloud for a renascence of the spirit that orders and
controls.  Human affairs sway at a dizzy height of opportunity.
Will they keep their footing there, or stagger?  We have got back at
last to a time as big with opportunity as the early empire.  Given
only the will in men and it would be possible now to turn the
dazzling accidents of science, the chancy attainments of the
nineteenth century, into a sane and permanent possession, a new
starting point. . . .  What a magnificence might be made of life!

He was aroused by Amanda‘s voice.

"When we go back to London, old Cheetah," she said, "we must take a
house."

For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point
of divergence.

"Why?" he asked at length.

"We must have a house," she said.

He looked at her face.  Her expression was profoundly thoughtful,
her eyes were fixed on the slumbering ships poised upon the
transparent water under the mountain shadows.

"You see," she thought it out, "you've got to TELL in London.  You
can't just sneak back there.  You've got to strike a note of your
own.  With all these things of yours."

"But how?"

"There's a sort of little house, I used to see them when I was a
girl and my father lived in London, about Brook Street and that
part.  Not too far north. . . .  You see going back to London for us
is just another adventure.  We've got to capture London.  We've got
to scale it.  We've got advantages of all sorts.  But at present
we're outside.  We've got to march in."

Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.

She was roused by Benham s voice.

"What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?"

She turned her level eyes to his.  "London," she said.  "For you."

"I don't want London," he said.

"I thought you did.  You ought to.  I do."

"But to take a house!  Make an invasion of London!"

"You dear old Cheetah, you can't be always frisking about in the
wilderness, staring at the stars."

"But I'm not going back to live in London in the old way, theatres,
dinner-parties, chatter--"

"Oh no!  We aren't going to do that sort of thing.  We aren't going
to join the ruck.  We'll go about in holiday times all over the
world.  I want to see Fusiyama.  I mean to swim in the South Seas.
With you.  We'll dodge the sharks.  But all the same we shall have
to have a house in London.  We have to be FELT there."

She met his consternation fairly.  She lifted her fine eyebrows.
Her little face conveyed a protesting reasonableness.

"Well, MUSTN'T we?"

She added, "If we want to alter the world we ought to live in the
world."

Since last they had disputed the question she had thought out these
new phrases.

"Amanda," he said, "I think sometimes you haven't the remotest idea
of what I am after.  I don't believe you begin to suspect what I am
up to."

She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her chin between her hands
and regarded him impudently.  She had a characteristic trick of
looking up with her face downcast that never failed to soften his
regard.

"Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your early morning habit
of calling your own true love a fool," she said.

"Simply I tell you I will not go back to London."

"You will go back with me, Cheetah."

"I will go back as far as my work calls me there."

"It calls you through the voice of your mate and slave and doormat
to just exactly the sort of house you ought to have. . . .  It is
the privilege and duty of the female to choose the lair."

For a space Benham made no reply.  This controversy had been
gathering for some time and he wanted to state his view as vividly
as possible.  The Benham style of connubial conversation had long
since decided for emphasis rather than delicacy.

"I think," he said slowly, "that this wanting to take London by
storm is a beastly VULGAR thing to want to do."

Amanda compressed her lips.

"I want to work out things in my mind," he went on.  "I do not want
to be distracted by social things, and I do not want to be
distracted by picturesque things.  This life--it's all very well on
the surface, but it isn't real.  I'm not getting hold of reality.
Things slip away from me.  God! but how they slip away from me!"

He got up and walked to the side of the boat.

She surveyed his back for some moments.  Then she went and leant
over the rail beside him.

"I want to go to London," she said.

"I don't."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Where I can see into the things that hold the world together."

"I have loved this wandering--I could wander always.  But . . .
Cheetah!  I tell you I WANT to go to London."

He looked over his shoulder into her warm face.  "NO," he said.

"But, I ask you."

He shook his head.

She put her face closer and whispered.  "Cheetah! big beast of my
heart.  Do you hear your mate asking for something?"

He turned his eyes back to the mountains.  "I must go my own way."

"Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah?
Can't you trust the leopard's wisdom?"

He stared at the coast inexorably.

"I wonder," she whispered.

"What?"

"You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast--."

Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbottoned and rolled up the
sleeve of her blouse.  She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before
his eyes.  "Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it?  It was your
powerful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless
young leopardess--"

"Amanda!"

"Well."  She wrinkled her brows.

He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face
and there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.

"Look here, Amanda!" he said, "if you think that you are going to
make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of
complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a
campaign of social assertion--by THAT, then may I be damned for an
uxorious fool!"

Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.

"This, Cheetah, is the morning mood," she remarked.

"This is the essential mood.  Listen, Amanda--"

He stopped short.  He looked towards the gangway, they both looked.
The magic word "Breakfast" came simultaneously from them.

"Eggs," she said ravenously, and led the way.

A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a
truce between them.



3


Their marriage had been a comparatively inconspicuous one, but since
that time they had been engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and
variety.  Their wedding had taken place at South Harting church in
the marked absence of Lady Marayne, and it had been marred by only
one untoward event.  The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in spite of the
earnest advice of several friends had insisted upon sharing in the
ceremony, had suddenly covered his face with the sleeves of his
surplice and fled with a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an
uproar of inadequately smothered sorrow came as an obligato
accompaniment to the more crucial passages of the service.  Amanda
appeared unaware of the incident at the time, but afterwards she
explained things to Benham.  "Curates," she said, "are such pent-up
men.  One ought, I suppose, to remember that.  But he never had
anything to go upon at all--not anything--except his own
imaginations."

"I suppose when you met him you were nice to him."

"I was nice to him, of course. . . ."

They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains
of this infatuated divine.  His sorrow made them thoughtful for a
time, and then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot
about him, and their honeymoon became so active and entertaining
that only very rarely and transitorily did they ever think of him
again.

The original conception of their honeymoon had been identical with
the plans Benham had made for the survey and study of the world, and
it was through a series of modifications, replacements and additions
that it became at last a prolonged and very picturesque tour in
Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, North Italy, and down the Adriatic
coast.  Amanda had never seen mountains, and longed, she said, to
climb.  This took them first to Switzerland.  Then, in spite of
their exalted aims, the devotion of their lives to noble purposes,
it was evident that Amanda had no intention of scamping the detail
of love, and for that what background is so richly beautiful as
Italy?  An important aspect of the grand tour round the world as
Benham had planned it, had been interviews, inquiries and
conversations with every sort of representative and understanding
person he could reach.  An unembarrassed young man who wants to know
and does not promise to bore may reach almost any one in that way,
he is as impersonal as pure reason and as mobile as a letter, but
the presence of a lady in his train leaves him no longer
unembarrassed.  His approach has become a social event.  The wife of
a great or significant personage must take notice or decide not to
take notice.  Of course Amanda was prepared to go anywhere, just as
Benham's shadow; it was the world that was unprepared.  And a second
leading aspect of his original scheme had been the examination of
the ways of government in cities and the shifting and mixture of
nations and races.  It would have led to back streets, and involved
and complicated details, and there was something in the fine flame
of girlhood beside him that he felt was incompatible with those
shadows and that dust.  And also they were lovers and very deeply in
love.  It was amazing how swiftly that draggled shameful London
sparrow-gamin, Eros, took heart from Amanda, and became wonderful,
beautiful, glowing, life-giving, confident, clear-eyed; how he
changed from flesh to sweet fire, and grew until he filled the sky.
So that you see they went to Switzerland and Italy at last very like
two ordinary young people who were not aristocrats at all, had no
theory about the world or their destiny, but were simply just
ardently delighted with the discovery of one another.

Nevertheless Benham was for some time under a vague impression that
in a sort of way still he was going round the world and working out
his destinies.

It was part of the fascination of Amanda that she was never what he
had supposed her to be, and that nothing that he set out to do with
her ever turned out as they had planned it.  Her appreciations
marched before her achievement, and when it came to climbing it
seemed foolish to toil to summits over which her spirit had flitted
days before.  Their Swiss expeditions which she had foreseen as
glorious wanderings amidst the blue ice of crevasses and nights of
exalted hardihood became a walking tour of fitful vigour and
abundant fun and delight.  They spent a long day on the ice of the
Aletsch glacier, but they reached the inn on its eastward side with
magnificent appetites a little late for dinner.

Amanda had revealed an unexpected gift for nicknames and pretty
fancies.  She named herself the Leopard, the spotless Leopard; in
some obscure way she intimated that the colour was black, but that
was never to be admitted openly, there was supposed to be some
lurking traces of a rusty brown but the word was spotless and the
implication white, a dazzling white, she would play a thousand
variations on the theme; in moments of despondency she was only a
black cat, a common lean black cat, and sacks and half-bricks almost
too good for her.  But Benham was always a Cheetah.  That had come
to her as a revelation from heaven.  But so clearly he was a
Cheetah.  He was a Hunting Leopard; the only beast that has an up-
cast face and dreams and looks at you with absent-minded eyes like a
man.  She laced their journeys with a fantastic monologue telling in
the third person what the Leopard and the Cheetah were thinking and
seeing and doing.  And so they walked up mountains and over passes
and swam in the warm clear water of romantic lakes and loved each
other mightily always, in chestnut woods and olive orchards and
flower-starred alps and pine forests and awning-covered boats, and
by sunset and moonlight and starshine; and out of these agreeable
solitudes they came brown and dusty, striding side by side into
sunlit entertaining fruit-piled market-places and envious hotels.
For days and weeks together it did not seem to Benham that there was
anything that mattered in life but Amanda and the elemental joys of
living.  And then the Research Magnificent began to stir in him
again.  He perceived that Italy was not India, that the clue to the
questions he must answer lay in the crowded new towns that they
avoided, in the packed bookshops and the talk of men, and not in the
picturesque and flowery solitudes to which their lovemaking carried
them.

Moods began in which he seemed to forget Amanda altogether.

This happened first in the Certosa di Pavia whither they had gone
one afternoon from Milan.  That was quite soon after they were
married.  They had a bumping journey thither in a motor-car, a
little doubtful if the excursion was worth while, and they found a
great amazement in the lavish beauty and decorative wealth of that
vast church and its associated cloisters, set far away from any
population as it seemed in a flat wilderness of reedy ditches and
patchy cultivation.  The distilleries and outbuildings were
deserted--their white walls were covered by one monstrously great
and old wisteria in flower--the soaring marvellous church was in
possession of a knot of unattractive guides.  One of these conducted
them through the painted treasures of the gold and marble chapels;
he was an elderly but animated person who evidently found Amanda
more wonderful than any church.  He poured out great accumulations
of information and compliments before her.  Benham dropped behind,
went astray and was presently recovered dreaming in the great
cloister.  The guide showed them over two of the cells that opened
thereupon, each a delightful house for a solitary, bookish and
clean, and each with a little secret walled garden of its own.  He
was covertly tipped against all regulations and departed regretfulry
with a beaming dismissal from Amanda.  She found Benham wondering
why the Carthusians had failed to produce anything better in the
world than a liqueur.  "One might have imagined that men would have
done something in this beautiful quiet; that there would have come
thought from here or will from here."

"In these dear little nests they ought to have put lovers," said
Amanda.

"Oh, of course, YOU would have made the place Thelema. . . ."

But as they went shaking and bumping back along the evil road to
Milan, he fell into a deep musing.  Suddenly he said, "Work has to
be done.  Because this order or that has failed, there is no reason
why we should fail.  And look at those ragged children in the road
ahead of us, and those dirty women sitting in the doorways, and the
foul ugliness of these gaunt nameless towns through which we go!
They are what they are, because we are what we are--idlers,
excursionists.  In a world we ought to rule. . . .

"Amanda, we've got to get to work. . . ."

That was his first display of this new mood, which presently became
a common one.  He was less and less content to let the happy hours
slip by, more and more sensitive to the reminders in giant ruin and
deserted cell, in a chance encounter with a string of guns and
soldiers on their way to manoeuvres or in the sight of a stale
newspaper, of a great world process going on in which he was now
playing no part at all.  And a curious irritability manifested
itself more and more plainly, whenever human pettiness obtruded upon
his attention, whenever some trivial dishonesty, some manifest
slovenliness, some spiritless failure, a cheating waiter or a
wayside beggar brought before him the shiftless, selfish, aimless
elements in humanity that war against the great dream of life made
glorious.  "Accursed things," he would say, as he flung some
importunate cripple at a church door a ten-centime piece; "why were
they born?  Why do they consent to live?  They are no better than
some chance fungus that is because it must."

"It takes all sorts to make a world," said Amanda.

"Nonsense," said Benham.  "Where is the megatherium?  That sort of
creature has to go.  Our sort of creature has to end it."

"Then why did you give it money?"

"Because--  I don't want the thing to be more wretched than it is.
But if I could prevent more of them-- . . .  What am I doing to
prevent them?"

"These beggars annoy you," said Amanda after a pause.  "They do me.
Let us go back into the mountains."

But he fretted in the mountains.

They made a ten days' tour from Macugnaga over the Monte Moro to
Sass, and thence to Zermatt and back by the Theodule to Macugnaga.
The sudden apparition of douaniers upon the Monte Moro annoyed
Benham, and he was also irritated by the solemn English mountain
climbers at Saas Fee.  They were as bad as golfers, he said, and
reflected momentarily upon his father.  Amanda fell in love with
Monte Rosa, she wanted to kiss its snowy forehead, she danced like a
young goat down the path to Mattmark, and rolled on the turf when
she came to gentians and purple primulas.  Benham was tremendously
in love with her most of the time, but one day when they were
sitting over the Findelen glacier his perceptions blundered for the
first time upon the fundamental antagonism of their quality.  She
was sketching out jolly things that they were to do together,
expeditions, entertainments, amusements, and adventures, with a
voluble swiftness, and suddenly in a flash his eyes were opened, and
he saw that she would never for a moment feel the quality that made
life worth while for him.  He saw it in a flash, and in that flash
he made his urgent resolve not to see it.  From that moment forth
his bearing was poisoned by his secret determination not to think of
this, not to admit it to his mind.  And forbidden to come into his
presence in its proper form, this conflict of intellectual
temperaments took on strange disguises, and the gathering tension of
his mind sought to relieve itself along grotesque irrelevant
channels.

There was, for example, the remarkable affair of the drive from
Macugnaga to Piedimulera.

They had decided to walk down in a leisurely fashion, but with the
fatigues of the precipitous clamber down from Switzerland still upon
them they found the white road between rock above and gorge below
wearisome, and the valley hot in the late morning sunshine, and
already before they reached the inn they had marked for lunch Amanda
had suggested driving the rest of the way.  The inn had a number of
brigand-like customers consuming such sustenance as garlic and
salami and wine; it received them with an indifference that bordered
on disrespect, until the landlord, who seemed to be something of a
beauty himself, discovered the merits of Amanda.  Then he became
markedly attentive.  He was a large, fat, curly-headed person with
beautiful eyes, a cherished moustache, and an air of great
gentility, and when he had welcomed his guests and driven off the
slatternly waiting-maid, and given them his best table, and
consented, at Amanda's request, to open a window, he went away and
put on a tie and collar.  It was an attention so conspicuous that
even the group of men in the far corner noticed and commented on it,
and then they commented on Amanda and Benham, assuming an ignorance
of Italian in the visitors that was only partly justifiable.
"Bellissima," "bravissima," "signorina," "Inglesa," one need not be
born in Italy to understand such words as these.  Also they
addressed sly comments and encouragements to the landlord as he went
to and fro.

Benham was rather still and stiff during the meal, but it ill
becomes an English aristocrat to discuss the manners of an alien
population, and Amanda was amused by the effusion of the landlord
and a little disposed to experiment upon him.  She sat radiating
light amidst the shadows.

The question of the vehicle was broached.  The landlord was
doubtful, then an idea, it was manifestly a questionable idea,
occurred to him.  He went to consult an obscure brown-faced
individual in the corner, disappeared, and the world without became
eloquent.  Presently he returned and announced that a carozza was
practicable.  It had been difficult, but he had contrived it.  And
he remained hovering over the conclusion of their meal, asking
questions about Amanda's mountaineering and expressing incredulous
admiration.

His bill, which he presented with an uneasy flourish, was large and
included the carozza.

He ushered them out to the carriage with civilities and compliments.
It had manifestly been difficult and contrived.  It was dusty and
blistered, there had been a hasty effort to conceal its recent use
as a hen-roost, the harness was mended with string.  The horse was
gaunt and scandalous, a dirty white, and carried its head
apprehensively.  The driver had but one eye, through which there
gleamed a concentrated hatred of God and man.

"No wonder he charged for it before we saw it," said Benham.

"It's better than walking," said Amanda.

The company in the inn gathered behind the landlord and scrutinized
Amanda and Benham intelligently.  The young couple got in.
"Avanti," said Benham, and Amanda bestowed one last ineradicable
memory on the bowing landlord.

Benham did not speak until just after they turned the first corner,
and then something portentous happened, considering the precipitous
position of the road they were upon.  A small boy appeared sitting
in the grass by the wayside, and at the sight of him the white horse
shied extravagantly.  The driver rose in his seat ready to jump.
But the crisis passed without a smash.  "Cheetah!" cried Amanda
suddenly.  "This isn't safe."  "Ah!" said Benham, and began to act
with the vigour of one who has long accumulated force.  He rose in
his place and gripped the one-eyed driver by the collar.  "ASPETTO,"
he said, but he meant "Stop!"  The driver understood that he meant
"Stop," and obeyed.

Benham wasted no time in parleying with the driver.  He indicated to
him and to Amanda by a comprehensive gesture that he had business
with the landlord, and with a gleaming appetite upon his face went
running back towards the inn.

The landlord was sitting down to a little game of dominoes with his
friends when Benham reappeared in the sunlight of the doorway.
There was no misunderstanding Benham's expression.

For a moment the landlord was disposed to be defiant.  Then he
changed his mind.  Benham's earnest face was within a yard of his
own, and a threatening forefinger was almost touching his nose.

"Albergo cattivissimo," said Benham.  "Cattivissimo!  Pranzo
cattivissimo 'orrido.  Cavallo cattivissimo, dangerousissimo.  Gioco
abominablissimo, damnissimo.  Capisce.  Eh?" *


* This is vile Italian.  It may--with a certain charity to Benham--
be rendered: "The beastliest inn!  The beastliest!  The beastliest,
most awful lunch!  The vilest horse!  Most dangerous!  Abominable
trick!  Understand?"


The landlord made deprecatory gestures.

"YOU understand all right," said Benham.  "Da me il argento per il
carozzo.  Subito?" *


* "Give me back the money for the carriage.  QUICKLY!"


The landlord was understood to ask whether the signor no longer
wished for the carriage.

"SUBITO!" cried Benham, and giving way to a long-restrained impulse
seized the padrone by the collar of his coat and shook him
vigorously.

There were dissuasive noises from the company, but no attempt at
rescue.  Benham released his hold.

"Adesso!" said Benham. *


* "NOW!"


The landlord decided to disgorge.  It was at any rate a comfort that
the beautiful lady was not seeing anything of this.  And he could
explain afterwards to his friends that the Englishman was clearly a
lunatic, deserving pity rather than punishment.  He made some sound
of protest, but attempted no delay in refunding the money Benham had
prepaid.  Outside sounded the wheels of the returning carriage.
They stopped.  Amanda appeared in the doorway and discovered Benham
dominant.

He was a little short of breath, and as she came in he was
addressing the landlord with much earnestness in the following
compact sentences.

"Attendez!  Ecco!  Adesso noi andiamo con questa cattivissimo
cavallo a Piedimulera.  Si noi arrivero in safety, securo that is,
pagaremo.  Non altro.  Si noi abbiamo accidento Dio--Dio have mercy
on your sinful soul.  See!  Capisce?  That's all." *


* "Now we will go with this beastly horse to Piedimulera.  If we get
there safely I will pay.  If we have an accident, then--"


He turned to Amanda.  "Get back into the thing," he said.  "We won't
have these stinking beasts think we are afraid of the job.  I've
just made sure he won't have a profit by it if we smash up.  That's
all.  I might have known what he was up to when he wanted the money
beforehand."  He came to the doorway and with a magnificent gesture
commanded the perplexed driver to turn the carriage.

While that was being done he discoursed upon his adjacent fellow-
creatures.  "A man who pays beforehand for anything in this filthy
sort of life is a fool.  You see the standards of the beast.  They
think of nothing but their dirty little tricks to get profit, their
garlic, their sour wine, their games of dominoes, their moments of
lust.  They crawl in this place like cockroaches in a warm corner of
the fireplace until they die.  Look at the scabby frontage of the
house.  Look at the men's faces. . . .  Yes.  So!  Adequato.
Aspettate. . . .  Get back into the carriage, Amanda."

"You know it's dangerous, Cheetah.  The horse is a shier.  That man
is blind in one eye."

"Get back into the carriage," said Benham, whitely angry.  "I AM
GOING TO DRIVE!"

"But--!"

Just for a moment Amanda looked scared.  Then with a queer little
laugh she jumped in again.

Amanda was never a coward when there was excitement afoot.  "We'll
smash!" she cried, by no means woefully.

"Get up beside me," said Benham speaking in English to the driver
but with a gesture that translated him.  Power over men radiated
from Benham in this angry mood.  He took the driver's seat.  The
little driver ascended and then with a grim calmness that brooked no
resistance Benham reached over, took and fastened the apron over
their knees to prevent any repetition of the jumping out tactics.

The recovering landlord became voluble in the doorway.

"In Piedimulera pagero," said Benham over his shoulder and brought
the whip across the white outstanding ribs.  "Get up!" said Benham.

Amanda gripped the sides of the seat as the carriage started into
motion.

He laid the whip on again with such vigour that the horse forgot
altogether to shy at the urchin that had scared it before.

"Amanda," said Benham leaning back.  "If we do happen to go over on
THAT side, jump out.  It's all clear and wide for you.  This side
won't matter so--"

"MIND!" screamed Amanda and recalled him to his duties.  He was off
the road and he had narrowly missed an outstanding chestnut true.

"No, you don't," said Benham presently, and again their career
became erratic for a time as after a slight struggle he replaced the
apron over the knees of the deposed driver.  It had been furtively
released.  After that Benham kept an eye on it that might have been
better devoted to the road.

The road went down in a series of curves and corners.  Now and then
there were pacific interludes when it might have been almost any
road.  Then, again, it became specifically an Italian mountain road.
Now and then only a row of all too infrequent granite stumps
separated them from a sheer precipice.  Some of the corners were
miraculous, and once they had a wheel in a ditch for a time, they
shaved the parapet of a bridge over a gorge and they drove a cyclist
into a patch of maize, they narrowly missed a goat and jumped three
gullies, thrice the horse stumbled and was jerked up in time, there
were sickening moments, and withal they got down to Piedimulera
unbroken and unspilt.  It helped perhaps that the brake, with its
handle like a barrel organ, had been screwed up before Benham took
control.  And when they were fairly on the level outside the town
Benham suddenly pulled up, relinquished the driving into the proper
hands and came into the carriage with Amanda.

"Safe now," he said compactly.

 The driver appeared to be murmuring prayers very softly as he
examined the brake.

Amanda was struggling with profound problems.  "Why didn't you drive
down in the first place?" she asked.  "Without going back."

"The landlord annoyed me," he said.  "I had to go back. . . .  I
wish I had kicked him.  Hairy beast!  If anything had happened, you
see, he would have had his mean money.  I couldn't bear to leave
him."

"And why didn't you let HIM drive?"  She indicated the driver by a
motion of the head.

"I was angry," said Benham.  "I was angry at the whole thing."

"Still--"

"You see I think I did that because he might have jumped off if I
hadn't been up there to prevent him--I mean if we had had a smash.
I didn't want him to get out of it."

"But you too--"

"You see I was angry. . . ."

"It's been as good as a switchback," said Amanda after reflection.
"But weren't you a little careless about me, Cheetah?"

"I never thought of you," said Benham, and then as if he felt that
inadequate: "You see--I was so annoyed.  It's odd at times how
annoyed one gets.  Suddenly when that horse shied I realized what a
beastly business life was--as those brutes up there live it.  I want
to clear out the whole hot, dirty, little aimless nest of them. . . ."

"No, I'm sure," he repeated after a pause as though he had been
digesting something "I wasn't thinking about you at all."



4


The suppression of his discovery that his honeymoon was not in the
least the great journey of world exploration he had intended, but
merely an impulsive pleasure hunt, was by no means the only obscured
and repudiated conflict that disturbed the mind and broke out upon
the behaviour of Benham.  Beneath that issue he was keeping down a
far more intimate conflict.  It was in those lower, still less
recognized depths that the volcanic fire arose and the earthquakes
gathered strength.  The Amanda he had loved, the Amanda of the
gallant stride and fluttering skirt was with him still, she marched
rejoicing over the passes, and a dearer Amanda, a soft whispering
creature with dusky hair, who took possession of him when she chose,
a soft creature who was nevertheless a fierce creature, was also
interwoven with his life.  But--  But there was now also a multitude
of other Amandas who had this in common that they roused him to
opposition, that they crossed his moods and jarred upon his spirit.
And particularly there was the Conquering Amanda not so much proud
of her beauty as eager to test it, so that she was not unmindful of
the stir she made in hotel lounges, nor of the magic that may shine
memorably through the most commonplace incidental conversation.
This Amanda was only too manifestly pleased to think that she made
peasant lovers discontented and hotel porters unmercenary; she let
her light shine before men.  We lovers, who had deemed our own
subjugation a profound privilege, love not this further
expansiveness of our lady's empire.  But Benham knew that no
aristocrat can be jealous; jealousy he held to be the vice of the
hovel and farmstead and suburban villa, and at an enormous
expenditure of will he ignored Amanda's waving flags and roving
glances.  So, too, he denied that Amanda who was sharp and shrewd
about money matters, that flash of an Amanda who was greedy for
presents and possessions, that restless Amanda who fretted at any
cessation of excitement, and that darkly thoughtful Amanda whom
chance observations and questions showed to be still considering an
account she had to settle with Lady Marayne.  He resisted these
impressions, he shut them out of his mind, but still they worked
into his thoughts, and presently he could find himself asking, even
as he and she went in step striding side by side through the red-
scarred pinewoods in the most perfect outward harmony, whether after
all he was so happily mated as he declared himself to be a score of
times a day, whether he wasn't catching glimpses of reality through
a veil of delusion that grew thinner and thinner and might leave him
disillusioned in the face of a relationship--

Sometimes a man may be struck by a thought as though he had been
struck in the face, and when the name of Mrs. Skelmersdale came into
his head, he glanced at his wife by his side as if it were something
that she might well have heard.  Was this indeed the same thing as
that?  Wonderful, fresh as the day of Creation, clean as flame, yet
the same!  Was Amanda indeed the sister of Mrs. Skelmersdale--
wrought of clean fire, but her sister? . . .

