The Research Magnificent

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 Prothero. 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 answer 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 put it 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 had 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 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 found 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

Amanda 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 such

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. 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

out 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 the

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,

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 armchair 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 inhuman,

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-Sanders, 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 of 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 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 suddenly, “Mrs. Fly-by-Night, or

some such name, who rings you up on the telephone?”

Benham hesitated, 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. Don'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?”

“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 against 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. Why 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 want you,” he whispered close to her. “You are my mate. From the

first sight 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 demand

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 would 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

against 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 unbuttoned 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 regretfully 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

a 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 penetration; 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 mind 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 see 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 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 chivalrous 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