But also beside the inimical aspects which could set such doubts
afoot there were in her infinite variety yet other Amandas neither
very dear nor very annoying, but for the most part delightful, who
entertained him as strangers might, Amandas with an odd twist which
made them amusing to watch, jolly Amandas who were simply
irrelevant.  There was for example Amanda the Dog Mistress, with an
astonishing tact and understanding of dogs, who could explain dogs
and the cock of their ears and the droop of their tails and their
vanity and their fidelity, and why they looked up and why they
suddenly went off round the corner, and their pride in the sound of
their voices and their dastardly thoughts and sniffing
satisfactions, so that for the first time dogs had souls for Benham
to see.  And there was an Amanda with a striking passion for the
sleekness and soft noses of horses.  And there was an Amanda
extremely garrulous, who was a biographical dictionary and critical
handbook to all the girls in the school she had attended at
Chichester--they seemed a very girlish lot of girls; and an Amanda
who was very knowing--knowing was the only word for it--about
pictures and architecture.  And these and all the other Amandas
agreed together to develop and share this one quality in common,
that altogether they pointed to no end, they converged on nothing.
She was, it grew more and more apparent, a miscellany bound in a
body.  She was an animated discursiveness.  That passion to get all
things together into one aristocratic aim, that restraint of
purpose, that imperative to focus, which was the structural
essential of Benham's spirit, was altogether foreign to her
composition.

There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the Venuses--
Cytherea, Cypria, Paphia, Popularia, Euploea, Area, Verticordia,
Etaira, Basilea, Myrtea, Libertina, Freya, Astarte, Philommedis,
Telessigamma, Anadyomene, and a thousand others to whom men have
bowed and built temples, a thousand and the same, and yet it seemed
to Benham there was still one wanting.

The Amanda he had loved most wonderfully was that Amanda in armour
who had walked with him through the wilderness of the world along
the road to Chichester--and that Amanda came back to him no more.



5


Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.

These moods of his perplexed her; she was astonished to find he was
becoming irritable; she felt that he needed a firm but gentle
discipline in his deportment as a lover.  At first he had been
perfect. . . .

But Amanda was more prepared for human inconsecutiveness than
Benham, because she herself was inconsecutive, and her
dissatisfaction with his irritations and preoccupation broadened to
no general discontent.  He had seemed perfect and he wasn't.  So
nothing was perfect.  And he had to be managed, just as one must
manage a dog or a cousin or a mother or a horse.  Anyhow she had got
him, she had no doubt that she held him by a thousand ties, the
spotless leopard had him between her teeth, he was a prisoner in the
dusk of her hair, and the world was all one vast promise of
entertainment.



6


But the raid into the Balkans was not the tremendous success she had
expected it to be.  They had adventures, but they were not the
richly coloured, mediaeval affairs she had anticipated.  For the
most part until Benham broke loose beyond Ochrida they were
adventures in discomfort.  In those remote parts of Europe inns die
away and cease, and it had never occurred to Amanda that inns could
die away anywhere.  She had thought that they just became very
simple and natural and quaint.  And she had thought that when
benighted people knocked at a door it would presently open
hospitably.  She had not expected shots at random from the window.
And it is not usual in Albania generally for women, whether they are
Christian or Moslem, to go about unveiled; when they do so it leads
to singular manifestations.  The moral sense of the men is shocked
and staggered, and they show it in many homely ways.  Small boys at
that age when feminine beauty does not yet prevail with them, pelt.
Also in Mahometan districts they pelt men who do not wear fezzes,
while occasionally Christians of the shawl-headed or skull-cap
persuasions will pelt a fez.  Sketching is always a peltable or
mobable offence, as being contrary to the Koran, and sitting down
tempts the pelter.  Generally they pelt.  The dogs of Albania are
numerous, big, dirty, white dogs, large and hostile, and they attack
with little hesitation.  The women of Albania are secluded and
remote, and indisposed to be of service to an alien sister.  Roads
are infrequent and most bridges have broken down.  No bridge has
been repaired since the later seventeenth century, and no new bridge
has been made since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  There
are no shops at all.  The scenery is magnificent but precipitous,
and many of the high roads are difficult to trace.  And there is
rain.  In Albania there is sometimes very heavy rain.

Yet in spite of these drawbacks they spent some splendid hours in
their exploration of that wild lost country beyond the Adriatic
headlands.  There was the approach to Cattaro for example, through
an arm of the sea, amazingly beautiful on either shore, that wound
its way into the wild mountains and ended in a deep blue bay under
the tremendous declivity of Montenegro.  The quay, with its trees
and lateen craft, ran along under the towers and portcullised gate
of the old Venetian wall, within clustered the town, and then the
fortifications zigzagged up steeply to a monstrous fantastic
fortress perched upon a great mountain headland that overhung the
town.  Behind it the rocks, slashed to and fro with the road to
Cettinje, continued to ascend into blue haze, upward and upward
until they became a purple curtain that filled half the heavens.
The paved still town was squalid by day, but in the evening it
became theatrically incredible, with an outdoor cafe amidst flowers
and creepers, a Hungarian military band, a rabble of promenaders
like a stage chorus in gorgeous costumes and a great gibbous yellow
moon.

And there was Kroia, which Benham and Amanda saw first through the
branches of the great trees that bordered the broad green track they
were following.  The town and its castle were poised at a tremendous
height, sunlit and brilliant against a sombre mass of storm cloud,
over vast cliffs and ravines.  Kroia continued to be beautiful
through a steep laborious approach up to the very place itself, a
clustering group of houses and bazaars crowned with a tower and a
minaret, and from a painted corridor upon this crest they had a
wonderful view of the great seaward levels, and even far away the
blue sea itself stretching between Scutari and Durazzo.  The eye
fell in succession down the stages of a vast and various descent, on
the bazaars and tall minarets of the town, on jagged rocks and
precipices, on slopes of oak forest and slopes of olive woods, on
blue hills dropping away beyond blue hills to the coast.  And behind
them when they turned they saw great mountains, sullenly
magnificent, cleft into vast irregular masses, dense with woods
below and grim and desolate above. . . .

These were unforgettable scenes, and so too was the wild lonely
valley through which they rode to Ochrida amidst walnut and chestnut
trees and scattered rocks, and the first vision of that place
itself, with its fertile levels dotted with sheep and cattle, its
castle and clustering mosques, its spacious blue lake and the great
mountains rising up towards Olympus under the sun.  And there was
the first view of the blue Lake of Presba seen between silvery beech
stems, and that too had Olympus in the far background, plain now and
clear and unexpectedly snowy.  And there were midday moments when
they sat and ate under vines and heard voices singing very
pleasantly, and there were forest glades and forest tracks in a
great variety of beauty with mountains appearing through their
parted branches, there were ilex woods, chestnut woods, beech woods,
and there were strings of heavily-laden mules staggering up torrent-
worn tracks, and strings of blue-swathed mysterious-eyed women with
burthens on their heads passing silently, and white remote houses
and ruins and deep gorges and precipices and ancient half-ruinous
bridges over unruly streams.  And if there was rain there was also
the ending of rain, rainbows, and the piercing of clouds by the
sun's incandescence, and sunsets and the moon, first full, then new
and then growing full again as the holiday wore on.

They found tolerable accommodation at Cattaro and at Cettinje and at
a place halfway between them.  It was only when they had secured a
guide and horses, and pushed on into the south-east of Montenegro
that they began to realize the real difficulties of their journey.
They aimed for a place called Podgoritza, which had a partially
justifiable reputation for an inn, they missed the road and spent
the night in the open beside a fire, rolled in the blankets they had
very fortunately bought in Cettinje.  They supped on biscuits and
Benham's brandy flask.  It chanced to be a fine night, and, drawn
like moths by the fire, four heavily-armed mountaineers came out of
nowhere, sat down beside Benham and Amanda, rolled cigarettes,
achieved conversation in bad Italian through the muleteer and
awaited refreshment.  They approved of the brandy highly, they
finished it, and towards dawn warmed to song.  They did not sing
badly, singing in chorus, but it appeared to Amanda that the hour
might have been better chosen.  In the morning they were agreeably
surprised to find one of the Englishmen was an Englishwoman, and
followed every accessible detail of her toilette with great
interest.  They were quite helpful about breakfast when the trouble
was put to them; two vanished over a crest and reappeared with some
sour milk, a slabby kind of bread, goat's cheese young but hardened,
and coffee and the means of making coffee, and they joined
spiritedly in the ensuing meal.  It ought to have been
extraordinarily good fun, this camp under the vast heavens and these
wild visitors, but it was not such fun as it ought to have been
because both Amanda and Benham were extremely cold, stiff, sleepy,
grubby and cross, and when at last they were back in the way to
Podgoritza and had parted, after some present-giving from their
chance friends, they halted in a sunlit grassy place, rolled
themselves up in their blankets and recovered their arrears of
sleep.

Podgoritza was their first experience of a khan, those oriental
substitutes for hotels, and it was a deceptively good khan, indeed
it was not a khan at all, it was an inn; it provided meals, it had a
kind of bar, or at any rate a row of bottles and glasses, it
possessed an upper floor with rooms, separate rooms, opening on to a
gallery.  The room had no beds but it had a shelf about it on which
Amanda and Benham rolled up in their blankets and slept.  "We can do
this sort of thing all right," said Amanda and Benham.  "But we
mustn't lose the way again."

"In Scutari," said Benham, "we will get an extra horse and a tent."

The way presently became a lake and they reached Scutari by boat
towards the dawn of the next day. . . .

The extra horse involved the addition of its owner, a small
suspicious Latin Christian, to the company, and of another horse for
him and an ugly almost hairless boy attendant.  Moreover the British
consul prevailed with Benham to accept the services of a picturesque
Arnaut CAVASSE, complete with a rifle, knives, and other implements
and the name of Giorgio.  And as they got up into the highlands
beyond Scutari they began to realize the deceitfulness of Podgoritza
and the real truth about khans.  Their next one they reached after a
rainy evening, and it was a cavernous room with a floor of indurated
mud and full of eye-stinging wood-smoke and wind and the smell of
beasts, unpartitioned, with a weakly hostile custodian from whom no
food could be got but a little goat's flesh and bread.  The meat
Giorgio stuck upon a skewer in gobbets like cats-meat and cooked
before the fire.  For drink there was coffee and raw spirits.
Against the wall in one corner was a slab of wood rather like the
draining board in a scullery, and on this the guests were expected
to sleep.  The horses and the rest of the party camped loosely about
the adjacent corner after a bitter dispute upon some unknown point
between the horse owner and the custodian.

Amanda and Benham were already rolled up on their slanting board
like a couple of chrysalids when other company began to arrive
through the open door out of the moonlight, drawn thither by the
report of a travelling Englishwoman.

They were sturdy men in light coloured garments adorned
ostentatiously with weapons, they moved mysteriously about in the
firelit darknesses and conversed in undertones with Giorgio.
Giorgio seemed to have considerable powers of exposition and a gift
for social organization.  Presently he came to Benham and explained
that raki was available and that hospitality would do no harm;
Benham and Amanda sat up and various romantic figures with splendid
moustaches came forward and shook hands with him, modestly ignoring
Amanda.  There was drinking, in which Benham shared, incomprehensible
compliments, much ineffective saying of "BUONA NOTTE," and at last
Amanda and Benham counterfeited sleep.  This seemed to remove a
check on the conversation and a heated discussion in tense undertones
went on, it seemed interminably. . . .  Probably very few aspects
of Benham and Amanda were ignored. . . .  Towards morning the
twanging of a string proclaimed the arrival of a querulous-faced
minstrel with a sort of embryonic one-stringed horse-headed fiddle,
and after a brief parley singing began, a long high-pitched solo.
The fiddle squealed pitifully under the persuasion of a semicircular
bow.  Two heads were lifted enquiringly.

The singer had taken up his position at their feet and faced them.
It was a compliment.

"OH!" said Amanda, rolling over.

The soloist obliged with three songs, and then, just as day was
breaking, stopped abruptly and sprawled suddenly on the floor as if
he had been struck asleep.  He was vocal even in his sleep.  A cock
in the far corner began crowing and was answered by another
outside. . . .

But this does not give a full account of the animation of the khan.
"OH!" said Amanda, rolling over again with the suddenness of
accumulated anger.

"They're worse than in Scutari," said Benham, understanding her
trouble instantly.

"It isn't days and nights we are having," said Benham a few days
later, "it's days and nightmares."

But both he and Amanda had one quality in common.  The deeper their
discomfort the less possible it was to speak of turning back from
the itinerary they had planned. . . .

They met no robbers, though an excited little English Levantine in
Scutari had assured them they would do so and told a vivid story of
a ride to Ipek, a delay on the road due to a sudden inexplicable
lameness of his horse after a halt for refreshment, a political
discussion that delayed him, his hurry through the still twilight to
make up for lost time, the coming on of night and the sudden silent
apparition out of the darkness of the woods about the road of a
dozen armed men each protruding a gun barrel.  "Sometimes they will
wait for you at a ford or a broken bridge," he said.  "In the
mountains they rob for arms.  They assassinate the Turkish soldiers
even.  It is better to go unarmed unless you mean to fight for
it. . . .  Have you got arms?"

"Just a revolver," said Benham.

But it was after that that he closed with Giorgio.

If they found no robbers in Albania, they met soon enough with
bloodshed.  They came to a village where a friend of a friend of
Giorgio's was discovered, and they slept at his house in preference
to the unclean and crowded khan.  Here for the first time Amanda
made the acquaintance of Albanian women and was carried off to the
woman's region at the top of the house, permitted to wash, closely
examined, shown a baby and confided in as generously as gesture and
some fragments of Italian would permit.  Benham slept on a rug on
the first floor in a corner of honour beside the wood fire.  There
had been much confused conversation and some singing, he was dog-
tired and slept heavily, and when presently he was awakened by
piercing screams he sat up in a darkness that seemed to belong
neither to time nor place. . . .

Near his feet was an ashen glow that gave no light.

His first perplexity gave way to dismay at finding no Amanda by his
side.  "Amanda!" he cried. . . .

Her voice floated down through a chink in the floor above.  "What
can it be, Cheetah?"

Then: "It's coming nearer."

The screaming continued, heart-rending, eviscerating shrieks.
Benham, still confused, lit a match.  All the men about him were
stirring or sitting up and listening, their faces showing distorted
and ugly in the flicker of his light.  "CHE E?" he tried.  No one
answered.  Then one by one they stood up and went softly to the
ladder that led to the stable-room below.  Benham struck a second
match and a third.

"Giorgio!" he called.

The cavasse made an arresting gesture and followed discreetly and
noiselessly after the others, leaving Benham alone in the dark.

Benham heard their shuffling patter, one after the other, down the
ladder, the sounds of a door being unbarred softly, and then no
other sound but that incessant shrieking in the darkness.

Had they gone out?  Were they standing at the door looking out into
the night and listening?

Amanda had found the chink and her voice sounded nearer.

"It's a woman," she said.

The shrieking came nearer and nearer, long, repeated, throat-tearing
shrieks.  Far off there was a great clamour of dogs.  And there was
another sound, a whisper--?

"RAIN!"

The shrieks seemed to turn into a side street and receded.  The
tension of listening relaxed.  Men's voices sounded below in
question and answer.  Dogs close at hand barked shortly and then
stopped enquiringly.

Benham seemed to himself to be sitting alone for an interminable
time.  He lit another match and consulted his watch.  It was four
o'clock and nearly dawn. . . .

Then slowly and stumbling up the ladder the men began to return to
Benham's room.

"Ask them what it is," urged Amanda.

But for a time not even Giorgio would understand Benham's questions.
There seemed to be a doubt whether he ought to know.  The shrieking
approached again and then receded.  Giorgio came and stood, a vague
thoughtful figure, by the embers of the fire.  Explanation dropped
from him reluctantly.  It was nothing.  Some one had been killed:
that was all.  It was a vendetta.  A man had been missing overnight,
and this morning his brother who had been prowling and searching
with some dogs had found him, or rather his head.  It was on this
side of the ravine, thrown over from the other bank on which the
body sprawled stiffly, wet through, and now growing visible in the
gathering daylight.  Yes--the voice was the man's wife.  It was
raining hard. . . .  There would be shrieking for nine days.  Yes,
nine days.  Confirmation with the fingers when Benham still fought
against the facts.  Her friends and relatives would come and shriek
too.  Two of the dead man's aunts were among the best keeners in the
whole land.  They could keen marvellously.  It was raining too hard
to go on. . . .  The road would be impossible in rain. . . .  Yes it
was very melancholy.  Her house was close at hand.  Perhaps twenty
or thirty women would join her.  It was impossible to go on until it
had stopped raining.  It would be tiresome, but what could one do? . . .



7


As they sat upon the parapet of a broken bridge on the road between
Elbassan and Ochrida Benham was moved to a dissertation upon the
condition of Albania and the politics of the Balkan peninsula.

"Here we are," he said, "not a week from London, and you see the
sort of life that men live when the forces of civilization fail.  We
have been close to two murders--"

"Two?"

"That little crowd in the square at Scutari--  That was a murder.  I
didn't tell you at the time."

"But I knew it was," said Amanda.

"And you see the filth of it all, the toiling discomfort of it all.
There is scarcely a house here in all the land that is not filthier
and viler than the worst slum in London.  No man ventures far from
his village without arms, everywhere there is fear.  The hills are
impassable because of the shepherd's dogs.  Over those hills a
little while ago a stranger was torn to pieces by dogs--and
partially eaten.  Amanda, these dogs madden me.  I shall let fly at
the beasts.  The infernal indignity of it!  But that is by the way.
You see how all this magnificent country lies waste with nothing but
this crawling, ugly mockery of human life."

"They sing," said Amanda.

"Yes," said Benham and reflected, "they do sing.  I suppose singing
is the last thing left to men.  When there is nothing else you can
still sit about and sing.  Miners who have been buried in mines will
sing, people going down in ships."

"The Sussex labourers don't sing," said Amanda.  "These people sing
well."

"They would probably sing as well if they were civilized.  Even if
they didn't I shouldn't care.  All the rest of their lives is muddle
and cruelty and misery.  Look at the women.  There was that party of
bent creatures we met yesterday, carrying great bundles, carrying
even the men's cloaks and pipes, while their rascal husbands and
brothers swaggered behind.  Look at the cripples we have seen and
the mutilated men.  If we have met one man without a nose, we have
met a dozen.  And stunted people.  All these people are like evil
schoolboys; they do nothing but malicious mischief; there is nothing
adult about them but their voices; they are like the heroic dreams
of young ruffians in a penitentiary.  You saw that man at Scutari in
the corner of the bazaar, the gorgeous brute, you admired him--."

"The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the diamonds on his
yataghan.  He wanted to show them to us."

"Yes.  You let him see you admired him."

"I liked the things on his stall."

"Well, he has killed nearly thirty people."

"In duels?"

"Good Lord!  NO!  Assassinations.  His shoemaker annoyed him by
sending in a bill.  He went to the man's stall, found him standing
with his child in his arms and blew out his brains.  He blundered
against a passer-by in the road and shot him.  Those are his feats.
Sometimes his pistols go off in the bazaar just by accident."

"Does nobody kill him?"

"I wanted to," said Benham and became thoughtful for a time.  "I
think I ought to have made some sort of quarrel.  But then as I am
an Englishman he might have hesitated.  He would have funked a
strange beast like me.  And I couldn't have shot him if he had
hesitated.  And if he hadn't--"

"But doesn't a blood feud come down on him?"

"It only comes down on his family.  The shoemaker's son thought the
matter over and squared accounts by putting the muzzle of a gun into
the small of the back of our bully's uncle.  It was easier that
way. . . .  You see you're dealing with men of thirteen years old
or thereabouts, the boy who doesn't grow up."

"But doesn't the law--?"

"There's no law.  Only custom and the Turkish tax collector.

"You see this is what men are where there is no power, no
discipline, no ruler, no responsibility.  This is a masterless
world.  This is pure democracy.  This is the natural state of men.
This is the world of the bully and the brigand and assassin, the
world of the mud-pelter and brawler, the world of the bent woman,
the world of the flea and the fly, the open drain and the baying
dog.  This is what the British sentimentalist thinks a noble state
for men."

"They fight for freedom."

"They fight among each other.  There are their private feuds and
their village feuds and above all that great feud religion.  In
Albania there is only one religion and that is hate.  But there are
three churches for the better cultivation of hate and cruelty, the
Latin, the Greek and the Mahometan."

"But no one has ever conquered these people."

"Any one could, the Servians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the
Italians, the Austrians.  Why, they can't even shoot!  It's just the
balance of power and all that foolery keeps this country a roadless
wilderness.  Good God, how I tire of it!  These men who swagger and
stink, their brawling dogs, their greasy priests and dervishes, the
down-at-heel soldiers, the bribery and robbery, the cheating over
the money. . . ."

He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any longer, and
began to pace up and down in the road.

"One marvels that no one comes to clear up this country, one itches
to be at the job, and then one realizes that before one can begin
here, one must get to work back there, where the fools and pedants
of WELT POLITIK scheme mischief one against another.  This country
frets me.  I can't see any fun in it, can't see the humour of it.
And the people away there know no better than to play off tribe
against tribe, sect against sect, one peasant prejudice against
another.  Over this pass the foolery grows grimmer and viler.  We
shall come to where the Servian plots against the Bulgarian and the
Greek against both, and the Turk, with spasmodic massacres and
indulgences, broods over the brew.  Every division is subdivided.
There are two sorts of Greek church, Exarchic, Patriarchic, both
teaching by threat and massacre.  And there is no one, no one, with
the sense to over-ride all these squalid hostilities.  All those
fools away there in London and Vienna and St. Petersburg and Rome
take sides as though these beastly tribes and leagues and
superstitions meant anything but blank, black, damnable ignorance.
One fool stands up for the Catholic Albanians, another finds heroes
in the Servians, another talks of Brave Little Montenegro, or the
Sturdy Bulgarian, or the Heroic Turk.  There isn't a religion in the
whole Balkan peninsula, there isn't a tribal or national sentiment
that deserves a moment's respect from a sane man.  They're things
like niggers' nose-rings and Chinese secret societies; childish
things, idiot things that have to go.  Yet there is no one who will
preach the only possible peace, which is the peace of the world-
state, the open conspiracy of all the sane men in the world against
the things that break us up into wars and futilities.  And here am
I--who have the light--WANDERING!  Just wandering!"

He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the torrent under the
bridge.

"You're getting ripe for London, Cheetah," said Amanda softly.

"I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands on definite things."

"How can we get back?"

She had to repeat her question presently.

"We can go on.  Over the hills is Ochrida and then over another pass
is Presba, and from there we go down into Monastir and reach a
railway and get back to the world of our own times again."



8


But before they reached the world of their own times Macedonia was
to show them something grimmer than Albania.

They were riding through a sunlit walnut wood beyond Ochrida when
they came upon the thing.

The first they saw of it looked like a man lying asleep on a grassy
bank.  But he lay very still indeed, he did not look up, he did not
stir as they passed, the pose of his hand was stiff, and when Benham
glanced back at him, he stifled a little cry of horror.  For this
man had no face and the flies had been busy upon him. . . .

Benham caught Amanda's bridle so that she had to give her attention
to her steed.

"Ahead!" he said, "Ahead!  Look, a village!"

(Why the devil didn't they bury the man?  Why?

And that fool Giorgio and the others were pulling up and beginning
to chatter.  After all she might look back.)

Through the trees now they could see houses.  He quickened his pace
and jerked Amanda's horse forward. . . .

But the village was a still one.  Not a dog barked.

Here was an incredible village without even a dog!

And then, then they saw some more people lying about.  A woman lay
in a doorway.  Near her was something muddy that might have been a
child, beyond were six men all spread out very neatly in a row with
their faces to the sky.

"Cheetah!" cried Amanda, with her voice going up.  "They've been
killed.  Some one has killed them."

Benham halted beside her and stared stupidly.  "It's a band," he
said.  "It's--propaganda.  Greeks or Turks or Bulgarians."

"But their feet and hands are fastened!  And-- . . .  WHAT HAVE THEY
BEEN DOING TO THEM? . . ."

"I want to kill," cried Benham.  "Oh! I want to kill people.  Come
on, Amanda!  It blisters one's eyes.  Come away.  Come away!  Come!"

Her face was white and her eyes terror-stricken.  She obeyed him
mechanically.  She gave one last look at those bodies. . . .

Down the deep-rutted soil of the village street they clattered.
They came to houses that had been set on fire. . . .

"What is that hanging from a tree?" cried Amanda.  "Oh, oh!"

"Come on. . . ."

Behind them rode the others scared and hurrying.

The sunlight had become the light of hell.  There was no air but
horror.  Across Benham's skies these fly-blown trophies of devilry
dangled mockingly in the place of God.  He had no thought but to get
away.

Presently they encountered a detachment of Turkish soldiers, very
greasy and ragged, with worn-out boots and yellow faces, toiling up
the stony road belatedly to the village.  Amanda and Benham riding
one behind the other in a stricken silence passed this labouring
column without a gesture, but presently they heard the commander
stopping and questioning Giorgio. . . .

Then Giorgio and the others came clattering to overtake them.

Giorgio was too full to wait for questions.  He talked eagerly to
Benham's silence.

It must have happened yesterday, he explained.  They were
Bulgarians--traitors.  They had been converted to the Patriarchists
by the Greeks--by a Greek band, that is to say.  They had betrayed
one of their own people.  Now a Bulgarian band had descended upon
them.  Bulgarian bands it seemed were always particularly rough on
Bulgarian-speaking Patriarchists. . . .



9


That night they slept in a dirty little room in a peasant's house in
Resnia, and in the middle of the night Amanda woke up with a start
and heard Benham talking.  He seemed to be sitting up as he talked.
But he was not talking to her and his voice sounded strange.

"Flies," he said, "in the sunlight!"

He was silent for a time and then he repeated the same words.

Then suddenly he began to declaim.  "Oh!  Brutes together.  Apes.
Apes with knives.  Have they no lord, no master, to save them from
such things?  This is the life of men when no man rules. . . .  When
no man rules. . . .  Not even himself. . . .  It is because we are
idle, because we keep our wits slack and our wills weak that these
poor devils live in hell.  These things happen here and everywhere
when the hand that rules grows weak.  Away in China now they are
happening.  Persia.  Africa. . . .  Russia staggers.  And I who
should serve the law, I who should keep order, wander and make
love. . . .  My God! may I never forget!  May I never forget!
Flies in the sunlight!  That man's face.  And those six men!

"Grip the savage by the throat.

"The weak savage in the foreign office, the weak savage at the party
headquarters, feud and indolence and folly.  It is all one world.
This and that are all one thing.  The spites of London and the
mutilations of Macedonia.  The maggots that eat men's faces and the
maggots that rot their minds.  Rot their minds.  Rot their minds.
Rot their minds. . . ."

To Amanda it sounded like delirium.

"CHEETAH!" she said suddenly between remonstrance and a cry of
terror.

The darkness suddenly became quite still.  He did not move.

She was afraid.  "Cheetah!" she said again.

"What is it, Amanda?"

"I thought--.  Are you all right?"

"Quite."

"But do you feel well?"

"I've got this cold I caught in Ochrida.  I suppose I'm feverish.
But--yes, I'm well."

"You were talking."

Silence for a time.

"I was thinking," he said.

"You talked."

"I'm sorry," he said after another long pause.



10


The next morning Benham had a pink spot on either cheek, his eyes
were feverishly bright, he would touch no food and instead of coffee
he wanted water.  "In Monastir there will be a doctor," he said.
"Monastir is a big place.  In Monastir I will see a doctor.  I want
a doctor."

They rode out of the village in the freshness before sunrise and up
long hills, and sometimes they went in the shade of woods and
sometimes in a flooding sunshine.  Benham now rode in front,
preoccupied, intent, regardless of Amanda, a stranger, and she rode
close behind him wondering.

"When you get to Monastir, young man," she told him, inaudibly, "you
will go straight to bed and we'll see what has to be done with you."

"AMMALATO," said Giorgio confidentially, coming abreast of her.

"MEDICO IN MONASTIR," said Amanda.

"SI,--MOLTI MEDICI, MONASTIR," Giorgio agreed.

Then came the inevitable dogs, big white brutes, three in full cry
charging hard at Benham and a younger less enterprising beast
running along the high bank above yapping and making feints to
descend.

The goatherd, reclining under the shadow of a rock, awaited Benham's
embarrassment with an indolent malice.

"You UNCIVILIZED Beasts!" cried Benham, and before Amanda could
realize what he was up to, she heard the crack of his revolver and
saw a puff of blue smoke drift away above his right shoulder.  The
foremost beast rolled over and the goatherd had sprung to his feet.
He shouted with something between anger and dismay as Benham,
regardless of the fact that the other dogs had turned and were
running back, let fly a second time.  Then the goatherd had clutched
at the gun that lay on the grass near at hand, Giorgio was bawling
in noisy remonstrance and also getting ready to shoot, and the
horse-owner and his boy were clattering back to a position of
neutrality up the stony road.  "BANG!" came a flight of lead within
a yard of Benham, and then the goatherd was in retreat behind a rock
and Giorgio was shouting "AVANTI, AVANTI!" to Amanda.

She grasped his intention and in another moment she had Benham's
horse by the bridle and was leading the retreat.  Giorgio followed
close, driving the two baggage mules before him.

"I am tired of dogs," Benham said.  "Tired to death of dogs.  All
savage dogs must be shot.  All through the world.  I am tired--"

Their road carried them down through the rocky pass and then up a
long slope in the open.  Far away on the left they saw the goatherd
running and shouting and other armed goatherds appearing among the
rocks.  Behind them the horse-owner and his boy came riding headlong
across the zone of danger.

"Dogs must be shot," said Benham, exalted.  "Dogs must be shot."

"Unless they are GOOD dogs," said Amanda, keeping beside him with an
eye on his revolver.

"Unless they are good dogs to every one," said Benham.

They rushed along the road in a turbulent dusty huddle of horses and
mules and riders.  The horse-owner, voluble in Albanian, was trying
to get past them.  His boy pressed behind him.  Giorgio in the rear
had unslung his rifle and got it across the front of his saddle.
Far away they heard the sound of a shot, and a kind of shudder in
the air overhead witnessed to the flight of the bullet.  They
crested a rise and suddenly between the tree boughs Monastir was in
view, a wide stretch of white town, with many cypress and plane
trees, a winding river with many wooden bridges, clustering minarets
of pink and white, a hilly cemetery, and scattered patches of
soldiers' tents like some queer white crop to supplement its
extensive barracks.

As they hurried down towards this city of refuge a long string of
mules burthened with great bales of green stuff appeared upon a
convergent track to the left.  Besides the customary muleteers there
were, by way of an escort, a couple of tattered Turkish soldiers.
All these men watched the headlong approach of Benham's party with
apprehensive inquiry.  Giorgio shouted some sort of information that
made the soldiers brighten up and stare up the hill, and set the
muleteers whacking and shouting at their convoy.  It struck Amanda
that Giorgio must be telling lies about a Bulgarian band.  In
another moment Benham and Amanda found themselves swimming in a
torrent of mules.  Presently they overtook a small flock of
fortunately nimble sheep, and picked up several dogs, dogs that
happily disregarded Benham in the general confusion.  They also
comprehended a small springless cart, two old women with bundles and
an elderly Greek priest, before their dusty, barking, shouting
cavalcade reached the outskirts of Monastir.  The two soldiers had
halted behind to cover the retreat.

Benham's ghastly face was now bedewed with sweat and he swayed in
his saddle as he rode.  "This is NOT civilization, Amanda," he said,
"this is NOT civilization."

And then suddenly with extraordinary pathos:

"Oh!  I want to go to BED!  I want to go to BED!  A bed with
sheets. . . ."

To ride into Monastir is to ride into a maze.  The streets go
nowhere in particular.  At least that was the effect on Amanda and
Benham.  It was as if Monastir too had a temperature and was
slightly delirious.  But at last they found an hotel--quite a
civilized hotel. . . .

The doctor in Monastir was an Armenian with an ambition that outran
his capacity to speak English.  He had evidently studied the
language chiefly from books.  He thought THESE was pronounced
"theser" and THOSE was pronounced "thoser," and that every English
sentence should be taken at a rush.  He diagnosed Benham's complaint
in various languages and failed to make his meaning clear to Amanda.
One combination of words he clung to obstinately, having clearly the
utmost faith in its expressiveness.  To Amanda it sounded like,
"May, Ah! Slays," and it seemed to her that he sought to intimate a
probable fatal termination of Benham's fever.  But it was clear that
the doctor was not satisfied that she understood.  He came again
with a queer little worn book, a parallel vocabulary of half-a-dozen
European languages.

He turned over the pages and pointed to a word.  "May!  Ah!  Slays!"
he repeated, reproachfully, almost bitterly.

"Oh, MEASLES!" cried Amanda. . . .

So the spirited honeymoon passed its zenith.



11


The Benhams went as soon as possible down to Smyrna and thence by
way of Uskub tortuously back to Italy.  They recuperated at the best
hotel of Locarno in golden November weather, and just before
Christmas they turned their faces back to England.

Benham's plans were comprehensive but entirely vague; Amanda had not
so much plans as intentions. . . .



CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY



1


It was very manifest in the disorder of papers amidst which White
spent so many evenings of interested perplexity before this novel
began to be written that Benham had never made any systematic
attempt at editing or revising his accumulation at all.  There were
not only overlapping documents, in which he had returned again to
old ideas and restated them in the light of fresh facts and an
apparent unconsciousness of his earlier effort, but there were
mutually destructive papers, new views quite ousting the old had
been tossed in upon the old, and the very definition of the second
limitation, as it had first presented itself to the writer, had been
abandoned.  To begin with, this second division had been labelled
"Sex," in places the heading remained, no effective substitute had
been chosen for some time, but there was d many
appetites that are not sexual yet turn to bodily pleasure, and on
the other there are elements of pride arising out of sex and passing
into other regions, all the elements of rivalry for example, that
have strained my first definition to the utmost.  And I conceive it, marches
to its end.  It
saves itself for the truth rather than sacrifices itself
romantically for a friend.  It justifies vivisection if thereby
knowledge is won for ever.  It upholds that Brutus who killed his
sons.  It forbids devotion to women, courts of love and all such
decay of the chivala closely-written
memorandum, very much erased and written over and amended, which
showed Benham's early dissatisfaction with that crude rendering of
what he had in mind.  This memorandum was tacked to an interrupted
fragment of autobiography, a manuscript soliloquy in which Benham
had been discussing his married life.

"It was not until I had been married for the better part of a year,
and had spent more than six months in London, that I faced the plain
issue between the aims I had set before myself and the claims and
immediate necessities of my personal life.  For all that time I
struggled not so much to reconcile them as to serve them
simultaneously. . . ."

At that the autobiography stopped short, and the intercalary note
began.

This intercalary note ran as follows:

"I suppose a mind of my sort cannot help but tend towards
simplification, towards making all life turn upon some one dominant
idea, complex perhaps in its reality but reducible at last to one
consistent simple statement, a dominant idea which is essential as
nothing else is essential, which makes and sustains and justifies.
This is perhaps the innate disposition of the human mind, at least
of the European mind--for I have some doubts about the Chinese.
Theology drives obstinately towards an ultimate unity in God,
science towards an ultimate unity in law, towards a fundamental
element and a universal material truth from which all material
truths evolve, and in matters of conduct there is the same tendency
to refer to a universal moral law.  Now this may be a simplification
due to the need of the human mind to comprehend, and its inability
to do so until the load is lightened by neglecting factors.  William
James has suggested that on account of this, theology may be
obstinately working away from the truth, that the truth may be that
there are several or many in compatible and incommensurable gods;
science, in the same search for unity, may follow divergent methods
of inquiry into ultimately uninterchangeable generalizations; and
there may be not only not one universal moral law, but no effective
reconciliation of the various rights and duties of a single
individual.  At any rate I find myself doubtful to this day about my
own personal systems of right and wrong.  I can never get all my
life into one focus.  It is exactly like examining a rather thick
section with a microscope of small penetratrion; sometimes one level
is clear and the rest foggy and monstrous, and sometimes another.

"Now the ruling ME, I do not doubt, is the man who has set his face
to this research after aristocracy, and from the standpoint of this
research it is my duty to subordinate all other considerations to
this work of clearing up the conception of rule and nobility in
human affairs.  This is my aristocratic self.  What I did not grasp
for a long time, and which now grows clearer and clearer to me, is
firstly that this aristocratic self is not the whole of me, it has
absolutely nothing to do with a pain in my ear or in my heart, with
a scar on my hand or my memory, and secondly that it is not
altogether mine.  Whatever knowledge I have of the quality of
science, whatever will I have towards right, is of it; but if from
without, from the reasoning or demonstration or reproof of some one
else, there comes to me clear knowledge, clarified will, that also
is as it were a part of my aristocratic self coming home to me from
the outside.  How often have I not found my own mind in Prothero
after I have failed to find it in myself?  It is, to be paradoxical,
my impersonal personality, this Being that I have in common with all
scientific-spirited and aristocratic-spirited men.  This it is that
I am trying to get clear from the great limitations of humanity.
When I assert a truth for the sake of truth to my own discomfort or
injury, there again is this incompatibility of the aristocratic self
and the accepted, confused, conglomerate self of the unanalyzed man.
The two have a separate system of obligations.  One's affections,
compounded as they are in the strangest way of physical reactions
and emotional associations, one's implicit pledges to particular
people, one's involuntary reactions, one's pride and jealousy, all
that one might call the dramatic side of one's life, may be in
conflict with the definitely seen rightnesses of one's higher
use. . . ."

The writing changed at this point.

"All this seems to me at once as old as the hills and too new to be
true.  This is like the conflict of the Superior Man of Confucius to
control himself, it is like the Christian battle of the spirit with
the flesh, it savours of that eternal wrangle between the general
and the particular which is metaphysics, it was for this
aristocratic self, for righteousness' sake, that men have hungered
and thirsted, and on this point men have left father and mother and
child and wife and followed after salvation.  This world-wide, ever-
returning antagonism has filled the world in every age with hermits
and lamas, recluses and teachers, devoted and segregated lives.  It
is a perpetual effort to get above the simplicity of barbarism.
Whenever men have emerged from the primitive barbarism of the farm
and the tribe, then straightway there has emerged this conception of
a specialized life a little lifted off the earth; often, for the
sake of freedom, celibate, usually disciplined, sometimes directed,
having a generalized aim, beyond personal successes and bodily
desires.  So it is that the philosopher, the scientifically
concentrated man, has appeared, often, I admit, quite ridiculously
at first, setting out upon the long journey that will end only when
the philosopher is king. . . .

"At first I called my Second Limitation, Sex.  But from the outset I
meant more than mere sexual desire, lust and lustful imaginings,
more than personal reactions to beauty and spirited living, more
even than what is called love.  On the one hand I had in minsee now that
this Second Limitation as I first imagined it spreads out without
any definite boundary, to include one's rivalries with old
schoolfellows, for example, one's generosities to beggars and
dependents, one's desire to avenge an injured friend, one's point of
honour, one's regard for the good opinion of an aunt and one's
concern for the health of a pet cat.  All these things may enrich,
but they may also impede and limit the aristocratic scheme.  I
thought for a time I would call this ill-defined and miscellaneous
wilderness of limitation the Personal Life.  But at last I have
decided to divide this vast territory of difficulties into two
subdivisions and make one of these Indulgence, meaning thereby
pleasurable indulgence of sense or feeling, and the other a great
mass of self-regarding motives that will go with a little stretching
under the heading of Jealousy.  I admit motives are continually
playing across the boundary of these two divisions, I should find it
difficult to argue a case for my classification, but in practice
these two groupings have a quite definite meaning for me.  There is
pride in the latter group of impulses and not in the former; the
former are always a little apologetic.  Fear, Indulgence, Jealousy,
these are the First Three Limitations of the soul of man.  And the
greatest of these is Jealousy, because it can use pride.  Over them
the Life Aristocratic, as I ous idea.  And it resigns--so many things that
no common Man of Spirit will resign.  Its intention transcends these
things.  Over all the world it would maintain justice, order, a
noble peace, and it would do this without indignation, without
resentment, without mawkish tenderness or individualized enthusiasm
or any queen of beauty.  It is of a cold austere quality, commanding
sometimes admiration but having small hold upon the affections of
men.  So that it is among its foremost distinctions that its heart
is steeled. . . ."

There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the
interrupted autobiography.



2


What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering
storms of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are
buried and hidden and implied in every love story!  What a waste is
there of exquisite things!  So each spring sees a million glorious
beginnings, a sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection
in every stirring egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation
in every forest tree; and in the autumn before the snows come they
have all gone, of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all
that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness, there is
scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead
leaf, black mould or a rotting feather. . . .

White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham
and Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held
it he thought of the laughter and delight they must have had
together, the exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of
her cheek, the gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit
between them, the sense of discovery, the high rare paths they had
followed, the pools in which they had swum together.  And now it was
all gone into nothingness, there was nothing left of it, nothing at
all, but just those sheets of statement, and it may be, stored away
in one single mind, like things forgotten in an attic, a few
neglected faded memories. . . .

And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love
leaves behind it.  For a time White would not read them.  They lay
neglected on his knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable
chair and enjoyed an entirely beautiful melancholy.

White too had seen and mourned the spring.

Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs. . . .

With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated
story of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had
decided to leave his wife and go out alone upon that journey of
inquiry he had been planning when first he met her.



3


Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
womanhood.  Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three
weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had
been struggling instinctively ever since they came together.  For a
time at Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she
formed her bright and limited plans for London.  Benham had no plans
as yet but only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled
in opposite directions by two irresistible forces.  To her it was
plain that he needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and
she could imagine nothing better for him than a political career.
She perceived he had personality, that he stood out among men so
that his very silences were effective.  She loved him immensely, and
she had tremendous ambitions for him and through him.

And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with
appetite.  Her soul thirsted for London.  It was like some enormous
juicy fruit waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large
enough to give her avidity the sense of enough.  She felt it waiting
for her, household, servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly
delight of buying and possessing things, the opera, first-nights,
picture exhibitions, great dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties,
crowds seen from a point of vantage, the carriage in a long string
of fine carriages with the lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a
thousand bright settings, in a thousand various dresses.  She had
had love; it had been glorious, it was still glorious, but her love-
making became now at times almost perfunctory in the contemplation
of these approaching delights and splendours and excitements.

She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she
was a realist.  She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of
a career.  Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind.  One
talks ideas, but THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS.  And
though she believed that Benham had a certain strength of character
of his own, she had that sort of confidence in his love for her and
in the power of her endearments that has in it the assurance of a
faint contempt.  She had mingled pride and sense in the glorious
realization of the power over him that her wit and beauty gave her.
She had held him faint with her divinity, intoxicated with the pride
of her complete possession, and she did not dream that the moment
when he should see clearly that she could deliberately use these
ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would be the end of
their splendour and her power.  Her nature, which was just a nest of
vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his gathering
disillusionment until it burst upon her.

Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.
In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all,
they dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note
how much he had been able to disregard.  There were countless times
still when he would have dropped his observation and resumed that
mutual exaltation very gladly, but always now other things possessed
her mind. . . .

There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on
things superficial, vulgar or destructive.  She made him understand
and share the excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter
and prettiness of a smart restaurant, the clustering little acute
adventures of a great reception of gay people, just as she had
already made him understand and sympathize with dogs.  She picked up
the art world where he had laid it down, and she forced him to feel
dense and slow before he rebelled against her multitudinous
enthusiasms and admirations.  South Harting had had its little group
of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy villages, and she
slipped back at once into the movement.  Those were the great days
of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak.  John,
Orpen, Tonks, she bought them with vigour.  Artistic circles began
to revolve about her.  Very rapidly she was in possession. . . .
And among other desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon
and captured Lady Marayne.

At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and
aloofness was to end.  Benham never quite mastered how it was done.
But Amanda had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, very
sweetly and chastely dressed, had abased herself and announced a
possible (though subsequently disproved) grandchild.  And she had
appreciated the little lady so highly and openly, she had so
instantly caught and reproduced her tone, that her success, though
only temporary in its completeness, was immediate.  In the afternoon
Benham was amazed by the apparition of his mother amidst the
scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home Amanda had chosen in
Lancaster Gate.  He was in the hall, the door stood open awaiting
packing-cases from a van without.  In the open doorway she shone,
looking the smallest of dainty things.  There was no effect of her
coming but only of her having arrived there, as a little blue
butterfly will suddenly alight on a flower.

"Well, Poff!" said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, "What are you up
to now, Poff?  Come and embrace me. . . ."

"No, not so," she said, "stiffest of sons. . . ."

She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.

"Congratulations, dear little Poff.  Oh! congratulations!  In heaps.
I'm so GLAD."

Now what was that for?

And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the
encounter with an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with
arms wide open.  It was the first intimation he had of their
previous meeting.  He was for some minutes a stunned, entirely
inadequate Benham. . . .



4


At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know,
and then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people.  The
artistic circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people;
they spread.  It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young
couple; he would certainly do something considerable presently, and
she was bright and daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and,
when you came to talk to her, astonishingly well informed.  They
passed from one hostess's hand to another: they reciprocated.  The
Clynes people and the Rushtones took her up; Mr. Evesham was amused
by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed her charm like a trumpet, the
Young Liberal people made jealous advances, Lord Moggeridge found
she listened well, she lit one of the brightest weekend parties Lady
Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.  And her descriptions of
recent danger and adventure in Albania not only entertained her
hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal courage which
completes the fascination of a young woman.  People in the gaps of a
halting dinner-table conversation would ask: "Have you met Mrs.
Benham?"

Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking.  A smiling and successful
young woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl
with a good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely
engaged, or at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr.
Rathbone-Sanders, may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success
she does not altogether grasp the intention of her husband's
discourse.  It seemed to her that he was obsessed by a
responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was
aristocratic.  (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was
justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother
was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great harm in it
nowadays.)  Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more
spirited young peers.  And it was only very slowly and reluctantly
that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his
problem.  She reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his
Finacue Street study in their new home, she declared constantly that
she would rather forego any old social thing than interfere with his
work, she never made him go anywhere with her without first asking
if his work permitted it.  To relieve him of the burthen of such
social attentions she even made a fag or so.  The making of fags out
of manifestly stricken men, the keeping of tamed and hopeless
admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and reasonable of
feminine privileges.  They did their useful little services until it
pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own.  That was how she put
it. . . .

But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
ignored.  He was manifestly losing his temper with her.  There was a
novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face
on certain occasions that lingered in her memory.

He was indeed making elaborate explanations.  He said that what he
wanted to do was to understand "the collective life of the world,"
and that this was not to be done in a West-End study.  He had an
extraordinary contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of
British politics.  He had extravagant ideas of beginning in some
much more fundamental way.  He wanted to understand this "collective
life of the world," because ultimately he wanted to help control it.
(Was there ever such nonsense?)  The practical side of this was
serious enough, however; he was back at his old idea of going round
the earth.  Later on that might be rather a jolly thing to do, but
not until they had struck root a little more surely in London.

And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she
began to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon
this vague extravagant research, that all this work she had been
doing to make a social place for him in London was as nothing to
him, that he was thinking of himself as separable from her. . . .

"But, Cheetah!  How can you leave your spotless leopard?  You would
howl in the lonely jungle!"

"Possibly I shall.  But I am going."

"Then I shall come."

"No." He considered her reasons.  "You see you are not interested."

"But I am."

"Not as I am.  You would turn it all into a jolly holiday.  You
don't want to see things as I want to do.  You want romance.  All
the world is a show for you.  As a show I can't endure it.  I want
to lay hands on it."

"But, Cheetah!" she said, "this is separation."

"You will have your life here.  And I shall come back."

"But, Cheetah!  How can we be separated?"

"We are separated," he said.

Her eyes became round with astonishment.  Then her face puckered.

"Cheetah!" she cried in a voice of soft distress, "I love you.  What
do you mean?"

And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms. . . .



5


"Don't say we are separated," she whispered, putting her still wet
face close to his.

"No.  We're mates," he answered softly, with his arm about her.

"How could we ever keep away from each uvver?" she whispered.

He was silent.

"How COULD we?"

He answered aloud.  "Amanda," he said, "I mean to go round the
world."

She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.

"What is to become of me," she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
"while you go round the world?  If you desert me in London," she
said, "if you shame me by deserting me in London--  If you leave me,
I will never forgive you, Cheetah!  Never."  Then in an almost
breathless voice, and as if she spoke to herself, "Never in all my
days."



6


It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children.  There
was nothing involuntary about Amanda.  "Soon," she said, "we must
begin to think of children.  Not just now, but a little later.  It's
good to travel and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are
children in the background.  No woman is really content until she is
a mother. . . ."  And for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said
about that solitary journey round the world.

But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk.  She set
herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
were other men in the world.  The convenient fags, sometimes a
little embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought
into the light before Benham's eyes.  Most of them were much older
men than himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no
sane man need be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a
contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood
and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much
in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible
difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy.  He was
ashamed of the feeling.  Easton it seemed was a man of a peculiarly
fine honour, so that Amanda could trust herself with him to an
extent that would have been inadvisable with men of a commoner
substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy that was
almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
despondent.  For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her
time that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an
hour now and then for being lonely and despondent.  And he was a
liberal and understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he
understood that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham
was notably deficient. . . .

"Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir
Philip Easton?" said Lady Marayne.

Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
nothing.

"When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her," said Lady Marayne.

"No," said Benham after consideration.  "I don't intend to be a
wife-herd."

"What?"

"Wife-herd--same as goat-herd."

"Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays."

"It's exactly what I mean.  I can understand the kind of curator's
interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to
look after herself--"

"She's very young."

"She's quite grown up.  Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid."

"If you leave her about and go abroad--"

"Has she been talking to you, mother?"

"The thing shows."

"But about my going abroad?"

"She said something, my little Poff."

Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
inordinately.  He weighed his words before he spoke again.  "If
Amanda chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity,
I don't see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my
life. . . ."



7


"No aristocrat has any right to be jealous," Benham wrote.  "If he
chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to
compel her to go his way.  What is the use of dragging an unwilling
companion through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends?
What is the use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no
inherent will to seek and live the aristocratic life?

"But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call. . . ."

He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
Already he had thought out and judged Amanda.  The very charm of
her, the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him
more grimly resolute to break away.  All the elaborate process of
thinking her over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while
she had been preoccupied with her housing and establishment in
London; it was with a sense of extraordinary injustice, of having
had a march stolen upon her, of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda
found herself faced by foregone conclusions.  He was ready now even
with the details of his project.  She should go on with her life in
London exactly as she had planned it.  He would take fifteen hundred
a year for himself and all the rest she might spend without check or
stint as it pleased her.  He was going round the world for one or
two years.  It was even possible he would not go alone.  There was a
man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don called
Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out his
ideas. . . .

To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things
should happen.

She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
told her that this only hardened his heart.  She perceived that she
must make a softer appeal.  Now of a set intention she began to
revive and imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she
perceived for the first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing
it is for a woman to bear a child.  "He cannot go if I am going to
have a child," she told herself.  But that would mean illness, and
for illness in herself or others Amanda had the intense disgust
natural to her youth.  Yet even illness would be better than this
intolerable publication of her husband's ability to leave her
side. . . .

She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself
forthwith to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate
it to him.  Her dread of illness disappeared; her desire for
offspring grew.

"Yes," he said, "I want to have children, but I must go round the
world none the less."

She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind.
She argued with persistence and repetition.  And then suddenly so
that she was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she
ceased to argue.

She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and
she was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-
forgetful; she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale
green, that set off her slim erect body and the strong clear lines
of her neck and shoulders very beautifully, some greenish stones
caught a light from without and flashed soft whispering gleams from
amidst the misty darkness of her hair.  She was going to Lady
Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for a dinner at the House
with some young Liberals at which he was to meet two representative
Indians with a grievance from Bengal.  Husband and wife had but a
few moments together.  She asked about his company and he told her.

"They will tell you about India."

"Yes."

She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark
green trees, and then she turned to him.

"Why cannot I come with you?" she asked with sudden passion.  "Why
cannot I see the things you want to see?"

"I tell you you are not interested.  You would only be interested
through me.  That would not help me.  I should just be dealing out
my premature ideas to you.  If you cared as I care, if you wanted to
know as I want to know, it would be different.  But you don't.  It
isn't your fault that you don't.  It happens so.  And there is no
good in forced interest, in prescribed discovery."

"Cheetah," she asked, "what is it that you want to know--that I
don't care for?"

"I want to know about the world.  I want to rule the world."

"So do I."

"No, you want to have the world."

"Isn't it the same?"

"No.  You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--
standing there in the dusk.  You're a stronger thing.  Don't you
know you're stronger?  When I am with you, you carry your point,
because you are more concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous.
When you run beside me you push me out of my path. . . .  You've
made me afraid of you. . . .  And so I won't go with you, Leopard.
I go alone.  It isn't because I don't love you.  I love you too
well.  It isn't because you aren't beautiful and wonderful. . . ."

"But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want
than you care for me."

Benham thought of it.  "I suppose I do," he said.

"What is it that you want?  Still I don't understand."

Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of
pain.

"I ought to tell you."

"Yes, you ought to tell me."

"I wonder if I can tell you," he said very thoughtfully, and rested
his hands on his hips.  "I shall seem ridiculous to you."

"You ought to tell me."

"I think what I want is to be king of the world."

She stood quite still staring at him.

"I do not know how I can tell you of it.  Amanda, do you remember
those bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?"

"I saw them," said Amanda.

"Well.  Is it nothing to you that those things happen?"

"They must happen."

"No.  They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings.
They happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care."

"But what can YOU do, Cheetah?"

"Very little.  But I can give my life and all my strength.  I can
give all I can give."

"But how?  How can you help it--help things like that massacre?"

"I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule
it and set it right."

"YOU!  Alone."

"Other men do as much.  Every one who does so helps others to do so.
You see-- . . .  In this world one may wake in the night and one may
resolve to be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king.
Does that sound foolishness to you?  Anyhow, it's fair that I should
tell you, though you count me a fool.  This--this kingship--this
dream of the night--is my life.  It is the very core of me.  Much
more than you are.  More than anything else can be.  I mean to be a
king in this earth.  KING.  I'm not mad. . . .  I see the world
staggering from misery to misery and there is little wisdom, less
rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things come by chance
and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my world and I
am responsible.  Every man to whom this light has come is
responsible.  As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your
kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no
delight, except in work, in service, in utmost effort.  As far as I
can do it I will rule my world.  I cannot abide in this smug city, I
cannot endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of
success, its rottenness. . . .  I shall do little, perhaps I shall
do nothing, but what I can understand and what I can do I will do.
Think of that wild beautiful country we saw, and the mean misery,
the filth and the warring cruelty of the life that lives there,
tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and think, too, of the limitless
ugliness here, and of Russia slipping from disorder to massacre, and
China, that sea of human beings, sliding steadily to disaster.  Do
you think these are only things in the newspapers?  To me at any
rate they are not things in newspapers; they are pain and failure,
they are torment, they are blood and dust and misery.  They haunt me
day and night.  Even if it is utterly absurd I will still do my
utmost.  It IS absurd.  I'm a madman and you and my mother are
sensible people. . . .  And I will go my way. . . .  I don't care
for the absurdity.  I don't care a rap."

He stopped abruptly.

"There you have it, Amanda.  It's rant, perhaps.  Sometimes I feel
it's rant.  And yet it's the breath of life to me. . . .  There you
are. . . .  At last I've been able to break silence and tell
you. . . ."

He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky
mystery of her face.  She stood quite still, she was just a
beautiful outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness
under the black shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches
of darkness.

He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the
time.  His voice changed.  "Well--if you provoke a man enough, you
see he makes speeches.  Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda.  Here we
are talking instead of going to our dinners.  The car has been
waiting ten minutes."

Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas. . . .

A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly.  In an instant
she had ceased to plot against him.  A vast wave of emotion swept
her forward to a resolution that astonished her.

"Cheetah!" she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed,
"give me one thing.  Stay until June with me."

"Why?" he asked.

Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.

"Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not
trying to hold you any more. . . .  I want. . . ."

She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.

"Cheetah," she whispered almost inaudibly, "Cheetah--I didn't
understand.  But now--.  I want to bear your child."

He was astonished.  "Old Leopard!" he said.

"No," she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing
very close to him, "Queen---if I can be--to your King."

"You want to bear me a child!" he whispered, profoundly moved.



8


The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of
Commons came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer.  And over
against Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of
those men who know that their judgments are quoted.

"Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?" he asked
of his neighbour in confidential undertones. . . .

He tittered.  "I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY
aware that the man to her left is talking to her. . . ."



9


A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was
now a fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer. . . .

All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in
some way Prothero was necessary to his mind.  It was as if he looked
to Prothero to keep him real.  He suspected even while he obeyed
that upward flourish which was his own essential characteristic.  He
had a peculiar feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray
him; that from exaltation he might presently float off, into the
higher, the better, and so to complete unreality.  He fled from
priggishness and the terror of such sublimity alike to Prothero.
Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a peculiar
distinctive manner SAW.  He had less self-control than Benham, less
integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were
before his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably
visible to him.  Things were able to insist upon themselves with
him.  Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted his purpose
too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them.  He repudiated
inconvenient facts.  He mastered and made his world; Prothero
accepted and recorded his.  Benham was a will towards the universe
where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive
activity.  And it was because of his realization of this profound
difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking
Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--
rather like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another. . . .

After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms
in Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-
soaked blue sky, seemed cool and quiet.  A flavour of scholarship
pervaded them--a little blended with the flavour of innumerable
breakfasts nearly but not completely forgotten.  Prothero's door had
been locked against the world, and he had appeared after a slight
delay looking a little puffy and only apprehending who his visitor
was after a resentful stare for the better part of a second.  He
might have been asleep, he might have been doing anything but the
examination papers he appeared to be doing.  The two men exchanged
personal details; they had not met since some months before Benham'
s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to
the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch,
the distinctive Prothero flavour.  Then his eye was caught by a
large red, incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch
that had an air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE,
its cover proclaimed. . . .

His host followed that glance and blushed.  "They send me all sorts
of inappropriate stuff to review," he remarked.

And then he was denouncing celibacy.

The transition wasn't very clear to Benham.  His mind had been
preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between
his teeth and bolted.  He began to say the most shocking things
right away, so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of
himself.

"Inflammatory classics."

"What's that?"

"Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me," said Prothero.  "I
can't stand it any longer."

It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world,
such a statement might have been credible.  Even in his own life,--
it was now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been
something distantly akin. . . .

"You're going to marry?"

"I must."

"Who's the lady, Billy?"

"I don't know.  Venus."

His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly.  "So far as I
know, it is Venus Anadyomene."  A flash of laughter passed across
his face and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant.
"I like her best, anyhow.  I do, indeed.  But, Lord!  I feel that
almost any of them--"

"Tut, tut!" said Benham.

Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.

"Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face?
I am not pronouncing an immoral principle.  Your manner suggests I
am.  I am telling you exactly how I feel.  That is how I feel.  I
want--Venus.  I don't want her to talk to or anything of that
sort. . . .  I have been studying that book, yes, that large,
vulgar, red book, all the morning, instead of doing any work.
Would you like to see it? . . .  NO! . . .

"This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad.  It is a
peculiarly erotic spring.  I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I
cannot attend to ordinary conversation.  These feelings, I
understand, are by no means peculiar to myself. . . .  No, don't
interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is
upon me.  When you came in you said, ‘How are you?'  I am telling
you how I am.  You brought it on yourself.  Well--I am--inflamed.  I
have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist me either to
endure or deny this--this urgency.  And so why should I deny it?
It's one of our chief problems here.  The majority of my fellow dons
who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
combination-room are in just the same case as myself.  The fever in
oneself detects the fever in others.  I know their hidden thoughts.
Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts.  Each
covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly
indifference.  A tattered cloak. . . .  Each tries to hide his
abandonment to this horrible vice of continence--"

"Billy, what's the matter with you?"

Prothero grimaced impatience.  "Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a
humbug, Benham?" he screamed, and in screaming became calmer.
"Nature taunts me, maddens me.  My life is becoming a hell of shame.
‘Get out from all these books,' says Nature, ‘and serve the Flesh.'
The Flesh, Benham.  Yes--I insist--the Flesh.  Do I look like a pure
spirit?  Is any man a pure spirit?  And here am I at Cambridge like
a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia.  Not that I
should have liked Aspasia."

"Mutual, perhaps, Billy."

"Oh! you can sneer!"

"Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy."

Prothero had walked to the window.  He turned round.

"I CAN'T marry," he said.  "The trouble has gone too far.  I've lost
my nerve in the presence of women.  I don't like them any more.
They come at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and
chattering about all sorts of things that don't matter. . . .  He
surveyed his friend's thoughtful attitude.  "I'm getting to hate
women, Benham.  I'm beginning now to understand the bitterness of
spinsters against men.  I'm beginning to grasp the unkindliness of
priests.  The perpetual denial.  To you, happily married, a woman is
just a human being.  You can talk to her, like her, you can even
admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against her. . . ."

He sat down abruptly.

Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered
him.

"Billy! this is delusion," he said.  "What's come over you?"

"I'm telling you," said Prothero.

"No," said Benham.

Prothero awaited some further utterance.

"I'm looking for the cause of it.  It's feeding, Billy.  It's port
and stimulants where there is no scope for action.  It's idleness.
I begin to see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser."

"Idleness!  Look at this pile of examination answers.  Look at that
filing system like an arsenal of wisdom.  Useless wisdom, I admit,
but anyhow not idleness."

"There's still bodily idleness.  No.  That's your trouble.  You're
stuffy.  You've enlarged your liver.  You sit in this room of a warm
morning after an extravagant breakfast--.  And peep and covet."

"Just eggs and bacon!"

"Think of it!  Coffee and toast it ought to be.  Come out of it,
Billy, and get aired."

"How can one?"

"Easily.  Come out of it now.  Come for a walk, you Pig!"

"It's an infernally warm morning.

"Walk with me to Grantchester."

"We might go by boat.  You could row."

"WALK."

"I ought to do these papers."

"You weren't doing them."

"No. . . ."

"Walk with me to Grantchester.  All this affliction of yours is--
horrid--and just nothing at all.  Come out of it!  I want you to
come with me to Russia and about the world.  I'm going to leave my
wife--"

"Leave your wife!"

"Why not?  And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and
instead you are in this disgusting state.  I've never met anything
in my life so hot and red and shiny and shameless.  Come out of it,
man!  How can one talk to you?"



10


"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went
through the heat to Grantchester.

"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.

"Truth!  As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
discipline and training some sort of falsity!"

"Artificiality.  And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's
pride."

For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them. . . .

The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.

"I'm not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently
outrageous.  "I'm talking of physical needs.  That first.  What is
the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you
know what is physically possible. . . .

"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?"

"Then why don't we up and find out?" said Billy.

He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
surrounded these questions.  We didn't worship our ancestors when it
came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or
studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or
wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental
affair?  Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and
stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the
ages?  "What is the wisdom of the ages?" said Prothero.  "Think of
the corners where that wisdom was born. . . .  Flea-bitten sages in
stone-age hovels. . . .  Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a
fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic. . . ."

"Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.

The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
experience.  Most of it was better forgotten.  It didn't convince.
It had never worked things out.  In this matter just as in every
other matter that really signified things had still to be worked
out.  Nothing had been worked out hitherto.  The wisdom of the ages
was a Cant.  People had been too busy quarrelling, fighting and
running away.  There wasn't any digested experience of the ages at
all.  Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.

"Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or
isn't it?" Prothero demanded.  "There's a simple question enough,
and is there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages
to tell me yes or no?  Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and
vigorous as a mated man?  Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy
human being?  Can she be?  I don't believe so.  Then why in thunder
do we let her be?  Here am I at a centre of learning and wisdom and
I don't believe so; and there is nothing in all our colleges,
libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that plain
question for me, plainly and finally.  My life is a grubby torment
of cravings because it isn't settled.  If sexual activity IS a part
of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set about
making it accessible and harmless and have done with it.  Swedish
exercises.  That sort of thing.  If it isn't, if it can be reduced
and done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to
control themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion.
But all this muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with
it!"

"But, Billy!  How can one settle these things?  It's a matter of
idiosyncrasy.  What is true for one man isn't true for another.
There's infinite difference of temperaments!"

"Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral
code for each sort?  Why am I ruled by the way of life that is
convenient for Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like
a glove?  It isn't convenient for me.  It fits me like a hair-shirt.
Of course there are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them
and exercise the elementary charity of recognizing that one man's
health in these matters is another man's death?  Some want love and
gratification and some don't.  There are people who want children
and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are
full of vivid desires.  There are people whose only happiness is
chastity, and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers.
Some of us would concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea;
others overflow with a miscellaneous--tenderness.  Yes,--and you
smile!  Why spit upon and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham?
Why grin at it?  Why try every one by the standards that suit
oneself?  We're savages, Benham, shamefaced savages, still.
Shamefaced and persecuting.

"I was angry about sex by seventeen," he went on.  "Every year I
live I grow angrier."

His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.

"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
that is going on in Cambridge this morning.  The hundreds out of
these thousands full of it.  A vast tank of cerebration.  And we put
none of it together; we work nothing out from that but poor little
couplings and casual stories, patchings up of situations,
misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble, escapes; and the next
generation will start, and the next generation after that will start
with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn't wisdom at all,
which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the secretive
cunning of the savage. . . .

"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off
quite unexpectedly again.  "That is why all this business, this
incessant craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally
angry. . . ."



11


"There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick
torrent of Prothero's prepossessions.  "What we want to do is our
work."

He clung to his idea.  He raised his voice to prevent Prothero
getting the word again.

"It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--
living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity
out of this business.  If it was only submission. . . .  YOU think
it is only submission--giving way. . . .  It isn't only submission.
We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would
make us, if we didn't know all the time that there was something
else to live for, something far more important.  And different.
Absolutely different and contradictory.  So different that it cuts
right across all these considerations.  It won't fit in. . . .  I
don't know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about
with you.  But I know that it IS, in all my bones. . . .  YOU
know. . . .  It demands control, it demands continence, it insists
upon disregard."

But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
Prothero that day.

"Mankind," said Benham, "is overcharged with this sex.  It
suffocates us.  It gives life only to consume it.  We struggle out
of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence.  We are not so
much living as being married and given in marriage.  All life is
swamped in the love story. . . ."

"Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero,
sticking stoutly to his own view.



12


It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at
Grantchester after their lunch that Benham could make head against
Prothero and recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily
touched the imagination of Amanda.  And then he did not so much
dispose of Prothero's troubles as soar over them.  It is the last
triumph of the human understanding to sympathize with desires we do
not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved beyond
the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and austerely
content, it was impossible that Prothero's demands should seem
anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast
that has to be overridden and rejected altogether.  It is a freakish
fact of our composition that these most intense feelings in life are
just those that are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one
may recall for years, but the magic of love and the flame of desire
serve their purpose in our lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like
the snows of Venice.  Benham was still not a year and a half from
the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale, and he looked at
Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its sty. . . .

What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia.  When at last
he could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the
project that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon
experience.

He had discovered a new reason for travelling.  The last country we
can see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country.  It is as
hard to see one's own country as it is to see the back of one's
head.  It is too much behind us, too much ourselves.  But Russia is
like England with everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt
that directly one walked about St. Petersburg.  St. Petersburg upon
its Neva was like a savage untamed London on a larger Thames; they
were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other capitals in Europe.
The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects.  Like London it
looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless polyglot
empire.  And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class
that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness
and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care.
Russia, like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a
state church and the opposition to that church was not secularism
but dissent.  One could draw a score of such contrasted parallels.
And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid bare the
elemental facts of a great social organization.  It was having its
South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
certain defeat instead of a dubious victory. . . .

"There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
England," said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.

Benham went on with his discourse about Russia. . . .

"At the college of Troitzka," said Prothero, "which I understand is
a kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells
me that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls,
the arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various
hotels are conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality."

Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.

He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian
situation.  He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see
Russia, to try to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process,
was the manifest duty of every responsible intelligence that was
free to do as much.  And so he was going, and if Prothero cared to
come too--

"Yes," said Prothero, "I should like to go to Russia."



13


But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was
never able to lift Prothero away from his obsession.  It was the
substance of their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting
destroyers and winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the
smoothly undulating darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them
again as they sat over the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in
the express for Berlin.  Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his
complaints against nature and society, and distracted Benham in his
contemplation of Polish agriculture from the windows of the train
with turgid sexual liberalism.  So that Benham, during this period
until Prothero left him and until the tragic enormous spectacle of
Russia in revolution took complete possession of him, was as it were
thinking upon two floors.  Upon the one he was thinking of the vast
problems of a society of a hundred million people staggering on the
verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by the
feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous things that were
going on all about them.  It was only presently when the serenity of
his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that he
began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of
thought.  Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.

"Inattentive," said Prothero, "of course I am inattentive.  What is
really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in
here, is that nearly everybody is inattentive.  These Big Things of
yours, nobody is thinking of them really.  Everybody is thinking
about the Near Things that concern himself."

"The bombs they threw yesterday?  The Cossacks and the whips?"

"Nudges.  Gestures of inattention.  If everybody was thinking of the
Res Publica would there be any need for bombs?"

He pursued his advantage.  "It's all nonsense to suppose people
think of politics because they are in ‘em.  As well suppose that the
passengers on a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war.
Before men can think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day.
Before they can think of others, they must be sure about themselves.
First of all, food; the private, the personal economic worry.  Am I
safe for food?  Then sex, and until one is tranquil and not ashamed,
not irritated and dissatisfied, how can one care for other people,
or for next year or the Order of the World?  How can one, Benham?"

He seized the illustration at hand.  "Here we are in Warsaw--not a
month after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging.  Windows have still
to be mended, smashed doors restored.  There's blood-stains still on
some of the houses.  There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and
in the Ochrana prison.  This morning there were executions.  Is it
anything more than an eddy in the real life of the place?  Watch the
customers in the shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the
cafes who stare at the passing women.  They are all swallowed up
again in their own business.  They just looked up as the Cossacks
galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets spat. . . ."

And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide
of the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him
back to Cambridge--changed.

Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
disregard Prothero.  He was looking over him at the vast heaving
trouble of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the
hurrying darknesses of an approaching storm.  In those days it
looked as though it must be an overwhelming storm.  He was drinking
in the wide and massive Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the
entangling streets, the houses with their strange lettering in black
and gold, the innumerable barbaric churches, the wildly driven
droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the Kremlin, with its bulbous
churches clustering up into the sky, the crosses, the innumerable
gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil, carrying the Russian note
beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and in this setting the
obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing peasants, long-
haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of uniform, a
running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of little
papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a
gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a
perpetual clash and clamour of bells.  Benham had brought letters of
introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed.
They were "away," the porters said, and they continued to be
"away,"--it was the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were
evasive, a few showed themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform
him about things, to explain themselves and things about them
exhaustively.  One young student took him to various meetings and
showed him in great detail the scene of the recent murder of the
Grand Duke Sergius.  The buildings opposite the old French cannons
were still under repair.  "The assassin stood just here.  The bomb
fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that was where
they found his arm.  He was torn to fragments.  He was scraped up.
He was mixed with the horses. . . ."

Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter
of days or at the utmost weeks.  And whatever question Benham chose
to ask these talkers were prepared to answer.  Except one.  "And
after the revolution," he asked, "what then? . . ."  Then they waved
their hands, and failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.

He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous
drift towards a conflict.  He was trying to piece together a
process, if it was one and the same process, which involved riots in
Lodz, fighting at Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal
battlings in Manchuria, the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet
lost somewhere now in the Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its
fate, he was trying to rationalize it all in his mind, to comprehend
its direction.  He was struggling strenuously with the obscurities
of the language in which these things were being discussed about
him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of visual images
because of its strange alphabet.  Is it any wonder that for a time
he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely
disconnected affair.

They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre
Square.  Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-
looking men with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's
friends and guides to take him out and show him this and that.  At
first Prothero always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then
he began to make excuses.  He would stay behind in the hotel.  Then
when Benham returned Prothero would have disappeared.  When the
porter was questioned about Prothero his nescience was profound.

One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
alarmed.

"Moscow is a late place," said Benham's student friend.  "You need
not be anxious until after four or five in the morning.  It will be
quite time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow.  He may be--close at
hand."

When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
sleepy and irritable.

"I don't trouble if YOU are late," said Prothero, sitting up in his
bed with a red resentful face and crumpled hair.  "I wasn't born
yesterday."

"I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow."

"I don't want to leave Moscow."

"But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now."

"I want to stay in Moscow."

Benham looked baffled.

Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon
them.  "I don't want to leave Moscow," he said, "and I'm not going
to do so."

"But haven't we done--"

Prothero interrupted.  "You may.  But I haven't.  We're not after
the same things.  Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest
me.  I've found--different things."

His expression was extraordinarily defiant.

"I want," he went on, "to put our affairs on a different footing.
Now you've opened the matter we may as well go into it.  You were
good enough to bring me here. . . .  There was a sort of
understanding we were working together. . . .  We aren't. . . .  The
long and short of it is, Benham, I want to pay you for my journey
here and go on my own--independently."

His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
incredible in him.

Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other
matters jerked back into Benham's memory.  It popped back so
suddenly that for an instant he wanted to laugh.  He turned towards
the window, picked his way among Prothero's carelessly dropped
garments, and stood for a moment staring into the square, with its
drifting, assembling and dispersing fleet of trains and its long
line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS.  Then he turned.

"Billy," he said, "didn't I see you the other evening driving
towards the Hermitage?"

"Yes," said Prothero, and added, "that's it."

"You were with a lady."

"And she IS a lady," said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face
twitched as though he was going to weep.

"She's a Russian?"

"She had an English mother.  Oh, you needn't stand there and look so
damned ironical!  She's--she's a woman.  She's a thing of
kindness. . . ."

He was too full to go on.

"Billy, old boy," said Benham, distressed, "I don't want to be
ironical--"

Prothero had got his voice again.

"You'd better know," he said, "you'd better know.  She's one of
those women who live in this hotel."

"Live in this hotel!"

"On the fourth floor.  Didn't you know?  It's the way in most of
these big Russian hotels.  They come down and sit about after lunch
and dinner.  A woman with a yellow ticket.  Oh!  I don't care.  I
don't care a rap.  She's been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me.
How are you to understand?  I shall stop in Moscow.  I shall take
her to England.  I can't live without her, Benham.  And then--  And
then you come worrying me to come to your damned Odessa!"

And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face
as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an
apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears.  They ran between his
fingers.  "Get out of my room," he shouted, suffocatingly.  "What
business have you to come prying on me?"

Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared
round-eyed at his friend.  His hands were in his pockets.  For a
time he said nothing.

"Billy," he began at last, and stopped again.  "Billy, in this
country somehow one wants to talk like a Russian.  Billy, my dear--
I'm not your father, I'm not your judge.  I'm--unreasonably fond of
you.  It's not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you.
If you want to stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow.  Stay here, and stay
as my guest. . . ."

He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.

"I didn't know," said Prothero brokenly; "I didn't know it was
possible to get so fond of a person. . . ."

Benham stood up.  He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
abominable in his life before.

"I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy.  I'll make things all right here
before I go. . . ."

He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound
thought to his own room. . . .

Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
explain what so evidently did not need explaining.  He walked about
the room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.

In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to
have shrunken to something sleek and small.

"I wish," he said, "you could stay for a later train and have lunch
and meet her.  She's not the ordinary thing.  She's--different."

Benham plumbed depths of wisdom.  "Billy," he said, "no woman IS the
ordinary thing.  They are all--different. . . ."



14


For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
matter to be.  While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and
travelled hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in
the endless tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia,
Prothero was lost to all those large issues in the development of
his personal situation.  He contributed nothing to Benham's thought
except attempts at discouragement.  He reiterated his declaration
that all the vast stress and change of Russian national life was
going on because it was universally disregarded.  "I tell you, as I
told you before, that nobody is attending.  You think because all
Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned.
Nobody is concerned.  Nobody cares what is happening.  Even the men
who write in newspapers and talk at meetings about it don't care.
They are thinking of their dinners, of their clothes, of their
money, of their wives.  They hurry home. . . ."

That was his excuse.

Manifestly it was an excuse.

His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy
and divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible.
To Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business
of love.  The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all.  He had
to love Amanda.  He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again,
more in love, he felt, than they had ever been before.  They were
now writing love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation
that was almost voluptuous.  She found in the epistolatory treatment
of her surrender to him and to the natural fate of women, a
delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of expression.
Life pointed now wonderfully to the great time ahead when there
would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the Cheetah loped
about the wild world upon a mighty quest.  In such terms she put it.
Such foolishness written in her invincibly square and youthful hand
went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up against his return
in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or pursued him down
through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or waited for
him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray.  Perhaps
they supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service
with useful exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English.  He
wrote back five hundred different ways of saying that he loved her
extravagantly. . . .

It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your
business.  It seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin
high and diffuse a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate
multitudes who stewed in affliction and hate because they had failed
as yet to find this simple, culminating elucidation.  And Prothero--
Prothero, too, was now achieving the same grand elementariness, out
of his lusts and protests and general physical squalor he had
flowered into love.  For a time it is true it made rather an
ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere goose-stepping
for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay exaltation.  Benham
had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this Anglo-Russian, who was
a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had seen her for a
doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him, and his
impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with dusky
hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her, a
quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda.  And
if she liked old Prothero--  And, indeed, she must like old Prothero
or could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?

They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul
would wake up and face the world again.  What did it matter what she
had been?

Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained
anxiety and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering
towards revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within
him and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was
quite prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when
he came back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance.  He intended
to help Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to
assist by every possible means in destroying and forgetting the
official yellow ticket that defined her status in Moscow.  But he
reckoned without either Prothero or the young lady in this
expectation.

It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations that
there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course.  Prothero
hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.

On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished.  It was
chiefly a similarity of complexion.  She had a more delicate face
than Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none
of Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty
halting limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.

She put her case compactly.

"I would not DO in Cambridge," she said with an infinitesimal glance
at Prothero.

"Mr. Benham," she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman of
affairs," now do you see me in Cambridge?  Now do you see me?  Kept
outside the walls?  In a little DATCHA?  With no occupation?  Just
to amuse him."

And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved
still completer lucidity.

"I would come if I thought he wanted me to come," she said.  "But
you see if I came he would not want me to come.  Because then he
would have me and so he wouldn't want me.  He would just have the
trouble.  And I am not sure if I should be happy in Cambridge.  I am
not sure I should be happy enough to make him happy.  It is a very
learned and intelligent and charming society, of course; but here,
THINGS HAPPEN.  At Cambridge nothing happens--there is only
education.  There is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even
sinful people to be sorry for. . . .  And he says himself that
Cambridge people are particular.  He says they are liberal but very,
very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my part well.
Sometimes I am not always well behaved.  When there is music I
behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored.  He says the Cambridge
people are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he
says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are
what you are. . . .  So that it comes to exactly the same
thing. . . ."

"Anna Alexievna," said Benham suddenly, "are you in love with
Prothero?"

Her manner became conscientiously scientific.

"He is very kind and very generous--too generous.  He keeps sending
for more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him."

"Were you EVER in love?"

"Of course.  But it's all gone long ago.  It was like being hungry.
Only very fine hungry.  Exquisite hungry. . . .  And then being
disgusted. . . ."

"He is in love with you."

"What is love?" said Anna.  "He is grateful.  He is by nature
grateful."  She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who
looks down on her bambino.

"And you love nothing?"

"I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone.  When I am
dead perhaps I shall be alone.  Not even my own body will touch me
then."

Then she added, "But I shall be sorry when he goes."

Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone.  "Your Anna," he said,
"is rather wonderful.  At first, I tell you now frankly I did not
like her very much, I thought she looked ‘used,' she drank vodka at
lunch, she was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing.  All that was
prejudice.  She thinks; she's generous, she's fine."

"She's tragic," said Prothero as though it was the same thing.

He spoke as though he noted an objection.  His next remark confirmed
this impression.  "That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,"
he said.

"You see, Benham," he went on, "she's human.  She's not really
feminine.  I mean, she's--unsexed.  She isn't fitted to be a wife or
a mother any more.  We've talked about the possible life in England,
very plainly.  I've explained what a household in Cambridge would
mean. . . .  It doesn't attract her. . . .  In a way she's been let
out from womanhood, forced out of womanhood, and I see now that when
women are let out from womanhood there's no putting them back.  I
could give a lecture on Anna.  I see now that if women are going to
be wives and mothers and homekeepers and ladies, they must be got
ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never really let out
into the wild chances of life.  She has been.  Bitterly.  She's
REALLY emancipated.  And it's let her out into a sort of
nothingness.  She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man.  She
ought to be able to go on her own--like a man.  But I can't take her
back to Cambridge.  Even for her sake."

His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.

"You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone," said Benham.

"Oh, damnably not!  But what can I do?  I had at first some idea of
coming to Moscow for good--teaching."

He paused.  "Impossible.  I'm worth nothing here.  I couldn't have
kept her."

"Then what are you going to do, Billy?"

"I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you.  I live for the
moment.  To-morrow we are going out into the country."

"I don't understand," said Benham with a gesture of resignation.
"It seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they
insist upon each other.  What is to happen to her if you leave her
in Moscow?"

"Damnation!  Is there any need to ask that?"

"Take her to Cambridge, man.  And if Cambridge objects, teach
Cambridge better manners."

Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.

"I tell you she won't come!" he said.

"Billy!" said Benham, "you should make her!"

"I can't."

"If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--"

"But I don't love her like that," said Prothero, shrill with anger.
"I tell you I don't love her like that."

Then he lunged into further deeps.  "It's the other men," he said,
"it's the things that have been.  Don't you understand?  Can't you
understand?  The memories--she must have memories--they come between
us.  It's something deeper than reason.  It's in one's spine and
under one's nails.  One could do anything, I perceive, for one's
very own woman. . . ."

"MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.

"I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts.  How could any man make
her his very own woman now?  You--you don't seem to understand--
ANYTHING.  She's nobody's woman--for ever.  That--that might-have-
been has gone for ever. . . .  It's nerves--a passion of the nerves.
There's a cruelty in life and--  She's KIND to me.  She's so kind to
me. . . ."

And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.



15


The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken
fragments in letters.  When he looked for Anna Alexievna in
December--he never learnt her surname--he found she had left the
Cosmopolis Bazaar soon after Prothero's departure and he could not
find whither she had gone.  He never found her again.  Moscow and
Russia had swallowed her up.

Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion.
But Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a
shock to Benham's ideas.  It was clear he went off almost callously;
it would seem there was very little crying.  Towards the end it was
evident that the two had quarrelled.  The tears only came at the
very end of all.  It was almost as if he had got through the passion
and was glad to go.  Then came regret, a regret that increased in
geometrical proportion with every mile of distance.

In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero.  He had some
hours there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and
women happy with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and
full of delicious secrets, girls and women who ever and again
flashed out some instant resemblance to Anna. . . .

In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go
back.  "But now I had the damned frontier," he wrote, "between us."

It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let
the "damned frontier" tip the balance against him.

Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured.  "I can't stand this
business," he wrote.  "It has things in it, possibilities of
emotional disturbance--you can have no idea!  In the train--luckily
I was alone in the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I
could not help it, I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar!  A
beastly German came and stood in the corridor to stare.  I had to
get out of the train.  It is disgraceful, it is monstrous we should
be made like this. . . .

"Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to
you about my dismal feelings. . . ."

After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero
but to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of
inappeasable regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the
invincible earthliness of his friend.  Prothero stayed three nights
in Paris.

"There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris," he wrote.  "A
levity.  I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet
undescribed radiations.  Suddenly the world looks brightly
cynical. . . .  None of those tear-compelling German emanations. . . .

"And, Benham, I have found a friend.

"A woman.  Of course you will laugh, you will sneer.  You do not
understand these things. . . .  Yet they are so simple.  It was the
strangest accident brought us together.  There was something that
drew us together.  A sort of instinct.  Near the Boulevard
Poissoniere. . . ."

"Good heavens!" said Benham.  "A sort of instinct!"

"I told her all about Anna!"

"Good Lord!" cried Benham.

"She understood.  Perfectly.  None of your so-called ‘respectable'
women could have understood. . . .  At first I intended merely to
talk to her. . . ."

Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.

"Little Anna Alexievna!" he said, "you were too clean for him."



16


Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign
travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind
of relief, to the grey mildness of Trinity.  He saw him, capped and
gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings,
resuming friendships.

The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet
Benedicts and restrained celibates at the high tables.  They ate on
in their mature wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled.
Presently they would withdraw processionally to the combination
room. . . .

There would be much to talk about over the wine.

Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow. . . .

He laughed abruptly.

And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a
space of years.  There may have been other letters, but if so they
were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-
office.  Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some
forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav. . . .



17


In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff
which had brought him within an inch of death, and because an
emotional wave had swept across him and across his correspondence
with Amanda, Benham went back suddenly to England and her.  He
wanted very greatly to see her and also he wanted to make certain
arrangements about his property.  He returned by way of Hungary, and
sent telegrams like shouts of excitement whenever the train stopped
for a sufficient time.  "Old Leopard, I am coming, I am coming," he
telegraphed, announcing his coming for the fourth time.  It was to
be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the mutual refreshment
of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to Russia again.

Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the
utmost dignity of expectant maternity.  Like many other people he
had been a little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a
common human experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a
rare and sacramental function.  Amanda had become very beautiful in
quiet, grey, dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had
given way to a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little
neck that had always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now
softened and rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the
place in the manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice.  She
dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment
in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-
sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's
unparalleled immolation.  The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere,
and at his bedside he found--it had been put there for him by
Amanda--among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most
wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.

Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the
impending fact.  An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept
Sir Godfrey in the depths of London society, but to make up for his
absence Mrs. Morris had taken a little cottage down by the river and
the Wilder girls were with her, both afire with fine and subtle
feelings and both, it seemed, and more particularly Betty, prepared
to be keenly critical of Benham's attitude.

He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.

In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments
an effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed.  It was
as if she put aside for him something official, something sincerely
maintained, necessary, but at times a little irksome.  It was as if
she was glad to take him into her confidence and unbend.  Within the
pre-natal Amanda an impish Amanda still lingered.

There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must
never know. . . .

But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most
unpontifical moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who
had drawn him home across Europe.  At times she was extraordinarily
jolly.  They had two or three happy walks about the Chexington
woods; that year the golden weather of October had flowed over into
November, and except for a carpet of green and gold under the horse-
chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the trees.  Gleams of her
old wanton humour shone on him.  And then would come something else,
something like a shadow across the world, something he had quite
forgotten since his idea of heroic love had flooded him, something
that reminded him of those long explanations with Mr. Rathbone-
Sanders that had never been explained, and of the curate in the
doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.

On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little
surprised to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into
the garden, with an accustomed familiarity.  Sir Philip perceived
him with a start that was instantly controlled, and greeted him with
unnatural ease.

Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket
in the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending
the summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from
scholars and literary men.  A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought
to have been aviating or travelling.

Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that
there was a flavour of established association in their manner.  But
then Sir Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne.  She
called him "Pip," and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-
court to him, "Pip!"  And then he called her "Amanda."  When the
Wilder girls came up to join the tennis he was just as brotherly. . . .

The next day he came to lunch.

During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been
before of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes.
They watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that
seemed at once pained and tender.  And there was something about
Amanda, a kind of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of
something undefinably suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive
certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip would be spoken to
privately, and that then he would pack up and go away in a state of
illumination from Chexington.  But before he could be spoken to he
contrived to speak to Benham.

They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took
advantage of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.

"Mrs. Benham," he said, "looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
don't you think?"

"Yes," said Benham, startled.  "Yes.  She certainly keeps very
well."

"She misses you terribly," said Sir Philip; "it is a time when a
woman misses her husband.  But, of course, she does not want to
hamper your work. . . ."

Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest
in these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no
better expression for this than a grunt.

"You don't mind," said the young man with a slight catch in the
breath that might have been apprehensive, "that I sometimes bring
her books and flowers and things?  Do what little I can to keep life
interesting down here?  It's not very congenial. . . .  She's so
wonderful--I think she is the most wonderful woman in the world."

Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
really a primitive barbarian in these matters.

"I've no doubt," he said, "that my wife has every reason to be
grateful for your attentions."

In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir
Philip was engendering something still more personal.  If so, he
might be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl
of chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an
improving manner.  He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would
probably take anything of the sort very touchingly.  He scrambled in
his mind for some remark that would avert this possibility.

"Have you ever been in Russia?" he asked hastily.  "It is the most
wonderful country in Europe.  I had an odd adventure near Kiev.
During a pogrom."

And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description. . . .

But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were
presently thrown out by Lady Marayne.  They were so much more in the
air. . . .



18


Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had
foreseen.

"Easton has gone away," he remarked three days later to Amanda.

"I told him to go.  He is a bore with you about.  But otherwise he
is rather a comfort, Cheetah." She meditated upon Sir Philip.  "And
he's an HONOURABLE man," she said.  "He's safe. . . ."



19


After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
earnest.  The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic
love for the modern aristocrat ended abruptly.  Instead there came
the first draft for a study of jealousy.  The note was written in
pencil on Chexington notepaper and manifestly that had been
supported on the ribbed cover of a book.  There was a little
computation in the corner, converting forty-five degrees Reaumur
into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it had been written
in the Red Sea.  But, indeed, it had been written in a rather
amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's journey to the
gathering revolt in Moscow. . . .

"I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
jealousy. . . .  I thought it was something essentially
contemptible, something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in
the mere effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it
is not quite so easily settled with. . . .

"One likes to know. . . .  Possibly one wants to know too
much. . . .  In phases of fatigue, and particularly in phases of
sleeplessness, when one is leaving all that one cares for behind, it
becomes an irrational torment. . . .

"And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of
this base motive.  I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how
strongly jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs
with a man. . . .

"There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human
being being one's ownest own--utterly one's own. . . .

"There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives. . . .

"One does. . . .

"There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted
and the one who distrusts. . . ."

After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.



20


Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their
child.  He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the
fitful fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and
taking care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had
gone astray temporarily on the way home from Baku.  Then he went
southward to Rostov and thence to Astrakhan.  Here he really began
his travels.  He determined to get to India by way of Herat and for
the first time in his life rode out into an altogether lawless
wilderness.  He went on obstinately because he found himself
disposed to funk the journey, and because discouragements were put
in his way.  He was soon quite cut off from all the ways of living
he had known.  He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten, saddle-sore,
hungry and, above all, thirsty.  He was haunted by a dread of fever,
and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses of
quinine.  He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in
May.  He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was
well with Amanda.

He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with
the outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken
conscience took him back to England.  He found a second William
Porphyry in the world, dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly
triumphant and passionate, the Madonna enthroned.  For William
Porphyry he could feel no emotion.  William Porphyry was very red
and ugly and protesting, feeble and aggressive, a matter for a
skilled nurse.  To see him was to ignore him and dispel a dream.  It
was to Amanda Benham turned again.

For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
familiar flatteries of her love.  He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him. . . .

And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her
side.  "We have both had our adventures," she said, which struck him
as an odd phrase.

It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind.  She had
absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had
seemed to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their
lives.  It had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her.  And
upon his interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a
year.  She was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled
her during their first settlement in London.  She wanted a joint
life in the social world of London, she demanded his presence, his
attention, the daily practical evidences of love.  It was all very
well for him to be away when the child was coming, but now
everything was different.  Now he must stay by her.

This time he argued no case.  These issues he had settled for ever.
Even an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation
that began with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him.
Behind these things now was India.  The huge problems of India had
laid an unshakeable hold upon his imagination.  He had seen Russia,
and he wanted to balance that picture by a vision of the east. . . .

He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington.  The young
man displayed no further disposition to be confidentially
sentimental.  But he seemed to have something on his mind.  And
Amanda said not a word about him.  He was a young man above
suspicion, Benham felt. . . .

And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
two larger carnivores began to change.  Except for the repetition of
accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense
of the word.  They dealt chiefly with the "Cub," and even there
Benham felt presently that the enthusiasm diminished.  A new amazing
quality for Amanda appeared--triteness.  The very writing of her
letters changed as though it had suddenly lost backbone.  Her
habitual liveliness of phrasing lost its point.  Had she lost her
animation?  Was she ill unknowingly?  Where had the light gone?  It
was as if her attention was distracted. . . .  As if every day when
she wrote her mind was busy about something else.

Abruptly at last he understood.  A fact that had never been stated,
never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
perceived to be THERE. . . .

He left a record of that moment of realization.

"Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
never seen Amanda before.  Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with
that same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a
pitiless, a scientific distinctness that has neither light nor
shadow. . . .

"Of course," I said, and then presently I got up very softly. . . .

"I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin.  I
wanted to feel the largeness of the sky.  I went out upon the deck.
We were off the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment,
there comes back to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air,
the low line of the coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian
moonlight, the swish of the black water against the side of the
ship.  And a perception of infinite loss, as if the limitless
heavens above this earth and below to the very uttermost star were
just one boundless cavity from which delight had fled. . . .

"Of course I had lost her.  I knew it with absolute certainty.  I
knew it from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her
needs.  I knew it from every line she had written me in the last
three months.  I knew it intuitively.  She had been unfaithful.  She
must have been unfaithful.

"What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?"



21


"Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters.  Let
me be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I
may have been led into by force of my passions.  Always I have
despised jealousy. . . .

"Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the
aristocratic life to be achieved.  They come in a certain order, and
in that order the spirit of man is armed against them less and less
efficiently.  Of fear and my struggle against fear I have told
already.  I am fearful.  I am a physical coward until I can bring
shame and anger to my assistance, but in overcoming fear I have been
helped by the whole body of human tradition.  Every one, the basest
creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature that ever
breathed poison in a slum, knows that the instinctive constitution
of man is at fault here and that fear is shameful and must be
subdued.  The race is on one's side.  And so there is a vast
traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
limitation of physical indulgence.  It is not so universal as the
first, there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness,
but common pride is against it.  And in this matter my temperament
has been my help: I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and
feel a shivering recoil from excess.  It is no great virtue; it
happens so; it is something in the nerves of my skin.  I cannot
endure myself unshaven or in any way unclean; I am tormented by
dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories, and after I had once
loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational impulse to get
equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to her, whatever
breach there was in her faith to me. . . .

"I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more
easily clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that
distinctive virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of
resentment and anger.

"I despised a jealous man.  There is a traditional discredit of
jealousy, not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very
strong.  But the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped
up with the supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it
is unreasonable suspicion.  Given a cause then tradition speaks with
an uncertain voice. . . .

"I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable to
imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that
she was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when
silently, gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a
pool, that knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated
up into my consciousness.

"And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me!  Outrageously.
Abominably.

"Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
question.  My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
whatever to her love or loyalty.  I must have that very clear. . . .

"This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except
accidentally here and there, incompatible with the domestic life.
It means going hither and thither in the universe of thought as much
as in the universe of matter, it means adventure, it means movement
and adventure that must needs be hopelessly encumbered by an
inseparable associate, it means self-imposed responsibilities that
will not fit into the welfare of a family.  In all ages, directly
society had risen above the level of a barbaric tribal village, this
need of a release from the family for certain necessary types of
people has been recognized.  It was met sometimes informally,
sometimes formally, by the growth and establishment of special
classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged knights, of
a great variety of non-family people, whose concern was the larger
collective life that opens out beyond the simple necessities and
duties and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman's house.
Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form of celibacy;
but besides that there have been a hundred institutional variations
of the common life to meet the need of the special man, the man who
must go deep and the man who must go far.  A vowed celibacy ceased
to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea
entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
men.  That was plain to Plato.  It was plain to Campanelea.  It was
plain to the Protestant reformers.  But the world has never yet gone
on to the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of
feminine aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as
untrammelled by domestic servitudes and family relationships as the
men of their kind.  That I see has always been my idea since in my
undergraduate days I came under the spell of Plato.  It was a matter
of course that my first gift to Amanda should be his REPUBLIC.  I
loved Amanda transfigured in that dream. . . .

"There are no such women. . . .

"It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with
myself.  I had no sound reason for supposing that.  I did suppose
that.  I did not perceive that not only was she younger than myself,
but that while I had been going through a mill of steely education,
kept close, severely exercised, polished by discussion, she had but
the weak training of a not very good school, some scrappy reading,
the vague discussions of village artists, and the draped and
decorated novelties of the ‘advanced.'  It all went to nothing on
the impact of the world. . . .  She showed herself the woman the
world has always known, no miracle, and the alternative was for me
to give myself to her in the ancient way, to serve her happiness, to
control her and delight and companion her, or to let her go.

"The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm
and her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home.  She
demands the concentration of a man.  Not to be able to command that
is her failure.  Not to give her that is to shame her.  As I had
shamed Amanda. . . ."



22


"There are no such women."  He had written this in and struck it
out, and then at some later time written it in again.  There it
stayed now as his last persuasion, but it set White thinking and
doubting.  And, indeed, there was another sheet of pencilled broken
stuff that seemed to glance at quite another type of womanhood.



23


"It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the
remaking of the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as
great as those from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes.
These women must become aristocratic through their own innate
impulse, they must be self-called to their lives, exactly as men
must be; there is no making an aristocrat without a predisposition
for rule and nobility.  And they have to discover and struggle
against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle
against.  They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence,
indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy--
proprietorship. . . .

"It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand
times in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and
desired a mate.  A mate--not a possession.  It is a need almost
naively simple.  If only one could have a woman who thought of one
and with one!  Though she were on the other side of the world and
busied about a thousand things. . . .

"‘WITH one,' I see it must be rather than ‘OF one.'  That ‘of one'
is just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again. . . .

"Man is a mating creature.  It is not good to be alone.  But mating
means a mate. . . .

"We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying. . . .

"And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers.
‘Dancing attendance'--as they used to say.  We should meet upon our
ways as the great carnivores do. . . .

"That at any rate was a sound idea.  Though we only played with it.

"But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
satisfaction now for me.  What is the good of dreaming?  Life and
chance have played a trick upon my body and soul.  I am mated,
though I am mated to a phantom.  I loved and I love Arnanda, not
Easton's Amanda, but Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams.
Sense, and particularly the sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason
in us.  There can be no mate for me now unless she comes with
Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and Amanda's quick movements and
her clever hands. . . ."



24


"Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave
me?

"There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more
beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible
expression, images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals,
images of moonlight in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the
shade, of far-off wonderful music heard at dusk in a great
stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of floating happiness and
stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as the knife of an
assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears, tears that are
happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations, gratitudes,
sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed
in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard unexpectedly;
sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words for. . . .

"If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that
she was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that
has been between us more cheaply than I did?  It does not change one
jot of it for me.  At the time she did not hold it cheaply.  She
forgets where I do not forget. . . ."



25


Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.

Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda
and himself.

He did not at once turn homeward.  It was in Ceylon that he dropped
his work and came home.  At Colombo he found a heap of letters
awaiting him, and there were two of these that had started at the
same time.  They had been posted in London on one eventful
afternoon.  Lady Marayne and Amanda had quarrelled violently.  Two
earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women, full of neat but belated
repartee, separated to write their simultaneous letters.  Each
letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.  Lady
Marayne told her story ruthlessly.  Amanda, on the other hand,
generalized, and explained.  Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure.  Was there no trust
nor courage in the world?  She would defy all jealous scandal.  She
would not even banish him from her side.  Surely the Cheetah could
trust her.  But the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond
Amanda's explaining.  The little lady's dignity had been stricken.
"I have been used as a cloak," she wrote.

Her phrases were vivid.  She quoted the very words of Amanda, words
she had overheard at Chexington in the twilight.  They were no
invention.  They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover.  It was
as sure as if Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had
peeped and seen, as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling
softly.  It brought back the living sense of her, excited, flushed,
reckless; his wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight. . . .  All day
those words of hers pursued him.  All night they flared across the
black universe.  He buried his face in the pillows and they
whispered softly in his ear.

He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.

He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the
stirring quiet of the stars.

He sent no notice of his coming back.  Nor did he come back with a
definite plan.  But he wanted to get at Amanda.



26


It was with Amanda he had to reckon.  Towards Easton he felt
scarcely any anger at all.  Easton he felt only existed for him
because Amanda willed to have it so.

Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger.
His devotion filled Benham with scorn.  His determination to serve
Amanda at any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights
for her, his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her
moods and happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility.
That rage against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist
against a blackleg.  Are all the women to fall to the men who will
be their master-slaves and keepers?  But it was not simply that
Benham felt men must be freed from this incessant attendance; women
too must free themselves from their almost instinctive demand for an
attendant. . . .

His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings.
Never in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be
fooled and won and competed for and fought over.  So that it was
Amanda he wanted to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated
and ruled his senses only to fling him into this intolerable pit of
shame and jealous fury.  But the forces that were driving him home
now were the forces below the level of reason and ideas, organic
forces compounded of hate and desire, profound aboriginal urgencies.
He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his berth or sulked on
deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of exasperating
images that ever and again would so wring him that his muscles would
tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself restraining a
snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.

Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole
world.  She filled the skies.  She bent over him and mocked him.
She became a mystery of passion and dark beauty.  She was the sin of
the world.  One breathed her in the winds of the sea.  She had taken
to herself the greatness of elemental things. . . .

So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see
that she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather
tired and very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an
evening-dress of unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of
gold and colour about her wrists and neck.

In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
homeward.  He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.

For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to
kill than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.



27


He took them by surprise.  It had been his intention to take them by
surprise.  Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.

He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near
Charing Cross.  In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in
Lancaster Gate.  The butler was deferentially amazed.  Mrs. Benham
was, he said, at a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought
some other people also.  He did not know when she would be back.
She might go on to supper.  It was not the custom for the servants
to wait up for her.

Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in
Finacue Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him.
He sent the man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.

It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey
and went out at once upon the landing.

The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside.  She stood in
the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he
was carrying.

"Good-night," she said, "I am so tired."

"My wonderful goddess," he said.

She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared,
and wrenched herself out of his arms.

Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them, white-
faced and inexpressive.  Easton dropped back a pace.  For a moment
no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-
door and shut out the noises of the road.

For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
changed. . . .

Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his
mind.

He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase.
When he was five or six steps above them, he spoke.  "Just sit down
here," he said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself
upon the stairs.  "DO sit down," he said with a sudden testiness as
they continued standing.  "I know all about this affair.  Do please
sit down and let us talk. . . .  Everybody's gone to bed long ago."

"Cheetah!" she said.  "Why have you come back like this?"

Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.

"I wish you would sit down, Easton," he said in a voice of subdued
savagery.

"Why have you come back?" Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.

"SIT down," Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.

"I came back," Benham went on, "to see to all this.  Why else?  I
don't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it.  But it has
distressed me.  You look changed, Amanda, and fagged.  And your hair
is untidy.  It's as if something had happened to you and made you a
stranger. . . .  You two people are lovers.  Very natural and
simple, but I want to get out of it.  Yes, I want to get out of it.
That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see it is.  It's queer, but on
the whole I feel sorry for you.  All of us, poor humans--.  There's
reason to be sorry for all of us.  We're full of lusts and
uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to control.
What do you two people want me to do to you?  Would you like a
divorce, Amanda?  It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it?  Or
would the scandal hurt you?"

Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.

"Give us a divorce," said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.

Amanda shook her head.

"I don't want a divorce," she said.

"Then what do you want?" asked Benham with sudden asperity.

"I don't want a divorce," she repeated.  "Why do you, after a long
silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?"

"It was the way it took me," said Benham, after a little interval.

"You have left me for long months."

"Yes.  I was angry.  And it was ridiculous to be angry.  I thought I
wanted to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is
to help you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you.
You two would like to marry.  You ought to be married."

"I would die to make Amanda happy," said Easton.

"Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy.  That
you may find more of a strain.  Less tragic and more tiresome.  I,
on the other hand, want neither to die nor live for her."  Amanda
moved sharply.  "It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely
man may get into his head.  If you don't want a divorce then I
suppose things might go on as they are now."

"I hate things as they are now," said Easton.  "I hate this
falsehood and deception."

"You would hate the scandal just as much," said Amanda.

"I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you."

"It would be only a temporary inconvenience," said Benham.  "Every
one would sympathize with you. . . .  The whole thing is so
natural. . . .  People would be glad to forget very soon.  They
did with my mother."

"No," said Amanda, "it isn't so easy as that."

She seemed to come to a decision.

"Pip," she said.  "I want to talk to--HIM--alone."

Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity.  "But
why?" he asked.

"I do," she said.

"But this is a thing for US."

"Pip, I want to talk to him alone.  There is something--something I
can't say before you. . . ."

Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.

"Shall I wait outside?"

"No, Pip.  Go home.  Yes,--there are some things you must leave to
me."

She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the
younger man.  The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to
be at any cost splendid.  He felt--and it was a most unexpected and
disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with
Amanda; that prior, more fundamental and greater associations
prevailed over his little new grip upon her mind and senses.  He
stared at husband and wife aghast in this realization.  Then his
resolute romanticism came to his help.  "I would trust you--" he
began.  "If you tell me to go--"

Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.

She laid her hand upon his arm.  "Go, my dear Pip," she said.  "Go."

He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham
as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen,
somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in
a gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.

Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.

"WELL?" said Benham.

She held out her arms to him.

"Why did you leave me, Cheetah?  Why did you leave me?"



28


Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms.  But they recalled
in a swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to
England.  To remind him of desire now was to revive an anger
stronger than any desire.  He spoke seeking to hurt her.

"I am wondering now," he said, "why the devil I came back."

"You had to come back to me."

"I could have written just as well about these things."

"CHEETAH," she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping
forward and looking into his eyes, "you had to come back to see your
old Leopard.  Your wretched Leopard.  Who has rolled in the dirt.
And is still yours."

"Do you want a divorce?  How are we to fix things, Amanda?"

"Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things."

She dropped upon the step below him.  She laid her hands with a
deliberate softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered
hair was a little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to
touch his knees.  Her eyes implored him.

"Cheetah," she said.  "You are going to forgive."

He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.

"Amanda," he said at last, "you would be astonished if I kicked you
away from me and trampled over you to the door.  That is what I want
to do."

"Do it," she said, and the grip of her hands tightened.  "Cheetah,
dear!  I would love you to kill me."

"I don't want to kill you."

Her eyes dilated.  "Beat me."

"And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you," he
said, and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he
would stand up.

She caught hold of him again.  "Stay with me," she said.

He made no effort to shake off her grip.  He looked at the dark
cloud of her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of
old delights made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as
he spoke.  "Dear Leopard," he said, "we humans are the most streaky
of conceivable things.  I thought I hated you.  I do.  I hate you
like poison.  And also I do not hate you at all."

Then abruptly he was standing over her.

She rose to her knees.

"Stay here, old Cheetah!" she said.  "This is your house.  I am your
wife."

He went towards the unfastened front door.

"Cheetah!" she cried with a note of despair.

He halted at the door.

"Amanda, I will come to-morrow.  I will come in the morning, in the
sober London daylight, and then we will settle things."

He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled.  He spoke as one
who remarks upon a quite unexpected fact. . . .

"Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted
so little to kill."



29


White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of
those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.

"The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her
mental quality.

"With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she
had deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about
herself.  Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential
strength.  And it was gone.  I came back to find Amanda an
accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects.  She
was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.  Beneath that surface I could not
discover anything individual at all.  Fear and a grasping quality,
such as God gave us all when he gave us hands; but the individual I
knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard was gone.  Whither, I
cannot imagine.  An amazing disappearance.  Clean out of space and
time like a soul lost for ever.

"When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene,
she acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in
reality. . . .

"I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this
way, by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she
despised. . . .  There can be no inequality in love.  Give and take
must balance.  One must be one's natural self or the whole business
is an indecent trick, a vile use of life!  To use inferiors in love
one must needs talk down to them, interpret oneself in their
insufficient phrases, pretend, sentimentalize.  And it is clear that
unless oneself is to be lost, one must be content to leave alone all
those people that one can reach only by sentimentalizing.  But
Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for it still--could not leave any
one alone.  So she was always feverishly weaving nets of false
relationship.  Until her very self was forgotten.  So she will go on
until the end.  With Easton it had been necessary for her to key
herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely insincere.
She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate
gestures were forgotten.  She could not recover them; she could not
even reinvent them.  Between us there were momentary gleams as
though presently we should be our frank former selves again.  They
were never more than momentary. . . ."

And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of
his last parting from his wife.

Perhaps he did Amanda injustice.  Perhaps there was a stronger
thread of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed.
Clearly he believed that under the circumstances Amanda would have
tried to recover anybody.

She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and
dried her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face.  She set
herself with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they
were inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim
determination to discuss the conditions of their separation.  When
he asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over
Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might
sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.

Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began
to feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands.  His
initial grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown
into irritability.  But she was puzzled by his laughter.  For he
laughed abruptly.

"You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy.  And
really,--you are a Lark."

And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do
about their future and the future of their little son.

"You don't want a divorce and a fuss.  Then I'll leave things.  I
perceive I've no intention of marrying any more.  But you'd better
do the straight thing.  People forget and forgive.  Especially when
there is no one about making a fuss against you.

"Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
We'll both be able to get at the boy then.  You'll not hurt him, and
I shall want to see him.  It's better for the boy anyhow not to have
a divorce.

"I'll not stand in your way.  I'll get a little flat and I shan't
come too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town.
You must be discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about
him, send them to me.  After all, this is our private affair.

"We'll go on about money matters as we have been going.  I trust to
you not to run me into overwhelming debts.  And, of course, if at
any time, you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--
if nobody knows of this conversation we can be divorced then. . . ."

Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while
Amanda gathered her forces for her last appeal.

It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
before him and clung to his knees.  He struggled ridiculously to get
himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate
on the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.

She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
without.  He had come back.  The door reopened.  There was a slight
pause, and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the
second housemaid.  There are moments, suspended fragments of time
rather than links in its succession, when the human eye is more
intelligible than any words.

The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a
click of the door.

"DAMN!" said Amanda.

Then slowly she rose to her knees.

She meditated through vast moments.

"It's a cursed thing to be a woman," said Amanda.  She stood up.
She put her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot
about it.  After another long interval of thought she spoke.

"Cheetah!" she said, "Old Cheetah! . . .

"I didn't THINK it of you. . . ."

Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who
packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.



30


The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in
Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's
private processes the morning after this affair.

Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London.
She had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a
coldly decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last
man to behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way.
On the morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor
waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in
the night, and almost immediately she was summoned to see Benham.

He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
obscure the condition of the room behind him.  He was carefully
dressed, and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever.  But
one of his hands was tied up in a white bandage.

"I am going this morning," he said, "I am going down now to
breakfast.  I have had a few little accidents with some of the
things in the room and I have cut my hand.  I want you to tell the
manager and see that they are properly charged for on the
bill. . . .  Thank you.''

The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.

Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having
been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive
cataclysm.  One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly
have overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully
exhibited.  For example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen
strips and they were lying side by side on the bed.  The clock on
the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded
to pieces.  All the looking-glasses in the room were smashed,
apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the
bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the
other breakables.  And there was a considerable amount of blood
splashed about the room.  The head chambermaid felt unequal to the
perplexities of the spectacle and summoned her most convenient
friend, the head chambermaid on the third floor, to her aid.  The
first-floor waiter joined their deliberations and several housemaids
displayed a respectful interest in the maful to
Martindale House and the thing was rankling almost unendurably.  It
seemed to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the
essentially illogical position of his assailant.  He was entirely
inattentive to Benham's carefully made conversational opportunities.
He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he would
break out suddenly with: "What seems to me so unreasonable, so
ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second argument--if one
can call it an argument--. . . .  A man who reasons as he does is
bound to get laughed at.  If people will only see it. . . ."



CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID



1


Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913.  Sometimes
the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
sometimes with great bitterness.  When he met White in Johannesburg
durtter.  Finally they invoked
the manager.  He was still contemplating the scene of the disorder
when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned him of
Benham's return.

Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly
tranquil.

"I had a kind of nightmare," he said.  "I am fearfully sorry to have
disarranged your room.  You must charge me for the inconvenience as
well as for the damage.



31


"An aristocrat cannot be a lover."

"One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of
life and the intricacies of another human being.  I do not mean that
one may not love.  One loves the more because one does not
concentrate one's love.  One loves nations, the people passing in
the street, beasts hurt by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and
university dons in tears. . . .

"But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's
hands I do not think one can expect to be loved.

"An aristocrat must do without close personal love. . . ."

This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper.  The writing
ended halfway down the page.  Manifestly it was an abandoned
beginning.  And it was, it seemed to White, the last page of all
this confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and Third
Limitations.  Its incompleteness made its expression perfect. . . .

There Benham's love experience ended.  He turned to the great
business of the world.  Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life
no more; like Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and
subdued when they could not be altogether dismissed.  Whatever
stirrings of blood or imagination there were in him after that
parting, whatever failures from this resolution, they left no trace
on the rest of his research, which was concerned with the hates of
peoples and classes and war and peace and the possibilities science
unveils and starry speculations of what mankind may do.



32


But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
with Lady Marayne.

The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger
and distress.  Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so
hopelessly dispersed and mixed.  And when for a moment it seemed to
him that she was not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all,
then with an instant eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory
gleam.  "What are you doing in England, Poff?" she demanded.  "And
what are you going to do?

"Nothing!  And you are going to leave her in your house, with your
property and a lover.  If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come
back?  And why did you ever marry her?  You might have known; her
father was a swindler.  She's begotten of deceit.  She'll tell her
own story while you are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it."

"Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?"

"I never wanted you to go away from her.  If you'd stayed and
watched her as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do.
Didn't I tell you, Poff?  Didn't I warn you?"

"But now what am I to do?"

"There you are!  That's just a man's way.  You get yourself into
this trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and
then you turn to me!  How can I help you now, Poff?  If you'd
listened to me before!"

Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.

"Yes, but--"

"I warned you," she interrupted.  "I warned you.  I've done all I
could for you.  It isn't that I haven't seen through her.  When she
came to me at first with that made-up story of a baby!  And all
about loving me like her own mother.  But I did what I could.  I
thought we might still make the best of a bad job.  And then--.  I
might have known she couldn't leave Pip alone. . . .  But for weeks
I didn't dream.  I wouldn't dream.  Right under my nose.  The
impudence of it!"

Her voice broke.  "Such a horrid mess!  Such a hopeless, horrid
mess!"

She wiped away a bright little tear. . . .

"It's all alike.  It's your way with us.  All of you.  There isn't a
man in the world deserves to have a woman in the world.  We do all
we can for you.  We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and
we talk for you.  All the sweet, warm little women there are!  And
then you go away from us!  There never was a woman yet who pleased
and satisfied a man, who did not lose him.  Give you everything and
off you must go!  Lovers, mothers. . . ."

It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
exclusively with himself.

"But Amanda," he began.

"If you'd looked after her properly, it would hing the strike period of 1913,
he was on his way to see her in
London and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite
footing.  It was her suggestion that they should meet.

About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction.  He
could not persuade himself that his treatmee evil between different
kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling,
but far more is it due to bad thinking."  At times he seemed on the
verge of the persuasion that most human trouble is really due to bad
metaphysics.  It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey he
had made; he had started from chivalry and arrived at metaphysics;
every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is
courage of the mind.  One thinks of his coming to this conclusion
with knit brows and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of
bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin Bisse. . . .

"Men do not know how to think," he insisted--getting along the
planks; "and they will not realize that they do not know how to
think.  Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
misconceptions. . . .  Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the
mind, and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct. . . .
Infinitely more disastrous."

And again he wrote: "Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
eager to get into action.  There is our deepest trouble.  He takes
conclusions ready-made, or he makes themave been right
enough.  Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him. . . .  A
woman can't wait about like an umbrella in a stand. . . .  He was
just a boy. . . .  Only of course there she was--a novelty.  It is
perfectly easy to understand.  She flattered him. . . .  Men are
such fools."

"Still--it's no good saying that now."

"But she'll spend all your money, Poff!  She'll break your back with
debts.  What's to prevent her?  With him living on her!  For that's
what it comes to practically."

"Well, what am I to do?"

"You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff?  You ought to
stop every farthing of her money--every farthing.  It's your duty."

"I can't do things like that."

"But have you no Shame?  To let that sort of thing go on!"

"If I don't feel the Shame of it--  And I don't."

"And that money--.  I got you that money, Poff!  It was my money."

Benham stared at her perplexed.  "What am I to do?" he asked.

"Cut her off, you silly boy!  Tie her up!  Pay her through a
solicitor.  Say that if she sees him ONCE again--"

He reflected.  "No," he said at last.

"Poff!" she cried, "every time I see you, you are more and more like
your father.  You're going off--just as he did.  That baffled,
MULISH look--priggish--solemn!  Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor
woman has to bring into the world.  But you'll do nothing.  I know
you'll do nothing.  You'll stand everything.  You--you Cuckold!  And
she'll drive by me, she'll pass me in theatres with the money that
ought to have been mine!  Oh!  Oh!"

She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other.  But
she went on talking.  Faster and faster, less and less coherently;
more and more wildly abusive.  Presently in a brief pause of the
storm Benham sighed profoundly. . . .

It brought the scene to a painful end. . . .

For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.

He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was
in default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--
he could never define what he owed her.

And yet, what on earth was one to do?

And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and
kindred goodwill.  He went down to see him before he returned to
India.  But if there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham
senior, it had been very carefully boarded over.  The parental mind
and attention were entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD
about the heuristic method.  Somebody had been disrespectnt of her and that
his
relations to her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility,
and yet at no precise point could he detect where he had definitely
taken an ignoble step.  Through Amanda he was coming to the full
experience of life.  Like all of us he had been prepared, he had
prepared himself, to take life in a certain way, and life had taken
him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unexpected
way. . . .  He had been ready for noble deeds and villainies, for
achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact of his
personal life was a perplexing riddle.  He could not hate and
condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration;
he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate
shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could
not banish her from his mind.

During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
accepted.  Meanwhile he worked.  His nervous irritability increased,
but it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.

Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea
and method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems
he put together under his headings of the first three "Limitations."
He had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and
that instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of
self which he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous
exception of Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded.  Amanda.
Amanda.  Amanda.  He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown
that beating in his brain.

Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this
dream of a larger human purpose.  The bulk of his work was to
discover and define that purpose, that purpose which must be the
directing and comprehending form of all the activities of the noble
life.  One cannot be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one
must be noble to an end.  To make human life, collectively and in
detail, a thing more comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous
and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the fundamental
intention of all nobility.  He believed more and more firmly that
the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are
abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty
thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real
ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a release.
He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
limitation.  In one place he had written it, "Prejudice or
Divisions."  That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in
the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great
age, the noble age, would begin.

So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised
disloyalties and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the
papers that White struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to
various aspects of this search for "Prejudice."  It seemed to White
to be at once the most magnificent and the most preposterous of
enterprises.  It was indeed no less than an enquiry into all the
preventable sources of human failure and disorder.  .  .  And it was
all too manifest to White also that the last place in which Benham
was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of his own
head.

Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of
influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of
patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social
consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except
the purely personal dissensions between man and man.  And he
developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles.  "No
doubt," he wrote in one place, "much of th in a hurry.  Life is so
short that he thinks it better to err than wait.  He has no
patience, no faith in anything but himself.  He thinks he is a being
when in reality he is only a link in a being, and so he is more
anxious to be complete than right.  The last devotion of which he is
capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers partial
performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought.  He scamps his
thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is
already being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in
the same egotistical haste. . . ."

It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these
words should have been written by a man who walked the plank to
fresh ideas with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to
drag him forward, and who acted time after time with an altogether
disastrous hastiness.



2


Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from
the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at
cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete
Research Magnificent.  You can no more resolve to live a life of
honour nowadays and abstain from social and political scheming on a
world-wide scale, than you can profess religion and refuse to think
about God.  In the past it was possible to take all sorts of things
for granted and be loyal to unexamined things.  One could be loyal
to unexamined things because they were unchallenged things.  But now
everything is challenged.  By the time of his second visit to
Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious and deliberate aristocracy
reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had already
grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an
uncrowned king in the world.  To be noble is to be aristocratic,
that is to say, a ruler.  Thence it follows that aristocracy is
multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the
nature of philosopher and king. . . .

Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no
means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in
quality, petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and
limited, fall far short of kingship.  Nevertheless, there IS
nobility, there IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind
but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet.  From that it is an easy
step to this idea, the idea whose first expression had already so
touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and
voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind.  The aristocrats
are not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who
are enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar;
the real king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive
passions and self-interest of the common life for the rule and
service of the world.

This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary
writing.  It is one of those ideas that seem to appear
simultaneously at many points in the world, and it is impossible to
say now how far Benham was an originator of this idea, and how far
he simply resonated to its expression by others.  It was far more
likely that Prothero, getting it heaven knows where, had spluttered
it out and forgotten it, leaving it to germinate in the mind of his
friend. . . .

This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to
Benham as his life went on.  When Benham walked the Bisse he was
just a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled
in the jungle by night he was there for all mankind.  With every
year he became more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man
as kings are consecrated.  Only that he was self-consecrated, and
anointed only in his heart.  At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al
Raschid again, going unsuspected about the world, because the palace
of his security would not tell him the secrets of men's disorders.
He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he was kingly,
unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the Danes.  In the great later
accumulations of his Research the personal matter, the
introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and
less.  He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness.  He
worries less and less over the particular rightness of his definite
acts.  In these later papers White found Benham abstracted, self-
forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased self-
detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are
massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine,
disease and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast
multitudes in the midst of possible plenty.  And when he foundrejudice.  His
examination of the social and political condition of
Russiaty and swarming with
naked black children, and yet all the time they seemed to be in a
wilderness.  They forded rivers, they had at times to force
themselves through thickets, once or twice they lost their way, and
always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great mountain peak
with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the background
until it domina out
and as far as he found out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to
apply his knowledge. . . .



3


The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end.  His
definition of Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless
and philosophical formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.

"Prejudice," Benham had written, "is that common incapacity of the
human mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a
difference in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an
instinctive hostility to what is unlike ourselves.  We exaggerate
classification and then charge it with mischievous emotion by
referring it to ourselves."  And under this comprehensive formula he
proceeded to study and attack Family Prejudice, National Prejudice,
Race Prejudice, War, Class Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex
Prejudice, in the most industrious and elaborate manner.  Whether
one regards one's self or others he held that these prejudices are
evil things.  "From the point of view of human welfare they break
men up into wars and conflicts, make them an easy prey to those who
trade upon suspicion and hostility, prevent sane collective co-
operations, cripple and embitter life.  From the point of view of
personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent, unjust and
futile.  All the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a constant
struggle against false generalizations; it is as much his duty to
free himself from that as from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is
a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal
and essential.  Indeed it is more cardinal and essential.  The true
knight has to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist.
He has to be a philosopher.  He has to be no hasty or foolish
thinker.  His judgment no more than his courage is to be taken by
surprise.

"To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal
affair, it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his
arms; but the destruction of division and prejudice and all their
forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work
of knighthood.  It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man
working by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing
some crippling restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread
of knowledge, and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter
a tyrannous presumption.  Most imaginative literature, all
scientific investigation, all sound criticism, all good building,
all good manufacture, all sound politics, every honesty and every
reasoned kindliness contribute to this release of men from the heat
and confusions of our present world."

It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part
of his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he
was not making his own personal research alone, but, side by side
with a vast, masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of
others; that this great idea of his was under kindred forms the
great idea of thousands, that it was breaking as the dawn breaks,
simultaneously to great numbers of people, and that the time was not
far off when the new aristocracy, the disguised rulers of the world,
would begin to realize their common bent and effort.  Into these
latter papers there creeps more and more frequently a new
phraseology, such expressions as the "Invisible King" and the
"Spirit of Kingship," so that as Benham became personally more and
more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.

Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of
mankind.  He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices
worked, to get at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind
of prejudice, and to devise means for its treatment, destruction or
neutralization.  He had no great faith in the power of pure
reasonableness; his psychological ideas were modern, and he had
grasped the fact that the power of most of the great prejudices that
strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual level.
Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
discover their sub-rational springs.

A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at
Westhaven Street which White from his extensive experience of the
public patience decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted
of notes and discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had
made in this or that part of the world.  He began in Russia during
the revolutionary trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and
from place to place in Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom
he had his first really illuminating encounter with race and culture
p seems to have left him much more hopeful than was the common
feeling of liberal-minded people during the years of depression that
followed the revolution of 1906, and it was upon the race question
that his attention concentrated.

The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India.  Here in an
entirely different environment was another discord of race and
culture, and he found in his study of it much that illuminated and
corrected his impressions of the Russian issue.  A whole drawer was
devoted to a comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into
human dissensions in lower Bengal.  Here there were not only race
but culture conflicts, and he could work particularly upon the
differences between men of the same race who were Hindus, Christians
and Mahometans respectively.  He could compare the Bengali Mahometan
not only with the Bengali Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan
from the north-west.  "If one could scrape off all the creed and
training, would one find much the same thing at the bottom, or
something fundamentally so different that no close homogeneous
social life and not even perhaps a life of just compromise is
possible between the different races of mankind?"

His answer to that was a confident one.  "There are no such natural
and unalterable differences in character and quality between any two
sorts of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-
operation in the world impossible," he wrote.

But he was not satisfied with his observations in India.  He found
the prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating.  He
went on after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the
first of several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America.
White found a number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently
anti-Japanese quality still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it
was clear to him that Benham had given a considerable amount of
attention to the development of the "white" and "yellow" race
hostility on the Pacific slope; but his chief interest at that time
had been the negro.  He went to Washington and thence south; he
visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at a tangent to
Hayti.  He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid book,
WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able to
visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the "Black Napoleon,"
the Emperor Christophe.  He went with a young American demonstrator
from Harvard.



4


It was a memorable excursion.  They rode from Cap Haytien for a
day's journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of
luxurious vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of
unbridled jungle with populous country.  They passed countless
villages of thatched huts alive with curiosited the landscape.  Long after
dark they blundered
upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they were to
pass the night.  They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd
into the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about
their right to go further.  They might have been in some remote
corner of Nigeria.  Their papers, laboriously got in order, were
vitiated by the fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that
the commandant could not read.  They carried their point with
difficulty.

But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
imperialism that humanity has ever made.  The roads and parks and
prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines
and precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding
traces of a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly
approach to his fastness.  Below they passed an abandoned palace of
vast extent, a palace with great terraces and the still traceable
outline of gardens, though there were green things pushing between
the terrace steps, and trees thrust out of the empty windows.  Here
from a belvedere of which the skull-like vestige still remained, the
negro Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years of absolute rule, had
watched for a time the smoke of the burning of his cane-fields in
the plain below, and then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted
him, had gone in and blown out his brains.

He had christened the place after the best of examples, "Sans
Souci."

But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he
never used.  The defection of his guards made him abandon that.  To
build it, they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives.  He had the
true Imperial lavishness.  So high it was, so lost in a wilderness
of trees and bush, looking out over a land relapsed now altogether
to a barbarism of patch and hovel, so solitary and chill under the
tropical sky--for even the guards who still watched over its
suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly galleries and had
made hovels outside its walls--and at the same time so huge and
grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores
of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king's apartments and
queen's apartments, towering battlements and great arched doorways--
that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and passing of that
miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of multitudes
before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more
completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
before.  Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle
grass and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away
a sheer two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain
populous and diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an
amethystine wall.  Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling
his victims, and below this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons
where men, broken and torn, thrust in at the neck-like hole above,
starved and died: it was his headquarters here, here he had his
torture chambers and the means for nameless cruelties. . . .

"Not a hundred years ago," said Benham's companion, and told the
story of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.

"Leap," said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed,
and with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down
through the shimmering air.

Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.

The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
presently struggled and found itself still a living man.  It could
scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for
mercy.  An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm
broken and bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a
faint flavour of pride in its bearing.  "Your bidding has been done,
Sire," it said.

"So," said the Emperor, unappeased.  "And you live?  Well--  Leap
again. . . ."

And then came other stories.  The young man told them as he had
heard them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men
standing along the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by
one as the feast went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and
his one note of wonder, his refrain was, "HERE!  Not a hundred years
ago. . . .  It makes one almost believe that somewhere things of
this sort are being done now."

They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins.  The
lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
sunshine.  The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his
black fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a
search for some saleable memento. . . .

Benham sat musing in silence.  The thought of deliberate cruelty was
always an actual physical distress to him.  He sat bathed in the
dreamy afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that
crowded into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-
driven men toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience
and of cringing and crawling black figures, and the defiance of
righteous hate beaten down under blow and anguish.  He saw eyes
alight with terror and lips rolled back in agony, he saw weary
hopeless flight before striding proud destruction, he saw the poor
trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in his soul. . . .

He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride,
and then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes
Christophes but humility.

There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience.  Every
natural sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly
guidance, a definite direction for his own partial life.  At the
bottom of his heart he feels, even if he does not know it
definitely, that his life is partial.  He is driven to join himself
on.  He obeys decision and the appearance of strength as a horse
obeys its rider's voice.  One thinks of the pride, the uncontrolled
frantic will of this black ape of all Emperors, and one forgets the
universal docility that made him possible.  Usurpation is a crime to
which men are tempted by human dirigibility.  It is the orderly
peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above as
stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to men.  There are
kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of the
unkingliness of men.

And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off
from his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing
States, and expounded to another human being for the first time this
long-cherished doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord
of human destiny, the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the
sceptre and rule the earth. . . .  To the young American's naive
American response to any simply felt emotion, he seemed with his
white earnestness and his glowing eyes a veritable prophet. . . .

"This is the root idea of aristocracy," said Benham.

"I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real
true Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed," said the young
American.



5


Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing
glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences.  The adventure in
Kieff had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality.  He
was caught in the wheels of a pogrom.

"Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race.  I
still think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-
operation, but I see now better than I did how difficult it is for
any man to purge from his mind the idea that he is not primarily a
Jew, a Teuton, or a Kelt, but a man.  You can persuade any one in
five minutes that he or she belongs to some special and blessed and
privileged sort of human being; it takes a lifetime to destroy that
persuasion.  There are these confounded differences of colour, of
eye and brow, of nose or hair, small differences in themselves
except that they give a foothold and foundation for tremendous
fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in which hostilities and
hatreds may gather.  When I think of a Jew's nose, a Chinaman's eyes
or a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little pit which
nature has left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in itself
and of no significance, but a gathering-place for mischief.  The
extremest case of race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I
am convinced, it is the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of
those inevitable professional champions who live upon racial
feeling, far more than their common distinction of blood, which
holds this people together banded against mankind."

Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read
little scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let
fall in Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.

Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side
of the Dnieper.  As they drove back along dusty stretches of road
amidst fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little
villages, they saw against the evening blue under the full moon a
smoky red glare rising from amidst the white houses and dark trees
of the town.  "The pogrom's begun," said Benham's friend, and was
surprised when Benham wanted to end a pleasant day by going to see
what happens after the beginning of a pogrom.

He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in
disgust and went home by himself.

For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted
theories, passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to
active intervention.  The two men left their carriage and plunged
into the network of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and
traders harboured. . . .  Benham's first intervention was on behalf
of a crouching and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged
about and kicked at a street corner.  The bundle resolved itself
into a filthy little old man, and made off with extraordinary
rapidity, while Benham remonstrated with the kickers.  Benham's
tallness, his very Gentile face, his good clothes, and an air of
tense authority about him had its effect, and the kickers shuffled
off with remarks that were partly apologies.  But Benham's friend
revolted.  This was no business of theirs.

Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning
houses.

For a time he watched.  Black figures moved between him and the
glare, and he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by
enquiries in clumsy Russian.  He was told that the Jews had insulted
a religious procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the
shop of a cheating Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the
blaze had spread to the adjacent group of houses.  He gathered that
the Jews were running out of the burning block on the other side
"like rats."  The crowd was mostly composed of town roughs with a
sprinkling of peasants.  They were mischievous but undecided.  Among
them were a number of soldiers, and he was surprised to see a
policemen, brightly lit from head to foot, watching the looting of a
shop that was still untouched by the flames.

He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall.  Behind his
remonstrances the Jewesses escaped.  His anger against disorder was
growing upon him. . . .

Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a
party of Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in
a court that had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives.  Some of
the young Jewish men had already been making a fight, rather a poor
and hopeless fight, from the windows of the house near the entrance
of the court, but it is doubtful if they would have made an
effective resistance if it had not been for this tall excited
stranger who was suddenly shouting directions to them in
sympathetically murdered Russian.  It was not that he brought
powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but that he
put heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because he
was so manifestly non-partizan.  Nobody could ever have mistaken
Benham for a Jew.  When at last towards dawn a not too zealous
governor called out the troops and began to clear the streets of
rioters, Benham and a band of Jews were still keeping the gateway of
that court behind a hasty but adequate barricade of furniture and
handbarrows.

The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him,
but it was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their
rescue, and he was implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very
intelligent-looking old men to stay with them and preserve them
until their safety was assured.

They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to
entertain him and assure him of their gratitude.  They seemed to
consider him as a representative of the British Government, and
foreign intervention on their behalf is one of those unfortunate
fixed ideas that no persecuted Jews seem able to abandon.

Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood
fire in an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening
to a discourse in evil but understandable German.  It was a
discourse upon the wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish people--
and it was delivered by a compact middle-aged man with a big black
beard and long-lashed but animated eyes.  Beside him a very old man
dozed and nodded approval.  A number of other men crowded the
apartment, including several who had helped to hold off the rioters
from the court.  Some could follow the talk and ever again endorsed
the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others listened with tantalized
expressions, their brows knit, their lips moving.

It was a discourse Benham had provoked.  For now he was at the very
heart of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the
mystery of this great hatred at first hand.  He did not want to hear
tales of outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to
understand what was the irritation that caused these things.

So he listened.  The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
usefulness of the Jews.

"But do you never take a certain advantage?" Benham threw out.

"The Jews are cleverer than the Russians.  Must we suffer for that?"

The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race.
Benham suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who
finds a bill being made against him.  Did the world owe Israel
nothing for Philo, Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy,
Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer, Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill?  Does
Britain owe nothing to Lord Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the
Rothschilds?  Can France repudiate her debt to Fould, Gaudahaux,
Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider, Herxheimer, Lasker,
Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey? . . .

Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that
these names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was
it not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the
inferior peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?

The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.

"They are merciful creditors," he said.  "And it is their genius to
possess and control.  What better stewards could you find for the
wealth of nations than the Jews?  And for the honours?  That always
had been the role of the Jews--stewardship.  Since the days of
Joseph in Egypt. . . ."

Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
Gentile population.  He wished to be just and generous but the truth
was the truth.  The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness;
they had no sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now
the Jews would possess all the land of South Russia. . . .

Benham listened with a kind of fascination.  "But," he said.

It was so.  And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from
the onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe
close beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.

"Look!" he said, "all over South Russia there are these!"

Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these
papers had been thrust into his hand.  Eager fingers pointed, and
several voices spoke.  These things were illegalities that might
some day be legal; there were the records of loans and hidden
transactions that might at any time put all the surrounding soil
into the hands of the Jew.  All South Russia was mortgaged. . . .

"But is it so?" asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and
stared into the fire.

Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and,
feeling his way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued
to speak in spite of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption
from the Jewish spokesman.

All men, Benham said, were brothers.  Did they not remember Nathan
the Wise?

"I did not claim him," said the spokesman, misunderstanding.  "He is
a character in fiction."

But all men are brothers, Benham maintained.  They had to be
merciful to one another and give their gifts freely to one another.
Also they had to consider each other's weaknesses.  The Jews were
probably justified in securing and administering the property of
every community into which they came, they were no doubt right in
claiming to be best fitted for that task, but also they had to
consider, perhaps more than they did, the feelings and vanities of
the host population into which they brought these beneficent
activities.  What was said of the ignorance, incapacity and vice of
the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and
accepted, but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all
his incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel
and did have a curious irrational hatred of debt. . . .

The faces about Benham looked perplexed.

"THIS," said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand.  "They will not
understand the ultimate benefit of it.  It will be a source of anger
and fresh hostility.  It does not follow because your race has
supreme financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to
the exclusion of other considerations. . . ."

The perplexity increased.

Benham felt he must be more general.  He went on to emphasize the
brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible,
unhindered by the idiosyncrasies of others.  He could feel the
sympathy and understanding of his hearers returning.  "You see,"
said Benham, "you must have generosity.  You must forget ancient
scores.  Do you not see the world must make a fresh beginning?"

He was entirely convinced he had them with him.  The heads nodded
assent, the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement
of his bad German.

"Free yourselves and the world," he said.

Applause.

"And so," he said breaking unconsciously into English, "let us begin
by burning these BEASTLY mortgages!"

And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the
fire.  The assenting faces became masks of horror.  A score of hands
clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger
filled the room.  Some one caught at his throat from behind.  "Don't
kill him!" cried some one.  "He fought for us!"



6


An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled and
battered condition to his hotel.  He found his friend in anxious
consultation with the hotel proprietor.

"We were afraid that something had happened to you," said his
friend.

"I got a little involved," said Benham.

"Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?"

"Very probably," said Benham.

"And torn your coat?  And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?"

"It was a complicated misunderstanding," said Benham.  "Oh! pardon!
I'm rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding."



7


Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.

"I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my
point of view," he said. . . .

"I'm not sure if they quite followed my German. . . .

"It's odd, too, that I remember saying, ‘Let's burn these
mortgages,' and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German
for mortgage. . . ."

It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to
grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings.  His
aristocratic impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of
brotherhood, and time after time it was only too manifest to White
that Benham's pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of
his disinterested observations extremely.  His explorations in Hayti
had been terminated abruptly by an affair with a native policeman
that had necessitated the intervention of the British Consul.  It
was begun with that suddenness that was too often characteristic of
Benham, by his hitting the policeman.  It was in the main street of
Cap Haytit of representative men.  I went about that Westphalian
country after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless,
blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all about me.  I felt
that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black
dragons.  They were crouching here and away there in France and
England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks
are hooded. . . .  And I had never thought very much about them
before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that
frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a
million, saw fit to call them out to action.  Just out of hatred and
nationalism and faction. . . ."

Then came a queer fancy.

"Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see
it more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for
the happiness of life.  It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an
enormous plot of the rebel metals against sensation.  That is why in
particular half-living people seem to love these things.  La
Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of tyranny that passes out of
human experience, the tyranny of the strong man over men.  Essen
comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong machine. . . .

"Science is either slave or master.  These people--I mean the German
people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over
the scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ren, and the
policeman had just clubbed an unfortunate youth
over the head with the heavily loaded wooden club which is the
normal instrument of Haytien discipline.  His blow was a repartee,
part of a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble,
mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a blue handkerchief
played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an entirely
unjustifiable blow.

He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had
been gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince
to carry him away.  He advanced with the kind of shout one would
hurl at a dog, and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout
stick that the peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him
to carry.  By the local standard his blow was probably a trivial
one, but the moral effect of his indignant pallor and a sort of
rearing tallness about him on these occasions was always very
considerable.  Unhappily these characteristics could have no effect
on a second negro policeman who was approaching the affray from
behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on the shoulder that was
meant for the head, and with the assistance of his colleague
overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.

The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to
the lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's
superior knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his
British citizenship.

The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German
gunboat was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed
it that in spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had
knocked over, he was after two days of anger, two days of extreme
insanitary experience, and much meditation upon his unphilosophical
hastiness, released.

Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified
his enquiries into Indian conditions.  They too turned for the most
part on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt
desire for human brotherhood.  At last indeed came an affair that
refused ultimately to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil
that invoked newspaper articles and heated controversies.

The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
attraction and irritation.  He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to
the other.  "I came to see India," he wrote, "and there is no India.
There is a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin
in the air, quietly scorning everybody else."

His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste
began with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had
turned an Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and
culminated in a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness
at Benares, who had thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner
because Benham's shadow had fallen upon it.

"You unendurable snob!" said Benham, and then lapsing into the
forceful and inadvisable: "By Heaven, you SHALL eat it! . . ."



8


Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep
in his character as to seem almost instinctive.  But he had too a
very clear reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in
human continuity in his sense of the gathering dangers they now
involve.  They had always, he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred,
misery and the destruction of human dignity, but the new conditions
of life that have been brought about by modern science were making
them far more dangerous than they had ever been before.  He believed
that the evil and horror of war was becoming more and more
tremendous with every decade, and that the free play of national
prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness that seems to be
inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catastrophe,
unless a real international aristocracy could be brought into being
to prevent it.

In the drawer full of papers labelled "Politics," White found a
paper called "The Metal Beast."  It showed that for a time Benham
had been greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were
in those days piling up in every country in Europe.  He had gone to
Essen, and at Essen he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins
and the great guns that were presently to smash the effete British
fleet and open the Imperial way to London.

"I could not sleep," he wrote, "on account of this man and his talk
and the streak of hatred in his talk.  He distressed me not because
he seemed exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary.  I realized
that he was more human than I was, and that only killing and killing
could come out of such humanity.  I thought of the great ugly guns I
had seen, and of the still greater guns he had talked about, and how
gloatingly he thought of the destruction they could do.  I felt as I
used to feel about that infernal stallion that had killed a man with
its teeth and feet, a despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in
life.  And this creature who had so disturbed me was only a beastly
snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife
and fork by their tips on the edge of his plate, and picked his
teeth with gusto and breathed into my face as he talked to me.  The
commoneside.  The
monster of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe
captive.  It has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they
must follow the logic of its path.  Whither? . . .  Only kingship
will ever master that beast of steel which has got loose into the
world.  Nothing but the sense of unconquerable kingship in us all
will ever dare withstand it. . . .  Men must be kingly aristocrats--
it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or, these confederated metals,
these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these explosives and
mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of our race into
mere red-streaked froth and filth. . . ."

Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release.
Would it ever be given blood?

"Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great
war that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is
with a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, "After all this
war may happen.  But can it happen?"

He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war
would ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident
to White that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that
idea.  It was too disagreeable for him to think it probable.  The
paper was dated 1910.  It was in October, 1914, that White, who was
still working upon the laborious uncertain account of Benham's life
and thought he has recently published, read what Benham had written.
Benham concluded that the common-sense of the world would hold up
this danger until reason could get "to the head of things."

"There are already mighty forces in Germany," Benham wrote, "that
will struggle very powerfully to avoid a war.  And these forces
increase.  Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama
and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble
people. . . .  I have talked with Germans of the better kind. . . .
You cannot have a whole nation of Christophes. . . .  There also the
true knighthood discovers itself. . . .  I do not believe this war
will overtake us."

"WELL!" said White.

"I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better," the notes
went on.

But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve.  Other
things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was
too late for them. . . .

"It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over
Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the
blood of a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately
controlled. . . .  Does no one see what that metallic beast will do
if they once let it loose?  It will trample cities; it will devour
nations. . . ."

White read this on the 9th of October, 1914.  One crumpled evening
paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: "Rain of
Incendiary Shells.  Antwerp Ablaze."  Another declared untruthfully
but impressively: "Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City."

He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them
and turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he
had no data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was
able to go on with Benham's manuscripts.

These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between
the pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked
out from a heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their
fill. . . .

"How can we ever begin over again?" said White, and sat for a long
time staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting,
forgetting too that men who are tired and weary die, and that new
men are born to succeed them. . . .

"We have to begin over again," said White at last, and took up
Benham's papers where he had laid them down. . . .



9


One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth
Limitation was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social
Position.  This section alone was manifestly expanding into a large
treatise upon the psychology of economic organization. . . .

It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important
part played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
human affairs.  This was a very natural result of his peculiar
social circumstances.  Most people born to wealth and ease take the
established industrial system as the natural method in human
affairs; it is only very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy
and disinterestedness that they can be brought to realize that it is
natural only in the sense that it has grown up and come about, and
necessary only because nobody is strong and clever enough to
rearrange it.  Their experience of it is a satisfactory experience.
On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider is one's outlook
and the more alert one is to see the risks and dangers of
international dissensions.  Travel and talk to foreigners open one's
eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
conceivable.  It is in the nature of things that socialists and
labour parties should minimize international obligations and
necessities, and equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and
plutocracies should be negligent of and impatient about social
reform.

But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker
and director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful
humanity and enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned
opportunity.  It is a far profounder and subtler conflict than any
other in human affairs.  "I can foresee a time," he wrote, "when the
greater national and racial hatreds may all be so weakened as to be
no longer a considerable source of human limitation and misery, when
the suspicions of complexion and language and social habit are
allayed, and when the element of hatred and aggression may be clean
washed out of most religious cults, but I do not begin to imagine a
time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there will not be
great friction between those who employ, those who direct collective
action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
industrialism.  This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due
very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort
of organization.  Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass
and self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so
deeply seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be
cheerfully obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no
reason why ultimately they should not be so in the business of
peace.  But I do not understand the elements of the methods by which
this state of affairs can be brought about.

"If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know
that at once he would answer ‘Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a
solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost
in the wilderness and hungry.  Of course everybody with any
intelligence wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to
see all human efforts directed to the common good and a common end,
but brought face to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a
vast insufficiency of practical suggestions.  I do not say that
Socialism would not work, but I do say that so far Socialists have
failed to convince me that they could work it.  The substitution of
a stupid official for a greedy proprietor may mean a vanished
dividend, a limited output and no other human advantage whatever.
Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent gesture, inspiring,
encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very helpful, towards the
vast problem of moral and material adjustment before the race.  That
problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate, and only by great
multitudes of generous workers, one working at this point and one at
that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden and dispersed
kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right to count
himself among those who do these kingly services, is this elaborate
rightening of work and guidance to be done."

So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to
his panacea.  All paths and all enquiries led him back to his
conception of aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted,
self-examining yet secret, making no personal nor class pretences,
as the supreme need not only of the individual but the world.



10


It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
schoolfellows together again.  White had been on his way to
Zimbabwe.  An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven
him to seek consolations in strange scenery and mysterious
desolations.  It was as if Zimbabwe called to him.  Benham had come
to South Africa to see into the question of Indian immigration, and
he was now on his way to meet Amanda in London.  Neither man had
given much heed to the gathering social conflict on the Rand until
the storm burst about them.  There had been a few paragraphs in the
papers about a dispute upon a point of labour etiquette, a question
of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a thing that impressed
them both as technical, and then suddenly a long incubated quarrel
flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of houses and
furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.  White
stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up
country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of
the situation.  Benham stayed because he was going to London very
reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
delay.  The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in
the Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the
other.  They came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy
that neither would have displayed in London.

White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at
Lancaster Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had
made in him.  The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair
had become more marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed
more prominent and his expression intenser.  His eyes were very
bright and more sunken under his brows.  He had suffered from yellow
fever in the West Indies, and these it seemed were the marks left by
that illness.  And he was much more detached from the people about
him; less attentive to the small incidents of life, more occupied
with inner things.  He greeted White with a confidence that White
was one day to remember as pathetic.

"It is good to meet an old friend," Benham said.  "I have lost
friends.  And I do not make fresh ones.  I go about too much by
myself, and I do not follow the same tracks that other people are
following. . . ."

What track was he following?  It was now that White first heard of
the Research Magnificent.  He wanted to know what Benham was doing,
and Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his
interest in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions.
"It is, of course, a part of something else," he amplified.  He was
writing a book, "an enormous sort of book."  He laughed with a touch
of shyness.  It was about "everything," about how to live and how
not to live.  And "aristocracy, and all sorts of things."  White was
always curious about other people's books.  Benham became earnest
and more explicit under encouragement, and to talk about his book
was soon to talk about himself.  In various ways, intentionally and
inadvertently, he told White much.  These chance encounters, these
intimacies of the train and hotel, will lead men at times to a stark
frankness of statement they would never permit themselves with
habitual friends.

About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
considering how insistent it was becoming.  But the wide
propositions of the Research Magnificent, with its large
indifference to immediate occurrences, its vast patience, its
tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory
with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about
them.  For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast
inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he
was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid
little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and
afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of
disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the muffled
galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night, of
groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated
iron.  And once there was a marching body of white men in the
foreground and a complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of
Kaffirs watching them over this fence and talking eagerly amongst
themselves.

"All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,"
said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation. . . .

But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt
that it was more than that.  Always he kept the tail of his eye upon
that eventful background while Benham talked to him.

When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
background the greater share of his attention. . . .



11


It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that
the full values came to very many things that Benham said during
these last conversations.  The papers fitted in with his memories of
their long talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk
had repeated the private writings in which he had first digested his
ideas that it was presently almost impossible to disentangle what
had been said and understood at Johannesburg from the fuller
statement of those patched and corrected manuscripts.  The two
things merged in White's mind as he read.  The written text took
upon itself a resonance of Benham's voice; it eked out the hints and
broken sentences of his remembered conversation.

But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
mere marked absence an impression on White's mind.  And occasionally
after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men
who restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation.  He would
say nothing about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant
to speak of Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred
perhaps half a dozen times or more to the idea that he was a "prig."
He seemed to be defending himself against some inner accusation,
some unconquerable doubt of the entire adventure of his life.  These
half hints and hints by omission exercised the quick intuitions of
White's mind very keenly, and he drew far closer to an understanding
of Benham's reserves than Benham ever suspected. . . .

At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
completely justified in his treatment of her.  She had betrayed him
and he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control.  He had
no doubt that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only
after he had been travelling in China with Prothero for some time
and in the light of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he
began to have doubts whether he ought to have punished her at all.
And one night at Shanghai he had a dream in which she stood before
him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda,
and said that she was dirty and shameful and spoilt for ever,
because he had gone away from her.  Afterwards the dream became
absurd: she showed him the black leopard's fur as though it was a
rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had
been so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke
before he could answer her, and for a long time he was full of
unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd.  She had spoilt
her own fur.  But what was more penetrating and distressing in this
dream was not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of
unconquerable intimacy between them, as though they still belonged
to each other, soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened
afterwards could have destroyed their common responsibility and the
common interest of their first unstinted union.  She was hurt, and
of course he was hurt.  He began to see that his marriage to Amanda
was still infinitely more than a technical bond.

And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether
she realized anything of the sort.  Her letters fluctuated very much
in tone, but at times they were as detached and guarded as a
schoolgirl writing to a cousin.  Then it seemed to Benham an
extraordinary fraud on her part that she should presume to come into
his dream with an entirely deceptive closeness and confidence.  She
began to sound him in these latter letters upon the possibility of
divorce.  This, which he had been quite disposed to concede in
London, now struck him as an outrageous suggestion.  He wrote to ask
her why, and she responded exasperatingly that she thought it was
"better."  But, again, why better?  It is remarkable that although
his mind had habituated itself to the idea that Easton was her lover
in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt to marry again,
filled him with jealous rage.  She asked him to take the blame in
the divorce proceedings.  There, again, he found himself ungenerous.
He did not want to do that.  Why should he do that?  As a matter of
fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid for his
Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely.  He was
regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life
it ought to be diminishing.

It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with
Prothero while they travelled together in China that his concern
about what he called priggishness arose.  It is a concern that one
may suppose has a little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious
man who has turned from the natural passionate personal life to
religion or to public service or any abstract devotion.  These
things that are at least more extensive than the interests of flesh
and blood have a trick of becoming unsubstantial, they shine
gloriously and inspiringly upon the imagination, they capture one
and isolate one and then they vanish out of sight.  It is far easier
to be entirely faithful to friend or lover than it is to be faithful
to a cause or to one's country or to a religion.  In the glow of
one's first service that larger idea may be as closely spontaneous
as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as the glow dies away
there is a fearful sense of unreality.  It was in such dark moments
that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda and most
distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was a
priggishness, a pretentious logomachy.  Prothero could indeed hint
as much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an
insult to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the
good light in wine and all the warm happiness of existence.  And
then Amanda would peep out of the dusk and whisper, "Of course if
you could leave me--!  Was I not LIFE?  Even now if you cared to
come back to me--  For I loved you best and loved you still, old
Cheetah, long after you had left me to follow your dreams. . . .
Even now I am drifting further into lies and the last shreds of
dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful leopard I am now,
who was once clean and bright. . . .  You could come back, Cheetah,
and you could save me yet.  If you would love me. . . ."

In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined
speeches, the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that
his ear had loved, and not only could she distress him, but when
Benham was in this heartache mood, when once she had set him going,
then his little mother also would rise against him, touchingly
indignant, with her blue eyes bright with tears; and his frowsty
father would back towards him and sit down complaining that he was
neglected, and even little Mrs. Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely
tearful on her chair looking after him as he slunk away from her
through Kensington Gardens; indeed every personal link he had ever
had to life could in certain moods pull him back through the door of
self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching and accusing himself
of harshness and self-concentration.  The very kittens of his
childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented hardness.  For
a year before Prothero was killed there were these heartaches.  That
tragedy gave them their crowning justification.  All these people
said in this form or that, "You owed a debt to us, you evaded it,
you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world, and
with empty phantoms of power and destiny.  All this was
intellectualization.  You sacrificed us to the thin things of the
mind.  There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like
you may lay hold upon.  The rule of the world is a fortuitous result
of incalculably multitudinous forces.  But all of us you could have
made happier.  You could have spared us distresses.  Prothero died
because of you.  Presently it will be the turn of your father, your
mother--Amanda perhaps. . . ."

He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several
memoranda about priggishness that White read and came near to
understanding.  In spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham
was making up his mind to be a prig.  He weighed the cold
uningratiating virtues of priggishness against his smouldering
passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate sympathy for
Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and he made
his choice.  But it was a reluctant choice.

One fragment began in the air.  "Of course I had made myself
responsible for her life.  But it was, you see, such a confoundedly
energetic life, as vigorous and as slippery as an eel. . . .  Only
by giving all my strength to her could I have held Amanda. . . .  So
what was the good of trying to hold Amanda? . . .

"All one's people have this sort of claim upon one.  Claims made by
their pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and
dependences.  You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand
freedom when it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering
tendrils they have wrapped about you.  The true aristocrat I think
will have enough grasp, enough steadiness, to be kind and right to
every human being and still do the work that ought to be his
essential life.  I see that now.  It's one of the things this last
year or so of loneliness has made me realize; that in so far as I
have set out to live the aristocratic life I have failed.  Instead
I've discovered it--and found myself out.  I'm an overstrung man.  I
go harshly and continuously for one idea.  I live as I ride.  I
blunder through my fences, I take off too soon.  I've no natural
ease of mind or conduct or body.  I am straining to keep hold of a
thing too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability.  Only after
Prothero's death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have
always been, first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my
mother and every one.  A necessary unavoidable priggishness. . . ."I
do not see how certain things can be done without prigs, people,
that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest as to be
a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and
forced. . . .  All things must begin with clumsiness, there is
no assurance about pioneers. . . .

"Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
aristocracy. . . .  But the very essence of aristocracy, as I
conceive it, is that it does not explain nor talk about itself. . . .

"After all it doesn't matter what I am. . . .  It's just a private
vexation that I haven't got where I meant to get.  That does not
affect the truth I have to tell. . . .

"If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one
must speak the truth.  I have worked out some very considerable
things in my research, and the time has come when I must set them
out clearly and plainly.  That is my job anyhow.  My journey to
London to release Amanda will be just the end of my adolescence and
the beginning of my real life.  It will release me from my last
entanglement with the fellow creatures I have always failed to make
happy. . . .  It's a detail in the work. . . .  And I shall go on.

But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
operation.

"It's very like that.  A surgical operation, and when it is over
perhaps I shall think no more about it.

"And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done.
So far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of
living.  I must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can
upon the details, and, presently, I shall see more clearly where
other men are working to the same ends. . . ."



12


Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble
life to the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and
sympathy for the earthliness of that inglorious little don.
Although Benham insisted upon the dominance of life by noble
imaginations and relentless reasonableness, he would never
altogether abandon the materialism of life.  Prothero had once said
to him, "You are the advocate of the brain and I of the belly.
Only, only we respect each other."  And at another time, "You fear
emotions and distrust sensations.  I invite them.  You do not drink
gin because you think it would make you weep.  But if I could not
weep in any other way I would drink gin."  And it was under the
influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty
intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the
caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great
teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.

Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.
It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of
an entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream.  For some
time as he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into
relationship with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people
who seemed to promise at least a mental and moral co-operation.  Yet
it is difficult to see what co-operation was possible unless it was
some sort of agreement that presently they should all shout
together.  And it was after a certain pursuit of Rabindranath
Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a horror of perfect manners
and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled from that starry calm
to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified fellow of Trinity.
And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of the lower levels
of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of the uttermost
refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of Siberia to
the Chinese scene.

Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their
choice of food and drink.  Benham was always wary and Prothero
always appreciative.  It peeped out in the distribution of their
time, in the direction of their glances.  Whenever women walked
about, Prothero gave way to a sort of ethnological excitement.
"That girl--a wonderful racial type."  But in Moscow he was
sentimental.  He insisted on going again to the Cosmopolis Bazaar,
and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna had vanished and
left no trace he prowled the streets until the small hours.

In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her.  "I should
have defied Cambridge," he said.

But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform
ethnologically alert. . . .

Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero.  Really he was not
disgusted at all.  There was something about Prothero like a
sparrow, like a starling, like a Scotch terrier. . . .  These, too,
are morally objectionable creatures that do not disgust. . . .

Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians.
He said they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their
faults and failures just as much as in their virtues and
achievements.  He extolled the "germinating disorder" of Moscow far
above the "implacable discipline" of Berlin.  Only a people of
inferior imagination, a base materialist people, could so maintain
its attention upon precision and cleanliness.  Benham was roused to
defence against this paradox.  "But all exaltation neglects," said
Prothero.  "No religion has ever boasted that its saints were spick
and span."  This controversy raged between them in the streets of
Irkutsk.  It was still burning while they picked their way through
the indescribable filth of Pekin.

"You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things," said
Benham.  "But look out there!"

Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling
along, cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single
word and two brace of pails of human ordure.

"That is not a fine disdain for material things," said Benham.
"That is merely individualism and unsystematic living."

"A mere phase of frankness.  Only frankness is left to them now.
The Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their
waterways.  European intervention paralyses every attempt they make
to establish order on their own lines.  In the Ming days China did
not reek. . . .  And, anyhow, Benham, it's better than the silly
waste of London. . . ."

And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried
Benham and found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.

What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal
of Confucius, the superior person, "the son of the King"?  There you
had the very essence of Benham, the idea of self -examination, self-
preparation under a vague Theocracy.  ("Vaguer," said Benham, "for
the Confucian Heaven could punish and reward.")  Even the elaborate
sham modesty of the two dreams was the same.  Benham interrupted and
protested with heat.  And this Confucian idea of the son of the
King, Prothero insisted, had been the cause of China's paralysis.
"My idea of nobility is not traditional but expectant," said Benham.
"After all, Confucianism has held together a great pacific state far
longer than any other polity has ever lasted.  I'll accept your
Confucianism.  I've not the slightest objection to finding China
nearer salvation than any other land.  Do but turn it round so that
it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the best
social and political culture in the world.  That, indeed, is what is
happening.  Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you
will have made a new lead for mankind."

From that Benham drove on to discoveries.  "When a man thinks of the
past he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he
radiates from self.  Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening
forward away from me, instead of focussing on me. . . ."

"You make me think of an extinguisher," said Prothero.

"You know I am thinking of a focus," said Benham.  "But all your
thought now has become caricature. . . .  You have stopped thinking.
You are fighting after making up your mind. . . ."

Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of
his Chinese identification.  He had hoped it would be exasperating.
He tried to barb his offence.  He amplified the indictment.  All
cultures must be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and
Confucianism had produced formalism, priggishness, humbug. . . .  No
doubt its ideals had had their successes; they had unified China,
stamped the idea of universal peace and good manners upon the
greatest mass of population in the world, paved the way for much
beautiful art and literature and living.  "But in the end, all your
stern orderliness, Benham," said Prothero, "only leads to me.  The
human spirit rebels against this everlasting armour on the soul.
After Han came T'ang.  Have you never read Ling Po?  There's scraps
of him in English in that little book you have--what is it?--the
LUTE OF JADE?  He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
after the Prophet.  Life must relax at last. . . ."

"No!" cried Benham.  "If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it
is creative, no. . . ."

Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven
to closer enquiries into Chinese thought.  He tried particularly to
get to mental grips with English-speaking Chinese.  "We still know
nothing of China," said Prothero.  "Most of the stuff we have been
told about this country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle.  We
send merchants from Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what
doesn't remind them of these delectable standards seems either funny
to them or wicked.  I admit the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to
speak, in the ancient characters and the ancient traditions, but for
all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what all the rest of the world has
still to find and get.  When they begin to speak and write in a
modern way and handle modern things and break into the soil they
have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find just how much
it is behind. . . .  Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not such
fools as that, but LIFE. . . ."

Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.

He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities,
delirious religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with
loaded guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a
massive possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism. . . .

The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths.
Through Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses,
as one might catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that
bilateral adventure.  He saw Benham in conversation with liberal-
minded mandarins, grave-faced, bald-browed persons with disciplined
movements, who sat with their hands thrust into their sleeves
talking excellent English; while Prothero pursued enquiries of an
intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of a more confidential
type.  And, presently, Prothero began to discover and discuss the
merits of opium.

For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of
one's sensations, why should one not use opium?  It is art
materialized.  It gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of
exertion, and if presently its gifts diminish one need but increase
the quantity.  Moreover, it quickens the garrulous mind, and
steadies the happiness of love.  Across the varied adventures of
Benham's journey in China fell the shadow first of a suspicion and
then of a certainty. . . .

The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like
some tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to
drag him away.  And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.

"To this," cried Benham, "one comes!  Save for pride and
fierceness!"

"Better this than cruelty," said Prothero talking quickly and
clearly because of the evil thing in his veins.  "You think that you
are the only explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the
mountains I board the house-boat and float down the stream.  For you
the stars, for me the music and the lanterns.  You are the son of a
mountaineering don, and I am a Chinese philosopher of the riper
school.  You force yourself beyond fear of pain, and I force myself
beyond fear of consequences.  What are we either of us but children
groping under the black cloak of our Maker?--who will not blind us
with his light.  Did he not give us also these lusts, the keen knife
and the sweetness, these sensations that are like pineapple smeared
with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven, like being flayed
with delight. . . .  And did he not give us dreams fantastic beyond
any lust whatever?  What is the good of talking?  Speak to your own
kind.  I have gone, Benham.  I am lost already.  There is no
resisting any more, since I have drugged away resistance.  Why then
should I come back?  I know now the symphonies of the exalted
nerves; I can judge; and I say better lie and hear them to the end
than come back again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo,
my--effort!  My EFFORT! . . .  I ruin my body.  I know.  But what of
that? . . .  I shall soon be thin and filthy.  What of the grape-
skin when one has had the pulp?"

"But," said Benham, "the cleanness of life!"

"While I perish," said Prothero still more wickedly, "I say good
things. . . ."



13


White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung
with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a
pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a
garden set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and
lanterns of white porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city.
Here it was that Benham stayed and talked with his host, a man robed
in marvellous silks and subtle of speech even in the European
languages he used, and meanwhile Prothero, it seemed, had gone down
into the wickedness of the town below.  It was a very great town
indeed, spreading for miles along the banks of a huge river, a river
that divided itself indolently into three shining branches so as to
make islands of the central portion of the place.  And on this river
swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and boats, boats in which
people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure, moored places of
assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger sampans, cargo
craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless miles of it,
as no other part of the world save China can display.  In the
daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon a
fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected
quiveringly upon the black flowing waters.

And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger
who was for some reason very vividly realized by White's
imagination.  He was a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken
cheeks that made his cheek bones very prominent, and gave his thin-
lipped mouth something of the geniality of a skull, and the arm he
thrust out of his yellow robe to hand Prothero's message to Benham
was lean as a pole.  So he stood out in White's imagination, against
the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs and blue haze of the
great town below, and was with one exception the distinctest thing
in the story.  The message he bore was scribbled by Prothero himself
in a nerveless scrawl: "Send a hundred dollars by this man.  I am in
a frightful fix."

Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage
of opium, and something in this message stirred his facile
indignation.  Twice before he had had similar demands.  And on the
whole they had seemed to him to be unreasonable demands.  He was
astonished that while he was sitting and talking of the great world-
republic of the future and the secret self-directed aristocracy that
would make it possible, his own friend, his chosen companion, should
thus, by this inglorious request and this ungainly messenger,
disavow him.  He felt a wave of intense irritation.

"No," he said, "I will not."

And he was too angry to express himself in any language
understandable by his messenger.

His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the
occasion was serious.  Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.

"No," said Benham.  "He is shameless.  Let him do what he can."

The messenger was still reluctant to go.

And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.

"Where IS your friend?" asked the mandarin.

"I don't know," said Benham.

"But they will keep him!  They may do all sorts of things when they
find he is lying to them."

"Lying to them?"

"About your help."

"Stop that man," cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake.  But
when the servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were
misunderstood, and the man dashed through the open gate of the
f pulling down and trying
again.  Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy. . . .
I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
undertaking.  And all my life hereafter goes to serve it. . . ."

He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend.  He spoke with a grim
enthusiasm.  "I'm a prig.  I'm a fanatic, White.  But I have
something clear, something better worth going on with than any
adventure of personal relationship could possibly be. . . ."

And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the
faith that had grown up in his mind.  He spoke with a touch of
defiance, with the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes
his shame.  "I will tell you what I believe."

He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
until he saw that tgarden and made off down the winding road.

"Stop him!" cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid
for Prothero.

The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble
sometimes starts an avalanche. . . .

White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance
that spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying
messenger.

For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder
from the north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue.
The stupid manoeuvres of one European "power" against another, the
tactlessness of missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to
meet violence and force with violence and force, had fermented and
brewed the possibility of an outbreak.  The sudden resolve of Benham
to get at once to Prothero was like the firing of a mine.  This
tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible stranger charging through the
narrow streets that led to the pleasure-boats in the south river
seemed to many a blue-clad citizen like the White Peril embodied.
Behind him came the attendants of the rich man up the hill; but they
surely were traitors to help this stranger.

Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his
way to the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained,
barred by a vigorous street fight.  Explanations were impossible; he
joined in the fight.

For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
disappearance.

It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders
on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from
the up-river barracks were presently drawn.  It was a struggle that
was never clearly explained, and at the end of it they found
Prothero's body flung out upon a waste place near a little temple on
the river bank, stabbed while he was asleep. . . .

And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall,
White had an impression of him hunting for all those three days
through the strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages,
over queer Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty
warehouses, in the incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along
planks that passed to the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-
flying boats that slipped noiselessly among the larger craft, and
sometimes he hunted alone, sometimes in company, sometimes black
figures struggled in the darkness against dim-lit backgrounds and
sometimes a swarm of shining yellow faces screamed and shouted
through the torn paper windows. . . .  And then at the end of this
confused effect of struggle, this Chinese kinematograph film, one
last picture jerked into place and stopped and stood still, a white
wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a corner, a dirty
flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for the first
time an inexpressive face. . . .



14


Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel
at Johannesburg and told of these things.  White watched him from an
armchair.  And as he listened he noted again the intensification of
Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin,
the touch of red in his eyes.  For there was still that red gleam in
Benham's eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a
light.  And he sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved
his long lean hand about over the things on the table.

"You see," he said, "this is a sort of horror in my mind.  Things
like this stick in my mind.  I am always seeing Prothero now, and it
will take years to get this scar off my memory again.  Once before--
about a horse, I had the same kind of distress.  And it makes me
tender, sore-minded about everything.  It will go, of course, in the
long run, and it's just like any other ache that lays hold of one.
One can't cure it.  One has to get along with it. . . .

"I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to
know then that it was so imperative to send that money? . . .

"At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices. . . .

"I was angry.  I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness
altogether.  It takes me by surprise.  Before the messenger was out
of sight I had repented. . . .

"I failed him.  I have gone about in the world dreaming of
tremendous things and failing most people.  My wife too. . . ."

He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and
stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.

"You see, White," he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth,
"this is the sort of thing one has to stand.  Life is imperfect.
Nothing can be done perfectly.  And on the whole--"  He spoke still
more slowly, "I would go through again with the very same things
that have hurt my people.  If I had to live over again.  I would try
to do the things without hurting the people, but I would do the
things anyhow.  Because I'm raw with remorse, it does not follow
that on the whole I am not doing right.  Right doing isn't balm.  If
I could have contrived not to hurt these people as I have done, it
would have been better, just as it would be better to win a battle
without any killed or wounded.  I was clumsy with them and they
suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have to stick to
the way I have taken.  One's blunders are accidents.  If one thing
is clearer than another it is that the world isn't accident-proof. . . .

But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero. . . .  God!  White,
but I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned
away. . . .  Trying to stop him. . . .

"I didn't send those dollars.  So fifty or sixty people were killed
and many wounded. . . .  There for all practical purposes the thing
ends.  Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some
other fool's haste and blundering. . . .

"I couldn't help it, White.  I couldn't help it. . . .

"The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on.  One thinks, one
learns, one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding.
The spirit of the race goes on to light and comprehension.  In spite
of accidents.  In spite of individual blundering.

"It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to
come slick and true on every occasion. . . .

"If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
disasters.  This Research I undertook grows and grows.  I believe in
it more and more.  The more it asks from me the more I give to it.
When I was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round
the corner.  I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or
two, just what it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of
my life I would live it.  Finely.  But I am just one of a multitude
of men, each one going a little wrong, each one achieving a little
right.  And the noble life is a long, long way ahead. . . .  We are
working out a new way of lihere is no honour nor pride for a man until he
refers his life to ends and purposes beyond himself.  An aht rise instantly
out of all
this squalor and evil temper. . . .  What does all this struggle
here amount to?  On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent
resentment on the other; suspicion everywhere. . . .

"And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!

"If only they had light enough in their brains to show them
how."It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the
simplest industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good
life for men, prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in
the air.  And mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice,
stupidity, poison it all.  A squabble about working on a Saturday
afternoon, a squabble embittered by this universal shadow of miner's
phthving for mankind, a new rule, a new
conscience.  It's no small job for all of us.  There must be
lifetimes of building up and lifetimes oristocrat
must be loyal.  So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must
also be lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for
kingship and the repudiation of all existing states and kings.  In
this manner he had come to his idea of a great world republic that
must replace the little warring kingdoms of the present, to the
conception of an unseen kingship ruling the whole globe, to his King
Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty.  "There,"
he said, "is the link of our order, the new knighthood, the new
aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.  There is our Prince.
He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all mankind.  I have
worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly
and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be a poor
thing and a base one.  On great occasions and small occasions I have
failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
lasts.  What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
want now to tell the world.  Somehow I will tell it, as a book I
suppose, though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a
book.  But I have away there in London or with me here all the
masses of notes I have made in my search for the life that is worth
while living. . . .  We who are self-appointed aristocrats, who are
not ashamed of kingship, must speak to one another. . . .

"We can have no organization because organizations corrupt. . . .

"No recognition. . . .

"But we can speak plainly. . . ."

(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and
voices of mounted police riding past the hotel.)

"But on one side your aristocracy means revolution," said White.
"It becomes a political conspiracy."

"Manifestly.  An open conspiracy.  It denies the king upon the
stamps and the flag upon the wall.  It is the continual proclamation
of the Republic of Mankind."



15


The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were
manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.
"Pulling out" was going on first at this mine and then that, there
were riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up
of a number of houses.  It was not until July the 4th that, with the
suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg
itself became the storm centre.

Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused
crowded occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred
throisis that the masters were too incapable and too mean to
prevent.

"Oh, God!" cried Benham, "when will men be princes and take hugh a large
uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers.
The whole big square was astir, a swaying crowd of men.  A
ramshackle platform improvised upon a trolley struggled through the
swarming straw hats to a street corner, and there was some speaking.
At first it seemed as though military men were using this platform,
and then it was manifestly in possession of an excited knot of
labour leaders with red rosettes.  The military men had said their
say and got down.  They came close by Benham, pushing their way
across the square.  "We've warned them," said one.  A red flag, like
some misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully visible and
incomprehensible behind the platform.  Somebody was either pitched
or fell off the platform.  One could hear nothing from the speakers
except a minute bleating. . . .

Then there were shouts that the police were charging.  A number of
mounted men trotted into the square.  The crowd began a series of
short rushes that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police
as they rode to and fro.  These men trotted through the crowd,
scattering knots of people.  They carried pick-handles, but they did
not seem to be hitting with them.  It became clear that they aimed
at the capture of the trolley.  There was only a feeble struggle for
the trolley; it was captured and hauled through the scattered
spectators in the square to the protection of a small impassive body
of regular cavalry at the opposite corner.  Then quite a number of
people seemed to be getting excited and fighting.  They appeared to
be vaguely fighting the foot-police, and the police seemed to be
vaguely pushing through them and dispersing them.  The roof of a
little one-story shop became prominent as a centre of vigorous
stone-throwing.

It was no sort of battle.  Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of
human affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious.  A meeting was
being prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being
pelted or obstructed.  Mostly people were just looking on.

"It amounts to nothing," said Benham.  "Even if they held a meeting,
what could happen?  Why does the Government try to stop it?"

The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time.
Every now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began a
speech and was pulled down by policemen.  And at last across the
confusion came an idea, like a wind across a pond.

The strikers were to go to the Power Station.

That had the effect of a distinct move in the game.  The Power
Station was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy.  There if
anywhere it would be possible to express one's disapproval of the
administration, one's desire to embarrass and confute it.  One could
stop all sorts of things from the Power Station.  At any rate it was
a repartee to the suppression of the meeting.  erything will be
soon--when one comes to death then everything is at one's
fingertips--I can feel that greater wback of a number of Everybody seemed
gladdened by a definite project.

Benham and White went with the crowd.

At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
scattered drift of people became congested.  Gliding slowly across
the mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with
even its glass undamaged, and then another and another.  Strikers,
with the happy expression of men who have found something expressive
to do, were escorting the trams off the street.  They were being
meticulously careful with them.  Never was there less mob violence
in a riot.  They walked by the captured cars almost deferentially,
like rough men honoured by a real lady's company.  And when White
and Benham reached the Power House the marvel grew.  The rioters
were already in possession and going freely over the whole place,
and they had injured nothing.  They had stopped the engines, but
they had not even disabled them.  Here too manifestly a majority of
the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.

"But this is the most civilized rioting," said Benham.  "It isn't
rioting; it's drifting.  Just as things drifted in Moscow.  Because
nobody has the rudder. . . .

"What maddens me," he said, "is the democracy of the whole thing.
White!  I HATE this modern democracy.  Democracy and inequality!
Was there ever an absurder combination?  What is the good of a
social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff
than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by
prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with
advantage?  This trouble wants so little, just a touch of
aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling
of responsibility, and the place migold of
life?  When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own? . . .
Look at this place!  Look at this place! . . .  The easy,
accessible happiness!  The manifest prosperity.  The newness and the
sunshine.  And the silly bitterness, the rage, the mischief and
miseries! . . ."

And then: "It's not our quarrel. . . ."

"It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
Life is one long struggle against the incidental.  I can feel my
anger gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason.
I want to go and expostulate.  I have a ridiculous idea that I ought
to go off to Lord Glindividuals into
the roadway and then a derisive shouting.  Nobody had been hit.  The
soldiers had fired in the air.

"But thiadstone or Botha and expostulate. . . .  What
good would it do?  They move in the magic circles of their own
limitations, an official, a politician--how would they put it?--
‘with many things to consider. . . .'

"It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels.  It's a thing I have to
guard against. . . .

"What does it all amount to?  It is like a fight between navvies in
a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star.  It doesn't
concern us. . . .  Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us.  It's a scuffle
in the darkness, and our business, the business of all brains, the
only permanent good work is to light up the world. . . .  There will
be mischief and hatred here and suppression and then forgetfulness,
and then things will go on again, a little better or a little
worse. . . ."

"I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places.  I'm tired
of the shouting and running, the beating and shooting.  I'm sick of
all the confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one
need amidst an endless multitude of distresses.  I've seen my fill
of wars and disputes and struggles.  I see now how a man may grow
weary at last of life and its disorders, its unreal exacting
disorders, its blunders and its remorse.  No!  I want to begin upon
the realities I have made for myself.  For they are the realities.
I want to go now to some quiet corner where I can polish what I have
learnt, sort out my accumulations, be undisturbed by these
transitory symptomatic things. . . .

"What was that boy saying?  They are burning the STAR office. . . .
Well, let them. . . ."

And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things
that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the
sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights
down side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the
making of greatness and a new great spirit in men.  All the rest of
his life, he said, must be given to that.  He would say his thing
plainly and honestly and afterwards other men would say it clearly
and beautifully; here it would touch a man and there it would touch
a man; the Invisible King in us all would find himself and know
himself a little in this and a little in that, and at last a day
would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the world
and such squalor as this about them would beng red and strange to his
face with both hands; above them his eyes were round and anxious.
Blood came out betwing.  He shouted out something
about "Foolery!"

Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference
to current things. . . .

But the carbines spoke again.

Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible.  He
spun right round and fell down into a sitting position.  He sat
looking surprised.

After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket
handkerchief, held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out
from the piazza of the hotel.



17


"Are you hit?" cried White dropping to his knees and making himself
as compact as possible.  "Benham!"

Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange
voice, a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.

"It was stupid of me to come out here.  Not my quarrel.  Faults on
both sides.  And now I can't ge as impossible any more
for men as a Stone Age Corroboree. . . .

Late or soon?

Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.

"Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes. . . .

"Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred
years or ten thousand years?  It will never come in our lives,
White.  Not soon enough for that.  But after that evorld I shall never see as
one
feels the dawn coming through the last darkness. . . ."



16


The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at
lunch in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the
burning of the STAR office.  The Sherborough dining-room was on the
first floor, and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to
a verandah above a piazza.  As they talked they became aware of an
excitement in the street below, shouting and running and then a
sound of wheels and the tramp of a body of soldiers marching
quickly.  White stood up and looked.  "They're seizing the stuff in
the gunshops," he said, sitting down again.  "It's amazing they
haven't done it before."

They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
Mukden that had won Benham's admiration. . . .

A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
smashing.  Then more revolver shots.  "That's at the big club at the
corner, I think," said Benham and went out upon the verandah.

Up and down the street mischief was afoot.  Outside the Rand Club in
the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers.  Down the
street people were looking in the direction of the market-place and
then suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a
froth of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching
with an appearance of order and waving a flag.  It was a poorly
disciplined body, it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and
spectators upon the side walk, and at the head of it two men
disputed.  They seemed to be differing about the direction of the
whole crowd.  Suddenly one smote the other with his fist, a blow
that hurled him sideways, and then turned with a triumphant gesture
to the following ranks, waving his arms in the air.  He was a tall
lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and wild-eyed.  On he
came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.

And then up the street something happened.  Benham's attention was
turned round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath,
on the part of the advancing procession under the verandah.

The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear.  Across it a
dozen soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined
out, with their carbines in readiness.  The mounted men at the club
corner had vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards
this new threat.  Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the
crowd ceased.  Understanding seized upon every one.

These soldiers were going to fire. . . .

The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots
rang out almost in one report. . . .

There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
enquiring pause, the darting s is a stupid game," said Benham.  "Why did they
fire at
all?"

The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the
road.  His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal
position, and it had to be reassured.  He was near enough for Benham
to see his face.  For a time it looked anxious and thoughtful.  Then
he seemed to jump to his decision.  He unbuttoned and opened his
coat wide as if defying the soldiers.  "Shoot," he bawled, "Shoot,
if you dare!"

A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him.  The small
figure of the officer away there was inaudible.  The coat of the man
below flapped like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of
dirty shirt, the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, "Shoot, if
you dare.  Shoot, if you dare!  See!"

Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a
dozen bullets.  It was an extraordinary effect.  As though the
figure had been deflated.  It was incredible that a moment before
this thing had been a man, an individual, a hesitating complicated
purpose.

"Good God!" cried Benham, "but--this is horrible!"

The heap of garments lay still.  The red hand that stretched out
towards the soldiers never twitched.

The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women
shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which
they might still see, others pressed forward.  "Go for the swine!"
bawled a voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the people,
and in the road below a man with a rifle halted, took aim, and
answered the soldiers' fire.  "Look out!" cried White who was
watching the soldiers, and ducked.  "This isn't in the air!"

Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer
very rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were
dropping all over the road.  One white-faced man not a score of
yards away fell with a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for
some yards with blood running abundantly from his neck, and fell and
never stirred again.  Another went down upon his back clumsily in
the roadway and lay wringing his hands faster and faster until
suddenly with a movement like a sigh they dropped inert by his side.
A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit ran and stopped and ran
again.  He seemed to be holding somethieen his fingers.  He went right past
the hotel
and stumbled and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite corner.
The majority of the crowd had already vanished into doorways and
side streets.  But there was still shouting and there was still a
remnant of amazed and angry men in the roadway--and one or two angry
women.  They were not fighting.  Indeed they were unarmed, but if
they had had weapons now they would certainly have used them.

"But this is preposterous!" cried Benham.  "Preposterous.  Those
soldiers are never going to shoot again! This must stop."

He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed
for the staircase.  "Good Heaven!" cried White.  "What are you going
to do?"

Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go
to stop a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly.  He
was going to stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.

White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying "Benham!"

But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
impatient kingship.  He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel.  With
a gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street,
holding up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin
clenched like a bomb.  White believes firmly that Benham thought he
would be able to dominate everytt up.  I will sit here a moment and
pull myself together.  Perhaps I'm--I must be shot.  But it seemed
to come--inside me. . . .  If I should be hurt.  Am I hurt? . . .
Will you see to that book of mine, White?  It's odd.  A kind of
fainthness. . . .  What?"

"I will see after your book," said White and glanced at his hand
because it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red.
He forgot about himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down
the street.

The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more
about the book, a promise, a definite promise.  He could never
recall his exact words, but their intention was binding.  He
conveyed his absolute acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever
they were.  His life for that moment was unreservedly at his
friend's disposal. . . .

White never knew if his promise was heard.  Benham had stopped
speaking quite abruptly with that "What?"

He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who
is going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to
give way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man
in his arms.